The Seven Stages of Muslim Brotherhood Denial

In the past day on on Facebook I have seen various old friends go through the stages of what I am going to call "Muslim Brotherhood Denial", the refusal to acknowledge the truth that there is a worldwide conspiratorial fraternal organization, active, wealthy, and well-organized in the United States, devoted to bringing the world (including the United States) to Islamic rule.

So, diagnose your friends and relatives with this handy MBD chart

Stage 1:  It is paranoid to think that such an organization exists.

Stage 2:  It is paranoid to think that such an organization is active in the United States.

Stage 3:  With 1% of the US population, it is paranoid to think that Islam will take over in the United States.

Stage 4:  Anyone who opposes large-scale immigration of Muslims supremacists is paranoid.

Stage 5:  If the Muslims take over I will be long dead,

Stage 6:  "The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam."

Stage 7:  Ash-hadu anla ilaha illal-Lahu Wahdahu la Sharika Lahu wa-ash-hadu anna Muhammadan abduhu wa rasuluhu.

In 24 hours some people have gone from Stage 1 to Stage 5.  Insufficient data yet on how long it takes to go all the way to stage 7, but research grants for a long-term study are gratefully accepted.

{I should add:  The Muslim Brotherhood is a complex organization, and my views of it are complex.  At one time I shared the general neocon view that the Brotherhood and its affiliates were progressive democratic forces that should be encouraged in the Middle East.  But the Brotherhood in Egypt, and its Palestinian affiliate Hamas, turned out to be weaker and perhaps less democratic than we had believed.

As regards the United States, I believe with George Washington that "reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle"; and with John Adams that "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."   Which religion?  As recently as 2008, I was a cheerleader for the old time Americanism of, say, Bill Clinton.  But while that political religion is not quite dead, it much weaker than it was a decade ago, and younger people are mostly unaware of it or disaffected from it.  There are certainly worse possible futures for most Americans than political Islam.}

Why I am a West Coast Straussian

It is ordered, and by this Court declared; that every person within this Jurisdiction, whether Inhabitant or other shall enjoy the same justice and law that is general for this Jurisdiction which we constitute and execute one towards another, in all cases proper to our cognizance without partialities or delay.
Massachusetts, The Book of General Laws and Libertyes, "Body of Liberties" (1641)
quoted in William B. Allen, Let the Advice Be Good, 4.

This passage brings tears to my eyes because of its noble and simple beauty. These men aspired to render equal justice under law, a rare aspiration in this world, and one realized in few places today. "Have Faith in Massachusetts" said Calvin Coolidge, "In the general results, there is no place on earth where the people secure, in a larger measure, the blessings of organized government, and nowhere can those functions more properly be termed self-government."

John Dunn on American Exceptionalism (2005)

No government can make a country prosper; but any government can ruin one; and most today are in a position to do so very rapidly and extremely thoroughly. The country of which this is least clearly true is the United States of America; and the obstacles which stand in the way of its doing so are still a plain legacy from the efforts of Madison and his colleagues...
--John Dunn, Setting the People Free: The Story of Democracy (2005), p. 135 and n.