Beria Was Right: " Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime. "

Can a Divided America Survive?

June 15, 2017 12:00 AM

The United States is currently the world’s oldest democracy. {Are we? We are not supposed to be}

But America is no more immune from collapse than were some of history’s most stable and impressive consensual governments. Fifth-century Athens, Republican Rome, Renaissance Florence and Venice, and many of the elected governments of early 20th-century Western European states eventually destroyed themselves, went bankrupt, or were overrun by invaders.

The United States is dividing as rarely before. Half the country, mostly liberal America, is concentrated in 146 of the nation’s more than 3,000 counties — in an area that collectively represents less than 10 percent of the U.S. land mass. The other half, the conservative Red states of the interior of America, is geographically, culturally, economically, politically, and socially at odds with Blue-state America, which resides mostly on the two coasts.

The two Americas watch different news. They read very different books, listen to different music, and watch different television shows. Increasingly, they now live lives according to two widely different traditions.

Barack Obama was elected president after compiling the most left-wing voting record in the U.S. Senate. His antidote, Donald Trump, was elected largely on the premise that traditional Republicans were hardly conservative.

Red America and Blue America are spiraling into divisions approaching those of 1860, or of the nihilistic hippie/straight divide of 1968.

Currently, some 27 percent of all Californians were not born in the United States. More than 40 million foreign-born immigrants currently live in the U.S. — the highest number in the nation’s history.

Yet widely unchecked immigration comes at a time when the country has lost confidence in its prior successful adherence to melting-pot assimilation and integration. The ultimate result is a fragmenting of society into tribal cliques that vie for power, careers, and influence on the basis of ethnic solidarity rather than shared Americanness.

History is not very kind to multicultural chaos — as opposed to a multiracial society united by a single national culture. The fates of Rwanda, Iraq, and the former Yugoslavia should remind us of our present disastrous trajectory.

Either the United States will return to a shared single language and allegiance to a common and singular culture, or it will eventually descend into clannish violence.

Does the unique American idea of federalism still work, with state rights and laws subordinate to federal law? We fought a Civil War that cost more than 600,000 lives in part to uphold the idea that individual states could not override the federal government.

Yet sanctuary cities declare that they can freely nullify federal immigration law. The California Senate passed a bill earlier this month that would prohibit the state from contracting with any firms that work on the federal government’s wall at the border with Mexico.

States such as California vow that they will ignore Washington and work directly with foreign nations to promote their own policies on global warming. Read carefully what some prominent Californians are saying about the federal government: It is not much different from what influential Confederate South Carolinians boasted about in 1860 on the eve of secession.

The national debt has almost doubled over the last eight years and at nearly $20 trillion is unsustainable.

Entitlement spending rose even as new taxes increased. The have-nots claim the haves make far too much money; the haves retort that they pay most of the income taxes while nearly half the country pays nothing.

All Americans need to take a deep breath, step back, and rein in their anger — and find more ways to connect rather than divide themselves.

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Most Americans agree that the present levels of borrowing and spending cannot continue. But many believe that the tough medicine to cure the disease of chronic annual deficits and mounting debt is unacceptable.

America’s infrastructure and military are vastly underfunded, even though some voters want more subsidies for themselves and apparently want others to pay for them.

America’s once-preeminent colleges and universities are fatally compromised. Universities charge far too much, resist reform, expect exemption from accountability, and assume their students must take on huge amounts of debt. Yet campuses can’t guarantee that their graduates are competently educated or that they will find jobs.

Illiberal attempts to end free speech, to sanction racial and gender segregation, and to attack rather than argue with opponents are disguised by euphemisms such as “safe spaces,” “trigger warnings,” and various -isms and -ologies.

Behind the guise of campus activism and non-negotiable demands is the reality that too many students simply are unprepared to do their assigned work and seek exemption through protests in lieu of hard studying.

America barely survived the Civil War of 1861–65, the Great Depression of 1929–39, and the rioting and protests of the 1960s. But today’s growing divides are additionally supercharged by instant Internet and social-media communications, 24/7 cable news, partisan media, and the denigration of America’s past traditions.

All Americans need to take a deep breath, step back, and rein in their anger — and find more ways to connect rather than divide themselves.

They should assume their opponents are not all sinners, and that their supporters are not all saints.

Things are bad now. But our own history suggests that if we are not careful, they can get even worse.

READ MORE:
We’re Not in a Civil War, but We Are Drifting Toward Divorce
America’s Second Civil War: A Fight over Basic Values
The Left’s Politics of Rioting

— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, to appear in October from Basic Books. You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com. © 2017 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Thank you

NEW YORK ELITES

A Long History of Leftist Hatred

By Patrick J. Buchanan

James T. Hodgkinson of Belleville, Illinois, who aspired to end his life as a mass murderer of Republican Congressmen, was a Donald Trump hater and a Bernie Sanders backer.

Like many before him, Hodgkinson was a malevolent man of the hating and hard left.

His planned atrocity failed because two Capitol Hill cops were at that Alexandria baseball field, providing security for House Whip Steve Scalise. Had those cops not been there, a massacre would have ensued with many more dead than the gunman.

Recall. There were no armed citizens at that Tucson grocery in 2011, when six were murdered and Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was gravely wounded along with a dozen others. The nutcase doing the shooting was only wrestled to the ground when he dropped a clip trying to reload.

The Alexandria attack brings back memories of long ago.

A day before my 12th birthday, when I was in Children’s Hospital with a broken leg, my parents brought me the news that Puerto Rican terrorists had just attempted to assassinate Harry Truman at Blair House. A heroic cop, Leslie Coffelt, died stopping them.

In my second year in high school, blocks from the Capitol, Puerto Rican nationalists entered the visitor’s gallery of the House and began firing semiautomatic pistols. Five Congressmen were wounded.

Democratic politics has often proven a dangerous calling.

Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley and JFK — one in every 10 of all our presidents — were assassinated.

Attending a service for a South Carolina Congressman in the Capitol in 1835, President Jackson survived twin misfires of two pistols. Old Hickory used his cane to attack his assailant, who was collared by Congressman Davy Crockett of Tennessee.

As a third-party candidate for president in 1912, Theodore Roosevelt was shot in the chest. “It takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose,” Teddy scoffed, and finished his speech.

In February 1933, President-elect FDR, in Miami, was the target of would-be assassin Giuseppe Zangara, whose arm was jostled at the moment of firing. The bullet killed Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak.

Between the assassination of JFK in 1963 and near-mortal wounding of President Reagan by John Hinckley in 1981, Martin Luther King was murdered in Memphis in April 1968, and Sen. Robert Kennedy, two months later, in Los Angeles.

Presidential candidate George Wallace, campaigning in Laurel, Maryland, was shot five times in May 1972 by Arthur Bremer, who had spent weeks stalking President Nixon. President Ford was the target of two attempts on his life in 1975, the first by a Manson Family hanger-on Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, the second by radical leftist Sara Jane Moore.

What drove the assassins?

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In the early 20th century, it was anarchism. McKinley was killed by anarchist Leon Czolgosz in Buffalo, New York.

In 1919, Carlo Valdinoci tried to assassinate Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer with a bomb on his porch at 2132 R Street. Valdinoci tripped on a wicket and his dynamite bomb exploded prematurely, blasting Carlo’s body parts all over the neighborhood.

Palmer’s neighbor across the street, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt, rushed over to help.

Palmer ordered a roundup of anarchists in what came to be known as “Palmer Raids,” and put in charge of field operations a 24-year-old lawyer and D.C. law-enforcement prodigy by the name of John Edgar Hoover.

Hoover’s career flourished. But the career of America’s most famous anarchist, Emma Goldman, faded. She and ex-lover Alexander Berkman, who had tried to kill Carnegie Steel’s Henry Clay Frick during the violent Homestead Strike of 1892, were rounded up and deported in 1920 with hundreds of anarchists to the new Russia of Lenin and Trotsky in a ship the press dubbed “the Red Ark.”

A. Mitchell Palmer did not get the 1920 presidential nomination he was seeking. But neighbor FDR did make it onto the ticket.

As radical anarchists were the principal terrorists of the first quarter of the 20th century, and Puerto Rican nationalist-terrorists dominated the 1950s, the 1960s and early 1970s were marked by the seemingly endless violence of the hard left, beginning with the Communist Oswald, who had tried to shoot Gen. Edwin Walker in Dallas before killing JFK.

The campus violence and urban riots of the decade, from Harlem to Watts to Newark and Detroit, to Washington, D.C., and 100 cities after Dr. King’s death, were not the work of the Goldwater right.

Those were the days of the Black Panthers, Students for a Democratic Society, Weatherman and the Symbionese Liberation Army. It was America’s radical left shooting cops and burning down ROTC buildings. Leftist violence propelled the political careers of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

As for James Hodgkinson, he was a Trump-hating left-wing terrorist.

And those who incite sick minds with images of a bloodstained decapitated head of the president, and cheer Central Park productions of “Julius Caesar” with the assassinated Roman Consul made up to look like the president, cannot evade moral culpability.

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The Democrats, Hollywood & Media Elites Own This - "for whatever one sows, that will he also reap."

The Left Embraces Political Violence

June 15, 2017 4:00 AM

NATIONAL REVIEW

This is why the standard liberal motto — that violence is never legitimate, even though it may sometimes be necessary to resort to it — is insufficient. From a radical emancipatory perspective, this formula should be reversed: for the oppressed, violence is always legitimate (since their very status is the result of the violence they are exposed to), but never necessary (it will always be a matter of strategy whether or not use violence against the enemy).

Slavoj Žižek, On Violence and Democracy

It did not take very long to get from “Punch a Nazi!” to “assassinate a congressman.”

A great deal of spittle has been deployed in the debate over whether or to what extent the Left’s recent indulgence of its penchant for violent rhetoric can be linked to the shooting of Representative Steve Scalise and other members of a Republican congressional baseball team by an angry Democratic activist and Bernie Sanders partisan. But the relevant question here is not violent rhetoric but violence itself. The violence at Berkeley and Middlebury did not lead to the shooting in Alexandria — they are part of the same phenomenon: The American Left has embraced political violence.

More precisely, the Left has embraced “anarcho-tyranny.” (Yes, I know what kind of man Sam Francis became; his phrase remains useful.) The anarcho part: Progressives including mainstream Democrats have embraced the sort of violence that has been directed against the likes of Charles Murray as an instrument of liberationist politics. Representative Val Demings, a Democratic congressman from Florida, shared her view that the riots greeting Milo Yiannopoulos at Berkeley were “a beautiful sight.” After a physical attack on white nationalist Richard Spencer, Jeremy Binckes of Salon wrote: “Maybe the question shouldn’t be, ‘Is it okay to punch a Nazi?’ but, ‘If you don’t want to be punched in the face, maybe you shouldn’t preach Nazi values to the public?’” A lively debate about the ethics of using violence to suppress certain political views ensued. Short version: Free speech did not experience a runaway victory.

Things are worse on campus. The editorial board of the Daily Californian defended blackshirt violence on the grounds that, without it, “neo-Nazis would be free to roam the streets of Berkeley.” The argument that people who hold unpopular political opinions should be physically unsafe — that they should be subject not to social exclusion or criticism but to violence, afraid to roam the streets — is textbook totalitarianism.

California’s political leaders did almost nothing in response to the violence at Berkeley, but when the Trump administration threatened to sanction California, they leapt to action. Nancy Pelosi claimed, with no evidence, that the violence in Berkeley was the result of peaceful protests being “infiltrated,” and insisted “the protesters have a right to free speech as well.” But what greeted Yiannopoulos in Berkeley was not free speech: It was political violence organized to suppress free speech. Representative Barbara Lee complained that the Trump administration’s insistence that Berkeley protect the safety and civil rights of its students and visitors was an attempt to “bully our university into silence” — but it was Yiannopoulos who had literally been bullied into silence — with firebombs and truncheons — along with Charles Murray, Ann Coulter, and others. A Middlebury professor had to be briefly hospitalized after being physically attacked for having invited Charles Murray to campus. That is not free speech. That is violence, and Democrats, judging by their non-response to these episodes, have more or less made their peace with it.

We have the modern answer to the beer-hall brawlers of the 1930s.

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That’s the anarcho part. The tyranny part is that while the Left’s blackshirts are permitted to inflict actual physical violence on people who have political opinions they don’t like, the Left’s whiteshirts — respectable Democratic officeholders and media figures — are working feverishly to inflict civil and criminal penalties on individuals and institutions that hold and communicate unpopular political opinions: “Arrest climate deniers!” Adam Weinstein and Robert Kennedy Jr. demanded, and, soon enough, Democrats were cooking up fraud cases against oil companies that had criticized climate-change proposals, and then used subpoenas and other measures to harass conservative and free-market political groups affiliated with them. Every Democrat in the Senate voted with Harry Reid to repeal the First Amendment and allow Congress to regulate political speech. The Obama administration saw to it that no one in the IRS ever faced any real punishment for that agency’s targeting of conservative groups for persecution and harassment.

So, on the one hand, we have the modern answer to the beer-hall brawlers of the 1930s, and on the other hand, we have powerful political figures working to criminalize dissent. The same people who have spent the past 30 years cooking up ever-battier campus speech codes want to do the same thing for society at large in the form of so-called hate-speech regulation.

They do this partly because they intend to win and to rule. They also do it because they have convinced themselves that we are in a state of national crisis, and that the dark shadow of fascism in descending on the United States. In reality, the only thing resembling a genuine totalitarian movement in American politics is the progressive camp from which emerged the man who shot Steve Scalise.

Once you’ve accepted political violence as a legitimate tool in the context of American democracy — once you have concluded that the decision to use violence is only a matter of strategy, as Slavoj Žižek insists — then progress from pepper spray and bicycle locks to rifles and bombs is neither very long nor very difficult to anticipate.

And here we are.

READ MORE:
Editorial: How to Think about the Alexandria Attack
When Speech Inspires Violence, Protect Liberty While Restoring Virtue
Impassioned Political Speech Doesn’t Turn Anyone into a Killer

— Kevin D. Williamson is National Review’s roving correspondent.



ANYONE ELSE NOTICE SOMETHING?

The Coup: Trump Needs To Fire Mueller Today

• The Establishment is out to destroy Trump
• It will not end
• Mueller has a blatant conflict of  Interest with his relationship with Comey
• The Republicans will wilt and the Democrats know it
• Your first loss is your best loss

Trump has no choice but to first  fire the  Mueller supporters in his administration and that should include all Obama holdovers. He needs to fire Mueller and take the heat.

"No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State. ARTICLE I, SECTION 9, CLAUSE 8

Emoluments Clause Does Not Ban Sales to Foreigners

Hans Bader

The Constitution is not hostile to the free market or international trade. Indeed, many Constitutional provisions are designed to protect them, such as the Contracts Clause, the Takings Clause, and the Constitution’s ban on state taxes on exports and imports.

And early American presidents often owned businesses, which they kept operating even while in office. As Greg Jarrett notes, “The first five presidents were farmers and plantation owners who maintained their businesses while in office. Some of their crops, especially tobacco, were sold abroad to companies and foreign governments.”

So it is more than a little strange to see claims that President Trump has somehow violated the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause merely by owning hotels and other business interests that are patronized by foreigners. Yet, as law professor Eugene Kontorovich notes, “earlier this year a group of law professors and prominent attorneys filed a lawsuit [alleging that] the Trump Organization’s hotel rentals to a Chinese state-owned bank—along with royalties on ‘The Apprentice’ from state television in countries such as Vietnam—violate the Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause.”

This odd reading of the Emoluments Clause is contrary to its historical understanding, notes Jarrett, since sales to foreigners by the Founding Fathers “were never regarded, even by their political opponents, as emoluments because they were unrelated to the holding of office.”

The framers of the Emoluments Clause were concerned about gifts to officials from foreign powers – such as the money France gave a British king to enter into a treaty ceding territory, and the pension it gave him that enabled him to avoid summoning parliament; and lavish gifts to diplomats by kings. There is little evidence that it was aimed at sales at market prices, even to foreign officials.

Indeed, as Prof. Kontorovich notes, President George Washington even asked a British official to help find renters for his land: “On Dec. 12, 1793, Washington wrote to Arthur Young, an officer of the U.K. Board of Agriculture…The president asked for Young’s help in renting out his Mount Vernon lands to secure an income for his retirement. Not finding customers in America, he wondered if Young, with his agricultural connections, could find and organize some would-be farmers in his home country and send them over.”

But left-leaning academics are suspicious of the free market, and have come up with an anti-market interpretation of the Emoluments Clause that essentially requires presidents to divest such business interests (presumably, at fire sale prices) before assuming office. In the Los Angeles Times, a May 14 op-ed claimed “the Constitution's emoluments clause” is based on “a dread of corruption” from “officeholders” tainted by “the scrum of the marketplace,” and that Trump’s continuing business holdings are “violating it.”

As National Review notes, these expansive, anti-market interpretations of the Emoluments Clause would snare not just Trump, but also other modern presidents such as Barack Obama, who obtained copyrights while in office from many foreign governments to sell his books overseas: The law professors and attorneys bringing the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) lawsuit “advocate a broad view of ‘emoluments’ to cover any sort of commerce between any foreign sovereign entity and the Trump Organization, a view so broad that it would hold President Obama to have violated the Foreign Emoluments Clause every time a foreign public library bought a copy of Dreams of My Father…By contrast, University of Iowa Law Professor Andy Grewal marshalled historical evidence (mainly from the 19th century) showing that the traditional understanding of ‘emoluments’ was limited to salary and other financial benefits attached to the holding of an office, and did not cover outside private business interests.” As Grewel observes, “market-rate transactions between the Trump Organization and foreign governments do not come within the clause.”

Grewel’s conclusions are echoed by University of Montana Law Professor Robert Natelson, author of The Original Constitution: What It Actually Said and Meant, who analyzed the legislative history of the Clause and its precursor in the Maryland Constitution. As Natelson notes, CREW’s interpretation of emoluments “would have eliminated Virginia tobacco planters like Thomas Jefferson or James Madison from ever being considered for the presidency.”

Some law professors say the Emoluments Clause may not even apply to Presidents, as opposed to appointed federal officials like diplomats.

There Will Be Blood

Are We Nearing Civil War?

Patrick J. Buchanan

Tuesday, 13 June 2017

President Trump may be chief of state, head of government and commander in chief, but his administration is shot through with disloyalists plotting to bring him down.

We are approaching something of a civil war where the capital city seeks the overthrow of the sovereign and its own restoration.

Thus far, it is a nonviolent struggle, though street clashes between pro- and anti-Trump forces are increasingly marked by fistfights and brawls. Police are having difficulty keeping people apart. A few have been arrested carrying concealed weapons.

That the objective of this city is to bring Trump down via a deep state-media coup is no secret. Few deny it.

Last week, fired Director of the FBI James Comey, a successor to J. Edgar Hoover, admitted under oath that he used a cutout to leak to The New York Times an Oval Office conversation with the president.

Goal: have the Times story trigger the appointment of a special prosecutor to bring down the president.

Comey wanted a special prosecutor to target Trump, despite his knowledge, from his own FBI investigation, that Trump was innocent of the pervasive charge that he colluded with the Kremlin in the hacking of the DNC.

Comey's deceit was designed to enlist the police powers of the state to bring down his president. And it worked. For the special counsel named, with broad powers to pursue Trump, is Comey's friend and predecessor at the FBI, Robert Mueller.

As Newt Gingrich said Sunday: "Look at who Mueller's starting to hire.... (T)hese are people that ... look to me like they're ... setting up to go after Trump ... including people, by the way, who have been reprimanded for hiding from the defense information into major cases....

"This is going to be a witch hunt."

Another example. According to Daily Kos, Trump planned a swift lifting of sanctions on Russia after inauguration and a summit meeting with Vladimir Putin to prevent a second Cold War.

The State Department was tasked with working out the details.

Instead, says Daniel Fried, the coordinator for sanctions policy, he received "panicky" calls of "Please, my God, can you stop this?"

Operatives at State, disloyal to the president and hostile to the Russia policy on which he had been elected, collaborated with elements in Congress to sabotage any detente. They succeeded.

"It would have been a win-win for Moscow," said Tom Malinowski of State, who boasted last week of his role in blocking a rapprochement with Russia. State employees sabotaged one of the principal policies for which Americans had voted, and they substituted their own.

Not in memory have there been so many leaks to injure a president from within his own government, and not just political leaks, but leaks of confidential, classified and secret documents. The leaks are coming out of the supposedly secure investigative and intelligence agencies of the U.S. government.

The media, the beneficiaries of these leaks, are giving cover to those breaking the law. The real criminal "collusion" in Washington is between Big Media and the deep state, colluding to destroy a president they detest and to sink the policies they oppose.

Yet another example is the unfolding "unmasking" scandal.

While all the evidence is not yet in, it appears an abnormal number of conversations between Trump associates and Russians were intercepted by U.S. intelligence agencies.

On orders higher up, the conversations were transcribed, and, contrary to law, the names of Trump associates unmasked.

Then those transcripts, with names revealed, were spread to all 16 agencies of the intel community at the direction of Susan Rice, and with the possible knowledge of Barack Obama, assuring some would be leaked after Trump became president.

The leak of Gen. Michael Flynn's conversation with the Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, after Obama imposed sanctions on Russia for the hacking of the DNC, may have been a product of the unmasking operation. The media hit on Flynn cost him the National Security Council post.

Trump has had many accomplishments since his election. Yet his enemies in the media and their deep state allies have often made a purgatory of his presidency.

What he and his White House need to understand is that this is not going to end, that this is a fight to the finish, that his enemies will not relent until they see him impeached or resigning in disgrace.

To prevail, Trump will have to campaign across this country and wage guerrilla war in this capital, using the legal and political weapons at his disposal to ferret out the enemies within his own government.

Not only is this battle essential, if Trump hopes to realize his agenda, it is winnable. For the people sense that the Beltway elites are cynically engaged in preserving their own privileges, positions and power.

If the president cannot rewrite Obamacare or achieve tax reform, he should not go around the country in 2018 wailing about Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer. They are not the real adversaries. They are but interchangeable parts.

He should campaign against the real enemies of America First by promising to purge the deep state and flog its media collaborators.

Time to burn down the Bastille.

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of a new book, Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever. To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2017 CREATORS.COM

General Sessions

A few days before the November election, Jeff Sessions did an interview with Lou Dobbs, commenting about the shenanigans by Lynch, Clinton, Obama and guess who? 

Jumping Jim (Big Bird) Comey.

Jeff Sessions, now Attorney General has now agreed to testify publicly  in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Wouldn't it be great for General Sessions to make an interesting announcement about who's  next in the barrel.

Take no prisoners General.

We Just Don't Understand Them (Voice Of America -November 01, 2009)

The ninth month of the Obama presidency

Is Islam Misunderstood in America?

A new survey of U.S. public attitudes toward Muslim-Americans and Islam finds that a majority of Americans -- 55 percent -- regard Muslim-Americans favorably, but that smaller numbers - only 41 percent -- have favorable impressions of Islam as a religion. The study by the Washington, D.C.-based Pew Research Center indicates that many Americans perceive a link between Islam and violence, with more than one in three saying Islam is more likely than other religions to encourage violence among its believers. Experts on Islamic-American relations believe such negative views stem from American ignorance of Islamic culture. 

Muslims and Islamic culture have long been an integral part of American society. But today, almost years after the 9/11 attacks by radical Islamists and the start of America's war on terror, many Americans associate Islam with violence and extremism. 

We asked a random sample of people in downtown Washington, DC, what immediately comes to mind when they hear the word "Islam". "Unfortunately, the first thought that I have is something maybe a little charged with aggression and negativity," said one woman. A man remarked, "The fact that I work in Washington, DC, makes me especially fearful of Islamic terrorism, especially in the time after September 11." Another woman shared her thoughts: "I know it is a religion founded by Muhammad, and that he was a General, a warrior." Another man talked about his fears: "It brings a little bit of fear to me after being here on September 11th and watching the planes go in." 

The Washington, DC-based Pew Research Center did a more scientific survey. Gregory Smith, who co-authored the study say, "Only about four in 10 say they have favorable views of Islam, and there is also a minority of the public - but a substantial minority, about one third in our survey last summer - who say that they are concerned that Islam encourages violence among its believers."

American Muslim leaders blame the US news media for generating what Nihad Awad, Executive Director of the Council for American Islamic Relations calls "Islamophobia". 

"The kind of coverage that the American audience has been receiving about Islam and Muslims leads one to just one conclusion, that Islam is bad and Muslims are violent," he said. "The media has failed to capture the reality of the Muslim world and only focused on the actions of the few."

One of the problems with the media's portrayal of Islam, experts say, is that violent acts committed by Islamic terrorists aligned with al-Qaida make the news far more often than the peaceful aspects of Islamic culture. 

Dr. Yvonne Haddad is Professor of Islamic History at the Center for Muslim -Christian Understanding at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. "It is very difficult for Americans to distinguish between al-Qaida and not al-Qaida," she said. "It is very difficult for them to distinguish between the few people who are terrorists and the rest of Muslims who are just people trying to make their living, trying to raise their kids and have a peaceful life."

According to the Pew Research Center study, public perceptions depend heavily on a few key factors. Gregory Smith explained. "One of the most powerful factors shaping views of Islam is education," he said. "Those Americans who have more education tend to be more favorable toward Muslim Americans and Islam than Americans with less education. Interestingly, age was also a good predictor of views of Muslim Americans and Islam, with young people tend to be more favorable than were older people." 

Betsy McCormick, a working professional, says she gained a more positive view of Islam by traveling and having direct contact with Islamic culture in the Middle East: "I guess there are a lot of distorted views, because I have traveled to Egypt and I sort of witnessed the practice of the religion and I found it very enriching and very interesting," she said.

Some Americans, including Patricia Hagen, believe a dialogue among the people of the three monotheistic faiths - Christianity, Islam and Judaism - is the best approach to overcome misunderstandings. "Better understanding - and I think it is got to come from within all of the three major religions, to work together," she said. "Coming from a Christian background, Abraham is the founder of Judaism [and] Christianity as well as Islam, so we came from the same foundation, now we have to build upon that foundation."

But building that trust will be a challenge. The Pew study suggests many Americans believe the terrorist attacks of recent years are just the first salvoes of an intensifying conflict between Islam and the West.