Abbreviated Pundit Round-up

Nicholas Kristof on how ISIS could not have a better recruiter than Donald Trump.

Donald Trump's proposal to bar Muslims from America may be a gift to ISIS recruitment and a grotesque echo of the sentiment behind the Chinese Exclusion Act and the internment of Japanese-Americans. But, like those earlier spasms of exclusion, the Trump proposal has plenty of supporters.

In one recent poll, more than three-quarters of Republicans said that Islam was incompatible with life in the United States. There’s a widespread perception in America that Islam is rooted in misogyny and violence, incorrigible because it is rooted in a holy text that is fundamentally different from others. …

There’s a profound human tendency, rooted in evolutionary biology, to “otherize” people who don’t belong to our race, our ethnic group, our religion. That’s particularly true when we’re scared. It’s difficult to conceive now that a 1944 poll found that 13 percent of Americans favored “killing all Japanese,” and that the head of a United States government commission in 1945 urged “the extermination of the Japanese in toto.”

At the time of the 9/11 attacks, the CIA estimated that there were perhaps 100 people in al-Qaeda. After the expenditure of several trillion dollars and the death of more than twice as many Americans that those who died in not just 9/11, but all terrorism attacks in America before and since, al-Qaeda has about 30,000 and ISIS has matched them.

I don’t suppose there’s a chance we might think of something else to do other than more of the same? No? Yeah. Didn’t think so.

Let’s do unto other pundits, by going inside.