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Sigh.
Xenophobia has been mentioned a couple times. I'd like to address that.
I'm not xenophobic. I've traveled out of the country, I'm fascinated by other cultures, I've taken a stab at learning several different languages (the only one that stuck worth a darn was Espanol), I'd love to take a tour of the Far East.
I have no problem with legal immigrants who make a reasonable effort to assimilate and obey our laws and respect our customs. Nor do I expect them to give up all theirs.
I DO have a problem with those who come here illegally, often through stealing someone else's identity, and often with no intention of becoming a citizen or fitting in.
I have a MAJOR problem with letting Muslims into the country in great numbers until we have a FAR better means of "vetting" them to weed out the terrorists and militants than is currently the case. Given the tendency of Muslims in large numbers to start pushing for their own Shariah law system, I'm concerned about letting too many of them in period.
Until we can tell Haji the peaceful shopkeeper from his cousin Haji the seemingly-peaceful-but-secret-Jihadist, we need to be a bit more cautious.
This does not make me xenophobic; it makes me mindful of a real and present danger, and a potential but severe future danger.
I'm the only one who mentioned xenophobia, so I'll take this as addressed to me.
Firstly, I'd like to point out that Islam is incredibly illiberal, has a massive terrorism problem and is in great need of reform. I'd also like to say that the vast vast vast majority of muslims are peaceful. These statements are not mutually exclusive.
Now that's out of the way, the point I was making was that the only reason this guy seems to think women are the heralds of destruction is that they are more welcoming to outside parties than men are. So this guys fear of our nation being destroyed is not down to women, but to foreigners.
As to the actual threat posed by foreigners, you're more likely to be killed by Steve from down the street than either one of the Haji's in your example.
There were just 25 U.S. noncombatant fatalities from terrorism worldwide. (The US government definition of terrorism excludes attacks on U.S. military personnel). While we don’t have the figures at hand, undoubtedly more American citizens died overseas from traffic accidents or intestinal illnesses than from terrorism.
The March, 2011, Harper‘s Index noted:
Number of American civilians who died worldwide in terrorist attacks last year: 8 — Minimum number who died after being struck by lightning: 29.
You say you are mindful of the danger presented by muslims. Well, a phobia is characterized as an irrational fear, and fear of muslim immigrants is irrational. If we expressed our fears in proportion to the amount of danger we are actually in, then instead of seeing calls for banning immigration of muslims, we would be seeing calls for funding road safety initiatives 20x more than they are now. There is very little reason to be scared of muslim immigrants, but for some reason the irrational fear that we do have is preventing us from finding the humanity to help hundreds of thousands of people who are in dire need of help, help that is well within our means to provide.