I’ll go ahead and preemptively insert the counter argument here: But how do you tell the difference?

You guys can discuss amongst yourselves while I give you Glenn Beck’s take on what’s going on with Trump’s Muslim (travel) ban.

Beck differentiated between Muslims and “Islamists” in a recent interview with CBS’ Alex Wagner.

According to Beck, Islamists are different in that they believe “the Koran supersedes the Constitution or any country.”

Beck is concerned that President Trump is whipping up anti-Muslim sentiment, where American Muslims will be targeted, based solely on the fact that they are Muslim, and nothing more. He also stressed that American Muslims are no different than Mormons or Catholics.

The idea is, they’re here for the same reasons as everyone else, and I have no doubt that that’s the case, although I can agree with the administration that given the state of the world, we can’t just throw open the gates. There needs to be a rigid screening process, for safety’s sake.

Beck continued:

“We could see some sort of internment camp situation … We could head someplace we’ve been before and we don’t want to go again,” he said, referring to internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

Another ugly period in American history, and one where fear took the lead and created a situation where fellow Americans were treated as pariahs and enemies.

Beck knows that speaking out against the administration will make him a target and maybe lose him some fans, but says he doesn’t care, as pointed out by our Jim Jamitis on Thursday.

And while Beck is a steadfast conservative, he didn’t hesitate to defend the Obama administration from Trump’s unsubstantiated charges of having been wiretapped. He also pointed to a very real danger to making such claims with no evidence to back them up.

“We’re losing our faith in everything. It’s concerning to me that we’re now going down this road of ‘deep state.’ We have to logically come together — people on the right and the left that are fair minded — let’s fix reason firmly in her seat and question everything honestly and look at all of it, and disprove this or prove this,” Beck said.

“We can’t go another year, let alone another four years with someone claiming that the government is somehow or another run by shadow people,” he added.

He couldn’t be more right.

I’ve pointed this out myself, and as I am fond of using scripture to back up my point:

Mark 3:23-25 (NIV) “So Jesus called them over to him and began to speak to them in parables: ‘How can Satan drive out Satan? 24If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. 25If a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand.’”

The idea that we can continue on this road, with everybody looking at everybody else through the lens of suspicion just isn’t workable.

If we want solutions, they won’t come from spreading conspiracies or from casting doubts on the government, and our neighbors.