ONE of the battier moments in the primary election I just covered came when the conversation during a televised debate turned toward illegal immigration. The first candidate to respond to the question of what to do about illegal immigrants (nb: I refuse to call human beings "illegals". They themselves are not illegal. They do not exist illegally; they emigrated illegally. It is the action, not the person, that is illegal, much like it is the sin, not the sinner, that is supposed to be rejected). The first candidate to respond, Nathan Deal, said he favoured an Arizona-style law in Georgia. The second candidate said that law is fine as far as it goes, but he was tired of paying to educate, jail and care for illegal immigrants; he wanted to sue the federal government to recoup the money. The next candidate said Arizona-style laws and suing the federal government is fine and dandy; he was tired of illegal immigrants wandering the streets. He wanted to put them in prison camps. (What he actually said was, "If we have to set up a Guanatanamo Bay of Georgia, I would do it.") Then the last candidate said all of that was just the beginning: he would have local sheriffs round them up, put them on buses and drop them off at the White House (I don't know either; I suppose taking them to Hartsfield-Jackson isn't dramatic enough and Canada and Mexico are both too far from Atlanta). Mercifully, the candidate roster was exhausted before the one-upmanship moved to boiling and flaying.

That hysteria, alas, seems to be repeating itself in the reaction to the "Ground Zero mosque", which is in fact ("fact", noun, from Latin factum: a real occurrence or event) a couple of blocks from Ground Zero. We've all heard the calls for refudiation. We know that Newt Gingrich believes that allowing Americans the right to worship and assemble as they choose just shows how timid elites are. Betterwritersthan I have dealt with the dangerous inanity of those charges. But this is not opposition to one single project. It is something far larger and more worrying than that. Here in Tennessee some seem actually to believe that building a mosque will mean that Muslims "have conquered Tennessee". A church in Gainesville wants to turn September 11th 2010 into International Burn A Koran day. And in Oklahoma, Rex Duncan, a state senator, wants to make it illegal for judges to consider international or Sharia law in their rulings.

It is this last one, I think, that is most invidious. The Florida church's proposal is a mean-spirited stunt proposed by clowns. There is already a mosque in Murfreesboro. I was there today: trust me, the Muslims haven't conquered it. Mr Duncan's law not only proposes to dictate to judges how they do their jobs, it also sees the entire outside world as a threat, and something to be kept at bay. It opposes not merely Islamic law, but any "international" law, and doing so for no apparent reason (need I point out here that I of course believe American judges should enforce American law?): as my colleague points out in the article linked to above, it's not as though there has been a rash of Sharia-influenced decisions. It is nothing more than an expression of contempt.

And it gets tiring to say this and see it over and over, but it's worth making the point again: all of these measures alienate the very people we need most: American Muslims. Muslims who believe in the rule of law. Anyone who believes that the First Amendment actually means something. Of course, that assumes that what we want is to win this war, rather than to expand it into an all-out clash of civilisations. And that is what we want, right? Right?