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Molly White, a Republican state rep, asks Muslim community members to renounce terrorism, swear allegiance

A Texas lawmaker instructed staff to greet Muslim visitors with an Israeli flag.

Molly White, a Republican state representative, said in a Facebook posting that she would be out of the office on Thursday, Muslim Capitol Day, organized by the local Council on American-Islamic Relations chapter.

“I did leave an Israeli flag on the reception desk in my office with instructions to staff to ask representatives from the Muslim community to renounce Islamic terrorist groups and publicly announce allegiance to America and our laws,” she said. “We will see how long they stay in my office.”

The Texas Tribune said about 100 Muslims visited the Capitol, most of them students and children.

Within hours, White’s Facebook posting had drawn hundreds of replies, positive and negative, including one from Martin Woodward, who said he was Jewish, Texan and a supporter of Israel.

“Choosing to display the Israeli flag solely as a reaction to Muslim visitors is not respectful to Israel, her citizens, or her supporters,” he said. “I urge you to reconsider your actions.”

White, who engaged with other commenters, saying she would ban those who are “insulting,” did not reply to Woodward.

From her page, it appears that White backs laws that would ban Muslims from settling differences through Sharia, or Islamic law.

Most Jewish groups oppose such laws, in part because they would likely also lead to restrictions on Jewish religious courts, or batei din.

The civil war in Syria will soon enter its fifth year, with no end in sight. On January 20, Foreign Affairs managing editor Jonathan Tepperman met with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus to discuss the conflict in an exclusive interview.

I would like to start by asking you about the war. It has now been going on for almost four years, and you know the statistics: more than 200,000 people have been killed, a million wounded, and more than three million Syrians have fled the country, according to the UN. Your forces have also suffered heavy casualties. The war cannot go on forever. How do you see the war ending?
All wars anywhere in the world have ended with a political solution, because war itself is not the solution; war is one of the instruments of politics. So you end with a political solution. That’s how we see it. That is the headline.

You don’t think that this war will end militarily?
No. Any war ends with a political solution.

Your country is increasingly divided into three ministates: one controlled by the government, one controlled by ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, and one controlled by the more secular Sunni and Kurdish opposition. How will 

you ever put Syria back together again?
First of all, this image is not accurate, because you cannot talk about ministates without talking about the people who live within those states. The Syrian people are still with the unity of Syria; they still support the government. The factions you refer to control some areas, but they move from one place to another—they are not stable, and there are no clear lines of separation between different forces. Sometimes they mingle with each other and they move. But the main issue is about the population. The population still supports the state regardless of whether they support it politically or not; I mean they support the state as the representative of the unity of Syria. So as long as you have the Syrian people believing in unity, any government and any official can unify Syria. If the people are divided into two, three, or four groups, no one can unify this country. That’s how we see it.

In the 5th Century BC, the “Persian disease” noted by Hippocrates probably was bubonic plague; in 8th-century Japan, it meant the measles. Today it well might mean chlamydia. Standout levels of infertility among Iranian couples, a major cause of the country’s falling birth rate, coincide with epidemic levels of sexually transmitted disease. Both reflect deep-seated social pathologies. Iran has become a country radically different from the vision of its theocratic rulers, with prevailing social pathologies quite at odds with the self-image of radical Islam.

Iran’s fertility decline from about seven children per female in 1979 to just 1.6 in 2012 remains a conundrum to demographers. Never before in recorded history has the birth rate of a big country fallen so fast and so far. Iran’s population is aging faster than that of any other country in the world. In 2050, 30% of its people will be over 60, the same ratio as in the United States but with a tenth of America’s per capita GDP. I see no way to avoid a social catastrophe unique in human experience. Since I first drew attention to Iran’s demographic implosion a decade ago, I have heard not one suggestion as to how Iran might avert this disaster, despite some belated efforts to raise the birth rate.

“In the warmest of hearts there’s a cold spot for the Jews.” Irving Howe wrote these words to me in 1972 in a letter (actually, a postcard) of bitter reflection about the fact that A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, the great work of literary salvage that he and Eliezer Greenberg had published in 1954, “never got reviewed in any American literary magazine.”

Those words returned to me as I read the shocking report of the death on Jan. 18 (in highly suspicious circumstances) of Argentinian federal prosecutor Alberto Nisman. In 2006 he had indicted seven Iranians, who are still at large, and a Lebanese suspect (now dead) for the massacre of 85 Argentinian Jews in the 1994 bombing of the Buenos Aires Jewish Community Center. Nisman had also concluded that the Iranians were responsible for the 1992 attack on Israel’s Buenos Aires embassy, which killed 29 and wounded 242. Nisman was scheduled to present, on Jan. 19, evidence that Argentinian President Kirchner and her Foreign Minister Timerman had entered into a secret agreement with the Iranian government to release the killers in exchange for an Iranian oil agreement to purchase Argentinian grain.