RUTHFULLY YOURS

As I argued in Faithless Execution, the principal constitutional duty of the chief executive is to execute the laws faithfully. President Obama, by contrast, sees his principal task as imposing his post-American “progressive” preferences, regardless of what the laws mandate.

In his latest harangue against Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) and other Americans opposed to his insistence on continuing to import thousands of Muslim refugees from Syria and other parts of the jihad-ravaged Middle East, Obama declaimed:

When I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which a person who’s fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted … that’s shameful…. That’s not American. That’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion.

Really? Under federal law, the executive branch is expressly required to take religion into account in determining who is granted asylum. Under the provision governing asylum (section 1158 of Title 8, U.S. Code), an alien applying for admission must establish that … religion [among other things] … was or will be at least one central reason for persecuting the applicant.

Moreover, to qualify for asylum in the United States, the applicant must be a “refugee” as defined by federal law. That definition (set forth in Section 1101(a)(42)(A) of Title , U.S. Code) also requires the executive branch to take account of the alien’s religion:

When the hacker group Anonymous announced it was launching a campaign against the Islamic State (“These are not the 72 virgins they were expecting,” as one now immortal online quipster put it), something happened that was, in its way, remarkable: Most everybody took them seriously.

Anonymous has taken credit for eliminating some 3,800 pro-ISIS social-media accounts, and it has suggested that, as in its campaign against the rather less significant Ku Klux Klan, it will gather a great deal of real-world information on Islamic State sympathizers and confederates and make it public. In the case of the Klan, that would mean mainly exposure to social opprobrium; in the case of Islamic State groupies and co-conspirators, that could mean a great deal more.

Anonymous is a famously fractious coalition of individuals and factions with internal rivalries and disagreements — a collective front rather than a united front, as Jamie Condliffe put it in Gizmodo — but it is generally regarded as being reasonably good at what it does. Terrorist groups are critically dependent upon electronic communication for everything from recruitment and motivation to actual operations, and there is some reason to suspect that groups such as Anonymous will prove more adept at disrupting that communication than our conventional intelligence and law-enforcement forces have. The Islamic State isn’t really a state, yet; like al-Qaeda, it is a non-state actor, and it is likely that other non-state actors will be enormously important in countering it.

Secretary of State John Kerry believes that the terrorist attacks in Paris last week are a more demonstrable assault on Western society than the massacre of Charlie Hebdo writers that took place in January.

Kerry made the distinction while addressing U.S. embassy staff in Paris Tuesday. “There’s something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo, and I think everybody would feel that,” he said. “There was a sort of particularized focus and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of — not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, ‘Okay, they’re really angry because of this and that.’ This Friday was absolutely indiscriminate. It wasn’t to aggrieve one particular sense of wrong. It was to terrorize people.”

Kerry’s comments reflect the discomfort with Charlie Hebdo​’s satirizing of Islam that led left-leaning writers to criticize the magazine after two men affiliated with al-Qaeda murdered most of its editorial team. But they are at odds with his remarks in the immediate aftermath of that attack.

Ladies and gentleman, your Secretary of State, Mr. John Kerry:

In the last days, obviously, that has been particularly put to the test. There’s something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo, and I think everybody would feel that. There was a sort of particularized focus and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of – not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, okay, they’re really angry because of this and that. This Friday was absolutely indiscriminate. It wasn’t to aggrieve one particular sense of wrong. It was to terrorize people. It was to attack everything that we do stand for. That’s not an exaggeration. It was to assault all sense of nationhood and nation-state and rule of law and decency, dignity, and just put fear into the community and say, “Here we are.” And for what? What’s the platform? What’s the grievance? That we’re not who they are? They kill people because of who they are and they kill people because of what they believe. And it’s indiscriminate.