RUTHFULLY YOURS

My only minor quarrel with what Donald Trump said regarding Islamic “hatred” for the West (see the prior post) involves his assertion that it is “hard to tell who’s who” – i.e., to sort out anti-Western from pro-Western Muslims.

Trump is right in the sense that (a) the American tradition frowns on examining people about their religious beliefs (or even on whether beliefs that they regard as “religious” necessarily are), and (b) even if we conducted such examinations, respondents who are hostile to us can always lie about their true sentiments. Nevertheless, sharia (Islamic law) is useful here.

Sharia is antithetical to Western principles and American constitutional law in fundamental ways. (I have addressed this many times, see, e.g., here.) A Muslim who is overtly sharia-adherent and believes sharia should be adopted as the law of the land is highly likely to be hostile to Western culture. A Muslim who is not overtly sharia-adherent and who does not favor its imposition as governing law is very likely to be pro-Western. (See, e.g., my 2011 column on the “Mapping Sharia” study.)

I am not as sheepish as Republicans tend to be about the propriety of examining the sharia adherence of Muslim aliens who want to enter the United States. The vast majority of sharia seeks to control matters we in the West regard as the province of civil and criminal law, not religious belief. Plus, even if sharia were mainly about religious belief, aliens who want to enter our country have no First Amendment right against questioning by our government.

I’m also not as pessimistic as many commentators about the potential effectiveness of such examinations. To those who say the respondents will lie, I say (a) government interrogators are trained to detect lying; (b) the government is often able to prove lying beyond a reasonable doubt even when the government bears the burden of proof and the person accused of lying is presumed innocent; and (c) we are dealing here with the opposite situation: The burden is on the alien to prove he merits entry into our country, there is no presumption of innocence, and the government does not need a reason to keep a suspected threat out, much less bear a burden of proving that its suspicions are valid. If the government suspects a Muslim alien is lying or is otherwise a threat, the alien should be denied entry, period.

In an interview by CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Donald Trump was asked whether he thought “Islam is at war with the West.” He replied, “I think Islam hates us,” adding that there is such a “tremendous” and “unbelievable” amount of “hatred” that we must “get to the bottom of” it. But when Cooper pushed him, it became clear that Trump was far less interested in getting to the bottom of it than shielding the country from its consequences.

Cooper pressed Trump about whether this “hatred” was inherent “in Islam itself?” Trump answered, “You’re going to have to figure that out.” He went on to opine that the cause was less important than what we do to protect ourselves: “We have to be very vigilant, we have to be very careful, and we can’t allow people coming into this country who have this hatred of the United States and of people who are not Muslim.”

Cooper, however, continued homing in on the root cause of the hatred: “Is there a war between the West and radical Islam, or is there a war between the West and Islam itself?”

Trump responded, “It’s radical, but it’s very hard to define, it’s very hard to separate because you don’t know who’s who.”

Before I address Trump’s remarks on Islam (in this post and a second one that follows), let’s clear away the underbrush. I am a Cruz supporter. I also do not have a view about whether Trump’s comments reflect what he really thinks or what he thinks people want to hear. On the matter of Trump’s candor, I lean more toward Kevin than Camille Paglia, but for present purposes it is beside the point. My objective here is twofold: (1) to assess what Trump said; and (2) to urge other candidates not to condemn it just because Trump, who often says condemnable things, is the one who said it. Already, the usual suspects are attacking Trump as a bigot and demanding that other candidates do likewise. That would be a mistake. One needn’t be a Trump supporter to see that there is a lot more right than wrong in his remarks.