RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Clinton campaign and the mainstream media are in high dungeon over comments Donald Trump made at Wednesday’s “Commander in Chief Forum.” Trump said that intelligence analysts who briefed him recently were not happy with President Obama, who often ignored their analysis.

According to Trump:

What I did learn is that our leadership, Barack Obama, did not follow what our experts and our truly — when they call it intelligence, it’s there for a reason — what our experts said to do. And I was very, very surprised. In almost every instance, and I could tell, I have pretty good with the body language, I could tell, they were not happy. Our leaders did not follow what they were recommending.

In response, Clinton supporters, former intelligence officers, and some current intelligence officials lashed out at Trump for politicizing intelligence.

Based on my 25 years working in U.S national-security posts, I agree that Trump’s intelligence briefings have been politicized, but not by Trump.

Trump did not break the rules by revealing classified information from his intelligence briefings. The concerns he voiced, based on the briefings, that President Obama ignored crucial intelligence were warranted, given numerous reports of intelligence politicization during this administration — such as the politicized 2012 Benghazi talking points drafted by the CIA and the slanting of CENTCOM intelligence analysis on ISIS to support Obama-administration policy.

You may remember that in January 2014 President Obama called ISIS a “JV” terrorist group. To counter criticism of this remark and the administration’s failure to address the growing threat from ISIS, Obama officials circulated stories in mid 2014 that they were caught off-guard by ISIS because of a failure by U.S. intelligence agencies to warn about the ISIS threat. I wrote in a June 2014 article how House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Rogers disputed this claim, and that Defense Intelligence Agency director Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, now a Trump senior adviser, warned about the growing threat from ISIS in congressional testimony in February 2014.

My guess is that Trump or his advisers asked a question during the intelligence briefings about when the Intelligence Community first warned U.S. officials that ISIS posed a serious threat to international and American national security. If the answer was that it occurred prior to the president’s “JV” comment (which I am sure it was), Trump would be justified in expressing his concern that Obama has been ignoring crucial intelligence analysis.

Several former senior intelligence officers rejected Trump’s comments by telling the news media that U.S. intelligence agencies are completely divorced from policymaking and domestic politics. These claims were unconvincing and were made in at least two cases by individuals who engaged in improper political activities when they served as senior intelligence officials.

On August 1 I reported here at PJ Media about the ongoing Obama administration discrimination against non-Muslim Syrian refugees, noting that at that time, fewer than one percent (43 of 6,877, or 0.7 percent of the total) of refugees admitted to the U.S. as of July 31 were Christians, Yezidis, and other Syrian religious minorities.

For the month of August, 3, 159 Muslim and 30 non-Muslim refugees were admitted to the U.S. – again, fewer than one percent.

And so far for September (as of today, 9/10), the numbers are even more depressing: 749 Muslim and just 2 Christian refugees, with non-Muslim admittance representing just 0.2 percent of the current monthly total.

So year-to-date, of 10,817 Syrian refugees admitted 10,742 were Muslim, and just 75 were non-Muslim (0.7 percent), while non-Muslim minorities in Syria make up at least 12 percent of the population.

During a media conference call just days after my August report, sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), both the Obama administration officials and the media were incurious and apparently unconcerned about the ongoing discrimination of non-Muslim minorities.

In fact, only one media outlet asked about the problem.

Coordinator:

Absolutely and as a reminder if you would like to ask a question you can press Star 1 on your phone and record your name when prompted. Our next question comes from Lauren Ashburn with EWTN. Your line is open.

Lauren Ashburn:

Thank you very much and thank you for taking my call. The percentage of those Syrian refugees who have been let into the country – what percent are Muslims? Do you have that breakdown?

Anne Richard:

Yes, most are Muslims over 99% are Muslims.

Lauren Ashburn:

And then what percent are of religious (execution) are fleeing (because they) say religious persecution?

Anne Richard:

I don’t have that breakdown for you.

And that was the entire substance of the discussion about why so few non-Muslim refugees were being admitted.

From the official Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination’s Gender Identity Guidance, just released last week:

Even a church could be seen as a place of public accommodation if it holds a secular event, such as a spaghetti supper, that is open to the general public.

Now, churches hold events “open to the general public” all the time — it’s often how they seek new converts. And even church “secular events,” which I take it means events that don’t involve overt worship, are generally viewed by the church as part of its ministry, and certainly as a means of the church modeling what it believes to be religiously sound behavior.

My guess is that most churches would not turn someone away from a generally open spaghetti supper. (Though I think churches should be free to exclude transgender attendees — just as they should be free to hold men-only and women-only events or, for that matter, black-only events, white-only events, events only for ethnic Jews, and the like — that is a question for another day.)

But some religious leaders, as well as the church employees and volunteers, may refuse to use pronouns that they believe are inconsistent with God’s plan as revealed by anatomy. To quote one example — whether or not you agree with its logic or theology —

Truth-telling is always necessary for the Christian (Eph. 4:15). We are not allowed speak in ways that are fundamentally dishonest and that undermine the truth of God’s word about how he made us and the world. Transgender ideology is fundamentally a revolt against God’s truth. It encourages people–sometimes very disturbed and hurting people–to deny who God made them to be. It traps them in a way of thinking and living that is harmful to them and that alienates them from God’s truth. We do not serve them or love them well by speaking as if transgender fictions are true. …

The practical upshot of this principle means that I must never encourage or accomodate transgender fictions with my words. In fact, I have an obligation to expose them. For me, that means that I may never refer to a biological male with pronouns that encourage him to think of himself as a female. Likewise, I may never refer to a biological female with pronouns that encourage her to think of herself as a male. In other words, I have to speak truthfully. And that includes the choice of pronouns that I use.

Under Massachusetts law, refusing to use a transgender person’s preferred pronoun would be punishable discrimination. (At least this is true of “he” or “she” — I saw nothing in the document about “ze” and other newly made-up pronouns.) The Massachusetts document I linked to makes that clear in the employment context, and it also makes clear that the antidiscrimination law rules apply to places of public accommodations (including churches, in “secular events” “open to the public”) just as much as to employment.

Indeed, a church might be liable even for statements by its congregants (and not just its volunteers, who are acting as agents) that are critical of transgender people. Tolerating such remarks is generally seen as allowing a “hostile environment,” and therefore “harassment.” Indeed, the statement I linked to specifically encourages people to “prohibit derogatory comments or jokes about transgender persons from employees, clients, vendors and any others, and promptly investigate and discipline persons who engage in discriminatory conduct” (emphasis added). But that’s not just encouragement; it simply reflects hostile work environment harassment law, which has long required employers to restrict derogatory speech by clients, to prevent “hostile environments.” See 29 C.F.R. § 1604.11. The same logic applies for places of public accommodation, which Massachusetts says can include churches.

Pro-Israel bloggers like William Jacobson and Caroline Glick have brought much attention to a fiasco at Syracuse University first reported by The Atlantic. The invitation to Shimon Dotan, a leftist Israeli filmmaker, to speak on and show his anti-settler movie “The Settlers” at a Syracuse conference on religion and film, was revoked because of the fear of pressure from campus activists supporting the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel. While Jacobson and Glick wrote mordant commentaries, pointing to the alarming advance of antisemitism on campus, and The Atlantic stressed the role of political correctness, to me the most interesting character in this story is M. Gail Hamner, the tenured professor who disinvited Dotan. Here are extracts of her letter of disinvitation, taken from Jacobson’s blog, with his emphases. The letter is a classic example of shame-filled shamefulness:

I now am embarrassed to share that my SU colleagues, on hearing about my attempt to secure your presentation, have warned me that the BDS faction on campus will make matters very unpleasant for you and for me if you come. In particular my film colleague in English who granted me affiliated faculty in the film and screen studies program and who supported my proposal to the Humanities Council for this conference told me point blank that if I have not myself seen your film and cannot myself vouch for it to the Council, I will lose credibility with a number of film and Women/Gender studies colleagues. Sadly, I have not had the chance to see your film and can only vouch for it through my friend and through published reviews. Clearly I am politically naive. I also feel tremendous shame in reneging on a half-offered invitation….. I feel caught in an ideological matrix and by my own egoic needs to sustain certain institutional affiliations.

After this came out, as the Algemeiner reported, Syracuse University overruled her and promised, in a high-minded statement of its principles, to re-invite Professor Dotan. In itself that was good news, even if, as Jacobson emphasized, it averted its administrative eye from the dirty work that had put those pressures on Professor Hamner in the first place. Professor Hamner then issued another shamefaced apology in which she describes herself as “overly concerned” about “how others would react,” and apologizes for not having viewed the film in advance. Note, however, that confessing to the crime of not seeing the movie in advance amounts to the admission that if only everyone had known it was an anti-settler movie maybe it would have been okay. (Apparently not though, if Syracuse Professor Miriam Elman, the subject of the Algemeiner interview, is to be believed.)