RUTHFULLY YOURS

The hysterical, politically correct outburst following Donald Trump’s idea of barring Muslims from abroad produced much emotion and wacky claims, including the protest that barring someone based on his religion is unconstitutional according to the 1st Amendment.

The ignorance here is shocking. The rights, privileges and obligations of a U.S. citizen are simply inapplicable to non-citizen foreigners.

But this is hardly the first time the 1st Amendment has been misunderstood. It may be, in fact, the most misunderstood, starting with its first words: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”

In our time, these words have been used to bar school prayer, prevent football coaches from presiding over collective team prayer, disallow references to God in high school graduation speeches, buttress the demand that “Merry Christmas” be deleted from American speech in exchange for “Happy Holidays,” etc. Today’s standard, politically correct interpretation is that the purpose of the 1st Amendment was to make of the new United States an irreligious republic when that was nowhere near its original intent.

The massacre in San Bernardino, Calif., came a few days after a law went into effect banning access by intelligence agencies to key digital communications. It is time for the U.S. to get ahead of terrorism by finally allowing its intelligence agents to use digital tools before the next attack.

Soon after the San Bernardino massacre, law-enforcement agents discovered digital records left behind by Syed Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik. If intelligence agencies had been allowed access to the information in real time, the terrorist attack might have been prevented.

Politics forces the National Security Agency to operate with blinders. The Obama administration blocked the agency from its post-9/11 practice of collecting metadata—tracking digital data on an anonymous basis, and then seeking a court order if Americans are involved—for emails and other digital communications. The law that went into effect just before the San Bernardino killings ended direct NSA access to historic phone records.

Iranian hackers infiltrated the control system of a small dam less than 20 miles from New York City two years ago, sparking concerns that reached to the White House, according to former and current U.S. officials and experts familiar with the previously undisclosed incident.

The breach came amid attacks by hackers linked to Iran’s government against the websites of U.S. banks, and just a few years after American spies had damaged an Iranian nuclear facility with a sophisticated computer worm called Stuxnet. In October 2012, then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta called out Iran’s hacking, prompting fears of cyberwar.

The still-classified dam intrusion illustrates a top concern for U.S. officials as they enter an age of digital state-on-state conflict. America’s power grid, factories, pipelines, bridges and dams—all prime targets for digital armies—are sitting largely unprotected on the Internet. And, unlike in a traditional war, it is sometimes difficult to know whether or where an opponent has struck. In the case of the dam hack, federal investigators initially thought the target might have been a much larger dam in Oregon.

In a video that appeared earlier this month, a man is claiming that he videoed several buses that are carrying people who were brought in from a United Parcel Service flight.

He discusses what he saw prior to filming which he described as people who came in on a UPS flight into Harrisburg International Airport. He also claims that it was supposed to be a parcel flight, and responds to someone in the vehicle with him that it is not soldiers as they are not brought home in this manner.

Apparently there were up to 30 buses waiting to take these people to their destination, which was unknown.

He identifies the bus as #245, but fails to identify the bus company. He also provides the license plate number, which sounds like J0191B.

Consider this syllogism:

Muslim Brotherhood membership = a possible indicator of extremism.

CAIR = a Muslim Brotherhood organization.

∴ CAIR = “possibly” an “extremist” i.e. terrorist organization.

A recently-published British government report concludes that “membership of, association with, or influence by the Muslim Brotherhood should be considered as a possible indicator of extremism,” according to Prime Minister David Cameron. The report also notes that the British government was mistaken in believing it shared a common agenda with the Muslim Brotherhood against al-Qaeda and militant Salafism in general. Cameron said the government would be more careful in the future not to provide legitimacy or a platform for the Muslim Brotherhood.

The study is particularly noteworthy given that CAIR, a widely-quoted organization which poses as a civil-rights group, is a Muslim Brotherhood entity. A federal district court found it to be so, listing it under the heading “The following individuals/entitles who are and/or were members of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee and/or its organizations.” CAIR is number 11 on the list. CAIR was started with the help of a $5,000 donation from the Holy Land Foundation, a terrorist organization prosecuted by the aforementioned court for aiding the terrorist group Hamas. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the Muslim Brotherhood is “Hamas’ parent organization.”

There are 107 jihadists remaining at Guantanamo Bay. President Obama sees that as a huge problem and, for once, I agree with him. But there the agreement ends. The president is hell bent on shuttering the detention camp. I think the problem is that there are only 107 detainees.

Heading into his eighth year as commander-in-chief, Obama seems increasingly detached — inevitably so, as reality relentlessly distances itself from the president’s fantasies about Islam and terrorism.

Impervious to the bitter irony, the president waxed idiotic at his final White House press conference of 2015 about the need to close Gitmo — and about his imminent release of 17 jihadists to speed that process along — while the engines revved up to jet him to San Bernardino, Calif. There, he’ll find time for a quickie meeting with family members in mourning after the jihadist mass-murder of their loved ones two weeks ago.

Last year, undergraduate Sandra Korn initiated a furor when she authored an article for the Harvard Crimson newspaper arguing that academic freedom should be discarded in favor of social justice. Citing the example of Richard Herrnstein’s research on racial differences in intelligence, Korn posed the question: “if our university community opposes racism, sexism, and heterosexism, why should we put up with research that counters our goals simply in the name of ‘academic freedom'”?

Why, indeed. One reason might be that the entire concept of social justice is hopelessly ambiguous. As early as the fifth century BC, Greek philosophers demonstrated that any attempt to define abstract moral quantities such as justice, truth, or courage was doomed from the outset. Plato’s most famous work, The Republic, is devoted to an exploration of the nature of justice. The conclusion is that everyone defines justice to be what he perceives to be in his own self-interest. The standard of “justice” is no standard at all, because it has no objective existence. To declare that one is for “justice” is nothing more than an assertion than one is for oneself.

Ms. Korn is hardly the first person to make an argument against toleration. Her views were anticipated in the fifth century by that most influential of the Christian Fathers, Augustine of Hippo. In a letter to a colleague, Augustine confessed that he had once made the mistake of embracing toleration. But experience had taught him the folly of tolerating heretics and eschewing coercion. “The thing to be considered when anyone is coerced,” Augustine explained, “is not the mere fact of the coercion, but the nature of that to which he is coerced, whether it be good or bad.” If someone had truth on their side, persecution was entirely justified. Like Ms. Korn, Augustine was one of those exceptional individuals blessed with an infallible talent for discerning right from wrong.

The annual war on Christmas began early this year. A week after Halloween, Starbucks unveiled its seasonal cup design, which left off traditional holiday motifs like reindeer and snowmen, opting instead for a plain red cup with the Starbucks logo. Within days, an irate individual posted on Facebook, “Starbucks REMOVED CHRISTMAS from their cups because they hate Jesus.” He also claimed Starbucks forbids employees from saying “Merry Christmas.” Donald Trump, on the stump in Illinois, reacted by calling for a boycott of Starbucks and suggesting he wouldn’t renew the company’s lease on a store in Trump Towers. Trump also promised that if he became president, “We’re all going to be saying Merry Christmas again, that I can tell you.”

Within a week of being posted, the Facebook comment was viewed over 11 million times, and shared half a million. In response, the liberal Daily Kos called the complaint a “right-wing freakout” by a “deeply insane Christian person.”

The whole affair suggests that the Christmas wars are now as much a part of the season as caroling and shopping. Schools proscribing Christmas parties, store clerks shying away from greeting customers with a “Merry Christmas,” and municipalities forbidding crèches on public property seem to millions of American Christians—who form 71% of the population—to be attacks on their most cherished holiday, and another secular assault on their religious beliefs by a minority of atheists, agnostics, and followers of faiths other than Christianity. And though not much of Christian theology remains in a holiday that is more about consumption and leisure than the birth of Christ, the attacks on Christmas do reflect an evangelical secularism that aims to drive Christianity from the public square.

Muslims are the new Jews. You can find this offensive claim repeated everywhere in the media. The Jews, a small ethnic minority of millions that was stateless for thousands of years, are a terrible analogy for a global Muslim population of 1.6 billion and around 50 countries that do not comprise a single ethnicity or race. Comparing the two makes as much sense as comparing the Finns to all of Asia.

The only thing the Muslims and the Jews have ever had in common is that the former conquered, persecuted and enslaved the latter. Any religious similarities are the product of Muslim cultural appropriation of Jewish beliefs and any cultural similarities are the result of Muslim colonization.

Comparing Jews to Muslims makes as much sense as comparing Jews to Nazis. But the media began making the argument that the Jews are the new Nazis from the very moment that the stateless Jews got their first state since Rome and its allied Arab invaders had destroyed the last one.

In this twisted historical revisionism, the Jews, a beleaguered minority hanging on to a country slightly bigger than Fiji, who have spent the last 40 years cutting pieces off their small slice of the world to hand over to the region’s massive Muslim majority in the hopes of being left alone, are the new Nazis.

The chilling thing about the hung jury that resulted in a mistrial for Officer William G. Porter, the first Baltimore cop to stand trial on charges arising out of the death of Freddie Gray, is that it was a hung jury.

This was a prosecution that should never have been brought, based on such a stark lack of evidence that there was not even probable cause to make an arrest, much less proof beyond a reasonable doubt to convict a man presumed innocent. The jury should have acquitted Officer Porter in record time. Indeed, the case should never have gone to jury deliberations because the trial judge should have dismissed it when the state rested without proving any crimes.

Yet, the demagoguery created such an atmosphere of intimidation that at least one juror voted to convict. We may never know what the numerical split was in the vote of the twelve jurors. We know for a fact, however, that a riotous element of the community, which has the prosecutors and the government in its thrall, has made clear that no verdict except “guilty” – regardless of the lack of proof – will be acceptable if Baltimore is to be spared more violence.