RUTHFULLY YOURS

Note: Former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Pete Hoekstra is the Investigative Project on Terrorism’s Shillman senior fellow. This article originally appeared at Newsmax.

NBC’s “Meet the Press” moderator Chuck Todd in a recent exchange with a presidential candidate raised an issue that should be discussed not only by all of the candidates, but debated and analyzed by the American people.

Is Islamic law (Shariah) compatible with the U.S. Constitution?

The question has no simple answer, but we have three recent examples of where regime change forced national leaders to determine Shariah’s role in their governance, all failing to reach a definitive conclusion.

The first two followed interventions by the Obama administration, in one case actively and in the other passively, that facilitated the overthrow of stable authorities.

In Libya, NATO precipitated the overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi’s 42-year dictatorship. In Egypt, the U.S. sent clear and unambiguous indications that replacing President Hosni Mubarak with the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood would be acceptable, if not desirable.

On Sunday night, the Western Wall plaza in Jerusalem was nearly empty. Though it was the eve of Simchat Torah, when thousands of Jew normally congregate at the holy site to celebrate the holiday by dancing with Torah scrolls, the Palestinian terrorist attack that took place in the area 24 hours earlier served to scare off even those people who believe that everything is in God’s hands.

No one could possibly be blamed for such fear.

The stabbing of an Israeli family by a 19-year-old Ramallah resident and Jerusalem law student — culminating in the death of 22-year-old Aharon Bennett and 41-year-old Rabbi Nehemia Lavi, who came to the rescue; the critical wounding of 21-year-old Adele Bennett; the injury to the couple’s two-year-old boy and trauma to their physically unscathed baby daughter — was not merely brutal. It was documented on the cellphones of Arab onlookers, who laughed and spit at the young mother covered in blood, begging for help as she tried to flee the scene with a knife wedged in her shoulder.

“You should die, too,” they chanted, while she stumbled ahead in the direction of Israeli Border Police.

Hillary Clinton has a new gun agenda that is the same as the old gun agenda.

We all are appalled and heartsick over the country’s mass shootings, which aren’t any less shocking for their routine occurrence. But that doesn’t mean we know how to stop them. The Pavlovian Democratic reaction is to offer a raft of familiar gun-control proposals, whether or not they have any bearing on mass shootings.

Hillary’s ideas are a testament to the essential sterility of the gun debate, no matter how much heat it generates. There is no way around the fact that marginal changes will do little or nothing to stop mass killers, while more sweeping changes — even if they were practicable or wise — run afoul of the Second Amendment.

Among other things, Clinton wants to renew the assault-weapons ban, which we had for 10 years before it lapsed in 2004. The ban never made any sense, and a push to revive it is nostalgia for a meaningless gesture. To review: A so-called assault weapon is a semi-automatic rifle tricked out with frightening-looking cosmetic features. It is functionally indistinguishable from any other semi-automatic rifle.

In a rare burst of independence and self-interest, the California Legislature, led by largely Latino and Inland Democrats, last month defeated Gov. Jerry Brown’s attempt to cut gasoline use in the state by 50 percent by 2030. These political leaders, backed by the leftovers of the once-powerful oil industry, scored points by suggesting that this goal would lead inevitably to much higher fuel prices and even state-imposed gas rationing.

Days later, however, state regulators announced plans to impose similarly tough anti-fossil-fuel quotas anyway. This pronouncement, of course, brought out hosannas from the green lobby – as well as their most reliable media allies. Few progressives today appear concerned that an expanding, increasingly assertive regulatory state, as long as it errs on the “right side,” poses any long-term risks.

Welcome to the new age of authority, in which voters’ mundane concerns are minimized, and the bureaucracy – backed by an elected executive – rules the roost, armed with full confidence that it knows best. Nor is this merely a California phenomenon. Rule by decree has become commonplace in Washington, D.C., as President Obama seems to dictate policies on everything from immigration to climate change without effective resistance from a weak Congress and a listless judiciary.

While no modern leader since President Richard Nixon has been so bold in trying to consolidate power, this centralizing trend has been building for decades. Since 1910, the federal government has doubled its share of all government spending to 60 percent and grows ever more meddlesome in people’s daily lives. Its share of GDP has now grown to the highest level since the Second World War.

“In sum, the region is North Korea cubed, an Islamic shoot-’em-up Tombstone or Dodge City where punks with nuclear six-guns, not sober classical deterrence, will make the rules.”

There are several scenarios the Obama administration may be entertaining as it pursues its diplomacy in the Middle East. It may believe that the new agreement with Iran will lead to “engagement” with reform-minded theocrats. The idea is that this will insidiously liberalize the regime, empower a younger generation of pro-Western reformers, and put the theocracy on “an arc of history” back into the “family of nations.” Or perhaps an Obama-inspired second green revolution will overthrow the regime, and we will see a Euro-socialist Iranian republic renounce nuclear weapons — or at least, having inherited custodianship of the existing arsenal, oversee it in the fashion of democratic Israel or France.

Alternatively, the administration may imagine that a Shiite Axis — Iran, Syria, Iraq, Hezbollah, Hamas — empowered by Putin’s Russia, will balance the region, either, strategically, convincing the Sunni monarchies to accept the new balance of power, or, morally, ensuring that formerly outlaw anti-American radical regimes find parity with the pro-American conservative and right-wing regimes in Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf monarchies. Or, less concretely, the United States may simply wish to abdicate the Middle East and let the players there all fight it out, reentering when the players are worn out and defeated.

The Obama administration plans to create a global police force that counters “violent extremism” in the United States and elsewhere.

The problem is that in Obama-speak “violent extremism” refers not only to jihadists wishing to harm Americans but also to conservatives and Tea Party activists. Just ask all the law-abiding right-of-center nonprofit groups targeted by Lois Lerner’s IRS during the Obama presidency.

Ominously, President Obama and U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch unveiled the Strong Cities Network last week at the United Nations.

America’s chief executive, who speaks in hushed and reverent tones when discussing the Muslim faith, said the U.S. will use “all of our tools” to fight Islamic State terrorists.

“This is not an easy task,” Obama said. “This is not a conventional battle. This is a long-term campaign — not only against this particular network, but against its ideology.” The United States and a coalition of 60 other countries are “pursuing a comprehensive strategy” for dealing with Islamic State, he said.

Last week a fifteen-year-old Muslim, Farhad Jabar Khalil Mohammad, went to a police station in New South Wales and shot dead a civilian police employee, Curtis Cheng. After the murder, the young murderer was, according to an eyewitness, “dancing joyously.” Outside the station, he waved his gun at police and screamed “Allahu akbar” at them before he was killed in the ensuing gunfight.

In the wake of this jihad murder, Australian officials have behaved in an utterly predictable manner – one that we have seen many, many times before in Western countries, and that we will doubtless see many more times as well: they rushed to profess ignorance of the killer’s motives and above all, to defend Islam.

None of these officials are Muslims. They have all just been thoroughly indoctrinated with the idea that to look too closely at the motivating ideology behind murders like that of Curtis Cheng would be “hateful” and “bigoted.”

And so Pat Gooley from the New South Wales Police Association said: “We are used to being under threat. What’s really concerning police is there’s no rhyme or reason to these current terror threats.”

Palestinian jihadists have continued murdering Jews in Jerusalem and the West Bank. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his security forces stood by for days and let these murders happen. In fact, by declaring last week at the United Nations General Assembly that he was prepared to walk away from the Oslo Accords and abandon the Palestinian Authority’s security responsibilities, Abbas effectively gave the Palestinian thugs a wink and a nod. His incendiary rhetoric regarding the Temple Mount has also contributed to the incitement of Palestinian violence.

Abbas knowingly lied to the General Assembly when he accused the Israeli government of using “brutal force to impose its plans to undermine the Islamic and Christian sanctuaries in Jerusalem, particularly its actions at Al-Aqsa Mosque.” He also lied when he accused Israel of taking actions to “convert the conflict from a political to religious one, creating an explosive in Jerusalem and in the rest of the occupied Palestinian territory.”

Russia’s armed intervention in the Syrian civil war is but the latest foreign policy disaster of Barack Obama’s tenure. Yet Obama has been nothing if not consistent. What many see as bungling, naiveté, or evidence of a plot to destroy America is simply the consequence of a particular view of interstate relations he has openly and frequently endorsed.

Obama came into office chanting all the mantras of idealistic internationalism. In contrast to the caricature of George W. Bush as a unilateralist cowboy disdainful of diplomacy, Obama promised to “rebuild the alliances, partnerships, and institutions necessary to confront common threats and enhance common security.” Balance of power realism, which is predicated on the notion that sovereign nations seek power to pursue their own interests, was rejected: “In an era when our destiny is shared, power is no longer a zero-sum game. No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation. No world order that elevates one nation or group or people over another will succeed. No balance of power among nations will hold.” Contrary to accepting force as an arbiter of conflict, he championed “tough diplomacy” and “new partnerships,” promising our enemies to “seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect,” and to “extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” Finally, he evoked America’s history of foreign policy aggression as a factor in contemporary conflict, in his Cairo speech decrying “colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations.”

In this 800th anniversary year, I’m honored to be part of a new book, with Chris Berg and John Roskam from our friends at the IPA, called Magna Carta: The Tax Revolt That Gave Us Liberty. If you live not just in England but in North America, Australia, New Zealand and around the Commonwealth, this is the great foundational document of individual liberty, and this book is its story. If you’d like your copy personally autographed by me, do swing by the SteynOnline bookstore.

~These are tough times for core liberties around the western world. A week ago, I was at the Danish Parliament for the tenth anniversary of the Mohammed cartoons. We’ve been posting the remarks of the various speakers piecemeal throughout the week, but I thought we’d assemble them in one convenient central location, so you can get a sense of the whole event as it unfolded. Please note that the videos below are extended versions of the ones previously posted, so they include not only the speeches but questions from the audience – including my final one about picking up imams.

First up, our hosts for the day, Katrine Winkel Holm of the indispensable Free Press Society and her sister Marie Krarup, Member of Parliament and defense spokesperson for the Danish People’s Party: