RUTHFULLY YOURS

I cannot think of a more potent recruitment tool for ISIS than … Barack Obama.

This puts me at odds with Barack Obama, as is often the case. It is worth explaining my reasoning, though, since – as our bloviator-in-chief is fond of saying – this is a teachable moment.

The president of the United States, shamefully but characteristically, took the opportunity of being on foreign soil – in the Philippines with its large Muslim population – to smear his fellow countrymen over their effort to protect American national security. The Republican initiative, led by Senator Ted Cruz, would thwart Obama’s scheme to import thousands of refugees and prioritize the asylum claims of Christians. In response to this “rhetoric,” Obama seethed, “I cannot think of a more potent recruitment tool for ISIL.”

The president elaborated that “when you start seeing individuals in position of responsibility suggesting Christians are more worthy of protection than Muslims are in a war-torn land, that feeds the ISIL narrative.”

So tough here to untangle the ignorance from the demagoguery. For starters, asylum does not involve placing comparative values on the lives of different categories of people. And no one would be more offended than Christians at the notion that Christian lives should be valued more highly than those of other human beings. (By contrast, the conceit that Muslim lives – especially the lives of male Muslims – are more worthy than others is a leitmotif of Islamic scripture that is reflected throughout sharia law.)

Asylum, instead, is a remedy for persecution that is controlled by federal law. Obama lashed out at Republicans for promoting a “religious test,” which he claimed was “offensive and contrary to American values.” Yet, because asylum addresses persecution, governing law has always incorporated a religious test. Again, that is not because the lives of one religion’s believers are innately better than others; it is because when religious persecution is occurring, the targeted religion’s believers are inevitably more vulnerable to murder, rape, torture, and other atrocities than co-religionists of the persecutors.

In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like. Here’s why that’s disastrous for education—and mental health.

Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense. Last December, Jeannie Suk wrote in an online article for The New Yorker about law students asking her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape law—or, in one case, even use the word violate (as in “that violates the law”) lest it cause students distress. In February, Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern University, wrote an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education describing a new campus politics of sexual paranoia—and was then subjected to a long investigation after students who were offended by the article and by a tweet she’d sent filed Title IX complaints against her. In June, a professor protecting himself with a pseudonym wrote an essay for Vox describing how gingerly he now has to teach. “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me,” the headline said. A number of popular comedians, including Chris Rock, have stopped performing on college campuses (see Caitlin Flanagan’s article in this month’s issue). Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher have publicly condemned the oversensitivity of college students, saying too many of them can’t take a joke.

Two terms have risen quickly from obscurity into common campus parlance. Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless. For example, by some campus guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or Latino American “Where were you born?,” because this implies that he or she is not a real American. Trigger warnings are alerts that professors are expected to issue if something in a course might cause a strong emotional response. For example, some students have called for warnings that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart describes racial violence and that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby portrays misogyny and physical abuse, so that students who have been previously victimized by racism or domestic violence can choose to avoid these works, which they believe might “trigger” a recurrence of past trauma.

Some recent campus actions border on the surreal. In April, at Brandeis University, the Asian American student association sought to raise awareness of microaggressions against Asians through an installation on the steps of an academic hall. The installation gave examples of microaggressions such as “Aren’t you supposed to be good at math?” and “I’m colorblind! I don’t see race.” But a backlash arose among other Asian American students, who felt that the display itself was a microaggression. The association removed the installation, and its president wrote an e-mail to the entire student body apologizing to anyone who was “triggered or hurt by the content of the microaggressions.”
According to the most-basic tenets of psychology, helping people with anxiety disorders avoid the things they fear is misguided.

This new climate is slowly being institutionalized, and is affecting what can be said in the classroom, even as a basis for discussion. During the 2014–15 school year, for instance, the deans and department chairs at the 10 University of California system schools were presented by administrators at faculty leader-training sessions with examples of microaggressions. The list of offensive statements included: “America is the land of opportunity” and “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.”

An abbreviated version of the following testimony was delivered yesterday by UMAction Director John Lomperis to the board of directors of the General Board of Pensions and Health Benefits of the United Methodist Church. This denominational agency, which manages billions of dollars of assets and investments on behalf of the church, has been pressured by activists for the Palestinian cause to divest from companies described as “profiting from the Israeli occupation,” as these same activists have successfully gotten some United Methodist annual conferences (regions) to do.

Thanks for hearing me out. I am here as your brother in Christ, as a longtime fellow United Methodist, as an elected General Conference delegate, and as the director of one of the major evangelical caucuses within our denomination, the UMAction program of the Institute on Religion and Democracy.

Some activists have lobbied various United Methodist leaders to single out certain companies for divestment because of their business with Israel, particularly companies characterized as “profiting from the Israeli occupation.”

As you approach these matters, both for the board’s internal work and for your influence at General Conference, I respectfully express my hope that you will consider some reasons why such agendas are morally irresponsible, factually misleading, unrepresentative of United Methodists, and really harmful to the church we all love.

I wish to make clear that I do not adhere to the dispensationalist theology that drives many Christians to support Israel. Rather, I am driven by a deep concern that my church’s social witness be thoughtful, well-informed, and devoted to the highest standards of social justice.

It is bad enough that Israel is forced to combat terror from Hezbollah, Hamas, the Palestinian Authority and Palestinians bent on its destruction. But the Jewish State is also forced to deal with the enemy within. New research reveals that a majority of Arab citizens of Israel support terrorist organizations, including ISIS and say radical Islamists best-represent their true feelings.

The 2015 index measuring Arab-Israeli and Jewish-Israeli relations, published in part for the first time on Tuesday, exposes just how deep contempt for the Jewish people runs among Israel’s Arabs, who say that they are not the least bit ashamed of groups like ISIS and in fact find them good representatives of their people.

Princeton students ended a 32-hour sit-in in the university president’s office on Thursday night after administrators signed a document that committed them to begin conversations about addressing racial tension on campus, including possibly removing the name of former President Woodrow Wilson from some public spaces, the university and students said.

The sit-in came amid racial tension and escalating student activism on college campuses nationwide and focused in part on what students called Wilson’s legacy of racism. Shortly after the document was signed, an administrator received a bomb or firearm threat by email. It was being investigated late Thursday.

Wilson graduated from Princeton in 1879 and served as its president from 1902 to 1910 before becoming president of the United States from 1913 until 1921. Historians often remember him for liberal internationalism amid the horrors of World War I, but he also held a number of racist views.

A group of about 20 graduate students gathered in the Columbia Law School lobby on Wednesday for what they called an emergency town hall meeting to discuss discrimination on campus.Princeton Students Hold Sit-In on Racial InjusticeNOV. 18, 2015
Christopher L. Eisgruber, the university’s president, told students Wednesday that he agreed that Wilson had been a racist but that he had done some things that were honorable and others that were worthy of scorn.

On Wednesday, Boko Haram hit the top of the Global Terrorism Index. The Nigerian organization, which recently aligned itself with the Islamic State group, earned this distinction for having slaughtered 20,000 people and causing more than 2 million people to flee their homes over the last six years.

The reason this fact has elicited barely a yawn among anyone other than a handful of reporters is because most people know nothing, and care less, about the goings-on in West Africa. Bleeding-heart Westerners occasionally make a fuss about that area when raising funds for the war on AIDS, but where Islamic barbarism is concerned, no outrage is heard, in spite of the ongoing mass murder taking place in plain sight.

The same goes for Syria. For decades, huge numbers of men, women and children have been tortured, shot, bombed and poisoned by the regimes of Bashar Assad and his father, Hafez, before him. Yet it is only the plight of and fight over the refugees that has caused a stir — and political battles in the West that follow ideological lines.

In contrast, when Paris suffered last Friday night what is being called “France’s 9/11,” the outcry from every corner of the world was swift and loud, even among state sponsors of terrorism bent on subjugating the West.

On Tuesday night Channel 10 broadcast an interview with PLO chief and Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas in which Abbas admitted publically for the first time that he rejected the peace plan then prime minister Ehud Olmert offered him in 2008.

Olmert’s plan called for Israel to withdraw from the entire Old City of Jerusalem, including the Western Wall, and from 93.7 percent of Judea and Samaria. Olmert also offered sovereign Israeli territory to the Palestinians to compensate for the areas Israel would retain in Judea and Samaria.

Abbas said his rejection was unequivocal. “I didn’t agree. I rejected it out of hand.”

For years, the story of Abbas’s rejection of Olmert’s 2008 offe has been underplayed. Many commentators have insisted Abbas didn’t really reject it, he just failed to respond.

But now the truth is clear. Abbas is not interested either in peace or in Palestinian statehood.

Abbas’s many apologists in the Israeli Left insist that he didn’t reject the plan on its merits. Rather, they argue, Abbas rejected Olmert’s offer because by the time Olmert made it, he was steeped in criminal investigations that forced him to resign from office eight months later.

Walid Aly is a well-known Australian media commentator. This week on Channel Ten’s The Project he produced an impassioned and compelling speech about the Paris killings. This went viral, achieving 27 million views on social media within just a few days. That is more hits than there are people in Australia.

According to Walid Aly, ISIS is weak but it hides this because it wants us all to be afraid, very afraid. Its whole purpose is that our fear will turn to hate, and hate will ripen into ‘World War III’.

All people of good will who would stand against ISIS, Muslim or non-Muslim alike, must therefore come together in unity. According to Walid Aly, love, and less hate is what we need.

Walid Aly is absolutely right that we do need love. But like the air we breathe, love by itself is not enough. It is not all we need.

We also need truth, and a whole lot more of it. John’s gospel reports that Jesus came ‘full of grace and truth.’ Truth without grace becomes a police state. But grace without truth is every bit as dangerous.

Walid Aly himself rightly identified the Paris atrocity as an “Islamist terrorist attack”. It is not hatred to ask what this word ‘Islamist’ actually means.

The deadly threats to the homeland posed by the legal immigration system.

For many years most people assumed that any discussion about immigration needed to focus on illegal immigration and the supposed “four border states” along the U.S./Mexican border.

My July 6, 2014 FrontPage article, “Border Security and the Immigration Colander: Why the breakdown of the Southwest border is only the tip of the iceberg” explained that our immigration system has many components and that not only must the U.S./Mexican border be secured, but that all elements of the immigration system must possess integrity if we are to be protected.

On February 5, 2015 FrontPage Magazine published my article, “The ‘Secure Our Border First Act’ Deception: Why it’s no solution to the immigration crisis.”

The official government report “9/11 and Terrorist Travel: Staff Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States” focused specifically on the ability of the terrorists to travel around the world, enter the United States and ultimately embed themselves in America as they went about their deadly preparations.

Page 54 contained this excerpt under the title “3.2 Terrorist Travel Tactics by Plot”:

Although there is evidence that some land and sea border entries (of terrorists) without inspection occurred, these conspirators mainly subverted the legal entry system by entering at airports.

• Gerald Walpin served as a U.S. inspector general from 2007 to 2009. He is the author of “The Supreme Court vs. The Constitution” (Significance Press, 2013).

Last week, I was attacked by so-called “diversity” groups at Yale Law School because I had accepted an invitation from a student group (providing a forum for diversity of ideas), to speak on the meaning of the Birthright provision of the 14th Amendment. Without having heard what I would say, this speech-suppression coalition sought to prevent me from speaking by charging that I would utter “anti-immigrant rhetoric,” rest on “racist assumptions,” and express “racist and xenophobic ideas,” and “hateful ideologies.”

As a 1955 graduate of Yale Law School, it was difficult to believe that students who came to this excellent school would seek to prevent a diverse view from being expressed. After all, lawyers in the real world must be trained to hear their adversary’s differing views and be willing to answer them. Yale Law School itself proudly announces on its web site that it is “renowned as a center of constitutional law” — attained certainly by constant discourse, including differing views on the meaning of Constitutional provisions.

This was not simply an attack on my free speech right. It was an attack on all students’ right to obtain the benefit of free speech by hearing different views. Most disconcerting, it was not a single incident, but one of many in the nationwide movement at schools to suppress any thinking that the self-appointed student and faculty thought-police find unacceptable.