RUTHFULLY YOURS

If the #MeToo movement only reduces sexual predation in the workplace, it will have been a force for good. Its most likely result, however, will be to unleash a torrent of new gender and race quotas throughout the economy and culture, on the theory that disparities in representation and employment are due to harassment and bias.

Hollywood and the media are already showing the effect. It’s no coincidence that The Today Show now has two female anchors. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has pledged to double its female and minority members by 2020. Actress Natalie Portman’s sneer in presenting the best director prize at the recent Golden Globe movie awards—“And here are the all-male nominees”—will become the standard response to any perceived lack of “diversity” in entertainment. The Wall Street Journal’s pop music critic, Jim Fusilli, for example, groused that females were underrepresented among Grammy award nominees. “No groups led by women are among the nominees in the Best Contemporary Instrumental, Best Jazz Instrumental, Best Large Jazz Ensemble and Best Contemporary Christian Music album categories. “There is no Grammy category comprised entirely of women,” he complained. Six female music industry executives then complained to the Recording Academy’s board of trustees that the Recording Academy’s leadership suffered from “inclusion issues across all demographics.” In response, management has penitently promised to overcome the “unconscious biases that impede female advancement” in the music industry. The National Hispanic Media Coalition is planning to protest at the Academy Awards because of the paucity of Hispanic Oscar nominations. Even before the Hispanic protest, Hollywood execs were experiencing quota fatigue, given the pressures from feminist, LGBTQ, and disability activists to hire by identity category.

Fake polls have infected politics by disheartening American voters with approval ratings and predictions which are falsely researched and bruited, and out of sync with the American people. In 1948 the Chicago Daily Tribune went to press and public with the now famous headline: “Dewey Defeats Truman.”

Harry Truman, who trounced Thomas Dewey held up the Nov. 3, 1948 edition of the Chicago Tribune with that headline as he celebrated victory over the man who was predicted to win by most national polls.

Ronald Reagan averaged a 53% job approval rating during his presidency, slightly below average for all U.S. presidents for which Gallup has recorded job approval ratings.

After the Democratic National Convention in July, the Mondale-Ferraro ticket actually bested the Reagan-Bush ticket in a nationwide Gallup Poll, 48 percent to 46 percent.

Questions in polls remind one of the old saw about a trial when the prosecutor asks: “When did you stop beating your wife?”

I have been polled twice and it goes something like this exaggerated version:

“Are you a registered Republican voter? Just answer yes or no”

” If it were disclosed that the Republican candidate was guilty of pillage and plunder and rape would you vote for him?”

Of course, the answer is no, and the poll then discloses that only 3% of registered Republicans will vote for the party’s incumbent. rsk

I’ve been boycotting the Grammys since “Feline Groovy” inexplicably failed to garner, as the rock journalists say, a half-dozen awards. So I didn’t discover until this morning that the Grammy producers had booked an actual grammy, Hillary Clinton, to appear in a sketch about the Fire and Fury audio book. I know there are those who think pop culture’s completely lost its sense of danger and rebelliousness, but c’mon, in an age whose very slogan is one of groupthink coercion (#MeToo) what could be edgier, as they say, than to book a serial enabler of serial predators? Cool! #Time’sUp – but, oddly, never for Hillary. Next year maybe Harvey Weinstein and Charlie Rose can appear in bathrobes and play a few cords.

~Meanwhile, in further news of female empowerment, Australia is promoting itself as a hub of the booming “modest fashion” market:

Modest fashion is clothing that conceals rather than accentuating the body – and it is quickly increasing in popularity.

Hmm. Interesting. Why would “modest fashion” be “quickly increasing in popularity”? Particularly for, say, unaccompanied women walking at night in certain neighborhoods of western cities?

Once upon a time Australian fashion was associated with women like Elle Macpherson, who was known as “The Body” because it was very evident that she had one. But from The Body to the body bag is a mere blink of an eye. This new exhibition, funded by Australian taxpayers and promoted by my old friend Julie Bishop’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, celebrates the Australian inventor of the burqini and “the rise of the hijabistas”.

That’s great news! Tie me burqa hood down, sport! Who’ll come a-shroudin’ Matilda with me? Sorry, I’m just working on my Grammy nomination for Best Covered Versions.

Unfortunately, The Australian’s Caroline Overington is none too happy at being fitted for her burqini:

‘Modest Australian fashion.’

In case you don’t know what that is, it’s skirts to the floor, ladies.

It is full body suits at the beach. It’s covering up your hair, and draping yourself in heavy fabric as you go about your day.

When did this become something the Australian government wanted to promote, and celebrate?

There were five seconds left in the playoff game between the Minnesota Vikings and the New Orleans Saints. The Saints had a two point lead and a virtual lock on the victory. But in one of the strangest events in National Football, Case Keenum, the Vikings’ quarterback, threw a pass to Stefon Diggs in the flat. He jumped up and dashed to the end zone. What was a virtually assured Saints’ victory became a Vikings visit to the NFC championship game.

When asked about the circumstances surrounding his catch, Diggs said, “it happened so fast, I didn’t know what was happening.” He went on to note that he owes his success to God. “God made it happen.” Since this was a miracle of a kind that defies logic, there may be something to this argument. It is instructive that no one to my knowledge from the American Civil Liberties Union or Atheists of America have challenged Diggs’ judgement.

The reason this matter comes up at all is that football coaches across the country receive the wrath of the ACLU when they have asked their teams to pray to God before and after games. What was once a pre-game ritual has been ridiculed to the point where it is rarely employed. I doubt Mr. Diggs will start a trend–as an NBC official said, “religion and politics don’t mix.” Well they do mix in ways he will never recognize.

I am neither rich nor a philanthropist so I always avoid suggestions for charitable contributions. However, a debt to our veterans is an exception. Here is a very worthy cause: Healing the Wounds

Read about it:

In an excellent article in the Daily Caller, Retired US Army Special Forces Officer Mykel Hawke gives a heartfelt introduction to a wonderful new charitable organization, appropriately named Healing the Wounds. When our nation loses a Son or Daughter in service to our country, it is a deep and tragic loss. For the children of these Heroes, the loss is devastating and profound. Healing the Wounds charter is to attempt to heal the precious hearts of these children.

http://www.wnd.com/2018/01/alaskan-wilderness-experience-planned-for-kids-of-fallen-service-members/

https://townhall.com/notebook/bethbaumann/2017/12/07/bipartisan-effort-launches-to-aid-child-of-fallen-law-enforcement-military-members-n2419267

http://dailycaller.com/2017/11/28/here-is-how-you-change-the-lives-of-the-children-of-our-nations-fallen-heroes/http://www.wnd.com/2018/01/mother-of-slain-navy-seal-kids-of-fallen-heroes-need-help/

http://www.wnd.com/2018/01/mother-of-slain-navy-seal-kids-of-fallen-heroes-need-help/

It would be folly to maintain that change is not sorely needed to improve the lives of many women around the world. Clearly the West has long been in the forefront of fundamental change. In 1792 Mary Wollstonecraft penned A Vindication of the Rights of Woman arguing that “middle-class women’s oppression was largely due to their deficient education.” Thus,

Girls who have been thus weakly educated, are often cruelly left by their parents without any provision; and, of course, are dependent on, not only the reason, but the bounty of their brothers [.] But, when the brother marries, . . . [his sister] is viewed with averted looks as an intruder, an unnecessary burden on the benevolence of the master of the house, and his new partner.

Yet, in 2014 in Saudi Arabia, a young woman named Nadia who was not permitted to drive had to rely on her brother to take her to work. Often he refused to take her, thus making her late and at risk of losing her position.

Nineteenth century Victorian England long treated women as subordinate and disempowered. In 1869 when John Stuart Mill published his book The Subjection of Women, he shed light on Victorian culture and argued that women should be granted more political, legal, social and economic opportunities.

Nonetheless, in modern-day Pakistan “even though [women] are legally equal to men, it is common for decisions to be taken by male heads of households or male tribal chiefs [.] Traditionally, women have fewer, if any, rights of inheritance . . . resulting in difficulties accessing land or finances.”

In America “under the leadership of Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a convention for the rights of women was held in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848.” The participants wrote the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions, patterned after the Declaration of Independence. It “specifically asked for voting rights and for reforms in laws governing marital status.” Finally in 1920, the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granted American women the right to vote.

According “to the 2015 World Economic Forum Gender Gap Report, Yemen, has the biggest average gender gap of the 145 countries surveyed. It has the largest disparities in economic participation and opportunities for men and women, and one of the greatest differences in literacy rates between genders — with 55% of women considered literate as compared to 85% of men.” Moreover, “Yemeni women . . . cannot marry or receive health care without the permission of their male guardian (usually their father) and do not have equal rights to divorce or child custody. And the legal system has few provisions for the protection of women who experience domestic and sexual violence — leaving some women vulnerable to becoming the victims of honor killings. Around 52% of girls in Yemen are married before the age of 18 [.]”

South of the border finds Honduras as the “femicide capital of the world” where “[o]n average, one woman is murdered every 18 hours in Honduras [.] With a femicide impunity rate of 90%, most of these women’s murderers are getting away with it. The lack of accountability and prosecution of perpetrators of violence against women mean that women can’t live safe, successful lives and reach their full potential.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/455757/printThere is a great deal of commentary, some of it hysterical, about a short memo authored by Republican staffers on the House Intelligence Committee under the direction of Chairman Devin Nunes (R., Calif.). The memo is said to be about Obama-era abuses of the executive branch’s surveillance authorities under federal law — specifically, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The contents of the memo are not yet known to the public, so the commentary is the familiar game of shaping reaction to it.

The Republican script is that this was “Watergate on steroids.” The Democratic counter is that the memo is a one-sided partisan summary that takes investigative actions out of context in order to make mountains out of molehills. Unless and until we can read the document, we cannot make a judgment about which of these assessments is true, or at least closer to the truth. We can, however, make some observations about the controversy.

The Claim That the Memo Is One-Sided
The most common complaint is that the memo represents the Republican slant on a dispute that should be above politics. (Yeah, yeah, I know . . . but stop snickering.) Now, maybe the memo will read like sheer propaganda, but this seems highly doubtful. There are extremely good reasons for Nunes and his staff to create a summary, and very easy ways for Democrats to remedy anything that is arguably misleading, so the “one-sidedness” objection appears overblown.

First, the main questions that we need answered are:

Were associates of President Trump, members of his campaign, or even Trump himself, subjected to foreign-intelligence surveillance (i.e., do the FISA applications name them as either targets or persons whose communications and activities would likely be monitored)?

Was information from the Steele dossier used in FISA applications?

If Steele-dossier information was so used, was it so central that FISA warrants would not have been granted without it?

If Steele-dossier information was so used, was it corroborated by independent FBI investigation?

If the dossier’s information was so used, was the source accurately conveyed to the court so that credibility and potential bias could be weighed (i.e., was the court told that the information came from an opposition-research project sponsored by the Clinton presidential campaign)?

The FBI has said that significant efforts were made to corroborate Steele’s sensational claims, yet former director James Comey has acknowledged (in June 2017 Senate testimony) that the dossier was “unverified.” If the dossier was used in FISA applications in 2016, has the Justice Department — consistent with its continuing duty of candor in dealings with the tribunal — alerted the court that it did not succeed in verifying Steele’s hearsay reporting based on anonymous sources?

These are not questions that call for nuanced explanation. These things either happened or didn’t. To provide simple answers to these straightforward questions would not be a one-sided partisan exercise, even if the person providing the answers happened to be a partisan.

FISA proceedings are classified, and applications for surveillance warrants from the FISA court typically include information from classified sources — informants who spy at great risk to themselves, intelligence techniques (e.g., covert surveillance), etc. Disclosing such applications and/or the underlying intelligence reporting on which they are based could thus jeopardize lives, national security, and other important American interests.

Thus, the problem: How do we convey important information without imperiling the sources and methods through which it was obtained?

Fortunately, this is far from a unique problem: It comes up all the time in court cases that involve intelligence matters, and Congress has prescribed a process for dealing with it in the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA). There are various remedies: Sometimes the classified information can be declassified and disclosed without causing danger; sometimes the classified information can be redacted without either jeopardizing sources or compromising our ability to grasp the significance of what is disclosed. When neither of those solutions is practical, the preferred disclosure method is to prepare a declassified summary that answers the relevant questions without risking exposure of critical intelligence secrets and sources. (See CIPA section 4 — Title 18, U.S. Code, Appendix.)

So, far from being unconventional, the preparation of a summary is a routine and sensible way of handling the complicated tension between the need for information and accountability, on the one hand, and the imperative of protecting intelligence, on the other.

As with any summary, there is always a danger of its being misleading. This, too, is a recurring problem in judicial proceedings, where the need to boil voluminous information down to its essence is obvious. The problem is solved by the so-called rule of completeness: If a party contends that his adversary is taking information out of context or otherwise omitting essential details necessary to an accurate understanding of a document, the party may propose that the necessary context or details be included. An example: Smith tells the police, “I was in the bank but I didn’t rob it.” At the trial, the prosecutor disingenuously suggests to the jury that Smith was implicitly admitting guilt when he told the police “I was in the bank” the day it was robbed. Smith would then be entitled to introduce his complete statement — the “but I didn’t rob it” portion is necessary to the jury’s understanding that, far from implicitly admitting guilt, Smith explicitly denied guilt.

Conforming to House rules, Chairman Nunes has taken pains to make his memo available to all members of Congress before proceeding with the steps necessary to seek its disclosure. Thus, lawmakers have an opportunity to propose the inclusion of details that may be necessary to correct any misimpressions; or Democrats could prepare their own summary in an effort to demonstrate Nunes’s partisan spin. Congressman Nunes is a smart guy, and he clearly knows he will look very foolish if he plays fast and loose with the facts. It is in his interest not to do that, and the careful way he has gone about complying with the rules — rather than leaking classified information, as Trump’s opponents have been wont to do — suggests that his memo will prove to be a fair representation of the underlying information.

On that last point, it would be hard to imagine a more one-sided partisan screed than the Steele dossier. Democrats seem to have had no hesitation about using it as a summary of purported Trump collusion with Russia.

The Failure to Share the Memo with the FBI
The Justice Department and the FBI are reportedly angry that, after they complied with the Intelligence Committee’s demand that they make classified and investigative materials available for inspection, Nunes will not permit the FBI to inspect his memo summarizing that information before moving to disclose it. The irony here is rich.

These executive-branch agencies did not cooperatively comply with congressional investigators; they stonewalled for five months. To this day they are stonewalling: Just this weekend, they belatedly fessed up that the FBI had failed to preserve five months’ worth of text messages — something they had to have known for months. An American who impeded a federal investigation the way federal investigators are impeding congressional investigations would swiftly find himself in legal jeopardy.

Moreover, it is not like the Justice Department and FBI did Nunes a favor and are thus in a position to impose conditions; Congress is entitled to the information it has sought in its oversight capacity. There is no Justice Department or FBI in the Constitution; while these agencies are part of the executive branch, they are creatures of statute. Congress created them, they are dependent on Congress for funding, and Congress has a constitutional obligation to perform oversight to ensure that the mission they are carrying out — with taxpayer support and under statutory restrictions — is being carried out appropriately.

Republicans tend to be favorably disposed toward law enforcement’s preferences. They would surely have preferred to have non-confrontational interactions with vital executive agencies led by Republican appointees of a Republican president. Indeed, most Republicans are puzzled by the lack of cooperation — by the failure of the White House to direct the president’s subordinates to comply with congressional requests for information about potential abuses of power carried out under the prior, Democratic administration.

This is a reciprocal business. If the Justice Department and FBI want accommodations, they have to exhibit cooperation — do the little things, like maybe remember that congressional subpoenas are lawful demands, not suggestions or pleas. On the record thus far, the committee has every reason to believe that submitting the Nunes memo for review by the Justice Department and FBI will result in more delay and foot-dragging. Clearly, there is a strategy to slow-walk compliance in hopes that events — such as, say, a midterm-election victory that returns the House to Democratic control — will abort congressional investigations of the investigators.

Nunes is wise not to play into that strategy. As he knows, if the House ultimately moves to declassify and publicize information, the chamber’s rules require giving the president five days’ notice. (See Congressional Research Service, “The Protection of Classified Information: The Legal Framework” page 3 and note 23.) Thus, the Justice Department and FBI will have an opportunity to both review the memo and try to persuade the president to oppose disclosure. There’s no reason to hold up the works at this point.

The Claim That the Memo Discredits or Distracts from the Mueller Investigation
Finally, committee Democrats and other critics contend that Chairman Nunes is engaged in a stunt designed to discredit Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, or at least distract attention from its subject matter — Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. These transparently political claims are ill-conceived.

The memo reportedly addresses an issue that is at least as significant as election meddling by Russia and suspected but unproven Trump-campaign collusion in it, namely: election meddling by the intelligence and law-enforcement arms of government and Clinton-campaign collusion in it. The latter issue involves conduct that predates Mueller’s investigation by more than two years — Hillary Clinton’s criminal conduct having been exposed in March 2015.

Let’s assume for a moment, and for argument’s sake, that there were irregularities in the Obama-era investigation of Trump associates (perhaps including Trump himself). This would discredit Mueller’s investigation only to the extent it is established that the premise of that investigation is traceable to those irregularities. For example, if the principal basis for the allegation that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia were shown to be the shoddy, unverified Steele dossier, this allegation would be discredited — and deservedly so. To the contrary, if it turns out that there are other legitimate grounds for suspecting Trump-campaign collusion in Russian activity that violated American law, those would plainly merit investigation — although we ought to be told what they are.

Moreover, it would remain perfectly legitimate to investigate Russia’s interference in the 2016 election — the counterintelligence purpose that the Justice Department told us was the principal reason for appointing a special counsel. Of course, as we’ve covered many times (see, e.g., here), there are independent reasons for discrediting Mueller’s appointment on this score: (a) The appointment was unnecessary because counterintelligence investigations are not prosecutor work and ordinarily do not have a prosecutor assigned because the aim is not to develop a criminal prosecution; and (b) the appointment was improper because the Justice Department is supposed to specify a crime that has triggered the need for a special counsel, and that was never done here.

Still, my objections on these grounds notwithstanding, the stubborn facts remain that Mueller has been appointed and Russian interference in our election is a worthy subject for investigation.

To the extent Democrats and their media friends caterwaul that the Nunes memo “distracts” from concerns about Russia, this brings us to a longstanding complaint among national-security-minded conservatives: We were warning about Russian perfidy long before the Democrats jumped aboard that bandwagon for patently political reasons. It has always been partisan hackery to mark acceptance of the “Trump collusion” narrative as the price of admission for taking threats posed by Russia seriously.

The moment that the “collusion with Russia” narrative is no longer politically viable (and we may be nearing that point if the Steele dossier is its foundation), Democrats will return to their default appeasement mode and goofy “Reset” buttons. But in the meantime, investigating Russia’s provocations will still be a worthy exercise. And even if there was no need to appoint a special counsel to lead such an investigation, Mueller has been working the issue and his conclusions should prove valuable. They will not rise or fall on the question of whether Obama-era executive agencies abused their powers.

Conclusion
There is no problem a priori with the fact that Nunes’s memo is a summary prepared by Republican members of the Intelligence Committee’s professional staff. There is no need to delay its release by permitting the FBI and Justice Department to vet it; they will have that opportunity in any event when the president is given five days to weigh in on whether the memo should be disclosed. And complaints that the memo is a distraction intended to discredit Mueller’s investigation are meritless political talking points.

Democrats contend that Chairman Nunes is engaged in a partisan stunt. The allegation that the Obama administration put the law-enforcement and intelligence arms of the federal government in the service of the Clinton campaign to undermine the Trump campaign is, they maintain, an overwrought conspiracy theory. If that is true, then Democrats — who have had the opportunity to review the memo — should be clamoring for it to be disclosed, not fighting its release. After all, Republicans have made extravagant corruption claims in recent days; if the memo does not bear them out, many a face will be covered in egg.

No one is more aware of this than Congressman Nunes. He is pressing ahead nonetheless. So . . . let’s see what he’s got.

READ MORE:

When Senator Cory Booker delivered his fuming diatribe last week, blasting the “ignorance and bigotry” of President Trump’s “vile and vulgar” reference to “s***hole countries,” it was merely the latest installment in the interminable series of assaults against Trump by Congressional Democrats and virtually every member of the mainstream news media. From the day Trump was elected, the Left’s principal objective has been to ridicule him variously as a deranged buffoon, a demented menace, a traitorous collaborator with the Kremlin, a congenital racist, a fascist, an Islamophobe, a xenophobe, a homophobe, an anti-Semite, and a misogynist. Every day, every hour, brings a new charge.

Not one iota of this has occurred randomly. Every single fragment of this assault against Trump has been meticulously orchestrated and carried out by the Left with undiluted fidelity to the famous blueprint for political warfare that was first laid out several decades ago by the late Saul Alinsky, who posthumously has re-emerged as the Democratic Party’s guiding intellectual light.

Known as the godfather of “community organizing” – a term that serves as a euphemism for fomenting public anger, political hatred, and in some cases, violence – Alinsky was a communist fellow-traveler whose monumental importance to the Democrats is underscored by the fact that both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama became devoted disciples of his political creed. He laid out a set of basic tactics designed to help radical activists and politicians destroy their enemies while gaining power for themselves.

Such radicals, said Alinsky, “must first rub raw the resentments of the people”[1] by selecting a particular political adversary and “publicly attack[ing]” him as a “dangerous enemy” of the people.[2] This foe, Alinsky explained, must be a clearly identifiable individual – “a personification, not something general and abstract like a corporation or City Hall.”[3] The chief “personification” in the Left’s cross hairs today is Donald Trump; there isn’t even a close second.

“Congress shall make no law” restricting the free exercise of religion, freedom of speech, or of association. Aside from Christ’s distinction between duties to God and duties to Caesar, the First Amendment’s words are some of the greatest barriers ever erected against tyranny. But James Madison, who wrote them, warned how easily the ever-present temptation to tyrannize overcomes “parchment barriers.”

Until recently, the First Amendment was our Constitution’s least questioned, most treasured part. Today, growing calls for joining the rest of the world in criminalizing speech offensive to society’s most powerful groups remain anathema to most Americans. As the federal government applied the Bill of Rights to the states, the First Amendment was the first that it imposed upon them, in a 1925 Supreme Court decision called Gitlow v. New York. No one exercising government power at any level, no “state actor” may deprive anyone of his First Amendment rights. That’s how it works in theory, anyhow.

Nevertheless, most Americans sense that freedom to engage publicly in religious activity, to express ourselves, to choose with whom to associate (or not), is declining perhaps irreversibly. States, for example, have created “human rights commissions” that penalize businesses for refusing to take part in celebrating homosexuality. Public school employees are fired for praying on school grounds, and even children are punished for doing so. All know that certain opinions or attitudes, even casual remarks, deemed “offensive” by powerful persons preclude, derail, or end careers.

This re-prioritization naturally led to a re-defining of the First Amendment’s objective as ridding America of “discrimination” by private individuals. No one should be surprised that this change of focus, which initially led the courts to disallow laws permitting discrimination by private individuals against what came to be known as “protected classes,” ended in Justice Kennedy, writing for the Supreme Court’s majority, damning and well-nigh criminalizing the very motivations of such discrimination. How easily did “Congress shall make no law” become “Congress really must make a law…” !

Muslims individually should, without qualification, be treated as respectfully and kindly as everyone else. However, at another level, it is surely reasonable to ask whether Muslims collectively should be absolved of accountability for the bitter fruits of Islam?

I’ll begin with a provocative question. Steel yourselves. Can those expressing affinity with Mein Kampf and National Socialism be, nevertheless, moderate and peaceful Nazis? I’ll leave the question hanging. And won’t directly come back to it.

Donald Trump got himself into one of those messes of his own making back in August. Having had his scripted response to the events in Charlottesville well received, he couldn’t later resist extemporising by blaming the violence on both sides. Moreover, he made the claim that among the thugs there were fine people on both sides, who had simply come to express their views peacefully on whether a statue of Robert E. Lee should be removed or left in place

Commentators piled on. They need little opportunity where Trump is concerned. Fine people, it was pointed out, do not associate themselves with the Ku Klux Klan, with white supremacists, and with Nazis marching under torches, some chanting “blood and soil”. Fine people, it was said, would have left when they saw the character of many of those marching. They would not have wanted to associate themselves with Nazis and their evil creed.

As relentlessly nit-picking as they are, this time Trump’s critics had a point. Would people of moderate and peaceful disposition march with Nazis? I think not. While freedom of association is important, the company you keep matters; and, most particularly, if you share similar aims. Suppose that those “fine” marchers that Trump referred to, based on his own observations, were, in fact, sympathetic to the KKK. Their apparent peacefulness wouldn’t be enough to let them off the hook.

This brings me to Islam and more pointedly to its followers.

At one level it is essential to distinguish Islam from its followers. In the normal course of every­day life, Muslims individually should, without qualification, be treated as respectfully and kindly as everyone else. However, at another level, it is surely reasonable to ask whether Muslims collectively should be absolved of accountability for the bitter fruits of Islam that are everywhere evident. For it is clear that they have been absolved by the mainstream media, by Christian church leaders, by most of the political class, and even by conservative commentators who are otherwise indelicate enough to use the word Islamic when describing terrorist attacks. You simply don’t get such attacks without the assertion, at some early point, that the vast majority of Muslims are moderate and peaceful and reject violence. Sometimes a figure of 99 per cent plus is used to hammer home the storyline.

Where does this habitual response come from? I suggest it starts with the tendency of human beings to put things having different characteristics into separate boxes or categories. In this case, Islam and Muslims have been put into two non-intersecting categories.

Take Islam first.

An evil alter ego has emerged as a category separate from Islam proper. It’s called Islamism. Islamism is sometimes referred to as “political Islam”. This is the favoured description of Dr Zuhdi Jasser. Dr Jasser is a leading light among those who want to see Islam “reformed”. He’s a medical doctor and former officer in the US Navy.

Near the end of 2015, Jasser, along with another twelve “renegade” Muslims—six of the thirteen are based in America, five in Canada, one in the UK and one in Denmark—signed and publicised a two-page Muslim Reform Movement Declaration. With Martin Luther and Wittenberg in mind, they pinned a copy on the doors of the Islamic Center in Washington DC. I can only guess at the fate of these two pieces of paper, but I can say that unlike Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses Jasser’s Declaration has not spread like wildfire.