RUTHFULLY YOURS

If Donald Trump recited “The Star-Spangled Banner” before a baseball game, it would be criticized as an alt-right dog whistle. So naturally spring-loaded opinions rained down in Poland after he delivered a defense of Western values.

Only this particular American president could say, “Let us all fight like the Poles—for family, for freedom, for country, and for God,” and elicit attacks from the left as sending subliminal messages to his isolated rural supporters, and from the anti-Trump right as a fake speech because he gave it. We live in a cynical age.

Angela Stent, a professor at Georgetown University, provided the reductio ad politics analysis: “He wants to show at least his domestic base that he’s true to all of the principles that he enunciated during the election campaign.”

The Trump “base.” It’s still out there, isn’t it?

It was conventional during the presidential campaign to think of the Trump candidacy as a beat-up bus caravan of marginalized American citizens, who someone called the deplorables. In the event, about half the total U.S. electorate somehow voted for the man who in Warsaw gave a speech that his opponent, Hillary Clinton—or any current Democrat—would never give.

To simplify: One side of this debate will never be caught in anything it considers polite company using that phrase of oppression—“the West.” Ugh.

For an enjoyably trenchant takedown of the left’s revulsion at the Trump speech, I recommend Robert Merry’s essay in the American Conservative, “Trump’s Warsaw Speech Threw Down the Gauntlet on Western Civilization.” As Mr. Merry says, this is a big, worthy debate, and one I think the Trump “base” instinctively understood in 2016.

In fact, that Warsaw speech on Western Civ was really about the current edition of the Democratic Party and its two-term leader, Barack Obama. Mr. Trump momentarily suppressed the urge to call out his opposition, so allow me.

The Trump “base” knew the 2016 presidential election—the contest between Mr. Obama’s successor and whoever would run against her—wasn’t just another election. It was a crucial event, deciding whether America would go on in the Western tradition as it had developed in the U.S. or continue its steady drift away from those ideas.

Progressives have an interest in ridiculing the Trump speech as a stalking horse for the heretofore obscure and microscopic alt-right because it deflects from their own political values—on view and in power the past eight years.

If there is one controlling Western idea developed across centuries in Europe, including by resort to war, it is that the individual person deserves formalized protection from the weight of arbitrary political authority, whether kings, clergy or dictators.

Bernard Bailyn, the great historian of the pre-revolution politics of the U.S. colonies, showed through a deep reading of colonial pamphleteering that the early Americans were ardently resentful of distant, central authority. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Left has been struggling to disassociate the anti-cop hatred spewed by the Black Lives Matter movement from the assassination of New York police officer Miosotis Familia during the Fourth of July holiday. Police Commissioner James O’Neill demolished those efforts in his blazing funeral oration for Officer Familia on Tuesday. Assassin Alexander Bonds “hated the police,” O’Neill said, because he had heard and read “countless times” in conversation, on television, and in the newspapers that the cops were the “‘bad guys.’” That hate “has consequences,” O’Neill warned. “When we demonize a whole group of people—whether that group is defined by race, by religion, or by occupation—this is the result.” Bonds had mental problems, but it’s no coincidence that they culminated in the deliberate slaying of a cop.

The Left denies that the Black Lives Movement is anything other than a reasonable movement for justice and insists that it has no connection with anti-cop violence. Never mind the “Fuck the Police” signs, the “Police = KKK” chants, the “Racist, Killer Cops” tee-shirts. Never mind the exclusive attention to a handful of officer-involved shootings and the refusal to acknowledge why officers focus on minority neighborhoods in the first place, or why they are more likely to encounter armed and resisting suspects there. Never mind the media stampede to justify riots as an understandable reaction to supposed police racism. While any given Black Lives Matter protest, however virulent its rhetoric, enjoys First Amendment protection, it is disingenuous to pretend that the all-consuming anti-police narrative is not making officers’ work more difficult and more dangerous. The anti-cop Left has no explanation for the 53 percent increase in gun murders of officers last year. It turns its eyes away from the growing animosity and resistance that officers now encounter when they try to investigate suspicious behavior on the street. And most important, the anti-cop Left ignores the truth: we are not living through an epidemic of racially biased police killings of black males. In fact, if there is a bias in police shootings, it favors blacks against whites, as four studies found last year. The widely held impression that blacks make up the majority of people killed by the police is entirely a media creation.

Most tellingly, the Left has nothing to say about the rise in black-on-black violence that the demonization of cops has produced. An additional 900 black males were killed in 2015 nationally compared with the previous year, the result of officers backing off of proactive policing. Commissioner O’Neill rightly asked where the demonstrations were in protest of Familia’s killing: “Why is there no outrage?” he wondered. But he could as well have asked where the Black Lives Matter demonstrations were in protest of the mindless and constant drive-by shootings of black civilians. A handful of grass-roots activists in Chicago and elsewhere have protested the slaying of children and the elderly, but not one Black Lives Matter leader has seen fit to organize against the rising street violence. Seven thousand blacks, overwhelmingly male, were killed in 2015—2,000 more deaths than all white and Hispanic homicide deaths combined, though black males are only 6 percent of the nation’s population. Not a peep of protest from Black Lives Matter agitators.

The people who are paying attention are the police, who analyze crime patterns on a minute-by-minute and corner-by-corner basis, seeking to break the grip of violence on a community. When no witnesses will cooperate in solving the latest drive-by shooting, the police work tirelessly to try to track down the shooter on their own.

Commissioner O’Neill celebrated what drove Familia and her colleagues to become police officers—the desire to improve people’s lives. “Cops are regular people who believe in the possibility of making this a safer world,” O’Neill said. “It’s why we run toward, when others run away.” But fewer and fewer individuals are choosing to take on what O’Neill called the “vast responsibility” of becoming a police officer, knowing that the first assumption that the media, the activists, and academia would make about them is that they are implicit, if not explicit, racists. Recruiting has dried up. And many police departments, pressured by the Obama Justice Department, are lowering hiring standards, including clean criminal-record requirements, in order to increase what is speciously referred to as “diversity.”

A pro-LGBT and feminist Muslim organization says it was expelled from tabling at the annual Islamic Society of North America convention earlier this month where self-proclaimed LGBT ally Linda Sarsour headlined as a keynote speaker.https://spectator.org/pro-lgbt-muslim-group-says-it-was-kicked-out-of-muslim-conference-where-linda-sarsour-spoke/

“We’re really sick and tired of the hypocrisy of them (ISNA) claiming to be LGBT allies,” said Ani Zonneveld, founder and president of Muslims for Progressive Values, a faith-based human rights organization founded in 2007. “They’re only an ally when the camera is on.”

ISNA is the largest Muslim organization in North America and acts as an umbrella organization for numerous other Islamic groups and affiliated mosques. The organization was established in 1981 by the Muslim Student Association, and its founding members had connections with Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood and the Jamaat-i Islami, according to academic scholars on Islamism in America.

In 2015, President Barack Obama recorded a video message for the group’s convention, which annually draws tens of thousands of attendees. Women’s March board member Linda Sarsour spoke at the 54th ISNA convention held on June 30–July 3 in Chicago this year.

MPV partnered with the Human Rights Campaign to operate a tabling booth. There, MPV says their pamphlets advocating LGBT and women’s equality within Islam first drew the ire of an ultra-orthodox attendee. Soon after, they were asked to close shop and leave the venue by ISNA staff.

According to Frank Parmir, a convert to Islam and organizer with MPV-Columbus who staffed the booth with Michael Toumayan, HRC’s religion and faith program manager, a man in “Salafi garb” lectured them on homosexuality and sin. “To be a ‘real Muslim,’ one must assert that homosexuality is a sin,” Parmir recalled the man saying.

Parmir said within an hour after that encounter, a group of men in suits accosted them at the booth. Parmir identified one of the suited men as ISNA Conventions, Conferences, and Special Projects Director, Basharat Saleem. “He wasn’t sure that they could allow us to stay because of some of the literature and some of the positions we were advocating,” Parmir said. “They would have to think about it and get back to us.”

Saleem and ISNA did not respond to a request for comment.

Soon after, Parmir said another man “asked” MPV and HRC to vacate the premises. Parmir described the request as a veiled demand. Before leaving, Parmir and Toumayan met with Saleem and ISNA board director Farhan Syed to negotiate. Other men, including security, were also present, according to Parmir. “It finally became clear that HRC was not the problem,” Parmir said. “They were okay with HRC’s advocacy for gay rights. They were not okay with MPV’s advocacy that gays should find unrepentant inclusion with the Muslim community and that women should be given equality.”

Parmir said the men found MPV’s literature “stressful” and “upsetting” for convention attendees. According to Parmir, Syed attempted to be sensitive, citing his homosexual friends who “come to dinner,” but added the caveat that “they’re not Muslim.”