RUTHFULLY YOURS

All religions are equal, but aren’t some religions more equal than others?

Editor’s note: When asked recently on “Meet the Press” whether he would support a Muslim as president of the United States, Ben Carson replied, “I absolutely would not agree with that.” He added: “If [the candidate’s faith is] inconsistent with the values and principles of America, then of course it should matter.” Does it matter if a candidate is a devout Muslim? On this occasion, Frontpage is re-publishing below William Kilpatrick’s article from our October 19, 2010 issue, as it provides an in-depth exploration of that question.

President Eisenhower famously observed that “our form of government has no sense unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.” Now that we are beginning to see the consequences when Muslims act on their deeply felt faith, it’s time to revisit Eisenhower’s statement. The question is, can we still afford to take an “I don’t care what it is” attitude toward religion? In short, does the content of a religion matter? Or are we to assume that all religions share the same essential truths, as Eisenhower seemed to assume?

It’s ironic that the part of Eisenhower’s statement which evoked criticism in the early 1950’s would pass almost unnoticed today, while the part that seemed unremarkable then would be challenged in many quarters today. When Eisenhower said, “our form of government has no sense unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious faith,” he was merely echoing a widespread belief. Even William O. Douglas, the most liberal member of the Supreme Court at the time, and not a particularly religious man, opined in a 1952 decision that “We are a religious people, whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.” Since then, however, we’ve grown accustomed to the notion that religion ought to have little or no influence on our government and institutions. More and more, religion is looked upon as something that should be confined to the private sphere. As a result, religion has been pushed steadily out of public life—one Christmas crèche, one school prayer, one court decision at a time. These days, most of our institutions, particularly the press, the courts, and the schools, seem to presume that secularism is the officially established belief.

Hamas-linked CAIR wants a Muslim President, and wants Carson to drop out for not wanting one.

If Ibrahim Hooper of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has any say in the matter, whoever the next President is, it won’t be Ben Carson. “He is not qualified to be president of the United States,” fumed CAIR’s Ibrahim Hooper, no doubt an unimpeachable authority on who is and is not qualified to be President, on Sunday. “You cannot hold these kinds of views and at the same time say you will represent all Americans, of all faiths and backgrounds.” What views? Carson said: “I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation. I absolutely would not agree with that.” He said that this was because Islam contradicted important Constitutional principles.

CAIR, designated a terror organization by the United Arab Emirates, sent out an email Sunday saying it would hold a news conference demanding that Carson withdraw from the presidential race for daring to say these things. “Mr. Carson clearly does not understand or care about the Constitution, which states that ‘no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office,’” said CAIR top dog Nihad Awad. “We call on our nation’s political leaders – across the political spectrum – to repudiate these unconstitutional and un-American statements and for Mr. Carson to withdraw from the presidential race.”

The expectation pictured Jeb Bush rolling out of Florida and riding his family’s political machine into the White House. Donald Trump, buffoon and blowhard, has not only derailed the front runner, he has opened the way for another oustider, a far more credible contender.
A poll, taken immediately after the second Republican candidates’ debate, shows Carly Fiorina now in a tie with Donald Trump for first place among Republican primary voters. This may be the first sign that Donald Trump’s huge lead amongst an angry and alienated base is starting to evaporate.

Trump’s appeal was always visceral and emotional. His supporters could vent, knowing full well that they will not be required to pull a lever in a polling booth until 2016. Trump’s brashness, rudeness and narcissism could be deployed against a squishy GOP establishment to the accompaniment of wild cheers from the conservative base, whilst his inconsistencies or, indeed, any consideration as to whether he was fit to be president could be safely deferred by his current supporters. Jonah Goldberg and other writers from National Review are right to denounce Trump as a populist fraud. However, they may be missing the political dynamic which will be the rise of the viable outsider.

Say good-night, Gracie:

The United States will increase its cap on the number of refugees it admits and resettles to 85,000 in the coming year and 100,000 in the following year, Secretary of State John F. Kerry said Sunday. The additional refugees, up from 70,000 in the current fiscal year that ends Sept. 30, will come from countries around the world. But the increase largely reflects the 10,000 Syrian refugees that the White House has promised to resettle over the next 12 months.

Naturally, this is being couched in Alinskyite terms: making the enemy (us) live up to their own book of rules.

“This step is in keeping with America’s best tradition as a land of second chances and a beacon of hope,” Kerry said in announcing the increase during a visit to Berlin to discuss the Syrian refugee crisis with his German counterpart, Frank Walter Steinmeier. Even before Syrian refugees began streaming into Europe in recent weeks, the State Department had been considering a modest increase of about 5,000 refugees, including more from Congo, where human rights abuses are rampant. At the end of every fiscal year, the State Department announces the new target number for refugees.

Administration also advocating “for our African LGBT brothers and sisters and their right to equal treatment.” Huh?????rsk

National Security Advisor Susan Rice said the U.S. is working with its partners to fight a “growing terrorist threat” in Africa.

“With our partners, we’re facing down a growing terrorist threat. In Somalia, we continue to provide training, equipment, and funding to support the African Union’s Mission to root out al-Shabaab and strengthen Somalia’s security institutions. In the fight against Boko Haram, we are increasingly providing specialized advisers, training and equipment, and intelligence support to Nigeria and its regional neighbors,” Rice said at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Annual Legislative Conference.

According to the Washington Post, Kenya has received $100 million in U.S. counterterrorism assistance this year.

Rice also said the U.S. is working to combat wildlife trafficking in Africa to preserve Africa’s ecology and to shut down the “illicit” transfer of funds to terrorist networks.

“Critically, we’re working with governments and community leaders to counter violent extremism before radicalization to violence can occur. In Nigeria, Niger and Chad, we’re increasing civilian security and building communities targeted by Boko Haram,” Rice said.

“We’re supporting efforts in Northern Mali to promote reconciliation and mitigate conflict, particularly in isolated communities and we’re working with governments to responsibly address legitimate grievances that terrorists might exploit, as in Ethiopia, where American legal advisers are training police and lawyers to better uphold the rule of law,” she added.

The Islamic State has managed to destroy two thousand years of Christian civilization in the Middle East in just a couple of years, Lt. Col. Ralph Peters noted on The O’Reilly Factor last week. And he placed the blame squarely on President Obama’s cowardly, feckless, incompetent foreign policy.

ISIS has been spreading across the Middle East like a plague of locusts, and as they have spread, they have targeted religious minorities, particularly Christians, for destruction. In Syria, tens of thousands of Assyrian Christians have been attacked and displaced.

They are the forgotten refugees.

A Catholic priest who visited Kurdish Iraq last fall described the wounded souls of the Christians who had taken refuge there. They had been forced from their homes in northern Iraq in the summer of 2014.

We don’t know yet what issue will end up driving the autumn phase of the 2016 election. In 2008 a hectoring Obama thought it would always be Iraq — an issue that he had scrubbed from his website by mid-2008 when the surge had rendered his anti-war traction irrelevant.

Instead, the key moment was not the war, but the sudden Lehman Brothers meltdown — and the herky-jerky McCain reaction to it, coupled with Obama’s monotonous “Bush did it” blame-gaming of the crashing stock market. Before September 14, 2008, John McCain and Sarah Palin were consistently up over the supposedly transformational first African-American president by anywhere from 2 to 4 points; afterwards it was steadily downhill.

No one knows what will happen to the economy in the fall of 2016, much less what North Korea, Iran, Putin or ISIS will be doing. If nothing, Democrats benefit; if something, not so much. Obama last week reminded us of the rules of media and progressive politics for 2016: he announced that critics of his presidency were de facto unpatriotic — apparently in the same manner that as a presidential candidate in 2008 he slurred a sitting president as unpatriotic. No one even noticed.

Some central and eastern European countries are being criticized by more “progressive” Western nations for not wanting to take in Muslim refugees.

Chief among them is Hungary, specifically in the person of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Western media are characterizing him as “xenophobic,” “full of hate speech,” and Europe’s “creeping dictator.” Sounding like the mafia boss of the Left, the Guardian simply refers to him as a “problem” that needs to be “solved.”

Orbán’s crime is that he wants to secure his nation against Muslims and preserve its Christian identity. According to Hungary’s prime minister:

Those arriving have been raised in another religion, and represent a radically different culture. Most of them are not Christians, but Muslims. This is an important question, because Europe and European identity is rooted in Christianity…. We don’t want to criticize France, Belgium, any other country, but we think all countries have a right to decide whether they want to have a large number of Muslims in their countries. If they want to live together with them, they can. We don’t want to and I think we have a right to decide that we do not want a large number of Muslim people in our country. We do not like the consequences of having a large number of Muslim communities that we see in other countries, and I do not see any reason for anyone else to force us to create ways of living together in Hungary that we do not want to see….

Should AIPAC temper its opposition to Obama’s Iran deal in the name of “bipartisanship”?

One of the most diehard Obama loyalists in Chicago, Steve Sheffey, is unhappy that AIPAC chose to oppose the president’s Iran deal. Sheffey argues that since Democrats were on one side of this issue and Republicans on the other, AIPAC should have been neutral, and not come down for one side, especially of course the Republican side. We don’t know what Sheffey thought about AIPAC opposing President Reagan’s sale of AWACs to Saudi Arabia in the early 80s. Maybe he was too young to be writing partisan screeds back then. My guess is that for Sheffey, bipartisanship is good if it helps neuter opposition to anything Obama wants. When a Republican is in the White House, all bets are off.

Most telling in the article is Sheffey’s apparent need for a safe space at AIPAC conferences and probably a few trigger warnings from AIPAC leadership as well:

“In the past few years, the atmosphere at AIPAC meetings has become increasingly partisan. Democratic speakers get polite applause, if any, while Republican speakers get thunderous applause. Speakers whose views diverge from mine on other issues, such as Pastor John Hagee, and whose rationale for supporting Israel is troubling, seem too popular among too many AIPAC members. But I can live with that as long as their support for Israel does not require me to support the rest of their agenda.”

Vladimir Putin doesn’t seem to share President Obama’s definition of “smarter.” Ten days ago Mr. Obama declared that the Russian President’s military deployments in Syria were “doomed to fail” and the Kremlin was “going to have to start getting a little smarter.” Mr. Putin then began sending fighter jets, and now it looks like Mr. Obama is the one who has been taken to school.

That’s the only way to read Secretary of Defense Ash Carter’s call on Friday to Russian counterpart Sergei Shoigu to explore what a Pentagon spokesman called “mechanisms for deconfliction” in Syria. In addition to the jets, Russia is sending T-90 tanks, howitzers, troop-transport and attack helicopters, a company of armed Marines, and further equipment to establish an air base near the coastal Syrian city of Latakia. Mr. Shoigu describes the build-up as “defensive in nature.”

Sure, as in Ukraine. Along with Iran, Russia is the Bashar Assad regime’s principal sponsor, providing weapons, diplomatic protection at the United Nations, and now direct military support. Mr. Putin sees an opportunity to rescue his client in Damascus, strengthen ties with Iran, establish a large military footprint along the eastern Mediterranean, further reduce U.S. influence, and create diplomatic leverage that he can use to ease Western sanctions imposed in response to his invasion of Ukraine. On present course he’ll accomplish all of the above.