The media elites, both liberal and conservative, as well as all other elites such as in academia or some church hierarchies have expressed outrage with Donald Trump's assertion that no Muslims should be allowed to come to this country until some questions are answered, perhaps one having to do with how a young couple with a six-month-old child (the folks next door?) managed the San Bernardino carnage, complete with assault rifles, pistols, and bombs. Trump has a point.
Trump did not articulate his point well because it smacked of some sort of discrimination based on religion, though one wonders if a manual for living—such as the “holy” Koran—can be accounted religious in that it demands the death or enslaving of the infidel, i.e., anyone not a Muslim...virtually everyone in the U.S. He would better have said, instead of Muslim, anyone from the Middle East or North Africa or anyone traveling recently in those areas, at least for starters.
Trump does not see this as a matter of religion but as whether or not the president intends to look out for the safety of U.S. citizens on their own real estate, in which case the government has a compelling interest in who is allowed in the country, especially based on past experiences and evidence. The 9/11 butchers were all Muslims, as were both the unsuccessful shoe- and underwear-bomber, the Times Square would-be bomber, the attackers of the USS Cole, the murderers in the Khobar Tower affair and the bombings with great bloodshed and death of two U.S. embassies in Africa.
This doesn't even touch the murderers at the Chattanooga armory, San Bernardino state facility, Benghazi, the four officers killed in their tent just before the overthrow of Saddam (grenade tossed by a fellow soldier), and the butchery at Ft. Hood, in which an army major on duty screamed “Allah Akbar” as he shot down unarmed civilians like dogs. There is nothing good to say about the connection of this country with Islam. There are two Muslims in Congress, neither of Middle East descent, who should be shamed by both the Koran and the willful murder of infidels for which it calls and which takes place throughout the world every day.
The strangest argument against Trump is that the Constitutional rights of the Syrians (all Muslims) are being violated, notwithstanding that the Constitution governs people in the U.S. and nowhere else in the world. No would-be immigrant has any Constitutional rights. Article 2, Section 2, of the Constitution designates the president as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Section 1 indicates that he takes an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the document, without constraints as to how.
The Fourth Amendment indicates that citizens are to be secure in their houses, papers and effects and protected from unreasonable seizures. The lives of 14 citizens in San Bernardino and 3,000 on 9/11 were seized by Muslims and snuffed out in seconds. The president's job is to see that such seizures do not happen, one way being most logical, to wit, disallowing any possibility of seizure by keeping the threat out of the country.
The only meaningful mention of a “test of religion” as a qualifier is in Article 6 of the Constitution and mandates that no religious test may be used to qualify for any office or public trust. This applies only to the U.S. and has nothing to do with anyone anywhere else in the world, certainly not Muslims.
The argument that withholding immigration on the grounds of violating the “who we are” argument, i.e., that the U.S. is a melting pot to which all people have been invited is spurious in the case of Muslims. All ethnic groups – Irish, English, Chinese, Italian, German – came to this country to take advantage of opportunity. The notion that they came to kill Americans for any reason—especially religious—is too off the wall to consider.
This is not true of Muslims, even if only a handful are perpetrators of murder. It's almost impossible to weed out the perpetrators—as seen on 9/11 and in later bloodbaths—so the only way to have adequate protection is to not invite any Muslims (or Middle Easterners or North Africans) at least until something sensible can be done to assuage the fear of people who are looking over their shoulders. This is not barbaric or unpatriotic, just plain common sense.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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