RUTHFULLY YOURS

Last year, undergraduate Sandra Korn initiated a furor when she authored an article for the Harvard Crimson newspaper arguing that academic freedom should be discarded in favor of social justice. Citing the example of Richard Herrnstein’s research on racial differences in intelligence, Korn posed the question: “if our university community opposes racism, sexism, and heterosexism, why should we put up with research that counters our goals simply in the name of ‘academic freedom'”?

Why, indeed. One reason might be that the entire concept of social justice is hopelessly ambiguous. As early as the fifth century BC, Greek philosophers demonstrated that any attempt to define abstract moral quantities such as justice, truth, or courage was doomed from the outset. Plato’s most famous work, The Republic, is devoted to an exploration of the nature of justice. The conclusion is that everyone defines justice to be what he perceives to be in his own self-interest. The standard of “justice” is no standard at all, because it has no objective existence. To declare that one is for “justice” is nothing more than an assertion than one is for oneself.

Ms. Korn is hardly the first person to make an argument against toleration. Her views were anticipated in the fifth century by that most influential of the Christian Fathers, Augustine of Hippo. In a letter to a colleague, Augustine confessed that he had once made the mistake of embracing toleration. But experience had taught him the folly of tolerating heretics and eschewing coercion. “The thing to be considered when anyone is coerced,” Augustine explained, “is not the mere fact of the coercion, but the nature of that to which he is coerced, whether it be good or bad.” If someone had truth on their side, persecution was entirely justified. Like Ms. Korn, Augustine was one of those exceptional individuals blessed with an infallible talent for discerning right from wrong.

The annual war on Christmas began early this year. A week after Halloween, Starbucks unveiled its seasonal cup design, which left off traditional holiday motifs like reindeer and snowmen, opting instead for a plain red cup with the Starbucks logo. Within days, an irate individual posted on Facebook, “Starbucks REMOVED CHRISTMAS from their cups because they hate Jesus.” He also claimed Starbucks forbids employees from saying “Merry Christmas.” Donald Trump, on the stump in Illinois, reacted by calling for a boycott of Starbucks and suggesting he wouldn’t renew the company’s lease on a store in Trump Towers. Trump also promised that if he became president, “We’re all going to be saying Merry Christmas again, that I can tell you.”

Within a week of being posted, the Facebook comment was viewed over 11 million times, and shared half a million. In response, the liberal Daily Kos called the complaint a “right-wing freakout” by a “deeply insane Christian person.”

The whole affair suggests that the Christmas wars are now as much a part of the season as caroling and shopping. Schools proscribing Christmas parties, store clerks shying away from greeting customers with a “Merry Christmas,” and municipalities forbidding crèches on public property seem to millions of American Christians—who form 71% of the population—to be attacks on their most cherished holiday, and another secular assault on their religious beliefs by a minority of atheists, agnostics, and followers of faiths other than Christianity. And though not much of Christian theology remains in a holiday that is more about consumption and leisure than the birth of Christ, the attacks on Christmas do reflect an evangelical secularism that aims to drive Christianity from the public square.

Muslims are the new Jews. You can find this offensive claim repeated everywhere in the media. The Jews, a small ethnic minority of millions that was stateless for thousands of years, are a terrible analogy for a global Muslim population of 1.6 billion and around 50 countries that do not comprise a single ethnicity or race. Comparing the two makes as much sense as comparing the Finns to all of Asia.

The only thing the Muslims and the Jews have ever had in common is that the former conquered, persecuted and enslaved the latter. Any religious similarities are the product of Muslim cultural appropriation of Jewish beliefs and any cultural similarities are the result of Muslim colonization.

Comparing Jews to Muslims makes as much sense as comparing Jews to Nazis. But the media began making the argument that the Jews are the new Nazis from the very moment that the stateless Jews got their first state since Rome and its allied Arab invaders had destroyed the last one.

In this twisted historical revisionism, the Jews, a beleaguered minority hanging on to a country slightly bigger than Fiji, who have spent the last 40 years cutting pieces off their small slice of the world to hand over to the region’s massive Muslim majority in the hopes of being left alone, are the new Nazis.

The chilling thing about the hung jury that resulted in a mistrial for Officer William G. Porter, the first Baltimore cop to stand trial on charges arising out of the death of Freddie Gray, is that it was a hung jury.

This was a prosecution that should never have been brought, based on such a stark lack of evidence that there was not even probable cause to make an arrest, much less proof beyond a reasonable doubt to convict a man presumed innocent. The jury should have acquitted Officer Porter in record time. Indeed, the case should never have gone to jury deliberations because the trial judge should have dismissed it when the state rested without proving any crimes.

Yet, the demagoguery created such an atmosphere of intimidation that at least one juror voted to convict. We may never know what the numerical split was in the vote of the twelve jurors. We know for a fact, however, that a riotous element of the community, which has the prosecutors and the government in its thrall, has made clear that no verdict except “guilty” – regardless of the lack of proof – will be acceptable if Baltimore is to be spared more violence.