RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

You knew this was coming:

It has become increasingly clear that terrorist groups such as ISIS can extend their reach to American territory via the Internet. Using their own websites, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other platforms, they lure young men and women to their mission—without having to risk the capture of foreign agents on U.S. soil. The Americans ensnared in ISIS’s net in turn radicalize others, send money to ISIS, and even carry out attacks.

Never before in our history have enemies outside the United States been able to propagate genuinely dangerous ideas on American territory in such an effective way—and by this I mean ideas that lead directly to terrorist attacks that kill people. The novelty of this threat calls for new thinking about limits on freedom of speech.

Consider Ali Amin, the subject of a recent article in the New York Times. Lonely and bored, the 17-year-old Virginia resident discovered ISIS online, was gradually drawn into its messianic world, eventually exchanged messages with other supporters and members, and then provided some modest logistical support to ISIS supporters (instructing them how to transfer funds secretly and driving an ISIS recruit to the airport). He was convicted of the crime of material support of terrorism and sentenced to 11 years in prison. Amin did not start out as a jihadi; he was made into one.

At a House Oversight Committee hearing yesterday, a State Department official admitted the government does not know the whereabouts of thousands of foreigners who had their visas revoked over terror concerns.

“You don’t have a clue do you?” Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, told Michele Thoren Bond, assistant secretary for the Bureau of Consular Affairs.

Bond told the committee that the U.S. has revoked more than 122,000 visas, 9,500 of which were revoked due to terrorism concerns.

Chaffetz asked Bond where those individuals were located now, to which she responded: “I don’t know.”

The startling admission came as members of the committee pressed administration officials on what safeguards are in place to reduce the risk from would-be extremists.