EDWARD CLINE: ISLAM GOES “MENTAL”

From France, Germany, Sweden, and other European nations come innumerable stories of Muslims apprehended after committing horrendous crimes only to be declared “mentally ill” (or who were just too “young” to be treated as adults) and so can’t be held responsible for the crimes. WNDreports, even though stabbing attacks, vehicle jihad, and suicide bombings are committed by individuals who are in full possession of their faculties and are in the right Islamic mind:

Is “mental illness” the new cover for jihadist attacks on the West?

Pamela Geller highlighted a story on June 2nd from France that caught my attention because it demonstrated just how far the “City of Light” (Paris) has gone over to “the dark side,” that is, to Islam.

“Muslim who screamed “Allahu akbar” while brutally murdering French Jewish woman may not be tried, “not in his right mind.” The story is taken mostly from The Times of Israel.

A Muslim man suspected in the violent murder of an elderly French-Jewish woman in Paris in early April may not face murder charges, as claims that he was not in his right mind when he committed the act are being considered.

The suspect has been hospitalized for psychiatric evaluation since his arrest for the murder of Sarah Halimi, 66, on April 4. His name has not been released but he is known to be a 27-year-old African Muslim and a neighbor of the victim.

Halimi was beaten severely before the suspect pushed her to her death out of the window of her apartment on Vaucouleurs Street in the heavily Muslim 11th district of Paris, considered a crime-ridden area.

His lawyer, Thomas Bidnic, told AFP on Wednesday that there was a strong chance he would not be held “criminally responsible” for the murder. The lawyer based this assessment on the medical advice of the suspect’s examiners.

What Western morality deems as criminal acts, Islam treats as acts of virtue, as professions of faith and adherence to a primitive “morality.” This is why I regard it as fruitless to try and instruct Muslims of the wrongness and evil of their actions when raping, murdering, and looting. That kind of concrete-bound mentality, especially one that was raised in a culture that permits anything in terms of dealing with others – and especially in dealing with “outsiders” or non-believers, i.e., infidels – is immune to “integration,” culturally and epistemologically. Muslim minds are arrested at nearly the level of chimpanzees in which there is also a “caste” system or pecking order.

Chimps are not conceptual creatures, and neither is the average Muslim that does not resort to violence to be loyal to his “faith.” It is the jihadists who take Islam literally who become predatory because of clashing priorities in their minds. But it’s difficult to predict when your average, non-intellectual Muslim will turn jihadist. Almost to a man, virtually every description of a jihadist who has committed some crime is that he was “quiet” and an otherwise “nice guy.”

I am more and more convinced that, aside from its totalitarian elements, Islam, from a psychological perspective, deliberately plants the seed of criminality in the average Muslim. The essence of any criminal act is the initiation of force – whether it’s robbery, rape, vandalism, etc., which is to wish for and take the unearned. I should think that would be obvious to the occasional reader of the last few weeks’ depredations, from the two Paris massacres to the rape of a 5-year-old girl in Idaho by “underage” Muslim boys I see nothing but an inculcated urge to kill, maim, to inflict pain and humiliation, and this urge is sanctioned by any number of Koranic verses and Hadiths. Here is a small handful of Islam sanctioned orders to commit crimes:

Violent verses from the Koran:

2:191-193: “And slay them wherever you come upon them, and expel them from where they expelled you; persecution is more grievous than slaying. But fight them not by the Holy Mosque until they should fight you there; then, if they fight you, slay them — such is the recompense of unbelievers, but if they give over, surely Allah is All-forgiving, All-compassionate. Fight them, till there is no persecution and the religion is Allah’s; then if they give over, there shall be no enmity save for evildoers.”

DAVID WEINBERG: TURKISH TAKEOVER IN JERUSALEM SEE NOTE

Accelerated radicalization and recruitment as well as an effective disinformation campaign spearheaded and funded by Turkey, the main supporter of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, is threatening Israel’s sovereignty in east Jerusalem. The Salafist Hizbut Tahrir is also gaining influence in the area.Jordan’s role as Guardian of the Holy Places and protector of Arabs in the city is being usurped by Turkish-backed Islamists. Janet Levy

Turkish takeover in Jerusalem

The fireworks and fanfare of the Jerusalem liberation jubilee have shoved under the radar a blockbuster expose about the unruly situation in east Jerusalem. Alarm bells should be ringing about the nefarious intensifying involvement of Erdogan’s Turkey and other radical Islamist groups in Jerusalem political and social affairs.

Dr. David Koren and Ben Avrahami are the advisors on east Jerusalem affairs for the Jerusalem Municipality. They lead the municipal team that oversees all of Jerusalem City Hall’s interactions with the Muslim and Christian populations of the city. They are intimately familiar with the thicket of contradictory interests, tensions, and disagreements that inform daily life in earthly Jerusalem.

The two experts have just published a rare, breathtaking and shocking description of political trends in east Jerusalem. Their article, “East Jerusalem Arabs Between Erdogan and Israel,” published in the new, important Hebrew intellectual journal Hashiloach (Vol. 4, May 2017), offers a brief account of the fruits of normalization and Arab east Jerusalemites’ increasing integration into the Israeli scene, But mainly it serves as a wake-up call regarding countervailing toxic trends.

According to Koren and Avrahami there has been very significant erosion in the status of the veteran east Jerusalem mukhtars and the influence of Fatah political infrastructures and Palestinian Authority leaders. Into the vacuum have stepped elements identified with Hamas, with the northern faction of the Islamic Movement in Israel, and with the Muslim Brotherhood in its wider context.

Through a series of civic associations, nonprofits, and grassroots organizations, sometimes at the neighborhood level and sometimes more extensive, they are investing tens of millions of dollars per year in dawa (missionary) activities, mainly charitable enterprises and educational programs to attract the young to Islamic values.

There is a direct line, say the article authors, from civic dawa to radicalization and active enlistment in the armed struggle against Israel. This includes active social networking which glorifies terrorists, martyrs, and prisoners, and explicitly calls for violent resistance to Israel. These networks were also the source for the libel that Al-Aqsa mosque is endangered by the Jews/Zionists, and for dissemination of an incredible volume of disinformation related to Israeli actions on the Temple Mount.

The authors ask for particular attention to the mounting involvement of Erdogan’s Turkey, which is the worldwide Brotherhood’s main patron. Turkey now enjoys unprecedented popularity among the Arab residents of east Jerusalem, the authors write. The Turks’ public support of the Palestinian cause and adoption of the Al-Aqsa issue, and their decision to inject millions of dollars into east Jerusalem, have won them great sympathy and support.

The Turks fund a great part of the dawa activities in the city, with Sheikh Ekrima Sa’id Sabri as the lead Turkish agent. (He is a former grand mufti of Jerusalem appointed by the PA and today the most prominent representative of the Muslim Brotherhood in the city.) The Turkish consulate in Jerusalem, the Turkish government assistance agency, and a string of Turkish organizations that have local branches in Israel or the West Bank, are directly implicated in this subversive activity too. As a result, Turkish flags today fly everywhere in east Jerusalem and prominently on the Temple Mount as well.

The Turks also have injected significant sums to those who do their bidding on the Temple Mount, for various activities such as Quran-recitation groups, transportation of worshipers to and from the mosque, iftar feasts in Ramadan, renovation and cleaning campaigns, and the like. In general, the Islamist forces on the Temple Mount operate, intentionally or not, to Turkey’s benefit and the detriment of Jordan. They may believe that the replacement of the Jordanian presence by a Turkish presence would be a positive and welcome development.

The main loser here is Jordan, which long enjoyed the status of Guardian of the Holy Places and protector of the Arabs of Jerusalem. This also is the context of the PA’s intensive activity in the international arena, and especially at UNESCO, ostensibly intended to protect the Islamic holy places against an Israeli takeover. This tactic allows the PA to convey to its critics that it is the true defender of Al-Aqsa and Jerusalem against the threat of “Judaization,” while at the same time gnawing at Jordan’s historic role as guardian of the Mount and seeking to counteract the emerging Turkish dominance in Temple Mount affairs.

The New York Times Just Outed the CIA’s Top Iran Spy Bre Payton

In an article published Friday, The New York Times outed the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) top spy overseeing the organization’s efforts in Iran. The paper justified its outing of the undercover CIA spy and his role within the agency by saying it was necessary since the agent is “leading an important new administration initiative against Iran.”

Yes. That really happened.

In an article entitled “C.I.A. Names New Iran Chief in a Sign of Trump’s Hard Line,” the newspaper of record revealed that Michael D’Andrea, who previously led the hunt for Osama bin Laden, will now be in charge of the agency’s operations in Iran.

As the Times explained in its report, Iran is “one of the hardest targets” for the CIA to keep tabs on.

“The agency has extremely limited access to the country — no American embassy is open to provide diplomatic cover — and Iran’s intelligence services have spent nearly four decades trying to counter American espionage and covert operations,” the article noted.

So the Times has apparently made it the newspaper’s mission to make the agency’s work much more difficult and far more dangerous by publicly identifying the man in charge of its covert operations in the Persian country. The paper’s rationale? The report’s authors claimed that because the newspaper already outed D’Andrea in 2015 as the official in charge of a CIA drone program, ignoring desperate pleas from the CIA at the time to keep his name secret in order to protect both the agent and overall national security, it was kosher to out him as the agency’s new Iran chief in 2017.

Here’s what the Times article says (emphasis added):

The C.I.A. declined to comment on Mr. D’Andrea’s role, saying it does not discuss the identities or work of clandestine officials. The officials spoke only on the condition of anonymity because Mr. D’Andrea remains undercover, as do many senior officials based at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Va. Mr. Eatinger did not use his name. The New York Times is naming Mr. D’Andrea because his identity was previously published in news reports, and he is leading an important new administration initiative against Iran.

The bolded portion of the excerpt above links to a piece dated April 25, 2015, in which D’Andrea is identified as the man in charge of growing the CIA’s drone programs in Yemen and Pakistan. But the paper’s real reason for outing D’Andrea, who was depicted as a character known only as “The Wolf” in the film “Zero Dark Thirty,” is that he’s an Iran hawk likely to oppose the previous administration’s attempts to normalize the nation by giving it billions of dollars, trading it terrorists for hostages, and blessing its nuclear program.

Accept Islamic Terror as the New Normal? by Nonie Darwish

“The use of terror under this doctrine [luring and terrorizing] is a legitimate sharia obligation.” — Salman Al Awda, mainstream Muslim sheikh, on the Al Jazeera television show “Sharia and Life”.

Part of the tarhib or “terrorizing” side of this doctrine is to make a cruel example of those who do not comply with the requirements of Islam. That is the reason Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, and entities such as ISIS, intentionally hold ceremonial public beheadings, floggings, and amputation of limbs.

Islamic jihad has always counted on people in conquered lands eventually to yield, give up and accept terrorism as part of life, similar to natural disasters, earthquakes and floods.

After terror attacks, we often hear from Western media and politicians that we must accept terrorist attacks as the “new normal.”

For Western citizens, this phrase is dangerous.

Islam’s doctrine of jihad, expansion and dawah (Islamic outreach, proselytizing) rely heavily on the use of both terror and luring. Targhib wal tarhib is an Islamic doctrine that means “seducing (luring) and terrorizing” as a tool for dawah, to conquer nations and force citizens to submit to Islamic law, sharia. It amounts to manipulating the instinctive parts of the human brain with extreme opposing pressures of pleasure and pain — rewarding, then severely punishing — to brainwash people into complying with Islam.

Most ordinary Muslims are not even aware of this doctrine, but Islamic books have been written about it. Mainstream Muslim sheikhs such as Salman Al Awda have discussed it on Al Jazeera TV. On a show called “Sharia and Life,” Al Awda recommended using extremes “to exaggerate… reward and punishment, morally and materially… in both directions”. “The use of terror under this doctrine,”‘ he said, “is a legitimate sharia obligation.”

People in the West think of terror as something that Islamic jihadists inflict on non-Muslims, and it is. But terror is also the mechanism for ensuring compliance within Islam. Under Islamic law, jihadists who evade performing jihad are to be killed. Terror is thus the threat that keeps jihadists on their missions, and that make ordinary Muslims obey sharia.

An online course for recruiting jihadists contains this description:

“Individual Dawa depends on eliciting emotional responses from recruits (and building a personal relationship). Abu ‘Amr’s approach illustrates a recruitment concept called al-targhib wa’l-tarhib, which is a carrot-and-stick technique of extolling the benefits of action while explaining the frightening costs of inaction. The concept was introduced in the Qur’an and is discussed by many Islamic thinkers exploring the best way to call people to Islam (several scholars, for example, have written books titled al-targhib wa’l-tarhib). According to Abu ‘Amr, recruiters should apply the concept throughout the recruitment process, but emphasize the benefits of action early in the process and the costs of inaction later.”

Death of a Religious Minority Under Radical Islam by Majid Rafizadeh

How can a religion seize so much power in a country? Before Islamists come to power, they make sham promises to every faith and political party. Using charm, manipulation, and community infiltration, they give the impression that they will be defenders of minorities, the poor, and local politics. Once they are in power, when it is too late to stop them, anyone who does not comply with their narrow view of religion and politics will be eliminated under the name of God and Islam.

The authorities engaged in hate speech and allowed hate crimes to be committed with impunity against Baha’is, and imprisoned scores of Baha’is on trumped-up national security charges, imposed for peacefully practicing their religious beliefs. Allegations of torture of 24 Baha’is in Golestan Province were not investigated. The authorities forcibly closed down dozens of Baha’i-owned businesses and detained Baha’i students.

It is not an “Iran problem”, it is an epidemic of hatred and violence that will continue to spread if something is not done to stop it.

They were quiet family, not politically minded, and they did not get involved in community unrest or gossip. Fear of people knocking on the door, or of a stranger showing up in the neighborhood with unknown intentions, drove them to withdraw from society. They were careful, so careful, that they barely mingled with anyone. They were our neighbors in Iran and trusted us enough to visit with us, until one day, they no longer did.

We checked on them out of concern. Their house was empty. There was no note, no goodbyes to anyone; they were just gone. Despite being our friends, they had never mentioned their last name. We had no way to track them down, to make sure they were safe and unharmed.

Then someone mentioned that they were from the Baha’i religious minority. He explained that the government had finally come for them. All of their fear and seclusion now had a reason. You could see how protective and careful the father was, how fearful and silent the mother was, and how their daughter would never venture far from home. I had thought their problem was just paranoia. In that moment, you see that you, too, have reason to be afraid.

May 14 is the ninth anniversary of the arrest of Bahai’s leadership which included the arrest of seven Baha’i leaders known as “Yaran” or “Friends in Iran”.

The Baha’i faith is monotheistic, but a religious minority in Iran. The Baha’i community has been peaceful and apolitical for a long time.

MY SAY: THE SWAMP’S HOT AIR CONTRIBUTES TO GLOBAL WARMING

A top government scientist with several PhDs in climate science, environmental studies, and climacteric syndrome ( recurring symptoms experienced by some women during menopause-hot flashes and chills) who wishes to remain anonymous, has informed me that many former and present members of the Congressional Climate Summit, have expressed serious concerns that the hot air emanating from the media and Congress and the methane Pelosium gas which is the prime constituent of swamp grass are contributing to Global Warming and causing irreversible harm to our Planet. rsk

Art of the Climate Deal: How Trump Should Renegotiate Paris By Steve Milloy

While a coalition of leftists, globalists, and rent-seekers rage about President Trump’s awesome decision to withdraw America from the Paris climate hoax, a key aspect of the president’s announcement is being overlooked — his offer to renegotiate.

In his Rose Garden speech, Trump stated:

So we are getting out. But we will start to negotiate and we will see if we can make a deal that’s fair. And if we can, that’s great. And if we can’t, that’s fine.

As a leader in the climate skeptic movement, I was at first disappointed to hear about the possibility of renegotiation. But upon further reflection, I considered that Trump had simply included it as one might use “sure, I’ll call you” following a bad date.

Yet now, I’ve concluded that his renegotiation offer may actually be brilliant, and could possibly be utilized to help American businesses, to solve real environmental problems, and even to assuage climate alarmists.

Thanks to fracking, America has a surfeit of natural oil and gas. So much so that our glut has depressed global oil prices.

Although Obama’s war on coal was wrong, it was made possible by the gas glut. There would have been no way for utilities to switch from coal to gas without the surfeit provided by fracking. But as a result, America’s carbon dioxide emissions are back down to 1990s levels. So fracking is a tried-and-true way to reduce emissions while keeping electricity prices low.

Our problem, though, is that the gas glut is not only hurting the coal industry, but it’s also hurting the oil and gas industry by keeping prices so low. If prices are too low, incentives for greater production are limited. Prices are hurting ExxonMobil so much, for example, the oil giant actually supports a carbon tax as a means of raising prices.

That’s bad business, bad policy, and bad politics.

A much better policy: Look to Europe and China, two large economies that have major problems which American natural gas can solve.

Europe is dependent on Russia for a large part of its gas supply, and is therefore vulnerable to the whims of Vladimir Putin on energy — and just about everything else. In China, the dirty way it burns coal for residential heating and cooking befouls its air, especially during the winter, to the point where deadly accidents occur because of visibility problems.

President Trump should sit down with the Europeans and the Chinese and offer them America’s natural gas.

Natural gas would wean Europe off of Russia. CONTINUE AT SITE

Send Leakers to Jail Washington’s blabocracy is endangering our national security. By Deroy Murdock

The next time President Donald J. Trump thinks about national-security leakers, he should shout this four-letter word:

“Jail!”

Washington has become riddled with leaks. They far exceed gossip whispered to journalists to hamper political rivals. Breaking news that Steve Bannon oversalts his eggs or Reince Priebus blasts his speaker phone would be distracting and foster strife, not harmony. Such infantilism merits discipline or, ultimately, dismissal.

Relentless leaks of state secrets are something completely different.

When reports of President Trump’s combative discussion with Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull emerged in February, they reflected poorly on Trump. This may have been what senior officials intended when they peddled these secrets. These leakers also sent world leaders a simple message: Whatever you tell Trump may be in the papers within hours. So, watch your words. Or avoid his calls.

This obstructs U.S. diplomacy.

Likewise, one or more leakers gave the Washington Post secrets about Trump’s discussions with Russian diplomats about ISIS’s plans to bomb jets with weaponized laptops. Reports that Israel uncovered this plot seemed designed to portray Trump as reckless with foreign intelligence. But the leakers, not Trump, blasted the Israeli angle worldwide.

Notorious leaks about ISIS’s deadly attack on Ariana Grande’s concert in Manchester, England, appeared crafted to humiliate him during his European tour. This leak earned a public rebuke by British prime minister Theresa May and a high-profile, albeit temporary, suspension in Anglo-American intelligence sharing.

Not good.

Washington’s blabocracy pre-dates Trump. Soon after Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden, word spilled on how America tapped Dr. Shakil Afridi to pay a house call on a Pakistani residence and confirm that it was bin Laden’s home. Perhaps some Obamite wanted the world to know how clever the previous administration was. Alas, this leak outed Dr. Afridi. He now is serving a 33-year prison sentence for cooperating with Washington. The enemy now knows this technique. Pro-U.S. physicians who might want to help America fight radical Islamic terrorism now will think thrice before doing so.

Under G. W. Bush, some idiot revealed that America had intercepted bin Laden’s satellite phone in Tora Bora, Afghanistan. Bin Laden’s line soon went dead.

Not helpful.

A former Green Beret, Lt. Colonel Michael G. Waltz, explained on Tuesday’s Fox & Friends: “ISIS, al-Qaeda, and these other groups have English-speaking cells that scour American newspapers and look for leaks, so that they can react and change their tactics.”

President Trump must lead the charge against these scoundrels.

“I believe when you leak the kind of information that seems to be routinely leaked, at a high, high level of classification,” homeland-security secretary John Kelly told NBC’s Meet the Press, “I think it’s darn close to treason.”

“The main felony that can (and should) be charged in this situation is the Espionage Act (18 USC 793),” former U.S. attorney and counter-terrorism specialist Andrew McCarthy told me. “Subsections (d) and (f) call for a penalty of up to ten years in prison. It is really essential to prosecute some people, to stop these leaks.”

How College Summer-Reading Programs Are Failing Our Students — and Our Culture Most universities have cut out the classics in favor of indoctrinating students. By Mark Tapson —

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/448246/print

EDITOR’S NOTE: This piece is reprinted with permission from Acculturated.https://acculturated.com/how-college-summer-reading-programs-are-failing-our-students-and-our-culture/

Many colleges have a “common-reading program” that assigns incoming students a book to read over the summer before starting school in the fall. The National Association of Scholars (NAS) has just released its annual study of these programs, and the findings, while not unexpected, are a disheartening indication of how higher education is shortchanging our youth — and our culture.

The Beach Books Report (BBR) is an examination of the common-reading programs of 348 colleges and universities in nearly every state in the country — 58 of them identified by U.S. News & World Report as among the top 100 universities in America, and 25 among the top 100 liberal-arts colleges. Thus, you might expect from them reasonably challenging reading assignments that reflect the highest quality education — but you would be wrong. If you assumed that the recommended books include such classics as, say, St. Augustine’s Confessions or even Ralph Ellison’s more modern Invisible Man, then you are blissfully ignorant of the intellectually shallow state of our purported institutions of higher learning.

The NAS study revealed that colleges rarely assign classic works anymore; in fact, all the books in the common-reading programs for the academic year 2016-2017 were published during the students’ lifetime — 75 percent of them since 2010. Moreover, a significant number of the readings demonstrates the degree to which “high culture” has capitulated to pop culture: many are graphic novels, young adult novels, books based on popular films and TV shows, and books associated with the left-leaning National Public Radio (NPR).

The NPR factor comes into play because the books’ themes are increasingly politicized and heavily weighted toward social-justice activism. Indeed, as FrontPage Magazine’s Jack Kerwick notes in his article about the BBR, the reading programs’ mission statements emphasize “non-academic goals” such as “building community or inclusivity.”

The BBR’s authors note that the themes strongly reflect “the common reading genre’s continuing obsession with race . . . and its progressive politics.” The “most popular subject categories this year were Civil Rights/Racism/Slavery (74 readings), Crime and Punishment (67 readings), Media/Silence/Technology (34 readings), Immigration (32 readings), and Family Dysfunction/Separation (31 readings).” The most routinely assigned text is Bryan Stevenson’s nonfiction work Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. Its theme is “African-American” and its subject categories are “Civil Rights/Racism/Slavery” and “Crime and Punishment.” In fact, those two were the most popular subject categories for the last three years in a row.

The report laments that the “ideologically-constrained” reading selections have become “homogenous” and “predictable,” and that the programs promote progressive dogma and activism rather than encourage “the virtues of the disengaged life of the mind.” The BBR’s damning conclusion is that this politicization makes “the common reading genre parochial, contemporary, juvenile, and progressive.”

By contrast, the National Association of Scholars appends its own list of 80 recommended books appropriate for college common-reading programs. It includes such classics as the aforementioned Confessions and Invisible Man, and Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (once the most widely-read work in English besides the Bible), as well as the usual — or perhaps not so usual anymore — suspects such as Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and Orwell.

Steering our youth toward ideological activism is not education — it is indoctrination.

Disturbingly, however, students for decades now have been too often brainwashed into shunning the wisdom of Dead White Males, disconnecting themselves from our common culture, and instead, embracing a historical narrative of oppression and victimhood that molds a false identity for them based on tribal classifications of skin color, class, and gender. That way lies the death of the individual, of culture, and of civilization itself.

Will Paris Revive the Constitution’s ‘America First’ Approach to Treaties? The climate agreement is a bad deal, but far more important, the Senate never approved it. By Andrew C. McCarthy

When did the definition of “leadership” in America become “the courage and foresight to ignore the United States Constitution”?

The fact that the sun rose again this morning was less predictable than the media-Democrat hysteria over President Trump’s entirely reasonable decision to pull the United States out of the Paris Convention on climate change. The decision was clearly right on the merits: The pact, which would do nothing meaningful to address global temperatures, is an exercise in progressive preening, touted by hypocrites who zip to and from climate confabs in their private jets — the kind of “Do as I say, not as I do” lovers of humanity (but loathers of people) who never take one plane when two are available.

To anyone but a zealot in the Church of Climate, it is obvious that carbon emissions are best reduced not by central planning but by a private sector free to innovate and respond to the market demand for environmentally responsible products and practices. That is how the United States leads, how it is already driving down emissions, and how it can promote the generation of wealth and know-how that — far better than dubious statistical models and rose-tinted crystal balls — would enable 22nd-century Americans to address their environmental challenges.

All that aside, however, President Trump’s decision should have been obvious and indisputable, not momentous. That it was not is a measure of detachment from our constitutional moorings.

The Paris Convention is a treaty. Under the Constitution, a treaty does not become law binding on the United States unless the president submits it to the Senate, obtains two-thirds approval there, and then ratifies the treaty. (Contrary to popular belief, the Senate does not ratify treaties; the president does the ratifying, but only if the Senate has consented.) That never happened to the climate agreement. It never had a chance of happening.

In this instance, as in others, President Obama conspired with his fellow transnational progressives to defeat the Constitution he had sworn to preserve, protect, and defend. He waited until late 2016, the eleventh hour of his presidency, to sign the agreement. As with the Iran deal, he had no intention of submitting it to the Senate, because there was no way it would be approved there. Because the pact would have punished American companies and workers, Obama knew that pushing Democratic senators into a vote, and boxing Hillary Clinton into a high-profile campaign debate, would have been a body blow to his party’s hopes of retaking the Senate and winning the White House.

The Left’s objective was to impose the Paris agreement without making Democratic office-seekers accountable for it. That is exactly what the Constitution is designed to prevent.

Here is the basic problem for transnational progressives: If the U.S. Constitution remains vital, their ultimate goal of global governance is unattainable.

Their premise is that the Westphalian model, a world ordered by nation-states pursuing their interests, is passé. History, they tell us, has refined us into a single world community, united by common values — eerily like sharia-supremacists’ claim that the ummah is a single world community of Muslims, united by Allah’s law.

By contrast, the Constitution is designed to enable the United States to secure its prosperity, interests, and security in a world where we hope for the best but prepare for the worst — hostile countries and other alien threats. The goal of the Constitution is to protect our nation against the globe’s many troublemakers, not to tame our nation in the name of global stability.

The perfect exemplar of the Constitution’s approach is the treaty clause (art. II, sec. 2, cl. 2). Its requirement of supermajority Senate consent is a presumption against international agreements.

The perfect exemplar of the Constitution’s approach is the treaty clause. Its requirement of supermajority Senate consent is a presumption against international agreements.