RUTHFULLY YOURS

In the increasingly bitter battle between religious liberty and the liberal political agenda, religion is losing. Witness the media and political wrath raining down upon Indiana because the state dared to pass an allegedly anti-gay Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The question fair-minded Americans should ask before casting the first stone is who is really being intolerant.

The Indiana law is a version of the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) that passed 97-3 in the Senate and that Bill Clinton signed in 1993. Both the federal and Indiana laws require courts to administer a balancing test when reviewing cases that implicate the free exercise of religion.

If the House panel investigating Benghazi really wants to get a look at Hillary Clinton’s emails, perhaps it should subpoena the Chinese military. Beijing—which may have hacked the private server she used to send official email as Secretary of State—is likely to be more cooperative than are Mrs. Clinton and her stonewall specialists now reprising their roles from the 1990s.

On Friday Mrs. Clinton’s lawyer, David Kendall, disclosed that he couldn’t cooperate with the Benghazi committee’s request that she turn over her private server to an independent third party for examination. Why not? Well, the former first diplomat had already wiped the computer clean.

A radical imam threatened me with death—and was later hired to preach in U.S. prisons. I was surprised, but I shouldn’t have been.

Less than a year after I moved to the United States in 2006, I was asked to speak at the University of Pittsburgh. Among those who objected to my appearance was a local imam, Fouad El Bayly, of the Johnstown Islamic Center. Mr. Bayly was born in Egypt but has lived in the U.S. since 1976. In his own words, I had “been identified as one who has defamed the faith.” As he explained at the time: “If you come into the faith, you must abide by the laws, and when you decide to defame it deliberately, the sentence is death.”

After a local newspaper reported Mr. Bayly’s comments, he was forced to resign from the Islamic Center. That was the last I would hear of him—or so I thought.

Imagine my surprise when I learned recently that the man who threatened me with death for apostasy is being paid by the U.S. Justice Department to teach Islam in American jails.

It would be unfair to say that few Jews have résumés as impressive as that of Eric Greitens — because there are few people in the world who have a comparable track record.

Greitens, 40, is a former Navy SEAL, the recipient of seven military awards (including a bronze star and a purple heart), a former Rhodes Scholar and the founder of The Mission Continues, a nonprofit that helps veterans integrate themselves back into their communities through volunteer work. He served in Iraq from 2003 to 2007. His second book, “Resilience: Hard-Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life,” published earlier this month, is a collection of inspirational letters to a fellow Navy SEAL struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder. (His first book, “Strength and Compassion,” is a collection of essays and photographs.)

Greitens, who was raised in the Maryland Heights suburb of St. Louis and attended the city’s B’nai El synagogue, which is Reform, talked to JTA about his Jewish upbringing, his new book and his potential run for governor of Missouri in 2016. The interview has been condensed and edited.

There probably aren’t many Jews in the Navy SEALs. Is that true?

There was one other Jewish Navy SEAL that I knew when I was going through BUD/S, or Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL training. The guy was actually in my class of all things. I actually don’t know the exact statistics, but I suspect that there is Jewish representation in the military consistent with our representation in the American population. Part of the reason I joined the military was because of the Jewish education I received.

“[Education] is now being used to raise an obedient generation that will serve the government.” — Sakine Esen Yilmaz, Secretary General of a secular teachers’ union.

Christian Pastor Ahmet Guvener managed to get his daughter, also a Christian, an exemption from mandatory Islamic religious classes in her Turkish school, but he soon found out this was not an easy task. Schoolteachers offered the girl three options: take as an elective course, “the life of the Prophet Muhammad, the Quran,” or basic religious knowledge — or fail the year. After the father spoke to the press, the school offered his daughter an alternative: an elective course in “astronomy.”

For the Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a pious Sunni man is, by definition, a more decent man than any other. Therefore, he reasons, a pious Sunni youth is better than any other youth.

While the president’s amnesty gets all the ink, his plan to flood the U.S. with cheap foreign workers proceeds apace.
When President Obama issued a series of executive orders on immigration last November, he unleashed a fierce torrent of criticism for granting millions of undocumented immigrants a de-facto amnesty. Lost in all the attention paid to that fight, however, was a lesser known executive action taken at the same time, one which the administration claimed would “modernize, improve and clarify immigrant and nonimmigrant visa programs to grow our economy and create jobs.” Now, the Obama administration has issued guidance clarifying what exactly their modernized, improved visa system will look like, and it’s not pretty: It appears that the president aims to unilaterally overhaul a critical visa program to usher in a flood of cheap foreign labor, crowding thousands of American workers out of their jobs and potentially discouraging many more from reentering the workplace.

A deadline passes with no agreement in sight. The third deadline has expired. There is no agreed framework. While the negotiators in Lausanne are continuing to talk, their language is telling. By yesterday there was supposed to be an agreed framework outlining the contours of a nuclear deal. Instead, negotiators said they would release a statement explaining which issues are agreed and which are not yet resolved. The truth is clear: For all the hard work of American and European diplomats, this endeavor has failed.

Why?

Because, as it has for over twelve years now, Iran is playing games. Ayatollah Khamenei has decided to roll the dice and pursue endless concessions. In doing so, he’s rolled out four obstacles to prevent a deal from taking shape. First, as the New York Times notes, Iran is now intransigent about the future of its existing nuclear-fuel stockpiles. Before, Iran had agreed to ship its stockpiles to Russia to be transformed into fuel rods for its civilian nuclear-power program. Second, Iran is demanding that advanced centrifuges — and future centrifuge research and development — be included in its post-deal nuclear portfolio.

Are we prepared to handcuff a feminist photographer who won’t take pictures at a strip club? The only identifiable victim of Indiana’s new Religious Freedom Restoration Act is the First Amendment’s Freedom of Association clause. Like Joan of Arc, it has been burned at the stake. In the name of nondiscrimination, Republican governor Mike Pence has surrendered to the angry mobs that erupted like the Sandinistas’ turbinas divinas. Despite RFRA’s similarity to a 22-year-old federal statute and laws in 18 other states, liberal activists and journalists have distorted Indiana’s measure into an alleged anti-gay hit list.

It never helps that laws like this one focus solely on the rights of religious people. As vital as religious liberty is, what about the rights of the 25 percent of Americans who have no faith? The safe harbors that these laws attempt to dredge should not, themselves, discriminate against nonbelievers. The sorts of freedoms shielded by Indiana’s new law — and nearly identical pieces of legislation heralded by the ACLU, signed by President Clinton, and supported by Obama in the Illinois state senate — should be protected for all Americans, be they religious, agnostic, atheist, confused, or otherwise.

While the latter compelled discrimination, the former does nothing of the sort. ‘I could have handled that better.” I don’t know if the captain of the Titanic ever said that. But Mike Pence did on Tuesday. The Indiana governor has managed to step on an impressive number of parts of his own anatomy recently and in the process gravely injured what was already a long-shot ambition to run for president in 2016. Earlier this month he signed the Religious Freedom and Restoration Act in a private ceremony. In attendance were prominent opponents of gay marriage.
In response, great algae plumes of righteous outrage erupted across the Internet. Gay-rights groups, the Democratic party, and the mainstream media, in unison, lost their collective marbles and raised unshirted hell. Know-nothings of every stripe cried out that Jim Crow had returned to the land. Shouts of “boycott!” went forth, including perhaps of the NCAA’s Final Four, which for Hoosiers is like threatening a boycott of Easter Mass at the Vatican. The Indiana Chamber of Commerce hied to its corporate fainting couch and begged to be rescued. Pence, desperate to put out the political fire, raced to a TV studio last Sunday to quench the flames on ABC’s This Week.

The Algemeiner recently reported that “After weeks of escalating criticism of Israel by the Obama Administration, Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State and the leading 2016 Democratic presidential contender, on Sunday called for the renewal of the ‘special’ relationship between the US and the Jewish state. In a telephone conversation with Malcolm Hoenlein, Executive Vice Chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Clinton said that she ‘thinks we need to all work together to return the special US-Israel relationship to constructive footing, to get back to basic shared concerns and interests.’”