The Founders and Islam

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s been a discussion in the comments section about the attitude of the Founders towards Islam, and how it relates to freedom of religion, and I thought I’d add some background.

At the outset, when the principles of freedom of religion were being established in Virgina in 1779, and Jefferson and Madison were discussing them (later to be the basis of the First Amendment of the US Constitution), Jefferson felt that freedom of religion should:

…comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahomedan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination.

This was despite the fact that the Founders must have known, for example, the history of the Crusades and later of the Gates of Vienna.

In 1786, when the fledgling US was dealing with the Barbary pirates, by whom many US and European ships were seized and their crews sold into slavery, the initial reaction of the US was this:

Congress gave assent to the Treaty of Tripoli, negotiated by Jefferson’s friend Joel Barlow, which stated roundly that “the government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion, as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen.” This has often been taken as a secular affirmation, which it probably was, but the difficulty for secularists is that it also attempted to buy off the Muslim pirates by the payment of tribute…

…Jefferson and John Adams [later] went to call on Tripoli’s envoy to London, Ambassador Sidi Haji Abdrahaman. They asked him by what right he extorted money and took slaves in this way. As Jefferson later reported to Secretary of State John Jay, and to the Congress:

The ambassador answered us that [the right] was founded on the Laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Later, as president, Jefferson launched a war against the pirates and was successful. But he never had to deal with anything approaching large numbers of Muslim arrivals to this country; at the time, Muslim immigrants were few and far between, nearly nonexistent. The fight was almost wholly an external one, and so the question of whether Islam’s tenets disagreed with our Constitution, and what to do about that in terms of immigration, did not really come up.

And then there was John Quincy Adams, not exactly a Founding Father (although we might call him a Founding Father’s Son). In 1830 he wrote, in the context of discussing the Russo-Turkish wars:

In the seventh century of the Christian era, a wandering Arab of the lineage of Hagar, the Egyptian, combining the powers of transcendent genius, with the preternatural energy of a fanatic, and the fraudulent spirit of an impostor, proclaimed himself as a messenger from Heaven, and spread desolation and delusion over an extensive portion of the earth. ”¦He poisoned the sources of human felicity at the fountain, by degrading the condition of the female sex, and the allowance of polygamy; and he declared undistinguishing and exterminating war, as a part of his religion, against all the rest of mankind. THE ESSENCE OF HIS DOCTRINE WAS VIOLENCE AND LUST: TO EXALT THE BRUTAL OVER THE SPIRITUAL PART OF HUMAN NATURE.

Between [Islam and Christianity]”¦a war of twelve hundred years has already raged. That war is yet flagrant; nor can it cease but by the extinction of that imposture”¦While the merciless and dissolute dogmas of the false prophet shall furnish motives to human action, there can never be peace upon earth, and good will towards men. The hand of Ishmael will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him”¦(Blunt, 1830, 29:269, capitals in orig.)”¦.

The precept of the koran is, perpetual war against all who deny, that Mahomet is the prophet of God. The vanquished may purchase their lives, by the payment of tribute; the victorious may be appeased by a false and delusive promise of peace; and the faithful follower of the prophet, may submit to the imperious necessities of defeat: but the command to propagate the Moslem creed by the sword is always obligatory, when it can be made effective. The commands of the prophet may be performed alike, by fraud, or by force (Blunt, 29:274)”¦

I’ve been able to locate the entire passage, and the rest of the essay is an elaboration on the differences between Christianity and Islam, as well as a discussion of Russia’s (a Christian nation’s) war with the Ottomans. In the essay, Adams does not discuss the prospect of Muslim immigration to this country, still extremely rare at that time, and what it might mean. So he never had to come to any conclusions about freedom of religion in this country, and whether it included the freedom to practice a religion he had described in such a manner.

[NOTE: In a footnote to his essay, Adams describes (page 379 in the complete text) the negotiation of a Barbary War treaty in Algiers, when the American signers assumed that the English and Arabic translations were the same. Wrong! The Arabic translations apparently contained an extra clause omitted in the English version, which required payment of the very sort of tribute the treaty was meant to end.]

New Year’s Eve sexual assaults in Finland, too

The New Neo Posted on by

Helsinki has had some problems much like Cologne’s, but not quite as widespread:

Asylum seekers who met in central Helsinki to celebrate New Years’s Eve “had similar plans” to commit sexual assault and other crimes as those who targeted women in the Germany city of Cologne, Finnish Police have reported.

Three Iraqi asylum seekers have been arrested for committing sexual assaults during the celebrations in the city’s Senate Square, where some 20,000 had gathered.

Security personnel reported “widespead sexual harrassment” during the celebrations, police added, with women complaining that asylum seekers had groped their breasts and kissed them without permission.

“This phenomenon is new in Finnish sexual crime history,” Ilkka Koskimaki, the deputy chief of police in Helsinki, told the Telegraph. ”We have never before had this kind of sexual harrassment happening at New Year’s Eve.”

It seems that Western Europe has been such a relatively pacific place post-WWII that it has contributed to a truly extraordinary naivete about the differences between their culture and the people they’ve been letting recently in under the guise of compassion for the needy and the afflicted. It’s hard to believe that anyone who follows the news, or anyone who has read about the treatment of women in most Middle Eastern Muslim countries, could be ignorant of the difference between a place like Finland and a place like Iraq. But I believe that many people are—or at least they were—ignorant.

My guess is that the magical words “asylum” and/or “refugee” (combined with decades of PC propaganda) helped the European natives see the newcomers as peaceful supplicants, coming only in order to take shelter from the storm. No doubt there are such people, and it’s highly possible they’re in the majority, but there also should have been little doubt that in addition there would be a significant number of aggressive people out to cause trouble and to take advantage of their hosts, and who would have a very predatory attitude towards women in western culture.

It may be that the only reason things weren’t worse in Helsinki on New Year’s was because authorities were tipped off:

He said that the police had received tip-offs from staff at the asylum reception centres.

“Our information from these reception centres were that disturbances or other crimes would happen in the city centre. We were prepared for fights and sexual harrassment and thefts.”

He said that police had established a “very massive presence” to control the estimated 1,000 Iraqi asylum seekers who had gathered in the tunnels surrounding the central railway station by 11pm, many of whom appeared to be under the influence of alcohol or drugs.

Mr Koskimaki said that sexual assults in parks and on the streets had been unknown in Finland before a record 32,000 asylum seekers arrived in 2015, making the 14 cases last year “big news in the city”.

It all reminds me of this:

This should be considered a smoking gun—but will it be?

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s early in this story, so there might be some extenuating circumstances we don’t know about yet—

But with that caveat, this should be big, big news:

In [an email] thread from June 2011, Hillary exchanges e-mails with Jake Sullivan, then her deputy chief of staff and now her campaign foreign-policy adviser, in which she impatiently waits for a set of talking points. When Sullivan tells her that the source is having trouble with the secure fax, Hillary then orders Sullivan to have the data stripped of its markings and sent through a non-secure channel.

That should be game, set, and match, yes?

Among other things, it may depend on what the material actually was and its level of classification. However:

Ordering aides to remove headers to facilitate the transmission over unsecured means strongly suggests that the information was not unclassified. On top of that, removing headers to avoid transmission security would be a violation of 18 USC 793 anyway, which does not require material to be classified ”” only sensitive to national security.

See also this.

I love love love…

The New Neo Posted on by

…this story, in which two young people who met when one donated a portion of his liver to the other ended up falling in love and are engaged to marry. There’s a video at the link, but it can’t be embedded, so you’ll have to go there to watch it:

The two underwent grueling surgeries in March that took over eight hours. Doctors removed 55 percent of Dempsey’s liver. The recovery process took about two months for both Krueger and Dempsey. During the process they realized they were falling in love with each other.

“If wasn’t for this person, I wouldn’t have made it to Christmas,” Krueger said. “[Dempsey] was a selfless and brave person who was perfectly healthy and didn’t know me before this.”

By the way—not to take anything away from the noble gesture of the man who made the donation, but a healthy liver will ordinarily regenerate after such a procedure. So it’s a physical manifestation of the idea that in love, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. He not only gets a new love, he gets a partly new liver, and she gets a wholly new one.

The making of “The Making of a Murderer”

The New Neo Posted on by

I haven’t seen the Netflix series “The Making of a Murderer,” and I probably won’t—too time-consuming. But I’m familiar with a lot of criminal cases where the convicted person has been exonerated, including cases in which eyewitness testimony turns out to have been wrong (see this for a discussion of the problems with eyewitness testimony).

“The Making of a Murderer” is a documentary which has caused scads of people to feel so strongly that convicted murderer Steven Avery was railroaded by local Wisconsin law enforcement and the justice system when he was tried for the 2005 murder of photographer Teresa Halbach and found guilty that they’ve started a huge petition for his pardon:

The documentary, and Avery’s defense team, suggested that law enforcement officials in Manitowoc County planted evidence against Avery after he filed a $36 million federal civil rights lawsuit against the county over his 1985 conviction. The current sheriff of Manitowoc County has rejected those claims.

Avery’s original 1985 rape conviction (not the 2005 murder conviction) was a case of mistaken eyewitness testimony, and he was exonerated by later DNA tests. This is similar to the way in which quite a few other convicts have been cleared now that DNA testing has been perfected, a review that was sparked by the Innocence Project. But prior to that mistaken conviction (and by the way, the actual perpetrator turns out to have physically resembled Avery), Avery had been a criminal and had engaged in animal torture and burning:

At age 18, Avery pleaded guilty to burglary of a bar and was sentenced to 10 months in prison. When he was 20, Avery and another man pleaded guilty to animal cruelty after pouring gasoline and oil on Avery’s cat and throwing it, alive, into a fire; Avery was again sentenced to prison. In 1985, Avery was charged with assaulting his cousin, the wife of a part-time Manitowoc County sheriff’s deputy, and possessing a firearm as a felon. The same year, he was also convicted of raping a Manitowoc woman, Penny Beerntsen, of which he was later proven innocent. He served six years for assaulting his cousin and illegally possessing firearms, and 18 years for the assault, sexual assault, and attempted rape he did not commit.

And that’s not all; there are also these additional allegations [from a 2006 article]:

The collective allegations of depravity are numbing, even when he was incarcerated. In recent court filings arguing for changes in bail, investigators alleged that early in his incarceration he threatened to kill and mutilate his own wife. They also contend he told another inmate at some point that he had drawn up plans for a “torture chamber” for kidnapping, raping and killing women.

Nevertheless, part of the 18 year sentence was indeed for a rape he didn’t commit. And we know that law enforcement can and sometimes does act in unethical ways in order to get someone.

However, from everything I’ve read about this case (and subsequent to the controversy, I have read a good deal), Avery in fact committed this murder. The evidence is, quite simply, overwhelming. The “Making of a Murderer” documentary, moreover, does not present all of it. And yet millions of people have become convinced by the documentary of Avery’s innocence, without knowing (or perhaps caring?) that they’ve been getting a skewed picture.

Propaganda works. And that’s what this is.

[NOTE: If you want to read some in-depth articles about the problems with the documentary, please see this, this, this, and this, among others.

In addition:

The show includes comments from an excused juror in Avery’s case suggesting his conviction was based on flawed evidence.

But Diane Free, a juror who was present to the end, told The Associated Press by phone that she was “comfortable with the verdict we reached. The thing on Netflix was a movie, not a documentary.”…

…In an email to TheWrap on Monday, [prosecutor] Kratz [says] the documentary series got it wrong.

The email concludes with Kratz saying Netflix should “either provide an opportunity for rebuttal, or alert the viewers that this series was produced by and FOR the defense of Steven Avery, and contains only the opinion and theory of the defense team.”

Kratz’s email is presented in its entirety at the link, and it’s well worth reading.]

[ADDENDUM: Here’s another good analysis of the flaws in the conspiracy theories.]

Some of the candidates “not sure” whether Ted Cruz is a natural-born citizen

The New Neo Posted on by

Fancy that; nice of them to be so concerned.

Here’s Trump—only for Ted’s own good, of course:

Donald Trump wants Ted Cruz to go before a judge to “immediately, like tomorrow” to determine whether or not he is a “natural born citizen” and therefore eligible to run for president.

Trump made the request for Cruz to seek a declaratory judgment from federal court on the issue during an interview with CNN on Wednesday.

Trump cast such a move as “for the good of Ted.”

And I have little doubt that this snarky comment of Rand Paul has endeared him further to the 100 or so people who still support him:

Rand Paul said on Wednesday that he’s not sure if his Canadian-born rival for the Republican presidential nomination Ted Cruz is eligible to be president of the United States.

“You know, I think without question he is qualified and would make the cut to be prime minister of Canada, absolutely without question, he is qualified and he meets the qualifications,” the Kentucky senator said of Cruz on the radio show Kilmeade and Friends.

Curiously enough, back in 2013 Paul thought differently:

“You won’t find me questioning his eligibility. I decided a long time ago I wouldn’t be a birther. I’m not a birther for Democrats. I’m not a birther for Republicans. I’m staying out of that.”

And maybe John McCain wants to get into the act and run for president again now that Lindsay Graham is out, because McCain’s wondering about Cruz, too.

If you want the legal scoop, go to Andrew C. McCarthy.

Some un-PC events in Cologne

The New Neo Posted on by

The Guardian is a leftist British paper, and so I was surprised to see its straightforward report on mobs of “men largely of Arab and north African appearance” attacking women in Cologne, Germany on New Year’s Eve:

German police are investigating reports that scores of women were sexually assaulted and mugged in Cologne city centre during New Year’s Eve celebrations, in what a minister called a “completely new dimension of crime”.

Authorities and media were accused of a cover-up linked to initial indications that, according to the police, those allegedly responsible for the sex attacks and numerous robberies were of Arab and north African origin.

Sixty complaints were filed to police, a third of which were linked to sexual assault. Cologne’s mayor, Henriette Reker, called an emergency meeting of high-ranking security officials on Tuesday, saying her aim was to ensure the city centre did not turn into a “lawless zone”.

Between 500 and 1,000 men described as drunk and aggressive are believed to have been behind the attacks on partygoers in the centre of the western German city. Whether they were working as a single group or in separate gangs remains unclear.

Women reported being tightly surrounded by groups of men who harassed and mugged them. Some people threw fireworks into the crowds, adding to the chaos.

“Sexual crimes took place on a huge scale,” said the police president, Wolfgang Albers. “The crimes were committed by a group of people who from appearance were largely from the north African or Arab world.”

To me, the attacks themselves are far less surprising than the fact that a paper like the Guardian isn’t pulling its punches. In fact, the actual events are not surprising at all. The minister may call the attacks “a completely new dimension of crime,” but that only reflects the minister’s ignorance of the Lara Logan story at the hands of a mob in Egypt.

And the behavior in Germany was not limited to Cologne, either:

Similar attacks are believed to have taken place on a smaller scale in Hamburg’s red light district of St Pauli on New Year’s Eve, according to a police spokesman.

The Guardian is careful to point out that:

Critics of Merkel’s open-door policy on refugees were quick to blame it for the attacks, despite the police’s insistence that the alleged perpetrators were not new arrivals.

How would they know the perpetrators were not new arrivals, since they haven’t figured out exactly who they were yet? Was it, perhaps, because they spoke fluent German, or even unaccented German? And even if that were the case (I don’t know if it was or wasn’t), how on earth would that fact support the idea that taking in more refugees from that general area of the world will be perfectly okay? In fact, it would tend to argue against it, because if years of residence or even local birth and supposed assimilation to German culture did not discourage this sort of behavior, why wouldn’t a person expect that it would be even worse with newer arrivals, who have had less exposure to modern Western ways?

But this article also said some of the perpetrators didn’t speak German, and that some of the women (it’s not clear how many) were robbed of wallets and/or cellphones. Furthermore, this report in the Telegraph, allegedly leaked from the police, says that some of the attackers were indeed recent arrivals, and rather bold ones at that:

But the leaked police report, published in Bild newspaper and Spiegel, a news magazine, claims that one of those involved told officers: “I am Syrian. You have to treat me kindly. Mrs Merkel invited me.”

Another tore up his residence permit before the eyes of police, and told them: “You can’t do anything to me, I can get a new one tomorrow.”

A local newspaper reported that fifteen asylum-seekers from Syria and Afghanistan were briefly held by police on New Year’s Eve in connection with the sex attacks but were released.

I don’t really know how the actual perpetrators can be identified, anyway; I suppose it would depend on how good the surveillance video is. Perhaps the women also remember a few of the more prominent faces, but it would be hard to make an identification without other evidence, and I’m not at all sure that authorities are motivated to do so. Instead, the mayor of Cologne, Henriette Reker, has issued some guidelines for German women’s behavior in the future:

The crisis management team said prevention measures should include a code of conduct for young women and girls, and Mayor Reker said the existing code of conduct will be updated online.

The suggested code of conduct includes maintaining an arm’s length distance from strangers, to stick within your own group, to ask bystanders for help or to intervene as a witness, or to inform the police if you are the victim of such an assault.

She’s been heavily criticized for this, as one might expect. Of course, asking bystanders for help or informing police if you are attacked is mere common sense, but the rest of the directives are not how German women are used to being told to act. However, when a country takes in a large group of people (particularly young men) who believe that women walking around freely makes them fair game, then this is what that country will get, and that country will have to deal with the fallout.

Perhaps the issuance of a bunch of chadors to the women of Germany would do the trick. The institution of the religious police might also be in Germany’s future:

They have the power to arrest unrelated males and females caught socializing, anyone engaged in homosexual behavior or prostitution; to enforce Islamic dress-codes, and store closures during the prayer time. They enforce Muslim dietary laws, prohibit the consumption or sale of alcoholic beverages and pork, and seize banned consumer products and media regarded as anti-Islamic (such as CDs/DVDs of various Western musical groups, television shows and film which has material contrary to Sharia law or Islam itself).

If a large enough group of refugees and/or immigrants arrives in a country without admiring the culture and customs of their new home and without wanting to become part of it except in the sense of personal financial gain, then that country is at risk of having its own culture and customs undermined. It’s not bigotry to recognize that, it’s simple logic, and although people give it the name “xenophobia” it is not a “phobia” at all. Phobias are disproportionate and irrational. A concern about what is going on in Europe (and in this country) if those conditions persist, and where it all is going to end, is (unfortunately) quite rational.

North Korea claims to have tested a hydrogen bomb

The New Neo Posted on by

Maybe yes, maybe no; North Korea’s claims of testing an H-bomb are doubted, but might be true.

“We have consistently made clear that we will not accept [North Korea] as a nuclear state,” said a spokesman for the National Security Council. “We will continue to protect and defend our allies in the region, including the Republic of Korea, and will respond appropriately to any and all North Korean provocations.”.

Blah, blah, blah. The truth is that we have accepted North Korea as a nuclear state:

There is currently no diplomacy from the U.S. to restrain the nuclear development, so this test “also puts the U.S. on the spot.”…

The fact that the test has taken place, assuming it was successful, complicates the situation in Northeast Asia,” [Mike Chinoy of the U.S.-China Institute at USC] said. “Beijing had been becoming more friendly.”

Being more warm and cordial was hoped to restrain North Korea but now this places the Chinese authorities in a big dilemma.

I would say that many of the world’s nations have been in “a big dilemma” about North Korea and its nuclear program for several decades.

“If [fill in the blank] becomes the Republican nominee…”

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m choosing to discuss this comment by “mollyNH.” But really, that’s an arbitrary selection on my part. You’ll see why in a moment:

If Cruz were to be the nominee the MSM will shred him apart because of his Christian fundamentalism…The media will just dust off what they used for Romney & Santorum & replace Mormon & Catholic with So Baptist.

Indeed. But I’d go further and add that a sentence that takes the form “If [fill in the blank] becomes the Republican nominee, the MSM will shred him/her because of [fill in the blank]…” can be used for any Republican. One thing you can bank on is that the eventual Republican nominee will be under rhetorical attack from the mainstream media, and the eventual Democratic nominee will be under an umbrella of protection.

However, the form these things will take varies, because although all possible nominees will be under attack, the content will differ.

If a candidate is seen as especially threatening to the Democrats, he or she is more likely to be met with an attempt to take him/her down early, in order to try to avoid that person getting the nomination in the first place. That sort of early attack is not geared primarily to repel Democrats or moderates, either, because the people who vote in Republican primaries and choose the nominee of the GOP are primarily (pun intended) Republicans, although in some states others can cross over.

The MSM sometimes doesn’t even have to enter that fray, because other Republican candidates will often supply the ammunition and lead the charge. But sometimes the MSM tries to undermine a Republican candidate during the primaries; for example, the charges against Herman Cain in 2011, and this season’s lame attempt to discredit Rubio because of ownership of a boat.

But at the moment the MSM is relying mostly on the Republicans to attack each other, and the Republicans are mostly obliging. However, you can be certain that the MSM is holding back information on every single one of the Republican candidates in order to use that knowledge when it can do the most damage, which is after the nomination.

The real question is not whether they have such information on each, but what form it will take, how damaging it will be, and what segment of the public will be listening.

Just to illustrate what I’m getting at here: what dirt does the MSM have on Rubio? Tales of debt and boats and traffic tickets don’t really seem to matter to many people. The thing that hurts Rubio the most is his voting record on illegal immigration, but that is already pretty well-known to those who would find it to be a major drawback: conservatives, more than independents or Democrats. So I’m not sure that further revelations about the Gang of 8 would hurt Rubio any more than he’s already been hurt.

What of the rest? We can pretty much assume that Cruz will be excoriated as an extremist, both religious and otherwise. That would hurt him with moderates (and the religiosity might hurt him with some libertarians) and help him with conservatives. I’m not sure what the net result would be. For Fiorina it’s easy: more Hewlett-Packard. Christie? They already tried with Bridgegate, so that damage has been done. I’m not sure what else they would find (the hug is old, old news); perhaps there isn’t all that much more.

Trump, of course, is a very special case. There are a great many negatives that can be pulled out and emphasized or in some cases re-emphasized; you can find some of them here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. As you can see, it’s a lengthy list.

But will it matter? One thing of which I’m fairly sure is that it won’t matter to the hard-core Trump enthusiasts—who at the moment seem to account for something like one-third of the Republican Party, which makes them less than one-sixth of the American public, and perhaps slightly more than that of the voting public. I have no idea about the remaining majority of voters, but my guess is that those who are negative about Trump will become more so, and those who are ambivalent or lukewarm won’t find that the stories enhance his appeal. But that’s only a hunch of mine—and with Trump, what I really believe is that no one can predict what will happen, neither his followers nor his opponents.

The only truly predictable thing is what I said earlier: the MSM will do what it can to bring the Republican down, it will save some of its ammunition for after the nomination, and it will do its level best to protect the Democrat.