Nicholas Kristof on how ISIS could not have a better recruiter than Donald Trump.
Donald Trump's proposal to bar Muslims from America may be a gift to ISIS recruitment and a grotesque echo of the sentiment behind the Chinese Exclusion Act and the internment of Japanese-Americans. But, like those earlier spasms of exclusion, the Trump proposal has plenty of supporters.
In one recent poll, more than three-quarters of Republicans said that Islam was incompatible with life in the United States. There’s a widespread perception in America that Islam is rooted in misogyny and violence, incorrigible because it is rooted in a holy text that is fundamentally different from others. …
There’s a profound human tendency, rooted in evolutionary biology, to “otherize” people who don’t belong to our race, our ethnic group, our religion. That’s particularly true when we’re scared. It’s difficult to conceive now that a 1944 poll found that 13 percent of Americans favored “killing all Japanese,” and that the head of a United States government commission in 1945 urged “the extermination of the Japanese in toto.”
At the time of the 9/11 attacks, the CIA estimated that there were perhaps 100 people in al-Qaeda. After the expenditure of several trillion dollars and the death of more than twice as many Americans that those who died in not just 9/11, but all terrorism attacks in America before and since, al-Qaeda has about 30,000 and ISIS has matched them.
I don’t suppose there’s a chance we might think of something else to do other than more of the same? No? Yeah. Didn’t think so.
Let’s do unto other pundits, by going inside.
Sara Lipton on what comes before the sticks and stones.
Do harsh words lead to violent acts? At a moment when hate speech seems to be proliferating, it’s a question worth asking.
Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch recently expressed worry that heated anti-Muslim political rhetoric would spark an increase in attacks against Muslims. Some claim that last month’s mass shooting in Colorado Springs was provoked by Carly Fiorina’s assertion that Planned Parenthood was “harvesting baby parts”; Mrs. Fiorina countered that language could not be held responsible for the deeds of a “deranged” man. ...
The experience of Jews in medieval Europe offers a sobering example. ...
In the decades around 1100, a shift in the focus of Christian veneration brought Jews to the fore. In an effort to spur compassion among Christian worshipers, preachers and artists began to dwell in vivid detail on Christ’s pain. Christ morphed from triumphant divine judge to suffering human savior. A parallel tactic, designed to foster a sense of Christian unity, was to emphasize the cruelty of his supposed tormentors, the Jews. ...
Ferocious anti-Jewish rhetoric began to permeate sermons, plays and polemical texts. Jews were labeled demonic and greedy. In one diatribe, the head of the most influential monastery in Christendom thundered at the Jews: “Why are you not called brute animals? Why not beasts?” Images began to portray Jews as hooknosed caricatures of evil.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Jews were massacred in towns where they had peacefully resided for generations.
Considering everything that has happened again, I’m not going to say it can’t happen again.
The New York Times has an attention span greater than one week.
After months of grief and depression, parents who lost children in the 2012 schoolhouse gun slaughter in Newtown, Conn., turned to the courts last year for a modicum of justice and only then discovered the full power of gun manufacturers: The industry marketing the weapons that killed 20 children and six adults at the school enjoys an extraordinary immunity from civil damage suits — a customized shield from Congress that the makers of autos, drugs and other American industries are not given. …
Whether that happens, of course, depends on whether Congress is ever going to break from the gun lobby. Could there be anything less controversial than denying gun purchases to people on the terrorist watch list? Yet Republicans prefer to express concern about “due process” for gun purchasers even as they propose blanket bans on Islamic refugees.
A lot of people think the current Congress wouldn’t thwart the gun lobby unless someone shoot up the House chamber. I think those people are optimists.
Carl Hiaasen has an example.
A strange thing happened the other day in Washington, D.C.:
Marco Rubio actually showed up for work.
Without needing Mapquest he found his way to the Senate floor. He even remembered where his seat was. …
The reason for his recent detour to Washington was to cast a very important vote affecting the security of this country, and of all the Floridians he’s supposed to represent.
The Senate was considering a law to prevent persons on the FBI’s terror watch list from buying explosives or guns. To most Americans, that’s a no-brainer.
Rubio showed up to vote against the bill. Went out of his way to vote against it.
What does it take to get Rubio to hang up his presidential ambitions long enough to do some senating? A tiny frown from Wayne LaPierre.
This was only one day after the mass shootings in San Bernardino.
The measure was defeated by the Republican majority, slaves as always to the NRA, which opposed the law.
Ross Douthat is a kinder, gentler bigot.
Unlike Donald Trump, or at least the demagogue he’s playing, most Americans probably don’t want to seal our borders against Muslims.
But most Americans do look at Islam and see a problem. It isn’t just Trump supporters or Republicans. In a poll the Public Religion Research Institute conducted before the Paris attacks, 56 percent of Americans agreed that “the values of Islam are at odds with American values.” In a more recent YouGov poll, 58 percent of Americans viewed Islam unfavorably, just 17 percent viewed it favorably.
You might wait for Douthat to mention that this YouGov poll, like most of their “polls” was an Internet-based opt-in poll. You might also think that Douthat would note that the same PRRI poll that had 57% of respondents saying “The values of Islam, the Muslim religion, are at odds with American values and way of life“ also had 81% of respondents saying they knew either only “a little” or “nothing at all” about Islam. Or you might think he’d mention that in the same poll, a majority favored admitting Syrian refugees. You’ll be waiting a long time.
But hey, you won’t catch Douthat saying Islam is at odds with Western values. Nope. Because that has far too few words.
This is clearly true of the idea, held by certain prominent atheists and some of my fellow conservatives and Christians, that the heart of Islam is necessarily illiberal — that because the faith was born in conquest and theocracy, it simply can’t accommodate itself to pluralism without a massive rupture, an apostasy in fact if not in name.
I have to tell you, the whole idea that a majority of Americans regard terrorism as the top issue is so discouraging that it makes me want to retire. I just don’t know what to retire from.
Ruth Marcus is nervous about where the chaos a conservative court may bring.
Watching the racial ferment on campuses nationwide and listening to the Supreme Court consider the charged topic of affirmative action expose the gulf — the chasm, really — between the difficult reality of race relations on campus and the out-of-touch, aggrieved perspective of the conservative justices.
... Wednesday’s arguments were striking for the disconnect between the persistent worldview of the conservative justices and the current reality of campus unrest.
The conservative justices see white students as the aggrieved party. When, asked Justice Antonin Scalia, will colleges “stop disadvantaging some applicants because of their race?” These justices disdain the benefit of a diverse campus. “What unique perspective does a minority student bring to a physics class?” asked Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. They want out of the whole distasteful enterprise.
Scalia. The Trump of Law.
Kathleen Parker spent last week telling women to get out of the Army. And this week…
Arguments against this move are many, some of which I touched upon in a previous column that focused on women’s unequal opportunity to survive because of various physical differences. This time, I submit another crucially important but politically incorrect proposition: Men’s lives will also be put at greater risk if women are in combat.
The reasoning should be obvious. Plainly put, men tend to like women quite a lot and either will be tempted to express their attraction, and/or will want to protect their female companions.
Scoff if you must, but blame Nature.
That’s right. Men will be so busy holding open the tank door and spreading their bulletproof jackets over mud puddles, that they’ll plum forget which way to point their weapons. I’m going with scoff.
You want a good reason to put women in combat? Because it will really piss off — and frighten — the misogynist bastards we’re fighting.
Alexandera Petri on Der Firer.
I used to think that Donald Trump was trying to take us back only 150 years, to the days of the Know-Nothing Party, a famously xenophobic group that insisted on the election of native-born Protestants to all offices, inveighed against “papism” and generally panicked at the thought of immigrants.
But the Know-Nothings wanted only to delay the period of naturalization of the immigrants whose religion filled them with dread and terror. They did not seek to ban their coming. Trump wants to bar Muslims from immigrating altogether. Actually. He said so in a statement Monday.
When a party called the Know-Nothings that Abraham Lincoln made fun of before the Civil War was less xenophobic than you are on Dec. 7, 2015 — something is dead wrong.
Margot Hirsch thinks smart weapons would at least be action of a sort.
Gun stores in San Bernardino County are already seeing a rush of customers who want to secure their Second Amendment rights while they know that they can.
But our country’s legislative track record shows that even nationally publicized acts of gun violence do not lead to the enactment of new firearms legislation. If the tragedy at Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary School, in which 26 innocent lives were taken, was not sufficient to spur legislation effective at preventing gun violence, it’s unlikely that San Bernardino will have any greater impact. Solutions on gun violence won’t come from Washington anytime soon.
That’s why we need to go a completely different route when it comes to beginning to solve the U.S. gun violence problem: empowering gun owners to make safer choices about the weapons they buy and own.
How empowered do gun owners need to be, exactly? I’m still waiting for a calculation on how much more armed we need to be before that polite society sets in.
Jesse Kirkpatrick and Andrew Light look at new DNA editing techniques.
Recently in China, scientists genetically engineered a beagle to double its muscle mass. The scientists juiced up the aptly named Hercules by “editing” a gene called myostatin. While scientists have been able to edit genes for some time, the advent of a powerful tool called CRISPR has made gene editing — the insertion, deletion or modification of a gene in an organism — easier, cheaper and more precise. Although the case of the super-beagle raises potential ethical considerations related to the implications of inducing such dramatic changes in an animal, it also points to a broader set of issues that merit wider attention. …
We believe that the potential for applications like these provides a morally compelling argument for committing to this new research agenda. At the same time, however, we need to watch out for possible hazards and take appropriate precautions, especially when research moves into the field. For example, the ecological effects of eliminating a whole species of mosquitoes are unknown.
Until recently, genetic modification was an expensive and literally hit-or-miss proposition that often involved firing gene-coated particles cells using a gun in hopes that a chunk of DNA would enter the cell and be incorporated in the right way. Some companies also employed bacteria to carry genes into cells, but again the odds of getting a precise “hit”—delivering the right genes to the right location—were low.
CRISPR changes all that. Using a technique borrowed from the system that bacteria deploy against invading viruses, genetic modification is suddenly much cheaper, much easier, and much more accurate. It turns genetic tinkering, not just of our food crops, but our own genome, into something that’s going to be very, very, VERY tempting.
Of all the dystopias I’ve ever seen or read, GATTACA is the only one that has always seemed not just likely, but inevitable.
