Who’s the Crazy One? By David Horowitz. FrontPage Magazine, December 10, 2015.
Horowitz:
Why Trump’s Muslim ban resonates.
Why Trump’s Muslim ban resonates.
Presidential
candidate Donald Trump has called for a moratorium on Muslim immigration until
we can figure out why Islamic terrorists have been able to enter our country
and devised ways to protect ourselves. This has caused the left and right
establishments to dogpile on Trump. Echoing the sentiments of virtually all
Democrats and many Republicans, a Washington
Post editorial has declared that Trump’s proposal disqualifies him as a
candidate because in the Post’s view
what he recommends is unconstitutional and therefore un-American. But President
Obama has issued executive orders – as it happens orders that sabotage our
borders - that he himself has called unconstitutional (“I don’t have the
authority to stop deportations”). Has
the Post editorialized that this is
un-American and disqualifies him for the presidency? Has it called for Obama to
be impeached? Have Democrats ridiculed Obama for his un-American prescriptions?
Consider
the nature of the threat. A 2009 “World Opinion” survey by the University of Maryland
showed that between 30 and 50% of Muslims in Jordan, Egypt and other Islamic
countries approved of the terrorist attacks on America and that only a minority
of Muslims “entirely disapproved” of them. ISIS has acknowledged its plans to
use refugee programs to infiltrate its terrorists into the United States and
other infidel countries. In Minneapolis we have a Somali refugee community many
of whose members have returned to Syria to fight for ISIS. Other Muslim
immigrants like Major Hassan and Tashfeen Malik have carried out barbaric acts
of terror here at home. Today Muslim terrorists are using assault rifles and
pipe bombs, but we know they have Sarin gas and other chemical weapons which
they might use tomorrow. The terrorists inexorably arrive along with the other
immigrants, no one in authority apparently knowing who’s who. Who, then, in his
right mind does not think that Muslim immigration poses a serious security
threat to us?
The
outrage against Trump should properly have been directed at our president who
refuses to identify the enemy as Islamic terrorism, who has opened the door to
nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles to the Islamic America-haters in Iran,
whose policies have created the vacuums that ISIS has filled, and who even
after Paris and San Bernardino is determined to bring 100,000 immigrants from
Syrian war zones to our unprotected shores. This outrage is missing and it is
precisely because it is missing that Trump’s unconstitutional proposal
resonates with so many rightly concerned Americans. When the man in charge of
our security is by general consensus out to lunch in regard to fighting the war
on Islamic terror, or protecting us at home, a proposal like Trump’s, which at
least recognizes the threat, is going to resonate with the public.
In
middle of a crisis of national security, the Democratic Party seems to think
that climate change and especially gun ownership are greater threats to our
survival than the one that comes from hundreds of millions of Muslims who think
America should be attacked and who believe the whole world should be put under
medieval Islamic law. In the face of this threat, the Democratic Party and its
leaders seem to have no problem with the fact that we have more than 350
“Sanctuary Cities” that are dedicated to sabotaging our immigration laws; that
we have no southern border and as a result have 179,000 illegal alien criminals
and who knows how many terrorists in our country today.
Once
again we have Trump to thank for changing the surreal conversation about
whether having a border at all is compatible with American values, and forcing
people to focus on the dangers we face. Republicans are generally defenders of
this country, but not in this controversy over Donald Trump. Would that they
would use the same ridicule and outrage over the Democrats’ many betrayals of
our country and its citizens through proposals to expose us to our enemies as
they do over a proposal to protect us from them. Trump’s idea may be
unconstitutional and unworkable, but it springs from a desire that is honorable
and patriotic. The appropriate response would be to propose alternatives that
recognize the same dangers and serve the same ends but do so within
constitutional limits.
Donald
Trump’s great contribution is saying the unsayable; putting things on the table
that would otherwise be buried; calling a spade a spade in a time when
political correctness has made us unable to discuss things that have to do with
our basic national survival. This is the
crux of the issue. Every time he creates
a controversy like this he also tells this country that its emperors,
Republican and Democrat, have no clothes. That they prefer propriety over
defending the country. That they are
dedicated only to keeping the lid on a cauldron of threat and challenge they
have allowed to boil over.
The
2016 election will be a referendum on the defense of this country and its
survival. Let’s see who answers the call.
