At the core of Barack Obama’s terrorism speech on Sunday night lay a contradiction. He gave the address to convince an increasingly fearful nation that he takes the terrorist threat seriously. But he doesn’t, at least not in the way his political opponents do. …
On November 27, the Islamic Center of Lexington, Kentucky received an email vowing that “I’m going to kill everyone… there you Muslim f***s.” On November 24, when congregants at the Islamic Center of South Plains in Lubbock, Texas arrived for morning prayers, they found the mosque’s glass door smashed. On November 21, a group of armed protesters surrounded the Islamic Center of Irving, Texas, and ...
Give Donald Trump this: He has taught Americans something about the candidates he’s running against. He has exposed many of them as political cowards. In August, after Trump called undocumented Mexican immigrants “rapists” and vowed to build a wall along America’s southern border, Jeb Bush traveled to South Texas to respond. Bush’s wife is Mexican American; he has said he’s “immersed in the immigrant experience”; ...
The last two weeks have brought a festival of American ugliness. Since the attacks in Paris, virtually every Republican governor has declared their state off-limits to Syrian refugees. GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz has called for allowing in Syrians only if they’re Christian. Donald Trump has mused about registering American Muslims and falsely accused them of celebrating 9/11. The bigotry and cowardice are jaw dropping. ...
Two days after ISIS attacked Paris, The New York Times published a front-page story suggesting that terrorism’s new centrality to the presidential race might be “prompting voters to reconsider their flirtations with unconventional candidates and to take a more sober measure of who is prepared to serve as commander in chief.” …
Once upon a time, liberals criticized Barack Obama for only taking on fights he knew he could win. Not anymore. In 2013, Obama responded to the Sandy Hook shooting with a fervent, if unsuccessful, push for gun control. Now, over the past week, he’s met the nativist hysteria sparked by the attacks in Paris with an impassioned, enraged rhetorical barrage on behalf of the admission ...
Imagine that today’s Republican contenders were running for president in 1920. In 1917, the Bolsheviks had taken power in Russia, and sworn to export revolution across the globe, if necessary by force. They were joined in that desire by the Communist Party USA, a disproportionate percentage of whose members were Eastern European immigrants, especially Jews. In the 1920s, the Yiddish-language Morgen Freiheit, was the largest ...
Before Saturday night’s debate, the Democratic presidential candidates had only a day to prepare for terrorism’s new centrality to the 2016 campaign. And it showed. Bernie Sanders rightly noted that both the Iraq War and climate change had contributed to the political breakdown on which ISIS feeds. But when it came to outlining a vision for fighting the Islamic State going forward, none of the ...
At least Marco Rubio didn’t answer the attacks in Paris by demanding that the United States accept only Christian refugees. He left that to Ted Cruz. But given the Florida senator’s reputation in GOP circles as a foreign-policy wonk, it’s worth looking in some detail at just how ridiculous his response was. …
Peter Beinart’s remarks at Haaretz’s Israel Conference on Peace. I’m not an Israeli and I don’t know what it’s like to live here now. I don’t know what it’s like to wonder whether the next stabbing will take place on your block. I don’t know what it’s like to have ISIS to the north and Hamas to the south. I don’t know what it’s like ...