Imagine if an Islamist nutter went to the convent of the Little Sisters of the Poor and murdered a bunch of nuns (alas, hardly an unimaginable hypothetical). Would I be right to say that the New York Times and its allied Brain Trusts have no right to be outraged? After all, liberals have heaped scorn and contempt on those nuns for their effrontery in not wanting to be forced to pay for birth control. Or what if an Islamist shot up a Baptist Church or Koch headquarters or the Washington office of AIPAC?
.. On the secular left today, conservative Christians (and Zionist Jews) are the enemy. They are the other. The oppressor. The villains in the stories the Left tells itself.
Donald Trump Steps on his own Inflamatory Speech
During his speech, Trump gave the false impression that immigrants who enter the United States as refugees and asylum seekers aren’t subject to background checks. Without citing any convincing evidence, he accused Clinton of supporting “policies that bring the threat of radical Islam into America, and allow it to grow overseas.” He reaffirmed his proposal to ban Muslims from entering the United States, which is popular among Republican voters, and he suggested that Muslim communities in this country need to do more to coöperate with law enforcement and turn in “the bad guys,” claiming, again without any basis, that “they do know where they are.”
.. Although he was speaking from a teleprompter, the tone in which he delivered his address was so disdainful that it was hard to concentrate on the actual words.
.. In a post on Sunday, my colleague David Remnick lamented the “velocity, vapidity, and sheer ugliness” of Trump’s initial response to the Orlando tragedy: a series of tweets drawing attention to himself and seeking to build capital from the attack.
.. But even in a party that has cynically exploited voters’ fears for decades, there is rising concern about where Trump is going. On Monday, he came close to suggesting that a President who oversaw the killing of Osama bin Laden, who has greatly expanded the use of drone strikes against targets in foreign countries, and whose approval rating recently edged above fifty per cent, is a closet Islamist sympathizer.