Chillingworth has, at his blog, linked a counter-proposal to Donald Trump’s proposal to end Islamic immigration, from Mark Krikorian at National Review.
The problem with Krikorian’s proposed ideological test, is quite simply, that anyone could lie, just to be admitted. Heck, under Sharia principles, lying to unbelievers to advance Islam is encouraged:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taqiya
I have no doubt that Krikorian’s litmus test would accomplish precisely nothing.
Krikorian is obviously intelligent and well-informed, as is evident in his essay, so he surely knows damn well the worthlessness of his proposal. But he’d rather preserve appearances, than take concrete action that would actually work to keep out Islamic fundamentalists – banning any further immigration and refusing to admit further refugees, of Muslim background. (That may be a challenge to enforce, but it can be done, more or less.)
Donald Trump may be a pompous blowhard, a joker, who says one thing one day then another the next, but on this matter, he’s managed to articulate precisely what must be done, to prevent more such occurrences as we’ve seen recently in San Bernardino and Paris.
Too much for some to stomach, I realize, but that’s often the case with hard truths.
Trump’s view is more grown-up than Krikorian’s, because it is honest, and workable.
I also noticed that Russell Moore, the well-known (at least within evangelicalism) Southern Baptist commentator, has also come out against Trump’s proposal, here. He frames it as a religious freedom issue.
Oh, please! Even if Trump hadn’t amended his statements to apply specifically to foreigners wishing to immigrate to America, there is nothing about refusing to re-admit a citizen who takes a ‘holiday’ in IS territory that impinges on religious freedom in America – don’t like it? Then don’t go to IS territory! You can freely practice your religion in America as long as you don’t leave to go to an enemy state.
No; as with Krikorian, so with Moore; the churchian evanjellyfish and the neo-cuckservative are at best, gutless cowards; or at worst, traitors to their own people, not wanting to do what is necessary to safeguard them, because political correctness and respectability are more important to them.
Patriactionary 
realgaryseven
December 9, 2015 at 12:57 pm
“…the churchian evanjellyfish and the neo-cuckservative are at best, gutless cowards; or at worst, traitors to their own people, not wanting to do what is necessary to safeguard them, because political correctness and respectability are more important to them.”
Precisely!
Will S.
December 9, 2015 at 1:02 pm
Thanks!
Mel R.
December 9, 2015 at 1:48 pm
If were we serious about this we could simply put a temporary end to all immigration and impose a travel ban to all areas where ISIS is active. But you still have the issue of North American Moslems travelling to “allied” lands like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and getting radicalized and trained there. So even then, you cant stop it entirely. I frankly believe we are heading toward the deporting’s like we had in 1919. Unfortunate, but probably the only effective counter measure available. But it will take some brass ones to pull it off.
weak stream
December 9, 2015 at 6:42 pm
Well the politicians have votes to sell. They don’t care if those they sell burn the place to the ground. There’s a section in Donald Trump’s book The Art of the Deal where he says he made appeals to the NYC government to save the city money on various projects and they turned them all down. He said that he learned that politicians didn’t care to save public money…it was not their own. That Trump says what’s on his mind directly, sets him well apart from the career politician whore..er.. sex worker, as they call them now.
feeriker
December 9, 2015 at 8:57 pm
The rank and file/Joe and Jane Average among the neocons and evanjellyfish would LOVE to see a ban on Muslim immigration into the U.S. Unfortunately, being neocons and evanjellyfish, they are afflicted with the Einstinian version of insanity: they keep following “leaders” who always, Always, ALWAYS sell them out for personal or political gain, betraying everything they (supposedly) believe in. Yet the Marching Morons continue to trust them.
Chillingworth
December 9, 2015 at 9:53 pm
uhhhh
I don’t want to throw around words like “jumping the shark”, but when you make out that people like Mark Krikorian are knowingly advocating “worthless” proposals out of a fearful slavery to “political correctness and respectability”…
Chillingworth
December 9, 2015 at 10:17 pm
Or Mark Steyn
Will S.
December 10, 2015 at 3:33 am
@ Mel R: It may take some more incidents to get to that point.
@ weak stream: Yep.
@ feeriker: Alas…
@ Chillingworth: I think you’re misreading Mark Steyn, who has been beating the drum about the Islamic threat from before 9/11, but especially since then.
When he said, in the passage you quoted:
“Dream on… Because a moratorium on mass Muslim immigration is — all together now — “not who we are”.”
It’s clear he would love nothing better than a moratorium on mass Muslim migration, and hates that such is impeded by sentimentality, it’s “not who we are”, blah blah blah.
Anyway, I realized long ago that the National Review crowd are sell-outs; their treatment of Joe Sobran and John Derbyshire, not to mention Pat Buchanan, or Steve Sailer, demonstrated that completely. J’accuse! The ‘respectable’ right has its own form of political correctness; its own dogmas that dare not be questioned, and anyone who dares do so gets booted out of ‘respectable’ neo-con society, as has happened with all the aforementioned. Mark Steyn only gets to stay because he’s warmongering and imperialist enough, unlike, say, Pat Buchanan, questioning America’s foreign policy in the post-Cold-War era, advocating a more neutral, isolationist stance.
Will S.
December 10, 2015 at 11:44 am
The mainstream right keeps letting the left dictate what they will stand for.
Take the Confederate flag, after the church murders.
Republican politician after Republican politician scrambled to join in with leftists in calling for removing the Confederate flag from the S.C. legislature grounds.
(And so things got to the point where the Dukes of Hazzard ended up being pulled from reruns on T.V., out of a desire to not offend. Yeah. And Republicans went along with the whole movement…)
And so again we see it here, with this matter.
Republicans do embrace ‘political correctness’, whether that of the liberals, or that of their own (against anti-war views, isolationist foreign policy, etc.).
Sanne
December 10, 2015 at 6:07 pm
I don’t know about Evangelicals in the USA but the church folks over here appear to think that Muslim migrants all come to Europe to get converted to Christianity and not at all for gibsmedats.
Chillingworth
December 10, 2015 at 6:29 pm
I think you’re misreading Mark Steyn!
I’m aware that he’s been “beating the drum” about Islamists since at least 2006. I’m a huge Steyn fan, have been for years; I will take second place to no one for sheer Steynthusiasm. (As I’ve said before, I would never mock Steyn, though I would love to be a mock Steyn. You might even call me a Mark St’ist.) At one point I even started handing out copies of his latest book to everyone I knew, like a secular evangelist for the prophet. (Incidentally, you’re slightly behind; he’s no longer with National Review, for reasons that have not been made public, as far as I’m aware.)
Mark Steyn didn’t say that he wanted a ban on all Muslim immigrants; he said a moratorium on “mass Muslim migration”. He’s saying that America and other countries can’t assimilate immigrants from cultures alien to ours in nearly the numbers we’ve been importing every year. He’s right! I think all of us here are at least agreed about that.
But he didn’t say that he wants a ban on all Muslim immigration, which is what Trump is calling for (and you appear to be arguing for or defending). I’ve never known Mark Steyn to be needlessly wordy, or to hedge his wording out of a concern for political correctness; so I take it as read that his inclusion of the qualifier “mass” isn’t a careless mistake or surplussage.
Anyway the larger picture of Mark Steyn’s body of writing includes a lot of emphasis on culture and cultural confidence. The iconic example is the story he always tells (that is, I’m told it’s the most popular thing audiences ask for during Q&A after any speech he gives) about “suttee”. Here’s a version of his writing about it in 2006:
“In a more culturally confident age, the British in India were faced with the practice of ‘suttee’ — the tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. General Sir Charles Napier was impeccably multicultural:
“‘You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows.You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.’
“India today is better off without suttee. If we shrink from the logic of that, then in Afghanistan and many places far closer to home the implications are, as the Prince of Wales would say, ‘ghastly.'”
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0306/steyn032706.php3
Or consider Steyn’s thoughts on NR’s expulsion of Mr. Derbyshire, since you mentioned him:
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/295591/re-derb-mark-steyn
–in which I probably agree with every single point made (I told you, huge fan).
“Why is Haiti Haiti and Barbados Barbados? Why is India India and Pakistan Pakistan?”
Of course I agree with you that Mark Steyn hates the stifling culture of political correctness.
Or consider how Steyn distinguishes the relatively more functional early-twentieth-century Egypt (Muslim, by the way) from the Egypt of our time (still Muslim):
http://www.steynonline.com/3756/the-post-western-middle-east
My point is that my sense of it is that Mark Steyn would be more than happy to welcome in as immigrants, say, Muslim Kurds, or people like General al-Sisi or the Ataturk, in much greater numbers or with a much lower barrier to entry than, say, people like Anjem Choudary (an Islamist so extreme that he was apparently deported from Lebanon—but then welcomed back into the United Kingdom!). In other words, I think Mark Steyn is on my side of this argument, not yours (and he’s unimpeachable for our purposes here, because we’re agreeing that he’s the furthest thing from cowering in fear of the politically correct mob).
Meanwhile Mark Krikorian has been practically single-handedly fighting the good fight on immigration reform in America for years. He writes about it for National Review Online all the time—I can’t recall whether I’ve ever seen him write about anything else—as well as running a whole think tank to produce pro-immigration-restriction studies and move the debate in Washington, despite the fact that all this sort of thing routinely earns charges of “racism” from the American left. I agree with you that he’s likely to have a very good idea of what immigration policies are likely to be effective or not, but I find it highly unlikely that he would then lie and advocate a policy that would be “worthless”. The fact that you can accuse him of being a “gutless coward” “at best”, cowering in fear of being thought politically incorrect, I suppose indicates that this is the first you’ve heard of him.
And the American right certainly did not go along with “the whole movement”—conservatives both criticized and mocked the mob who wanted to go beyond removing the Confederate flag from the South Carolina state capitol, or to go beyond the flag to a more general scrubbing of history—and we were no tag-alongs to the movement to remove the flag from the South Carolina state capitol in the first place. Republicans are the ones who took the flag down in the 1860s, so to speak; Democrats put it back up in the 1960s; and we’re the ones who finally took it back down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Carolina_General_Assembly
feeriker
December 10, 2015 at 9:32 pm
I don’t know about Evangelicals in the USA but the church folks over here appear to think that Muslim migrants all come to Europe to get converted to Christianity and not at all for gibsmedats.
Very interesting to see how flavors of delusion are the inverse of each other between nations on different continents. Here in the States the consensus among churchians is that the Muslims are here to completely destroy Christianity while at the same time helping themselves to gibsmedats as a side benefit.
I must admit that I do find hilarious the idea that Muslims are flooding Europe to convert to a religion that most Europeans themselves not only don’t even practice anymore, but are openly hostile to.
Will S.
December 10, 2015 at 10:42 pm
@ Chillingworth: It’s true that this is the first time I’ve heard of Mark Krikorian, also the first that I’d heard Mark Steyn was no longer with NR, as I admit I haven’t been a regular reader of NR in several years, though a couple years ago or so, I did occasionally read some Mark Steyn pieces there, even linked them from here.
I do indeed admire much of Steyn’s writings (excepting his foreign policy prescriptions, as I lean far more isolationist), and have for years; same with the Derb. (And the late Joe Sobran, and Steve Sailer, and many others who are often now considered ‘beyond the pale’ as far as mainstream conservatism goes.)
I believe we’ll continue to disagree regarding whether Steyn would lean more towards your side or mine in this, as I’m not convinced it’s altogether clear from his latest writings, though I concede maybe he could be in favour of heavily restricting Islamic immigration rather than an outright ban altogether.
(BTW, I must say, as regards Krikorian’s piece, I found it weird how he had to cite Iman the supermodel, as an example of a Muslim who has contributed to America. Really. A Somali chick best known for being naked or almost in most of her photo shoots. And as for Dr. Oz, he’s a quack, a shill for whoever will pay him the most, like the ‘raspberry ketone’ pushers. I would think were I Fareed Zakaria or the other two, I’d probably grimace or wince at being mentioned in the same breath, as an example of a ‘good’ Muslim and a ‘productive citizen’. But I digress…)
You are of course completely correct to point out who re-raised the Confederate flag in South Carolina in 1962, just as anyone would be correct to point out the absurdity of a party that has former KKK members like Robert Byrd attacking the Republicans on racial matters. That said, I guess I might have hoped that more conservatives would have fought against the flag’s removal, just because the symbol needn’t be perceived as racist; it certainly isn’t in the Dukes of Hazzard, yet the same zeitgeist that required its removal from the S.C. legislature also got DoH reruns banned from T.V., and the progs are now going after Confederate statues, names, etc. at universities, etc. We can’t give the bastards an inch, because they’ll take a mile. Far better to forgo trying to curry favour with black Americans, and stand up for the Confederate flag, IMO. Of course, we will disagree on that, too.
@ Sanne: Really? Then they’re incredibly naïve and stupid.
Sanne
December 11, 2015 at 5:45 am
Will, yes, they are…
Will S.
December 11, 2015 at 9:36 am
Chronicles nails it:
https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/no-one-has-the-right-to-come-to-america/
feeriker
December 11, 2015 at 11:13 am
Then they’re incredibly naïve and stupid.
More likely just in a state of obtuse, stubborn denial. That’s a nearly universal condition among churchians in every corner of the globe.
Will S.
December 11, 2015 at 11:14 am
True…
Sanne
December 11, 2015 at 3:38 pm
I’d say it’s a mixture of white guilt, pathological altruism and white man’s burden:)
Will S.
December 12, 2015 at 1:49 am
Ah.