Conservative Truth - Lies And Fallacies By ACLU Leadership - Jeffrey Ludwig

David Cole, National Legal Director of the wonderfully "conservative and patriotic" American Civil Liberties Union, is taking aim at President Donald Trump’s immigration policy. For Cole, the travel ban in effect against six predominately Muslim states is a surreptitious attack on a religion and on an ethnicity, and thus grossly unconstitutional and un-American. Updated version two of Trump’s Executive order, he tells us, is merely an attempt to manipulate the legal system in that Trump followed the advice of Rudolph Giuliani who “told Fox News that he advised Trump that he could achieve his goal by targeting particular countries rather than Islam itself.”
For Cole, Trump’s change in language whereby he bans entry to applicants from Libya, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Somalia, and Yemen is an attempt to get around the Supreme Court’s admonition that “the clearest command of the Establishment Clause is that one religious denomination cannot be officially preferred over another.” Thus, for him, Trump’s often stated hostility to radical Islam (taken to mean “Islam” by the Left) is only thinly disguised in this Executive Order where nationalities are cited, not religious affiliation.

Cole and others of his ilk fail to keep in mind one salient fact: the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment only applies to citizens of the USA. National security interests may apply to any threatening group that defines itself as a religion (Islam is not a denomination of a religion [as he states] but is a religion). Further, Islam’s Sharia law is both a religion and a political ideology. The criminal and civil laws of Muslim countries are founded on Islamic doctrines expressed prescriptively in the Quran and other holy books. Islam does not end at the door of the mosque. Further, all other religions in Muslim countries are there by sufferance of the religious majority and their adherents exist as second class citizens within those countries. Therefore, to define Islam as a religion is itself begging the question, namely, what in heaven’s name is Islam? To define Islam as a religion modeled on parameters similar to other religions is itself, for this writer, an extremely problematic assumption.

At another point in his presentation, Cole suggests the relevance of the SCUSA decision in Korematsu V. United States (1944). There, the internment of Japanese citizens was upheld, but four decades later, he points out, legislation was passed apologizing for that action and providing for reparations for the survivors. Again, Cole, with his usual anti-American colored glasses, fails to note that the Japanese affected by the decision were American citizens. The treatment of American citizens, by definition, is different and is supposed to be different from the treatment our government affords to foreign nationals. Foreign nationals held as enemy combatants do not have the same habeas corpus rights and constitutional rights as U.S. citizens. Nor does the Bill of Rights apply to those applying for admission to the U.S. or to any foreign nationals residing in their home countries.

Beginning with the horrific event of 9/11, worse than Pearl Harbor, there have been a number of terrorist attacks by Islamic adherents on U.S. soil. And, worldwide there have been over 20,000 Islamic terror attacks against Jews, Buddhists, Christians, non-believers, Yazidis, Zoroastrians, and against their fellow Muslims. The attacks on fellow Muslims is sometimes used to show that terrorism should not be associated with Islam, but is a fringe development within Islam. However, it is a unique and defining aspect of the Islamic world. It has not abated over time. Internecine bloodlust, revenge, hate, and power struggles typify the tribal history of Islam. There have been periods of violence within Christendom, but the great world wars were not about religion. Protestants and Catholics have had a very longstanding truce. And forced conversions of unbelievers by Roman Catholics stopped hundreds of years ago, but forced conversions were never typical or defining for the growth of Christianity as they were for Islam.

This scourge of Islamic terrorism against other religions and against non-Islamic political systems has not been abating. The political component of these attacks must be considered as the political aspect adheres closely to the religious doctrines of that violent mishmash called Islam. Was the British policeman Lee Rigby beheaded in broad daylight on a street in London because he did not follow Islamic religion or because he represented the authority of an alien, i.e., non-Islamic, political system?

However, the low point of Cole’s article comes when he tries to advance a hypothetical scenario where a hypothetical mayoral candidate “promises repeatedly during a campaign that he would keep African-Americans out of the town, and then, upon election adopted a policy barring entry from seven cities with populations that were 90 percent African-American.” Cole asks “Would anyone doubt that the policy discriminated on the basis of race?” This hypothetical is nothing less than the most egregious, self-serving, vicious, and ignorant pandering one can imagine – completely unworthy of any serious, thinking person. Those like Mr. Cole, who hold professorships and consider themselves to be informed intellectuals are, by developing examples like this, committing fallacies that every educated person is taught to avoid.

First of all, it would not apply to African-Americans because it would be a denial of their due process rights under the Constitution.

Second, it would go against all existing anti-discrimination laws that apply to all citizens of the U.S. Just as it is no longer legal in the U.S. to post a sign in one’s window or in a newspaper ad that “Jews need not apply” or “Poles need not apply,” it is illegal to discriminate where one may live. However, the right to secure our borders is a legitimate requirement of government, and to protect the citizenry against all threats both foreign and domestic is a necessary activity of government.

Third, being African-American is a racial designation. It is particularly egregious to equate the threat from Islam or from people who are nationals of Islamic-majority countries with race or “racism” because race is not a belief system or a political ideology, both of which are defining in Islam.Race is not ideological although the left perpetually attempts to say that race implies an ideology, and even former President Barack Obama sometimes sounded as though just being white implies an anti-black ideology at some subconscious level (although the subconscious is in some mysterious way institutionally defining).

Fourth, itispatent that during any of America’s wars, it would have been absurd for us to admit refugees or students or any citizens of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, Japan, North Korea, or North Vietnam. Were all the citizens of those countries war mongers, Nazis, communists, etc.? Was our exclusion of any or all of these people racially motivated in any way? No. Admitting immigrants or tourists or students from any of those countries would have been stupid, unwise, and a downright abdication of governmental duty towards God and country.
Wake up, Mr. Cole and other great 'patriotic' minds on the Left. You opine year in and year out about people supposedly deprived of their “rights” by a malign system. You twist logic to suit your own purposes and deny common sense and the rule of law while claiming to defend them. In the process, you weaken us. Your false logic and lies are being exposed.

Lies And Fallacies By ACLU Leadership

May 15, 2017