Did Dubya really keep America safe?

Jonathan Chait NYMag.com

During last week’s Republican debate, Jeb Bush made a curious claim,
said Jonathan Chait. His brother, George W., had “kept us safe,” he
proclaimed, to loud applause from a Republican audience. But Jeb
neglected to mention that “the worst domestic mass casualty attack in
American history” took place on his brother’s watch, with 3,000 people
killed and the World Trade Center reduced to rubble. Even worse,
Dubya received multiple CIA warnings of an impending al Qaida
attack—and did nothing. The CIA told the Bush administration that “a
group presently in the U.S.” was planning a major terrorist operation
soon; on Aug. 6, while Bush was on vacation, he was handed a memo
headlined “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” Bush and his aides
dismissed the urgent warnings as “a disinformation campaign” to distract
attention from the real threat, Iraq. After 9/11, Bush let Osama
bin Laden get away at Tora Bora, and then led the country into the
Iraq War, “which was not exactly a safety-enhancing event, either.” But
Bush sure did talk tough. Only in some alternate reality did his strutting
displays of “alpha manhood” make America safer.

Does the U.S. have an Islamophobia problem?

It was “a great week for Islamophobia in America,” said Jack
Mirkinson in Salon.com. First, Ahmed Mohamed, 14, was
arrested, handcuffed, and interrogated by police in Irving,
Texas, for bringing to school a homemade clock that teachers
decided looked like a bomb; that absurd overreaction was later
defended by the town’s Republican mayor and conservative
luminaries such as Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin. Then,
at a town hall event for Donald Trump, the GOP frontrunner
cheerfully promised to “look into” the concerns
of a supporter who called President Obama a foreignborn
Muslim, ranted about Islamist training camps,
and declared, “We have a problem in this country—
it’s called Muslims.” Finally, on Meet the Press, GOP
presidential candidate Ben Carson said that he “would
absolutely not agree” with putting “a Muslim in charge of this
nation” as president. Carson’s bigoted view of Muslims is actually
“a majority sentiment” in today’s Republican Party, said Jonathan
Chait in NYMag.com. As the primaries loom, brace yourself for
more nasty appeals to “right-wing Islamophobia.”
Islamophobia is a myth, said Kyle Smith in The New York Post.
Since 9/11, liberals have searched in vain for “evidence, any evidence,
that Muslims are facing deep-seated discrimination,” and
all they’ve come up with are nonstories like Ahmed Mohamed’s.
Ahmed’s “clock,” let the record show, was a “scary tangle of
wires” that looked very much like a bomb, and he chose to bring
it to school in a “zero tolerance” era in which dozens of students,
mostly white Christians, have been suspended or arrested for
drawing guns on paper, mentioning guns in homework assignments,
or even just wearing National Rifle Association T-shirts.
As for Carson, said Jonah Goldberg in NationalReview.com, all he
said was that he personally wouldn’t vote for a Muslim president,
not that Muslims should be barred from the office.
How is that different from liberals openly scorning
candidates with strong Christian beliefs? The truth is
that “a candidate’s faith is deeply relevant,” and liberals
think so, too, when they’re not feigning politically
correct outrage. Besides, Islam isn’t just a religion, said
Andrew McCarthy, also in NationalReview.com. It’s an
entire “political-social ideology” that sets out very clear,
strict rules for how people should live their lives. Whether
liberals like to admit it or not, Islam is opposed to the
separation of church and state, free speech, democracy, and
freedom of religion. Carson was right: “Islamic ideology is
inconsistent with the Constitution.”
“The overwhelming majority of Muslim scholars
would disagree” with that view of their faith, said Michael Gerson
in The Washington Post. So would nearly all American Muslims,
who live happily in a secular society. By painting all of Islam as
extremist, violent, and inherently un-American, Carson is siding
not only with “the worst elements” of our society but also with
the Islamic extremists themselves. “Ben Carson is right about
something,” though, said Dean Obeidallah in TheDailyBeast.com.
Religious extremism is incompatible with democracy and the U.S.
Constitution—and that conflict is not purely theoretical. There
are several religious extremists running for president this year—all
of them Christian. Carson, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, and
Ted Cruz all have bitterly complained that the Supreme Court had
no right to contradict the biblical definition of marriage, and all
insist that Kentucky clerk Kim Davis’ “religious freedom” trumps
her duties as a public official. So in accordance with “the Carson
doctrine,” all presidential candidates should be asked: Will you
pledge to place our Constitution above the Bible and your religious
beliefs? It will be fascinating to hear their responses.

Elephants and Trauma

Culling can cast a long shadow for elephants. Graeme Shannon and Karen
McComb of the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom studied a population
of elephants orphaned from culling operations and placed in South Africa’s
Pilanesberg National Park. They found that the practice, which involves killing
older elephants and relocating young ones, has a strong effect on the behavior
and social knowledge of surviving animals, causing symptoms similar to those
experienced by people diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
South African wildlife officials used culling to control elephant populations
from the mid-1960s until 1995. To gauge the effects, Shannon and McComb
visited family groups in Pilanesberg and in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park,
where culling didn’t occur. They played recorded calls from elephants familiar and
unfamiliar to each, and of various ages. The Amboseli elephants responded as
expected: attentively bunched when they perceived high-level threats but relaxed
when the calls signaled low-level threats. Pilanesberg elephants responded
abnormally, showing no clear connection between threat level and reaction.
The behavioral ecologists attribute the abnormal responses to both the initial
trauma and the loss of role models that culling caused. “Fundamental aspects
of the elephant’s complex social behavior may be significantly altered in the long
term,” their study says. And because elephants transfer knowledge, this abnormal
behavior could be passed down for generations. —Lindsay N. Smith