By Selwyn Duke
Is constitutionalism akin to blind faith? Some statists certainly think so, as they have called the position “constitution-worship.” In light of this, what should we call those who lack that “faith”? Given that they don’t believe in the Constitution, and that the document is the supreme law of the land, can it be said that they don’t believe in law? Are these people, who are often atheists, also “alegalists”?
Whatever you call them, they’re more visible and brazen than ever. Writing in Time magazine recently, Richard Stengel insisted that our Constitution “must accommodate each new generation and circumstance.” Georgetown professor Michael Dyson said recently, “When I talk about the document being living and vital, I’m talking about the interpretation of it.” And these appeals are buttressed by the notion that our founding document is fatally flawed. For example, Harvard Law School professor Michael Klarman wrote, “For the most part, the Constitution is irrelevant to the current political design of our nation.” And CNN’s Fareed Zakaria recently opined, “The United States Constitution was … drafted in a cramped room in Philadelphia in 1787 with shades drawn over the windows” — which, presumably, is worse than an idea coming out of his cramped head.
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By Selwyn Duke
It was 60 years ago that William F. Buckley published God and Man at Yale, a book critical of the hostility toward religion prevalent at the Ivy League school. But now religion may be poised to make a comeback at the institution — at least, that is, if its god is called Allah.
Just this month, Yale took the striking step of shutting down the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism (YIISA), supposedly at the behest of powerful Muslim forces. Writes FrontPageMag.com’s Phyllis Chesler:
The Palestinianization and Stalinization of the American professoriate coupled with the likely prospect of funding from the Arab world made this outcome inevitable….
Only last year, there were bitter and very public complaints the Palestinians and their supporters made in response to YIISA’s best-ever conference on contemporary global anti-Semitism, which was held last August. And why? Because the scholars gathered by YIISA from at least five or more continents dared to focus on the Muslim and Islamist face of genocidal anti-Semitism.
The YIISA global conference…was utterly unique in focusing not only upon the politically correct view of anti-Semitism as a Christian, Western, and European phenomenon, but also on its current and lethal incarnation in the Islamic and Islamist worlds.
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By Selwyn Duke
Much like a caterpillar, the West grows more self-destructive with age. And the moth it has become cannot resist being drawn toward the flame of liberalism. This results in continual forays into the heat of cultural indifference, and a recent example is the British police’s refusal to pursue Muslim criminals for fear of being labeled bigots. The Telegraph reports on the story, writing that it has “uncovered more than a dozen…cases in [the London Borough of] Tower Hamlets where both Muslims and non-Muslims have been threatened or beaten for behaviour deemed to breach fundamentalist ‘Islamic norms.’”
By Selwyn Duke
Once again, a study has show that American students are woefully ignorant of history. Test scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress demonstrate, writes the Wall Street Journal, that only “20% of U.S. fourth-graders and 17% of eighth-graders who took the 2010 history exam were ‘proficient’ or ‘advanced’…” and only 12 percent of 12th-graders were so. In fact, their knowledge is so lacking that fewer than “a quarter of American 12th-graders knew China was North Korea's ally during the Korean War, and only 35% of fourth-graders knew the purpose of the Declaration of Independence,” the paper continued. Other studies have shown similarly stunning results. In 2008, the New York Times wrote about how fewer than “half of American teenagers…knew when the Civil War was fought, and one-quarter thought that Christopher Columbus sailed to the New World sometime after 1750, not in 1492.” The Times also reported that “[a]bout a quarter of the teenagers surveyed were unable to correctly identify Adolf Hitler as Germany’s chancellor during World War II, instead identifying him variously as a munitions maker, an Austrian premier and the German Kaiser.”
Now, of course, this educational dysfunction inspires many to sound the alarm about America’s decline. And we hear many proposed solutions. Unfortunately, though, the typical ones will do nothing to right the ship.
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