Articles

Hell-raising is fine — for a time. It isn’t even St. Patrick’s Day, but we are all Irish now: In Connecticut, the boneheaded state government passed a law demanding the registration of certain firearms, and the people of Connecticut, perhaps communing for a moment with their independent-minded Yankee forebears, mainly refused to comply. On the other side of the country…

At the end of World War II, the Jewish survivors of Europe’s Holocaust found that nearly every door was closed to them. “Tell Me Where Can I Go?” was a popular Yiddish song at the time. Decades later, the Christians of the Middle East face the same problem, and the Obama administration is keeping the door shut. America is about…

How many political insiders do you know who are opposed to Barack Obama and his nefarious works — IRS abuses, corporate bribes, climate fantasies, bailouts for Iran, importing saboteurs — yet save their peak agitation for Donald Trump, a presidential candidate they say “can’t” be nominated? If it “can’t” happen, why sputter to the point of apoplexy? Perhaps because “it”…

Donald Trump’s rhetorical excesses aside, he has a way of pushing us into important debates, particularly on immigration. He has done it again with his bracing proposal to force “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” I have no idea what Mr. Trump knows about…

For months, the Republican establishment has carefully dealt with Donald Trump and his in-your-face, shoot-from-the-lip presidential campaign that has sharply resonated with Americans. On Tuesday it became a full-scale condemnation as GOP leaders and Trump’s GOP presidential competition tore into the billionaire developer over his proposal to ban all Muslims from entering the United States. “Freedom of religion is a…

Repudiated across much of the political spectrum but defended on conservative talk radio, Donald J. Trump on Tuesday stood by his call to block all Muslims from entering the United States. He cast it as a temporary move in response to terrorism and invoked President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s authorization of the detention of Japanese, German and Italian immigrants during World…

To protect American national security we must first understand what threatens American national security. We must grasp who our enemies are, what animates them, and how they work together — despite their internecine rivalries — to destroy us from without and within. We must stop trying to define “true Islam” and start restoring our own principles as our guide: liberty,…

A strange thing happened yesterday on social media. Prayer became a micro-aggression. As the San Bernardino, Calif., attack unfolded in real time, most Americans knew that dozens of their fellow citizens were suffering, with hundreds more terrified. They knew police were tracking down at least two depraved killers who were armed and dangerous. They also knew there was absolutely nothing…

Syed Rizwan Farook was heavily involved in his local mosque and focused his energies on memorizing the Quran, he wrote in a short-lived dating profile in 2013. “I spend much of my free time in the masjid,” Farook, then 28, wrote on his profile for the dating site, BestMuslim.com. He also enjoyed “memorizing the quran and learning more about the…

One of two people accused of killing 14 in California apparently pledged allegiance to a leader of Islamic State militant group, two U.S. government sources said on Friday, as intelligence officials in her native Pakistan pressed the investigation overseas. Tashfeen Malik, 27, and her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, were killed in a shootout with police hours after the Wednesday…

Early Wednesday morning, Syed Rizwan Farook asked his mother for the sort of favor grandmothers love to grant: A few hours of baby-sitting. Farook told her that he and his wife, Tashfeen, had a doctor’s appointment and didn’t want to take their 6-month-old daughter. In an account of the conversation provided by a relative through a local Islamic leader, the…