printSean Hannity, on radio and TV, has developed three stock talking points. I hear them twice a day when in the car: on the way to my destination and back. The oldest is less in vogue these days. It has Mr. Hannity recite the number of Americans out of the work force, no longer looking for work, on food stamps, and living in poverty since Barack Obama. The facts are staggering and bear repetition but not 3 times a day (factoring in the Fox News, TV evening slot), over years, and when mouthed loudly over more edifying information imparted by some guests on Mr. Hannity’s shows.
The next two stock talking points are when Mr. Hannity rattles off all the top intelligence and military brass who’ve all proposed this safe, foolproof proposition: ISIS or its proxies will try to infiltrate the Syrian refugees.
So, urges Mr. Hannity 3 times a day, let’s hit “pause” on this otherwise without blemish immigrant intake.
Over and over does Sean recite this old hat religiously, almost always drowning out more valuable, less easily “available” information.
The last of Hannity’s thrice daily talking points is where he recites a vastly truncated smidgen of Samuel P. Huntington’s clash of civilizations concept. The peerless Harvard scholar drew on modern history to chronicle “Islam’s bloody borders.” “Islam’s borders are bloody, and so are its innards,” Huntington wrote in his wonderfully learned book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996).
The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power. The problem for Islam is not the CIA or the US department of Defence. It is the West, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the universality of their culture and believe that their superior, if declining, power imposes on them the obligation to extend that culture throughout the world. These are the basic ingredients that fuel conflict between Islam and the West.
But Hannity uses the clash-of-civilizations idea to forge forth with a non sequitur. How do we know what’s in the hearts of Muslim migrants from hostile, terrorism-riddled countries, asks Hannity thrice daily and he invariably answers himself irrationally.
But here’s the deal: We don’t and we can’t know what’s in anyone’s heart. Immigration, like all policy—legislation being an unavoidable reality—ought to aim, at the very least, to do no harm. Any migrant who comes from Islam is more likely to do harm to his hosts than, say, an Afrikaner migrant who worked the land in South Africa and worshiped, Sundays, in the Dutch Reformed Church.