While Americans fret over Donald Trump's plans to ban Muslim immigration to the United States temporarily thanks to the government's inability to keep us safe, the government continues to prove its inability to keep us safe. This week, we found out that President Obama's Department of Homeland Security prohibited agents from screening foreign citizens applying for visas to enter the country.
According to former acting undersecretary at DHS for intelligence and analysis John Cohen, "During that time period immigration officials were not allowed to use or review social media as part of the screening process. ... The primary concern was that it would be viewed negatively if it was disclosed publicly and there were concerns that it would be embarrassing."
He continued, "It was primarily a question of optics. There were concerns from a privacy and civil liberties perspective that while this was not illegal, that it would be viewed negatively if it was disclosed publicly."
So 14 Americans in San Bernardino died for optics.
While President Obama insists that the government must check the metadata of American citizens to catch terrorists, he insists that his own people stop checking the publicly posted Facebook messages of potential terrorists.
This is the essence of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism suggests that all cultures are equal, that they carry equal values, that they pose equal threats to public safety. Extending that logic, we must treat suspects from all cultures with equal care. But what if not all cultures provide an equal threat? What if the people who engage in some cultures are more likely than others to participate in terrorism? Then, in order to maintain the multicultural fiction, we must bend over backwards not to check out threats from such cultures. Either that, or we must violate everyone's civil rights equally.
The former is happening in the United States; the latter is happening in France, where the government has been knocking down the doors of hundreds of mosques on grounds of "preach[ing] hatred" or using "takfiri speech," according to French imam Hassan El Alaoui. In the United States, we'd see such raids as a violation of the First and Fourth Amendments. In France, they have no such amendments. They do, however, have a multicultural view of the world.
Or at least they did. Across Europe, the reality of multiculturalism is hitting home. German chancellor Angela Merkel, who was recently named Time's Person of the Year for taking in one million Syrian refugees, said, "Multiculturalism leads to parallel societies and therefore remains a 'life lie' ... We want and we will reduce the number of refugees noticeably." She was forced to denounce her own former viewpoint thanks to the fallout from her decisions: Refugee camps have turned into hotbeds of rape and child abuse. Mass Muslim immigration into Europe has heightened such challenges for years, of course, but the left and the press have suppressed such information.
No longer.
This is what happens when the West denies its values. Eventually, reality forces the West to confront the truth: Its own culture is superior to others, and that pretending otherwise creates real danger. But so long as leftists like President Obama remain in denial, that danger will only grow.