Megyn Kelly is intelligent, quick on her feet, and knows how to aggressively challenge interviewees. Her mind is sharp and her tongue can be sharp. She will skewer anyone who cannot effectively defend his position.
She is terrific when she’s right and dangerous when she’s wrong.
And in her interview with Bobby Jindal the other night, she was dangerously wrong.
Jindal argued that we should restrict immigration to Muslims who want to kill us. Ms. Kelly was outraged. She said such a view, if you can believe it, was “controversial.”
She said, “Members of ISIS may be a different story, but just to say that if you are a radical Islamist or, more specifically, if you believe in Sharia law, then you won’t be allowed into the United States is controversial. Who decides how far into Sharia law you have to be? Who decides who’s a radical Islamist and who’s just an Islamist?”
In other words, Ms. Kelly’s position appears to be we are morally obligated to let people into this country whose worldview calls for our destruction, and there’s nothing we should do about that until they actually start blowing up or shooting innocent American infidels.
It’s not enough, in Ms. Kelly’s mind, that they want to immigrate into America with an ideology that teaches them, in a book they believe was dictated word for word by the god they worship, to “slay the idolaters wherever you find them” (Sura 9:5).
What Ms. Kelly, despite her obvious intelligence, fails to grasp is that nobody has a right to immigrate to America. Nobody. According to the Constitution in Article I, Section 8, the right to establish immigration policy belongs to Congress. Thus, Congress has the authority to restrict immigration to anyone whose presence in this country, in its judgment, would be dangerous or detrimental to the American experiment.
So there is a simple answer to Ms. Kelly’s question about “who decides.” Congress, that’s who.
We restricted the immigration of Communists after World War II for obvious and quite correct reasons. Importing folks who brought with them an ideology which advocated the death and destruction of the West was quite reasonably thought to be a lousy idea.
And importing people whose god tells them to cut our heads off is just as shortsighted. True, most of them have no intention of doing it. But how do we tell the difference?
The surviving Tsarnaev brother is on trial right now for the Boston Marathon Massacre bombing. In a glowing profile in the London Telegraph, the subheading reads, “To his father, he was a 'true angel', and to a family friend 'a beautiful boy in a tux' at a prom party. His schoolmates found nothing remotely strange or off-putting about Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.”
He was an all-star member of his wrestling team, whose “friends and acquaintances expressed confusion and dismay at how a sociable if reserved 19-year-old became America's most wanted man.”
Larry Aaronson, a former teacher of Tsarnaev’s, was at a total loss to explain or even understand what happened.
"I knew this kid. He could not have possibly have done this. He could not have been a sweeter more gracious young man. I cannot believe he was capable of such a heinous crime and of so many murders."
Bottom line: nobody saw it coming.
We can readily stipulate that most Muslims who immigrate to the U.S. do not wish us harm. The problem is that we have no way of distinguishing the Muslims we do have to worry about from the ones we don’t.
Bobby Jindal gets that. Megyn Kelly, unfortunately, does not.
