THE SPEECH OBAMA SHOULD HAVE GIVEN Tara Sonenshine, NSN Advisory Board December 8, 2015 | THE HILL President Obama was right to lay out the strategy for defeating the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and to explain his policy. Full stop. But we confront a bigger problem than just ISIS, which the president understated: The temptation to turn fear into paralysis and forget the lessons of history. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and an increasing number of supporters like the logic of keeping out people whose backgrounds, ideas, values, religions and other defining characteristics we don’t like and whom we are afraid of. It’s a tempting theory. Just cordon off people and ideas behind big walls and tight borders and all will be well. The theory has appeal to many — keeping a nation safe by removing any potential irritants, denying safe haven to those fleeing conflict and letting those who need shelter find another backyard. It is so easy to conflate “outsiders” with “terrorists” and blend immigration issues with international terror and create a blob of fear. Just put everyone we don’t like in a ghetto or behind a barrier. If only it worked that way; we’d have… Read More ›

NSN 2016 Update: Return to the Dark Side December 4, 2015 In recent days, conservative candidates for president have revived the rhetoric of the immediate post 9-11 period and have seemed almost eager to play into the hands of ISIS, campaigning on policies that reinforce ISIS’s claims that the West is engaged in religiously-motivated warfare against all Muslims. Ben Carson, Chris Christie, and Donald Trump all want to bring back waterboarding. While these candidates agree that the United States should start torturing people again, none of them have provided any reason to believe that torture gathers information that could not be gathered by lawful methods. There are, however, strong reasons not to bring back waterboarding: not only is it torture, and therefore a war crime, it puts American soldiers at risk of receiving the same treatment at the hands of our enemies. Sen. John McCain, a victim of torture, said in 2014: “I know the use of torture compromises that which most distinguishes us from our enemies, our belief that all people, even captured enemies, possess basic human rights, which are protected by international conventions the U.S. not only joined, but for the most part authored.” These proposals are just… Read More ›

Mainstreaming Hate: The Far-Right Fringe Origins of Islamophobic and Anti-Refugee Politics Policy Brief by J. Dana Stuster and Samuel Davidoff-Gore December 2015 To read the full report, click here. The National Security Network (NSN) is pleased to release a new policy brief, Mainstreaming Hate: The Far-Right Fringe Origins of Islamophobic and Anti-Refugee Politics. Since the November 13 terrorist attack in Paris, politicians have seized on reports of participation in the attacks by alleged Syrian refugees to impugn U.S. efforts to resettle 10,000 refugees displaced by the Islamic State and the violence of the Syrian civil war – a relatively small number of refugees in relation to the overall number of people displaced from Syria and the burden on other nations accepting Syrian refugees. These political attacks are irrational and disconnected from events. They ignore key facts, most importantly the drastic differences between the relatively unchecked refugee flow into Europe and the thorough and time-intensive vetting process involved in the U.S. resettlement program. Some Republican presidential candidates have gone further and proposed measures that would circumscribe the rights of Muslim-Americans that are protected by the First Amendment. The current political climate is the culmination of a years-long and well-funded effort to… Read More ›