Max Rossi/Reuters

Pascal-Emmanuel

Gobry

In just three years, Pope Francis has taken the world by storm, and it is largely

on the back of his great, tweetable soundbites. But the reason why those

soundbites have been so effective is because they’re so multilayered.

Part of what makes Francis’s soundbite strategy successful is that they’re often

vague, acting as a Rorschach Test for every constituency. This is deliberate, and

there is a very good reason that goes unremarked upon: The quotes are

designed to work on several levels at once, addressing a different message to

different constituencies.

In this, he is the consummate Jesuit, always playing multidimensional chess

several moves ahead. But he has an even more hallowed precedent—none other

than Jesus Christ.

Jesus also liked to stun audiences with shocking, deliberately vague and

multilayered soundbites.

Take the famous “Give back to Cesar

what belongs to Cesar, give to God what

belongs to God” in response to whether

Jews should pay taxes to a Roman

occupier they viewed as illegitimate. On

one level, the quote meant that

resistance against the Romans should

be peaceful. On another level, it was a

putdown against Caesar—the Roman

emperor claimed to be a god, but the

quote reminds that he is a mere mortal,

and to be regarded with indifference.

And of course on a third level it was an

important statement that politics

cannot save us.

5/13/2015 2:35 PM

Jewish prophet of national liberation; giving Rome what they wanted while

undermining their claims to power. No wonder he made such an impression.

Now, Francis.

Like his predecessor John Paul II, he has keenly and rightly identified one of

the key challenges of the Catholic Church in the 21st century as overcoming its

negative image and presenting its faith as more than a long list of “don’ts.”

But, as Francis well knows from his decades of church governance, this

problem is a symptom of an underlying problem. The church, for all its

impressive size and institutional and cultural resources, has in many ways

become a ship of spiritually lukewarm passengers led by complacent

bureaucrats.

Thus, his soundbites work on two levels at once, delivering one message to the

world at large, and another to the Catholic faithful.

Take one of his most famous quotes: “Who am I to judge?” regarding gay

Christians who strive to follow church teaching. Was he changing doctrine? No.

Was he trying to signal a change in doctrine? No. Did he know what impact

that statement would have? You bet.

So, what is going on? On one level, he is saying to the world at large: “Take

another look. We’re not who you think we are.” On the other, he is giving the

profound spiritual advice to faithful Catholics to refuse to judge their brethren.

Or take his exhortation to build a church that “goes out to the peripheries” of

society. On the one hand, he is reminding the world at large of the church’s

doctrine on social justice and the immense work it does for the poor every day.

On the other hand, he is reminding faithful Catholics of their duty to the “least

of these.”

This multifaceted aspect of his rhetoric is why some Catholics find him

infuriating, but it is also a very canny way to fulfill his office. It’s a clever

strategy, and also one that shows us how he is a pastor in the classical Christian

mode, who sometimes has to shock us out of our everyday complacency to

bring us closer to God.

Recommended by

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Reuters

JamieDettmer

URFA, Turkey—Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State’s leader, has been

moved from Iraq to the Syrian city of Raqqa, the terror army’s de facto capital,

amid tight security two months after sustaining serious shrapnel wounds that

left his spine damaged and his left leg immobile, say jihadi defectors.

He is said to be mentally alert and able to issue orders, but his physical injuries

are now prompting the so-called Islamic State’s governing Shura Council to

make a final decision on a temporary stand-in leader who can move back and

forth between front lines in Syria and Iraq and is able to handle day-to-day

leadership in the self-declared caliphate.

That leader will be, in effect, under al-Baghdadi, a super deputy to the

caliph—in Arabic, na’ib al-malik, or viceroy. According to Islamic State

defectors debriefed by opposition activists in neighboring Turkey, the election

will pit two Iraqis and a Syrian against each other—all well-known figures

within the terror army’s top leadership.

These sources say nine doctors were also taken to Raqqa to treat the infirm

al-Baghdadi, including a senior physician from Mosul’s general hospital, but

the entire al-Baghdadi caravan of attending medics, aides and bodyguards was

split into separate convoys to avoid attracting attention from U.S. satellite

surveillance and inviting a coalition airstrike or drone attack. At least one

doctor didn’t know who his patient was when he arrived in Raqqa and was

ordered brusquely to stop asking questions about the man’s identity.

The doctors initially were put in a military barracks in Raqqa’s Al-Mishlab

neighborhood close to the city’s industrial district, but were subsequently

5/13/2015 2:35 PM

al-Baghdadi in Raqqa, the Islamic State (widely known as ISIS) will be able to

secure drugs, equipment, or additional medical expertise needed from nearby

Turkey.

Britain’s Guardian newspaper first reported last month that al-Baghdadi had

been injured in a March coalition airstrike, citing a Western diplomat and an

adviser to the Iraqi government, and the BBC quoted a spokesman for Iraq’s

interior minister as saying the ISIS caliph had been seriously wounded in an

airstrike believed to have taken place on March 18. The Iraqi official, though,

gave no details about which country carried out the raid, saying only it was

coalition warplanes.

U.S. defense officials have said since the Guardian report that they have no

knowledge of al-Baghdadi’s fate and some said they were unaware of an

airstrike on March 18. Pentagon spokesman Col. Steve Warren told The Daily

Beast: “We have no reason to believe it was Baghdadi.” But Iraqi government

adviser Hisham al-Hashimi told the British newspaper that al-Baghdadi was

“wounded in al-Baaj near the village of Umm al-Rous on 18 March with a

group that was with him” in a three-car convoy. The strike aircraft was most

likely a drone.

Without more confirmation and details, compounded with al-Baghdadi’s

general invisibility and U.S. caution, rumors have multiplied, and so has

skepticism. Last November, there were reports in Arab and Western media that

al-Baghdadi had been injured but they turned out to be inaccurate.

And last week Radio Iran reported al-Baghdadi died from the March airstrike,

saying ISIS members had already sworn loyalty to a former physics teacher,

Abu Ala al-Afri, as his successor, although there has been no evidence of this

on jihadi social-media sites and Twitter feeds.

Interestingly, last week the United States posted al-Afri, under the name Abd

al-Rahman Mustafa al-Qaduli, on a fresh list of al Qaeda and ISIS figures with

multimillion-dollar bounties on their heads. His was put at $7 million;

al-Baghdadi (Abu Du’a) is at $10 million.

According to ISIS defectors, including a

senior security official in Raqqa and a

bodyguard to one of the group’s top

leaders, al-Baghdadi is alive, even if

he’s not kicking. They say he was

seriously injured in March with wounds

that could have been life threatening if

left untreated. The defectors say he was

moved because top commanders

decided he would be safer in Raqqa

than Mosul, where an Iraqi offensive

with Kurdish support is expected to

start this summer to recapture Iraq’s

second largest city.

The defectors were debriefed by Ahmad

Abdulkader, who recently launched a

network of activists called Eye-On-

The-Homeland. He told The Daily Beast at the weekend that other would-be

defectors have confirmed the claims of the security defectors, one of whom

goes by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammed and was tasked by ISIS with

hunting down activists in Raqqa.

The Daily Beast has not talked directly with the defectors, who are reluctant to

meet Western reporters while Eye-on-The-Homeland is negotiating their fate

5/13/2015 2:35 PM

debriefing notes, and Islamic State ID cards. Turkish officials confirm he is an

important conduit for defectors from the self-styled caliphate. Abdulkader says

in the past month his activists inside Raqqa have helped about 100 fighters to

defect.

“Most are Syrians but a dozen are foreigners,” he says. They include a French

man, a French woman, and a Moroccan. He waves the Moroccan’s passport at

me in his small office in the heart of Urfa, the Turkish border city that many

foreign recruits have passed through on their way to join the Islamic State. He

says there has been a dramatic decrease in foreign recruits to the Islamic State,

basing the claim on reports coming to him from those who have already

defected and would-be defectors still in the caliphate.

“There used to be each week 100 to 200 foreign [Western] recruits arriving

in Raqqa; now there are five or six every week,” he says. He suspects one of the

reasons for that is, “The foreigners inside are communicating to their friends

back home not to come and they’re explaining the reality of what life is really

like inside.” If so, that would contrast with their public Twitter and Facebook

postings extolling the virtues of the caliphate — postings followed by the terror

army’s propagandists housed in four buildings in Raqqa’s al-Rawdah

neighborhood just outside the old city.

The defectors say media reports that Abu Ala al-Afri has already been

appointed viceroy are inaccurate, claiming that the Shura Council, a religious

governing body of about nine senior ISIS leaders, is due to vote this week on

who will become na’ib al-malik. The Shura Council is thought to be dominated

by Iraqis.

In addition to Abu Ala al-Afri, who is one of the nominees, there is a second

Iraqi contender for the slot—Abu Ali al-Anbari, a Mosul native and former

major general in the Iraqi army who has been in charge of overseeing Islamic

State territory in Syria.

Like al-Afri, he rose through the ranks of al Qaeda in Iraq but had been

previously thrown out of another extremist Sunni group, Ansar al-Islam, for

financial corruption. A clever military tactician, he has no religious training

and little juridical background in Sharia law. The third nominee is a Syrian, the

current Islamic State governor of Raqqa—Abu Luqman, whose real name is Ali

Moussa al-Hawikh. He was one of dozens of Syrian jihadis released from jail by

President Bashar al-Assad in the summer of 2011 as the rebellion against the

Syrian regime was starting.

Al-Afri, who is said to be more charismatic than the other two nominees,

remains the most likely to win the full backing of the Shura Council, but he is

outranked by al-Anbari. Handing the slot to the Syrian contender may not sit

well with the Iraqis who dominate the upper reaches of ISIS, but boosting the

power of Abu Luqman could be smart politics with signs mounting of

disgruntlement among the terror army’s Syrian fighters, who are said to be

unhappy with the pressure on them to volunteer to fight in Iraq.

In a statement issued April 27 by al-Baghdadi, the ISIS leader requested emirs

and fighters in the Syrian provinces to volunteer to serve in Iraq. In the

announcement (which appeared on jihadist forums), al-Baghdadi appears

specifically to call for those willing to be suicide bombers-fighters, asking

for “religiously dedicated, patient ones, and war experts who don’t look back,

fight and don’t lay down their weapons until they get killed or God grants them

victory.”

Two analysts at the Combating Terrorism Center at the United States Military

Academy at West Point, Daniel Milton and Muhammad al-Ubaydi, noted that

that statement was curiously worded, with the so-called Caliph Ibrahim

5/13/2015 2:35 PM

authority to order people who have already joined the military side of ISIS to

mobilize and deploy. “It is possible,” they argued, “that he is concerned about

undermining his own leadership by giving an order that may not be obeyed by

emirs and fighters in Syria.”

Recently there has been a surge of Islamic State recruitment propaganda

videos showing fighters pledging themselves to defend territory the group

seized in Iraq last summer after a lightning offensive. In Raqqa, political

activists opposed to ISIS say there is considerable pressure now being placed

on the local population to put people forward for enlistment.

“They need soldiers to go to Iraq,” say an activist with the opposition network

named Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently. “They are using all the means they

can to persuade people to join—from money offers to threats, and prisoners are

being press-ganged.”

Abdulkader agrees, saying morale began to plummet after the Islamic State’s

failure to capture the mainly Kurdish town of Kobani following a months-long

siege and a high death toll among fighters. And morale problems have

mounted with the loss of Tikrit. “Disgruntlement has increased with the

shifting of the group’s Syrian fighters to front-lines in Iraq,” says Abdulkader.

MLB

AlexChancey

One Phillies fan saved his wife’s first Mother’s Day, quite literally

singlehandedly. During a Mets-Phillies game in Philadelphia on Sunday, Mike

Capko caught a foul ball while his seven-month-old, Kolton, was strapped to

his chest. Capko brought his wife, Alyssa, to the game for Mother’s Day, and

5/13/2015 2:35 PM

One can argue about the wisdom of catching a foul ball with a baby on you, but

the Capko family won’t forget this special day.

YouTube/Comedy Central

AlexChancey

We’re still two months out from the new season of Key & Peele, but they’re

teasing it already in this brilliant musical short.

‘Negrotown’ is a satirical look at the concerns of Black America, from being

profiled by police to cultural appropriation, through the filter of a Music

Man-style Broadway show. The biting wit and catchy melodies are reminiscent

of South Park’s Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Perhaps Key & Peele have a Book

of Mormon of their own itching to get out.

5/13/2015 2:35 PM

Eduardo Munoz/Reuters

KirstenPowers

The root of nearly every free speech infringement on campuses across the

country is that someone—almost always a liberal—has been offended or has

sniffed out a potential offense in the making. Then, the silencing campaign

begins. The offender must be punished, not just for justice’s sake, but also to

send the message to anyone else on campus that should he or she stray off the

leftist script, they too might find themselves investigated, harassed, ostracized,

or even expelled. If the illiberal left can preemptively silence opposing speakers

or opposing groups— such as getting a speech or event canceled, or denying

campus recognition for a group—even better.

5/13/2015 2:35 PM

journalist Frank Rich that he had stopped playing college campuses because of

how easily the audiences were offended. Rock said he realized some time

around 2006 that, “This is not as much fun as it used to be” and noted George

Carlin had felt the same way before he died. Rock attributed it to, “Kids raised

on a culture of ‘We’re not going to keep score in the game because we don’t

want anybody to lose.’ Or just ignoring race to a fault. You can’t say ‘the black

kid over there.’ No, it’s ‘the guy with the red shoes.’ You can’t even be offensive

on your way to being inoffensive.” Sadly, Rock admitted that the climate of

hypersensitivity had forced him and other comedians into self-censorship.

This Orwellian climate of intimidation and fear chills free speech and thought.

On college campuses it is particularly insidious. Higher education should

provide an environment to test new ideas, debate theories, encounter

challenging information, and figure out what one believes. Campuses should be

places where students are able to make mistakes without fear of retribution. If

there is no margin for error, it is impossible to receive a meaningful education.

Instead, the politically correct university is a world of land mines, where faculty

and students have no idea what innocuous comment might be seen as an

offense. In December 2014, the president of Smith College, Kathleen

McCartney, sent an e-mail to the student body in the wake of the outcry over

two different grand juries failing to indict police officers who killed African

American men. The subject heading read “All Lives Matter” and the e-mail

opened with, “As members of the Smith community we are struggling, and we

are hurting.” She wrote, “We raise our voices in protest.” She outlined campus

actions that would be taken to “heal those in pain” and to “teach, learn and

share what we know” and to “work for equity and justice.”

Shortly thereafter, McCartney sent

another e-mail. This one was to

apologize for the first. What had she

done? She explained she had been

informed by students “the

phrase/hashtag ‘all lives matter’ has

been used by some to draw attention

away from the focus on institutional

violence against black people.” She

quoted two students, one of whom said,

“The black students at this school

deserve to have their specific struggles

and pain recognized, not dissolved into

the larger student body.” The Daily

Hampshire Gazette reported that a

Smith sophomore complained that by

writing “All Lives Matter,” “It felt like

[McCartney] was invalidating the experience of black lives.” Another Smith

sophomore told the Gazette, “A lot of my news feed was negative remarks

about her as a person.” In her apology e-mail McCartney closed by affirming

her commitment to “working as a white ally.”

McCartney clearly was trying to support the students and was sympathetic to

their concerns and issues. Despite the best of intentions, she caused grievous

offense. The result of a simple mistake was personal condemnation by

students. If nefarious motives are imputed in this situation, it’s not hard to

extrapolate what would, and does, happen to actual critics who are not

obsequiously affirming the illiberal left.

In an article in the Atlantic, Wendy Kaminer—a lawyer and free speech

advocate—declared, “Academic freedom is declining. The belief that free

speech rights don’t include the right to speak offensively is now firmly

5/13/2015 2:35 PM

codes. Campus censors don’t generally riot in response to presumptively

offensive speech, but they do steal newspapers containing articles they don’t

like, vandalize displays they find offensive, and disrupt speeches they’d rather

not hear. They insist that hate speech isn’t free speech and that people who

indulge in it should be punished. No one should be surprised when a professor

at an elite university calls for the arrest of ‘Sam Bacile’ [who made the YouTube

video The Innocence of Muslims] while simultaneously claiming to value the

First Amendment.”

On today’s campuses, left-leaning administrators, professors, and students

are working overtime in their campaign of silencing dissent, and their

unofficial tactics of ostracizing, smearing, and humiliation are highly effective.

But what is even more chilling—and more far reaching—is the official power

they abuse to ensure the silencing of views they don’t like. They’ve invented a

labyrinth of anti-free speech tools that include “speech codes,” “free speech

zones,” censorship, investigations by campus “diversity and tolerance offices,”

and denial of due process. They craft “anti-harassment policies” and “anti-

violence policies” that are speech codes in disguise. According to the

Foundation for Individual Rights in Education’s (FIRE) 2014 report on campus

free speech, “Spotlight on Speech Codes,” close to 60 percent of the four

hundred–plus colleges they surveyed, “seriously infringe upon the free speech

rights of students.” Only sixteen of the schools reviewed in 2014 had no

policies restricting protected speech. Their 2015 report found that of the 437

schools they surveyed, “more than 55 percent maintain severely restrictive, ‘red

light’ speech codes—policies that clearly and substantially prohibit protected

speech.” FIRE’s Greg Lukianoff attributed the slight drop to outside pressure

from free speech groups and lawsuits.

For many Americans the term “speech code” sends shivers up the spine. Yet

these noxious and un-American codes have become commonplace on college

campuses across the United States. They are typically so broad that they could

include literally anything and are subject to the interpretation of school

administrators, who frequently fail to operate as honest brokers. In the hands

of the illiberal left, the speech codes are weapons to silence anyone

—professors, students, visiting speakers—who expresses a view that deviates

from the left’s worldview or ideology. Speech that offends them is redefined as

“harassment” or “hate speech” both of which are barred by most campus

speech codes. At Colorado College, a private liberal arts college, administrators

invented a “violence” policy that was used to punish non-violent speech. The

consequences of violating a speech code are serious: it can often lead to public

shaming, censoring, firings, suspensions, or expulsions, often with no due

process.

5/13/2015 2:35 PM

amazon.com

Many of the incidents sound too absurd to be true. But true they are. Consider,

for example, how Yale University put the kibosh on its Freshman Class

Council’s T-shirt designed for the Yale-Harvard football game. The problem?

The shirt quoted F. Scott Fitzgerald’s line from This Side of Paradise, that, “I

think of all Harvard men as sissies.” The word “sissy” was deemed offensive to

gay people. Or how about the Brandeis professor who was found guilty of racial

harassment—with no formal hearing—for explaining, indeed criticizing, the

word “wetbacks.” Simply saying the word was crime enough. Another

professor, this time at the University of Central Florida, was suspended for

making a joke in class equating his tough exam questions to a “killing spree.” A

student reported the joke to the school’s administration. The professor

promptly received a letter suspending him from teaching and banning him

from campus. He was reinstated after the case went public.

The vaguely worded campus speech codes proliferating across the country turn

every person with the ability to exercise his or her vocal chords into an offender

in the making. New York University prohibits “insulting, teasing, mocking,

degrading or ridiculing another person or group.” The College of the Holy

Cross prohibits speech “causing emotional injury through careless or reckless

behavior.” The University of Connecticut issued a “Policy Statement on

Harassment” that bans “actions that intimidate, humiliate, or demean persons

or groups, or that undermine their security or self-esteem.” Virginia State

University’s 2012–13 student handbook bars students from “offend[ing] . . . a

member of the University community.” But who decides what’s “offensive”?

The illiberal left, of course.

The list goes on and on. The University of Wisconsin-Stout at one point had an

Information Technology policy prohibiting the distribution of messages that

included offensive comments about a list of attributes including hair color.

Fordham University’s policy prohibited using e-mail to “insult.” It gets worse:

Lafayette College—a private university—instituted a “Bias Response Team”

which exists to “respond to acts of intolerance.” A “bias-related incident” was

“any incident in which an action taken by a person or group is perceived to be

malicious . . . toward another person or group.” Is it really wise to have a policy

that depends on the perception of offense by college-aged students? Other

schools have bias reporting programs encouraging students to report incidents.

Speech codes create a chilling environment where all it takes is one accusation,

true or not, to ruin someone’s academic career. The intent or reputation or

integrity of the accused is of little import. If someone “perceives” you have said

or acted in a racist way, then the bar for guilt has been met. If a person claims

5/13/2015 2:35 PM

In November 2013, more than two dozen graduate students at UCLA entered

the classroom of their professor and announced a protest against a “hostile and

unsafe climate for Scholars of Color.” The students had been the victims of

racial “microaggression,” a term invented in the 1970s that has been recently

repurposed as a silencing tactic. A common definition cited is that racial

microaggressions “are brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or

environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that

communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults towards

people of color.” Like all these new categories, literally anything can be a

microaggression.

So what were the racial microaggressions that spawned the interruption of a

class at the University of California at Los Angeles? One student alleged that

when the professor changed her capitalization of the word “indigenous” to

lowercase he was disrespecting her ideological point of view. Another proof

point of racial animus was the professor’s insistence that the students use the

Chicago Manual of Style for citation format (the protesting students preferred

the less formal American Psychological Association manual). After trying to

speak with one male student from his class, the kindly seventy-nine-year-old

professor was accused of battery for reaching out to touch him. The professor,

Val Rust, a widely respected scholar in the field of comparative education, was

hung out to dry by the UCLA administration, which treated a professor’s

stylistic changes to student papers as a racist attack. The school instructed Rust

to stay off the Graduate School of Education and Information Services for one

year. In response to the various incidents, UCLA also commissioned an

“Independent Investigative Report on Acts of Bias and Discrimination

Involving Faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles.” The report

recommended investigations, saying that, “investigations might deter those

who would engage in such conduct, even if their actions would likely not

constitute a violation of university policy.”

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