---Published in AMERICAN THINKER, 26 June, 2016

The people of Britain made their decision by a slim majority of 52 per cent to 48 percent to Leave the EU. After months of heart-wrenching debates and all the leverage that the Remain side with the Prime Minister David Cameron and his opposite, the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, could apply, the people decided staying within the EU was not positive for Britain’s future.

The referendum’s outcome throws Britain into a period of economic and political uncertainties that the Remain side vigorously pushed as their main argument for staying within the EU. There will be a lot of soul-searching among the British elites in politics and business, in the media and in the universities, as to why the opponents of the EU prevailed. The referendum results will be minutely analyzed to understand why the British public was not sufficiently persuaded by their party leaders to back the status quo, and why on the other hand a majority of voters put aside their fear of uncertainty in favor of leaving the EU.

But the overarching reason why Britain left the EU, I believe, is plainly and simply understood if political correctness is set aside. A slim majority of the British public, primarily its aging population who remember what Britain was once like not too long ago as society and culture that open immigration policy severely, if not mortally, has undermined, decided that to save what remained of their island kingdom they needed to regain their full political sovereignty instead of losing more of it to the bureaucrats of the EU in Brussels.

--Published in AMERICAN THINKER, 15 June 2016

The month of Ramadan just begun for Muslims is not merely about the rigors of fasting and prayers, it is also about meditating on man’s responsibility in this world and accountability in the next. One of the most urgent issues for Muslims at the present time is take responsibility for those who commit violence against innocent people in the name of Islam, and unequivocally repudiate them and their theology that defiles Islam and makes a mockery of God’s revelation to Muhammad that first occurred, as tradition records, in the month of Ramadan.

But nearly fifteen years after 9/11 and counting, Muslims in America as elsewhere remain in denial of Islam’s role (or a perverse theological rendition of Islam) in the terrorist violence that spread from the Middle East around the world. This explains in part why any expectation that so-called “moderate” Muslims in sufficient numbers will publicly repudiate their religious compatriots who engage in terrorism as an act of religious obligation, or jihad (holy war), has not materialized yet and likely will not unless there is some significant change in majority American view of Islam that presses upon Muslims.

The emergence of Donald Trump as the Republican nominee for the presidential election in November could be the spur for a sufficient number of Muslims, if they have courage and imagination, to break from their past. A Trump presidency might well facilitate the making of an American Islam as an effective counterweight to political Islam, or Islamism, that has been ruinous for Muslims everywhere in modern times.

On winning the May 3rd GOP primary in Indiana, Donald Trump emerged as the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party for the presidential election in November 2016. Trump’s win over sixteen other contenders for the nomination as an outsider, as a business tycoon with no past experience of running for an elected office, has been a most remarkable story in recent American politics. The last time the GOP nominated an outsider and non-politician as the party’s nominee for the presidency was Dwight D. Eisenhower. Books will be written on how Trump won, and why Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, Governors Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Bobby Jindal, John Kasich, Rick Perry, among the more notable contenders lost.

I began giving attention to the GOP primary ahead of the primary season last summer when the contenders began to gather. Donald Trump announcing his candidacy in June 2015 spurred my interest. Just about every opinion writer in the mainstream American media was scornful of Trump, and dismissive of the very notion that he might be the eventual Republican nominee. Soon after the primary season opened in January 2016, I wrote to friends frequently sharing my thoughts with them on what I came to view as “the Trump phenomenon” in explaining Trump winning primary after primary.

Following the New Hampshire primary held on February 9, which Trump won, I wrote to friends the letter I reproduce below. In it I began to explore “the Trump phenomenon.”