Both murderers were wounded by police. One was photographed and recorded. His message:

“There are many, many (verses) throughout the Quran that says we must fight them as they fight us. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. I apologize that women had to witness this today, but in our land women have to see the same. Your people will never be safe.”

According to ITV, one murderer, hands dripping blood, ranted, “We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you.”

Both killers are Muslim converts of African descent, and both are British born.

Wednesday also, Stockholm and its suburbs ended a fourth night of riots, vandalism and arson by immigrant mobs protesting the police shooting of a machete-wielding 69-year-old.

“We have institutional racism,” says Rami Al-khamisi, founder of a group for “social change.”

Sweden, racist?

Among advanced nations, Sweden ranks fourth in the number of asylum seekers it has admitted and second relative to its population.

Are the Swedes really the problem in Sweden?

The same day these stories ran, the Washington Post carried a front-page photo of Ibrahim Todashev, martial arts professional and friend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who, with brother Dzhokhar, set off the bombs at the Boston Marathon massacre.

Todashev, another Chechen, had been shot to death by FBI agents, reportedly after he confessed to his and Tamerlan’s role in a triple murder in Waltham, Mass.

Though Tamerlan had been radicalized and Moscow had made inquiries about him, he had escaped the notice of U.S. authorities. Even after he returned to the Caucasus for six months, sought to contact extremists, then returned to the USA, Tamerlan still was not on Homeland Security’s radar.

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His father, granted political asylum, went back to the same region he had fled in fear. His mother had been arrested for shoplifting. Yet none of this caused U.S. officials to pick up Tamerlan, a welfare freeloader, and throw the lot of them out of the country.

One wonders if the West is going to wake up to the new world we have entered, or adhere to immigration policies dating to a liberal era long since dead.

It was in 1965, halcyon hour of the Great Society, that Ted Kennedy led Congress into abolishing a policy that had restricted immigration for 40 years, while we absorbed and Americanized the millions who had come over between 1890 and 1920.

The “national origins” feature of that 1924 law mandated that ships arriving at U.S. ports carry immigrants from countries that had provided our immigrants in the past. We liked who we were.

Immigration policy was written to reinforce the Western orientation and roots of America, 90 percent of whose population could by 1960 trace its ancestry to the Old Continent.

But since 1965, immigration policy has been run by people who detest that America and wanted a new nation that looked less like Europe and more like a continental replica of the U.N. General Assembly.

They wanted to end America’s history as the largest and greatest of Western nations and make her a nation of nations, a new society and a new people, more racially, ethnically, religiously and culturally diverse than any nation on the face of the earth.

Behind this vision lies an ideology, an idee fixe, that America is not a normal nation of blood and soil, history and heroes, but a nation erected upon an idea, the idea that anyone and everyone who comes here, raises his hand and swears allegiance to the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights becomes, de facto, not just a legal citizen but an American.

But that is no more true than to say that someone who arrives in Paris from Africa or the Middle East and raises his hand to declare allegiance to the Rights of Man thereby becomes a Frenchman.

What is the peril into which America and the West are drifting?

Ties of race, religion, ethnicity and culture are the prevailing winds among mankind and are tearing apart countries and continents. And as we bring in people from all over the world, they are not leaving all of their old allegiances and animosities behind.

Many carry them, if at times dormant, within their hearts.

And if we bring into America – afflicted by her polarized politics, hateful rhetoric and culture wars – peoples on all sides of every conflict roiling mankind, how do we think this experiment is going to end?

The immigration bill moving through the Senate, with an amnesty for 11 to 12 million illegals already here, and millions of their relatives back home, may write an end to more than just the Republican Party.

The AP, IRS and Benghazi matters represent a scandal not of presidential wrongdoing, but of presidential indolence, indifference and incompetence in discharging the duties of chief executive.

The Barack Obama revealed to us in recent days is something rare in our history: a spectator president, clueless about what is going on in his own household, who reacts to revelations like some stunned bystander.

Consider. Because of a grave national security leak, President Obama’s Department of Justice seized two months of records from 20 telephones used by The Associated Press. An unprecedented seizure.

Yet the president was left completely in the dark. And though he rushed to defend the seizure, he claims he was uninvolved.

While the AP issue does not appear to have legs – we know what was done and why – it has badly damaged this president. For his own Justice Department treated the press, which has an exalted opinion of itself and its role, with the same contempt as the IRS treated the tea party.

The episode has damaged a crucial presidential asset. For this Washington press corps had provided this president with a protective coverage of his follies and failings unseen since the White House press of half a century ago covered up the prowlings of JFK.

The Benghazi issue is of far greater gravity. Still, Obama’s sins here as well seem to be those of omission, not commission.

The president was apparently completely in the dark about the urgent requests from Benghazi for more security. Obama was also apparently completely out of the loop during the seven-hour crisis of Sept. 11-12, when Ambassador Stevens was assassinated, calls for help from Benghazi were denied and two heroic ex-Navy SEALs died fighting to defend U.S. personnel from the roof of that CIA installation.

No one seems to know where Obama was that night.

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The following week, as the State Department, CIA and National Security Council all worked the “talking points” to make it appear that this preplanned terrorist atrocity was a spontaneous event triggered by an anti-Islamic video, Obama knew nothing of the discussions.

Thus, almost a week after the massacre, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice was put on six networks to move the line that we could not have better prepared for what would happen in Benghazi because it was all a spontaneous event triggered by a YouTube video.

Rice’s version was untrue, but consistent with Obama’s campaign message: “Bin Laden is dead, and al-Qaida is on the run.”

Yet if Rice’s credibility was crippled by what she was sent out to parrot, a week after she got the egg all over her face, Obama was himself peddling the same line at the United Nations. Obama, it seems, may have been the last man to know the cover story had collapsed.

As for the IRS’s targeting of tea party applications for tax-exempt status, this bureaucratic misconduct began as far back as 2010, when the tea party was a national sensation.

Yet, despite tea party protests to members of Congress, who made inquiries of the IRS, the discrimination against groups with “tea party” and “patriot” in their names continued, and was extended to groups whose proclaimed mission was to defend the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.

Literally for years this went on. Investigations were begun by the IRS, and the results reported to the Treasury Department.

But nothing was made public before the election of 2012.

This weekend we learned that the White House counsel was told this April about the IRS misconduct and the investigations, but she did not inform President Obama. He learned about it from news reports.

What we have here, it appears, is a government out of control and a president clueless about what is going on in that government.

And that is the best case. For it is difficult to believe the IRS could conduct a full-court press on Obama’s opponents, that IRS higher-ups knew about it, years ago, and that Treasury knew about it before the election – but the White House was kept in the dark about a scandal that could have derailed the Obama campaign.

But whatever Obama knew, he and his allies in Congress bear moral responsibility for denying these tea party folks for years their right to participate fully in the politics of their country.

For years, Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and other Democrats have slandered and slurred tea party people as enemies of progress – smears echoed by their mainstream press allies.

Should we then be surprised that IRS bureaucrats, hearing this, thought they were doing what was right for America by slow-walking applications for tax exemptions from these same tea party folks?

Who demonized the tea party people? Who created the climate of contempt? Whoever did gave moral sanction to those IRS agents.

And the Spectator President is right in the vanguard.

That was the leading Senate hawk favoring U.S. intervention in Syria’s civil war. But by ruling out U.S. ground troops, John McCain was sending, perhaps unintentionally, another message: There is no vital U.S. interest in Syria’s civil war worth shedding the blood of American soldiers and Marines.

Thus does America’s premier hawk support the case made by think-tank scholars Owen Harries and Tom Switzer in their American Interest essay, “Leading from Behind: Third Time a Charm?”

There is in the USA today, they write, “a reluctance to commit American blood.”

A legacy of Iraq and Afghanistan “is an unwillingness of the American public to take casualties on behalf of less than truly vital challenges. … While such concerns may be admirable … they are incompatible with a superpower posture and pretensions to global leadership.”

You cannot be the “indispensable nation” if you reflexively recoil at putting “boots on the ground.”

“If a nation is not prepared to take casualties, it should not engage in the kind of policies likely to cause them. If it is not prepared to take casualties, it should resign itself to not having the kind of respect from others that a more resolute nation could expect.”

About the author’s premise, that Americans are reluctant to take casualties, is there any doubt?

To demonstrate this, we need only address a few questions.

Would we be willing to send another army of 170,000 to stop a Sunni-Shia war that might tear Iraq apart? Would the American people support sending 100,000 troops, again, to fight to keep Afghanistan from the clutches of the Taliban?

To ask these questions is to answer them.

Should Kim Jong-un attack across the DMZ with his million-man army and seize Seoul, would Barack Obama’s America, like Harry Truman’s America, send a third of a million U.S. soldiers and Marines to drive the North out? Or would we confine our support to the South, under our security treaty, to air, sea and missile strikes – from above and afar?

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Under NATO, the United States is required to assist militarily any member nation that is a victim of aggression.

If Moscow occupied Estonia or Latvia in a dispute over mistreatment of its Russian minorities, would we declare war or send U.S. troops to fight Russians in the Baltic?

Would we fight the Chinese to defend the Senkakus?

“America no longer has the will, wallet or influence to impose an active and ambitious global leadership across the world,” Harries and Switzer contend. They cite Walter Lippmann, who wrote that a credible foreign policy “consists in bringing into balance, with a comfortable surplus of power in reserve, a nation’s commitments and the nation’s power.

“Without the compelling principle that the nation must maintain its objectives and its power in equilibrium, it purposes within its means and its means equal to its purposes, its commitments related to its resources and its resources adequate to its commitments, it is impossible to think at all about foreign affairs.”

Though U.S. commitments are as great or greater than in 1991, the authors write, America is not so domineering as she was at the end of the Cold War, or when Bush 43 set out to “end tyranny in our world.”

“The dollar is weak. The debt mountain is of Himalayan proportions. Budget and trade deficits are alarming. Infrastructure is aging. The AAA bond credit rating is lost. Economic growth is exceptionally sluggish for a nation that is four years out of a recession. And where 20 years ago U.S. military power was universally considered awesome in its scope, today, after more than a decade of its active deployment, the world is much more aware of its limitations and costs. It is decidedly less impressed.”

Consider Syria, where the neocons and liberal interventionists are clamoring for U.S. military action, but “no boots on the ground.”

Is there really any vital U.S. interest at risk in whether the 40-year-old Assad dictatorship stands or falls?

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has been calling for Assad’s ouster for two years and transships weapons to the rebels, has now seen his country stung by a terrorist attack.

But though he has a 400,000-man NATO-equipped army, three times Syria’s population, and a 550-mile border to attack across, Erdogan wants us, the “international community,” to bring Assad down.

But why is Assad our problem – and not Erdogan’s problem?

Harries and Switzer urge Obama to enunciate a new foreign policy that defines our true vital interests and brings U.S. war guarantees into balance with U.S. power – a policy where the first question U.S. leaders ask about a conflict or crisis abroad is not “how” but “why”?

Why, exactly, is this America’s problem?

He was purged after the Washington Post unearthed his doctoral dissertation at the JFK School of Government.

Richwine’s thesis:

IQ tests fairly measure mental ability. The average IQ of immigrants is well below that of white Americans. This difference in IQ is likely to persist through several generations.

And the potential consequences of this?

“A lack of socioeconomic assimilation among low IQ immigrant groups, more underclass behavior, less social trust and an increase in the proportion of unskilled workers in the American labor market.”

Richwine defended his 166-page thesis before Harvard’s George Borjas, Richard Zeckhauser and Christopher Jencks, who once edited the New Republic. But while his thesis was acceptable at Harvard – it earned Richwine a Ph.D. – it has scandalized the Potomac priesthood.

Our elites appear unanimous: Richwine’s view that intelligence is not equally distributed among ethnic and racial groups, and is partly inherited, is rankest heresy. Yet no one seems to want to prove him wrong.

Consider Richwine’s contention that differences in mental ability exist and seem to persist among racial and ethnic groups.

In the Wall Street Journal last month, Warren Kozak noted that 28,000 students in America’s citadel of diversity, New York City, took the eighth-grade exam to enter Stuyvesant, the Bronx School of Science and Brooklyn Tech, the city’s most elite high schools. Students are admitted solely on their entrance test scores.

Of the 830 students who will be entering Stuyvesant as freshmen this fall, 1 percent are black, 3 percent are Hispanic, 21 percent are white – and 75 percent are Asian.

Now, blacks and Hispanics far outnumber Asians in New York. But at Stuyvesant, Asians will outnumber blacks and Hispanics together 19-to-1.

Is this the result of racially biased tests at Stuyvesant?

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At Berkeley, crown jewel of the California university system, Hispanics, 40 percent of California’s population and an even larger share of California’s young, are 12 percent of the freshman class. Asians, outnumbered almost 3-to-1 by Hispanics in California, have almost four times as many slots as Hispanics in the freshman class. Another example of racial bias?

The 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment, PISA, which measures the academic ability of 15-year-olds worldwide, found the USA falling to 17th in reading, 23rd in science, 31st in math.

Yet, Spain aside, not one Hispanic nation, from which a plurality of our immigrants come, was among the top 40 in reading, science or math.

But these folks are going to come here and make us No. 1 again?

Is there greater “underclass behavior” among Hispanics?

The crime rate among Hispanics is about three times that of white Americans, while the Asian crime rate is about a third that of whites.

Among white folks, the recent illegitimacy rate was 28 percent; among Hispanics, 53 percent. According to one study a few years back, Hispanics were 19 times as likely as whites to join gangs.

What about Richwine’s point regarding “social trust”?

Six years ago, in “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the 21st Century,” Robert Putnam, author of “Bowling Alone,” wrote that after 30,000 interviews he found that ethnic and racial diversity can be devastating to communities and destructive of community values.

In racially mixed communities, Putnam wrote, not only do people not trust strangers, they do not even trust their own kind.

“People living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down,’ that is, to pull in like a turtle … (to) withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more but have less faith they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.”

With the immigration bill granting amnesty to 12 million illegals, an open door to their dependents and a million new immigrants each year, almost all from the Third World, America in 2040 is going to look like Los Angeles today. Yet, it was in L.A. that Putnam found social capital at its most depleted and exhausted.

If Richwine is right, America in 2040 will be a country with whites and Asians dominating the professions, and 100 million Hispanics concentrated in semiskilled work and manual labor.

The issues Richwine raises go to the question of whether we shall survive as one nation and one people.

If our huge bloc of Hispanics, already America’s largest minority at 53 million, is fed by constant new immigration, but fails for a couple of generations to reach the middle-class status that Irish, Germans, Jews, Italians and Poles attained after two generations, what becomes of our “indivisible” nation?

Rather than face this question, better to purge and silence the Harvard extremist who dared to raise it.

The question arises while reading an analysis of Census Bureau statistics on the 2012 election by Dan Balz and Ted Mellnik.

One sentence in their Washington Post story fairly leaps out:

“The total number of white voters actually decreased between 2008 and 2012, the first such drop by any group within the population since the bureau started to issue such statistics.”

America’s white majority, which accounts for nine in 10 of all Republican votes in presidential elections, is not only shrinking as a share of the electorate, but it is declining in numbers, as well.

The Balz-Mellnik piece was primarily about the black vote.

Sixty-six percent of the black electorate turned out, to 64 percent of the white electorate. Black turnout in 2012 was higher by 1.7 million than in 2008. Hispanic turnout rose by 1.4 million votes.

But from 2008 to 2012, the white vote fell by 2 million.

This is the crisis of the Grand Old Party:

Minorities, peoples of color – Hispanic, black, Asian – gave 80 percent of their votes to Obama. And while the minorities’ share of the electorate was 26 percent in 2012, minorities constitute 36.3 percent of the population. And their share of both the electorate and the population is inexorably rising.

Obama won only 39 percent of White America, lowest ever of any victorious presidential candidate. But he did not need any more white votes, when he was carrying people of color 4 to 1.

Any good news in the Census Bureau report for the GOP?

Only this: The tremendous turnout of black Americans in 2012 was surely due to Obama’s being under ferocious attack and in peril of being repudiated. Black folks turned out in record numbers to rescue the first black president. That situation will not recur in 2016.

Yet the bad news for the Republican Party does not cease.

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While the total Hispanic vote rose by 1.4 million between 2008 and 2012, some 12 million eligible Hispanics did not bother to vote. And when one considers that Romney lost Hispanics 71-27, any Democratic effort to get out the Hispanic vote is going to be problematic for the GOP.

Only 48 percent of eligible Asians voted. But when they did, they went 70 percent Democratic. Asians’ numbers, too, are growing, and as more go to the polls, the GOP crisis deepens.

The Republican response to this gathering disaster?

Led by Sens. Marco Rubio, John McCain and Lindsey Graham, Republicans are pushing for amnesty and “a path to citizenship” for the 11 to 12 million illegal aliens in the country today.

Who are these folks? Perhaps half are Hispanic, but 90 percent are people of color who, once registered, vote 4-to-1 Democratic. One would not be surprised to hear that the Senate Democratic Caucus had broken out into chants of “Go, Marco, Go!”

Setting aside the illegals invasion Bush 41 and Bush 43 refused to halt, each year a million new immigrants enter and move onto a fast track to citizenship. Between 80 and 90 percent now come from the Third World, and once naturalized, they vote 80 percent Democratic.

This brings us back around to the Electoral College.

After Richard Nixon cobbled together his New Majority, the GOP carried 49 states in 1972 and 1984, 44 states in 1980 and 40 in 1988. In four elections – 1972, 1984, 1988 and 2004 – the Republican Party swept all 11 states of FDR’s “Solid South.”

Such were the fruits of that evil Southern Strategy.

But when conservatives urged Bush 1 to declare a moratorium on legal immigration in 1992 and build a security fence, the politically correct Republican establishment fought tooth and nail to keep the idea out of the platform.

So, where are we?

Eighteen states, including four of the seven mega-states – California, New York, Illinois and Pennsylvania – have gone Democratic in six straight elections. Two others, Florida and Ohio, have gone Democratic twice in a row. And white folks are now a minority in the last mega-state, Texas.

In Ohio, which produced seven Republican presidents, more than any other state, Republicans are dropping out, and may be dying out.

“Eight years ago, blacks and whites voted at about the same rate (in Ohio),” write Balz and Mellnik. In 2008, “the participation rate for whites dropped to 65 percent, while the rate for blacks rose to 70 percent. Last November, the turnout rate among whites fell to 62 percent, while the rate for blacks ticked up to 72 percent.”

From these Census figures, white folks are losing interest in politics and voting. Yet, whites still constitute three-fourths of the electorate and nine in 10 Republican votes.

Query: Is the way to increase the enthusiasm and turnout among this three-fourths of the electorate for the GOP to embrace amnesty and a path to citizenship for 12 million illegal foreign aliens?

Or is it to demand the sealing of America’s borders against any and all intruders?

Just asking.

According to the Huffington Post poll, Americans oppose U.S. air strikes on Syria by 3-to-1. They oppose sending arms to the rebels by 4-to-1. They oppose putting U.S. ground troops into Syria by 14-to-1. Democrats, Republicans and independents are all against getting involved in that civil war that has produced 1.2 million refugees and 70,000 dead.

A CBS/New York Times poll found that by 62-to-24 Americans want to stay out of the Syrian war. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found that by 61-to-10 Americans oppose any U.S. intervention.

But the numbers shift when the public is asked if it would make a difference if the Syrian regime used poison gas. In that case, opposition to U.S. intervention drops to 44-to-27 in Reuters/Ipsos.

Yet on the Sunday talk shows and cable news, the hawks are over-represented. To have a senator call for arming the rebels and U.S. air strikes is a better ratings “get” than to have on a senator who wants to stay out of the war.

In that same CBS poll, however, the 10 percent of all Americans who say they follow the Syrian situation closely were evenly divided, 47-to-48, on whether to intervene.

The portrait of America that emerges is of a nation not overly interested in what is going on in Syria, but which overwhelmingly wants to stay out of the war.

But it is also a nation whose foreign-policy elites are far more interventionist and far more supportive of sending weapons to the rebels and using U.S. air power. From these polls, it is hard not to escape the conclusion that the Beltway elites who shape U.S. foreign policy no longer represent the manifest will of Middle America.

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America has not gone isolationist, but has become anti-interventionist. This country does not want its soldiers sent into any more misbegotten adventures like Iraq and Afghanistan, and does not see any vital national interest in who comes out on top in Syria.

But who is speaking up for that great silent majority? Who in the U.S. Senate is on national TV standing up to the interventionists?

Who in the Republican Party is calling out the McCainiacs?

Another story that came out this weekend, smothered by news of Israeli air strikes on Syrian military installations and missile depots, might cool elite enthusiasm – and kill any public desire to intervene.

“Syrian Rebels May Have Used Sarin Gas,” ran the headline in Monday’s New York Times. Datelined Geneva, the story began:

“United Nations human rights investigators have gathered testimony from casualties of Syria’s civil war and medical workers indicating that rebel forces have used the nerve agent sarin, one of the lead investigators said Sunday.”

The U.N. commission has found no evidence that the Syrian army used chemical weapons. But Carla Del Ponte, a former Swiss attorney general and a commission member, stated:

“Our investigators have been in neighboring countries interviewing victims, doctors and field hospitals, and according to their report of last week, which I have seen, there are strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof of the use of sarin gas, from the way the victims were treated.

“This was use on the part of the opposition, the rebels.”

In short, the war criminals may be the people on whose behalf we are supposed to intervene. And if it was the rebels who used sarin gas, and not the forces of President Bashar Assad, more than a few questions arise that need answering.

For just two weeks ago, the White House informed Congress:

“Our intelligence community does assess, with varying degrees of confidence, that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria, specifically, the chemical agent sarin.”

A clamor then arose demanding Obama make good on his threat that the Syrian regime’s use of poison gas would cross a “red line” and be a “game changer,” calling forth “enormous consequences.”

If the Syrian military did not use sarin, but the rebels did, who in the U.S. intelligence community blew this one? From whom did U.S. agencies get their evidence that sarin had been used by Damascus? Were we almost suckered by someone’s latest lies about weapons of mass destruction into fighting yet another unnecessary war?

When allegations of the Syrian government’s use of sarin arose, many in Congress, especially in the Republican Party, denounced Obama for fecklessness in backing off of his “red line” threat.

It now appears that Obama may have saved us from a strategic disaster by not plunging ahead with military action. And the question should be put to the war hawks:

If Assad’s use of sarin should call forth U.S. air strikes, ought not the use of sarin by the rebels, if confirmed, cause this country to wash its hands of those war criminals?

The Holy Father was referring to the $40 a month paid to apparel workers at that eight-story garment factory in Bangladesh that collapsed on top of them, killing more than 400.

“Not paying a just wage … focusing exclusively on the balance books, on financial statements, only looking at personal profit. That goes against God!”

The pope is describing the dark side of globalism.

Why is Bangladesh, after China, the second-largest producer of apparel in the world? Why are there 4,000 garment factories in that impoverished country which, a few decades ago, had almost none?

Because the Asian subcontinent is where Western brands – from Disney to Gap to Benetton – can produce cheapest. They can do so because women and children will work for $1.50 a day crammed into factories that are rickety firetraps, where health and safety regulations are nonexistent.

This is what capitalism, devoid of a conscience, will produce.

Rescuers at the factory outside Dhaka have stopped looking for survivors, but expect to find hundreds more bodies in the rubble.

The Walt Disney Co., with sales of $40 billion a year, decided – after an apparel plant fire in November took the lives of 112 workers – to stop producing in Bangladesh. “The Disney ban now extends to other countries, including Pakistan,” says the New York Times, “where a fire last September killed 262 garment workers.”

Not long ago, the shirts, skirts, suits and dresses Americans wore were “Made in the USA” – in plants in the Carolinas, Georgia and Louisiana, where the lower wages, lighter regulations and air conditioning that came after World War II had attracted the factories from New England.

The American idea was that the 50 states and their citizens should compete with one another fairly. The feds set the health and safety standards that all factories had to meet, and imposed wage and hour laws. Some states offered lower wages, but there was a federal minimum wage.

How did we prevent companies from shutting down here and going to places like today’s Bangladesh to produce as cheaply as they could – without regard for the health and safety of their workers – and to send their products back here and kill the American factories?

From James Madison to the mid-20th century, we had a tariff.

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This provided revenue for the U.S. government to keep other taxes low and build the nation’s infrastructure. Tariffs prevented exploiters of labor from getting rich here on sweatshops abroad.

Tariffs favored U.S. companies by letting them compete for free in the U.S. market, while a cover charge was placed on foreign goods entering the USA. Foreign producers would pay tariffs for the privilege of competing here, while U.S. companies paid income taxes.

Foreigners had to buy a ticket to the game. Americans got in free.

After all, it’s our country, isn’t it?

But in the late 20th century, America abandoned as “protectionism” what Henry Clay had called The American System. We gave up on economic patriotism. We gave up on the idea that the U.S. economy should be structured for the benefit of America and Americans first.

We embraced globalism.

The ideological basis of globalism was that, just as what was best for America was a free market where U.S. companies produce and sell anywhere freely and equally in the U.S., this model can be applied worldwide.

We can create a global economy where companies produce where they wish and sell where they wish.

As one might expect, the big boosters of the concept were the transnational corporations. They could now shift plants and factories out of the high-wage, well-regulated U.S. economy to Mexico, China and India, then to Bangladesh, Haiti and Cambodia, produce for pennies, ship their products back to the U.S., sell here at the same old price, and pocket the difference.

As some who were familiar with the decline of Great Britain predicted, this would lead inexorably to the deindustrialization of America, a halt to the steady rise in U.S. workers’ wages and standard of living, and the enrichment of a new class of corporatists.

Meanwhile, other nations, believing yet in economic nationalism, would invade and capture huge slices of the U.S. market for their home companies, their “national champions.” The losers would be the companies that stayed in the USA and produced for the USA, with American workers.

And so it came to pass. U.S. real wages have not risen in 40 years.

In the first decade of the century, America lost 5 million to 6 million manufacturing jobs, one in every three we had, as 55,000 factories closed.

Since Bush 41 touted his New World Order, we have run trade deficits of $10 trillion – ten thousand billion dollars! Everybody – the EU, China, Japan, Mexico, Canada – now runs a trade surplus at the expense of the U.S.

We built the global economy – by gutting our own.

And if Barack Obama plunges into Syria’s civil war, it could consume his presidency, even as Iraq consumed the presidency of George W. Bush.

Why would Obama even consider this?

Because he blundered badly. Foolishly, he put his credibility on the line by warning that any Syrian use of chemical weapons would cross a “red line” and be a “game changer” with “enormous consequences.”

Not only was this ultimatum unwise, Obama had no authority to issue it. If Syria does not threaten or attack us, Obama would need congressional authorization before he could constitutionally engage in acts of war against Syria. When did he ever receive such authorization?

Moreover, there is no proof Syrian President Bashar Assad ever ordered the use of chemical weapons.

U.S. intelligence agencies maintain that small amounts of the deadly toxin sarin gas were likely used. But if it did happen, we do not know who ordered it.

Syrians officials deny that they ever used chemicals. And before we dismiss Damascus’ denials, recall that an innocent man in Tupelo, Miss., was lately charged with mailing deadly ricin to Sen. Roger Wicker and President Obama. This weekend, we learned he may have been framed.

It is well within the capacity of Assad’s enemies to use or fake the use of poison gas to suck us into fighting their war.

Even if elements of Assad’s army did use sarin, we ought not plunge in. And, fortunately, that seems to be Obama’s thinking.

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Why stay out? Because it is not our war. There is no vital U.S. interest in who rules Syria. Hafez Assad and Bashar have ruled Syria for 40 years. How has that ever threatened us?

Moreover, U.S. intervention would signal to Assad that the end is near, making his use of every weapon in his arsenal, including chemical weapons, more – not less – likely.

U.S. intervention would also make us de facto allies of Assad’s principal enemies, the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Nusra Front, Syria’s al-Qaida. As the New York Times reported Sunday, “Nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of.”

Do we really wish to expend American blood and treasure to bring about a victory of Islamists and jihadists in Syria?

If Assad’s chemical weapons threaten any nation, it is Israel. But Israel knows where they are stored and has an air force superior to our own in the Med. Israeli troops on the Golan are as close to Damascus as Dulles Airport is to Washington, D.C. Yet Israel has not attacked Syria’s chemical weapons.

Why not? Israel is well aware that Syria’s air defense system is, as the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, “one of the most advanced and concentrated barriers on the planet.”

And if Israel does not feel sufficiently threatened by Syria’s chemical weapons to go after them, why should we, 4,000 miles away?

Then there is Turkey, with three times Syria’s population, NATO’s second-largest army and a 600-mile border. Why is ridding the Middle East of Assad our assignment and not Ankara’s?

Surely the heirs of the Ottomans have a larger stake here.

And if we get into this war, how do we get out?

For the war is metastasizing. Hezbollah is sending in fighters to help the Alawite Shia. Other Lebanese are assisting the Sunni rebels. The war could spread into Iraq, where the latest clashes between Sunni and Shia are pulling the country apart. Young Muslims are coming in from Europe.

Iran and Russia are aiding Damascus. Qatar and Saudi Arabia are aiding the Islamists. The United States, Jordan and Turkey are aiding the secularists. Syria could come apart, and a sectarian and ethnic war of all against all erupt across the region.

Do we really want the U.S. military in the middle of this?

Because his “red line” appears to have been crossed, Obama is being told he must attack Syria to maintain his credibility with Iran and North Korea.

Nonsense. To attack Syria would compound Obama’s folly in drawing the red line. Better to have egg on Obama’s face than for America to be dragged into another unnecessary war.

Obama would not be alone in having his bluff called. George Bush proclaimed that no “axis of evil” nation would be allowed to acquire the “world’s worst weapons.” North Korea now has those weapons.

Congressional war hawks, led by Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham, are cawing for air strikes and no-fly zones, which would mean dead and captured Americans and many more dead Syrians.

Time for Congress to either authorize Obama to lead us into a new Middle East war, or direct him, in the absence of an attack upon us, to keep America out of what is Syria’s civil war.

Before we slide into another war, let the country be consulted first.

The same holds true of Islam, the majority faith of 49 nations from Morocco to Indonesia, a religion that 1.6 billion people profess.

Yet, some assertions appear true.

Islam is growing in militancy and intolerance, evolving again into a fighting faith and spreading not only through proselytizing, but violence.

How to justify the charge of intolerance?

The Taliban blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas. The Sufi shrines of Timbuktu were blown up by Ansar Dine. In Saudi Arabia, Iran and Afghanistan, Christian converts face the death sentence.

In Nigeria, the Boko Haram attacks churches and kills Christians, as in Ethiopia and the Sudan, where the south seceded over the persecution.

Egyptian Copts are under siege. Assyrian and Chaldean Christians in Iraq have seen churches pillaged, priests murdered. In Indonesia, churches are being shut on the demand of Islamists. Shariah law is being demanded by militants across the Middle East, as Christianity is exterminated in its cradle.

Has Islam become again a fighting faith?

Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia are the sites of Islamist uprisings using terror to rip these statelets from Russia. Muslim Uighurs are fighting to tear off a chunk of China and create an East Turkestan. Muslim Malays in south Thailand have fought a decade-long war of secession. Albania has acquired two sister Muslim states in Europe, Bosnia and Kosovo, both born in blood.

“Islam has bloody borders,” wrote the late Samuel Huntington. They are bloodier today.

At the time of 9/11, al-Qaida seemed confined to Afghanistan. Al-Qaida may now be found in the Maghreb, Mali, Iraq and Yemen. Its Syrian auxiliary, the al-Nusra Front, is dominant in the anti-Assad rebellion.

Since Y2K, Islamists have perpetrated massacres in Mumbai, Madrid, London, Moscow, Beslan and Boston. Osama bin Laden appears no longer as popular as he once was, yet tens of millions worldwide still admire him. Why?

Islamism can also call upon true believers prepared to die for the cause. No other faith produces so many suicide bombers.

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Muslims counter-argue that America has killed many more noncombatants, in Iraq, and Afghanistan and Pakistan with drone strikes.

What right, they ask, did we have to attack Iraq? Did we not ourselves stir up the nest of hornets that stung us in Boston?

Yet there is another reality.

While the clash of cultures widens between the West and Islam, leaders in the Muslim world can be found working with the United States against their own extremists.

Jihadists are by no means a majority in the Islamic world, where they are also feared and hated. And in the West, they are but a fraction of our Muslim communities.

The crisis: Even a tiny minority of terrorists like the Tsarnaevs can so inflame tensions between the West and the Muslim world they can bring our two civilizations into conflict. Would we have fought those wars in Iraq and Afghanistan without the atrocity of 9/11?

What are the goals of the jihadists?

Expulsion of Christians and infidels from the Dar al-Islam, the house of Islam. Expulsion of the American Crusaders. Overthrow of Muslim rulers who collude with the Great Satan. Annihilation of Israel. Infiltration of the homelands of a decadent, dying West. Death to all who insult the Prophet.

Ultimate goal: Bring the world to acknowledge and act on the truth that there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his Prophet.

And while the Islamic world remains far inferior in technology and manufacturing and military power, Muslim peoples are far more numerous and devout. With a fourth of mankind, their birth rate is higher and their numbers soaring, along with their militancy at home and in the diaspora.

In population and territory, the West is shrinking, while our Muslim minorities are growing and becoming more assertive in their demands.

“No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come,” said Victor Hugo. Many in the Muslim world believe that as the Christian West dominated for 500 years, their time has come.

How do we deal with this irreconcilable conflict between a secular West and a resurgent Islam?

First, as it is our presence in their world that enrages so many, we should end our interventions, shut down the empire and let Muslim rulers deal with Muslim radicals.

Second, we need a moratorium on immigration from the Islamic world. Inevitably, some of the young we bring in, like the Tsarnaevs, will yield to radicalization and seek to strike a blow for Islam against us.

What benefit do we derive as a people to justify the risks we take by opening up America to mass migration from a world aflame with hatred and hostility over race, ethnicity, culture, history and faith?

Why are we bringing all of the world’s quarrelsome minorities, and all the world’s quarrels with them, into our home?

What we saw in Boston was the dark side of diversity.

“They failed because the people of Boston refused to be intimidated. They failed because as Americans we refuse to be terrorized.”

Bostonians did react splendidly. From first responders to folks who gave blood, from hospital staffs to the FBI, ATF and state troopers, from the Boston and Watertown cops to the hostage rescue team that talked Dzhokhar Tsarnaev out of that boat.

But did the Brothers Tsarnaev really fail – as terrorists?

On Sunday’s talk shows, a sub-theme was that this had been the “most successful terrorist attack since 9/11.”

For consider what these brothers accomplished.

By brazenly exploding two bombs right at the finish line of the marathon, with TV cameras all around, they killed three and injured, wounded and maimed 178 people for all the world to see.

Within hours, their atrocity had riveted the attention of the nation. Cable channels went wall to wall, as did major networks. By the evening of the attack, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick and President Obama had gone live to reassure us they would be apprehended and justice done.

Day two, Obama appeared again as the greatest manhunt in U.S. history was under way. On day four, the FBI released photos, imploring citizens to come forward and identify the men in the white and black caps.

That evening, the brothers murdered an MIT police officer, hijacked a Mercedes SUV and engaged in a gunfight with Watertown police that left Tamerlan Tsarnaev dead and his brother a fugitive.

On Friday morning, Gov. Patrick went before the cameras to tell a stunned nation he was imposing a lockdown on all of Boston and half a dozen neighboring communities. Red Sox and Bruins games were canceled.

A million people in and around the city of Paul Revere, of the Lexington and Concord patriots, of Bunker Hill, locked their doors and hid inside because a lone armed teenager with pipe bombs was on the loose.

Boston, said the New York Times, was a “ghost town.”

“The scene was extraordinary. The hub of the universe, as Boston’s popular nickname would have it, was on lockdown from first light until near dark Friday. A massive dragnet for one man had brought a major U.S. city to an absolute standstill.

“The people were gone, shops were locked, streets were barren, the trains did not run. The often-clogged Massachusetts Turnpike was as clear as a bowling lane.”

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Saturday, all six newspapers this writer receives led with the capture of Dzhokhar. “Frenzied Hunt Paralyzes Boston,” ran the Times banner.

TV and print media are still consumed with the brothers, their motives, their travel history, their Chechen background, their Islamic beliefs. And Washington is in a ferocious debate over whether Dzhokhar should be interrogated at length or read his Miranda rights.

Each side of the gun control and immigration debates claims the marathon massacre and its aftermath validates their position.

On April 15, the day the Tsarnaevs set off the pressure-cooker bombs on Boylston Street, there were 40 bombings and shootings across Iraq that took the lives of 75 and wounded 350. No one in the outside world knows the names of those who set off these bombs, and no one cares. And Baghdad was not locked down.

How, then, when these brothers are now as well-known as Timothy McVeigh, if not Osama bin Laden, and they committed an atrocity that mesmerized America for a week, and they forced a lockdown of one of our greatest cities, can it be said that they failed – as terrorists?

Worse may be yet to come.

For, just as some of the perpetrators of the Columbine, Virginia Tech, Tucson, Aurora and Newtown massacres found inspiration and exemplars in mass murderers before them, so the Brothers Tsarnaev may have shown the way for those who hate us to go out in their own special blaze of glory.

All true Americans were with the people of Boston last week. Yet there are individuals to whom these brothers are heroes. Lest we forget. Millions across the Muslim world still believe bin Laden struck a blow for them when he sent those planes into the World Trade Center.

Al-Qaida has been growing and gaining recruits since 9/11.

Yet, while Osama targeted the symbols of U.S. economic, military and political power – the Trade Center towers, the Pentagon, the Capitol – the Tsarnaevs hit a “soft target.” They went after innocent people engaged in the purely innocent activity of competing in and watching a sports event.

And from the weapons and bombs they were carrying Thursday night, they were prepared to keep on killing, until killed themselves.

Suicide-seekers going after soft targets such as ballgames, concerts, malls, parades or school events is something other nations have known but we have largely avoided. Our luck may have run out.

Let us pray the Boston Marathon massacre is not the new paradigm for the sick souls within.