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• Global Persecution of Christians
  

  Perhaps the gravest under-publicized atrocity in the world is the persecution of Christians. A comprehensive Pew Forum study last year found that Christians are persecuted in 131 countries containing 70 percent of the world’s population, out of 197 countries in the world (if Palestine, Taiwan, South Sudan, and the Vatican are included). Best estimates are that about 200 million Christians are in communities where they are persecuted. There is not the slightest question of the scale and barbarity of this persecution, and a little of it is adequately publicized. But this highlights the second half of the atrocity: the passivity and blasé indifference of most of the West’s media and governments.

   

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• Unconscionable
  

  The Obama administration is now telling liberals that it is not backing down on its new health-care mandate, even as it coos of compromise to religious groups appalled by it. These messages may seem to be contradictory, but actually the administration has been quite consistent: Nothing it has ever said on this issue has been trustworthy.

  Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, has been the leading misleader. The administration, recall, has decided that almost all employers must cover contraception, sterilization, and abortifacients in their employees’ insurance plans — even if those employers are religious universities, hospitals, and charities that reject those practices.

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• Iran 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0
  

  On the campaign trail, presidential candidate Barack Obama once called for a “reset” policy with Iran. Supposedly, the unpopularity of the Texan provocateur George W. Bush and his administration’s inability to finesse “soft power” had needlessly alienated the Iranian theocracy.

  After all, the widely quoted but highly politicized 2007 National Intelligence Estimate claimed that Iran had ceased work on a bomb in 2003 and would not have a weapon for the foreseeable future. That flawed analysis fueled another popular talking point: that the Bush- Cheney warmongers were looking for more phantom weapons of mass destruction in Iran of the sort that had led them into Iraq.

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• Wooing the Millennials
  

  The Republican presidential candidates, except for Ron Paul, haven’t been paying much attention to young voters in the primaries and caucuses so far. But any Republican nominee — which is to say probably Mitt Romney, or maybe Newt Gingrich, or Rick Santorum — had better be paying attention to them in the summer and fall.

  The reason three of the four Republicans haven’t paid much attention to young voters is that the under-30 folks have been turning out in the Republican contests in minuscule numbers.

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• Two Decades Too Late
  

  For months, former senator Rick Santorum has been talking about working-class woes and promoting a working-class-friendly economic agenda, and in late January President Obama’s State of the Union speech placed working-class concerns at the center of the election debate. Nevertheless, Santorum remains in third place in the GOP race. Does this suggest that Republican efforts to address working-class angst are politically ineffective?

  No, it doesn’t. The problem is twofold: Santorum has not emphasized this aspect of his campaign enough, and the agenda he has presented seems designed to resurrect an idealized past rather than to lead worried workers into a new future.

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• An important man, &c.
  

  Especially in the last three years, we’ve had a debate in this country over who or what creates jobs. The other day, the Washington Post seemed to have an answer. The paper’s website had a line saying “Meet Obama’s man who creates jobs for the U.S.” I thought, “Whoa, there is such a man?”

  You clicked on this line and you were taken to an article headed “Gene B. Sperling: Obama’s jobs creator.”

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• The Never-Ending War
  

  If you’re not with us, you’re against us. President Bush popularized this expression after 9/11 to describe his foreign-policy doctrine: Countries couldn’t support or indulge terrorists and be our friends at the same time. But his detractors quickly turned it into a fairly paranoid vision of domestic political life, as if Bush had been talking about domestic opponents and dissenters.

  The irony is that few worldviews better describe the general liberal orientation to public policy and the culture war. The Left often complains about the culture war as if it’s a war they don’t want to fight. They insist they just want to follow “sound science” or “what works” when it comes to public policy, but those crazy knuckle-dragging right-wingers constantly want to talk about gays and abortion and other hot-button issues.

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• CAIR’s Crusade against The Third Jihad
  

  M. Zuhdi Jasser is a physician, a U.S. Navy veteran, an American patriot, and a Muslim who does not hold with those who preach that Islam commands its followers to take part in a war against unbelievers.

  The Third Jihad, a documentary film that Jasser narrated, takes a hard look at those Muslims who are waging this war — both with bombs and by stealthier means. The film had been among the educational materials used to train New York City police officers dealing with terrorism. Then, last month, the New York Times went on what one might call a crusade against the movie, publishing a series of articles branding it a “hate-filled film about Muslims” and calling on Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly to “apologize for the film . . . and make clear that his department does not tolerate such noxious and dangerous stereotyping.”

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• The Anti-Romney Vote
  

  A funny thing happened to Mitt Romney on the way to his coronation as the inevitable Republican candidate for president of the United States. Minnesota, Missouri, and Colorado happened. Rick Santorum beat him in all three states on the same day — and beat him by huge margins in two of those states, as well as upsetting him in Colorado, where the Mormon vote was expected to give Romney a victory.

  The Republican establishment, which has lined up heavily behind Romney, has tried to depict him as the “electable,” if not invincible, candidate in the general election this November. But it is hard to maintain an aura of invincibility after you have been beaten, especially in a month when pundits had suggested that Romney might build up an unstoppable momentum of victories.

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• HHS Mandate 101
  

  The Obama administration and its allies continue to defend a regulation mandating that Catholics offer and purchase health-insurance plans that violate their consciences. The administration is counting on confusion to keep this from becoming a permanent political wound. But Obama voters — including prominent ones — see this not as an issue about birth control or even abortion (an issue they’ve overlooked in Obama’s case before), but as an issue of religious liberty and the nature of our nation.

  Mark Rienzi walks through some of the most frequently asked questions with National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez. Rienzi is senior counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and a professor of constitutional law at the Catholic University of America (Lopez’s alma mater).
  

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• A Post-American World?
  

  In a scathing denunciation of Mitt Romney last week, Fareed Zakaria praised Barack Obama for his nuanced understanding of what Zakaria has called the “Post-American World”:

  This is a new world, very different from the America-centric one we got used to over the last generation. Obama has succeeded in preserving and even enhancing U.S. influence in this world precisely because he has recognized these new forces at work. He has traveled to the emerging nations and spoken admiringly of their rise. He replaced the old Western club and made the Group of 20 the central decision-making forum for global economic affairs. By emphasizing multilateral organizations, alliance structures and international legitimacy, he got results. It was Chinese and Russian cooperation that produced tougher sanctions against Iran. It was the Arab League’s formal request last year that made Western intervention in Libya uncontroversial.

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• Three Lessons from the ‘Beauty Contests’
  

  Did Tuesday’s results matter? Nowhere near as much as the results from Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Florida mattered. But primary campaigns rarely reach stasis; momentum shifts, ebbs, and flows, and the trio of contests yesterday offered a few hints that the storyline will change once again.

  Rick Santorum is on the verge of overtaking Newt Gingrich as the anti-Romney alternative.

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• The Coming Israel–Iran Confrontation
  

  Events are conspiring to precipitate a cataclysmic confrontation with Iran. Time has nearly expired for international sanctions — even the so-called tough and crippling ones — to keep Iran from acquiring deliverable nuclear weapons. The U.S. soon will not be able to avoid making a choice: Will it meet the challenge of the coming confrontation or shrink from it? Either way, there will be consequences for U.S. interests abroad and at home.

  During last Friday’s prayers in Tehran, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Iran would continue its nuclear program. His remarks were broadcast on Iranian state television. In these remarks to worshippers, Khamenei reiterated Iran’s threat to wipe Israel — “a cancerous tumor that should be cut and will be cut” — off the map, and averred that Iran will aid any nation or group that attacks Israel. The Associated Press reports that he explicitly acknowledged that Iran has supported and will support Hezbollah and Hamas attacks.

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• The President’s War on Religious Freedom
  

  In his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus, Pope John Paul II delivered a scathing critique of socialism, declaring that “the fundamental error of socialism is anthropological in nature. Socialism considers the individual person simply as an element, a molecule within the social organism, so that the good of the individual is completely subordinated. . . . Socialism likewise maintains that the good of the individual can be realized without reference to his free choice, to the unique and exclusive responsibility which he exercises in the face of good or evil.”

  Pope John Paul II’s indictment of socialism is illustrated in the Obama administration’s recent edict requiring nearly all employers — including Catholic hospitals, schools, and charities — to cover sterilizations and contraception in their employees’ health-care plans. Because “contraception” includes abortifacients, this decision — made under the powers granted to the executive branch under Obamacare — also threatens many Protestant employers.

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• Why Newt Fights
  

  Last Saturday, in a dimly lit ballroom on the Las Vegas strip, Newt Gingrich stood before a row of television cameras, exhausted and showing it.

  Hours earlier, Gingrich had lost the Nevada caucuses to Mitt Romney by nearly 30 points. His poor showing was the culmination of a long and disappointing week, coming four days after Romney swept Florida’s primary. Gingrich, who had won South Carolina’s primary in late January, was suddenly deflated, sparring with skeptical Beltway reporters about whether his campaign could survive.

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