ANALYSIS/OPINION:

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is leading the charge against President Trump’s order to temporarily halt immigrants from seven Middle Eastern countries identified by the Obama administration as hotbeds of terrorism.

So far, they have managed to find sympathetic judges in friendly climes such as the Ninth Circuit.

The group had promptly filed a lawsuit against the order, which it calls “Trump’s Muslim ban,” despite the fact that it allows in travelers from more than 40 other Muslim majority nations comprising more than a billion people, plus India, which has an estimated 300 million Muslims.

Last week, 50 ACLU affiliates filed Freedom of Information Act requests with Customs and Border Protection field offices inquiring how the new policy was being enforced at airports.

Declaring war, ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero boasted in a blog post that “if we carpet-bomb the Trump administration with lawsuits, we can rob it of momentum and gum up the machinery of its anti-civil liberties and anti-civil rights agenda.”

He also cheered the ongoing, zany left wing protests, some of which have been accompanied by violent vandalism, saying, “The protests across the country — in the streets and at airports and courthouses — have been truly exhilarating.”

Exhilarating? Maybe for the mobs who are trying to shut down freedom of speech for anyone but themselves. Because they live in a bubble reinforced by the liberal media, the ACLU’s brain trust apparently doesn’t realize or care that it’s out of step with most Americans, who polls show support the temporary travel restrictions and want secure borders.

ACLU Legal Director David Cole on Jan. 28 castigated the president for clearly identifying America’s enemies:

“In signing the executive order on Friday, Trump pledged to ‘keep radical Islamic terrorists out of the United States of America.’ Not ‘terrorists.’ Not ‘radical terrorists.’ But only ‘radical Islamic terrorists.’ Of course we should be keeping terrorists out, but why limit our concern to those of one faith?”

Maybe because “radical Islamic terrorists,” unlike Catholics, Methodists, Mormons, Hindus or Buddhists, are committing terrorist acts every day around the world and have specifically pledged to wipe the United States and Israel off the map? Honestly, do you know any Presbyterians or Zen practitioners who are turning their sweet young children into suicide bombers?

“Radical Islamic terrorists” killed 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001. And they blew up the Boston Marathon with pressure cooker bombs hidden in knapsacks in April 2013, killing three people and leaving 264 others without limbs or with other serious injuries. They have committed mass murder at Fort Hood, Texas, San Bernardino, Calif. and Orlando, Florida, and beheaded a woman in Oklahoma, among other atrocities.

“Radical Islamic terrorists” of ISIS have tortured, raped and crucified countless Christians and Yazidis and burned down churches, as have “radical Islamic terrorists” in many countries in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. They also target Muslims who disagree with their brand of Islam, strapping suicide bombs to hapless women and children, some of them mentally impaired and unable to resist.

In Germany, Angela Merkel’s policy of flooding her country with a million migrants, many of them unmarried young men, has destabilized her government and led to countless crimes against German citizens. Even in the face of at least 1,200 sexual assaults, including dozens of rapes, by young, male migrant gangs during the 2015-2016 New Year’s Eve celebrations in Cologne and other German cities, she stuck to her guns, oblivious to the outcries. Now that she’s running for re-election, she says she’s shocked, shocked that migrants are causing problems in Germany.

In France, the terrorized city of Paris is spending $22 million on a barrier around the Eiffel Tower. It is hoped the new structure will be sound enough to withstand mobs of rampaging Quakers, Baptists or American tourists from Long Island. “Sadly, the risk of terrorism hasn’t gone away,” Deputy Mayor Jean-Franois Martins told a press conference. “It’s not a wall, it’s an aesthetic perimeter.” Whatever.

In the lawsuit to end the “ban” on travelers from the seven countries where terrorists flourish, the ACLU attorneys warned, “Rarely in American history has governmental intent to discriminate against a particular faith and its adherents been so plain.”

Well, they might want to research Thomas Jefferson about that. He acquired a Koran specifically for insight into how he could defeat the Muslim pirates of the Barbary Coast of North Africa who were laying waste to American shipping and enslaving our sailors.

Adding to their litany of efforts to leave America less secure, the ACLU just issued a report that says the Transportation Security Administration shouldn’t train its agents to look for suspicious behavior in airports. “Behavior detection” doesn’t work, the ACLU says, because lots of people at airports look nervous or shifty.

Perhaps they’re on to something, because who would know better than they about the nuances of shiftiness?

• Robert Knight is a senior fellow for the American Civil Rights Union.

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