A budget deal has been reached in Washington. It is a mammoth bill, at least 2,000 pages long. Conservatives are not happy, while the White House is applauding. I won’t ruin your Christmas by going through all the gory details, but I’ll just mention two.

Planned Parenthood gets full funding. So, too, does the Syrian refugee program, even as the administration continues to insist that no changes are needed to ensure that there are no jihadists among the refugees.

Here’s the bottom line: Congressional leaders faced a choice. One option was to risk a government shutdown, which the media would blame on congressional Republicans. The second option was to risk alienating the conservative base of the Republican Party.

The leadership decided that between these two unpleasant options, it was a better bet to risk alienating the conservative base than to have the media convince the American public that Republicans were shutting down the government at Christmas time.

I think their calculation is wrong, given the mood of the country and the fact that concerns about terrorism are front and center in everyone’s mind. (More on that below.)

What’s Wrong At Wheaton?

There is a constant drumbeat from the left and in the media that Muslims are the victims of a bigoted America. I think a more accurate description is that ever since the morning of 9/11, Americans of all faiths have been put upon, their routines upset and their lives endangered because of threats from Islamic supremacists.

By the way, there was another hate crime in New York recently. What, you didn’t read about it? How about this one? Or this one? In every case, the victims were Jewish.

According to the FBI’s own statistics, Jews are far more likely than Muslims to be victims of hate crimes in America. But you would never know that from the media or the Obama administration’s constant lectures.

Even though in the world we live in, Christians, Jews, Yazidis and other religious minorities are routinely victimized by radical Islamists, America’s elites are all in on the notion that Muslims are suffering in America. And it’s not just the elites in Washington.

A few days ago, Dr. Larycia Hawkins, a professor at Wheaton College, announced that she was going to show her solidarity with American Muslims by wearing the hijab through the Christmas season.

There has been no word on whether Dr. Hawkins ever thought of wearing the Star of David in solidarity with Israeli Jews who are being hacked to death on the streets of Jerusalem or threatened with a second Holocaust from the radicals in Iran.

There has been no word on whether she offered to wear a cross in solidarity with the Christians being beheaded or crucified by ISIS.

No, the heart of this professor, at one of the premier Christian colleges in America, is breaking over the alleged ill-treatment of American Muslims.

I suspect that when word got out, Wheaton may have heard from more than a few alumni because [Wednesday] the college announced that she was being put on administrative leave.

While Dr. Hawkins has freedom of expression, which those of us who live in non-Muslim majority nations still enjoy, she does not have a right to fuzzy theology at a Christian university. And her theology is indeed fuzzy.

In her public statement, Dr. Hawkins asserted that the God of the Bible and the god of the Koran are one and the same.

That cannot be true unless we believe God is a god who can’t make up His mind. As Wheaton’s administration pointed out, the God of the Bible is of a completely different nature than the god of the Koran. The relationship of the God of the Bible to man is a completely different relationship than that of the god of the Koran to mankind.

Dr. Hawkins has been placed on administrative leave so that she can clean up her theology. If she can’t, then the parents who have saved so long to send their kids to Wheaton would be more than justified in finding another institution for their children and their hard-earned dollars.

Obama’s Failure

According to the Pew Research Center, a majority of Americans (52%) now say that the government is failing to reduce the threat of terrorism — its lowest rating ever since 9/11. And 57% of Americans disapprove of Obama’s handling of the issue.

Protecting the country is the government’s first responsibility. On that score, the American people overwhelmingly agree that Barack Obama is failing.

And it’s not just Obama. Americans have watched our leaders refer to jihadi attacks as “workplace violence.”

They have read about the failures of our immigration system to check the social media posts of people coming into the country. They read about thousands of children walking across our border. (If little kids can walk in, who else is getting in?)

They have concluded — rightly so — that politically correct policies have created systemic failures across the entire federal government!