Detroit: Last One Leaving, Turn Off the Spite

The needless waste resulting from the Detroit City Council dithering away the state’s offer to lease Belle Isle last week is all the more pathetic for having been completely predictable. Detroiters rarely pass up a chance to make things worse.

John Fund, writing at NRO, cites Detroit as an example of several American cities that are dying, “and the worst part is that these grievously ill patients often are refusing to take even the mildest medicine that would make things better.” (“America’s Suicidal Cities”).

To Fund, the Belle Isle plan sounded like:

a win-win idea, but Detroit’s city council nixed it at a tumultuous meeting on Tuesday night. The council voted 6 to 3 to not even put the proposal on its agenda. Governor Rick Snyder’s office then promptly withdrew the offer because a key deadline for the state’s budget wouldn’t be met.

Opponents who showed up at the meeting angrily denounced the proposal as akin to selling the island to outsiders. “The governor has his hands on our jewels,” one skeptic told the council.

Fund quotes Detroit News cartoonist and writer Henry Payne telling him “the tenor of the council meeting depressed him. ‘It was a throwback to old conspiracy theories that have long prevented progress in Detroit,’ he told me. ‘Several speakers raved on about the Belle Isle deal being a suburban plot to take over Detroit.’”

That’s because the conspiracy theories Payne has in mind aren’t old at all – they’re quite current, alive and well. (If you doubt it, listen to Mildred Gaddis’s show for a week or two). John Carlisle at the Detroit Free Press gave an account of one “regular” at council meetings denouncing the Belle Isle rescue plan last Tuesday:

“It’s a plan to have us out of Detroit and that island out there,” he said. “They don’t want that island out there for black people to enjoy. They want to turn that island into something other than a black island. Detroit is under attack. It’s under assault, and nobody wants to admit it, but it is.” (“John Carlisle: City Council's regular speakers put on a good show”).

Stephen Henderson, editorial page editor at the Free Press, thinks things could have been much worse. “Truth be told, this council is eons better than what we were faced with four years ago, when members were literally singing ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ in defiance of the plan to regionalize Cobo Hall’s management.’”

Many of us regularly ask ourselves why Detroit’s leaders consistently make such self-defeating choices? Fund says “[t]here are many explanations, but a common one is that Detroit has a reactionary political class that views almost any proposed change as smacking of ‘union busting’ or ‘selling off the city’ to white interests.”

Fund is writing on his tiptoes when he says there are many explanations, because there’s really only one that makes sense:

Racism.

And I don’t mean white racism against blacks, but the other way around. Only a simmering hatred for white people explains why so many Detroiters, year in and year out, choose such awful leaders and strangle progress rather than be found making common cause with “people who don’t look like us.”

All racism is bad, including the kind eating away at millions of America’s blacks. That should be obvious, but the fact is pointedly absent from any of the warmed-over homilies from the sixties and seventies slopped up regularly to explain things to the rest of us.

There’s obviously no equivalence between the social and political harm done to blacks by slavery and Jim Crow, and whatever social harm whites endure as a result of black racism: yet that’s not the important thing anymore. The harm that matters most is the harm to the souls of the haters themselves. The savagery of the hatred of whites for blacks in the segregated South was surely all the worse for the absence of the kinds of checks Southern society’s mediating institutions – its families, its churches, its law courts – provided in other areas but refused to provide in matters of racial prejudice. Passions like those are hard enough to keep down when strict sanctions are in place to tame them; remove those sanctions and a lot of ugliness is sure to follow.

In spite of that, in response to the civil-rights movement and the racial strife of the 50s and 60s something very remarkable happened: a genuine moral awakening. White society accepted – if not completely and all in a single moment, at least eventually and within an astoundingly short period of a few years, and from the heart -- all the lessons of the civil-rights leaders: that blacks and whites are equal, that prejudice is irrational, and that denying people their rights because of the color of their skin is immoral.  Critically, it wasn’t only laws that changed, but private behaviors as well. The same religious, social, cultural, and familial inhibitors that before had failed to punish racist tendencies now were punishing them to the nth degree; outbursts against blacks became a rare occurrence even among whites in unmixed company. It’s nothing these days to observe in places where America’s working-class whites congregate a pair of redneck grandparents doting on a black grandchild, perhaps born to one of their children, perhaps adopted, without a care in the world for its race.

This gigantic historical fact of the majority culture’s transformation  is one of the best-kept open secrets of our time, partly because the phenomenon of white guilt keeps us from seeing it, and partly because race hustlers work overtime to deny it. But their work’s getting harder. To keep the cauldrons of racial hate at a steady boil they’ve had to keep turning up the rhetorical dial, which now is past saying that things are just as bad for America’s blacks now as they were during Jim Crow, to saying that blacks are hardly better off now than during the days of slavery. Only a community wallowing in racial resentment would react to such demagogues with anything but tar and feathers.

Still, it was the social and cultural inhibitors that played a critical role in this transformation of the majority culture in response to the civil-rights movement, and still play that role. And those same inhibitors are barely at work in the black community, if they exist at all. In a community that embraces the pretense that black racism is either a contradiction in terms, or else a justifiable reaction to “injustice,” anti-white hostility (i.e., racism), will be regarded as, at worst, tolerable, and at best, virtuous. A young black child might hear from every model provided for him to emulate -- from the elders in his family, from the clergy in his church, and from his teachers at school -- the same poisonous message that white folks care for nothing more than hurting him. Forget the hopeless wrangle over whether that’s really true or not. Focus on what must become the content of that child’s character if this is what’s been used to fill it up? Will he, like those outraged citizens at last week’s council meeting, join in with the old hymn that everything is all “about race and disrespect”?

In this sense, Detroit’s problems aren’t complex at all. They’ll continue to be intractable as long as Detroit wages a futile war of getting even with against “outsiders” who aren’t trying to get even with them. Regardless, those outsiders aren’t going to keep watching resources poured down the drains of an unreformable kleptocracy.

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Egyptians Condemn Americans To Die

From NRO:

Will the U.S. Defend Constitutional Freedoms from Egyptian Threats?

By Paul Marshall

Iranian-American Pastor Saeed Abedini, now condemned to eight years imprisonment by the Iranian government for raising funds for an orphanage, is not the only American under threat from a foreign government.

On Tuesday, the Cairo Criminal Court reaffirmed a death sentence for “insulting Islam” and “undermining national unity” on seven Copts, Egyptian Christians, accused of being involved in creating the now infamous video “The Innocence of Muslims.” This short, obscure video was initially falsely implicated by the American government in the killing of American diplomats in Benghazi.

Those condemned to death include Morris Sadek, a lawyer and founder of the National American Coptic Assembly, Coptic priest Father Aziz Khalil, Fikri Abdel Masih Zaklma (known as Esmat Zaklma), Nabil Adib Besada, media coordinator of the National American Coptic Assembly, Eliyah Basile (known as Nicholas Basile Nicholas), Nahed Mahmoud Metwally (known as Fibie Abdel Masih), and Nader Farid Fawzi Nicholas. One is a resident of Australia, another of Canada, and five of them are residents of the United States. In addition, American micro-pastor Terry Jones, famous for his threats to burn a koran, and his subsequent burning of one, was sentenced to five years in prison, despite his having no connection to Egypt whatsoever.

There were many irregularities in the case. The death sentences were handed down despite the fact that, according to Egyptian law, the death penalty may be imposed only in three instances — espionage, premeditated murder, and rape. But, in the current Egypt, the constitution passed in December by a majority of a minority gives primacy to an undefined “sharia,” which has the practical effect that the courts can run wild. Plus the trials were conducted in absentia.

However, the irregularities are a side issue. Even if the proceedings had been rigidly regular under Egyptian law, the bottom line is that Egyptian courts have condemned to death people in America for exercising rights protected under the American constitution.

So far, despite the fact that even Al Jazeera has accurately publicized the case, the administration has not publicly responded to this Egyptian sentence of death on those under the U.S. government’s constitutional protection. Is the American government willing to vigorously defend freedom of speech, religion, and the press of those it is sworn to protect, regardless of how unpopular their views might be?

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He’s Got Legos, and He Knows How to Use ‘Em

A Cape Cod five-year-old has gotten himself in trouble for, as one Hyannis news report puts it, pretending to “fire on” classmates with a gun he made out of two Lego pieces. In this case what’s connoted by the menacing phrase “fire on” is that the kid took his plastic gun and “made shooting sounds”with it.

HYANNIS – Barnstable school officials are facing criticism from as far away as Arizona and Colorado over the decision to reprimand a Hyannis West Elementary School student who pretended to fire on fellow students last week with a toy gun he made out of Legos.

In a statement released Thursday, Barnstable Public Schools Superintendent Mary Czajkowski reiterated her position on the incident, which school officials said made other students uncomfortable.

“Parents and other members of the community have a right to expect educators in our schools to address any potentially harmful or threatening situation swiftly and appropriately,” she wrote in the statement. “The teacher and school principal acted in accordance with school and district policy.” (“Hyannis West officials criticized for Lego gun incident”).

School administrators believe they’re being unfairly criticized because the shooter, Joseph, had been repeatedly warned before this that his behavior in the day care was “unacceptable.” “Some children are coming in with no structure, no guidelines for expectations, for how to behave and how to act,” the superintendent said, strongly implying that Joseph was that kind of kid. Consequently, a letter of reprimand went home with him, warning that Joseph faced suspension if he got written up again.

Maybe the kid really is a behavior problem, in which case school officials are well within bounds to clamp down.  I’m sure that thousands of times a day school officials and angry mothers clash over whether or not the little angels deserve punishment.

But that’s not exactly what this is. The school superintendent justified the school’s response not based on disciplinary policy, but on safety: “Parents and other members of the community have a right to expect educators in our schools to address any potentially harmful or threatening situation swiftly and appropriately.” Joseph’s misbehavior was a “threatening situation.” When he kept on with his shooting-sound spree in spite of orders to stop, it became clear he didn’t just have a time-out coming: he needed to be disarmed.

Something similar happened in Maryland last month when  a 6-year-old was suspended from his public school “for pointing his finger like a gun and saying ‘pow,’ an incident school officials characterized in a disciplinary letter as a threat ‘to shoot a student.’”     That poor kid’s parents were able to get his record expunged, but it took getting an attorney to do it; the attorney also felt it necessary to state for the record that “the boy had no intention to shoot anyone.”  It took an attorney to figure that out?

In either case school officials really seemed not to know there was a difference between small boys going “bang! bang! bang!” and what law-enforcement types call an “active shooting situation.” 

I’ve noticed this inability to make distinctions is widespread in the outspoken gun-control community. It correlates with the premise that all firearms are evil in themselves, even to the extent of the abstract idea of a firearm. When all you know is that a gun is a gun is a gun, (even when it’s not a gun at all, but only a finger or a drawing of a gun), then you’ll see a pointed finger combined with the word “pow” as a threat. 

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The Prophet Speaks

Apes, Pigs, and F-16s

By Andrew C. McCarthy

When Mohamed Morsi dehumanizes Jews as “the descendants of apes and pigs,” there’s an elephant in the room. We find it here:

Those who incurred the curse of Allah and His wrath, those of whom some He transformed into apes and swine, those who worshipped evil — these are many times worse in rank, and far more astray from the even Path!

You see, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood mahoff–turned–president did not conjure up the apes-and-pigs riff on his own. When Morsi fulminates that Muslims “must not forget to nurse our children and grandchildren on hatred towards those Zionists and Jews, and all those who support them,” he is taking his cues straight from the Koran. Or rather, from the Holy Koran, as “progressive” American politicians take pains to call it in the off hours from their campaign to drive every last vestige of Judeo-Christian culture from the public square.

The excerpt above is not from the Life and Times of Mohamed Morsi. It originates with that other Mohammed. Specifically, it is Sura 5:60 of the Koran, the tome Muslims take to be the immutable, verbatim commands of Allah, as revealed to the prophet. And as Andrew Bostom illustrates (with a disquieting amplitude of examples), the verse is not an outlier. It states an Islamic leitmotif.

Contrary to the fairy tale weaved by apologists for Islamists on both sides of America’s political aisle, Jew hatred is not a pathogen insidiously injected into Islam by the Nazis (with whom Middle Eastern Muslims enthusiastically aligned). Nor did the ummah come by it through exposure to other strains of anti-Semitism that blight the history of Christendom. Jew hatred is ingrained in Islamic doctrine. Consequently, despite the efforts of enlightened Muslim reformers, Jew hatred is — and will remain — a pillar of Islamist ideology.

You may recall hearing this little ditty from the Hamas charter — often echoed by ministers of the Palestinian Authority and in the preachments of Brotherhood jurist Yusuf al-Qaradawi, on whose every word millions hang weekly on al-Jazeera (or is it al-Gore?):

The Day of Resurrection will not arrive until the Muslims make war against the Jews and kill them, and until a Jew hiding behind a rock and tree, and the rock and tree will say: “Oh Muslim, Oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him!”

Again, these are not sentiments dreamt up by “violent extremists” waging a modern, purely political “resistance” against oppressive “Zionists.” The prophet’s admonition that Muslims will be spared the hellfire by killing Jews is repeated in numerous authoritative hadiths (see, e.g., Sahih Muslim Book 41, No. 6985; Sahih Bukhari Volume 4, Book 56, No. 791).

Hadiths, it is worth emphasizing, are the recorded actions and instructions of Mohammed, who is taken by Muslims to be the “perfect example” they are to emulate. And in case you suppose, after years of listening to Bill Clinton, George Bush, and Barack Obama, that the prophet must ultimately have come around on the Jews, you might want to rethink that one. Another hadith, relating Mohammed’s dying words, recounts his final plea: “May Allah curse the Jews and the Christians.” (Sahih Bukhari Volume 1, Book 8, No. 427.)

Now of course, none of this is to say that it is impossible for Islam to evolve beyond anti-Semitism. As individuals, millions of Muslims want no part of the ancient hatreds. As scholars and activists, a number of Muslim reformers admirably endeavor to erase this legacy by limiting it to its historical context, reducing it to allegory, or casting doubt on its provenance. Let’s hope these efforts eventually bear fruit. After all, as noted above, anti-Semitism stains the West’s legacy, too; and as discussed in this space before, the history of Christianity in America is a history of evolving beyond punishments and practices akin to those we today presume to look down our noses at as if we were total strangers to invidious discrimination and assaults on freedom of speech and conscience.

Nevertheless, the humility with which we must acknowledge this history is not an excuse for failing to grapple with what it means. Elite Western opinion came to condemn what it once practiced by correctly reasoning that those noxious practices cut against the grain of our guiding doctrine, which is predominantly Christian. Evolution was in no way easy, but it was logical.

In Islam, to the contrary, the doctrine itself is the most daunting barrier against evolution. And now, with the self-defeating encouragement of the West, Islamic-supremacist ideology has, throughout the Middle East, broken out of the shackles that kept it in check. The result of this “democratization” (the regnant euphemism for sharia installed by popular vote) is an increasingly rabid rise of intolerance.

The answer to this challenge is to take the Islamists head-on. It is to show them for what they truly are: enemies of civil rights, totalitarian tormentors of women and non-Muslims. The answer is not to arm them — as the Obama administration, with the maddening support of some leading Republicans, is arming Morsi’s regime — with a score of F-16 fighter jets and a couple of hundred Abrams tanks.

When not manufacturing history, tears, and indignation this week during her long-overdue testimony on the Benghazi massacre, outgoing secretary of state Hillary Clinton stunned careful listeners by repeatedly mentioning the “global jihad” against America. These were stark violations of Obama-administration strictures against any reference to Islam in discussions of the threat to the West.

They also marked quite a departure for Mrs. Clinton. She has played no small part in propagating the “Islamophobia” canard. She has championed the imposition of sharia blasphemy standards on speech that is protected by the First Amendment. And, with an assist from Senator John McCain, she has cowed 99 percent of Beltway Republicans into silence over the longstanding ties of her top adviser, Huma Abedin, to the Muslim Brotherhood and to an al-Qaeda financier, Abdullah Omar Naseef, whose now-defunct “charity” (the Rabita Trust) was designated as a global terrorist organization under American law. Who knows: Maybe someday, after enough F-16 transfers and sharia constitutions, Charles Krauthammer will be moved to a fleeting mention of these irrefutable facts, making it socially acceptable for our heroes to come out from under their desks and talk about the national-security implications. I can dream, can’t I?

In the Clinton tradition, there was more calculated confusion than clarity in the secretary’s meandering testimony. Mrs. Clinton frets over the “jihadists” but insists that we must be able to “partner” with the region’s Islamists . . . like Morsi and the Brotherhood. Do you suppose she’s noticed that the Muslim Brotherhood demands the release of the Blind Sheikh, just like al-Qaeda does? That Morsi and Hamas (the Brotherhood’s Palestinian terror branch) publicly yearn for the destruction of Israel, just like al-Qaeda does? That the Brotherhood’s top priority is the imposition of sharia, the same imperative that drives al-Qaeda’s rampage?

Alas, this is not a series of strange coincidences. These are the major points that define a Muslim — violent or nonviolent — as an Islamist. When you “partner” with Islamists, you are abetting the global jihad, not opposing it. When you arm Islamists, you become a willing participant in your own undoing.

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‘March of the Islamists’

Tristan MConnell writes:

March of the Islamists brings death and desolation in Mali

She feared the armed Islamic militants who patrolled the sand-blown streets and narrow alleys of Timbuktu, enforcing the strict Islamic laws imposed on the town when they took over last April.

Like any 20-year-old woman, she missed her friends and her school, nightclubs and dancing. Most of all, she said, she missed the music: "Before the Islamists came, life was so good. We had fun. But now there is a complete lack of freedom."

In November, Ms Walet fled to the capital, Bamako, clad in a long, dark dress and a veil that covered all but her eyes. She now lives with an aunt who has taken in 15 relatives in recent months who fled from the north.

"I was afraid all the time," Ms Walet said. In the safety of Bamako, she allows her long braids to hang loose, wears jewellery again and a bright, coloured off-the-shoulder dress. "Timbuktu was like a prison," she said.

Residents of Mali's northern cities had good reason to fear the Islamists, who meted out brutal punishments, such as amputations, floggings, and stonings to death.

Groups including al-Qa'ida in the Islamic Maghreb supported and then hijacked a rebellion by Tuareg separatists last year.

When the Islamists arrived in Timbuktu, they destroyed bars, churches and government buildings.

They looted, smashed bottles of alcohol and tore down crucifixes. Schools were closed.

Within days, the Malian flag had been replaced by the black flag of jihad and armed, bearded men were patrolling the streets in long tunics and turbans.

Music and television were forbidden, as were the football matches played every evening. Women either stayed at home or were forced to cover up completely.

"Life in Timbuktu changed," said Mohamed Traore, 41. "We were living together, Christians and Muslims, we helped each other, supported each other, even married each other."

Malian soldiers captured by the militants were routinely executed, according to Cisse Aziz, from Gao. Walking to the bus stop, he passed a barracks where, he said, the severed heads of Malian soldiers had been put on display on the wall.

Perceived criminals and traitors received awful punishments. Truck driver Mouctar Toure, 26, had his right hand hacked off for hiding Malian army weapons from the militants. Chanting "Allahu akbar" (God is greatest), the militants, with AK47s slung over their shoulders, tied him to a chair and fastened a rope around his wrist. For 20 excruciating minutes one of them sawed through flesh and bone with a kitchen knife until the driver's hand fell into the dirt at his feet.

The amputation two months ago was allegedly ordered by Mr Toure's cousin, Alou, who had become head of the Islamic police in town. "I've known him since we were kids," said Mr Toure. "He wasn't an Islamist before but they asked for volunteers and he joined them. He became like a devil in Gao."

Mr Toure now spends his days sitting by the roadside in Bamako. "I hope he is dead," said Mr Toure of his cousin.

On Saturday, French and Malian troops entered Gao after days of airstrikes and the Islamic militants are being steadily pushed from the towns they have occupied across northern Mali.

Reports have emerged of deadly reprisals by the Malian army - and among those who suffered under the the Islamists there is no sympathy, just a desire for revenge. Another man who had his right hand amputated said he would like the chance to "do more to them than they did to me. I'd cut the flesh from their bones."

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‘Britain’s National Sickness’

Melanie Phillips writes:

For the fact is that Israel is not trying to exterminate the Palestinians – indeed how could this possibly be the case, since the Palestinian population has more than quadrupled since the rebirth of Israel in 1948. Nor are the Israelis oppressing the Palestinians, who have benefited from some of the highest rises in GDP and lowest child mortality ratios in the Middle East.

Nor are the Israelis behaving inhumanely; it is the Palestinians who are committing crimes against humanity by targeting Israeli innocents for mass murder without remission, both from Gaza and from the West Bank. It is the Palestinians, in the West Bank as well as Gaza, who are brainwashed from the cradle to hate Jews and to believe that murdering Israelis is their highest glory. Which they have been doing in Israel and before that in Palestine for more than a century– despite the fact that, as the international community laid down in binding treaty in 1920, the Jews alone had the inalienable and historic right to settle throughout Palestine, including not just present-day Israel but also the West Bank and Gaza.

Read the rest of it here.

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‘Throw Eraser Only in Emergency’

Ohio teachers are taking different lessons from the school shooting in Newtown last month. As could be expected, many of the teachers and school staff would prefer to deal with the remote possibility of a shooter getting into their school by continuing to keep themselves and their schools disarmed. Some of them have been signing up for courses that – without the use of weapons -- “teach ways educators can prevent shootings and save lives once a shooter enters a school.” (“Ohio teachers train to stop active shooters”).

James Burke, an instructor at the Montgomery County Sheriff's Office, leads the four-hour training sessions, which focus on weapon-free techniques to stop active shooters - from identifying students as potential shooters to what to do once a shooter is in the classroom.

Burke said, at that point, "You have to fight."

Yes, you would have to fight – or give up and die and let your pupils be killed. But I have to hope that while Burke was saying this there weren’t a classroom full of teachers furiously underlining  in their notebooks: “HAVE TO FIGHT” as if it had really not occurred to them before.

But having raised the point of responding to an active shooter with an actual act of self-defense, Burke turns out to have limited suggestions for “weapons-free techniques.” The report mentioned only two: “Distract the shooter by throwing objects to make time for students to escape,” and, "Stab him with a pair of scissors.”

Burke’s suggestion about the scissors raises the twin problems that using scissors to stab someone violates weapons-free defense doctrine, and that using school scissors to stab someone also runs afoul of the rules of common sense.

Not that I’m blaming Burke: it can’t be easy to explain to his class how to handle an attacker who picked you and your classroom as targets in the first place just because you’re all weapons-free fish in a barrel. The plot device of the unarmed hero needing to overcome a pathological attacker with a gun using just  his wits is a standard device in thrillers, suspenseful precisely because the audience is aware just how badly stacked the odds are in the shooter’s favor. Burke follows up his scissors defense by urging his class to “do whatever you need to do but you need to think about it beforehand . . . . I'm not telling you have to be ninjas and disarm people, but you've got to do something."

Yes, they do have to do something – and I’ll bet people even signed up for his class expecting that Burke could offer a more specific suggestion about what to do than “you've got to do something.” Expect attendance in future sections of the course to drop off.

Meanwhile, a different set of  Ohio teachers actually did think beforehand about what they might need to do in such circumstances, and decided it would be a good idea to get themselves armed.

School teachers in Texas and Ohio are flocking to free firearms classes in the wake of the Connecticut elementary school massacre, some vowing to protect their students with guns even at the risk of losing their jobs.

In Ohio, more than 900 teachers, administrators and school employees asked to take part in the Buckeye Firearms Association’s newly created, three-day gun training program, the association said.

In Texas, an $85 Concealed Handgun License (CHL) course offered at no cost to teachers filled 400 spots immediately, forcing the school to offer another class, one instructor said.

“Any teacher who is licensed and chooses to be armed should be able to be armed,” said Gerald Valentino, co-founder of the Buckeye Firearms Association. “It should be every teacher’s choice.” (“Teachers In Ohio, Texas Flock To Free Gun Training Classes”).

Ten percent of the teachers taking the free courses were kindergarten teachers.

It’s no surprise that not everyone likes this idea. “Critics ridicule arming teachers as a foolhardy idea promoted by overzealous gun enthusiasts, saying it would only add danger to the classroom while distracting teachers from their job of educating children.”

We wonder if these critics would describe as “foolhardy”  instructor James Burke urging teachers to throw school supplies at active shooters and arm themselves with scissors. And don’t all these courses assume that an active shooter has already distracted teachers from their job of educating children, forcing upon them the urgent new priority of protecting children?

Gun control advocates shouldn’t get away with having it both ways. After Newtown they went wild insisting that the massacre proves that legal gun ownership places every American child at imminent risk (and unless the NRA could answer the riddle of how to prevent the next Newtown, gun owners would have to start giving up their guns). America’s schoolkids were sitting ducks. After NRA spokesman Wayne LaPierre took the bait and inartfully suggested that “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” he was ridiculed in the media as the “CRAZIEST MAN ON EARTH.” (Oh? At least he didn’t suggest stopping a bad guy with a gun with a pair of scissors.) When more and more commentators started popping up saying that armed defenders in schools might not be such a bad idea, gun controllers decided that America’s classrooms were mostly safe, after all; so it would be just stupid to burden Miss Crabtree with having to lug around a loaded Glock all day. “Not to mention,” explained Angela Wallace at The Examiner, “it is not the responsibility of teachers to play armed guard, regardless of how much they would want to do this due to their natural instinct to protect our children.”

I have no idea whether or not teachers have a “natural instinct” to protect children. But I do believe it’s the professional duty of teachers to protect them. Children’s parents aren’t armed guards, either, but might some time have to step in as one regardless, the same as they step in as lifeguards, fire fighters, animal control experts, sewer divers, tree climbers – or a thousand other risky specialties when exigent circumstances prevent them from waiting for the real thing.

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Unconditional Surrender?

From Voice of America:

France Looking for 'Total Reconquest' of Mali

French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian says France will accept nothing less than the "total reconquest" of Mali from Islamist militants.

Le Drian told French television Sunday that his forces "will not leave any pockets" of resistance.

. . . . The extremists seized control of northern Mali after renegade soldiers toppled the government in March, leaving a temporary power vacuum. The militants have imposed harsh conservative Islamic law across the north. France is Mali's former colonial ruler and still has economic and political interests there.

Refreshing to see such clarity as to the nature of the enemy – “Islamists” -- and the most effective strategy for dealing with jihadists: “total reconquest.”

Personally, I wish France the best. It occurred to me some time back that I had little basis for my Yankeecentric assumption that the USA was the only nation able to beat back the 21^st-Century scourge of Islamic belligerence.

Why not the French?  They’ve been at this a lot longer than we have.  It was the Franks under the leadership of Charles Martel who stopped the European advance of Islam at the Battle of Tours in 732.

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Bell, Book, -- and Scented Candle

Yet another indicator of things to come in America is the incident of the Atlanta pastor, Rev. Louie Giglio, being banned from saying a benediction at President Obama’s inaugural because he gave a sermon in the mid-1990s critical of homosexuality. (“Louie Giglio pulls out of inauguration over anti-gay comments”).

The decision has been validly blasted as an example of political correctness run amok (as if PC ever runs any other way). It’s also a further instance of the Left’s strategy of persecuting Christianity by falsifying its message.

Controversies like these are being used to redefine normative Christianity so that behaviors the Church has always recognized as sinful are now being praised as pleasing to God and deserving of liturgical celebration.

This new kind of persecution isn’t like the old kind, which tried to eradicate Christianity from society by banishing its adherents into lead mines or feeding them to lions; it didn’t work, anyway, as the number of Christians increased during times of persecution. The new method entails eradicating Christian teachings from Christians, by means of the slow and steady pressure of shaming us from confessing any but this harmless and neutered shell of the faith.

A case in point: part of me, when I wrote about redefining Christianity above, felt an impulse, out of fairness towards that other, widespread version of Christianity that calls itself liberal and progressive, to modify my use of “Christianity” with an adjective like “conservative,” or “traditional.” I chose to resist that reflex as simply a Pavlovian response to social conditioning, of which the discrediting of Rev. Giglio is only the most recent example. While I can’t deny that Americans are by and large just as at home with liberal religious ideas as conservative ones, the Left has no interest in – and doesn’t – try to silence Christians for adhering to progressive dogma, especially on homosexuality. No one ever clamors to marginalize a Reverend Al Sharpton, or a Reverend Jeremiah Wright. When Michael Moore manages to get heckled at the New York Film Critics Awards for praising gay invaders who desecrated the Sacrament at a Catholic Mass it’s the heckler who gets skewered by the Left. Nor does Billy Graham’s hard-won popularity with most Americans protect him when he dares to encourage Christians to vote biblical values.

Even the Reverend Jim Wallis, whose cred in the Obama White House extends to being described as Obama’s spiritual adviser, must go under the bus because he registered less than 100% commitment on same-sex marriage. Wallis’s Sojourners’ website declined to run an ad featuring lesbian parents attending church, and the yipping from the Left included Jim Naughton, an Episcopal insider in D.C., darkly warning that “people inviting Wallis to policy briefings and White House meetings should realize that he ‘is far to the right of the people he’s allowed to speak for.’”

Naughton’s warning that Wallis is only being “allowed” to speak for his constituency lends support to my view that the Left has taken up the old ecclesiastical device of the anathema, only minus the spiritual authority or the divine guidance that goes with it – “If any one saith thus and so, let him be anathema.”

The Left has effectively used its power to enforce orthodoxy and declare wrong-thinking people accursed to accomplish the first leg of their goal: extirpating from popular conversation the suggestion that homosexual activities are wrong. A poll released last week indicates that only 37% of Americans believe that homosexual behavior is a sin. The second leg – the normalizing of homosexual acts by means of the legal feint of national recognition of same-sex marriage – is within sight.

After giving Giglio the heave-ho, the White House clarified that replacement candidates had to demonstrate “beliefs [that] reflect this administration’s vision of inclusion and acceptance for all Americans.” As usual, the irony of Rev. Giglio being publicly humiliated to pacify the most exclusive and intolerant constituency in American history – in the name of “inclusiveness” no less – sank instantly below the notice of Obama’s compliant media.

Obama is entitled to have anyone he wants say a benediction at his inaugural – or no one at all. Things being what they are, we should all be grateful he hasn’t asked Mohammed Morsi to do it. What’s wrong is that he’s using the power of his office to enforce religious orthodoxy – or, more accurately, he’s allowing activists to co-opt the prestige of the presidency to do it. That neither St. Paul nor Benedict XVI could qualify as worthy to pronounce a blessing on the American president ought to be of concern to American Christians.

Homosexual activists view this as a “tipping point,” “interpreting Giglio’s withdrawal as a rejection of religious conservatives who don’t accept homosexuality — regardless of what other good works they do.” Whether it’s a tipping point or not I don’t know; I do know that when a combination of media, government officials, and a nest of Christian-hating poofters get to decide what kind of religious ideas should be accepted or rejected in America’s pulpits, things are not well with the Republic – nor with the Church.

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American Muslims Still Behind–As Hate-Crime Victims

David J. Rusin has contributed this at NRO:

A detailed analysis of FBI statistics covering ten full calendar years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks reveals that, on a per capita basis, American Muslims, contrary to spin, have been subjected to hate crimes less often than other prominent minorities. From 2002 to 2011, Muslims are estimated to have suffered hate crimes at a frequency of 6.0 incidents per 100,000 per year – 10 percent lower than blacks (6.7), 48 percent lower than homosexuals and bisexuals (11.5), and 59 percent lower than Jews (14.8). Americans should keep these numbers in mind whenever Islamists attempt to silence critics by invoking Muslim victimhood.

. . . .

As the usual voices fault “our oversaturated Islamophobic environment” and “growing anti-Muslim hate,” they neglect to mention how rare it is for an actual or perceived Muslim to die in a hate crime. By the FBI’s count, 74 people were killed in hate crimes (“murder and nonnegligent manslaughter” in Table 4) from 2002 to 2011, but not a single one in an anti-Muslim incident. Indeed, the FBI lists no anti-Muslim fatalities since 1995, corresponding to the earliest report available.

Why do Islamists obfuscate? The false picture of an epidemic of physical assaults on Muslims distracts Americans from Islamist hatred and enshrines Muslims as the country’s leading victim class, a strategy intended to intimidate citizens into remaining quiet about Islamic supremacism and lay the groundwork for granting Muslims special privileges and protections at the expense of others. In short, anti-Muslim hate crimes are a powerful Islamist weapon. (“Hate-Crime Stats Deflate ‘Islamophobia’ Myth”).

The Right (Not To Have to Bear the Sight of Someone Else) Bearing Arms

As is so often the case, the real menace signaled by the incident where a Denny’s restaurant in firearmophobic Illinois told detectives they had to take their naughty guns outside (“Belleville cops booted from Denny's for toting guns”) isn’t the official foo poo itself:  Denny’s mitigated that more or less immediately. 

The incident began about 10 a.m. Tuesday when five Belleville detectives went into the Denny’s at 1130 South Illinois Street, ordered food and began to eat. The detectives had badges on their belts or on chains around their necks, but they weren’t in uniform.

Belleville Capt. Donald Sax said restaurant manager David Rice then approached and told one of the detectives that a diner had complained about seeing one of the detectives carrying a gun.

Even though the detective told Rice all at the table were police officers, Rice insisted the detectives take their guns back out to their cars, Sax said.

According to Sax, Rice then told the officers that it is company policy to allow only uniformed officers to carry their guns into a restaurant and that a sign on the door stated that policy.

The officers all got up to leave, refusing to pay for their meal. As they were leaving, Sax said a Denny’s general manager, Michael Van, approached the group. He told them Rice was wrong and it was fine for them to stay and to keep their guns.

The detectives, whom Sax described as “embarrassed” by the incident, decided to leave anyway. Sax said the detectives made a point to check the door on their way out.

“There was no sign on the door (regarding firearms),” Sax said. “They all looked for it.”

Belleville Police Chief William Clay later issued an order to his troops, banning them from eating at that Denny’s when they are on duty or when they’re off duty and still in uniform. Off-duty and out of uniform, officers can eat where they want.

What worries me is the stage of civic degeneration we’ve reached when a diner in an example of Americana like Denny’s actually feels justified taking offense at the mere sight of a holstered firearm borne by a police officer, and that a restaurant manager would then actually respond with what the Belleville PD press release accurately called the “political stupidness” of insisting the detectives take their scary guns outside.

It’s this mentality, combining many times a day in small transactions like this, multiplied, that breaks us all down.

Is anyone surprised at all that public school administrators not only suspended a six-year old for pointing his fingers at classmates and saying “Pow,” but thereafter stated in a disciplinary letter to the boy’s parents that the finger-pointing was “a threat ‘to shoot a student’”? (“Boy, 6, suspended from Silver Spring school for pointing finger like a gun”).

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