Dearborn: Still Home of the Brave

But how much longer Dearborn qualifies for membership in the Land of the Free is anybody’s guess.

How much guts should it need to fly an Israeli flag in Dearborn? I know I haven’t been willing to do it, though it’s occurred to me from time to time; I can’t guarantee the safety of my household.

But at least one Dearborn family, in which the husband is Lebanese-born, no less, has been willing to take the chance. With predictable results.

What the WDIV story doesn’t report is that the Dakhlallahs’ home is directly adjacent to Ford Road, where their Israeli flag was plainly visible to traffic passing through majority-Arab east Dearborn.  I pass that way myself on the way home from work, and was astounded to see that flag. 

And even more significant than its proximity to Ford Road, the Dakhlallahs’ home is directly across the street from Fordson High School, the first majority-Muslim high school in the country, and known in these parts, with good reason, as “Hezbollah High.” There couldn’t be a more provocative location from which to tempt Dearborn’s vindictive Jew-haters.

But I’m sure the Dakhlallahs had no intention of tempting anyone: they only wanted to show support for Israel, an expression they’re entitled to according to all that’s holy in America.

Unfortunately, most of what’s holy in America is being replaced with what’s holy in the Umma.  In Dearborn we’re expected to think twice about showing support for anything that might offend Muslims.

But speaking of flags, a few miles up the road from the Dakhlallahs’ house the Islamic Center of America has the past couple of weeks sprouted an impressively imposing black flag. Because I don’t read Arabic I won’t venture to translate the legend. (If you can, please let us know). In all likelihood, it says “Welcome to Dearborn!,” the city the mosque’s Iman Qazwini has described as the “Muslim capital of the West.”  Or perhaps it was raised for the significant commemoration of Ashura that took place on November 14; but I’m not sure it was flying then, nor why it would still be flying now.

Since 2001 Americans have come to associate the black flags of Islam with jihadi enthusiasm to make the rest of us slaves: we saw it at the beheading of Nicholas Berg, as a backdrop to the sermons of bin Laden, and when Muslim terrorists ripped down the American flag at the Cairo embassy last 9/11 and replaced it with a black Islamic flag.

Even other Muslims dread the sight of it at times. Sunnis in Afghanistan, where Shias were persecuted under the Taliban, worry about increasing power of Shias thanks to ever-interfering Iran. The appearance of Shias’ black Ashura banners weeks before the anniversary – when Ashura previously was banned under the Taliban – makes Sunnis nervous about the growing clout of the Shia minority. One Sunni spokesman says that “each black flag is reflective of Iran's evil intentions in Afghanistan.”

Which hardly says that the Islamic Center of America’s black flag reflects an evil intention. Nor justifies the stretch required to declare that Qazwini only shinnied up his flagstaff from sheer enthusiasm over Iran’s recent Munich-style triumph over America’s hapless president.  But the timing is a bit of a coincidence. The timing, and Hezbollah’s hailing of the agreement as “a major victory for Iran and to all the people of the region and it is a defeat for the enemies of these people.”

But, to quote Freud, (or was it Bill  Clinton?): “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” And I suppose sometimes a black flag is just a black flag.

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Downward Slide of Justice

John Fund posts at NRO:

President Obama’s last head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division was Thomas Perez, a highly controversial radical. Perez is now the secretary of the Department of Labor. (He was confirmed in July this year by a vote of only 54 to 46.) When looking to replace Perez at the DOJ, President Obama could have chosen to improve the Civil Rights Division — after all, the Justice Department’s own inspector general concluded in a report earlier this year that the division was guilty of “deep ideological polarization” and a “disappointing lack of professionalism.”

Instead, Obama has picked someone who clearly shares Perez’s worldview, Debo Adegbile, the senior counsel to the highly partisan Senate Judiciary Committee. He will also be the fourth head of the division who has worked at the Washington office of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. This group, which has a rigid view of civil-rights enforcement, has recently lost several high-profile court cases. Just last February, Adegbile went before the Supreme Court to defend Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, which required that many states (mostly Southern) have all changes to their voting laws precleared either by the DOJ or in federal court. The Supreme Court properly decided that this portion of the Voting Rights Act was unconstitutional, given that much of the data used to decide which states needed preclearance dated from 40 years ago

“His nomination is an in-the-face appointment,” says J. Christian Adams, a former Justice Department whistle-blower who documented his disillusion with the Perez Civil Rights Division in his book Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department. “Any thought that Obama would moderate as a lame duck with collapsing poll numbers vanishes with the Adegbile nomination.” He notes that during Adegbile’s time at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the group became increasingly radical, going so far as to oppose criminal-background checks by employers and endorsing extreme racial-hiring quotas.

It even provided legal representation to Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther and Marxist revolutionary who was convicted of murdering a Philadelphia police officer. The question of Abu-Jamal’s guilt is not a close call. Two hospital workers testified that Abu-Jamal confessed to them: “I shot the motherf***er, and I hope the motherf***er dies.” His brother, William, has never testified to his brother’s innocence even though he was at the scene of the crime. Abu-Jamal himself chose not to testify in his own defense.

Please read the rest at “The DOJ’s Radical Civil Rights Division”. 

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It Is Hallowed Ground, After All

Steve Hayward at Forbes wonders if it’s just as well that President Obama’s schedule was too heavy to include the 150th anniversary of Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address. 

One reason may be that Obama has to carefully avoid associating himself fully with Lincoln’s view about the centrality of what Lincoln called, at Gettysburg, “the proposition” that “all men are created equal.” Obama omitted this famous line from the Declaration of Independence in his famous Philadelphia speech about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright controversy in 2008. He did finally quote the Declaration’s “self-evident truth” in his second inaugural address earlier this year, but then added in a revealing line, “while these truths may be self-evident. . .”

May be self-evident? This is what intellectual poker players would call a revealing “tell.” If hooked up to a polygraph, Obama would likely have to confess to the modern liberal view that individual rights come not from our natural equality as human beings, but from a positive grant from government. The redistributive welfare state depends on this principle for its legitimacy, as does today’s “progressive” insistence on dividing people into groups according to skin color or gender or sexual preference, and assigning hierarchies of legal rights accordingly. Much of modern liberal philosophy depends on turgid obfuscation to disguise the fact that it is at odds with Lincoln’s understanding of equal rights.  (“Obama's Gettysburg Skip May Confirm Clint Eastwood's Thoughts About Him”).

Whatever his reasons, it’s fitting this president wasn’t there.

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The System Works! Now Down With the System!

The Detroit Free Press, in the great liberal tradition of turning every tragedy into an ultimatum to enact their agenda, has adopted the shooting of Renisha McBride by Theodore Wafer as an excuse to attack Michigan’s Stand Your Ground law.

“This is the first step toward justice,” writes the Freep about the charges brought against Wafer in its Sunday editorial, “Charges in Renisha McBride case show the system working.”   The next step, a classic liberal non sequitur, needs to be a blanket repeal of self-defense protections: “No matter the outcome of Wafer’s trial, it’s time to take a serious look at Michigan’s stand-your-ground law.” 

Let me re-phrase that sentence. “No matter if Wafer is convicted or not, [and the Freep believes he’s going to be] we should all agree that it should be illegal for a person to defend himself using deadly force, even if he’s defending his own home.”

I’m aware that Wafer has been charged based on prosecutors’ opinion he had  insufficient justification to claim self-defense; those facts remain to be tried.  Regardless, the Freep says it doesn’t matter whether Wafer is or isn’t found guilty, we still need to repeal self-defense laws.  That means that even if a homeowner has a crew of villains invading dead to rights, he’ll have no legal right to fight back.

By way of taking a “serious look” at stand your ground, the Freep promptly resorts to the same childish sort of caricature of such laws that has been discredited over and over  again. “The ability to fire at will, on the flimsiest of perceived threats, is a destructive empowerment that benefits no one.” (Besides, America’s already got a perfectly good destructive empowerment that enables homicide on the flimsiest of perceived threats – we call it “abortion on demand”!)

Only a few days back the Miami Herald used the more traditional, but equally stupid, caricature of stand your ground: “a self-defense law that gives immunity to someone who shoots first and asks questions later.” Well, that does sound crazy.  Everyone knows that when confronting a desperate felon capable of anything it’s better to hold your fire and ask questions first.  And if you’re too rattled (or what liberals call being “allegedly in fear for your life”) to think of any questions on the spot you could use some of these favorites that, actually, never had the chance to be asked:

1) Why did you guys kick my door in and shoot my dog? followed up by, why are you pointing that gun at me?

2) Can we take a time-out so I can make a call?

3) Haven’t you got fellas something better to do than rape my wife?, or

4) How long do you think you’ll be banging my brains into the concrete before you kill me as you promised to do?

Besides, the Free Press is just wrong that the McBride case is about stand your ground, when it’s actually about a homeowner who says he was afraid that someone was trying to break into his house.   

Even Deadline Detroit’s Darrell Dawsey, not someone you’d think of for a “serious talk” about stand your ground, (or anything else?) takes issue with the Freep that the McBride case has anything to do with “SYG.”   It’s not as if D.D. (Dee-Dee?) approves of stand your ground. He can draw as funny a Crayola cartoon of stand your ground as anybody -- just watch!  “[A]ny law that would allow someone to target another innocent person and then kill him/her for nothing”,

and

“basically . . . a license to hunt human beings.”

If Dawsey’s rendition of stand your ground isn’t proof enough  of his fair-mindedness, how about his courage in pointing out there are even some differences between the cases of Trayvon Martin and Renisha McBride, differences he discusses in a brief timeout from his endless comparisons of Trayvon and Renisha.   Like when Dawsey says we shouldn’t turn Renisha McBride into “Detroit’s Trayvon,” but instead deal with “her death and her killer on their own merits.”

Dealing with things on their merits doesn’t seem to be something Dee-Dee has much flair for.  For example, like the Free Press, Dee-Dee shows no competence for dealing with the Trayvon case on its merits, if by “dealing with the case on its merits” means acknowledging evidence and well-tried facts revealed after a thorough public trial. As far as I can tell, Dawsey, and every one of his co-belligerents for all that, continue to ignore the actual Zimmerman trial, the evidence, and the verdict as if they never happened – allowing them all to continue repeating outdated fairy tales about Martin’s death – more or less a legal Flat Earth Society. 

For a better source on that subject I highly recommend Jack Cashill’s book, “'If I had a Son': Race, Guns, and the Railroading of George Zimmerman”.

The big brains at the Free Press easily conflate stand your ground laws with simple self-defense because they hate both and would happily take them both away. In a just world, liberals would be allowed to proactively destroy the coal and oil industry, the auto industry, the world economy, the standard of living of future generations, and American freedom, in unreasonable response to the inchoate predictions of documented liars about global climate change 200 years from now, but a homeowner who can hear thugs kicking his door in THIS MINUTE should have no legal right to do anything but call 911, and maybe roll himself and his family into roly-poly bugs to wait for the end.  (Legal language permitting self-defensive prayers to God asking Him to help are invariably cut from proposed legislation as grossly unconstitutional, and as union-busting tricks meant to starve the children of first responders).

Between sobs the Free Press blubbers that Michigan’s law on self-defense is “a destructive empowerment that benefits no one.”

The only problem with that statement is that it’s insane.

Detroit has one of the highest rates of justifiable (self-defense) homicides in the country, reporting 411 homicides in 2012, 25 of which were justifiable. That’s only justifiable homicides in Detroit, not all of Michigan.  Not only does that number reflect the number of violent crime attacks on innocent people that needed to be answered with deadly force, but it also gives the lie to  the ludicrous after-the-fact rationalizing that only calling 911 equals instant delivery from a potential life-and-death situation.

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‘Islam Is on the March in Africa’

John Hinderaker writes at Powerline Blog:

Someday, the World Will Have To Pay Attention To Africa

There is considerable irony in the fact that Barack Obama, John Kerry and liberals in general, both in the U.S. and in Europe, are up in arms about the fact that Jews are building houses in East Jerusalem, while those same liberals care nothing about what is happening to the Southwest, in Africa, where millions are being slaughtered.

Islam is on the march in Africa. Conquering terrorist armies have carried out Mohammed’s commands to the letter, murdering Christians and other “infidels” in numbers that probably never will be counted, since the world doesn’t care. The Muslim offensive has swept over Somalia, Tunisia, Egypt, Nigeria, Libya, Mali and now the Central African Republic. The modus operandi is always the same, the merciless mass murder and enslavement that Mohammed enjoined his followers to commit.

Islam can be defeated by military force, but at the moment, there is no such countervailing force to be found in the Central African Republic. UPI tells the sad story:

The mineral-rich Central African Republic is collapsing into chaos amid a worsening religious conflict between Christians and Muslims that could trigger genocide and bring more upheaval to a region already beset by turmoil, observers warn.

So we have a “Christian-Muslim conflict”–hey, it sounds like the Christians could be responsible!–but at the same time, genocide is threatened. If you keep reading, you can sort it all out:

“The state has collapsed and this country is now simply plundered, looted, the women are raped, people are killed by thugs,” [Gerard Araud, France's ambassador to the United Nations] said. “The country has fallen into anarchy.”

Gosh! Are those Muslim women being raped? Just kidding. A large majority of the Central African Republic’s citizens are Christians, but they are being murdered and brutalized by Muslim terrorists who have seized control of the government, such as it is.

Godfrey Byaruhanga, Amnesty International’s CAR researcher, said Seleka [Muslim] soldiers have been responsible for widespread sexual violence, forcibly recruiting child fighters and recruiting criminals and foreign fighters from neighboring Chad and Sudan drawn by the volatile situation.

“The situation’s totally appalling and the government appears to be either not able or willing to prevent these soldiers from continuing with the human rights crimes,” he said.

“Long term, the problem is that this could lead to the CAR people becoming completely ungovernable and it becoming a failed state, and the repercussions will not be felt just in the CAR, but are beyond in neighboring African countries.”

Actually, I am, at the moment, more concerned about the thousands of Christians and others who are being murdered and raped by Muslims in the CAR. Nevertheless, it is true that the Western world should be concerned about the prospect that much of Africa may turn into a vast failed state, or group of states, with the most ruthless and violent element–that is, the Muslims–seizing control. Al Qaeda was able to achieve quite a lot before the Bush administration drove it out of Afghanistan. How much will aggressive Muslims be able to accomplish if they are ceded control over half of Africa?

This is a very important question, but one that no one in the Obama administration is interested in addressing. They have bigger fish to fry, like the construction of an apartment building in Israel. We can only hope that American Christians–a majority, last time I looked–care enough to try to prevent, or to avenge, the murder of thousands or millions of their African brethren.

And Away We Go

Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy has finally made a charging decision in the death of Renisha McBride (3 charges: second-degree murder, manslaughter and possession of a firearm in a felony). Worthy reportedly said that race didn’t enter into her charging decision.

We’ll see if the tone improves.

Who am I kidding? It’s already getting worse.

Reverend Wendell Anthony, president of the Detroit Branch NAACP, released a statement invoking

the case of Trayvon Martin, a Florida 17-year-old who was shot and killed last year in Florida by a neighborhood watch coordinator. That man, George Zimmerman, followed Martin and shot him during a scuffle and was acquitted of second-degree murder this year.

Well, that’s not accurate, but why worry about that now?  More odd is why Anthony wants to go the Trayvon route at all.  The Trayvon Martin case gave the Martin protesters everything the McBride protesters say is all they want  – an arrest, a trial, answers, justice – and Zimmerman was ultimately exonerated.  Not only was Zimmerman found to have acted in self-defense, but Martin was revealed as a violent and formidably aggressive 160-pound young man whose impulsive and savage assault on Zimmerman was the proximate cause of Martin’s death.  So wouldn’t invoking the Trayvon Martin case be kind of like invoking the fugitive Richard Kimble’s case in a situation where a doctor is accused of murdering his wife?

Why do that? Just kidding. I know exactly why; Anthony wants to drag Trayvon into this because he knows that American blacks refuse to accept the Zimmerman verdict.  Wendell wants to incite that resentment by offering the McBride case as a race-based do-over.

Dawud Walid, the Muslim Brotherhood spokesman recently shoving his snout into Detroit’s crowded “civil rights” trough, makes my point.

“When we look at the Trayvon Martin case, we believe jury selection did play a role in terms of the eventual outcome,” Walid said. “We believe it's important there are people of color on that jury. There needs to be people from Detroit on that jury.”

Walid’s transparently racist, and corrupt conception of the justice system is that jurors are nothing more than appointed representatives of their several victim communities, expected to render verdicts that satisfy their ethnic constituents’ thirst for payback.  But beyond that, just how does Walid get to demand people from Detroit as jurors? The incident didn’t happen in Detroit. This is a Dearborn Heights case. (Anyway, the jury will be drawn from all of Wayne County, including Detroit).

My doctor warned me that too much irony makes me colicky, but I have to comment about how these “Justice for [Your Name Here]!”  guys always demand that both jury selection and the jury’s pre-determined verdict should be based on, well, racial profiling. White defendants who kill black victims are always let off by white jurors!   Think of his demand for black jurors as Walid’s  way of channeling George Zimmerman telling that 911 dispatcher: “these assholes, they always get away.”

As far as I’m concerned, at this stage Worthy had what she needed to charge Wafer. It was important that the charging decision be done the right way – not in response to mob demand – which was the initial injustice (but hardly the only one) of what was done to George Zimmerman. Unlike what happened to Trayvon Martin, nothing released to the public so far indicates that Renisha McBride did anything to provoke Wafer to shoot her – an uphill climb for his defense.  We still haven’t heard the details of what his defense will be.

I do know that when Wafer’s side of things is revealed, (which, who knows, may turn out to be compelling), it won’t make any difference to the entrenched loudmouths determined to exploit this thing four ways from Sunday.  This narrowness may be emotionally excusable for McBride’s family, but not for outsiders who’ve never met the young lady – just appointed themselves as advocates and spokesman for The Cause.  They ought to have a duty to remain objective.  (Hey, stop that laughing over there!)

That was the real lesson of the Trayvon Martin case: “we don’t care about the facts and never did. We’ll make do with our own.”

Sad how the last thing the civil rights industry cares about these days is anyone’s civil rights.

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Odeh Humanity!, or, Bomb’s the Word

News writers serious about reporting the facts (as opposed to those guilty of trying to commit an “act of literature”) know well the inverted pyramid, the convention of straight-news lead writing that  starts with the most important fact and descending from there to the less important details. The Detroit News has picked up a story, likely from the AP, that is a splendid example of how not to do it.

Detroit — A woman accused of failing to tell U.S. immigration authorities about her role in a deadly bombing in Israel has pleaded not guilty in her first appearance in federal court Detroit Wednesday afternoon.

Rasmieh Yousef Odeh, who lives in the Chicago area, became a naturalized citizen in 2004 in Detroit. Nearly a decade later, she’s charged with covering up her conviction in an attack that killed two people at a Jerusalem market in 1969.

An Israeli military court sentenced her to life in prison in 1970, but she was released 10 years later in a prisoner swap with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

The 66-year-old woman was arrested last month and charged with not disclosing her conviction when she applied for U.S. citizenship in Detroit. She was released on bond in Chicago. (“Israel bombing suspect pleads not guilty to immigration charge in Detroit”).

Thus lead-writing in an age of PC. Reporters don’t write their own headlines, editors do, and in this case the Detroit News editor wanted to help muddy things more by describing Odeh as a “bombing suspect,” though this is flatly false.  She isn’t a bombing suspect, but a convicted bomber and terrorist doing life, as even the article eventually gets around to mentioning in the fourth paragraph -- where the real lead lies buried. The fact of that conviction lets anyone in the media refer to Odeh unconditionally as a terrorist and a murderer – if the reporter chooses to do so. Instead, the media has chosen to pussyfoot around the real story rather than violate PC rules that Palestinian terrorists are never murderers and fiends, but freedom fighters.

Yesterday the Detroit Free Press ran substantially the same AP story, writing in their headline that Odeh is  an “activist” with a “role” in a deadly Israel bombing.

“Role” could mean almost anything, or, as it was perhaps intended to imply, almost nothing; like maybe her only “role” was to drive her fellow PFLP members around to their day jobs, or to bring falafel to her fellow activists after a long day of handing out pamphlets outside the local mosque (isn’t that what activists do?). But the role she was convicted of was belonging to a terrorist group and placing two bombs in a Jerusalem supermarket that killed two people, and then placing another bomb in the British Consulate. The only reason Odeh is on the loose now is that Israel was forced to let her go in a prisoner swap with the bad guys.

Reporters and editors are pros who know exactly what they’re doing when they choose to do what they’re doing the wrong way. When it comes to reporting similar stories about people who don’t belong to PC-immunized pariah groups, they’ve don’t have this much trouble getting it straight. A typical example from a Department of Justice press release from a few years back goes like this:

An 83-year-old man who admitted that as a Nazi concentration camp guard he took part in a two-day killing spree in which 42,000 people were killed was deported to Austria Thursday from his home in Wisconsin, immigration officials said. (“Nazi Guard Deported to Austria”).

Most important fact: There’s been a Nazi concentration camp guard who participated in a mass killing spree living peacefully in Wisconsin all these years.

The most important fact in this week’s Odeh coverage? An old lady who looks like she could be Helen Thomas’s daughter is in trouble with immigration for being less than truthful about her past. Now that’s gotta grab any reader! especially because we don’t routinely see stories about any of the other 12 million people living here who’ve got white-lie issues with INS. Why, it’s almost as if they don’t really want you to pay close of attention to Odeh!

Naaa.

Still, if that nothing-to-see-here intro hasn’t put you off you’ll eventually find out that the poor old lady in the photo who needs help getting into the courthouse is “’revered in the Chicago area, serving as a mentor to many, someone to look up to . . . standing up to oppression.’” Brother, she’s a veritable Rosa Parks, except with TNT in her handbag. (Wouldn’t you think that with all the humanity loving, social justice heroes who’ve called Chicago home -- Reverend Wright, Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan, Rahm Emanuel,  Bill Ayers, Huey Newton, Angela Davis, Barack Obama – they wouldn’t have quite so much of a murder problem? Must be that their gun control laws aren’t strict enough.)

Odeh’s supporters marched around with her picture and signs that said “stop anti-Arab racism.” They know the immigration charge is only a pretext: “’the real issue is the U.S. government’s going after people in our community including before 9/11.’”  Hey, if you say so; it’s true enough that people were going after Odeh (Israel, not us) long before 9/11 – because she slaughtered her victims way back in 1969. But Odeh’s supporters say Uncle Sam is only picking on her now because “’she speaks out for human rights and social justice.’” I guess speaking out can take all forms. The backpack bomb she used to kill Jerusalem shoppers was probably Odeh’s way of saying “three cheers for liberty, equality, and brotherhood!”

Strangely enough,  this former model for the Palestinian issue of the Eddie Bauer catalog is actually in trouble now for not speaking out, specifically when INS invited her to speak out about anything in her background that might keep her from gaining entry to the country – like, for example, having ever been convicted of belonging to a terrorist group or planting bombs or killing people.

For some odd reason Odeh also let go by another great opportunity on Wednesday to speak truth to power about her case. According to the News:

“I don’t want to speak,’ she said, declining comment outside court following a brief arraignment.

Inspiring!  A courageous champion of social justice, and doesn’t like to toot her own horn to boot!

Just the same, if she happens to be your mentor, a word of advice: don’t volunteer to carry her backpack.

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Dearborn Heights: Justice Gone in 60 Seconds

While I’m not really interested in comparing McBride’s death with the killing of Trayvon Martin, fears that a lack of official dispatch will hamper the case -- as happened last year in Sanford, Fla., -- strike me as very legitimate. 

-- Darrell Dawsey

We know Deadline Detroit columnist and race-baiter around town Darrell Dawsey doesn’t really mean it when he says he doesn’t want to compare the Renisha McBride case with Trayvon Martin, because, of course, he’s just gone and done it.

As punctual, if not as musical, as a cuckoo bird piping the hour, Dawsey has popped out to join the condemnation of the Dearborn Police Department and the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office for -- doing their jobs.

McBride’s death — and the subsequent inquiry — should indeed be cause for worry. The unnamed man who told police his .12-gauge shotgun fired accidentally hasn’t been arrested. The police continue to investigate, but many believe without proper urgency.

So is that a cause for worry? That the police are doing their jobs, just not fast enough? Where’s the need for urgency after a fatal shooting where the victim is deceased and the shooter’s identity and location are known? How are the results of any investigation improved by rushing it?

Well, I’ll tell you. It’s because, as Dawsey and his cobelligerents know, it will be easier to pre-judge the homeowner as guilty of a crime if the public gets to see him being arrested and in custody.  (Ahem.  Zimmerman.)  Dawsey says as much: “. . . Al Sharpton and John Conyers issued statements and activists descended on Dearborn Heights to protest the lack of an arrest.” Because the kind of justice Sharpton and his imitators are looking for is the kind you get when mobs of people are simultaneously outraged and uninformed.  (Ahem.  Zimmerman.)

Unhinged demands that law enforcement deprive people of their freedom first and then try to determine if a crime has been committed some time later indicates an astounding ignorance of the Fourth Amendment -- or bottomless cynicism -- or both. (Not to mention an utter disregard for the abuses suffered by Southern blacks from cops who saw white mobs as the source of their authority instead of  the law). Do these guys think we’re idiots claiming they only want a thorough investigation into the truth, when they’ve been holding themselves out since day one as already knowing the truth about what happened, and that it was a premeditated murder motivated by racism?

The last thing you’ll ever get from anyone with a vested interest in somebody being guilty is justice.

Among the “critical questions” Dawsey insists need to be investigated (but not before an arrest is made!) includes this most important one, “[S]ince when do we take claims that a gun ‘accidentally discharged’ as possible reason enough to excuse killing an innocent young woman?”

Aside from hopelessly confusing categories, the question itself reveals Dawsey’s refusal to acknowledge the same moral universe as the rest of civilized humanity. The answer to his “since when?” question is, as long as there have been lawgivers, there has been recognition of a distinction between harms committed against others with malicious intent and those harms committed by accident. Although Dawsey may pretend, or genuinely hasn’t any idea, that there is a vastly lesser weight of culpability assigned to an unintended wrong compared with that assigned to an intentional crime, the distinction has always been an irreducible component of anything that even remotely deserves the name of “justice.” But Dawsey knows nothing of that:

Guns don’t fire themselves. People pull the trigger. So “accidentally” or not, this man shot and killed a young woman standing on his porch.

Or -- as Dawsey’s sermon is meant to be interpreted by the mob -- whether it was an accident or not, we’re going to keep saying it was a cold-blooded, first-degree race murder.

It’s true enough that guns don’t fire themselves. And cars don’t drive themselves, but we don’t treat every fatal auto accident as an act of murder. (Oh wait! Isn’t Reverend Al Sharpton  the model for this kind of rabble-rousing, and didn’t he build his ministry on explaining how Jesus preached treating an auto accident as an act of murder -- and as an excuse for murder, too?).

An accidental discharge of a firearm isn’t an excuse, but it is a legal defense against a criminal charge, and we’ve been accepting it as such as long as there have been firearms to have accidents with.  That doesn’t mean people can’t be held liable for the accidental wrongs they commit, but there’s a big difference between that kind of liability and criminal guilt.

Dawsey wants to compare Detroit’s recent spree of intentional shootings with what happened in Dearborn Heights, but it won’t wash, at least not on the few facts as they’re known right now. If he wants to show that the McBride case is being handled differently because the victim is black and the homeowner is white, then he’s going to have to show that blacks involved in accidental shootings – not cold-blooded and deliberate ones -- are treated with less leniency than whites are.

Dawsey’s not going to do that, nor the rest of them, because it’s too much work, and it doesn’t feed the racial bonfire they’re stoking.

###

Carpe Bullhorn

Dawud Walid ought to be ashamed of himself. Has he had so little success as a spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood in Dearborn that he’s now decided he’s got a better future as a bullhorn-grabbing race hustler?

Last week a 19-year-old woman, Renisha McBride, was shot to death by a Dearborn Heights homeowner under uncertain circumstances at a  house near the border with Detroit. Little is known yet thanks to the trickle of details allowed out by the local PD and the careless press.

It seems to be a fact that McBride was the sole participant in a car accident near Warren and Outer Drive at 1:30 a.m., although she strangely didn’t appear on the homeowner’s porch only a few blocks away until 3:40 a.m. The homeowner admits to the shooting, but has stated that he was in fear for his life, and that his shotgun went off accidentally.

It’s also a fact that when Dearborn Heights cops sent a request for an arrest warrant to the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office, it was returned with a request for more investigation. That means that the prosecutors still don’t see enough evidence for criminal charges -- yet.

But that didn’t stop McBride’s family from rushing to the media and the NAACP with a story chockfull of baseless speculations and at least one falsehood: that McBride “was shot in the back of the head with a shotgun as she turned to leave. The family said she had gone to the house seeking help after being involved in a car accident several blocks away.” In fact, McBride was shot in the face, and the family’s story about her being shot in the back of the head had to be countered by the police, and an autopsy.

As to what McBride was doing on the front porch, the family’s version is absolute conjecture. They can say all they want that she was only there to ask for help, but they don’t know that. They couldn’t. I haven’t heard the family try to explain why it took McBride two hours and 10 minutes to rap on someone’s door for help. USA Today’s report ran under the ironic headline, “Family wants answers in shooting of woman seeking help.” It sounds more like they don’t so much want to get answers as to give them. 

Is it likely that this young lady had a car accident and then decided to commit a violent B & E a few blocks away?  No.  Nor is it likely that a homeowner living in a racially-mixed neighborhood on the edge of Detroit, and awakened in the dead on night by someone at his door, grabbed his shotgun with a fervent hope that this will be his best chance to shoot a black person to death on hos front porch for absolutely no reason.  The shooting is still unexplained; as is, I note, the two-plus hour gap between McBride’s accident and her appearance at the homeowner’s door. 

That’s why they have investigations.

But as all good race hustlers learned from the Trayvon fiasco, (and the Duke fiasco), a lot of early speculation and a couple of fast fibs (focus on fast) will harden into an impervious version in the minds of the nation’s plentiful supply of stupid people. A review of online commentary shows a huge segment ready, willing, and able to conclude this was a racial murder committed for absolutely nothing, just like Trayvon.

Stupor was certainly the desired state of mind sought by the hustlers that got up  Thursday’s “No Justice, No Peace” rally.  That’s where Walid was a prominent mouth, bullhorning the crowd:

“Had she been a white woman and the shooter a black man, would the shooter be sitting comfortably at home watching TV today?”

“What we need, this man needs to be arrested.”

Walid and his kind don’t want justice at all.  What they want is for people to be arrested and charged with crimes regardless of evidence, based only on whatever pressure can be threatened by a racially-charged mob.

We have a word for that in America. It’s called a lynching.

By the end of last week, 8 persons had been murdered in Detroit in les than 7 days – as far as I know, all of them black, and as far as I know all of them murdered by other blacks. None of them appear to have been killed by anyone who was, mistakenly or otherwise, at home and in fear of his life.

Demonstrations = 0.

Prosecutor Kym Worthy can remedy the shame she earned by violating her oath when she unlawfully prosecuted Terry Jones.  She should only issue an arrest warrant in this case if there is probable cause that a crime has been committed.

###

Because Practice Makes Perfect

Jihadist dry runs are back in the news.  Well, they’re back, anyway (they never left), but they’re not making the news they should.

We take an updated look at them over at The Public Thing.

###

Councilman from Bint Jabail

We fully intend to leave our aged and rheumatic Dearborn Underground grazing in its pasture contentedly and for good, except for thinking this once it’s in the public interest to say a word or two about Tarek Baydoun.

As Dearborn residents are aware, a character named Tarek Baydoun is working hard – or as hard as I guess a professional hustler like Baydoun ever works -- for a seat on the city council. We’ve paid our gimlet-eyed notice of Baydoun before, notably for his intemperate accusations of Islamophobia and carefully placing himself on the wrong side of every issue. Whether adopting the role of a journalist, a Democratic consultant, a lawyer, or a realtor, Baydoun’s focus is always to be spokesman inflaming the Islamic community and lying to the infidels about the connection between Islamic terrorism and Islam: Hasan’s murders at Ft. Hood were strictly criminal, with no religious component, and none of the 9/11 hijackers were “affiliated with Islam.”

Baydoun is a committed Islamist who’s openly declared his loyalty to the One Nation, and it’s not the nation mentioned in the Pledge of Allegiance. At least one metro-area source has publicly denounced him as a Hezbollah-sympathizing crook.

Dearborn already has a mayor who can’t tell the difference between the First Amendment and the paper his Potbelly’s sandwich comes wrapped in.  Things are going to get worse, regardless; we already know that. They’ll get worse faster if Baydoun gets into government.

Moved To New Location

I am now blogging at a new site, The Public Thing. 

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.

###

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?

###

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.

###

‘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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