Gall, Interrupted

Michigan’s gay wedding snake dance has been rudely interrupted by a Circuit Court of Appeals decision to extend indefinitely a stay of Judge Friedman’s ruling against the Michigan Marriage Amendment. (“Federal appeals court extends freeze on Michigan gay marriages”). The stay will remain in place at least until the state’s appeal of the decision has run its course, and possibly until the U.S. Supreme Court gets to rule.

Predictably, the media is reporting all this from the point of view of the 300 same-sex couples (read: “victims”) who rushed to get married on Saturday, and who now (Shocked! Shocked!) face waiting all that time find out if they’re legally married.

Of course, those 300 couples were perfectly well aware that they were rushing into relationships that might well turn out to be invalid. They knew perfectly well that the attorney general would file an appeal and request a stay. That’s why they hurried to take advantage of the handful of county clerks who opened up for unheard of Saturday hours to the sole end of issuing as many licenses as possible before a stay was ordered.

And the ACLU knew all this, too. Saturday’s mad rush to get same-sex marriages completed is part of their plan to prevail by foul means – or fouler – and hopefully outside of court. They’ll use those existing marriages to intimidate the attorney general, the governor, and Michigan’s elected (i.e., politician) state judges to just give up now rather than tangle with all conceivable manner of hairy cases they’re threatening. The Detroit Free Press describes how the ACLU is

preparing to launch legal challenges if the state doesn’t recognize the validity of the marriages of same-sex couples performed Saturday.

The challenges could come if the state refuses to grant benefits to a spouse in a same-sex marriage, blocks adoptions by those couples or hinders the joint filing of state income tax forms, Kaplan said.

“There are more than 1,400 state laws dealing with a legal civil marriage,” he said. “And if the state maintains that these marriages are not legally valid, we have a problem with that and we’ll explore a legal challenge against the state.”

Just like the ACLU, especially on the heels of a courtroom victory, to believe they can sue us all into gender utopia.

But I’ve noticed too that this penchant for resolving things through the judicial process only lasts until the instant they get what they want – after which the same lawsuit-happy bunch condemn further judicial intervention as an iniquitous barrier to social justice.

For instance, in complete disregard for the 2.7 million Michigan voters who passed the marriage amendment by a 59%-41% margin, advocates have “gathered more than 14,000 signatures on a petition calling on Gov. Rick Snyder and Schuette to drop the state’s appeal of Friedman’s ruling.”

“We’re asking Gov. Snyder to abide by the judicial ruling and order your attorney general to stand down. There should be no more wasting our taxpayer dollars and making phony cases about what families should look like with baloney science,” said state Sen. Gretchen Whitmer, D-East Lansing.

Senator Whitmer’s weak grasp on the state constitution doesn’t speak well for what I suspect is an even weaker grasp on on the national one.  She ought to know that the Michigan attorney general doesn’t answer to the governor: he works for the people of Michigan, in this case the 2.7 million voter majority who spoke plainly on marriage in 2004.  He made this powerfully clear on Tuesday when he wrote in the Free Press:

[I]n Michigan, the people rule. So, when 2.7 million Michigan voters support a constitutional amendment, that means something, and an attorney general is duty-bound to defend the wishes of the voters.

Regardless, Senator Whitmer sees no reason why her 14,000 shouldn’t trump our 2.7 million.   After all, her minority is on the “right side of history.”  And the rest of us?  Well, as  Judge Friedman said in conclusion of Friday’s opinion, to hell with the people.

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Unicorns Now, Unicorns Tomorrow, Unicorns Forever

Over at our local journalistas’ puzzle factory, Deadline Detroit, Allan Lengel is sure he’s spotted a similarity between Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette’s defense of the Michigan Marriage Amendment, and George Wallace’s defiant call for “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” (“Bill Schuette's George Wallace Moment”).   You will never learn from reading Lengel’s article exactly how an immensely popular state constitutional amendment that was passed to protect the definition of marriage compares with segregation. My guess is Lengel had simply worked his way through his alphabetical list of villains to the Ws,  and  here we are.  Next week he’ll be back around again comparing Julie Boonstra to Marie Antoinette.

Anyway, Lengel magnanimously recognizes that, for all Wallace’s bigotry, he recanted his segregationist ideas after becoming a born-again Christian.  For reasons he never explains (what can I say?  Lengel writes that way) he forecasts that:

Schuette will regret his crusade, much like Wallace did, once he sees beyond the Tea Party and his personal prejudices and religious beliefs. Bill, we’re talking about constitutional rights here. Separation of church and state.

You may not be able [sic] label Schuette a racist for fighting against gay marriage. But you might as well.

He’s operating on the assumption — much like George Wallace did — that it’s OK to try and prevent a certain group of people from having equal rights.

Hatred is hatred. Prejudice is prejudice.

The secret of all effective liberal argument is to conflate unlike things beyond where they can be untangled, and then dare an opponent to untangle them.  I’m not going to try.  Conflating Wallace-era racial segregation with a citizen initiative protecting an ancient social institution is stupid and obscene. Equating homosexuals denied an imaginary right to a made-up marital arrangement   – one never recognized by any tribe or civilization prior to the 21^st century – equating, I say, that with blacks being denied fundamental and well-established civil rights such as the rights to vote and to work -- is ludicrous.

Only a liberal would suggest that the custom and practice of marriage as exclusive to members of the opposite sex was a tyrannical idea dreamt up by the Tea Party, or forced upon utopian America by religious fanatics. Only a liberal, (like one person commenting on Lengel’s diatribe) would think it makes senses to accuse AG Schuette of “trying to drag Michigan back to the 1950’s,” as if same-sex marriage existed in Michigan until the Michigan Marriage Amendment was passed.

Only a very shallow liberal, and a secularist, would despise the reality of religious faith so completely as to think that it is a good thing for a believer to “see beyond [his] religious beliefs.” Religious beliefs have to do with ultimate things. The highest things. There is no seeing beyond them. Certainly leftist politics and its tawdry controversies are not “beyond” any religious beliefs worthy of the name. If a person claiming to be a believer does see beyond them, it’s because he’s really never seen them at all – just glanced briefly at them and then forgot them somewhere in the back of his overcrowded skull.

Meanwhile, Lengel is so focused on lambasting Schuette for being a reincarnated Wallace he forgot that he had already explained the Alabama governor’s abandonment of his segregationist ideas by – Wallace’s religious beliefs! – “when he became a born-again Christian and apologized to black civil rights leaders for his racist segregationist stand.”  I guess it was Wallace seeing beyond his earthbound regional politics, not his religious beliefs, that got Wallace’s mind right. 

And if you yourself simply hate religious beliefs, then don’t preach to us about the separation of church and state. The purpose of that doctrine was to protect the church, not the state.  The hatred and prejudice you harbor against believers renders you an unfit guardian of our rights.

Only a liberal would argue that you “might as well” label someone (Schuette) a racist for fighting against same-sex marriage after admitting that it’s probably not justified to do so.  (It isn’t).

Never mind Lengel’s adolescent rhetoric of indignation.  Hatred is not hatred, because hatred of wrong and injustice is not the same as hatred of what is good and true.  Prejudice is not prejudice.  Prejudice against empty cant and pulling down timeless structures of civilization by judicial insolence is not the same as prejudice based on race, or on a hypocritical and smoldering enmity towards believers in God and common sense. 

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‘That’s Between a Woman and Her Doctor’ – and the Rest of Us

The urgency of Sandra Fluke and Kathleen Sebelius to make sure that religious pro-lifers are financial contributors to abortion has almost nothing to do with wanting to guarantee there’s sufficient funding for the practice.  The point is that, even while abortion advocates unceasingly chant that what goes on with their private parts is none of our business, they do everything they can think of to make sure it’s our business to pay for it.  Kevin D. Williamson at NRO explains it this way:

I object to abortion as violence, including abortion actuated via relatively bloodless chemical means, and believe that it should be prohibited as a matter of humane principle. The use of actual contraceptives, such as condoms, and the question of what combinations of consenting adults do what with whom — by which I mean maintaining joint bank accounts and sharing dental plans, of course — may be of acute interest to the bishops but are not properly matters of prohibition by the federal government, the purpose of which is to protect property, thus enabling Americans to organize their lives as they will, rather than to move citizens about like chessmen on the theory that it does so for their benefit. There is not much that I would have be illegal — but any civilized society requires a great deal of breathing room between forbidden and compulsory.

The Left would not have it that way: Homosexual behavior is not to be tolerated, or homosexual unions recognized under law — rather, homosexuality is to constitute a special class of blessedness, and the failure to celebrate it is to be a sin, which in the liberal mind must be identical to a crime. It is not enough for religious conservatives, such as the ones who own Hobby Lobby, to tolerate the legal sale and use of things such as the so-called morning-after pill — rather, they are expected to provide them at their own expense. Abortions are not to be legal, but legal and funded by the general community, with those funds extracted at gunpoint if necessary.

This is not merely, or even mainly, a question of economics. A monthly dose of emergency contraception (which seems like a lot) paid entirely out-of-pocket would run less than the typical cell-phone bill. One does not suspect that Americans would find it very difficult to locate gay-friendly firms in the wedding-planning business. The typical first-trimester abortion costs less than an entry-level iPad — hardly an insurmountable economic barrier for a procedure that is, if we take the pro-choice side at their word, absolutely fundamental to a woman’s health and happiness.

The economics are incidental. The point is not to ensure that we all pay, but that we are all involved.

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America, Standing Small

Someone we like, Caroline Glick, has this to say about the situation in Ukraine in an interview at NRO:

Putin is thinking that under President Obama, the U.S. has abandoned its position of leader of the free world. As a consequence, Putin, Iran, and other aggressors feel free to advance their agendas unfettered by concern over how Washington will respond.

Since it is Obama’s withdrawal of the U.S. from its position of global leadership that has facilitated Putin’s aggressiveness, as well as Iran and its clients from Venezuela to Syria, only the U.S. can do something about it, by reasserting its primacy in global affairs and defending its allies and its interests.

As for America’s spurned and endangered allies, including Israel, they need to plan for the worst and develop the means of coping with the empowerment of these aggressors and plan to defend themselves in the absence of U.S. support, at least until Obama leaves office.

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Not Fade Away

You can forget about trying right up front to persuade folks that homosexuality is a good thing.  But if you can get them to think it is just another thing--meriting no more than a shrug of the shoulders--then your battle for legal and social rights is virtually won.

-- Marshall Kirk & Hunter Madsen

Doug Mainwaring, a gay man who blogs at American Thinker, is bringing to light a strategy dating back to the late-80s “to establish the ‘normalcy’ of gays and lesbians and secure broader acceptance and rights.” Harvard graduates Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen laid out in their 1989 book, After the Ball, a propaganda campaign (their term) in which “[t]he main thing is to talk about gayness until the issue becomes thoroughly tiresome.”

Mainwaring’s article is worth reading in itself, but there’s a part of what he wrote that bears quoting:

Let's return to an earlier statement:  "The main thing is to talk about gayness until the issue becomes thoroughly tiresome."

The most recent Pew Poll found that public acceptance of same sex marriage is now up to 54%.  Does this really reflect an enthusiastic embrace of the notion of same sex marriage?  -- Or --  Is a vast swath of the population just sick and tired of hearing about gays in the news day after day for the last few years?

Maybe they're also sick and tired of irrational accusations of bigotry and homophobia every time they try to enter into a reasoned discussion about same sex marriage.  Many who have been shut down for trying to engage in intellectually honest conversation, have concluded, "Why bother?  Just let them have what they want.  Maybe then they'll fade away."

Fade away?  Don't count on it.  There is never an end to progressive ideology.  Statists never have enough power and control.  This will never end until the very institution of marriage is obliterated from human civilization, in which case, we will no longer actually have a civilization.

I'm gay and I oppose same sex marriage because it is not marriage.  It is something else.  I, too, am tired of being labeled a "self loathing gay" and a "hater."  I am not.  But I refuse to be silenced by those who seek to manipulate and silence rather than enter into rational discussion.

Silencing techniques -- the modus operandi of the marriage "equality" activists -- will continue relentlessly until one day they discover that strategy no longer works.  But it is only each of us refusing to be silenced which will hasten the arrival of that day.

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In Like a Lion, Out Like a Clam

Earlier this month Lois Lerner refused for the second time to testify before a House committee about what she knows about the Obama administration’s siccing of the IRS on political opponents – an abuse of power in which she played a principal lead -- invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Jim Jordan, Republican Congressman from Ohio and a member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government, wrote in the Wall Street Journal last week (“A Special Prosecutor for the IRS”), that the regardless of administration stonewalling the committee investigation  has uncovered evidence showing that  “the administration's version of the agency's targeting of conservative nonprofits seeking tax-exempt status—such as blaming local officials in the Cincinnati office or claiming that liberal groups were victimized along with conservative groups—is nonsense.”

The real news has been revealed at the Lois Lerner hearing on March 5 and in the report of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on March 11: "Lois Lerner's Involvement in the IRS Targeting of Tax-Exempt Organizations." The evidence brought to light in that hearing and report completely discredited Ms. Lerner's claims about her involvement in what went on. It also eviscerated the notion that liberal and conservative groups were targeted.

When Ms. Lerner appeared before Congress in May 2013, she made this statement: "I have done nothing wrong. I have not broken any laws. I have not violated any IRS rules or regulations." But Ms. Lerner, we discovered, forwarded confidential taxpayer information to her personal email account in early May 2013, which is a violation of IRS rules. About the infamous "Be on the Lookout" targeting list—a document used to identify conservative groups for additional scrutiny—she told Congress that the criteria for screening tax-exempt groups for extra scrutiny never changed. In fact, she personally ordered it changed in July 2011 according to documents and testimony received by the committee.

Ms. Lerner was most certainly driven by politics. One email of June 11, 2011, shows that she directed her subordinate to focus on the issues surrounding the application of Karl Rove's group, Crossroads GPS. In another email of Feb. 1, 2011, she frets about the Supreme Court "overturning the ban on corporate spending" as it applies to nonprofits. (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission also overturned the ban on union political spending, but she expressed no concern about that.)

Yet, there’s more to this ugly story than that, because once again Attorney General Eric Holder’s politicized Justice Department has been deployed to assist in keeping the truth from coming to light. Writes Jordan,

Last May, and again on March 5 of this year, Ms. Lerner refused to answer the committee's questions about the IRS treatment of tax-exempt groups, asserting her right under the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination. Yet we learned on March 6 in reporting by this newspaper that she had previously given an interview to the Justice Department and, according to her lawyer, spoke with no grant of immunity.

Ms. Lerner's lawyer claims she gave an interview to the Justice Department because she did not believe the Oversight Committee would treat her fairly. More likely, the reason is because Justice is friendly territory. The lead investigator is a substantial Obama campaign contributor, and Justice has already leaked that it doesn't expect to prosecute anyone. As to the claim that liberal groups were also victimized, our committee investigation has yet to hear from a single progressive group that received the systematic scrutiny and harassment faced by the tea party and other conservative groups.

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Now Heather Can Have 3 Mommies

Thanks to U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman’s eagerness to overturn the decision of 2.7 million voters, Michigan’s bridal salons and hip second-hand shops are abuzz with 2-for-1 sales on plus-sized wedding dresses.

The Detroit media’s jubilant reaction on Friday evening was only slightly more one-sided than when the Tigers win a pennant. It was 6:10 before Fox2 Detroit even mentioned that there was an opposing party in the case.

The case was brought by a same-sex couple demanding the right to marry and adopt one another’s children, Judge Friedman has found that the Michigan Marriage Amendment (MMA) has to go, because the amendment’s language defining marriage as “the union of one man and one woman” doesn’t “advance any conceivable legitimate state interest.”

Now maybe you thought, as I did, that regulating marriage, which necessarily includes defining marriage, is fairly obviously a legitimate state interest. But that, not-so-patiently explains His Honor, is where we’re all wrong -- at least if we’re going to push so far as to clarify that “marriage” means a union of persons of the opposite sex.  The way Judge Friedman sees it, there is simply no rational basis for concocting a novel and eccentric legal definition of marriage as a union of a man and a woman.  Of the process by which the MMA was adopted by a majority of Michigan voters, Judge Friedman says in the language from a prior case, that he “can only conclude that the government’s actions were irrational.”

Attorney General Bill Schuette has filed a notice of appeal, and I expect Judge Friedman’s decision to be overturned by the Sixth Circuit.

There’s a lot wrong with this opinion. Principally, Judge Friedman held a trial when none was needed. Trials are held to find facts, and in this case there were no facts in dispute, at least none that were material. All parties agreed, including the court, that the whole issue of the lawsuit stood or fell on the question of whether or not the MMA, as a matter of law, could withstand “rational-basis review.” The defendant State of Michigan, citing U.S. Supreme Court precedent, pointed out that, under rational-basis review, “a legislative choice is not subject to courtroom fact-finding and may be based on rational speculation unsupported by evidence or empirical data.”  (Emphasis added).  And the burden of proof stays on the party attacking the law,  – in this case, the  same sex-plaintiffs – who must meet “the burden to negative every conceivable basis which might support it.”  (Emphasis added).

Under rational basis review, a court does not judge the perceived wisdom or fairness of a law, nor does it examine the actual rationale for the law when adopted, but asks only whether “there is any rational basis for the classification.”  (Emphasis in original).  

But Judge Friedman didn’t want to be limited to asking that, or rather, he didn’t want to be limited to answering that with a simple no, because then he would sound irrational, if not starkly cray-cray. That the correct answer is yes is beyond obvious: In a state where marriage has always been restricted to opposite-sex couples, an initiative to resolve to leave that restriction in place has a rational basis, even if a minority of voters don’t agree. 

To avoid ruling as he should have, Judge Friedman did two things. First, he adopted the false reasoning of the plaintiffs that the MMA’s restatement of marriage as a union of a man and a woman is a positive effort to harm same-sex couples. (He also implies same-sex marriage as a “fundamental right” recognized in federal law, which it is not).  In other words, rather than ask if there’s any rational basis for Michigan continuing its (and mankind’s) timeless practice of defining marriage as exclusive to members of the opposite sex, the judge wanted to ask instead if there’s any rational basis for Michigan voters to pass an amendment aimed at discriminating against homosexuals.* 

Next, Judge Friedman held a trial in which both sides’ social scientists engaged in mutual attacks on each other’s dodgy studies of same-sex parenting.  At the conclusion of this trial he then decided which set of experts he found more credible. Not surprising, he picked the experts whose studies found no evidence that this whole kids-being-better-off-with-a-mom-and-dad thing had any basis in Science.

Science, mind you. No evidence whatsoever. 

Voila!   Most of Judge Friedman’s opinion consists of a hectoring argument, thanks to the fact-finding he was forbidden to engage in under rational-basis review,  that kids of same-sex couples don’t do any worse in school than kids of heterosexual parents.  He uses this factoid to re-examine the rationale of the law when it was adopted – which also runs afoul of rational-basis review – as he sets about criticizing and rejecting the rationales anyway.  The testimony of defense experts that it’s optimal for a child to be raised by opposite-sex parents – a rational speculation even without the need for empirical proofs – was dismissed out-of-hand by the judge as so much pseudo-science.     

Having brought forth this factual mouse after much labor, Judge Friedman makes it the basis for his intellectual pretense that the sex of the parties has no rational relation to the regulation of Michigan marriages.  Even if, for argument’s sake, the plaintiffs’ experts are right, there’s more to marriage than how kids do in school.  Remember that the State of Michigan doesn’t need to prove that the MMA is perfect, all-wise, or will be the first law in history that doesn’t make someone unhappy – it’s presumed to be constitutional if there was a rational basis for adopting it.  We’ll see if the Sixth Circuit comments on the way Judge Friedman shifted the plaintiffs’ burden to “negative every conceivable basis which might support” the MMA onto the defendant to make a factual showing that heterosexual child-rearing is better than homosexual child-rearing.  

The Sixth Circuit ordered a stay Saturday afternoon, but at least 4 Michigan county clerk’s offices opened on Saturday morning, which they never do, in order to hand out as many licenses as possible. Would it be cynical to speculate that the rush wasn’t because true love can’t be held back one more moment, than establish a fait accompli of same-sex marriages to complicate the matter when Judge Friedman’s opinion is reversed?

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*The thinking is analagous to that of the spoiled child who denounces her parents’ reasons for refusing to buy her a brand-new Camaro -- that the finances are impossible, that she doesn’t need her own vehicle, and that none of the other siblings  got their own cars – because the real reason is her parents hate her and always have.  The homosexual-rights movement has been brattiness on steroids. 

Hare Today, Gun Tomorrow

Plaudits to the Detroit mother who defended her home and two children last Monday by opening fire on a trio of teenage home invaders who kicked her door in.  (“Detroit woman opens fire when 3 teens break into home”).   When they disregarded her warning that she was armed, she drove them off with multiple shots from a semi-automatic rifle.  When one of the assailants went back in for a second try, she opened fire again.  None of the assailants was hurt; all three were caught.  This wasn’t their first home invasion.   Detroit Police Chief James Craig, who publicly endorses armed citizens as a deterrent to crime, said the mother did the right thing.  Craig said the mother’s armed response “sends a message.”  Since last Monday two more Detroiters sent even louder messages, both using lethal force to defend themselves.

One guy not likely to get these messages is Darrell Dawsey, whose latest hysterical tract promoting race war showed up just a day earlier on Deadline Detroit: “Why Shouldn't We Arm Ourselves Against Stand-Your-Ground Shooters?”  His article features a spoof press release by NRA that advocates lowering the legal age for gun purchase to 15 so that black teenagers can protect themselves from Stand-Your-Ground stalkers.  “’This would allow all law-abiding teenagers to enjoy the same gun rights and legal protections as adults in defending themselves from attackers.’”

Please keep reading at The Public Thing.

Maybe Michigan Doesn’t Want To Go Over the Falls

“It’s the state of Michigan that’s paddling against a Niagara of social change.”

- Detroit News columnist Laura Berman.

I know whenever I’m watching a picture where the heroes are desperately paddling upstream to avoid a deadly waterfall, I always root for the waterfall. Don’t you?

According to Laura Berman,  the lesbian couple adoption/same sex-marriage case going on in Detroit’s federal district court right now (“Michigan lags rest of nation in move to enact social change”),“is shaping up as a modern day Scopes ‘monkey’ trial that pits the force of modernity against tradition, science against religion.”

Berman wants the rest of us rubes to know that, whatever traditional notions we’re clinging to that there’s a link between parenthood and heterosexual behavior, science knows nothing of it.

Please read the rest at The Public Thing.

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.

###

‘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.

###

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.

###

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.