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.

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Egyptians Condemn Americans To Die

From NRO:

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

By Paul Marshall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Prophet Speaks

Apes, Pigs, and F-16s

By Andrew C. McCarthy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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‘March of the Islamists’

Tristan MConnell writes:

March of the Islamists brings death and desolation in Mali

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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‘Britain’s National Sickness’

Melanie Phillips writes:

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

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

Read the rest of it here.

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‘Throw Eraser Only in Emergency’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Unconditional Surrender?

From Voice of America:

France Looking for 'Total Reconquest' of Mali

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Bell, Book, -- and Scented Candle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

###

American Muslims Still Behind–As Hate-Crime Victims

David J. Rusin has contributed this at NRO:

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

. . . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

###

(Not So) Good Grief, or, Empathy for the Devil

When I heard the news I worried about how it would affect my twelve year old son who is a sensitive child. I did not worry much about my older children until I received a text from my eighteen year old son reading, “turn on the news, I am so shaken.” Everyone is affected by what happened. Everyone needs a hug and to feel loved right now. This happened to the children of our nation and we must come together now to love and heal one another.

-- Blogger Tricia LaVoice

Oh, my.  Now on top of everything else I owe this lady a hug, and I’m morally obliged to sympathize with her poor son, who’s suffered being “shaken.”

At this stage, I’d gladly trade whatever hugs I have coming from the national bleed for a 24-hours moratorium on any sentence containing the words “grief,” “hug,” “heal,” “tragic,” “safe,” and “assault weapon.”

In defiance of all that is sacred, precious, and huggable, I’m proposing here that, while empathy is an admirable capacity when displayed in sensible proportions, in immoderate quantities, like any other emotion gone – frankly -- nuts, it is now only making things worse.  At this stage of our history America simply lacks civilizing norms to tell us when indulging an emotion has reached a healthy boundary, letting us know that any more of it will only be self-indulgence. The same social dictates that used to require a widow to wear black in public for a respectful time after her husband’s death also required that, beyond that point, she needed to stop wearing it, too.

Is there no useful human impulse we don’t manage to corrupt and spoil?   Et tu, empathy?  Alas, having suffered (because I support the Second Amendment) through two weeks of moral bullying over what happened in Newtown, I have to insist you have at maximum a two-degree proximity to the actual victims if you intend to claim my deference to your “need to heal.”  As for hugs – don’t even try it.  The Bible does indeed command that we’re to mourn with those who mourn. But if you expect me to send sympathy cards to all the rest of you who are mourning with those who mourn, I’m going to call a foul.

It’s not even the etiquette of all this that matters to me. It’s that all this boundless emotionalism is taken advantage of and exploited by people in this nation who know exactly how to use it.

Now, in the unlikely event that you are reading this and you actually are a parent or relative or associate of the victims of Sandy Hook, absolutely none of this intended for you. I’m sincerely sorry for your loss, and I have nothing more to add.

But for the rest of you, it’s time to get a grip. (Not a pistol grip, naturally. Those are going to be banned.) Or am I really the only one in America left able to distinguish what Adam Lanza did to 20 kindergartners in Newtown, Connecticut (he massacred them) from what “happened to the children of our nation” (nothing)?

Before six o’clock on Friday the 14^th, the media powers-that- be had already decided the entire population of the country were in a state of mourning.  Even Fox News did a Thelma and Louise over the responsible-reporting cliff.  It was Nina Easton on Fox News’ Special Report who referred to the president as the “mourner-in-chief.” (Is there anything that guy’s not the -in-chief of?) Bret Baer spent 100% of that Friday’s newscast on Sandy Hook. 

The national wake – besides being arbitrarily open-ended -- has since been enforced according to the kind of Victorian-era rules of behavior we Americans don’t even bother with when our actual relatives die. In this case, showing a proper respect for the bereaved (none of whom I know, nor do they know me) for some reason means not contradicting the media’s lockstep adoption of this particular mass shooting as qualitatively different, more shocking, and more beneficial to a rational discussion about guns than any other.   A colleague at work told me she took offense at a gun-rights advocate on a panel discussion – not because of his positions on gun rights – but because he said that the Sandy Hook massacre wasn’t “that shocking.” Wasn’t how shocking? Is there a meter that measures these things?

We are now being divided over how bad we feel?  As William Hurt’s character in Broadcast News said to Holly Hunter’s drama-queen response to massive terminations in the office, “I won’t feel bad because I don’t feel worse. This has happened at every station I’ve worked at.”  And no one hugged me when JFK, RFK, or MLK were assassinated and I turned out – well, never mind how I turned out.

But here I’ve just said I didn’t know the bereaved, when I guess I do, because it’s all of us, right? Especially those who feel so deeply that Sandy Hook was caused by Too Many Guns. And we all do know at least enough about bereavement to know it’s just bad form to say anything to upset the bereaved in his, or her, grief.

The problem is that that kind of immunity, enjoyed by the wrong people, can be misused.  Look at what happened with Cindy Sheehan.  Maureen Dowd said the death of Sheehan’s son in Iraq conferred upon her “absolute moral authority,” and on the strength of that stupid comment the Democrats used Sheehan  as a blackjack for a while to clobber supporters of the Iraq War --  right up until they got tired of her and threw her over.

As just one example of the same kind of thing, we have the opinions of Tom Messenger, a St. Louis editor, published in The Detroit News the other day.  This writer is on record elsewhere opposed to permitting “any teacher or principal with a concealed-carry permit to carry a gun while teaching our children.” (“Editorial: More guns in schools? Wrong answer “).  Fine, so he has an opinion.  But he has more than that, or thinks he does; he has the moral authority of a man going through the “five stages of grief,” although he’s currently stuck at “anger.” He describes making full use of it on a radio talk show recently when he took issue with the host’s view that the struggle to protect the Second Amendment as a left vs. right issue, an opinion Messenger denounced as ‘bunk”:

I went straight to anger as I explained my grief over Sandy Hook.

On top of being an American, a human being, a father and grandfather of children the age of the 20 who were shot to death, two days before the tragedy I'd been thinking about what might happen in a real-life school shooting in my community.

Now I won’t spoil the surprise if I tell you all that Messenger turns out not to have experienced an actual real life shooting in his community, beyond thinking about it, and, of course, experiencing Sandy Hook through news reports – which, for some reason I feel it necessary to repeat -- is not the same thing as having it happen to you. Anyway, in his mind he’s one of the bereaved of Sandy Hook

And because he’s one of the bereaved, we have to listen quietly as he bullies us with his opinions (immunized by grief, don’t forget) that “we must do whatever we can to make sure our children are safe, [or else] we have lost our souls.”

But by “whatever we can” he really means the very limited list of things that didn’t work last time, (the assault weapons ban), wouldn’t have stopped Lanza this time (“making high-capacity ammunition magazines illegal”), or costly and impractical solutions (“finding the funding to support existing programs that put police officers — not armed teachers or volunteers — in schools.”).    Why not armed teachers or volunteers?  Messenger doesn’t say.  He only makes clear that he’s opposed to the NRA or “other pro-gun groups,” making  him, it’s fair to say, an anti-gun advocate.  This just happens to fit in nicely with the extremely anti-gun extremism of the party in power in Washington, which is nothing if not adept at exploiting tragedies to achieve its objectives. Messenger’s views, dressed up in widow’s weeds and multiplied by millions, are jet fuel for a crafty politician with a demonstrated record for harnessing emotion to political ends.

And that, my friends, is why we mustn’t humor empathy running wild.

###

From Our No One Saw This Coming Department

This from the AP:

ASSIUT, Egypt -- A campaign of intimidation by Islamists left most Christians in this southern Egyptian province too afraid to participate in last week's referendum on an Islamist-drafted constitution they deeply oppose, residents say. The disenfranchisement is hiking Christians' worries over their future under empowered Muslim conservatives.

Around a week before the vote, some 50,000 Islamists marched through the provincial capital, Assiut, chanting that Egypt will be "Islamic, Islamic, despite the Christians." At their head rode several bearded men on horseback with swords in scabbards on their hips, evoking images of early Muslims conquering Christian Egypt in the 7th Century.

They made sure to go through mainly Christian districts of the city, where residents, fearing attacks, shuttered down their stores and stayed in their homes, witnesses said.

The day of the voting itself on Saturday, Christian voting was minimal -- as low as 7 percent in some areas, according to church officials. Some of those who did try to head to polling stations in some villages were pelted by stones, forcing them to turn back without casting ballots, Christian activists and residents told The Associated Press this week.

The activists now see what happened in Assiut as a barometer for what Christians' status will be under a constitution that enshrines a greater role for Shariah, or Islamic law, in government and daily life. Even under the secular regime of autocrat Hosni Mubarak, Egypt's Christians complained of discrimination and government failure to protect them and their rights. They fear it will be worse with the Islamists who have dominated Egypt's political landscape since Mubarak's ouster in February 2011. (“Fear keeps Egypt's Christians away from polls”).

More Heat Than Light

From Wednesday’s Detroit Free Press:

With the shock of the mass shooting at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school still fresh on the nation's conscience and protests and vigils by clergy and others closer to home, Gov. Rick Snyder vetoed a bill Tuesday that would have allowed Michigan gun owners with extra training to carry concealed weapons in schools, day care centers, churches and stadiums. (“In light of tragedy, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder vetoes bill that allowed guns in schools”).

This paragraph makes sense under one, and only one, condition: that you accept as true the premise that the Sandy Hook massacre was carried out by a lawful gun owner  permitted to carry a concealed weapon, (which, in a related assumption, is why whole thing can be laid at the feet of “the nations’s conscience.”)

But that isn’t the truth. Adam Lanza was not a lawful gun owner (he stole his mother’s guns), he did not have a CCW, and his murder weapon was not concealed.

The same poor logic is echoed in a statement by State Rep Shanelle Jackson:

“Gov. Rick Snyder made the right call in vetoing a bill that would have allowed concealed weapons into schools, day care centers, hospitals and places of worship,” Jackson's statement said. “In light of the tragic loss of children's lives in Connecticut, this was simply not the time to recklessly advance the expansion of concealed weapons in Michigan.”

Once again, this statement is devoid of a scintilla of sense if you don’t already take as given that Adam Lanza’s rampage – or any part of his plan or execution of it – had anything at all to do with anyone’s freedom to carry a concealed weapon into a school.

And yet both of these statements are meant to explain how Sandy Hook informed Snyder’s decision to veto the bill.

I’m not asking for much here; I never do.

But if anti-gun enthusiasts insist on using expressions like “in the light of the tragic loss of children’s lives” as a moral club to flatten whatever follows, it’s only fair that whatever follows actually have some moral connection to the opportunistically cited tragedy.

Yet not only is there no such connection, but the obverse thing being implied isn’t true either – that no reasonable person could envision how the presence inside Sandy Hook of an armed, trained citizen could have possibly lessened the tragedy of what happened. 

Even Gov Snyder manages to make things worse by protesting how he prefers to consider the concerns raised in the bill he vetoed in a “holistic manner”:  including finding “a way to better incorporate community mental health workers into schools.”

Except Sandy Hook had a mental health worker on the job: the school psychologist, who heroically lost her life, along with the school principal, taking on the killer without assistance of any weapon suited to the threat.

I don’t quite see how vetoing a bill that would have changed that dynamic should a similar scenario ever threaten a Michigan school can truly be said to have been made “in light of the tragedy.”

In fact, I’m stumped if I can understand how, with all the “light” the Newtown massacre is supposed to be shedding on everything, so many people are so much in the dark.

###

For Egypt, Not a Hand Out, But a Hand Off

Andrew G. Bostom writes on Friday at American Thinker:

Hadd Times Ahead for Egypt?

Today (12/14/12), the senior Egyptian judges of the so-called "Judges Club" reaffirmed their previously announced abstention from overseeing the two-stage (i.e., December 15th and 22nd) referendum on Egypt’s draft constitution.

A rival judicial club body has announced it would oversee the plebiscite. Zaghloul al-Burshi, head of the council responsible for overseeing the referendum, told Al Arabiya during an interview Monday 12/10/12 that between 7,000 to 9,000 judges, had agreed to oversee the referendum, which he maintained, was "more than enough"

Ahmad al-Zind, Chairman of the Egypt Judges Club, which declined the referendum oversight responsibility, nevertheless opined that all judges seek to protect the country’s national interests despite their differences.

We accept judge’s stances either way. People from here can learn democracy.

Al-Zind’s own recently aired "stance" on Sharia, specifically his condoning the mandatory hadd (plural hudud, or hudood) punishments, is well-worth noting given his prominent position.

What are the so-called hadd punishments condoned by Chairman of the Egypt Judges Club, al-Zind? Defined by the Muslim prophet Muhammad either in the Koran or in the hadith (the canonical collections of Muhammad’s deeds and pronouncements), these draconian punishments include: (lethal) stoning for adultery; death for apostasy; death for highway robbery, when accompanied by murder of the robbery victim; for simple highway robbery, the loss of hands and feet; for simple theft, cutting off of the right hand; for "fornication," a hundred lashes; for drinking wine, eighty lashes. Muhammad Abu Zahra (d. 1974), was a prominent member of Al Azhar’s Academy of Islamic Research, professor of Islamic law at Cairo University, and prolific author. These extracts from Abu Zahra’s "Punishment in Islam," featured in the seminal 935-page Proceedings of the Fourth Conference of the Academy of Islamic Research, September 1968, provide the mainstream institutional Islamic context for the contemporary views expressed by Ahmad al-Zind:

The hadd punishments being prescribed for the protection of society, their execution is tantamount to an act of worship and equivalent to a holy war [jihad] in the cause of Allah. To purge the community of pernicious elements is a sort of holy war to safeguard religion and morals. . . . From the words of Ibn Taymiya [d. 1328, the seminal jurist] it appears that Hudud are prescribed as a divine blessing. This idea is further developed by al-Mawardi in his ‘al-Ahkam al-Sultaniya’. [d. 1058, author of this landmark treatise on the governance of an Islamic state, Mawardi writes] "Hadd punishments are imposed by Allah as [a] deterrent from his prohibitions and the omission of His commandments."

In accord with this mainstream, Sharia-based Islamic jurisprudence across a millennial continuum, the following are excerpts from an interview with Ahmad Al-Zind, which was broadcasted on Egyptian television (Dream 2 TV), November 26, 2012:

The judges have a burning desire to instate shari’a laws regarding Islamic hudud punishments and the diya indemnity. The UAE [United Arab Emirates] has resolved this issue without problems and in a simple way -- the first article of its penal code states that shari’a law will be implemented with regard to the hudud and diya. When shari’a laws are implemented, they leave no room for bargaining. Any country that refrains from implementing these punishments is lacking in many ways. People should not fear the implementation of the hudud punishments, because this could be more lenient to the accused then ta’zir punishment [in which the judge has discretion]... Yet people terrify you with talk about the hudud. There is no backwardness in Islam, and people who claim otherwise are backward themselves. Allah’s mercy towards His servants is evident in the fact that the person administering lashings places a notebook in his armpit, preventing him from inflicting pain by raising his arm too high, lest the notebook should fall.

Unfortunately, Ahmad Al-Zind’s opinion reflects the overwhelming vox populi sentiments of Egypt’s Muslim masses, while providing a respected contemporary jurist’s authoritative Sharia-compliant validation of such views. Dating back to within a few days of their publication in April, 2007, I have repeatedly highlighted data from Egypt indicating that 74% of Egyptians favored "strict" application of the Sharia in general. As recently as December 2010, Pew polling data revealed that with regard to the draconian hadd punishments, 84% of Egyptian Muslims rejected freedom of conscience in the most ugly terms claiming apostates should be killed (i.e., that percentage would likely be well over 90% if less draconian punishments, such as imprisonment and beating till recantation were queried), 82% favor stoning adulterers to death, and 77% approved of mutilating punishments for theft.

Given such widely prevalent attitudes, even Muslim Brotherhood "Spiritual Adviser," and esteemed, prolific commentator Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s cautious admonition to reapply the full panoply of Sharia’s odious regulations "gradually," may not be necessary. With likely passage of Egypt’s Sharia-affirming draft constitution in the offing, "hadd times" may be returning to Egypt sooner than even confirmed Arab Spring pessimists like myself ever imagined.

###

No More Phobia?

Charles C. W. Cooke at NRO writes the following:

‘Phobic’ No More

‘In politics,” Coleridge wrote, “what begins in fear usually ends in folly.” In journalism, he might have added, what ends in “-phobia” usually suffers the same fate.

The Associated Press’s November announcement that it will cease conflating “phobia” and “criticism” is a welcome one, and both other news outlets and the general public would do well to follow its example. For a criminally long time now, “-phobe” has been lazily tacked on to other words without reference to its meaning or judgment about its suitability. In the dictionary of modern usage, “-phobe” is to “critic” what “-gate” is to “-scandal.” Oppose gay marriage? You’re a homophobe! Defend the Mohammed cartoonists? You’re an Islamophobe! The word joins others, such as “racist” and “misogynist,” in the twisted arsenals of those who would lob loaded terms into the field of debate in order to kill discussion.

The word “phobia” is derived from the Greek phobos, which translates literally as “panic flight,” and which medical dictionaries tend to translate more loosely as “morbid fear.” In the modern world, the term is most commonly employed by clinical psychologists as a label for a specific form of anxiety disorder in which a person experiences “excessive or unreasonable” — in other words, irrational— fear in response to a given stimulus. The most recent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders explains that in order for a person to be a “phobic,” “exposure to the phobic stimulus” must “almost invariably provoke an immediate anxiety response.” Among other things, this response can include loss of control, flight, fainting, and panic attacks. And the reaction can be classified as “phobic” only if “the person recognizes that the fear is excessive and unreasonable.”

Here’s the question for those who casually launch the word against their ideological opponents: Is there really no better description of democratic opposition to, say, gay marriage than “phobia”? The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual would certainly suggest that there is. The medical profession, too, which holds that one can diagnose a phobia only if “the anxiety, panic attack, or phobic avoidance associated with the specific object or situation are not better accounted for by another mental disorder.” It helps if those symptoms actually exist, too.

Explaining the AP’s decision, Deputy Standards Editor Dave Minthorn expressed his concern at the way in which “phobia” is being misused.   “‘Homophobia’ especially — it’s just off the mark,” he observed. “It’s ascribing a mental disability to someone, and suggests a knowledge we don’t have. It seems inaccurate.” I’d go one step further than Minthorn. It doesn’t just seem inaccurate, it is inaccurate— and wildly so. Nevertheless, it is easy to see why the “phobia” tag is appealing in political discourse. By insinuating that your opponents are irrational and motivated by primal fear — mentally ill, even — you are free to discount the legitimacy of their position without actually having to debate them. After all, who would bother to argue with a madman?

At this point in any discussion about language, someone usually pops his head above the parapet and says something to the effect of, “Calm down, language changes, and besides, it’s all about communication anyway.” This is true, and far be it for me to discourage lingua Anglica’s virtuous flexibility. But my complaint here is not so much about the changes in words’ meaning and use as it is about language that exists simultaneously in two states. “Phobia” has a clinical definition that is universally understood. It also has a colloquial — primarily political — usage that is not. The trouble is that the two uses do not coexist in separate, hermetically sealed arenas. The colloquial use has not become wholly divorced from the original use.

For Dave Minthorn, this is problematic because it results in copy that is “not quite accurate.” It’s a little more serious that that. We cannot have fruitful political discussions if we don’t know what we’re talking about or if we shut down our interlocutors at the first hurdle. Granted, this is a symptom as much it is a cause. But there are good reasons to remove barriers from our discourse, and I would applaud the Associated Press for recognizing that “phobia” is often an inappropriate descriptor. Perhaps Franklin Delano Roosevelt got it slightly wrong. What we have to fear is less fear itself, and more the prospect of losing the ability to talk about fear.

Presumably, there are some people who are genuinely scared of homosexuals. After all, there are people who are irrationally terrified — phobic, if you will — of garden spiders (arachnophobes), of string (cnidophobes), of chins (geniophobes), of stars (siderophobes), and of everything (panophobes). But homophobia is not a condition that afflicts many — certainly not all of the 44 percent of Americans who oppose gay marriage. As strongly as gay-marriage supporters (and they make up nearly half the population) might feel about the issue, it helps nobody for them to pretend that their fellow citizens are clinically ill.

“Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way,” George Orwell wrote in his essay “Politics and the English Language,” adding, “It is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it.” In our diffuse and noisy modern world, Orwell’s “we” is made up of billions of autonomous people each jostling for his say, and the temptation is to fall in line and contentedly reassemble those “strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else.” Congratulations to the Associated Press for having the courage to reject this pernicious tendency and demand that if language is to have any purpose at all, it should actually mean something.

###

R.I.P. The Detroit News

After many long years as a champion of the pro-life cause, the editorial department of the Detroit News has finally abandoned the cause for good. That leaves the Detroit newspaper audience without a major pro-life voice.

In a Sunday editorial advising Michigan lawmakers on goals for their lame-duck session, the following was included under the “Don’t Pass These” heading:

Abortion restrictions: Nearly 40 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that abortion is constitutional and legal. State lawmakers should stop trying to relitigate that decision. These bills, including one transparently designed to shut down clinics providing abortions, should be allowed to dissolve.

I suspect that Nolan Finley is the author of this unsigned editorial, and the author of the News’s abandonment of the cause of life. During primary season I noticed Finley’s comments were notably pro-choice, crabbing that Republicans were still weighing down the campaign with “social issues.”

When I first started reading editorial and op-ed pages in the early 1970s, Detroit had two distinct editorial voices in the Free Press and the News. Our house subscribed to both, and I devoured both.

As anyone would notice who regularly reads this blog , in recent years I haven’t had a very high opinion of either newspaper , both of which I feel compelled to ridicule for the thoroughgoing PC-ness of how they report the news – or refuse to report the news.

But until recently the News still held onto some of its old sense in its editorial pages. For 40 years we’ve had the Free Press lecturing readers about how the Supreme Court declared that killing the unborn was the law of the land and so we all had to stop talking about it – except to say how great it all was.  The News never admitted that either the moral or the legal subject were closed, as they weren’t, and as they never can be.

Never did until now.

Maybe Obama’s re-election has shaken people that deep.

Regardless, Detroit no more needs two papers babbling the same moral nonsense than the country needs two political parties promising the same moral nonsense. 

Too bad. Too, too bad.

###

In Detroit ‘Mistakes Were Made’–And They’re Just Getting Started

Here’s a made-in-Detroit story with almost everything in it that makes my hometown so interesting these days: allegations of civil rights violations by the cops, an astoundingly incompetent city department, and an autocrat too busy pretending to defend the city’s sacred honor to care that she single-handedly cost the city $1.1 million dollars from its bankrupt budget.

According to the Detroit Free Press:

The City of Detroit has been ordered to pay $1.1 million to a man who was rousted out of bed as a 14-year-old, charged with murder and held in a violent juvenile lockup for nearly two years before being acquitted of a fatal shooting in his neighborhood.

Caleb Sosa, now 19, claimed that police violated his civil rights by coercing him to put his initials on a confession that he couldn't even read.

The allegations in his lawsuit were never tested, however, because the case ended in an extraordinary way. A judge declared a default when city lawyers failed the most basic procedural step: They never filed a timely answer in court.

"The judge found that mistakes were made," said Krystal Crittendon, the head of Detroit's law department. (“Detroit ordered to pay man $1.1M in botched murder case”).

Now you Detroit watchers, and especially you court watchers, can especially appreciate that the case ending this way wasn’t extraordinary at all -- not for the Detroit Law Department. Detroit’s lawyers have specialized for years – at least going back to the Young administration -- in failing to answer lawsuits or show up in court to handle the most routine legal chores, racking up default judgments resulting in tens of millions of dollars in damages without plaintiffs ever having to prove a thing in court. And yes, that law-department chief offering the ultra-weak “mistakes were made” excuse in this recent case was none other than Krystal Crittendon, the Detroit Corporation Counsel who’s been holding Detroit hostage since June, and whom the Free Press just finished lionizing a few days before as a “fighter” whose only goal is “doing the right thing.” (“Detroit's controversial counsel Krystal Crittendon speaks out on why she won't stop fighting”).

It may be that the plaintiff in this case had a meritorious case and deserved the award. The Detroit police have been under a federal consent decree for years meant to correct a deeply-embedded departmental disregard for civil rights, and things still aren’t what they should be.

But that’s not really the point. The City of Detroit owes it to taxpayers to at least show up in court and defend these cases to insure that frivolous lawsuits aren’t being filed to fleece the city of money it hasn’t got. I have no doubt that the law department’s longtime reputation for negligence about routine lawyering has meant plenty of plaintiffs with phony claims gambled on winning by default and won.

Crittendon obviously doesn’t care. She’s on a mission she likes better, which is exercising co-equal powers with the mayor and the City Council. Thanks to her, not a single reform that was worked out in a consent agreement between Detroit and the State earlier this year has gone into effect. Detroit voters steeped in racist politics and convinced by their leaders that the only motive outsiders have for wanting to take over Detroit’s many failing departments are malevolent ones, voted this month to change the city charter to give Crittendon the power to interpret for herself the meaning of the city charter, and then to take judicial action on her own initiative to force elected officials to comply whenever she believes there’s been a violation.

Aside from the political insanity of this charter language (imagine a solicitor general with the authority to sue the President and the Congress to force them to abide by his interpretation of the Constitution), Crittendon’s talent for interpreting municipal law is limited. She claimed to believe she represented the citizens directly, rather than as counsel for the elected city government, her bosses. Accordingly, she filed a lawsuit on her own (imaginary) authority to stop the consent agreement from going into effect. The judge threw it out upon the obvious ground that only the mayor or the council can file lawsuits on the city’s behalf. (Notably, when the judge made his ruling, “Crittendon was not in court.”). As for the merits of her argument, she speciously determined that the State of Michigan was one of the city’s “debtors,” and so the city charter prohibited the city from making contracts with anyone in default. It remains to be seen if Crittendon’s logic will be applied the next time an agreement between Michigan and Detroit is made involving the transfer of state funds to the city.

I don’t believe for one second that Crittendon is dumb enough to believe any of this.  My guess is she is yet one more in Detroit’s long, long, line of shrewd opportunists who understands exactly where all Detroit voters’ buttons are, and intends to push them.  My own guess is she wants to be mayor.  How far-fetched is it when we just watched as 63% of Detroit voters willingly amended the city charter to make her co-mayor and a one-woman Supreme Court all rolled into one.  Obviously, she’s already grown beyond the mundane duties of running the law department.

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