Hard Nosed Glick and Meg Heap! Back To Feeling Normal, Whatever That Means!

;/

Caroline Glick is a very hard nosed editorial writer who pulls no punches. (See 1 below.)
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Lets hear it for Israel: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/09/if_it_werent_for_israel.html
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
A new approach? (See 2 below.)
++++++++++++++++++++++
Our fabulous District Attorney, Meg Heap,  gives a presentation. (See 3 below.)
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Back to feeling normal whatever that means.
+++++++++++++++++++++
Dick
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
1) The New Democrat Party

By Caroline B. Glick

Since 2015, Britain has been one election away from having an antisemitic prime minister backed by antisemitic voters. If current trends in the Democratic Party continue, in the not-so-distant future, the United States might be in the same position.

Two years ago, Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of Britain’s main opposition Labor Party. That officially put an end to Tony Blair’s alignment of the Labor Party with the political center in Britain, both in economic and in foreign affairs.

Corbyn is an antisemite. He refers to Hezbollah and Hamas – two terrorist groups that openly support the genocide of world Jewry and the annihilation of the Jewish state – as “our friends.” He has shared stages with Hamas terrorists and Holocaust- deniers. Since his ascension to leadership of the Labor Party, he has overseen the mainstreaming of antisemitic actions and rhetoric by his party members and supporters.

Shortly after Corbyn’s election, repeated, well-publicized acts of antisemitism by senior Labor Party members forced Corbyn to call for an investigation of the phenomenon. He appointed his ally Shami Chakrabarti to oversee the effort.

The Chakrabarti report – first presented at a Labor Party conference convened last June for that purpose – was not merely a whitewash. It effectively denied that it is possible to be concerned with antisemitism without being racially insensitive to other minority groups. In other words, concern for antisemitism is a form of racism in and of itself.

As for Corbyn himself, he couldn’t be clearer about his feelings. His remarks at his conference on antisemitism were antisemitic.

Corbyn insisted that it’s wrong “to assume that a Jewish friend is wealthy, part of some kind of financial or media conspiracy or takes a particular position on politics in general, or on Israel and on Palestine in particular.”

After all, not all Jews are bad, rich Jews who run the media and support Israel.

If that wasn’t enough, Corbyn then proceeded to allege that Israel is as evil as Islamic State. In his words, “Our Jewish friends are no more responsible for the actions of Israel and the Netanyahu government than our Muslim friends are for those various self-styled Islamic states and organizations.”

Since then, according to Jewish Labor Party members, Corbyn has refused to take any steps to diminish the increasingly strident antisemitic rhetoric and character of his party.

This then brings us to the American Democratic Party.

Over the past week, two incidents occurred that indicate that the party of Harry Truman and Bill Clinton is becoming increasingly comfortable with blaming the Jews.

First, last Thursday, Obama loyalist and former CIA operative Valerie Plame approvingly shared a fiercely antisemitic article on her Twitter feed.

The article, “America’s Jews are Driving America’s Wars,” was written by Philip Giraldi, a fellow former CIA officer and outspoken Jew-hater.

Giraldi’s piece included all the classic antisemitic tropes: Jews control the media and culture; they control US foreign policy; and they compel non-Jewish dupes to fight wars for Israel, to which the treacherous Jews of America are loyal.

Giraldi recommended barring Jews from serving in government positions and participating in public debates related to the Middle East. And, he added, if an American Jewish Israel-backer refuses to recuse himself, the media should duly label him, “Jewish and an outspoken supporter of the State of Israel.”

Such a label, he contended, “would be kind of like a warning label on a bottle of rat poison.”

Plame, who ultimately issued a contrite, defensive apology for circulating Giraldi’s anti-Jewish screed, initially justified her decision to repost the article and say it was “thoughtful.”

She added, “Many neocon hawks ARE Jewish.”

And she should know.

Plame rose to fame in 2003, when she was at the center of a chain of events that led to the delegitimization of Jewish neo-conservatives in the Bush administration through a campaign of antisemitic innuendo and legal persecution.

In 2003, Plame’s husband, former diplomat Joe Wilson, published an article in The New York Times in which he falsely denied White House claims that Saddam Hussein had sought to purchase uranium yellow cake from Niger for the purpose advancing his nuclear program.

Apparently in retaliation for his false allegations, then-deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage leaked to syndicated columnist Robert Novak that Wilson’s wife Valerie was a CIA officer. Plame was a covert operative at the time, making Armitage’s leak a crime.

The Justice Department appointed special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to oversee the investigation and prosecute the leak. Fitzgerald knew almost from the outset that Armitage was the source of the leak.

Yet he failed to prosecute him.

Instead, Fitzgerald went on a fishing expedition to root out then-vice president Richard Cheney’s Jewish chief of staff Scooter Libby. After a multiyear investigation, Libby, who did not leak Plame’s identity, was indicted and convicted on a specious count of perjury.

The effect of Libby’s indictment, prosecution and conviction was to place all his fellow Jews in the Bush national security team under constant and deeply antisemitic scrutiny. This defamation of Jewish American security experts in many ways paved the way for Barack Obama’s wholesale use of antisemitic undertones to defend his nuclear deal with Iran.

As Omri Ceren from the Israel Project recalled in a long series of Twitter posts after Plame circulated Giraldi’s article, Obama and his advisers repeatedly argued that “lobbyists” and Israel were seeking to convince lawmakers not to act in the US’s best interest. Instead they tried to manipulate senators into defending Israel and oppose Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, to the detriment of America. These exhortations, made repeatedly by Obama and his surrogates were then expanded upon and made explicit by their political allies in places like the Ploughshares Foundation, which served as focal points of Obama’s media campaign on behalf of the Iran nuclear deal.

Until she resigned on Sunday, Plame served on the Ploughshares board of directors.

Plame’s wing of the Democratic Party is not explicitly antisemitic. Obama never said, “Jews are undermining US national security.” Instead, he attacked Israel and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. He attacked “lobbyists” and foreign interests.

Plame’s mistake last week was that, in tweeting a link to Giraldi’s article, she moved beyond Obama’s dog-whistle approach.

In a way, she can be excused for crossing the line, because the rising force in her party has little problem openly trucking in Jew-hatred.

That force, of course is the Bernie Sanders radical leftist wing of the party.

Around the same time that Plame was tweeting her way into ill-repute, Iran was showing off a medium- range ballistic missile capable of hitting Israel and Europe and Sanders was giving a foreign policy speech in Missouri.

Israel was a key focus for Sanders, who is now in charge of the Democratic Party’s outreach efforts.

Sanders said the US is “complicit” with Israel’s “occupation” of Judea and Samaria and Gaza. He said that he would consider cutting off US military aid to Israel. He argued the US should take a more evenhanded approach to Israel.

No similar statements have ever been made by any major presidential contender or political leader in either party.

And yet, they have raised no outcry among his fellow Democrats.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
2) PRESIDENT TRUMP TRIES A NEW TACK ON THE PEACE PROCESS
By Evelyn Gordon

President Donald Trump’s address to the UN last week received considerable attention for what he actually said. No less interesting, however, is what he didn’t say. The speech contained zero mention of the Palestinians, zero mention of their conflict with Israel, and zero mention of the peace process Trump has been trying to revive.

This omission isn’t unprecedented, but it is unusual; most U.S. presidents have included the Israeli-Palestinian issue in their annual UN addresses. And it seems especially surprising for a president who has repeatedly declared Israeli-Palestinian peace to be one of his major foreign policy goals.Yet the omission is perfectly consistent with Trump’s approach to the peace process to date, which has differed markedly from that of all his predecessors in one crucial regard: He appears to be trying to apply serious pressure to the Palestinians rather than only to Israel.

Take, for instance, his administration’s consistent refusal to say that the goal of the peace process is a two-state solution. Since efforts to achieve a two-state solution have repeatedly failed for almost 25 years now, it makes obvious sense for anyone who’s serious about trying to solve the conflict to at least consider whether this is really the most workable option. But even if, as seems likely, the administration actually does believe in the two-state solution, refusing to publicly commit to it serves an important purpose.

That’s because insisting that the end goal be a Palestinian state is a major concession to the Palestinians—something that has unfortunately been forgotten over the last quarter century. After all, throughout Israel’s first 45 years of existence, there was almost wall-to-wall consensus among Israelis that a Palestinian state would endanger their country. Even the 1993 Oslo Accord included no mention of Palestinian statehood, and the man who signed it, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, asserted in his final address to the Knesset in 1995 that he envisioned a “Palestinian entity . . . which is less than a state.”

Yet to date, this significant concession to the Palestinians has never been accompanied by a corresponding Palestinian concession to Israel. Though the Palestinians insist on a Palestinian nation-state, they still refuse to accept a Jewish nation-state alongside it. Instead, they demand that millions of descendants of Palestinian refugees be allowed to relocate to Israel, turning it into a binational state.

Nor has this major concession to the Palestinians been accompanied by a corresponding international concession to Israel. The European Union, for instance, repeatedly makes very specific demands of Israel, insisting that it accept a Palestinian state based on the 1967 lines and Jerusalem as the capital of two states. But the EU has never demanded that the Palestinians accept a Jewish state or give up their idea of relocating millions of Palestinians to Israel. Instead, it merely calls for an unspecified “just, fair, agreed and realistic solution” to the Palestinian refugee problem, which the Palestinians–who view flooding Israel with millions of Palestinians as the only “just” solution–can easily interpret as support for their position.

In short, until Trump came along, the Palestinians won this major concession for free. Now, by refusing to declare a two-state solution as his goal, he has essentially told the Palestinians, for the first time in the history of the peace process, that every concession they previously pocketed is reversible unless and until they actually sign a deal. In other words, for the first time in the history of the peace process, he has told the Palestinians they have something to lose by intransigence. And if they want to reinstate America’s commitment to a Palestinian state, they will have to give something in exchange.

The same goes for Trump’s refusal even to mention the Palestinians in his UN speech. When former Secretary of State John Kerry repeatedly insisted that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is the world’s most important foreign policy problem (a message routinely echoed by European diplomats), that gave the Palestinians tremendous leverage. Since they have always been the more intransigent side, the easiest path for any broker to follow is to simply support more and more Palestinian demands without requiring any substantive Palestinian concessions in return and then try to pressure Israel into agreeing. Thus, if world leaders are desperate to resolve the conflict, they will naturally tend to take that easy path in the hope of producing quick “achievements,” which is, in fact, what has happened over the last two decades. The result is that the Palestinians have concluded they can keep getting more simply by continuing to say no.

In his UN speech, Trump sent the opposite message: There are a lot of important foreign policy issues, like North Korea and Iran, and the Palestinian issue is so trivial by comparison that it doesn’t even merit a mention. In other words, though Trump would like to broker a peace deal, it isn’t necessary for America’s own interests. And therefore, it’s only worth investing time and effort in it if Palestinians and Israelis are both actually ready to deal, which means the Palestinians will have to be ready to finally make some concessions.

There are ample grounds for skepticism about whether Trump’s approach will work; based on the accumulated evidence of the last quarter century, I consider it far more likely that the Palestinians simply aren’t interested in signing a deal on any terms. Nevertheless, there is a plausible alternative theory. Perhaps Palestinians keep saying no simply because doing so has proven effective in securing more concessions. And if that’s the case, then reversing this perverse set of incentives by telling them they stand to lose from intransigence rather than gain by it could actually be effective.

Whether he succeeds or fails, Trump deserves credit for trying something new. Given the failure of his predecessors to achieve peace, only State Department bureaucrats could imagine that doing the same thing one more time would somehow produce different results.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

3) Before a packed house of SIRC members and visitors at Plantation Club,Chatham County District Attorney Meg Heap gave a riveting summary of the fight against gang violence in Chatham County. 

Now in her fifth year as DA, she exhibited her energetic approach to all facets of this crucial effort, citing heartbreaking incidents where unsupervised juveniles and younger children were apparently well on their way to a life of crime. Her department’s efforts are evidently stretched to their limits, with over 16,000 active criminal cases in Chatham County courts and  a DA staff of only 42 devoted to combating gang violence in  Savannah. Yet, even with federal help, she characterized the fight as limited due to the systemic risk of boys in fatherless homes who have no male role models and drug dealers in their neighborhood. 

Her department efforts are also hampered by lenient laws pertaining to juvenile criminals and sympathetic to attempts to rehabilitate the hardened ones or protect their privacy.

Shooting victims but not killing them gets juvenile criminals too easy a path back to the environment which allowed that to happen. And the supplier of guns to a 13-year-old needs to have stronger criminal penalties as a
deterrent. The accused shooter in the three-fatality incident downtown was only 17 and a known gang member. 

Because of feared retaliation by rival gangs, several activities were canceled (Battle of the
Bands and Homecoming at a high school). 

As a further problem, the state’s Parole Board seems to have an overly sympathetic tendency to release hardened criminals who may be an imminent threat to repeat their criminal activity. Meg did recount a conviction of a

 clueless sympathizer who published witnesses’ names on line as a foolhardy effort to intimidate them
 into not cooperating with prosecuters in an upcoming trial.
 

Current efforts to combat crime In addition to working with other agencies – state and federal – her department now has efforts such as Designated Felony Statute (juveniles can  do prison time for certain crimes), Open Records and Touch DNA facilities (to identify who owned the gun when it was ditched). One successful effort involved
undercover work in a local park where guns and drugs were being dealt. After convictions, this had a measurable
effect in that neighborhood, and perhaps an unmeasurable effect as a deterrent due to fears of future “stings”. Also starting to enforce even minor offences does work (along the lines of the “broken window” theory), as fear of prosecution does have some effect. It definitely works to threaten prosecution under federal crimes, because prison time under those crimes has little chance of parole.  Using confiscated money in drug busts (some $50,000), without depleting other crime-fighting budgets, the DA has been able to create an elaborate data base of crucial information in detecting the source of gang crime. 

Another success was identifying the source of drug trafficking and gang violence plans as coming from prisons
themselves. These former criminal leaders, now in jail, were actively planning activities using cell phones smuggled in to them in prison.  Guards themselves were sometimes complicit in this via  bribery. 

Q&A 1.     On Parole Board’s being perceived a too lenient, Meg Heap stressed that Parole Board members are
appointed by the Georgia governor. (The implication is that some of these Parole Board members are appointed not necessarily by pure merit for the job but as political gratitude.

2.     On those providing guns to potential felons and to juveniles, who would not qualify for a gun license, there needs to be stronger penalties and even felony convictions, even for women who are enablers.  

3.    On the need for male role models for juveniles in broken homes, ideally it could come from black
males in the community (or NFL or NBA players), but even white males could have an influence.

 4.    On the wisdom of getting a concealed carry permit, the suggestion was to also do a lot of practice with a weapon,  because if you have one, you need to be very responsible in how to use it. (Meg herself has done so, partially because of the risk of retribution from gangs in other locales against prosecutors of gang violence.

 5.    Someone from Huntsville, Alabama suggested that breaking up the “public housing projects”
 there had a beneficial effect on crime in Huntsville, although he conceded the residents merely went to other cities.  

6.    The Chatham County Youth Intercept Program is making strides to combat and reduce crime in the area. When a young victim of intentional violence is taken to the emergency room, the Youth Intercept Program steps in to offer vital help and resources. It is a community-focused, hospital-based program designed to reduce
recidivism among youth ages 12 to 25, providing a path out of community violence for kids caught up in crime or the victims of violent crime.  

7.    Georgia House Representative Jesse Petrea echoed the concern about the risks of juveniles
growing up in broken families with little parental supervision and no responsible male role models. He also referred to a pending state law to go after prison guards and others who enable illegal cell phones to be smuggled into prisons to allow future crime planning (they detected some 20,000 of these in Georgia prisons today).   

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++