As Hillary prepares to take over as her
party's nominee she has begun campaigning
against Trump and has been pandering to females
first, by telling them Trump does not respect them and
second, telling them about all the goodies they can
depend upon receiving from a Clinton Administration
that will turn our government into a true "nanny state."
Her husband proved to be a philanderer and now she is
campaigning as a panderer.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Heather Mac Donald takes a different approach regarding "Black Lives Matter!" She goes to the heart of the issue rather than pussy footing. The problem is predominantly three fold:
Blacks seem to get a thrill killing each other and the president prefers blaming the police because it supports the radicalization of America.
Third, the police consequently back off and more crime occurs and more blacks are allowed to continue killing each other.(See 1 below.)
Blacks seem to get a thrill killing each other and the president prefers blaming the police because it supports the radicalization of America.
Third, the police consequently back off and more crime occurs and more blacks are allowed to continue killing each other.(See 1 below.)
===
Israelis are a happy lot notwithstanding the threats they constantly face. Perhaps it is because they are not led by Obama. (See 2 below.)
====
Dennis Prager remains scared but not by Trump as much as by the consequences of Liberalism which has helped destroy our nation's character. (See 3 below.)
===
This from an very long time friend and fellow memo reader: "Some of the old timers in the Republican Party don't like the way the game is going. They are threatening to take their ball and go home. They may end by being at home with their ball while the game continues without them. No politician wants to be forgotten. They will make statements. Noise.
Once Trump is the candidate, there will be no shortage of people who will give money to have the President owe them a private hearing. Political Operatives always need work and will work for whomever pays. They always have.
Hilary will be the weakest candidate the Democrats could put forward. Trump will win. G-----"
===
===
Unlike West Point, The Citadel did not cave and refused to allow a female Muslim Cadet to wear a Muslim headscarf called a hijab — a decision that may now lead to a lawsuit against the school. The Citadel is located in Charleston, S.C.
Are certain Muslims being encouraged to join various organizations, make demands that would be disruptive and create the "termiting" of our nation's social order?
The financing of Middle East Studies on our college campuses has fomented extraordinary
discord and these departments are being financed by the radical Wahhabi wing of the Saudi Royal Family.You decide.
===
Sowell believes both cadidates are a disaster and harkens back to Hoover to relate the damage that could result to The Republian Party.
I am not as persuaded but I understand where he is coming from but believe common sense will prevail and Republicans will rally if only because they have skin in the game. Their skin!. (See 4 below.)
===
More regarding Rhodes' transgressions or was it simply just another day of lying and twisting at the office.? (See 5 below.)
===
A Harvard Professor speaks out about anti-Semitism in England. (See 6 below.)
===
That "THING" hanging over Hillary's head has been identified by the head of the FBI. He calls it a criminal investigation.
Maybe he should be president. Then we might know the enemy we face are radical islamists. (See 7 below.)
===
Sowell believes both cadidates are a disaster and harkens back to Hoover to relate the damage that could result to The Republian Party.
I am not as persuaded but I understand where he is coming from but believe common sense will prevail and Republicans will rally if only because they have skin in the game. Their skin!. (See 4 below.)
===
More regarding Rhodes' transgressions or was it simply just another day of lying and twisting at the office.? (See 5 below.)
===
A Harvard Professor speaks out about anti-Semitism in England. (See 6 below.)
===
That "THING" hanging over Hillary's head has been identified by the head of the FBI. He calls it a criminal investigation.
Maybe he should be president. Then we might know the enemy we face are radical islamists. (See 7 below.)
===
Dick
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
1) The Danger of the “Black Lives Matter” Movement
By Heather Mac Donald
Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. She earned a B.A. from Yale University, an M.A. in English from Cambridge University, and a J.D. from Stanford Law School. She writes for several newspapers and journals, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The New Criterion, andPublic Interest, and is the author of three books, including Are Cops Racist?and The War on Cops: How The New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe (forthcoming June 2016).
The following is adapted from a speech delivered on April 27, 2016, at Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C., as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series.
For almost two years, a protest movement known as “Black Lives Matter” has convulsed the nation. Triggered by the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014, the Black Lives Matter movement holds that racist police officers are the greatest threat facing young black men today. This belief has triggered riots, “die-ins,” the murder and attempted murder of police officers, a campaign to eliminate traditional grand jury proceedings when police use lethal force, and a presidential task force on policing.
Even though the U.S. Justice Department has resoundingly disproven the lie that a pacific Michael Brown was shot in cold blood while trying to surrender, Brown is still venerated as a martyr. And now police officers are backing off of proactive policing in the face of the relentless venom directed at them on the street and in the media. As a result, violent crime is on the rise.
The need is urgent, therefore, to examine the Black Lives Matter movement’s central thesis—that police pose the greatest threat to young black men. I propose two counter hypotheses: first, that there is no government agency more dedicated to the idea that black lives matter than the police; and second, that we have been talking obsessively about alleged police racism over the last 20 years in order to avoid talking about a far larger problem—black-on-black crime.
Let’s be clear at the outset: police have an indefeasible obligation to treat everyone with courtesy and respect, and to act within the confines of the law. Too often, officers develop a hardened, obnoxious attitude. It is also true that being stopped when you are innocent of any wrongdoing is infuriating, humiliating, and sometimes terrifying. And needless to say, every unjustified police shooting of an unarmed civilian is a stomach-churning tragedy.
Given the history of racism in this country and the complicity of the police in that history, police shootings of black men are particularly and understandably fraught. That history informs how many people view the police. But however intolerable and inexcusable every act of police brutality is, and while we need to make sure that the police are properly trained in the Constitution and in courtesy, there is a larger reality behind the issue of policing, crime, and race that remains a taboo topic. The problem of black-on-black crime is an uncomfortable truth, but unless we acknowledge it, we won’t get very far in understanding patterns of policing.
Every year, approximately 6,000 blacks are murdered. This is a number greater than white and Hispanic homicide victims combined, even though blacks are only 13 percent of the national population. Blacks are killed at six times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined. In Los Angeles, blacks between the ages of 20 and 24 die at a rate 20 to 30 times the national mean. Who is killing them? Not the police, and not white civilians, but other blacks. The astronomical black death-by-homicide rate is a function of the black crime rate. Black males between the ages of 14 and 17 commit homicide at ten times the rate of white and Hispanic male teens combined. Blacks of all ages commit homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined, and at eleven times the rate of whites alone.
The police could end all lethal uses of force tomorrow and it would have at most a trivial effect on the black death-by-homicide rate. The nation’s police killed
987 civilians in 2015, according to a database compiled by The Washington Post. Whites were 50 percent—or 493—of those victims, and blacks were 26 percent—or 258. Most of those victims of police shootings, white and black, were armed or otherwise threatening the officer with potentially lethal force.
The black violent crime rate would actually predict that more than 26 percent
of police victims would be black. Officer use of force will occur where the police interact most often with violent criminals, armed suspects, and those resisting arrest, and that is in black neighborhoods. In America’s 75 largest counties in 2009, for example, blacks constituted 62 percent of all robbery defendants, 57 percent of all murder defendants, 45 percent of all assault defendants—but
only 15 percent of the population.
Moreover, 40 percent of all cop killers have been black over the last decade. And a larger proportion of white and Hispanic homicide deaths are a result of police killings than black homicide deaths—but don’t expect to hear that from the media or from the political enablers of the Black Lives Matter movement. Twelve percent of all white and Hispanic homicide victims are killed by police officers, compared to four percent of all black homicide victims. If we’re going
to have a “Lives Matter” anti-police movement, it would be more appropriately named “White and Hispanic Lives Matter.”
Standard anti-cop ideology, whether emanating from the ACLU or the academy, holds that law enforcement actions are racist if they don’t mirror population data. New York City illustrates why that expectation is so misguided. Blacks make up 23 percent of New York City’s population, but they commit 75 percent of all shootings, 70 percent of all robberies, and 66 percent of all violent crime, according to victims and witnesses. Add Hispanic shootings and you account for 98 percent of all illegal gunfire in the city. Whites are 33 percent of the city’s population, but they commit fewer than two percent of all shootings, four percent of all robberies, and five percent of all violent crime. These disparities mean that virtually every time the police in New York are called out on a gun
run—meaning that someone has just been shot—they are being summoned to minority neighborhoods looking for minority suspects.
Officers hope against hope that they will receive descriptions of white shooting suspects, but it almost never happens. This incidence of crime means that innocent black men have a much higher chance than innocent white men of being stopped by the police because they match the description of a suspect. This is not something the police choose. It is a reality forced on them by the facts of crime.
The geographic disparities are also huge. In Brownsville, Brooklyn, the per capita shooting rate is 81 times higher than in nearby Bay Ridge, Brooklyn—
the first neighborhood predominantly black, the second neighborhood predominantly white and Asian. As a result, police presence and use of proactive tactics are much higher in Brownsville than in Bay Ridge. Every time there is a shooting, the police will flood the area looking to make stops in order to avert a retaliatory shooting. They are in Brownsville not because of racism, but because they want to provide protection to its many law-abiding residents who deserve safety.
Who are some of the victims of elevated urban crime? On March 11, 2015, as protesters were once again converging on the Ferguson police headquarters demanding the resignation of the entire department, a six-year-old boy named Marcus Johnson was killed a few miles away in a St. Louis park, the victim of a drive-by shooting. No one protested his killing. Al Sharpton did not demand a federal investigation. Few people outside of his immediate community know his name.
Ten children under the age of ten were killed in Baltimore last year. In Cleveland, three children five and younger were killed in September. A seven-year-old boy was killed in Chicago over the Fourth of July weekend by a bullet intended for his father. In November, a nine-year-old in Chicago was lured into an alley and killed by his father’s gang enemies; the father refused to cooperate with the police. In August, a nine-year-old girl was doing her homework on her mother’s bed in Ferguson when a bullet fired into the house killed her. In Cincinnati in July, a four-year-old girl was shot in the head and a six-year-old
girl was left paralyzed and partially blind from two separate drive-by shootings.
This mindless violence seems almost to be regarded as normal, given the lack of attention it receives from the same people who would be out in droves if any of these had been police shootings. As horrific as such stories are, crime rates were much higher 20 years ago. In New York City in 1990, for example, there were 2,245 homicides. In 2014 there were 333—a decrease of 85 percent. The drop in New York’s crime rate is the steepest in the nation, but crime has fallen at a historic rate nationwide as well—by about 40 percent—since the early 1990s. The greatest beneficiaries of these declining rates have been minorities. Over 10,000 minority males alive today in New York would be dead if the city’s homicide rate had remained at its early 1990s level.
What is behind this historic crime drop? A policing revolution that began in New York and spread nationally, and that is now being threatened. Starting in 1994, the top brass of the NYPD embraced the then-radical idea that the police can actually prevent crime, not just respond to it. They started gathering and analyzing crime data on a daily and then hourly basis. They looked for patterns, and strategized on tactics to try to quell crime outbreaks as they were emerging.
Equally important, they held commanders accountable for crime in their jurisdictions. Department leaders started meeting weekly with precinct commanders to grill them on crime patterns on their watch. These weekly accountability sessions came to be known as Compstat. They were ruthless, high tension affairs. If a commander was not fully informed about every local crime outbreak and ready with a strategy to combat it, his career was in jeopardy.
Compstat created a sense of urgency about fighting crime that has never left the NYPD. For decades, the rap against the police was that they ignored crime in minority neighborhoods. Compstat keeps New York commanders focused
like a laser beam on where people are being victimized most, and that is in minority communities. Compstat spread nationwide. Departments across the country now send officers to emerging crime hot spots to try to interrupt
criminal behavior before it happens.
In terms of economic stimulus alone, no other government program has come close to the success of data-driven policing. In New York City, businesses that had shunned previously drug-infested areas now set up shop there, offering residents a choice in shopping and creating a demand for workers. Senior citizens felt safe to go to the store or to the post office to pick up their Social Security checks. Children could ride their bikes on city sidewalks without their mothers worrying that they would be shot. But the crime victories of the last
two decades, and the moral support on which law and order depends, are now in jeopardy thanks to the falsehoods of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Police operating in inner-city neighborhoods now find themselves routinely surrounded by cursing, jeering crowds when they make a pedestrian stop or
try to arrest a suspect. Sometimes bottles and rocks are thrown. Bystanders stick cell phones in the officers’ faces, daring them to proceed with their duties. Officers are worried about becoming the next racist cop of the week and possibly losing their livelihood thanks to an incomplete cell phone video that inevitably fails to show the antecedents to their use of force. Officer use of
force is never pretty, but the public is clueless about how hard it is to subdue a suspect who is determined to resist arrest.
As a result of the anti-cop campaign of the last two years and the resulting push-back in the streets, officers in urban areas are cutting back on precisely the kind of policing that led to the crime decline of the 1990s and 2000s.
Arrests and summons are down, particularly for low-level offenses. Police officers continue to rush to 911 calls when there is already a victim. But when it comes to making discretionary stops—such as getting out of their cars and questioning people hanging out on drug corners at 1:00 a.m.—many cops
worry that doing so could put their careers on the line. Police officers are, after all, human. When they are repeatedly called racist for stopping and questioning suspicious individuals in high-crime areas, they will perform less of those stops. That is not only understandable—in a sense, it is how things should work. Policing is political. If a powerful political block has denied the legitimacy of assertive policing, we will get less of it.
On the other hand, the people demanding that the police back off are by no means representative of the entire black community. Go to any police-neighborhood meeting in Harlem, the South Bronx, or South Central Los Angeles, and you will invariably hear variants of the following: “We want the dealers off the corner.” “You arrest them and they’re back the next day.” “There are kids hanging out on my stoop. Why can’t you arrest them for loitering?” “I smell weed in my hallway. Can’t you do something?” I met an elderly cancer amputee in the Mount Hope section of the Bronx who was terrified to go to her lobby mailbox because of the young men trespassing there and selling drugs. The only time she felt safe was when the police were there. “Please, Jesus,” she said to me, “send more police!” The irony is that the police cannot respond to these heartfelt requests for order without generating the racially disproportionate statistics that will be used against them in an ACLU or Justice Department lawsuit.
Unfortunately, when officers back off in high crime neighborhoods, crime shoots through the roof. Our country is in the midst of the first sustained violent crime spike in two decades. Murders rose nearly 17 percent in the nation’s 50 largest cities in 2015, and it was in cities with large black populations where the violence increased the most. Baltimore’s per capita homicide rate last year was the highest in its history. Milwaukee had its deadliest year in a decade, with a 72 percent increase in homicides. Homicides in Cleveland increased 90 percent over the previous year. Murders rose 83 percent in Nashville, 54 percent in Washington, D.C., and 61 percent in Minneapolis. In Chicago, where
pedestrian stops are down by 90 percent, shootings were up 80 percent
through March 2016.
I first identified the increase in violent crime in May 2015 and dubbed it “the Ferguson effect.” My diagnosis set off a firestorm of controversy on the anti-
cop Left and in criminology circles. Despite that furor, FBI Director James Comey confirmed the Ferguson effect in a speech at the University of Chicago Law School last October. Comey decried the “chill wind” that had been blowing through law enforcement over the previous year, and attributed the sharp rise
in homicides and shootings to the campaign against cops. Several days later, President Obama had the temerity to rebuke Comey, accusing him (while leaving him unnamed) of “cherry-pick[ing] data” and using “anecdotal evidence to drive policy [and] feed political agendas.” The idea that President Obama knows more about crime and policing than his FBI director is of course ludicrous. But the President thought it necessary to take Comey down,
because to recognize the connection between proactive policing and public safety undermines the entire premise of the anti-cop Left: that the police oppress minority communities rather than bring them surcease from disorder.
As crime rates continue to rise, the overwhelming majority of victims are, as usual, black—as are their assailants. But police officers are coming under attack as well. In August 2015, an officer in Birmingham, Alabama, was beaten unconscious by a convicted felon after a car stop. The suspect had grabbed the officer’s gun, as Michael Brown had tried to do in Ferguson, but the officer hesitated to use force against him for fear of being charged with racism. Such incidents will likely multiply as the media continues to amplify the Black Lives Matter activists’ poisonous slander against the nation’s police forces.
The number of police officers killed in shootings more than doubled during the first three months of 2016. In fact, officers are at much greater risk from blacks than unarmed blacks are from the police. Over the last decade, an officer’s chance of getting killed by a black has been 18.5 times higher than the chance of an unarmed black getting killed by a cop.
The favorite conceit of the Black Lives Matter movement is, of course, the
racist white officer gunning down a black man. According to available studies,
it is a canard. A March 2015 Justice Department report on the Philadelphia Police Department found that black and Hispanic officers were much more
likely than white officers to shoot blacks based on “threat misperception,” i.e., the incorrect belief that a civilian is armed. A study by University of Pennsylvania criminologist Greg Ridgeway, formerly acting director of the National Institute of Justice, has found that black officers in the NYPD were 3.3 times more likely to fire their weapons at shooting scenes than other officers present. The April 2015 death of drug dealer Freddie Gray in Baltimore has been slotted into the Black Lives Matter master narrative, even though the
three most consequential officers in Gray’s arrest and transport are black.
There is no evidence that a white drug dealer in Gray’s circumstances, with a similar history of faking injuries, would have been treated any differently.
We have been here before. In the 1960s and early 1970s, black and white radicals directed hatred and occasional violence against the police. The difference today is that anti-cop ideology is embraced at the highest reaches
of the establishment: by the President, by his Attorney General, by college presidents, by foundation heads, and by the press. The presidential candidates of one party are competing to see who can out-demagogue President Obama’s persistent race-based calumnies against the criminal justice system, while
those of the other party have not emphasized the issue as they might have.
I don’t know what will end the current frenzy against the police. What I do know is that we are playing with fire, and if it keeps spreading, it will be hard to put out.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
2)The Improbable Happiness of Israelis
Global surveys find Israel high on happiness and life-satisfaction rankings—despite threats all around.
By Avinoam Bar-Yosef
The World Happiness Report 2016 Update ranks Israel (Jews and Arabs) 11th of 158 countries evaluated for the United Nations. Israel also shines as No. 5 of the 36 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries on the OECD’s Life Satisfaction Index—ahead of the U.S., the U.K. and France.
How can this be so? Israelis live in a hostile and volatile neighborhood, engaged in an endless conflict with the Palestinians and under the threat of nuclear annihilation by Iran. If you crunch the different components of these indexes, Israel falls much further down the lists. It ranks only 24th in GDP per capita, and comes in at No. 30 of the 36 OECD countries on security and personal safety. Israel has only the 17th-highest per capita income in the world.
But Israelis do not rank as stupid on any index. Israel was the fifth-most innovative country in the 2015 Bloomberg Innovation Index, and a 2014 OECD study ranked it fourth in the percentage of adults with a higher education.
So what explains the Israeli paradox? Do Israelis only become stupid when thinking about their own happiness?
The explanation probably lies in indicators not considered in standard surveys. For instance, a new study by my organization, the Jewish People Policy Institute, looked at pluralism in Israel and found that 83% of Israel’s Jewish citizens consider their nationality “significant” to their identity. Eighty percent
mention that Jewish culture is also “significant.” More than two-thirds (69%) mention Jewish tradition
as important. Strong families and long friendships stretching back to army service as young adults, or even to childhood, also foster a sense of well-being. All of these factors bolster the Jewish state’s raison d’être.
This year, May 12 will mark the 68th anniversary of Israel’s founding, when a nation was created against all odds. The enormous challenges never eroded Israelis’ energy, or hope.
David Ben-Gurion, the first Israeli prime minister, once said: “We will know we have become a normal country when Jewish thieves and Jewish prostitutes conduct their business in Hebrew.” Well, in this respect Israel has done much better than he could have dreamed: with one ex-president in jail for rape, and a former prime minister locked up for corruption. Israelis find comfort in the fact that the high and mighty are treated the same under the law as common crooks.
Former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who died in 2014, once recalled that after finishing a day’s work with his father in their Kfar Malal fields, he had pointed out in frustration how much was left to be plowed. His father, Samuel, told him to turn around and take in how much they had done.
In every aspect of Israel’s existence there is plenty left to be plowed—plenty of room for improvement. Yet Israelis take comfort in looking back and savoring how much has been achieved, how sovereignty over the land of their forefathers was reclaimed. At least 60% of the Israeli population, now eight
million, are Jewish immigrants or their children. Jews from more than 90 countries, of all colors and walks of life, are united in one society. They cherish the sense of self-determination.
And it isn’t just Jews. Go to any beach or shopping mall and—despite the frictions—you will see Jews and Arabs peacefully coexisting. They all can take pride in their country’s accomplishments, as when Israel faced a water crisis a decade ago and launched a desalination project that is now the envy of the world.
In 1964, my close childhood friend, Aryeh Argani, a young Israeli Defense Force pilot, was killed in action. Since then I have visited his grave every spring on Independence Day. Three years ago, I got a phone call from his squadron telling me that they had noticed that no one was participating in the
official memorials for Aryeh. He had been an only child, and the sorrow destroyed his parents. The squadron
had learned that he and I had been friends, and they invited me to attend a memorial for Aryeh. In the pilots’ club of Squadron 103, I found, a corner of the club is dedicated to Aryeh’s memory. His violin rests there.
These kinds of things make Israelis proud and happy. If the global happiness and satisfaction index
could measure them, we might get a better grip on the Israeli paradox.
Mr. Bar-Yosef is the president of the Jewish People Policy Institute and former chief diplomatic correspondent and Washington bureau chief for the Israeli daily Maariv.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
3)The Scariest Reason Trump Won
The majority of Republicans are not conservative.
By: Dennis Prager
There are many reasons Donald Trump is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.
The four most often cited reasons are the frustrations of white working-class Americans, a widespread revulsion against political correctness, disenchantment with the Republican “establishment,” and the unprecedented and unrivaled amount of time the media afforded Trump. They are all valid.
But the biggest reason is this: The majority of Republicans are not conservative. Conservatives who opposed Trump kept arguing — indeed provided unassailable proof – that Donald Trump is not a conservative and has never been one. But the argument meant little or nothing to two types of Republicans: the majority of Trump voters who don’t care whether he is a conservative, and the smaller number of Trump voters who are conservative but care about illegal
immigration more than all other issues, including Trump’s many and obvious failings.
So, then, what happened to the majority of Republicans? Why aren’t they conservative? The answer lies in America’s biggest – and scariest – problem: Most Americans no longer know
what America stands for. For them, America has become just another country, a place located between Canada and Mexico. But America was founded to be an idea, not another country. As Margaret Thatcher put it: “Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.”
Why haven’t Americans over the past three generations known what America stands for? Probably the biggest reason is the influence of left-wing ideas. Since its inception, the Left has opposed the American idea, and for good reason. Everything the American idea represents undermines leftist ideas. And the Left, unlike most Americans, has always understood that either the Left is right or America is right. America stands for small government, a free economy (and therefore capitalism), liberty (and it therefore allows for liberty’s inevitable consequence, inequality), the “melting pot” ideal, and a God-centered population rooted in Judeo-Christian values (so that a moral society is created by citizens exercising self-control rather than relying on the state to impose controls). Only America was founded on the idea of small government. But the Left is based on big government. America was founded on the principle that human rights come from the Creator. For the Left, rights come from the state. America was founded on the belief that in order to maintain a small government, a God-fearing people is necessary. The Left opposes God-based religions, particularly Judeo-Christian religions. Secularism is at the core of Leftism every bit as much as egalitarianism is. It took generations, but the Left has succeeded in substituting its values for America’s. The American Revolution, unlike the French Revolution, placed liberty above equality. For the Left, equality is more important than all else. That’s why
so many American and European leftists have celebrated left-wing regimes, no matter how much they squelched individual liberty, from Stalin to Mao to Che and Castro to Hugo Chávez. They
all preached equality. It took generations, but the Left has succeeded (primarily through the schools, but also through the media) in substituting its values for America’s. While the Left has been the primary cause, there have been others. The most significant is success.
American values were so successful that Americans came to take America’s success for granted. They forgot what made America uniquely free and affluent. And now, it’s not even accurate to say “forgot,” because, in the case of the current generation, they never knew. While the schools, starting with the universities, were being transformed into institutions for left-wing indoctrination, American parents, too, ceased teaching their children American values (beginning with not reading to their children the most popular book in American history, the Bible). Schools even stopped teaching American history. When American history is taught today, it is taught as a history of oppression, imperialism, and racism. Likewise, there is essentially no civics education, once a staple of the public-school system. Young Americans are not taught either the
Constitution or how American government works. I doubt many college students even know what “separation of powers” means, let alone why it is so significant. So, then, thanks to leftism and America’s taken-for-granted success, most Americans no longer understand what it means
to be an American. Those who do are called “conservatives” because they wish to conserve the unique American idea. But conservatives now constitute not only a minority of Americans, but
a minority of Republicans. That is the primary reason Donald Trump — a nationalist but not a conservative — is the presumptive Republican nominee.
As I noted from the outset, I will vote for him if he wins the nomination — because there is no choice. But the biggest reason he won is also the scariest. —
Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
4)An Unmitigated Disaster
By Thomas Sowell
Republican party leaders may have worried that Donald Trump would not only lose the general election for the presidency, but would so poison the image of the party as to cause Republican candidates for Congress and for state and local offices to also lose. Now they seem to be trying to patch things up, in order to present an image of unity before the general elections this fall.
Regardless of how that attempt at patching up an image turns out, Trump's candidacy could be not only a current political setback for Republicans, but an enduring affliction in future elections.
For decades after Republican President Herbert Hoover was demonized because the Great Depression of the 1930's began on his watch, Democrats warned repeatedly, in a series of later presidential elections, that a vote for the Republican candidate was a vote to return to the days of Herbert Hoover.
It was 20 years before another Republican was elected president. As late as the 1980's, President Ronald Reagan was called by the Democrats' Speaker of the House, "Hoover with a smile." When a high official of the Reagan administration appeared before Congress to explain the administration's policy, a Democratic Senator said, "That's Hoover talk, man!"
Actually, it was a policy proposal the opposite of that of the Hoover administration, but who in politics worries about the truth? The point is that Hoover was still being used as a bogeyman, more than 40 years after he left office, and nearly two decades after he was dead. Trump's image could easily play a very similar role.
The political damage of Donald Trump to the Republican party is completely overshadowed by the damage he can do to the country and to the world, with his unending reckless and irresponsible statements. Just this week, Trump blithely remarked that South Korea should be left to its own defenses.
Whatever the merits or demerits of that as a policy, announcing it to the whole world in advance risks encouraging North Korea to invade South Korea -- as it did back in 1950, after careless words by a high American official left the impression that South Korea was not included in the American defense perimeter against the Communists in the Pacific.
The old World War II phrase -- "loose lips sink ships" -- applies on land as well as on the water. And no one has looser lips than Donald Trump, who repeatedly spouts whatever half-baked idea pops into his head. A man in his 60's has life-long habits that are not likely to change. Age brings habits, even if it does not bring maturity.
Nations around the world risk their own survival when they ally themselves with the United States in the fight against international terrorists -- and we need their cooperation in that fight, in order to track down hidden terrorists and the hidden money that finances them.
If nations cannot have confidence in American commitments and American leadership, we are not likely to get their cooperation. And the stakes are life and death.
What the Republican establishment once feared most -- that Trump would lose the nomination and run on a third party -- now seems to be a danger that has passed. But a far larger danger to something far more important, American society, is that Trump could be elected President of the United States.
Those who talk about "the will of the people" need to know that neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton represents the will of the people. Polls repeatedly show these two with the highest negative reactions of any of the candidates in either party. A majority of the people polled have negative reactions to each.
Hillary Clinton's much-vaunted "experience" has been an experience in carrying out a policy that has failed disastrously from the Middle East to Ukraine to North Korea. We don't need more of that kind of experience.
What was once feared most by the Republican establishment -- a third party candidate for President -- may represent the only slim chance for saving this country from a catastrophic administration in an age of proliferating nuclear weapons.
If a third party candidate could divide the vote enough to prevent anyone from getting an electoral college majority, that would throw the election into the House of Representatives, where any semblance of sanity could produce a better president than these two.
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5)What Rhodes Revealed
Manhattan Institute
Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. She earned a B.A. from Yale University, an M.A. in English from Cambridge University, and a J.D. from Stanford Law School. She writes for several newspapers and journals, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The New Criterion, andPublic Interest, and is the author of three books, including Are Cops Racist?and The War on Cops: How The New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe (forthcoming June 2016).
The following is adapted from a speech delivered on April 27, 2016, at Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C., as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series.
For almost two years, a protest movement known as “Black Lives Matter” has convulsed the nation. Triggered by the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014, the Black Lives Matter movement holds that racist police officers are the greatest threat facing young black men today. This belief has triggered riots, “die-ins,” the murder and attempted murder of police officers, a campaign to eliminate traditional grand jury proceedings when police use lethal force, and a presidential task force on policing.
Even though the U.S. Justice Department has resoundingly disproven the lie that a pacific Michael Brown was shot in cold blood while trying to surrender, Brown is still venerated as a martyr. And now police officers are backing off of proactive policing in the face of the relentless venom directed at them on the street and in the media. As a result, violent crime is on the rise.
The need is urgent, therefore, to examine the Black Lives Matter movement’s central thesis—that police pose the greatest threat to young black men. I propose two counter hypotheses: first, that there is no government agency more dedicated to the idea that black lives matter than the police; and second, that we have been talking obsessively about alleged police racism over the last 20 years in order to avoid talking about a far larger problem—black-on-black crime.
Let’s be clear at the outset: police have an indefeasible obligation to treat everyone with courtesy and respect, and to act within the confines of the law. Too often, officers develop a hardened, obnoxious attitude. It is also true that being stopped when you are innocent of any wrongdoing is infuriating, humiliating, and sometimes terrifying. And needless to say, every unjustified police shooting of an unarmed civilian is a stomach-churning tragedy.
Given the history of racism in this country and the complicity of the police in that history, police shootings of black men are particularly and understandably fraught. That history informs how many people view the police. But however intolerable and inexcusable every act of police brutality is, and while we need to make sure that the police are properly trained in the Constitution and in courtesy, there is a larger reality behind the issue of policing, crime, and race that remains a taboo topic. The problem of black-on-black crime is an uncomfortable truth, but unless we acknowledge it, we won’t get very far in understanding patterns of policing.
Every year, approximately 6,000 blacks are murdered. This is a number greater than white and Hispanic homicide victims combined, even though blacks are only 13 percent of the national population. Blacks are killed at six times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined. In Los Angeles, blacks between the ages of 20 and 24 die at a rate 20 to 30 times the national mean. Who is killing them? Not the police, and not white civilians, but other blacks. The astronomical black death-by-homicide rate is a function of the black crime rate. Black males between the ages of 14 and 17 commit homicide at ten times the rate of white and Hispanic male teens combined. Blacks of all ages commit homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined, and at eleven times the rate of whites alone.
The police could end all lethal uses of force tomorrow and it would have at most a trivial effect on the black death-by-homicide rate. The nation’s police killed
987 civilians in 2015, according to a database compiled by The Washington Post. Whites were 50 percent—or 493—of those victims, and blacks were 26 percent—or 258. Most of those victims of police shootings, white and black, were armed or otherwise threatening the officer with potentially lethal force.
The black violent crime rate would actually predict that more than 26 percent
of police victims would be black. Officer use of force will occur where the police interact most often with violent criminals, armed suspects, and those resisting arrest, and that is in black neighborhoods. In America’s 75 largest counties in 2009, for example, blacks constituted 62 percent of all robbery defendants, 57 percent of all murder defendants, 45 percent of all assault defendants—but
only 15 percent of the population.
Moreover, 40 percent of all cop killers have been black over the last decade. And a larger proportion of white and Hispanic homicide deaths are a result of police killings than black homicide deaths—but don’t expect to hear that from the media or from the political enablers of the Black Lives Matter movement. Twelve percent of all white and Hispanic homicide victims are killed by police officers, compared to four percent of all black homicide victims. If we’re going
to have a “Lives Matter” anti-police movement, it would be more appropriately named “White and Hispanic Lives Matter.”
Standard anti-cop ideology, whether emanating from the ACLU or the academy, holds that law enforcement actions are racist if they don’t mirror population data. New York City illustrates why that expectation is so misguided. Blacks make up 23 percent of New York City’s population, but they commit 75 percent of all shootings, 70 percent of all robberies, and 66 percent of all violent crime, according to victims and witnesses. Add Hispanic shootings and you account for 98 percent of all illegal gunfire in the city. Whites are 33 percent of the city’s population, but they commit fewer than two percent of all shootings, four percent of all robberies, and five percent of all violent crime. These disparities mean that virtually every time the police in New York are called out on a gun
run—meaning that someone has just been shot—they are being summoned to minority neighborhoods looking for minority suspects.
Officers hope against hope that they will receive descriptions of white shooting suspects, but it almost never happens. This incidence of crime means that innocent black men have a much higher chance than innocent white men of being stopped by the police because they match the description of a suspect. This is not something the police choose. It is a reality forced on them by the facts of crime.
The geographic disparities are also huge. In Brownsville, Brooklyn, the per capita shooting rate is 81 times higher than in nearby Bay Ridge, Brooklyn—
the first neighborhood predominantly black, the second neighborhood predominantly white and Asian. As a result, police presence and use of proactive tactics are much higher in Brownsville than in Bay Ridge. Every time there is a shooting, the police will flood the area looking to make stops in order to avert a retaliatory shooting. They are in Brownsville not because of racism, but because they want to provide protection to its many law-abiding residents who deserve safety.
Who are some of the victims of elevated urban crime? On March 11, 2015, as protesters were once again converging on the Ferguson police headquarters demanding the resignation of the entire department, a six-year-old boy named Marcus Johnson was killed a few miles away in a St. Louis park, the victim of a drive-by shooting. No one protested his killing. Al Sharpton did not demand a federal investigation. Few people outside of his immediate community know his name.
Ten children under the age of ten were killed in Baltimore last year. In Cleveland, three children five and younger were killed in September. A seven-year-old boy was killed in Chicago over the Fourth of July weekend by a bullet intended for his father. In November, a nine-year-old in Chicago was lured into an alley and killed by his father’s gang enemies; the father refused to cooperate with the police. In August, a nine-year-old girl was doing her homework on her mother’s bed in Ferguson when a bullet fired into the house killed her. In Cincinnati in July, a four-year-old girl was shot in the head and a six-year-old
girl was left paralyzed and partially blind from two separate drive-by shootings.
This mindless violence seems almost to be regarded as normal, given the lack of attention it receives from the same people who would be out in droves if any of these had been police shootings. As horrific as such stories are, crime rates were much higher 20 years ago. In New York City in 1990, for example, there were 2,245 homicides. In 2014 there were 333—a decrease of 85 percent. The drop in New York’s crime rate is the steepest in the nation, but crime has fallen at a historic rate nationwide as well—by about 40 percent—since the early 1990s. The greatest beneficiaries of these declining rates have been minorities. Over 10,000 minority males alive today in New York would be dead if the city’s homicide rate had remained at its early 1990s level.
What is behind this historic crime drop? A policing revolution that began in New York and spread nationally, and that is now being threatened. Starting in 1994, the top brass of the NYPD embraced the then-radical idea that the police can actually prevent crime, not just respond to it. They started gathering and analyzing crime data on a daily and then hourly basis. They looked for patterns, and strategized on tactics to try to quell crime outbreaks as they were emerging.
Equally important, they held commanders accountable for crime in their jurisdictions. Department leaders started meeting weekly with precinct commanders to grill them on crime patterns on their watch. These weekly accountability sessions came to be known as Compstat. They were ruthless, high tension affairs. If a commander was not fully informed about every local crime outbreak and ready with a strategy to combat it, his career was in jeopardy.
Compstat created a sense of urgency about fighting crime that has never left the NYPD. For decades, the rap against the police was that they ignored crime in minority neighborhoods. Compstat keeps New York commanders focused
like a laser beam on where people are being victimized most, and that is in minority communities. Compstat spread nationwide. Departments across the country now send officers to emerging crime hot spots to try to interrupt
criminal behavior before it happens.
In terms of economic stimulus alone, no other government program has come close to the success of data-driven policing. In New York City, businesses that had shunned previously drug-infested areas now set up shop there, offering residents a choice in shopping and creating a demand for workers. Senior citizens felt safe to go to the store or to the post office to pick up their Social Security checks. Children could ride their bikes on city sidewalks without their mothers worrying that they would be shot. But the crime victories of the last
two decades, and the moral support on which law and order depends, are now in jeopardy thanks to the falsehoods of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Police operating in inner-city neighborhoods now find themselves routinely surrounded by cursing, jeering crowds when they make a pedestrian stop or
try to arrest a suspect. Sometimes bottles and rocks are thrown. Bystanders stick cell phones in the officers’ faces, daring them to proceed with their duties. Officers are worried about becoming the next racist cop of the week and possibly losing their livelihood thanks to an incomplete cell phone video that inevitably fails to show the antecedents to their use of force. Officer use of
force is never pretty, but the public is clueless about how hard it is to subdue a suspect who is determined to resist arrest.
As a result of the anti-cop campaign of the last two years and the resulting push-back in the streets, officers in urban areas are cutting back on precisely the kind of policing that led to the crime decline of the 1990s and 2000s.
Arrests and summons are down, particularly for low-level offenses. Police officers continue to rush to 911 calls when there is already a victim. But when it comes to making discretionary stops—such as getting out of their cars and questioning people hanging out on drug corners at 1:00 a.m.—many cops
worry that doing so could put their careers on the line. Police officers are, after all, human. When they are repeatedly called racist for stopping and questioning suspicious individuals in high-crime areas, they will perform less of those stops. That is not only understandable—in a sense, it is how things should work. Policing is political. If a powerful political block has denied the legitimacy of assertive policing, we will get less of it.
On the other hand, the people demanding that the police back off are by no means representative of the entire black community. Go to any police-neighborhood meeting in Harlem, the South Bronx, or South Central Los Angeles, and you will invariably hear variants of the following: “We want the dealers off the corner.” “You arrest them and they’re back the next day.” “There are kids hanging out on my stoop. Why can’t you arrest them for loitering?” “I smell weed in my hallway. Can’t you do something?” I met an elderly cancer amputee in the Mount Hope section of the Bronx who was terrified to go to her lobby mailbox because of the young men trespassing there and selling drugs. The only time she felt safe was when the police were there. “Please, Jesus,” she said to me, “send more police!” The irony is that the police cannot respond to these heartfelt requests for order without generating the racially disproportionate statistics that will be used against them in an ACLU or Justice Department lawsuit.
Unfortunately, when officers back off in high crime neighborhoods, crime shoots through the roof. Our country is in the midst of the first sustained violent crime spike in two decades. Murders rose nearly 17 percent in the nation’s 50 largest cities in 2015, and it was in cities with large black populations where the violence increased the most. Baltimore’s per capita homicide rate last year was the highest in its history. Milwaukee had its deadliest year in a decade, with a 72 percent increase in homicides. Homicides in Cleveland increased 90 percent over the previous year. Murders rose 83 percent in Nashville, 54 percent in Washington, D.C., and 61 percent in Minneapolis. In Chicago, where
pedestrian stops are down by 90 percent, shootings were up 80 percent
through March 2016.
I first identified the increase in violent crime in May 2015 and dubbed it “the Ferguson effect.” My diagnosis set off a firestorm of controversy on the anti-
cop Left and in criminology circles. Despite that furor, FBI Director James Comey confirmed the Ferguson effect in a speech at the University of Chicago Law School last October. Comey decried the “chill wind” that had been blowing through law enforcement over the previous year, and attributed the sharp rise
in homicides and shootings to the campaign against cops. Several days later, President Obama had the temerity to rebuke Comey, accusing him (while leaving him unnamed) of “cherry-pick[ing] data” and using “anecdotal evidence to drive policy [and] feed political agendas.” The idea that President Obama knows more about crime and policing than his FBI director is of course ludicrous. But the President thought it necessary to take Comey down,
because to recognize the connection between proactive policing and public safety undermines the entire premise of the anti-cop Left: that the police oppress minority communities rather than bring them surcease from disorder.
As crime rates continue to rise, the overwhelming majority of victims are, as usual, black—as are their assailants. But police officers are coming under attack as well. In August 2015, an officer in Birmingham, Alabama, was beaten unconscious by a convicted felon after a car stop. The suspect had grabbed the officer’s gun, as Michael Brown had tried to do in Ferguson, but the officer hesitated to use force against him for fear of being charged with racism. Such incidents will likely multiply as the media continues to amplify the Black Lives Matter activists’ poisonous slander against the nation’s police forces.
The number of police officers killed in shootings more than doubled during the first three months of 2016. In fact, officers are at much greater risk from blacks than unarmed blacks are from the police. Over the last decade, an officer’s chance of getting killed by a black has been 18.5 times higher than the chance of an unarmed black getting killed by a cop.
The favorite conceit of the Black Lives Matter movement is, of course, the
racist white officer gunning down a black man. According to available studies,
it is a canard. A March 2015 Justice Department report on the Philadelphia Police Department found that black and Hispanic officers were much more
likely than white officers to shoot blacks based on “threat misperception,” i.e., the incorrect belief that a civilian is armed. A study by University of Pennsylvania criminologist Greg Ridgeway, formerly acting director of the National Institute of Justice, has found that black officers in the NYPD were 3.3 times more likely to fire their weapons at shooting scenes than other officers present. The April 2015 death of drug dealer Freddie Gray in Baltimore has been slotted into the Black Lives Matter master narrative, even though the
three most consequential officers in Gray’s arrest and transport are black.
There is no evidence that a white drug dealer in Gray’s circumstances, with a similar history of faking injuries, would have been treated any differently.
We have been here before. In the 1960s and early 1970s, black and white radicals directed hatred and occasional violence against the police. The difference today is that anti-cop ideology is embraced at the highest reaches
of the establishment: by the President, by his Attorney General, by college presidents, by foundation heads, and by the press. The presidential candidates of one party are competing to see who can out-demagogue President Obama’s persistent race-based calumnies against the criminal justice system, while
those of the other party have not emphasized the issue as they might have.
I don’t know what will end the current frenzy against the police. What I do know is that we are playing with fire, and if it keeps spreading, it will be hard to put out.
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2)The Improbable Happiness of Israelis
Global surveys find Israel high on happiness and life-satisfaction rankings—despite threats all around.
By Avinoam Bar-Yosef
The World Happiness Report 2016 Update ranks Israel (Jews and Arabs) 11th of 158 countries evaluated for the United Nations. Israel also shines as No. 5 of the 36 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries on the OECD’s Life Satisfaction Index—ahead of the U.S., the U.K. and France.
How can this be so? Israelis live in a hostile and volatile neighborhood, engaged in an endless conflict with the Palestinians and under the threat of nuclear annihilation by Iran. If you crunch the different components of these indexes, Israel falls much further down the lists. It ranks only 24th in GDP per capita, and comes in at No. 30 of the 36 OECD countries on security and personal safety. Israel has only the 17th-highest per capita income in the world.
But Israelis do not rank as stupid on any index. Israel was the fifth-most innovative country in the 2015 Bloomberg Innovation Index, and a 2014 OECD study ranked it fourth in the percentage of adults with a higher education.
So what explains the Israeli paradox? Do Israelis only become stupid when thinking about their own happiness?
The explanation probably lies in indicators not considered in standard surveys. For instance, a new study by my organization, the Jewish People Policy Institute, looked at pluralism in Israel and found that 83% of Israel’s Jewish citizens consider their nationality “significant” to their identity. Eighty percent
mention that Jewish culture is also “significant.” More than two-thirds (69%) mention Jewish tradition
as important. Strong families and long friendships stretching back to army service as young adults, or even to childhood, also foster a sense of well-being. All of these factors bolster the Jewish state’s raison d’être.
This year, May 12 will mark the 68th anniversary of Israel’s founding, when a nation was created against all odds. The enormous challenges never eroded Israelis’ energy, or hope.
David Ben-Gurion, the first Israeli prime minister, once said: “We will know we have become a normal country when Jewish thieves and Jewish prostitutes conduct their business in Hebrew.” Well, in this respect Israel has done much better than he could have dreamed: with one ex-president in jail for rape, and a former prime minister locked up for corruption. Israelis find comfort in the fact that the high and mighty are treated the same under the law as common crooks.
Former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who died in 2014, once recalled that after finishing a day’s work with his father in their Kfar Malal fields, he had pointed out in frustration how much was left to be plowed. His father, Samuel, told him to turn around and take in how much they had done.
In every aspect of Israel’s existence there is plenty left to be plowed—plenty of room for improvement. Yet Israelis take comfort in looking back and savoring how much has been achieved, how sovereignty over the land of their forefathers was reclaimed. At least 60% of the Israeli population, now eight
million, are Jewish immigrants or their children. Jews from more than 90 countries, of all colors and walks of life, are united in one society. They cherish the sense of self-determination.
And it isn’t just Jews. Go to any beach or shopping mall and—despite the frictions—you will see Jews and Arabs peacefully coexisting. They all can take pride in their country’s accomplishments, as when Israel faced a water crisis a decade ago and launched a desalination project that is now the envy of the world.
In 1964, my close childhood friend, Aryeh Argani, a young Israeli Defense Force pilot, was killed in action. Since then I have visited his grave every spring on Independence Day. Three years ago, I got a phone call from his squadron telling me that they had noticed that no one was participating in the
official memorials for Aryeh. He had been an only child, and the sorrow destroyed his parents. The squadron
had learned that he and I had been friends, and they invited me to attend a memorial for Aryeh. In the pilots’ club of Squadron 103, I found, a corner of the club is dedicated to Aryeh’s memory. His violin rests there.
These kinds of things make Israelis proud and happy. If the global happiness and satisfaction index
could measure them, we might get a better grip on the Israeli paradox.
Mr. Bar-Yosef is the president of the Jewish People Policy Institute and former chief diplomatic correspondent and Washington bureau chief for the Israeli daily Maariv.
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3)The Scariest Reason Trump Won
The need is urgent, therefore, to examine the Black Lives Matter movement’s central thesis—that police pose the greatest threat to young black men. I propose two counter hypotheses: first, that there is no government agency more dedicated to the idea that black lives matter than the police; and second, that we have been talking obsessively about alleged police racism over the last 20 years in order to avoid talking about a far larger problem—black-on-black crime.
Let’s be clear at the outset: police have an indefeasible obligation to treat everyone with courtesy and respect, and to act within the confines of the law. Too often, officers develop a hardened, obnoxious attitude. It is also true that being stopped when you are innocent of any wrongdoing is infuriating, humiliating, and sometimes terrifying. And needless to say, every unjustified police shooting of an unarmed civilian is a stomach-churning tragedy.
Given the history of racism in this country and the complicity of the police in that history, police shootings of black men are particularly and understandably fraught. That history informs how many people view the police. But however intolerable and inexcusable every act of police brutality is, and while we need to make sure that the police are properly trained in the Constitution and in courtesy, there is a larger reality behind the issue of policing, crime, and race that remains a taboo topic. The problem of black-on-black crime is an uncomfortable truth, but unless we acknowledge it, we won’t get very far in understanding patterns of policing.
Every year, approximately 6,000 blacks are murdered. This is a number greater than white and Hispanic homicide victims combined, even though blacks are only 13 percent of the national population. Blacks are killed at six times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined. In Los Angeles, blacks between the ages of 20 and 24 die at a rate 20 to 30 times the national mean. Who is killing them? Not the police, and not white civilians, but other blacks. The astronomical black death-by-homicide rate is a function of the black crime rate. Black males between the ages of 14 and 17 commit homicide at ten times the rate of white and Hispanic male teens combined. Blacks of all ages commit homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined, and at eleven times the rate of whites alone.
The police could end all lethal uses of force tomorrow and it would have at most a trivial effect on the black death-by-homicide rate. The nation’s police killed
987 civilians in 2015, according to a database compiled by The Washington Post. Whites were 50 percent—or 493—of those victims, and blacks were 26 percent—or 258. Most of those victims of police shootings, white and black, were armed or otherwise threatening the officer with potentially lethal force.
The black violent crime rate would actually predict that more than 26 percent
of police victims would be black. Officer use of force will occur where the police interact most often with violent criminals, armed suspects, and those resisting arrest, and that is in black neighborhoods. In America’s 75 largest counties in 2009, for example, blacks constituted 62 percent of all robbery defendants, 57 percent of all murder defendants, 45 percent of all assault defendants—but
only 15 percent of the population.
Moreover, 40 percent of all cop killers have been black over the last decade. And a larger proportion of white and Hispanic homicide deaths are a result of police killings than black homicide deaths—but don’t expect to hear that from the media or from the political enablers of the Black Lives Matter movement. Twelve percent of all white and Hispanic homicide victims are killed by police officers, compared to four percent of all black homicide victims. If we’re going
to have a “Lives Matter” anti-police movement, it would be more appropriately named “White and Hispanic Lives Matter.”
Standard anti-cop ideology, whether emanating from the ACLU or the academy, holds that law enforcement actions are racist if they don’t mirror population data. New York City illustrates why that expectation is so misguided. Blacks make up 23 percent of New York City’s population, but they commit 75 percent of all shootings, 70 percent of all robberies, and 66 percent of all violent crime, according to victims and witnesses. Add Hispanic shootings and you account for 98 percent of all illegal gunfire in the city. Whites are 33 percent of the city’s population, but they commit fewer than two percent of all shootings, four percent of all robberies, and five percent of all violent crime. These disparities mean that virtually every time the police in New York are called out on a gun
run—meaning that someone has just been shot—they are being summoned to minority neighborhoods looking for minority suspects.
Officers hope against hope that they will receive descriptions of white shooting suspects, but it almost never happens. This incidence of crime means that innocent black men have a much higher chance than innocent white men of being stopped by the police because they match the description of a suspect. This is not something the police choose. It is a reality forced on them by the facts of crime.
The geographic disparities are also huge. In Brownsville, Brooklyn, the per capita shooting rate is 81 times higher than in nearby Bay Ridge, Brooklyn—
the first neighborhood predominantly black, the second neighborhood predominantly white and Asian. As a result, police presence and use of proactive tactics are much higher in Brownsville than in Bay Ridge. Every time there is a shooting, the police will flood the area looking to make stops in order to avert a retaliatory shooting. They are in Brownsville not because of racism, but because they want to provide protection to its many law-abiding residents who deserve safety.
Who are some of the victims of elevated urban crime? On March 11, 2015, as protesters were once again converging on the Ferguson police headquarters demanding the resignation of the entire department, a six-year-old boy named Marcus Johnson was killed a few miles away in a St. Louis park, the victim of a drive-by shooting. No one protested his killing. Al Sharpton did not demand a federal investigation. Few people outside of his immediate community know his name.
Ten children under the age of ten were killed in Baltimore last year. In Cleveland, three children five and younger were killed in September. A seven-year-old boy was killed in Chicago over the Fourth of July weekend by a bullet intended for his father. In November, a nine-year-old in Chicago was lured into an alley and killed by his father’s gang enemies; the father refused to cooperate with the police. In August, a nine-year-old girl was doing her homework on her mother’s bed in Ferguson when a bullet fired into the house killed her. In Cincinnati in July, a four-year-old girl was shot in the head and a six-year-old
girl was left paralyzed and partially blind from two separate drive-by shootings.
This mindless violence seems almost to be regarded as normal, given the lack of attention it receives from the same people who would be out in droves if any of these had been police shootings. As horrific as such stories are, crime rates were much higher 20 years ago. In New York City in 1990, for example, there were 2,245 homicides. In 2014 there were 333—a decrease of 85 percent. The drop in New York’s crime rate is the steepest in the nation, but crime has fallen at a historic rate nationwide as well—by about 40 percent—since the early 1990s. The greatest beneficiaries of these declining rates have been minorities. Over 10,000 minority males alive today in New York would be dead if the city’s homicide rate had remained at its early 1990s level.
What is behind this historic crime drop? A policing revolution that began in New York and spread nationally, and that is now being threatened. Starting in 1994, the top brass of the NYPD embraced the then-radical idea that the police can actually prevent crime, not just respond to it. They started gathering and analyzing crime data on a daily and then hourly basis. They looked for patterns, and strategized on tactics to try to quell crime outbreaks as they were emerging.
Equally important, they held commanders accountable for crime in their jurisdictions. Department leaders started meeting weekly with precinct commanders to grill them on crime patterns on their watch. These weekly accountability sessions came to be known as Compstat. They were ruthless, high tension affairs. If a commander was not fully informed about every local crime outbreak and ready with a strategy to combat it, his career was in jeopardy.
Compstat created a sense of urgency about fighting crime that has never left the NYPD. For decades, the rap against the police was that they ignored crime in minority neighborhoods. Compstat keeps New York commanders focused
like a laser beam on where people are being victimized most, and that is in minority communities. Compstat spread nationwide. Departments across the country now send officers to emerging crime hot spots to try to interrupt
criminal behavior before it happens.
In terms of economic stimulus alone, no other government program has come close to the success of data-driven policing. In New York City, businesses that had shunned previously drug-infested areas now set up shop there, offering residents a choice in shopping and creating a demand for workers. Senior citizens felt safe to go to the store or to the post office to pick up their Social Security checks. Children could ride their bikes on city sidewalks without their mothers worrying that they would be shot. But the crime victories of the last
two decades, and the moral support on which law and order depends, are now in jeopardy thanks to the falsehoods of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Police operating in inner-city neighborhoods now find themselves routinely surrounded by cursing, jeering crowds when they make a pedestrian stop or
try to arrest a suspect. Sometimes bottles and rocks are thrown. Bystanders stick cell phones in the officers’ faces, daring them to proceed with their duties. Officers are worried about becoming the next racist cop of the week and possibly losing their livelihood thanks to an incomplete cell phone video that inevitably fails to show the antecedents to their use of force. Officer use of
force is never pretty, but the public is clueless about how hard it is to subdue a suspect who is determined to resist arrest.
As a result of the anti-cop campaign of the last two years and the resulting push-back in the streets, officers in urban areas are cutting back on precisely the kind of policing that led to the crime decline of the 1990s and 2000s.
Arrests and summons are down, particularly for low-level offenses. Police officers continue to rush to 911 calls when there is already a victim. But when it comes to making discretionary stops—such as getting out of their cars and questioning people hanging out on drug corners at 1:00 a.m.—many cops
worry that doing so could put their careers on the line. Police officers are, after all, human. When they are repeatedly called racist for stopping and questioning suspicious individuals in high-crime areas, they will perform less of those stops. That is not only understandable—in a sense, it is how things should work. Policing is political. If a powerful political block has denied the legitimacy of assertive policing, we will get less of it.
On the other hand, the people demanding that the police back off are by no means representative of the entire black community. Go to any police-neighborhood meeting in Harlem, the South Bronx, or South Central Los Angeles, and you will invariably hear variants of the following: “We want the dealers off the corner.” “You arrest them and they’re back the next day.” “There are kids hanging out on my stoop. Why can’t you arrest them for loitering?” “I smell weed in my hallway. Can’t you do something?” I met an elderly cancer amputee in the Mount Hope section of the Bronx who was terrified to go to her lobby mailbox because of the young men trespassing there and selling drugs. The only time she felt safe was when the police were there. “Please, Jesus,” she said to me, “send more police!” The irony is that the police cannot respond to these heartfelt requests for order without generating the racially disproportionate statistics that will be used against them in an ACLU or Justice Department lawsuit.
Unfortunately, when officers back off in high crime neighborhoods, crime shoots through the roof. Our country is in the midst of the first sustained violent crime spike in two decades. Murders rose nearly 17 percent in the nation’s 50 largest cities in 2015, and it was in cities with large black populations where the violence increased the most. Baltimore’s per capita homicide rate last year was the highest in its history. Milwaukee had its deadliest year in a decade, with a 72 percent increase in homicides. Homicides in Cleveland increased 90 percent over the previous year. Murders rose 83 percent in Nashville, 54 percent in Washington, D.C., and 61 percent in Minneapolis. In Chicago, where
pedestrian stops are down by 90 percent, shootings were up 80 percent
through March 2016.
I first identified the increase in violent crime in May 2015 and dubbed it “the Ferguson effect.” My diagnosis set off a firestorm of controversy on the anti-
cop Left and in criminology circles. Despite that furor, FBI Director James Comey confirmed the Ferguson effect in a speech at the University of Chicago Law School last October. Comey decried the “chill wind” that had been blowing through law enforcement over the previous year, and attributed the sharp rise
in homicides and shootings to the campaign against cops. Several days later, President Obama had the temerity to rebuke Comey, accusing him (while leaving him unnamed) of “cherry-pick[ing] data” and using “anecdotal evidence to drive policy [and] feed political agendas.” The idea that President Obama knows more about crime and policing than his FBI director is of course ludicrous. But the President thought it necessary to take Comey down,
because to recognize the connection between proactive policing and public safety undermines the entire premise of the anti-cop Left: that the police oppress minority communities rather than bring them surcease from disorder.
As crime rates continue to rise, the overwhelming majority of victims are, as usual, black—as are their assailants. But police officers are coming under attack as well. In August 2015, an officer in Birmingham, Alabama, was beaten unconscious by a convicted felon after a car stop. The suspect had grabbed the officer’s gun, as Michael Brown had tried to do in Ferguson, but the officer hesitated to use force against him for fear of being charged with racism. Such incidents will likely multiply as the media continues to amplify the Black Lives Matter activists’ poisonous slander against the nation’s police forces.
The number of police officers killed in shootings more than doubled during the first three months of 2016. In fact, officers are at much greater risk from blacks than unarmed blacks are from the police. Over the last decade, an officer’s chance of getting killed by a black has been 18.5 times higher than the chance of an unarmed black getting killed by a cop.
The favorite conceit of the Black Lives Matter movement is, of course, the
racist white officer gunning down a black man. According to available studies,
it is a canard. A March 2015 Justice Department report on the Philadelphia Police Department found that black and Hispanic officers were much more
likely than white officers to shoot blacks based on “threat misperception,” i.e., the incorrect belief that a civilian is armed. A study by University of Pennsylvania criminologist Greg Ridgeway, formerly acting director of the National Institute of Justice, has found that black officers in the NYPD were 3.3 times more likely to fire their weapons at shooting scenes than other officers present. The April 2015 death of drug dealer Freddie Gray in Baltimore has been slotted into the Black Lives Matter master narrative, even though the
three most consequential officers in Gray’s arrest and transport are black.
There is no evidence that a white drug dealer in Gray’s circumstances, with a similar history of faking injuries, would have been treated any differently.
We have been here before. In the 1960s and early 1970s, black and white radicals directed hatred and occasional violence against the police. The difference today is that anti-cop ideology is embraced at the highest reaches
of the establishment: by the President, by his Attorney General, by college presidents, by foundation heads, and by the press. The presidential candidates of one party are competing to see who can out-demagogue President Obama’s persistent race-based calumnies against the criminal justice system, while
those of the other party have not emphasized the issue as they might have.
I don’t know what will end the current frenzy against the police. What I do know is that we are playing with fire, and if it keeps spreading, it will be hard to put out.
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2)The Improbable Happiness of Israelis
Global surveys find Israel high on happiness and life-satisfaction rankings—despite threats all around.
By Avinoam Bar-Yosef
The World Happiness Report 2016 Update ranks Israel (Jews and Arabs) 11th of 158 countries evaluated for the United Nations. Israel also shines as No. 5 of the 36 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries on the OECD’s Life Satisfaction Index—ahead of the U.S., the U.K. and France.
How can this be so? Israelis live in a hostile and volatile neighborhood, engaged in an endless conflict with the Palestinians and under the threat of nuclear annihilation by Iran. If you crunch the different components of these indexes, Israel falls much further down the lists. It ranks only 24th in GDP per capita, and comes in at No. 30 of the 36 OECD countries on security and personal safety. Israel has only the 17th-highest per capita income in the world.
But Israelis do not rank as stupid on any index. Israel was the fifth-most innovative country in the 2015 Bloomberg Innovation Index, and a 2014 OECD study ranked it fourth in the percentage of adults with a higher education.
So what explains the Israeli paradox? Do Israelis only become stupid when thinking about their own happiness?
The explanation probably lies in indicators not considered in standard surveys. For instance, a new study by my organization, the Jewish People Policy Institute, looked at pluralism in Israel and found that 83% of Israel’s Jewish citizens consider their nationality “significant” to their identity. Eighty percent
mention that Jewish culture is also “significant.” More than two-thirds (69%) mention Jewish tradition
as important. Strong families and long friendships stretching back to army service as young adults, or even to childhood, also foster a sense of well-being. All of these factors bolster the Jewish state’s raison d’être.
This year, May 12 will mark the 68th anniversary of Israel’s founding, when a nation was created against all odds. The enormous challenges never eroded Israelis’ energy, or hope.
David Ben-Gurion, the first Israeli prime minister, once said: “We will know we have become a normal country when Jewish thieves and Jewish prostitutes conduct their business in Hebrew.” Well, in this respect Israel has done much better than he could have dreamed: with one ex-president in jail for rape, and a former prime minister locked up for corruption. Israelis find comfort in the fact that the high and mighty are treated the same under the law as common crooks.
Former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who died in 2014, once recalled that after finishing a day’s work with his father in their Kfar Malal fields, he had pointed out in frustration how much was left to be plowed. His father, Samuel, told him to turn around and take in how much they had done.
In every aspect of Israel’s existence there is plenty left to be plowed—plenty of room for improvement. Yet Israelis take comfort in looking back and savoring how much has been achieved, how sovereignty over the land of their forefathers was reclaimed. At least 60% of the Israeli population, now eight
million, are Jewish immigrants or their children. Jews from more than 90 countries, of all colors and walks of life, are united in one society. They cherish the sense of self-determination.
And it isn’t just Jews. Go to any beach or shopping mall and—despite the frictions—you will see Jews and Arabs peacefully coexisting. They all can take pride in their country’s accomplishments, as when Israel faced a water crisis a decade ago and launched a desalination project that is now the envy of the world.
In 1964, my close childhood friend, Aryeh Argani, a young Israeli Defense Force pilot, was killed in action. Since then I have visited his grave every spring on Independence Day. Three years ago, I got a phone call from his squadron telling me that they had noticed that no one was participating in the
official memorials for Aryeh. He had been an only child, and the sorrow destroyed his parents. The squadron
had learned that he and I had been friends, and they invited me to attend a memorial for Aryeh. In the pilots’ club of Squadron 103, I found, a corner of the club is dedicated to Aryeh’s memory. His violin rests there.
These kinds of things make Israelis proud and happy. If the global happiness and satisfaction index
could measure them, we might get a better grip on the Israeli paradox.
Mr. Bar-Yosef is the president of the Jewish People Policy Institute and former chief diplomatic correspondent and Washington bureau chief for the Israeli daily Maariv.
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3)The Scariest Reason Trump Won
The majority of Republicans are not conservative.
By: Dennis Prager
There are many reasons Donald Trump is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.
The four most often cited reasons are the frustrations of white working-class Americans, a widespread revulsion against political correctness, disenchantment with the Republican “establishment,” and the unprecedented and unrivaled amount of time the media afforded Trump. They are all valid.
The four most often cited reasons are the frustrations of white working-class Americans, a widespread revulsion against political correctness, disenchantment with the Republican “establishment,” and the unprecedented and unrivaled amount of time the media afforded Trump. They are all valid.
But the biggest reason is this: The majority of Republicans are not conservative. Conservatives who opposed Trump kept arguing — indeed provided unassailable proof – that Donald Trump is not a conservative and has never been one. But the argument meant little or nothing to two types of Republicans: the majority of Trump voters who don’t care whether he is a conservative, and the smaller number of Trump voters who are conservative but care about illegal
immigration more than all other issues, including Trump’s many and obvious failings.
immigration more than all other issues, including Trump’s many and obvious failings.
So, then, what happened to the majority of Republicans? Why aren’t they conservative? The answer lies in America’s biggest – and scariest – problem: Most Americans no longer know
what America stands for. For them, America has become just another country, a place located between Canada and Mexico. But America was founded to be an idea, not another country. As Margaret Thatcher put it: “Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.”
what America stands for. For them, America has become just another country, a place located between Canada and Mexico. But America was founded to be an idea, not another country. As Margaret Thatcher put it: “Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.”
Why haven’t Americans over the past three generations known what America stands for? Probably the biggest reason is the influence of left-wing ideas. Since its inception, the Left has opposed the American idea, and for good reason. Everything the American idea represents undermines leftist ideas. And the Left, unlike most Americans, has always understood that either the Left is right or America is right. America stands for small government, a free economy (and therefore capitalism), liberty (and it therefore allows for liberty’s inevitable consequence, inequality), the “melting pot” ideal, and a God-centered population rooted in Judeo-Christian values (so that a moral society is created by citizens exercising self-control rather than relying on the state to impose controls). Only America was founded on the idea of small government. But the Left is based on big government. America was founded on the principle that human rights come from the Creator. For the Left, rights come from the state. America was founded on the belief that in order to maintain a small government, a God-fearing people is necessary. The Left opposes God-based religions, particularly Judeo-Christian religions. Secularism is at the core of Leftism every bit as much as egalitarianism is. It took generations, but the Left has succeeded in substituting its values for America’s. The American Revolution, unlike the French Revolution, placed liberty above equality. For the Left, equality is more important than all else. That’s why
so many American and European leftists have celebrated left-wing regimes, no matter how much they squelched individual liberty, from Stalin to Mao to Che and Castro to Hugo Chávez. They
all preached equality. It took generations, but the Left has succeeded (primarily through the schools, but also through the media) in substituting its values for America’s. While the Left has been the primary cause, there have been others. The most significant is success.
so many American and European leftists have celebrated left-wing regimes, no matter how much they squelched individual liberty, from Stalin to Mao to Che and Castro to Hugo Chávez. They
all preached equality. It took generations, but the Left has succeeded (primarily through the schools, but also through the media) in substituting its values for America’s. While the Left has been the primary cause, there have been others. The most significant is success.
American values were so successful that Americans came to take America’s success for granted. They forgot what made America uniquely free and affluent. And now, it’s not even accurate to say “forgot,” because, in the case of the current generation, they never knew. While the schools, starting with the universities, were being transformed into institutions for left-wing indoctrination, American parents, too, ceased teaching their children American values (beginning with not reading to their children the most popular book in American history, the Bible). Schools even stopped teaching American history. When American history is taught today, it is taught as a history of oppression, imperialism, and racism. Likewise, there is essentially no civics education, once a staple of the public-school system. Young Americans are not taught either the
Constitution or how American government works. I doubt many college students even know what “separation of powers” means, let alone why it is so significant. So, then, thanks to leftism and America’s taken-for-granted success, most Americans no longer understand what it means
to be an American. Those who do are called “conservatives” because they wish to conserve the unique American idea. But conservatives now constitute not only a minority of Americans, but
a minority of Republicans. That is the primary reason Donald Trump — a nationalist but not a conservative — is the presumptive Republican nominee.
Constitution or how American government works. I doubt many college students even know what “separation of powers” means, let alone why it is so significant. So, then, thanks to leftism and America’s taken-for-granted success, most Americans no longer understand what it means
to be an American. Those who do are called “conservatives” because they wish to conserve the unique American idea. But conservatives now constitute not only a minority of Americans, but
a minority of Republicans. That is the primary reason Donald Trump — a nationalist but not a conservative — is the presumptive Republican nominee.
As I noted from the outset, I will vote for him if he wins the nomination — because there is no choice. But the biggest reason he won is also the scariest. —
Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist.
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4)An Unmitigated Disaster
By Thomas Sowell
Republican party leaders may have worried that Donald Trump would not only lose the general election for the presidency, but would so poison the image of the party as to cause Republican candidates for Congress and for state and local offices to also lose. Now they seem to be trying to patch things up, in order to present an image of unity before the general elections this fall.
Regardless of how that attempt at patching up an image turns out, Trump's candidacy could be not only a current political setback for Republicans, but an enduring affliction in future elections.
For decades after Republican President Herbert Hoover was demonized because the Great Depression of the 1930's began on his watch, Democrats warned repeatedly, in a series of later presidential elections, that a vote for the Republican candidate was a vote to return to the days of Herbert Hoover.
It was 20 years before another Republican was elected president. As late as the 1980's, President Ronald Reagan was called by the Democrats' Speaker of the House, "Hoover with a smile." When a high official of the Reagan administration appeared before Congress to explain the administration's policy, a Democratic Senator said, "That's Hoover talk, man!"
Actually, it was a policy proposal the opposite of that of the Hoover administration, but who in politics worries about the truth? The point is that Hoover was still being used as a bogeyman, more than 40 years after he left office, and nearly two decades after he was dead. Trump's image could easily play a very similar role.
The political damage of Donald Trump to the Republican party is completely overshadowed by the damage he can do to the country and to the world, with his unending reckless and irresponsible statements. Just this week, Trump blithely remarked that South Korea should be left to its own defenses.
Whatever the merits or demerits of that as a policy, announcing it to the whole world in advance risks encouraging North Korea to invade South Korea -- as it did back in 1950, after careless words by a high American official left the impression that South Korea was not included in the American defense perimeter against the Communists in the Pacific.
The old World War II phrase -- "loose lips sink ships" -- applies on land as well as on the water. And no one has looser lips than Donald Trump, who repeatedly spouts whatever half-baked idea pops into his head. A man in his 60's has life-long habits that are not likely to change. Age brings habits, even if it does not bring maturity.
Nations around the world risk their own survival when they ally themselves with the United States in the fight against international terrorists -- and we need their cooperation in that fight, in order to track down hidden terrorists and the hidden money that finances them.
If nations cannot have confidence in American commitments and American leadership, we are not likely to get their cooperation. And the stakes are life and death.
What the Republican establishment once feared most -- that Trump would lose the nomination and run on a third party -- now seems to be a danger that has passed. But a far larger danger to something far more important, American society, is that Trump could be elected President of the United States.
Those who talk about "the will of the people" need to know that neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton represents the will of the people. Polls repeatedly show these two with the highest negative reactions of any of the candidates in either party. A majority of the people polled have negative reactions to each.
Hillary Clinton's much-vaunted "experience" has been an experience in carrying out a policy that has failed disastrously from the Middle East to Ukraine to North Korea. We don't need more of that kind of experience.
What was once feared most by the Republican establishment -- a third party candidate for President -- may represent the only slim chance for saving this country from a catastrophic administration in an age of proliferating nuclear weapons.
If a third party candidate could divide the vote enough to prevent anyone from getting an electoral college majority, that would throw the election into the House of Representatives, where any semblance of sanity could produce a better president than these two.
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5)What Rhodes Revealed
4)An Unmitigated Disaster
By Thomas Sowell
Republican party leaders may have worried that Donald Trump would not only lose the general election for the presidency, but would so poison the image of the party as to cause Republican candidates for Congress and for state and local offices to also lose. Now they seem to be trying to patch things up, in order to present an image of unity before the general elections this fall.
Regardless of how that attempt at patching up an image turns out, Trump's candidacy could be not only a current political setback for Republicans, but an enduring affliction in future elections.
For decades after Republican President Herbert Hoover was demonized because the Great Depression of the 1930's began on his watch, Democrats warned repeatedly, in a series of later presidential elections, that a vote for the Republican candidate was a vote to return to the days of Herbert Hoover.
It was 20 years before another Republican was elected president. As late as the 1980's, President Ronald Reagan was called by the Democrats' Speaker of the House, "Hoover with a smile." When a high official of the Reagan administration appeared before Congress to explain the administration's policy, a Democratic Senator said, "That's Hoover talk, man!"
Actually, it was a policy proposal the opposite of that of the Hoover administration, but who in politics worries about the truth? The point is that Hoover was still being used as a bogeyman, more than 40 years after he left office, and nearly two decades after he was dead. Trump's image could easily play a very similar role.
The political damage of Donald Trump to the Republican party is completely overshadowed by the damage he can do to the country and to the world, with his unending reckless and irresponsible statements. Just this week, Trump blithely remarked that South Korea should be left to its own defenses.
Whatever the merits or demerits of that as a policy, announcing it to the whole world in advance risks encouraging North Korea to invade South Korea -- as it did back in 1950, after careless words by a high American official left the impression that South Korea was not included in the American defense perimeter against the Communists in the Pacific.
The old World War II phrase -- "loose lips sink ships" -- applies on land as well as on the water. And no one has looser lips than Donald Trump, who repeatedly spouts whatever half-baked idea pops into his head. A man in his 60's has life-long habits that are not likely to change. Age brings habits, even if it does not bring maturity.
Nations around the world risk their own survival when they ally themselves with the United States in the fight against international terrorists -- and we need their cooperation in that fight, in order to track down hidden terrorists and the hidden money that finances them.
If nations cannot have confidence in American commitments and American leadership, we are not likely to get their cooperation. And the stakes are life and death.
What the Republican establishment once feared most -- that Trump would lose the nomination and run on a third party -- now seems to be a danger that has passed. But a far larger danger to something far more important, American society, is that Trump could be elected President of the United States.
Those who talk about "the will of the people" need to know that neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton represents the will of the people. Polls repeatedly show these two with the highest negative reactions of any of the candidates in either party. A majority of the people polled have negative reactions to each.
Hillary Clinton's much-vaunted "experience" has been an experience in carrying out a policy that has failed disastrously from the Middle East to Ukraine to North Korea. We don't need more of that kind of experience.
What was once feared most by the Republican establishment -- a third party candidate for President -- may represent the only slim chance for saving this country from a catastrophic administration in an age of proliferating nuclear weapons.
If a third party candidate could divide the vote enough to prevent anyone from getting an electoral college majority, that would throw the election into the House of Representatives, where any semblance of sanity could produce a better president than these two.
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5)What Rhodes Revealed
By Dr. Michael Makovsky - The Weekly Standard
Dr. Michael Makovsky is President & CEO of JINSA.
Sunday's New York Times Magazine story by David Samuels on President Obama's deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes has created quite a stir. It's not every day that a senior White House official brags about how the administration has successfully manipulated what he portrays as an ignorant and compliant media, particularly on as critical and contested an issue as last summer's nuclear deal with Iran. The media has not taken kindly to Rhodes' remarks, especially after so many of them carried the White House's water.
The media's hurt feelings aside, the 9,700-word article was more important for further revealing the Obama's Administration's approach to the world: undo much of the approach, strategy and achievements of seventy years of American foreign policy - the alliances and partnerships, the strength and the credibility that has kept us, and much of the world, safe.
Last month, WEEKLY STANDARD editor Bill Kristol and I authored an editorial, "The Costanza Approach," that analyzed Jeffery Goldberg's 30,000-word article in The Atlantic on a series of interviews with President Obama. We argued: "Obama's foreign policy is less about what he stands for than what he rejects-namely, much of what America has stood for and done over many decades. Obama's doctrine, such as it is, consists of a few simplistic ideas that emerge from a shallow and ideological disdain for the American past." Obama, we contended, sought to reverse U.S. foreign policy, by reassuring enemies we unnecessarily alienated in his view, such as Iran, Cuba and Venezuela, and distancing ourselves from traditional allies, such as Israel and Saudi Arabia. The Atlantic article reinforced a comparison we had made a few years earlier between Obama and Clement Attlee, the post-WWII British Prime Minister who sought precipitously to undo what he called the "mess of centuries" of prior British policies. The article on Rhodes further reinforces this interpretation.
In Samuels' telling, "The buck stops with the establishment, not with Obama, who was left to clean up their mess." Rhodes blames the "establishment," or, as he calls it, "the Blob," for all the world's ills. Rhodes asserts: "The complete lack of governance in huge swaths of the Middle East, that is the project of the American establishment." Similarly, Rhodes, according to Samuels, "goes off the record, to suggest, in effect, that the world of the Sunni Arabs that the American establishment built has collapsed." To lay complete blame on the so-called American establishment for Middle Eastern chaos is absurd. The modern Middle East structure that is now collapsing was broadly "built" by the victorious powers following the First World War. The United States, led by President Woodrow Wilson, certainly shares blame in believing pursuing self-determination and creating artificial states across irrational borders would better the inhabitants and lead to greater stability. The same approach failed in Europe as well. But that's not what Rhodes has mind, as he appears oblivious to any such history.
And what is America's big sin that merits such visceral, reflexive disdain? Iraq, of course. It is the lens through which Rhodes sees all American foreign policy. Samuels writes that "Iraq is his one-word answer to any and all criticism." Indeed, Rhodes explains Obama's passivity before the slaughter of over 400,000 in Syria thusly: "I profoundly do not believe that the United States could make things better in Syria by being there. And we have an evidentiary record of what happens when we're there - nearly a decade in Iraq." End of discussion. Serious ideas such as possible benefits to carving out a humanitarian enclave in Syria protected by a no-fly zone, for instance, merit no consideration. As Samuels writes about Rhodes' thinking, "the Iraq war was proof, in black and white, not of the complexity of international affairs or the many perils attendant on political decision-making but of the fact that the decision-makers were morons."
For Rhodes, history, or at least his historical knowledge, begins with the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, when he was 25. The article does dwell on how Rhodes, living in New York, reacted to 9/11, but it doesn't seem to have left a big imprint on his thinking. If it did, he might have to pay greater attention to the threat posed by Islamic radicalism, which would interfere with the "narrative" he's always spinning that the American establishment's policies are the root of most problems and must be almost mindlessly undone.
The new narrative Rhodes seeks to create is bereft of much if any consideration of strategic interests at all, such as whether empowering Iran serves our strategic interests, or its impact on traditional Middle Eastern allies, such as Israel and Saudi Arabia. Presumably, he considers such details pesky carryovers from an antiquated establishment mode of thinking, which has drawn us in conflicts for decades. As he argued about Iran, "We don't have to kind of be in cycles of conflict if we can find other ways to resolve these issues....We can do things that challenge the conventional thinking that, you know, 'AIPAC doesn't like this,' or 'the Israeli government doesn't like this,' or 'the gulf countries don't like it.' It's the possibility of improved relations with adversaries. It's nonproliferation." Of course, the Iran deal encourages proliferation. It is the possibility of improved relations with our adversaries, which we have created unnecessarily, no matter the impact on our strategic position or that of our allies, that does seem to drive Rhodes and Obama.
It should not be surprising that President Obama's closest aides share his outlook, including a simplistic, reactionary contempt for traditional U.S. foreign policy. But the article raises this troubling question: what does it say about a president with a top advisor on foreign policy who seems very clever but ignorant and shallow?
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++6)The resurfacing of anti-Semitism in Britain
By Niall Ferguson
I am a philo-Semite. The disproportionate Jewish contribution to Western civilization — not least to science and the arts — is one of the most astonishing achievements of modern history. I am also an anti-anti-Semite. The murder and mayhem perpetrated by anti-Semites throughout history, above all in the 20th century, deserves its special place in the annals of infamy.
I had assumed that anti-Semitism had no place in British life, aside from the odious antics of skinheads and other Neanderthal types on the fringes of the far right. There are therefore few things that depress me more than the resurfacing of anti-Semitism on the British left, and not on its fringes.
In an interview on BBC London last week, Ken Livingstone, the former mayor of London, claimed that “when Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism — this before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews.”
Some Nazi officials did indeed favor emigration as the “solution to the Jewish Question.” But for Livingstone to claim that this was Hitler’s preferred option is simply wrong. From as early as 1919, Hitler repeatedly stated that he saw the Jews as “the racial tuberculosis of peoples.” In a speech he gave in April, 1920, he called for them “to be exterminated.” In “Mein Kampf’’ he wrote: “If at the beginning of the [First World] War and during the war (12,000) or 15,000 of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas … the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain.” Germans who voted National Socialist in 1932 and 1933 were not voting for a Zionist resettlement program.
Last week’s controversy is of course not really about the history of 1930s Germany, but about the much more recent history of the British Labour Party. Since the late 1960s — the era when both Ken Livingstone and the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn joined the party — a significant element of the British left has aligned itself with the Palestine Liberation Organization and other groups hostile to the state of Israel. Close to half a century of anti-Zionist rhetoric lies behind Livingstone’s complaint that “there’s been a very well-orchestrated campaign by the Israel lobby to smear anybody who criticizes Israeli policy as anti-Semitic.”
Yet Livingstone and Corbyn are no longer the devious “entryists” of their early militant years. Rather, they have become the useful idiots of an entirely new generation of Labour infiltrators.
Remember: Livingstone’s comments were made in defense of two 2014 Facebook posts by Naseem (“Naz”) Shah, who became the Labour Party member of Parliament for the Bradford West constituency last year. One stated: “Solution for Israel-Palestine conflict — relocate Israel into United States. Problem solved.” The other explicitly equated “Apartheid Israel” with Hitler’s Germany.
Now, ask yourself why the MP for Bradford West was systematically using the Palestinian issue to mobilize voters.
It is not that Naz Shah is herself an Islamist. If she were, I doubt she would appear with her head uncovered in the House of Commons. It is just that bashing Israel appears to be an effective way of mobilizing Muslim voters, who account for roughly half the electorate in Bradford West. Nor is Bradford the only place in Britain where this goes on.
It was a difficult week for Sadiq Khan, the MP for Tooting, who also happens to be the Labour candidate in Thursday’s mayoral election in London. Khan lost no time in distancing himself from the last Labour mayor, condemning Livingstone’s comments as “appalling and inexcusable.” Yet, as the Evening Standard pointed out, Khan has done a few appalling and inexcusable things of own.
In September 2004, for example, he attended a meeting under the banner “Palestine — The Suffering Still Goes On,” hosted by the Friends of Al-Aqsa (the mosque in Jerusalem that is the third holiest site in Islam) and the Tooting Islamic Center. Invitations said “all welcome,” but a sign at the door made it clear that the sexes would be segregated.
Other speakers on the bill included the preachers Ibrahim Hewitt, whose book “What Does Islam Say?’’ likens homosexuals to pedophiles, and Suliman Gani, whom the prime minister named in the Commons on Friday as a supporter of Islamic State.
Khan has argued that he attended this meeting in his capacity as a human rights lawyer, but he was in fact billed as a “Labour parliamentary candidate.” And this (if polls are to be believed) is the next mayor of London?
Forced last week to face its own long-standing problem with anti-Semitism, the Labour Party is frantically trying to turn the tables by accusing David Cameron and the Tory mayoral candidate Zac Goldsmith of “Islamophobia.” But the real issue is Labour’s dangerous flirtation with a new and very different generation of anti-Semites. Trotskyists and Islamists make strange bedfellows, to be sure. But perhaps only slightly stranger than the anti-Marxists and German racial theorists who together created National Socialism.
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7)
7)
FBI Director: This 'Security Inquiry' Hillary Keeps Talking About Isn't a Thing, This Is a Criminal Investigation
Since the FBI launched its criminal investigation into Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's alleged mishandling and exposure of classified information through a private server, the Democrat presidential candidate and her staff have maintained the FBI is simply conducting a security review or inquiry, not a criminal investigation.
After months of staying silent surrounding the investigation, FBI Director James Comey told Fox News Wednesday that he doesn't understand what "security inquiry" Clinton is referring to. The FBI does criminal investigations and the investigation surrounding Clinton's personal server, on which she kept and transmitted top-secret, classified and human source information, is no exception.
"I don't even know what that means, a 'security inquiry.' We do investigations here at the FBI," Comey told Fox News' Catherine Herridge, reiterating Clinton will not be receiving any kind of special treatment.
Herridge further noted "security inquiry" is an unknown term to the Director.
The FBI is expected to interview Clinton about her personal server in the coming weeks. Top Clinton aides like Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin have already been questioned by the FBI as part of the criminal probe.
More than 2079 pieces of classified information have been found on Clinton's server. Some of the information found on the server is so sensitive, additional security clearances were needed for FBI agents to handle it and proceed with their investigation.
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