Thursday, March 22, 2018



How come school shooters are usually white?

They're not. Gun deaths in black schools are just not publicized.  Why?  Is it white privilege at work?  No.  It is because the well of Leftist outrage would run dry if black deaths were noted: The deaths are so frequent.  Plus the shooter is black too and we must not mention that

The renewed push for gun control, the nationwide “March for Our Lives” this Saturday, the school protests last Wednesday — they happened after 14 teenagers and three adults were murdered at a high school in affluent Parkland, Fla. A well-heeled school. And nobody who died was black.

This did not go unnoticed by families who’ve lost children, black children, to gun violence in Boston.

There were no calls to action when Ron and Kim Odom’s son Steven, 13, was murdered, in 2007, on his way home from playing basketball.

There was no uproar after the murder that same year of Warren Daniel Hairston, 21; or Eric Smith-Johnson, 18, in 2010; or Raekwon Brown, 17, in 2016; or before that, Quintessa Blackwell, 18, though both were gunned down in broad daylight outside Boston schools: Brown at Jeremiah Burke, Blackwell near Holland Elementary.

Thousands of teenagers, many just in the wrong place at the wrong time, have died in shootings in America’s inner cities for years. But these shootings don’t happen on the same day. They happen day after day.

During this powerful uprising after a suburban school shooting, let’s hope we hear as much about daily gun slaughters terrorizing city teens and children in school and on the street in front of their homes.

Boston families I spoke to last week have long recognized this stark, unjust double standard. Yet they did not speak with resentment.

Ron Odom, father of Steven, a minister and a retired postal worker, now works as a school crossing guard. “People say, ‘Nothing will happen until it starts happening to white children.’ Well, now it’s happened. What’s the difference between what these children are saying and what our children are saying?” Odom asked. “But if they’re able to move Congress to some centrist agreement on guns, I’m standing with them. Our children are dying.”

Ruth Rollins, mother of Warren Daniel Hairston, runs Operation Lipstick, a program to reduce illegal gun trafficking. Lipstick has two buses leaving Boston for the Washington “March for Our Lives.” Most of the riders are children, teens, or young adults. One is the daughter of Rollins’s dead son, a 13-year-old who was a baby when her father was shot to death. “We always hear from parents,” Rollins said. “Now we’ll hear from the children.”

Leonard Lee, Warren Daniel Hairston’s uncle, is a community activist who has gone to burials of dozens of gun-downed teens and young men he’s known. Said Lee, “We were conflicted around this march. But what resonated after we talked to young people was, ‘Use it as a bridge to connect.’ Don’t make this a black/white issue, an urban vs. suburban issue. Make it an American issue.

“It’s so easy to get a gun now. I can get you one in a couple of minutes for less than $35.”

Monalisa Smith, Eric Smith-Johnson’s aunt, runs Mothers for Justice and Equality, a group committed to ending the “normalization” of child gun murders.

Let’s hear about the gun deaths of young people in inner cities.

“If we get angry and bitter and focus on injustice, not justice, we can’t run the race. You’ve got to be that example, and that’s not easy,” she said. “You’ve got to fight and cry at the same time. You meet mothers who just lost children, what do you say? Young people come to you afraid they’ll lose loved ones too. What do you say? All you can do is promise them that tomorrow is coming, that weeping endures for the night,” she said, quoting the psalms, “but joy comes in the morning.”

“I pray a lot. I’m always praying,” said Smith. “You have to hold onto this unwavering faith that we’ll get through this, that we’re going to win, that the NRA is powerful but we’re going to see the change we need,” she said. “It is happening. Our children are rising up from the ashes.”

SOURCE






Firing Tillerson removed an obstacle to peace

by CAROLINE GLICK

As Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was being fired on Tuesday, his central assumptions about the Palestinian conflict with Israel, which are shared by the entire Washington foreign policy establishment, literally blew up in Gaza.

On Tuesday morning, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah's convoy was attacked by a roadside bomb during an official visit in Hamas-controlled Gaza.

Hamdallah was in Gaza to inaugurate a wastewater treatment facility sponsored by the World Bank. The facility was approved 14 years ago, but infighting between Hamas, which runs Gaza, and Fatah, the PLO ruling faction which controls the Palestinian Authority (PA), blocked its operation time after time.

The shuttered water treatment facility in northern Gaza has long been a monument to the Palestinian leadership's incompetence and indifference to the plight of the people it is supposed to be serving. As the plant gathered dust, Gaza plunged deeper and deeper into a water crisis.

As the Times of Israel reported, Gaza has two water problems: insufficient ground water, and massive pollution of the existing supply due to the absence of sufficient sewage treatment facilities.

Untreated sewage is dumped directly into the Mediterranean Sea, and then seeps back into Gaza's groundwater.

Gaza's polluted acquifiers only produce a quarter of its water needs, and due to insufficient water treatment facilities, 97 percent of Gaza's natural water sources are unsafe for human consumption.

Hamdallah's visit to Hamas-controlled Gaza was supposed to show that the Fatah-Hamas unity deal Egypt brokered between the two terror groups last year was finally enabling them to solve Gaza's humanitarian needs.

And then Hamdallah's convoy was bombed, and the whole charade of Palestinian governing competence and responsibility was put to rest.

Later in the day, the White House held a Middle East summit that demonstrated Tillerson's basic assumptions have the problems of the Middle East precisely backwards.

Under the leadership of Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump's son-in-law, along with Jason Greenblatt, Trump's senior negotiator, Israeli officials sat in the White House for the first time with Arab officials from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Oman, and Qatar. Representatives from Egypt and Jordan, with which Israel enjoys open diplomatic relations, were also in attendance. Canadian and European officials participated as well.

Although they were invited, the Palestinians chose to boycott the conference. Their boycott was telling. The PA claimed it was boycotting the conference in retaliation for America's recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital and President Trump's plan to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem on Israel's 70th Independence Day in May.

But anger over Jerusalem doesn't justify the snub. The purpose of the summit wasn't to reach "the ultimate deal." The summit was called to to formulate the means to contend with the humanitarian crises emanating from Hamas-controlled Gaza. The Palestinians boycotted a summit whose sole purpose was to help them.

As Palestinian commentator Bassam Tawil noted, the PA's boycott while appalling, was unsurprising.

The White House summit was a threat to both rival Palestinian factions. It showed that the Trump administration, which both Fatah and Hamas hate passionately, cares more about the Palestinians than they do.

The humanitarian crisis in Gaza is entirely the product of Hamas and Fatah actions. In an op-ed in the Washington Post last week, Greenblatt laid the blame on Hamas. "Hamas's utter failure to fulfill any of the most basic functions of governance has brought Gaza to the brink of collapse, which has necessitated the response of the international community."

Fatah, Tawil noted, is just as responsible. The Fatah-controlled PA has used the Palestinians of Gaza as a pawn in its power struggle against Hamas. Rather than work to decontaminate Gaza's water supply and provide for the basic needs of the population, for the past year the PA has imposed economic sanctions on the Gaza Strip.

Ostensibly imposed to induce the population of Gaza to rise up against Hamas, they have simply served to increase the misery of the residents of Gaza. Hamas's power remains unchallenged as Qatar, Turkey, and Iran shower the terror group with cash and arms.

As Tawil noted, Hamas and Fatah are willing to fight one another until the last Palestinian in Gaza.

The conference showed that the attack on Hamdallah's convoy was not a freak episode. The bombing was emblematic of the Fatah-Hamas leadership's obsession with their own power, to the detriment of the people they claim to represent.

The events in Gaza and the White House on Tuesday tell us two important things.

First, they reveal that the primary obstacle to both peace and regional stability in the Middle East is the Palestinian leadership - both from Fatah and Hamas.

Not only did the PA refuse to participate in a summit dedicated solely to helping the Palestinians, but also the very day the summit took place, PA-controlled Voice of Palestine Radio reported that the PA intends to file a complaint against President Trump at the International Criminal Court. Trump's recognition of Jerusalem, the PA insists, "violated all international laws and resolutions."

The report also said the PA intends to sue Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman for "crimes against the Palestinian people."

Tuesday's second lesson is that while the PA is the primary obstacle to peace and regional stability, it is easily surmountable.

Tuesday's conference was a diplomatic triumph for the Trump administration. For the first time, official representatives of five Arab states that have no diplomatic relations with Israel sat publically in the White House with Israeli officials. They were brought together due to their common concern for the Palestinians in Gaza, and for the instability that the plight of the Palestinians in Hamas-controlled Gaza might encourage.

Although it is still unknown whether anything discussed at the conference will turn into concrete improvements on the ground, the summit itself was a concrete achievement. It showed that the Arabs are willing publicly to bypass the Palestinians to work with Israel. The fact that the conference was devoted to helping the Palestinians served to transform the PA from the critical partner in any peace deal to an irritating irrelevance.

And that brings us to Tillerson, and the foreign policy establishment whose positions he channeled.

During his 14 months in office, Tillerson insisted on maintaining the establishment's view that the Fatah-controlled PA is the be-all-and-end-all of Middle East peace efforts. The view that there can be no Arab-Israeli peace without the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) compelled successive U.S. administrations to continue to embrace it despite its support for terrorism, and despite its refusal to accept or even respond to any offer of peace by either Israel or the U.S.

The belief that there can be no peace without Fatah convinced successive American administrations to pour billions of dollars in aid money down the black hole of PA treasury accounts. Since the Israeli-PLO peace process began in 1993, the Palestinians have received more international aid per capita than any nation on earth has received in world history. And all they produced are an impoverished, sewage-filled terror state in Gaza, and a jihadist hub in Judea and Samaria that would explode in violence if Israel did not control security.

The view that the U.S. needs the PLO and its PA to achieve peace gave the Palestinian leadership an effective veto over every U.S. policy towards Israel and towards the peace process.

Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital and move the embassy to Jerusalem was the first time any American leader since Bill Clinton had dared to reject the Palestinian veto on US Middle East policy.

Tillerson supported maintaining the PA's veto. As a result, he all but openly opposed Trump's decision.

So too, last June, in a bid to protect U.S. funding to the PA - despite the fact that fully 7 percent of its donor-funded budget is used to pay salaries to terrorists in Israeli prisons and their families - Tillerson falsely told the Senate Foreign Relations committee that the PA had agreed to end the payments. After the Palestinians themselves denied his statement, he only partially walked it back. The next day, he told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that the U.S. was in "active discussions" with the Palestinians regarding halting the payments.

In the event, the PA raised its payments to terrorists in 2017 to $403 million. In 2016, the PA spent $347 million to pay salaries to terrorist murderers and their families.

In other words, Tillerson is so committed to the view that there can be no peace without the PA, that he willingly misled U.S. lawmakers.

Trump administration officials keep insisting that they are almost ready to present their peace plan for the Palestinians and Israel. But whatever the plan may entail, the steps the White House has already taken - Tuesday's summit, Trump's move on Jerusalem, and his determination to sign the Taylor Force Act to end U.S. support for the PA if it maintains its payments to terrorists - have already advanced the cause of peace more than any American peace proposal ever has and likely ever will.

Those moves removed the principle blockage to all peace deals - namely, the Palestinian leadership from Fatah and Hamas alike. By bypassing the PA, the White House has focused its efforts on expanding the already burgeoning bilateral ties between Israel and the Arab states. It has encouraged the expansion of cooperation between these regional actors. That cooperation is the key to diminishing Iranian power in the region; defeating Sunni jihadists from the Muslim Brotherhood and its spinoffs; and to improving the lives and prospects for peace of Palestinians, Israelis and all the nations of the region.

Tillerson opposed all of these actions. Like the foreign policy establishment he represented, Tillerson refused to abandon the false belief that nothing can be done without PLO approval. By removing him from office, President Trump took yet another step towards advancing prospects for peace in the Middle East.

SOURCE




UK: The jingoistic fear of Russia is out of control

The Salisbury poisoning has exposed the hysteria of Britain’s rulers.

The speed with which Britain’s political class has descended into jingoism and anti-foreigner hysteria in the wake of the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Salisbury has been extraordinary. In mere days, before we have proof of Russian state involvement, before we know the full facts of who was behind this attempted murder, virtually every section of our political and media elites was hollering for confrontation, demanding punishment of the Russian beast, and wailing, yet again, about the threat this warped eastern entity poses to Western stability and democracy. That such an evidence-lite outburst of nationalistic and militaristic fervour has come from those who have spent the past 18 months lecturing the little people about our alleged disdain for truth and our Little Englander paranoia should be lost on no one.

We are living through a desperate, hammed-up re-enactment of the Cold War era. ‘Christ, I miss the Cold War’, said Judi Dench’s M in Casino Royale when one of her missions proved rather more complicated than she had expected. She could have been speaking for much of the 21st-century Western political establishment who, feeling all at sea, and bamboozled by a contrarian electorate that refuses to vote in the way they’re meant to, seem to long to wrap themselves in the comfort blanket of old Cold War certainties from that era when the world was binary and our politicians didn’t have to say much more than ‘I hate the USSR’ to win applause. Post-Salisbury we’ve had Theresa May doing a bad impersonation of M, telling us it is ‘highly likely’ the Russian state was behind this poisoning and that Britain will confront the evil east head-on over this matter. Hey presto, suddenly ‘Maybot’, this PM so ridiculed by the press as flat and uninspiring, looks strong. This is the magic dust of Cold War nostalgia.

For many, it’s not enough. Tory MPs and much of the right-wing press, gabbing in heated tones about Russian menace, Putin’s warped plans to destabilise Europe, and other things that exist more in their heads than in the world of provable fact, have been egging May on to say more and do more. There must be confrontation, there must be sanctions, there must be no cuts to our military resources because, who knows, we may need to go to war, they say, madly. Fancying themselves as bit-part players in a John le Carré novel, these politicians and observers clearly relish the political and personal momentum, however fleeting and opportunistic it might be, that talking tough on Russia has provided them with. And it’s not just the right. An editor at the Guardian says the poisoning was a ‘brazen attack on a sovereign country’ and ‘cannot go unpunished’. The Guardian cares about British sovereignty now? Wonders will never cease.

Such has been the fever pitch of anti-Russia sabre-rattling over the past couple of days that even to ask ‘Shall we wait for all the facts?’ is to risk being shot down, being accused of ‘Putin apologism’, being branded an enemy of Britain and friend of Russia. Witness the response to Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s sensible plea that we remain in a ‘robust dialogue with Russia’ rather than ‘cutting off contact and letting the tensions and divisions get worse and potentially even more dangerous’. A politician calling for calm? For diplomacy? For dialogue? Boo! That cannot be tolerated. He has been branded ‘disgusting’ and ‘disgraceful’. David Miliband compared him to Trump: in short, he’s all but a Russia stooge. These attacks on Corbyn merely for saying we should speak robustly with Russia rather than get into a needless confrontation with it confirms that this affair has left the realm of measured political discussion and is now a needy, emotionalist search for a foreign evil entity that our political class might feel united in opposition to. No questioning, no appeals for calm, can be tolerated by the moral beneficiaries of this anti-Russia hysteria and so they seek to shut such things down with slurs and accusations. ‘What’s wrong with you? Do you love Putin. Do you hate Britain?’

Yet even Corbyn couldn’t resist milking the anti-Russian moment. Shortly after appealing for calm he attacked the Tories for taking donations from Russian oligarchs. Now all the talk is of ‘dirty Russian money’. Owen Jones at the Guardian went into full conspiracy-theory mode, accusing the Tories of being at the ‘centre of a web spun by [the Russian regime]’. Sections of the supposedly radical left are engaging in borderline xenophobic, or at least paranoid, chatter about our politicians having been bought off by ‘filthy’ money from Moscow, rehabilitating the McCarthyite panic about Russians infiltrating our political systems. Corbynite Paul Mason even called on Theresa May to cancel all defence cuts because we cannot ‘face down’ the Russian threat if we are ‘depleting our armed forces’. Behold Corbynista jingoism. Socialists for war with Russia – who saw that coming?

It looks likely to get worse. Ofcom is now threatening to revoke Russia Today’s right to air in Britain. Moscow is summoning Britain’s ambassadors for talks. Will it expel them? Will Britain expel Moscow’s? Trump’s Washington, keen to disprove the claims that it is in bed with the Kremlin, is getting involved, with Rex Tillerson asserting that the Russian state was probably behind the poisoning. And so international tensions intensify, in a way that could soon spin out of control. And on what evidence? None. Some experts believe it is unlikely the Russian state okayed the poisoning, given its amateurishness and pointlessness. They think it could have been a result of fallout between groups of former spies or possibly the action of the Russian mob. That is, non-state actors. Perhaps. Perhaps not. But can’t we wait for more facts before we rush to judgement, and conflict? It seems not. You’re a Putin apologist if you don’t share their longing for the ramping up of global tensions.

For nearly two years, Britain’s political class and chattering class have looked with contempt upon ordinary British people, whom they accuse of being post-truth, nationalistic, xenophobic and nostalgic for Empire. Now, these same people sniff at the suggestion that we should wait for more evidence on the Salisbury poisoning, suddenly care about Britain’s national integrity, engage in paranoid ‘vulnerable Britain’ vs ‘evil Russia’ hysteria, and want Britain to build up its military muscle to face down the Evil East. Everything they have said about us is far truer of them. That it happened so quickly, this descent from a supposedly rational political class into unstable, jingoistic war-talkers going on about filthy foreign money and influence, tells us just how thin is the veneer of reason on today’s ruling elites.

SOURCE






The 'patriotic' thought police came for Corbyn. You are next

By PETER HITCHENS

Is THIS a warning? In the past few days I have begun to sense a dangerous and dark new intolerance in the air, which I have never experienced before. An unbidden instinct tells me to be careful what I say or write, in case it ends badly for me. How badly? That is the trouble. I am genuinely unsure.

I have been to many countries where free speech is dangerous. But I have always assumed that there was no real risk here.

Now, several nasty trends have come together. The treatment of Jeremy Corbyn, both by politicians and many in the media, for doing what he is paid for and leading the Opposition, seems to me to be downright shocking.

I disagree with Mr Corbyn about many things and actively loathe the way he has sucked up to Sinn Fein. But he has a better record on foreign policy than almost anyone in Parliament. Above all, when so many MPs scuttled obediently into the lobbies to vote for the Iraq War, he held his ground against it and was vindicated.

Mr Corbyn has earned the right to be listened to, and those who now try to smear him are not just doing something morally wrong. They are hurting the country. Look at our repeated rushes into foolish conflict in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan. All have done us lasting damage.

Everyone I meet now thinks they were against the Iraq War (I know most of them weren’t, but never mind). So that’s over.

But Libya remains an unacknowledged disgrace. David Cameron has not suffered for it, and those who cheered it on have yet to admit they were mistaken.

Yet we pay for it, literally, every day. Along with our clinically insane covert intervention on the side of Al Qaeda in Syria, the Libyan adventure created the unending migration crisis across Europe which, in my view, threatens the stability of the whole continent.

Yet I recall a surge of anger from the audience when I doubted some crude war propaganda about mass rapes in Libya on the BBC’s Question Time. War is strangely popular, until it comes to your own doorstep.

I sense an even deeper and more thoughtless frenzy over Russia, a country many seem to enjoy loathing because they know so little about it.

I have already been accused, on a public stage, of justifying Moscow’s crime in Salisbury. This false charge was the penalty I paid for trying to explain the historical and political background to these events. I wonder if the bitterness also has something to do with the extraordinarily deep division over the EU, which has made opponents into enemies in a way not seen since the Suez Crisis.

In any case, the crude accusation, with its implication of treachery, frightened me. I expect, as time goes by, I will be accused of being an ‘appeaser’ and of being against ‘British values’. And then what? An apparatus of thought policing is already in place in this country. By foolishly accepting bans on Muslim ‘extremists’, we have licensed public bodies to decide that other views, too, are ‘extremist’.

Because the authorities are terrified of upsetting Islam, nothing much will happen to Muslim militants. But conservative and Christian views such as mine will suffer.

Christian and Jewish schools, especially ones which have conservative views on marriage and sex education, increasingly find themselves in trouble. Even mainstream Catholic and C of E schools are under stealthy attack, with attempts made to stop them ‘discriminating’ in favour of pupils from Christian homes.

Ofsted now says that ‘all schools’ have a ‘duty to actively promote fundamental British values’, which sounds totalitarian to me. This includes so-called ‘mutual respect and tolerance of values different from their own’.

Actually, there is nothing mutual about it. The sexual revolution fanatics demand submission, and offer no tolerance in return. Now the freedom to educate children at home, always a barometer of liberty, is being seriously threatened for the first time in our history. The pretext for this is supposed fears of child abuse or ‘extremism’. The real reason is that so much home education rejects the so-called ‘British values’ of multiculturalism and sexual liberation.

What next? ‘British values’ over foreign policy, war, immigration? I expect so. TV and the internet have for years been promoting a leaden conformism, whose victims are actually shocked – and often angry – when anyone disagrees.

There’s no real spirit of liberty left in this country.

Yes, I am scared, and I never have been before. And so should you be. War, or the danger of war, is always an opportunity to silence troublemakers.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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