Exploiting the deaths of innocents in El Paso and Dayton for political gain

By: Bruce Thornton

The bodies in Gilroy, El Paso, and Dayton were still in the morgue when the progressive “carrion-picking crows” started politicizing the murders. But everything they said about gun control, “white nationalism,” and Trump’s culpability was based on lies and stale clichés recycled for political gain.

The argument that more gun control laws will lessen substantially such murders has been disproven with facts over and over. In the Nineties, gun homicides fell by half, even as the number of guns increased 56%. The reason has been obvious since Prohibition in the Twenties: if enough people want something, black markets and criminal gangs will exist to get it for them. We’ve spent about a trillion dollars on reducing the availability of drugs, yet any savvy teenager in America can get just about any drug in less than a day. Likewise, someone bent on mayhem can circumvent the most stringent gun control laws. Just look at the crime rate in Democrat-controlled cities like Chicago, D.C., or Baltimore. They have some of the most restrictions on guns, and some of the highest murder rates.

Yet after the El Paso massacre, Democrat primary candidate Amy Klobuchar, a “moderate” only by comparison to her hard-left rivals, wrote, “The U.S. House has passed common sense gun safety legislation. It is long past time to pass it in the Senate. The question to ask: Whose side are you on? The NRA’s or the people’s?” “Beto” O’Rourke decried “lax gun laws,” Bernie Sanders called for “common-sense gun safety legislation,” and Kamala Harris vowed during her first 100 days as president to block the import of “assault rifles”. These empty statements have become anti-gun-nut mantras designed to exploit the suffering of the victims and the ghoulish spectacle of the crimes.

The next lie is the sinister power of “white nationalism.” According to a “manifesto” published online 19 minutes before the El Paso attack, probably by the shooter, his motives were focused on racial and national identity degeneration of the sort that troubled the Boston Brahmins like Henry Cabot Lodge. They, too, promoted racial purity, as well as “scientific racism,” eugenics, and the 1924 immigration law that restricted emigrants from Eastern Europe, Southern Italy, and other “inferior” countries filled with “beaten men from beaten races,” as MIT President Francis Amasa Walker put it.

Based on those sentiments, the shooter can fairly be called a white nationalist, but there is no evidence in his manifesto that he is part of a larger, organized group with any national following or influence. In fact, it appears that the shooter, like the vast majority of other mass-shooters other than jihadists, is a deranged loner. Like most such killers, he masks his personal demons, neuroses, and failures with the claim that he wants to shock awake Americans who aren’t taking seriously the degeneration of the country, one he blames on Republicans as well as Democrats.

But the killer’s fever-swamp ramblings do not bespeak a widespread “white nationalist” threat. Indeed, even the Southern Poverty Law Center, notorious for hyping the threat of “white supremacism” and the “alt-right,” puts the number of Klansmen at 6500, compared to the four million active in 1920. Moreover, according to Joel Kotkin of Chapman University, “The far Right has no political leader of consequence, and its media presence is limited, to say the least. As the Los Angeles Times reported last year, the nine major alt-right sites received nearly 3 million visits and 839,000 unique visitors, compared with 236 million visits and 102 million unique visitors for the mainstream Left, and 264 million visits and 111 million unique visitors for the mainstream Right.”

Yet predictably, the Trump-hating Democrat primary candidates are using the massacre to peddle their meme that Donald Trump is a friend of “white nationalists” and hence a “racist.” Julian Castro decried a “toxic brew” of white nationalism he linked to Trump’s “divisive racist rhetoric.” Jay Inslee proclaimed, “The first order of business to reduce white nationalism is to eliminate white nationalism in our White House. The sentiments of fear and division, and outright racism, that this president has emboldened ought to be sickening to anyone.” So too another low-polling candidate desperate for attention, Pete Buttigieg: “The President of the United States is condoning white nationalism. White nationalism is one of the evils that is motivating and inspiring at least some people to go kill Americans. The president has a responsibility to nip this in the bud.” And Elizabeth Warren tweeted, “We need to call out the president himself for advancing racism and white supremacy.”

This claim of Trump’s affinity for “white nationalism” has been debunked as a construct of selective editing of Trump’s remarks after the 2017 Charlottesville rally that left one woman dead. The media asserted that Trump characterized the white supremacists protesting the removal of Confederate statues as “very fine people.” What the media left out is Trump saying explicitly, “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and white nationalists because they should be condemned totally.” Trump clarified once again that his comment merely pointed out that just as there were non-violent protestors among the Antifa thugs in favor of removing the statues, there also were nonviolent supporters of keeping them. He again emphasized that “Racism is evil, and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.”

As of now, it appears that the El Paso shooter targeted Latinos, which has brought out yet another dimension of the “Trump is racist” smear: His efforts to improve border security and fix our broken immigration system are a “racist” attack on yet another “people of color.” Cultural appropriator “Beto” O’Rourke, for example, recycled another dishonestly edited Trump quote: “We’ve had a rise in hate crimes every single one of the last three years during an administration where you have a president who’s called Mexicans rapists and criminals.”

First, O’Rourke’s claim that hate crimes have risen steadily from 2016-2019 is dubious, and not just because the most recent statistics, like the DOJ’s report released in March of this year, go up only through 2017. But there are other problems with hate-crime data, such as elastic definitions of what constitutes a hate-crime, and the subjectivity and reliability of self-reported data. As Heather MacDonald points out,

“In 2017, the FBI reported an additional 1,000 hate crimes from 2016, for a total of 7,000. But an additional 1,000 police agencies participated in hate-crime reporting in 2017, as Reason’s Robby Soave has pointed out, so it’s not clear that that increase is real or simply a result of more reporting. Even if real, 7,000 “hate crimes” in a country this large is an infinitesimal number. And the definition of a hate crime is highly political: very little black-on-white street crime gets classified as such, though hatred for whites undoubtedly drives a considerable fraction of this activity.” (Between 2012 and 2015, blacks committed more than 85 percent of interracial violent victimizations between blacks and whites.)

O’Rourke’s attempt to make a causal link between Trump’s immigration policies and reported hate crimes against Latinos is sheer demagoguery.

So too with the doctored Trump quote he alludes to, in which Trump called Mexican immigrants “rapists and criminals.” Here’s the full quote: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” First, everything he said is true. Our southern border is the gateway for most illegal drugs to reach this country. And every day there’s another story about an illegal alien murdering or raping a victim, many of whom are Latino. To argue, as some apologists do, that crime rates among the immigrant population are lower than natives is beside the point. The victims are still victims, and their suffering and their families’ suffering are a consequence of lax border controls resulting from state and federal policy.

Are Angel Parents, those families who have lost loved ones to illegal alien crime, to be comforted with some utilitarian cost-benefit political or business calculation, especially when their government has failed its foremost obligation––to protect their children’s “right to life”?

And of course, Trump’s acknowledgement that some immigrants are “good people” weakens the claim that his comment is “racist,” and part of a rhetoric of hate that culminated in the El Paso shooting. Stating facts bluntly is not a sign of racism.

We know that these comments and reactions are all about the Democrat primary and terminal Trump Derangement Syndrome. If we had a consistent principle about rhetoric causing crimes, then the Democrats would have condemned Black Lives Matter for the policemen assassinated in Dallas and Brooklyn, or Bernie Sanders for the shooting of Republican Congressmen by one of his supporters. They would have called for proscribing sermons in mosques that include verses from the Koran and Hadiths, which jihadists have told us repeatedly inspire their terrorist murder of infidels. The fact is, millions and millions of people hear hateful speech but don’t go out and massacre innocent people.

Finally, the Democrats’ habit of using mass shootings as fodder for their partisan political message is despicable. If they really cared about crimes against “people of color,” they would have long ago been talking about the violence of blacks against black people in the cities they run. It’s shocking moral idiocy that a party continually harping on “racism” ignores the fact that more blacks are murdered in one year than were killed in the whole history of racist violence from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Act.

But as Trump pointed out about Baltimore, that would require the black elite to actually do something for their “brothers” and “sisters” trapped in Blue-State plantations. How much easier, and lucrative, it is to rail against “racism” and marginal “white nationalists,” and to exploit a tragedy in order to demonize a president who has done more for black and Latino Americans than Barack Obama ever did.          

(Front Page Mag)

Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, a Research Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, and a Professor of Classics and Humanities at the California State University. He is the author of nine books and numerous essays on classical culture and its influence on Western Civilization. His most recent book, Democracy’s Dangers and Discontents (Hoover Institution Press), is now available for purchase.

The threat of anti-Semitic violence is real. But American Jews are not in the kind of danger that should force them to hide their identities or stay away from synagogues

By: Jonathan Tobin

This week on Twitter, a Jewish writer in Los Angeles decided to dispense some advice to her followers. Ariel Sobel had become aware that a small group of white supremacists was compiling a list of online Jews. Their purpose was clearly harassment, and so when she saw her name and that of others that she knew in this archive, she tweeted that Jews should “please avoid typing out the phrase ‘I’m Jewish’ on Twitter.”

That set off something of a debate, prompting many to reply that they disagreed. What followed was an avalanche of tweets proclaiming “I’m Jewish,” along with a message to anti-Semites that they weren’t afraid. Non-Jews soon joined in to proclaim their solidarity.

That ought to encourage us that tolerance for hate is not as great as many of us fear it to be, though this exchange isn’t taking place in a vacuum. It happened within day of a shooting outside a Miami synagogue that left a man wounded. And after the horrific crimes in Pittsburgh last fall and in Poway, Calif., this spring, security is being ramped up at Jewish institutions all over the country. That’s caused some people to worry about whether it’s wise to go to synagogue.

So perhaps under the circumstances, no one should be criticizing Sobel for an approach that urged Jewish individuals not to make it easier for fringe groups to target them online. Much like the German official who caused a stir in May when he advised Jews not to wear kipahs in public because it put them in danger, Sobel also seemed to be trying to shield people from harm.

The Internet and social media are not for the faint of heart these days. Any expression of opinion—whether construed as left-wing or right-wing—is bound to generate nasty comments or worse. And for those of us who are journalists and do so openly as Jews, a certain volume of anti-Semitic tweets, Facebook posts or emails comes with the territory. Yet I wouldn’t blame anyone for trying to escape being targeted by a white-supremacist group that seeks to threaten or intimidate Jews.

Still, we need to place our fears, however much they may be rooted in harsh reality, in perspective. For all of our worries about violence, including synagogue shootings, it would be a mistake to think of the United States as no longer a safe place for Jews. Nor should we think that most Americans share the feelings of anti-Semites.

As a Pew Research Survey released in July pointed out, most non-Jewish Americans don’t know that much about Judaism yet still have positive feelings about Jews. Indeed, the poll showed that Jews are more highly regarded than any specific religious group in the country. There isn’t a single sector of American social, political or economic life in which Jews cannot aspire to leading roles.

The prevalence of intermarriage has created a genuine demographic crisis. But it must also be understood that this is only possible because non-Jews want to marry Jews.

Nor is the situation in the United States comparable to that in Europe.

FBI hate-crime statistics have consistently shown that the vast majority of religious-based incidents have targeted Jews. But when one looks at the raw numbers, those totals are still quite small considering that they are measuring hate in a country of hundreds of millions of people. Statistically, the odds of being a victim of an anti-Semitic crime in this country remain remote. There is simply no comparison between what is going on in the United States, and the routine violence and intimidation faced by European Jews.

The truth is that most American Jews have little personal experience of anti-Semitism. Indeed, the age group that is most likely to have come up against Jew-hatred these days is college students because of BDS activists.

The one exception would be ultra-Orthodox Jews living in some sections of Brooklyn, N.Y., who have been subjected to constant harassment and even violence at the hands of some African-Americans. Sadly, leading Jewish organizations that are most vocal about anti-Semitism, especially when it comes from the far-right, aren’t particularly interested in what’s happening in Brooklyn; it’s not unfair to speculate that the reason is that the Jews at risk there don’t look like most other American Jews.

We can’t blame people for being scared when presented with stories about anti-Semitic violence or even the prospect of having to confront Internet trolls. It’s only natural that people unused to dealing with these kinds of situations, as most American Jews are, might react by wanting to avoid any risk.

But that’s the wrong answer to hate.

The right answer to hate groups archiving Jewish names is to be open and loud about your Jewish identity. And as much as synagogue shootings are awful, that should be even more reason for Jews to show up and be counted by going even more often.

This is not a matter of bravado, but realism. Jews are neither alone nor isolated in the United States. Most Americans abhor anti-Semitism and anti-Semites, as well as strongly support Israel. There is no reason for American Jews to feel as if they are helpless victims and every reason for them to realize that anti-Semites—whether right-wing extremists or left-wingers who peddle intersectional lies about Israel and BDS—are very much in the minority.

The best response to anti-Jewish hate is Jewish pride, based not only on our willingness and ability to defend ourselves in an era when there is an Israel, but also in our confidence that Jews need not live in fear in a country as exceptional and free as the United States has always been.               

(JNS.org)

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS—Jewish News Syndicate. Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin.

By: Rachel Avraham

A recent survey put out by Fox News found that six in ten Americans believe that Iran poses a threat to America’s safety. These Americans are backed up in their convictions as they recently witnessed the Iranian Revolutionary Guards threatening a British warship. This came after Iran attacked a Japanese tanker, had its proxies attack an international airport in Saudi Arabia and seized a British ship. As tensions flare in the region, it is of critical importance to recall that Iran does not merely pose a threat to the US in the Persian Gulf. The Mullahs can also harm America via their proxies in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen. Given this fact, it is of utmost importance that Americans pay attention to how the Islamic Republic is entrenching itself in Syria.

A recent report issued by the Safadi Center found that:

there has been increased infiltration by Iran-supported militias along the border with Israel. Four Lebanese Hezbollah bases were established in Southern Syria over the past year, three of them in Zara and one of them in Quneitra.

The report claims that Hezbollah utilizes these bases in order to train new volunteers and to store weapons and armaments for the terror group. According to the Safadi Center, Hezbollah and the Iranian regime are increasingly spreading out along the Golan Heights, thus posing a strategic threat to the State of Israel:

This is done in order to realize the regional ambitions of the Iranian regime, which seeks to establish a Shia Crescent from Tehran to the Mediterranean Sea.

“Hezbollah is not satisfied with providing training bases for the regime and its volunteers,” Mendi Safadi, the head of the Safadi Center for International Diplomacy, Research, Public Relations and Human Rights, states. He continues:

They also established militant groups and security cells in Daraa and Quneitra in order to obtain wide deployment in the region via families that support recruiting children. This is done so that they can obtain comprehensive military control over the border in the Hermon region till Swaida via the Golan Heights and the Jordanian border. Hezbollah has recruited in recent months hundreds of residents of the Quneitra region. In addition, other secret groups have done special training on rockets in the military academy in Aleppo and Lebanon, where participants received from Hezbollah a monthly salary of 120,000 Syrian liras in addition to military uniforms for combat missions so that they can fight alongside the Syrian military.

The report issued by the Safadi Center has been confirmed by Syrian Kurdish dissident Sherkoh Abbas, who affirms that Iran and Hezbollah not only are more and more entrenched along the border with Israel but are increasingly taking over all of Syria. He states,

Iran is in charge of Syria. Assad is a figurehead for Syria but the people who run the day to day operations in Syria are Iran. They have bases throughout the country. We see their influence in all of Syria in general. In fact, they have been working on changing the character of Syria so that it will be Shia and the demographics are changing in favor of groups allied with Iran. They are shipping in oil tankers, weapons and people. It is a fact.

“It is beyond the Israel border,” Abbas adds, stressing that:

Iran started not just now. They supported groups and are building up their influence slowly in Syria, economic to military. Now, they fully control Syrian day to day life. It is not so easy to detect anymore. They gave citizenship to people, changed neighborhoods and they let people economically rely on them. People began to rely on them. It is not easy to detect like an army. They look Syrian. They dress like Syrians. They learned to speak Syrian Arabic. They embedded themselves in Syrian society. What Iran is doing is more a threat to Syria and the whole Middle East for they are embedded in Syria.

Abbas proclaims that eventually all of the ethnic and religious cleansing that is occurring in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen will be a nightmare for the world to manage for a number of reasons:

This is firstly because of the refugee displacement and also the changing the landscape of the Middle East. Where are you going to strike? They are embedded in schools and hospitals. It is important for the US and Israel to realize that they need to address the Syrian issue. Any political solution is in favor of Iran. The Iranians view Syria as a way to bypass sanctions and use its ports, airports and seaports and energy sources to make it a market or to bring it from there to Iran. This is the only way to bypass the international community. Unfortunately, the US, Israelis and Europeans have not recognized it. They can put sanctions on Iran but Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq serve its needs.

Abbas also notes that as Iran extends its sphere of influence, it puts pressure on groups that are traditionally friendly to the US, such as the Christians, Kurds, Yezidis, etc. He also declares that this creates more disgruntled Sunnis, which can lead to the reemergence of ISIS or something worse:

They will make ISIS look moderate. The sooner the US and Europeans address the issue and recognize Syria as a failed state and try to have Iran’s influence reduced as well as Russia’s, there will be a better Middle East for them with less radical Islam and a smaller refugee crisis. It will allow certain sectors of Syria to prosper. That has the potential to make the Middle East safer versus burying ones head in the sand. Now is the time to recognize these failed states as such and to support your true allies in these areas and to make sure other people don’t go the same way as Assad by finding a way to let them rebuild. That is something that needs to be addressed.

Given that this is the reality, US President Donald Trump should not just apply more sanctions on Iran. He also needs to address how Iran is taking over Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen, where it is establishing a Shia Crescent. He needs to tackle how Turkey is increasingly building an alliance with Iran. This reality makes it pivotal for the US to keep a presence in Syria, especially as Turkey threatens to engage in a military operation if it can’t come to an agreement with the US. Such a military operation combined with the Iranian threat in the rest of Syria would transform the entire Kurdish region into another Afrin, where ISIS is presently reemerging. The only way to avoid such a scenario is for the US to go after Iran’s proxies in the same manner that they go after the Iran regime itself–and to not abandon Syria to Iran.                

(Front Page Mag)

Rachel Avraham is a political analyst working at the Safadi Center for International Diplomacy, Research, Public Relations and Human Rights. She is the author of “Women and Jihad: Debating Palestinian Female Suicide Bombings in the American, Israeli and Arab media.”