RUTHFULLY YOURS

One year ago today, President Obama announced the start of the flawed nuclear deal that he claimed would prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Unfortunately, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) has made America less safe. It at best only delays Iran’s nuclear-weapons program and does nothing to protect Israel and our allies in the region from Tehran’s continued nefarious activities.

The Obama administration has gone to great lengths to save this deal. Administration officials have boasted of creating an “echo chamber” with reporters ensuring that journalists parroted the administration’s line and ignored worrisome details about the deal.

Over the last year, Iran has continued to endanger our troops and allies in the region and further its quest for regional domination.

Iran has kidnapped U.S. citizens and dual citizens as part of its statecraft. Iran still has not provided information on the whereabouts of Floridian Robert Levinson, who is the longest-held hostage in American history. Iran also continues its unjust detention of Siamak Namazi and his father, Baquer Namazi.

Iran has expanded its support to proxy forces in Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, which has been made easier by the $100 billion Tehran received because of the JCPOA. The head of designated terrorist group Hezbollah recently admitted that his group, which has the blood of Americans and Israelis on its hands, receives funding directly from Iran.

Over the last year, Iran has continued to expand its ballistic-missile program. Iranian missiles launched in March were marked with a statement in Hebrew reading, “Israel must be wiped off the arena of time.” The Obama administration has backtracked from its original assertions that these launches were prohibited by U.N. Security Council Resolutions.

In January, Iran detained U.S. sailors in international waters and an investigation by the chief of naval operations noted that Iran “violated international law by impeding the boats’ innocent passage transit and they violated sovereign immunity by boarding, searching and seizing the boats and by photographing and videotaping the crew.”

There is no more important book to read right now than Heather Mac Donald’s clear-eyed, riveting new work The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe. You cannot fully get to the core of the truth about the current anti-cop sentiment in the country, or be armed with the facts to shoot down Black Lives Matter lies without reading it. If you can get a copy, that is – demand is so great that there is currently a one-to-two month wait for it on Amazon.com. Don’t wait – get the ebook.

In case you haven’t already been following everything Mac Donald writes, she is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. Her writings have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, The New Republic, Partisan Review, The New Criterion, and elsewhere.

She is the recipient of the New Jersey State Law Enforcement Officers Association’s 2004 Civilian Valor Award, the 2008 Integrity in Journalism award from the New York State Shields, the 2008 Eugene Katz Award for Excellence in the Coverage of Immigration from the Center for Immigration Studies, and the 2012 Quill & Badge Award for Excellence in Communication from the International Union of Police Associations. In other words, unlike the legion of talking heads in the news media pontificating about the racism in American law enforcement, Heather Mac Donald has actually done the journalistic legwork, is qualified to discuss the subject, and is bold enough to speak the truth about it.

The War on Cops begins by noting that crime is skyrocketing in cities across the United States as “the most anti-law-enforcement administration in memory draws to a close.” This isn’t, however, “the greatest danger in today’s war on cops. The greatest danger lies, rather, in the delegitimization of law and order itself.” If we don’t begin to counter the present lies about law enforcement propagated by the Black Lives Matter movement and facilitated by a complicit media and by the “academic victimology industry,” Mac Donald concludes, civilized urban life will break down – which we are already beginning to witness.

Ms. Mac Donald took time out to answer a few questions about crime, terrorism, and the recent Dallas cop shooting for FrontPage Mag.

Mark Tapson: More than a dozen years ago you wrote Are Cops Racist? in which you pushed back against the anti-profiling crusade and warned that it was undermining the law enforcement progress of the previous decade. What, if anything, has changed between that book and your newest one?

Heather Mac Donald: We are now living in the most anti-law enforcement administration in recent memory and most likely in American history. The specious “driving while black” crusade of the 1990s and early 2000s was mostly promulgated by left-wing activists, albeit with help from the mainstream media.

Today, we have a president who regularly spreads the poisonous lie that the criminal justice system is racist. The academic victimology industry, presciently identified by David Horowitz’s pioneering work, has only become more entrenched and powerful over the last decade. It, too, is the essential helpmate of the Black Lives Matter movement, propelling the anti-cop narrative to powerful mainstream status.

MT: What were your thoughts upon hearing of last week’s Dallas shooting in progress, when police were dying and being wounded even as they tried to protect the demonstrators who had gathered there to protest their supposed racial bias?

WASHINGTON — President Obama hailed the Iran nuclear deal as “avoiding further conflict and making us safer” on the one-year anniversary of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

Within that year, Iran has conducted ballistic missile tests in violation of a UN Security Council resolution that the administration says are outside the scope of the nuclear agreement but UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said are “not consistent with the constructive spirit” of the agreement in a confidential report cited by Bloomberg.

Iran has also captured U.S. sailors and humiliated them on-camera before releasing them, indicted an American businessman and a U.S. permanent resident who had done work for the U.S. government, and shipped arms to Yemen. Iran has warned that if the U.S. gives them any grief about their activities, they’ll consider the nuclear deal null and void.

German intelligence reported at the end of June that Iran has continued its “illegal proliferation-sensitive procurement activities” at a “quantitatively high level” — which “holds true in particular with regard to items which can be used in the field of nuclear technology.” The State Department has denied the report.

“The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution also registered a further increase in the already considerable procurement efforts in connection with Iran’s ambitious missile technology program which could among other things potentially serve to deliver nuclear weapons,” states the German report. “Against this backdrop it is safe to expect that Iran will continue its intensive procurement activities in Germany using clandestine methods to achieve its objectives.”

“All of Iran’s pathways to a nuclear weapon remain closed, and Iran’s breakout time has been extended from two to three months to about a year,” Obama declared in a statement released by the White House today. “The United States and our negotiating partners have also fully implemented our commitments to lift nuclear-related sanctions, and we will continue to uphold our commitments as long as Iran continues to abide by the deal.”

“The JCPOA demonstrates what can be achieved by principled diplomacy and a sustained commitment to stopping the spread of nuclear weapons,” the president added. “America’s willingness to engage directly with Iran opened the door to talks, which led to the international unity and sustained engagement that culminated in the JCPOA. We still have serious differences with Iran, but the United States, our partners, and the world are more secure because of the JCPOA.”

Secretary of State John Kerry did his own victory lap, emerging before the media at the Westin Hotel in Paris to declare that “a program that so many people said will not work, a program that people said is absolutely doomed to see cheating and be broken and will make the more dangerous, has, in fact, made the world safer, lived up to its expectations, and thus far produced an ability to be able to create a peaceful nuclear program with Iran living up to its part of this bargain and obligation.”

“The world is safer today because conflict in the region is not calculated on the basis of the potential of a nuclear confrontation or nuclear explosion, and because we have the ability to be able to work through some issues which we’ve seen, for instance with our sailors who stumbled into Iranian waters and within 24 hours we were able to get them out,” Kerry said. “That could not have happened prior to this agreement having taken place.”

Kerry added that “nobody pretends that some of the challenges we have with Iran have somehow been wiped away.”