RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/anti-semitism-yair-lapid-israel-bdsm-ben-and-jerrys-marxism-palestine-bigotry-11628447206

Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid startled the Conference Against Antisemitism in Jerusalem last month by redefining the term: “The anti-Semites weren’t only in the Budapest ghetto,” he said. They were also “the slave traders,” the Hutus who committed genocide in Rwanda, “those Muslims who have killed more than 20 million fellow Muslims in the past decade,” and “those who beat young LGBT people to death.”

It was, Mr. Lapid explained, a political appeal. “We need allies,” he said. “Anti-Semitism is racism, so let’s talk to all those who oppose racism. . . . Anti-Semitism is hatred of outsiders, so let’s recruit anyone who was ever an outsider and tell them—this is your fight too.”

Five days later, Ben & Jerry’s, a division of Unilever and a self-styled champion of progressive values, demonstrated Mr. Lapid’s naiveté by announcing that it will pull out of Israel because selling its ice cream in the “Occupied Palestinian Territory”—the loaded Arab term—was “inconsistent with our values.” The Arab League had launched the original pan-Arab boycott of Israel in 1945, defining any Jewish presence in Palestine as an occupation of Arab territory. That boycott would have done far greater damage had the U.S. not intervened to thwart it, which it did because Israel’s destruction was inconsistent with American values.

But America has changed. At the end of the 20th century, a home-grown boycott, divestment and sanctions movement became an American arm of the war against Israel, uniting a self-defined progressive coalition on the side of Arab-Muslim rejectionism. Anuradha Mittal, Ben & Jerry’s chairman and a supporter of BDS, is the initiator of today’s boycott of Israel, a country whose creation she once called a “catastrophe.” She knows that blaming Israel undermines its legitimacy, causing not only economic but political and diplomatic harm.

2 Chicago police officers shot, 1 killed; 3 in custody By Chuck Goudie and Maher Kawash
https://abc7chicago.com/2-cpd-officers-shot-1-killed-in-west-englewood-shooting–/10938393/

Female Chicago cop, 29, shot dead during traffic stop armed confrontation – two months after giving birth to her child
Ella French, 29, was fatally shot during a traffic stop Saturday
She had just returned from maternity leave and leaves behind a two-month-old  
Her male colleague is ‘fighting for his very life,’ a police spokesman said
The pair were fired upon after a vehicle carrying two men and a woman had been pulled over in the South Side of Chicago
Two suspects have been arrested and a weapon seized; a third is on the run 
The officer is the first to be shot and killed in the city since December 2018 
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9873491/Female-Chicago-police-officer-killed.html
Chicago surpasses 460 shooting incidents in July: police
The new figures bring the year-to-date totals to 1,973 shooting incidents and 2,471 shooting victims, compared to 1,779 incidents and 2,217 victims in 2020 By Lucas Manfredi

https://www.foxnews.com/us/chicago-surpasses-460-shooting-incidents-in-july-police

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/criminal-justice-reformers-chose-the-wrong-slogan/ar-AAN4qze

After George Floyd’s murder, when sweeping criminal-justice reforms seemed more possible than ever, many Black Lives Matter activists and their allies settled on a rallying cry: “Defund the Police.”

That choice was a disaster. The slogan—shorthand for cutting spending on law enforcement and redirecting it toward social services, or, for more radical proponents, moving toward eventual police abolition—is a political liability, largely due to justified fears that, if implemented, it would lead to many more murders, assaults, and other violent crimes, disproportionately harming victims in America’s most marginalized communities. Yet even as the Democratic Party abandons the slogan, the activist left still clings to it, as if oblivious to its opportunity cost: Namely, the public is open to any number of potential improvements to American policing, but no politically viable reform is getting anywhere near the attention of “defunding.”

Before the public sours on criminal-justice reform more broadly—as it may amid rising fears about crime and disorder in cities—a new focus and rallying cry are needed. And given the spike in homicides that has afflicted the United States during the pandemic, disproportionately killing Black people, there’s an especially strong case for this overdue slogan: Solve All Murders. Precisely because Black lives matter, people who take Black lives shouldn’t get away with it.

The Murder Accountability Project, a nonprofit watchdog group that tracks unsolved murders, found in 2019 that “declining homicide clearance rates for African-American victims accounted for all of the nation’s alarming decline in law enforcement’s ability to clear murders through the arrest of criminal offenders.” In Chicago, the public-radio station WBEZ’s analysis of 19 months of murder-investigation records showed that “when the victim was white, 47% of the cases were solved … For Hispanics, the rate was about 33%. When the victim was African American, it was less than 22%.” Another study in Indianapolis found the same kind of disparities.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2021/08/08/where-is-your-god-now-portland-cops-do-nothing-as-antifa-attacks-prayer-event-led-by-persecuted-christian-pastor-n1467987

If you wondered what it looked like when Nazi brown shirts went after the churches in Germany, wonder no more: It probably looked like Portland on Saturday, when black bloc-outfitted antifa thugs burst into a waterfront prayer event featuring persecuted Canadian Pastor Artur Pawlowski. The antifa members sprayed those gathered, including toddlers, with chemicals and lobbed IEDs.

“Where is your God, now?” taunted one of the attackers.

Antifa has attacked at least one church before. Antifa members organized their violent attack via Twitter and other social media platforms. They later gloated on Twitter that they had stolen the Christian group’s food and water.

Portland police watched as antifa bear-sprayed parents and their kids, lobbed “flash bombs” into the sparse crowd, and reportedly threw the group’s sound equipment into the Willamette River. This being Portland, police didn’t arrest antifa members for polluting the river, much less attacking people.

Portland’s police bureau has been defunded by at least $15 million and there’s been a mass exodus of officers retiring or going to places where the rule of law is observed.

As a result of antifa and BLM attacks on (the defunded) police, Portland is now awash in violent crime and on course to break records for shootings.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

“There’s a way you political folks have of coming round and round a plain right thing.”

                                                                                                                                Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)

                                                                                                                                Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852

It is not that I am without concerns, for everything that happens today is a ‘crisis.’ We live on a planet that has been around for 4.5 billion years. Over that time, it has been warm enough in Connecticut, where I live, to host dinosaurs and cold enough to place it under thirty feet of ice. By the time of the last ice age, man had been around for tens of thousands of years. He adapted. Yet today’s changing climate is said to present an existential challenge for the planet. “Woke” governments and large businesses demand diversity, equity and inclusion, but what they really mean are uniformity, unjustness and exclusion. Universities, once places for inquiring minds, have become venues for intellectual conformity. In sports, men, as transgender women, compete against biological women. Merit has fallen victim to social equity. What gives? The United States was founded on principles of personal liberty and the rule of law, derived from the Enlightenment. Should we let what has taken 250 years to create devolve into darkness?

We should not. We need to lighten up. The political atmosphere has become nasty. In an essay (“Old Glory, new anger”) in the August issue of The Spectator, Peter Wood wrote: “There is the wrathfulness of the political left, stemming from visceral hatred of Trump and his supporters.” As for the Right, he noted: “Their complaint lies far deeper as they see the purposeful destruction of American values by an elite that bullies and derides them.”  Friends and family members are no longer able to air political differences without one being called a racist and the other a toady. If we are to survive as a free, decent and independent people, composed of myriad races, religions and nationalities, political leaders, the media and universities must promote tolerance and mutual respect. To achieve this, they must encourage traditional American values, like family formations and public schools that teach. They must reaffirm the values of common sense, responsibility, hard work, merit and reintroduce civility and humor.

The political spectrum is linear, with autocracy at one end and anarchy at the other. Understanding that, we should know where on that line our own political philosophies lie. Fundamentally, our differences are simple. Progressives believe equitable progress is best achieved with more government involvement. Conservatives believe in what Margaret Thatcher said in Gdansk in 1988: “Economic freedom and personal freedom go hand in hand.” The first depends on the ability of a few hundred senior bureaucrats. The second relies on millions of people making millions of decisions. There are gradations of belief. A few extremists are clustered at either end, believing in either the benevolence of autocracy or the benignity of anarchy. Mainstream media would have us bunched (along with them) at extremes – the “woke” on one end and “deplorables” at the other. Most of us, however, lie within a few degrees of the center. But anger divides us, and communication is difficult.

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=21c1dc7597

There has been a lot of talk recently about “systemic racism” in the United States. At first, I was skeptical of the term, particularly because those who throw the term around rarely name an example of specific conduct by anyone that intentionally disadvantages blacks. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that there actually are quite a number of instances of major societal institutions engaging in systemic conduct that is clearly known to differentially disadvantage blacks. In every case I can think of, the conduct that systemically disadvantages blacks is a sacred cow of the left promoted for the benefit of some other progressive interest group.

For today, I’ll discuss two of the most clear-cut examples. One has been going on for a long time, while the other is new. Because both involve sacred cows of the political left, the harmful systemic effect on blacks just gets ignored.

Opposition to School Choice

Over the course of the last year or so, the two big national teachers unions (National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers) have been mostly in the news for their advocacy to keep schools closed and kids at home. That’s bad enough, but hopefully will end soon. But then the teachers unions will revert to their previous and perennial priority number one, which is the opposition to school choice — otherwise known as keeping minority kids trapped in failing urban public schools.

Here in New York, charter schools saw major expansion under the strong advocacy of Mayor Michael Bloomberg (2002-2013). But current Mayor de Blasio, who was backed by the teachers union, has done everything in his power to stall and halt the expansion of the charters, and thereby keep as many kids as possible trapped in the failing unionized schools. Moreover, the state legislature, also at the behest of the union, has imposed a cap on the number of charters. That cap has been reached in New York City, meaning that no more charters can open; and the legislature has failed to raise the cap. A charter school advocacy group called the New York City Charter School Center lists 6 new charters ready to open but unable to do so due to the cap. Meanwhile, applications by students to attend the charters exceed available slots by factors of 2:1 in Manhattan and Brooklyn, 3:1 in the Bronx, and 4:1 in Queens.

Data on school performance overwhelming show that the charters wildly outpace the unionized public alternatives. In a post back in 2017 I quoted this statistic from 2016 comparing the regular public schools to Success Academies, one of the top charters:

Test scores released by the state Friday show 94% of Success Academy students passed the 2016 math exam and 82% passed the reading exam. . . . By comparison, 38% of students in traditional public schools met state reading standards this year, up from 30.4% in 2015. And 36.4% of city kids passed math tests in 2016, up from 35.2% in 2015.