RUTHFULLY YOURS

New Yorkers under a certain age may not recall when racing home from the subway at night was normal, but maybe they’ll get the opportunity. They can thank the progressive city council, which this week repudiated the “broken windows” policing that has contributed so much to making Gotham safe.

On Wednesday the councillors decriminalized so-called quality-of-life offenses such as littering, drinking or urinating in public and loitering in parks after dark. The package of new laws downgrades such misdemeanor citations to civil summonses so scofflaws will no longer have to appear in court or pay hefty fines.

Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito claims the laws will reduce arrests and incarcerations of minorities. Quality-of-life offenses make up about half of criminal summonses. However, only one in five individuals who are summoned to criminal court are actually found guilty, and fewer than 10% of those arrested for misdemeanors are sentenced to jail.
Relaxing law enforcement will almost certainly promote disorder instead, as James Q. Wilson and George Kelling surmised in their classic 1982 article “Broken Windows.” Their theory, which has been borne out in real life, is that tolerating widespread disorderly behavior encourages greater lawlessness, and minor infractions often lead to major crimes. CONTINUE AT SITE

New Yorkers strolling through Chinatown in downtown Manhattan last Sunday might have noticed an unusual flurry of activity: Jewish men and women, a rabbi in a clerical gown, and a color guard gathering in graveyard tucked away behind a wrought-iron fence. Members of the New York synagogue Shearith Israel, the oldest Jewish congregation in North America, were visiting their historic cemetery at Chatham Square.

In an annual ritual ahead of Memorial Day, they were there for a ceremony that few other synagogues in America could perform: honoring the members of their congregation who had fought in the Revolutionary War.

For Shearith Israel, where I am the rabbi, what is most striking is not that its history stretches back to the Colonial period, but rather that so many of its congregants sided with George Washington against England. New York was known as a Tory stronghold: When English forces expelled Washington’s troops from the city, King George III’s soldiers were greeted with a “Declaration of Dependence” signed by hundreds of New Yorkers, declaring their allegiance to Great Britain.

The Jews of New York, by contrast, were largely of the patriot persuasion, in part because Shearith Israel’s spiritual leader, Gershom Mendes Seixas, was known for his vocal support for the Colonists’ cause. Like many members of the Continental Congress, even Seixas had hoped for reconciliation with England. As late as May 1776, Seixas gathered his flock in the synagogue, located then on what is now South William Street, to pray that the English would “turn away their fierce Wrath from against North America.”

Hiring more TSA agents may shorten the lines of passengers waiting to go through airport security, but this will do little to ensure they safely arrive at their destination. And shortcutting Syrian refugees vetting procedures from 12 or 18 months to a few days, increases the risk of bringing jihadists and their sympathizers into the country.

While it is necessary to screen passengers and their luggage for explosives and weapons. And while there is an added deterrence factor in doing so publically, such screenings are not enough to better secure airports and airplanes waiting to take off.

Rushing through proper vetting of TSA agents to cut down on long lines of passengers, or drastically reducing the screening of Syrian refugees, many are undocumented and unknown numbers using false passports, could pose a serious threat to the United States. But even if done properly, such screening tells nothing about their tendencies.

Moreover, political correctness enforced by the U.S. and European governments and potential legal harassment from Islamic organizations have conditioned many to turn a blind eye to potential security risks.

How many among the growing numbers of supporters of radical Muslim groups are posing as refugees? How many are working at airports? How many are looking for ways to exploit security gaps? How can they be identified before they carry out an attack?

Workers allowed to airports restricted areas and on planes are supposed to go through security checks each and every time. However, as of last month, according to TSA Administrator Robert Neffenger, only Atlanta, Miami, and Orlando airports required “employees to go through a security check before entering “secured” areas of the airport.”

This year marks the 75th anniversary of the December 7, 1941, Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor that killed more than 2,400 Americans.

President Obama is visiting Hiroshima this week, the site of the August 6, 1945, dropping of the atomic bomb that helped end World War II in the Pacific Theater. But strangely, he has so far announced no plans to visit Pearl Harbor on the anniversary of the attack. The president, who spent much of his childhood in Hawaii, should do so — given that many Americans have forgotten why the Japanese attacked the United States and why they falsely assumed that they could defeat the world’s largest economic power.

Imperial Japan was not, as often claimed, forced into a corner by a U.S. oil embargo, which came only after years of horrific Japanese atrocities in China and Southeast Asia. Instead, an opportunistic and aggressive fascist Japan gambled that the geostrategy of late 1941 had made America uniquely vulnerable to a surprise attack.

By December 1, 1941, Nazi Germany, Japan’s Axis partner, had reached the suburbs of Moscow. Japan believed that the German army would soon knock the Soviet Union out of the war.

Japan had also hedged its bets by signing a nonaggression pact with the Soviets. Japanese leaders assumed that even if communist Russia survived, Japan could avoid a costly land war on its rear flank. The U.S., not Japan, would likely have a two-front war.

By 1941, the Netherlands, France, and Belgium had all been defeated and occupied by the Third Reich. Only the British remained of the original European anti-Axis allies, and London had been under constant aerial assault by the German Luftwaffe during the Blitz. Japan figured that Germany and Italy might soon win the war and wished to pile on before it ended.

Japan had calculated that all of Europe’s resource-rich Pacific and Asian colonies were now orphaned and up for grabs. By starting a Pacific war and knocking out the U.S., Japan could get its hands on the resources necessary to fuel its war machine.

British-held Singapore and the American bases in the Philippines were isolated and poorly defended. And they would be completely cut off once the U.S. Seventh Fleet and air arm were neutralized at Pearl Harbor.

Starting a war in the Pacific meant the Japanese would have easy access to huge supplies of oil, rubber, rice, and strategic metals for their newfound mercantile empire, the Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

The U.S. also had lost military deterrence. The Japanese had watched carefully as America did little to help its two closest allies: France and Great Britain. The former was easily overrun by the Nazis, the latter bombed unmercifully.

An outbreak of deadly infectious tuberculosis among refugees President Obama sent to Indiana is a frightening reminder that the administration’s dangerous immigration policies are putting American lives at risk.

In a frenzied rush to bring as many non-English-speaking Third World aliens to the country as possible before his presidency ends in a few months, Obama is allowing Syrian war migrants and refugees to be brought into the country without first undergoing proper medical examinations, a violation of the nation’s most basic public health protocols.

“Tuberculosis is one of the most lethal infectious diseases in history,” said Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the Association of American Physicians and surgeons. “It is easily transmitted, say on a public bus [and] increasingly, it is becoming highly resistant to all our antibiotics,” she said.

It is clear that Obama doesn’t care about the health and well-being of the American people. That was obvious when he began pushing to create the so-called death panels that Obamacare mandates. But now as a result of the president’s recklessness, fatal diseases are surfacing or making a comeback in the U.S. Among those ailments are pneumonia, paralysis-causing acute flaccid myelitis, dengue fever, swine flu, and enterovirus D68.

Under Obama, immigration policy aims to import new Democratic voters — the less skilled, less educated, less enamored with the norms and values of Western civilization, the better. Lackluster border security, risible efforts at immigration law enforcement, mass amnesties, promises of generous taxpayer-financed welfare benefits, and other goodies, are used by Obama to expand and remake the American electorate.

Prior to the Obama era, tuberculosis was a rare diagnosis and many thought the disease had more or less been eradicated in the United States. Multi-drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis have been reported in populous California, Florida, Texas, and New York, all of which have large concentrations of illegal aliens.

Defense Secretary Ashton Carter expressed openness today to editing military job titles to make “man” more gender-neutral, even as he struggled with a way to make “unmanned” less masculine.

The Marine Corps Times reported last week that the service is reviewing its job titles — rifleman, infantryman, etc. — in the wake of all combat roles being opened to women and a January directive from Navy Secretary Ray Mabus for the Corps and the Navy to ensure those job descriptions are gender-neutral.

Every job title that includes “man” is up for review and potentially on the editing block.

Meeting with reporters today at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, R.I., Carter was asked whether he saw “a benefit or a need to do that throughout the military.”

Carter said it was “a very good question.”

“And, you know, of course one wants to signify a reality, which is a very favorable reality for us in defense, of the modern era, which is that we’re making full use of the wonderful talents of half of the population of the country,” he said.

“And it would be a huge mistake not to do so. And that’s why I wanted to see all military operational specialties opened to qualified females. That doesn’t mean that they’ll get in and it doesn’t mean that they’ll choose to do it. But it does mean that I have the opportunity to pick from the entire population of the country. And since it’s an all-volunteer force, I would be — wouldn’t be fulfilling the needs of having the best force if I weren’t fishing in the widest possible pond.”

Carter stressed “that’s the logic behind the position of women in our Department of Defense in today’s world.”

“And signifying that in all appropriate ways is I think exactly that — very appropriate and needed,” he added. CONTINUE AT SITE

Hillary Clinton has said for more than a year that her use of a private email server as Secretary of State violated no federal rules and posed no security risk. Only the gullible believed that, and now everyone has proof of her deceptions in a scathing report from State Department Inspector General Steve Linick.

The report obtained by news outlets Wednesday is ostensibly an audit of the email practices of five secretaries of State. But the majority of the report, and the most withering criticism, focuses on Mrs. Clinton. The IG concludes that the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee broke federal record-keeping rules, never received permission for her off-grid server, ignored security concerns raised by other officials, and employed a staff that flouted the rules with the same disdain she did.

“Secretary Clinton should have preserved any Federal records she created and received on her personal account by printing and filing those records with the related files in the Office of the Secretary,” says the report. “At a minimum, Secretary Clinton should have surrendered all emails dealing with Department business before leaving government service and, because she did not do so, she did not comply with the Department’s policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act.”

State still has never received emails from her private account for the first six weeks after she became Secretary, and the IG notes that it found (by other means) business-related emails that Mrs. Clinton did not include among the emails she has turned over.

The report says she has also stonewalled requests to obtain her server. And “through her counsel, Secretary Clinton declined [the IG’s] request for an interview.” Former Secretaries Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and current Secretary John Kerry all sat for interviews. CONTINUE AT SITE

If you have not ever done so, I urge you to program into your next trip abroad a visit to an American military cemetery. There are quite a few in Europe, and some in Asia. You can find a list online.

These cemeteries are settings of an awesome serenity and beauty, immaculately kept by the American Battle Monuments Commission. As Americans, we must thank the architects who designed these settings and the workers who over the decades and to this day have kept them in their immaculate condition.

My wife, born in China and reared in Taiwan, and I, born in Germany and a longtime U.S. citizen, first visited the World War II cemeteries when our American-born children were young. We would tell them: Here rest some of the warriors who sacrificed their lives so that your parents and people in many parts of the world would be free from tyranny and could pursue their dreams in freedom. We made it clear to our children that this was not just a grown-up talk—that it was real and part of their proud heritage.

The lesson must have stuck. Last year our eldest child, now a fully grown man, urged me to come along to visit the battlegrounds in Germany, near the Belgian border, where U.S. troops fought so bravely and where so many of them—too many—met their early death.

This time we visited the large American cemetery near the Belgian town of Henri-Chapelle, about 20 miles west of the German city of Aachen. There rest the warriors who fell in the brutal, four-month-long battle of the Hürtgen Forest, followed by the Battle of the Bulge and the eventual push of American forces all the way to the Rhine River.

You can walk along the gravel paths of these cemeteries, and among the thousands of markers—crosses and Stars of David—beneath which the warriors rest. Pick a marker at random and adopt the soldier whose name is chiseled into that marker. Make him your father, or brother, or cousin, or a friend. Imagine him alive, and how you might have hugged him as he shipped out to the distant front. CONTINUE AT SITE