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April 2017

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Hall of Mirrors in Syria By Victor Davis Hanson

By on April 11th, 2017

Syria is weird for reasons that transcend even the bizarre situation of bombing an abhorrent Bashar al-Assad who was bombing an abhorrent ISIS — as we de facto ally with Iran, the greater strategic threat, to defeat the more odious, but less long-term strategic threat, ISIS.

Trump apparently hit a Syrian airfield to express Western outrage over the likely Syrian use of chemical weapons. Just as likely, he also sought to remind China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea that he is unpredictable and not restrained by self-imposed cultural, political, and ethical bridles that seemed to ensure that Obama would never do much over Chinese and Russian cyber-warfare, or Iranian interception of a U.S. warship or the ISIS terror campaign in the West or North Korea’s increasingly creepy and dangerous behavior.

But the strike also raised as many questions as it may have answered.

Is Trump saying that he can send off a few missiles anywhere and anytime rogues go too far? If so, does that willingness to use force enhance deterrence? (probably); does it also risk further escalation to be effective? (perhaps); and does it solve the problem of an Assad or someone similar committing more atrocities? (no).

Was the reason we hit Assad, then, because he is an especially odious dictator and kills his own, or that the manner in which he did so was cruel and barbaric (after all, ISIS burns, drowns, and cuts apart its victims without much Western reprisals until recently)? Or is the reason instead that he used WMD, and since 1918 with a few exceptions (largely in the Middle East), “poison” gas has been a taboo weapon among the international community? (Had Assad publicly beheaded the same number who were gassed, would we have intervened?)

Do we continue to sort of allow ISIS to fight it out with Syria/Iran/Hezbollah in the manner of our shrug during the Iran-Iraq War and in the fashion until Pearl Harbor that we were okay with the Wehrmacht and the Red Army killing each other en masse for over five months in Russia? Or do we say to do so cynically dooms innocents in a fashion that they are not quite as doomed elsewhere, or at least not doomed without chance of help as is true in North Korea?

Trump campaigned on not getting involved in Syria, deriding the Iraq War, and questioning the Afghan effort. Does his sudden strike signal a Jacksonian effort to hit back enemies if the mood comes upon us — and therefore acceptable to his base as a sort of one-off, don’t-tread-on-me hiss and rattle?

Or does the strike that was so welcomed by the foreign-policy establishment worry his supporters that Trump is now putting his suddenly neocon nose in someone’s else’s business? And doing so without congressional authorizations or much exegesis?

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BOOKS, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Norman Podhoretz, Still a Dazzling Success His memoir, 50 years on, remains one of the liveliest and most important books on our national obsession: ‘making it.’ By Ian Tuttle

By on April 11th, 2017

‘Whom the gods wish to destroy,” Cyril Connolly wrote in 1938, “they first call promising.” If that is true, Norman Podhoretz is that rarest of Greek myths: a mortal who evades the designs of the gods. For his writerly career is ending as it began: with acclaim. The New York Review of Books’ Classics series has just reissued Podhoretz’s Making It, to celebrate the book’s 50th anniversary.

Making It is the story of how Podhoretz, a “filthy little slum child” from a Jewish enclave in Brooklyn, became a literary sensation in Manhattan — the journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan being “one of the longest journeys in the world,” Podhoretz writes in the famous opening sentence — and a member of the exclusive New York intellectual circle that included Lionel Trilling, Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt, Saul Bellow, and a number of (equally noteworthy) others. But as Podhoretz himself admits, the book is “not an autobiography in the usual sense,” nor is it an unqualified “success story.”

As Podhoretz observes, success is a confused matter in America. “On the one hand,” he writes, “our culture teaches us to shape our lives in accordance with the hunger for worldly things; on the other hand, it spitefully contrives to make us ashamed of the presence of those hungers in ourselves and to deprive us as far as possible of any pleasure in their satisfaction.” Here is the double-edged sword of the Protestant work ethic. The purpose of Making It, then, is “to describe certain fine-print conditions that are attached to the successful accomplishment of what the sociologists call ‘upward mobility’ in so heterogeneous a society as our own.”

Podhoretz is a self-professed glutton for literary eminence. He was, he says, “driven by an ambition for fame which . . . was self-acknowledged, unashamed, and altogether uninhibited.” Among the unwritten clauses in his vocational contract is a sensitivity regarding class. Although he does not realize it at the time, his first introduction to the many strata into which American society is divided comes courtesy of a high-school teacher who takes upon herself the burden of equipping him for a life beyond Brooklyn. Mrs. K “was saying that because I was a talented boy, a better class of people stood ready to admit me into their ranks,” he writes. “But only on one condition: I had to signify by my general deportment that I acknowledged them as superior to the class of people among whom I was born. That was the bargain — take it or leave it.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Obama Administration’s Zelig The Benghazi deceptions, the selling of the Iran deal, the Bergdahl trade – one ‘expert’ kept turning up to peddle falsehoods. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on April 11th, 2017

Susan Rice is the real version of Woody Allen’s cinematic character Zelig, who in the movie of the same name popped up almost anywhere as an expert on anything.

As U.N. ambassador from 2009 to 2013, and later as National Security Adviser from 2013 to 2017, Rice seemed to have turned up everywhere there was an Obama-administration implosion. She was always eager to offer a supposedly expert assessment — one that also always proved wrong or untrue or both.

Rice, along with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power, had a major role in the disastrous Libyan bombing decision and its wasteland aftermath.

As U.N. ambassador, she helped the U.N. draft resolutions establishing no-fly-zones and humanitarian aid to curb the violence against Arab Spring protestors. But such U.N. policies were immediately contorted into an active military role when the U.S. and allies supplied direct air support to anti-Qaddafi ground forces. The allied bombing to overthrow Qaddafi gave some credence to Russian complaints that Rice had deceived them about the true intent of the resolutions, which were really used by the Obama administration to facilitate French, British, and American efforts to achieve regime change in Libya.

The later Benghazi disaster and the subsequent false narrative of a video-inspired spontaneous riot — aimed at advancing the “al-Qaeda on the run” talking point central to Obama’s reelection campaign —were her most infamous moments of deceit. That fake-news effort eventually led to the unjustifiable imprisonment of the scapegoat (and otherwise shady character) Nakoula Basseley Nakoula on suddenly trumped-up enforcement of his parole violation. Rice’s well-publicized untruth, while helpful to Obama’s reelection effort, was not benign: It obscured the disturbing circumstances in which four brave Americans died.

Yet, to be fair, it is difficult to know whether Rice was a seasoned architect of that duplicity. Given her reputation as a useful naïf and loyal fall person, perhaps she was easily manipulated into going on five Sunday shows to mislead and distort. Her subordinate Ben Rhodes needed a vessel to assure the nation that the Benghazi attacks were not due to administration policy failures, and Rice was deemed the ideal vehicle to spread that myth.

And the fable of the supposedly honorable Bowe Bergdahl (currently facing Pentagon charges of desertion)?

Rice was there, too. To prop up an unhinged trade of five terrorists at Guantanamo for an AWOL soldier, Rice falsely claimed that Bergdahl had “served with honor and distinction.” Then she trumped that with a quite unnecessary fillip: “Sergeant Bergdahl wasn’t simply a hostage; he was an American prisoner of war captured on the battlefield.” Left unsaid was that a number of American soldiers were killed as a result of efforts to find his walkabout whereabouts.

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A Russian Patriot and His Country, Part II The extraordinary Vladimir Kara-Murza By Jay Nordlinger

By on April 11th, 2017

Editor’s Note: In the current issue of National Review, we have a piece by Jay Nordlinger on Vladimir Kara-Murza, the Russian democracy leader. This week in his Impromptus, Mr. Nordlinger is expanding that piece. For yesterday’s installment, Part I, go here.

So, as we’ve said, Boris Nemtsov was murdered — shot in the back on February 27, 2015, about 200 yards from the Kremlin walls. Who killed him? Who did it?

Kara-Murza gives a long answer. But it comes down to this: He can’t tell you who pulled the trigger or triggers — who the triggerman or triggermen were. But, in his mind, there is no doubt about who is ultimately responsible: Putin and his regime.

I ask a very awkward question: Did they make a mistake? Did Nemtsov’s murder backfire on them? Kara-Murza says that he will return a very awkward answer: No, they did not make a mistake. “They knew whom they were killing. From their point of view, they did exactly the right thing.”

Nemtsov was by far the most effective opposition leader in Russia, Kara-Murza explains. He could talk to anyone, from heads of state to the man on the street — most any street. He could enter a hall full of people hostile to him, and come out with many new friends.

“There is a saying that no one is irreplaceable,” Kara-Murza notes. “But Boris was unique. It’s hard to imagine that he can be replaced.” Nemtsov’s murder was a huge blow to the Russian democracy movement, and to Kara-Murza personally.

“My life is divided into before and after February 27, 2015,” he says. Before and after Nemtsov’s murder.

Three months after the murder, Kara-Murza was poisoned. One by one, his organs shut down. The experience was, needless to say, terrifying and brutal. Kara-Murza was shuttled from hospital to hospital, as doctors tried to figure out what was going on.

Finally, they realized that Kara-Murza had been attacked by a poison — one of an extremely sophisticated nature.

When he was able, Kara-Murza resumed his work. Yet there was always a threat over his shoulder. In early 2016, for example, Putin’s man in Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, did something charming. He posted to his Instagram page a video showing two men in the crosshairs of a sniper. Those men were two Putin critics: Mikhail Kasyanov, a former prime minister, and Kara-Murza.

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French Cops Seek Motive of Muslim Who Murdered Jewish Woman in the Name of the Koran Daniel Greenfield

By on April 11th, 2017

The motives of Muslim terrorists are such a mystery. First police sought the motive of the Muslim terrorist in London. Now they’re searching for the motive of the Muslim who murdered a Jewish woman while shouting, Allahu Akbar, a cry that originated with Mohammed’s attacks on Jews, which means Allah is Greater.

​Paris police are checking suspicions that a 27-year-old Muslim murdered his Jewish neighbor, Sarah Lucy Halimi, following a confrontation in her apartment.

According to a report in Yediot Aharonot, 66-year-old Halimi was attacked by the terrorist as she slept in her bed. He stabbed her and pushed her from her third-story apartment to her death while shouting “Allahu Akbar.”

During the police investigation, the terrorist asserted that the Koran had commanded him to murder her.

Which indeed the Koran does. Islam is a fundamentally anti-Semitic and anti-everyone ideology. Islamic teachings preach violent hate toward Jews. Mohammed was a mass murderer of Jews.

But the police are going with the standard excuse for Muslim terrorists these days… mental instability.

French police continued Sunday to investigate the murder of Sarah Attal-Halimi, a 67-year old Jewish woman from Paris, who was hurled to her death from her apartment window last week.

A 27-year-old Muslim man who lived on the floor beneath the victim was detained shortly after the incident. Following a preliminary investigation, the suspect – apparently known to the police as a small-time criminal – was sent for psychiatric evaluation.

The incident has caused a storm within the Parisian Jewish community, with many claiming that the act was motivated by antisemitism. Joel Mergui, president of the Consistoire, said Tuesday that the community must allow the police to investigate the incident before branding it antisemitic, though he described the circumstances of the incident as “troubling.”

The prosecutor informed the Jewish leaders that at this stage, they do not have any evidence that the crime was antisemitic.

Or of Islamic terrorist. Just another case of Jihad mental illness. Nothing to see here folks. Now let’s welcome in some more Muslim migrants and settlers. Try not to hear the screams of their victims.

A source who spoke with Jewish media said the suspect stabbed the victim as she lay in bed sleeping, shouting “Allahu Akbar!”. The source told the Hebrew-language Hadrei HaHaredim the victim was heard begging and screaming for her life as the killer dragged her to the window, and then was seen pushing her from the third floor to her death.

There could hardly be a metaphor for Europe. And this is what the anti-Semitic collaborators of Muslim migration, like HIAS and the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect, are bringing to America.

Jewish News has managed to contact one of the victim’s children, Yonathan Halimi. Residing in Israel, where the family has respected since Thursday the week of mourning, he agreed to answer our call, “Because everyone must know that it was an anti-Semitic act,” introduced his wife Esther.

Yonathan Halimi expresses himself slowly. In a posed voice, he alternates French, which he perfectly knows, and Hebrew. “She was killed al pi kiddoush hashem,” hhe said.

What does he know about him? “He has lived in the building for 20 years in a family known for anti-Semitism”. Yonathan Halimi remembers the snags in the stairwell between the Jewish family on the 4th floor and his neighbors on the 2nd.

“One day, one of the killer’s sisters pushed my sister down the stairs, and the next time she called her a dirty Jew.”

A few hours before the Shabbat, he asks that one pays tribute to her who, as a director of Jewish nursery, “always sought to elevate and elevate others.” “Do something good in her memory.”

This is what Islamic migration and settlement means.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Threats to Conservative Students What are faculty and administrators doing about it? Jack Kerwick

By on April 11th, 2017

Whether it is female Republican students at places like St. Olaf College and Cornell University being accosted, cursed at, threatened with physical violence and, in the latter case, actually assaulted; Cal State Fullerton Trump supporting students being assaulted by an instructor; a riot at Berkeley; or College Republicans being targeted by name as “fascists” and encouragements made to make their personal information public so that decent folks can “punch fascists”—bullying, intimidation, and threats of violence against conservative students have become staples of campus life.

While this phenomenon is an outrage in itself, equally outrageous is the fact that it has been permitted to occur and recur.

It’s inconceivable that college administrators and faculty would permit these outrages if white Republican conservative students were the perpetrators and their victims were, say, black, gay, or transgendered.

But because it is only conservative and moderate students who are being victimized by leftists, not only has no real action been initiated to stop these attacks. In some instances, faculty and administrators have even encouraged them.

In October of last year, the Young Conservatives of Texas (YCT) held a bake sale at the University of Texas that was designed to expose the moral dubiousness of “affirmative action.” Goods were sold to blacks and Hispanics for prices that were lower than those that whites and Asians were expected to pay.

Consequently, leftist students surrounded their display and shouted at them to remove it. One such student livestreamed the event on Facebook in a post titled, “Racists are live at UT.” It received nearly 230,000 views.

Eventually, students sporting black masks stole the bake sale menu and raided the inventory.

The Vice President for Diversity and Community Engagement, Dr. Gregory J. Vincent, was the only administrator from UT to issue a formal response to the incident.

Vincent blamed the conservative students.

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Trump Bombs Syria. Now What? A look at what the strategic objectives should be. April 11, 2017 Bruce Thornton

By on April 11th, 2017

President Trump’s swift bombing of a Syrian airfield responsible for a chemical attack has been praised by our allies and even by Democrats. The mere fact that Trump followed up his condemnation of a sarin gas attack with military action sends a signal that the U.S. is no longer the “weak, pitiful giant,” to use Richard Nixon’s phrase, that eight years of Barack Obama’s appeasement and retreat had left it. Such praise is deserved, but the bombing is just the start. The real question is, what happens next? What’s the strategic goal?

The effect of the attack on restoring American prestige is undoubtedly important. Obama’s foreign policy reflected the idealistic internationalism that dismisses such old-fashioned ideas as prestige. Modern progressive thinking holds that the use of force represents a foreign policy failure, and usually makes things worse by entangling the U.S. in escalation and quagmires. Non-lethal negotiated settlements are a better way to defuse conflict, and a national humility based on recognition of past neo-imperialist sins (see Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech) can make our rivals and enemies more amenable to “win-win” agreements.

Obama’s now infamous “red line” warning about Assad’s use of chemical weapons in 2013, a warning the Syrian butcher promptly violated, reflected this thinking. Rather than back up his bold words with force when Assad went ahead and used chemical weapons in the Ghouta region, Obama quickly accepted Russia’s offer to help him negotiate a deal: The U.S. wouldn’t bomb Syria if Assad surrendered his chemical weapons stockpiles to Russia. Despite domestic and international criticism of such an obviously feckless capitulation, Obama told a reporter last year that he is still “very proud of this moment.”

Of course the deal was negotiated in bad faith by Syria and Russia, and did nothing to stop the slaughter or the use of chemical weapons. Like the current deal with Iran, no one knew if the terms of the deal were being adhered to by Assad. Now we know that they weren’t, and that he retained significant stockpiles. Such duplicitous behavior is consistent with the long history of failed negotiated agreements that usually serve as a tactic for furthering an aggressor’s ends. And the failure of such “covenants without the sword,” as Hobbes called them, damages a state’s credibility and prestige, emboldening other aggressors. That in a nutshell is the history of Obama’s foreign policy, which has been a huge success for Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, and the myriad jihadist outfits swarming out of the Libya that our thoughtless intervention turned into a jihadist jungle.

So bombing the airfield is a necessary first step to restoring our credibility and concentrating the minds of our enemies and rivals. But it is only one step, and such a one-off by itself can often be an act of international public relations rather than a game-changer. Cruise-missile and drone attacks are dramatic and photogenic. They get media attention and make noise, but without a larger strategic plan, they serve mainly to create the illusion of action in the absence of a lack of will to use decisive force. Destroying some planes on one airfield, or killing an endless series of al Qaeda “number two” leaders has little strategic value. New war planes can be bought, and al Qaeda has an endless supply of potential “number twos.”

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‘Swedish Conditions’ Diagnosing a deadly disorder. Bruce Bawer

By on April 11th, 2017

Will last Friday’s terror attack in Stockholm change Swedish attitudes toward Islam? Not likely. Pretty much all of Europe has spent the last few decades undergoing (steady) Islamization, but the invasion has progressed so much further in Sweden than in almost every other country on the continent – and has occasioned so much less frank reportage, commentary, and criticism, that brave souls in Sweden’s Scandinavian neighbors, Denmark and Norway – routinely make disparaging reference to “Swedish conditions.” What this term refers to is not only the drastic social and economic changes currently underway in the country that once proudly called itself Folkhemmet, “the people’s home,” but the mentality – a mentality not unique to Sweden, but certainly more fully developed there, in the government, media, academy, police, and the public at large, than anywhere else in Europe – that has made this dread transformation possible.

A few recent news items provide illustrative examples of what it means to be living under “Swedish conditions”:

On March 10, it was reported that despite longtime plans, there would not be a new police station in Rinkeby, a notoriously unsafe immigrant neighborhood in Stockholm. Not a single construction firm had put in a bid for the project. Why? Because, as several police officers told SVT News, “it’s much too dangerous to build a police station in the area.”
On March 12, Sweden’s Minister for Culture and Democracy, Alice Bah Kuhnke, said in a TV interview that the 150-odd jihadists who have returned to Sweden after fighting for ISIS should not be investigated, let alone prosecuted, but should instead be welcomed back and encouraged to integrate – by which she seemed to mean offering various welfare incentives and assorted freebies. (Such enticements, incidentally, would be perfectly in line with Swedish practice.)
On April 5, after Sweden’s TV4 reported that a Muslim school in Vällingby was forcing girls to sit in the back of the school bus, Victoria Kawesa, head of a party called Feminist Initiative, blamed it not on Islam but on the “global patriarchy.”

But no recent event or telecast provided a more illuminating picture of “Swedish conditions” than the April 3 episode of Horisont, a 60 Minutes-type series on Danish TV. (The fact that Danish TV airs such programs while Swedish TV does not is itself, of course, a telling reflection of “Swedish conditions.”)

The central figure on the Horisont episode was Eva Ek Törnberg, an ethnic Swede who not only lives in Seved, an immigrant-heavy district of Malmö, but is known as the “Queen of Seved” because of her decades-long efforts to cozy up to her Muslim neighbors and help them become full members of Swedish society.

On Horisont, however, she admits that her attitudes have changed over time. She used to call herself a “citizen of the world” and to champion open borders – now she looks around and finds herself thinking: “What has happened to my little Sweden?” She once thought it was “nonsense” to expect newcomers to learn Swedish – now she feels otherwise. Yes, she still believes in letting these people in by the truckload – but she no longer warms as she once did to the idea of a “multicultural society.” She perseveres in her attempt to bring Muslims into the Swedish fold – but she’s increasingly frustrated and confused by her lack of success. As she puts it, she’s curious about these people’s lives – why are they so indifferent to hers?

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VICTOR SHARPE: PASSOVER’S GIFT TO THE JEWISH PEOPLE

By on April 11th, 2017

Millions, perhaps billions, of the world’s population still do not know the meaning of the towering festival of freedom and liberty known as Passover; a festival recognizing an event that has blessed the world for some 3,300 years.

The festival begins at eventide on April 10th of this year and always on the 15th day of the Jewish month of Nissan. Jews and Christians know from the Bible the story of the Exodus and of the salvation of the Jewish people from centuries of slavery under the Egyptian pharaohs: This was the creation and deliverance of an entire nation.

Such a seminal event in humanity’s history became the foundation for freedom and liberty – created many centuries before democracy was first enunciated by Greek philosophers who nevertheless lived within a polytheistic society.

Many people know in varying degrees the Passover story and the birth of the Jewish people and of their undying faith in the One and Only God; invisible and indivisible. Judaism has given the world monotheism in its purest and Editmost undiluted nature. The Unity of God is what Jews have defended against all who attempted to suggest a plurality: even to enduring martyrdom.

The long suffering Jews under Egyptian bondage were led to freedom by the Jewish prophet, Moses, who brought them to their own very special and promised Land of Israel. Moses spoke with God in Sinai and brought a wondrous divine gift to the Jewish people and through them to all humanity – the Decalogue; the Ten Commandments, and the basis of today’s laws of Western and Judeo-Christian civilization and jurisprudence. These ten brief commandments – a mere 120 Hebrew words – are written on the walls of synagogues and churches.

But, as in all Jewish practice, Moses was never deified. He was shown in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, as a man; nothing else. Indeed in order not to deify him or exalt him over others he is shown in the Holy Bible with human failings and his burial place remains unknown.

He sought the mountain top and beheld the Promised Land of Israel, yet was never to enter. In fact, in the Torah Moses is described merely as “the humblest and meekest of all human beings.” For in Judaism, only God is divine and besides Him there are none other.

Passover (Pesach in Hebrew) is the first of the Jewish holidays and festivals, coinciding with the coming of the Spring in the Jewish people’s ancestral, biblical and native land: the land given by God in an everlasting Covenant to the Jewish people; a land extending from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea and including Gilead (the possession of the tribes of Manasseh, Gad and Reuben) east of the river, in the present day Arab state of Jordan.

The Passover festival precedes two other harvest festivals based upon the agricultural cycles of ancient and modern Israel. Next comes Shavuot, Pentecost, which records and commemorates the giving to Moses of the Ten Commandments followed by Succot, which is known as Tabernacles. Mankind was, and is, blessed through the Passover for it is a veritable gift to those who accept its divine message and perform the ritual meal, the Seder, recording the Exodus story.

But there is an evil in men’s hearts, and it is a profound evil, for those who hate and envy this Jewish gift to humanity and its message of freedom, liberty and foundational democracy. They have chosen since time immemorial to rise up to destroy all that it stands for and persecute those – the Jews – who received it from God and who have shared it with all humanity.

Let me recount what Mary Antin wrote in 1911 about the horrors inflicted upon the Jews in Russia as they celebrated the festival of liberty in the Exodus story during the festive Seder meal. Ms. Antin wrote of what routinely took place at Passover and of how Russian neighbors reminded the Jews that for them it was another Egypt:

“… in Russian cities and even more in country districts, where Jewish families lived scattered, the stupid peasants would hear lies about the Jews, fill themselves with vodka, and set out to kill their Jewish neighbors.

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Baltimore Anti-Cop Consent Decree Imposed Judge Bredar slaps down Sessions’ pleas — as the Ferguson effect grabs hold. April 11, 2017 Matthew Vadum

By on April 11th, 2017

An Obama-appointed judge is moving forward with a federal takeover of the Baltimore, Md. police department that critics say will boost crime there by handcuffing police officers in the increasingly violent city.

The pleas of U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions fell on deaf ears as U.S. District Judge James K. Bredar, appointed by President Obama in 2010, denied a request from Sessions to hold off on enforcing the consent decree drafted by cop-haters for at least 30 days so the new Trump administration could assess the underlying settlement.

“The time for negotiating the agreement is over,” Bredar wrote this past Friday, April 7. “The only question now is whether the Court needs more time to consider the proposed decree. It does not.”

Sessions said he’s in favor of reform but has “grave concerns that some provisions of this decree will reduce the lawful powers of the police department and result in a less safe city.”

The consent decree in U.S. v. Police Department of Baltimore City was signed by both sides on Jan. 12, 2017 as President Obama was packing his bags at the White House. (The consent decree may be read here. Bredar’s order requiring immediate enforcement of the decree, may be read here.)

Sessions said the provisions of the consent decree were “negotiated during a rushed process by the previous administration,” and at a time when “Baltimore is facing a violent crime crisis.”

Cops across America are shirking their duties because they are quite justifiably afraid of being called racist. This is called the “Ferguson effect,” because it took hold after an August 2014 police shooting of a black suspect in the St. Louis, Mo., suburbs led to huge race riots and catapulted the violent, racist Black Lives Matter movement to national and international prominence.

Sessions said:

Baltimore has seen a 22 percent increase in violent crime in just the last year. While arrests in the city fell 45 percent based on some of these ill-advised reforms, homicides rose 78 percent and shootings more than doubled. Just in 2017, we’ve seen homicides are up another 42 percent compared to this time last year. In short, the citizens of Baltimore are plagued by a rash of violent crime that shows no signs of letting up.

Within the consent decree “there are clear departures from many proven principles of good policing that we fear will result in more crime.”

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