RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/maryland-hate-crime-commission-official-compares-israel-to-nazi-germany/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=second

Maryland’s attorney general has temporarily suspended an official on the state’s Commission on Hate Crime Response who compared Israel to Nazi Germany in a series of social-media posts and claimed that reports of Hamas murdering Jewish babies were “fake.”

Zainab Chaudry is the Maryland director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and was appointed to the hate-crime commission by Maryland attorney general Anthony Brown in August. Made up of 20 stakeholder representatives, the group is designed to “develop strategies to prevent and respond to hate crime activity and evaluate state laws and policies relating to hate crimes.” The commission’s first annual report to the General Assembly is slated for December 2024 and will detail recommendations on addressing hate crimes.

Following Hamas’s October 7 massacre of 1,200 Israelis, Chaudry made a series of antisemitic social media posts. On October 17, she posted a photo of Israeli flags at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin next to a photo of Nazi Germany flags at the same gate in 1936. She captioned the post: “That moment when you become what you hated most.”

“The Commission must serve as a model for the entire State on how to respond to incidents of hate and bias,” Brown said on Tuesday. “The Commission is facing its first test. How we respond has deep implications. I take this very seriously, and I will do everything possible to bring people together to move forward the critical work of this Commission.”

Directly after Hamas invaded Israel, Chaudry referred to the attack on Facebook as an “uprising in Palestine.” She asked followers to remember that Palestinians “are a people who are illegally occupied.”

“Militarized occupation is inherently evil and violent,” she continued. “The state of Israel was created through the oppression, persecution and subjugation of Palestinians. It sits on the graves of martyrs and people forcibly displaced from their homes, forced to endure humiliation, terror, desecration of their holy spaces.”

Chaudry accompanied her post with a Malcolm X quote: “If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”

On Facebook two days later, Chaudry criticized elected officials for showing “support for an apartheid government that has been waging terror against Palestinians for decades.”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/create-a-crime-research-powerhouse

Calls to “reimagine” everything from policing to incarceration have dominated criminal-justice policy circles in recent years, but truly innovative research has been stifled. The federal government should devote more resources to collecting data on criminal incidents and offenders, police, courts, and other facets of public safety.

To start, policymakers should work to improve the consistency and uniformity of data that cities provide. All jurisdictions—encompassing roughly 18,000 law-enforcement agencies—should report their data to the FBI-run National Incident-Based Reporting System. NIBRS, which became the sole collections system in 2021, improves on past systems by collecting not just broad incident numbers but also such details as date, time, and location, whether offenses were carried out or merely attempted, the relationships between victims and offenders, the presence of drugs, whether the offender was under the influence, gang involvement, and whether a computer was used in the commission of the crime. All told, NIBRS reports on 52 discrete offenses.

Though the FBI has distributed $120 million since 2015 to help departments adopt this system, in 2021, about 7,000 police agencies, representing approximately 35 percent of the U.S. population, still did not provide any data. It’s unlikely that the 2022 numbers will be more robust. With more than a third of the country’s crime reporting missing, analysts struggle to draw solid conclusions. Federal authorities should therefore offer carrots and wield sticks to ensure that jurisdictions submit NIBRS data.

Further, Washington should establish a “sentinel cities” program—an idea proposed by crime-data analyst Jeff Asher. Such a program would include about 100 cities, offering them targeted funding to publish statistics on selected offenses, at frequent, synchronized intervals, on an open portal and using a standard data format. Collecting all this baseline information will enable authorities to view and analyze trends.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/11/21/the-meaning-of-thanksgiving-can-save-america/

Thanksgiving, according to Britannica.com, has come to “has come to symbolize intercultural peace, America’s opportunity for newcomers, and the sanctity of home and family.” This definition captures the ideals, more relevant than ever, of one of America’s favorite holidays. But these ideals are threatened, because America’s mainstream institutions have either rejected them, or have created an environment where they are no longer possible.

This is immediately obvious with the “woke” doctrine of race-based oppressor and oppressed, now promoted by academia, the media, entertainers, politicians, and corporations. Maybe the fellowship of the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians is mostly fable, cruelly debunked by history.

Or maybe, fable or not, it is an inspiring message of unity for a nation of settlers and immigrants who have created a place where everyone, including descendants of the Indians, have enjoyed more freedom and opportunity than anywhere else in the history of the world. That’s a debate we have to wage, and one we cannot lose. Like all nations and tribes, America has had dark moments. But the good overwhelms the bad. It’s not even close.

The attempted destruction of America’s self-confidence and unity by its own institutions, however, which must be challenged and overcome, must not distract from an even bigger problem. America’s institutions have also launched a propaganda campaign, growing in intensity every year, that claims we face an existential climate crisis, and massive sacrifices are necessary to cope. This is a lie.

It’s particularly relevant to reflect on this fraud during Thanksgiving, because our nation of settlers and immigrants would not exist if the types of rules and restrictions being imposed on Americans today were in effect 400 years ago. And it gives rise to a fundamental conflict: We continue to invite immigrants from around the world to move here, but thanks to extreme environmentalist restrictions, we are unable to build the necessary infrastructure to support them.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-other-crises-demanding-our-attention/

Israel’s battle to neutralize Hamas has dominated our collective attention, as it should. For all of its existence, Israel has been the canary in the mine shaft, the West’s beleaguered outpost of political freedom, tolerance, and equality in the midst of illiberal and tyrannical enemies that want to destroy the West’s power and influence. As Israelis have said over the past month, Israel’s fight is our fight, and always has been.

Yet our country is at a dangerous crossroads, with other threats both at home and abroad that demand our attention, and that should be the focus of next year’s elections. We are at the point where democracy’s historically bad habit of kicking multiple cans down the road is becoming unsustainable, if not lethal.

The Ukraine Stalemate

You didn’t have to be Nostradamus to predict that the Russo-Ukrainian war would become a stalemate redolent of the Western Front in World War I. For all the self-congratulation of the Nato countries about standing up to Vladimir Putin and protecting the “rules-based world order,” their money and materiel have been just enough to create the current stasis.

We seem to be pursuing a Mr. Micawber foreign policy, waiting for “something to turn up,” like a coup in Russia, to get us out of this quagmire. But more-realist commentators are casting doubt on Ukraine’s chances of defeating Russia and recovering their purloined territories.

In the U.S., the policy positions have settled into a bipartisan contrast: America First isolationism and a “no more costly endless wars abroad” sentiment vs. “aggression must be checked and deterred” by intervention lest we incentivize other aggressors to try conclusions. The result is the choice still facing us, between the bad and the worse.

Yet this debate is an exercise in shutting the barn door after the horse got out. The real story here is how our feckless foreign policy in the Nineties assumed that in a post-Soviet world we could enjoy the “peace dividend” and cut our defense spending.

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2023/11/20/alan-dershowitz-alleged-rise-of-islamophobia-at-universities-fake-n4924086

On the latest episode of “Life, Liberty & Levin” on Fox News, famed lawyer and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz scoffed at the idea that there’s a rise of Islamophobia on college campuses today.

“Let me ask you this, Alan — we have a very big bureaucracy. We have a huge Department of Justice Civil Rights Division. We have a huge Civil Rights Division and another big bureaucracy called the Department of Education,” began host Mark Levin. “Donald Trump signed an executive order, which gives those authorities the power to act against anti-Semitism and threats on college campuses. Maybe they’re doing it here and there. I’m not seeing a big push. I’m not hearing from the attorney general. I’m not hearing from the head of either Civil Rights Division. What the hell is going on?”

Dershowitz explained how he was at the White House when Trump announced the executive order and how he congratulated him on it despite the fact Dershowitz is not a Republican. 

“I congratulated him for his great efforts in getting the administration behind this effort to root out anti-Semitism,” he said. “It hasn’t worked. In fact, what’s happened, and it’s this administration and Biden as well, whenever they talk about anti-Semitism, they say, ‘and Islamophobia.’ I’ve got news for you. There is no Islamophobia at any university in the United States. It’s a fake. It’s virtue parading. Oh, we have to fight anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. Let me tell you who the anti-Semites are. They are largely, not completely, the radical Muslims who claim to be victims of Islamophobia. This is a one-sided issue.”

In fact, real incidents of Islamophobia are so hard to come by that a Palestinian man in Ohio faked an Islamophobic hate crime last month. Unfortunately, too many people on the left choose to pretend this isn’t a one-sided issue.