RUTHFULLY YOURS

What gives Gene Dattel’s Reckoning with Race: America’s Failure its special power is that, even after its bracingly original and thoroughly researched account of the racism of the abolitionist North from the late eighteenth century until long after the Civil War, the book nevertheless does not shrink from laying the ills of today’s black American underclass not at the door of a painful history, with ample blame for northern as well as southern whites, but squarely at the feet of black Americans themselves. Yes, shameful, deeply shameful, were slavery, Jim Crow, and northern racism, and who can doubt that they left grievous scars? Still, America fought a war to end the evil institution, had a civil rights movement to try to erase its malign remnants, and spent decades on affirmative action and other nostrums to expunge even the faintest remaining traces. Whatever white Americans could do to atone for and repair the damage they caused, they have done, as much as imperfect humans in an imperfect world can do. Now, Dattel argues, it’s up to black Americans to save themselves.

The most surprising part of the book is Dattel’s documentation of the racism of northern abolitionists. As early as the 1790s, about a decade after Massachusetts had abolished slavery and while Connecticut was in the midst of its gradual abolition, the white townspeople of Salem and New Haven fretted that the movement of blacks into their neighborhoods would crash property values by up to 50 percent. Nor did Yankees make any distinction between freeborn blacks and freed slaves, as an 1800 survey by the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences found. Yale president Timothy Dwight, who sponsored the survey with lexicographer Noah Webster, summed up its consensus on the state’s blacks: “Uneducated to principals of morality, or to habits of industry . . . they labor only to gratify gross and vulgar appetites. Accordingly, many of them are thieves, liars, profane drunkards, Sabbath-breakers, quarrelsome, idle.” New Haven’s freedmen, Dwight expanded a decade later, “are, generally, neither able, nor inclined to make their freedom a blessing to themselves” and end up as “nuisances to society.” Little wonder, given such attitudes, that as white immigrants crowded into the new nation, employers preferred them to native blacks, left with mostly menial jobs as domestic servants, chimney sweeps, washerwomen, and outhouse cleaners.

Half a century after Connecticut’s survey, New York senator and governor William Seward made a famous abolitionist speech, perhaps a template for Abraham Lincoln’s immortal 1854 Peoria speech. Lincoln’s future secretary of state argued that “a higher law than the Constitution,” decreed by “the Creator of the Universe,” forbade slavery. Nevertheless, that same abolitionist, a decade later, pronounced that “the African race here is a foreign and feeble element . . . incapable of assimilation . . . a pitiful exotic unnecessarily transplanted into our fields, and which it is unprofitable to cultivate at the cost of the desolation of our native vineyard.” Just after the Civil War, Seward added that “I have no more concern for [Negroes] than for the Hottentots. They are God’s poor, they always have been and always will be so everywhere.”

Abolitionists, said ex-slave author and clergyman Samuel R. Ward in the 1840s, “best love the colored man at a distance.” Such even was the case with abolitionist heroine Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the epochal Uncle Tom’s Cabin. At the end of her novel, she sends her ex-slave character and his family, who could easily pass for white, she notes, as missionaries to Liberia. “I have no wish to pass for an American,” says George. “I want a country, a nation, of my own.” Wrote Frederick Douglass, starchily, to Stowe: “The truth is, dear Madam, we are here, & we are likely to remain.”

To Hell in a Handbasket is a chilling account of how Jimmy Carter’s abandonment of a longtime U.S. ally in favor of a murderous mullah thirty years ago enabled the Islamization of Iran—and how Barack Obama’s current oblivion to and appeasement of the radical Muslim world are helping to Islamize the rest of the Middle East. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Ruthie Blum, who immigrated to Israel from the United States in 1977, was a columnist, interviewer, and senior editor at The Jerusalem Post for two decades. She blogs for Israel Hayom. PRAISE: “Whether Barack Obama is another Jimmy Carter is unfortunately not just academic speculation. Carter was bad enough, especially in the Middle East, but Obama is close on his heels. A second Obama term could well bring a nuclear Iran, a militantly anti-Israeli Egypt, and the overthrow of the pro-American Arab monarchies. The United States needs to wake up to what is happening, and Ruthie Blum’s book is just the ticket. Let’s hope she doesn’t have to write a sequel.” —John Bolton Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations “The esteemed writer and commentator Ruthie Blum has produced a timely and essential account of President Obama’s betrayal of a longtime U.S. ally, former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, and its consequences for America’s vital national-security interests. Just as important, by placing Obama’s mishandling of the current pan-Arab populist wave against the backdrop of then-president Jimmy Carter’s betrayal of longtime U.S. ally the shah of Iran, Blum demonstrates the timeless truth of George Santayana’s lament that ‘those who fail to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors are destined to repeat them.’ ” —Caroline B. Glick Senior contributing editor, The Jerusalem Post, and senior Middle East fellow, Center for Security Policy

A modern-day story of love, music, and death, with echoes of the Nazi retreat in World War II France.

Septuagenarian Jules Lacour is a widower and a cellist in agony after losing his wife, Jacqueline. His grandson, Luc, has leukemia and will die without treatments that neither Jules nor his daughter, Cathérine, can possibly afford. Stage fright has always prevented him from achieving fame and fortune, and he considers himself a failure. Though in terrific physical shape—he runs, he rows on the Seine—he wants to die and be with Jacqueline again, because “he himself did not need to live. It was Luc who needed to live.” Then, mirabile dictu, a “giant international conglomerate” asks him to write “telephone hold music,” promising obscenely high pay that would easily cover Luc’s treatment. Jules delivers beautifully, but alas, complications ensue. An intelligent and deeply sympathetic man, Jules remembers the day in 1944 when a Nazi soldier retreating through Reims heard his father playing Bach on his cello instead of La Marseillaise, realized the cellist was a hidden Jew and executed the family, leaving only 4-year-old Jules. That shock shaped the man Jules became, but it’s just one thread the author weaves. He is in no hurry to finish telling this beautiful tale as he lavishes attention on characters such as Armand Marteau, perhaps the worst insurance salesman in France; a team of homicide detectives, a Muslim and a Jew, eating a ham lunch with a judge; and women of ineffable beauty with whom Jules falls into instant love. One, Élodi, is a cellist 50 years his junior. Even the conglomerate has a personality: “the great, indefatigable, trillion-dollar machine of Acorn, a dispositif with neither soul nor conscience.” As Élodi declares to Jules that she will be his student, he sees “directly into her eyes, and never had he beheld a more elegant and refined woman, not even Jacqueline.” The conversations often read like mini-essays, as when Jules tells Élodi about the “jealous” God of the Jews—arguing with Him is “like a goddamn wrestling match.”

A masterpiece filled with compassion and humanity. Perfect for the pure pleasure of reading.

Not only have Islamic revivalists declared war on the West, our ruling elites have joined them. This is the arena in which the Battle of Ideas will be won or lost, and not through the version of appeasement given voice in British MP Liam Byrne’s deceptively ‘objective’ book.

Black Flag Down: Counter-Terrorism, Defeating ISIS and Winning the Battle of Ideas
by Liam Byrne
Biteback Publishing, 2016, 272 pages, £12.99
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Liam Byrne, former British Labour cabinet minister and author of Black Flag Down: Counter-Terrorism, Defeating ISIS and Winning the Battle of Ideas, has been a harsh critic of President Trump, describing him as a megalomaniac “trumpeting anti-Muslim hate speech”. Byrne, who sought the opinions of Muslims in his inner-city Birmingham constituency, extensively interviewed British intelligence and police officers and even spent time in Iraq, prefers the softly, softly PC approach in “bringing down the black flag of extremism”. His Black Flag Down is an almost plausible account of how the Battle of Ideas might be won in this era of the global jihad.

Black Flag Down positions itself as a sensible and practical response to radical Islamic terrorism, although Liam Byrne would not label the phenomenon beyond calling it “violent extremism”. Any attempt to connect Islam with the atrocities perpetrated by Salafi jihadism, from the Islamic State group and Al Qaeda to Al Shabaab, Ansar al-Sharia and Boko Haram, is straight-out wrong. Additionally, it can only be unhelpful in the Battle of Ideas, the key to winning our confrontation with what Byrne does, at least, agree is a global insurgency (if not a global jihad).

Not that Black Flag Down undervalues the role of the military, security and counter-intelligence in defeating terrorism. Byrne champions the role of security agencies in monitoring the terrorist recruiters and thwarting attempts to co-opt young Muslims in the United Kingdom for their nefarious cause. By February 2016, the Islamic State group, according to the statistics in Black Flag Down, was boasting that it operated 10,000 Facebook accounts and 5000 Twitter profiles. The sheer scale of digital communication among the British general public is overwhelming, with Scotland Yard’s figures indicating that every minute of the day some 3.3 million Facebook posts, 342,000 tweets, 41,000 Instagram photos and 120 hours of video to YouTube are uploaded. As Byrne says: “Try policing that.” The longer-term answer, in his opinion, is not policing but self-policing. It is more important to train Muslim parents “to spot the warning signs in their children’s online habits” rather than “fight the last war against extremist preachers in the backrooms of mosques”.

black flag downThis will obviously come as cold comfort to the British victims of radical Islamic terrorism—I mean violent extremism—in the short period since the publication of Black Flag Down. In March this year, we recall, a jihadist drove a four-wheel-drive into a crowd of pedestrians on London Bridge, killing four people, before going on a knife rampage and slaughtering a policeman. Two months later, a suicide bomber killed twenty-two people and injured dozens more at the conclusion of an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester. On June 3, three radical Islamic terrorists drove into a crowd of pedestrians on London Bridge, before going on a knife rampage resulting in eight dead and dozens wounded. And then, on June 19, an anti-Muslim fanatic drove his car into a crowd of worshippers outside a London mosque, killing one person and injuring nine others. People have a right to know why this kind of carnage is happening in Britain, not to mention the atrocities perpetrated in Nice, Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Sydney, San Bernardino, Orlando and Barcelona.

Liam Byrne has been a leading figure in calling for the British government to crack down on global tech companies that allow terrorist organisations to spread their propaganda. He might even be able to take some credit for Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, in July this year, announcing plans to introduce into Parliament laws that would compel businesses such as Apple and Facebook to release encrypted data to assist urgent counter-terrorism operations: “Encryption is vital for information security but the privacy of the terrorist must never trump the personal security of Australians. We cannot allow the internet to be an ungoverned space.” But even Byrne—if not Turnbull—would acknowledge that increased security, online and off, is not an all-encompassing remedy for terrorism.

At the beginning of the 20th century, three figures dominated the rapidly expanding world of American philanthropy. Two— Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller —are still remembered, mostly because of the foundations they established. But the third—Julius Rosenwald—is largely forgotten. No foundations, and few buildings, bear his name. If his approach to giving was more modest in spirit, it was no less influential and effective in its day.

That Rosenwald became one of the leading philanthropists of his era is itself a remarkable story. As Hasia R. Diner tells us in “ Julius Rosenwald : Repairing the World,” a volume in Yale’s Jewish Lives series, he was the son of an immigrant peddler who arrived in Baltimore in the middle of the 19th century and eventually wound up in Springfield, Ill., running a clothing store. In 1879, the 17-year-old JR (as he was known) went to New York to learn the garment business from his relatives. Soon enough, he made connections with other ambitious young men, such as the future financiers Henry Morgenthau and Henry Goldman.

After returning to the Midwest and starting his own clothing store in Chicago, Rosenwald invested in a catalog sales company that needed capital: Sears, Roebuck. He gradually became more involved in the business and, when co-founder Richard Sears resigned in 1908, took over its leadership. An initial public offering two years earlier (underwritten by Henry Goldman in his first IPO) had not only provided resources for the company’s growth but had also made JR a wealthy man.

Because the rise and fall of Sears, Roebuck is already well-chronicled, Ms. Diner, a professor of American Jewish history at New York University, concentrates on what Rosenwald did with the status and fortune he accumulated. By one estimate, he donated, in today’s dollars, close to $2 billion before he died in 1932, as well as considerable time to the causes he cared about.

Photo: WSJ
Julius Rosenwald: Repairing the World

By Hasia R. Diner
Yale, 237 pages, $25

Many of these centered on his hometown of Chicago. Rosenwald’s gifts helped to create the city’s Museum of Science and Industry, build the University of Chicago, and support the settlement houses run by Jane Addams and others. He also underwrote a wide range of Jewish organizations, including cultural institutes, theological seminaries and, most notably, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a fund that was set up during World War I to aid Jewish refugees and that has continued to do so ever since.

Islam is a totalitarian system that regulates down to the smallest detail the life of Muslims, obliges them to impose this system to the ends of the earth, and teaches genocidal hatred of those that do not submit. It is no surprise to learn that this system impacts societies and individuals subject to its oppressive ideology. The opposite would be contrary to everything we have learned about the psychological development of human beings. It is curious to observe that the stubborn refusal to make the connection between ideology and psychology is buttressed by flimsy socio-economic explanations that fall apart as soon as they’re touched.

Not a day goes by without confirmation of the insights compiled in Kobrin’s Jihadi Dictionary. Case in point: Mamade Y, the 19 year-old that tried to commit an attack at the Eiffel Tower on August 5th, had been released for the weekend from the psychiatric institution where he was slated to remain for the next 6 months. The aspiring jihadi’s father explained that his son has problems managing his anger. In the past, whenever he had a fit of anger, he would see a masked man telling him to do things. Lately, it’s a jhadi. The young man, who has been in psychiatric treatment since the family moved to France from Mauritania some sixteen years ago, was angry that weekend because the hospital had refused to give him a smartphone. The family is described as “observant but not radicalized.”

Not “radicalized?” The answer, I think, can be found in the intricate coherent argument developed by Dr. Nancy Hartevelt Kobrin, psychoanalyst and counter-terrorism expert. The pathology that produces a young man inspired to stab a soldier at the iconic Tour Eiffel originates in the impossible bonding of the infant with the devalued mother, herself terrorized by a shame-honor culture that leaves her defenseless against male brutality, with all avenues for personal fulfillment blocked by a culture/ideology/religion that perverts every aspect of human relations. Kobrin has opted for a multi-dimensional dictionary format that provides insight into the chasm that separates, term by term, Western and jihadi meanings. Each entry lists a standard dictionary definition, etymology, and usage, followed by a specific jihadi meaning. “Brothers,” for example: The term denotes a spectrum of meaning, from fraternal comradeship to, at the far end, jihadi brothers acting in tandem to commit butchery. Among the examples cited are: Hassan and Walid bin Attash (9/11); Ali Imron, Amrosi, and Muhlas (Bali 2002); Mohamed & Abdulkader Merah (Toulouse, Montauban 2012); the Tsarnaev brothers (Boston Marathon 2013); Ibrahim and Salah Abdeslam (Paris November 2015), the el Bakraoui brothers (Brussels 2016)…[pp 43-4, and “Twinship” p 255]

The sharply observant treatment of this one entry, which is characteristic of the entire dictionary, contrasts vividly with the slack, evasive journalistic approach by which most people consume information about a life and death struggle that, on the contrary, demands clarity, lucidity and vigorous action by democratic governments.

It is obvious, observes Kobrin, that our counter-terrorism programs fall short of reasonable expectations. One reason is the “lethal blind spot” due to lack of knowledge of the “mechanics and dynamics of primitive mental states, mechanisms of defense, and …misuse of objects, constituting perverse behavior.” [pp 59-60] To wit: the August 9th car ramming of soldiers as they came out of their bivouac in Levallois-Perret was met with stubbornly ignorant wonder about the “mystery of the attacker’s motivations.” His “radicalization” was soon revealed.

Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution has written a flawed but important book about inequality and opportunity in present-day America. According to Reeves’s Dream Hoarders, ours is no longer a mobile society that gives people from all walks of life a fair shot at the American Dream. Although much has been written about the rising fortunes of the top 1 percent over past decades, Reeves’s focus is the highest quintile of the population, the top 20 percent by income and wealth. In his account, people in this tier unfairly “hoard” their privileges. Too many born into affluence remain well-off, and too few from modest backgrounds end up bettering their lot.https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/saving-american-dream/

Reeves is on firm ground in describing the charmed life lived by the upper fifth of society. People in this echelon have pulled away from the rest, with their earnings and wealth steadily increasing in recent decades relative to the larger population. Compared with those lower down on the income scale, those at the top enjoy stable marriages, good health, longevity, safe neighborhoods, superior schools, and steady employment. But according to Reeves, these upper-middle-class Americans have become “dream hoarders.” They have figured out how to preserve their status and pass it on to their offspring. Thanks in no small part to their parents’ advantages, as well as a host of social practices and public policies, the children born to this class are more likely than their peers to graduate from college, especially a selective or prestigious one; attain good jobs; and earn top-quintile incomes themselves. Meanwhile, children born lower on the economic scale struggle to rise, with most never making it into the top 20 percent. To Reeves, this fact alone is deeply unfair and represents a failure of the American Dream.

Dream Hoarders is not just a j’accuse, but a call to action. Something must be done to clear the channels of opportunity, and Reeves recommends that key aspects of private conduct and public policy be structured in service of that goal. But his desire to speed the path upward runs into some serious impediments.
Theorists have long acknowledged, and Reeves agrees, that the main obstacle to social mobility, and indeed to the very existence of a level playing field, is that powerful machine of social reproduction, the family. Compared with those who have less income and education, affluent parents are blessed with a host of advantages, many of which they secure through their choices about how to live their lives. As Charles Murray has noted in his magisterial Coming Apart (to which Reeves only alludes), people in the top tiers are more likely to be well-educated, get and stay married, be dedicated and attentive parents, work hard at their jobs, obey the law, and invest in their communities. They live healthier, more orderly, and longer lives. By contrast, the habits, behaviors, and communities of those lower down on the American totem pole are fast deteriorating, and these trends tell on their children.

Reeves recognizes that these developments are hard to arrest. And he concedes he must meet the challenge of deciding what counts as a legitimate versus an illegitimate advantage, and thus what changes he is willing to recommend to give the less well-off a leg up and make good on his conception of fair opportunity.

He is of two minds about the habits and practices of the upper middle class. He praises affluent parents for their devotion and diligence and the personal attention they lavish on their children, but is concerned that these very virtues tilt the playing field. He doesn’t specify precisely which of their efforts he would leave undisturbed, but they can be surmised from the reforms he proposes. Seeking out safe and pleasant neighborhoods, engaging in enriching activities (including paying for tutoring, lessons, and private schools), helping with homework and college applications, and throwing cash in children’s direction for college, summer support, and even subsidies beyond graduation, would appear to be allowed. But other now-commonplace parental interventions—such as pulling strings to procure jobs—would not.

Reeves also devotes considerable attention to policies and practices that assist well-off families in securing their perch. His main targets are exclusionary zoning, legacy admissions, and unpaid internships. He also provides a familiar laundry list of other proposals, including supplying low-cost, long-term contraception, funding free SAT preparation, eliminating tax credits and savings plans used primarily by higher-income families, and improving lower-income schools by paying teachers more or luring them into less affluent communities.

But is there any reason to believe that these measures will make much difference, especially against the untouchable benefits that privileged parents personally provide? Assessing effects requires taking a harder look at the problem Reeves is purporting to solve.

Reeves claims that the prospects for upward mobility are dismal and deteriorating, at least compared with his benchmark ideal of random sorting, which would have only a fifth of children from each quintile staying where they are. Based on that, he cites data showing that our society has both a “glass ceiling” and a “glass floor”—with more than 20 percent of children born at the top staying there, and significantly fewer in the lower tiers managing to rise. He is also concerned with differences in educational prospects that correspond to income. As befits a member of the elite knowledge class, he has a college fixation and is especially obsessed with children’s unequal chances of ending up at a “selective” college. But the data he cites on educational opportunity and income mobility tell a mixed and equivocal story—one less consistent with “privilege hoarding” than he claims.

Reeves himself admits that mobility rates have never been completely random, and he notes that “scholars are divided on whether relative mobility rates have worsened” since the middle of the 20th century, when the GI Bill sent unprecedented numbers of Americans on to higher education. Moreover, a look at Reeves’s charts reveals that income mobility across quintiles is still substantial, with 20 percent of children born into the bottom fifth rising out of that tier, those born in the middle quintiles as likely to move up as down, and only a minority born into the top tier managing to stay there. Inheritance of educational status is somewhat stickier, but not rigidly so. About 40 percent of those born to parents in the top educational quintile maintain that status, while most in the bottom quintile obtain more years of education than their fathers did.