In ‘The Outsider,’ Frederick Forsyth shares his life of intrigue

By Patrick Anderson October 6

https://www.washingtonpost.com/

As 1970 began, a 31-year-old English journalist named Frederick Forsyth, out of a job and broke, set out to write a novel. Camping in a friend’s London flat, Forsyth worked nonstop for 35 days to produce the story of a plot to assassinate French President Charles de Gaulle. He called it “The Day of the Jackal.”

Selling the novel took longer than writing it. The fact that de Gaulle had served out his term of office and was still alive (he died later that year) led several publishers to reject the book as patently ridiculous. Then Forsyth found an editor who understood that the story’s fascination lay not in de Gaulle’s fate but in the complex chess game between a determined assassin and the French leader’s formidable security team.

The editor surprised Forsyth with the offer of a three-book deal, whereupon the writer quickly dreamed up one novel about a search for fugitive Nazis and another about white mercenaries trying to take over an African nation. After “The Day of the Jackal” became his first best­seller, those two, “ The Odessa File ” and “ The Dogs of War ,” were his second and third .

[Forsyth’s finest, ‘The Fourth Protocol’]

That’s an all but unprecedented story of sudden success, but “The Outsider,”Forsyth’s new memoir, doesn’t dwell on his fiction. Instead, he offers a fast-paced look back at his life, from boyhood in England during World War II to his years as a foreign correspondent, his occasional hush-hush work for British intelligence and his endless adventures as a globe-hopping writer always ready to brave some new danger zone in search of a good story.

Author Frederick Forsyth (Gillian Shaw)

Forsyth’s love of adventure started early. When he was 6 and living near the English Channel in Kent, his father won young Freddie a chance to sit in the cockpit of one of the Spitfire fighters that the beloved Royal Air Force had used to beat back the German Luftwaffe. At that moment, Forsyth says, he vowed someday to fly a Spitfire.

When he was a teenager, his father arranged for him to spend summers in Germany, France and Spain, where he picked up languages that later boosted his journalistic career. At 16 he learned to fly. He also excelled in school but, told that he might aspire to Oxford, shocked his headmaster by saying he intended to join the Royal Air Force when he turned 18, which he did. Forsyth loved his three years as a pilot — although no Spitfires were available to him — but when his enlistment ended, he set out to become a foreign correspondent.

Three years reporting in England led to a job with Reuters, which sent Forsyth to Paris. There he learned that elements of the French army wanted de Gaulle dead because he had granted independence to ­Algeria. Several assassination attempts had failed because the assassins were known to de Gaulle’s defenders. Forsyth reasoned that only “a complete outsider, a professional hit man with no record or dossier known to Paris” could succeed. That insight, eight years later, inspired “The Day of the Jackal.”

Assigned to East Berlin, he delighted in outsmarting the government agents who shadowed him. He also delighted in interesting women. One night, at the opera, he met and took home beautiful, mysterious Sigrid, who returned often but always insisted on departing by cab. He snooped and discovered she was the mistress of the unforgiving East German defense minister, whereupon the fearless reporter sensibly demanded a transfer back to Paris.

He made his first career mistake when he joined the BBC as a foreign correspondent, only to clash with its leaders when they backed what he saw as the British government’s cruel and senseless support of Nigeria in its mid-1960s war with Biafra, a war Forsyth blames for the starvation of 1 million Biafran children. Forsyth ends his account of this bitter episode by saying of BBC executives and the government, “That is why I believe that this coterie of vain mandarins and cowardly politicians stained the honor of my country forever, and I will never forgive them.”

Forsyth has spent the rest of his life moving between the solitude of writing and the pursuit of adventure. In middle age he took up parachuting, scuba diving and deep-sea fishing, which almost cost him his life in a typhoon off the Mauritian coast. His friends in British intelligence sent him on a secret mission to South Africa to learn the country’s plans for its atomic weapons when the white government was replaced by a black one. At age 74, he set out for Somalia, one of the most dangerous places in the world, to research a novel, reluctantly taking along a bodyguard to ease his wife’s fears. Last year, at 76, he kept the vow he’d made at the age of 6 to fly a Spitfire.

The man has lived an amazing life. Call it stranger than fiction.

Anderson regularly reviews mysteries and thrillers for Book World.

THE OUTSIDER

My Life in Intrigue

By Frederick Forsyth

Putnam. 332 pp. $28

Today's Tune: Jason Isbell - 24 Frames

Can California Be Saved?

Victor Davis Hanson | Oct 22, 2015

http://townhall.com/

A sign from wetter times warns people not to dive from a bridge over the Kern River, which has been dried up by water diversion projects and a shortage of rain, in Bakersfield. (David McNew / Getty Images)

Crime is back up in California. Los Angeles reported a 20.6 percent increase in violent crimes over the first half of 2015 and nearly an 11 percent increase in property crimes.

Last year, cash-strapped California taxpayers voted for Proposition 47, which so far has let thousands of convicted criminals go free from prison and back onto the streets. Now the state may have to relearn what lawbreakers often do when let out of jail early.

The state may be entering the fifth year of a catastrophic drought, but California has not started building any of the new reservoirs that were planned but long ago canceled under the unfinished California Water Project. Water may remain scarce, but legislators -- many of whom have their daily water needs met by the ancient reservoirs and canals that their grandparents built -- don't seem overly bothered. They prefer to designate transgender restrooms, ban plastic bags at grocery stores, and prohibit pet dogs from chasing bears and bobcats.

Never has a region been so naturally rich but so poorly run by its latest generation of custodians.

California endures some of the highest gasoline taxes, sales taxes and income taxes in the nation. Yet its roads and public schools rate near the very bottom of U.S. rankings.

Traffic accidents in California increased by 13 percent over a three-year period -- the result of terrible roads and worse drivers. Almost half of all accidents in Los Angeles are hit-and-runs where the drivers leave the scene.

California has lots of petroleum and natural gas. It used to be a pacesetter in building nuclear and hydroelectric plants. Yet because of inept governance, the state's electricity and gasoline prices are among the highest in the nation.

Why is California choosing the path of Detroit -- growing government that it cannot pay for, shorting the middle classes, hiking taxes but providing shoddy services and infrastructure in return, and obsessing over minor bumper-sticker issues while ignoring existential crises?

The cause is political. California is a one-party state, without any serious audit of authorities in power.

The California State Assembly currently includes 52 Democrats and 28 Republicans. The California State Senate has 26 Democrats and 14 Republicans.

All of the state's executive officers are Democrats. Both of its U.S. senators are Bay-area progressives. California's House delegation is overwhelmingly liberal and Democratic. The party in power can do as it pleases without being held accountable at the polls.

But what turned a once bipartisan and purple state bright blue?

A perfect storm of events.

Higher taxes and increased regulations have driven out lots of small-business owners. In the last few years, hundreds of thousands of disgruntled middle-of-the-road voters voted with their feet and left for no-tax Nevada, Texas or Florida.

The state devolved into a pyramid of the coastal wealthy and interior poor -- the dual constituencies of the new progressive movement.

A third of America's welfare recipients reside in California. Nearly a quarter of Californians live below the poverty line.

Yet nowhere in America are there more billionaires. California's long, thin coastal corridor has become a tony La-La land unto itself. Some of the highest housing prices in the nation and richest communities are clustered along the Pacific coastline, from the wine country and Silicon Valley to Malibu and Hollywood, dotted by marquee coastal universities and zillionaire tech corporations.

Meanwhile, poorer people in the interior, in places such as Madera and Delano -- far from Stanford, Google, Pacific Heights and Santa Monica -- require ever more public services. The very rich don't mind paying the necessary higher taxes, while the strapped, shrinking middle class suffers or flees.

Demography also explains the new true-blue California. It is one of the youngest states, with a median age of 35. Voters tend to be more liberal before they reach 40 -- and must take on increasing responsibilities, often for people other than just themselves.

California hosts more undocumented immigrants than any other state. Its percentages of minority and foreign-born residents are among the highest in the country. (One of four California residents was not born in the United States.) As with the young, immigrant groups are likewise traditional liberal constituencies, at least in the early generations.

Good money in California along the affluent coast, for the most part, is not made the old-fashion way -- in mining, timber, ranching, farming and construction. Instead, California specializes in high-tech, social media, the Internet, government employment, academia, lawyering and acting.

Profits usually involve programming, investing, financing, hedging, talking, dealing, suing, instructing and regulating. The money is better, the physical work less grubby, and utopia seems attainable in a way impossible when growing lettuce, mining granite, drilling gas wells, producing two-by-fours, building dams or shipping steel.

Could California change?

Only when voters of all persuasions decide to return to the old give-and-take politics that keeps politicians honest.

Or when water taps in the suburbs go dry.

Or perhaps when the state's growing poor populations connect their exorbitant gas, power and housing costs with an elite agenda of rich coastal liberals, who do not seem to care about the people working hard to glimpse what the elites take for granted.

• Topics:
• CALIFORNIA
• CRIME
• TAXES
• WILD FIRES
• DROUGHT

Why Benghazi still makes a difference

By 

JOHN BOLTON

http://www.wsj.com/

October 20, 2015

Only in Perry Mason stories does the real culprit break down in open court. After Hillary Clinton’s now-immortal Capitol Hill outburst about investigations into the deadly 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya—“What difference, at this point, does it make?”—the former secretary of state and Democratic candidate for president is unlikely to offer any such spontaneity when she testifies Thursday before the House Select Committee on Benghazi.

Nonetheless, the committee’s work is utterly serious, its preparations extensive (and extensively stonewalled by Mrs. Clinton’s team) and its mission vital to our fight against still-metastasizing Islamist terrorism. Much is at stake. The hearing’s focus must be on the key policy and leadership implications of the mistakes made before, during and after the murders of Amb. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans on Sept. 11 three years ago.

Before the attack, there was ample warning that the U.S. consulate in Benghazi wasn’t secure, with terrorist threats in the area multiplying. Even the International Red Cross had pulled out of Benghazi. After a string of requests from the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli for more security, in mid-August came a joint Embassy-CIA recommendation to move the State Department’s people into the CIA’s Benghazi compound. The State Department in Washington was invariably unresponsive, even though, as Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey later testified, the rising terrorist threat in Libya was well known.

Given her self-proclaimed central role in deposing dictator Moammar Gadhafi, why was Mrs. Clinton so detached from the deteriorating situation in Libya? She has so far dodged the issue, pawning off such “technical” matters on her subordinates. Working in the State Department in 1990 when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, I saw firsthand how Secretary of State James Baker dived into every detail of safeguarding U.S. diplomats stranded in Kuwait City. If earlier secretaries of state have been perfectly prepared to get their fingernails dirty in operational details when those under their responsibility were threatened, why wasn’t Mrs. Clinton?

Libya was no backwater for Mrs. Clinton. It was one of President Obama’s highest foreign-policy priorities, touted by the administration as evidence of successfully “leading from behind,” averting a Gadhafi bloodbath through “humanitarian intervention,” and with democracy and stability to follow. So acknowledging that precisely the opposite was happening, and appropriately increasing security in Libya, would demonstrate failure. That was politically unacceptable.

As the crisis unfolded that day in Benghazi, with violence also erupting in Tunis, Cairo and potentially elsewhere, Mrs. Clinton disappeared. Instead of staying at her desk, “on the bridge” of the State Department’s seventh floor, Mrs. Clinton literally left the building. Why?

Imagine the effect on morale when, with colleagues in Libya in mortal peril, State Department personnel learned that their leader had gone home for the evening. There is no evidence that Mrs. Clinton or President Obama did anything other than passively monitor events. Instead, Mrs. Clinton should have been continuously demanding assistance for her beleaguered diplomats: hectoring, pleading, whatever it took.

On Thursday, the House committee should ask Mrs. Clinton not about military operations that might have been launched on Sept. 11 to save American personnel in Benghazi, but about her supposed leadership at the State Department that fateful day.

Mrs. Clinton protests that she was still fully connected from home. But she reportedly spoke exactly once, at 10 p.m., with the president when he called her to discuss the State Department news release that first floated the fantasy that Muslim outrage over a blasphemous video about Muhammad sparked the attack. Incredibly, Mrs. Clinton never spoke at all to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta or Joint Chiefs Chairman Dempsey, according to their congressional testimony.

Was Mrs. Clinton using her private email server while her State Department desk stood vacant? If so, where are those emails? With Americans in peril across the Middle East, were others listening to Mrs. Clinton communicating from home rather than from fully secure facilities at the State Department?

And who did concoct the Muhammad video explanation? State Department and CIA personnel on the ground in Tripoli and Benghazi all knew in real time that a terrorist attack was under way. There was no fog of war in Libya, as Mrs. Clinton has contended. The fog was all in Washington, an ideological and political fog protecting the last two months of President Obama’s re-election campaign, and reflecting his unworldly view that the global terrorist threat was receding.

After the attacks, America’s response was pathetic: arresting one person, Libyan militia leader Ahmed Abu Khattala. Following limited intelligence-community questioning, he has received full due-process criminal protections. He remains in a federal jail facility in Virginia; no trial date has been set pending resolution of numerous defense efforts to have the charges dismissed.

This is no response at all, as terrorists, their state sponsors and America’s international adversaries all understand. The American people have a right to know the following: What was Mrs. Clinton’s role in formulating the U.S. response to the Benghazi attack? Did she ever advocate retaliation for the coldblooded killing of four Americans?

Policy, leadership and management failures at the administration’s highest levels brought us both Benghazi and the continuing fecklessness of, in effect, granting impunity to all but one of the terrorist attackers who killed American citizens, including a U.S. ambassador. Politics has no place in the committee hearing on Thursday, save for a question that many Americans may be asking: Is this how we want our country led?

Mr. Bolton, an American Enterprise Institute senior fellow, is the author of “Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad” (Simon & Schuster, 2007).

A Look at the Facts on Gun-Free Zones

by JOHN LOTT

http://www.nationalreview.com/

October 20, 2015

Some have a hard time accepting that criminals can be deterred from committing crimes. They don’t believe that potential mass shooters have second thoughts when faced with the prospect of armed citizens who can fight back. They seem to think that everyday Americans can’t help stop attacks.

But it is getting hard to ignore that mass public shooters keep choosing to attack locations where victims can’t defend themselves. It’s little wonder that gun-control advocates resort to desperate tactics.

There have been a series of articles from Politico, the Huffington Post, Slate, and the New York Daily News with similar titles meant to cast doubt on defensive gun use, such as “the myth of the good guy with the gun.”

Since at least 1950, all but two public mass shootings in America have taken place where general citizens are banned from carrying guns. In Europe, there have been no exceptions.

Every mass public shooting — and there have been plenty of mass shooting in Europe — has occurred in a gun-free zone. In addition, they have had three of the six worst K–12 school shootings, and Europe experienced by far the worst mass public shooting perpetrated by a single individual (Norway in 2011, which from the shooting alone left 67 people dead and 110 wounded).

Mass killers have even explicitly talked about their desire to attack gun-free zones. The Charleston, S.C., church shooting in June was instead almost a college shooting. But that killer changed his plans after realizing that the College of Charleston had armed guards.

The diary of the “Dark Knight” movie-theater killer, James Holmes, was finally released just a few months ago. Holmes decided not to attack an airport because of what he described in his diary as its “substantial security.” Out of seven theaters showing the Batman movie premiere within 20 minutes of the suspect’s apartment, only one theater banned permitted concealed handguns. That’s the one he attacked.

Or take two cases from last year. Elliot Rodger, who fatally shot three people in Santa Barbara, Calif., explained his reasoning in his 141-page “manifesto.” He ruled out various targets because he worried that someone with a gun would stop his killing spree. Justin Bourque shot to death three people in Canada. On Facebook, Bourque posted a picture of a defenseless victim explaining to killers that guns are prohibited.

Shooters have good reason to be concerned. Here are some examples from the past few years.

— Conyers, Ga., May 31, 2015: A permit holder was walking by a store when he heard shots ring out. Two people were killed. The permit holder started firing, and the killer ran out of the store. Rockdale County Sheriff Eric Levett said: “I believe that if Mr. Scott did not return fire at the suspect, then more of those customers would have [been] hit by a gun[shot]. . . . So, in my opinion he saved other lives in that store.”

— Chicago, April 2015: An Uber driver who had just dropped off a fare “shot and wounded a gunman [Everardo Custodio] who opened fire on a crowd of people.” Assistant State’s Attorney Barry Quinn praised the driver for “acting in self-defense and in the defense of others.”

— Philadelphia, Pa., March 2015: A permit holder was walking by a barber shop when he heard shots fired. He quickly ran into the shop and shot the gunman to death. Police Captain Frank Llewellyn said, “I guess he saved a lot of people in there.”

— Darby, Pa., July 2014: Convicted felon Richard Plotts killed a hospital caseworker and shot the psychiatrist that he was scheduled to meet with. Fortunately, the psychiatrist was a concealed-handgun permit holder and was able to critically wound Plotts. Plotts was still carrying 39 bullets and could have shot many other people.

— Chicago, July 2014: Three gang members fired on four people who had just left a party. Fortunately, one of these four was a military serviceman with a concealed-handgun permit. He was able to return fire and wound the main attacker while keeping the others at bay. The UK’s Daily Mail reported, “The night might have had a very different outcome had the incident occurred a year earlier [before Illinois’s concealed-handgun law was passed].”

— Plymouth, Pa., September 2012: William Allabaugh critically wounded one man inside a restaurant and murdered a second man on the street outside. Luzerne County Assistant District Attorney Jarrett Ferentino said that without the concealed-handgun permit holder who wounded Allabaugh, “we believe that it could have been much worse that night.”

— Spartanburg, S.C., March 2012: Armed with a shotgun, Jesse Gates kicked in a door to his church. Concealed-carry permit holder Aaron Guyton drew his gun and held Gates at gun point, enabling other parishioners to disarm Gates. Spartanburg County Sheriff Chuck Wright called the churchgoers heroes. Though Gates was stopped before anyone was harmed, he was still charged with one count of kidnapping and three counts of pointing and presenting a firearm.

None of these stories received national news coverage. Many received only one or two local news stories. Yet, if a permit holder hadn’t stopped these attacks, these cases would surely have received national attention.

There are some other older cases in which permit holders saved the day in remarkable fashion and gained national attention. In December 2007, permit holder and former police officer Jeanne Assam defended her church from Matthew Murray who had just killed four people; Murray carried more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition. Assam was being stalked by an ex at the time and had asked her pastor if she could carry her permitted concealed handgun. The pastor accommodated her request by allowing her and other permit holders to act as volunteer security guards.

The recent Politico article “The Myth of the Good Guy with the Gun,” by Matt Valentine, not only misses these cases, but mischaracterizes other ones. In the case from Pearl, Miss., where Assistant Principal Joel Myrick stopped the shooter, Politico notes that the killer was leaving the high school but fails to mention where he was headed. In fact, the killer was heading across the street to the middle school. Politico makes it sound as though stopping the attack at that point did not save lives. Concerning the Wilcox case in Nevada, the article omits the fact that while Wilcox didn’t stop the killers, his intervention gave Walmart customers time to flee from the shooting.

But the deterrent and life-saving effects of concealed-handgun laws on mass public shootings aren’t just anecdotal. Bill Landes of the University of Chicago and I gathered data on mass public shootings from 1977 to 1999. We studied 13 different types of gun-control laws as well as the impact of law enforcement, but the only law that had a statistically significant impact on mass public shootings was the passage of right-to-carry laws. Right-to-carry laws reduced both the frequency and the severity of mass public shootings; and to the extent to which mass shootings still occurred, they took place in those tiny areas in the states where permitted concealed handguns were not allowed.

Umpqua Community College, scene of a recent mass shooting, was yet another gun-free zone. Oregon law allows permitted concealed handguns on university property, but public educators have undermined the law by putting bans in faculty and student handbooks. For students and faculty, the threat of expulsion or termination is surely threat enough. Faculty members may lose not only their jobs but also their career. Students are unlikely to ever be admitted to another school and must live with the fact that they will never get the college degree that they were working on.

In Oregon, students and faculty are prohibited from carrying firearms on public university campuses. Only people unaffiliated with the college are allowed to carry. But even they are subject to a 2011 Oregon appeals-court decision that allows schools to ban guns in their buildings.

This ensured that no one — students, faculty, or unaffiliated bystanders — was able to defend against that deadly shooting.

As evidence that the school wasn’t a gun-free zone, some have pointed out that one student, a veteran, still carried his gun despite the college’s warnings. Unfortunately, the student was far removed from the attack.

But to appreciate the impact of the school rules, you have to realize how exceptionally law-abiding most permit holders are. Permit-holder firearms violations are quite literally one in a million occurrences. Indeed, it is hard to think of any other group that is anywhere near as law-abiding — not even the police. And yet, Matt Valentine in Politico would have us believe that “you’re more likely to get shot by an ordinary gun owner who loses his temper than by a mass murderer.”

If you’re going to shoot people, why bother going through the process of getting a permit for a concealed handgun?

Obviously, gun-control advocates don’t think that deterrence works. Despite statements from the killers themselves, they don’t think that rampage shooters factor the presence of guns into their plans. Most of these shooters want to go out with a bang and take a lot of people with them. They tend to be antisocial, attention-starved people. They want their names to be remembered.

These killers know that the more people they murder, the more media attention they will get. And they also know that the longer it takes for someone with a gun to appear on the scene, the more people they can kill.

If you still agree with gun-control advocates about deterrence, ask yourself if you would post a sign on your home announcing it was a gun-free zone. So why do we post these signs at public locations? There’s simply no good reason for it.

— John Lott is the president of the Crime Prevention Research Center and the author of More Guns, Less Crime.

RELATED: Gun-Control Zealots, Try Looking at the Evidence

RELATED: What Gun-Control Advocates Mean but Dare Not Say: Guns Should Be Confiscated

RELATED: Liberals, What Laws Would You Pass That Could Stop These Shootings?

RELATED: The Deadly Consequences of Draconian Gun Laws

What Bernie Sanders doesn’t understand about economic equality

By George F. Will
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/
October 16, 2015


Bernie Sanders at the first Democratic debate (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

America is more distant from the 1933 beginning of the New Deal (82 years) than that beginning was from the 1865 end of the Civil War (68 years). Both episodes involved the nation’s understanding of equality: The war affirmed equality of natural rights, the New Deal addressed unequal social conditions. Today’s Democratic Party is frozen, like a fly in amber, in the New Deal preoccupation — but with less excuse than Democrats had during the Great Depression. The party believes that economic inequality is an urgent problem, and that its urgency should be understood in terms of huge disparities of wealth. Neither proposition is (to use the term Jefferson used when he wrote equality into America’s catechism) a self-evident truth.

The fundamental producer of income inequality is freedom. Individuals have different aptitudes and attitudes. Not even universal free public education, even were it well done, could equalize the ability of individuals to add value to the economy. Besides, some people want to teach, others want to run hedge funds. In an open society, rewards are set not by political power but by impersonal market forces, the rewards of which will differ dramatically but usually predictably. Beyond freedom’s valuable fecundity in producing unequal social outcomes, four other facets of today’s America fuel inequality.

First, the entitlement state exists primarily to transfer wealth regressively, from the working-age population to the retired elderly who, after a lifetime of accumulation, are the wealthiest age cohort. Second, big, regulatory government inherently exacerbates inequality because it inevitably serves the strong — those sufficiently educated, affluent, articulate and confident to influence the administrative state’s myriad redistributive actions.

Third, seven years of ZIRP — zero-interest-rate policy — have not restored the economic dynamism essential for social mobility but have had the intended effect of driving liquidity into equities in search of high yields, thereby enriching the 10 percent of Americans who own approximately 80 percent of the directly owned stocks. Also, by making big government inexpensive, low interest rates exacerbate the political class’s perennial disposition toward deficit spending. And little of the 2016 federal budget’s $283 billion for debt service will flow to individuals earning less than the median income.

Fourth, family disintegration cripples the primary transmitter of social capital — the habits, mores, customs and dispositions necessary for seizing opportunities. When 72 percent of African American children and 53 percent of Hispanic children are born to unmarried women, and 40 percent of all births are to unmarried women, and a majority of all mothers under 30 are not living with the fathers of their children, the consequences for the life chances, and lifetime earnings, of millions of children are enormous.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is doing well, if not good, by reducing the debate about equality to resentment of large fortunes. He should read Harry G. Frankfurt’s new book “On Inequality.” It is so short (89 pages) that even a peripatetic candidate can read it, and so lucid that he cannot miss its inconvenient point: “It is misguided to endorse economic egalitarianism as an authentic moral ideal.”

Frankfurt, a Princeton professor of philosophy emeritus, argues that economic inequality is not inherently morally objectionable. “To the extent that it is truly undesirable, it is on account of its almost irresistible tendency to generate unacceptable inequalities of other kinds.” These can include access to elite education, political influence and other nontrivial matters. But Frankfurt’s alternative to economic egalitarianism is the “doctrine of sufficiency,” which is that the moral imperative should be that everyone have

The pursuit of increased economic equality might, but need not, serve the ethic of sufficiency. And this pursuit might distract people from understanding, and finding satisfaction with, “what is needed for the kind of life a person would most sensibly and appropriately seek.” This has nothing to do with “the quantity of money that other people happen to have.” Frankfurt argues that “doing worse than others does not entail doing badly.” And an obsession with others’ resources “contributes to the moral disorientation and shallowness of our time.”

Sanders focuses less on empathy for the poor than on stoking the discontent of those who are comfortable but envious. They will ultimately be discomfited by the fact that envy is the only one of the seven deadly sins that does not give the sinner even momentary pleasure. Fortunately, for most Americans, believing in equality simply means believing that everyone is at least as good as everyone else.

Read more from George F. Will’s archive or follow him on Facebook.

To read more on this topic:

Dana Milbank: Sanders is right to be outraged

The Post’s View: Sanders’s questionable ‘revolution’

Catherine Rampell: Income inequality isn’t about the rich

Robert J. Samuelson: Myth-making about economic inequality

U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops: Bring Us More Jihadis

And don't you dare cross the "red line" of criticizing a bishop

by Robert Spencer

http://pjmedia.com/

October 16, 2015

“‘Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture!’ says the LORD.” — Jeremiah 23:1

“Because, yea, because they have misled my people, saying, ‘Peace,’ when there is no peace.” — Ezekiel 13:10

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is calling for the U.S. to take in 100,000 Syrian refugees this year alone.

The Conference shows no sign of knowing or caring that the Islamic State said last February that it would soon flood Europe with as many as 500,000 refugees. Or that an Islamic State operative recently boasted that, among the flood of refugees, 4,000 Islamic State jihadis had entered Europe. Or that the Lebanese education minister said there were 20,000 jihadis among the refugees in camps in his country.

Or that 80% of the migrants who claim to be fleeing the war in Syria aren’t actually from Syria at all, or that German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said the Islamic State is sneaking into the country with the refugees and is active in the refugee camps. Why would these “refugees” think they had to present themselves to Europe, which has welcomed the refugees, with false pretenses unless they had nefarious intentions?

Meanwhile, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is, as Ann Corcoran of Refugee Resettlement Watch points out, “NOT advocating to save the persecuted Christians of Syria through this program.” Instead, bishops such as Robert McManus, Kevin Farrell, Jaime Soto, and others are moving to silence those who speak about the Muslim persecution of Christians, and about the Islamic doctrines mandating warfare against and subjugation of Christians.

After years of tolerating open dissent from core Church teachings, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops moves like a Stalinist regime to silence and ostracize those who dare whisper a hint of dissent from their new and ironclad dogma that Islam is a religion of peace.

To take just one of many sorry examples of how energetically they move to crush dissent on this point, on August 13, 2015, I was the keynote speaker at the annual convocation of the North American Lutheran Church in Dallas, Texas (Kevin Farrell’s diocese). I spoke about the global Muslim persecution of Christians. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, I was told, sends a representative to the North American Lutheran Church convocation every year. However, this year, when the USCCB found out I was the keynote speaker, they pulled their rep from the Lutheran convocation, lest anyone get the idea that the Catholic Church endorsed a truthful and accurate analysis of the plight of Middle Eastern Christians.

No worries, gentlemen: no one will ever mistake you for people who are interested in telling uncomfortable truths. Watch the video of my talk here, and consider that this talk was too hot for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops enforces obedience to their spurious, self-defeating dogma of Islam being peaceful in pursuit of chimerical “dialogue”. This supposedly all-important Muslim-Christian dialogue hasn’t saved a single Christian from Muslim persecution, or turned one jihadi into a peaceful man.

What this insistence on “dialogue” has actually accomplished is the abandonment of untold numbers of Christians to their fates at the hands of those jihadis. They have been abandoned by those who should have been appealing to the conscience of the global community on their behalf.

Now, we learn what this craven behavior by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is all about. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops received $79,590,512 in 2014 alone – that’s right, nearly 80 million dollars —  from the federal government for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Migration Fund.

This money constitutes 97% of the budget of this corrupt, authoritarian fraternity.

Stories like this should bring down the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, but Catholics are reluctant in the extreme to criticize bishops, no matter what they do, and tend to shun those who dare to speak out anyway. But that attitude is what led to the priest abuse scandals.

For several years I accused Jaime Soto of moral cowardice for withdrawing his representative from a conference where I was speaking, even though I wasn’t speaking about the Muslim persecution of Christians, or anything related to Islam at all. Another speaker then pulled out of the conference because I had dared to criticize a bishop, and conference organizers then nervously told me that it was crossing a red line to accuse a bishop of moral cowardice.

Bishops cannot be guilty of moral cowardice? Bishops cannot be criticized, no matter what they do? Imagine holding a job or position that rendered one immune from criticism!

The bishops, as putative shepherds of souls, should be aware that such immunity is dangerous to one’s soul. Being surrounded by sycophants is never healthy — just look at what became of Elvis when none of his entourage dared suggest he seek help for his pill addiction, or dared tell him that maybe it wasn’t a good idea to fly to Colorado to get a sandwich made with peanut butter, blueberry jam, and a pound of bacon.

Closer to home, what did the Catholic Church gain from no one daring to call Bishop Patrick Ziemann of Santa Rosa, California to account when he sexually exploited a priest and squandered millions of the diocese’s money?

What did the Church gain from Archbishop Rembert Weakland paying his male lover $450,000 to keep quiet about their affair?

What has the Church gained from the massive coverup by bishops of priestly sex abuse? Should no one have dared criticize Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston for covering up that abuse?

What if a bishop really is guilty of moral cowardice? Who will have the courage to bear the ostracism and opprobrium that will come from telling him, and what will become of the bishop if no one does tell him, other than that he will continue to be a moral coward, and probably worse as well?

In light of the fact that they are not perfect beings, and they are far from that, bishops should be aware that sometimes the voice of truth and reason is speaking through their critics, and that to slap down those critics with an authoritarian hand does not automatically render their own position correct. In fact, it may likely demonstrate that their position is incorrect, insofar as it cannot be defended with reason but only propped up by force.

Since bishops are neither impeccable nor infallible, it does no one any good to stay silent when they are doing actual wrong that harms the Church and society as a whole. Catholics seem to have lost sight of that. Acquiescing to evil because a bishop is acquiescing to evil is neither genuine charity nor genuine obedience.

The Church could have and should have been a voice for a genuinely charitable response to the jihad threat, and a robust defense of the value of Judeo-Christian civilization. Instead, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, wildly rich courtesy of U.S. taxpayers, rule the day and have their man in the Vatican. Cowardice and appeasement are passed off as “charity.”

The Catholic Church has entered dark days. As the bishops enrich themselves off the flood of refugees pouring into the United States, they can congratulate themselves that no one, not even the “flock” they have betrayed, will hold them accountable for what they have done.