Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Why Benghazi still makes a difference

By 
http://www.wsj.com/
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Tuesday, October 20, 2015

A Look at the Facts on Gun-Free Zones


by JOHN LOTT
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.




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Monday, October 19, 2015

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.
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Sunday, October 18, 2015

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


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

October 16, 2015

US Conference of Bishops

“‘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.
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The plot against Donald Trump

By Michael Walsh

October 17, 2015
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a No Labels convention on Oct. 12, 2015. (Jim Cole, AP)

Back in the days of Richard Nixon and Watergate, Donald Segretti had a word for it.
Unfortunately, I can’t use that word in a family newspaper, but suffice it to say it had something to do with rats and everything to do with a vulgarism for political dirty tricks: using plants and double-agents in order to embarrass a candidate and boost their own man’s chances.
Last week it was GOP front-runner Donald Trump’s turn to get, well, ratfreaked.
A young woman at a campaign event in New Hampshire — self-righteous, hands on hips, a-quiver with indignation — popped up to declare, “I don’t think you’re a friend to women.” (“I knew I shouldn’t have picked her,” Trump immediately joked.)
Oops. Turns out that the woman, identified as Lauren Batchelder, 18, is a college volunteer for the fading candidacy of Jeb Bush.
The Bush campaign immediately backpedaled away — but not before getting its digs in: “While this question was not sanctioned by the campaign,” said a Jeb spokeswoman, “we can’t help but notice Mr. Trump does seem to be very sensitive about being challenged by women.”
Given that Trump has been married to three high-profile women and has an equally high-profile daughter, Ivanka, that’s doubtful.
But it illustrates that in the age of the outsider candidate (Trump, Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina), the GOP establishment is having a devil of a time figuring out a way to stop him.
Trump currently maintains his lead in theReal Clear Politics average of national polls, with Carson second and Fiorina in fourth place behind Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.
This wasn’t the first time Trump has had to face questioners of dubious provenance. Last month in a rally in New Hampshire, a still-unidentified man sporting a Trump T-shirt popped up to opine that, “We have a problem in this country. It’s called Muslims. We know our current president is one.”
Trump’s typically New York-style reaction to the statement was one of laughter and “we need this question.”
In the cold light of print that may look like the real-estate mogul was endorsing the statement, but in fact was simply a sarcastic expression of disbelief. Trump went on to foul off the pitch and then quickly turn to another questioner.
Still, the Donald was pummeled by the left-wing media for not “correcting” or “denouncing” the sentiments. His reply to critics: “I decided, why should I come to the defense of the president? He’s not going to come to my defense.”
After the event, journalists couldn’t find the man who asked the question. He mumbled his name into the microphone. Consider what happened with Batchelder, what are the chances “Muslim president” guy was a plant as well?
Whatever the case, it’s clear that the Trump phenomenon is giving professional politicians a severe case of heartburn.
The GOP establishment, already reeling from the surprise defeat of former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in Virginia last year and the announcement late last month thatJohn Boehner will soon give up both his House seat and his speakership, has been caught flat-footed by the rise of Trump and the other nonprofessional politicians and is desperately seeking a way to stop them.
Measures being bruited now include making candidates swear fealty to whomever turns out to be the nominee, and pledge not to run as a third-party candidate. Failure to do so would be punished by loss of ballot access.
Problem is, the traditional candidates aren’t achieving liftoff. Jeb Bush combines the worst qualities of his father and brother without any of their strengths; he’s also already spent a fortune, with almost nothing to show for it.
Rubio — as Obama was when he first ran in 2008 — is an ambitious freshman senator who hasn’t even served a single full term, and is sacrificing a hard-won Senate seat to boot, just to further his own ambition.
Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum are retreads. And sitting governors John Kasich, Chris Christie and Bobby Jindal have yet to set many hearts aflutter.
So the GOP is now facing its worst nightmare: What if Trump is for real? That behind all the bluster, beneath the weird hair, is a guy who just might be able to clean out the Augean stables of the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party that continues to cling to power in Washington.
The Democrats — with their eminently indictable presumptive nominee, Hillary Clinton — don’t like the idea of fundamental change any better than the Republicans. They prefer GOP opponents who don’t fight back, lose gracefully, and keep their seats at the national trough.
The odds are still against Trump. But long-suffering voters of both parties staring at a possible Clinton-Bush flashback, might be forgiven for thinking that this year, maybe, just maybe, things could be different. And all the rats in the world won’t change their minds.
Michael Walsh’s new book, “The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: the Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West,” was recently published by Encounter Books.

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The One-State Solution, Cont’d


Palestinian terrorism and Israeli self-defense are not the same thing.

By Andrew C. McCarthy — October 17, 2015
http://www.nationalreview.com/
Palestinian protesters carry knives and the national flag during a demonstration in the Jabalia refugee camp, in northern Gaza on October 16, 2015
Palestinian protesters carry knives and the national flag during a demonstration in northern Gaza on October 16, 2015 (AFP Photo/Mohammed Abed)

The next intifada is on, and the Obama administration, as one would expect, is on the wrong side.

There has been a spike in Palestinian terrorism over the past few weeks. One has to call it a spike because Palestinian terrorism is always thrumming — there’s never a real stop. About 70 Israelis have recently been mauled, and some killed, in over two dozen sneak attacks, mostly by stabbing.

The ultimate cause of the rampage is the Palestinian determination to eradicate Israel’s existence as a Jewish state by a two-track campaign of internal violence and international political pressure. As I’ve previously detailed, this is the “one-state solution” preferred by Islamists and Leftists. It is abetted, wittingly or not, by the “two-state solution,” a bipartisan Beltway obsession that entails pressuring Israel to accommodate next-door neighbors who will be satisfied with nothing less than burning its house down.

The proximate cause for the current bloodletting is incitement by Palestinian political leadership, particularly Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas (also known as “Abu Mazen”).

Abbas is a longtime terrorism enabler, the right hand of Yasser Arafat, by whose intercession he rose to the top rank of the PLO and, ultimately, the Palestinian Authority. Naturally, the Obama administration has hallucinated him into a “moderate” Muslim “peacemaker” — just as the Bush administration did.

The ugly reality is that Islamists and the radical pan-Arab Left — those in the Nasser-Arafat mold — are in competition to prove who is the most anti-Semitic, a coveted distinction in their culture. Abbas and his Fatah party must compete with Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian terror branch, whose charter explicitly frames the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews as dictates of Allah. As Caroline Glick perceptively explains, Abbas has more to gain from the perversely named “peace process,” which keeps the West invested in him, than from a peace settlement, in which an influx of Hamas sympathizers would likely drive him from power. Thus, he does his bit to stoke the violence.

Over the past few weeks, he has incited rioting at the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem, falsely accusing Jews of defiling and attempting to seize the site. Among his gems is the admonition that Jews “have no right to desecrate [the al-Aqsa Mosque and other Temple Mount sites] with their filthy feet.” The purported secular moderate went on to out-Hamas Hamas, lauding Muslims who physically attack Jews attempting to tour the area:
Each drop of blood that was spilled in Jerusalem is pure blood as long as it’s for the sake of Allah. Every shahid [i.e., martyr] will be in heaven and every wounded person will be rewarded by Allah’s will.
For good measure, Abbas libelously accused Israel of “executing” a 13-year-old Palestinian boy, Ahmad Mansara, “in cold blood.” In fact, Mansara and his older brother were caught on video stabbing Jews, including a child riding a bicycle. When they tried to slice and dice the Israeli police who responded to the crime scene, Mansara was shot. But he was not “executed in cold blood”; he is alive and well and recuperating thanks to Israeli doctors and nurses who immediately gave him medical care.

Abbas’s diatribe can have had no purpose but to ignite yet another round of attacks — not a “cycle of violence,” as the State Department describes it, but a unilateral terror campaign. Indeed, Abbas is merely repeating his performance of a year ago, when he exhorted Palestinians to prevent Jews “from entering the holy site in every way possible” — a summons to jihad that was broadcast repeatedly on Palestinian television and, Ms. Glick recounts, led to a similar spate of attacks on Israeli civilians.

To describe as utter nonsense the claim that Israel is trying to seize the Temple Mount would be an insult to utter nonsense.

Jordan invaded East Jerusalem in 1948. During the 19 years of Jordanian occupation that followed, the world did not seem to mind that Palestinians were not given their own state. Nor did it much notice the enforcement of sharia: thousands of Jews and Christians driven from their homes, Jews denied access to holy sites, centuries-old synagogues destroyed, and severe restrictions placed on Christians — including limits on visits to holy sites and a requirement that the Koran be taught in Christian schools.

In 1967, against Israel’s warnings, Jordan joined the Six-Day War of aggression waged by Arab-Islamic states, to disastrous effect for themselves. Their goal then, like the Islamist-Leftist goal now, was to annihilate the Jewish state — as Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser put it about a week before the war, “Our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel,” with which, he later added, “we will not accept any . . . coexistence.” It was the Arab-Islamic states, though, that were routed. Jordan’s foolish decision to attack West Jerusalem resulted in its being throttled and pushed out of East Jerusalem by the Israeli Defense Forces.

#share#The Old City’s iconic edifices are among the world’s holiest sites for Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Under Israeli control, the sites have been opened to tourists of all faiths. Yet, in deference to Islam’s notoriously hair-trigger sensitivities, Israel placed the Temple Mount under the management of a Muslim waqf (a Jordanian trust). Furthermore, the Israeli government prohibits Jews from praying at the Temple Mount, notwithstanding that it is widely regarded as Judaism’s most sacred site. Even a hint that this status quo may be altered suffices to trigger Palestinian terror attacks, so Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly and emphatically committed to maintaining it.

So what did the Obama administration do? As the violence raged, a top State Department spokesman, retired Navy admiral John Kirby, addressed the situation. “Well, certainly,” he claimed (the word is a verbal tic for this highly uncertain man), “the status quo has not been observed, which has led to a lot of the violence.”

This statement was patently untrue and, under the circumstances, recklessly irresponsible — so much so that Kirby ended up retracting his “certainly” statement on Twitter, burbling about how he “did not intend to suggest” what he had so clearly said — and what, as John Hinderaker notes, an Israeli security official described as the U.S. State Department’s “crazy, deceitful and baseless” comments.

Kirby’s retraction came only after he had poured more fuel on the fire by rolling out the moral-equivalence canard that State has honed through 20 years of blood-soaked “peace process.” Asked if he would assess blame for the violence, the spokesman responded, “certainly [uh-oh] individuals on both sides of this divide are — have proven capable of and in our view are guilty of acts of terror.”

Yup, those Israeli terrorists have only themselves to blame.

Keep in mind: This is the administration that labels blatant anti-American terrorism “violent extremism” and “workplace violence” because it cannot bring itself to attach the T-word to jihadist mass murderers. Yet Obama’s minions blithely applied the “terrorist” label to Israelis — thus echoing Abbas, Hamas, Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, al-Qaeda, ISIS, and Hezbollah.

Not surprisingly, Kirby declined to specify what Israeli “terrorist” attacks he had in mind. Perhaps he was referring to an apparent revenge attack by an Israeli who injured four men in stabbings last week — two Palestinians and two Israeli Bedouins it seems he mistook for Palestinians. Maybe Admiral Kirby preferred not to elaborate because, at a certain point, disgracefully drawn moral equivalency embarrasses even the shameless Obama administration. 
The Israeli government vigorously condemns and prosecutes criminals who attack civilians. By contrast, the Palestinian Authority willfully incites terrorism, sings paeans to terrorists in government-controlled media, and even names streets after them. In fact, the PA has joined a unity government with Hamas, a formally designated terrorist organization under American law. It is in the terrorism business.

Well, if moral equivalence is the order of the day, we should add that Kirby’s boss, John Kerry, was just as reprehensible as Kirby. In a speech at Harvard University, our redoubtable secretary of state opined that the Palestinian rampage was catalyzed by . . . wait for it . . . “a massive increase in settlements” purportedly built by Israelis over the past two years. This, he says, threatens — all together now — the “two-state solution.”

Of course, Israel is not massively increasing settlements; it is constructing additional housing on existing settlements for growing communities. Moreover, the fact that the settlements are unrelated to the ongoing violence is open and notorious: Abbas incited the attacks, he is quite proud of having done so, and he continues to lionize the attackers.
An outraged Netanyahu sized up the situation this way:
As far as settlements are concerned — this is not a result of a massive wave of settlements because there’s not been a massive wave of settlements. . . . And second, . . . the facts count. It is the very killers themselves who explain why they’re doing what they’re doing. They leave behind Facebook pages in which they cite and repeat Palestinian incitement about the al-Aqsa Mosque. All the lies that are said about us trying to bring down the mosque or change the status quo, they cite that as the reason for their activity. And you can’t fit a false template on reality. . . .  
This is what is driving this current wave. I’m sorry. The old models don’t apply. There’s a Palestinian attempt to inflame violence based on the false allegations that we are changing the Temple Mount, now on the false allegations that we’re executing innocent civilians. It doesn’t wash. And I expect our friends around the world to look at these facts, recognize them for what they are and, I think, to condemn these Palestinian attacks and to demand from Abu Mazen to stop the incitement and to restore calm.
Dream on, Mr. Prime Minister.

As to Kerry’s claim that settlement building provoked the violence, it was left to Kirby to rationalize that the secretary did not really mean what he said — an occupational hazard for Kerry spokesmen, but one Kirby “certainly” is the perfect guy to handle. The problem, alas, is that Abbas means exactly what he says: What Israel’s enemies want is the one-state solution.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a policy fellow at the National Review Institute. His latest book is Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment.





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