Schools Are Not Parents

Children in Virginia Beach are suspended from school for playing with an airsoft gun at home. 

By Charles C. W. Cooke

http://www.nationalreview.com/

September 26, 2013

The disquieting news that a pair of seventh-grade children, Khalid Caraballo and Aidan Clark, were suspended from school in Virginia Beach for the high crime of playing with an airsoft gun on their parents’ private property has been misinterpreted in almost all quarters as just another in the long line of the fringe skirmishes that make up America’s ongoing struggle over firearms. Yet insofar as guns are the issue at all in this case, they are but a secondary consideration; the detail, perhaps, but not the story.

In truth, the implications here are much wider and much more troubling, touching as they do on foundational questions about property rights, the remit of the public school system, and the nature of American civil society. Contrary to the now infamous beliefs of the likes of Hillary Clinton and Melissa Harris-Perry, children in America do not “belong” to the community — and nor would Americans be any better off if they did. In free societies, schools are not designed to serve as a mandatory means by which the Bismarckian state may seek to shape the young, but instead to act merely as a service to which parents can choose to send their kids for basic education if they so wish. This is to say that schools may well act in loco parentis, but they may not act as ipsi parentes.

Had the two children in Virginia Beach actually brought real guns into school, in clear violation of both the school’s explicit policy and of federal law, it seems that administrators would have been thoroughly within their rights to punish them. Likewise, if they had shown off in the classroom their airsoft guns, which, although basically toys, certainly do not belong in school. But the children did no such thing. Instead, they played with them on their parents’ property before school and then dispensed with them before they reached the bus.

It really should not need saying that parents who choose to give their children legal toy weapons on their own property are entirely within their rights to do so, nor that those parents should not live in fear of repercussions from the educational arm of the state. As Khalid’s mother, Solangel Caraballo, complained after the expulsion, “my son is my private property, he does not become the school’s property until he goes to the bus stop, gets on the bus, and goes to school.”

This is indisputably true and, as a result, it remains wholly immaterial whether the pair was expelled for this incident alone or, as the school claimed in its defense, it was the last among a long train of grievances. They should not have been punished at all. Why? Because, whatever one thinks of children’s playing with airsoft guns, the events for which they were reproved did not take place within the school’s jurisdiction. Indeed, even if the children involved had done something illegal outside of school — which they did not — we might ask if we honestly want schools getting involved in doling out secondary punishment for infractions that do not concern them. Should a school put a child in detention if he gets a ticket for jaywalking, for example?

Guns are relevant here inasmuch as they probably explain the degree of the hysteria, which one suspects would have been diminished had the two children been playing with something else. Axes and hatchets are also illegal in most schools, but I am struggling to imagine a faculty punishing a child for playing with a toy version of either in his own yard. Either way, the unlovely truth is that the children in this case were penalized publicly for refusing to behave in their private lives in a way of which the local government approves.

This, without putting too fine a point on it, is tyranny, and the underlying principle is a rotten one. If a child’s parents are unreconstructed racists and expose him to all sorts of bigotry at home, are we to assume that he can be punished even if he is a model student when within the grounds of the school? If not, why not? What about clothes? Should one be punished for wearing offensive or commercial-heavy clothing in one’s own yard if there is a possibility that other schoolchildren might see the offending words from the school bus? What about more conservative school districts that do not tolerate cross-dressing children in the classroom? If Charles dresses up as Charlotte for a day and roams around the lawn, would our progressive arbiters of taste be content if his school later punished him for it?

The British free-speech outrages that I have catalogued here over the past two years are a neat demonstration of what happens when a society begins to privilege the subjective “discomfort” of individual citizens over the universal principles of liberty and the rule of law. The city code in Virginia Beach holds that it is in no way illegal for children in Virginia Beach to own or fire airsoft guns on private property, affirming that “no person shall use a pneumatic gun except at approved shooting ranges or within private property.” And yet according to the website of TV station WAVY in Portsmouth, Va., the 911 caller who sparked the incident evidently believed that her sensibilities trumped both the laws of the state and the sacred distinction between the public and the private.

The caller told the dispatcher that she knew that the airsoft gun Khalid was using was “not a real one.” Nevertheless, she continued, “it makes people uncomfortable. I know that it makes me [uncomfortable], as a mom, to see a boy pointing a gun.” In response to this brazen waste of the police’s time, the cops contacted the school and set the ball rolling on the suspensions. The caller is, naturally, entirely within her rights to feel uncomfortable — I imagine that I would experience a similar feeling were I ever to engage her in conversation — but she is not entitled to involve the public authorities and ask them to intervene.

This could have been, to use the president’s words, “a teachable moment.” Authorities could have used the woman’s behavior kindly to remind the public that the police are not there to prevent citizens from feeling uncomfortable and that the schools do not exist to impose upon children the prevailing views of the local education board. That authorities chose to follow the opposite course in both instances portends ill for the citizens of Virginia Beach and for other jurisdictions across the country.

— Charles C. W. Cooke is a staff writer for National Review.

BOOK REVIEW: ‘Catastrophe 1914’ by Max Hastings

By James Srodes

http://www.washingtontimes.com

September 23, 2013

CATASTROPHE 1914: EUROPE GOES TO WAR
By Max Hastings
Alfred A. Knopf, $35, 640 pages

If you are as alarmed as I am over how the world’s political leadership — especially our own — seems to be a parade of imbeciles, then invest $35 and read about how the world slid into a similar global catastrophe almost exactly 99 years ago. While history does not repeat itself exactly, this book shows how close it can come.

The British editor and war correspondent Max Hastings over the past two decades has become the contemporary premier historian of 20th-century war. Most of his more than two-dozen books, such as his 2011 masterpiece, “Armageddon,” focus on World War II. But in this large and lavishly illustrated book, he examines just the final six months of a single year when the world descended from an idyllic, albeit unstable, age into the chasm of carnage and upheaval that is known as World War I.

The real strength of this story is how Mr. Hastings portrays the principal characters, not as stereotyped tyrants, greedy empire builders or mindless militarists, but rather as very real human beings with as many flaws as virtues. Most of all, they were prisoners of the times in which they lived and had to make decisions. In other words, a lot like the current crowd.

One of the disturbing echoes for today’s reader is how certain the leaders on both sides of the impending conflict were that the new technologies of warfare would enable them to triumph over their perceived enemies without the traditional cost of the lives of their troops or the destruction of their cities.

Just as today the terrorists who attack Western civilization with random bombing and we reply with drones and “surgical strikes,” so the European elites conjured quick victories conducted by such high-tech marvels as submarines, airships, machine guns and, yes, poison gas as a painless substitute for the brave but bloody infantry charges and cavalry sweeps of the past. In the end, high tech still meant “boots on the ground” — or boots in the mud — were inevitable.

One of the joys of this hefty book is Mr. Hastings‘ narrative skill. He provides the wide-lens approach to the broad political environment, but he spices the long view with attention to the quotidian details of his characters and their inner lives that makes for a very human story. In this, Mr. Hastings is a lot like the French Neo-Impressionist painter Georges Seurat whose pointillist arrangements of dots produced such evocative images.

Mr. Hastings rejects the long-held academic theory that Europe’s leaders were “sleepwalkers” who blundered into World War I by accident. Instead, he shows how all of the major players made what appeared at the time to be carefully thought-out and tough-minded strategic choices that offered considerable strategic gains at little risk. If this sounds familiar, it should.

Another point the author makes that has special resonance these days is that in the years before 1914, there had been an alarming shift in the global balance of power. The result was that the stability the European monarchies and their empires had enjoyed since peace was imposed after Napoleon’s defeat in 1815 was coming unstuck. The Ottoman Empire had imploded already. Throughout Europe and in Great Britain, the rise of Marxist socialism was roiling the working class and turning once-placid parliaments into centers of resistance.

The Hapsburgs of Austria-Hungary felt threatened by the emergence of the new nation of Serbia and the resulting threat of a pan-Slavic revival throughout the Balkans that would ally with Russia. The Romanovs in St. Petersburg had troubles of their own. The czar’s Pacific fleet had been destroyed a decade earlier by the upstart nation of Japan. There had been one revolution already in Russia in 1905 and another could come at any time.

Europe’s newest power nation — Wilhelmine Germany — had become an industrial miracle, but Kaiser Wilhelm felt surrounded by France on one side and Russia on the other. Besides, his industrial barons needed expanded access to raw materials and new markets. Otherwise, the fragile coalition of provinces that Bismarck had put together less than 50 years earlier could come unglued.

Britain, too, was distracted and uneasy. Parts of its vast empire were growing restive, nowhere more so than next door in Ireland, which was on the verge of rebellion. At home, disaffected workers in mines and mills went on strike so often and so violently that troops were increasingly used to force them back to work. The French were changing governments on an almost monthly basis and bet that their alliance with Russia would keep the Germans and Austrians in check.

The assassination of the Hapsburg heir-apparent, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife on June 28, need not have led to war. European royalty faced murder attempts by radicals as an occupational hazard, but the advisers to Emperor Franz Josef convinced him that a quick strike against the Serbs would put the Slavic threat to rest for a while. Call it a “surgical strike.”

In this, the Austrians were urged on by the kaiser, who saw the move as a way to increase Germany’s prestige. The czar responded to Serbia’s plea for help by ordering a troop mobilization — such a move in 1912 had frightened both the Germans and Austrians into silence; surely, it would work again. The French, to show solidarity with the czar, called their troops up, too. The British, who had let their army shrink while building up their navy, sent what troops they could to help the French. The rest is history.

Will the past be prologue? Get this book.

James Srodes’ latest book, “On Dupont Circle” (Counterpoint), has just been released in paperback.

Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/sep/23/book-review-catastrophe-1914/#ixzz2fzcF2vQd
Follow us: @washtimes on Twitter

Islamist War on Christians

Each time Islamists murder Christians, the media treat it as an isolated episode. 

By Lee Habeeb

http://www.nationalreview.com/

September 25, 2013

I'm waiting. I am a Lebanese Christian, and I am waiting. Waiting for CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, orTime magazine to really tell the story. To finally run this headline: “War on Christians Being Waged by Islamists.”

I’m waiting for someone in the mainstream media to admit the facts.

Matt Lauer and NBC News made headlines when they declared there was a civil war in Iraq in 2006, putting them at odds with the narrative coming from the Bush White House.

Islamists are persecuting and murdering Christians all over the world. Where in the world are Matt Lauer and NBC News? Do they not want to be at odds with the narrative coming from the current occupants of the White House, which downplays the atrocities being perpetrated by Muslims against Christians? Or to be at odds with Muslim groups like CAIR, which might accuse NBC of some kind of bias?

It is not an accident, the persecution and mass murder of Christians by Muslims. It is not episodic. It is by design. It is part of a master plan to destroy any competing narrative about God. To bully, threaten, and intimidate Christians into submission, or mass evacuation.

And it is not an accident that the media aren’t covering this very real war. If this were Christians murdering Muslims, blowing up mosques, and driving Muslims by the millions from their homes, we’d never stop hearing about that war.

My goodness, the media didn’t mind covering the fake war on women that Democrats accused Republicans of waging, while the very real war on women being waged in Islamic countries marched on unreported.

The media haven’t ignored the stories of Muslim violence against Christians altogether, to be fair. But they do treat the incidents as tragic isolated events perpetrated by a few nuts. They refuse to frame the mass murder and mass persecution as what they are: a war.

Don’t ask me if I’m exaggerating the claim. Ask the victims. Ask the Christians living in places that are predominantly Muslim. Ask the Christians living in refugee camps, the Christians running for their lives in too many parts of the world.

And ask the millions of American Christians who wonder why this story isn’t being framed as a war.

But just because the media aren’t covering the war, that doesn’t mean it’s not happening. It’s actually spreading to more countries and continents as Islamists become more emboldened.

Islamists are persecuting and murdering Christians not just in Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and the rest of the Middle East, but also in Pakistan and Kenya and too many other countries. And for doing nothing more than having different beliefs about God. They are persecuting Christians to let them know that they had better keep their most deeply held beliefs to themselves. Or move. Or else.

Here are some dispatches from the Middle East and beyond just in this past month.

This one is from Reuters this past weekend: “Suicide bombers kill 78 Christians outside Pakistani church.” Nearly 600 people had gone to one of Pakistan’s most historic churches Sunday to do what they’ve been doing there for 130 years: worship their God. A plaque on the wall had this inscription: “This church is erected to the Glory of God and dedicated to the memory of All Saints in the year of our Lord Jesus Christ 1883.” Words that don’t warm the heart of your average Islamist.

The attack occurred as worshipers left the service to receive free food being distributed on a lawn outside the church. That’s when the two explosions ripped through the crowd.

That was no accident. It was a deliberate choice meant to desecrate a holy place and a beautiful ritual. And to let Christians know there’s no place they’re safe. Not even a house of worship.

This isn’t the first time something like that has happened in Pakistan. Back in March, the New York Times reported that a Muslim mob swarmed through a Christian neighborhood, burning two churches and more than 100 houses. The story noted that Christians in the area were also increasingly the victims of Pakistan’s strict blasphemy laws.

Here’s another September headline, this one from the London Telegraph: “Christians flee Syria village that speaks the language of Jesus.” Islamist rebels, theTelegraph reported, had taken control of Maaloula, one of the oldest Christian towns in the world and one of the few remaining places where the language of Christ and his disciples is still spoken — Western Aramaic. The Christians started fleeing after regime forces failed to win Maaloula back from the Islamists.

“They shot and killed people,” one Christian man who has fled that small town told reporters. “I heard gunshots and then I saw three bodies lying in the middle of a street in the old quarters of the village. . . . Where is President Obama to see what has befallen us?”

Another Christian resident told this story: “I saw the militants grabbing five villagers and threatening them and saying, ‘Either you convert to Islam, or you will be beheaded.’”

And how about this headline from Voice of America? “Syrian Christians in Limbo, Fearing Repeat of Iraq.” VOA reported that the two-and-a-half-year civil war in Syria has forced hundreds of thousands of Christians to flee their homes, frightened of what might happen to them if Islamist radicals overthrow the Assad regime.

They have much to be afraid of, and need only look at what has happened in Iraq to get a glimpse of their own future. More than half of the 1.5 million Iraqi Christians have fled their home country since the fall of Saddam Hussein. Islamists drove them out with intimidation, violence, and murder (reports put that number at over 2,000). While Christians accounted for only 3 or 4 percent of Iraq’s pre-2003 population, they have accounted for 40 percent of its refugees, according to the U.N.

So it’s no surprise that 450,000 Syrian Christians have fled their homes. Some remain displaced inside Syria. An estimated 25,000 have sought refuge in Lebanon.

Those are just some of the stories. And that’s not counting Nina Shea’s tally of attacks on Christians and their churches in Egypt. The headline of her NRO story: “Egypt’s Christians Are Facing a Jihad.”

She documented a parade of horrible attacks on churches in Egypt — 58 and counting as of mid-August. And there have been many more attacks — lootings or burnings — on schools, monasteries, convents, and countless Christian homes and businesses. Even a local YMCA wasn’t spared.

“For the first time in 1,600 years, Sunday prayers were cancelled at the Orthodox Monastery of the Virgin Mary and Priest Ibram in Degla, south of Minya, because the three churches there were destroyed by a mob,” Shea wrote. “In Cairo, Franciscan nuns watched as the cross over the gate to their school was torn down and replaced by an al-Qaeda flag and the school itself torched.”

Small wonder Christians are fleeing their homes all over the Middle East.

And then we read the news from that mall in Nairobi, Kenya. At least 68 people were killed in the attack, and nearly 200 were wounded. And this we know for certain: The victims were attacked for one reason — they were not Muslim.

The account by one witness, Joshua Hakim, as reported in the Guardian, makes this clear. Hakim had stopped at the mall for a snack on his way to a rugby match. During a lull in the initial attack, the attackers called out in Swahili, a language widely spoken in Kenya and the rest of East Africa, for Muslims to identify themselves and leave.

Covering the Christian name on his ID with his thumb, Hakim approached one of the attackers and showed him the card. They let him go. What Hakim saw next was mind-numbing.

An Indian man came forward and identified himself as a Muslim. The assailants didn’t believe him, and hit him with a pop quiz. “What’s the name of Mohammed’s sister?” one of them asked, according to Hakim. The man didn’t know. “When he couldn’t answer,” Hakim continued, “they just shot him.”

Though there were non-Christians among the victims, the attack has added to concerns among minority Christians in Africa that they will be increasingly singled out for attacks by Islamic militants, including al-Shabab, which carried out the Nairobi attack.

In one of the bloodiest anti-Christian attacks on record in Africa, masked gunmen tossed grenades and sprayed bullets last summer at two churches in Garissa, a town in northern Kenya, killing at least 15 people and wounding many others.

Why the refusal on the media’s part to frame this as what it is, which is a war against Christians by Islamists?

Perhaps for the same reasons there has been abject silence on the war against women by these very same religious fanatics?

Is it fear? The media do indeed have reason to fear that groups like CAIR would soon be beating down their doors with accusations of anti-Muslim bias, boycotts, and worse.

Or is it just a blind spot? A case of bias so profound that they just can’t see this story for what it really is?

One thing’s for certain: All of this would make for one heck of a continuing story for a network like CNN. Covering the millions of Middle Eastern Christian refugees, many living in tents in refugee camps in Lebanon, would make for compelling television. Covering the increasing attacks on Christians by Muslims in Africa would make for compelling television, too.

It is certainly a story that millions of Christians in this country want covered. And many non-Christians as well.

Judging from the latest ratings, it might be a great way for CNN to do some bold reporting, and help its bottom line, too.

 — Lee Habeeb is the vice president of content at Salem Radio Network, which syndicates Bill Bennett, Mike Gallagher, Dennis Prager, Michael Medved, and Hugh Hewitt. He lives in Oxford, Miss., with his wife, Valerie, and daughter, Reagan.

The Hypocrisy Of Congress's Gold-Plated Health Care

Special subsidies for Hill workers trample on the Founders' code of equal application of the law.

By 
• WILLIAM BENNETT
 And 
• CHRISTOPHER BEACH

• http://online.wsj.com

• September 24, 2013

• 
  

As close observers of history and human nature, James Madison and the other Founders of the U.S. Constitution knew that the equal and unbiased application of the law to all people, especially elected officials, is essential to freedom and justice and one of the primary safeguards from authoritarianism and oppression by a ruling class.

And so, referring to the members of Congress, James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 57: "[T]hey can make no law which will not have its full operation on themselves and their friends, as well as on the great mass of the society."

Today, elected officials need to be reminded of these truths. Under pressure from Congress, the White House has carved out a special exemption for Congress and its staffers from ObamaCare—the law it recently deemed necessary for the entire country. No Republicans voted for ObamaCare. Yet it appears that some of them support the exemption President Obama approved on his own—so they would not have to go on record with a vote for or against it.

Enlarge Image

Corbis

This is the height of hypocrisy, and worse, a trampling of the Founders' code of equal application of the law. Having forced a health law on the American people, the White House and Democrats now seek to insulate themselves from the noxious portions of the law, and from the implementation struggles, indecision and uncertainty that many other Americans face today.

In other words, Congress's health-care premiums will not rise, but yours may. Members of Congress will be able to afford to keep their health-insurance plan, but you may be kicked off yours. They will be able to afford to keep their doctors, but you may have to find a new one.

Rep. Ron DeSantis, a Republican from Florida, recently put forward legislation—aptly named the James Madison Congressional Accountability Act—which would end the special exemption. In the Senate, Republicans David Vitter of Louisiana and Mike Enzi of Wyoming have also introduced legislation to end the exemption.

In response, several Democratic senators have reacted by drafting legislation that would punish anyone who votes for Sen. Vitter's plan by permanently blocking an exemption from them and their staff, even if Mr. Vitter's law doesn't pass. It doesn't get more vindictive and petty than that.

All this began when Congress passed the Affordable Care Act in 2010. It compelled Congress and its staff to participate in ObamaCare and its insurance exchanges like other Americans who don't have employer-provided plans. But in their haste and confusion over legislation so long that few even read it all, some members of Congress voted for the law without realizing that the final bill had no mention of the very generous premium contributions the government makes to federal employees as part of the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program.

Imagine the horror when these elected officials, who make $174,000 a year, realized that not only must they and their staffers be subject to inferior-quality health exchanges like the millions of ordinary Americans, but they might also have to shell out thousands of dollars for increased premiums if they exceed the subsidy income cutoff.

The White House, under heat from Congress, directed the Office of Personnel Management to carve out special rules so that the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program can continue to contribute to the health plans used by Congress and congressional staff.

Congress complains that without its special subsidies the Hill will suffer a "brain drain" as staffers leave their jobs because of increasing out-of-pocket insurance costs. Heaven forbid Congress suffer the same fate as private companies like UPS, which recently had to cut health-care benefits entirely for employees' spouses; or labor unions, like the 40,000 International Longshore and Warehouse Union workers who recently left the AFL-CIO citing as one factor ObamaCare's tax on their "Cadillac" health-care plans.

You'd think that the authors of ObamaCare would have been prepared to cope with its effects. Sen. Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, has already put money aside in his budget to help supplement his staff's health-care costs in anticipation of the new law. Other congressmen should have done the same.

Regardless of whether or not they support ObamaCare, members of Congress should refuse the special exemption. The law they enacted should apply to them.

Mr. Bennett, a former secretary of education, is a fellow of the Claremont Institute, and host of the nationally syndicated radio show, "Morning in America." Mr. Beach is the show's executive producer.

A version of this article appeared September 24, 2013, on page A19 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Hypocrisy Of Congress's Gold-Plated Health Care.

Jihad in Kenya

By Robert Spencer On September 23, 2013 @ 12:55 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 73 Comments

frontpagemag.com

As of Sunday afternoon, Islamic jihadists in an upscale Kenyan mall have murdered 59 people and wounded 175, and were still holding at least 30 hostages. All (or at least most) of the victims have been non-Muslims, for as witness Elijah Kamau reported: “The gunmen told Muslims to stand up and leave. They were safe, and non-Muslims would be targeted.”

The murderers didn’t just take the word of those who were trying to leave that they were Muslims. One of the hostages, a non-Muslim named Joshua Hakim, recounted that the jihadists were “firing indiscriminately, they shot a lot of people” – hence the possibility that some Muslims may have been hit. Hakim himself covered his Christian name on his ID card and showed it to the jihadists, who were apparently satisfied that he was Muslim. However, Hakim said, “Then an Indian man came forward and they said, ‘What is the name of Muhammad’s mother?’ When he couldn’t answer they just shot him.”

Non-Muslims who wish to prepare for the future of the United States and other non-Muslim nations may wish to commit to memory the factoid that Muhammad’s mother was Amina bint Wahb; however, the most noteworthy aspect of these jihadists’ selection process was that it forced the mainstream media, which generally ignores, denies, and/or obfuscates the Islamic identity and motives of jihad murderers, to report about the jihadists’ desire to kill only non-Muslims, not Muslims.

This was singular. Remember that before the Boston Marathon jihad murderers were identified, the mainstream media was full of hope that they had finally witnessed a violent terror attack by Bible-quoting Christian killers, as they had hoped for for years.

Media reports were full of speculation about how the bombings appeared to be the work of “right-wing extremists,” “Tea Partiers,” and the like. On the day of the bombings, Charles P. Pierce in Esquire was one of the first of many to caution people against thinking that the Marathon had just been the site of a jihad attack (“foreign terrorism”) and to try to link the bombings to the Right: “Obviously, nobody knows anything yet, but I would caution folks jumping to conclusions about foreign terrorism to remember that this is the official Patriots Day holiday in Massachusetts, celebrating the Battles at Lexington and Concord, and that the actual date (April 19) was of some significance to, among other people, Tim McVeigh, because he fancied himself a waterer of the tree of liberty and the like.”

Likewise, CNN’s national security analyst, Peter Bergen, speculated that if “conventional explosives” had been used, “that might be some other kind of right-wing extremists,” as opposed to Al Qaeda. He reminded viewers that “we’ve also seen other extremist groups attacking, right-wing groups, for instance trying to attack the Martin Luther King parade in Oregon in 2010.”

Most egregiously of all, David Sirota of Salon hoped that the bomber would turn out to be a “white American.”

Sirota, of course, got his wish. Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were indeed white – indeed, veritable Caucasians – and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was a naturalized American citizen.
The Tsarnaev brothers’ motivations quickly became clear. CNN reported a week after the bombings that “Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, wounded and held in a Boston hospital, has said his brother — who was killed early Friday — wanted to defend Islam from attack.”

Also, just before he was captured, when he was hiding out inside a pleasure boat, Dzhokhar wrote a long self-justification on the inside of the boat, including the line: “When you attack one Muslim, you attack all Muslims.”

Tamerlan also said, “I’m very religious.” His friend Donald Larking affirmed this: “Tamerlan Tsarnaev was my friend and we talked about everything from politics to religion. He was very, very religious. He believed that the Qur’an was the one true word and he loved it.” Tamerlan noted that he did not drink alcohol because Allah forbade it: “God said no alcohol,” and that his Italian girlfriend had converted to Islam, as his American wife did later. Even his name indicated the world from which he had come: Tamerlan Tsarnaev was apparently named for the warrior Tamerlane, the fourteenth-century conqueror of much of Asia, who was as noted for his Muslim piety as he was for his bloodlust: in 1398, he massacred 100,000 Hindus in Delhi, and killed 90,000 more people in Baghdad in 1401, all the while his devout adherence to the religion of Muhammad. This was the figure for whom Tamerlan Tsarnaev was named.

Combine all that with the fact that the Boston Marathon bombs were similar to IED’s that jihadis used in Afghanistan and Iraq, and that Faisal Shahzad, who tried to set off a jihad car bomb in Times Square in the summer of 2010, used a similar bomb, and that instructions for making such a bomb had been published in al-Qaeda’s Inspire magazine, and the motivations of the Tsarnaev brothers were abundantly clear.

Yet despite all this, the mainstream media continued to obfuscate the truth. On July 15, 2013, three months after the bombings and long after the Tsarnaev brothers’ motivations had become clear, PBS — without mentioning Dzhokhar’s statements or any other evidence of the bombers’ motivations – expressed hope that the surviving brother’s trial would “shed more light on the motive behind the bombing.”

NBC made only scant mention of the brothers’ connections to Islam in their profile of them, noting only eight paragraphs down in a lengthy story that “Tamerlan had a YouTube page that featured videos about Islamic radicalism.” CNN’s initial profile of the bombers never mentioned Islam at all, and suggested instead that the bombers had decided to blow up the Marathon because Americans had not extended to these two immigrants a welcoming hand, quoting a comment Tamerlan made on a social media site: “I don’t have a single American friend. I don’t understand them.”

When journalists deigned to examine the brothers’ Islamic identity, they downplayed it. The Atlantic ran a piece entitled “The Boston Bombers Were Muslim – So?” It complained that “we confuse categories – ‘male,’ ‘Muslim’ — with cause,” and cautioned against stereotyping all Muslims, painting them with a broad brush.

Meanwhile, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews had on an FBI agent who asked about the bombers, “Where was their inspiration? Where did they get the guidance?” To that Matthews  responded: “Why is that important? Why is that important to — is that important to prosecuting? I mean, what difference does it make why they did it if they did it? I’m being tough here.” Also on MSNBC, Martin Bashir lamented about how these Muslim bombers were “burying the ‘peace, compassion and kindness of the Qur’an.’”

The jihad murderers in Kenya, unbeknownst to themselves, did not allow for this kind of media obfuscation. With their single act of freeing Muslims and murdering non-Muslims, they did more to raise awareness of the nature and magnitude of the jihad threat than anyone in recent memory in this age of denial, obfuscation, and misinformation. The media couldn’t ignore their selection process. And now thousands of people know that they’ve been lied to, and lied to for years. We can only hope that these newly enlightened will be moved to act for justice before yet another jihad mass murderer makes his bloody arrival on the scene.

Photo: AP

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Rediscovering the American Archetype: Why Longmire is Good

Stephanie Janiczek  

http://clashdaily.com

September 22, 2013

While I was in the US visiting friends, family, paying respects to a late comrade and visiting my horse, I stumbled upon a revelation. Craig Johnson’s novels about Sheriff Walt Longmire were an undiscovered treasure and how I discovered them was through the A&E series based on the novels. In an America hungry to see something positive about its culture and heritage on TV, we now have the bounty that is Longmire.

The actor who plays Walt Longmire is an Australian named Robert Taylor. Many people might remember him for a part he played in the bizarre Matrix film. One would never guess the raw craggy Taylor is an Australian. When he is in character he does that laconic Walt Longmire’s accent so well, one would assume he’s as American as most of the shows viewers. He was born to play the role. I find it strange how there are very few American actors now who could wear Longmire’s beaten cowboy hat, faded jeans, that old brown suede jacket and boots. But the Aussie does not need to apologize. He plays the role as it was meant to be played.

Longmire’s life is tragic. His wife is dead. We discover, though she was suffering cancer, she was murdered by a meth addict. He carries that horror with him stoically but the emotions are there. In the first episode, when he informs a woman her husband is dead, we see a single tear fall and hit the top of his boot. He knows what the loss means and when it’s due to foul play its worse. The murder of Longmire’s wife is the cloud that hangs over every episode. Even if not talked about, the nuances in Longmire’s speech and expressions, ever so subtle, tell the viewer she’s not far out of his mind.

The other characters are well played by Katee Sackhoff, who plays Deputy Vic Morretti. She does a fine job capturing the aimless former Philadelphia Homicide detective. She’s a wounded woman but she has bravado and hides her issues with her husband well. There’s a secret in her past that we’re not sure about, but it’s intriguing.

Lou Diamond Phillips is Henry Standing Bear, a member of the Cheyenne tribe and Longmire’s best friend. Standing Bear advises Longmire, doesn’t take anything from him and is about the only person that can talk to Longmire plainly and honestly. Standing Bear is the voice of the old west, a spiritual native voice. He’s very earthy and he engages Longmire in a philosophical way and helps him see things as they really are.

Longmire’s daughter, Cady, played by Cassidy Freeman, is a rather more sophisticated character in the show and books. She’s a lawyer; she’s seen a lot of the world. She’s very close to her dad but not so close that she knows all of his secrets. Cassidy Freeman does a great job playing her low key. Cady has some of her dad’s laconic character, but not so much that his withholding how her mother really died made sense to her. They have conflict. There’s her need to be a grown up and his need to protect her. The big issue in their relationship isn’t just the lie about how Cady’s mother died, but her relationship with Branch Connolly, Longmire’s deputy and chief rival for the sheriff’s office.

Bailey Chase plays the mercurial Connolly and does a great job capturing his ambition. But unlike his own father, Branch Connolly has a conscious. There are lengths his father would go to that he would not. It all comes down to Cady and his relationship with her.

The land, Wyoming, plays a huge role in the stories. The landscape of Wyoming is as much a character as Longmire. A viewer realizes then the simple truth that if Wyoming’s landscape did not exist, Walt Longmire would not exist. The land made the character, as it did in reality the people who lived there, from the Natives to the explorers, pioneers and settlers. Walt Longmire is a living example of that craggy, roughhewn landscape with its wildness, its danger and its silence.

It has been a longtime since Americans have had a cultural archetype to cheer for. The western sometimes makes an appearance in a big way; Tombstone, and of course, Lonesome Dove come to mind as the best of the later films and series; however, as far as weekly series, we haven’t had a western for decades. A&E adapting Longmire to for TV took a chance Americans missed that western hero and they were right.

The thing about Longmire is this: He’s decent, and honorable. He is also very moral which is a revelation. He doesn’t care for cheaters, liar or corruption. His antagonists know that to. He speaks in hushed tones and but when he has to say something it sticks. When asked why he was so quiet in the first episode he replies, “I was thinking. I do that sometimes before I speak”. That’s a perfect example of the western hero. The cowboy, the law man. Longmire, like so many characters before him, takes his cues from the little things, an Owl on a branch, or a Congress of Ravens. He sees things that his deputies cannot see because they are unable to separate themselves from their technology, and other modern distractions.

One can say Hollywood got one right. A character Americans can appreciate and cheer for without being insulted; or the usual wait for the sucker-punch where values and American pride will be attacked. We have a hero that defines something we have lost in our culture, and that hero, the cowboy who is just and decent, recaptures what we have lost. If you want a show to watch, to be entertained and to cheer for the good guys, Longmire’s your show.

Read more at http://clashdaily.com/2013/09/rediscovering-american-archetype-longmire-good/#vwSbOwYqhVzMzKCA.99

American Banana Republic

The decay of a free society doesn’t happen overnight, but we’re getting there. 

By Mark Steyn

http://www.nationalreview.com/

September 20, 2013

"This is the United States of America,” declared President Obama to the burghers of Liberty, Mo., on Friday. “We’re not some banana republic.”

He was talking about the Annual Raising of the Debt Ceiling, which glorious American tradition seems to come round earlier every year. “This is not a deadbeat nation,” President Obama continued. “We don’t run out on our tab.” True. But we don’t pay it off either. We just keep running it up, ever higher. And every time the bartender says, “Mebbe you’ve had enough, pal,” we protest, “Jush another couple trillion for the road. Set ’em up, Joe.” And he gives you that look that kinda says he wishes you’d run out on your tab back when it was $23.68.

Still, Obama is right. We’re not a banana republic, if only because the debt of banana republics is denominated in a currency other than their own — i.e., the U.S. dollar. When you’re the guys who print the global currency, you can run up debts undreamt of by your average generalissimo. As Obama explained in another of his recent speeches, “Raising the debt ceiling, which has been done over a hundred times, does not increase our debt.” I won’t even pretend to know what he and his speechwriters meant by that one, but the fact that raising the debt ceiling “has been done over a hundred times” does suggest that spending more than it takes in is now a permanent feature of American government. And no one has plans to do anything about it. Which is certainly banana republic-esque.

Is all this spending necessary? Every day, the foot-of-page-37 news stories reveal government programs it would never occur to your dimestore caudillo to blow money on. On Thursday, it was the Food and Drug Administration blowing just shy of $200 grand to find out whether its Twitter and Facebook presence is “well-received.” A fifth of a million dollars isn’t even a rounding error in most departmental budgets, so nobody cares. But the FDA is one of those sclerotic American institutions that has near to entirely seized up. In October 1920, it occurred to an Ontario doctor called Frederick Banting that insulin might be isolated and purified and used to treat diabetes; by January 1923, Eli Lilly & Co were selling insulin to American pharmacies: A little over two years from concept to market. Now the FDA adds at least half-a-decade to the process, and your chances of making it through are far slimmer: As recently as the late Nineties, they were approving 157 new drugs per half-decade. Today it’s less than half that.

But they’ve got $182,000 to splash around on finding out whether people really like them on Facebook, or they’re just saying that. So they’ve given the dough to a company run by Dan Beckmann, a former “new media aide” to President Obama. That has the whiff of the banana republic about it, too.

The National Parks Service, which I had carelessly assumed was the service responsible for running national parks, has been making videos on Muslim women’s rights: “Islam gave women a whole bunch of rights that Western women acquired later in the 19th and 20th centuries, and we’ve had these rights since the seventh century,” explains a lady from AnNur Islamic School in Schenectady at the National Park Service website, nps.gov. Fascinating stuff, no doubt. But what’s it to do with national parks? Maybe the rangers could pay Dan Beckmann a quarter-million bucks to look into whether the National Parks’ Islamic outreach is using social media as effectively as it might.

Where do you go to get a piece of this action? As the old saying goes, bank robbers rob banks because that’s where the money is. But the smart guys rob taxpayers because that’s where the big money is. According to the Census Bureau’s latest “American Community Survey,” between 2000 and 2012 the nation’s median household income dropped 6.6 percent. Yet in the District of Columbia median household income rose 23.3 percent. According to a 2010 survey, seven of the nation’s ten wealthiest counties are in the Washington commuter belt. Many capital cities have prosperous suburbs — London, Paris, Rome — because those cities are also the capitals of enterprise, finance, and showbiz. But Washington does nothing but government, and it gets richer even as Americans get poorer. That’s very banana republic, too: Proximity to state power is now the best way to make money. Once upon a time Americans found fast-running brooks and there built mills to access the water that kept the wheels turning. But today the ambitious man finds a big money-no-object bureaucracy that likes to splash the cash around and there builds his lobbying group or consultancy or social media optimization strategy group.

The CEO of Panera Bread, as some kind of do-gooder awareness-raising shtick, is currently attempting to live on food stamps, and not finding it easy. But being dependent on government handouts isn’t supposed to be easy. Instead of trying life at the bottom, why doesn’t he try life in the middle? In 2012, the top 10 percent were taking home 50.4 percent of the nation’s income. That’s an all-time record, beating out the 49 percent they were taking just before the 1929 market crash. With government redistributing more money than ever before, we’ve mysteriously wound up with greater income inequality than ever before. Across the country, “middle-class” Americans have accumulated a trillion dollars in college debt in order to live a less comfortable life than their high-school-educated parents and grandparents did in the Fifties and Sixties. That’s banana republic, too: no middle class, but only a government elite and its cronies, and a big dysfunctional mass underneath, with very little social mobility between the two.

Like to change that? Maybe advocate for less government spending? Hey, Lois Lerner’s IRS has got an audit with your name on it. The tax collectors of the United States treat you differently according to your political beliefs. That’s pure banana republic, but no one seems to mind very much. This week it emerged that senior Treasury officials, up to and including Turbotax Timmy Geithner, knew what was going on at least as early as spring 2012. But no one seems to mind very much. In the words of an insouciant headline writer at Government Executive, “the magazine for senior federal bureaucrats” (seriously), back in May:

“The Vast Majority of IRS Employees Aren’t Corrupt”

So, if the vast majority aren’t, what proportion is corrupt? Thirty-eight percent? Thirty-three? Twenty-seven? And that’s the good news? The IRS is not only institutionally corrupt, it’s corrupt in the service of one political party. That’s Banana Republic 101.

What comes next? Government officials present in Benghazi during last year’s slaughter have been warned not to make themselves available to congressional inquiry. CNN obtained one e-mail spelling out the stakes to CIA employees: “You don’t jeopardize yourself, you jeopardize your family as well.”

“That’s all very ominous,” wrote my colleague Jonah Goldberg the other day, perhaps a little too airily for my taste. I’d rank it somewhere north of “ominous.”  

“Banana republic” is an American coinage — by O. Henry, a century ago, for a series of stories set in the fictional tropical polity of Anchuria. But a banana republic doesn’t happen overnight; it’s a sensibility, and it’s difficult to mark the precise point at which a free society decays into something less respectable. Pace Obama, ever swelling debt, contracts for cronies, a self-enriching bureaucracy, a shrinking middle class preyed on by corrupt tax collectors, and thuggish threats against anyone who disagrees with you put you pretty far down the banana-strewn path.

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2013 Mark Steyn