A 'Duty to Hate Britain'

by Douglas Murray
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12096/britain-ahmed-hassan
March 27, 2018


CCTV of Ahmed Hassan after Parsons Green explosions

Last week, Ahmed Hassan was sentenced to a minimum term of 34 years in prison. The previous September, he had stepped onto the District line of the London Underground and left a homemade bomb on the train. At Parson's Green tube station, the device detonated. Fortunately for the commuters, which included many children on their way to school, only the detonator of the bomb went off. On its own, it created a fireball which ran along the roof of the carriage, singeing the hair of many passengers and causing an immediate stampede away from the blast and a number of injuries. The main explosive material the of bomb, however, which was packed with shrapnel, including bolts, nails and knives, failed to detonate. Had it done so, the United Kingdom would have seen -- for the fourth time in a few months -- dozens more dead victims, including school children, carried out in body bags.

All this happened because of a young man of Iraqi origin, who should never have been in the UK in the first place. Hassan moved into Europe among the migrant flows of 2015. He ended up at the "Jungle" migrant camp in Calais -- a place to which celebrities in the UK consistently go in order to implore the British people to take in the people who are living there. A particular cry of these celebrities (figures such as the actress Juliet Stevenson) is that the "child migrants" in particular should be taken in by the UK. The call is flawed, not least, in that it suggests that anybody who breaks the existing asylum procedures of the European Union and simply pushes their way to the front of the queue is somebody who will be rewarded for this act.

At the Calais camp, Hassan did not bother to wait for the British government to invite him. Most likely aided by the anti-borders NGOs who work in the camp, Hassan found out how to get around the system. In 2015, smuggled in the back of a lorry, Hassan arrived in the UK. If he had been a genuine asylum seeker, he could have -- and should have (under the terms of the Dublin Treaty) -- applied for asylum in the first European country where he set foot. Certainly, if there had been any legitimate reason for him to gain asylum, there was no reason why he should not have applied for asylum in France.

Once he arrived in the UK, it took some time for the British authorities to catch up with him. When they eventually did, and he was questioned by Home Office officials, he told them he had been a member of ISIS and had been trained by the group to kill.

He claimed to be 16 years old, although the authorities believed he was probably older. The open-borders NGOs are able to advise people in Calais and elsewhere that claiming to be a "child migrant" increases the likelihood of being able to stay.
A week later, housed at a Barnado's children's home, he was seen by a member of the staff looking up ISIS videos on his phone, and later, to be listening to extremist songs (nasheed).

Nevertheless, the British authorities helped him find a school. At Brooklands College, a teacher observed him reading a WhatsApp message which said "IS has accepted your donation." He told a teacher that it was his "duty to hate Britain". The state also placed him with a foster family, whom they failed to inform about his ISIS past.

Every effort continued to be made for this young man who had broken into the country. At Brooklands College in July 2017, he was even awarded a prize as "student of the year". Hassan used the £20 Amazon voucher he received to purchase the first of the ingredients he needed to build his bomb.

At every stage, the British state helped Hassan in every way it could. It took in a person who had no right to be in the country -- who indeed had entered the country illegally. It housed him, fed him, educated him and encouraged him. He repaid this by building a bomb at the home of his foster parents and trying to bring carnage to the rush-hour commuters on the London Underground.

Now that Hassan has been tried, convicted and sentenced for his crime, the British people may be surprised at the priorities of the authorities who are meant to keep them safe. But at the final stage of that process, the state produced one final insult against the people of the country.

This is how The Honourable Mr Justice Haddon-Cave concluded his sentencing on March 23:

Finally, Ahmed Hassan, let me say this to you. You will have plenty of time to study the Qur'an in prison in the years to come. You should understand that the Qur'an is a book of peace; Islam is a religion of peace. The Qur'an and Islam forbid anything extreme, including extremism in religion. Islam forbids breaking the "law of the land" where one is living or is a guest. Islam forbids terrorism (hiraba). The Qur'an and the Sunna provide that the crime of perpetrating terror to "cause corruption in the land" is one of the most severe crimes in Islam. So it is in the law of the United Kingdom. You have, therefore, received the most severe of sentences under the law of this land. You have violated the Qur'an and Islam by your actions, as well as the law of all civilized people. It is to be hoped that you will come to realise this one day. Please go with the officers.

First, what business is it of a judge to make such a statement? Why should Mr Justice Haddon-Cave think that being a judge in a British court also permits him to expound on Islamic theology? And what if he is wrong in his theological pronouncements? What if it is not the case that Islam "forbids anything extreme"? What if a lot of British subjects who are not Muslims discover that this judge is telling an untruth? What if he is wrong, and that the cure for a jihadist like Ahmed Hassan is not in fact confinement with the Quran and Sunna?

Mr Justice Haddon-Cave seems almost to suggest that "violating" the law of the Quran and Islam is an offense in itself -- one worth noting alongside the crime of putting a bomb on a packed commuter train. That his pronouncement was superfluous is obvious. That it is incorrect is at least equally so. But worst is that it will further erode the belief of the citizenry in their lawmakers.

In his sorry and violent life, Ahmed Hassan had already proven the incompetency of Britain's border-police and the ignorance or naivety of its Home Office officials. His final gift to the state that allowed him in was to bring about the over-reach -- and presumption and lack of awareness -- of its judiciary.

Douglas Murray, British author, commentator and public affairs analyst, is based in London, England. His latest book, an international best-seller, is "The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam."

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Standing Up in France

One hundred French intellectuals make a public declaration against Islamist totalitarianism.

Ibn Warraq

https://www.city-journal.org/html/standing-france-15789.html

March 25, 2018

A French soldier enforcing the Vigipirate plan, France's national security alert system, is pictured on November 18, 2015 in Paris in front of the Eiffel Tower, which is illuminated with the colors of the French national flag in tribute to the victims of the November 13 Paris terror attacks in which some 129 people were killed. / AFP / JOEL SAGET (Photo credit should read JOEL SAGET/AFP/Getty Images) 

On Friday, March 23, while he screamed “Allahu Akbar,” Redouan Lakdim killed three people in a supermarket in Southwestern France, where he had just taken hostages. First known to the police as a drug dealer, more recently Lakdim became known as a jihadi, an Islamic militant who proclaimed his allegiance to ISIS. He had demanded the release of Salah Abdeslam, the prime surviving suspect in the Islamic State attacks that killed 130 people in Paris in 2015. Yet he was allowed to circulate freely. Why?

All too often, the first reaction to such acts of Islamic terrorism is not horror at the barbaric acts and compassion for the victims, but an obsessive fear that “Islamophobia” will increase. In France, editorials in liberal outlets will once again warn against “conflation” (in French, the expression is “pas d’amalgam”), by which is meant that there should be no automatic identification of acts of terrorism with Islam. Islam is a religion of peace, we are instructed, and terrorists know nothing about true Islam. Liberal publications deny the evidence of the Koranic texts, Islamic principles, and the 1,400- year history of jihadi terrorism, which began with the Prophet Muhammad himself. They also ignore the writings of “modern” jihadists such as Sayyid Qutb, Abdullah Azzam, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the Ayatollah Khomeini, which provide ample justification for holding Islam itself responsible for acts of terror.

Unfortunately, “Islamophobia” has now entered the dictionaries of all modern languages. It is at once a way to deflect any criticism or critical examination of Islam, on the one hand, and, on the other, a means for apologists to play victim. It is also no less than an attempt to stifle the fundamental principles of democracy and one of the glories of Western civilization—freedom of thought and expression. By demanding separate and privileged treatment, Islamists undermine another fundamental Western achievement—the concept of equality before the law, irrespective of race, gender, or religion. Islamists argue that they have been humiliated and victimized by French secularism; thus, their demand that we accept their Islamic laws, which they claim comes from God himself, but which reduce women and non-Muslims to an inferior status. If they prevail, the Islamists will undermine the principle that, more than any other, has resulted in unprecedented peace and prosperity in the West: the separation of state and religion, state and church, or state and mosque.

This brings us to the recent declaration by 100 French intellectuals against Islamist totalitarianism, published in the Paris daily newspaper Le Figaro. “We want to live in a world where no religion lays down the law,” it concludes. Some of the signatories have personal experience of the pernicious effects of new laws designed to protect the tender sensibilities of Muslims, and only Muslims. For example, award-winning historian Georges Bensoussan was acquitted in March 2017 of charges of incitement against Muslims; he had quoted an Algerian scholar who said that “in French Arab families, babies suckle anti-Semitism with their mother’s milk.” Another signatory, Mohamed Louizi, is being taken to court for defamation for having implied that French president Emmanuel Macron had been politically hostage to the Islamist vote. Louizi has an intimate knowledge of Islamists, since he’s a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Several other signers are also ex-Muslims, such as Walid al-Husseini, Boualem Sansal, and myself. We, too, have firsthand knowledge of Islamist ideology.  We value the freedom of religion and from religion, which includes leaving or changing one’s faith, or not having any faith. Female signatories, such as Fatiha Boudjahlat and Fawzia Zouari, underline the need to defend women’s freedom to live their lives without interference from fundamentalists. Many signers are distinguished philosophers—Alain Finkielkraut, Luc Ferry, Renée Fregosi, Vincent Descombres, Rémi Brague, Philippe de Lara, Jean-Pierre Le Goff, Damien le Guay, and Yves-Charles Zarka—while others are historians, essayists (Pascal Bruckner), and professors. All are dedicated to secularism and the firm separation of state and religion; all, of course, value the free discussion of ideas, wherever it may lead.

Our worries are founded on facts, not irrational fears. Well-known Islamologist Gilles Kepel has remarked upon the inexorable rise of Islamist propaganda and proselytism in universities, where the ideas of the Salafists and Muslim Brotherhood are often promoted. Thankfully, French authorities have recently shut down 20 mosques and prayer halls that they found to be preaching radical Islamist ideology—hatred of non-Muslims and advocacy of jihad.

The French suburbs are rife with Islamic militants proselytizing among the young, imposing sharia on all (especially women), segregating swimming pools, demanding halal food, and so on. Incidents of anti-Semitism in France have multiplied dramatically, almost all of them perpetrated by Muslims. But if I were to say so in France, I might well be prosecuted for “Islamophobia.”

Ibn Warraq is the author, most recently, of The Islam in Islamic Terrorism.

TRUMP’S CHOICE OF BOLTON REFLECTS AMERICAN GREATNESS

The political warriors from the Freedom Center’s events are Trump’s newest fighters.

Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/

March 23, 2018

Fifteen years ago, North Korea banned John Bolton from the useless nuclear talks. “Such human scum and bloodsucker is not entitled to take part in the talks,” its foreign ministry declared.

North Korea had freaked out because then Undersecretary of State Bolton had called Kim Jong Il, a “tyrannical dictator” and life in the socialist hellhole, a “hellish nightmare”.

Bolton would later describe that as one of his proudest moments.

Back then, North Korea had defended the move by pointing out that Bolton’s views differed "from the recent remarks of the U.S. president". And so it could claim that he didn’t represent the United States.

Fifteen years later the game has changed. Kim Jong Il is dead and the President of the United States has called his successor, “little rocket man”, a “madman” and “short and fat”.

John Bolton very definitely does represent the views of this president.

And to prove it, President Trump has appointed him as his new National Security Adviser.

Bolton knew then that appeasing the North Korean dictatorship would never work. Bill Clinton’s bad North Korean deal paved the way for the even worse Iran deal. It took a decade and a half for an administration to actually listen to him. And his appointment sends a clear signal to North Korea.

The media had been buzzing that McMaster would be replaced by a more conciliatory figure on North Korea. The establishment even had their man all lined up. Trump also sent them a clear message.

President Trump is tired of the failed establishment foreign policy of appeasement. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was replaced over the Iran deal. The new lineup of Pompeo heading the State Department and Bolton cleaning house at the NSC shows Trump is ready to get tough on the Mullahs and the Norks.

McMaster spent his tenure at the National Security Council ruthlessly forcing out Trump supporters while protecting Obama holdovers. His obstructionism enabled the leakers undermining the president. He refused to call out Islam, put a Hamas apologist on the Israel desk, and blocked the investigations of the eavesdropping and unmasking efforts aimed at the future president by Obama associates.

Now that’s over and done with.  And the worst of the Democrats are already ranting and raving.

Rep. Keith Ellison, Rep. Adam  Schiff, Rep. Gerry Connolly, Rep. Betty McCollum and many other lefties don’t want Bolton. Ellison called him, “dangerous”, Rep. Boyle dubbed him a “dangerous radical”, Rep. Bass accused him of “peddling hatred of Muslims”, and Rep. Don Beyer wailed, "Trump desperately needs tempered and measured voices around him, Bolton is neither of those things."

John Bolton is actually tempered and measured. He’s been tempered by his struggles against a bureaucracy more interested in protecting careerists and their agendas than defending America. And he has been measured by the President of the United States as a voice he wants around him.

Bolton is also a voice that the Freedom Center and its supporters have wanted around them.

The new National Security Adviser was a favorite speaker at Freedom Center events from California to Texas to Florida. From the Restoration Weekend to the Wednesday Morning Club, he was always brimming with confidence in this country’s strength and outrage at the betrayals of her leaders.

At a 2014 Restoration Weekend, Bolton powerfully indicted Obama for sending a "signal of American weakness" and urged the rise of a presidential candidate who would understand that, "a strong America is the best way to protect our interests and preserve the peace". Now that has finally come to pass.

Bolton is not the only familiar face from the Center in this administration. A Washington Post hit piece from last year bitterly complained that, “Since its formation in 1988, the Freedom Center has helped cultivate a generation of political warriors seeking to upend the Washington establishment. These warriors include some of the most powerful and influential figures in the Trump administration: Attorney General Sessions, senior policy adviser (Stephen) Miller.” And more are joining their ranks.

Larry Kudlow, the new White House economic adviser, has known David Horowitz since the founding of the Freedom Center and is a former member of the Center’s board. He joins Sessions, an Annie Taylor award recipient from the Center, Miller and now Bolton.

And they’re not alone.

Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke spoke at a Wednesday Morning Club.

Rep. Jim Bridenstine was nominated to head NASA. Senator Patty Murray attacked him for his appearances at "conferences at the David Horowitz Freedom Center". Rep. Bridenstine was indeed a popular Restoration Weekend speaker whose 2016 speech was about why Trump won.

“What other candidate would have talked about how Hillary Clinton attempted to silence and shame the victims of Bill Clinton?  What other candidate would have brought up the fact that Hillary Clinton said that they were part of a vast right-wing conspiracy?” he asked.

And which other president would have made Bolton his National Security Advisor? Which other president would have picked Sessions, Miller, Kudlow, Zinke, Bridenstine and so many others?

It takes a warrior to pick the political warriors who want to fight to win. And who understand that standing up to bullies, thugs and tyrants is less likely to lead to a fight than surrendering to them.

Bolton and Kudlow are part of a vigorous new wave of picks by President Trump. They’re part of his strategy to remake the administration to better reflect his vision, his strategy and his message.

The David Horowitz Freedom Center has spent decades waiting for a man who would lead the fight. And it’s happy to see many of the political warriors who have rallied the troops at its weekends, who lifted spirits in the years when things were hard and convinced us that victory was on the way, in his army.

The fight is what it has always been: to leave America greater, happier, more prosperous, stronger and more secure than it has been in generations.  There was a time when this vision was on the decline. There was a time when malaise and appeasement ruled the day. We were told that we had to cringe before dictators, accept the impoverishment of our economy and the narrowing of our horizons.

President Trump rejected that defeatism. As President Reagan had rejected it before him. And Bolton, Kudlow and Bridenstine represent vital elements of that rejection of despair and embrace of hope.

The common qualities that they share are optimism, determination and a willingness to fight.

Those are also the defining qualities of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, of Front Page Magazine, and of you, our readers, the men and women whose comments enlighten me and whom I have met in person at countless Freedom Center events, including our annual Restoration Weekend.

We believe that America can be great again. And we are willing to fight for it.

There was a time when that was a minority view. Now it’s becoming the majority consensus. There was a time when many took it for granted that we shouldn’t upset dictators or go big on the economy.

Fifteen years ago, North Korea got its way. That time is over.

President Trump’s choice sent that message to North Korea. But it also sent it to the appeasement lobby. The era of American weakness is over. The age of American greatness has begun.

Jordan Peterson Saves the World

The professor with the massive social following isn't just doing pop psychology. He's trying to rebuild the West's moral order.


By TANNER GREER
http://www.weeklystandard.com/jordan-peterson-saves-the-world/article/2012010#!
March 22, 2018

The spectacular rise of Jordan Peterson has caught much of the world flat-footed. Discussions of the psychology professor from the University of Toronto tend to focus on the enormous popular movement his lectures have spawned, rather than the actual ideas presented in the lectures themselves. As a result, no one seems to know who the “real” Jordan Peterson is.

In a way, this is understandable. Peterson is a man of several personae. One Peterson is the inventor of an innovative and compelling neuropsychological model of human behavior. This is the Peterson presented in a dozen research articles reviewed and published by his academic peers.

Another Peterson dispenses pieces of practical advice and dispels progressive dogmas with a quiet, fatherly charisma. This is the Peterson made famous inpodcasts, television interviews, and his best selling self-help book.

But there is a third Peterson, the Peterson of his debut book, Maps of Meaning, and the annual 40-hour long lecture series that shares this book’s name. This Peterson is the bridge between the other two, the key to understanding both his agitations as a culture warrior and his work as an academic psychologist. This is also the Peterson that inspires a religious sense of devotion among his followers. They are devoted not just to the man, but to his project.

And this project is grand. It is nothing less than the revitalization of Western civilization itself.

* * *

Left or right, European or American, the one thing Westerners seem to agree on is that the Western model is failing. (See Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Has Failed, the biggest seller in political philosophy this year.) We are living through a crisis of faith in the liberal order. This crisis in political ideals comes on top of another crisis of faith—the crisis of faith, itself.

With declining faith in religious institutions and the collapse of trust in secular ones, the West is left bereft of shared moral bearings. Social order and community cohesion are either slowly dying or already dead (depending on your level of optimism). Some collective myths maintain the vestiges of cultural authority, but they are few and may not outlast the churnings of the current age.

This is the starting point of Peterson’s project. In essence, he asks: Is it possible to build up a new sense of moral order in a society that has stopped believing in—as he calls it—“the metaphysical ethic” of its youth?

Peterson insists that this undertaking is possible. The totalitarian regimes of the 20th century are proof that new moral systems can be created and entire peoples can be convinced—or coerced—into believing in them. But those creations came at terrible cost. In his books and lectures, Peterson returns again and again to moments of horror and torture culled from the history of these regimes. He reads scenes from Gulag Archipelago or The Rape of Nanking to shocked students and asks: How do we account for this behavior? What makes someone act like that? Beneath it all is an unstated question: Without the guidestar of traditional ethical systems, how do we ensure that no post-modern society creates a “moral order” like that again?

Peterson suggests that Nietzsche foresaw the problem of our times when he declared that God was dead. From this starting point, Nietzsche hoped mankind might realize a new, shinier moral order absent all of the baggage of the “slave morality” he attributed to Christian ethics. Peterson agrees with Nietzsche’s diagnosis, but sees his solution to be fundamentally mistaken: By his lights, the path to totalitarian terror begins with this Nietzschean impulse to bend human society to the whims of human will.

Peterson takes great pains to prove that humans cannot simply “be” whatever they will themselves to become. We are hardwired to act and feel in certain ways. In his Maps of Meaning lectures and book special attention is paid to the neuroscience of emotion and the role emotions play in regulating human behavior. As Peterson tells it, humans, like all animals with relatively advanced brains, create mental maps of the world they live in. The correspondence between the map we make in our heads and the reality we live on the ground in is a prerequisite for emotional stability.

But the maps humans make are more complex than the maps a rat or cat might have in its head, for we endow our surroundings with social and sacred meanings. More important still, we must negotiate our maps with other humans. Customs, rituals, and hierarchies are, in Peterson’s view, the tools humans use to keep our shared maps of the world stable—and by extension, emotionally satisfying.

One implication of all this is that certain human behaviors—especially those related to creativity or the emotional drive to enact social narratives—are hardwired into the brain. They are just as much a part of human nature as the sex drive.

Peterson argues that the catastrophic mistake of the totalitarians lies here: They assumed that all nature, including human nature, could be subjected to dictates of human will. They never understood how much of human nature was innate and unmalleable. Peterson describes totalitarian movements a little bit like how nutritionists describe sugary treats: modern inventions that take the impulses of our evolutionary heritage to unhealthy extremes.

As he sees it, the totalitarians did create narratives and rituals to regulate behavior; they were excellent myth makers, and their rationally-constructed myths were wonderfully adapted to hijack the emotional drivers of the human brain. But in the end the gap between the mental map the totalitarians wished to impose on society and the actual society they lived in was simply too wide. It was their increasingly frantic attempts to force the territory to match the map that led to their acts of incredible brutality and destruction.

For Peterson, the totalitarian movements are a cautionary tale about the limits of a rationalist social order built from first principles. But Peterson also postulates that humans need a set of transcendent myths, narratives, and rituals to live an emotionally healthy life. If a metaphysical ethic cannot be rationally built from first principles, then where can it be found?

Peterson suggests that the guiding myths of the future will be found where they always were: in the great books, religious texts, and rituals of the human past. If we can admit that the ancients may have intuitively grasped aspects of human psychology that we are only just starting to discover through scientific methods, then there is a treasure hoard of material to draw from. As Peterson states in Maps of Meaning:

Careful comparative analysis of this great body of religious philosophy might allow us to provisionally determine the nature of essential human motivation and morality—if we were willing to admit our ignorance, and take the risk. Accurate specification of underlying mythological commonalities might comprise the first developmental stage in the conscious evolution of a truly universal system of morality.

Thus Peterson’s lectures on Biblical stories and the large passages of Biblical exegesis in Twelve Rules for Life. Peterson does not read the Bible as the living word of a Living God, but as a series of archetypes that provide a pattern of order and structure for human life. The appeal this has to millennials who have lost faith in God but still yearn for order and belonging probably shouldn’t be surprising. Peterson’s aim is to take such myths and stories and reformat them as rituals that can be re-enacted in the modern day: the building blocks of a new moral order.

* * *

This is but a partial sketch of a much more complex thesis, a set of interlocking ideas that takes Peterson 40 hours of lectures and 300 pages full of diagrams and dense prose to lay out in full. The thumbnail is sufficient, however, to grasp both the scope of Peterson’s ambition and the myopia of his critics.

Yes, it’s true that some elements of Peterson’s quest to totalitarian-proof the Western world are shallow. His analysis of world mythology and religious imagery is built almost entirely on the writings of Carl Jung and Mircea Eliade. This a painfully limited foundation for the task at hand. And yes, there are a hundred ways one might pick at Peterson’s civilization-revitalization project. What’s striking, though is that most of Peterson’s critics don’t even seem to realize that this project exists. The liberal commentariat’s collective horror with Peterson seems instead to be rooted in an instinctive revulsion for his followers. “Does it bother you, that your audience is predominantly male?” journalist Cathy Newman asks Peterson, as if a message that appealed to young men is inherently sinful.

But is it so surprising that young men have found inspiration in Peterson’s musings? They are heirs to a faith tradition they no longer believe in. They are citizens of communities who have lost their cohesion. They are members of a generation trained to be cynical but exhorted since birth to somehow find a life full of “meaning.” Peterson has compassion for these dispossessed and recognizes that bad things happen to societies full of brooding, listless, and hollow men.

Peterson has critics from the Christian right, too, who seem to be disappointed that the answer to how to build a new moral order is “not them.” Charlie Clark’s review for Mere Orthodoxy is the best of the genre. Peterson “is not the next C.S. Lewis” (which is true) and noting that, his book concludes that people can save themselves “without God’s grace.” (Also true.)

This distinctly Christian critique of Peterson is more thoughtful (and certainly more interesting) than the reviewers who condemn Peterson merely for having the temerity to push back against progressive pieties. However, there is in these protests a certain unwillingness to engage with reality of our present moment.

The “Great Awokening” was this generation’s Great Awakening. The dam has already burst; the post-Christian tide has already swept Millennials well onto the pagan course. There will be no return to Christendom—not in the short term. “Benedict Option” type solutions might preserve Christian communities in the midst of this deluge, but they are only half a solution. They leave unaddressed what sort of moral order conservatives should support in this new post-Christian world.

This question deserves to be taken seriously. If America is destined to be a pagan nation, it is in our interest to ensure that America’s pagans are of the virtuous, not vicious, variety. It is possible to live honorably and morally without Christianity—entire civilizations have flourished outside the auspices of Christendom. But it remains to be seen if our civilization can so flourish.

To this end, I must salute Jordan Peterson. It takes foresight to recognize that the moral order of your civilization needs patching up; it takes chutzpah to believe that you can do the patching. Peterson’s patches are not perfect, but they are a useful starting point for an effort that is long overdue.

Tanner Greer is a writer and analyst currently based out of Beijing.

How the Epic Story of "El Padrino" and the Cuban Mafia Started with...the Lottery

BOB RUGGIERO

http://www.houstonpress.com/arts/a-cuban-godfathers-cinematic-tale-of-crime-cocaine-andthe-lottery-10309010

March 20, 2018

The Corporation: An Epic Story of the Cuban American Underworld
By T.J. English
592 pp.
$28.99
William Morrow

There is perhaps no better modern chronicler of organized crime and criminals than T.J. English. Combining the research of a historian with the narrative flair of a novelist, he’s chronicled bad men of Italian, Irish, Asian descent, along with the taking a bite out of racially-tinged crimes in the Big Apple.

English has covered some of the Cuba-Italian Mafia story before in his essential Havana Nocturne. But for this hefty tome, his focus is on Cuban-American crime and criminals in America.

And the whole thing swirls around the life and activities of one man: José Miguel Battle, or “El Padrino.” That roughly translates into The Godfather. Battle was obsessed with the mafia film saga, would quote lines endlessly, and many say even changed his voice at times to sound more like Marlon Brando’s Vito Corleone.

An avowed anti-Castro true believer, earlier in life Battle participated as part of Brigade 2506, the 1,100 or so Cuban expatriates who fought in the doomed Bay of Pigs invasion. By all accounts, his actions proved heroic on the ill-fated expedition, and he saved many lives of his fellow expatriates. How the U.S. government and President John F. Kennedy screwed over those soldiers has filled other books, but it did allow Battle and his surviving members a ticket to the United States – initially through military service, and then citizenship.

Battle’s civilian criminal empire centered around his dominance of bolita– the ages-old, off-the-books lottery system favored by Hispanics and Cubans where kids, business people, and grandmothers of mostly lower class economic situations took a chance at betting on daily numbers with various amounts at stake and to win. At one point, Battle’s operations were grossing $2 million a week in New York City alone. All in cash, and worth millions more in 2018 dollars.

English’s narrative jumps from many locales including New York City, Miami, Cuba itself, Peru, and the unlikely venue of Union City, New Jersey were Battle started his empire. An empire that quickly expanded from gambling to drug trafficking, racketeering, money laundering, and even running a shady South American casino.

Like a revolving door, English introduces a cast of characters who may appear on a handful of pages, or pop in and out of the entire story. And sometimes, it’s hard to keep track of so many characters in such an epic narrative. Through, English also weaves an equally interesting story of the experience of thousands of Cuban Americans in exile in America, with thehated Fidel Castro looming large for decades.

There’s shadowy anti-Castro terrorist groups with names like “Omega 7” and “Alpha 66,” and a Scarface-like side story about the Mariel boat lifts of refugees coming to Florida and looking for work – any work.

Battle’s enterprise – which he called “The Corporation” – included a litany of shootings, beatings, assassinations, arson, shifting alliances trade-offs with dirty cops, cockfighting, heists, and sex. And as the body count piles high, victims are not always male and not always involved with Battle’s world.

There’s even dark comedy in the form of one Jorge “Palulu” Enriquez. He murdered one of Battle’s brothers, and then survived a dozen retribution assassination attempts over a decade (while losing a lot of blood from shootings and stabbings…and a leg along the way).

With Enriquez seemingly protected by a Divine force, the obsessed Battle even consulted black magic practitioners to make his target more vulnerable. He was eventually done in on the 12th try by assassins while lying in a hospital bed recovering from wounds suffered during the 11th attempt.

If all this sounds like it would make for a great movie…it will! Even before the book’s publication, the rights were sold to Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company, and Benicio Del Toro has been cast to play Battle. And he’ll certainly have a chance to show his acting range, as Battle in this book can be at times evil, noble, vain, emotional, lustful, heroic, proud, and even a committed pet lover (he had a thing for taking in stray dogs by the dozens). Yet, he was also a man who could order the brutal murder of a mistress, possibly for embarrassing him in front of his crew with her hysterics.

Tracking Battle like a hound for much of many years of his empire was Miami cop David Shanks, who once found a live rattlesnake planted in his mailbox, likely by Battle as a sign to lay off. Fortunately, he realized the hissing coming from within was not the sound of cicadas and emptied two guns in it before opening.

In the end, the saga of “El Padrino” ends with somewhat of whimper. A very ill and defeated man by the time he pleaded guilty to racketeering (of all things) in 2006, he died the next year at the age of 78 from a host of ailments, though liver failure was the cause of record. But his deeds live on here, and English takes readers on the methodical criminal journey, every dirty step of the way.

Bob Ruggiero has been writing about music, books, and entertainment for the Houston Press since 1997, with an emphasis on classic rock. He used to have an incredible and luxurious mullet in college as well. He is the author of the band biography Slippin’ Out of Darkness: The Story of WAR.

Deep-Freezing the Truth at Penn

A distinguished law professor is publicly shamed for pointing out truths about race preferences

Heather Mac Donald

https://www.city-journal.org/

March 20, 2018

The diversity imperative demands dissimulation and evasion. The academic-achievement gap, the behavioral differences that produce socioeconomic disparities, and the ubiquity of racial preferences must all be suppressed in public discourse, since they undercut the narrative that white racism is the driving force in American society. This dissimulation was on display last week at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, when Dean Ted Ruger announced that law professor Amy Wax would no longer teach mandatory first-year law courses at the school. In a memo announcing his decision, Ruger accused Wax of “conscious indifference” to truth. It is Ruger, however, who has distorted facts.

Ousting Wax from her first-year civil-procedure class has been a desideratum of the academic Left since she published an op-ed last August celebrating bourgeois virtues like the work ethic, respect for authority, and sexual temperance. Wax was deemed a “white supremacist” for suggesting that not all cultures were equal in preparing people for participation in a modern economy.

In December, Dean Ruger asked her to desist from teaching first-year students and to take a leave of absence, in the hope that the controversy spurred by her op-ed would die down. As a “pluralistic dean,” he said, he needed to accommodate all factions in the school. Wax declined the request and reported the details of the conversation immediately thereafter to friends. (I was one of the people to whom she spoke.) Wax later described the conversation in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. Ruger denied her account through a spokesman, claiming that he had merely engaged in a pro forma discussion of her sabbatical schedule, such as he would have done with any other professor. Ruger’s version is not credible, though: in an informal survey, no law professor polled reports ever having a dean drop by his office to discuss a routine sabbatical. This alleged bureaucratic convention does not exist, unless Dean Ruger has only recently introduced it.

Ruger’s request that Wax stop teaching first-year students became non-negotiable, however, after a video dialogue Wax had recorded in September came to the attention of her opponents. On the video, Wax and Brown University economist Glenn Loury discuss affirmative action. Wax talks about how racial preferences hinder the ability of their alleged beneficiaries to succeed academically, by catapulting them into schools for which they are significantly less prepared than their peers; this negative consequence of affirmative action is known as the “mismatch effect.” At Penn’s law school, Wax said, she didn’t think that she had ever seen a black law student graduate in the top quarter of his class, and “rarely” in the top half. Loury asked Wax if the University of Pennsylvania Law Review had a “racial diversity mandate.” Wax answered “yes.” In his memo to the school, Ruger denied this point: “the Law Review does not have a diversity mandate,” he wrote. “Rather, its editors are selected based on a competitive process.”

By any common understanding of a “diversity mandate,” the Penn law review most certainly has one. In the summer of 2003, it created a new pathway for membership to solve the perennial lack of racial diversity among its editors. According to a contemporaneous Chronicle of Higher Education article, until then, students were selected based either on their grades or on a writing competition that assessed analytic and editing skills. Now, however, a third criterion would be added—a “personal statement,” in which an applicant might address the “challenges” he has faced, the “familial, cultural, or personal experiences that have contributed” to his worldview, and the “unique contribution” he would make to the review. The editorial guidelines explain that the personal statement allows the law review to find editors who bring “diverse perspectives” to legal scholarship.

Anyone familiar with “holistic admissions” will recognize this language, even had the architects of the personal-statement requirement not already explained that its goal was to increase racial diversity. Somehow, “challenges” and “cultural experiences” always pertain exclusively to underrepresented minorities. The percentage of editors selected via the personal statement, which is factored into a new composite score that includes first-year grades and the writing competition, may vary from year to year.

The 2003 Chronicle article was a rare public peek into law reviews’ diversity efforts, not just at Penn but across the country. Since then, the Penn guidelines have been closely guarded; any editor who discusses them with an outsider risks getting kicked off the review. But they remained in place as recently as 2015, according to a former member. There is zero chance that the review has since reverted to a purely meritocratic selection process, especially in the era of Black Lives Matter campus protests.

If challenged, Ruger might argue that the Penn law review’s diversity policy is not a “mandate,” since it was not imposed by the administration. But most such diversity policies are similarly self-imposed. Ruger might also insist that the process remains “competitive.” But the question is: would the candidates who compete via the personal-statement route have gotten on the review through grades or writing skills alone? If they could not have, then the competition is not universal but race-specific.

Ruger also accused Wax of saying during her interview with Loury that Penn’s black law students should not “even go to college” (whatever that would mean, since they have already gone to college). That, too, is a distortion, presumably intended to inflame the sentiments against her. Wax at that point in the discussion was speaking about college generally. She said in passing that while no critic of racial preferences is saying that black students should not go to college, some students should not. Wax was speaking generally, not referring to Penn law students in particular.

As for the low number of black Penn law students graduating in the top of their class, Wax’s observations about the mismatch effect accord with all available data. The Law School Admissions Council collected 27,000 law student records in the early 1990s, representing nearly 90 percent of accredited schools. After the first year, 51 percent of black law students ranked in the bottom tenth of their class, compared with 5 percent of white students. Two-thirds of black students were in the bottom fifth of their class. Only 10 percent of blacks were in the top half of their class. As mismatch theory predicts, bar-examination failure rates were also skewed, since students put into classrooms above their preparation levels will learn less than when teaching is pitched to their current academic skills. Twenty-two percent of black test-takers in the LSAC database never passed the bar exam after five attempts, compared with 3 percent of white test-takers.

Unfortunately, Wax overlooked the precautionary rule for criticizing affirmative action: avoid any generalizations that can be rebutted with an even vaguer generalization. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class and rarely, rarely in the top half,” she said, clearly speaking informally and from a subjective perspective. Ruger responded in his memo: “It is imperative for me as dean to state that these claims are false: black students have graduated in the top of the class at Penn Law.” Ruger’s statement leaves unspecified what the “top of the class” is and how many black students over what period of time have graduated in it. But his assertion, as so broadly defined, is undoubtedly true. It is also not inconsistent with Wax’s claim that black students have graduated in the top half of the class, but “rarely.”

Ruger’s stated reasons for demoting Wax were that she had violated the confidentiality of students’ academic records and had put her impartiality regarding black students into doubt. The confidentiality charge is the only facially plausible one. Though Wax mentioned no students by name, and was speaking generally, to state even a provisional recollection that no black student has graduated in the top quarter of his class does allow an inference about the grades of all black law students. But if making such a statement is a punishable offense, then there will be a serious chilling effect on any discussion of the negative consequences of affirmative action.

Ruger says that black students may now “legitimately question whether the inaccurate and belittling statements she has made may adversely affect their learning environment and career prospects.” That is a calumny. Wax has won teaching awards from students and from faculty. There is no evidence that she has ever treated her students unfairly. And even if she were inclined to partiality, which she most decidedly is not, grading in first-year courses is blind.

If Wax’s statements about the mismatch effect are “belittling,” that is not her fault. She has simply dared utter the facts about black academic underpreparedness that the diversity charade works overtime to conceal. It is the perverse consequence of affirmative action that the people who pull back the veil on that charade are the ones accused of doing damage to minorities.

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of the New York Times bestseller The War on Cops.