How Do You Solve a Problem Like Ilhan Omar?

By Michael Walsh
https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/06/how-do-you-solve-a-problem-like-ilhan-omar/
March 6, 2019


Representative Ilhan Omar at a news conference in the Capitol on January 10, 2019. (Tom Williams / AP Images)

Nothing in the Constitution requires that members of Congress either be born in the United States or have at least one American parent. We’ve got plenty of foreign-born politicians, and always have; in the U.S. Senate alone, right now, Ted Cruz was born in Canada, Mazie Hirono is from Japan, and Tammy Duckworth was born in Thailand to a Thai mother and American father. The House includes Cubans, Mexicans, Indians, and Dominicans. We’ve had refugees as well, including the late Tom Lantos, a Holocaust survivor.

But now we have Ilhan Omar, one of the first Muslims in Congress, born in Mogadishu, Somalia, brought here as a child, and now representing Minnesota’s  5th Congressional District as a result of the 2018 midterm elections. Along with her Islamic compatriot, Rashida Tlaib (representing Detroit and Dearbornistan), and the ineffable Alexandria  Ocasio-Cortez (the Bronx by way of Long Island and Boston), the trio of female radicals has jerked the geriatric-led Democrat Party abruptly far-leftward as we approach the 2020 presidential election, tossing previous political calculations into a cocked hat.

But in Omar’s case, that’s far from the worst of it. Conservatives are accustomed to leftists hiding their true motives and feelings as they attempt to claw their way to political control over all of us, but Omar is different in that she makes no attempt to disguise her true feelings, either about America or the Jews. Anti-Western to her core, she rewards the generosity of the Americans toward the Somali Muslim community by spitting  in our faces.

As I wrote recently at PJ Media, there’s something about the Somalis that makes them different from other cultural aliens who have arrived in—or, in the Somalis’ case, been deliberately imported to—the United States. An ethnic group low on its share of geniuses but long on violence, the Minnesota Somalis have the disgraceful distinction of sending more men and boys to join foreign terrorist organizations such as al-Shabab and ISIS over the past dozen years than any other place in the country. And this, of course, is Omar’s district—why would we have any doubt that she will represent it faithfully?

Recently one of the first Somali policemen in Minnesota, Mohamed Mohamed Noor—with a name like that, what could go wrong?—was charged with murder in the 2017 shooting death of Justine Damond; he goes on trial next month, having pleaded not guilty. (Be sure to read the details of the killing at any of the links.) And now, open gang—perhaps “militia” will soon be a better word—warfare is breaking out in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood in Minneapolis as the Somalis (known colloquially in the military and intelligence services as “skinnies”) recreate the same hellish conditions they fled in their East African homeland:

As for Omar, she spoke up for a group of six Somalis arrested in 2015 for trying to cross into Mexico, as part of a plan to join ISIS in Syria. As the case went to trial the following year, the then-state representative wrote a letter to the trial judge requesting “compassion”—and lighter sentencing on behalf of one of the Minnesota men, who was facing 30 years jail time.

“Such punitive measures not only lack efficacy, they inevitably create an environment in which extremism can flourish, aligning with the presupposition of terrorist recruitment,” Omar wrote. “The best deterrent to fanaticism is a system of compassion. We must alter our attitude and approach; if we truly want to affect change, we should refocus our efforts on inclusion and rehabilitation.”

And how did that plea for mercy work out? One young lad was sentenced to “rehabilitation” after being caught trying to join ISIS; six months later, at a halfway house, he was found watching a documentary about westerners fighting for ISIS. What’s bred in the bone . . .

But coddling terrorists is the least of Omar’s problems. For one thing, there’s some reason to suspect that Omar married her own brother in order to get him American citizenship—something she denies, although her marital history is, shall we say, culturally colorful. (There’s a good, if confusing, summation of it at Snopes.com, which rates the issue “unproven,” and you can find a video on the subject here.) It’s hard to fathom why she might do such a thing, since even the most dedicated open-borders activist might blanch at outright fraud; further it makes little sense for a lawbreaker to then raise her profile and run for Congress—although, in succeeding Keith Ellison, now Minnesota’s attorney general, she was bound to get elected no matter what.

For her part, Omar issued a statement during her campaign, which basically elided the issue and naturally framed herself as the real victim: “I will offer clarity and share a difficult part of my personal history that I did not consider relevant in the context of a political campaign, so that we can put these rumors to rest. Insinuations that Ahmed Nur Said Elmi is my brother are absurd and offensive.”

Most troubling of all is her consistent anti-Semitism, relayed to the public via a series of tweets, some of which she later deleted. Incredibly, Omar sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and thus far Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has refused to remove her, despite requests from prominent Jewish organizations. Chairman Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) said that defenestrating her “will not solve the problem of anti-Semitism” and would merely be “retribution.” Still Pelosi had planned a vote on a House resolution condemning anti-Semitism on Wednesday, but the vote was abruptly postponed after “progressives” objected to it.

And so the stage is set for a major battle. Pelosi cannot afford to alienate the Democrats’ sizable Jewish constituency, but neither can she blow off the freshmen radicals, who are pushing BDS and outright socialism:

House Democratic leaders are struggling to contain the controversy over Rep. Ilhan Omar’s comments criticizing Israel, with the caucus fighting behind closed doors over whether—and how—to respond. Tensions ran high at a caucus meeting Wednesday as some Democrats privately vented that Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her leadership team had failed to adequately respond to the escalating political crisis, with too little outreach to their own rank-and-file.

[There is] widespread anxiety in the caucus over how to handle the latest bout of remarks from Omar—one of the first Muslim women to serve in Congress—after she suggested that pro-Israel advocates had “allegiance” to Israel. The remarks offended multiple top Democrats, who said it was assuming painful, decades-old stereotypes that Jews had “dual loyalties.”

Multiple Jewish lawmakers, including Rep. Ted Deutch (D-Fla.) stood up in the caucus meeting to explain why Omar’s latest remarks were so offensive and potentially dangerous. But other Democrats—including a Jewish lawmaker—stood up to defend their colleague and say they didn’t see the remarks as deeply offensive.

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus had spoken out loudly against a measure aimed at Omar’s comments at a time when Omar herself has been the target of anti-Muslim attacks . . .  Omar did not speak in the meeting, multiple sources said, although she was spotted chatting with some Democrats one-on-one and received hugs from others.

Isn’t that sweet? The Democrats and their “progressive” media allies are so obsessed with the “historic” nature of Omar’s membership in the American congress that they can’t see the danger she poses. By background, religion, and upbringing she is a dedicated enemy of the United States, the camel’s nose under the tent of what the Left likes to call “our democracy.” As such, she’s a useful tool, protected by her faith and her ethnic origins; any criticism of her immediately triggers accusations of racism and “hate.” Indeed, the resolution against anti-Semitism is now being rewritten to include denunciations of other forms of “hate speech.”

It’s a nasty nettle to grasp, although it’s impossible not to enjoy Pelosi’s discomfiture. In order to hang on to her gavel—because you just know the Republicans are going to “pounce” on this—Pelosi has to reduce the public profiles of the radicals lest the rest of America catch on to what they’re up to. Once San Fran Nan was the public face of the Democrats; now, among others, it’s Ilhan Omar, wearing a hijab.

Upon her arrival in Congress, Omar demanded—and got—a change in a 181-year House rule forbidding head coverings on the House floor. If you think that’s the last change she wants to make, you’d better think again. Pelosi should strip her of her committee assignments and, if she continues these antics, the House should expel her. It’s the right thing to do.

Women’s sports may one day soon consist entirely of men

Rod Liddle
https://spectator.us/womens-sports-consist-men/?fbclid=IwAR3ENzh5jYrYGlPNHP2W6YiHXaC07ufQotRh781nrN26BbBDPw-Khoynq7I
February 28, 2019

Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood

Congratulations to Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood for sweeping all before them in the Connecticut girls’ high school track races last week. Yes, of course they are men. There were some anguished complaints from the various girls these two speedy lads defeated, but these were of course brushed aside in a country where women’s sporting events may one day soon consist entirely of men.

Already a Democratic party representative, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, is insisting that the US powerlifting tournaments allow transgender women to compete, so that people who look very much like Geoff Capes, and have the same chromosomes as Geoff Capes, and the same bone structure and musculature, can compete against women. Meanwhile, the fastest female college sprinter in the US is CeCe Telfer, who, once again, is not what you or I or science would call a lady, and one of the world champions in women’s cycling is a chap called Rachel McKinnon, whom I have mentioned here before.

Writing in the Sunday Times of London, Martina Navratilova described it as ‘insane’ and ‘cheating’ that men who have transitioned should be allowed to compete against women, adding that ‘hundreds’ of trans athletes have ‘achieved honors as women which were beyond their capabilities as men’. The former tennis star added that few people were prepared to speak up about this issue because of the furore that would immediately descend upon them from the perpetually enraged trans lobby. Indeed, within a few hours of her article being published she was booted off the advisory board of a gay advocacy group and was being denounced left, right and center in the kind of furiously screeched terms that have become the hallmark of these perhaps not wholly balanced campaigners.

Those who support the rights of transgender women to compete in women’s sports often cite the only piece of research done on the issue which ‘proves’ that it is a myth that transgender women have an advantage over normal women. This study was published in 2015 and is cited every time the issue arises — but I have one or two problems with it, to tell you the truth. First, it concerned a total of just eight athletes, which is a smallish sample (no control group, either). Second, it was not carried out by a qualified geneticist or social scientist, but by a ‘medical physicist’ by the name of Joanna Harper. And third, Joanna Harper, once an athlete herself, was, um, how can I put this, not always called Joanna. She was raised as a boy and transitioned to being a fairly fast lady in her thirties. So she has skin in the game and we might surmise that she, or he, set out to prove a thesis, rather than, in good Popperian practice, trying to disprove it.

But none of these caveats cuts the remotest ice with the lobby groups or indeed the liberal media, who quote from her survey as if it were on a par with the work of Crick and Watson. And meanwhile, blokes keep winning everything. Sometimes they are blokes who have had some becoming breasts appended to them and put on a bit of lippy, sometimes they are blokes who seemingly make no effort at all to disguise the fact that they are blokes.

The question, then, is this: will women’s sports cease to exist before or after we’ve closed down Frankenstein’s castle, i.e. the Tavistock clinic’s gender identity development service? The Tavistock is an extremely well endowed, so to speak, institution in London and every year somewhere in the region of 2,000 children are referred to this service, a substantial number of whom go on to be interfered with chemically or surgically, and transferred from one sex to another.

An internal report on this god-awful place by Dr David Bell suggested that it was ‘not fit for purpose’ and that decisions were taken to transition young people without taking into account social and personal factors, such as whether they had suffered a bereavement or abuse.

I will bet there’s a whole bunch of other factors they don’t take into account as well, such as peer pressure at school, other underlying mental health issues, unhelpful interventions from parents or social workers, and a repulsive propaganda program which surrounds them at all times telling them how wonderful it is to transition.

Anyway, following Bell’s report a senior governor at the hospital, Marcus Evans, has resigned. Evans, who practices the pseudoscience of psychoanalysis, has said that decisions to transition the poor kids are taken ‘too quickly’. He added: ‘There is pressure from the child who is in a distressed state, there is pressure from the family and the peer group and from the pro-trans lobbies — and all of this puts pressure on the clinician who may want to help the individual to resolve their distressed state by going along with a quick solution.’ No kidding. The point being that these are largely adolescent children who are trying to come to terms with their own sexuality: it’s a confusing time.

The trans lobby doesn’t recognize any of this stuff, mind: if a kid, no matter how old he or she might be, wishes to change sex, then it should be allowed to do so. It is remarkable and a little chilling how all of those concerned with the wellbeing of our children — the government, the teachers, the doctors, the counsellors, the social workers, the Tavistock and in many cases even the parents — have bought into the extremist views of a pressure group which, at the very least, we might describe as ‘troubled’. But then, I suppose that they dare not.

My guess is that we will look back on this period of experimentation on our children with horror and deeply regret the day we decided that kids should be allowed to be shunted into whatever ghetto of victimization they so desire, given that our society today seems to value victimhood above all else. In the meantime, shouldn’t the Tavistock’s gender clinic be closed down?

This article was originally published in The Spectator magazine.

Amazon Bans Tommy Robinson’s Book, ‘Mohammed’s Koran’

BY ROBERT SPENCER
https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/amazon-bans-tommy-robinsons-book-mohammeds-koran/
March 5, 2019

On January 7 of this year, I published an article at PJ Media about Amazon removing doormats featuring Qur’an verses from sale because the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) found them offensive. In that article, I asked:

How long will it be before Hamas-linked CAIR starts demanding that books that criticize jihad terror and Sharia oppression of women, gays, and others also be dropped by Amazon?

The answer turned out to be 51 days.

It’s the British government and the BBC, rather than CAIR, that are likely behind this, but Amazon has just dropped the book Mohammed’s Koran by the renowned British activist Tommy Robinson and Peter McLoughlin -- and apparently only because its censors dislike Robinson. In the last two weeks, Robinson spectacularly embarrassed the BBC by exposing the bias and dishonesty of its reporter John Sweeney. The retaliation has been swift and severe: Robinson has been banned from YouTube and Facebook, and now his book has been withdrawn from sale.

Coauthor Peter McLoughlin states:

[T]his is the twenty-first century equivalent of the Nazis taking out the books from university libraries and burning them. Can you think of another scholarly book on Islam that has been banned by Amazon?Mein Kampf is for sale on Amazon. As are books like the terrorist manual called The Anarchist Cookbook.

McLoughlin is correct that Amazon’s behavior has been wildly inconsistent. He adds that Amazon officials are steadfastly mum on why the book was banned:

[They] refuse to reinstate the book and refuse to explain why it has been banned. So they have banned the No.1 best-selling exegesis of the Koran. I can’t get my head round it. Every few weeks for the past 18 months they had emailed me asking to put it into special sales programmes, as it was selling so well. For 18 months they sought to profit even more from the sales.

“As dark as my vision is,” McLoughlin concludes, “I thought we were 10 to 20 years away from dissenting books from being banned.”

Indeed. Those who object to my labeling Leftist totalitarians “fascists” should take careful note of this story. What group is most famous for burning books? That’s right. And what group is doing it now? Right again. I predicted this, but like Peter McLoughlin, I didn’t think it would come so soon.

This is an extremely ominous development. Amazon and Barnes and Noble -- which is also not carrying this book -- have a virtual monopoly on book sales. When these two giants refuse to carry a book, that book effectively does not exist. If they are now going to ban books that are critical of Islam and opposed to jihad terror and Sharia oppression of women, gays, and others, then an Islam-critical perspective will be almost impossible to find anywhere.

Some will applaud this as the ultimate and laudable demise of “Islamophobia,” but it is actually far more insidious. If the motivating ideology of jihad terrorists cannot be criticized or even discussed openly, jihad terrorists will have an absolutely free hand. They will act with impunity, secure in the knowledge that any criticism of their activities will be shut down the same way Tommy Robinson was shut down.

Whatever anyone thinks of Tommy Robinson or the Qur’an, this is a serious matter that anyone who cares about the freedom of speech should be extremely concerned about.

Mohammed’s Koran is critical of Islam’s holy book. It endeavors to illustrate how violent jihadists justify their actions by referring to Islamic texts and teachings -- and that’s all. Robinson and McLoughlin call for no violence. Their book is accurate.

Anyone who has written a book that is critical of anything should read the writing on the wall and realize that once this censorship begins, it won’t end with Tommy Robinson or Qur’an-critical books. But they won’t. PEN, the international organization that is supposedly dedicated to defending the freedom of speech, is made up of hard-Leftists who won’t utter a whisper in defense of Tommy Robinson’s book, or a murmur of protest that it is not allowed to be sold.

They don’t realize that what is being done to him can be done to them. But it will be.

Tommy Robinson Turns the Tables on the BBC

Tommy Robinson: The New Untouchable

No Collusion: Omidyar-Backed NeverTrumpers Hardest Hit

By Julie Kelly
https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/04/no-collusion-omidyar-backed-nevertrumpers-hardest-hit/
March 4, 2019

Pierre Omidyar

By all accounts, even from his most devoted propagandists in the news media, Special Counsel Robert Mueller soon is expected to release a report that will devastate Trump antagonists who have been convinced his investigation would result in the president’s removal from office. They are bracing themselves to hear two words from the special counsel that just a few months ago seemed inconceivable: No collusion.

The idea that a nearly two-year-long probe conducted by a team of partisan, Trump-hating prosecutors empowered with an unending supply of public resources and shielded from any legitimate scrutiny will come up empty-handed is causing great angst in the Acela Corridor. The List of Shame—journalists, editors, cable news contributors, Democratic lawmakers, and NeverTrump operatives who’ve foisted this outrageous farce on the American people—is long and ignominious.

One man who in many ways sits at the center of this manufactured storm is Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire founder of eBay. After Trump won the election, an outcome Omidyar tried to prevent by spending hundreds of thousands of dollars against Trump in 2016, the Hawaiian-based mogul ratcheted up his opposition to the president through a network of nonprofits.

Omidyar is a leftist and supports many policies hostile to conservatives, including open borders, abortion, universal voting rights, and climate change. He’s tied to many of the same causes pushed by fellow billionaires George Soros and Tom Steyer, avowed left-wing activists. One of his missions has been to stoke the Trump-Russian collusion conspiracy in an effort to derail Trump’s presidency.

“Over the past two years, I have seen alarming and sometimes unprecedented violations of our country’s democratic norms,” wrote Joe Goldman, president of Democracy Fund, one of Omidyar’s well-funded foundations, last summer. “For an organization committed to strengthening democracy on behalf of the American people, this isn’t just disturbing—it’s humbling.”

Goldman disclosed that Democracy Fund has awarded $100 million in grants to dozens of politically oriented groups in just the past four years. (Omidyar’s net worth is about $10 billion.) Several Omidyar-backed outlets have been instrumental in shaping positive news coverage about the Mueller investigation, as well as fueling the notion that Russia somehow poses the direst threat to the future of the republic and that Trump is a willing agent of Vladimir Putin.

Among Omidyar’s shrewdest moves was to co-opt a number of outcast Republicans who were bitter that Trump won the presidential election over their strong objections. This list includes once-influential Republican officials and lawmakers, as well as conservative opinion-makers and consultants. Since Trump’s surprise election, they have aided the Left in attempting to drive Trump from office. Their greatest hope has been Robert Mueller.

Omidyar’s most dependable stooge on that score has been Bill Kristol, the founder of the now-defunctWeekly Standard. Last year, one of Omidyar’s funds gave $600,000 to an outlet Kristol created to pimp for the Mueller probe. That group, Defending Democracy Together, aired several television ads to tout Mueller’s alleged sterling reputation and to urge lawmakers to protect the special counsel from Trump. (The Bulwark, Kristol’s latest media venture, is a project of Defending Democracy Together’s nonprofit. Charles Sykes, The Bulwark’s editor, sits on the advisory committee for Omidyar’s Democracy Fund.)

As a regular contributor to both CNN and MSNBC, Kristol routinely has warned that Mueller’s various inquiries into Trump family member and associates would spell doom for the president.

“I do think things have changed, the reality has changed,” Kristol opined in August after Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to a number of non-Russia related crimes. “How do we know it’s not Russia? Michael Cohen seems to be cooperating . . . he may well know about the Trump Tower meeting. He has contemporaneous knowledge and probably documentary evidence . . . on the collusion side.”

Kristol also is an advisor for the Alliance for Securing Democracy, which also has received $600,000 from Omidyar since 2017. Other Mueller fanboys including former Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff and David Kramer, a John McCain associate who helped disseminate the infamous Steele dossier in late 2016, also worked with Kristol on that project.

Several NeverTrumpers are aligned with the Niskanen Center, a nominally libertarian D.C.-based think tank that has received at least $200,000 from Omidyar. Board members include vocal Trump-haters on the Right, including David Frum, Tom Nichols, Mindy Finn, and Eliot Cohen, all of whom have vouched for the credibility of the Mueller probe and predict it will doom Trump’s presidency.

In an op-ed for USA Today in January, Nichols hilariously claimed the Russians must have compromising material on the president, called the deep state “nonsense” and blasted Republicans for “attacking the men and women of the FBI.” Writing for The Atlantic in August 2018, Frum concluded that “collusion itself is above all a threat to national security: the installation of a president beholden to some greater or lesser degree to a hostile foreign power.”

In November 2017, the Niskanen Center posted a public letter signed by more than two dozen NeverTrumpers demanding that congressional Republicans prevent any White House interference with Mueller’s work. “It is morally imperative that the Republican Party and the conservative movement stand as bulwarks of the rule of law, not enablers of its erosion and violation. Now is the time for choosing,” they warned. Other signers included Max Boot, Mona Charen, and Evan McMullin. (Finn and McMullin are the beneficiaries of other Omidyar projects as well.)

All have appeared on cable news shows, on political websites, and in national newspapers since May 2017 to insist that Mueller and/or congressional investigators will soon expose the nefarious links between Trump and the Kremlin. “It has become an article of faith in some quarters on the right—well, most—that Robert Mueller’s investigation has found no evidence of collusion with Russia and has accordingly shifted gears to process crimes like lying to the FBI or obstruction of justice,” Charen, a National Review contributor, wrote in December. “Having decided that this must be true, many have called for Mueller to wrap it up. But this requires a lot of wishful thinking.”

The R Street Institute received $650,000 in 2017 from Omidyar’s Democracy Fund. The nonprofit is a conservative/libertarian think tank with offices across the country. The group criticized as “rank politics” the February 2018 memo by then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) that exposed the political roots of the fabricated collusion story and claimed the memo was an attempt to undermine “the basis for the Mueller investigation.”

Paul Rosenzweig, a senior fellow at R Street, is also an outspoken defender of Mueller and an avowed Trump foe. Rosenzweig joined George Conway, the husband of Trump confidant Kellyanne Conway, and other “conservative” lawyers last year to form yet another group opposed to the president. “If there were a conspiracy, then the order to reach out to Roger Stone might be an overt act that would make the conspiracy complete,” Rosenzweig told Vice News last month.

Protect Democracy houses a glittering array of NeverTrump cheerleaders for the collusion hoax; Charen, Linda Chavez, McMullin, Finn, Matthew Dowd, and Watergate relic John Dean are among a cast of characters that “engage in specific projects” for the outlet, which received $400,000 in 2017 from Omidyar. Dean, an advisor to Michael Cohen, told CNN last week that Trump’s former lawyer would tell Congress that Trump committed crimes while in the Oval Office. Dowd predicted right before Mueller’s appointment in May 2017 that calls for Trump’s impeachment will build.

Omidyar’s reach also extends to left-leaning think tanks, media outlets and policy groups, which will be outlined in a forthcoming story. But his craftiest move was to enlist gullible, if not dishonest, mouthpieces in the NeverTrump movement to bolster the special counsel, admonish Americans that doomsday was coming, and help do inestimable damage to the country in the process. Their reputations deserve to suffer the same embarrassing fate as the Mueller investigation itself.

Detroit Red Wings' Ted Lindsay dies: A badass on ice, a gentleman off

By Bill McGraw
https://www.freep.com/story/sports/nhl/red-wings/2019/03/04/ted-lindsay-dies-detroit-red-wings/579477002/
March 4, 2019



Ted Lindsay’s nicknames were “Terrible Ted” and “Old Scarface” because Lindsay played tough and sometimes dirty.

That hell-bent style was reflected in the tiny ridges, bumps, wrinkles and puffy marks on his cheeks and chin that gave his face a hang-dog look.

Lindsay, one of the greatest Detroit Red Wings of all time, received some 600 stitches during his hall-of-fame career, most of them in his face.

One day, an acquaintance, holding the hand of his 2-year-old daughter, ran into Lindsay on the street.

Lindsay kneeled to say hello to the smiling little girl, who burst into tears when Lindsay’s face appeared next to hers.

“It’s not the first time that’s happened,” Lindsay said, laughing. 

“Terrible Ted had a face only a hockey mom could love,” John Finley, the Red Wings’ longtime physician who had stitched up Lindsay many times, wrote in his memoir. Recalling the man behind the scars and how different he was away from the game, Finley added: “I have many fond memories of the grace, respect, and special effort he took with all those close to him.”

And that was the paradox of Ted Lindsay, who died at 93 years old, while under hospice care, on Monday morning, according to his family. Off the ice, he was a gentleman who had many friends. And he was a philanthropist who became deeply involved in his community.

On the ice, Lindsay was cocky and abrasive and would do anything to win. He was a highly unusual player in the post-World War II National Hockey League, a brainy boat-rocker who repeatedly challenged the conservative league establishment. Those qualities — plus his enormous talent — made him one of the most memorable and controversial players in NHL history and a fan favorite for decades in metro Detroit, where he lived for more than 70 years.

“I hated everybody I played against, and they hated me,” Lindsay was fond of saying.  “That’s the way hockey should be played.”

Away from the game Lindsay was patient, generous and even tender. Despite his super-star status, he drove through winter nights to appear at countless sports banquets across Michigan and Ontario, and thought nothing of driving even to Sault Ste. Marie for the night to make a speech about hockey. He devoted a lot of time to charity. When the 9-year-old son of a friend was diagnosed with autism, Lindsay established a foundation to raise money for autism research.

“Ted never let fame go to his head,” said Joe Lapointe, a longtime sportswriter for the Free Press and New York Times.

Lindsay was only 5-foot-8 and 165 pounds, and people who met him often expressed surprise someone so small could be such a terror. “When I put my skates on I’m 6-foot-5,” he told them.

Lindsay punched far above his weight for 14 seasons with the Red Wings and three seasons with the Chicago Blackhawks between 1944 and 1965. When Lindsay was at his peak, in the early 1950s, the Wings were the team to beat in the NHL, winning four Stanley Cups in six years.

In 1964, four years after he retired as a Blackhawk, he made a one-season comeback with the Wings at 39, surprising critics with his skills and endurance.

Rebel with a cause

During his prime, Look magazine described Lindsay, darting about the ice in the crimson Detroit uniform, as “a blood-red flash of cold fury” and “a picture of unmitigated villainy.”

The Free Press wrote that hockey fans pictured Lindsay “as a cross between Jack the Ripper and Al Capone.”

Lindsay mocked opponents, pushed referees and argued with Jack Adams, the tyrannical Detroit coach and general manager whom most players feared. Lindsay blasted the disciplinary hearings of NHL president Clarence Campbell, a former war-crimes prosecutor, as a “kangaroo court” and shocked NHL owners when he filed an anti-trust lawsuit against the league during his attempt to form a players’ association in the late 1950s.

The suit was a daring move, and while the union effort fell short, it set the stage for the founding of the NHL Players’ Association in 1967. Adams traded Lindsay for masterminding the union drive (with Montreal’s Doug Harvey), and it soured the once-close friendship between Lindsay and Gordie Howe, who voted against the union.

“Lindsay represented everything Clarence Campbell abhorred in a hockey player: cockiness, irreverence and disrespect,” wrote the authors of “Net Worth,” an authoritative book on NHL finances that was turned into a 1995 Canadian movie in which Lindsay was the hero and Adams the villain.

By 1958 the campaign for an association had ended, though the NHL met some of the players’ demands.  A permanent players’ association was formed in 1967, and today, the association bestows the Ted Lindsay Award annually to the NHL’s most outstanding player, as voted by association members.

“When I did it the NHL was a dictatorship. I just wanted to give us a voice. We had no voice,” Lindsay told the authors of “Net Worth.”

“I’d do it again. I was not a crusader, I wasn’t trying to change hockey. It was just something we as players needed as a vehicle to be able to discuss things. The effort was not a failure, because we did make a few gains and we paved the way” for the players’ association.

In retirement, Lindsay was estranged from the Wings, owned at the time by Bruce Norris, who bitterly fought Lindsay during the unionization drive. But in 1977, Norris hired him to be general manager and, later, coach.

At the time, the Florida-based Norris, the dissolute scion of the family that had owned the team since 1932, was bankrupting the family fortune, and the “Dead Wings” were one of the NHL’s worst teams. Lindsay set off a buzz among Detroit fans with his initial marketing slogan, “Aggressive Hockey is Back in Town,” but his three years in the front office were a failure in almost every respect, the opposite of his storied career.


Gordie Howe, Sid Abel and Ted Lindsay


The Production Line

In 1,068 regular season games, Lindsay scored 379 goals and had 472 assists for 851 points. He added 47 goals for 96 points in 133 playoff games. When he retired for the first time in 1960, the only players who had amassed more points than him were two all-time greats, Howe and Montreal’s Maurice (The Rocket) Richard.

In 2017 an NHL panel named Lindsay one of the 100 best players in league history. He was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1966. The Red Wings retired his No. 7 jersey in 1991 and unveiled a statue in his honor in Joe Louis Arena in 2008.

Lindsay’s aggressiveness as a player and insolence toward NHL authority figures endeared him to hockey fans in rough-and-tumble Detroit during the city’s postwar go-go years. Fans in other NHL cities heckled Lindsay, and he heckled them back. On at least one occasion, Lindsay tussled with a spectator.

During Lindsay’s 14 seasons with the Red Wings, they won 10 league championships in addition to their four Stanley Cups. Lindsay, who served as team captain even though Adams worried about his influence on other players, was often among league leaders in both scoring and penalty minutes. Beyond his belligerence, he was an excellent skater, shooter and passer. He was, in many respects, the perfectly well-rounded NHL player: a highly skilled leader who is the craziest and hardest-working guy on the team.

Lindsay starred with center Sid Abel and right wing Howe on the Wings’ famed Production Line, one of the league’s greatest trios, which tormented the NHL from 1947 to 1952.

In the 1949-50 season, Lindsay, Abel and Howe finished 1-2-3 in league scoring, and the Wings won their first Cup of the decade.  In 1949, during a seven-game semifinal playoff series against Montreal, the line accounted for 12 of 17 Red Wing goals. After Abel was traded in 1952, Lindsay and Howe continued their tear, accounting for roughly one-third of all Red Wing goals over a nine-year period.

"They are both unorthodox, crisscrossing on the ice so that no one really is a right wing, a center or left wing,” Abel said in 1957.

As a player, Lindsay stopped at little. Even elbowing and kneeing were part of his arsenal until the NHL made them two-minute penalties. He used his stick as a cudgel and a sword.

One of Lindsay’s most infamous confrontations took place in January 1951 with Bill Ezinicki of the Boston Bruins, a frequent opponent since junior hockey. The two, the most penalized players in the NHL the previous season, started with shoving, then moved on to swinging sticks at each other’s heads before they slugged it out — for a full minute.

The clash finished when Ezinicki charged Lindsay from behind. Lindsay suddenly spun, flattening Ezinicki with one lightning punch. Ezinicki was left unconscious on the ice and needed 19 stitches in his face. He also suffered a broken nose and lost a tooth. Lindsay had bleeding knuckles.

Referee George Gravel handed Lindsay and Eziniki rare match penalties for “deliberately injuring an opponent.” Campbell suspended each player for the next three games between their two teams.

“It was a rousing battle as hockey fights go, but was a sickening and disgusting display of sportsmanship,” wrote Marshall Dann, the Free Press hockey writer.

Lindsay’s assertive attitude also is behind a celebrated NHL tradition — the parading of the Stanley Cup on the ice by players after they win the post-season playoffs. It first happened at Olympia Stadium in Detroit in 1950 after the Wings defeated the New York Rangers in seven games, including a double-overtime victory in the seventh game. Lindsay spontaneously hoisted the shining trophy and skated around so fans could see it. 

"I recognized who was paying my salary. It wasn't the owners,” Lindsay told the Toronto Globe and Mail in 2013. "I saw all the people sitting there so I picked it up and took it to them.” 

Lindsay took the initiative in his private life, too. In the early 1950s, when many hockey players worked menial jobs to earn extra cash in the summer, Lindsay saw a way to make real money, and he established a plastics businesses in Livonia with teammate Marty Pavelich and, for a time, Howe.

Lindsay had lived in southeast Michigan since the mid-1940s. Multiple generations of Detroiters came to know him as an approachable presence at Red Wings’ games, local rinks, restaurants and charity functions, always willing to strike a humorous pose with his fist clenched against the jaw of a smiling fan.

Lindsay was calm and serious, but he laughed easily. He sometimes sounded gruff when he talked, often expressing belief in such old-fashioned virtues as hard work and honesty. He criticized modern athletes — and hockey itself — for being soft.

He was generous with his time. Over the years, Lindsay served as chairman of the Easter Seals campaign and coached the hockey team at Hillsdale College, driving frequently to Jackson, where the team practiced, charging only expenses. 

Since 2001, the Ted Lindsay Foundation has raised more than $4 million for autism research, while using only 13 percent of its donations for operating expenses, the foundations says. In December, the foundation pledged $1 million to support Oakland University’s autism outreach efforts. 

Lindsay was a physical fitness devotee who for years after his final NHL game continued playing hockey, in men’s leagues or pick-up games, just like legions of metro Detroiters have done for years. At one point, he was rising at 3 a.m. to make an early game in Windsor.

In the late 1970s, when Lindsay was the Wings’ general manager, he joined a weekly pickup game at Olympia for anyone who worked in the building, from media to Zamboni drivers. Lindsay was more than twice the age of some players, but he still dominated the games with his skating and puck control. He bought beer for the players after games yet never stayed around to drink it with them.

“Ted Lindsay would check you into the boards!” said Tom Henderson, a veteran journalist who played in those games. “If you grew up in Detroit — that was unbelievable. That was like Ty Cobb spiking you.”

At one morning game in Southfield in 1976, Ted and his 21-year-old son, Blake, skated on opposing teams. At one point, Blake complained about getting high-sticked by another player.

“What’s wrong, cant you take it?” his father yelled at him.

“You’re a good one to say that,” Blake responded. “What did you do, leave your brains in your locker?”

Ted stalked off the ice, showered, left the rink and refused to speak to Blake for three weeks.

“He did that only because he loves you,” Marty Pavelich, a former Wing and close Lindsay friend, told Blake. “He would have killed anybody else for saying that.”


(AP)

Taunting Toronto fans

Lindsay gained a national audience in the 1970s when he served as a color commentator for games on NBC. He also hosted his own sports show on Saturday evenings before Hockey Night in Canada telecasts on what was then CKLW-TV in Windsor. Even on television, Lindsay had a polarizing effect, not unlike commentator Don Cherry in recent times. One of Lindsay’s memorable expressions was “laying on the lumber,” a phrase he used when a player hit another player with his stick.

“Since NBC signed him up, Lindsay’s devotion to violence, brutality and mayhem on the ice has been drummed into American living rooms with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer,” a Philadelphia sportswriter wrote in 1975.

As a player, Lindsay defended his tactics as necessary to survive at his size in the six-city NHL, in which teams played each other 14 times a season, traveled by train and no one — not even goalies — wore helmets or face shields.

“I’ve been slashed, speared, elbowed, board-checked, butt-ended and hit on the head as much as anyone,” Lindsay said in a 1976 interview. “I just like to keep the ledger balanced.”

One game that encapsulated Lindsay’s nerve, ability and flamboyance took place in Toronto on March 24, 1956, during a tough playoff series against the Maple Leafs.

The Wings led, 2-0, after two games in Detroit. Leafs’ fans seethed after Toronto’s Tod Sloan was injured during a run-in with Howe. As the series shifted to Maple Leaf Gardens, an unidentified man called Toronto newspapers and said, “Don’t worry about Howe and Lindsay tonight. I’m going to shoot them if they play.”

Authorities took no chances. The Gardens was crawling with police that night, and the threat was big news, intensifying the tension that surrounded the series. Howe and Lindsay suited up, and Lindsay got revenge by scoring the tying goal late in the third period and then notching the winner in overtime, when he took a pass from behind the net from Bob Goldham and shot it past goalie Harry Lumley.

After the final buzzer, Lindsay taunted Toronto fans by putting his stick blade under his shoulder and holding the shaft as if it were a long gun. Skating around the ice, he mimicked a machine gun, yelling, “rat-tat-tat-tat.”

“We figured it was a crank call and didn’t take it seriously,” Lindsay said at the time. Added Howe: “We were lucky nobody threw a firecracker or Ted and I would have dug a fox hole in the ice.”

'Aggressive hockey is back in town'

Robert Blake Theodore Lindsay was born in Renfrew, Ontario, near Ottawa, July 29, 1925. The youngest of nine children, Lindsay moved with his family during the Depression to Kirkland Lake, Ontario, a small gold-mining town 600 miles north of Detroit that produced several NHL players, including Mickey Redmond, the Red Wings broadcaster. As a child, Lindsay listened to Wings’ games via the powerful signal of Detroit’s WJR-AM that reached northern Ontario on cold, clear nights.

Lindsay’s father, Bert, was a goalie for the Montreal Wanderers and Toronto Arenas in the early years of the NHL. Ted was the first player in the NHL who was the son of a former player.

By 1944, the 19-year-old Lindsay was a star for Toronto St. Michael’s in Ontario junior hockey, and in those pre-draft days, NHL clubs signed players directly from Canadian junior teams. But the Maple Leafs managed to overlook Lindsay, despite his playing in their backyard. Adams, the Red Wings’ coach and general manager, swooped in and asked Lindsay to sign a Detroit contract. Even as a teenager, Lindsay was bold, demanding he play four-fifths of the Wings games and not be sent to the minors. Adams put it in writing, and gave him a $2,000 bonus.

Conn Smythe, the Leafs’ principal owner, fumed for years over Lindsay’s signing with Detroit. To rub it in, Lindsay would point to Smythe’s seat, smirking, whenever he scored or tangled with a Maple Leafs player.

Lindsay’s first retirement lasted fours seasons. In 1964, Abel, then the Wings coach and general manager and always a big-brother figure to Lindsay, suggested he consider making a comeback with the Wings. Lindsay came to camp and made the team.  

“It’s the blackest day in hockey,” said Campbell, the NHL president, “when a 39-year-old man thinks he can make a comeback in the world’s fastest sport.”

Lindsay played in all but one game that season, scoring 14 goals and 14 assists, and was instrumental in the Wings’ finish atop the NHL for the first time since he was traded to Chicago eight years earlier.

Campbell apologized.

In the final game of his career, Lindsay scored a goal and received a 10-minute misconduct for yelling at referee Art Skov.

In the mid-1970s, a decade into Lindsay’s retirement, the once-mighty Wings found themselves in disarray. The Norris family had owned the franchise since 1932, but the family business was careening toward financial collapse and a sense of entropy permeated the hockey organization. The Wings had qualified for the playoffs only twice in 17 seasons and burned through eight coaches — many of them former Detroit players — in as many years. Jimmy Skinner, a former coach who hung on as an assistant general manager, said later he often sought advice from the portrait of Adams, who died in 1968.

Pressure grew from fans and Detroit sportswriters to hire Lindsay. Finally, late in the 1976-77 season — when the team had won only three of its previous 40 games — Norris relented and made Lindsay the general manager. In his first news conference, Lindsay slammed Norris, the front office, the players and the scouts, but he begged the fans to stick with the Wings.

“Don’t give up on us,” he said. “I don’t expect to instill in these modern-day athletes the pride we had in our great days here — we were a different animal — but somewhere along the line, I’d like to instill it a little.”

Hockey fever — along with cascades of octopus and other sea creatures — returned to Detroit in 1977-78 as the Wings made the playoffs for the first time in nine years and won a playoff series for the first time in 12 years. Lindsay was named executive of the year.

The next season, though, the Wings reverted to pre-Lindsay form, finishing third worst in the NHL.

As criticism mounted, Lindsay was demoted to coach at the end of the 1979-80 season, and stripped of his general manager duties after he had put an excessive number of players under contract and blundered by signing goalie Rogie Vachon from the Los Angeles Kings without settling on compensation. That led to the Wings temporarily losing star center Dale McCourt, which resulted in a complex and time-consuming legal battle and a poisoned atmosphere in the Detroit locker room. 

In November 1980, when the Wings had won only three of their first 20 games, Norris fired Lindsay.

Learning how to treat others

In “Seven,” a tribute book published in Lindsay’s honor by the Red Wings in 2008, Lindsay discussed people who had helped him in his career, both as a player and a person. He brought up Larry Aurie, a Red Wing from 1927 to 1938 who was small, like Lindsay.

“He showed me a lot of things about hockey,” Lindsay recalled. “He showed me how a little guy could survive. He showed me how a little guy could go out there and make little guys out of big guys.

“But the most important thing he taught me was how to treat others. I’ve tried to live that way. You see, the people in my sport are very gifted. I was one of the gifted. I had a chance to make a living at the thing I love, and I have always appreciated that and I have always wanted to give something back.”

Bill McGraw worked as a reporter, sportswriter, editor and columnist for the Free Press for 32 years. He covered the Red Wings from 1979 to 1983.