The police in France get their man.

Profiling - the Dry Bones Blog

As Michael Gurfinkiel tells the story of the recent Jihadist murders in France:

According to French Interior Minister Claude Guéant, the similarities between the assassination of soldiers in Toulouse and Montauban and the eerie butchery at Ozar Hatora were “compelling.” Moreover, investigators established that the criminal used the same weapon, a World War II 11.43 gun, in all three instances. What remained unclear, according to police, was the number of killers and whether they had received support from a larger criminal network. Motive also remained a mystery.

For 48 hours, many speculated about a neo-Nazi psychopath, some sort of French Tim McVeigh or Anders Breivik. What seemed to encourage this view was the fact that the shooter targeted only non-Caucasian soldiers and Jews and that a neo-Nazi network had been investigated and prosecuted among the Montauban military four years ago.

In fact, the police already knew their suspect: one single killer, a jihadist. The man — Mohammed Merah, a French citizen of Algerian origin — was not even hiding. Confident that police sought a neo-Nazi, he stayed at his unassuming home in Toulouse. Tuesday evening, the Raid huntsmen and dozens of other police personnel circled the building. At 3:00 AM they tried to apprehend him alive. He fired on them, wounding two. By 6:00 PM local time, the police expect him to surrender soon.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-jihad-in-france/?singlepage=true

Profiling, of course, is the essence of all police and security work.  That profiling is, today, definitely not PC is just another sign that political correctness is about destroying the basis for any real society, in favor of some Utopian fantasy, i.e. bloodshed.  Ironically, however, in this case PC may have helped the French police get their man.  The early consensus that the murderer was some kind of "Nazi", the all-purpose, or only allowable, profile of evil for an age that otherwise refuses to profile, may have led Mohammed Merah to think he was not being followed, so he could let his guard down.

Does murderer Merah's mind now race through the possibility that if only the liberal elite in the media and political class had been more forthcoming that the more likely profile for the killer in this case was some kind of Islamist who wouldn't, as most of his kind don't, have qualms about killing "Muslims" (i.e. apostates, because French soldiers, in the Jihadist's eyes), as well as Jews, he might have gotten away with more murder? One could argue the point about the most likely profile in various ways, but the basic point is that Jihadist murder and criminality in today's world outnumbers "neo-Nazi" murder somewhat exponentially. Instead, the media and the French political class wished to point a finger at "neo-Nazis" and continued in their normal condescending refusal to consider seriously the ethical claims of Islam,  i.e. to see Muslims as moral agents who have to come to terms with holy texts and daily rituals that obsessively divide the world into true Believers (who are also ideally warriors) and infidels. As Jonathan Narvey asks, Why Not Blame Islam?  If we are to blame murderers and their motivations, as a general principle, the only alternative is to blame the Jews or white supremacists (if that isn't redundant in the thinking of much of today's left) for somehow setting the stage for Mohammed Merah's emotional outburst.  No one can seriously think these killings are just the sign of one uniquely-corrupted mental universe.  But many will no doubt say as much.

As Barry Rubin puts it:

What is needed is not more hypocrisy or professions of innocence — or expensive conferences where long speeches are made about the evils of antisemitism by those who do nothing but get free plane tickets and nice hotel rooms — but a real change in the behavior of the mass media that pours out lies, the academics who slander and distort, and the governments that cannot even stand with a country and people beset by terrorism and once again by the world’s oldest hatred.

Oh, and one more thing is needed: the admission that the greatest threat of hatred, “racism,” dehumanization of the “other,” and threat of persecution today — as the statistics for Europe and North America show — is not “Islamophobia” but antisemitism.

And none of those things are going to happen because the liars, haters, apologists, and enablers will not acknowledge their own behavior while those who are supposed to supervise them will not act. Hating and lying about Israel and the Jewish people is too useful politically and too entwined with the version of left-wing ideology, not to mention Islamism and the dominant interpretation of Islam, currently so powerful in the world.

It would be an exaggeration to say that Europe is no longer a safe place for Jews to live. Yet it is accurate to say that it is becoming an unsafe place for Jews to live, and certainly for those who wish to express mainstream Jewish views and to practice their religion openly. Meanwhile, the EU and various governments dare not admit that the principal cause of antisemitic activity is radical Islam, and the principal inspiration for popular antisemitism is trendy leftist ideas that now dominate much of that continent and are spreading in North America.

Thus, Jewish children are deliberately murdered by a terrorist in the midst of France. In response come get the formal statements and the crocodile tears. Yet at the exact same time as the bullets are entering the children’s bodies, as the victims fall to the ground, as the ambulance sirens sound, the incitement and the lies and the slanders continue, laying the groundwork for more hatred and more murder.

Radio Memories: False Mirrors

History is ultimately story; a narrative based on that most imperfect of sources, the human mind, and its most unreliable contents, human memory.

Our Sunday series of Radio Memories posts has usually tried to modestly sharpen our understanding of history by unearthing buried relics from the dearly departed art form of radio drama; a re-examination of stories fallen through the cracks of memory, hopefully illuminating a side of ourselves that had been forgotten. So much of learning involves re-learning, after all; remembering hard-earned lessons too quickly forgotten, too readily mis-understood.

Family memories of the days before television inevitably include stories of the hours spent devouring the audio art of theatrical radio: radio drama, the theater of the mind. Comedy, adventure, thrillers, romance... a wide variety of programming involving sound effects, mood music, evocative acting and provocative story-telling, of such power that decades later a request to share those memories inevitably sparks the warmest of smiles, the fondest of memories, from those fortunate enough to have experienced them firsthand, through the 1930s, '40s, and '50s.

One engaging series that deserves more attention is CBS' valiant attempt at making history interesting to those under the mistaken impression that history was, somehow, a boring subject. The brainchild of the mercurial humorist Goodman Ace, You Are There was premised on a delightful whimsy tailor-made for the imagination-based medium of radio drama: what if CBS' news department had been in operation at the major events in past history, using the same pool of correspondents that had recently covered the epic Second World War?

Last April we offered the You Are There episode on the suspenseful capture of Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth; in a related sequel this Sunday we jump ahead a few years to the dramatic high point of Lincoln's successor, President Andrew Johnson... and the beginning of a false memory, a distortion of history.

When we know anything about the impeachment of President Johnson at all, we might think that he was bullied and bruised by extremist "Radical Republicans", by "...a Congress, determined to avenge the devastation and slaughter of The War, turned its anger on President Johnson for advocating Lincoln's policy of a charitable peace, based upon his well-remembered words, 'with malice towards none'," as John Charles Daly himself sets the stage in the February 27 1949 broadcast below.

I respectfully propose that we all think a second time about how trustworthy that memory might be.

Let's look at Andrew Johnson's life, as prologue to the re-enacted concluding chapter presented on the You Are There show.

Democrat Andrew Johnson was one of the 12 slave-owning Presidents of the United States, although he is one of the four who did not own slaves while serving as President. Elected mayor of Greenville Tennessee in 1834, he started his political career by helping pass a new Constitution for that state which denied freed blacks the right to vote. After representing Tennessee in Congress in the 1840s, where he voted in favor of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, he became Governor of Tennessee in 1853. As Governor he signed into law legislation that required blacks freed from slavery to be deported; not to another state, but deported to Africa.

During the fractious 1860 Presidential election, the Democrat Party split in two, seeing the Southern States nominating former Vice President John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky as Presidential candidate, since the candidate selected at the Democratic National Convention, Illinois Senator (and perennial Lincoln rival) Stephen A. Douglas was viewed as not bigoted enough on the issue of slavery to be worthy of support. The split enabled the candidate of the newly-formed Republican Party, Abraham Lincoln, to win the Presidency with only 40% of the vote.

Johnson supported Breckenridge in that contest.

Despite his support for slavery, professed again and again on the Senate floor, War Democrat Andrew Johnson nevertheless remained loyal to the Union. He continued to represent the state of Tennessee as its military governor through the early years of the Civil War. In 1862, Johnson persuaded the Republican President to exclude his state from Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, ensuring that slavery would continue in the Southern state of Tennessee, as it would in Northern slave states.

President Lincoln faced a tough re-election campaign in 1864: in an effort to broaden their appeal to War Democrats the party name was changed from Republican to the National Union Party, and the convention selected Johnson to fill Hannibal Hamlin's Vice Presidential seat. What followed was a curious choice for a party founded on abolishing slavery, but ends justify means in politics then as today, it seems: it was thought that Democrat Andrew Johnson would attract enough northern Democrat votes away from Peace Democrat candidate General McLellan to help make up for increased defections in the Republican ranks. The most pro-abolitionist wing of the party, known as the "Radical Republicans", were disappointed with Lincoln's slow moves to end slavery during the war, and in particular his vetoing of the "Ironclad Oath", a measure that would prevent slavery-supporting Confederates from holding political office after the war. They set up a new party of their own, the Radical Democrat Party, and held their convention a month before the Republicans had scheduled their own. Former Lincoln-supporting abolitionists such as Wendel Phillips turned once again to the original Republican Presidential standard-bearer, John C. Fremont, as their candidate.

The assasination of Lincoln in April of 1865 thrust Democrat Johnson to the Presidency, and with Congress recessed until December of that year, the immediate burdens of forging peace fell upon the former slave-owner's shoulders. The state governments installed under his approach to "reconstruction" saw former Confederate combattants emerge in positions of political prominence, enabling the exact opposite result intended by the "Ironclad Oath" favored by the Radical Republicans: the Southern states returned to office the same kind of pro-slavery Confederate Democrats that had been in power prior to the war. These Democrat politicans promptly enacted 'black codes' calculated to circumvent the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which had abolished slavery in the United States.

When the Republican-dominated Congress finally reconvened, they tried to renew the authority of the wartime government office of the Freedman's Bureau, charged with providing medical aid, food and shelter to the freed black slaves. President Johnson vetoed the bill to renew, but his veto was successfully over-ridden by the Senate, despite every single Democrat voting to sustain Johnson's veto.

Reacting to the Southern Democrats black codes, which stripped millions of blacks of their legal rights, Republican Congressmen passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, in an attempt to guarantee the right to vote for anyone born in the United States of America. President Johnson vetoed the Act, but the Senate once again overrode his veto, as did the House, allowing the Act to become Law.

In January 1867 President Johnson vetoed a bill to grant the right to vote to blacks living in the District of Columbia, the very capital of the country. His veto was over-ridden by the Senate and the Congress the following day.

The "Radical Republicans" tried to thwart Southern Democrats' efforts to continue to deny blacks the right to vote, through the First Reconstruction Act in early March 1868. This Act was vetoed by President Johnson; once again the Senate and Congress managed to over-ride his veto.

The Second Reconstruction Act of March 1868 was also vetoed by President Johnson; this time his veto was over-ridden the same day, March 22nd.

Two more Reconstruction Acts were vetoed by the President, and twice more his vetoes were over-ridden by an increasingly frustrated Senate and Congress.

In his State of the Union message delivered on December 3rd, 1867, President Johnson devotes paragraph after paragraph to his views on why it was such a mistake to give black-skinned citizens of the US the right to vote:

The morality is always false which excuses a wrong because it proposes to accomplish a desirable end. We are not permitted to do evil that good may come. But in this case the end itself is evil, as well as the means. The subjugation of the States to Negro domination would be worse than the military despotism under which they are now suffering.

[...]
It is not proposed merely that they shall govern themselves, but that they shall rule the white race, make and administer State laws, elect Presidents and members of Congress, and shape to a greater or less extent the future destiny of the whole country. Would such a trust and power be safe in such hands?

This is the historical background leading to Johnson's impeachment by the Congress, and the history-making vote in the Senate dramatized in this Sunday's installment of Radio Memories, below. Keep the above record in mind as you listen to the demonizing of the "Radical Republicans", determined to right the wrongs of history and establish the equal rights so long denied so many citizens of the Republic of the United States of America.

History is story, based on memory. Memory is faulty, in need of constant renewal; lack of such refreshing of memory in this case has resulted the story of President Andrew Johnson's impeachment becoming distorted like a funhouse mirror, re-shaped to serve the pressing political needs of the present age.

In his mammoth 1,200-page chronicle of another President Johnson, "The Years Of Lyndon Johnson Vol 3: Master Of The Senate", Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Robert A. Caro describes the 1865-1868 period as "[f]our years of struggle between a Congress dominated by Radical Republicans determined to solidify the equality of races and humble the Confederacy and a President more interested in reconciliation than revenge..." [page 24]

"Reconciliation", indeed. But, it's the "story" that we all know, the faulty memory we seem fated to remember.

Another author, Bruce Bartlett, recently revisited the historical record to refresh his, and our, memory on this chapter of North America's story. Bartlett summarizes his findings on the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson as follows:

"The textbooks still portray Johnson as the injured party and Republicans as the bully -- using extra-constitutional methods to usurp presidential power.
In fact, Congress had ample grounds for impeachment. It's mistake was in believing that it had to find Johnson guilty of violating the law to justify removing him from office, rather than simply saying that Johnson was not doing his job properly and removing him for that reason. But Johnson hadn't really broken the law, and the specific grounds upon which the House based impeachment were extremely weak. The Senate was right not to convict on them."
["Wrong On Race", Chapter 2, page 37]

The 1868 Presidential election was won by Republican candidate (and former US General) Ulysses S Grant; when the 15th Amendment was passed the following year, guaranteeing the right to vote regardless of race. The last gasp of Reconstruction occurred in 1875, with the passing of Republican Senator Charles Sumner and Republican Benjamin Butler's Civil Rights Act, legislation designed to curb the ongoing discrimination against blacks in the South.

Unfortunately the many Republican attempts to bring equal rights to blacks in the South were undone in 1876, with the election of the next GOP President, Rutherford B. Hayes. The world got to hear quite a bit about the Hayes-Tilden disputed election of 1876 as it witnesed the disputed Bush-Gore election of 2000; what we didn't hear much about, was the compromise agreed upon to help resolve the deadlock in various southern state legislatures. Federal troops stationed in the former Confederate states were finally withdrawn, and with them went the will to enforce the various anti-discrimination measures enacted by the Republican-dominated Congress over the previous decade. In their place came the Jim Crow segregation policies, poverty, illiteracy, and misery that characterized the Democratic "solid south" record on race for almost a full century.

It took another Civil War, this time within the Democratic Party itself, to finally see the stirrings of conscience, the beginnings of justice, and the promise of peace.

In fact, broadcast as it was in the aftermath of the 1948 Presidential election, the listeners to this show would have been familiar with the latest Democratic Party split: the formation of the States Rights Democratic Party, or "Dixiecrats"... southern Democrats determined to preserve the "southern way of life" in the face of Democrat President Truman's stalled efforts to finally, finally, see a country where every citizen could vote.

And could rightfully say, as he looked in his mirror, that he presided over the Land of the Free.




Previous 2010 Radio Memories posts:

Great Gildersleeve: 1947 Easter show
Lux Radio Theater: Hitler's Children
Biography In Sound: The Story Of Science Fiction
Mr President: Romance In The White House
Frontier Fighters: George Pickett
Destination Freedom: Citizen Toussaint [Toussaint L'Ouverture]
Ports Of Call: Haiti

For a list of our 2009 Radio Memories listings, go here.

Durban II: yet more proof that antisemitism and the UN is incompatible with constitutional rule, or the freedom of ordinary people to covenant and rule themselves

Anne Bayefsky, The Obama Administration Sacrifices Israel - Forbes.com

The Obama administration's decision to join the planning of the U.N.'s Durban II "anti-racism" conference has just taken a new twist: cover-up. On Friday, State Department officials and a member of the American Durban II delegation claimed the United States had worked actively to oppose efforts to brand Israel as racist in the committee drafting a Durban II declaration. The trouble is that they didn't.

The Feb. 20 State Department press release says the U.S. delegation in Geneva "outline[d] our concerns with the current outcome document" and in particular "our strong reservations about the direction of the conference, as the draft document singles out Israel for criticism." One member of the delegation told The Washington Post: "The administration is pushing back against efforts to brand Israel as racist in this conference." In fact, tucked away in a Geneva hall with few observers, the U.S. had done just the opposite. The U.S. delegates had made no objection to a new proposal to nail Israel in an anti-racism manifesto that makes no other country-specific claims.
[...]
The reality, however, was nothing of the sort. Instead, Obama's Durban II team slipped easily into the U.N.'s anti-Israel and anti-Jewish environs, taking the approach that "fitting in" was best accomplished by staying silent.

On Tuesday, the Palestinian delegation proposed inserting a new paragraph under the heading "Identification of further concrete measures and initiatives ... for combating and eliminating all manifestations of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance..." with the subtitle "General provisions on victims ... of discrimination." The paragraph includes: "Calls for ... the international protection of the Palestinian people throughout the occupied Palestinian territory." In other words, it claims that the Palestinian people are victims of Israeli racism and demands that all U.N. states provide protection from the affronts of the racist Jewish state.

Furthermore, the new Palestinian provision "Calls for ... implementation of international legal obligations, including the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice on the wall..." This is a dramatic attempt to change an "advisory opinion" into a "legal obligation"--a status which attaches to no advisory opinion. The ICJ decision, which advises that the Israeli security fence is illegal, has always been rejected by the United States--hitherto. And with good reason. The Egyptian judge had voiced his opinion on the result before the case was even heard, in his capacity as a leading Egyptian diplomat. The terms of reference from the General Assembly who asked for the decision, and the documents they laid before the Court, predetermined the outcome. And as the strong dissent by the American judge and Holocaust survivor Tom Buergenthal pointed out, the Court came to its preposterous conclusion that "the right of legitimate or inherent self-defense is not applicable in the present case" without considering "the deadly terrorist attacks to which Israel is being subjected."

But when the Palestinian delegation laid their new proposal before the drafting committee, what did Obama's team do? Nothing, absolutely nothing. They made no objection at all.

It is impossible to argue that their silence was unintended. Over the course of the week's negotiations the American delegation had objected to a number of specific proposals. They had no trouble declaring "we share reservations on this paragraph," in the context of a demand to criminalize profiling. They "called for the deletion" of provisions undermining free speech like the suggestion to "take firm action against negative stereotyping of religions and defamation of religious personalities, holy books, scriptures and symbols."

Their silence when it came to Israel was, therefore, deafening. It also had the very concrete result of not placing the Palestinian paragraph in dispute, and the diplomatic rule of thumb is that paragraphs that have not been flagged as controversial cannot be reopened for discussion, as negotiations finalize an end product.

The Obama team was not only silent on the new "Israel is racist" language, it also said nothing when faced with Holocaust denial. Negotiators from the European Union suggested on Wednesday a new provision to "condemn without reservation any denial of the Holocaust and urges all states to reject denial of the Holocaust as an historical event, either in full, or in part, or any activities to this end." Iran--whose president is a Holocaust-denier--immediately objected and insisted that the proposal be "bracketed" or put in dispute. The move blocked the adoption of the proposal and ensured another battle over the reality of the Holocaust in April--at these supposedly "anti-racism" meetings. After Iran objected, the chair looked around the room, expecting a response. He said: "Is there any delegation wishing to comment on this new proposal by the European Union? It doesn't seem the case. We move on." U.S. delegates said nothing, even after the prompt.
[...]
Evidently, a U.S. team bent on legitimizing Durban II believed it would be counter-productive to object vigorously to sections most likely to be noticed by Americans skeptical about participation in the conference. They must have figured that no objection would mean no controversy, which in turn would mean there would be no cause for complaint from U.S. observers. That's one way to buy favors on the international stage, but it sure doesn't forward a stated intention of changing the Conference direction. Nor does it promote the ultimate need to change the anti-Semitic and anti-democratic direction of global human rights policy.

The fact that "the Palestinians" have been granted an honorific sovereignty by the manipulators of the UN, that they have a delegation taking a lead in this anti-Israel conference, even though "the Palestinians" have never had a government willing to act like a responsible state, negotiating honestly with the fact of its neighbour's existence as a powerful military and economic and demographic reality, is the greatest irresponsibility. It guarantees the ability of Palestinians to forever encourage their own martyrdom to what cannot be acknowledged, i.e. of avoiding serious recognition of and negotiation with Israel, all the while confident the UN will take on the task the Palestinians cannot achieve in the real world with diplomatic, military or economic means: penalizing Israel, throwing its existence into doubt. The Palestinians don't want to negotiate like a responsible state, accepting its neighbor's existence; they want Mommy UN to impose "justice" on the recalcitrant. This is just another form of taxing and killing the successful to indulge the resentments of a failed ideology or religion. In the long run, this can only lead to a more totalitarian world order, one that erodes the ability of constitutional democracies to allow ordinary human realities to represent themselves and take a full part in governing themselves. Instead of talking seriously about the ordinary economic, social, and political needs of the Palestinians, nothing much can be said other than nothing can be said until Israel is dealt with. This is how an unrepresentative elite commands the stage, as high priests in a drama of human sacrifice. As Wretchard at Belmont Club aptly summarizes:

I think the real issue here is the extent to which self-appointed organizations can create either law or compelling persuasion without any sort of democratic grounding. NGOs and regimes like Syria or Iran for example, are of dubious legitimacy. Yet they are participants, even the ringleaders, in an international attempt to “legislate” the behavior of third parties. Where did they get this power? This issue isn’t confined to racism or reparations. That is only its most egregious form. Whether on climate or social mores, organization like this have created an lawmaking process that is unaccountable. Moreover, they are imputing to themselves the power to tax. Suppose “reparations” became a Human Right, where does it end? Can Filipinos sold to slavery to the Moluccas apply? Can Europeans who were captured as slaves apply? Can Robert Mugabe’s population apply to regimes like his for recompense? Can the people of Darfur apply to the UN for compensation for the suffering occasioned by UN inaction?

No. Because they’re not represented directly at places like Durban.

Although this issue has been represented as an anti-semitic enterprise, it goes deeper than that. This is an irregular proceeding that is taking place outside the constitutional structures of states. Outside the control of voters, except at so many removes that there is barely a connection. I know it will be argued that the states have to “agree” but in the nature of things, these international bullying sessions are an exercise in shakedowns and blackmail.

The solution here is to reform the UN and to put a stop all these nonsensical conferences on climate, racism, human rights, etc which impose huge costs on the taxpayers of the world and are run, moreover, by the worst violators in the issues they purport to care so much about. If the UN really wants to do something it should host a conference calling for the stop to shakedowns like Durban. It’s a waste of money and an abomination.

Today it is Israel. Tomorrow it will be some other cause. And that next imposition will be all the more legitimate because of precedent. Where does Durban II gets its legitimacy? From previous conferences. It’s not Durban II people should be concerned about. It’s Durban III.