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.

The future belongs to those who show up

Yitta Schwartz, Who Died at 93, Had 2,000 Living Descendants - NYTimes.com. After being moved by this story of a Holocaust survivor I couldn't help but wonder how many readers of the New York Times would have been apalled to read this article. It now reminds me of a party where a secular Jew/academic intellectual was shocked to find himself in the company of another academic who was also a sincere Christian; he then asked the man how many children he had. The sophisticate's face of utter astonishment to the response, "five" has stuck with me through the years.

Christy Clark invites a guest to tell the story of "Arab Jews" that the Western media almost never hears

Good on Christy Clark, host of British Columbia's most-listened to radio program, to have a guest whose story, simply told, refutes so much of the ideologically-laden rhetoric we are told about Israel being a project of European colonialism. Regina Waldman (this is her married surname) speaks about her family's experience as "Arab Jews", of how they barely escaped Libya with their lives in the wake of the Arab world's pogroms against the Jews who had lived among them for thousands of years, the  Jewish refugees from Arab lands who would go on to constitute about half of Israel's Jewish population. Listen to the interview, here:
CIC Scene » Christy Clark Show on CKNW Interviews Regina Waldman on Jews from Arab Lands

Not just Rubes from Poland

Why Are Jews Liberals?---A Symposium: Commentary magazine has an interesting round table on Norman Podhoretz's latest book. Many good answers are given to the question, though all deal with the relation of Jews either to Judaism or to the non-Jewish world; none deals with the difficult subject of Jew-on-Jew relations in the old Europe of limited Jewish opportunities, or in the New World; and part of the answer to (secular) Jewish liberalism surely lies there. Anyway, a couple of neat quotes, first from Jeff Jacoby:

...troubadour Shlomo Carlebach after a lifetime of visiting American campuses: “I ask students what they are. If someone gets up and says, I’m a Catholic, I know that’s a Catholic. If someone says, I’m a Protestant, I know that’s a Protestant. If someone gets up and says, I’m just a human being, I know that’s a Jew.”

“Just-a-human-being” liberalism, secular and universalist—there is the dead end into which the flight from Jewish separateness has led so many American Jews. To call it a dead end is not to deny its allure. Much of liberalism’s appeal lay in making Jews feel good about themselves, secure in the conviction that they were part of a broad and enlightened mainstream. Liberalism freed them from the charge of parochial self-interest that had so often been leveled against Jews. It replaced the ancient, sometimes difficult burden of chosenness—the Jewish mission to live by God’s law and bring the world to ethical monotheism—with a more palatable and popular commitment to equality, tolerance, and “social justice.”

And from David Gelernter:

The title of Norman Podhoretz’s book asks an important question, and the text answers it: Jews are religious by nature, and having mostly abandoned Judaism, they have taken up the “Torah of liberalism” instead—as an ex–wine connoisseur who has lost all sense of taste but is still thirsty might switch to cheap gin.

Spengler - David Goldman - on American religion

The critic Harold Bloom once argued that the characteristic American religion is a species of gnosticism, and I have good reason to believe it to be true, having spent some years—from 1976 to 1986—in a gnostic cult under the leadership of a man named Lyndon LaRouche.
[...]
We were all about thirty, and most of us were Jewish. The question, of course, is what were a group of young Jews doing in the company of a cult leader with a paranoid view of the world and a thinly disguised anti-Semitic streak.

Here is one answer: We were all long-in-the-tooth student radicals. LaRouche’s organization was the flotsam washed up by the wave of the collective madness that had swept through the youth of the world in 1968 and left many of its participants maladapted to ordinary life for years afterward.

During the 1960s, LaRouche was a one-man Trotskyite splinter group, teaching free-lance courses on Marxist economics at whatever venue would have him. He culled student radicals with an intellectual bent who were repelled by the mindlessness endemic on the left in the late 1960s. LaRouche’s pitch was insidious: How can you justify yourself morally unless you know that what you are doing is right? There existed a science of mind, LaRouche claimed, that would enable the adept to reach the right conclusion.
[...]
His intellectual method resembled the old tale about stone soup: Having announced that he had the inside track on the hidden knowledge that underlay Western civilization (one of his essay was titled “The Secrets Known Only to the Inner Elites”), he attracted a small parade of intellectual orphans, whom he then put to elaborating the details. By the late 1970s he had collected some highly credentialed acolytes, including a group of physicists and mathematicians at his front organization, the Fusion Energy Foundation.

LaRouche claimed to trace a tradition of secret knowledge across the ages, from Plato and Plotinus, through the Renaissance, and down to the German scientists and philosophers of the nineteenth century. Of course, that raises a question: If there exists this kind of knowledge, then why isn’t it universally shared? The reverse side of the gnostic page is paranoia: There must be a cabal of evil people who prevent the dissemination of the truth.
[...]
The Venetian Inquisition, the British Empire, the Hapsburg family, the Rockefellers, and the Trilateral Commission all figured variously in this grand conspiracy against LaRouche’s supposed intellectual antecedents. Jewish banking families kept popping up in LaRouche’s accounts of the evil forces.

You might think—you should think—that this would have sent us running for the exits. But, Godless and faithless, we were all possessed by a fear of being Jewish, and LaRouche offered us a rock to hide under. LaRouche feigned a sort of philo-Semitism, praising marginal figures who could be fit into his mold: the Platonist Philo of Alexandria, for example, and the German rationalist Moses Mendelssohn—Jews, that is, who sounded more like Greek philosophers than like Jews. He also portrayed himself as the opponent of Nazi tendencies that lurked everywhere. In a caricature of the reductio ad Hitlerum, everything he didn’t like pointed to the Nazis. The economist Milton Friedman, whose students had advised the Pinochet regime in Chile, must be a fascist because LaRouche didn’t like his economics, and I coauthored a book with LaRouche in 1978 with that silly allegation.
[...]
In 1978, I did a study for LaRouche of the economics of the narcotics traffic. The numbers I crunched showed that narcotics was a hundred-billion-dollar-a-year business—not a controversial conclusion today, but at the time it seemed startling. LaRouche took my quantitative study and combined it with the paranoid musings of other researchers into a book, Dope, Inc., that had unmistakable anti-Semitic overtones. I knew about this, too, and again I looked the other way.

When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, LaRouche was doing well, with a pocket publishing empire, a more-or-less accepted scientific front in the Fusion Energy Foundation, and a remarkable capacity to raise money (a good deal of which, it later turned out, was obtained by fraud). Nonetheless, within a few years nearly all his key people had quit. Once they began to engage the real world at a serious level, they broke free of LaRouche’s spell.
[...]
Like so many leftist Jews, I came to believe that only a universal solution to humanity’s problems would solve the problems of the Jews, and the more universal the solution, the less Jewish. In plain English I was afraid to be Jewish: The less Jewish I was, and the more universal, the less likely I would be to be killed for being Jewish.

But are the many who are afraid to be Americans much different?
FIRST THINGS: On the Square » Blog Archive » Confessions of a Coward

Denmark no longer protects its Jews, no longer willing to fight fascists?

It is no secret that many Canadian parents actively seek to isolate their children from the children of poor immigrants from countries not-yet-modern, much of the time. Middle-class Canadians often do this at the same time as preaching multicultural pieties. They often speak of their choice to enrol the kids in French immersion(when they can't or won't pay for private schools: for anglos in cities like Toronto and Vancouver, French immersion is the state-subsidized alternative to state schools full of English as a Second Language students and often with racial/gang problems) as taking a stand for multiculturalism. How long can we sustain such polite hypocrisy?

Are we not avoiding the hard work that would come with apprehension of the need to insist that newcomers only maintain (but also expand) their old-world cultural preferences after signing on to what is required by a civilized country in the way of modern behaviour and reason? Can we look forward to becoming even more like Denmark?

Unless we are willing to expel evil from our midst, the violent thugs will rule:

A number of school administrators have come forth in recent days to confirm that they recommend Jewish children should not enrol at their schools.

According to school administrators, law enforcement officials and social workers, the on-going conflict in Gaza has led to heightened tensions between Jews and Arabs - particularly Palestinians - here in Denmark.

And although few headmasters of schools have faced the situation, most of those at schools with a high percentage of children of Arab descent say they try to prevent Jewish parents from enrolling their children there.

On Monday, headmaster Olav Nielsen of Humlehave School in Odense publicly admitted he would refuse Jewish parents' wish to place their child at his school.

The comments were made following an incident last week in which two Israeli citizen's were shot and wounded at a city shopping centre. Police believe the incident was a reaction to the Gaza conflict.

Other headmasters have now come forth to support Nielsen's position, adding that they are putting the child's safety first.

At Caroline Skole in Copenhagen's Østerbro district, video cameras watch over the playground and entrances of the school, which is surrounded by a 2.5 metre-high barbed-wire fence.

One parent whose child goes to the Jewish school said thinking about the extra security can be disturbing at times, but she felt it was necessary.

Rabbi Bent Lexner called the headmasters' concern 'theoretical. In reality, Jewish parents would never try to enrol their child in those schools.'

Yeah, but that's a sign of a scary lack of freedom in Denmark, and not just for Jews: great education the Muslims must be getting. I mean, what kind of idiot headmaster do you have to be to think that this problem will go away with the Jews, that one can avoid the need to tackle the thugs, to fight a war? I guess they're just hoping that their pensions and state benefits will keep being paid, that they will die before Denmark. And tough luck for any in the younger generation.