Sometimes even in the politically correct and intellectually stifling world of academia, a refreshing breeze of sanity reminds us that this is still America.
Professor Nicholas Damask of Scottsdale Community College posted three questions on a quiz about the inferential relationship between radical Islam and Islamic religious writings.
The section was on radical Islamic terrorism, and the questions were totally within the purview of the course and the instructor’s area of expertise, having written a doctoral dissertation decades ago on the subject of terrorism.
By way of disclosure, I was a member of Professor Damask’s doctoral committee back in the day. Even as a graduate student, he showed a remarkable capacity for scholarship, and the idea that he would use his talent to inflame passions about Islam, or any other religion, is simply wrong.
It should also be noted that while everyone should take professor ratings on the Internet with a huge grain of salt and a glass of Alka- Seltzer, for the two and a half decades Professor Damask has been teaching, he has received outstanding ratings and comments. An overwhelming majority of students indicated that they would take another course from him.
One student in the class took exception to the questions on the quiz and posted them on social media without any context. Predictably, they drew a lot of hateful comments, including death threats toward Professor Damask and his entire family.
Clearly, the purveyors of these threats no more represented traditional Islam than did Professor Damask’s questions.
If the professor’s questions could be seen as opining that Islam was not a religion of peace, the hateful responses ironically served as confirmation by embracing the worst stereotypes about Islam.
Social media is a representative sample of nothing, but the satire was inescapable nonetheless.
We might make allowances for the passions of the immature and uneducated, especially since social media does not always bring out the best in people.  What was difficult to comprehend was the reaction of Professor Damask’s superiors, who rushed to judgment, denied him any form of due process, issued an apology in his name without his permission, and then proposed that he become an acolyte of some unnamed imam who would school him in the true nature of the relationship between radical Islam and terrorism.
This assumes that there is one universally accepted understanding of that relationship. Indeed, one can almost hear Islamic religious leaders parsing the differences between the greater and lesser jihad, noting that traditional Islam has been hijacked by groups who kill in the name of Islam and whose victims are primarily Muslims.
It is Muslims who stand in the path and fight against the radical jihadists.
Of course, the bureaucrats at SCC probably understood none of that. Their rush to judgment was based on what they saw as a public relations and political correctness problem.
As some on social media were rushing to extinguish Professor Damask, his superiors were rushing to extinguish his First Amendment and due process rights – a pattern of behavior that, compared to radical Islam, is far more threatening to our democracy.
But in the midst of this brouhaha, voices of sanity emerged – and they are to be commended. Maricopa County Community College District Interim Chancellor, <a href="https://news.maricopa.edu/news-articles/mcccd-statement-academic-freedom" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://news.maricopa.edu/news-articles/mcccd-statement-academic-freedom&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1589834453304000&amp;usg=AFQjCNG3CKontcHSBZkXlm1XzySdA0kj7w">Dr. Steven R. Gonzales</a>, rose to remind the community of the purpose of an education and his abhorrence that Professor Damask’s due process and First Amendment rights had been trampled in a rush to judgment.  “The questions were taken out of context from a unit examining violent political and social movements, and the subject they addressed – the reliance of certain violent groups on religious texts as a justification for their actions – was within the scope of the course,” said Dr. Gonzales, adding that the individuals posting the objections were not even involved in the class.
<a href="https://arizonadailyindependent.com/2020/05/10/arizona-professor-receives-death-threats-for-connecting-islam-to-terrorism/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://arizonadailyindependent.com/2020/05/10/arizona-professor-receives-death-threats-for-connecting-islam-to-terrorism/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1589834453304000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEAOE19q0AyRkPBRpSR6-mE8Uru5Q">Kathleen Winn</a>, governing board member of Maricopa County Community College District, noted the sheer hypocrisy and selectivity in the application of standards of offense. The showing, by another professor in the same district, of a pornographic movie denigrating Jesus had been defended on the grounds of academic freedom. The destruction of a Trump balloon covered in swastikas had been defended on similar grounds.
Only, a misperceived attack on Islam had drawn the ire of academic administrators and a rush to judgment unworthy of the positions they hold.
Amid the continuing caricature of itself that academia frequently presents, such sobering voices, reflective of our traditional values, inspire hope that America is still America.
The Daily Wire, headed by bestselling author and popular podcast host Ben Shapiro, is a leading provider of conservative news, cutting through the mainstream media’s rhetoric to provide readers the most important, relevant, and engaging stories of the day. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.  
Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science, University of Cincinnati, and a distinguished fellow with the Haym Salomon Center.

books

MILLER: An Academic Controversy in Arizona Shows America is Still America

College

First Amendment

Islam

Israel

Social Justice

It’s not really a plague, until you can blame the Jews. From the Black Death of the Middle Ages to the COVID-19 outbreak in Mayor Bill de Blasio’s New York City, bigotry, ignorance, and raw hatred will inevitably find the Jews somehow responsible if not for the plague itself, as in Medieval times, but for its transmission.
The <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-n-y-c-mayor-threatens-jewish-community-with-arrests-over-coronavirus-infractions-1.8806789">gathering of thousands</a> of Haredi (strictly observant) Jews at the funeral for a beloved rabbi, Chaim Mertz, in violation of de Blasio’s shelter in place order, has unleashed a verbal assault from the mayor not just on the violators—most of whom were photographed wearing a face mask—but on the entire Jewish community. It is as if a thousand or so Haredim represented the one million Jews living in New York City.
At the very time of Rabbi Mertz’s funeral, the Navy’s Blue Angels were flying over New York City, and <a href="https://nypost.com/2020/04/28/blue-angels-thunderbirds-fly-over-nyc-for-covid-19-workers/">thousands gathered</a>—also in violation of the mayor’s orders – to watch the show. No police were sent to disperse them.  No threats were made.
As a percentage of American Jews, the total Haredi population is roughly equal to the number of incarcerated blacks as a percentage of African Americans. Yet, it would take some special combination of ignorance and bigotry to attack law-abiding African Americans for the behavior of those in the penal system.
Any politician evincing this toxic blend of ignorance and bigotry would find himself or herself showcased by a media that would trigger all the predatory instincts of a school of sharks smelling fresh blood in the water. Not so when it comes to Jews.
So, while the impact of the coronavirus on other ethnic groups has elicited expressions of sympathy and concern from the mayor, the effect on Jews has brought threats, invoking ancient tropes that would be more appropriate for a group of neo-Nazis or radical Muslims than for the mayor of the country’s largest city.
By picking and choosing how to react to the coronavirus, de Blasio displays his own latent sense of bigotry toward some and favoritism toward others. While threatening the Jewish community with police roundups—no anti-Semitic trope there—the mayor had earlier announced the city would provide some 500,000 <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-23/nyc-to-serve-500-000-free-halal-meals-to-muslims-during-ramadan">free meals to impoverished Muslims</a> celebrating Ramadan. No such meals were provided for needy Jews celebrating Passover or destitute Christians celebrating Easter.
The <a href="https://crownheights.info/jewish-news/704130/after-deblasio-singles-out-orthodox-jews-on-twitter-nypd-goes-on-ticketing-binge-in-williamsburg/">mayor’s threats toward</a> the Jewish community were subsequently carried out by a raid on a synagogue where Haredim were studying Talmud, wearing face masks, and sitting six feet apart.
To date, no mosque has been raided.
To raid a mosque would immediately call up the ACLU, the Jewish Anti-Defamation League, CAIR and a host of liberal and progressive organizations that form the mayor’s political base.
In contrast, the Haredim are viewed, even by many other Jews, as a deviant cult that is both a social and political embarrassment to the Jewish community. From their position on abortion to their embrace of conservative moral values that align with Christian fundamentalism, the Haredim – the most conspicuous of New York’s Jews – are truly a people apart, who are generally without political allies who will stand up for their rights.
Consequently, it was somewhat surprising that in this instance de Blasio crossed so far over the line that the <a href="https://www.bing.com/search?q=Jewish+groups+condemn+Mayor+De+Blasio&amp;form=ANSPH1&amp;refig=287a0009bf4441d59c966d06415cf801&amp;sp=-1&amp;ghc=1&amp;pq=jewish+groups+condemn+mayor+de+blasio&amp;sc=1-37&amp;qs=n&amp;sk=&amp;cvid=287a0009bf4441d59c966d06415cf801">larger Jewish community</a> called him on it. Perhaps because his intemperate language identified all Jews with the Haredim, the community understood the degree of the threat.
De Blasio walked back his inflammatory statement in one of those non-apologies – disingenuous “clarifications” that are standard equipment in the cosmetic bag of politicians.
At the end of the day, however, the larger Jewish community will see this imbroglio as an attack on the Haredim and not on them.  For the members of the liberal Jewish community, coming to grips with the anti-Semitism of the Left would impose on them a psychological dissonance that they would find difficult to resolve.
Maybe they should remember that first they came for the Haredim, and I was not a Haredi ….
Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science, University of Cincinnati, and a distinguished fellow with the Haym Salomon Center.

De Blasio

MILLER: De Blasio, The Plague, And The Jews

Bill de Blasio

COVID

Jews

New York City

Don&#8217;t fault Jared Kushner for attempting to make peace between Arabs and Israelis. To the contrary, he should be praised for the effort. But if history is a guide, his <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trumps-mideast-peace-plan-hinges-on-50b-investment-offers-palestinians-deal-of-the-century">&#8220;deal of the century&#8221;</a> is dead on arrival.
Palestinian Authority&#8217;s unelected President Mahmoud Abbas rejected out-of-hand Kushner&#8217;s proposal to use $50 billion to build a peaceful Palestinian Authority. This is not a negotiating strategy, but a conscientious decision.
The Arab/Israeli dispute is not about territory, boundaries, or finances. If the Israelis were Muslims, exercising the same policies with the same geographic divisions, there would be no dispute.
The Arab/Israeli conflict is about one thing: Jews.
When <a href="http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_1948to1967_jordan_annex/">Jordan grabbed</a> the Arab part of the British Mandate of Palestine in 1948, there was no outrage. Although Jordan&#8217;s land grab was illegal, Britain and Pakistan even recognized Jordan&#8217;s sovereignty.
The rest of the world demurred. Jordan was not demonized for preventing Palestinian self-determination. There were no demonstrations on college campuses for Palestinian independence.
Jordan is a Muslim country that took over another Muslim entity.
The sole issue of the dispute is that Israel is a Jewish state. Under hardline interpretations of Islamic law, land, once Islamic, is Islamic forever. Militant nationalists and fundamentalist Muslims believe that Israel&#8217;s very existence is unacceptable, non-negotiable, and forever a mark of shame in a culture of honor.
In Western culture, our temporal orientation is forward &#8212; toward a better future. The past is nostalgic, not sacred. We might respect the Founding of our republic, but we don&#8217;t want to return to the 18th century. The Founding is celebrated, not worshiped. It is an icon of politics, not of religion.
Osama bin Laden spoke of the return of Islam to Andalusia, Muslim Spain. As he noted, &#8220;All in all, we request of Allah &#8230; that the umma should regain its honor and prestige, should raise again the unique flag of Allah on all stolen Islamic land, from Palestine to <a href="http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2007/10/dreaming-of-al-andalus">Andalus</a>.&#8221;
This what many Islamists believe.
In the late 1930s, the British Peel Commission conceived of a salamander of a Jewish state along the coast that easily could have been overtaken by the Arabs. The Arabs said no.
In 1948, in response to the initial U.N. partition plan, the Arabs not only said no &#8212; they also invaded the fledgling Jewish state and declared a war of genocide.
After the Six Day War, the Israelis offered to negotiate their conquest of the territories. The Arabs met in Khartoum and issued the infamous three &#8220;No&#8217;s&#8221;: No negotiations, no recognition, no peace.
At Camp David, Arafat shocked the assembled observers by spurning Ehud Barak&#8217;s offer of a Palestinian state. Only his subsequent apologists have managed to interpret this as anything less than a reversal of his own negotiating position.
In 2008, Israel&#8217;s then-prime minister Ehud Olmert <a href="https://www.jns.org/erekat-olmert-offered-abbas-more-than-the-entire-west-bank/">offered Abbas 110%</a> of the land he requested. Abbas said no.
The Palestinians want nothing less than the elimination of the Jewish state, either by a war of attrition that evolves into a larger conflict or by Israel being overrun by four generations of refugees who claim a &#8220;right to return&#8221; and will destroy Zionism demographically.
This situation has festered for more than 71 years. If the Palestinians do not want the $50 billion (six times the 2016 GDP) that the &#8220;deal of the century&#8221; promises, then perhaps there is another use for the money.
The Palestinians have uttered the same refrain from the beginning of the conflict. They are not going to change their position.
Arabs who are Israeli citizens could choose to remain in Israel, and the others could be resettled among the lands from which 850,000 Jews were evicted in the broader Arab world. As my Jewish Iraqi grocer in the German Colony of Jerusalem once told me, &#8220;I was dispossessed of 50 hectares in Iraq. Let them settle Palestinians on my land.&#8221;
After World War II, for her security needs, Russia changed the boundaries of Central and Eastern Europe and the nationalities of tens of millions of people.
Sometimes an intractable problem calls for a difficult solution.

Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science, University of Cincinnati, and a distinguished fellow with the news and public policy group <a href="https://salomoncenter.org">Haym Salomon Center</a>. Follow him <a href="https://twitter.com/salomoncenter">@salomoncenter</a>.

gettyimages-1133254840

MILLER: The ‘Deal Of The Century,’ D.O.A.

Foreign Policy

Jared Kushner

Middle East

Palestinians

Trump Administration

Chief Palestinian-Arab negotiator Saeb Erekat revealed in a candid interview that Israel&#8217;s then-prime minister, Ehud Olmert, had offered Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas in 2008 <a href="https://www.jns.org/erekat-olmert-offered-abbas-more-than-the-entire-west-bank/">more land than he had asked for</a> in an attempt by Israel to exchange land for peace. Despite the inducement, and Erekat&#8217;s urging Abbas to accept it, Abbas said no. 
This was the same response Arafat had given to Ehud Barak at Camp David some eight years earlier, to the amazement of then-President Bill Clinton.
Throughout the various attempts to create a Jewish state alongside an Arab state, the Arabs have had one response: No. 
For those who still cling to the notion that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be resolved by some exchange of land for peace, neither the failed Oslo Accords, the disaster of Gaza, nor the klepto-tyranny that has emerged in Judea and Samaria will dissuade them. 
Far too many Western diplomats think that the solution to the Palestinian-Arab problem is to be found in the paradigm of labor relations. That conveniently ignores that neither the workers nor the managers in the West want to destroy the steel mill &#8212; unlike the situation with the Palestinians, whose raison d&#8217;etre is the destruction of Israel. 
There is one way for this problem to be solved, and that is through victory. That is the thinking outside the box of the <a href="https://www.meforum.org/israel-victory-project/">Middle East Forum&#8217;s Israel Victory Project</a>. It seeks this victory not as a WWII devastation, but as a reassertion of Israel&#8217;s policy of deterrence as practiced from 1948 to 1993. That policy would be engaged on multiple fronts, including economic and diplomatic. 
The Israel Victory Project&#8217;s greatest asset is its focus on moving away from the farcical &#8220;peace process,&#8221; which has made life worse for both Israelis and Palestinians alike. The &#8220;peace process&#8221; has sacrificed another generation of Palestinians to the hatred that serves the ambitions of the unelected Palestinian-Arab chieftain and his wealthy sons &#8212; who have all flourished <a href="http://jcpa.org/article/the-businesses-of-mahmoud-abbas-and-his-sons/">economically</a> under their family&#8217;s kleptocracy. 
The Palestinian-Arab oligarchy &#8212; as distinct from the Palestinian-Arab people who continue to live in misery &#8212; has no incentive to change the status quo. The peace process has become a minuet of coming together with Israel, retreating, consulting with various partners, and ultimately achieving nothing.
The Israel Victory Project does not advocate specific tactics or outcomes. It is a paradigm shift away from the absurdity of rewarding the Palestinian elite while they continue to plot the elimination of Israel. 
As a sharp turn away from the dysfunctional peace process, the Israel Victory Project deserves attention &#8212; but its belief that it can change the hearts and minds of ordinary Palestinians, after decades of anti-Semitic indoctrination, is also misplaced. 
There are only two alternatives to solving the problem. Either the Arabs will defeat Israel and perpetrate the second Holocaust that they repeatedly boast about to a receptive world, or Israel will undertake a massive resettlement of Palestinian-Arabs as the Muslim countries did with 850,000 Jews after World War II. 
The Palestinian-Arabs will not make peace. Their culture of honor and shame does not permit Jews to inhabit &#8220;sacred Muslim ground.&#8221; Their orientation toward time is to embrace a revered, mythological past rather than to anticipate a rewarding future. To resurrect this past, they have been willing to consign their children to lives of despair, and they will continue to do so. 
The Israel Victory Project suffers from mirror imaging &#8212; projecting the values of the West where they do not belong. It excludes a World War II-style victory. But let&#8217;s be honest: If we had made a negotiated peace with Germany and Japan, would they be the advanced, economically vibrant democracies that they are today? Of course not!
In the aftermath of the 75th anniversary of D-Day, we are reminded that sometimes you need the mentality of a &#8220;Great Crusade&#8221; &#8212; an unyielding pursuit of conquest. 
The Arabs can fight an interminable number of wars, lose, and rise up another day to fight again. Israel can only lose once.
There are conflicts where the only option for peace is to destroy the enemy&#8217;s institutional structure, without compromise, without equivocation, but within the bounds of the rules of civilized society and to implement policies that are less about the enemy&#8217;s future than about one&#8217;s own security. 
After World War II, that is what the Allies did, and the world is better for that decision. Israel needs to learn by example. After 70 years of different negotiation strategies, it is time for Israel to move on to a different policy. The Israel Victory Project is a step in the right direction, but its reliance on changing Palestinian-Arab attitudes toward Israel is far and away too optimistic to be successful. 

Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science, University of Cincinnati, and a distinguished fellow with the news and public policy group <a href="https://salomoncenter.org">Haym Salomon Center</a>. Follow him <a href="https://twitter.com/salomoncenter">@salomoncenter</a>.

MILLER: Israel Victory Project Is A New Initiative To Resolve The Arab-Israeli Conflict

Judaism

Freshman congresswoman Rep. Rashida Tlaib&#8217;s (D-MI) <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/politics/rashida-tlaib-holocaust-calming-feeling-house-gop?fbclid=IwAR0lk2B0snwgN_DUj60CzDN_WIvEwximupqUhxWcq767WsY62kg5qZBm854">most recent foray</a> into the news cycle is not simply a vile twisting of history; it is also a mechanism designed to generate conflict. It is an in-your-face reconstruction of a false history in which Palestinians purportedly saved Jewish lives in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
Responding to these distortions with fact is only half the battle, for Tlaib must know that the <a href="https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=grand+mufti+and+hitler&amp;view=detail&amp;mid=E50ACF7670FCB334502BE50ACF7670FCB334502B&amp;FORM=VIRE">Grand Mufti of Jerusalem</a> was the guest of Adolf Hitler in Berlin during World War II. It is also well known that the Mufti <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/hitlers-mufti">recruited three divisions of Bosnian Muslims</a> for the dreaded Waffen SS, sought to defeat the British in Mandate Palestine, and to transmit Hitler&#8217;s &#8220;final solution&#8221; upon the Jews of the Middle East.
The Mufti was so popular that the British were incapable of bringing him to justice after the war for fear of creating unending civil unrest throughout the Muslim world.
Arabs possessed an affinity not just for Nazi anti-Semitism, but also for Nazi political doctrine. <a href="http://www.dougcarmichael.com/blog/bernard-lewis-on-the-nazi-and-communist-origins-of-the-baath-party/">Ba&#8217;ath socialism</a>, which became the dominant secular ideology in both Iraq and Syria, finds its roots and aspirations in Hitler&#8217;s National Socialism. Egyptian strongman and icon Gamal Abdel Nasser was a strong admirer of Hitler &#8212; as was the <a href="http://www.eretzyisroel.org/~jkatz/missed.html">young Anwar Sadat</a>.
Pogroms against Jews in Mandate Palestine did take place, and the Mufti himself organized the infamous <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-farhud">Farhud</a> (Arabic for violent dispossession) against the Jews of Baghdad in 1941. After World War II, the Jordanian Arab Legion <a href="http://www.zionism-israel.com/his/Hadassah_convoy_Massacre-4.htm">ethnically cleansed</a> the Jews living in eastern Jerusalem and throughout Judea and Samaria.
Tlaib knows that Jews in Judea and Samaria and <a href="https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-hebron-massacre-of-1929">Hebron</a> are returning to the land from which they were illegally dispossessed and to the soil from which they were previously massacred. As I write this on May 13, 2019, it is the date of the Arab <a href="http://www.zionism-israel.com/Gush_Etzion_Massacre.htm">massacre of the Kfar Etzion village</a>. On this date in 1948, Kfar Etzion was overrun by the Arab Legion. The Jews who surrendered were murdered.
Tlaib&#8217;s template is to say something outrageous, generate a lot of publicity, engender more exposure through responses, and then turn the tables by making the issue about the responses.
She keeps doing it because it works.
In propaganda, the first concern is for whom the message is intended. If the audience is the pious base, it is immaterial that the message is a factual distortion. The base&#8217;s narrative needs to be reaffirmed.
Tlaib is not just sending a message; she is creating theater. The subsequent responses and her ensuing outrage are part of the script. This is the propaganda of the deed.
To respond, it is neither necessary to engage in similar historical distortions nor sufficient to rely simply on facts. Instead, it is necessary to engage in outrageous truths that are often too controversial to reach the public forum in significant ways.
For example, the anti-Zionists have campaigned on historical distortions such as &#8220;Zionism is Nazism.&#8221; Yet, the political affinity of the Arab world for Nazism, and its reverence for both Hitler and the &#8220;final solution&#8221; seldom is part of the debate. The reality is that Arab nationalism, not Zionism, is partially rooted in Nazism &#8212; even going back to the creation of the <a href="https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2012/12/islamic_fascism_the_nazi_connection.html">Muslim Brotherhood</a> itself.
Anti-Zionists assert that Zionism is apartheid. But the reality is that no Jew is permitted to become a citizen of or own property in Jordan, and the punishment for Palestinian-Arabs selling land to Jews is death. No church or synagogue is permitted in Saudi Arabia, but Islam flourishes in Israel. When Hitler passed the racist Nuremberg Laws, he received <a href="https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/myths-and-facts-treatment-of-jews-in-the-arab-world-chapter-11">congratulations</a> from various corners of the Arab world.
&#8220;<a href="https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/8657/france-islam">First the Saturday people and then the Sunday people</a>&#8221; is the refrain heard among some triumphalist Islamists. The Saturday people, 850,000 of them, were ethnically cleansed from Arab and Muslim lands decades ago. Now, a militant brand of Islam cleanses the Christians from the Middle East, and in Africa, Islamic fundamentalists slaughter Christians.
These aspects need to be an aggressive part of the debate.
The best way to counter the outrage of distortion is with outrageous truths. The distortions are routinely propagated. The truth needs to be more aggressively told!

Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science, University of Cincinnati, and a distinguished fellow with the <a href="https://salomoncenter.org">Haym Salomon Center</a>.

MILLER: Rashida Tlaib And The Propaganda Of Her Anti-Semitic Deed

Anti-Semitism

Rashida Tlaib

Hate is the great unifier of <a href="https://reasonandmeaning.com/2017/09/04/summary-of-eric-hoffers-the-true-believer/">mass movements</a>. Its power is neither to be dismissed nor underestimated.
Identity politics, with its focus on intersectionality, is forged in the crucible of hate. If there are oppressed, there must be oppressors.
Identity politics deals not with the actions of individuals, but rather the actions of groups against groups.
Its incongruities and hypocrisies are palpable. In the wake of 9/11, we were cautioned to indict neither all Saudis nor all Muslims as terrorists.
But when it comes to Jews, there is no characterization, no matter how obscene or how offensive, that is beyond the pale of discourse. There are no caveats.
In the halls of Congress, the intersectionality-spawned disdain of Jews is almost a daily occurrence. Led by Congresswoman <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2019/02/10/ilhan-omar-israel-aipac-money-1163631">Ilhan Omar</a> (D-MN), it finds justification in the voices of other &#8220;minorities&#8221; who rise to defend her actions. Instead of condemning Omar&#8217;s invocation of hateful tropes that have been the historical foundations of anti-Semitism, the usual suspects have been stepping over themselves to affirm them.
Women&#8217;s March organizer Linda Sarsour was quick to jump into the fray. And, of course, no attack on Jews would be complete without some display of pathetic ignorance from Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who, when not distracted from preventing 25,000 jobs from coming to her district, is busy enlightening Congress on the virtues of the terrorist group Hamas.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who has drawn fire for placing Omar on the influential House Foreign Affairs committee, drew a moral equivalence between Omar and Trump supporters based on one aberrant individual at a Trump rally.
As Kellyanne Conway noted when CNN&#8217;s Jake Tapper asked whether she would call this <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/30/donald-trump-rally-jew-s-a-media-kellyanne-conway">individual deplorable</a>, &#8220;Yes, I would. His conduct is completely unacceptable and does not reflect our campaign or our candidate.&#8221;
In contrast, House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn (D-SC) had this to say about Omar: &#8220;… I wish we would just go on and stop beating up on people when they make a mistake. All of us have misspoken at one time or another.&#8221;
But Omar is not misspeaking. She knows exactly what she is doing, and the <a href="https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2019/02/14/this-is-why-minnesota-jewish-leaders-say-they-will-no-longer-treat-ilhan-omar-wit-n2541480">Jewish community of Minneapolis</a> has finally had enough of her disingenuous commitments to Israel and her repeated anti-Semitic slurs, followed by her duplicitous apologies.
Omar’s anti-Semitism drew endorsements from white supremacist <a href="http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/258991">David Duke</a> and Nation of Islam leader <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/news/farrakhan-praises-omar-anti-semitic-215742918.html?.tsrc=jtc_news_article">Louis Farrakhan</a>. If there is one thing white supremacists and black nationalists share, it is hatred of Jews.
Women&#8217;s March co-president Tamika Mallory, a vocal supporter of Farrakhan&#8217;s, naturally added to Omar&#8217;s defense, parroting Farrakhan&#8217;s specious indictment of Jews as being responsible for the slave trade.
Jews provide a convenient focal point for the American Left&#8217;s hate. And progressive Jews, given a choice between their leftist politics and their fading Jewish identity, have joined the Hamas chorus, lending a <a href="https://forward.com/opinion/419117/no-ilhan-omar-is-not-anti-semitic-for-calling-out-aipac/">twisted credibility</a> to hackneyed tropes that have resulted in inquisitions, crusader massacres, pogroms, and the Holocaust.
Max Berger, co-founder of the anti-Zionist IfNotNow, calls on his fellow Jews to stand with Omar against AIPAC, which Omar alleges buys votes from her fellow members of Congress.
Berger and Omar are obsessed with AIPAC, using old tropes of Jews and money. But somehow the various Arab lobbies, including the powerful Saudi and Emirates lobbies, escape their concern.
For all of Omar’s trafficking in allegations of Israeli apartheid, there is actually an empirical measurement of <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2325502/Map-shows-worlds-racist-countries-answers-surprise-you.html">racism among states</a>. Muslim states tend to be racist and xenophobic.
But Omar&#8217;s accusations bear no relation to facts — as fellow traveler Ocasio-Cortez has said, if you are morally correct, the facts don&#8217;t matter.
Neither do they matter to those who seek to mobilize a mass movement built on hatred as the sinew that ties it all together. In this pursuit, both Omar and her progressive accomplices are of one mind. Jews should take note, for those who do not pay attention to history are known to repeat it.
Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science, University of Cincinnati, and a distinguished fellow with the news and public policy group Haym Salomon Center. Follow him <a href="https://twitter.com/salomoncenter">@salomoncenter</a>.

MILLER: Disdain For Jews Is The Sinew Of Identity Politics

Leftism

Fearing that Jews will wake up and realize that the Democrats and their allied interest groups will confront every bias except Jew hatred, a group of Jewish Democrats has vowed to confront anti-Semitism and anti-Israel policies in their party.
Being pro-Israel isn&#8217;t just for Republicans, opines Democratic Party strategist<a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.jta.org/2019/02/04/opinion/pro-israel-is-not-just-for-republicans&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1550592090660000&amp;usg=AFQjCNG2Qfv0f4LfcfcA_jou3hm38_WbQw" href="https://www.jta.org/2019/02/04/opinion/pro-israel-is-not-just-for-republicans" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"> Ann F. Lewis</a>, seeking to assure the faithful that prominent Democrats are now willing to confront their party&#8217;s rising anti-Semitism and anti-Israel policies. One wonders where they were hiding when President Obama was reshaping Iran into the hegemonic power in the Middle East, creating an existential threat to Israel.
Lewis&#8217; statement showcases that Jews and Democrats have traditionally been in the vanguard of support for &#8220;minority&#8221; rights; but it refuses to confront that increasingly, &#8220;minorities&#8221; do not support Jews or Israel&#8217;s right to exist.
It&#8217;s no accident that it isn&#8217;t just Muslims that presage the extermination of the Jews by chanting, &#8220;From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.&#8221; it is also progressives and the various &#8220;minority&#8221; groups that mindlessly embrace intersectionality.
As gays in Berkeley carry signs proclaiming, &#8220;Gays for Palestine,&#8221; one wonders how the demonstrators would be received in Ramallah.
Intersectionality posits that Muslims generally and Palestinians specifically are members of the oppressed class and deserving of unfettered support.
Muslims have been oppressors as well as oppressed. The Jews of the Arab world, who preceded Islam by more than a thousand years, were ethnically cleansed after Israel&#8217;s establishment. And now, in areas of the Middle East where Christianity once flourished, Christians barely exist.
The trans-Saharan slave trade exists today in North Africa as Sub-Saharan Africans seeking to escape from war and famine find themselves prey to modern-day Arab slave traders.
But none of this concerns the followers of intersectionality, the &#8220;oppressed&#8221; American minorities, or the Democrats who are the self-anointed champions of the socially and politically marginalized. The leftists have become obsessed with the only democracy in the Middle East where gays can live openly and where all religions can be freely practiced.
The Left has built a wall of silence around bigotry directed at Jews. The <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/congressional-black-caucus-calls-on-northam-to-resign-e2-80-98an-apology-now-isn-e2-80-99t-enough-e2-80-99/ar-BBT4bRF&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1550592090660000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHhGH2gHAXw33Ev1LyCAGMOmb7ErA" href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/congressional-black-caucus-calls-on-northam-to-resign-e2-80-98an-apology-now-isn-e2-80-99t-enough-e2-80-99/ar-BBT4bRF" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Congressional Black Caucus fumes</a> about Virginia Governor Ralph Northam&#8217;s insensitive <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://news.yahoo.com/virginia-governor-ralph-northam-hangs-013534221.html&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1550592090660000&amp;usg=AFQjCNExBDmlMyRzzZ3wtr_XDGSFw2357g" href="https://news.yahoo.com/virginia-governor-ralph-northam-hangs-013534221.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">black-face escapade</a>, but it shows neither shame, remorse, nor outrage about its members proudly posing for photographs with the Rev. Louis Farrakhan, an unabashed anti-Semite and racist.
Anti-Semites in the Democratic Party threaten to erode the party&#8217;s natural base. Even Jewish liberals, not to be confused with &#8220;leftists,&#8221; will wake up one day to the reality that the groups they support do not support them.
All four announced Democratic presidential candidates have opposed the Senate&#8217;s anti-Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions resolution on the specious grounds of freedom of speech. The resolution prohibits behavior, not speech.
The ACLU used the same logic as found in the anti-BDS resolution to support gay rights, but now it has entered the courts <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.thetower.org/7184-legal-scholar-anti-israel-ideology-pushes-aclu-to-undercut-anti-discrimination-norms-it-had-established/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1550592090660000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEtYHRlLH7faxBNTt9XjUnhCCleJw" href="http://www.thetower.org/7184-legal-scholar-anti-israel-ideology-pushes-aclu-to-undercut-anti-discrimination-norms-it-had-established/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">to undermine the legal precedence for gay rights</a> in order to find a legal justification for supporting BDS. Such is the institutionalization of anti-Semitism by the Left.
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar crudely alleges in her latest anti-Semitic rant that AIPAC buys votes. AIPAC is a bottom-up lobby that represents the interests of American Jews. For all of Representative Omar&#8217;s fixation on AIPAC, the strongest lobby in Washington is arguably <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/04/20/saudi-government-has-vast-network-of-pr-lobby-firms-in-u-s/?utm_term%3D.ec0310223cc1&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1550592090660000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFNPqHIpiWVdBX7EjDo6wpFY9UKxw" href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/04/20/saudi-government-has-vast-network-of-pr-lobby-firms-in-u-s/?utm_term=.ec0310223cc1" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">the Saudi lobby</a>.
The Saudi lobby does not represent the interests of U.S. citizens but those of an extraordinarily wealthy and powerful foreign government.
Representative Omar knows less about who dominates Washington than whom to hate.
As Jews become increasingly aware that the Democratic Party no longer represents their interests, it will take more than a public relations campaign to win them back. It is time for the Jews to recognize that save for their votes and their campaign contributions, the Democratic Party has no use for them.
Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science, University of Cincinnati, and a distinguished fellow with the news and public policy group Haym Salomon Center. Follow him @salomoncenter
<div> </div>

MILLER: The Current Democratic Party Has No Use For Jews

Democratic Party

The latest conflict between Hamas and Israel reminds us that one thing is certain in the Middle East: there will always be war between Hamas and Israel.
 As long as Hamas believes in the viability of a war of attrition as both a short-term tactic and long-term strategy to defeat Israel, the next war is waiting around the corner.
The perception of the function of guerrilla warfare is based on the writings of the Chinese leader Mao Zedong and their application in Vietnam under <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&amp;q=https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u%3Dhttps-3A__alphahistory.com_vietnamwar_vo-2Dnguyen-2Dgiap_%26d%3DDwMFaQ%26c%3DRAhzPLrCAq19eJdrcQiUVEwFYoMRqGDAXQ_puw5tYjg%26r%3DeV4f_q0wYPQfvpAWdMEHYEZF332wkgrt9sdzshjnG3I%26m%3DmLt_JhoaUSiTCiPrhxROosEMZcIHzsE6LMdComS13gc%26s%3DHAk9fRCKwdcmGP1Mkfbz0YlvyU3TIfrjsL-w2wHRVh8%26e%3D&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1535067976459000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHwIsll2VI7xzHt7IS-88UaUEP-Qg" href="https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__alphahistory.com_vietnamwar_vo-2Dnguyen-2Dgiap_&amp;d=DwMFaQ&amp;c=RAhzPLrCAq19eJdrcQiUVEwFYoMRqGDAXQ_puw5tYjg&amp;r=eV4f_q0wYPQfvpAWdMEHYEZF332wkgrt9sdzshjnG3I&amp;m=mLt_JhoaUSiTCiPrhxROosEMZcIHzsE6LMdComS13gc&amp;s=HAk9fRCKwdcmGP1Mkfbz0YlvyU3TIfrjsL-w2wHRVh8&amp;e=" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">General</a><a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&amp;q=https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u%3Dhttps-3A__alphahistory.com_vietnamwar_vo-2Dnguyen-2Dgiap_%26d%3DDwMFaQ%26c%3DRAhzPLrCAq19eJdrcQiUVEwFYoMRqGDAXQ_puw5tYjg%26r%3DeV4f_q0wYPQfvpAWdMEHYEZF332wkgrt9sdzshjnG3I%26m%3DmLt_JhoaUSiTCiPrhxROosEMZcIHzsE6LMdComS13gc%26s%3DHAk9fRCKwdcmGP1Mkfbz0YlvyU3TIfrjsL-w2wHRVh8%26e%3D&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1535067976459000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHwIsll2VI7xzHt7IS-88UaUEP-Qg" href="https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__alphahistory.com_vietnamwar_vo-2Dnguyen-2Dgiap_&amp;d=DwMFaQ&amp;c=RAhzPLrCAq19eJdrcQiUVEwFYoMRqGDAXQ_puw5tYjg&amp;r=eV4f_q0wYPQfvpAWdMEHYEZF332wkgrt9sdzshjnG3I&amp;m=mLt_JhoaUSiTCiPrhxROosEMZcIHzsE6LMdComS13gc&amp;s=HAk9fRCKwdcmGP1Mkfbz0YlvyU3TIfrjsL-w2wHRVh8&amp;e=" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"> Vo Nguyen Giap</a>.
 A self-educated military strategist, Giap was recognized as one of the foremost architects of guerrilla warfare in the 20th century.
 Giap&#8217;s success and the withdrawal of colonial powers from both Asia and Africa gave guerrilla warfare mythical status as to how small bands of under-equipped but dedicated local forces could defeat larger, better-equipped armies.
Nowhere was this perception more enhanced than with the publication in 1965 of Robert Taber&#8217;s The War of the Flea. Taber&#8217;s conception of guerrilla warfare was that &#8220;the guerrilla fights the war of the flea and his military enemy suffers the dog&#8217;s disadvantages: too much to defend; too small, ubiquitous, and agile an enemy to come to grips with.&#8221;
Widely praised, poorly understood, mythical in character and insufficiently analyzed, guerrilla warfare took on the status of a panacea for Marxist insurgents whether in the jungles of Vietnam or the streets of Algiers.
The adoption of the guerrilla warfare fantasy ignored the fact that Mao did not defeat the Chinese Nationalists with guerrilla warfare but with a well-supplied conventional army.
No group has embraced the mythical character of guerrilla warfare and its corollary, terrorism, as have the Palestinians. Their persistence in fighting a war of attrition against Israel that they cannot win is illustrative of a failure to understand both the legacy and history of guerrilla warfare.
In the length of human history, there are only two examples of guerrilla warfare being successful against a non-colonial power, Castro&#8217;s war for control of Cuba and the Sandinista&#8217;s defeat of the Somoza regime in Nicaragua. In every other instance of guerrilla warfare, a colonial regime decided that the costs of colonialism outweighed the benefits, picked up its tents, and returned to its homeland.
Despite Palestinian rhetoric, the Israelis have only one homeland, Israel. They are not going to return to Europe or the Middle Eastern countries from where most of their grandparents came after being expelled by Muslim governments. They are going to fight.
The French could leave Algeria and Africa and return to France. The British could leave India and Africa and return to Britain. Colonialism was based on profit and loss.
It was unnecessary to defeat the enemy. Simply to cause enough chaos to make colonialism unprofitable would get the colonial power to leave.
But an indigenous people, as the Israelis are, will react to attrition by raising the costs to the enemy in both blood and treasure. Hamas has callously made Muslim blood cheap and expendable, and the European countries are only too eager to step in and replace the wasted treasure, ensuring the next conflict will occur.
For the Israelis, this cycle will continue until the cost of guerrilla warfare is so horrendous that it touches the Hamas leadership directly and makes it economically unpalatable for the Europeans to use their resources to keep the cycle of violence going.
Israel should not accept an endless war of attrition that Hamas is unable to consummate but has enough international sympathy to continue. The guerrilla must be presented with a cost that ends the war of attrition as an option.
Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science, University of Cincinnati, and a distinguished fellow with the news and public policy group Haym Salomon Center. Follow him @salomoncenter
<div> </div>

MILLER: Hamas, Israel, And The Fantasy of the War of Attrition

Most mentally ill people are harmless. If the mentally ill were a violent threat to public safety, you wouldn&#8217;t be able to walk down Market Street in San Francisco without fearing for your life.
The Toronto mass murderer has been portrayed by his family as a tormented young man struggling with mental illness and depression and <a href="https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/toronto-mass-shooter-faisal-hussain-suffered-from-psychosis-but-could-more-have-been-done-to-stop-him">incapable of being helped</a> by treatments.
We keep hearing the same explanation about Muslim murderers across Western society, begging the question rather than answering it: Why do mentally ill Muslims kill infidels and not other Muslims who are more likely to be in their social space? Why do so many acts of Muslim violence in the West target Jews, gays, and women?
The explanations for these crimes are almost uniformly at the psychological level, as if socialization no longer plays a role in our understanding of human behavior.
The mental-illness explanation is becoming as worn as it is meaningless and is an insult to those people facing the challenges of mental illness.
As a society, we in the West are loath to publicly admit that within Islam there is a strain of fundamentalist violence that is highly contagious and against which many in the Muslim community fail to take precautions.
Even moderate Islamic congregations will invite speakers whose sermons <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBlwxqqAprQ">contain incitements to violence</a>. Rather than acknowledge this, there is a circling of the wagons and the worn excuse that the remarks were lifted out of context or they don&#8217;t mean what non-Muslims think they mean.
The rise of a virulent, violent anti-Semitism in Europe is a product of that hatred, as is the acceleration of theological and cultural rationales for the bashing of gays and the raping of &#8220;infidel&#8221; women. Europe has <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/world/2018/03/01/angela-merkel-admits-that-no-go-zones-exist-in-germany.html">finally admitted</a> what has been obvious to ordinary citizens for years: <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2541635/Murders-rapes-going-unreported-no-zones-police-minority-communities-launch-justice-systems.html">no-go areas do exist</a>, where infidels fear to go and sharia is the moral norm.
To ignore the sociological conditions that Islam promotes and to focus solely on a psychological theory that mental illness explains acts of violence perpetrated by Muslims on select targets strains our sense of credulity. While the overwhelming majority of Muslims are not violent and while there are many strains of Islam, across continents Islam produces a disproportionate amount of violence, and migration from Muslim countries increases the incidence of violent behavior in countries where Muslims settle.
Of course, some of this is explained by other sociological factors such as cultural conflict and poverty; but for elites and the media to routinely dismiss Islam as not even a contributing or a catalytic factor is to manipulate reality to fit a socio-political agenda. Worse, it undermines the public&#8217;s faith in social and political institutions, for the elites are unwilling to tell us what is painfully obvious to everyone. 
As Hannah Arendt so brilliantly noted in The Origins of Totalitarianism, one of the greatest devices of propaganda is to convince the masses that there is a truth that is being hidden from them. In contemporary Western society, there is no need for propagandists to invent that. It occurs with each act of Islamist-related violence and the rush to excuse it.
Was the Toronto shooter even mentally ill? We have the family&#8217;s word for that, but people who knew him seemed unaware of his illness. So far, no one has produced a record of a confinement for mental illness or even treatment. The Canadian media repeated the family&#8217;s statements, and the repetition of those statements by different but not independent sources created an illusion of credibility.
Then, there are the shootings. The handgun was a .40 caliber. It has a recoil like a mule&#8217;s kick. It takes a lot of practice to comfortably shoot a handgun like that, handle the recoil, and hit something. The Toronto shooter appeared to be a very good shot, even able to hit his targets while on the move. No one who has never shot a high-caliber handgun could possibly appreciate the skill that takes. In addition, he was able to reload while moving &#8211; something that police and military learn to do but ordinary gun owners do not. How did he acquire those skills and where did he practice them?
If the Canadian government and a sycophantic media are yet again covering up an act of terrorism as mental illness, then the deception will cause far more harm than letting the truth emerge.
Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science, University of Cincinnati, and a distinguished fellow with the news and public policy group Haym Salomon Center. Follow: @salomoncenter

MILLER: Toronto Shooter: Mentally Ill Or Jihadist?

Shooting

Toronto

Compassion literally means to suffer with, to suffer together, to share in the suffering. If you want to understand real compassion for refugees, look to Israel.
In the 1950s, Israel took in the Mizrachi Jews of the Middle East at a time when the country did not have enough food for everyone to have three meals a day. Compassion literally meant going hungry to absorb refugees who had lived in their homelands for a thousand years and were thrown out in a virtual single night.
Contrast that with the virtue-signaling liberals denouncing President Trump&#8217;s refugee policy. What suffering are they going to incur in order to absorb people who largely are not refugees in any legal sense but rather economic migrants?
The answer is simple. None.
These middle-class liberals will not be competing with the economic migrants for low-skilled jobs. Their leafy upscale suburbs will not see a migrant unless they are there to sweep the floors, manicure the lawn, or bus the dishes in an upscale restaurant.
Their classrooms will not be overcrowded. Their schools will not have to shift resources to accommodate students who cannot speak English, and in some cases cannot speak Spanish but speak an indigenous language for which there are no translators.
Their parent-teacher nights will be well attended, whereas parents working long hours at manual labor and lacking language skills do not attend parent-teacher night. They haven&#8217;t the time, energy or money to help fill a school&#8217;s resource voids, as middle-class parents routinely do through volunteering and opening their pocket books.
Their communities will not face the impact of a group of unskilled, impoverished migrants with a different set of cultural values. <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/04/illegal-immigration-ideology-orwellian-virtue-signaling/">As Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution notes,</a> the central valley in California is littered with junk from illegals who have no respect for the land because their socialization is different.
The false middle-class compassion enables the Mexican oligarchy to maintain the status quo by exporting its poor and exploiting their economic remittances. Mexico, with its pass-through of Central American and Mexican immigrants, controls our immigration policy &#8211; even legal immigration. The ceilings on legal immigration are influenced by the vast number of illegals.
The liberals of Dobbs Ferry, New York will signal compassion for economic immigrants but will not see emergency rooms close or their county health facilities flooded with illegals to the point where the signs are now in Spanish.
We have an elite that has immunized itself from the problems its policies visit on ordinary Americans and a middle class that loves illegals while it feels nothing for America&#8217;s poor and homeless. If it did, it would ask the inconvenient questions about how allocating resources for illegals depletes those available for America&#8217;s impoverished citizens.
Israelis gave up a meal a day to absorb the Mizrachi Jewish refugees while straining its fledgling economy. That is compassion.
Middle-class compassion in America causes America&#8217;s poor to experience economic hardship so that the middle class can feel virtuous while denouncing President Trump.
If we want real immigration reform, let&#8217;s locate refugee resettlement areas in upscale middle-class neighborhoods. Establish public housing for immigrants in those neighborhoods and open the institutional facilities of those neighborhoods to the immigrants. And if that isn&#8217;t enough, recruit professionals from Mexico and Central America and license them to compete with America&#8217;s professional class.
Then we&#8217;ll see how compassionate and virtue-signaling middle-class liberals really are.
Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science, University of Cincinnati, and a distinguished fellow with the Haym Salomon Center. Follow him @salomoncenter

MILLER: Finding Real Compassion for Immigrants

Immigration

If you have been watching the news over the past week, you would have witnessed the veritable obsession with the fate of 2,000 immigrant children separated from their parents. Media coverage of the border exceeds that of a State of the Union Address. Pundits opine incessantly about the legalities and consequences of the policy. It&#8217;s as if the moral compass of the nation needs to be reset. And if there are any doubts, the media is relentless in reminding us that compassion is now the moral issue of the moment.
When it came his turn to interview Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz about his investigation into the FBI, African-American Congressman Elijah Cummings used his time to launch into a rant about the situation at the border. Ethical violations and partisan bias in the FBI were of far less consequence. As were this week&#8217;s Chicago shootings.
One thing you most likely would not have seen if you were watching the news is that as the temperature in Chicago rose, 84 people were senselessly shot. One of these was a 12-year-old boy shot in the stomach after a gunman fired into a crowd on the city&#8217;s West Side.
Another was a four-year-old girl, shot as she innocently sat with her parents on their front porch on the city&#8217;s South Side. Police say that someone in a dark sedan pulled up in front of the house and opened fire.
A 15-year-old boy was shot in the head as he was traveling on a city bus on his way home from one of the city&#8217;s elite high schools several miles away. A good kid striving to use his God-given talents takes a bullet in the head because he was in the wrong place &#8212; Chicago &#8212; at the wrong time.
Whatever you might think of the tragedy at the border, not one of these children has been injured, let alone killed. Their chain-link fence conditions, tugging at your heartstrings, is temporary. Some will end up in facilities that look like boarding schools, complete with computers, outdoor recreation, three meals plus two snacks a day, and schooling. The separation from their parents &#8212; as traumatic as it may be &#8212; is also temporary.
From 2011 to 2016, at least 174 children under the age of 17 have been killed in Chicago shootings and 1,665 children have been shot. The dead children&#8217;s separation from their parents is permanent &#8212; not temporary. The victims are overwhelmingly African-American.
It is a national disgrace that children are being injured and killed in America&#8217;s third largest city. So where are the camera crews, the bobbing heads, the pundits, the comely reporters in sleeveless dresses anguishing over the children, blurring the line between dispassionate reporting and compassion and advocacy? They aren&#8217;t there.
Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson told reporters that we need gun legislation to stop this. Well, Supt. Johnson, I grew up in those streets and have a special affection for them. When I grew up, any 18-year-old could walk into Sears Roebuck on Homan Avenue and buy a semi-automatic rifle. There was no waiting period and no federal gun check. Yet, no kid was shooting other kids.
So, let&#8217;s stop talking about guns. Let&#8217;s talk about why there is no media frenzy, no national hysteria, no push for an executive order, to dealing with this problem.
If 84 white people were gunned down in Jefferson Park, Highland Park, or name your favorite white middle-class community, all hell would break loose, and the svelte young women, with tear-filled eyes, would be evoking our compassion while the monitor would be showing the picture of a once-smiling four-year-old white girl.
Chuck Schumer and Paul Ryan would be competing for which party could come up with the best solution, and President Trump wouldn&#8217;t be able to sign executive orders fast enough.
But the reality is that black lives really don&#8217;t matter. What matters in America is the tear-jerking episode du jour that will help get you reelected. Next week, the Chicago Tribune&#8217;s tally will increase the number of children under 17 killed or wounded from gunfire, and the American people will collectively yawn.
Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science, University of Cincinnati, and a distinguished fellow with the news and public policy group Haym Salomon Center. Follow: @salomoncenter

MILLER: Lesson From Immigration Debate: Black Lives Don’t Matter

Chicago

Illegal Immigration

Murder

Republican Party

By some miracle, <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&amp;q=http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/247580&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1529620691039000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEOJQwt8lL2bJkCSxg-sQlgMrGcUA" href="http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/247580" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">18-year-old Shuva Malka</a> awoke in an Israeli hospital and was able to speak. She survived multiple stab wounds inflicted by a Palestinian jihadist waging the Intifada of the Knives. Her survival beat the odds.
Shuva Malka&#8217;s survival will bring joy in Israel and sadness in the Palestinian territories where the murder of young Israelis is celebrated by candies for the masses and shouts of &#8220;Allahu akbar.&#8221;
The targeted knifings of young women, together with the suicide bombing of places where young people congregate, are calculated strategies of the Palestinian campaign of genocide against the Jews.
Yet, on the Left there is no condemnation of this genocide. Quite to the contrary, there is unbridled support among the identity politics chorus for anything the Palestinians do. This includes self-proclaimed &#8220;queers&#8221; <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&amp;q=https://www.bing.com/images/search?q%3Dqueers%2Bfor%2Bpalestine%26qpvt%3DQueers%2Bfor%2BPalestine%26FORM%3DIGRE&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1529620691039000&amp;usg=AFQjCNH2M84a9W71uhWG7pT3Yr6B3O4kBQ" href="https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=queers+for+palestine&amp;qpvt=Queers+for+Palestine&amp;FORM=IGRE" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">announcing their support for Palestine</a>. In Gaza or Ramallah, this behavior would result in death.
Among feminists, there is embarrassing and hypocritical silence about the targeting of Jewish women in their reproductive years.
As Hamas wages war on the environment, burning forests and scorching verdant fields, the silence of the Left&#8217;s environmentalists is deafening. Attacking &#8220;space ship&#8221; Earth is good if it hurts the Jews.
In Mainz, Germany, 14-year-old <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&amp;q=https://heavy.com/news/2018/06/susanna-feldman/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1529620691039000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFCY_LZq4PSJSCtaPpc53W5oQnpmQ" href="https://heavy.com/news/2018/06/susanna-feldman/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Susanna Feldmann </a>was not as lucky as Shuva Malka. She was raped and murdered by a Muslim asylum seeker. Her body was found in a shallow grave.
The confessed perpetrator <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&amp;q=https://www.timesofisrael.com/suspect-in-murder-of-german-jewish-teen-arrested-in-iraq/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1529620691039000&amp;usg=AFQjCNG85BuoUeYIQrfEysXe4053o5jaRQ" href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/suspect-in-murder-of-german-jewish-teen-arrested-in-iraq/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Ali Bashar</a> fled to his native Iraq, where apparently the fears that caused him to seek asylum did not loom as threatening as facing the German judicial system. He was later turned over to German authorities.
The fact that Susanna Feldmann was Jewish is not necessarily the reason she was targeted. She might have been just another Kafir woman not dressed or comporting herself according to the standards of Sharia.
She was considered legitimate prey for sexual assault and murder, a phenomenon well explained by <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&amp;q=https://www.uni-frankfurt.de/43551644/schroeter&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1529620691039000&amp;usg=AFQjCNF_D7J8nYXX6RuctWmiGQWfLDhjOg" href="https://www.uni-frankfurt.de/43551644/schroeter" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Susanne Schroter</a>, Director of the Global Islam Research Center at Goethe University in Frankfurt.
&#8220;We&#8217;re no longer talking about isolated cases&#8221; of violence against women, said Schroter in an <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&amp;q=http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/247377&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1529620691039000&amp;usg=AFQjCNF_MyG4L39vcQwbISLOm6OiopqlGA" href="http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/247377" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">interview</a> with the <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&amp;q=http://web.de&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1529620691039000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEQxvyMvm_JAyExFHf_6V8Ixtw46g" href="http://web.de/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">web.de</a> online magazine, adding that German society urgently needed to confront Muslim and Arab immigration&#8217;s impact on women.
&#8220;I&#8217;m not making a blanket accusation against refugees, Arabic men or Muslims,&#8221; Schroter said. &#8220;But we clearly are going through something I would call a culture clash.&#8221;
When the German parliament stood for a moment of silence to honor Susanna Feldmann, members of the Left disrupted it, a vile, disgraceful, and all-too-common behavior exhibited by the Left with regard to Jews.
Like American leftists generally, and feminists specifically, standing with a culture that supports female genital mutilation, treats women as chattel, marries off little girls as brides, and advocates and ritualizes wife abuse causes neither dissonance nor introspection. The Right, not Islam, is their enemy, as are Jews.
In street demonstrations where the Right showed anger at what befell Susanna Feldmann and thousands of other German women, the Left was there to counter, lest the epidemic of Muslim sexual assault and murder interfere with German Chancellor Merkel&#8217;s grand design to transform Germany into a mythical multicultural society.
<a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&amp;q=https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/linda-sarsour-zionism-and-feminism-are-incompatible-1.5448822&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1529620691039000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGfm7GdoSER0KhOyF4w3drlxgD3kw" href="https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/linda-sarsour-zionism-and-feminism-are-incompatible-1.5448822" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Linda Sarsour</a>, a proponent of Sharia and a prominent figure in the women&#8217;s movement, strongly asserts that you can&#8217;t be a feminist and a Zionist. But apparently there is nothing incongruous about being both a feminist and a supporter of an ideology that subjugates and brutalizes women.
The Left believes that having a &#8220;just&#8221; cause is moral license to kill innocents. From Israel to Germany, it is the Left that sides with Palestinians and Muslims who kill innocents in the name of a just cause. It is the Left that finds a cultural rationale for butchery.
If the Left prevails in America, we will have a society that bleeds, as Israel, Germany, and much of Europe already do.
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This is Shuva Malka who was walking to her high school to take an exam when Brutally Stabbed multiple times by an arab attacker. She is 18. B&#8221;H, she is alive &amp; now stable. The media won&#8217;t report because Shuva is a Jewess, and Jewish life doesn&#8217;t matter to them. Am Yisrael Chai!! <a href="https://t.co/ad8KdVkksh">pic.twitter.com/ad8KdVkksh</a>
&#8212; Princess Pana(@PrincesssPana) <a href="https://twitter.com/PrincesssPana/status/1006503959471755265?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 12, 2018</a></blockquote>
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Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science, University of Cincinnati, and a distinguished fellow with the news and public policy group Haym Salomon Center. Follow: @salomoncenter

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Abraham H. Miller