Thursday, August 1, 2019

WHY MUSLIM FRIENDS BETRAY

Circumstance and profitability.

August 1, 2019
 
Raymond Ibrahim
11
Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and author most recently of Sword and Scimitar.
One of the most troubling aspects of the recent gang-rape and murder of a 60-year-old Christian teacher in Syria was reported on Arabic media as follows (in translation):
Her rapists and murderers are from the [jihadi] organization, al-Nusra.  Some of them are foreigners but others are from the area.  In other words, those who raped and stoned her are themselves from among her former students and neighbors, whom she taught Arabic in school over the course of 30 years….  Surely she never dreamt to see such depraved savagery in the eyes of her former students…. Nonetheless, they preyed on her like wild beasts—even though wild beasts do not rape their mothers (emphasis added).
Such is the third category of Muslims that lurks between “moderates” and “radicals”: “sleepers”—Muslims who appear “moderate” but who turn “radical” once circumstances become favorable.   For instance, after the Islamic State (“ISIS”) entered the Syrian city of Hassakè, prompting a mass exodus of Christians, many otherwise “normal” Muslims joined ranks with ISIS, instantly turning on their longtime Christian neighbors.
This shift has played out countless times wherever and whenever Islamic terror groups infiltrate.  The following are testimonials from non-Muslims, mostly Christian refuges from those regions of Iraq and Syria that came under ISIS or other jihadi control.  Consider what they say about their longtime Muslim neighbors who appeared “moderate”—or at least nonviolent—but who, once the jihad came to town, exposed their true colors:
Georgios, a man from the ancient Christian town of Ma‘loula, Syria, tells of how Muslim neighbors he knew all his life turned after al-Nusra—the same jihadi outfit that recently gang-raped and murdered the aforementioned 60-year-old Christian women—invaded in 2013:
We knew our Muslim neighbours all our lives. Yes, we knew the Diab family were quite radical, but we thought they would never betray us. We ate with them. We are one people.  A few of the Diab family had left months ago and we guessed they were with the Nusra. But their wives and children were still here. We looked after them. Then, two days before the Nusra attacked, the families suddenly left the town. We didn’t know why. And then our neighbours led our enemies in among us(emphasis added).
After explaining how he saw a young member of the Diab family whom he knew from youth holding a sword and leading foreign jihadis to Christian homes, Georgios continues:
We had excellent relations. It never occurred to us that Muslim neighbours would betray us. We all said “please let this town live in peace — we don’t have to kill each other.”  But now there is bad blood. They brought in the Nusra to throw out the Christians and get rid of us forever. Some of the Muslims who lived with us are good people but I will never trust 90 per cent of them again.
A teenage Christian girl from Homs, Syria, relates her story:
We left because they were trying to kill us. . . . They wanted to kill us because we were Christians. They were calling us Kaffirs [infidels], even little children saying these things. Those who were our neighbors turned against us. At the end, when we ran away, we went through balconies. We did not even dare go out on the street in front of our house. I’ve kept in touch with the few Christian friends left back home, but I cannot speak to my Muslim friends any more. I feel very sorry about that. (Crucified Again, p. 207; emphasis added).
When asked who exactly threatened and drove Christians out of Mosul, Iraq, another anonymous Christian refugee explained:
We left Mosul because ISIS came to the city. The [Sunni Muslim] people of Mosul embraced ISIS and drove the Christians out of the city. When ISIS entered Mosul, the people hailed them and drove out the Christians….  The people who embraced ISIS, the people who lived there with us… Yes, my neighbors. Our neighbors and other people threatened us. They said: “Leave before ISIS get you.” What does that mean? Where would we go?…  Christians have no support in Iraq (emphasis added).
Other “infidels,” Yazidis for example, have experienced the same betrayal.  Discussing the ISIS invasion of his village, a 68-year-old Yazidi man said:
The (non-Iraqi) jihadists were Afghans, Bosnians, Arabs and even Americans and British fighters….  But the worst killings came from the people living among us, our (Sunni) Muslim neighbours….  The Metwet, Khawata and Kejala tribes—they were all our neighbours. But they joined the IS, took heavy weapons from them, and informed on who was Yazidi and who was not. Our neighbours made the IS takeover possible (emphasis added).
When asked during an interview why people she grew up with her whole life suddenly joined ISIS and savagely turned on her people, a Yazidi woman replied:
I can’t tell you exactly, but it has to be religion.  It has to be religion.  They constantly asked us to convert, but we refused.  Before this, they never mentioned it.  Prior, we thought of each other as family.  But I say, it has to be religion (emphasis added).
This phenomenon is not limited to the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.  In Nigeria—a nation that shares little with Syria and Iraq, other than for its Islam—a jihadi attack that left five churches destroyed and several Christians killed was enabled by “local Muslims” who were previously on friendly terms with the region’s Christians.
Nor is this phenomenon connected to any of those contemporary Muslim “grievances”—whether the existence of Israel, “blasphemous” cartoons, or “lack of job opportunities”—Western talking heads often cite to rationalize away Muslim hatred.  The following anecdote, over one century old and from the Ottoman Empire, speaks for itself:
Then one night, my husband came home and told me that the padisha [sultan] had sent word that we were to kill all the Christians in our village, and that we would have to kill our neighbours. I was very angry, and told him that I did not care who gave such orders, they were wrong. These neighbours had always been kind to us...  but he killed them — killed them with his own hand (Sir Edwin Pears, Turkey and Its People, London: Methuen and Co., 1911, p. 39; emphasis added).
This, then, is the other, forgotten group of Muslims that lurk between “moderates” and “radicals”: sleepers, whose allegiance can and does shift at the drop of a dime.

ABOUT RAYMOND IBRAHIM

READ MORE
at

I WAS A STOOGE FOR A COMMUNIST TERROR GROUP THAT MURDERED AMERICANS

The allies of a Communist terrorist group are running the country.

August 1, 2019
 
Daniel Greenfield
25
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
There is a scene in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino's revisionist take on the Manson murders, in which the fictional members of the family blame movies for their crimes. The real answer is less cinematic and more political. The Manson family’s crimes were part of a culture of leftist violence.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is one of the many ways that American leftists evade that reckoning.
After the murders, one of the Manson family wrote “pig” in Sharon Tate’s blood on the door. The radical act carried out in California thrilled fellow Weathermen radicals halfway around the country.
"Dig It. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, they even shoved a fork into a victim's stomach! Wild!" Bernardine Dohrn gloated at a Weathermen war council.
Dohrn and other members of the leftist group understood the horrifying murders as a radical act that normalized violence. And Dohrn, a Weatherman terrorist, saw violence as an inspirational tool for shattering the norms of society. That was why the Weathermen adopted the ‘fork salute’.
The horrifying reality of the sorts of people that would do that is at odds with the media’s normalization of leftist radicals as principled activists reacting to racism and the Vietnam War. The radicals are routinely humanized and their victims are forgotten. History is entombed with the dead.
And so The Tablet decided to give Jonah Raskin, who had participated in the Weathermen, and later promoted the hateful works of the violent Communist terror group, a forum for his fond memories.
"I could wallow in nostalgia about my days with the Weather Underground in the early 1970s: at Coney Island with Bernardine Dohrn, eating Bill Ayers’ soufflés and Jeff Jones’ homemade breads," he begins.
Dohrn’s fork celebration of the murder of a pregnant woman had taken place in 1969.
But surely old Nazis also have fond memories of eating soufflés and homemade breads. Himmler’s wife probably made a mean ham sandwich. And the Manson family no doubt had some great chili. But outside of Neo-Nazi publications, they don’t get the space to share fond food and murder memories.
Old Communist killers and their cohort however get ample space for their horrifying nostalgia.
"I was in love with the romance of the underground but hated the bombings," Raskin writes.
And some of Manson’s followers liked the pot, but hated stabbing pregnant women.
A better title would have been I Was a Stooge for a Communist Terror Group That Murdered Americans. But instead, ‘Prairie Fire’ Memories is titled as a book review. Raskin, a professor emeritus, describes himself as a "reviewer of books, movies and restaurants", but the book, Prairie Fire, is the manifesto of the Weathermen, a Communist terror group, and its reviewer admits to his complicity.
Prairie Fire was dedicated to Ted Gold, Diana Oughton and Terry Robbins, "three of our comrades who gave their lives in the struggle."
Gold, Oughton and Robbins actually died in a botched effort to detonate a nail bomb at a military dance.
Instead of killing and mutilating hundreds of members of military, and their wives and girlfriends in New Jersey, they blew up a Greenwich townhouse and themselves with it.
Prairie Fire is also dedicated to “political prisoners” such as Sirhan Sirhan, who killed Robert F. Kennedy.
These are the sorts of ugly realities that Raskin and much of the coverage of the Weathermen elide for interfering with the central myth of the Boomer Left that it was Nixon and some nameless culture of “right-wing hate” that brought down the golden era of liberalism, rather than the culture of leftist violence that claimed the lives of JFK and RFK, ended the organistic celebrations of the Age of Aquarius, and paved the way, not for utopia, but for the Reagan revolution and the normalcy of the eighties.
Raskin has built his literary career on playing off his closeness to the Weathermen while bemoaning some of their extremes. The Tablet essay strums the same nostalgic chords accompanied by a few trills of criticism. The institutions that effectively run the country can’t openly countenance a mass campaign of bombing, but they can, and do, evoke sympathy for and solidarity with its perpetrators.
The complicity of many leftists with the Weathermen lay not in their unqualified support for the crimes of the Communist terror group, but for their sympathy with the principles that underlay their actions. It was exactly the same sin that led so many leftists to defend the Soviet Union as morally good, if tactically misguided, a revolutionary system of positive change responding poorly to a real crisis.
"I didn’t make or transport any bombs but I think I played a useful role," Raskin admits, after describing seeing a bomb maker at work.
Confessions like these come without social or legal penalties.
Confess to watching a Klansman assembling a bomb meant for a black church without tipping off the authorities, and the social and economic penalties would be severe. But there are plenty of social and economic rewards in writing, yet again, about protecting leftist terrorists while occasionally urging them to stop killing people, without actually going to the authorities to stop them from killing people.
"I supported my wife financially when she was underground, met with her immediately after the townhouse explosion, and on and off for the next six months," Raskin notes.
He fails to note that his wife, Eleanor Raskin, a red diaper baby, had advocated violence as far back as 1969, had allegedly aided the escape of one of the townhouse fugitives, and was indicted for possession of a bomb and explosive devices with unlawful intent in 1979.
Raskin, like most leftists, describes his ex-wife as a fugitive. The romanticized language is commonplace and inaccurate. He was financially supporting and protecting a violent terrorist.
But Raskin was hardly alone in that.
After being busted in 1981, his ex-wife graduated law school and became an Administrative Law Judge. Despite Raskin’s claim of a “a decade-long FBI manhunt that bordered on the pathological”, Dohrn, Ayers, his ex-wife, and other Weathermen, received a lighter slap on the wrist than Jeffrey Epstein, and were quickly embraced by the academic world. They became wealthy professors and even judges.
Their victims were not so lucky.
Just as in the Epstein case, law enforcement did its job. But the justice system chose not to. Like Raskin, the system protected its own. And, not long after, the radicals joined the system.
That was what Raskin and other leftists had urged them to do all along.
The issue was never a true disavowal of violence.
“They never totally ruled out mass action and I never totally ruled out ‘armed action,’ we came down on opposite sides of the divide between the two,” Raskin writes.
The ultimate issue was the best route to taking over the United States.
We live in a country run by the radicals who entered the system. And the radicals in the system eventually used their influence to bring members of the Weathermen in out of the cold.
This isn’t their greatest crime. But it is an obvious and bloody one. That’s why it’s rarely discussed.
The governments and political figures who gave sanction and shelter to Nazi figures were revealing something dark and disturbing about themselves. Ours gave sanction and shelter to Communist killers. Like the Nazi collaborators, the Democrats and other leftists who did so showed us who they are.
The Manson family, like the Weathermen, like all radicals, had sought to shatter the norms of a comfortable society with acts of horrifying violence. The leftists who actually won, want to maintain the outward comforts and norms, while using their power to transform society into a socialist tyranny.
Setting off nail bombs and stabbing pregnant women disturbs people. And they don’t want that.
Unlike the Manson family, the Weathermen faced few consequences and their crimes were forgotten, because even though they killed more people, they did so in the name of the ideology of the Left.
“It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up,” was the key quote of the end of the Nixon era.
But the real cover-up went on. Every member of the Weathermen who wound up in academia, pardoned by Democrats, elevated to high positions, is evidence of the cover-up. And the cover-up is evidence of the fact that the allies of a Communist terrorist group are running much of the country.
Raskin, predictably enough, also wound up in academia. His review is yet another of the endless political critiques that define his radical movement and fill the pages of its history with endless, inane scribblings.
His 5,400-word essay mentions everything except the victims.
At the end, he writes of Dave Gilbert, in jail after the "death of two police officers", passive voice and nameless, and his "comrade-in-arms", Judy Clark, who both "lived the politics of Prairie Fire and paid with their freedom." The victims of the politics of Prairie Fire however paid with their lives.
The officers have names. They are Edward O'Grady and Waverly "Chipper" Brown.
O'Grady had been a Marine during Vietnam. He left behind three children and was working on his BA in criminal justice.
Unlike the members of the Weathermen, he never got to finish it.
Brown was an African-American Air Force vet. He left behind two daughters who followed him into the Air Force.
Raskin indicts Weathermen members for their “white privilege”, just before he fails to mention their murder of a black man. He is wholly preoccupied with ideological assessments, rather than moral ones. The victims of the Communist terror group don’t matter to him. No more than Tate mattered to Manson or Dohrn. Or the millions murdered by Stalin, Mao and the leftist killers that the American Left admired.
"Today, the ex-Weathermen and former members of the Weather Underground belong largely to the pages of myth," Raskin writes.
It is a myth, but not as the professor emeritus means it. The Weathermen have been mythologized by the Left. Its members are cult heroes and the subjects of endless articles and essays.
Their victims have been denied justice and will be forgotten.
But what the collaborators of the Weathermen have failed to realize is that a reckoning is coming. The sins of the Weathermen are part of the DNA of the Left.
They are not just the myths of the past, but a foreshadowing of the future.
“Murder will out,” a poet far more ancient than Bob Dylan wrote. 
The Left repeats the same patterns of crimes and follies, revolutions and oppressions, lies and reckonings, that destroy its utopias. Camelot falls again and again. Because it was always tainted.
History can be buried. But the evil of a regime and a movement lives and rots within its soul.
A reckoning will come, not in academic papers or reviews, but in the crimes that have never been repented, and will therefore come again, until the tide of lies, blood and treachery bring down the same system that covered up the crimes of the Weathermen, and brings a revolution against the revolution.

ABOUT DANIEL GREENFIELD

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
READ MORE
at

DEMS DOUBLE DOWN IN DETROIT

Targeting Trump, turning back the clock.

August 1, 2019
 
Lloyd Billingsley
8
After the first debate on Tuesday, CNN took some heat for including no questions about the famous Mueller report. This time the CNN crew brought it up, but only near the end of the proceedings.
Sen. Kamala Harris of California cited “ten clear cases” of obstruction of justice on the part of President Trump. “No one is above the law,” she said, but the candidate failed to outline the ten clear cases. In his recent testimony, Mueller cited zero cases of obstruction.
Sen. Cory Booker said the president is “authoritarian,” so “start impeachment proceedings immediately.” Julian Castro told the crowd the Mueller reports indicates that Trump “deserves impeachment,” without any citation from that report or the recent Mueller testimony. The Texas Democrat also supports the “prosecution” of the president.
Likewise, New York mayor bill Di Blasio said the president “has committed crimes worthy of impeachment,” without naming any of the crimes. On the prospect of impeachment hindering the Democrats’ prospects to defeat Trump, several candidates, including Castro, said they had to “walk and chew gum at the same time.”
Former HUD boss Castro also delivered one of the bigger whoppers of the night when he acknowledged recent job growth and said it was all “due to Barack Obama.” As with the Mueller report, he didn’t explain how, or deliver any figures.
Castro did tout his “Marshall Plan” for Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, which would sent more money to those countries. Castro would not deliver a clear answer whether crossing the border should continue to be illegal. The notion of  “open borders,” he said, was a “right-wing talking point.”
Likewise, candidate Michael Bennet was silent on illegal border crossings, but did refer to “nativist hostility.” Kirsten Gillibrand, brilliantly clad in orange, wanted such illegal crossings to be a “civil violation.” The candidates opposed the separation of families and several targeted former vice president Joe Biden for the heavy deportation record of the Obama administration. In fact, anti-deportation chants broke out several times during the debate.
Biden pushed back at Castro and talked up his position on asylum, and how he had sent $750 million to Guatemala. Biden also asked the candidates “what do you say to all those who wait in line” and that the United States should be “able to send back” those who cross illegally.
Rep. Tulsi Gabbert of Hawaii, clad in white suit worthy of Elvis, referred to the undocumented as “second-class citizens.” She did not clarify that they are not citizens at all, and that states such as California have made illegals a privileged, protected class, even helping violent criminals to evade detection and deportation. Gabbert did say she would make it easier to gain asylum in the United States but did not support free college for illegals.
Candidate Jay Inslee, sporting a Clark Kent look, denounced the “white nationalist” in the White House and said “send us your Syrian Refugees.” Cory Booker, who like host Don Lemon often calls Trump a racist, warned about “playing into Republican hands.” Bill Di Blasio wondered if Biden used his power as vice president to stop deportations, and got no clear answer. For his part, Biden became something of a target in the opening exchange on health care.
Biden charged that the Medicare for all policies touted by leftist Democrats would raise taxes and cause people to lose their employer-based insurance. “You can’t beat Trump with double-talk,” said Biden, who wants to “build on Obamacare” and “take back all that Trump took away.”
That wasn’t enough for candidates such as Harris and Gillibrand, who blasted independent insurance companies with nearly the fury of Elizabeth Warren on Tuesday. The audience got no clear indication how it would all be funded. Several Democrat candidates supported health care as a “right” and Cory Booker said Donald Trump is “trying to take away health care.”
Joe Biden  also took some heat from Harris for working “with segregationists to oppose busing,” without indicating that those segregationists were in fact Democrats such as Senators Herman Talmadge and James Eastland. Harris talked a good game on criminal justice but Gabbert took her to task for jailing people on marijuana charges as a DA in San Francisco, and keeping cash bail in place.
In the debate’s foreign policy section, candidate Gabbert lamented the nation’s endless wars and said “our president is supporting al Qaida.” She didn’t say how, exactly but that might have tied Julian Castro’s contention that Obama caused the nation’s current prosperity. The people in Detroit  could be forgiven for thinking he didn’t, and that Democrats bear responsibility for many of their current woes.
As on Tuesday, the so-called moderates and progressives tangled but no clear winner emerged. On the other hand, Cory Booker may have provided a hint when he said, “Trump is enjoying this debate.”


ABOUT LLOYD BILLINGSLEY

Lloyd Billingsley is the author of  Barack ‘em Up: A Literary Investigation and, most recently, Sexual Terrorist, about the Golden State Killer.  Lloyd’s work has appeared in City Journal, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Times, California Globe, and many other publications. Bill of Writes: Dispatches from the Political Correctness Battlefieldis a collection of his journalism. His crime books include A Shut and Open Case, about a double murder in Davis, California.
READ MORE
at

AS POLICE PRESTIGE DECLINES, CRIME INCREASES AND CIVILIZATION WEAKENS The unraveling of law and order.

AS POLICE PRESTIGE DECLINES, CRIME INCREASES AND CIVILIZATION WEAKENS

The unraveling of law and order.

August 1, 2019
 
Bruce Thornton
31
In the latest of a string of municipal police stand-downs, New York City officers slunk away after a jeering crowd dumped water on them. In a separate incident in Harlem, an officer was hit on the head with a hard-plastic bucket. This retreat from an assault on the law was not as consequential as that of Portland police who did nothing as journalist Andy Ngo got assaulted and injured by Antifa thugs, but it bespeaks a dangerous trend: The growing disdain for the prestige of law enforcement officers, who now are politically handcuffed and prevented from doing their jobs.
That this latest embarrassment happened in NYC makes it even more revealing. Throughout the Nineties, crime in the city plummeted: Violent crime dropped by more than 56%, and property crimes 65%. Murders peaked at 2245 in 1990, then started to decline, particularly after Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor in 1993 and instituted changes in policing, such as the “broken windows” crackdown on misdemeanors like subway turn-style-jumping that created an atmosphere of disorder and lawlessness. Along with more police on the streets, more criminals put in jail, and tactics like “stop-and-frisk” of suspects, these changes contributed to the steep decline in murders. By 1999, murders had fallen by 73%. In 2018, there were 289 murders, almost half as many as Chicago, which has about one-fourth the population of New York.
That success demonstrated how the prestige of the police, their success at stopping crimes, and the respect for their authority that follows from their active presence in the public square, deters potential miscreants and improves the quality of life for citizens––especially minorities, who are the most frequent victims of violent crime in big cities.
But sometimes reinforcing this authority requires a physical response when a civilian continually resists even verbally an officer’s orders. I learned this lesson in my rural, multi-ethnic high school. The students were equally divided among white, black, and Mexican-American. This meant every few years there’d be an interracial gang fight, which brought out local sheriffs and highway patrolmen. Once, while I was watching the show, a white kid started to enter the fray, lunging between me and a highway patrolman. The officer told the student to stay out of it. The kid lunged again, and the officer grabbed his arm and gave it a pull. On the third try, the patrolman bounced his nightstick on the kid’s head, and he hit the ground with his eyeballs spinning like a slot-machine. 
Years later, I had a refresher course in how to avoid unpleasant encounters with the police. I was in D.C. with a couple of university colleagues, sitting in a cab after dinner at Union Station. The cab in front of us wasn’t moving, because the East African driver was being hassled by three black “youths.” The driver obviously did not want to transport them where they wanted to go. Yes, he profiled them, based on the hard experiences of cabbies who end up maimed or dead for not being as careful. After a few minutes, two D.C. policemen, black men who looked like they played linebacker for the Redskins, approached the group. We couldn’t hear what was said to the officers, but one of the cops didn’t like it–– he suddenly lifted the offending punk off the ground and slammed him against the cab. He then advised the group in very colorful language we could hear that they should not frequent this area. The kid wasn’t hurt enough to need medical care, but he and his fellows did get the point. And to show it wasn’t a question of race, our black cabby defended the black policemen.
These anecdotes illustrate what most of us who lived outside the affluent progressive cocoons learned growing up––the informal “rule of three” governing police reactions to resistance or disrespect. The first response is verbal, the next physical, and the last requires medical attention.  Sounds cruel and abusive in our age of therapeutic solicitude, dainty snowflakes, and predatory lawyers, but for the police to be effective, they cannot brook any public challenge to their authority that damages their prestige. Doing so invites more resistance, more contempt for the cops, and more crime.
Yes, as in any group of flawed human beings, there are abusive cops too fond of their power and of abusing it.  But even if the cop was in the wrong, those of us with common sense understood that at the moment of contact, he possessed the authority to use lethal force, so it’s more prudent and healthier to deal with his abuse of authority later. Don’t give a policeman, particularly one who seems overly aggressive and bullying, an excuse to mess you up. Knuckleheads, on the other hand, typically have a problem with authority and impulse control, and so require more kinetic persuasion. The “rule of three” reinforces the prestige of the police, showing that their words will be backed up with action. You don’t have to like them, but you’d better respect them.
But the war on police waged over the last decade by race-industry activists like Black Lives Matter, and progressive mayors like NYC’s Bill de Blasio, nee Warren Wilhelm Jr.––whose complaints are based on lies about racist cops targeting black males for extralegal execution––have damaged the prestige, and hence authority, of cops on the beat. According to the N.Y. Post, “The NYPD, under orders from City Hall, has been standing down for years now — watching fare-beaters beating fares, pot-dealers dealing pot and addicts and insane people defecating in the streets, all without consequence.” Now the police have gone from ignoring crimes to allowing them to be perpetrated against themselves.
Yet like most of our contemporary social dysfunctions, the current demonization of the police goes back half a century. The rise of the New Left in the Sixties, with its violent rhetoric and crimes, turned hatred of the police and violence against the social order that police defend into a political virtue. In this they were following radical leftist utopians from Robespierre to Lenin, who both embraced terrorist violence as revolutionary justice. Academics, of course, provided the legitimacy of scholarship to this idea. In 1969, Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm glorified violent criminals as “social bandits,” who “challenge the economic, social, and political order by challenging those who hold or claim power, law, and the control of resources.” Popular culture played along with movies like Bonnie and Clyde, which glamorized as “social justice warriors” two psychopathic cop-killers, and demonized the American hero who tracked them down and killed them. Then there was a National Lampoon cartoon strip in the Seventies titled “How to make a football,” which depicted the murder and skinning of a cop.
Why, then, given this long embrace of cop-hatred as an act of justice and virtue-signaling, are we now surprised that cops are assaulted and mocked with impunity, and a two-bit outfit like Antifa is being empowered and enabled by a political party that has returned to the lunacy of the Sixties? Or that civic “leaders,” having completed the Cultural Marxist “long march through the institutions,” go along? We have yet to hear any specific condemnations of Antifa from the Democrat Party, with the exception of presidential candidates Joe Biden and Andrew Yang. The “Squad” of four far-left Congresswomen, of course, refused a direct invitation to do so. Indeed, last year Minnesota one-time Congressman and DNC chairman, now state Attorney General, Keith Ellison tweeted a photo of himself with the Antifa Handbook, and months later posed with a Portland Antifa capo.
These anti-police ideas have burrowed deep into popular culture and school curricula, and have become so familiar that we see little outrage over Antifa’s depredations, or over the fashion of “making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep.” As Orwell said of Kipling’s memorable line, “He sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.”
The effectiveness of the police at keeping us safe and civilized depends on the citizens’ respect for their authority and their readiness to use force, sometimes lethal, to enforce the law. When the police do not use their power to do so, people start to disdain them and their illegal behavior escalates. Unless resisted, this political assault on the police will have dire consequences on public order. We’re already witnessing the wages of mayors and police chiefs of some American cities telling their officers to stand down in the presence of Antifa’s public assaults and vandalism. We should also be concerned about more deadly violence against police officers, such as the 2016 assassination of six policemen in Dallas by an assailant angered by the media and race-hacks’ over hyped and misleading coverage of police shootings of blacks.
Emboldened by this fecklessness on the part of officials responsible for public safety, Antifa is becoming more violent and destructive. At some point more people are going to start dying, and their blood will be on the hands of progressive politicians who restrain and disrespect the police in the service of a malign ideology long associated with violence against those who guard all of us--including anti-cop progressives and activists--while we sleep.


ABOUT BRUCE THORNTON

Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, a Research Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, and a Professor of Classics and Humanities at the California State University. He is the author of nine books and numerous essays on classical culture and its influence on Western Civilization. His most recent book, Democracy's Dangers and Discontents (Hoover Institution Press), is now available for purchase.
READ MORE
at
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)

Contact Form

Name

Email *

Message *