The Muslim Plot to Bomb a Black Church the Media Won't Talk About

“The best news is when you call get ready for jihad,” Mustafa Mousab Alowemer wrote in a public housing project in Pittsburgh. “I will spill my blood for the victory of my religion.”

Northview Heights, the low-income housing project, is 90% African-American. Or at least it was.

Then a flood of Syrian Muslim refugees showed up. Obama had promised to admit 10,000 Syrian migrants in 2016. The terrorist who plotted a massacre at a black church was one of them.

The Alowemer clan arrived at JFK airport in New York City. The same airport through which other terror refugees, including the World Trade Center bombers, had penetrated the United States. Instead of staying in New York, they were resettled in Pittsburgh joining a growing Syrian enclave there.

Northview Heights’ tenant council head told reporters that the Alowemers had “isolated themselves”. They had spent all their time with their fellow Syrian Muslims while avoiding their black neighbors.

But Mustafa Alowemer was not unaware of his black neighbors. He was plotting to kill them. When the FBI and the police descended on the housing project, neighbors learned how close the call had been.

The Syrian Muslim refugee’s target was the Legacy International Worship Center, a small black church on a narrow street with battered slum houses and cracked concrete. The international part reflected the multicultural population of African-Americans and African immigrants, including Nigerian Christians.

The Christians of Nigeria had been subjected to some of the most brutal Islamic massacres in a decade. The Nigerian Christians who had come to the United States were, unlike the Alowemer clan and other Syrian Muslim migrants, authentic refugees fleeing religious persecution, rather than economic migrants. They thought that they were safe in Pittsburgh. But Islamic terror had followed them here.

In Northview Heights, Alowemer plotted the massacre of the Christians whom he called, “Mushrikeen”, an Islamic religious term which condemns Christians and Jews as infidels and deems them to be fair game for mass murder.

“This house is still for the ones who go to church because they are Nigerians,” the Syrian Muslim ranted. “They are all polytheists. We, we, take revenge for our brothers in Nigeria.”

Alowemer plotted to plant a bomb backpack on the side of the gray brick church and then head for a mosque to secure his alibi. The timer would set off the bomb, but by then, the terrorists would claim that they had been at their morning prayers. And other Muslims in the mosque would be their alibi.

But while Alowemer wanted an alibi, he wanted to hear the sounds of the massacre at the black church.

The ISIS supporter’s plan was to be close enough when the bomb went off to hear the blast.

He imagined his attack would “shock the enemies of Allah almighty everywhere and all over America” and his goal was to prevent Christians from “going to their churches and instill fear in their hearts.”

At the bomb site would be an ISIS flag and a message, “We’ve arrived.”

The Alowemer clan arrived in America nearly three years ago. On August 2016, the black church bomber was admitted as a refugee to the United States.

Donald Trump had first won popular support in 2015 by calling for a, “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” Earlier he had said, "I'm putting the people on notice that are coming here from Syria as part of this mass migration, that if I win, they're going back.”

Obama had doubled down, raising the number of Syrians entering the country from 2,000 to 10,000.

“I don’t want people coming in from the terror countries!” Trump had argued a few months before the Pittsburgh terrorist was admitted as a refugee “I don’t want them, unless they’re very, very strongly vetted.”

Obama insisted in his Thanksgiving message, which falsely compared Syrian Muslim migrants to the pilgrims, that, “No refugee can enter our borders until they undergo the highest security checks of anyone traveling to the United States.”

“Refugees have to be screened by the National Counter Terrorism Center, by the F.B.I. Terrorist Screening Center. They go through databases that are maintained by D.H.S., the Department of Defense and the intelligence community,” the White House spokesman contended.

How good were Obama’s security checks that allowed the black church bomber into America?

“I was raised in Jordan on loving the Jihad and the Mujahdeen,” Alowemer told the man he thought was his accomplice. “I met some Jordanian brothers, some of which did the Nafir in Raqqah, and I, alongside some brothers, were arrested three times in Jordan, because I was one of the supporters.”

The Syrian Muslim refugee had been arrested three times for associating with ISIS fighters and for supporting ISIS.

Despite that he was admitted as a refugee to the United States.

If the robust screening and vetting couldn’t intercept a man who had been arrested three times by an allied country for ties to ISIS, there’s no reason to think that it can or will stop any terrorist.

The black church bomber proved that a travel ban was not an overreaction, but a vital necessity.

Alowemer plotted terrorism against his black neighbors while living in public housing. He graduated from Brashear High School, an English as a Second Language school teeming with a migrant population.

After President Trump’s travel ban was signed into law, a meeting of Syrian migrant students was held at Brashear High School which contained at least 30 Syrians.

Demands for English as a second language had rocketed from 180 to 1,200 at Pittsburgh public schools.

Brashear High School had suffered some of the worst damage from the migrant flood with 270 students: some from terror nations like Yemen, Somalia and Syria. 22% of students are immigrants or refugees.

A graduation video shows a student in black cap and gown coming on stage while the mistress of ceremonies clumsily pronounces his name, “Moustafa Alo-wey-mer.” He glances to the side and walks off. Even while this classic ritual of Americana is underway, the new graduate is plotting mass murder.

A few weeks later, the FBI comes for him.

“I long for the promise of Allah, he promised me paradise, he motivated me for martyrdom,” Mustafa Mousab Alowemer wrote in his nasheed addressed to the leader of ISIS. “I long for the land of the Caliphate. I am expecting to raise the banner. I will spill my blood for the victory of my religion.”

Mustafa had never been an American. He had always been a citizen of the ISIS Caliphate.

Local elected officials in Pittsburgh however had made it clear that they had learned nothing.

“In debates over the refugee crisis the past several years, as people from around the world have sought to flee violence and misery and seek better lives for their families in the United States, I have always been consistent in our message: we welcome all refugees and immigrants,” Mayor Peduto insisted.

The targets of this Syrian Muslim refugee were refugees. He had sought to massacre Nigerian Christians and Yazidis, telling ISIS that the Yazidis, the “enemies of Allah, have big celebrations and that they are here in big numbers” and offering to provide the Islamic terrorists with their location.

The arrest of the refugee black church bomber makes it clear that there is an irreconcilable choice.

Pittsburgh and America can accept refugees fleeing Muslim terror. Or they can accept migrants from Muslim terror countries. But to welcome “all refugees” is to terrorize true refugees and immigrants.

The bombing of a black church strikes deep into the nerve center of the civil rights movement.

Democrats claim that stopping attacks against black churches should be a major law enforcement priority, but their own policies brought the latest black church bomber into the heart of Pennsylvania.

And yet we know that this terror plot against a black church will pass. It will receive far less scrutiny and horror than the attacks carried out against black churches by white men. The Democrats who want to talk about white supremacy and white nationalism, don’t want to discuss Islamic supremacism.

What happens when an Islamic supremacist tries to bomb a black church? Silence.

But on Wilson Avenue, in Pittsburgh, in a formerly African-American neighborhood that is losing its character, a worn church with red doors stands witness to the bigotry whose name we may not speak.

The bigotry of Islam nearly killed here, as it slew thousands in black churches across Nigeria.

Mustafa Alowemer failed. The next one of the thousands of Syrian Muslim migrants may succeed.





Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

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A Soros DA Pulled Off the Biggest Islamophobia Hoax

Four years ago, Craig Stephen Hicks, a mentally unstable man prone to terrorizing his neighbors in a Chapel Hill condo, regardless of race and creed, shot three of his neighbors.

The three neighbors whom he shot over a parking dispute were Muslim.

Hicks, a mentally unstable leftist, was a militant atheist, but no hater of Muslims. In a post about the Ground Zero Mosque, he wrote, “I'd prefer them to most Christians as I was never coerced in any way by the Muslims to follow their religion, which I cannot say about many Christians.”

“I’ve defended Muslims. I know Muslims,” he later told police. “I take pity on them, the way society treats them like they are lesser people.”

“The FBI opened an inquiry into the brutal and outrageous murders of Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, Deah Shaddy Barakat, and Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha in Chapel Hill, North Carolina,” Barack Obama issued a statement five days after the murders. “No one in the United States of America should ever be targeted because of who they are, what they look like, or how they worship.”

Obama had frequently urged Americans not to jump to conclusions after Islamic terrorist attacks, but this time he was the one eagerly jumping to the wrong conclusion.

Hicks had confessed to the murder. And the killings had been caught on video. Nor did he try to put up much of a defense. There was no chance that he might escape justice and no need for the feds. But Islamist pressure groups had been lobbying aggressively to treat the murders as a hate crime or, even, as an act of terrorism, despite the absence of a single piece of supporting evidence for such a charge.

The only two pieces of evidence that Hicks had been acting out of hatred for Muslims when he shot his neighbors over a parking dispute was that he was a militant atheist and that they were Muslim.

Over four years later, the trial is over and no better evidence of bigotry was ever presented.

But the official conclusion is that Hicks, who had a history of threatening many of his neighbors over parking issues, was a bigot. Or at least a bigot who was suppressing the awareness of his bigotry.

Chapel Hill Police Chief Chris Blue apologized for his department's former factual position that the shootings had been about a parking dispute. “What we all know now and what I wish we had said four years ago is that the murders of Deah, Yusor, and Razan were about more than simply a parking dispute. The man who committed these murders undoubtedly did so with a hateful heart."

Murder is always a hateful act and murderers generally have hateful hearts. But Chief Blue was trying to appease Islamist groups without deviating too much from the facts, by imputing Islamophobia.

But the trial became a circus when Satana Deberry, a leftist pro-crime candidate allegedly backed by George Soros, defeated her credible predecessor to become the DA of Durham County.

District Attorney Roger Echols had wanted the death penalty. Satana ruled out the death penalty. The new radical DA had a very political agenda in mind. Not to punish Hicks, but to prove he’s a bigot.

“It is about cold-hearted malice and murder,” Satana Deberry insisted. “It is not about parking.”

The two are not incompatible. Malicious murders are committed over petty things all the time. But while Deberry was not particularly bright, she owed her new job to her ideological fidelity.

“It is about exposing the hate, bias and privilege that substituted for the lives of Razan, Yusor, and Deah,” Deberry ranted. She claimed, that Hicks’ “hate of Islam drove him to kill three innocent people.”

“He did not shoot the first available people – someone in the parking lot; he didn’t shoot at someone who happened by,” Assistant DA Kendra Montgomery-Blinn argued.

Hicks specifically picked fights with a variety of people he believed were parking in his spot. When he came to the door, he complained that his neighbors had three parked cars and there was no free space.

That his actions weren’t random doesn’t prove that he was motivated by hatred of Muslims.

But Montgomery-Blinn, a chair of the Durham People's Alliance and a director of the Innocence Inquiry Commission, had already disgraced herself after the Duke Lacrosse case, and had few standards.

And the target was easy enough.

When Hicks finally showed up in front of the judge, he complained that he had wanted to plead guilty and take the death penalty years ago. His attorneys didn’t put up very much of a fight.

In a bizarre turn of events, the prosecution used Samuel Sommers, a diversity expert from Tufts, to argue that Hicks may have been suffering from unconscious bias, arguing that there was a reasonable likelihood that, "their ethnic and religious backgrounds played a role in how Hicks perceived them, interacted with them and ultimately shot and killed them."

A reasonable likelihood that some parts of the shooter’s brain might have somehow reacted differently to his three victims does not make for hate crimes charges. Or, indeed, for any kind of evidence.

Lawyers for the defendant attempted to object to the circus by pointing out that there was no point to it. Hicks was pleading guilty and already getting the maximum possible sentence, three life terms without parole. The unconscious bias circus had no point and wasn’t accomplishing anything.

But the real point wasn’t to convict Hicks, who could have been tried, sentenced and put on death row a year after the crime, if the system had been willing, but to indict the entire country for his actions.

It was also to prove the unprovable, that Hicks was an Islamophobe.

Legitimate court proceedings would never have allowed the prosecution to repeatedly make claims that could not be proven and for which there was no evidence. It would have also kept out claims about unconscious bias, which even the “expert” making them refused to conclusively treat as absolute.

In April, Mohammed Abu Salha, the father of two of the women, was invited to testify at a hearing on hate crimes and white nationalism. “How many have to die until our government unequivocally stands up against bigotry in all forms, including white nationalist violence?” he demanded.

The man who had shot his daughters was a leftist opposed to white nationalism. But facts had never mattered in Chapel Hill. And as the trial ended, they mattered even less.

Farhana Khera, the head of Muslim Advocates, an Islamic group representing Abu-Salha, argued that we must, "take action to end the bigotry and hate that took the lives of his children. Congress must take this threat seriously. State lawmakers must enact strong hate crime laws and social media companies must do more to curb hate speech."

“The FBI must reprioritize its counterterrorism resources toward fighting white nationalist violence.”

Hicks had never posted anything to social media. But the real agenda was right there in the conclusion.

The actions of one mentally unstable man fighting over parking spaces was an urgent call to redirect resources from preventing another 9/11 and away from some of their terrorist coreligionist allies.

And so Islamophobia is now the official story of the 2015 murders in Chapel Hill. The case will be cited in every Islamophobia story. And yet the complete lack of evidence of bigotry, necessitating the absurd maneuver of inviting an expert on unconscious bias, shows just how unreal “Islamophobia” is.

After four years, the bigotry in the Hicks case had to be manufactured because it was never there. Vague statements by Hicks, “I don’t like the looks of you people”, had to be assembled into a narrative, while his explicit pro-Islamic statements had to be ignored. Hicks wanted to be executed. Instead he was kept alive to be used to accuse Americans of a culture of bigotry. But the culture of bigotry that Islamist groups and their allies in Durham County sought is as absent in America as it is in their case.






Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

A Conservative Civil Rights Movement to End Internet Segregation

(You can find video of a talk I delivered for the David Horowitz Freedom Center, discussing the New Segregation, this same topic, in great depth, at DemoCast.)


"I am, therefore, asking the Congress to enact legislation giving all Americans the right to be served in facilities which are open to the public--hotels, restaurants, theaters, retail stores, and similar establishments," President John F. Kennedy declared in his televised address to the nation.

"This seems to me to be an elementary right," he added.

Three generations later, restaurants all over the country boast of discriminating against Trump supporters. They’re able to do that because the promise of Kennedy’s speech remains unfulfilled.

Title II of the Civil Rights Act mandates that, “all persons shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation… without discrimination on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.”

The Civil Rights Act left out one important attribute. Political views.

In the spring of 2018, a Democrat judge ruled that a New York City bar had the right to discriminate against a Trump supporter wearing a MAGA cap because political affiliation is not a protected class.

Unlike race, religion and national origin, political affiliation protections are rare in civil rights legislation. But the only state that treats political affiliation as a protected class is also the home of Silicon Valley.

California.

The Ralph Civil Rights Act (California Civil Code Section 51.7) states that "all persons within the jurisdiction of this state have the right to be free from any violence, or intimidation by threat of violence, committed against their persons or property because of political affiliation."

Victims can contact the police or sue for Ralph Act violations. The significance of this is largely limited to some of California’s notoriously violent campuses and to violence occurring at street protests.

While California’s Unruh Act does not explicitly mention political affiliation, a California Supreme Court ruling a generation ago found that it "protects individuals" from "arbitrary discrimination" by California business owners who have excluded members of an entire class based on "the alleged undesirable propensities of those of a particular race, nationality, occupation, political affiliation, or age".

The Unruh Act has been used successfully in some past lawsuits, but its protections are limited. It might prevail in a restaurant discrimination case, assuming that there was a blanket policy of banning Republicans, but It does however offer a potential path forward against the new political segregation.

And toward a new civil rights movement.

The United States is no longer suffering a political crisis because of businesses denying services to black people. Instead the political crisis is caused powerful monopolies engaging in political discrimination.

The scope of the problem is both smaller and larger because while the internet platforms engaging in affiliation discrimination are fewer than the number of segregated businesses banned by the Civil Rights Act, their reach is far vaster, extending across state lines and even across borders with a global reach.

Facebook has 2.3 billion active users, Google processes 3.5 billion searches per day, Twitter has 321 million monthly users, and 5 billion videos are watched on YouTube every day. Segregation at this level can shut entire populations out of political participation in the marketplace of ideas. AI can then invisibly automate discriminatory policies and structurally embed them into countless sites across the internet.

And yet the fundamental problem is essentially the same.

A powerful elite has decided that a certain class of people should be shut out from being able to fully make use of public services. These policies of political segregation have not been openly articulated, but they have been exposed by hidden camera investigations, by lawsuits from employees fired for their political views, and by the pattern emerging from the mass of bans, shadowbans and demonetizations.

The latest crackdown by Google’s YouTube is typical of the use of non-transparent policies that are selectively applied and whose rationale represents structural discrimination against conservatives.

The new segregation masquerades as desegregation. Its implementation is segregating millions.

The Civil Rights Act and its various federal and state stepchildren created many protected classes and identities. Those identities were then weaponized for political activism. This created a system in which the very infrastructure of anti-discrimination law and policy were used to discriminate against conservatives when debating leftists who, unlike them, were not members of a protected class.

The disparate impact of this selectivity of protected classes is shutting down the First Amendment.

That’s what happened to Steven Crowder and countless other conservatives who were banned for engaging in verbal altercations with political activists shielded by their membership in a protected class.

And yet, as the testimony of countless conservatives of color who have been discriminated against and the lack of action against leftist bigots shows, this is not a sincere effort to protect minority groups, it’s a cynical effort to engage in political discrimination under the false flag of protecting minorities.

Minority conservatives who have been the victims of sustained racial and religious harassment have not benefited from the same protections that dot coms see fit to extend to identity politics leftists.

The identity behind the identity politics of race, religion and orientation is ultimately political.

That’s why minority conservatives are routinely accused of not being true members of a minority group. It’s also why white leftists routinely claim to be representing the concerns and views of minorities.

Adding political affiliation as a protected class would address the elephant in the room. It would also begin an important conversation about the structural political discrimination that has been built into the assumptions about what discrimination is and how to fight it. The dot coms did not invent the unfair double standards that are being used to silence conservative participation in the marketplace of ideas. The widespread discrimination against conservatives on the internet is a result of implementing them.

In the generations since the Civil Rights Act, not only has mandatory segregation been thoroughly stamped out, but private discrimination has been made legally and socially untenable.

In 1960, only 5% opposed their child marrying a spouse from another party. And only 4% approved of interracial marriage. By 2010, 86% of Americans approved of interracial marriage, but 40% disapproved of bipartisan marriage. (Opposition to interracial marriage is twice as high among blacks as whites.)

As many as 70% of Democrats have negative stereotypes of Republicans. It's the only socially acceptable prejudice. And what we are seeing in Silicon Valley is the implementation of those prejudices in policy.

This is the civil rights crisis of our time. The segregation is growing. And it must be met with a new movement to fight political discrimination in businesses, and especially among the dot coms.

America no longer has a racial segregation problem. It has a political segregation problem.

Some of the biggest companies in the country, which wield nearly total control over the internet, are politically segregated, have developed a culture of discrimination toward conservatives, and have engaged in a pattern of discriminatory conduct based on those prejudiced views.

It is an “elementary right”, as President John F. Kennedy put it, for conservatives to enjoy the same use of services at Facebook, Google, Twitter and Amazon, as anyone else. And the same access to financial services, such as MasterCard and Visa, which at one point banished the Freedom Center over its politics, the same right to visit a restaurant or a bar, or to teach in a school, regardless of their political affiliation.

This elementary right must be safeguarded by protecting not just sexual identity, but political identity.

The Bill of Rights is not built around most of the protected classes listed by many states, but around religious and political freedom. These were the issues that the revolt against British rule was built on. These are the rights that were meant to be safeguarded above all others. That guardianship has failed.

Conservatives are being silenced on the internet, fired from their jobs and evicted from their homes.

Republicans have enjoyed repeated majorities, have held the White House, and yet failed to take meaningful nationwide action to stop these abuses. Protecting political affiliation is a first step.

It is time for another Civil Rights Act to end political segregation by some of the most powerful corporations in America.

"We face," as Kennedy put it, "a moral crisis as a country and a people.”

Political segregation is the crisis of our time. It is time to meet it, not merely with rhetoric or excuses, but with solutions.







Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

Slavery Reparations for Millionaires

A few years ago, the University of Oregon paid Ta-Nehisi Coates a thousand dollars a minute to speak at its campus. After 40 minutes, Coates left the stage a half hour early and didn't take any questions.

He still got a $41,500 check.

Today, Coates will be speaking, presumably for free, at a House hearing on slavery reparations in the Rayburn Building in Washington D.C. As the author of The Case for Reparations, the wealthy racialist author will presumably be speaking in favor of taking money from Americans to give to, well, him.

The hearing, formally titled, H.R. 40 and the Path to Restorative Justice, references Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee’s bill calling for a commission to study a proposal to pay compensation to the descendants of slaves.

“I stand here as a freed slave,” Rep. Jackson Lee had once declared on the House floor.

Her estimated net worth, as of 2015, is $3,547,506. The median House average was $800,000.

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee’s annual salary, funded by taxpayers, is $174,000. Her husband, Elwyn C. Lee, is the Vice President for Community Relations at the University of Houston where he earns $239,501. The median salary at the University of Houston is $60,000. Lee sponsored or co-sponsored bills that sent $5.25 million to her husband’s employer in just two years. If anyone deserves reparations, it’s taxpayers.

Both Sheila Jackson Lee and Elwyn Lee are Yale graduates. Her son is a Harvard grad.

H.R. 40 was the obsession of former Rep. John Conyers. Unlike most of the reparations supporters who will be showing up on Wednesday at the Rayburn Building, Conyers had paid out reparations.

The recipient of the $27,000 in reparations was a female employee whom he had sexually harassed.

Taxpayers however received no reparations from the Conyers clan when Monica, John’s wife and a Detroit councilwoman, was sent to prison for taking bribes on a $47 million sludge hauling contract vote.

Anyone who stops by the Rayburn Building on June 19th, either for Small Businesses in the Cannabis Industry hearing or the slavery reparations hearing, will have the pleasure of listening to Lee and to Coates, who in 2016 had bought a luxurious landmarked brownstone in Brooklyn for $2.1 million.

The home, with its chef’s kitchen, wedding cake moldings, tin ceiling, terrace, garden, and carved woodwork, was paid for with the proceeds of Coates’ work of accusing America of institutional racism.

Those proceeds include the $625,000 McArthur grant that Coates received for, among other screeds, The Case for Reparations and Between the World and Me, a hateful text in which he claimed that the firefighters who died on September 11 “were not human to me.” The day before he ducked out of the $41,500 University of Oregon speech, he was paid $30,000 for a speech at Oregon State University.

The FDNY firefighters who climbed 100 stories on September 11 only to be deemed less than human by Coates, had a starting salary of under $40,000, risking their lives for less than Coates got paid an hour.

Who exactly deserves reparations here?

"Whiteness confers knowable, quantifiable privileges," Coates ranted in a defense of reparations.

What then is the sources of Ta-Nehisi Coates' known and quantifiable privileges, of turning down a New York Times column while getting paid by The Atlantic to blog about comic books?

How does the underprivileged Coates get to be a visiting professor at MIT despite not having a degree?

After buying his brownstone for $2.1 million, Coates tried to resell it for $2.395 million. After trying, and failing to score a $300K profit, he had to cut the price down to a mere $2.25 million.

Is it any wonder that his tortured soul cries out for a more successful source of reparations?

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a success story whose topic is his own oppression. And now he will lecture the rest of the country about their compelling responsibility to subsidize his vast reserves of unearned privilege.

Luxurious homes don’t buy themselves. It takes gullibly guilty idiots to buy them for Coates.

Also showing up to testify will be Danny Glover. The actor has been campaigning for reparations for some time now even though it’s the audiences who paid to see Lethal Weapon 4 who deserve them.

“We have to make demands. We can’t just sit around the table and accept what’s going on,” Glover had declaimed a few years back. “The whole idea of reparations is demanding justice, it’s all about that.”

Sites estimate the celebrity’s net worth somewhere between $15 and $40 million. In addition to earning multi-million salaries for the Lethal Weapon movies, he was due 2% of the gross profits from Saw.

Glover does know all about slave reparations.

In 2007, Venezuela’s socialist regime allotted Glover $17.8 million to make a movie about a slave revolt in Haiti. In 2008, the country, which was sliding toward serious economic problems, reportedly allotted another $9 million. The movie was never made, but the actor has gone on defending a regime that offered him millions before starving its own people to death and shooting them in the street.

If anyone is owed reparations, the people of Venezuela deserve them from Danny Glover. The starving children begging in the streets, the mothers crying for milk for their babies, and the fathers picking through the trash. One of their representations should be on hand to present the celebrity with a bill.

It’s all about, as Glover put it, “demanding justice”.

Is there a case for the Chinese immigrant running a corner store, a Cuban immigrant driving a taxi or a Russian immigrant moving furniture having to pay reparations to Glover and Ta-Nehisi Coates?

Both men make more an hour than the average American, black or white, makes in a year.

Justice can be hard to come by. H.R.40 or the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act won't offer justice. But the Commission will require the appropriation of $12 million. That’s not the cost of reparations, but the cost of a bunch of people discussing them.

"A federal commission can help us reach into this dark past and bring us into a brighter future," Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee claimed.

Doubtful. But it can certainly spend $12 million in taxpayer money.

That $12 million could be used to pay for health care or food for actual poor people. Or it could be used to fund a commission stocked with insiders and activists to discuss reparations.

How better to manage slavery reparations for millions than by spending $12 million on a commission?

Needy millionaires are standing by to take your paycheck.

Meanwhile Ta-Nehisi Coates will be appearing in New York in August. Tickets can be had for $75 in the upper boxes or as low as $50 for an orchestra seat. If you’re lucky, this time he may stay for Q&A.

Buy a ticket. Call it reparations.

And if you want to catch the free show, Coates will be agitating for reparations today in D.C.





Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

Jews and Jewish Anti-Semites Collide in California

On the last weekend of May, two very different responses to anti-Semitism came out of California.

Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein, whose courageous response to a Neo-Nazi shooting at his synagogue in Poway won the hearts of a nation, headed off to appear at a Jerusalem Day event.

Jerusalem Day or Yom Yerushalayim is a popular celebration in Israel commemorating the liberation of Jerusalem from its Islamic conquerors. “In the face of hatred and terror by our enemies in east Jerusalem, we continue to grow and thrive, despite the physical threat of violence and psychological danger that face our families every day, “Ateret Cohanim, the Jerusalem development organization, said in a statement.

In a very different response, California Democrats struggled with a hateful resolution put forward by David Mandel, a convention delegate, and a chapter leader in the hate group Jewish Voice for Peace. The hateful resolution falsely shifted blame to Israel and Jews for the synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh. It also defended Muslim anti-Semitism and condemned attempts to reject terrorism against Jews.

Jewish Voice for Peace is neither Jewish nor peaceful. This is its latest episode of promoting blood libels, dating back to its association with an anti-Semitic bigot who claimed that Jews drank blood. Mandel, a chapter leader in a hate group that promoted an anti-Israel activist who appeared on white supremacist radio, cynically accuses Israel and Jews of collaborating with white supremacists.

Mandel is a contributor to Mondoweiss: a hate site which claimed that a previous anti-Semitic attack by a white supremacist was really an Israeli plot.

The work of another Mondoweiss contributor had been cited by that same anti-Semitic shooter.

One Mondoweiss editor has said, "I do not consider myself an anti-Semite, but I can understand why some are."

The vast chasm between Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein and David Mandel, between Jews who stand up to hate and radical activists with Jewish last names who collaborate with hate, also appeared in the AJC survey.

The American Jewish Congress, a liberal group that, despite its name, represents Jews no more than any of the other alphabet soup non-profits with a ‘J’ thrown in there do, has released its annual survey. The AJC’s survey of American Jews and Israeli Jews features its own profound chasm between two peoples.

43% of American Jews answered that being Jewish was very important in their lives. 35% allowed how it might be somewhat important. The other 24% deemed it unimportant.

Meanwhile 51% of Israelis believed that being Jewish was most important, 29% thought that it was very important, and 11% downgraded it to somewhat important.

Only 8% of Israeli Jews thought that being Jewish wasn't a significant part of their lives.

35% of American Jews disagreed and 62% agreed that caring about Israel was very important. 25% did not think that Israel is important to the future of the Jewish people. 49% identified as Democrats.

Only 18% identified as Republicans.

91% of Israeli Jews believed that Israel was vital to the future of the Jewish people. 79% of Israeli Jews supported President Trump’s handling of the relationship between America and Israel.

45% of American Jews strongly disapproved of President Trump's handling of relations with Israel. 36% listed Russia as the greatest threat to America. Only 14% put down Iran.

50% backed Trump's recognition of the Golan Heights. 39% opposed the move.

88% of Israeli Jews were in favor of recognition.

Since last year, the number of American Jews caring about Jews dropped from 70% to 62%. Among 18-29 year old American Jews, the number stands at 44%.

Less than half.

These numbers are consistent with a previous Pew survey in which 42% of American Jews complained that President Trump was favoring Israel too much. To put those numbers into perspective, historically black churches were less likely to complain that Trump was too pro-Israel than American Jews.

Pew’s mistake was contrasting members of religious groups with a dissipating ethnic identity.

The AJC’s numbers show that support for Israel is linked to a strong Jewish identity. When respondents were asked about the importance of being Jewish, the responses, ranging from 100% among the Orthodox to 63% among Conservative Jews to 35% among Reform Jews to 15% among secular Jews, reflected the overlap between traditionalism, religiosity and support for Israel.

That’s also what the split between Rabbi Goldstein and David Mandel reflects.

A Gallup poll in 2015 found that among Jews who attended synagogue services at least once a week, 60% disapproved of Obama. Among those who didn’t, 58% supported Obama.

The split was equally obvious in New York City where the left-wing Forward tabloid noted that, “Nearly every election district that Trump won in Brooklyn was in a Jewish neighborhood.”

Some of the most left-wing and right-wing neighborhoods in the Big Apple in 2016 were Jewish areas.

Like the rest of America, Jews are coming apart into two very different groups.

At the end of May, California faced the same split, with Rabbi Goldstein celebrating the liberation of Jerusalem, while David Mandel tried to find a way to blame murdered Jews for their own deaths.

Rabbi Goldstein and Mandel are both perfect examples of a particular type. The Chabad Rabbi who lost several fingers in the Poway attack, embodies the Jewish tradition of faith. Mandel, a JVP leader who is active with the National Lawyers Guild, a radical group with historical ties to the Communist Party, represents the traditional animus of leftists for everything Jewish. Israel is just one example.

Mandel and Rabbi Goldstein believe in two very different sets of ideas.

At the White House, Rabbi Goldstein, in a quote, urged introducing a moment of silence in public schools, “So that children, from early childhood on, could recognize that there’s more good to the world, that they are valuable, that there is accountability, and every human being is created in God’s image.”

While Rabbi Goldstein quoted the Lubavitcher Rebbe, a key religious leader in his movement, Mandel quoted Bernie Sanders in his hateful resolution. Bernie is also the avatar that the anti-Israel activist uses. While the leaders of Rabbi Goldstein’s Lubavitch Chassidic movement faced persecution by Communists, Mandel boasts of a “Progressive-Labor Alliance comrades” and a “post-capitalist world”.

And, while all this was going on, I was burying my mother, who had spent her life fighting Communism, in a dusty grave in the hills of Jerusalem.

Thousands of miles and a century later, the struggle between Jews and the anti-Jewish Left goes on.




P.S. I'll be speaking on The War Against Us in Los Angeles on Wed, June 19, at 7 P.M.




Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

Thriving Glaciers and Doomed Environmentalists

"This August I visited Glacier National Park in Montana," Gianna Kelly, the founder of Climb for Conservation, wrote in the Huffington Post. "I am still stunned to have learned the following fact: by 2020, no glaciers will exist in Glacier National Park."

Kelly, who had worked for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, wrote that back in the first year of the Obama administration. It might stun her more to learn that Obama is out of the White House and that the glaciers of Glacier National Park are still there and waiting to be visited.

Throughout the Obama era, visitors to Glacier National Park were frequently harangued with false claims that the glaciers would all be gone in a decade. These warnings decorated dioramas and trash cans even as the hysterical propaganda become more ridiculous with every passing year.

The snow lay heavy on Logan Pass, when I arrived in July 2017. Visitors stomped through thick snow to reach the Hidden Lake Overlook. The alpine meadows of the Hanging Gardens didn’t live up to their name. Instead of the wildflowers that most visitors expected, there were nearly endless fields of white. Mountain goats, unaware that they were threatened by the supposed rising temperatures that were warming Glacier’s glaciers into extinction, eyed us suspiciously as we tried not to slip on the ice.

Sperry Glacier, a frequent target for environmentalist doommongers, was still there in the distance.

Next year, there was a 30-year snow record at Glacier. Snow removal crews in late April were struggling with drifts of between 10 to 20 feet. East Glacier Park Village measured 284 inches of snow.

Glacier National Park recorded “one of the coldest winters on record” this year. And across Montana, record wind chill temperatures hit 68 below zero in Bozeman and 59 below zero in Helena. In Great Falls, the temperature stayed below freezing for 32 days until the beginning of March.

In time for the 2019 summer season at Glacier National Park, the embarrassing signs claiming that the glaciers won’t be there next year have begun coming down. But the doomsday predictions won’t leave.

The melting glaciers of Glacier have been the subject of countless media stories and at least one book, The Melting World: A Journey Across America’s Vanishing Glaciers, from St. Martin’s Press, which excitingly promised to chronicle the “the first extinction of a mountain ecosystem in what is expected to be a series of such global calamities as humanity faces the prospect of a world without alpine ice.”

Melting World followed Daniel Fagre, who heads the Climate Change in Mountain Ecosystems Project for the United States Geological Survey, and is the figure most associated with the 2020 number.

Fagre had told the book’s author back in 2008 that all the glaciers would be gone in 10 to 12 years.

The USGS global warming expert has been quoted in media outlets every year predicting the death of the glaciers. He is largely responsible for the comparison photos claiming that the glaciers are vanishing, which he traces back to a visit by former Vice President Al Gore during the Clinton administration.

Fagre has a BA in Environmental Science, an MS in Animal Ecology and a PhD in Animal Ecology. In 1990, the Global Change Research Act was passed. The disastrous law created a massive infrastructure of chicken little “experts” tasked with finding evidence that the sky was falling.

In 1991, Fagre was hired to start to "climate change research program" and wrote a proposal to use the glaciers of Glacier to monitor the impact of global warming.

Somewhere along the way, despite no geology degree, he was deemed a glacier expert.

"One of the first things that we did was we went up and looked at Grinnell Glacier," he recalled.

Grinnell Glacier is the environmentalist's special nemesis.

In 2010, he told CNN that Grinnell Glacier was "this little dirty glacier that seems to be obviously falling apart, that has become very tiny and decrepit".

"This one is on its last legs," he insisted.

But Grinnell Glacier refuses to die. Instead it appears to have been growing.

The photos warning that the glaciers are shrinking are the work of Fagre and Lisa McKeon, who has a BA in Zoology. Neither of the two glacier experts, so often quoted in the media, have geology degrees.

But Fagre is the doomsayer most likely to predict the end of all the glaciers in Glacier. That’s why he and the media were outraged that the “area’s top climate scientist” wasn’t able to “share his expertise on global warming’s role in the retreating ice sheets” with Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg.

Fagre, who, according to one profile, doesn’t like “deskwork”, loves sharing his “expertise”. And that means predicting that the glaciers will be gone in a decade or two or who knows when.

And the government employee is open about his motives. “My role as a scientist is to make sure that everybody understands the pace at which they’re disappearing, and the reasons for that, so that, again, better decisions could be made societally.”

That’s not the role of a scientist. It’s the agenda of an advocate. The signs and photos warning of a glacier apocalypse at Glacier National Park are political advocacy.

"We get a lot of information visually," Fagre said. "And we tend to trust that even more than what we hear.”

That’s sensible enough because listening to Fagre speak can get a little bit confusing. Over the years, his doomsday date for the great glacier apocalypse has continued to fluctuate.

In 1999, he claimed that “all of Glacier's glaciers will be gone in 30 years”.

In a 2004, National Geographic article, he predicted that “within 30 years most if not all of the park's namesake glaciers will disappear”.

By either 2029 or 2034, some or all of the glaciers are set to disappear. Or something.

In 2009, Fagre downgraded a previous claim that all the glaciers would be gone by 2030, down to 2020. That 2020 date was featured in numerous media pieces warning that the glaciers would be gone in a decade. They also popped up in the park signage that is now being taken down in time for 2020.

In an official Glacier video, Fagre claimed in 2010 that, "they’ll melt by about 2020".

In a 2010 NBC News piece, the 2020 claim was cited, but Fagre hedged that some of the largest glaciers might make it to 2030.

The glaciers of Glacier National Park are always disappearing. But they never quite do.

Six years later, Fagre claimed that most of the glaciers would be “small insignificant lumps of ice on the landscape", but these lumps might survive another 10 or 15 years.

Three years after a 2011 chat with Fagre, in which the 2020 figure was cited, the New York Times did yet another piece claiming against that the glaciers are still vanishing.

"What will they call this place once the glaciers are gone?" the 2014 article began. This time it claimed that in 30 years, "there may be none". That postponed the date of glacier doomsday to 2044.

Fagre was quoted as saying, “I think we’re on the cusp of bigger changes.” Five years later, the biggest change is that the 2020 signs are being replaced.

In a 2017 USA Today piece, Fagre warned that the glaciers would be gone in our lifetime.

"Their fate is sealed," he insisted.

Sealed, indeed.

“What is important," Fagre emphasized, "is that it will happen in our lifetime.”

According to his conversation with a PBS reporter, "estimates on when the glaciers will disappear completely vary widely, from 2030 to 2080, depending on winter weather."

2030 to 2080 is quite a range.

“We are going to go toward a virtually glacierless state in the next few decades. Fagre had told Audubon in 2010. “We don’t care whether it is 2033 or 2029 or 2035. It’s just what’s happening.”

Scientists generally care about dates and predictions. The prophets of inevitable doom are cranks.

In a Guardian article in 2017, he claimed that all the glaciers in the country would vanish in the next few decades. “It’s inevitable,” Fagre insisted.

"They will certainly be gone before the end of the century," Fagre told a CBS affiliate in 2017.

"It's not just going to happen in my lifetime,” he had insisted in 2002 "It's going to happen during my career."

Back then, Fagre had been 49-years-old. He’s now approaching retirement age.

The glaciers of Glacier seem likely to outlive the environmentalist who had spent the bulk of his career predicting their doom. And, if the Department of the Interior cleans house, they will outlive his career.




P.S. I'll be speaking on The War Against Us in Los Angeles on Wed, June 19, at 7 P.M.



Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

How Cory Booker's Dot Com Get Rich Quick Scheme Cost Him 2020

In 2010, Mayor Cory Booker and Mark Zuckerberg were sitting across from Oprah while the Facebook boss announced a $100 million donation to Newark’s failing public schools. When the two men next met up, in a prominent forum, Senator Booker was questioning Zuckerberg about Facebook’s role in racism. The $100 million had long since vanished. So had the friendship between Zuckerberg and Booker.

And the money is drying up too.

Beto O’Rourke was able to raise $6.1 million within 24 hours of his campaign launch while Booker struggled to make $5 in his first fundraising quarter. Once upon a time, Booker owned Silicon Valley. The connections that he made would once upon a time have given him a huge war chest right from the start.

Booker’s problem was that he got greedy. And he failed.

The former isn’t necessarily a crime in an industry that wears a patina of altruism over the mass defrauding of everyone in sight. But failure carries a price. And 6 years later, Booker is still paying it.

Some of his old pals in the industry are still sticking by him. LinkedIn co-founder and old classmate Reid Hoffman and former Google boss Eric Schmidt are still helping him. But it’s not enough. Booker’s ties with them go back to his Waywire days. And that forgotten chapter in his career may help explain why an industry that once loved Booker is so cool to him. And why Oprah doesn’t call much anymore.

Booker, Zuckerberg and Oprah made a strange trio. Booker, Oprah, and the big bosses at Google and LinkedIn also made a strange group. But they were among the investors for Booker’s Waywire.

Waywire was supposed to be a more “progressive” version of YouTube that would click with young people. Oprah, Schmidt and Hoffman helped raise $1.75 million for the site. Even while Booker was serving as the mayor of a failed city, he had used celebrity and tech pals to create a company in which he owned a share of as much as $5 million. Not that he seemed to want anyone to know about it.

Booker failed to disclose the shares, the bulk of his financial assets, in his disclosure forms. He only disclosed them on the day that the New York Times ran a piece revealing his dubious behavior.

Despite his seemingly marginal status at Waywire, Booker received a larger stake than the people who were actually running it. It employed his Senate campaign social media consultant, and gave a board seat to the 15-year-old son of CNN boss Jeff Zucker, raising questions about whether Waywire was even a real company or a platform for a future presidential campaign.

There’s good reason to think that Waywire was a failed plan for a different kind of campaign.

Its stated business model was too stupid for tech royalty to invest money in it. Waywire would either push corporate video content to teens or form the core of a movement. One of its founders had compared Cory Booker to MLK.

“Social media is a movement,” she had claimed, “and Cory Booker is a leader in this movement.”

Not so much.

Waywire failed miserably. A year after its launch, it managed a little over 2,000 visitors in one month. Whatever money was poured into it was wasted. It never rivaled YouTube or even helped Booker. But, had it succeeded, Cory Booker would have figured out how to make a fortune while accepting unlimited donations for a campaign platform. It was a Silicon Valley plan for a political operation.

By 2016, Booker would have been a billionaire with a popular millennial video platform. Even if Waywire hadn’t been more than an also-ran, Google might have still acquired it for hundreds of millions.

All Booker had to do was harness his popularity to deliver better traffic than 2,000 visitors a month.

But his investors didn’t get in on the ground floor of a campaign operation slash huge payoff. Like Mark Zuckerberg in 2010, they ended up being shmucks who lost money believing in a political scam artist.

Not that we know for certain. Booker’s finances exist in their own black hole.

That year, in 2013, as he prepped his senate race, his campaign announced, after pressure from Republican opponents, that he would be releasing 15 years of tax returns. By releasing, the Booker campaign meant that it handed copies to reporters in a Newark hotel room, didn’t let them make copies, and then demanded them back. The typical behavior of a politician with nothing to hide.

Booker also announced that he was stepping down from Waywire and donating his shares to charity. It’s unclear which charities he donated them to or how much they were worth, but that same year saw a boom in his charitable donations. In 2013, he recorded an incredibly generous $469,906 in donations.

That was a truly impressive amount for a year in which he had only made $540,000 while claiming $241,917 in charitable deductions. He paid $72,292 in federal taxes and got a $3,210 refund. Much of those donations seemed to involve stocks and were uncharacteristic for his current donation profile.

The tax returns, no longer secret, reveal that Booker had sold his stock in Newscorp, the parent company of FOX News, and Lone Pine Resources, an oil and gas exploration company. He had also donated shares of Yandex, Russia’s top search engine, linked to Putin, to local charities.

Booker was getting rid of his politically inconvenient investments.

Next year’s tax returns revealed shares of Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Netflix.

Waywire failed downwards, trading hands, probably for stock value, landing with a Ukrainian owner.

It no longer exists.

There have been no huge public breaks with Booker over Waywire. Just a general coolness. Oprah once lavished Booker with gobs of attention. Now she sat down for an interview and helped out in his Senate race. But the groundbreaking push that helped make Obama and Booker into national figures is absent.

Silicon Valley still donates, but the former Stanford pal is no longer the industry’s big bet.

Cory Booker is polling at 2% in New Hampshire. Even in South Carolina, what ought to be his strongest state, his numbers dropped, cut in half, to 4%. His RCP average is equally miserable.

His fundraising lags behind all of the major candidates. And even one of the minor ones.

Waywire may help explain why.

Back in the day, Booker boasted of how easy it was to raise $1.75 million for Waywire because of the “power of the idea”. The idea however, like so much of digital publishing, was silly. The aspiring politician tapped into resources he would have needed now in the hopes of getting very rich.

Instead, he miscalculated. Badly.

Since then, the former darling of Silicon Valley has reinvented himself as an unconvincing critic of the industry. But every Booker reinvention is equally unconvincing. And nobody buys it anymore.

The former icon has pumped and dumped his way through politics, industries and entertainment.

For a brief and shining moment, Booker had a possible $5 million stake in the next big thing. Then his investors realized that there was nothing there. Not in Waywire or in Booker. Both were equally hollow.

Cory Booker is still burning cash chasing his White House dream. But he lost that opportunity in 2013. And when 2020 wraps, he will have burned through his donors and possibilities, and be truly worthless.




P.S. I'll be speaking on The War Against Us in Los Angeles on Wed, June 19, at 7 P.M.




Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

Who's Really Responsible for Anti-Semitic Hate Crimes in New York

The 90th Precinct squats in a faded tan building on Union Avenue in Brooklyn. There are dirty windows and protruding air conditioners. During Chanukah, a testament to its presence in one of the densest Jewish neighborhoods in the city, the Williamsburg police precinct puts up a large menorah.

The 90th was also the precinct at the center of multiple hate crime attacks on Jews caught on tape.

But the overall winner for the highest number of hate crime complaints was the 71st Precinct with 18 complaints. Of those, 14 were labeled as "anti-Jewish", another as anti-White, another as anti-gay and two as ambiguous. All but one of the suspects arrested in the attacks in the 71st were black men.

The 71st is located in Crown Heights while the 90th is based out of Williamsburg. Both have some of the largest populations of Chassidic Jews, who dress distinctively and are easily identifiable, in the country.

They’re also at the center of a disturbing rise in hate crimes in New York City.

“I want to be very, very clear, the violent threat, the threat that is ideological is very much from the right,” Mayor Bill de Blasio insisted, in response to numbers showing a 90% rise in anti-Semitic incidents, while denying that anti-Semitism exists on the Left.

In Williamsburg and Crown Heights, populations of Orthodox Jews intersect with African-American and Latino populations, and a new wave of hipsters. All three groups live uncomfortably with each other. None of them host the “white supremacist” movement that De Blasio was blaming for the problem.

The two non-Orthodox groups in Williamsburg and Crown Heights are strongly identified with the Left.

Mayor Bill de Blasio may be under the impression that because Trump won precincts in Williamsburg, the area is a right-wing hub, but the 6 of 8 districts that he won are made up of Chassidic Jews.

As the media noted after the election, “Nearly every election district that Trump won in Brooklyn was in a Jewish neighborhood.”

They’re about the only Trump supporters in the area. And they’re the victims of the violence.

The highest numbers of hate crimes in 2018 took place in the 71st precinct with 18, the 18th with 16, the 24th with 15, the 66th with 14, the 60th with 12, the 6th with 11, and the 90th with 10.

Jews were the single largest group targeted in the 18th, Midtown Manhattan, with 5 incidents, the 24th, the Upper West Side, with 12 incidents, the 66th, Borough Park, with 14 incidents, the 60th, Coney Island and Brighton Beach, with 10, the 6th, Greenwich Village, with 5, and the 90th with 8.

Many of these neighborhoods are heavily associated with Jews, but even in Greenwich Village, the home of Stonewall and the gay rights movement, there were more anti-Semitic incidents than anti-gay ones.

None of them are ideal platforms for a white supremacist movement.

In Borough Park, Trump won 69% of the vote. A New York Times reporter was unable to find a single Hillary voter. And that’s as close as the area gets to any kind of right-wing movement.

Who’s actually carrying out these attacks?

"Forty of the alleged perpetrators were white, 25 were black, two were Hispanic and two were Asian," the JTA claimed last year.

The arrests however represent barely a third of the actual incidents. And the NYPD frequently classifies Hispanic suspects as white. The NYPD’s statistics also list multiple arrests of the same person.

The first quarter hate crimes report shows that six 28-year-old males were arrested for anti-Semitic hate crimes at the 94th Precinct in Greenpoint.

That would be statistically unlikely.

28-year-old Glenn Murto was arrested and charged with 7 hate crimes for spray painting a whole bunch of Nazi graffiti around the area. Murto, not exactly a genius, confined the vandalism to most of the same places. Two cops were waiting when he next began spraying swastikas.

Age is the only useful metric for identifying a repeat offender. And unless there’s a rash of incidents and arrests, it can be very hard to know whether a suspect of the same age is also the same person.

Back in the 90th, four white men and three black men were arrested in anti-Semitic incidents. The white people in Williamsburg are mostly Orthodox Jews and hipsters with a sprinkling of old area holdovers.

In the 66th, 3 black men, 2 white and Hispanic males, and 2 Asians were arrested.

Asians are not known for engaging in anti-Semitic hate crimes. But Borough Park has large Chinese, Bangladeshi and Uzbekistani populations. It seems likelier that the perpetrators may have spoken Bengali or Uzbek than Fujianese. Muslims would have more of an anti-Semitic motive than Buddhists.

Meanwhile in the first quarter of 2019, the 71st has seen four anti-Semitic hate crime complaints and the arrests of 4 black men.

In the 112th and the 114th, three Asian teens were arrested in anti-Semitic incidents. Both precincts are located in Queens. The borough has the highest percentage of Muslims anywhere in the city.

But that’s speculation.

Compstat statistics leave plenty of room for ambiguity. What is reasonably clear though is that the rash of cases, especially the violent assaults, are not about white supremacy. Neo-Nazis in New York City usually limit themselves to some heavy blogging and social media trolling or light vandalism.

One of the fundamental problems with hate crime statistics is that they fail to distinguish between actual violent incidents, vandalism and more nebulous problems like bias intimidation.

The violent assaults on a number of Orthodox men in Williamsburg and Crown Heights are classed together with swastikas drawn on a playground. But it’s much easier to establish that graffiti has a bias motive, because of the physical evidence, than that a violent assault was a hate crime.

Last fall, a Jewish teen walking home from his Yeshiva in Queens was violently assaulted by a gang of teens shouting, “Kill the Jew” outside Masbia, a soup kitchen run by a Jewish religious organization. Even though the teen was hospitalized, the police claimed that there was insufficient evidence for hate crimes charges. But swastika graffiti in Queens this year was treated as a hate crime.

The paradox of hate crime charges is that they’re often useless for dealing with serious problems, like physical violence and arson, but come in handy when dealing with nuisance offenses like graffiti.

New York City’s presentation of statistics blur the line, but it’s clear that Mayor Bill de Blasio is wrong.

“I want to be very, very clear, the violent threat, the threat that is ideological is very much from the right," he insisted at a press conference.

New York City does not have very much of a Right. That doesn’t mean the violence comes from the Left.

The Left is just very good at covering it up.

In response to the rash of anti-Semitic attacks, Martha Ackelsberg and Arielle Korman, two members of Jews For Racial & Economic Justice (JFREJ), an anti-Israel and anti-Jewish group, wrote an editorial, claiming that, "policing cannot solve our problems" denounced "zero tolerance policies" and "armed guards", while urging "education" and "restrorative justice, counselling and peer support."

JFREJ's site features a petition that doubles down on the left-wing group's call for the decriminalization of anti-Semitic attacks on Jews by urging "transformative justice processes that focus on challenging and transforming the perspectives of people who do harm in our neighborhoods".

Despite its false claims otherwise, JFREJ is well aware that the perpetrators of anti-Semitism in New York City aren't white nationalists or Trump supporters.

JFREJ knows that better than anyone after the black foster son of one of its members set 7 fires inside synagogues and Jewish schools in Brooklyn, while scrawling, "Jew Better Be Ready" and "Kill All Jews".

The Left isn’t behind the anti-Semitic violence in New York City. But it’s covering for those who are.





Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

How Bill Gates Destroyed the SAT

Standardized testing is the engine of meritocracy. When the College Board standardized testing through the SAT, it introduced merit to an educational system where status was determined by family history.

A poor immigrant who studied hard and worked hard might have a shot at the best schools in the
land.

Over a century later, the College Board has announced that the Scholastic Assessment Test will include an adversity score based on zip codes that purports to measure the social environment of the student.

After nearly a century of trying to measure intelligence, instead of class, the SAT will collude in a college admission system where class overwhelms merit to a degree unseen since 18th century Harvard.

The latest assault on standardized testing assumes that the individual student should be defined by the income, education and family averages of his zip code, more than by his actual skills and learning in a complete reversal of the entire purpose of the SAT and the meritocratic work of the College Board.

Ironically, the College Board fell victim to the success of a college dropout from a wealthy family.

William Henry Gates III, more commonly known as Bill Gates, has wielded the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as a tool for wrecking education with Common Core and has hijacked the College Board, which began as a conclave of elite college leaders, into pursuing his radical social and political agendas.

The downfall of the College Board began when it picked David Coleman, a Gates alumnus who had played a significant role in writing Common Core standards, as its new president. Coleman, a Rhodes Scholar, the son of a Bennington College president and New School dean, had degrees from Yale, Cambridge and Oxford. By the age of 25, he was working at McKinsey as an educational consultant.

The rest of the story was an escalator ride through the consulting industry that destroyed education.

Coleman’s interviews are littered with claims of wanting to teach in public school, but instead he built a consulting firm that scored contracts with public schools. The consultancy was acquired by the McGraw-Hill behemoth, and Coleman moved on to founding a non-profit, with funding from the Gates Foundation, where he played a key role in creating the Gates-approved Common Core standards.

In 2012, Coleman became the president of the College Board. Even though the professional educational consultant had never actually taught, he had been put in charge of school and then college standards.

A year later, Stefanie Sanford, the Gates Foundation’s policy director, was brought on as the Board’s head of policy, erasing the distinctions between Gates and the College Board, already funded by Gates.

Stefanie’s official mission was pursuing “equity” in education on behalf of minority students.

The collapse of SAT standards began with the official Gates hijacking of the College Board. The new dumbed down test reduced the number of multiple-choice answers, eliminated penalties for guessing, disposed of many vocabulary words, and made the essay portion optional.

And, most importantly, from the Gates Foundation perspective, it integrated with Common Core.

“It was a bad year, and I’m sorry,” Coleman admitted in 2016. “It is no good to have vision if you don’t deliver.”

The new SAT rollout had been a disaster, but Coleman ricocheted from one disaster to another. A year later, the College Board wrapped up testing its Overall Disadvantage Level, or the adversity score

The level or score is a bad idea implemented in the most ridiculous way possible.

The adversity score uses high school and zip code information to depict students as advantaged or disadvantaged based on statistical averages. The number of students getting free lunches, literally and perhaps metaphorically, at a high school, tells administrators nothing about this individual student.

Crime rates and housing prices are even more useless, especially in dense urban areas where good and bad neighborhoods can overlap. A white student growing up in a gentrified part of Manhattan or the Bronx could be rated as disadvantaged. Meanwhile a middle-class black student moving into a decent neighborhood would be rated as advantaged. And, worst of all, the ratings are hidden from everyone.

Qualities like adversity are inherently unquantifiable. No test can measure the life you’ve lived or the challenges you have overcome. Instead they measure the skills and discipline you have learned.

We don’t measure people’s achievements by their bios, but by what they can actually do.

Beyond the terrible implementation of a terrible idea, a staple of the educational disasters wrought by Bill Gates, who has done for education what he did for operating systems, and David Coleman, is the larger philosophical problem. And Coleman, who has a degree in ancient philosophy, ought to be able to understand that, even if he doesn’t seem to understand how students learn or how tests operate.

The core criticism of the SAT is that wealthy parents can afford to spend more on test prep.

(Despite the College Board’s supposed hostility to test prep, its leadership is filled with Kaplan vets.)

The most aggressive users of test prep courses are the ‘Tiger Moms’ who spend fortunes to see to it that their children get into the best possible schools. Between 15% and 30% of Asian students took test prep courses and experienced significant gains. Only 10% of white students, the whipping boys of standardized testing, took test prep courses, and they only gained 12 points. Meanwhile 11% of Hispanic and 16% of black students took test prep courses and posted larger gains than the white students.

The SAT isn’t rigged by wealthy white students taking test prep courses. Instead Asian students aggressively compete for a limited number of slots due to discrimination in higher education.

Chinese students are paying as much $60,000 just for a shot at getting into an elite college.

Opponents of standardized testing helped take the test prep industry to a new level when they insisted on making copies of old SAT tests public. Transparency has made it a lot easier to game the system. If lefties are unhappy that Chinese students can get the lay of the land before they fly to Hong Kong to take the SAT, they have Ralph Nader and their own campaigns against standardized testing to blame.

Opponents of standardized testing, teachers’ unions, social justice activists, and Coleman, claim that such tests are unfair because wealthier students have more resources. That’s true. Like democracy, standardized testing is the least fair admissions criteria for higher education, except for all the others.

The alternative to measuring merit through standardized testing is a system of admissions based on class, group and political connections. That’s what the adversity score, like affirmative action, does.

The College Board was meant to open higher education to students based on their level of ability. The Gates/Coleman version of the College Board seeks to dole out admission to the right sorts of people.

That takes the educational system back in time to an era when admission was a test of group membership, and being a member of the right group came with the assumption of qualifications.

If you could trace your family tree back to the right sorts of people, you would succeed.

These days, if you can find a trace of minority status in your family tree, even if it’s as dubious as Senator Elizabeth Warren’s, you will get a leg up in an educational system once again based on group and class.

“We’ve tried to move beyond giving tests to delivering opportunity," Coleman declared last year.

But the College Board makes $77 million a year, with as much as a billion in assets, and Coleman earns his $900,000 salary, from giving tests.

He, and the College Board, are just bad at it.

Coleman doesn’t want to give tests. In the words of one article, he wants to save the world.

This sense of messianic entitlement infects progressive policymaking so that instead of making the world better by doing their jobs, leftist leaders insist on rigging the outcome to make themselves feel good.

The progressive nobles dispense college access like medieval barons throwing gold coins to beggars.

The SAT exists because nearly a century ago, the College Board understood that giving tests was giving opportunity. The attacks on standardized testing is an attempt at deciding who truly deserves them.

A free country can only be maintained as a meritocracy. Anything else lapses into the same game of charitable nobles and hopeless peasants that Coleman and the College Board are playing with the SAT.

Standardized testing brought into being a meritocracy by reaching into decrepit ghettos and impoverished valleys to discover and educate Thomas Jefferson’s “aristocracy of virtue and talent”.

Jefferson opened a door. Bill Gates is welding it shut.









Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

A Movement of Professional Victims and Conspiracy Theories

Every movement has a mission statement. “Make America Great Again” is the conservative one. (It’s the “Again” part that makes it conservative.) The enemies of making America great have one too.

If the radicals had red hats, they would say, “They’re Out To Get You.”

TOTGY has been the leftist motto since before Marx learned to shave and then decided to stop doing it. The arc of history may bend toward many places, but the black rainbow serviced by a snarling leprechaun with a PhD and a cocaine problem always begins and ends in the same paranoid place.

They’re destroying the planet. They’re hoarding all the wealth. They start all the wars. They’re dividing the country. They’re killing kids in schools. They’re conspiring with the Russians. They killed JFK.

The Democrats crave inspirational leaders for the same reason that alcoholics need mouthwash. It covers up the ugly stench. Lefties love packaging their hateful ravings, paranoid delusions and plans for world domination with moving soliloquies about everyone coming together to make a difference.

So far coming together and making a difference has killed approximately 200 million people.

Between Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Jim Jones, more people have been killed by lefties coming together and making a difference than by AIDS and the Ebola virus combined. Every day the media warns about the threat of unvaccinated children in school spreading measles. There are far more American children infected with the disease that piled up skulls in Cambodia and filled the Russian tundra with mass graves, that starved Chinese peasants to death and served poisoned Kool-Aid to American children.

Schools spread the infection like wildfire and the only vaccine against it isn’t allowed on school grounds.

What killed all those people is a mental bacillus that can be examined under a microscope. It has cilia, no spine and whispered its sour nothings in the ears of commissars and soldiers, of peasants and workers, of Brother Number Three and a thousand frenzied schoolchildren beating their teachers to death.

The thing it whispered in their ears was, “They’re out to get you.”

Normal people do not murder their neighbors for wearing glasses. They do not sink them in boats weighed down with stones. They do not inform on their parents or poison their own children.

But they can be convinced to do these things once they’ve come together to make a difference.

Why do lefties keep coming together to make a difference? Because they’re fighting an unjust society. And what makes the society unjust and in need of fighting with protests, bombs and gulags?

They’re out to get you.

All leftist credos begin with the conviction of a powerful conspiracy against the groups of people they hope to recruit, a conspiracy that is as implausible as it is unsustainable, which can only end in genocide or social transformation. Somehow the Left usually manages to fit both into its busy schedule.

First, it was class. The capitalist pigs, the factory owners, like the Engels family, were maintaining a permanent underclass while reaping all the profits. Mankind was doomed to live in a Dickensian novel of starving orphans cowering beneath puffing smokestacks unless the proletariat rose up in a revolution. Then it was going to be a racial war and now, finally the capitalists are plotting to destroy the planet.

Like any good conspiracy theory, the “they” keep changing. So does the “You”.

One day, it’s the evil factory owners keeping the working class down. The next day it’s the racist working-class whites keeping black people down. And then it’s the homophobic blacks keeping gay people down. And then it’s the Islamophobic gays keeping Muslims down.

Finally, it’s everyone destroying the planet by driving cars without buying carbon credits from Al Gore.

Intersectionality means that everyone is a “You” and a “They”. Everyone has cause to hate and fear, and to be hated and feared. There is no such thing as being too paranoid about identity politics.

In identity politics, the only question is are you paranoid enough?

As with all murderous ideologies, the conspiracy theories begin with conscious actions and end with subconscious crimes. A list of specific charges concludes with one unforgivable offense. Existence.

The final verdict is death.

What sort of monsters go around killing millions? The same sorts of little monsters who shout down professors, assault speakers, and expect an imminent apocalypse if they don’t get their way.

Victims.

To believe that, “they are out to get you”, you need to be a victim.

To be a victim isn’t to experience suffering or to survive a horrifying act of violence. It is to be convinced that the world is an unfair place and it can only be made fair when those responsible are put down.

Or, as they call it, social justice.

Every genocide begins with a conspiracy theory. So does victimhood. The conspiracy theory claims that utopia would be possible, but the bad people insist on selfishly ruining it for everyone. In Rwanda, the bad people were the Tutsis. In Nazi Germany, they were the Jews. In America, they’re everyone.

Racism has its limits. After applying enough DNA tests, there’s someone a racist won’t kill. But when everyone is complicit in the intersectional crimes of everyone else, and, the destruction of the planet, who is really innocent? Killings in leftist societies don’t stop when they run out of people to kill. They only end when the machine runs out of executioners to shoot, beat, torture and mutilate them.

And human nature, being what it is in both evil and goodness, they eventually do.

There comes a point when killing people no longer makes anyone feel good. And that’s when the People’s Republic of Killingstan settles down to a steady decline into corruption and decay like an old gangster passing away his remaining years in a drunken haze to make the time go by more quickly.

The old gangsters died off in Russia and China, and, more recently in Cuba and Venezuela. They’re even showing signs of passing on in North Korea. Human evil is more finite than human good. And weaker.

America’s gangsters have yet to grow old and they haven’t tasted blood in a long time.

Their message, the one that gets neighbors to smash each other’s heads and sons to turn on fathers, is broadcast on every channel and taught in every school. It’s hummed in songs and made into movies.

“They’re out to get you.”

The conspiracy is all the more compelling for being nebulous, shapeless and formless. The villains are oil companies and the working class. At any moment, the progressive male college student can become a rapist. Bigotry is in our subconscious. Carbon is exhaled in our every breath. The enemy is everywhere.

Once upon a time, the conspiracies were simple. Now we live in a world haunted by our own demons.

The crime was never truly capitalism or bigotry. It was human nature. And human nature was also the motive. “They’re out to get you,” is the primal paranoid idea of politics. It taps into the part of our brain that ran from wolves or killed them. The wolves have become men. And sometimes we are them.

Leftist politics is another means of justifying the robbery and abuse of your neighbors. Its sense of oppression is just entitlement misspelled. Its targets are guilty because the perpetrators are greedy.

Cain was the first Communist. He killed Abel because he worked harder and believed in G-d.

When G-d tried to tell the first murderer that the evil was not in his brother, it was in him, he didn’t listen. Modern lefties refuse to listen to this central message of religion, that we fix the world by fixing ourselves, rather than fixing ourselves by remaking the world in our own broken image.

The mark of Cain is a red flag. Where you see it, socialism and spilled blood soon follow. A layer cake of academic theories and violent outrage are used as masks for the same old evils of envy and hate.

And so millions of leftists are coming together to make a difference in America by rioting, punching, deplatforming, firing, harassing, and suppressing, spying on their political opponents, murdering babies and reminding us that they’re a deadlier outbreak than any disease to hit this country in a century.

The cries of, “justice”, really mean power. And the cries of, “change”, really mean murder.

Utopia won’t build itself.






Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

The Islamophobia Victim's Murder Plot

"Observe how peaceful we are," Imam Mahmoud Shalash urged. "We do not cause any harm to anybody."

Shalash's mosque, the Islamic Center of Lexington, had contacted Lexington cops and Homeland Security, while claiming to be suffering from Islamophobic threats.

Before long, two cop cars in the Kentucky city known as the Horse Capital of the World were parked outside the mosque to protect the imam and his congregation.

The FBI also got on board.

CAIR widely circulated reports of the threat to what it called, a "house of worship".

"Our nation's leaders must send a clear message challenging the rising Islamophobia that leads to such threats," CAIR's Ibrahim Hooper declared. With the 2016 election still imminent, his news release blamed the "extreme anti-Muslim rhetoric" of Donald Trump and Ben Carson.

Four years later, Imam Mahmoud Shalash is in jail. The imam of the Islamic Center, along with John Sadiqullah, and Abdul Hadi, were charged in a harmful and not especially peaceful murder plot.

What makes this particular murder plot interesting is that it would have been authorized with a fatwa.

Imam Shalash has worn many hats. According to a LinkedIn profile, In addition to running the Islamic Center of Lexington, a man of that name owned a mobile home park and the Bluegrass Extended Stay motel (guest reviews have complained about roaches, stained beds and unfriendliness to service dogs), was a member of the Muslim Students Association (a terror linked Muslim Brotherhood hate group) while working on a degree in electrical engineering at the University of Chicago, and, ironically, considering his current predicament, had worked as a chaplain at “federal and state prisons”.

It’s unknown which, if any of these businesses, led to the first plot.

In March, Imam Shalash met up with a government informant at the Days Motel which records indicate is owned by Shalash. (Reviews of the motel describe a man named Mohammed, accuse the staff of sexual harassment, and claim that the motel is dangerous and that the mattresses are covered in bugs.)

There the imam told the informant he needed help getting $80,000 from his target. “Do whatever you have to do to get my money back.” That, according to the informant, included breaking the man’s legs.

At a second meeting, Imam Shalash was there along with Sadiqullah, for a murder plot against another man, this time apparently involving a taxi company deal gone bad, across state lines.

“I want him dead,” Sadiqullah said. “If someone could kill him for $10,000, we all four will pay someone $10,000.”

A meeting was then meant to happen at a mosque at which a fatwa would be provided authorizing the murder. That mosque may have been the Islamic Center of Lexington, which is just across the street from the University of Kentucky.

A fatwa, a religious Islamic authorization, for murder would have provided a sharia license for violence.

"This is the month when the heart gets soft," Imam Shalash had claimed during a previous Ramadan. "You read the Quran more often, you remember Allah more often, you tend to come to the mosque more often to pray in congregation."

This Ramadan didn't seem to have softened his heart. But Imam Shalash has never been a kind man.

A decade ago, Asra Q. Nomani described Imam Mahmoud Shalash telling Muslim men to beat their wives.

"This is America," Nomani had protested. "How can you tell men to beat their wives?"

"They should beat them lightly," Imam Shalash had insisted. "It's in the Koran."

And yet, despite incidents like this, the media continued quoting Imam Shalash favorably.

When Sonny Landham called for a Muslim ban while running for a Senate seat in Kentucky, the media turned to Imam Shalash to describe the libertarian actor’s comments as “irresponsible”.

The media constantly turned to Imam Shalash because he’s a major figure in the Muslim settler community in Lexington. Documents list him as an incorporator of the Islamic Society of Central Kentucky. The Society’s site lists him as conducting marriages and funerals. And the Society founded the Lexington Universal Academy whose board appears to contain a number of people with that last name.

That includes one woman described as a CAIR board member and anti-Israel activist who shares a name with a woman who is listed as living at the same address as Imam Shalash.

The Islamic Center of Lexington responded to Imam Shalash’s arrest with a statement claiming that its leadership is “shocked” at the news, that "every American citizen is innocent until proven guilty", and that "Islam is a religion built on peace and tolerance". But how shocked can the Center really be?

News accounts report that Imam Shalash had already pleaded guilty to federal charges of $238,763 in illegal currency transactions back in 2012. Despite that, the Center didn’t cut ties with him.

It didn’t cut ties with him after the wife-beating story.

The Islamic Center is probably hoping once again that this latest Shalash scandal will blow over.

The media has been the Islamic Center’s greatest ally during its previous scandals. When neighbors protested the plans for an Islamic community center, the media took Shalash’s side. Had the media disclosed Shalash’s previous guilty plea and the wife-beating incident, the stories and the hearings might have had a very different outcome.

Instead the media waited for a murder. And nearly got one.

Imam Shalash has spent the better part of two decades trading in vague concerns about Islamophobia while preaching that Islam is a religion of peace.

When Obama ran for office, Imam Shalash claimed that his opponents were "trying to exploit the anti-Islamic sentiment in this country that ties Muslims with terrorists.”

After President Trump’s travel ban, Imam Shalash had insisted, “People come for better opportunities to this country, not to do terroristic actions.” Apparently the two are not mutually exclusive.

After repeatedly exploiting false claims of Islamophobia, the former chaplain is now facing prison.

This case isn’t about Islamic terrorism. But it is about how Islamic law can be leveraged for violent purposes. Islamic violence isn’t just terrorism. It’s violence that is licensed by Islamic authorities.

And that can be as simple as a meeting in a grimy motel or a mosque opposite the University of Kentucky where the religious authority is just a thug who wants to get his money any way he can.

"We want to come up here and show them the real Islam that carries the love and courtesy and tolerance in our faith," Imam Shalash was quoted as saying in news stories.

It took a while, but he finally did.







Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.