The Hellish Dingell Legacy

A decade ago, Time Magazine unveiled an in-depth article on the death of Detroit. One of the politicians whom the article blamed for Detroit’s woes was Rep. John Dingell.

The Dingell clan has held a congressional seat outside Detroit since 1932. Their 87-year tenure has not coincidentally coincided with the decline of a thriving industrial city into a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

But it’s been good for the Dingells, three of whom have sat in their congressional seat since the days of Herbert Hoover, the rise of Hitler, and the radio age, and fattened their pockets on its sinecures.

Dingell Sr. was the son of Polish immigrants who started out in politics as a union boss, jumped into a newly created seat, and kept it through eleven elections before passing it on to his son. Dingell Jr, outdid daddy by becoming the longest serving member of Congress in American history. Before he died, he passed on the seat to his second wife, whom he married when she was 28 and he was 55 years old.

She was a GM lobbyist who married the Congressman from GM. What was good for GM was good for the Dingells.

By 2014, Dingell Jr. was listed as the third richest member of Congress from Michigan with a net worth of $3.5 million. When Debbie took over for him next year, her net worth was up to $3.6 million. The salary for House members was $174,000. The median household income is $57,000 in the 12th.

Not bad for a family whose business was and is the 12th district from western Detroit through Ann Arbor. Much of the Dingell money came through GM. And Rep. John Dingell had vocally fought for the GM bailout. The GM couple, which had millions in GM stock, had a lot riding on taxpayers bailing them out.

Taxpayers spent billions and the Dingells got millions in an arrangement made in the depths of hell.

Even though Rep. Debbie Dingell ran unopposed in the Democrat primary, and even though she was running for office in one of the most heavily Democrat districts in the country, she still raised over $1 million for that campaign, and another $1.2 million for 2018, and is already up to half a million now.

Even though no one running in the 12th whose last name is Dingell could lose an election to Abe Lincoln.

Where’s the money coming from? Unions, PACs, including the GM PAC, the Ford PAC, Walmart, and, insurance companies. GM, Ford, and Chrysler had also been paying her an undisclosed salary before she took over her husband’s congressional seat. It was a very neat arrangement.

The Dingells take care of them and they take care of the Dingells. Everyone else can go to hell.

Despite Rep. John Dingell’s motorcade pausing at the Capitol, and the gushing tributes to the “longest-serving” member of Congress, even his own party loathed him in life.

In 1996, the New York Times called him a “bully”. Some years earlier, Bloomberg had accused him of the, “bullying of bureaucrats, executives, and colleagues.”

“In the arrogance of his power, he terrorized individuals and institutions that he wanted to humble,” Anthony Lewis wrote in the Times.

"There isn't an industry in the country not touched by our committee,” Rep. John Dingell had bragged.

That includes finance which dragged him into the BCCI scandal through a $10,000 contribution and a mortgage on a home in McLean, Virginia.

After ruling the Committee on Energy and Commerce for 28 years, his own party grew tired of him and unprecedentedly forced him out in 2008. The overthrow of the corrupt "old bull" was the work of none other than Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Despite eventually becoming the longest-serving member of the House, it was his fellow Democrats who conspired to take away the privileges of his seniority.

All that has been forgotten. Dingell’s descriptions of Asians as “little yellow people”, his greed, shameless abuse of power, and arrogance were replaced with empty tributes to his greatness.

President Trump hasn’t forgotten.

And so, at a campaign rally in Michigan, Trump recalled a phone call from Rep. Debbie Dingell on her husband’s funeral. “‘He’s looking down, he’d be so thrilled,’” He recalled her saying. “I said, that’s okay, don’t worry about it. Maybe he’s looking up, I don’t know. I don't know. I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe. But let’s assume he’s looking down."

The locals laughed.

It was impossible to be from Michigan, to have had a front row seat to the antics of the Dingell clan which practically date back to the birth of mass automobile ownership, and imagine “Big John” in heaven. The image of the old crooked thug with wings and a harp is hopelessly laughable.

It’s easy to imagine him looking up, but President Trump generously tried to assume otherwise.

This isn’t the first time that Trump has gotten into trouble for bluntly poking fun at the niceties of a political industry where every crook is “honorable” and everyone pretends to believe it in public.

Does Speaker Pelosi really believe that Rep. John Dingell was a saint? If she does, why did she conspire to take away his chairmanship, against precedent and the seniority rules of the road?

Do the New York Times and Bloomberg want to apologize for calling him a bully?

John Dingell was not a nice guy. Nobody seriously thinks he would have been traumatized by the suggestion that he might not be going to heaven. This was a man who admired a tombstone that read, “He’s done his damnedest.” There’s two ways to read that one. But Dingell never pretended to be a saint. His calling card was hauling pork back to his district and supporting local companies. Like GM.

Nor did he restrain his rhetoric.

"I've read enough of that Steele dossier to know just how risky a ‘used Trump hotel mattress’ can truly be," he tweeted in 2018, referencing a smear by the Clinton campaign.

But Trump reached out to Rep. Debbie Dingell. John got a nice funeral in Washington D.C. And Debbie responded by voting to impeach President Trump for the smears of her fellow Democrats.

Nor is Debbie a nice person. At one point she inveighed against the, "the 13 white boys–sorry to say it that way–that are going to be doing this in the Senate". So much for civility and collegiality.

Was Trump really supposed to pretend that this racist, thieving clan is heavenly?

The D.C. political class throws a fit every time President Trump speaks bluntly about members of the swamp. And Rep. John Dingell wasn’t just part of the swamp. He owned his own mire. In his days ruling the Committee on Energy and Commerce with an iron fist, he would define his jurisdiction by pointing at the planet. These days his ambit, wherever it may be, is a whole lot smaller. And that’s for the best.

There’s a place for civility and collegiality. And had the Dingell clan sailed off into the sunset, maybe we could all remember them fondly the way we do the Hapsburgs, the Bourbons, and the Gambinos.

But they’re not going anywhere. That’s what this is all about.

After John Sr, came John Jr, and after John Jr. came Debbie, and after Debbie will come Christopher, currently a Michigan judge, and on and on, endless generations of Dingells, marching through the House, porking, thieving, and procuring, passing the family legacy of taxpayer money on through the ages until the Republic falls. Should President Trump or anyone else really be afraid to say it’s so?

America didn’t need a single Dingell in her House. It certainly didn’t need three.

If the country is to be rid of them, the chattering classes will have to accept hearing that John Dingell Jr. might not, despite his lifetime of good deeds for GM at taxpayer expense, have made it to heaven.

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

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A Dangerous Holiday

Holidays are a calendar. They mark points in emotional and physical time. They remind of us who we are.

Many celebrate Chanukah as nothing more than celebrations of 'celebration', the rituals and rites of entertainment, a special food, a symbol whose meaning they don't remember and a little family fun.

Chanukah is not a safe holiday. It is a victory celebration in a guerrilla war. It is a reminder that the most recent war on Jerusalem was preceded long before by Antiochus's war on Jerusalem. It is a brief light in a period of great darkness.

As we light the menorah, bringing light out of that darkness, we are called on to remember to treasure the price of that light. It is brought forth through the divine matter of heavenly miracles and the earthly matter of suffering and blood.

Chanukah exists today because a small family, the remnant of a faithful priesthood, saw darkness, where many were blinded by the light of prosperity and progress, and they saw the light in the past, where their Hellenistic cousins saw only darkness.

This most dangerous of holidays does not represent a final victory, but the challenge to see the darkness around us and understand what it will take to summon even a little light.

The trivialization of Chanukah into camp and comedy, an eye roll at the lameness of tradition and the repetitiveness of games and jokes intended for children is its own kind of darkness. Those who would strip away the historical and religious meaning of Chanukah today would have been fighting against the Maccabees. The battle to preserve the meaning of Chanukah is part of the struggle to preserve the Jewish traditions and culture from the universalism of Hellenism.

The Maccabees fought for freedom of religion. They fought against the tyranny of a universalistic mass culture. But they also fought to make faith meaningful again. That is why Chanukah is more than a celebration of victory over what they fought against, as important a component of the holiday as it is, but a celebration of what they fought for, to reach Jerusalem and feel the presence of G-d.

When we light the menorah, we are meant to do more than perform rote ritual, and then on to childish games, but to feel, at least for a moment, the darkness that surrounds us, and aspire to feel G-d.

Chanukah is a dangerous holiday because it asks us to question our comfort zones. Its overt militarism and its dangerous underlying message that a time comes when you must choose between the destruction of your culture and a war you can't win, is too frightening for a comfortable age. The children of a material age are unwilling to consider the dark days in which a doomed war must be fought if the soul of the nation is to survive. It is too alien a notion for most. It was an alien one for the descendants of the pioneers who had struggled and sacrificed to return from exile, only for their descendants to eagerly embrace the gymnasiums and baths, the stadiums and idols of a new empire.

There are worse things than death and slavery, the fate that waited for the Maccabees and their allies had they failed, the fates that came anyway when the last of the Maccabees were betrayed and murdered by Caesar's Edomite minister, whose sons went on to rule over Israel as the Herodian dynasty. Nations can survive the mass murder of their bodies, but not the death of their spirit. A nation does not die, until its soul dies, and the soul of a nation is in its culture and its faith.

The mystery of history is that peoples endure through their willingness to for their people.

Tonight that first candle, that first glimmer of flame over oil, marks the night that the Maccabee forces entered Jerusalem, driving out the enemy armies and their Jewish collaborators, and reclaiming their people's culture and religion.

The light of the flame was a powerful message sent across time that even in the darkest hour, hope was not lost. And G-d would not abandon the people. Time passed the Maccabees fell, Jerusalem was occupied and ethnically cleansed over and over again, and still the menorah burned on. A covert message that still all hope was not lost. That Israel would rise again.

Israel had used signal fires and torches held up on mountain tops to pass along important news. The lighting of the menorah was a miniature signal fire, a perpetuation of the temple light, its eight-day light a reminder that even the smallest light can burn beyond expectation and light beyond belief and that those who trust in G-d and fight for the freedom to believe in Him, should never abandon hope.

That divine signal fire first lit in the deserts by freed slaves has been passed on for thousands of years. Today the menorah is on the seal of the State of Israel, the product of a modern day Chanukah. The mark of a Jerusalem liberated in a miracle of six days, not eight. Six as in the number of the original temple Menorah. And the one on the seal as well.

For those liberals who believe that Jewish identity should be limited to donating to help Haiti, agitating for illegal aliens and promoting the environment; Chanukah is a threatening holiday. They have secularized it, dressed it up with teddy bears and toys, trimmed it with the ecology and civil rights of their new faith. Occasionally a Jewish liberal learns the history of it and writes an outraged essay about nationalism and militarism, but mostly they are content to bury it in the same dark cellar that they store the rest of the history of their people and the culture that they left behind.

Holidays aren't mere parties, they are messages. Knots of time that we tie around the fingers of our lives so that we remember what our ancestors meant us to never forget. That they lived and died for a reason. The party is a celebration, but if we forget what it celebrates, then it becomes a celebration of celebration. A hollow and soulless festival of the self. The Maccabees fought because they believed they had something worth fighting for. Not for their possessions, but for their traditions, their families and their G-d. The celebration of Chanukah is not just how we remember them, but how we remember that we are called upon to keep their watch. To take up their banner and carry their sword.

History is a wheel and as it turns, we see the old continents of time rising again, events revisiting themselves as the patterns of the past become new again. Ancient battles become new wars. And old struggles have to be re-fought again until we finally get them right.

Modiin, the rural center of the old Maccabee resistance, is a revived city today, larger than it ever was. Modiin-Maccabim has some 80,000 people living there. In the ancient days, this was where the Maccabee clan rose against the Seleucid conquerors over religious freedom. Today it is a place that the European Union labels an illegal settlement. A place that Jews have no right to live even though it is within sight of the Maccabees who lived and died there. Over two thousand years after Chanukah, Jews are still not allowed to live in peace in Modiin.

The new Maccabees are farmers and teachers, men and women who build families and homes in the lands of their ancestors, who brave the threats of terrorists and international tyrants to live their lives and raise their children. Knowing that they will not be allowed to live in peace, that everything they stand for is hated by the UN, in the capitals of great empires and even by their own government, they still put flame to wick and mark the first day of many days of the miracle that revived the spirit of a nation and inspires it to this day.

Not only may Jews not live in Modiin, but they may not live in Jerusalem either. And yet they do. They persist, to the eternal frustration of empires, in this quiet resistance of building a future with their buildings, their bodies and their lives. They persist in living where so many would like them to die. And they persist in lighting the menorah when so many would rather that it be forgotten.

The Jew today is called on to forget. To turn his children into bricks in order to construct the utopia of their new world order. To bend to the progressive wheel and wear the social justice chain, and cast his own offspring into the sea of zero population growth. To give up his  nation, his land, his faith and his future to toil in the shadow of the pyramids of socialism. To go down to labor in Egypt once more, in South America and Haitian slums, in barrios and villages, in ghettos and madinas, to give up who he is in order to serve others in the new slavery of social justice.

It takes courage to resist physical oppression, but it takes even greater courage to resist cultural oppression. The terms of physical resistance are easy to understand. Force is used against force. Cultural resistance is far more difficult, and by the time the necessity for it is apparent, it can often be too late.The Maccabees had to resist not only physical oppression and armed force, but the cultural oppression of a system that regarded their monotheism, their nationalism, their traditions and rituals as barbaric. A system that much of their own fellow Jews had already accepted as right and proper.

The Maccabees rose up not only against physical oppression, Israel had and would face that over and over again, they rose up against an assault on their religious and cultural  identity.  The lighting of the Menorah is the perpetuation of that cultural resistance and when it is performed properly then it reminds us that cultural oppression, like physical oppression, is ubiquitous, and that just as the forms of cultural oppression can often go unnoticed, so too the resistance to it can go unnoticed as well.

Every year that we celebrate Chanukah, the left makes another attempt to "desecrate the temple" by destroying its meaning and replacing it with the usual grab bag of social justice issues under the union label of "Tikkun Olam". And each time we push back against their ruthless assault on Jewish history and tradition the same way that the Maccabees did, by reclaiming our sacred places, cleaning away the filth left behind by the occupiers, and lighting the Menorah to remind us of who we are.

Chanukah marks the culmination of the Maccabee campaign for the liberation of Jerusalem. It is the time when we remember the men and women who refused to submit to the perversion of their values and the theft of their land. It reminds us that we must not allow our land to be stolen under any guise or allow our religion, history and culture to be perverted on any pretext. The light of the Menorah reminds us that the sacredness of a nation is in its spirit and that preserving that spirit is an eternal struggle against the conquerors of land and the tyrants of souls.

Chanukah is a Holiday of Resistance. It commemorates the physical and spiritual resistance that is required of us sooner or later in all times. Chanukah takes us back to the armed resistance and the moral awakening that liberated Jerusalem and connected the Jewish people with their G-d once again. And that reminds us to never give up, not in the face of an assault on our bodies or on our culture. The lights go out, but they are lit again, each day, for thousands of years, reminding us to hold on to our traditions and our faith, rather than trade them in for the trendy trinkets and cheap jewelry of progressive liberalism.

To light the menorah on Chanukah is to pass on a signal fire that has been kept lit for thousands of years. From the first holiday of Passover, after which the freed slaves kindled the first Menorah, to the final holiday of Chanukah, that light burns on. The historical cycle of Jewish holidays begins with Moshe confronting Pharaoh and demanding the freedom of the Jewish people. It ends with the Maccabees standing up to the tyranny of Antiochus and fighting for the right of the Jewish people to live under their own rule on their own land.

The lights of the menorah embody the spirit of the Jewish people. A spirit that has outlived the atrocities of every tyrant. In the heart of the flame that has burned for a thousand years lives the soul of a people.

Bloomberg Outs His Own Reporters as Political Operatives

There will never be a President Michael Bloomberg. Not unless some bankrupt African country decides to auction off the privilege to the highest bidder. But while Bloomy is no real threat to the Democrats or Republicans, his campaign is unintentionally telling the obvious truth about the role of the media.

The billionaire famously banned staff from his eponymous outlet from investigating him or fellow Dems while declaring an open season on President Trump. He responded to criticism by saying that his reporters, “get a paycheck. But with your paycheck comes some restrictions and responsibilities.”

Those restrictions and responsibilities are to serve the political interests of the guy signing the checks.

The distinction between Bloomberg’s media outlet and presidential campaign are non-existent. Five staffers from the outlet, an executive editor, news editor, senior editorial page editor, social media editor, and another editorial page editor, have joined the presidential campaign of the same name.

The name of the guy signing their paychecks.

In response, President Trump denied press credentials to Bloomberg News reporters to cover his campaign. That was followed by GOP chairwoman Ronna McDaniel stating that, "Media outlets should be independent and fair, and this decision proves that Bloomberg News is neither."

And that the GOP would no longer provide credentials to Bloomberg News personnel.

“We condemn any action that keeps quality news media from reporting fairly and accurately on the presidency and the leadership of the country,” New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet objected.

But Is there anything wrong with banning political operatives from gaining access to your campaign?

“We have covered Donald Trump fairly and in an unbiased way since he became a candidate in 2015 and will continue to do so despite the restrictions imposed by the Trump campaign," John Micklethwait, the editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, insisted.

But the restrictions weren’t imposed by Trump, but by his own boss. Micklethwait can’t say so because of the signature on his paychecks. There are lots of things he can’t say and things that he must say.

In the memo put out by Micklethwait after his boss launched his campaign, he described the Bloomberg News "tradition of not investigating Mike (and his family and foundation) and we will extend the same policy to his rivals in the Democratic primaries. We cannot treat Mike's competitors differently from him." There's no problem though with treating his Republican competitors differently, as Micklethwait noted that, "our P&I team will continue to investigate the Trump administration."

Corruption can be a tradition. And refusing to investigate your own boss is corruption. Or it is if you accept the media’s self-definition as public interest organizations searching for the truth.

But as Michael Bloomberg demonstrated, the media are nothing more than political operatives.

The Media Research Center filed an FEC complaint against Michael Bloomberg, Bloomberg News, and the Bloomberg 2020 campaign, for violating the law by giving Bloomberg, but not Trump, a pass.

"Bloomberg News knowingly and willfully announced that it would be giving the Candidate and the Candidate's Committee (as well as all candidates running for the Democratic nomination) a thing of value - continued investigations and reporting into the Candidate's political opponent while refraining from investigations into the Candidate," the complaint notes.

When Michael Bloomberg launched his campaign, he also announced that Bloomberg News would function as his political operatives. There’s no meaningful distinction between Bloomberg News where, as MRC points out, the guy whose name is on the masthead owns 89% of the shares, and the campaign. The journalists who work for Bloomberg News quickly switched, officially or unofficially, to political operatives working for the Bloomberg 2020 campaign. Which are both controlled by the same guy.

And he should be praised for his honesty.

The media aren’t biased. That’s a meaningless term. Everyone is biased. Like Bloomberg News, the media is an infrastructure of political operatives who are pretending to provide a public service.

The ‘quid pro quo’ is more hidden than when Bloomberg orders his people not to investigate him, but it’s just as real. Could a pro-Trump journalist survive for long at the New York Times, the Washington Post or CNN? Forget the ideological lean of the leadership. Their audiences would never tolerate it.

The Post’s ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness’ brand dedicated it to a war on Trump. And that paid off with a massive influx of subscribers and readers. The ideological diversity of the paper, always marginal, dropped off the charts. The Washington Post no longer has any conservative contributors. Its former Republican section, Max Boot, and Jennifer Rubin, to a lesser degree George Will, are a choir who all write on the same topic that makes these papers profitable, the evils of Donald J. Trump.

Much as at Bloomberg News, that’s what the people who sign the paychecks want. Unlike Bloomberg News, there isn’t a single signer. Instead it’s the mass of subscribers who want the Washington Post to be wholly dedicated to destroying Trump. The phenomenon can be seen at the New York Times which, unlike the Post, has a few remaining conservatives, but no Trump supporters, and the paper comes under fire every time one of them questions some core leftist tenet of faith such as global warming

The media is caught in its own vicious cycle of partisanship. Its partisan skew narrows its readership and viewership to an echo chamber. And that radical echo chamber demands ideological purity. The media radicalizes its audience. And that audience radicalizes the media. This vicious cycle has transformed the media into a purely political operation whose outlets no longer recognize any journalistic standards.

It’s not just Bloomberg News. The media is a political operation that employs political operatives.

A radical wealthy urban subscriber base is signing the media’s checks to fight their culture war against Republicans and the rest of the country. The media’s journalists, corporate or non-profit, are the political operatives indirectly employed by the same people who clog ActBlue with donations.

Michael Bloomberg took that relationship out of the musty closet and into the bright light of day.

And that’s a good thing.

Political operatives are at their most dangerous when they pretend to be concerned citizens, public servants, or anything other than what they are, the compensated proponents of a political cause.

Everything from onerous environmental regulations to the impeachment crisis had its roots in political operatives functioning under the guise of everything from noble scientists to dedicated FBI agents.

And the media is the worst example of political operatives pretending to be something they’re not.

Michael Bloomberg will never be the President of the United States. He poses no threat to President Trump. But his ambitions and ego have already inflicted a severe blow on the media. Bloomberg’s actions have opened up a debate within the media about the legitimacy of his outlet’s coverage. Even while starring in his very own version of Citizen Kane, he exposed the truth about what the media is.

Some conservatives are content to criticize media bias. But the media is no more biased than Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, or Michael Bloomberg are biased. They’re politicians. The media is a political operation. Its personnel are political operatives. Their goal is no different than that of the politicians they support. Some politicians employ them, as in Bloomberg’s case, or, as is more common, their major donors do.

President Trump and the GOP were right to dump Bloomberg News. The Washington Post and the New York Times should be next.

Political operatives don’t deserve press credentials on the campaigns they’re working to undermine.

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

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Thank you for reading.

How Cory Booker Protected the Black Nationalist Killers Behind the Jersey City Anti-Semitic Shootings

After black nationalist gunmen opened fire in a Jewish market in his state, Senator Cory Booker issued a statement that did not mention Jews, but did mention fighting “gun violence”. A secondary joint press release with Senator Bob Menendez, the other politician representing the state in the Senate, did mention "rising anti-Semitism" before shifting over to the need for, “lifesaving gun safety reform.”

"There is no room in our communities or in our hearts for this evil," the press release concluded.

The Senator from New Jersey doesn’t give himself enough credit. There is plenty of room for this evil in his heart. The Democrat politician has repeatedly quoted Stokely Carmichael in his speeches. The black nationalist also known as Kwame Ture would have approved of the Jersey City market shootings.

“The only good Zionist is a dead Zionist we must take a lesson from Hitler,” Ture had once declared. “I’ve never admired a white man, but the greatest of them, to my mind, was Hitler.”

David Anderson, the Jersey City gunman, had obsessively listened to the ravings of Louis Farrakhan.

Cory Booker had tweeted a photo celebrating Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March which featured a photo of Farrakhan. Like Stokely, Farrakhan believes that Hitler is a “great man.” Earlier in the campaign, Booker had flip-flopped over whether he would agree to meet with Farrakhan, after saying, “I have heard Minister Farrakhan’s speeches for a lot of my life.” Ultimately, Booker decided to nix the idea.

But, much more significantly, Booker had worked to nix the FBI’s monitoring of black nationalist terror.

Earlier this summer, Booker had grinned at a Senate grilling of FBI Director Christopher Wray. “So, you no longer use the term Black Identity Extremism,” he had gloated. “That's great news.”

“So nobody is being investigated or surveilled under black identity extremism?” he demanded.

Nobody. Including David Anderson, the Black Hebrew Israelite hate group member, who had loaded up a U-Haul van with guns and explosives before setting out to kill Jews in the name of his racist hatred.

Had the FBI defied Senator Booker, the people at the JC Supermarket might still be alive today.

The end of the BIE category was great news for Booker who, along with Senator Dick Durbin, had waged a relentless crusade against the FBI for warning against the rising terror threat from black nationalists like the ones who murdered Detective Joseph Seals, Moshe Hersh Deutsch, Leah Mindel Ferencz, and Miguel Jason Rodriguez in the wave of brutal violence by Black Hebrew Israelite terrorists in Jersey City.

And it was bad news for those who lost their lives to the terrorists whom Booker was protecting.

After the hearing, Booker issued a press release urging “Director Wray to issue updated guidance notifying law enforcement agencies about the elimination of this misleading designation.”

The lack of awareness by local law enforcement in Jersey City, particularly by Detective Joseph Seals, who was unaware of the danger he faced when approaching the U-Haul of the black identity extremists, may have proven fatal not only to Seals, but the three people shot in the Kosher market, as well as to the two police officers wounded in the fighting. If Seals had understood the danger he was in, the entire attack could have been headed off at the Bayville Cemetery where the detective had confronted them.

At the Senate hearing, Booker followed the same talking points as other defenders of black nationalism did, objecting to Director Wray’s suggestion that racist violence was coming from both sides of the spectrum. “That language you said, both ends of the spectrum, the murders at synagogues, the murders we've seen motivated,” he rambled. “You said both ends of the spectrum, as if there actually is a movement of black identity extremism: it's almost creating this reality.”

Less than a year later, the reality that Booker was pretending didn’t exist hit home. The likely target, according to Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop, was a Jewish school and synagogue next door to the store.

Anderson and his girlfriend had opened fire on the glass front of the store while 50 children were trapped in a school and worshipers in a synagogue in the much less visible building next door.

The attack came from the black identity extremists whom Booker had been avidly protecting.

"The Trump Administration is conjuring up the idea that 'Black Identity Extremists' are a threat to our communities, particularly the safety of the brave men and women who serve in law enforcement. There is just one problem though: there is no such movement. No serious journalists or academics have written about or even found that 'Black Identity Extremists' exist," Booker had posted on Facebook.

That was in 2017. That same year, black nationalists Micah X. Johnson and Gavin Long, had murdered 8 police officers in mass shootings. These were some of the crimes that Senator Booker claimed didn’t exist.

And he wasn’t alone.

Booker, along with Senator Kamala Harris, Senator Dick Durbin, Senator Chris Coons, Senator Amy Klobuchar, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, and Senator Richard Blumenthal had sent a letter to Attorney General Barr this year claiming that "so-called 'Black identity extremists'" was a "fabricated term based on a faulty assessment of a small number of isolated incidents."

A letter by the Congressional Black Caucus had also taken issue with the BIE category. Rep. Donald M. Payne Jr, who represents the district in which the Kosher market shooting happened, is a CBC member. In his press release, Payne failed to mention the ideology of the gunmen, repeatedly describing the killings as “senseless” and blamed Republicans for not supporting Democrat gun control proposals.

“I will continue to encourage my House colleagues to support my Safer Neighborhoods Gun Buyback Act to help me get guns off the streets,” his press release boasted.

The Democrat House member failed to explain how buying back guns would have stopped a black nationalist terrorist who had stocked up on guns in order to kill police officers and Jews.

The FBI’s response to the rise in black nationalist violence was the right one.

You don’t stop terrorist attack with gun buybacks, but through monitoring and surveillance. Senator Cory Booker went to war to cripple the FBI’s ability to monitor and to warn local police departments of the threat of black nationalist terror. He shamelessly lied by repeatedly claiming that it didn’t exist.

And there is no reason to think that he will admit the truth now.

In between praising Greta Thunberg and touting his own political prospects in the 2020 election, Booker tweeted, "We won't be silent in the face of bigotry & hate. Sending love & prayers to the victims, their families, our Jewish neighbors & the JCPD."

The victims didn’t need Cory Booker’s love or prayers. Nor did the JCPD which lost one of its own, while two others were sent to the hospital, it needed to have the information to stop that from happening.

For the last two years, Booker had the opportunity to stand with police officers and the victims. Instead he chose to cover up for David Anderson and other racist black nationalist terrorists.

The people of New Jersey paid the price.

Senator Cory Booker was not only silent in the face of bigotry and hate, he silenced the FBI. His silencing enabled the terror attack in Jersey City. And his response to a terror attack in his own state by the very black identity extremists whom he claimed don’t exist, was this perfunctory sending of “love & prayers.”

President Trump has been repeatedly asked about his ties to white nationalists. Imagine if President Trump had repeatedly quoted an admirer of Adolf Hitler who had called for the murder of Jews. Imagine if he had played a major role in shutting down surveillance and monitoring of the KKK and Neo-Nazis. And imagine if nobody in the media were willing to report on it or ask him about his motives.

It’s time Cory Booker were asked, as he aspires to Trump’s job, why he covered for black nationalists.

And whether, after the bodies were removed from the floor of that small Jersey City market while he rushed between fundraisers and campaign events, he has any regrets.

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 Light of Chanukah

A candle is a brief flare of light. A wick dipped in oil burns and then goes out again. The light of Chanukah appears no different. Briefly there is light and warmth and then darkness again.

Out of the exile of Babylon, the handful that returned to resettle and rebuild the land faced the might of new empires. The Jews who returned from the exile of one evil empire some twenty-six hundred years ago were forced to decide whether they would be a people with their own faith and history, or the colony of another empire, with its history and beliefs.

Jerusalem's wealthy elites threw in their lot with the empire and its ways. But out in the rural heartland where the old ways where still kept, a spark flared to life. Modi'in. Maccabee.

And so war came between the handfuls of Jewish resistance fighters from a small town in the hinterlands and the Hellenized elites of the big city, between those who wished to be Jews and those who wanted to be pawns in an empire, between the tradition of the priests and the progress of a new order, between the Maccabees and the armies of Antiochus IV’s Selecuid empire. A war that had its echoes in the past and would have it again in the future as lightly armed and untrained armies of Jewish soldiers would go on to fight in those same hills and valleys against the Romans and eventually the armies of six Arab nations.

The Syrian Greek armies were among the best of their day. The Maccabees were living in the backwaters of Israel, a nation that had not been independently ruled since the armies of Babylon had flooded across the land, destroying everything in their path.

In the wilderness of Judea a band of brothers vowed that they would bow to no man and let no foreigners rule over their land. Apollonius brought his Samaritan forces against the brothers, and Judah, first among the Maccabees, killed him, took his sword and wore it for his own.

General Seron of the army of Coele-Syria, brought together his soldiers, along with renegade Jewish mercenaries, and was broken at Beit Haran. The Governor of Syria dispatched two generals, Nicanor, and Gorgias, with forty thousand soldiers and seven thousand horsemen to conquer Judea, destroy Jerusalem and abolish the whole Jewish nation forever. So certain were they of victory that they brought with them merchant caravans to fill with the Hebrew slaves of a destroyed nation.

Judah walked among his brothers and fellow rebels and spoke to them of the thing for which they fought; “My fellow soldiers, no other time remains more opportune than the present for courage and contempt of dangers; for if you now fight manfully, you may recover your liberty, which, as it is a thing of itself agreeable to all men, so it proves to be to us much more desirable, by its affording us the liberty of worshiping God.

"Since therefore you are in such circumstances at present, you must either recover that liberty, and so regain a happy and blessed way of living, which is that according to our laws, and the customs of our country, or to submit to the most opprobrious sufferings; nor will any seed of your nation remain if you be beat in this battle. Fight therefore manfully; and suppose that you must die, though you do not fight; but believe, that besides such glorious rewards as those of the liberty of your country, of your laws, of your religion, you shall then obtain everlasting glory.

"Prepare yourselves, therefore, and put yourselves into such an agreeable posture, that you may be ready to fight with the enemy as soon as it is day tomorrow morning."

Though the Maccabees were but three thousand, starving and dressed in bare rags, the God for whom they fought and their native wits and courage, gave them victory over thousands and tens of thousands.

Though, worn from battle, the Maccabees did not flee back into their Judean wilderness, instead they went on to Jerusalem and its Temple, to reclaim their land and their God, only to find the Temple and the capital in ruins.

The Maccabees had fought courageously for the freedom to worship God once again as their fathers had, but courage alone could not make the Menorah burn and thus renew the Temple service again. Yet it had not been mere berserker’s courage that had brought them this far. Like their ancestors before them who had leaped into furnaces and the raging sea, they had dared the impossible on faith. Faith in a God who watched over his nation and intervened in the affairs of men. And so on faith they poured the oil of that single flask in the Menorah, oil that could only last for a single day. And then having done all they could, the priests and sons of priests who had fought through entire armies to reach this place, accepted that they had done all they could and left the remainder in the hands of the Almighty.

If they had won by the strength of their hands alone, then the lamps would burn for a day and then flicker out. But if it had been more than mere force of arms that had brought them here, if it had been more than mere happenstance that a small band of ragged and starving rebels had shattered the armies of an empire, then the flames of the Menorah would burn on.

The sun rose and set again. The day came to its end and the men watched the lights of the Menorah to see if they would burn or die out. And if the flame in their hearts could have kindled the lamps, they would have burst into bright flame then and there. Darkness fell that night and still the lamps burned on.

For eight days and nights the Menorah burned on that single lonely pure flask of oil, until more could be found, and the men who for a time had been soldiers and had once again become priests, saw that while it may be men who kindle lamps and hearts, it is the Almighty who provides them with the fuel of the spirit through which they burn.

120 years after the Maccabees drove out the foreign invaders and their collaborators, another foreign invader, Herod, the son of Rome's Arab governor, was placed on the throne by the Roman Empire, disposing of the last of the Maccabean kings and ending the brief revival of the Jewish kingdom.

The revived kingdom had been a plaything in the game of empires. Exiled by Babylon, restored by Persia, conquered by the Greeks, ground under the heel of the remnants of Alexander's empire, briefly liberated by the Parthians, tricked into servitude and destroyed by Rome. The victory of the Maccabean brothers in reclaiming Jerusalem was a brief flare of light in the dark centuries and even that light was shadowed by the growing darkness.

The fall of the Roman Republic and the civil wars of the new empire, its uncontrollable spending and greed made it hopelessly corrupt. Caesar repaid Jewish loyalty by rewarding the Arab-Edomite murderers of Jewish kings, and his successors saw the Jewish state as a way to bring in some quick money. Out went the Jewish kings, in came the son of Rome's tax collector, Herod.

The promises made by Senate to the Maccabees ceased to matter. Imperial greed collided with Jewish nationalism in a war that for a brief shining moment seemed as if it might end in another Chanukah, but ended instead in massacre and atrocity. The exiles went forth once again, some on foot and some in slave ships. Israel became Palestine. Jerusalem was renamed and resettled. The long night had begun.

But no darkness lasts forever.

Two thousand years after the Jews had come to believe that wars were for other people and miracles meant escaping alive, Jewish armies stood and held the line against an empire and the would be empires of the region.

And now the flame still burns, though it is flickering. Seventy-one years is a long time for oil to burn, especially when the black oil next door seems so much more useful to the empires and republics across the sea. And the children of many of those who first lit the flame no longer see the point in that hoary old light.

But that old light is still the light of possibilities. It burns to remind us of the extraordinary things that our ancestors did and of the extraordinary assistance that they received. We cannot always expect oil to burn for eight days, just as we cannot always expect the bullet to miss or the rocket to fall short. And yet even in those moments of darkness the reminder of the flame is with us for no darkness lasts forever and no exile, whether of the body of the spirit, endures. Sooner or later the spark flares to life again and the oil burns again. Sooner or later the light returns.

It is the miracle that we commemorate because it is a reminder of possibilities. Each time we light a candle or dip a wick in oil, we release a flare of light from the darkness comes to remind us of what was, is and can still be.

What If You Hold Impeachment Rallies and No One Comes?

In Grand Rapids, Michigan, a city of 200,000, a grand total of 200 lefties turned out to rally for impeachment. The rally did not immediately manage to attract 200 lefties. Instead the very tiny mob of quarrelsome senior citizens shambled past trendy juice bars, restaurants decorated with festive lights, and a Subway shop while waving signs depicting President Trump as an orange with a combover.

At some point this sad gathering on ‘Impeachment Eve’ managed to get all the way up to 200 people.

The scene wasn’t much better in Boston Common where hundreds of protesters, in a city of 685,000, showed up to listen to former Governor Bill Weld, who is running against Trump for the Republican nomination in a campaign managed by his stepson, say something that neither the media nor his own campaign’s social media account saw fit to cover. And who can blame them? It’s Bill Weld.

The turnout was equally miserable in Philly where once again hundreds of protesters showed up at Thomas Paine Plaza to chant an original protest song they had composed just for the occasion.

“Hey hey, ho ho, Donald Trump has got to go."

Even they knew it was futile.

“This isn’t to try and actually remove him from office, we know that’s not going to happen,” a second-year law student in Philly explained.

It’s a sad state of affairs when you can only get a few hundred protesters to call for Trump’s impeachment in the city that had hosted the DNC convention, and even they know it’s not happening.

Hundreds, once again, gathered in Chicago’s Federal Plaza to bleat about impeachment. So much for the city’s vaunted community organizers who couldn’t even manage to turn out as many people to call for Trump’s impeachment as for the premiere of another Star Wars movie or a drive-by shooting.

MoveOn, among other lefty hate groups, had called for nationwide rallies on ‘Impeachment Eve’. And they got them. If you interpret “rallies” and “nationwide” very generously. Or, as the Washington Post generously put it, “Modest But Passionate Turnout at Pro-Impeachment Rallies.”

The Washington Post’s passionate attempt to kill democracy died in failed nighttime rallies of hundreds.

It’s easy to blame the weather for the poor turnout in Boston, Philly, and Chicago. But what about Phoenix, Arizona, where despite moderate temperatures, only a few hundred turned out?

And for all we know it might be the same few hundred.

Desperate protesters divided by traffic held up, “Honk to Impeach” signs. But that’s not why the drivers, worried that one of those idiots would rush off the sidewalk and into traffic, were actually honking.

In Los Angeles, the rally boasted celebrities like Rep. Katie Hill, who was forced to resign over an inappropriate relationship and is holding a GoFundMe to sue everyone, not to mention Rob Reiner.

Sadly, they only got hundreds of people to show up to Grand Park and listen to Rob Reiner.

But that’s still more people than Rob Reiner was able to get into theaters for classics like Rumor Has It, North, The Story of Us, and his latest, Shock and Awe, a shot at the Bush administration, which made $77,980 despite the combined acting talents of Woody Harrelson, Tommy Lee Jones, and Meathead.

You can see why Rob has focused on the political phase of his career as Carl Reiner’s talentless son.

But the impeachment rallies of Impeachment Eve were a bust from sea to shining sea. Even the reliable zoomer and millennial student base had abandoned impeachment activists in college towns and cities.

In Princeton, NJ, where the university boasts 1,289 faculty members and 5,267 undergrads, a little over 100 protesters showed up. Even the faculty of the various identity politics departments alone should have been able to manage a better turnout in a cafeteria line, never mind an anti-Trump protest.

In Ann Arbor, home of the University of Michigan and more radicals than you can hit with a dead raccoon, more than 1,000 people registered and only a few hundred showed up to the actual shindig.

Mayor Christopher Taylor addressed the sad handful of fellow radicals, telling them, "We value pluralism and diversity. We value welcoming the refugee, the immigrant. We value using the tool of government to support the neediest among us."

The “tool of government” should have brought some of those refugees, immigrants, and welfare recipients to the impeachment rally. Sadly, no matter how many MS-13 gang members and Syrian terrorists you resettle, they can’t be counted on to show up at your impeachment rallies.

In Des Moines, Iowa, that familiar quorum of “hundreds” gathered to wave their little signs. One woman was wearing a Russian fur hat. It’s unknown if that was a comment on the temperature or Russiagate.

Someone also brought a sad little, partly deflated, Trump balloon.

In Stamford, Connecticut, once again, mere hundreds turned out. But they brought along an African-American fifth grader to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. He appeared to be the only black person there.

It was an even bigger disaster in Madison, Wisconsin, where only 200 people and a broken bullhorn showed up. The gang that couldn’t impeach straight hadn’t even figured out their sound system. Even when it’s as basic as a bullhorn. Speakers had to shriek to be heard by the very small crowd.

Only a few hundred people turned out in Denver, Colorado. In Fort Worth, Texas, 100 protesters showed up outside the office of Rep. Ron Wright. Who wasn't there anyway.

In New York City, a small gathering waving a black banner reading, “Remove Them All” marched past a Sunglass Hut on the way down from Times Square. Organizers chanted, “Shut it down!” It was unclear what they wanted to shut down. There weren’t enough of them to shut down Times Square. But nobody could get into the Sunglass Hut while they were marching past it. So they did shut down the Sunglass Hut.

If temporarily shutting down the Sunglass Hut doesn’t stop President Trump, what will?

A woman held up a sign reading, “Trump digs his own grave.”

The way the small group carried the black banner suggested that they were using it for warmth.

The banner got tangled in the planters that had been set up to keep Islamic terrorists from running over people with cars. The momentum of the march collapsed as they tried to figure out how to untangle it.

“Impeach who?” the organizer demanded. As if they had all forgotten. “Impeach Trump.”

And then it began to rain.

The only place the Impeachment Eve rallies got any turnout was in San Francisco where 1,000 protesters marched to Senator Kamala Harris’ office to hear a speech by Christine Pelosi. That’s like going out for week old soy burgers and finding out that they don’t have any and you have to eat the bag they came in.

San Fran has a population of over 800,000 people. But it’s understandable that the other 799,000 stayed home. It’s one thing to march through bullets and clubs, but another thing to march your $600 Ferragamo loafers through progressive piles of Hepatitis infected human waste in Pelosi’s utopia.

The protests were meant to show that ordinary people wanted impeachment to succeed. Instead they predictably brought out the crazies and the kooks. In Naperville, Illinois, where, once again “hundreds” rallied for impeachment, a woman carried a racist sign reading, “White silence is violence.”

In San Francisco, one of the featured speakers was Alexander Hamilton.

The role of Hamilton was played by a British activist dressed in a tricorn and colonial clothing. The whole plan couldn’t have been any more misguided if the crowd had been waving the Union Jack. The state of activist desperation in San Fran is so bad that its protesters have started stealing from the Tea Party.

If they show up with a Gadsden flag, somebody should sue.

After all the noise, MoveOn, Indivisible, CREDO, and the whole gang managed to turn out thousands of angry lefties nationwide even as polls show that the majority of Americans oppose impeachment.

Everyone but Pelosi, Schiff, and the angriest activists have given up on impeachment.

In Oakland, a protester boasted, “I have the same bottle of champagne that I bought to toast our first woman president. When that didn’t happen, I put it in my refrigerator and I wrote ‘impeachment’ on the labels. And now I’m going to get to pull it out of the refrigerator tomorrow and open it up and drink it.”

Nobody tell her how impeachment works or she’ll never be able to drink that champagne.

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.

Why a Jewish Democrat Mayor Praised Trump for Standing Up to Anti-Semitism

At the White House Chanukah party, Mayor Michael Wildes approached President Trump to thank him for his support after the massacre at a Kosher market in Jersey City by two black nationalists.

"Thank you, Mr. President for your extraordinary work today," the Englewood mayor told Trump in a video posted on Facebook. "Standing up to anti-Semitism has been in your DNA. Why is that so natural?"

“It's always been the way I felt," President Trump replied. "As you know I have a son-in-law, daughter, and three magnificent children. Jewish. And what happened in New Jersey was horrible."

"I can't tell you how much means to the Jewish community,” Wildes said. “This is not a Democrat or Republican issue."

Mayor Wildes is a Democrat. And while he insists that standing up to the hatred that killed two Jewish people, as well as a police detective and a store employee is not a partisan issue, it very much is.

The divide over whether to describe the attack on the Jewish store as anti-Semitic began early on as authorities stalled on naming the attackers and misrepresented the shootings as random violence.

Mayor Steve Fulop of Jersey City broke the embargo by making it clear that the attackers had targeted the JC Supermarket, rather than randomly entering it, a fact which videos showed was indeed the case.

David Anderson, the Black Hebrew Israelite shooter, had listened to speeches by Louis Farrakhan, the anti-Semitic leader of the Nation of Islam, had a YouTube playlist of angry attacks on Jews by Black Hebrew Israelite preachers, and had left comments calling for violence against Jewish people while complaining that the current attacks were "not violent enough."

He set out to remedy that.

But Mayor Fulop’s willingness to break the embargo had political consequences.

Fulop was excluded from the state press conference held by Governor Phil Murphy, a former Goldman Sachs exec and Obama donor who has overseen an unprecedented wave of abuses by his political operatives and associates, including rape charges, and State Attorney General Gurbir Grewal.

It was odd for the mayor of a city where a terrorist attack had just taken place to be excluded from a press conference about it. But the state attorney general’s warning was odder and more troubling yet.

"It’s especially important that the press and the public stick to the facts as officially reported by our offices,” Grewal insisted.

It’s the job of the press to investigate facts on its own rather than to just parrot Grewal’s press releases. The attorney general’s warning that the press should stick to what came out of his office was offensive and troubling. A more independent media would have even called it out for what it was.

But while the media failed to do so, it did report on leaks from the investigation which showed that David Anderson, the black nationalist gunman, had a history of hatred toward Jews and the police.

On Twitter, Mayor Fulop retorted, “We shouldn’t parse words. To stop hate + anti-semitism we need to call it out QUICKLY for what it is. Some will say don’t call it anti-semitism or a hate crime till a longer review but being Jewish myself + the grandson of holocaust survivors I know enough to call it what this is.”

Even as the evidence mounted, Murphy and Grewal continued to stall. Only by Thursday, when the embargo had been definitely broken by local politicians like Fulop, was Grewal willing to finally call it an “act of hate”, possibly anti-Semitism. Meanwhile the FBI had taken the lead in labeling the attack as both domestic terrorism and hate, taking their cue from President Trump and the White House.

The authorities had dragged their feet on releasing the names of the JC Supermarket victims and of the killers. They had attempted to portray the shootings as random rather than entirely intentional. There was no reason for these delays. There was no reason to stall the release of the names of the killers. And there was no reason to stall the release of the names of the victims even as they circulated on social media. This delay caused needless pain to other families when the wrong names were passed around.

AG Grewal claimed to be worried about causing "unnecessary panic in the community". But it should be up to the community to have all the information and then to decide what to do with it.

After Murphy and Grewal finally conceded the obvious, Mayor Fulop tweeted, “I’m glad we are all calling this out now. Every day that passed diminished the impact of labeling it. All too often people are reluctant to call out hate because they may offend someone else.”

Fulop did not identify whom state bosses might have been afraid to offend, but the state’s Democrat leaders have built a shaky coalition. And black nationalists are a vital part of that coalition.

The Murphy administration had recently encountered its own anti-Semitism scandal when it hired Passaic NAACP President Jeffrey Dye to work for the Department of Labor & Workforce Development. Aside from an extensive criminal record covering drugs, assaulting his own brother, and police officers, Dye spent his time praising Farrakhan and spewing anti-Semitism.

When a reporter contacted him about his case, Dye had retorted, “I don’t talk to f____ Jews.”

Governor Murphy stonewalled questions about Dye’s hiring and failed to specifically condemn his anti-Semitism. Assemblyman Gary Schaer had warned the Murphy administration against hiring Dye. And described his hiring as "frightening at best." He noted, "Why he was hired, I can only imagine."

Murphy’s running mate, Lt. Governor Sheila Oliver had refused to vote for an anti-BDS bill.

Anti-Semitic events in New Jersey had been up 32% even before the Jersey City shootings. Like his proggie counterpart in New York City, Murphy has done nothing except wave the question away.

The words of the two New Jersey mayors, both Jewish, showed how isolated Jews had become. But it also showed that some Jewish Democrats were willing to challenge state and national party officials.

Mayor Wildes’ Facebook moment with President Trump sent a message to his own party.

"It's a time for our leaders to come together to keep all of us safe," he posted.

The question is will they?

American Jews face violence from racists and extremists across the spectrum. Like many Democrats, Governor Murphy is eager to condemn bigotry that doesn’t touch his party, but hesitant to offend the activists and the voters who helped put him at the top of the political food chain in New Jersey.

The events in New Jersey are a microcosm of the deep divide about anti-Semitism across the country.

Democrats falsely claim that President Trump is anti-Semitic. It should be a wake-up call for Jewish Democrats when the Democrat Mayor of Englewood praises President Trump for standing up to anti-Semitism after New Jersey Democrat leaders were caught trying to sweep it under the political rug.

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.

Black Nationalist Hate Group Praised by Media Shot Up Kosher Market

The New York Times called them "sidewalk ministers" who practice "tough love." The paper quoted Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center who described them as victims of racism and claimed that they were non-violent.

The Washington Post, in its own puff piece on the Black Hebrew Israelites, also falsely described them as non-violent, and concluded that, "Israelite street preaching in parts of D.C., Philadelphia and New York is commonplace, a familiar if odd accent to city life."

The odd accent to city life in Jersey City came amid a hail of bullets as two members of the racist black nationalist hate group opened fire in the JC Supermarket. Despite initial claims by the media and the authorities that the Jewish market had not been targeted, David Anderson and Francine Graham ignored passerby on Martin Luther King Dr, to get to the store and kill as many Jewish people as they could.

When the shooting had ended, Moshe Hersh Deutsch, a yeshiva student who was known for helping distribute food packages to the needy, Mrs Leah Mindel Ferencz, a mother of 3 who helped her husband run the grocery store, and Miguel Jason Rodriguez, the father of an 11-year-old daughter and a parishioner at an Assemblies of God church, were all dead.

Anderson, who left behind anti-Semitic and anti-police writings, had also killed Detective Joseph Seals, a father of 5, and wounded Officer Ray Sanchez and Officer Ferenella Fernandez.

The black nationalist terrorist had hated cops and Jews. He managed to kill both.

The media whitewash of the racist Black Israelites had come during the Covington Catholic case when the Washington Post, among other papers, had falsely blamed the pro-life students for a confrontation that actually began when members of the nationalist hate group had begun calling them, “crackers,” “faggots,” and “pedophiles.” An African-American pro-life student was called the ‘n-word’.

Rep. Ilhan Omar, who has her own history of racism and anti-Semitism, falsely claimed that the Covington Catholic students were “taunting 5 black men.”

The New York Times equivocated that members of the hate group “use blunt and sometimes offensive language, and gamely engage in arguments”. The typical “offensive language” and argumentative style of the Times’ second favorite racist hate group involves shouting racist and anti-Semitic slurs at people.

David Anderson, the Kosher supermarket shooter, had a whole YouTube playlist of such ugly incidents. In one video, a Black Israelite preacher shouts, “Satan is in you” at a Jewish man. “You stole our history. You are pretending to be us. The messiah, who is a black man, is going to kill you.”

Gamely indeed.

In another video, a Black Israelite preacher calls a Jewish teen a member of the “Synagogue of Satan”. “We want our book back and we want our land back,” the preacher demands. “Go back to Russia.”

You can see why Rep. Ilhan Omar might have felt called to defend the racist hate group.

“They move you all over the earth, but we know who you are. You are part of the Zionist deception. You go among the earth to spread Zionism, which is really Catholicism,” he rants. “Witchcraft and sorcery.”

Such statements may seem deranged, but they’re typical of the supremacist theology of the hate group.

Previous incidents involving the hate group have been even uglier with a video that doesn’t appear on Anderson’s playlist showcasing a Black Israelite preacher shouting, "The Holocaust is a damn joke! Heil Hitler!" A documentary shows another preacher standing on a prone white man and declaiming, "We're coming for you, white boys. Negroes are the real Jews. Get ready for war.”

It’s no wonder that Tom Metzger a KKK leader and the founder of the White Aryan Resistance, had described them, as "the black counterparts of us".

And yet, the New York Times concluded its whitewash of the hate group with a closing quote by Todd Boyd, a professor of race and culture at UCLA, which claimed that, "To many black people, Hebrew Israelites are a harmless part of their communities."

No doubt to many white people the KKK are a harmless part of their communities. Racist hate groups are the bigger problem for people who aren’t a member of their race.

"More alarming to many African Americans," the UCLA professor of race had argued, is "seeing a white guy in a ‘Make America Great Again’ hat."

The dead at the JC Supermarket would have liked to have seen a MAGA had instead of black coats.

The whitewash of the Black Israelite hate group was the work of John Eligon, a reporter hired by the New York Times to report on race, who had previously defended Rep. Ilhan Omar’s anti-Semitism, and had injected black nationalist sympathies into his writing. The Washington Post’s whitewash of the hate group was the work of Sam Kestenbaum, a contributing editor at the radical leftist The Forward. The anti-Jewish paper has a long history of whitewashing and defending anti-Semitism by its political allies.

But the problem is much bigger than just the media’s whitewash of the Black Israelites.

The FBI’s warning about the threat of “black identity extremism” was met with a wave of attacks by the media. A New York Times op-ed warned of "The F.B.I.’s Dangerous Crackdown on ‘Black Identity Extremists’" The Intercept, a notorious radical hate site funded by Franco-Persian eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar, joined in. "Why the FBI's "Black Identity Extremist" Classification Is Dangerous," Teen Vogue had argued. The Nation had warned of a "Coming War on 'Black Nationalists'".

Rep. Karen Bass, a militant anti-Israel Democrat, despite representing a partially Jewish district, attacked former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the FBI, and other officials over the BIE category. This was after the murder of 4 Dallas police officers by Micah X. Johnson and Kori Ali Muhammad's targeted killing of three white men in Fresno.

“I don’t believe black identity extremists exist, and I believe the FBI should retract the document and send out a document throughout law enforcement saying that black identity extremists do not exist,” Bass had ranted.

This year, under pressure, the FBI jettisoned the BIE term. Just in time for the Kosher market shooting.

The FBI report helps police officers prepare for coming threats. By undermining the warnings about black nationalist violence, Rep. Bass, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and every media activist and politician who went to bat for black nationalist racists sabotaged police preparedness.

And they have blood on their hands.

The media is already embracing the familiar narrative about lone wolves and individual instability. That’s the same story we hear after acts of violence by members of a movement that it is politically allied with.

Hate groups, whether it’s the KKK or the Black Israelites, or campus hate groups like the Groypers or SJP, should be exposed with clear and honest facts about who they are and what they believe.

When political activists and media whitewashes cover up the truth for partisan reasons, people can die.

A father of five with a badge, a mother of three running a grocery store, a man working to support his daughter, another man delivering food packages, did not have to die. If the truth had been told about the Black Israelites, they might still be alive today. Instead the media lied and they are gone.

Truly standing up against racism and anti-Semitism means jettisoning partisan agendas for the truth.

Rep. Karen Bass, the New York Times, The Intercept, the ACLU, and others colluded to tie the hands of the FBI and local police because they see black nationalists like Anderson as allies in their cause.

After the attack, a representative from Americans Against Anti-Semitism, an organization which, unlike the ADL, actually opposes hate wherever it comes from, took a camera to record local reactions.

"I blame the Jews. We never had a shooting like this until they came," one resident bellows. “My children are stuck at school because of Jew shenanigans.”

"Four of y'all are dead right? That's great. If they was there, they got shot dead, that's great," a man says.

"Get the Jews out of Jersey City," someone else shouts.

There’s nothing extraordinary about this. It’s the everyday hate that we can’t talk about. The hate that the media is quick to cover up. If you want to understand why children are beaten on Brooklyn streets and why a Kosher supermarket was shot up, it’s because we aren’t allowed to talk about it.

Evil needs silence and complicity. The media and Democrat politicians are guilty of both.

The Ferencz family, Moishe and Leah, opened a small market on Martin Luther King Dr. They filled the narrow aisles with bread, juice, candy, milk, and the household staples you need when time is short.

They worked late hours.

And then, while Moishe was praying next door, the black nationalist bigots whom the New York Times, the Washington Post, Rep. Ilhan Omar, and Rep. Karen Bass had defended, killed his wife.

That is the story that the media won’t tell. But it must be told.

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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In Europe, the Muslim Murder of Jews is a Mental Illness

Martin Colmans was selling furniture in the Albert Cuyp market in Amsterdam when he was stabbed in the thigh. His son, Sharon, ran out to help him and protect his mother and was stabbed in his back and chest. But he succeeded in preventing the stabber from getting to his mother, Orly.

Tarik Ghani, the Muslim man who stabbed him, ran a hookah shop in the market. The victim said that he noticed a sudden change in his attacker after he returned from the Middle East and was often seen, “reading the Koran.” “He stopped talking to us, shaved his head and prayed all the time. He also began giving us nasty looks.” Other vendors in the Cuyp market stated that Tarik hated Jews. There had been warnings that he might turn violent and attack someone. Those warnings were however disregarded.

Instead of sending him to prison, a Dutch judge sentenced Tarik to a year of psychiatric treatment. The Colmans had asked the judge to take his anti-Semitism into account, instead the judge accepted Tarik’s claim that he was mentally ill and had been hearing voices. There was no evidence for this claim.

"Many people who are psychotic read the Koran," a psychiatrist explained.

Tarik hadn’t been obsessively reading the Koran before the attack because he was a terrorist, but because he was psychotic.

Around the same time as a Dutch court was exempting Tarik from responsibility for his anti-Semitic attack, a French court was giving Kobili Traore another pass for the brutal murder of Sarah Halimi.

Sarah, the elderly head of a Jewish nursery school, was brutally attacked in her apartment. Her brother had said that the killer had previously called them, “dirty Jews”. The police had been called before the attack. They had heard Kobili loudly chanting verses from the Koran. Reinforcements were called, but the police did nothing. Meanwhile Kobili climbed through the window into Sarah’s apartment.

The Muslim beat her until her nightgown was covered in blood while shouting, “Allahu Akbar”, verses from the Koran and anti-Semitic rhetoric. Neighbors called the police and described what was going on. The police did nothing. At some point during the brutal assault, the killer crushed Sarah’s skull with a telephone. Finally, he shouted that his victim was “mad and about to commit suicide”.

And then he threw her out the window and returned to his apartment.

That was in 2017. Since then multiple courts have ruled that Kobili Traore was not responsible for his actions because cannabis had been found in his system. He had been smoking pot. And that had allegedly brought on some sort of psychotic episode that prevented him from being responsible for his actions. Like Tarik Ghani, he is likely to remain in a hospital until the shrinks decide to set him loose.

Kobili has had three psychiatric reviews, none of whom agree with each other, but all claim he was unfit.

But trying to belatedly make Sarah’s murder look like a suicide showed that he knew what he was doing. He had calculatedly cased her apartment early in the day and had calculated exactly where to drop her.

The cover-up of the murder began from before it even happened. Instead of taking Kobili to prison, the cops took him to a hospital. A urine test found cannabis in his system. And the narrative was set. And yet the killer admitted that he had been motivated by his hatred of Sarah’s Jewishness.

He told investigators, "When I saw the Torah and menorah in her home, I felt oppressed." By the Torah, he likely meant a copy of the bible in his victim's home. (His reference to the menorah that Jews light on Chanukah has been unhelpfully mistranslated as “chandelier” from the French by the media.)

The psychiatrist argued that Kobili could be both anti-Semitic and insane because "during delusional episodes among Muslims, an anti-Semitic theme is common." The psychiatrist was making the case that the killer wasn’t guilty because Muslims are inherently anti-Semitic, and he was acting on that inherent anti-Semitism, but wasn’t truly in control of his actions because he had smoked 10 joints beforehand.

Muslims are predisposed by their religion and culture to hate Jews, but Kobili would not have done so unless he had suffered a psychotic break. That argument simultaneously characterizes Muslims as anti-Semitic, while excusing anti-Semitic murders as a form of mental illness uniquely suffered by Muslims.

Homicidal Muslim anti-Semitism was diagnosed as a form of mental illness. Sarah had been killed because of “the fact that she was Jewish”, but the killer was not responsible for his actions.

Meanwhile, what Kobili did before the brutal murder, besides smoke pot, was ignored.

Before the murder, Kobili had visited the Omar Mosque in Paris whose previous imam, Mohammed Hammami, had been expelled from the country for promoting terrorism and anti-Semitism. The mosque had been set up by Tabligh Jamaat, an Islamist group at the center of terrorism in France. It’s been estimated that the majority of Islamic terrorists in France have been linked to the movement.

Many Tabligh Jamaat members joined Al Qaeda. That includes Zacarias Moussaoui, the 20th hijacker, and shoe bomber Richard Reid. Al Qaeda was able to use the Islamist organization as cover for its members. And it’s far from the only Islamic terrorist organization that Tabligh Jamaat has been associated with.

Tabligh Jamaat is also notorious for recruiting troubled young men and subjecting them to extensive brainwashing. In one report, a Malian, the same country of origin as the killer, described recruits being kept awake for long periods of chanting and praying until they lose touch with reality. That has ominous similarities to the behavior of Kobili Traore, obsessively chanting, on the night that he murdered Sarah.

Sarah’s killer had visited an anti-Semitic mosque linked to a cult-like Islamist movement that recruits troubled young men, as Kobili had been recruited in prison, and drives them into frenzies while teaching them that their duty is to conquer the world for Islam. And that’s exactly what Kobili did in Paris.

There is a tragic and ugly pattern.

In 2015, Farid Haddouche attacked Rabbi Acher Amoyal, his son, and another man, who were leaving a Marseilles synagogue on the Sabbath. Farid had shouted, "Allahu Akbar" and stabbed one of the men in the abdomen. He was deemed unfit to stand trial after a psychiatric evaluation even though his mother admitted that he had no history of mental illness. But he had been drunk at the time. Protests by the Jewish community eventually led to an actual trial and he was sentenced to four years in prison.

In 2003, Sébastien Selam, a Jewish DJ, was stabbed to death by Adel Amastaibou. The Muslim killer told the cops that it was the will of Allah. He boasted to his mother, "I killed a Jew! I will go to paradise."

Prior to the murder, Adel had assaulted a Rabbi and threatened a pregnant Jewish woman. But he was found unfit to stand trial on account of mental illness.

Like Kobili, Adel had been getting high. His drug of choice though was hashish.

Adel was hospitalized, but in a foreshadowing of just how little that will mean in the cases of Kobili and Tarik, he was given passes to leave the hospital and go off to parties.

It’s not just in Europe where homicidal Islamic anti-Semitism gets a psychiatric pass. Ahmed Ferhani, who plotted to bomb a New York City synagogue, became a popular progressive cause. The Nation claimed that he was a mentally ill man who had been entrapped by the cops. After a suicide attempt, the Center for Constitutional Rights held a vigil on behalf of the murderous anti-Semite.

The toxic combination of substance abuse, Ferhani had sold drugs to finance the Islamic killing spree, allegations of mental illness, and a plot to kill Jews, is becoming ubiquitous. As is the general effort to whitewash lone Islamic terrorists as being mentally ill because their behavior appears irrational.

There can be a thin line between crazy and evil. And some behavior that isn’t aberrant in the Muslim world, for example Kobili’s fear of demons, can in our context resemble mental illness. But, as Jamie Glazov noted in his recent book, Jihadist Psychopath, there isn’t a necessary contradiction there.

The rush to exonerate killers on the grounds of mental illness because they have alcohol or cannabis in their system, because their brutal crimes defy reason, and because it is easier than following the links to places like the Omar Mosque that the authorities don’t want to go, is encouraging Islamic violence.

In 2016, in Strasbourg, France, Chalom Levy was stabbed by an attacker shouting, "Allahu Akbar". Levy was wearing a 'kippa', a Jewish religious skullcap on his head, and had been preparing for Shabbat.

Levy, who had previously rushed into a burning car to save a woman trapped inside, was able to fight off the attacker and run for help. His attempted killer was arrested outside a café, Levy had escaped to.

The authorities and the media rushed to describe the attacker as mentally ill. And indeed, he had previously spent time in a psychiatric hospital after he had stabbed another Jewish man in 2010.

Instead of sending him to prison, he had been deemed unfit to stand trial and had been hospitalized.

This is what happens when Muslims murdering Jews ceases to be a crime and instead becomes a mental problem that a bit of time playing with dolls, talking about your dreams, and gobbling pills can solve.

The time will come when the attempted killer will stab someone else. And they may not survive.

If, as Tarik’s psychiatrist claimed, “many people who are psychotic read the Koran” and, as Kobili’s shrink insisted, "during delusional episodes among Muslims, an anti-Semitic theme is common”, then there’s no meaningful distinction between Islamic terrorism and mental illness. And if you characterize terrorism against Jews as a form of mental illness, then no Muslim terrorist should ever go to jail.

Murdering Jews or anyone in the name of Islam is not a form of mental illness. It’s genocide.

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

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Get High, Fix Race Relations in the People's Republic of Evanston

The last thing Evanston, Il needs is more drugs. The Cook County city bordering Chicago has already become notorious for its link to the Windy City’s drug trade with multi-million dollar busts and a former detective indicted last year for allegedly leaving the department for the DEA to work on behalf of the La Organizacion de Narcotraficantes Unidos or the United Drug-Traffickers Organization.

Violent crime was up 20% last year. Evanston’s population has declined at twice the rate as Chicago’s. The decline was most pronounced among Evanston’s black population. African-Americans, who made up 22.5% of the population in 2000, fell to 16.9% in 2017. But Evanston’s City Council found a solution.

Get high and fix race relations at the same time.

Evanston's Equity and Empowerment Commission, whose mission is to "eradicate" inequalities, met to discuss the issue. That body's members, Julie Corbier de Lara, a Chicago pastry chef, Pastor Monte L. G. Dillard, a former teller, Timothy Eberhart, an Assistant Professor of Theology & Ecology, Max Weinberg, the principal of an Evanston school where only 54% of students are proficient in English, and Alejandra Ibanez, who launched a petition to kick the Department of Homeland Security out of the city because she confused a Cook County DHS van with ICE, helped the city come up with an amazing answer.

Sell drugs. Give the money to black people so they’ll stay in Evanston. It’s a plan that could have only come out of the People’s Republic of Evanston whose ideas all seem to combine pot and Marxism.

“We are at this point because we have done a lot in Evanston to acknowledge discrimination and oppression and racism, and we have had resolutions and various policies and different honorific actions over the lifetime of Evanston, and it has just not been enough," Alderperson Robin Rue Simmons declared.

The proposal to pay reparations for slavery to black residents was defended as a way to make "meaningful and effective to make economic amends for the brutality of slavery."

The Northwest Ordinance had actually outlawed slavery in the area in 1787. Drugs, which enslave their users, will be sold to pay reparations for the non-existent slavery in Evanston.

Simmons however insisted that, “Slavery informs this whole nation." She has also claimed that she was a “teen mom” and that the “the war on drugs” had hurt her family. It’s unknown whether any of that is true, but last year, Simmons was hit with a lawsuit for taking $160,000 for shoddy work on a home renovation that went unfinished. Meanwhile, Simmons was also hit with ethics issues for being employed by a non-profit while voting on grant funding. Now she’s famous for something even worse.

Black residents would receive property tax relief, repair, down-payment and rental assistance to remain in a place that they’re fleeing as fast as the moving vans can carry them. The only question was where the $10 million to pay for this illegal racial privilege program would come from.

Alderman Ann Rainey suggested that banks ought to give Evanston the cash. “The more we take out of the City budget, the more it costs everybody to survive in Evanston,” she said, in a fit of unusual common sense. "The money isn’t here. We’re asking the Council and the people in this town to contribute another quarter of a percent to the local sales tax, because we don’t have enough money."

And then, unironically echoing Willie Sutton's answer about why he robbed banks, she said that banks ought to pay for it, "because that’s where the money is."

There is a lot of money in banks. But banks are notoriously unwilling to part with it. Evanston already has $218 million in unfunded pension liabilities and has seen its bonds downgraded over its finances.

But there’s lots of money in drugs. And the People’s Republic of Evanston will use the sales tax money from pot to fund racial reparations. If there’s anything that will save Evanston, it’s selling drugs and giving the proceeds to black people to apologize for the slavery which never existed there.

“I’m offering no apologies,” Alderperson Robin Rue Simmons huffed. “This is for black Evanston residents.”

No word on what kind of racial certification would be required of residents to prove their eligibility.

But that’s not the real problem. The slavery reparations program expects to monetize its $10 million fund at a rate of $250,000 to $750,000 a year. That’s a broad range and requires moving a lot of drugs.

Getting $750,000 on a 3% sales tax would require moving $25 million worth of legal marijuana a year. That’s a whole lot of drugs for a city of under 75,000 residents. Every person in Evanston would need to spend over $300 at drug dispensaries every year to fund racial reparations.

Evanston’s only drug “dispensary” operating out of a city parking lot ran into trouble when a merger between Med Men and another drug enterprise fell apart. The obvious revenue source for drug reparations for slavery would be the drug habits of Northwestern University students. But that’s also the group likeliest to cut costs by buying directly from drug dealers and bypassing Evanston’s racial pot taxes. Dispensary consumers are older, wealthier, and cautious enough not to use drug dealers.

The new setup will also divert drug sales from black drug dealers, like the Gangster Disciples, to white dot com drug dealers, like Med Men, which seems like an odd plan for racial equity.

Meanwhile, Evanston is still trying to figure out how to pay for its $321 million budget. Its only idea is more taxes on local businesses. And residents and students can easily bypass those by going online.

Responsible elected officials would help black residents by spending tax revenue to fund schools, libraries, and other city services, and deal with its pension debt. Fortunately, there are no responsible elected officials in the People’s Republic of Evanston. And instead they plan to drive the city deeper into debt while using drug money they don’t actually have to try and retain the exiting black population.

Simmons claimed that at a Nation League of Cities meeting, thousands of officials "were in awe of us" for using drug money for slavery reparations.

Evanston, the birthplace of Tinkertoys and the home of the ice cream sundae, named after the founder of the Illinois Republican Party, has become the People's Republic of Evanston. The awe at whatever crackpottery crawls out of the leftist college town is genuine. There’s never any way to know what sort of madness Evanston politicians will come up with next. Except that it will be horribly spectacular.

Only Evanston could combine marijuana, Marxism, and racism in one horrible bankrupt proposal.

Trying to bribe black people to stay in a failing city by using drug money to fund racial reparations is the sort of spectacularly bad idea that only Evanston, and a handful of other enclaves of politically correct insanity can pull off. And they’re places where nobody wants to live. Including black people.

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

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