Tag Archives: Israel

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The Oregon Food Bank Antagonizes Oregon Jewish Groups Over Gaza

Non-profit groups, like many academic institutions and corporations, have gotten in the unfortunate habit of opining on sensitive political and cultural issues. And they are paying a price. They often learn, too late, that their outspokenness is like stepping on a landmine.

A Portland-area non-profit taking issue with Israel’s actions in Gaza, to illustrate, is facing a backlash from local Jewish groups.

.In April the Oregon Food Bank drafted a statement calling for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war. 

The statement also accused Israel of perpetuating a “war against Palestine,” and said the Israeli military was “indiscriminately” hindering relief efforts in the region.

“As Oregonians, our tax dollars are funding the Israel army’s violence”, the statement said. “We call for immediate humanitarian aid and an end to Israel’s violence against Palestinians…”

The Food Bank’s president, Susannah Morgan, wrote to Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) that this kind of stance on an international conflict was a first for the organization.

The Food Bank has not expressed similar concerns about Russia’s indiscriminate killing of Ukrainians, the conflict in Sudan or Bashar al-Assad’s brutal war in Syria.

On June 4, the Food Bank issued a “statement to our community” thanking its supporters after its pronouncement generated controversy and a protest from local Jewish groups. . “Over the past few days, many of you have reached out, commented, posted, published written statements, signed petitions and donated in solidarity with Oregon Food Bank. Thank you for your support. We are touched by the overwhelming support we’ve received from community members…” 

But a dozen local Jewish organizations[1] persisted in their condemnation of the Food Bank’s actions. In a letter, they expressed their “deep disappointment” in the Food Bank’s statement and asserted, “In our view, the false accusations serve to further the flames of Jewish hatred.”

The letter made clear that financial support for the Food Bank from the organizations would cease and be directed, instead, to other organizations until such time as the Oregon Food Bank “…retracts its statement and issues one indicating it will maintain its focus on hunger and its root causes here in Oregon.”

You’d think the Oregon Food Bank would have been smart enough to have foreseen the consequences of stepping out front on the Gaza war., a divisive issue if there ever was one. 

A little knowledge of history would have given the Food Bank caution. 

In July 2023, for example, the CEO of Goya Foods said at a White House roundtable of Hispanic leaders, “We’re all truly blessed to have a leader like President Trump.” All hell broke loose, as his comment sparked ire against Goya from Trump opponents. 

Some employees, particularly young college educated ones, may push organizations to take strong public stances on controversial issues, but it can have devastating consequences in the public arena. If institutions fail to stand above divisive issues, choosing, instead, to add to public divisiveness, society becomes poorer for it. 

In April 2024, Bloomberg reported that a new survey of 600 C-suite leaders showed that nearly nine in 10 are now wary of wading into world events. Some 87% said that taking a public stance on current issues poses a greater risk for their company than not saying anything.

With 501(c)(3) non-profits, there is also the fact of restrictions on their political activity. They are generally not permitted to get involved in political issues and are permitted very limited lobbying. They may engage in general voter education about issues, including those which affect its mission, but only so long as all viewpoints are represented.Failing in that respect by taking a stand on current issues can affect a non-profit’s tax-exempt status.

Nonprofits should take heed, including whoever replaces  Susannah Morgan when she leaves her post in December.

[1] Jewish Federation of Greater Portland; Jewish Family and Child Service;  Mittleman Jewish Community Center ; Oregon NCSY;  Oregon Jewish Community Foundation; Portland Jewish Academy;  Portland Kollel; Congregation Beth Israel; Congregation Neveh Shalom; Congregation Shaarie Torah; Congregation Keser Israel; Congregation Ahavath Achim

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The Horror of Sexual Violence on Oct 7. Believe It.

“You haven’t talked about this until now. Why?

I decided to talk about it only after I heard that people are trying to say that it didn’t happen….I needed to talk for women. I need to talk because I won’t forgive myself if I will still see people that are saying  those things didn’t happen when I know that they did.”  

Testimony of an Israeli victim of sexual violence on Oct 7, Screams Before Silence

A claque of 59 academics who describe themselves as “professors of journalism and scholars of news media” from across the country are in high dudgeon about a Dec. 28, 2023 New York Times story describing a “pattern of rape, mutilation and sexual violence by Hamas” during its Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel.

Asserting there are compelling reports questioning the integrity of the story, the professors said in a letter to the paper, “We recommend that The New York Times immediately commission a group of journalism experts to conduct a thorough and full independent review of the reporting, editing and publishing processes for this story and release a report of the findings.”

Leaving aside that of all the things to complain about regarding coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict, a group of academics are focusing on a sexual assault story, it will be regrettable if the professors’ complaint is used to try to undermine widespread and convincing allegations of sexual violence committed by Hamas on Oct. 7.

Don’t let it.

Rami Davidian, who rescued some people from Nova, told Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, he saw women’s bodies tied to trees in the area of the party. “There were trees on which there was one body, and there were cases in which a number of bodies were tied to the same tree,” he related. “There was a case of a couple who were in an embrace, naked, and tied to a tree. Both of them had been shot in the chest.” Davidian said he had seen more than five bodies that had been mutilated “in intimate places… their organs were cut off, damaged. There was blood from the groin… There were also shots to breasts.”

The aftermath of the Nova massacre

In  Screams Before Silence, a new documentary film from Sheryl Sandberg, former COO of Meta, Sandberg interviewed multiple eyewitnesses, released hostages, first responders, medical and forensic experts, and survivors of the Hamas massacres..

“I’ll never forget what I saw there for so long as I live,” a witness to the massacre’s results said in the film ” I saw girls tied up with their hands behind them to every tree here…Someone murdered them, raped them, and abused them here on these trees. Their legs were spread. Everyone who sees them knows they were abused. Someone stripped them. Someone raped them. They inserted all kinds of things into their intimate organs, like wooden boards, iron rods. Over 30 girls were murdered and raped here. I had to close their legs and cover their bodies so no one else would see what I saw.”

“Every one of us, women and men, must speak up for these women and say, “We will bear your story. We will bear witness for you…what happened to you will be told.”   said Shari Mendes, an Israeli Defense Force (IDF) reservist. 

Whatever the reliability of the New York Times article, the professors need to acknowledge the truth of the larger story of sexual assault by Hamas.

Never forget that..

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College Protests and the Law of Unintended Consequences

An intervention in a complex system always creates unanticipated and often undesirable outcomes.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg understands unintended consequences. “[W]e all know that sometimes people mean well but cause harm nonetheless—out of ignorance, out of carelessness, out of deeply ingrained ways of thinking they haven’t examined, out of an emotional reaction that got the better of their lofty intentions, or … well, the list goes on,” she says.

There’s a message here for today’s rabid pro-Palestine student protesters convinced that their actions will bring about change.

If they are trying to emulate the protests against the Vietnam war in 1960s, the bloodiest and most dramatic of which occurred at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, they’re forgetting something. Those protests may have helped drive out President Lyndon Johnson, but they undermined the candidacy of the Democratic candidate for president, Hubert Humphrey, and invigorated the conservative supporters of Republican Richard Nixon.

In his first months in office, Nixon had the U.S. military increase, not decrease, its pressure on the battlefield and, in violation of international law, ordered secret bombings of North Vietnamese camps in Cambodia.

After he took office, another 21,200 Americans died in Vietnam and elsewhere in Southeast Asia, about one-third of all American deaths in the war (58,220), along with an estimated half a million Vietnamese., 

Nixon’s aggressive pursuit of the war also led to more protests on college campuses with deadly consequences. During one of those protests at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, National Guardsmen shot and killed four students. Just 10 days later, another two students at Jackson State University were killed by police.

Paul Berman, an American writer on politics and literature, wrote in yesterday’s Washington Post, about being involved as a Columbia University student in a late April 1968 campus uprising. He wrote about how professors upbraided him, warning about the potential dangers of the protests.

“The professors were haunted by Germany and its history, ” Berman wrote.” In 1968, the defeat of the Nazis was only 23 years behind us, and the era of World War II and the catastrophe of the Jews had not yet definitively disappeared into the past — at least, not in the professors’ eyes. They wanted me to understand that Germany’s leftists in the 1930s had failed to understand Nazism’s danger. Foolish left-wing radicalism had helped undermine the German universities, which ought to have been a place of anti-Nazi resistance. They wanted me to understand, all in all, that what people think they are doing might not be what they are actually doing, and, in the name of high ideals, society might be weakened, and the worst of disasters might be brought about.”

I bring all this up to remind today’s aggrieved student protesters that their aggressive actions may not lead events to where they want them to go. 

First, despite the protesters’ assumption that their peers have their back, the annual Harvard Youth Poll, run by the Institute of Politics (IOP) at Harvard’s Kennedy School, found that  Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 are not prioritizing the Israel-Gaza conflict. 

The poll found that young people are more worried about inflation, health care, housing and gun violence. The survey listed 16 issues facing the U.S., asking respondents which of two randomly paired issues most concerned them. The conflict in the Middle East ranked near the bottom at 15th.

The general public also can’t be counted on to support the protesters. Americans are actually quite divided about how – and whether – the U.S. should be involved in the Israel-Hamas war. According to the Pew Research Center, among US adults, only 22% say Hamas’ reasons for fighting Israel are valid and roughly six-in-ten Americans (58%) say Israel’s reasons for fighting Hamas are valid. 

In this environment, the student protests, particularly if they continue with violent events at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, may, as in 1968, lead to a conservative backlash that helps defeat President Biden and elect Donald Trump.

For most of the protesting students, that would surely be a worst case of unintended consequences. 

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Confronting Chaos: Today’s New York Times

NY Times Book Review interview with Brontez Purnell, 02/25/2024:

NY Times – “What’s the last book that made you cry?”

Purnell – “The newspaper is the only thing I read that makes me cry.”

Excerpts from the Sunday New York Times, Feb. 25, 2024

Predators Leer as Moms Put Girls on Instagram, NY Times
  • Seeking social media stardom for their underage daughters, mothers post images of them on Instagram. The accounts draw men sexually attracted to children, and they sometimes pay to see more.  Interacting with the men opens the door to abuse. Some flatter, bully and blackmail girls and their parents to get racier and racier images. The Times monitored separate exchanges on Telegram, the messaging app, where men openly fantasize about sexually abusing the children they follow on Instagram and extol the platform for making the images so readily available.

          “It’s like a candy store 😍😍😍,” one of them wrote. 

  • A record number of people across the country are experiencing homelessness. The federal government’s annual tally last year revealed the highest numbers of unsheltered people since the count began in 2007.
  • …the principal challenge has come at home, where additional U.S. military assistance to Ukraine has been stymied by Donald Trump-aligned House Republicans who question the importance of Ukraine for American security and in some cases even the centrality of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization alliance itself.
  • “You feel totally helpless, totally abandoned by authorities and society in general. You feel like nothing,” said Araceli Gatica, a 32-year-old who left San Luis Acatlán, a mountain village in Guerrero (Mexico). A local gang threatened to kill her after she refused to keep paying $200 a month in extortion. She arrived recently with her three children in Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, hoping to seek asylum in the U.S.
  • Bombs that struck houses, markets and bus stations across Sudan, often killing dozens of civilians at once. Ethnic rampages, accompanied by rape and looting, that killed thousands in the western region of Darfur. And a video clip, verified by United Nations officials, that shows Sudanese soldiers parading through the streets of a major city, triumphantly brandishing the decapitated heads of students who were killed on the basis of their ethnicity.
  • Ms. Haley’s loss in South Carolina follows a string of early defeats. She argued in her speech that the nation needed new leadership in the midst of “a world on fire.” “It seems like our country is falling apart,” she said, adding that she was worried “to my core” for its future. “America will come apart if we make the wrong choices. “
  • Prominent epidemiologists have estimated that an escalation of the war in Gaza could cause up to 85,000 Palestinian deaths over the next six months from injuries, disease and lack of medical care, in addition to the nearly 30,000 that local authorities have already reported since early October.
  • And yet, even if parts of society came to terms with natural bodies, the same cannot be said for the natural process of women aging. Wrinkles are the new enemy, and it seems Gen Z — and their younger sisters — are terrified of them. Gen Z-ers are being introduced to the idea of starting treatments early as “preventative” treatment. They are growing up in a culture of social media that promotes the endless pursuit of maintaining youth — and at home, some of them are watching their mothers reject aging with every injectable and serum they can find. But considering the speed at which social media is pushing ever more unattainable beauty standards onto children, it’s time for us to consider our moral obligation to minimizing damage for the next generation.
  • … increasingly in recent months, scrolling the (Tik Tok) feed has come to resemble fumbling in the junk drawer: navigating a collection of abandoned desires, who-put-that-here fluff and things that take up awkward space…(T)he malaise that has begun to suffuse TikTok feels systemic, market-driven and also potentially existential, suggesting the end of a flourishing era and the precipice of a wasteland period.
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Oregon Schools Are Fighting Rising Anti-Semitic Denialism

If there was ever a time for Oregon schools to teach about the holocaust, the time is now.

In a December 2023 YouGov/Economist poll, 20% of young American respondents aged 18-29 said the Holocaust is a myth. Another 30% said they don’t know if it’s a myth. And the proportion of respondents who said they believe the Holocaust is a myth was similar across all levels of education.

And now, denial of the well-documented Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel that left about 1,200 people dead is spreading, despite truly massive real-time documentation of the attacks.  

On social media, an expanding group of denialists link Israel itself to the attack, claiming it was a “false flag” event spurred by Israel to cast blame on Hamas. And as the Washington Post has reported, the denialism is “bleeding into the real world.”  

“Demonstrators have shouted the claim at anti-Israel protests and have used it to justify removing posters of hostages in cities like London and Chicago,” the Washington Post reported. “At a November city council meeting in Oakland, Calif., multiple residents disputed the veracity of the attack.”

According to the Post, “researchers are warning that Oct. 7 conspiracy theories may follow a similar trajectory to Holocaust denial, which was waning before social media platforms propelled a resurgence a decade ago.”

Fortunately, Oregon is ahead on educating its public school students on the Holocaust.

Claire Sarnowski, when she was a freshman at Lake Oswego’s Lakeridge High School, came up with the idea of mandating Holocaust instruction at Oregon’s public schools after hearing a Holocaust survivor, Alter Wiener, tell his story. Sarnowski approached state Sen. Rob Wagner, who agreed to introduce a bill, SB 664. 

The bill passed unanimously in the Oregon House and Governor Brown signed it on June 4, 2019. 

The bill required school districts across Oregon to provide instruction about the Holocaust and genocide in social studies classes, starting in the 2020-21 school year, to “enable students to evaluate the morality of the Holocaust, genocide and similar acts of mass violence and to reflect on the causes of related historical events.”

.As so often happens with legislation, the true believers expanded on Sarnowski’s vision and declared that the instruction must also address: the immorality of mass violence; respect for cultural diversity; the obligation to combat wrongdoing through resistance, including protest, and; the value of restorative justice. Like anti-terrorism laws, it was a classic example of mission creep.

But it was at least a start. And now it’s needed more than ever.

The question, of course, is whether schools are aggressively following the law’s mandates and whether students are absorbing the lessons. The State has also mandated drug prevention education in Oregon’s public schools, for example, but an investigative series from the Lund Report, the University of Oregon’s Journalism Project and Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) has revealed that what students are being taught varies widely and that many school districts don’t use programs backed by evidence that they are effective at delaying or preventing substance abuse. 

And then there’s the question of whether students are acting on what they are learning about the Holocaust.

Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) said recently in a Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Sermon at Central Synagogue NYC that when he was asked why he spoke out so frequently and forcefully about anti-Semitism, his answer was, “The question is not why have I chosen to be outspoken. The question is why have others chosen to be silent amidst the deadliest days for Jews since the Holocaust?”

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Hamas Even Hates Rotary Clubs

Do I have your attention?

Most media coverage of the war in Israel has inexorably shifted from the Oct. 7 barbarism of Hamas[1] to civilian casualties from Israel’s response. Hamas knew this would happen.

“After dealing with reporters through many rounds of violence since coming to power in Gaza in 2007, Hamas understood that most can be co-opted or coerced, and that coverage of Gaza would reliably focus on civilian casualties, obscuring the cause of the war, portraying Israel’s military operations as atrocities, and thus pressuring Israel to stop fighting,” Matti Friedman, a Canadian-Israeli journalist and author, wrote today in The Free Press. This has allowed Israel’s critics to claim the high ground without shame.

It is critical that this shift be challenged by going back to the reality of Hamas’ aims. 

The reality is in the Introduction to Hamas’ original 1988 charter.[2]

“…our struggle against the Jews is extremely wide-ranging and grave, so much so that it will need all the loyal efforts we can wield, to be followed by further steps and reinforced by successive battalions from the multifarious Arab and Islamic world, until the enemies are defeated and Allah’s victory prevails.”

Hamas perceived from the outset that it would have many enemies. 

“The enemies” who must be confronted “…stood behind the French and the Communist Revolutions and behind most of the revolutions we hear about here and there,” said Article 22. “They also used the money to establish clandestine organizations which are spreading around the world, in order to destroy societies and carry out Zionist interests. Such organizations are: the Free Masons, Rotary Clubs, Lions Clubs, B’nai B’rith and the like.”

“All those secret organizations, some which are overt, act for the interests of Zionism and under its directions, strive to demolish societies, to destroy values, to wreck answerableness, to totter virtues and to wipe out Islam,” added Article 28.

The shift in media coverage has allowed the reality of Hamas, as highlighted above, to recede into the background,

As one critical observer, Kevin Diamant, recently wrote in a Letter to the Editor in the Wall Street Journal, “”Hospitals and civilians are entangled in the fighting because the terrorist cowards want them to be — images of civilian casualties are the tool Hamas uses to turn weak minds to its cause.” 

Never forget.

[1] The New York Times reported on Nov. 28, 2023, that it had uncovered new details showing a pattern of rape, mutilation and extreme brutality against women in the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel.

[2] This is from a translation of the original 1988 charter of Hamas. A revised Hamas Document of General Principles and Policies was issued in 2017.

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A Message to Protesters: Show Your Face

A group of more than 40 interns working in President Biden’s  White House and other executive branch offices have sent a letter to Biden and Vice President Harris accusing them of having “ignored” the “pleas of the American people” and calling on the Administration “…to demand a permanent cease fire.”

“We, the undersigned Fall 2023 White House and Executive Office of the President interns, will no longer remain silent on the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people,” 

But despite the “We the undersigned” start to the letter, there were no names and signatures included. 

The demand for anonymity among protesters these days is cowardly, frustrating and annoying.

When Patrick Henry implored “Give me liberty, or give me death!” on March 23, 1775, he didn’t wear a face mask or send an anonymous letter to King George. He spoke up in a speech to the Second Virginia Convention at St. John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia.

But many of today’s most virulent protesters want no such personal exposure. They’d rather blend in with the mob, obscuring their individual responsibility. They want free speech without consequences. 

Observe the videos and photographs of ““From the river to the sea!” protests around the United States. 

In early October, the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee put out a statement on its Instagram page that was originally co-signed by 33 other Harvard student organizations saying they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence” in the wake of a deadly invasion of Israel by the Islamist militant group Hamas. 

But after an intense local and national backlash from lawmakers, professors, and other students, the organizers removed the list of student organizations from the open letter.

At a pro-Palestinian “Vigil for the Martyrs of Palestine,” by Georgetown University students, nearly every one of the students hid their face with a mask. Similarly, when Several hundred people gathered in Bruin Plaza at UCLA for a walkout and march in support of Palestine, and when pro-Palestinian students at Princeton staged a walk-out and demonstration, many wore masks. 

Come on now. Wouldn’t it be better for people to stand behind their convictions?

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Civilian Deaths in Gaza Lie at Hamas’s Door

“Far too many Palestinians have been killed, far too many have suffered these past weeks,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Friday in New Delhi.

Do you think Hamas cares?

When Hamas terrorists launched an unprecedented and sadistic surprise attack on Israel  with cold indifference on Oct. 7, brutally butchering and massacring more than 1,200 people, injuring at least 6,900, taking more than 240 people hostage (There is still been no formal master list of hostages held, because Hamas hasn’t provided one), and launching thousands of missiles at Israel from the Gaza Strip, did they expect to overrun the country and eliminate Israelis from the river to the sea? 

Not in the least.

Their aim was to cause chaos and invite massive retaliation, hoping the retaliation could be twisted to undermine Israel’s right to exist and justify Hamas’s cause. 

Israel initially gained wide support in the face of Hamas’s savagery. 

President Biden condemned the atrocities committed by Hamas fighters, including the “slaughter” of men, women and entire families, as well as “stomach-churning reports of babies being killed.”

“The United States unequivocally condemns this appalling assault against Israel by Hamas terrorists from Gaza,” Biden said in a statement. “Israel has a right to defend itself and its people.” 

U.N. human rights chief Volker Turk said he was “shocked and appalled” by the attack. Ursula von der Leyen, head of the European Union’s executive commission, called the attack “terrorism in its most despicable form.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, “Israel’s right to self-defense cannot be questioned.”

But as Israel has retaliated militarily in Gaza in an effort to punish Hamas, and more civilians have been caught in the crossfire, some because Hamas has demanded they stay in place, the public debate has shifted. The portrayal of Israel as the aggressor has emerged, just as Hamas surely hoped it would. 

Now the media is laser focused on the civilian casualties occurring with Israel’s response, all but eclipsing the Oct. 7 barbarities of Hamas. In achieving that shift, Hamas is turning itself into the victim.

Nowhere is that victim status more embraced now that at many American institutions of so-called higher learning. At Harvard, The Palestine Solidarity Committee issued a joint statement with more than 30 other student groups that held Israel “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” ” The apartheid regime is the only one to blame,” it continued.

” When antisemitism moves from the shameful fringe into the public square, it is not about Jews, It is never about Jews,” observed Bari Weiss, editor of The Free Press, in a recent speech to the Federalist Society. “It is about everyone else. It is about the surrounding society or the culture or the country. It is an early warning system—a sign that the society itself is breaking down. That it is dying.  It is a symptom of a much deeper crisis—one that explains how, in the span of a little over 20 years since Sept 11, educated people now respond to an act of savagery not with a defense of civilization, but with a defense of barbarism.”

Sarah Katz, an author with a background in Middle East Studies and counterterrorism, argues that statements such as the one from Harvard’s Palestine Solidarity Committee reflect the conflict of ideologies that has arisen between alleged racist perpetrators and racialized victims.

“When applied to Israel and Palestine, Israel as the “powerful Western oppressor” and Palestine as the “brave non-white victim” have captured the hearts and minds of many esteemed institutions,” Katz wrote recently in the Jewish Journal.  “This oppressor/victim binary tends to dismiss any reference to the culpability of any Palestinian entity in events preceding Israeli retaliation.”

As Ben Kawaller put it in a Free Press post, “What’s really righteous is to promulgate a fundamental loathing of anyone belonging to the “oppressor” class.”

It is essential to know all this when confronting the tragedy that is now Gaza. This is not to ignore or downplay the civilian deaths in Gaza, but Hamas does not get to position itself as the honorable resistance movement in Gaza because of them.

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Ted Kennedy and Al Sharpton: no excuses

(Addendum: Al Sharpton is at it again. The New York Times reported on Nov. 19, 2014,  that Sharpton “has regularly sidestepped the sorts of obligations most people see as inevitable, like taxes, rent and other bills. Records reviewed by The New York Times show more than $4.5 million in current state and federal tax liens against him and his for-profit businesses.”

“Sidestepped” is too polite a word for how Sharpton has behaved. And this is a man President Obama turns to for guidance?)

Reading all about Al Sharpton’s emergence as a respectable political leader and go-to guy for President Obama, I’m reminded of Ted Kennedy.

Liberal Democrats loved Ted Kennedy.

He was the standard-bearer for the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. He was their beloved champion for his work on health care, education, immigration reform, civil rights, voting rights, workers’ rights and other causes.

TeddyKennedyMaryJo

So what did Democrats do when faced with the news that Kennedy’s actions had caused the death of 28–year-old Mary Jo Kopechne when he drove an Oldsmobile 88 into a tidal channel on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969? They stuck with him.

What did they do when it was learned he had left the scene of the accident, consulted with a high-powered group of political and legal advisors, and didn’t notify the police for 10 hours after the accident. They stuck with him.

What did they do when State police detective-lieutenant George Killen said, “Senator Kennedy killed that girl the same as if he put a gun to her head and pulled the trigger?” They stuck with him.
They looked on without reproof when Kennedy’s only punishment was losing his driving license for a year and receiving a suspended two-month jail sentence.

All was forgiven. The liberal special interest groups that depended on his support in the contentious political arena, even the usually outspoken Liberal women’s rights groups, either stayed silent or defended him then and in the years to come. After all, he was one of them, a supporter of their agendas.

And Massachusetts voters continued sending Kennedy back to the Senate until his death on August 25, 2009, after which liberals eulogized him as a great American and a great senator.

“I can think of no one who engendered greater respect or affection from members of both sides of the aisle,” said President Obama in 2009 remarks on Kennedy’s death.

“I just hope we remember how he treated other people…,” said Vice President Biden, ignoring Kennedy’s reputation on the Hill as a “the rules don’t apply to me” boor whose appalling behavior was well documented.

Joyce Carol Oates suggested that even if Kennedy had caused the death of a young woman, he had redeemed himself by accomplishing so much good work thereafter, by his “…tireless advocacy of civil rights, rights for disabled Americans, health care, voting reform, his courageous vote against the Iraq war.”

Liberal’s willingness to excuse Ted Kennedy, even in the face of his clear guilt in the death of a young woman, reminds me of their tolerance for, and even promotion of, Al Sharpton’s ascension to political prominence.

Sharpton’s infamous rise in public notoriety has been well documented.

A 1987-1988 case that drew national attention revolved around Sharpton’s involvement with 15-year-old Tawana Brawley, a black woman from New York who accused six white men of raping her and leaving her in a garbage bag smeared with and covered with racist words written in charcoal.

Sharpton, who accused government officials of trying to cover up for the rapists because they were white, led the way in spurring a national uproar over the case.

brawley_sharpton_custom-1a3219e3e6986346b22e7fb0aea7ab0f3833f78e-s6-c30

He was later rebuked and fined after a grand jury concluded that Brawley had not been the victim of a forcible sexual assault and that she may herself have created the appearance of an attack.

In 1991, Sharpton stirred up black fury in the Crown Heights area of Brooklyn when a Jewish driver hit and killed a black boy, Gavin Cato, with his car.

At the boy’s funeral, Sharpton vilified Jewish “diamond merchants” who killed black children in Brooklyn.

Days of anti-Semitic riots culminated in the murder of Yankel Rosenbaum, an Australian Jew who had nothing to do with the incident, being stabbed to death in the midst of a mob of about 30.

The New York Post reported that after the driver of the car was cleared of charges and left for Israel, Sharpton flew to Tel Aviv to slap the driver with a civil suit. When a passer-by at Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport recognized Sharpton, she shouted, “Go to hell!”
“I am in hell already,” Sharpton replied. “I am in Israel.”

In December 1995, during a Harlem protest stirred up by Sharpton, a black man entered Freddy’s Fashion Mart, a Jewish-owned clothing store, took out a gun, ordered the black customers to leave and set a fire that killed himself and eight other people.

Sharpton was accused of having spurred the devastation by delivering and facilitating incendiary racist and anti-Semitic comments on black radio stations and at the protest.

In Sept. 2013, the New York Post reported that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had written in a previously secret diary, “Al Sharpton has done more damage to the black cause than [segregationist Alabama Gov.] George Wallace. He has suffocated the decent black leaders in New York. His transparent venal blackmail and extortion schemes taint all black leadership.”

Sharpton, pitching himself as America’s leading advocate of social justice, shows up everywhere there’s a TV camera and a potential racial dispute to be exploited. Most recently, he made himself visible in Ferguson, Missouri.

Now Obama, the Democratic Party and other liberals are legitimizing Sharpton and giving him a highly visible chair at the table.

It’s an appalling comment on their willingness to embrace one of their own regardless of his contemptible actions.

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Things fall apart

I was enjoying a coffee and pastry at a Starbucks this morning when a man sitting next to me checking his smartphone and reading the paper turned and said, “It looks like the rebels or the Russians might have shot down a Malaysian Airlines plane carrying 300 people. Do you get the feeling everything is just unraveling?”

Yes.

A plan to transport three busloads of Central American families through San Diego for processing at the Murrieta Border Patrol station took an unexpected turn when scores of protesters blocked the buses from entering.

A plan to transport three busloads of Central American families through San Diego for processing at the Murrieta Border Patrol station took an unexpected turn when scores of protesters blocked the buses from entering.

Tens of thousands of children of all ages, most unaccompanied by adults, are flowing across the U.S. Southwest border. Frustration and anger is bubbling up all over the country. Some people are arguing that President Obama has encouraged the stream of immigrants and that strong steps need to be taken to control the U.S. border and send the immigrants home. Others argue the immigrants need to be treated with compassion and welcomed to America with open arms in the spirit of “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”

Whichever side you are on, and just about everybody seems to have taken sides, just 28% of the public approves of the way President Obama is handling the surge of children from Central America, according to a new poll by the Pew Research Center or the People & the Press.

Meanwhile, violence is spreading in Gaza and Israel after the kidnapping and killing of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank set off a new cycle of violence in the region.

While Hamas militants and Israel exchange rocket fire, stories multiply of civilian deaths, including a story today reporting that four boys, ages 9 to 11, were killed on a beach west of Gaza City.

A boy on a Gaza beach killed in an Israeli attack is carried away.

A boy on a Gaza beach killed in an Israeli attack is carried away.

Of course, the only reason similar horrifying stories of civilian killings by the Hamas militants haven’t surfaced in Israel is because of its effective anti-rocket defenses.

In Ukraine, tension continues as Russia threatens the country, pro-Russian militants fight the government’s forces and, as noted earlier, rumors swirl that a Malaysian Airlines plane with 295 on board, including some Americans, that crashed in Ukraine near the Russian border was deliberately shot down. The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry in Kiev asserted that the “the airplane was shot down by the Russian Buk missile system.”

wreckage of Malaysia Airlines plane crash in Ukraine

wreckage of Malaysia Airlines plane crash in Ukraine

In Egypt, after a popular uprising resulted in the first democratically-elected Islamic president in Egypt’s history, forces led by Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi overthrew the fledgling president and instigated an unforgiving campaign of retaliation against the Muslim Brotherhood and regime critics that continues to this day.

In Syria, after Obama insisted that use of chemical weapons by the the Assad regime would be “a red line for us,” Obama dithered and the civil war escalated, creating a country scarred with destruction and pushing out hundreds of thousands of refugees into neighboring counries.

obama-redlinespeech821

In Afghanistan, scene of what Obama called “the good war” that needed to be fought, chaos has ensued since the U.S. precipitously withdrew its troops.

In Iraq, after thousands of American soldiers gave their lives in an effort to create a sustainable peace, the U.S.-backed Shia-led government under Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki initiated a cleansing of the Sunni minority. Now we have a violent struggle going on in Iraq with mostly Sunni militants from the radical Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

A file image uploaded on June 14, 2014 on the jihadist website Welayat Salahuddin allegedly shows militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) executing dozens of captured Iraqi security forces members at an unknown location in the Salaheddin province (AFP Photo / HO)

A file image uploaded on June 14, 2014 on the jihadist website Welayat Salahuddin allegedly shows militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) executing dozens of captured Iraqi security forces members at an unknown location in the Salaheddin province (AFP Photo / HO)

Meanwhile, despite a roaring stock market, economic insecurity reigns. Just 19% of those surveyed by Pew say economic conditions in the U.S. are excellent or good while 81% rate conditions as only fair or poor. About six-in-ten (62%) still say jobs are difficult to find locally.

Detroit Area Economy Worsens As Big Three Automakers Face Dire Crisis

Obama’s rating for handling the economy also has stayed negative, with 56% disapproving of the way Obama is handling the economy, according to the Pew survey. In fact, Obama’s job rating on the economy has been around 40% for most of the past five years.

Meanwhile, Obama, “a restless president weary of the obligations of the White House,” as the New York Times puts it, jets around the world for fundraisers and dinners with celebrities and wealthy supporters, taking as many breaks as he can for golf.

Barack Obama

Unravelling? You bet.