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Because he knows London so well, Theodore Dalrymple provides needed background on the attack in Woolwich.
A witness to the brutal hacking death of a British soldier, Lee Rigby, a few hundred yards from his barracks in London, had the presence of mind to record the explanatory statement of one of the perpetrators, Michael Adebolajo, on his phone immediately after the crime. What Adebolajo said—his hand bloody from the attack and still holding the meat cleaver with which he carried it out—was revealing, as were his manner and body language. Together, they showed him to be the product of the utterly charmless, aggressive, and crude street culture of the less favored parts of London. The intonation of his speech was pure South London, as was the resentful tone of thwarted entitlement and its consequent self-righteousness. His every gesture was pure South London; the predatory lope with which he crossed the road after speaking into the camera was pure South London.
Adebolajo was born in London of Nigerian parents who were devout Christians. He did not learn his manners from them, therefore, but from the society around him. At one point in his life, his parents moved away from London in an attempt to separate him from bad—which is to say, criminal—influences. Adebolajo had joined a gang that stole phones from pedestrians.
It is not true that the society in which he lived offered him no opportunity for personal betterment. Adebolajo was for a time a student at GreenwichUniversity, graduation from which, whatever the real value of the education it offered him, would have improved his chances in the job market, especially in the public sector. But it was at the university that he encountered radical Islam, that ideology that simultaneously succors people with an existential grudge against the world and flatters their inflated and inflamed self-importance. It also successfully squares the adolescent circle: the need both to conform to a peer group and to rebel against society. …
Charles Krauthammer takes on Dear Follower’s Dorothy Doctrine.
… But the ultimate expression of Obama’s Dorothy Doctrine is Guantanamo. It must close. Must, mind you.
Okay. Let’s accept the dubious proposition that the Yemeni prisoners could be sent home without coming back to fight us. And that others could be convicted in court and put in U.S. prisons.
Now the rub. Obama openly admits that “even after we take these steps, one issue will remain — just how to deal with those Gitmo detainees who we know have participated in dangerous plots or attacks but who cannot be prosecuted.”
Well, yes. That’s always been the problem with Gitmo. It’s not a question of geography. The issue is indefinite detention — whether at Gitmo, a Colorado supermax or St. Helena.
Can’t try ’em, can’t release ’em. Having posed the central question, what is Obama’s answer? “I am confident that this legacy problem can be resolved.”
That’s it! I kid you not. He’s had four-plus years to think this one through — and he openly admits he’s got no answer.
Because there is none. Hence the need for Gitmo. Other wars end, at which point prisoners are repatriated. But in this war, the other side has no intention of surrender or armistice. They will fight until the caliphate is established or until jihadism is as utterly defeated as fascism and communism. That’s the reason — the only reason — for the detention conundrum. There is no solution to indefinite detention when the detainees are committed to indefinite war.
Obama’s fantasies are twinned. He can no more wish away the detention than he can the war.
We were defenseless on 9/11 because, despite Osama bin Laden’s open written declaration of war in 1996, we pretended for years that no war against us had even begun. Obama would return us to pre-9/11 defenselessness — casting Islamist terror as a law-enforcement issue and removing the legal basis for treating it as armed conflict — by pretending that the war is over.
It’s enough to make you weep.
Pajamas Media asks if Thomas Perez will again try to maneuver around a definitive ruling by the Supreme Court.
One of the administration’s favorite legal theories, “disparate impact,” may get taken up again by the Supreme Court. Will the administration try to engineer some kind of payoff to take the issue away from the Court — again?
In June 2012, the town of Mount Holly, N.J., petitioned the Supreme Court to review the legitimacy of racial discrimination claims premised solely on a disparate impact theory under the Fair Housing Act. Under this theory, a policy — such as requiring high credit scores for loans — can be completely neutral, but if it yields a disparate impact on a particular racial or gender group, an institution using that policy can be held liable for discrimination. In other words, an entity can be found to have discriminated even if it didn’t actually intend to discriminate.
Thomas Perez, the assistant attorney general for Civil Rights at the Justice Department and President Obama’s nominee to be Labor secretary, has used disparate impact to extort huge settlements from the financial industry under the Fair Housing Act (FHA).
Here, MountHolly is alleged to have discriminated simply because it wanted to redevelop and rebuild a rundown housing development in a high-crime area where almost half the residents are black. Thus, the rebuilding plan would have had a statistically larger impact on black residents than white residents.
The issue of whether a mere disparate impact claim violates the FHA, or whether the more rigorous standard of intentional discrimination is required was before the Supreme Court last year. In that case, Magner v. Gallagher, the city of St. Paul, MN, was accused of violating the FHA because it aggressively enforced the health and safety provisions of its housing code. Slumlords sued the city, claiming that enforcement had a disparate impact because the majority of their tenants were racial minorities.
In other words, they were using the FHA to obstruct the city’s attempt to improve the horrible living conditions of poor families. …
Bart Hinkle of the Richmond Times-Dispatch wonders why a constitutional law professor is so dismissive of the document.
… If the IRS’ treatment of tea party groups were an isolated story, you could swallow the explanation that a few low-level bureaucrats went rogue. But that account does not explain why the EPA has been far more generous to freedom-of-information requests from liberal groups than from conservatives. Or why, shortly after the Obama campaign slimed Romney supporter Frank VanderSloot as a disreputable fellow, he was audited three times — twice by the IRS and once by the Labor Department. Or why, after Texas resident Catherine Engelbrecht started a tea party group, she received scrutiny not just from the IRS but also from the FBI. And OSHA. And, just for good measure, the ATF. Or why the IRS took 17 months to respond to an initial tax-exempt status application from the conservative Wyoming Policy Institute. Or why it shared confidential files from conservative groups with the liberal ProPublica. Or why …
Enough on the First Amendment. The president also has tried with considerable vigor to undermine the Second, and has succeeded in subverting the Fourth: Under Obama, who has gone to court to defend warrantless wiretaps he once condemned, warrantless “pen register” and “trap-and-trace” monitoring has soared to unprecedented heights.
In 2011, the president signed a reauthorization of the Patriot Act with just one regret: Congress approved an extension of only one year, while Obama wanted three. He signed into law a defense reauthorization bill allowing the indefinite detention, without charge, of American citizens, thereby gutting the principle of habeas corpus. Granted, he issued an executive order promising not to exercise that power. But the order does not constrain future presidents or, technically, even him.
From a civil-liberties perspective, Obama has carried forward nearly every one of the war on terror powers that led liberals to denounce George W. Bush as a goose-stepping fascist, and in fact has made many of them worse. When he retires from public life, perhaps he will return to teaching the Constitution. That should be much easier work — given how little of it there will be left.
It is not like this was unforeseen. We have here a October 2008 column by Mark Tapscott suggesting obama would try for a Caracas on the Potomac.
Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama gave us another preview this week of how he will deal with critics if he is elected to the White House when he kicked three newspapers that endorsed John McCain off of his press plane. Merely terminating access, however,is likely to look tame compared to what Obama has in store for his critics after he takes the oath of office.
PREDICTION: Within six months of moving into the Oval Office, Obama’s multiple moves to silence critics in the media and elsewhere will lead to Washington, D.C. becoming the Caracas on the Potomac.
There were multiple signs before The Washington Times, New York Post and Dallas Morning News got the boot. Hugo Chavez has long used mob intimidation to pressure opposition forces into submission. Obama has made a limited use of the same tactic, as when National Review’s Stanley Kurtz began some potentially damaging reporting about the Democratic nominee’s long relationship with unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist bombers William Ayers and wife Bernadine Dohrn.
In retaliation, the Obama campaign issued a call-to-censor alert to its supporters, especially against Milt Rosenberg, a long-time and highly respected Chicago radio host who invited Kurtz to discuss his reporting on air. The Obama campaign declined to provide an official to share the program and rebut Kurtz. Instead, hundreds of callers did what they were instructed to do by the Obama campaign – they jammed the station’s phone lines with protest calls demanding that Kurtz be silenced and accusing the show’s host of lowering journalism standards.
The Obama campaign had done the same thing a few weeks earlier when Rosenberg had as a guest another Obama critic, …