RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/new-york-violent-crime-surge

As we approach 2020, disaster looms over public safety in New York. A surge in violent crimes has shocked the public, from the midnight slaughter of four street sleepers by a mentally ill homeless drug addict; to the late-afternoon murder of a Barnard student, apparently by three young teenagers; to a spate of anti-Semitic attacks, climaxing in the Harlem arrest of a man who chopped his way with a machete into the upstate home of a Monsey rabbi celebrating the penultimate night of Hanukkah. 

Grafton Thomas, perpetrator of the Monsey attack, fled to New York City and was almost immediately apprehended. His car’s license plate number had been reported and, after he crossed the George Washington Bridge, the NYPD’s automated “license-plate reader” system registered his presence. He was arrested within 15 minutes of entering the city.

But if New York’s city council has its way, surveillance tools like the LPR will be rendered less effective, if not useless. The Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology Act enjoys the support of Speaker Corey Johnson and the co-sponsorship of most of the city council, which held a long-awaited hearing on the bill only two weeks ago. In the name of “transparency,” the POST Act would require the NYPD to disclose and publish the details of how such technology works. A council report complains that “if a license plate of a passing car matches a ‘plate of interest,’ the system sends an alert. Advocates believe that these license plate readers raise privacy concerns because every license plate is scanned.” The NYPD has warned that the POST Act would create “a one-stop shopping guide” for criminals to evade scrutiny.

But judging by the state’s evolving criminal-justice landscape, empowering criminals seems like the goal.  New York State is preparing to roll out sweeping criminal-justice reforms that will prevent police and the courts from detaining people arrested and charged with serious offenses. The new rules on bail remove judicial discretion from a remarkably wide array of charges. No one charged with a misdemeanor, for example, can be held on bail, regardless of his criminal history, gang affiliation, or evident disposition for committing more crimes. Misdemeanors in New York include assault in the third degree, causing “physical injury to another person by means of a deadly weapon or a dangerous instrument,” and reckless endangerment in the first degree, when, “evincing a depraved indifference to human life,” someone “recklessly engages in conduct which creates a grave risk of death to another person.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/attacks-jews-nyc-and-media-double-standards-danusha-v-goska/

December 26, 2019, the day after Christmas, those Americans who emerged from their holiday celebrations to check world headlines were in for a shock. Police reported several attacks on Jews in New York. Americans don’t think of their largest city, a world center of finance and the arts, a cosmopolitan capital where one can enjoy cuisine from any continent at any hour of the day or night, as a place where Jews are unsafe on the streets. New York is the city of Seinfeld, of Woody Allen and three-time mayor Michael Bloomberg. Former Mayor David Dinkins famously called New York a “gorgeous mosaic” of diverse peoples. But in fact, these Christmas-and-Hanukkah-week attacks were part of a trend. As bad as they were, worse was yet to come. On Saturday, December 28, Rabbi Chaim Rottenberg and his guests celebrated the closing nights of Hanukkah in Monsey, a suburb north of Manhattan. An intruder burst into the home and stabbed five people.

Recent attacks on Jews in New York City typically involve unprovoked punching, cursing, and hurling of objects ranging from soft drinks to large and potentially deadly stones. Victims range from children to the elderly, and include mothers accompanied by their babies. Attackers sometimes yell anti-Semitic comments.

Videos reveal that attackers are frequently black. In one startling video from November 4, 2018, a group of young African Americans congregate outside a Brooklyn synagogue, talk among themselves, hurl a pole through the synagogue window, and then run away. In another attack, a Jewish man is walking down the sidewalk when what appears to be a black youth runs up behind him and punches him hard in the head, nearly knocking him over. In a March, 2019 assault, an apparently healthy, young man kicks a toddler’s stroller being pushed by the child’s mother. Attacks are not always violent. In one videotaped confrontation, a black woman screamed verbal abuse at a Jewish man on the New York City subway.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/soros-war-against-jews-daniel-greenfield/

When George Soros hit middle age, he began seeing a shrink.

The ruthless financier’s problem was that he was burdened with an “oversized” sense of shame over a “guilty secret”. That guilty shameful secret which sent Soros to a psychoanalyst was “Jewishness”.

Soros’ Jewish problem was generational. He grew up in, in his own words, a “Jewish, anti-Semitic home”

He had adopted his father Tivadar’s worldview, that God was a human invention. It was Tivadar who forged and sold documents to Jews trying to escape the Holocaust, charging “wealthy clients”, as he put it, “whatever the market would bear”. And it was Tidavar who found his teenage son a place with a Hungarian fascist official who was confiscating Jewish property.

In his biography, Tivadar later described the trip to confiscate Jewish property as a move by the “kind-hearted” Nazi collaborator to “cheer the unhappy lad up” where after a dose of watching the persecution of Jews, “he quickly regained his spirits”. Soros would later describe this, a period that most Jews remember as a time of utter horror, as “the most exciting time of my life” or an “adventure”.

Tivadar’s amorality thoroughly infected his son. In an infamous 60 Minutes interview, which the Soros network and his media allies have worked hard to spin, Soros coolly agreed that he had “helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews.” Then denied any feelings of guilt. “It’s just like in the markets — that if I weren’t there — of course, I wasn’t doing it, but somebody else would,” he observed.

It echoed his response to allegations of hurting the British economy. “When you speculate in the financial markets, you are free of most of the moral concerns that confront an ordinary businessman.”

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-12-28-surely-california-has-done-a

Let’s face it: As much as we here in New York would like to think of ourselves as the true vanguard of woke progressivism, California has long since seized that honor from us. On everything from sanctuary and free health care for illegal immigrants, to requiring transgender bathrooms, to banning plastic straws, to having the highest personal income tax rates in the country, it is California that today claims the mantle of woke progressive leadership.

Surely, then, California has done away with racism by now.

If you think that, then you must have missed the big piece in the December 23 print edition of the New York Times, with the headline “Black, Homeless and Burdened by L.A.’s Legacy of Racism.” This multi-page spread tells the tale of one Timothy Wynn, a black Los Angeles resident, who somehow recently “landed on the streets” in his 50s. How could that have happened? We are given few specifics about Mr. Wynn’s life prior to homelessness. Yes, there are brief mentions (without any details) of “mental illness” and of a “criminal conviction for drug trafficking” as possibly being “part of the problem.” But overwhelmingly, according to this article, the main factor in Mr. Wynn’s downfall was racism.

To read this story, California has not just failed to do away with racism. Even as California loudly proclaims to the world its woke progressive virtue, it has, instead, turned into a hotbed — some might even say a “cesspit” — of racism.

So who was it who denied Mr. Wynn the fair treatment to which he was entitled? No names are named; and indeed, it appears that actual namable people don’t have much to do with this. What we’re talking about here is not personal discriminatory misconduct, but rather something referred to as “structural” or “institutional” racism that has brought about an explosion of homelessness, now seen as the “defining crisis” of Los Angeles today.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/dec/29/democrats-peddle-doom-but-the-middle-class-never-h/

These days when you listen to the gloom of the media and many of the presidential candidates you have to wonder what country these Debbie Downers are talking about.

Former Vice President Joe Biden recently declared “the middle class is getting crushed … and the working class has no way up.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders stews that President Trump’s policies have brought “handouts for billionaires and hunger for the poor.”

Mayor Pete Buttigieg claims that many working families are struggling so much financially they don’t have enough income to be able to “afford a two-bedroom apartment.”

The Washington Post says that Americans are awash in debt that they can’t repay.

Time out for a does of reality. If things are so bad, how is it that a new poll from CNN — hardly a network friendly to Mr. Trump, finds three of four Americans rate the economy as pretty good or really good.

We have become so rich as a nation that even most poor families can buy dolls and baseball bats and $100 Nike basketball shoes for the kids, and cellphones that have more computing power than every computer used to put a man on the moon.  

It is nonsense to say the poor and the middle class are worse off than 20 or 30 or 50 years ago.

Go to any neighborhood Walmart or Target and you will see average and even low-income Americans — blacks, whites, Hispanics, Asians, teenagers, mothers with three kids, and seniors — filing out of the store with sometimes two or three shopping carts overflowing with toasters, and winter coats, and flowers, and games, and dog food, and stuffed animals, and potato chips, and video games, and every conceivable piece of merchandise — and all stuffed in the back of the minivan. 

https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/29/trumps-failures/

It is popular on the NeverTrump Right and everyone on the Left to claim that President Trump has “failed” as we head into an election year. But his supposed failures are instructive.

Take the wall. True, Trump certainly in the last three years has not come close to building an envisioned initial phase of 1,000 miles or so of border fencing to stop the easiest access to the United States, much less made Mexico pay for it. Yet even his critics concede he relentlessly tried—and are fearful he will soon succeed.

There are some considerations to keep in mind. In some sense, we have had no wall at all, given that previous chain-link and thrown-up steel barriers were hardly impediments, at least in critical free-passage zones. Trump is addressing this. A recent Economist article lamented the fact that Trump is, in fact, slowly building a wall and replacing previous makeshift barriers in a manner that supposedly will have negative results—as defined by proponents of open borders—and “irrevocably change America’s south-western border.”

To move toward what the Economist believes is an existential redefinition of the border, the president has gone to court to fight constant lawsuits, scraped together almost $10 billion from previous allocations, as well as siphoning and redirecting funds from various agencies, shutting down the government from December 22, 2018 through January 25, and prompted a near crisis with the Mexican government—and yet so far built only 66 miles of replacement walling and about nine miles of new barriers.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/12/29/we-can-no-longer-ignore-the-attacks-on-jews-in-new-york/

In Rockland County last night, during a Chanukah celebration at a synagogue a man stormed in with a machete and stabbed at least five victims, who were taken to the hospital. This is the latest in a string of antisemitic attacks in the New York City area, coming in the wake of the tragic killing of four people during an attack on a Jewish grocery store in Jersey City.

These two acts of violence this month have brought renewed attention to the sharp uptick in anti Jewish violence that has quietly held New York City in its grip over the past few years. Sadly, Mayor Bill de Blasio, who spent much of the year more concerned with his farcical run for president than protecting the citizens of his own city, and the state governments of New York and New Jersey have, been flatfooted in addressing the growing concern.

It has frankly been astounding how little attention attacks on Jews in the New York City area have received. If any other minority group were subject to such abuse, it would be a leading national story. Why have these attacks been swept under the carpet? The clearest answer seems to be that the news media and our political leadership are uncomfortable with the fact that many of these attacks, including last night’s, were perpetrated by black people.

Make no mistake, if white supremacists in MAGA hats were shooting minorities or carving them up with machetes, it wouldn’t just be news, it would be the only news. So satisfying would that narrative be to our politicians and scribes that we would scarcely be able to turn away. But alas, it’s Jews being killed and maimed. And the criminals don’t fit the bill of right-wing, Trump-supporting Nazis, so, you know, it’s complicated.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/12/despicable_black_attacks_on_jews_are_rooted_in_democrats_coddling_of_antisemites.html

Once-tolerant New York City is becoming a haven for anti-Semitic, Jew-hating attacks, getting to be like Paris, eventually driving Jewish flight based on the surge of unpunished violence in the leftist-run city.

It’s shocking, not only because the number of unprovoked attacks on Jewish people just minding their own business and going about their daily lives are very numerous — nine at last count within about a week — but because within the violence itself is a tissue of lies, explicit and implicit, from silky enablers to conceal and euphemize what’s really happening.  In every case, the victim was Jewish and the attacker was black. That’s a politically incorrect to the press and its leftist allies, but it’s true. It’s similar to how Islamist terror was covered up as ‘workplace violence’ in the past, again in the name of political correctness. But this time, the refusal to name the source of the violence is not related to Middle East politics so much as Democrats’ coddling of black anti-Semitism within its own ranks.

Here’s just one of such incidents:

Suspects arrested in last week’s spree of eight anti-Semitic attacks are being quickly released right back into the neighborhoods they terrorized thanks to “bail reform” legislation — which doesn’t even take effect until Jan. 1.

The most recent case of revolving-door justice came Saturday morning, with the release, with no bail, of a woman charged with punching and cursing at three Orthodox women, ages 22, 26 and 31, in Crown Heights, Brooklyn at dawn the day before.

The accused assailant, Tiffany Harris, was hauled in handcuffs before a Brooklyn judge on 21 menacing, harassment and attempted assault charges.