Gone, thankfully, are the days when rape victims routinely were treated as if they deserved it. Perhaps the time also will come when the American people are no longer blamed after terrorists kill them.
We are not there yet.
In a rancid piece of trash that basically calls the Boston terror attack just deserts, a United Nations official says “the American global domination project” is the problem. Richard Falk, a professor at Princeton, urges politicians to “connect the dots” between US foreign policy and terrorism at home.
He asks: “Should we not all be meditating on W.H. Auden’s haunting line: ‘Those to whom evil is done/do evil in return’?”
He predicted “worse blowbacks” and said, “As long as Tel Aviv has the compliant ear of the American political establishment, those who wish for peace and justice in the world should not rest easy.”
Falk, an American ingrate and Arab apologist, has spouted nonsense before, suggesting our government had a hand in 9/11. His new assault appears online in Foreign Policy Journal, where nearly every other article attacks Israel.
As for his UN sinecure, Falk fits right in. Turtle Bay’s main activity these days is siding with Jew-haters and bashing its hosts while demanding that we give them more cash to fund their folly. And we do!
Yet Falk is not the only one with warped views. His praise for President Obama’s apologies to Muslims should give the president reason to pause, but the White House is too busy making sure it passes the test of the Boston bombing trial.
Not so much the test of whether Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is guilty, about which there seems little doubt. Rather, the trial is a test of American values, according to all the president’s men.
Obama himself still refuses to cite Islam as a motive for the bombing, despite the copious evidence investigators and the media have produced. He rushes to judgment only when it suits his worldview.
No doubt the president is hanging back now because he feels the need to protect ordinary Americans from the inconvenient truth. Otherwise, he suggested Friday, their innate bigotry against Islam will burst forth in murderous rage. His political correctness is so extreme as to suggest he imagines that, if Christians and Jews see an Islam connection to terror, they might start wearing suicide belts themselves.
Having bought into the myth that his countrymen are guilty of Islamophobia, Obama is upping the ante. He refused to even consider calling Tsarnaev an enemy combatant so more information about his terror ties could be learned.
Instead, he wanted him treated as an ordinary criminal almost immediately and, after brief questioning, Tsarnaev got his Miranda rights.
Patched up and lawyered up, at taxpayer expense, Tsarnaev can remain silent while recovering. Count me touched.
As always, Obama’s first inclination is to doubt his fellow citizens. That’s why the willingness to swallow his policies is always seen as a test of voters’ values. He is our bridge to world approval, you see.
It’s a one-way street, of course. Terror attacks are never a test of Islam’s values, and he doesn’t demand that Muslims stand united against terror.
The dynamic is bizarre. Americans are attacked and, in return, are warned by their president to behave. Obama used that formula to defend the proposed mosque at Ground Zero, saying it was important that “we stay focused on who we are as a people and what our values are all about.”
Apparently, the president sees the Constitution as a suicide pact.
His stubborn worldview may explain one of the more vexing riddles about Boston — why the FBI didn’t keep older brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev under watch after Russia warned in 2011 that he was becoming radicalized. Even after he traveled to a hotbed of Islamists in Russia the next year, the FBI never raised a peep.
Officials say they questioned him and found no cause for concern. By definition, they blew it.
Or, perhaps, the gumshoes were just following orders from the top, and the burden was on them to tolerate a budding jihadist. After all, the UN won’t like us if we go around protecting ourselves from attacks we deserve.
Was it good for you, Mike? It was for me
Christine Quinn’s proposal to raise the legal smoking age in New York to 21 is getting mega attention, but she was probably aiming at just one voter. Think of it as her personal pander to Mayor Bloomberg.
The mayor is Quinn’s political sugar daddy, but his baby is stumbling and needs a fix bad. And nothing touches Bloomy’s erogenous zones as much as an attack on tobacco. Throw in their fondness for the heavy-handed use of government power, and the moment is so good for both of them that the mayor and council speaker probably are tempted to share a smoke.
Quinn remains the Democratic front-runner, but she is sinking below the 40 percent threshold needed to avoid a runoff. The growing likelihood that Anthony Weiner will throw his, er, hat into the ring is adding to her woes.
The move to restrict tobacco sales could help reignite Bloomberg’s passion for her. She orchestrated the council vote to allow them both a third term, so he owes her, but he didn’t like it when she turned hard left to urge a Police Department inspector general, paid sick days for all workers, and other “social justice” causes. He fed talk of a split by soliciting Hillary Rodham Clinton and others to seek the mayoralty.
But making it harder to smoke is the kind of nanny zealotry that gets the mayor’s heart racing. Indeed, with his health commissioner joining Quinn, it’s possible the mayor even came up with the idea to rescue her.
Good sugar daddy.
Teflon Jon
So Jon Corzine is finally getting sued by the bankruptcy trustee over the collapse of MF Global, which still has not returned customers’ money.
The lawsuit is a jolt, but the clock of justice won’t start ticking until Corzine is arrested by the feds.
Don’t hold your breath. Since the disgraced Democrat is a Friend of Obama and big fund-raiser for him, Corzine is held to a different legal standard.
Different, as in above the law.
Pols sleazy for all to see
Who says bipartisanship is kaput? More than 90 percent of New Yorkers believe corruption is a serious problem in Albany. Almost as many — 82 percent — believe term limits would cut the rot.
On a separate question, one in three say their legislator “could” be indicted. Too bad the Siena College survey didn’t ask respondents whether their legislator “should” be indicted. The “yes” response might have hit 100 percent.
Tax-dollar transanity
Amid doomsday talk about sequester cuts creating airline havoc, my favorite Drudge headline is “Gov’t Spending $152,500 on Voice Therapy for Transgenders.”
CNSnews.com reports that the federal grant aims to “illuminate the capabilities of the human larynx and inform the relationship between voice production and perception.”
What a country.