THE WEIRS TIMES & THE COCHECO TIMES, Thursday, March 29, 2012


9


FRENCH SERIAL KILLINGS—THE USUAL SUSPECTS While there appeared no logical


UN ITED N A -


by John J. Metzler Syndicated Columnist


TIONS—A spate of seven seem- ingly unex- plained se- rial killings have shocked France with the uncomfort- able realiza- tion that the specter of ter-


rorism has not vanished. But the shootings of three soldiers and later, the calculated cold- blood- ed rampage at a Jewish school killing a rabbi and three children, turned the tragedy in Toulouse into a massive manhunt centered in southern France. President Nicolas Sarkozy has called the shootings a “national tragedy.”


motive nor connection, the media narrative soon drifted into the template that since the soldiers were of North African and Carib- bean origin and the children and Rabbi were Jewish, this could well be the work of a “right wing extremist” probably with military training. Echoes of Norway’s mass murderer last summer. Toulouse mayor Pierre Cohen


chimed in to say “Everything leads one to believe these were racist and anti-Semitic killings.” Well they were, but with a more bizarre twist. In the French case, foreign media outlets such as the BBC soon fell comfortably into this narrative as an explanation. Moreover many articles alluded


BARACK OBAMA’S MIDEAST MADNESS


WASHING-


by Oliver North Syndicated Columnist


TON - - Nine years ago this week, President George W. Bush ordered more than 250,000 troops in a U.S.- led coalition to cross the “berm” on the border of Kuwait and head into Iraq. Weeks


later, Saddam Hussein’s brutal re- gime was finished, and the despot was in hiding. It was a stunning victory for the force of American arms and leadership. Though it took until Dec. 13 to find the for- mer dictator hiding in a “spider hole” near his hometown of Tikrit, Saddam eventually was tried by his own people, convicted, inter alia, of crimes against humanity and executed by hanging Dec. 30, 2006. But Saddam’s demise and the installation of a democratically elected government didn’t quell the vicious insurgency that began shortly after the liberation of Bagh- dad. In November 2008, American


voters hired a previously obscure U.S. senator as commander in chief. During his campaign, Ba- rack Obama pledged to “get us out of Iraq,” and he made good on


his promise. On Oct. 21, 2011, he precipitously ordered all remaining U.S. troops to leave Mesopotamia. The ill-advised decision had three profoundly important unintended consequences: --Unlike the victors of the Gulf


War in 1991, none of the 2.2 mil- lion American soldiers, sailors, air- men, guardsmen and Marines who fought and won every battle in Op- eration Iraqi Freedom -- including nearly 4,500 U.S. personnel killed in combat and more than 32,000 wounded in action -- received a “welcome home” parade. Though administration and Pentagon offi- cials won’t admit it, the deleterious effect of the hasty pullout and lack of public acclaim has adversely affected military morale and con- tributed to a spate of damaging incidents involving American per- sonnel in Afghanistan. --The hurried U.S. withdrawal


from Iraq emboldened radical Islamists throughout the Middle East, who now claim their jihad succeeded in “driving the American invaders (or crusaders) out of Iraq.” This oft-repeated theme is now part of radical Islamist rhetoric in Tuni- sia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Jordan and Lebanon and is dis- seminated in propaganda organs supporting Hezbollah, Hamas, al- See NORTH on 36


to comments made in the cur- rent French Presidential election campaign against illegal immi- grants as being grist for the mill by encouraging a climate of “in- tolerance.” Well thanks to a massive and meticulous French police man- hunt, the suspect was cornered and killed after a 32 hour stand- off with police; alas, with a decid- edly different resume. Mohamed Merah a Frenchman of Algerian


origin, had not surprisingly spent time in Pakistan and Afghanistan at the Club Med of the Taliban. His jihadi training and appar- ent Al Qaida connections were put into grisly use with the pre- meditated and clinically brutal attacks.


Ironically, a day before the sus-


pect was caught, India’s UN del- egate, speaking about Afghani- stan in the Security Council said,


See METZLER on 35


RACE AND RHETORIC One of the


by Thomas Sowell Syndicated Columnist


thing s tha t turned up, dur- ing a long-over- due cleanup of my office, was an old yellowed copy of the New York Times dat- ed July 24, 1992. One of the front-page h e a d l i n e s


said: “White-Black Disparity in Income Narrowed in 80’s, Census Shows.” The 1980s? Wasn’t that the


years of the Reagan administra- tion, the “decade of greed,” the era of “neglect” of the poor and mi- norities, if not “covert racism”? More recently, during the ad-


ministration of America’s first black president, a 2011 report from the Pew Research Center has the headline, “Wealth Gaps Rise to Record Highs Between Whites, Blacks and Hispanics.” While the median net worth of


whites was ten times the median net worth of blacks in 1988, the last year of the Reagan admin- istration, the ratio was nineteen to one in 2009, the first year of the Obama administration. With Hispanics, the ratio was eight to one in 1988 and fifteen to one in 2009. Race is just one of the areas in


which the rhetoric and the reality often go in opposite directions. Political rhetoric is intended to do one thing -- win votes. Whether the policies that accompany that rhetoric make people better off or worse off is far less of a concern to politicians, if any concern at all. Democrats receive the over-


whelming bulk of the black vote by rhetoric and by presenting what they have done as the big reason that blacks have advanced. So long as most blacks and whites alike mistake rhetoric for reality, this political game can go on. A Manhattan Institute study last


year by Edward Glaeser and Ja- cob Vigdor showed that, while the residential segregation of blacks has generally been declining from the middle of the 20th century to the present, it was rising during the first half of the 20th century. The net result is that blacks in 2010 were almost as residentially unsegregated as they were back in 1890. There are complex reasons behind such things, but the bot- tom line is plain. The many laws, programs and policies designed to integrate residential housing cannot be automatically assumed to translate into residentially in- tegrated housing. Government is not the sole factor, nor necessar- ily the biggest factor, no matter what impression political rhetoric gives. No city is more liberal in its


rhetoric and policies than San Francisco. Yet there are less than half as many blacks living in San Francisco today as there were in 1970. Nor is San Francisco unique.


A number of other very liberal California counties saw their black populations drop by 10,000 people or more, just between the 1990 and 2000 censuses -- even when the total population of these counties was growing. One of the many reasons why rhetoric does not automatically See SOWELL on 31


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