Bully for You

(See these and other American Legion covers at Today's Inspiration)

In New York, Osman Daramy, a 12 African boy was charged with a 'hate crime' because while bullying a number of kids in the school, one of the kids he bullied was a Muslim girl. And in between punching her, he tore off her Hijab. The message is that it's okay to bully kids and to beat them up, so long as you don't touch the Hijab.

"This child is a terror. He goes around terrorizing staff and students," said a teacher at Dreyfus. On Monday, Osman raised hell in one class when he ran amok wielding scissors after using them to cruelly lop off a girl's hair, sources said. But instead of being booted from school or arrested, Osman was merely "suspended in-house," a teacher said.

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Osman's behavior is so problematic that officials at one point posted a school safety agent in front of that class just "so the teacher could teach," a staffer said. Despite how horrible Osman's behavior was-- there was no police intervention. Not until he touched a sacred symbol of Muslim oppression of women. And then the hammer came down. We have become a society that says violence isn't wrong-- offending Muslims is. But like other Muslim 'hate crime' claims, this one is suspicious. The boy's name is Osman Daramy. Osman is generally a Muslim first name and comes from the Arabic name of a Caliph. The last name Daramy suggests he's a member of the Mandinka people. And almost all Mandinka are Muslims. There's no reason for an African boy to have a Turkish derivation of an Arabic first name... unless his family is Muslim. Don't look for the media to report that their prized hate crimes case may actually be a case of Muslim on Muslim violence, it may turn into a minor item in the Post, but most likely the case will be pled out, Osman will be back in school soon. And the media will enjoy its orgy of rage over ANTI-MUSLIM HATE CRIMES. All Caps, of course. Newspapers which generally don't publish photos of 12 year olds charged with anything less than murder-- are gleefully running his perp walk photo. Of course if some newspaper actually manages to report that the boy's family are Muslims-- then all interest will suddenly be lost. No hate crime = no story. That's media cynicism for you.

Racial Preferences that substitutes for liberal morality, Black trumps Latino

A few weeks ago, a New York Times article covering the rape of an 11 year old girl, blamed the victim for the assault. Why? Because the victim was Latino and the perpetrators were Black. And in whatever twisted version of Racial Preferences that substitutes for liberal morality, Black trumps Latino. And so the New York Times had to turn the charges around on the victim. With the media increasingly driving the actions of courts and police-- we have a completely screwed up situation in which media people with no respect for legal equality or a moral code-- are pushing their own agendas as justice. The Gothamist blamed anti-Ground Zero mosque protesters for Osman Daramy's actions. Because clearly an African pre-teen on Staten Island who has been terrorizing the school for quite some time-- was really motivated by opposition to the mosque project. A little water the bridge in New Jersey, Governor Christie finally got around to defending his nomination of Sohail Mohammed to a Superior Court Judgeship in exactly the kind of cynically liberal way you expect,

"If it is disqualifying for the bench to be an Arab-American in New Jersey who represents innocent people and gets them released, then this isn’t the state I believe it is," Christie said

But Sohail Mohammed isn't being criticized for his actions as a lawyer... but as an activist who has come out in defense of the Fort Dix Six who plotted to kill US soldiers, for the Holy Land Foundation, Islamic Jihad leader Sami Al Arian... and many others. Who is linked to Islamic extremists via the American Muslim Union and who even tried to intimidate Coptic Christians in their time of mourning. Christie's disingenuous remark echoes a talking point circulated by Andrew Sullivan, that Sohail Mohammed's only problem is, "Defending those innocents swept up in the police sweep after 9/11." Except that's not the case.

Imam Mohammed Qatanani, a Muslim Brotherhood member associated with Hamas

What Christie is trying to distract from, is his own relationship to Imam Mohammed Qatanani, a Muslim Brotherhood member associated with Hamas, whom Christie defended when the US government was trying to deport him. Sohail Mohammed was Qatanani's original lawyer, and a board member of the American Muslim Union, which is heavily intertwined with Qatanani's Islamic Center of Passaic County. Passaic County has the second largest Muslim population in the country. And Christie clearly needed their support in the governor's race. And here's how it happened.

Qatanani has a history of Hamas support and was related by marriage to a leading Hamas operative in the West Bank. This fall, Qatanani will return to a New Jersey immigration court, where the Department of Homeland Security is fighting to have him deported. In his initial application for a green card filed in 1999, government lawyers say Qatanani failed to disclose a conviction in an Israeli military court for being a Hamas member and providing support to the terrorist group. Oddly, Christie – a Republican who was then the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey – sided with Qatanani against DHS, allowing a top lieutenant, Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles McKenna, to testify as a character witness at Qatanani's first immigration trial, and publicly embracing the imam at a Ramadan breakfast at his mosque. Christie later appointed McKenna as New Jersey's head of homeland security..

Not very oddly at all. And Sohail Mohammed's appointment smacks of a political payback by Christie. Unlike Qatanani, Sohail Mohammed has some veneer of legitimacy. And just enough distance from him to create plausible deniability. Christie and the media would very much like to reduce this to Sullivan's talking point. And some conservative sites have even fallen for it. Hotair limited the reporting only to Sohail's actions as an attorney, but the issue is not that Sohail Mohammed defended terrorism suspects for pay, but that he acted as an advocate without pay. The former reflects his job, the latter his own beliefs. There is a very reasonable letter to Governor Christie here by one of his constituents spelling out the case against Sohail Mohammed. But rather than addressing it, Christie hit out at a strawman. When I first broke the Sohail Mohammed story back in January, Think Progress took the first and last lines of my article, and ran that as if it were the actual point of the piece. And then I watched with some amusement as liberal site after site picked up that very summary and used it without actually familiarizing themselves with the issue. The TP piece went all the way up to MSNBC and CNN, where Anderson Cooper repeated the quote verbatim. It was a lesson in how little actual investigating the media does and the extent to which they rely on Think Progress talking points. But nobody bothers doing their research anymore. Let's take another look at Christie's defense of Sohail Mohammed.

"If it is disqualifying for the bench to be an Arab-American in New Jersey who represents innocent people and gets them released, then this isn’t the state I believe it is," Christie said.

Aside from everything else Christie got wrong in that one sentence-- Sohail Mohammed isn't Arab, he's an Indian Muslim. So either

1. Christie doesn't know the first thing about the background of his own nominee,
2. He doesn't know the difference between Arabs and Indian Muslims despite his time prosecuting terrorists
3. He was thinking of Imam Qatanani

Your guess is as good as mine. But clearly Christie's due diligence here is impressive. He has obviously done his research on Sohail Mohammed. No question about it. Speaking of the wonders of government officials, (Via Western Rifle Shooters) Stephen Moore's WSJ article on the transformation of America into a nation whose chief industry is government. The whole piece is worth reading, but I'll excerpt and comment on a few sections First the collapse of the manufacturing sector and its replacement by the government sector

Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million)... It gets worse. More Americans work for the government than work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and utilities combined... Nearly half of the $2.2 trillion cost of state and local governments is the $1 trillion-a-year tab for pay and benefits of state and local employees... Every state in America today except for two—Indiana and Wisconsin—has more government workers on the payroll than people manufacturing industrial goods... Even Michigan, at one time the auto capital of the world, and Pennsylvania, once the steel capital, have more government bureaucrats than people making things... Iowa and Nebraska are farm states, for example. But in those states, there are at least five times more government workers than farmers. West Virginia is the mining capital of the world, yet it has at least three times more government workers than miners...

But this just scratches the surface. GM workers may work in manufacturing, but their jobs exist through government subsidies. A lot of remaining manufacturing is subsidized in one way or another by the government. For example consider how many 'Green Jobs' there are and how many would exist without government subsidies. We're approaching the European model of two types of jobs

1. Government jobs
2. Government subsidized jobs

The number of 'Green Jobs' is usually fictional, but the US Mayors Association claims that there are over 750,000 Green Jobs. Some of those jobs might be listed under manufacturing, but they probably belong under government. Of that 750,000 jobs, nearly a tenth are listed under 'Government Administration'. Only 60,000, not even a tenth, are listed as manufacturing. And the largest share, 418,715 comes from a broad category titled, 'Engineering, Research, Legal and Consultant'. Who wants to guess that the legal and consultant jobs outweigh the research and engineering ones. Would you really need more researchers and engineers than manufacturing workers? And if you did, doesn't that mean the product is vaporware? Where are most of the Green Jobs? New York, Washington D.C. and other major metropolitan areas. Are there major solar or wind farms in the middle of these cities? Are they manufacturing alternative energy products? Hardly. Some might be research, most are paper pushing jobs. Which is what most government jobs are. Green Jobs look a lot like an extension of the bureaucracy. And Green Jobs is just one example. Relevant because it's the model that liberals are pushing for the future. We're headed toward a government economy.