On Thursday, September 24th, after an apparently productive day at Fengler High School in Chicago, Derrion Albert, a black 16 year old honor student was knocked to the ground by a blow to the head with a railroad tie. He was then punched, kicked and stomped. Those who responded to rescue him were too late.

Derrion had walked into the middle of a fight between two rival black gangs. He attempted to help one of the victims in the melee and was killed for his trouble. This took place in Barack Obama’s Chicago. All his work for “social justice” did a great deal for Obama, but it did nothing for Derrion Albert. Of course the President is not responsible for this tragedy, but it does expose the fatuous claim that such occurrences are the result of social injustice rather than the personal choice to engage in lawless behavior. The ghettos, drugs, gangs and violence are on display for all to see in spite of Jeremiah Wright, Louis Farrakhan, Acorn and all the community organizing.

Treating poor black people as victims to be “organized” has been an abject failure. They are human beings to be educated, inspired and required to take responsibility for their own lives. The tragedy here is that Derrion was doing just that and it was working, but the malignant pathology of the ghetto spread to him on that unfortunate day and ended his promising life.

There is another tragedy. The so called black civil rights leaders have been mute. Had this been a white gang attacking a black gang member, they would have jumped in front of every camera and microphone available to decry racism and injustice in America. If it had been a black criminal with a long rap sheet, killed in a confrontation with a white police officer, there would be protests and perhaps riots against systemic racism in the police department.

Yet in this case and others like it, there is a deafening silence from some of the biggest mouths in America. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Julian Bond, Louis Farrakhan and the Congressional Black Caucus see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil. When Prof. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was arrested by a white police officer, President Barack Obama — without any facts — found it necessary to put in his two cents. Here in Chicago, the salient facts are abundantly clear and a heinous murder has been committed in his home town, but the president is silent. Malicious, homicidal maniacs brutally killed a decent young man on the streets Obama “organized,” but he has nothing to say. The self-appointed, media supported “black leaders” have not seen fit to hold a press conference or a rally supporting Derrion Albert and his family and condemning the perpetrators of this vicious crime. They have not called for witnesses to come forward.

There’s a reason for their uncharacteristic silence. Derrion’s murder does not fit the black liberation narrative. As one civil rights leader said to me, “If we focus on black on black crime, we let white folks off the hook.” Never mind that the leading cause of death among black males ages 18 to 24 is homicide by other black males. In one interview before Obama was elected, Michelle Obama commented on threats to Barack Obama’s safety saying, “As a black man, Barack can get shot going to the gas station.” What she did not say is that his likely killer would be another black man. Blacks are only 13% of the population, but over 40% of the murder victims. Ninety Three percent of those black victims are killed by other black people. As a black man, I am far more wary of the real black criminal than the imagined white racist.

Absentee fathers, abortion, drug use, gangs and black on black crime have a much greater impact on people’s lives than theoretical systemic racism, but these issues do not fit the liberal paradigm to which civil rights leaders are hostage. The problems of the black community must be understood solely as a social justice problem inflicted on blacks by whites. No other explanation is worthy of discussion, and woe to those dare suggest otherwise. In truth the civil rights spokesmen have another agenda which supersedes the well-being of black folks — their personal financial and political well being.

Liberal benefactors and foundations are not interested in addressing social pathologies which can only be eliminated by change of values, stable families and the willingness of fathers to parent their children. The government’s coffers are closed to moral judgments and spirituality. Faith in God, parental love and discipline to instill values of decency and responsibility are the antidotes to gangs, crime and drugs. However, allegations of racism, discrimination and social injustice are far more marketable for the Rainbow Coalition and the NAACP.

The people who killed Derrion are monsters. Monsters come in all colors, but these happen to be black. They are not victims. They are cold-blooded criminals with no regard for human life. Maybe when the so called black leaders start speaking out against gangs and criminals as parasites instead of victims of society, there will be fewer real victims like Derrion Albert.

Former President Jimmy Carter departed from his usual habit of condemning America from abroad and did it from the homeland last week. Dealing the race card from the bottom of the deck, he charged that opposition to President Obama is “based on the fact that he is a black man, that he’s African-American.” And not just some of the opposition but “an overwhelming portion,” as he phrased it. In the absence of documented mind-reading, this is nothing more than a glib, unverifiable assertion. To paraphrase Al Gore, a convenient untruth.

Grasping for evidence, Carter described a sign he claimed he saw at the Sept. 12 March on Washington which read: “We should bury Obama with Kennedy.” In fact, the sign said: “Bury Obamacare with Kennedy.” This is a vital distinction. Carter’s imagined wording would have been personal and threatening. The actual wording, while in poor taste, expressed a difference in policy, since universal health care was Ted Kennedy’s pet issue.

Where do liberals come off being so mean-spirited and cynical when it comes to policy differences? Since my longstanding opposition to Kennedy on health care, taxation or foreign policy was on philosophical and political grounds, why couldn’t I disagree with Obama for the same reasons? Conservatives disagree with Gore on cap and trade and with labor bosses like Andy Stern and John Sweeny on the card check bill. Why is it automatically racist if you disagree with Obama on these same issues?

Alan Keyes, who is black, is an uncompromising conservative on economic, defense and social issues. He ran for president in 1992, 1996, 2000 and 2008. Were white liberals who opposed him motivated by racism? It gets even sillier: Maybe the blacks who opposed him were racists, too? How about Democrats who favored Obama over Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primaries? Are they misogynists? Can you disagree with half of Obama’s policies because he’s only half black?

I agree with conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who is black. I like Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell, two black, free-market economists. I support the school voucher program for black, low-income kids in Washington, D.C. Does all that exempt me from charges of racism?

There are, no doubt, some racist Americans. But when Carter claims that the racism factor is “overwhelming” among Obama critics, does he mean 51 percent, 75 percent or 99 percent? The latest Rasmussen poll reports that only 12 percent of voters believe that Obamacare opponents are racists; 67 percent disagree with that accusation. The breakdown by party affiliation is revealing: 88 percent of Republicans and 78 percent of independent voters reject the racist charge, while only 39 percent of Democrats do. Apparently, the capacity for liberal guilt runs deep, indeed.

It’s ironic that Obama, the candidate who ran as the avatar of a post-racial America, is now cast by his supporters and his cheerleaders in the liberal media as a martyr to intractable racism. This is absurd. He got 53 percent of the vote in 2008, only a small fraction of which was from African-Americans. He couldn’t have been elected in a truly racist America. Political analyst Charlie Cook reports that support for Obama from independent voters, approaching 70 percent in the spring, has fallen off the most sharply, down to just the mid-40s now. Are we to believe that they’ve somehow become racists since Election Day?

Jimmy Carter and other Democrats playing the race card may find that this backfires. Independents who swung to Obama, seduced by his promises of hope and change and who now have some honest policy differences with him, might resent being branded as racists. In the next election, they may find Republicans more acceptable — and accepting.

What follows is the transcript of an address by Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, delivered to the United Nations General Assembly on September 24, 2009.

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen…

Nearly 62 years ago, the United Nations recognized the right of the Jews, an ancient people 3,500 years-old, to a state of their own in their ancestral homeland. I stand here today as the Prime Minister of Israel, the Jewish state, and I speak to you on behalf of my country and my people.

The United Nations was founded after the carnage of World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust. It was charged with preventing the recurrence of such horrendous events. Nothing has undermined that central mission more than the systematic assault on the truth.

Yesterday the President of Iran stood at this very podium, spewing his latest anti-Semitic rants. Just a few days earlier, he again claimed that the Holocaust is a lie.

Last month, I went to a villa in a suburb of Berlin called Wannsee. There, on January 20, 1942, after a hearty meal, senior Nazi officials met and decided how to exterminate the Jewish people. The detailed minutes of that meeting have been preserved by successive German governments.

Here is a copy of those minutes, in which the Nazis issued precise instructions on how to carry out the extermination of the Jews. Is this a lie?

Netanyahu shames a degenerate United Nations

A day before I was in Wannsee, I was given in Berlin the original construction plans for the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Those plans are signed by Hitler’s deputy, Heinrich Himmler himself. Here is a copy of the plans for Auschwitz-Birkenau, where one million Jews were murdered. Is this too a lie?

This June, President Obama visited the Buchenwald concentration camp. Did President Obama pay tribute to a lie? And what of the Auschwitz survivors whose arms still bear the tattooed numbers branded on them by the Nazis? Are those tattoos a lie?

One-third of all Jews perished in the conflagration. Nearly every Jewish family was affected, including my own. My wife’s grandparents, her father’s two sisters and three brothers, and all the aunts, uncles and cousins were all murdered by the Nazis. Is that also a lie?

Yesterday, the man who calls the Holocaust a lie spoke from this podium. To those who refused to come here and to those who left this room in protest, I commend you. You stood up for moral clarity and you brought honor to your countries.

But to those who gave this Holocaust-denier a hearing, I say on behalf of my people, the Jewish people, and decent people everywhere: Have you no shame? Have you no decency? A mere six decades after the Holocaust, you give legitimacy to a man who denies that the murder of six million Jews took place and pledges to wipe out the Jewish state. What a disgrace! What a mockery of the charter of the United Nations!

Perhaps some of you think that this man and his odious regime threaten only the Jews. You’re wrong. History has shown us time and again that what starts with attacks on the Jews eventually ends up engulfing many others.

This Iranian regime is fueled by an extreme fundamentalism that burst onto the world scene three decades ago after lying dormant for centuries.

In the past thirty years, this fanaticism has swept the globe with a murderous violence and cold-blooded impartiality in its choice of victims. It has callously slaughtered Moslems and Christians, Jews and Hindus, and many others. Though it is comprised of different offshoots, the adherents of this unforgiving creed seek to return humanity to medieval times. Wherever they can, they impose a backward regimented society where women, minorities, gays or anyone not deemed to be a true believer is brutally subjugated.

The struggle against this fanaticism does not pit faith against faith nor civilization against civilization. It pits civilization against barbarism, the 21st century against the 9th century, those who sanctify life against those who glorify death. The primitivism of the 9th century ought to be no match for the progress of the 21st century. The allure of freedom, the power of technology, the reach of communications should surely win the day.

Ultimately, the past cannot triumph over the future. And the future offers all nations magnificent bounties of hope. The pace of progress is growing exponentially. It took us centuries to get from the printing press to the telephone, decades to get from the telephone to the personal computer, and only a few years to get from the personal computer to the internet.

What seemed impossible a few years ago is already outdated, and we can scarcely fathom the changes that are yet to come. We will crack the genetic code. We will cure the incurable. We will lengthen our lives. We will find a cheap alternative to fossil fuels and clean up the planet.

I am proud that my country Israel is at the forefront of these advances – by leading innovations in science and technology, medicine and biology, agriculture and water, energy and the environment. These innovations the world over offer humanity a sunlit future of unimagined promise.

But if the most primitive fanaticism can acquire the most deadly weapons, the march of history could be reversed for a time. And like the belated victory over the Nazis, the forces of progress and freedom will prevail only after a horrific toll of blood and fortune has been exacted from mankind.

That is why the greatest threat facing the world today is the marriage between religious fanaticism and the weapons of mass destruction, and the most urgent challenge facing this body is to prevent the tyrants of Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Are the member states of the United Nations up to that challenge? Will the international community confront a despotism that terrorizes its own people as they bravely stand up for freedom?

Will it take action against the dictators who stole an election in broad daylight and gunned down Iranian protesters who died in the streets choking in their own blood? Will the international community thwart the world’s most pernicious sponsors and practitioners of terrorism? Above all, will the international community stop the terrorist regime of Iran from developing atomic weapons, thereby endangering the peace of the entire world?

The people of Iran are courageously standing up to this regime. People of goodwill around the world stand with them, as do the thousands who have been protesting outside this hall. Will the United Nations stand by their side?

Ladies and Gentlemen, the jury is still out on the United Nations, and recent signs are not encouraging. Rather than condemning the terrorists and their Iranian patrons, some here have condemned their victims. That is exactly what a recent UN report on Gaza did, falsely equating the terrorists with those they targeted.

For eight long years, Hamas fired from Gaza thousands of missiles, mortars and rockets on nearby Israeli cities. Year after year, as these missiles were deliberately hurled at our civilians, not a single UN resolution was passed condemning those criminal attacks.

We heard nothing – absolutely nothing – from the UN Human Rights Council, a misnamed institution if there ever was one. In 2005, hoping to advance peace, Israel unilaterally withdrew from every inch of Gaza. It dismantled 21 settlements and uprooted over 8,000 Israelis. We didn’t get peace. Instead we got an Iranian backed terror base fifty miles from Tel Aviv. Life in Israeli towns and cities next to Gaza became a nightmare.

You see, the Hamas rocket attacks not only continued, they increased tenfold. Again, the UN was silent. Finally, after eight years of this unremitting assault, Israel was finally forced to respond. But how should we have responded? Well, there is only one example in history of thousands of rockets being fired on a country’s civilian population. It happened when the Nazis rocketed British cities during World War II.

During that war, the allies leveled German cities, causing hundreds of thousands of casualties. Israel chose to respond differently. Faced with an enemy committing a double war crime of firing on civilians while hiding behind civilians – Israel sought to conduct surgical strikes against the rocket launchers.

That was no easy task because the terrorists were firing missiles from homes and schools, using mosques as weapons depots and ferreting explosives in ambulances. Israel, by contrast, tried to minimize casualties by urging Palestinian civilians to vacate the targeted areas. We dropped countless flyers over their homes, sent thousands of text messages and called thousands of cell phones asking people to leave.

Never has a country gone to such extraordinary lengths to remove the enemy’s civilian population from harm’s way. Yet faced with such a clear case of aggressor and victim, who did the UN Human Rights Council decide to condemn? Israel. A democracy legitimately defending itself against terror is morally hanged, drawn and quartered, and given an unfair trial to boot.

By these twisted standards, the UN Human Rights Council would have dragged Roosevelt and Churchill to the dock as war criminals. What a perversion of truth! What a perversion of justice!

Delegates of the United Nations, will you accept this farce? Because if you do, the United Nations would revert to its darkest days, when the worst violators of human rights sat in judgment against the law-abiding democracies, when Zionism was equated with racism and when an automatic majority could declare that the earth is flat.

If this body does not reject this report, it would send a message to terrorists everywhere: Terror pays; if you launch your attacks from densely populated areas, you will win immunity. And in condemning Israel, this body would also deal a mortal blow to peace. Here’s why. When Israel left Gaza, many hoped that the missile attacks would stop. Others believed that at the very least, Israel would have international legitimacy to exercise its right of self-defense.

What legitimacy? What self-defense?

The same UN that cheered Israel as it left Gaza and promised to back our right of self-defense now accuses us –my people, my country – of war crimes? And for what? For acting responsibly in self-defense. What a travesty!

Israel justly defended itself against terror. This biased and unjust report is a clear-cut test for all governments. Will you stand with Israel or will you stand with the terrorists? We must know the answer to that question now. Now and not later. Because if Israel is again asked to take more risks for peace, we must know today that you will stand with us tomorrow. Only if we have the confidence that we can defend ourselves can we take further risks for peace.

Ladies and Gentlemen, all of Israel wants peace. Any time an Arab leader genuinely wanted peace with us, we made peace. We made peace with Egypt led by Anwar Sadat. We made peace with Jordan led by King Hussein. And if the Palestinians truly want peace, I and my government, and the people of Israel, will make peace. But we want a genuine peace, a defensible peace, a permanent peace.

In 1947, this body voted to establish two states for two peoples – a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Jews accepted that resolution. The Arabs rejected it. We ask the Palestinians to finally do what they have refused to do for 62 years: Say yes to a Jewish state.

Just as we are asked to recognize a nation-state for the Palestinian people, the Palestinians must be asked to recognize the nation state of the Jewish people. The Jewish people are not foreign conquerors in the Land of Israel. This is the land of our forefathers.

Inscribed on the walls outside this building is the great Biblical vision of peace: “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation. They shall learn war no more.” These words were spoken by the Jewish prophet Isaiah 2,800 years ago as he walked in my country, in my city – in the hills of Judea and in the streets of Jerusalem. We are not strangers to this land. It is our homeland.

As deeply connected as we are to this land, we recognize that the Palestinians also live there and want a home of their own. We want to live side by side with them, two free peoples living in peace, prosperity and dignity. But we must have security. The Palestinians should have all the powers to govern themselves except those handful of powers that could endanger Israel.

That is why a Palestinian state must be effectively demilitarized. We don’t want another Gaza, another Iranian backed terror base abutting Jerusalem and perched on the hills a few kilometers from Tel Aviv.

We want peace.

I believe such a peace can be achieved. But only if we roll back the forces of terror, led by Iran, that seek to destroy peace, eliminate Israel and overthrow the world order. The question facing the international community is whether it is prepared to confront those forces or accommodate them.

Over seventy years ago, Winston Churchill lamented what he called the “confirmed unteachability of mankind,” the unfortunate habit of civilized societies to sleep until danger nearly overtakes them.

Churchill bemoaned what he called the “want of foresight, the unwillingness to act when action will be simple and effective, the lack of clear thinking, the confusion of counsel until emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong.”

I speak here today in the hope that Churchill’s assessment of the “unteachability of mankind” is for once proven wrong. I speak here today in the hope that we can learn from history — that we can prevent danger in time.

In the spirit of the timeless words spoken to Joshua over 3,000 years ago, let us be strong and of good courage. Let us confront this peril, secure our future and, God willing, forge an enduring peace for generations to come.

by Henry Payne

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You can’t grasp the full craziness of Van Jones, Obama’s now-resigned “green jobs czar” (actual job title: “Special Advisor on Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation for the White House Council on Environmental Quality”), unless you watch his speeches on YouTube.

In a nutshell, along with his anti-capitalism, Marxism, and anti-white racism, Jones’ big idea is that we should knock down our prisons and create green jobs by having the nation’s murderers and rapists come over to caulk our windows.

Jones describes U.S. prisons as “slave ships on dry land,” a “punishment industry” that’s disproportionately victimizing people of color and profiting from America’s ongoing “racist war.”

One of the victims of that racist war, trapped unfairly on a “slave ship” in Philly, according to Jones, is Mumia Abu-Jamal. He’s the former community organizer and “Lieutenant of Information” for the Black Panther Party who was convicted of the Dec. 9, 1981, murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner.

Jones asserts that whites are the actual violent ones, shooting up whole schools, not just one person at a time. “You’ve never seen a Columbine done by a black,” says Jones. “Never.”

Perhaps. But the U.S. Department of Justice, totaling up all the murders nationwide — not just what happened on one day in 1999 — reports that the offending rate for blacks who commit murder is more than seven times higher than the rate for whites; the homicide-victimization rate for blacks is six times higher than the rate for whites; and 94 percent of black murder victims are killed by blacks.

In any case, Jones’ green-justice idea is to “build a pipeline from the prison economy to the green economy,” an innovative solution that allows us to simultaneously achieve several major goals. The “historical victims” trade in their AK-47s for caulking guns, the piggy public uses less energy, the polar bears get back their non-melting ice, and the abused occupants of the land-based slave ships will get out from behind bars and be pocketing a public sector “living wage” by applying weatherstripping from a nonprofit government factory.

As Investor’s Business Daily points out, Jones may not have been truly original in coming up with this scheme: “In his 2006 memoir, President Obama proposed government-subsidized green jobs ‘to hire and train ex-felons on projects’ such as ‘insulating homes and offices to make them energy-efficient.’ Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, who worked with Jones in California as a congresswoman, has already put such plans into motion.”

Jones explains that it was in the aftermath of the Rodney King riots in California that he became a communist. As he told the East Bay Express in 2005: “I was a rowdy nationalist on April 28 (1992), and then the verdicts came down on April 29. By August, I was a communist.”

In the same interview, Jones explains how he developed a soft spot for felons, the future weatherstrippers of America: “I met all these young radical people of color — I mean really radical: communists and anarchists. And I was, like, ‘This is what I need to be a part of.’ I spent the next 10 years of my life working with a lot of those people I met in jail, trying to be a revolutionary.”

And so we ended up with a self-described red as a “green czar,” a special adviser to the president, set to distribute some $30 billion or so of our tax dollars in ways that he determines would save the world from an Earth-killing capitalist system.

Jones outlined his strategy for a green and collectivist utopia last year during an interview with leftist Uprising Radio in Los Angeles: “The green economy will start off as a small subset” of a “complete revolution” against “gray capitalism” and toward a “redistribution of all wealth.”

And how’s the mundane caulking of windows fit in? It’s just the way to get Van Jones into the White House as a “czar” of something that sounds nice — a way to get guys like Abu-Jamal back on the street with our money in their wallets, ready to do some real community organizing on a grand scale.

In one of his more honest moments, Jones explains the ruse, the use of “green” as a deceptive maneuver to destroy the existing American system: “We are going to push it and push it until it becomes the engine for transforming the whole society.”

Your blues, author BeBe Moore Campbell famously wrote, ain’t like mine.

I’ve occasionally borrowed that phrase to explain how bigotry as experienced by majority and minority is not the same: the one has access to levers of power enabling it to express its hatred in public policy, the other has access only to fists and words. But there are times that observation is simultaneously true, and irrelevant. This is one of them.

There is, after all, a certain egalitarian outrageousness in what happened to 18-year-old Brian Milligan. Getting hit in the back of the head with a chunk of concrete is getting hit in the back of the head with a chunk of concrete, whether you are Jew or Muslim, gay or straight, black or white.

That’s reportedly what happened to Milligan the night of Aug. 18, after he walked his girlfriend to her home in their gritty Buffalo, NY., neighborhood. Milligan had headphones on, so he didn’t even hear it coming. A mob of 10 to 12 black males then stomped and kicked him and hit him with more concrete — all in the head and face, says his father, Brian, Sr., 41.

As they struck him, they taunted him. “You white motherf—–, we told you stay away from here. These are our streets. We told you stay away from our women.”

Brian, you see, is white. His girlfriend Nicola Fletcher, 18, is African-American. That difference in melanin has, they say, been a source of daily friction with a gang of black men in their neighborhood for months. She’s been shot with paintballs, they’ve both been repeatedly cursed and taunted. “They would hit on her right in front of me,” says Milligan. “They would call her baby and all that.”

Now there’s this. Brian Sr. says when he got to the hospital, he didn’t even recognize his son. “I seen a mess. I seen somebody laying there dead.”

Not quite, but close. Brian Jr. had a gash on his head that required seven staples to close. He had bleeding and swelling in his brain. His jaw and one tooth were broken. His sense of smell is gone. He has no memory of the beating.

According to media reports, blacks in the neighborhood have been conspicuous in their refusal to cooperate with investigators. While a black anti-crime group has been trying to help bring the criminals to justice, Brian Sr. says other blacks have chosen silence. “I don’t know if it’s that they’re scared or they don’t care. That’s a coin I just don’t want to toss up in the air.”

Nor do I. So let me just say this: Assuming the facts are as we have been told, this demands prosecution as a hate crime. What happened to Brian Milligan is an offense against civil society. We should all be outraged.

I loathe bigotry in all its forms, but I have a special problem with bigotry as practiced by those who, by dint of their own history, should know better. When Jews hate Muslims for their religion, when gays scorn straights for their sexual orientation, when blacks beat a white teenager for the color of his skin, it suggests people too dense to understand the moral of their own story, the meaning of their own passages. The minority is no more righteous in its hate than the majority is.

Brian, Sr., an unemployed construction worker facing a mountain of medical bills, is asking for help. A special savings account (No. 483023966528) has been set up for Brian at Bank of America under his mother’s name: Leslie Ann Milligan.

And yes, Brian and Nicola are still together. He credits her with nudging him to get his GED. “She loves me. And I love her. That’s more than anything. That sums it all up.”

Somebody thought they had a right to tell this kid where he could go and who he could see. They kicked his head in because he is.

And that’s a sadly familiar song. It is a blues we’ve heard too many times before.

Editor’s Note: For those who might wish to contribute to Brian’s fund by mail, Bank of America’s address is 6041 Transit Rd., Depew, NY, 14043.