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The Great Jackass-Terrorist Alliance
[CityJournal] This weekend marked 100 days since Israeli civilians were brought as captives into Gazan tunnels: girls raped, men tortured.Here, in hip New York, an unending series of escalating demonstrations hamper the city’s functioning and citizens’ general sense of trust and stability. What are the protesters calling for? An immediate Israeli ceasefire. Whom do they represent? An enormous coalition of jackasses. If the thousands of Gothamites who pretend to care about Arabs (except when other Muslims oppress and slaughter them) really wanted a ceasefire, they would demand that Hamas release innocent civilians and renounce terrorism. But they don’t actually want a ceasefire. What they want is to be jackasses. In 2024, New Yorkers need to stop tolerating those who think the fun of disrupting the system is more important than everyone else’s daily lives. Like cities nationwide, the Big Apple has been sliding down a slope from tolerating jerks to letting them ruin the joint. Since 2014, the post-Ferguson police-shooting moment has blurred the lines between protesters genuinely concerned with how police respond to lawbreakers and those who think lawbreaking is pretty groovy. The more civil faction (the non-jackasses) has been scared to resist this great stand against authority. So, when the most strident voices in the coalition insisted that minor offenses should not be policed, the non-jackasses indulged them, thinking it a necessary sacrifice, even if, deep down, they valued quality of life and public order. But low-level offending matters. And while we should work to balance community and law-enforcement responses to bad behavior, pretending that such infractions are no big deal is to let the jackasses win. And winning they are: multiple overlapping policy and political shifts, each diminishing our seriousness about low-level crime, have enabled New York City’s masked, belligerent, solipsistic demonstrators to get away with mayhem. ...Look beyond the United States: the world is overrun with repression. Over the weekend in Turkey, an Israeli member of the Antalyaspor soccer team was arrested, suspended, and condemned for displaying "100 Days, 7/10" on his hand brace in support of the hostages. This denial of liberty, standard throughout the Middle East and much of the world, is unthinkable to Americans—yet a portion among us, exploiting and overstepping our liberties, confidently block vital airports, besiege cancer hospitals, and squash holiday gatherings. We can’t convince these jerks that they enjoy an awesome yet fragile freedom—that of peaceful, lawful protest—if we don’t also enforce the boundaries of what constitutes peaceful and lawful. It’s past time that we started doing so. Posted by: Grom the Reflective 2024-01-20 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=689129 |