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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (285793)	12/30/2008 5:12:11 PM
From: longnshort	Respond to of 793917

PRUDEN: It's time once more to blame the Jews Wesley Pruden (Contact) Tuesday, December 30, 2008 ANALYSIS/OPINION: The Israelis finally get enough of the constant rain of rockets on their border towns and villages, fired by Hamas thugs recognized by nearly everybody as international jackals, and strike back to stop it. Guess who the villains are. Those international thugs have become expert at retail death, killing one or two Jews one day, occasionally three or four on another, but rarely enough to make the front pages in London or Paris, Washington or New York. Death-by-rocket in Ashkelon and other cities, towns and villages in southern Israel is bad, but like other urban inconveniences not something to "overreact" to. This is the inevitable message to Israel. The grim and unrelenting war in the Middle East can be relieved in the soft salons of the West by turning to the inside pages of the morning newspaper to read about a new restaurant or a review of the latest movie, or by changing the channel to watch a chef demonstrate how to make a fluffy souffle. The Israelis have no such luxury. Life is not so nice and easy on the ground where "the peace process" is played out with death from the sky. Because the Hamas terrorists have perfected provocation as an art of war, the blame is attached to Israel by those always eager to "blame it on the Jews," and by a media unable to make distinctions and eager to draw moral equivalence between provocateur and the provoked. Gen. Sherman "There was a shocking quality to Saturday's attacks," the New York Times observed of Israel's emphatic response to the incessant rocket attacks, which began in broad daylight as police cadets were graduating, women were shopping at the outdoor market, and children were emerging from school. The "overreaction" of the Israelis soon ruined this happy scene of domestic tranquility, turning it into "a scene of chaotic horror, with rubble everywhere, sirens wailing, and women shrieking as dozens of mutiliated bodies were laid out on the pavement ... so that family could identify them." "War is hell," said old Tecumseh Sherman, the firebug of Atlanta, but only a brute is untouched by the suffering of innocents, including Palestinian women and children. But much of the rest of the world long ago decided that it would no longer be moved by the suffering of the Israelis, nor impressed by their patience in the face of extreme provocation. The Israelis are friends of the Great Satan, after all, and so deserve whatever retail death their enemies can deal. We must give the provocateur a pass. The provocation is so unrelenting that it has become a bit boring to read about and tedious to talk about. The accounts of the Israeli response take ritual notice of the provocation, but only with statistics, dry to anyone not on the receiving end of the rockets: " ... the highest one-day toll in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in decades ... ." There are few dispatches telling of a Jewish mother embracing her dead child in the hideous glare of a rocket, of wailing sirens, of the rubble of a Jewish village with tendrils of acrid smoke climbing to heaven in protest. Just the impersonal statistics. Nevertheless, there is another reality on the ground available to anyone who looks. One place to look is Barzilai Hospital in Ashkelon, hard by the border with Gaza. The doctors have moved the most essential wards underground. So many rockets have targeted the hospital and the neighborhood that the hospital now takes only emergency cases. Jewish and Palestinian children lie side by side in an underground ward. "We treat whoever needs to be treated," says Dr. Ron Lobel, the deputy director of the hospital. Precision bombing is a modern science, actually more art than science. The Palestinians typically station their missile-launching sites in residential neighborhoods, close to schools and hospitals, counting on the Israelis to avoid them. A video posted on the Internet, offering a pilot's view of his bombing run, depicts a perfect hit, taking out a rocket site in such a residential neighborhood with little "collateral damage." Not every hit is a perfect score, but civilized men try. The tragedy is that none of this is necessary. The Palestinians could have a two-state solution if they would only take it. But they are determined to win a one-state solution bought at the price of a second Holocaust. This is the reality that Israel's critics in the West willfully refuse to acknowledge. The Jews can expect to be made the villains of the piece - again. • Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

To: LindyBill who wrote (285793)	12/30/2008 6:05:03 PM
From: FJB	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793917

Influx of black renters raises tension in Bay Area Dec 30, 3:24 PM (ET) apnews.myway.com By PAUL ELIAS ANTIOCH, Calif. (AP) - As more and more black renters began moving into this mostly white San Francisco Bay Area suburb a few years ago, neighbors started complaining about loud parties, mean pit bulls, blaring car radios, prostitution, drug dealing and muggings of schoolchildren. In 2006, as the influx reached its peak, the police department formed a special crime-fighting unit to deal with the complaints, and authorities began cracking down on tenants in federally subsidized housing. Now that police unit is the focus of lawsuits by black families who allege the city of 100,000 is orchestrating a campaign to drive them out. "A lot of people are moving out here looking for a better place to live," said Karen Coleman, a mother of three who came here five years ago from a blighted neighborhood in nearby Pittsburg. "We are trying to raise our kids like everyone else. But they don't want us here." City officials deny the allegations in the lawsuits, which were filed last spring and seek unspecified damages. Across the country, similar tensions have simmered when federally subsidized renters escaped run-down housing projects and violent neighborhoods by moving to nicer communities in suburban Washington, Chicago and Los Angeles. But the friction in Antioch is "hotter than elsewhere," said U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development spokesman Larry Bush. An increasing number of poor families receiving federal rental assistance have been moving here in recent years, partly because of the housing crisis. A growing number of landlords were seeking a guaranteed source of revenue in a city hard-hit by foreclosures. They began offering their Antioch homes to low-income tenants in the HUD Section 8 housing program, which pays about two-thirds of every tenant's rent. Between 2000 and 2007, Antioch's black population nearly doubled from 8,824 to 16,316. And the number of Antioch renters receiving federal subsidies climbed almost 50 percent between 2003 and 2007 to 1,582, the majority of them black. Longtime homeowners complained that the new arrivals brought crime and other troubles. In 2006, violent crime in Antioch shot up about 19 percent from the year before, while property crime went down slightly. "In some neighborhoods, it was complete madness," said longtime resident David Gilbert, a black retiree who organized the United Citizens of Better Neighborhoods watch group. "They were under siege." So the Antioch police in mid-2006 created the Community Action Team, which focused on complaints of trouble at low-income renters' homes. Police sent 315 complaints about subsidized tenants to the Contra Costa Housing Authority, which manages the federal program in the city, and urged the agency to evict many of them for lease violations such as drug use or gun possession. Lawyers for the tenants said 70 percent of the eviction recommendations were aimed at black renters. The housing authority turned down most of the requests. Coleman said the police, after a complaint from a neighbor, showed up at her house one morning in 2007 to check on her husband, who was on parole for drunken driving. She said they searched the house and returned twice more that summer to try to find out whether the couple had violated any terms of their lease that could lead to eviction. The Colemans were also slapped with a restraining order after a neighbor accused them of "continually harassing and threatening their family," according to court papers. The Colemans said a judge later rescinded the order. Coleman and four other families are suing Antioch, accusing police of engaging in racial discrimination and conducting illegal searches without warrants. They have asked a federal judge to make their suit a class-action on behalf of hundreds of other black renters. Another family has filed a lawsuit accusing the city's leaders of waging a campaign of harassment to drive them out. Police referred questions to the city attorney's office. City Attorney Lynn Tracy Nerland denied any discrimination on the part of police and said officers were responding to crime reports in troubled neighborhoods when they discovered that a large number of the troublemakers were receiving federal subsidies. "They are responding to real problems," Nerland said. Joseph Villarreal, the housing authority chief, said the problems in Antioch mirror tensions seen nationally when poor renters move into neighborhoods they can afford only with government help. "One of the goals of the programs is to de-concentrate poverty," Villarreal said. "There are just some people who don't want to spend public money that way." Tensions like those afflicting Antioch have drawn scholars and law enforcement officials to debate whether crime follows subsidized renters out of the tenements to the suburbs. Susan Popkin, a researcher at the nonprofit Urban Institute, said she does not believe that is the case. But the tensions, she said, are real. "That can be a recipe for anxiety," she said. "It can really change the demographics of a neighborhood."