Louis Farrakhan, Guardian of Chicago?

[Geee]

National Review:

Here’s a salient point about Chicago, location of the president’s much-touted birthday bash and home of a people far too progressive and enlightened to ever keep a Chick-fil-A in business: A lot of murders happen there. As the Daily Beast reported, the Windy City had more than 250 murders in the first half of 2012. Meanwhile, New York City, which is three times Chicago’s size, had 193, a record low. While the nationwide homicide rate has been falling, Chicago’s has been moving in the opposite direction — and its murder rate is now more than twice Mexico City’s. A few especially horrifying killings, like that of seven-year-old Heaven Sutton, have left Mayor Rahm Emanuel sounding — understandably — a little desperate. In an interview with CBS News, he said, “We’ve got two gangbangers, one standing next to a kid. Get away from that kid. Take your stuff away to the alley.”

But suggesting that gang members try not to shoot at each other when children are around isn’t the mayor’s only new crime-fighting tactic; he’s also welcomed the help of Louis Farrakhan, noted anti-Semite and supporter of the late Libyan dictator Moammar Qaddafi. “They have decided, the Nation of Islam, to help protect the community. And that’s an important ingredient, like all the other aspects of protecting a neighborhood,” the mayor said, speaking of an army of men Farrakhan formed, called the Fruit of Islam. Its members have been spreading throughout the city “to form a human wall of protection against any sudden outbreak of gunfire,” reports the Chicago Sun-Times. So it’s safe to assume that “something really bad is going on in Chicago,” as David Muhlhausen, a crime analyst at the Heritage Foundation, puts it.

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“Anytime you would link yourself to Louis Farrakhan, who’s a hatemonger, you must be pretty desperate,” he says.

Desperate times, desperate measures? Or is there something else behind this partnership between Emanuel, a liberal who volunteered for the Israeli Defense Forces during the Gulf War, and the leader of the Nation of Islam, an anti-Semite who has referred to homosexuals as “swine”?

Fred Siegel, a urban-policy fellow of the Manhattan Institute, a City Journal contributing editor, and author of The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., and the Fate of America’s Big Cities, thinks so. He says that Emanuel and Farrakhan aren’t actually strange bedfellows by Chicago standards — as the Chicago Tribune has pointed out, Al Capone’s defense attorney, a close friend of his, was also a former state legislator. And close ties between gang leaders and aldermen aren’t uncommon, either; a Chicago magazine investigation found that many city officials “routinely seek political support from influential street gangs.”

Further, while race is a driving force in Chicago politics, anti-Semitism doesn’t always hurt leaders’ careers.

“This is local Chicago stuff,” Siegel says. “Anti-Semitism is okay in that political world, and Emanuel has neither the courage nor the integrity required to combat it.”

Unlike Alderman Debra Silverstein, who noted that Farrakhan’s anti-violence efforts don’t “eradicate the comments that he’s made about the Jewish community,” Emanuel offered no reprimand of the minister’s anti-Semitism. Ultimately, the mayor’s condoning of the Nation of Islam leader shouldn’t surprise anyone.

[Casino67]

Ol' Louis is doing a great job too.

 

Headline from the Chicago Sun-Times:

 

 

5 dead, 29 wounded in weekend violence

 

 

 

http://www.suntimes.com/14277515-761/5-dead-29-wounded-in-weekend-violence.html

[Casino67]

Go here for a great cartoon in the Sun-Times. Site won't allow posting of it.

 

http://www.suntimes.com/opinions/index.html