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July 24, 2008

Rabbi Berel Wein: On the road again --- and again and again

Richard Z. Chesnoff: Mideast Refugees --- Failure vs. Success

JWisdom:: Word power is about more than vocabulary by Rabbi Sroy Levitansky

July 23, 2008

Jonathan Tobin: The Mufti of Jerusalem's Nazi ideology lives on among contemporary Islamists

The Kosher Gourmet by Joe Gray: Smoked paprika turkey meatballs simmered in red wine and tomato sauce

JWisdom:: 'Routine' doesn't need to mean ‘rote’ By Rabbi David Aaron

July 22, 2008

Yossi Klein Halevi: Dear Barack Obama

Elliot B. Gertel: Eli Stone: Self-indulgent, arrogant corporate attorney as modern-day prophet

JWisdom:: Three Weeks - Nine Days - One Purpose by Rabbi Mordechai Becher

July 21, 2008

The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Spending your kids' money

Mitch Albom: A grim exchange illustrates a key difference

JWisdom:: The Holocaust in the Perspective of Faith: Hammered on the Anvil --- Severed by the Sickle by Rabbi Nosson Scherman

July 18, 2008

Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo: The Sanctification and Importance of Time

Caroline B. Glick: US wants it absolutely clear it has no intention of attacking Iran's nuclear installations

Mona Charen: What can you say about a people who welcome a child murderer as a hero?

JWisdom:: Living a dog's life, dawg? by Rabbi Dovid Gross

July 17, 2008

Steven Emerson: Deals with devils

Libby Lazewnik: One Step at a Time

JWisdom:: Leader the follower? by Rabbi Sroy Levitansky

July 16, 2008

The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Poaching humans

The Kosher Gourmet by Linda Gassenheimer: Meaty pasta salad with summer berries perfect for warm evenings

JWisdom:: Keeping A Secret by Rabbi Mordechai Becher

July 15, 2008

Dennis Prager: False Equation: Opposing Same-Sex Marriage and Opposing Interracial Marriage

Joel Greenberg: Researchers look to Israeli circumcision program to help combat AIDS 'Alternatives' to Logic Won't Work

JWisdom:: Re-Jew-venating prayer, Part V: Why Judaism ISN'T Spiritual by Rabbi David Aaron

July 14, 2008

Jonathan Rosenblum: A warning from Canada to those who value life

Jonathan Tobin: 'Alternatives' to Logic Won't Work

JWisdom:: Holocaust in the Perspective of Faith by Rabbi Nosson Scherman: Poland's Unique Antisemitism, Part II

July 11, 2008

Rabbi Francis Nataf: It's hard to be humble when you're great

Caroline B. Glick: A tale of two hostages

JWisdom:: Profane for Prophet by Rabbi Sroy Levitansky

July 8, 2008

The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Q. Duty to save gullible from themselves?

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.: Islamists have the West just where they want us

JWisdom:: Putting the Spirit Back into Spirituality, Part 3: The Fully Loaded Human Being by Rabbi Dovid Gross

July 3, 2008

Rabbi Dr. Abraham J. Twerski: A spiritual budget (TOUCHING!)

Jeff Jacoby: Israel still paying for its defeat

JWisdom:: Re-Jew-venating prayer, Part IV by Rabbi David Aaron

JWisdom:: The Moses Method by Rabbi Sroy Levitansky

July 2, 2008

Jonathan Tobin: Appeasers Make Poor Patriots

The Kosher Gourmet By Kathleen Purvis: Slaw, y'all: For BBQs or Sabbath dinner, these southern recipes are something else!

JWisdom:: Rabbi Mordechai Becher: Jewish Rx for A Simpler Life

July 1, 2008

The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Q. I think it's important to leave a legacy to my children. How much should I save towards this end?

Paul Greenberg:A President who is history deficient?

JWisdom:: Holocaust in the Perspective of Faith by Rabbi Nosson Scherman: Poland's Unique Antisemitism

June 30, 2008

Jonathan Rosenblum: Remembering the architect of Torah Judaism for the modern world

Abe Novick: Hulk: Still a Jew?

JWisdom: : Putting the Spirit Back into Spirituality, Part 2: The Abandoned Child

June 26, 2008

Rabbi Abraham J. Twerski: Quantum leap to evil

Caroline B. Glick: Victimized families must not be allowed to dictate policy

June 25, 2008

Rabbi Yonason Goldson: Today in Biblical History: King Jeroboam of Israel prevents pilgrimage to Jerusalem

Jonathan Tobin: Real Friends and Real Enemies

JWisdom: Raping of reason By Rabbi Sroy Levitansky

June 25, 2008

Steven Emerson: Kristof: Never Mind the Terrorists

Stratfor Intelligence Briefing: Mediterranean Flyover: Telegraphing an Israeli Punch?

JWisdom: Rabbi David Aaron: Re-Jew-venating prayer, Part III

June 24, 2008

Caroline B. Glick: What were they thinking!?

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.: Guilty knowledge

JWisdom: Holocaust in the Perspective of Faith by Rabbi Nosson Scherman: Warping Innocence

June 23, 2008

The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Diploma dilemma

Jeff Jacoby: A world without children

JWisdom: Rabbi Dovid Gross: Putting the Spirit Back into Spirituality --- Introduction

June 20, 2008

Rabbi A. Henach Leibowitz: Man: The Crowning Glory of Creation

Caroline B. Glick: Israel's darkest week

JWisdom: We aren't worthy? by Rabbi Sroy Levitansky

June 19, 2008

Rabbi Elazar Meisels: The saints who don't come marchin' in

Chris Christoff: Muslim woman demands an apology from Obama after camera snub

June 18, 2008

Jonathan Tobin: Still Dancing Around Jerusalem

The Kosher Gourmet by Steve Petusevsky: Chilled fruit and vegetable soups

JWisdom: Souls Need A Check Up? by Rabbi Mordechai Becher

June 17, 2008

Rabbi Avi Shafran: Baby Einstein

Caroline B. Glick: Bush's rhetoric, Bush's policies

JWisdom: Re-Jew-venating prayer, Part II by Rabbi David Aaron

June 16, 2008

Varda Branfman: Bob Dylan, won't you please come home?

Diana West: Academic dares to question the 'religion of peace'

JWisdom: Holocaust in the Perspective of Faith by Rabbi Nosson Scherman: Positive Backfire

March 22, 2007

J-Rhythms with Avraham Rosenblum: JWR's cutting-edge music program showcasing performers -- singers, song writers, musicians, and bands -- who learn and live the Torah lifestyle (OUR NEWEST IGODCAST !)

Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review Sept. 6, 2007 / 23 Elul 5767

Destruction in black America is self-inflicted

By Jeff Jacoby

Jeff Jacoby
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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Debating capital punishment at an Ivy League university a few years ago, I was confronted with the claim that since death sentences are more often meted out in cases where the victim is white, the death penalty must be racially biased. It's a spurious argument, I replied. Whites commit fewer than half of all murders in the United States, yet more whites than blacks are sentenced to death and more whites than blacks are executed each year. (56 percent of death row inmates are white, and of the 53 murderers executed last year, 32 were white.) If there is racial bias in the system, it clearly doesn't operate in favor of whites.


But if you do choose to focus on the race of victims, I added, remember that nearly all black homicide is intraracial — more than nine out of 10 black murder victims in the United States are killed by black murderers. So applying the death penalty in more cases where the victim is black would mean sending more black men to death row.


After the debate, a young black woman accosted me indignantly. Ninety-plus percent of black blood is shed by black hands? What about all the victims of white supremacists? Hadn't I heard of lynching? Hadn't I heard of James Byrd, who died so horribly in Jasper, Texas? When I assured her that Byrd's murder by whites was utterly untypical of most black homicide, she was dubious. So I asked for an e-mail address, and promised to send her a link to the FBI's violent-crime statistics.


I thought of that young woman when I read recently about James Ford Seale, the former Mississippi Klansman sentenced last month to three life terms in prison for his role in murdering two black teenagers 43 years ago. The killing of Charles Moore and Henry Dee in 1964 was one of several unsolved civil-rights-era crimes that prosecutors in the South have reopened in recent years. Seale's trial was a vivid reminder of the days when racial contempt was a deadly fact of life in much of the country. His sentence proclaims even more vividly the transformation of America since then. White racism, once such a murderous force, is now associated mostly with feeble has-beens.


Yet many Americans, like the woman at my debate, still seem to view racial questions through an antediluvian lens. To them, it is always the 1960s: White bigotry remains a clear and present danger, and the reason so many black Americans die before their time.


But the data aren't in dispute. Though outrage over "racism" is ever fashionable, African-Americans have long had far less to fear from the violence of racist whites than from the mayhem of the black underclass.


"Do you realize that the leading killer of young black males is young black males?" asked Secretary of Health and Human Services Louis Sullivan 16 years ago. "As a black man and a father of three, this really shakes me to the core of my being."


From Georgia Congressman John Lewis, a veteran of the civil rights movement, came a similar cry of anguish. "Nothing in the long history of blacks in America," he lamented in 1994, "suggests the terrible destruction blacks are visiting upon each other today."


Happily, crime rates have declined from their 1990s peak. But it remains the case that the worst destruction in black America is self-inflicted.


In a new study, the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics confirms once again that almost half the people murdered in the United States each year are black, and 93 percent of black homicide victims are killed by someone of their own race. (For white homicide victims, the figure is 85 percent.) In other words, of the estimated 8,000 African-Americans murdered in 2005, more than 7,400 were cut down by other African-Americans. Though blacks account for just one-eighth of the US population, the BJS reports, they are six times more likely than whites to be victimized by homicide — and seven times more likely to commit homicide.


Such huge disproportions don't just happen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously warned 40 years ago that the collapse of black family life would mean rising chaos and crime in the black community. Today, as many as 70 percent of black children are born out of wedlock or raised in fatherless households. And as reams of research confirm, children raised without married parents and intact, stable families are more likely to engage in antisocial behavior.


High rates of black violent crime are a national tragedy, but it is the law-abiding black majority that suffers from them most. "There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life," Jesse Jackson said in 1993, "than to walk down the street and hear footsteps . . . then turn around and see somebody white and feel relieved."


It isn't an insoluble problem. Americans overcame white racism; they can overcome black crime, too. But the first step, as always, is to face the facts.

Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.

Jeff Jacoby is a Boston Globe columnist. Comment by clicking here.

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