What Happened Today: April 18, 2022
The murder wave continues; Violence in Jerusalem; Kosher Dubai
The Big Story
There were at least 10 mass shootings in eight states across the United States over the weekend, killing two teenage boys and highlighting the dramatic nationwide spike in violent crime that has driven murders up by 40% since 2019. An incident qualifies as a mass shooting if four or more people were shot. Law and order remains a local problem at its core—mayors and governors have more impact on it than members of Congress or the White House—but the surge in violent crime is a rising issue for voters across the country. According to a Gallup poll from earlier this month, concerns over crime are at their highest level since 2016, with 80% of Americans worried about it and a majority, 53%, reporting that they worry about it a “great deal.” Of the three mass shootings this weekend, two took place in South Carolina: one at a mall in its capital, Columbia, that wounded nine people and another a few hours later at a nightclub 90 miles to the south where another nine people were injured. In Pittsburgh on Sunday, an exchange of gunfire around a house party left two teens dead and another eight people wounded. There was also the standard gun violence in Philadelphia, where three people were shot in the span of three hours on Saturday. Multicity mass shootings like the one last weekend are becoming the norm. One month ago, there were nine mass shooting events across the country in a single weekend. Many top-level Democrats have recognized that the “defund the police” rhetoric championed by party activists and liberal media organs has become a liability with voters. Some politicians, like New York City Mayor Eric Adams, have run successful election campaigns by positioning themselves as the “common sense” law-and-order alternatives to the party’s progressive wing. But even Adams, who is only two months into his mayoralty, has yet to bring crime down in the city. At the national level, the political effects of the crime wave won’t become clear until we get the results of the midterm elections.
Read more: https://edition.cnn.com/2022/04/18/us/us-shootings-easter-weekend/index.html
In The Back Pages: The Arab World’s New Kosher Vacation Mecca
The Rest
→ Clashes between Palestinian rioters on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and Israeli security forces continued for their third straight day on Monday, but at a lower intensity, as the skirmishes appeared to be winding down. In a pattern that has reoccurred repeatedly over the past century, the violence is being driven in part by false claims spread over Palestinian media and throughout the Muslim world that Jews are planning to storm Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam. In fact, while recent video footage has shown some Israeli security officials using what appears to be excessive force against worshippers around the site, they have neither stormed the mosque nor shown any sign of planning to do so. The latest round of clashes began after Muslim worshippers gathered during the holy month of Ramadan started stockpiling rocks and firecrackers at Al-Aqsa to throw at Jewish worshippers assembled for Passover prayers at the Western Wall below the mount. The Temple Mount is the holiest site in Judaism, but Israeli government policy strictly regulates Jews’ ability to enter it and officially prohibits Jews from praying there.
→ Is the White House edging toward sending U.S. troops to Ukraine? That seems to be the message in recent comments from Democratic Sen. Chris Coons, who has been called President Biden’s “closest Senate ally” and represents his home state of Delaware. In a speech last Thursday, Coons told an audience at the University of Michigan that Congress and the White House need to agree on criteria for arming Ukraine and sending American troops into the war. “If the answer is never,” said Coons, “then we are inviting another level of escalation in brutality by Putin.” In an appearance Sunday on Face the Nation, Coons echoed recent comments from the president, focusing on Vladimir Putin’s war crimes in Ukraine. Earlier this month, Biden accused Putin of committing genocide in Ukraine, a comment he later partially walked back but that served to raise the moral and political stakes for the United States to intervene directly in the war.
→ Over the weekend, Russia presented an ultimatum to Ukrainian soldiers still defending the besieged port city of Mariupol: Surrender by noon on Sunday, or die. “We will fight absolutely to the end,” Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said in response, appearing on ABC’s This Week on Sunday. “We do not have the intention to surrender.” Russia has taken control of most of the city, which had a population of nearly half a million before the invasion and which, if seized, would secure a key piece of terrain solidifying Russia’s annexation of the Donbas region in eastern and southern Ukraine. Since the start of the war, Mariupol has seen some of the worst fighting and destruction, reporting more than 10,000 civilian casualties, with “corpses that were carpeted through the streets,” according to the city’s mayor. The remaining Ukrainian soldiers in Mariupol, however, are digging in for a prolonged fight. Russia estimates that there are 2,500 Ukrainian soldiers who have been fortifying a large steel mill on the city’s coast, stockpiling munitions and turning the four-square-mile compound into a labyrinth of tunnels and shelters.
→ Speaking of the rise in violent crime in the United States …
→ The number of migrants attempting to cross the border from Mexico into the United States reached its highest monthly total in two decades in March. Last month, border enforcement authorities arrested 210,000 people trying to enter the country illegally.
→ A federal judge in Florida has struck down the Biden administration’s attempt to impose a new mask mandate on public transportation. In her ruling Monday, U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, who was appointed by Donald Trump, said that the CDC had exceeded its legal authority by imposing the mandate, and faulted the agency for failing to seek public feedback and providing insufficient explanation for its policy.
→ Protestors clashed with police in several Swedish cities over the weekend, after a political candidate burned a Koran as part of his election campaign tour. Rasmus Paludan, the founder of the far-right political party Hard Line, announced that this Koran burning, which took place in Malmö, would be one of many. Hard Line calls for the deportation of all Muslims and a ban on immigration from all non-Western countries. Dozens of protestors have been arrested and injured in the clashes, during which several police officers were also injured and multiple vehicles were torched, according to Swedish authorities.
→ As Shanghai enters its third week of draconian COVID-19 lockdowns, the city is struggling to staff and service its main container port, the largest in the world. Restrictive stay-at-home laws have made it difficult for employees to get to work to unload cargo, while truck drivers are barred from leaving the city with deliveries. This is causing delays that are rippling across the global supply chain, container ships now bypassing Shanghai’s port to wait in lengthening queues at ports around the world. The backlog at Shanghai’s port has prompted some prominent members of China’s business elite to voice rare public criticism of the Chinese Communist Party. “If Shanghai cannot resume production by May, all of the tech and industrial players who have supply chains in the area will come to a complete halt, especially the automotive industry,” said Richard Yu Chengdong, head of Huawei’s consumer and auto division. “That will pose severe consequences and massive losses for the whole industry.” If the current COVID-19 policies are kept in place, analysts predict a 6% drop in Shanghai’s GDP, which would cause a 2% drop in China’s. Responding to these criticisms and concerns, President Xi Jinping said “persistence is victory” and encouraged his locked-down citizens to stay the course. “It is necessary to overcome paralyzing thoughts, war weariness, fluke mentality, and slack mentality.”
Rabbi Stuart Halpern on his family’s recent trip to Dubai, the new kosher vacation mecca of the Arab world.
Our quick family vacation, our first since making aliyah to Israel from New Jersey a few months ago, was to Dubai. It began with a charmingly warm welcome from the kandura-clad passport control officer at Dubai International Airport, who invited our kids to stamp their own passport and welcomed them in crisp English. Back in Israel, it ended, to put it lightly, in contrasting form.
Landing back in Tel Aviv around midday Friday, sweaty, tired, and anxious to get home in time for Shabbat, we tried in vain, using our broken Hebrew, to hail a taxi. “What do you mean you want your family of five to sit in one cab?! You need two cabs!” came the first response. “I’m not going as far as Modi’in today so I will not take you,” came the next. “What do you mean you can’t pay cash?! Who doesn’t carry cash?!” came the third (all this in angry Hebrew, of course). Finally, we managed to be rescued by a friendly airport taxi coordinator, who hailed a minivan for us and our bags—only to have that driver insist that I download a new app that links directly to my bank account and begrudgingly accept my multiple reassurances that we possess Israeli credit cards. Home has its own distinct charms, of course, but this wasn’t exactly the red-carpet treatment we’d received from the Emiratis.
Visiting Dubai from Israel is like the classic New York-to-Miami vacation Modern Orthodox Jews like myself are generally familiar with: Three-hour flight. New mix of kosher restaurants. Inexpensive hotels. Lots of Israelis all around. Our itinerary, which included suggestions from a friend and things I had scouted on a quick work trip I'd taken the previous year, amounted to a mad dash through the city’s family-friendly hits.
First stop was the towering Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, which I had first glimpsed in 2011 while clinging to my movie theater chair, nails dug into my seat cushions, hoping Tom Cruise’s suction cups wouldn’t fail him in the showstopping scene in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, unquestionably the greatest action movie of all time. (Spoiler alert: He didn’t fall.) The views of downtown Dubai, however far your eyes will take you before the Middle East fog kicks in, are spectacular. The borderline Tower of Babel vibes are kind of discomforting, but the interminable trip down was redeemed by the near-spiritual experience of joining hundreds of fellow tourists in watching, after evening set in, the Dubai Fountain dance to Enrique Iglesias’ “Hero” (Spanish version).
After a kosher breakfast in the hotel alongside fellow travelers from the United Kingdom and the United States, we visited the world’s largest natural flower garden (everything here seems to be “the world’s largest”), featuring Smurf Village and animatronic ballerina dancers …
Interesting the uptick, or reported, shootings and mayhem. Is it a “look here, not there” or just a general fever of lack of impulse control?
If the Biden administration is indeed beginning to signal the interjection of US troops into Ukraine, why did they so anxiously assure Putin, etc it was “off the table” during their build up of invasion forces? Why not offer “no comment” re future intervention? Force Russians to hold back some attack assets - especially air defense, etc. Obviously, they will fear a NATO/US air intervention far more now than pre-invasion but still why…
Did our intel forecast an immediate UKR political/military collapse? Why was the US embassy evacuated before hand and Zelenskyy offered an immediate ride out? Did the US suffer an intelligence assessment failure masked as a genius prediction of the initial invasion? Has that assessment now changed? Inquiring minds want to know..