The Irony of Ferguson

Posted on November 26, 2014November 26, 2014 by Denise Simon

In recent days we have watched terrorists in Ferguson burn the town, many of whom were not even from Missouri. Protests in solidarity for Justice for Michael Brown are occurring in cities across the nation including Oakland, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Boston and Atlanta.

The protests in Ferguson burned their own community over the Grand Jury decision not to indict Officer Daren Wilson. What is left of Ferguson and what will the future be? Furthermore, testimony and scientific forensic evidence spelled out without dispute that Michael Brown never put his hand in the air, the signature of submission to police orders. If he had, he would clearly be alive today.

The Ferguson Fraud

The bitter irony of the Michael Brown case is that if he had actually put his hands up and said don’t shoot, he would almost certainly be alive today. His family would have been spared an unspeakable loss, and Ferguson, Missouri wouldn’t have experienced multiple bouts of rioting, including the torching of at least a dozen businesses the night it was announced that Officer Darren Wilson wouldn’t be charged with a crime.

Instead, the credible evidence (i.e., the testimony that doesn’t contradict itself or the physical evidence) suggests that Michael Brown had no interest in surrendering. After committing an act of petty robbery at a local business, he attacked Officer Wilson when he stopped him on the street. Brown punched Wilson when the officer was still in his patrol car and attempted to take his gun from him.

The first shots were fired within the car in the struggle over the gun. Then, Michael Brown ran. Even if he hadn’t put his hands up, but merely kept running away, he would also almost certainly be alive today. Again, according to the credible evidence, he turned back and rushed Wilson. The officer shot several times, but Brown kept on coming until Wilson killed him.

This is a terrible tragedy. It isn’t a metaphor for police brutality or race repression or anything else, and never was. Aided and abetted by a compliant national media, the Ferguson protestors spun a dishonest or misinformed version of what happened—Michael Brown murdered in cold blood while trying to give up—into a chant (“hands up, don’t shoot”) and then a mini-movement.

When the facts didn’t back their narrative, they dismissed the facts and retreated into paranoid suspicion of the legal system. It apparently required more intellectual effort than almost any liberal could muster even to say, “You know, I believe policing in America is deeply unjust, but in this case the evidence is murky and not enough to indict, let alone convict anyone of a crime.”

They preferred to charge that the grand jury process was rigged, because St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch didn’t seek an indictment of Wilson and allowed the grand jury to hear all the evidence and make its own decision. This, Chris Hayes of MSNBC deemed so removed from normal procedure that it’s unrecognizable.

It’s unusual, yes, but not unheard of for prosecutors to present a case to a grand jury without a recommendation to indict. Regardless, who could really object to a grand jury hearing everything in such a sensitive case? If any of the evidence were excluded that, surely, would have been the basis of other howls of an intolerably stacked deck.

It’s a further travesty, according to the Left, that Officer Wilson was allowed to testify to the grand jury. Never mind that it is standard operating procedure. As former prosecutor Andrew McCarthy points out, guilty parties usually don’t testify because they have to do it without their lawyer present and anything they say can be used against them.

It is also alleged that the prosecutor McCulloch is biased because his father was a cop who was killed by a criminal. Follow this argument though to its logical conclusion and McCulloch would be unable to handle almost all cases, because of his engrained bias against criminality.

Finally, there is the argument that Wilson should have been indicted so there could be a trial “to determine the facts.” Realistically, if a jury of Wilson’s peers didn’t believe there was enough evidence to establish probable cause to indict him, there was no way a jury of his peers was going to convict him of a crime, which requires the more stringent standard of beyond a reasonable doubt.

Besides, we don’t try people for crimes they almost certainly didn’t commit just to satisfy a mob that will throw things at the police and burn down local businesses if it doesn’t get its way. If the grand jury had given into the pressure from the streets and indicted as an act of appeasement, the mayhem most likely would have only been delayed until the inevitable acquittal in a trial.

The agitators of Ferguson have proven themselves proficient at destroying other people’s property, no matter what the rationale. This summer, they rioted when the police response was “militarized” and rioted when the police response was un-militarized. Local businesses like the beauty-supply shops Beauty Town (hit repeatedly) and Beauty World (burned on Monday night) have been targeted for the offense of existing, not to mention employing people and serving customers.

Liberal commentators come back again and again to the fact that Michael Brown was unarmed and that, in the struggle between the two, Officer Wilson only sustained bruises to his face, or what Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo calls an “irritated cheek.” The subtext is that if only Wilson had allowed Brown to beat him up and perhaps take his gun, things wouldn’t have had to escalate.

There is good reason for a police officer to be in mortal fear in the situation Officer Wilson faced, though. In upstate New York last March, a police officer responded to a disturbance call at an office, when suddenly a disturbed man pummeled the officer as he was attempting to exit his vehicle and then grabbed his gun and shot him dead. The case didn’t become a national metaphor for anything.

Ferguson, on the other hand, has never lacked for media coverage, although the narrative of a police execution always seemed dubious and now has been exposed as essentially a fraud. “Hands up, don’t shoot” is a good slogan. If only it was what Michael Brown had done last August.

al Aqsa Mosque, Core of Hostilities

Posted on November 26, 2014November 26, 2014 by Denise Simon

The Al Aqsa Libel: A Brief History

Posted By Kenneth Levin On November 26, 2014

Repeated claims in recent weeks by Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas that Israel was attacking or otherwise threatening the Al Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount, and Abbas’s calls for Palestinians and other Muslims to take action to defend Al Aqsa and “purify” the Temple Mount, have been a key factor in the latest spate of deadly Arab assaults on Israelis. Other PA officials have echoed and elaborated on Abbas’s message, with some calling explicitly for murdering Jews in response to supposed provocations against Al Aqsa. Palestinian Authority media have conveyed the same message, punctuated by cartoons depicting Jews attacking Al Aqsa and Palestinians defending it. A number of those involved in the assaults against Jews in Jerusalem and elsewhere have asserted that they were acting in response to the calls of their leaders to protect Al-Aqsa. The false claims of Jewish threats against or damage to Al Aqsa have a long pedigree. They have been made by Abbas many times in the past and were a staple of Yasser Arafat’s screeds against Israel and against Jews more generally. Arafat labeled the terror war he launched in 2000 the “Al Aqsa Intifada.” He did so to cast the onslaught not as an aggressive campaign of mass murder of Israelis but as a struggle in defense of the Islamic holy site and to render the war not simply one of Palestinian pursuit of Israel’s destruction but as an Islamic fight against hostile, Al Aqsa-defiling non-believers. But such anti-Jewish libels have a still older history, pre-dating Arafat, pre-dating Israel’s gaining control over the Old City of Jerusalem in 1967, even pre-dating Israel’s creation. In 1929, during the British Mandate, the rabidly anti-Jewish, British appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini, claimed that Jews were threatening Al-Aqsa and sought to end Jewish prayer at the Western Wall (a Temple Mount retaining wall, which had become a place of Jewish prayer in the context of Jews being barred from ascending to the Temple Mount itself – the site of the First and Second Temples – for much of the preceding 2,000 years). According to the Mufti, the Western Wall was an Islamic holy place and Jewish prayer there was both an affront to Islam and a step towards Jewish attacks against Al-Aqsa. The Mufti is also reported to have distributed doctored photographs showing a damaged Al-Aqsa, with claims that the Jews were responsible. The Mufti’s incitement was accompanied by calls for the murder of Jews as revenge. Ensuing attacks by Arab mobs in Jerusalem and elsewhere in Mandate territory resulted in the death of 133 Jews and major injury to over 200 others. The most severely affected community was that of Hebron, where 64 Jews were slaughtered and another 85 injured. British authorities did virtually nothing to stop the attacks. They did evacuate the surviving Jews from Hebron. They also exonerated the Mufti from any responsibility for the murders and took almost no steps against those who actually carried out the carnage. (Only in 1937,when The Mufti began to instigate attacks against British forces, did the authorities seek to arrest him. El-Husseini, however, escaped and fled the Mandate, eventually making his way to Berlin, where he spent much of World War II as Hitler’s guest. Among his activities while in Europe were recruiting Balkan Muslims and Muslims in Nazi-occupied Soviet territory to Nazi SS units and broadcasting in Arabic to the Middle East and north Africa calling on Arabs to support the Nazis and to destroy the Jews in their midst.) Abbas has praised the Mufti as an inspiring hero of the Palestinian cause worthy of emulation. In reality, far from threatening Al Aqsa, Israel has repeatedly bowed to Arab claims of exclusive rights on the Temple Mount. In the wake of Israel’s gaining control of the Old City and the Temple Mount in 1967, the Israelis, with then defense minister Moshe Dayan delineating the policy, granted the Muslim religious authority, the Waqf, control over the Temple Mount. Jews would be allowed access to the Mount but forbidden to pray there. Christians and other non-Muslims would also be allowed access. The Israel Antiquities Authority was to oversee any construction or other physical changes on the Mount that would have an impact on this most sensitive of archaeological sites. The prohibition of Jewish prayer on the Mount has been strictly enforced by Israeli governments. While there is increasing support among Israelis for a small area of the Mount – far from Al Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock – to be set aside for Jewish prayer, no such arrangement has won government backing. Furthermore, Jewish and other non-Muslim visitors to the Temple Mount have commonly been harassed by Waqf guards and other Muslims, and Israeli officials have responded typically not by countering such harassment but by restricting non-Muslim access. Also, particularly between 1999 and 2001, the Waqf, in the context of establishing and expanding additional places of Muslim worship on the Mount and seeking to destroy evidence of historic Jewish (and Christian) connection to the Mount, brought heavy earth-moving equipment onto the Mount and dug up and hauled away thousands of tons of material. This material contained the remains of structures and other relics from pre-Muslim epochs, most notably from the First and Second Temple periods. In the context of any archaeological excavation of such a sensitive and historically rich site, the work would have been approached with archaeologists’ hand trowels and brushes. Yet the Israeli government – led for most of this period by Ehud Barak – did nothing to block this desecration of the Temple Mount, and the Israel Antiquities Authority likewise did nothing. A broad coalition of Israelis, drawn from across the nation’s political and religious spectra and including such luminaries as Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, formed “The Council for the Prevention of Destruction of Antiquities on the Temple Mount” and urged the Barak government to stop the desecration, but to little avail. So the Al Aqsa libel stands truth on its head: Muslim supremacism on the Temple Mount has not only been maintained since Israel gained control of the Old City, but has been expanded through aggressive Muslim actions and general Israeli acquiescence. Bur the anti-Jewish libel lives on, because it, and the violence it generates, serve its purveyors. Abbas uses it to build up his own anti-Israel and anti-Jewish bonafides against the popularity of Hamas among Palestinians. He also employs it to draw wider Arab attention away from the bloody chaos enveloping much of the Arab world, chaos that has led some Arab leaders to at least temporarily relate to Israel as an ally confronting shared threats. Abbas seeks to resurrect the focusing of Arab enmity on Israel. Abbas is also using the Al Aqsa libel and the accompanying bloodletting to advance his pursuit of UN and European “recognition” and international pressure on Israel for unilateral concessions, particularly withdrawal to the indefensible pre-1967 armistice lines. Abbas, like Arafat before him, seeks to achieve Israeli withdrawal while avoiding any bilateral agreement with Israel that would entail formal acceptance of Israel’s legitimacy within any borders. The Grand Mufti’s Al Aqsa libel and his incitement to the murder of Jews ultimately served him well. An investigating commission sent from London found the Arabs fully responsible for the bloodshed but then recommended steps be taken against the Jews so as to assuage Arab hostility, steps that violated Britain’s obligations to the Jewish community under the terms of its League of Nations mandate. European and some American media coverage of the recent violence, and the reactions of United Nations officials, various European governments and, with rare exception, the Obama administration, downplay or ignore entirely Abbas’s cynical use of the libel and incitement of murderous violence. Some distort the realities surrounding the violence into an indictment of Israel. And so again the libel and its murderous fallout redound to the perpetrator’s gain. If you need more:

This past week Israel’s south remained quiet, with two exceptions. In Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem the violence continues, partially to show solidarity with Al-Aqsa mosque. Rocks and stones are thrown, as are Molotov cocktails, and there have been stabbing and vehicular attacks. Hamas continues its anti-Israeli incitement campaign, while senior PA and Fatah figures claim Israel is responsible for the rioting and violence.
In recent weeks the Israel Security Agency exposed a Hamas terrorist squad whose members had served prison sentences in Israeli in the past. They planned to assassinate Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and had already begun gathering operational intelligence and preparing weapons.

Iran ‘Richer’ Today Due to John Kerry

Posted on November 24, 2014November 24, 2014 by Denise Simon

The legacy of the Obama administration will not be Obamacare, it will not be amnesty, it will be eliminating America’s enemies and Iran has become the closest ally to the U.S. State Department under the edict of the White House with John Kerry leading the charge.

Obama wrote a letter to the Mullahs back in 2008 as he became the presidential nominee. The letters to the Ayatollahs continued and open talks have continued such that John Kerry led the charge to move the needle to stop the Iranian nuclear weapons program. The expiration date for the agreement was today and they failed. The talks have now officially been extended another 7 months.

Iran is a state sponsor of terror and has been an avowed enemy of the United States going back to the late 70’s but John Kerry has dismissed all the history. A deal with Iran or no deal with Iran on their nuclear weapons program is bad news either way….the point is the program needs to be destroyed, there is and never was a peaceful nuclear program.

Each day that passes, Iran’s centrifuges continue to spin putting a nuclear warhead only months away. Iran does have everything to hide and to lie about such that Iran refuses the International Atomic Energy Agency access for inspections which has been agreed to and performed in the past and often.

There is a nuclear arms race in the Middle East and not only is Israel in jeopardy with its virtual existence but Saudi Arabia is also.

The story gets worse however as additional sanctions against Iran have been lifted. Some early sanctions were lifted just to get Iran to the negotiation table, and indeed since many months have passed with no resolution, additional sanctions were lifted by John Kerry to keep Iran at the table for the next 7 months.

Iran’s economy has been slipping from stability for a very long time due to effective sanctions, but their economy has received huge positive money shots due to lifted sanctions but now it gets better for them as additional sanctions will provide Iran with an economic income of seized monies up to $700 million a month. Iran has been rewarded for bad behavior and for stonewalling talks, hence John Kerry is either being a naïve dupe or a willing participant in allowing Iran’s to thrive.

Now the question is what will occur during the 7 months of extended talks? Could Saudi Arabia get involved to stop the enrichment? Will Israel be drafting war plans? Will John Kerry continue on a fool’s errand during the next 7 months to keep the talks viable and will they ultimately fail then?

Congress has been purposely left out of the loop of the talks yet they are in fact aware of some conditions. This is a time they will use once the 114th Congress is seated in January to stop the madness, pass additional irrevocable sanctions and the division in Congress and the State Department will continue.

All sides have been working from a thin ‘framework‘ such that Iran had little to do for compliance and now Iran is asking for a secondary framework to be developed.

It is going to be difficult in coming months due to continued military sequestration, the expanding footprint in Afghanistan, the expanding footprint in Iraq, a new Congress and then immigration. 2015 will not start off well.

Question is who is gonna notice and be proactive?

Prisons, Cells for Terrorism

Posted on November 21, 2014November 21, 2014 by Denise Simon

On March 10, 2003, Senator Charles Schumer wrote a letter to the OIG requesting that we examine the BOP’s process for selecting Muslim chaplains based on concerns that the BOP relies solely on two Islamic groups to endorse its Muslim chaplains, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences (GSISS). Schumer noted that the ISNA and the GSISS allegedly are connected to terrorism and promote Wahhabism, which some consider an exclusionary and extreme form of Islam. In addition to Senator Schumer, Senators Jon Kyl and Dianne Feinstein expressed similar concerns and asked the OIG to examine these issues as they relate to the BOP.

OIG interviewed the BOP’s ten Muslim chaplains, the BOP detailee to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) National Joint Terrorism Task Force (NJTTF), and officials at BOP Headquarters who are responsible for religious services providers, including the Chief of the Chaplaincy Services Branch and the Senior Deputy Assistant Director (SDAD) of the Correctional Programs Division. We also interviewed FBI counterterrorism officials and representatives of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom at the U.S. Department of State (Commission). Read more here.

Years later, prisons are in fact terror cells and no solution is in sight.

U.S. Prisons Churning Out Thousands Of Radicalized Inmates

Joy Brighton published a profound piece.

Back in 2006, then FBI director Robert Mueller prophetically described the radical Islamist conversion machine operating throughout U.S. prisons, to a Senate committee. He said that prisons were a “fertile ground” for Islamic extremists, and that they targeted inmates for introduction to the militant Wahhabi and Salafist strains of Islam.

The recent so-called “lone wolf” terrorist attacks in Oklahoma City, New York, and just over our northern border in the Canadian capital of Ottawa, may be the product of such radicalization.

In April 2010, Larry James murdered his mother, pregnant wife, 7-month-old son, 3-year-old niece and 16-year-old niece for refusing to convert to Islam. James converted in 2007, while in a U.S. prison.

Then two months ago Colleen Hufford, a 54-year-old grandmother and factory worker in Oklahoma, was beheaded with a produce knife by Alton Nolen who likely converted to Islam in a U.S. prison. Nolen is being charged with workplace violence.

Last month NYPD officer Kenneth Healey, 25, was axed to death with a hatchet to the side of the head. He was not attacked by a “lone wolf,” but by ex-con Zale Thompson. New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton has called it a terrorist attack, and the NYPD might want to look at Thompson’s record in California where he did two brief terms in California prisons.

The statistics are staggering, and woefully out of date. One out of three African-American inmates in U.S. prisons convert to Islam while incarcerated.

This statistic is no longer limited to African-Americans in prison. The Huffington Post reported an estimated 35,000 – 40,000 inmates convert to Islam each year, and that 15 percent of the total U.S. prison population or 350,000 inmates are Muslim.

This is more than 18 times the national representation of Muslims in America, reported to be 0.8 percent. Prisons are churning out converts to Islam who are taught they are righteously entitled to control the religion, speech, and dress of family, co-workers and strangers.

The key to conversion success is clear. Our government has been contracting and paying Muslim Brotherhood front groups, such as GSISS (The Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences) and ISNA (Islamic Society of North America) to screen and assign Muslim prison chaplains for at least 8 years.

While Egypt and Saudi Arabia have banned the Muslim Brotherhood, classifying it as a terror group, the White House, U.S. prisons, and the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security continue to work with Muslim Brotherhood groups.

For example, Paul Pitts served 14 years in prison for murder, where he converted to Islam and became Imam Abdu-Shahid. He was paroled in 2001 and hired as a prison chaplain in 2007 with an annual salary of $49,471. In Feb 2010, he was caught trying to bring scissors and razor blades into the Manhattan Detention Complex.

A New York City corrections department source told the New York Post: “It’s a disgrace that taxpayers are funding Muslim chaplains who not only have criminal records, but also are promoting violence.”

Abdu-Shahid’s boss – head chaplain Umar Abdul-Jalil – was hired at an annual salary of $76, 602 even though he served 14 years for dealing drugs. In 2006, he was suspended for two weeks without pay after declaring that “the greatest terrorists in the world occupy the White House.” He continues to oversee 40 prison chaplains.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Wallace Gene Marks converted under Imam Umar while in prison for weapon possession. He was hired as a one of the first paid Muslim chaplains in 1975 and has hired nearly 45 chaplains. Imam Umar says that prison “is the perfect recruitment and training grounds for radicalism and the Islamic religion” and that 9/11 hijackers should be honored as martyrs. “Funded by the Saudi government he traveled often to Saudi Arabia and brought that country’s harsh form of Islam to New York’s expanding ranks of Muslim prisoners.”

Just after 9/11, Aminah Akbar, a veteran female Muslim chaplain, told a crowd of 100 inmates at the Albion Correctional Facility for women that Osama bin Laden “is a soldier of Allah,” and added, “I am not an American, and I just live here.”

A New York City Corrections source told the New York Post: ”It’s a disgrace that taxpayers are funding Muslim chaplains who not only have criminal records, but also are promoting violence. “Ignoring these red flags under the aegis of political correctness is literally killing us.”

We must demand that the religion of Islam be separated from the totalitarian politics of Sharia-ism. Sharia-ism, like Soviet Communism and Nazism is bent on global control by silencing criticism and working within an unsuspecting political system to eventually overthrow it. Our taxpayer funded prisons have been co-opted by the leaders of Sharia-ism in America, the Muslim Brotherhood. More silence will likely mean the death of more innocent Americans.

Joy Brighton is author of Sharia-ism is Here: The Battle to Control Women and Everyone Else.

Amnesty Speech Full of Lies

Posted on November 21, 2014November 21, 2014 by Denise Simon

If you think that Barack Obama is governing the United States in the best interest of the nation you would be wrong. If you think he is leading, you would be wrong. Barack Obama reacts to only pressure from special interest and none was more poignant that the 15 minute speech he gave on November 15, 2014. This speech not only was full of distortions and omissions but was driven by several factors including powerbrokers speaking on behalf of illegals. If there is any question about how the speech came to be that Obama delivered last night, then click here for who was behind the event.

The law of unintended consequences are still to be determined. Just one consequence of Obama’s action goes back to Jonathan Gruber. He has been fast at work for years giving opaque points on Obamacare, but here is how illegals will be part of the healthcare system on your tax dollars.

Now for the speech, even the Associated Press delivered the Pinocchio report.

FACT CHECK: Obama’s claims on illegal immigration

By ALICIA A. CALDWELL and ERICA WERNER
Associated PressWASHINGTON (AP) – President Barack Obama made some notable omissions Thursday night in his remarks about the unilateral actions he’s taking on immigration.

A look at his statements and how they compare with the facts:

OBAMA: “It does not grant citizenship, or the right to stay here permanently, or offer the same benefits that citizens receive – only Congress can do that. All we’re saying is we’re not going to deport you.”

THE FACTS: He’s saying, and doing, more than that. The changes also will make those covered eligible for work permits, allowing them to be employed in the country legally and compete with citizens and legal residents for better-paying jobs.

___

OBAMA: “Although this summer, there was a brief spike in unaccompanied children being apprehended at our border, the number of such children is now actually lower than it’s been in nearly two years.”

THE FACTS: The numbers certainly surged this year, but it was more than a “brief spike.” The number of unaccompanied children apprehended at the border has been on the rise since the 2011 budget year. That year about 16,000 children were found crossing the border alone. In 2012, the Border Patrol reported more than 24,000 children, followed by more than 38,800 in 2013. In the last budget year, more than 68,361 children were apprehended.

___

OBAMA: “Overall, the number of people trying to cross our border illegally is at its lowest level since the 1970s. Those are the facts.”

THE FACTS: Indeed, in the 2014 budget year the Border Patrol made 486,651 arrests of border crossers, among the fewest since the early 1970s. But border arrests have been on the rise since 2011.

The decline in crossings is not purely, or perhaps even primarily, due to the Obama administration. The deep economic recession early in his presidency and the shaky aftermath made the U.S. a less attractive place to come for work. The increase in arrests since 2011 also can be traced in part to the economy – as the recovery improved, more people came in search of opportunity.

___

OBAMA: “When I took office, I committed to fixing this broken immigration system. And I began by doing what I could to secure our borders.”

THE FACTS: He overlooked the fact that he promised as a candidate for president in 2008 to have an immigration bill during his first year in office and move forward on it quickly. He never kept that promise to the Latino community.

___

Associated Press writers Calvin Woodward and Jim Kuhnhenn contributed to this report.

EDITOR’S NOTE _ An occasional look at political claims that take shortcuts with the facts or don’t tell the full story.

Then the Wall Street Journal delivered their summary of the immigration speech. Obama centered the speech and actions only around himself.

I, Barack

The immigration order is an abuse of power that fails as a policy reform.

President Obama ’s decision to legalize millions of undocumented immigrants by his own decree is a sorry day for America’s republic. We say that even though we agree with the cause of immigration reform. But process matters to self-government—sometimes it is the only barrier to tyranny—and Mr. Obama’s policy by executive order is tearing at the fabric of national consent.

The first question to address is Mr. Obama’s legal rationale. At least he finally rolled out a memo from the experts on presidential power in the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel, but it’s fair to wonder how much time he gave them. The OLC made its justification public about an hour before the speech.

The President’s rationale is “prosecutorial discretion,” but he is stretching that legal concept beyond normal understanding. The executive branch does have discretion about whom to prosecute. But this typically extends to individual cases, or to setting priorities due to limited resources such as prosecuting cocaine but not marijuana use.

Mr. Obama claims he is using his discretion to focus on such high deportation priorities as criminals, but he is going much further and is issuing an order exempting from deportation entire classes of people—as many as five million. Justice’s OLC memo claims there is no such categorical exemption, and that immigration officials can still deport someone if they want to, but the memo offers no measures by which to make that “complex judgment.” In practice it will almost never happen.

The Reagan and Bush precedents cited by the Obama lawyers are different in kind and degree. They involved far fewer people and they were intended to fulfill the policy set by Congress—not, as Mr. Obama intends, to defy Congress. That is why their actions were done with little controversy.

Mr. Obama is issuing his order amid furious political opposition and after his own multiple previous declarations that he lacks legal authority. “If we start broadening that [his 2012 order for undocumented children], then essentially I’ll be ignoring the law in a way that I think would be very difficult to defend legally,” Mr. Obama said on Telemundo in September 2013. Until now.

While we favor generous immigration, Mr. Obama’s order also fails as policy because it won’t reduce the economic incentive that drives illegal immigration. The only way to reduce the flow of illegal migrants is to offer enough legal ways to work in the U.S. and then return home.

His unilateral order will encourage more migrants to come in hope of a future amnesty, without matching the ebb and flow of migration to America’s changing labor market demands. His order also offers no prospect of future citizenship, creating a laboring class with less of a stake in American institutions—and less incentive to assimilate.

The politics of immigration is already fraught, and Mr. Obama’s order will make it worse. He is empowering the most extreme anti-immigrant voices on the Republican right, which may be part of his political calculation.

Mr. Obama wants Democrats to get political credit with Hispanics for legalization, while goading the GOP into again becoming the deportation party in 2016. Hillary Clinton would love that, which explains why Bill Clinton is already backing Mr. Obama’s order. Mark this down as one more way in which this President has become the Great Polarizer.

How should Republicans respond? They can use their own constitutional powers without falling into Mr. Obama’s political trap. Impeachment is a fool’s errand that would change the political subject and fail. The power of the purse is an obvious tool now that the GOP will soon control the Senate, but that will require patience and unity to prevail over Mr. Obama’s vetoes.

The best GOP revenge would be to trump him on immigration. Before Mr. Obama’s decree, smart Republicans were discussing a legislative strategy focusing on piecemeal immigration reforms. Separate bills addressing individual problems (border security, agriculture and tech visas) could pass with rotating majorities that show the GOP has immigration solutions of its own. Some bills might get to Mr. Obama’s desk, forcing him to reveal his cynical political hand if he uses his veto to block durable reform.

We realize this won’t be easy, especially as many on the anti-immigrant right will want an immediate strategy to defund the President’s order. But another Pickett’s charge up Shutdown Hill is exactly what Mr. Obama wants. Republicans need to keep the focus on Mr. Obama’s abuse of power while showing voters they have better immigration solutions.

***

The polls show the American people are uneasy about Mr. Obama’s unilateral law-making, and liberals should be too. Mr. Obama is setting a precedent that Republican Presidents could also use to overcome a Democratic majority. How about an order to the IRS not to collect capital-gains taxes on inflated gains from property held for more than a decade? That policy would be broadly popular and also address a basic lack of fairness.

Mr. Obama’s rule-by-regulation has already been rebuked more than once by the Supreme Court. His “I, Barack” immigration decree is another abuse that will roil American politics and erode public confidence in the basic precepts of self-government.