But when you compare black and white communities with similar education and poverty rates, there is still a huge disparity in crime.  At the end of the day, it comes down to personal decisions.  This is the 21st century.  Everyone knows if they stick their dick in someone without a condom, there is a high chance a baby comes out 9 months later.  People understand that a high school diploma is required to secure just about every job in this country.  You can't even join the Army without a diploma, and some jobs literally just require you to run copper wires or shoot guns at bad guys.  Not exactly the epitome of an intellectual challenge. 

Like you, I had shit growing up.  I never went hungry, but I went to public school in the poorest county in Ohio.  I still remember my 3rd grade teacher showing us slides on the overhead from the 1960s claiming Mars had vegetation that bloomed in the summer months, or school books in the mid-90s  written in the early 80s.  You don't need to be born with a silver spoon in your mouth to be successful.  But if you didn't know your father and choose to impregnate a woman and not be present when the child is born, you have no one to blame but yourself.

Until black american start making personal decisions that positively affect them and their progeny, no other laws or programs are going to have any positive effect.  A black man who was born to a single mother who practically abandoned him to go chase ethnic men while his grandparents raised him is now President of the most powerful country in the world.  Granted that is certainly an exception, but so is anyone becoming President.  But there's also a huge chasm of opportunity between selling rocks on the street and being the leader of the free world.

I don't know anything about the murderer, but I know Al Qaeda operatives are "allowed" to party to disguise themselves among westerners. This guy may be another loon like the Orlando shooter looking for attention. Only time will tell.

That's racist.  I mean, yes, when you look at cities with a similar poverty rate, yet different demographic makeup, you see reduced crime compared to blacks.  Yes, the most violent cities in America are also overwhelmingly black (Camden, NJ anyone?).  But because someone's great, great, great grandfather was a slave, that means they have to be violent.  Because Jim Crow ended in 1965 and limited to only the deep south, where most Blacks don't live, modern Blacks in the north suffer some intangible blight that forces a 50% high school graduation rate, 70% out of wedlock birth rate and a crime participation rate many times higher than any demographic.  What I'm trying to say is, black people aren't responsible for their individual or collective behavior in America, and you pointing out their personal actions is racist. 

I'm not defending the war in Iraq, but I'm also interested in being honest and calling out what it really did rather than what looks good on a meme.  I'm also being honest and admitting what everyone else secretly agrees on, and that is I care more for my family and countrymen than I do some foreigner who comes from a completely different culture and has no interests in embracing western values.  Multiculturalism is a crock of shit.  Not all cultures and beliefs are equal.  Japanese culture is different and it's cool to experience, but it's not fundamentally at odds with western values.  No one says 18th and 19th century slavery in the west was a good idea, so why is it okay in the 21st century if you live in the Middle East.

The west didn't kill millions of innocent arabs.  In every bombing raid we gave the civilian populace ample warning or made direct strikes on known jihadist targets.  Yes, some innocent life was lost, but that's the cost of every military action on this scale.  Had the jihadist and their sympathizers not enabled and continued a hostile environment, civilians wouldn't have been harmed.  I can't speak to the terrorist acts jihadist commit against their own people.

I'd much rather prefer a ground war around Babylon that forces them to face soldiers than continue to bury our collective heads in the sand while they infiltrate the west and bring their 6th century mindset with them.