I attended a very large pro-Israel rally at the Israeli Consulate in Los Angeles today. Numerus blocks were closed off.

First thing, whatever the media reports, there were more people there than they claim. To my untrained eye, there appeared to be many thousands. The crowd was tightly packed for blocks. There were so many people we found it hard to walk through to get closer to the speakers, so we stayed near the back.

After so much negative press and seeing the disgusting anti-Israel rallies everywhere — full of hatred and lies — it was a beautiful thing to see so many out to support Israel. We stood near a large Hispanic Christian group wearing tee-shirts in Spanish with a picture of a cross and a star of David. They held signs with slogans such as “Christians for Israel”. There were many Christians there supporting Israel. Israeli flags were everywhere as were American flags, and very effective posters asserting Israel’s right to safety and self- defense, and what constitutes a peace activist (not carrying murderous weapons or working for Hamas might be a good start).

My daughter and I had to park at least 5 blocks away after searching over 20 minutes for a space. While walking to the rally, we saw numerous cars drive by with huge Israeli flags flapping outside the window or sun roof. At first we had trouble hearing the speakers, though that was later fixed. I learned later that Governor Schwarzeneggar was there.

I heard Chuck Devore, who opened by having the crowd chant, “Free Gilad Shalit!” over and over. He said all the right things about security and the security lessons for America drawn from Israel’s experience with terror.

There were many speakers and I don’t know who most were. The only one who was jeered was the representative of Peace Now. Repeatedly people were told to just listen but my sense was the crowd was fed up with pie in the sky naive dreamers like Peace Now. With Israel in its current precarious position, people didn’t have the stomach to hear any kumbaya speech.

Two speeches really struck me. One was an evangelical preacher who shouted “Am Yisrael Chai” (The Jewish nation lives), and spoke about how Israel has 500,000,000 Evangelicals all over the world supporting it. He received great cheers from the crowd. Another Evangelical minister, from a Hispanic church, began his fiery talk — largely delived in Spanish — with “Viva Israel, Viva Israel, Viva Israel!!!” He said that he had hoped to get 100 from his church to come and more than 200 were there.

So about those numbers:  The LA Times reported that “hundreds” were there. Later in the same article, they mention that the LAPD estimated the crowd at 2200. So, I suppose it was 100′s — 22 of those hundreds to be precise. I am pretty sure, though, it was more than that. People were constantly coming and going, but I would think we were looking at a minum of 5,000 and probably more.

No surprises to any of you, but the crowd was sane.  There were no signs advocating ethnic cleansing, genocide or violent murder — all causes that the “peace” activists support. The world is morally confused and upside down, but I was glad today to see that there is a fierce love for Israel out there. It was a spirit lifter.

It turns out that Barack Obama might have been on to something with his bitterness speech. In case you’ve forgotten, he said:

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, a lot of them — like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they’ve gone through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, and they cling to guns, or religion, or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Where Obama got it wrong was that he focused on the wrong bitter people.  Down in Los Angeles, in the gun-ridden, crime-ridden, gang-ridden communities that taught that sprawling City, people are indeed getting increasingly bitter, although it’s a liberal government’s refusal to enforce the law that’s raising their ire:

When Jamiel Shaw Sr. stood up last week to call for a change in Special Order 40, it touched an already raw nerve in the black community. Shaw’s son, 17-year-old star football player Jamiel Shaw II, was gunned down within shouting distance of his house. The suspect, 19-year-old Pedro Espinoza, is an alleged gang member and an illegal immigrant. Special Order 40 has prevented law enforcement from probing the immigration status of some suspects and deporting criminals with dispatch. Even if Special Order 40 were modified, there’s no guarantee that Jamiel would still be alive, but to a community convinced that Latino-on-black racial violence is on the upswing, it’s still a matter of simple justice.

And that’s true despite the statistics Police Chief William Bratton (seconded by the Los Angeles Times) piled on the public table in recent weeks, numbers that back up the claim that, with the exception of young Shaw and a handful of other cases, the majority of the killings of blacks are by other blacks, not Latinos. That won’t ease black fears that some Latino gangs are bent on wiping them out.

The author of the above op-ed goes on to say that African-Americans are right to feel that this is all a racist thing, with the Hispanics trying to kill them because they’re black and the City government ignoring them because they’re black.  As to the first point, when one considers that gang warfare has been a fixture of American urban life practically since there were American urbs, I doubt that’s the case.  That is, the Hispanic gang members are gunning blacks down, not because they’re black, but simply because they’re the other gang, and this is a pure turf battle.

I also doubt that there is racism in the City’s response.  Instead, I suspect the City’s unwillingness to acknowledge black concerns this has more to do with a City wedded to a stupid liberal policy that makes it a haven for illegal immigrants (because liberals know that “no person is illegal.”)  To me, this snotty liberal attitude is evidenced by the fact that Bratton assured blacks that the policy is not a problem, since blacks are killing each other faster than Hispanics can.  In other words, what you’re seeing here isn’t racism run amok; it’s liberal politics and identity politics run amok.

In any event, I think the African-Americans in LA have the perfect right to be bitter that the City of Los Angeles does nothing about an influx of criminals into their communities, criminals who should be deported instantly before they get guns in their hands and victims in their sights.