Mayor Calls for Gaza Ceasefire As His City Spirals the Drain

(UnitedVoice.com) – Chicago City Council has just wasted time, and taxpayers’ money, passing a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Cynics might think they’d have been better calling for a ceasefire in Chicago. While virtue-signaling councilmen vote on meaningless resolutions with no power to change anything, crime in their own city is surging out of control.

On January 31, three teenagers were shot, one fatally, near a high school in the Edgewater neighborhood of Chicago. No suspects have been arrested so far, but cops believe the teens — one of them under 15 years old — were deliberately targeted.

Meanwhile, while children were being gunned down on their streets, the Chicago City Council was solemnly voting on whether Israel and Hamas should end the fighting over 6,000 miles away in Gaza. The council initially tied 23-23, but Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) saved the day by stepping in with his casting vote, pushing the resolution over the line.

Of course, he didn’t really save the day at all; Chicago City Council has no power to end the war in Gaza, and the only people who do have that power don’t care what Chicago’s Democrat political machine thinks. Israel has offered a ceasefire multiple times if Hamas releases the hostages it’s still holding. Hamas has refused every time.

Meanwhile, last year, there were 647 homicides in Chicago, 567 of whom were shot dead. Thirty-four people were murdered in the city in January, and 121 more were shot and wounded. The city has averaged a homicide a day for the last week. Chicago Police Department responded to 37 shooting incidents between January 22-28, two more than the same period last year.

Between midnight and 2 a.m. on New Year’s Day, automated surveillance system ShotSpotter detected 9,639 rounds fired in Chicago. Many Chicagoans are furious that the city council is wasting its time grandstanding about the Middle East when people are dying in huge numbers in their own city — a problem it could actually do something about — if it wanted to.