RUTHFULLY YOURS

An Israeli organization called Breaking the Silence has released a report, based on statements made to it by Israeli soldiers, excoriating Israel’s conduct in last summer’s Gaza war. Matti Friedman explains why the report—which has received much media attention in the U.S.—lacks credibility and, more importantly, what is fundamentally wrong with Breaking the Silence itself:

I’ve been asked a few times about the “Breaking the Silence” report that is currently being played up by the international press, as is any report that fits the narrative of Israelis as war criminals. (Contradictory reports, like the recent one I posted here from two US military experts, are not considered news.) I hope that most intelligent people have stopped taking international press coverage of Israel too seriously. But there are a few things that are important to understand.

An incompetent prosecutor — or worse, a politically driven prosecutor who also happens to be incompetent — can do worse things than blow an important case. The more one scrutinizes the case against six Baltimore police officers said to be implicated in the death of Freddie Gray, the more one worries that the prosecution will cost lives.

I’ve recently explored the incoherent and patently politicized set of charges filed last Friday by Marilyn Mosby, the social-justice activist who doubles as the Maryland state’s attorney for Baltimore City. The prosecutor has alleged a second-degree “depraved heart” murder offense and other homicide charges that contradict her “depraved heart” theory. The complex case was rashly lodged before investigators had come close to completing their witness interviews and other reports. Ms. Mosby admitted, with clueless pride, that she’d filed a murder case because she heard “the call of ‘no justice, no peace’” from demonstrators across the country.

It isn’t every day that judges on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals declare themselves “shocked.” But that happened on Monday when an animated three-judge panel eviscerated the IRS and Justice Department during oral argument in a case alleging the agency delayed the tax-exempt application of a pro-Israel group due to its policy views.

In December 2009, Pennsylvania-based Z Street applied for 501(c)(3) status to pursue its pro-Israel educational mission. In July 2010, when the group called to check on what was taking so long, an IRS agent said that auditors had been instructed to give special attention to groups connected with Israel, and that they had sent some of those applications to a special IRS unit for additional review.

Z Street sued the IRS for viewpoint discrimination (Z Street v. Koskinen), and in May 2014 a federal district judge rejected the IRS’s motion to dismiss. The IRS appealed, a maneuver that halted discovery that could prove to be highly embarrassing. Justice says Z Street’s case should be dismissed because the Anti-Injunction Act bars litigation about “the assessment or collection of tax.” Problem is, Z Street isn’t suing for its tax-exempt status. It’s suing on grounds that the IRS can’t discriminate based on point of view.

The Freddie Gray death on April 19 while in Baltimore Police Department custody set off nights of violent and devastating protests by black residents who were arguably stoked up by members of the news media and the usual agitators. While the police officers and Republican governor of Maryland were severely criticized for their handling of the civil unrest, Baltimore’s Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, Police Commissioner Anthony Batts and Deputy Police Commissioner Garnell Green, who are all African Americans were portrayed as being reasonable for their actions which included telling police officers to “stand down” and failing to call the governor to deploy the National Guard.

The most frustrating part for a rational observer of the P5+1 negotiations with Iran is this: There is little doubt that Iran is lying, and will continue to lie, but that doesn’t seem to matter to those negotiating with it.

Rather than cause Tehran to capitulate by ratcheting up the pressure, the White House and its negotiating partners first eased the sanctions that had been compelling Tehran to negotiate and then effectively tabled the military option. Since then, they have made a seemingly unending catalog of tangible and irreversible concessions, to which the Iranians have responded with increased hostility. Yet, still the talks go on.

Today’s New York Times editorial on the Garland, Texas affair protests a bit too much. One might expect liberal journalists to express solidarity with their murdered colleagues at Charlie Hebdo. Instead, the Times offers outright condemnation:

“Some of those who draw cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad may earnestly believe that they are striking a blow for freedom of expression, though it is hard to see how that goal is advanced by inflicting deliberate anguish on millions of devout Muslims who have nothing to do with terrorism. As for the Garland event, to pretend that it was motivated by anything other than hate is simply hogwash.”

Not to quibble, but a cartoon contest in Garland, Texas, like the 2005 Mohammed caricatures in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten and the 2014 Charlie Hebdo depictions, only reached a large Muslim audience because Muslim organizations chose to make an issue of images that appeared in obscure publications with a small circulation. The cartoonists did not cause the anguish of millions of Muslims: Muslim authorities of various sorts elicited the anguish of their constituents by denouncing them. If Muslim leaders had ignored the cartoons, the millions of devout Muslims cited by the New York Times would have gone about their daily lives suffering anguish from another source: the cruel and inevitable encroachment of modernity on traditional life.

The Hillary Clinton campaign is now “coqueteando,” or flirting, with Hispanics. It must be part of a strategy to revive the Obama 2008 and 2012 voter turnout. It is also another sign that this campaign wants to avoid the media or answer questions about the Clinton Foundation.

According to Alexis Simendinger, Hillary is courting Hispanics with another scripted meeting:

In Clinton’s narrative, immigration reforms are a key plank in her family-centered economic agenda, as well as evidence of her enthusiasm for Obama’s controversial interpretations of his executive authority in the absence of congressional action.

It’s interesting, because she promises to use executive authority to accomplish her objectives.

There are a couple of problems with the latest Clintonian pandering.

First, a judge in Texas has already halted the latest executive order. So is Hillary Clinton planning to challenge another federal court?

“Ruffians, delinquents, hoods, punks, rioters, hooligans, bullies, culprits, scofflaws, hoodlums, lawbreakers, muggers — use whatever synonym you choose are being given a patina of respect by political charlatans.”

As I expected, a number of the college students I instruct took exception to the use of the word thug as applied to the individuals who created mayhem and madness in Baltimore last week. That “their” president used the term was of little import to these students.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary the word thug is “[o]ne of an association of professional robbers and murderers in India, who strangled their victims; phansigar.” In “1810 in Hist. & Pract. Thugs (1837) xxi. 329 [one reads] . . . that ‘Thugs’, [who robbed and murdered] infested the . . . the Upper Provinces.” In “1839 T. De Quincey 2nd Paper on Murder in Blackwood’s Mag. Nov. 668/2 [wrote] [a]t length came the toast of the day — Thugdom in all its branches.”

Robert Weissberg is a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Illinois. He is the author of twelve books on politics and pedagogy. He has published numerous papers in leading journals in political science.

Israel has the most powerful military in the Middle East. No Arab state would launch a 1973-style attack and those that do take up arms know full well that a traditional military victory in beyond reach. Nevertheless, you would never sense this intimidating power if one visited today’s university. Beating up Israel—calls for boycotts, disinvestments (the BDS movement) burning the Israeli flag, vandalism and the like have become a way of life and even repeated failure to accomplish anything hardly cools the hatred.

As one who has spent four decades teaching political science and observing Jewish life more generally, let me explain why this powerful nation is the campus punching bag.
The answer is quite simple: at least in the US, nobody physically fears Jews. The disjunction between Israeli military strength and campus weakness is breath-taking. Worse, the campus docility seems virtually hard-wired into American Jewish life. Jackie Mason tells of visiting Israel and for the first time in his life seeing tough Jews. His instinctive reaction: they had to be Mexicans.

Let’s talk about the Garland, Texas, attack by enforcers of Islamic law. Not the physical attack by two Muslim enforcers of Islamic law, but rather the figurative, hardly less virulent attacks by mainly Christian enforcers of Islamic law on cartoon contest organizer Pamela Geller, free speech activist and head of American Freedom Defense Initiative. Judging by the intensity of these ongoing attacks, Geller, a person of exceptional courage, is also extremely effective.

As with all things jihad, the physical attack on Geller’s day-long Mohammed cartoon event, which temporarily secured a small piece of the public square where Americans who so desired could exercise their speech free from Islamic law, followed patterns as old as Islam and as current as the latest news cycles all over the globe. For this reason, it is hard to imagine anyone was shocked by this characteristically Islamic attempt to kill rebels against Islamic law — surely not in the way that earlier, pre-Islamic generations of Americans might have been shocked, perhaps as late as 1989.

That was the year the great Western powers accepted and accommodated Iran’s “fatwa” — Islamic death sentence — against a British citizen named Salman Rushdie for publishing a novel mullahs in Tehran deemed “blasphemous” to Islam. (“Blasphemy” is a crime punishable by death, according to mainstream Islamic law. Remember Obama’s 2012 admonition: “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”) People forget, but not only did Rushdie then enter into a state-provided, hidden security bubble in England, but riots ensued, books were burned, bookstores were bombed, translators and publishers were assaulted and even killed — and that’s in the West, a.k.a (once upon a time) Christendom.