Displaying posts published in

July 2018

Why Israel’s Nation-State Law Matters BY: David Isaac

https://freebeacon.com/blog/israels-nation-state-law-matters/

On Tuesday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared that the “spirit of Hitler has been revived, Israel is the most fascist and racist state.” He then called on—well, everybody—”to work against Israel.” What sent Erdogan into orbit was Israel’s newly minted Nation-State Law, which passed last week by a vote of 62 to 55 after a boisterous Knesset debate lasting over eight hours.

The law declares the Land of Israel is the Jewish people’s historic homeland. It identifies symbols of the state—the flag with its Star of David, the menorah, the national anthem Hatikvah (“the Hope”). It codifies certain official holidays like the Sabbath, recognizes Hebrew as the official language and proclaims encouragement for Jewish immigration and Jewish settlement.

Much of this sounds ho-hum. The law in good part is a reprise of Israel’s Declaration of Independence, which proclaims that it is the “natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State.”

Nevertheless, the Nation-State Law is significant:

1) It gives the 1948 declaration the force of law. As the first president of Israel’s Supreme Court said: “The Declaration expresses the vision and credo of the people; but it is not a constitutional law making a practical ruling on the upholding or nullification of various ordinances and statutes.”

For many years, Israeli legal scholars have called for turning the Declaration into a Basic law—Basic Laws in Israel have greater force than other laws as they cannot be easily overturned. Israel has about a dozen such laws. They are akin to a Bill of Rights in a country that has yet to pass a constitution.

My Collusion Confusion By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/andrew-mccarthy-collusion-comments-fox-news-clarification/

In response to Paging Andy McCarthy

It’s bad enough that I botched what I intended to say on Laura Ingraham’s show last night (and what I think I was pretty clear about if you actually watched the interview). But mea maxima culpaif I’ve confused Jonah by the rest of what I said. And if there’s a three-strikes-and-you’re-out law, I’m going down in flames on that, too: This morning, when I found out to my surprise and annoyance that I’d misspoken, I considered posting another tweet to make it crystal clear that I have never changed my position on the Trump Tower meeting. Specifically, I was going to tweet out this column again . . . but I got distracted by a phone call and never got around to it.

Too bad, because maybe I could have saved Jonah some time.

I won’t belabor what I’ve already corrected on Twitter (a correction I am grateful to Jonah for including). I have a bad habit of interrupting myself, particularly at the start of a sentence when I change my mind about how best to say something. When I did that last night, the garble resulted in what appears (if a dash is not inserted where I interrupted myself) to be a sentence that stands for the opposite of what I was arguing. Enough said.

Now, on to my confusion of collusion.

It is a challenge in a time-crunched television interview, with people occasionally talking over one another, to explain complex issues and distinctions adequately. I offer this in mitigation, not as an excuse. I’ve been harping on the distinction between “collusion” and “conspiracy” from the beginning. Since I criticize others for conflating the two, I have an added obligation to avoid that error myself, even when pressed for time. I didn’t do that well enough last night. When I said that turning to a foreign government for campaign dirt was not “collusion,” I meant it was not the collusion that is the rationale for the Trump-Russia investigation — specifically, the cyber-espionage conspiracy to influence the 2016 campaign.

Kim Brooks:Motherhood in the Age of Fear Women are being harassed and even arrested for making perfectly rational parenting decisions. See note please

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/27/opinion/sunday/motherhood-in-

Teachers and parents who subject their children to gender confusion including hormone treatments, or those who subject infant girls to barbaric genital mutilation are not arrested….rsk

CHICAGO — I was on my way home from dropping my kids off at preschool when a police officer called to ask if I was aware there was an outstanding warrant for my arrest.

“No, no,” I told him. “I didn’t know that.”

I needed to call my husband, but my fingers were shaking. I don’t remember if I was crying when he answered, only that he was saying he couldn’t understand me, that I needed to calm down, to tell him what had happened.

What happened began over a year before on a cool March day in 2011, at the end of a visit with my parents in Virginia. I needed to run an errand before our flight home to Chicago, and my son, then 4, didn’t want to get out of the car.

“Come on,” I said.

“No, no, no! I wait here.”

I took a deep breath. I knew what I was supposed to do. But I was tired. I was late. I didn’t want, at that moment, to deal with a meltdown. And there was something else: a small, quiet voice I’d been hearing more and more lately. “Why?” the voice asked.

Why did I have to fight this battle? He wasn’t asking to Rollerblade in traffic. He just wanted to sit in the car. Why couldn’t I leave him, just this once?

If it had been warm out, I would have said no. I knew about how quickly a closed car can overheat, even on a 60-degree day. But it was cool and cloudy. I’d grown up in that same town in the 1980s and had spent hours waiting in the back seat of my parents’ station wagon, windows open, reading or daydreaming, while they ran errands. Had so much really changed since then?

So I told him I’d be right back. I cracked the windows and child-locked the doors and set the alarm. When I got back five minutes later, he was still playing his game, smiling. We picked up his sister and our suitcases back at my parents’ house and caught our flight home.

It took me a while to figure out what had taken place in the parking lot — that a stranger had watched me go into the store, recorded my son, recorded the license plate on my mother’s car and called 911. CONTINUE AT SITE