RUTHFULLY YOURS

Not too long ago Democrats were America’s pro-Israel party. Harry Truman recognized Israel moments after the Jewish state declared independence in 1948. JFK sold advanced anti-aircraft missiles to Jerusalem, ending a de facto U.S. arms embargo. Bill Clinton was famously close to the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

If that party isn’t dead, it’s close. This week Bernie Sanders named James Zogby of the Arab-American Institute and professor Cornel West to the party’s platform-drafting committee. The pair are expected to push hard for a more “even-handed” position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which in practice means denouncing Israel at every turn.

Mr. West offered a flavor of his even-handedness on Facebook in 2014 during Israel’s last war with Hamas. “Let us not be deceived,” he wrote. “The Israeli massacre of innocent Palestinians, especially the precious children, is a crime against humanity! The rockets of Hamas indeed are morally wrong and politically ineffective—but these crimes pale in the face of the U.S. supported Israeli slaughters of innocent civilians.”

Mr. Zogby has prominently endorsed the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, calling it “a legitimate and moral response to Israeli policy.” BDS has gained steam in recent years on college campuses, where Palestinian victimology plays well and students are easily misled about the causes of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

These views go well beyond the usual bounds of fair criticism of Israel. No other country—including a genuine occupier like China in Tibet—is being singled out for boycotts the way Israel is. The suggestion that Israel deliberately “massacres” innocent Palestinians is false based on everything we know about Israel’s military restraint and war practices. If Palestinians wanted to end Israel’s occupation, they could have taken the deal offered to them at Camp David in 2000 when Bill Clinton was President. CONTINUE AT SITE

At a press conference at the G-7 summit in Japan on May 26, President Barack Obama declared that world leaders are “rattled” by Donald Trump, “and for good reason. Because a lot of the proposals that he’s made display either ignorance of world affairs or a cavalier attitude or an interest in getting tweets and headlines instead of actually thinking through what is required to keep America safe.”

This statement is remarkable not only for its eccentric syntax and convoluted logic. Obama assumes that 226 million Americans eligible to vote this year should take note of the fact that his G-7 colleagues—Messrs. Hollande, Trudeau, Abe et al—are unnerved, shocked, or put off by the Republican candidate, and that this should influence their decision next November. It should not: the election is an American affair, and it is offensive to suggest otherwise. Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and Jimmy Carter in 1980 could have made the same argument, yet for all their faults they sensed how impertinent it would have been to do so . . . but those were different times.

Obama’s statement is additionally irritating in view of the fact that three of his eight fellow-summiteers are unelected. Socialist Matteo Renzi is the third successive prime minister of Italy to be appointed through backroom deals in the country’s parliament; the last real “leader” to be elected to that post was Silvio Berlusconi, back in 2008. Luxemburger Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission, was nominated by the European Council in 2014 and duly confirmed by the “European Parliament,” an institution chronically devoid of democratic legitimacy. In that same year, former Polish prime minister Donald Tusk was appointed president of the European Council by the Council itself.

All three belong to the postnational, globalist elite class, so it is normal that they support Hillary Clinton. It is equally unsurprising that Obama cherishes their opinions. It is scandalous, however, that he expects to cajole American voters into taking those opinions to heart when deciding on who should be their next chief executive. Does Obama seriously expect us to assume that his fellow-“world leaders” are “actually thinking through what is required to keep America safe”?

One of my better moments as a manager came early in my first job as editor of a small newspaper, one that, as it turned out, was still (in the early 21st century) using a DOS-based publishing system dating from the first Reagan administration. My deputy editor offered to set aside an afternoon to instruct me in the eccentricities of the old system, and assured me that I should be able to master it in a short time. I had the old system, DOS terminals and all, in the dumpster by the end of the day.

Training the staff to use a modern desktop-publishing system wasn’t easy — the median age of my staff was about 58, and many had never used a mouse before — but it got done. The process was helped along by my publisher, who, foreseeing that the necessary technological changes might meet resistance from the staff, offered some helpful advice: “Fire them all.” As it turned out, I had to fire only one of them.

Oddly enough, I’d faced a similar problem training young editors in India in the late 1990s. The Indian upper class today is very technologically sophisticated, but at the time, my trainees, who came almost exclusively from well-to-do families, had a significant handicap: Most of them did not know their way around a computer keyboard, because they’d always had servants to do their typing for them. In Delhi, you could find professional freelance typists working outdoors, in the shade of a tree, with a manual typewriter on a folding card table. If you needed to fill out an official document such as a lease, you just walked down to the corner and had it done.

Technological change is a part of cultural change, and vice versa. I am in my early forties; when I try to explain to a colleague in his twenties that there was no web when I was in high school, that e-mail was an exotic thing reserved to hardcore nerds, and that only very rich people had mobile phones, I get that look that says: “That’s funny, Grandpa! Tell me more about the Dark Ages!” I feel like I should be talking about how we walked to school in eight feet of snow, uphill both ways.

Technological change becomes more difficult as you get older and the decreasingly elastic brain resists learning new things. I might write that you know you’re middle-aged when you dread an operating-system update rather than getting excited about it, but I suspect that we are only a few years away from people wondering what an operating-system update is, as though you were talking about something truly ancient, like a card catalogue or a fax machine.

It takes incentives to get people to embrace change and to put out the effort to do the work necessary to accommodate it. In the case of my newspaper staffers, there was a little bit of carrot (at least some of them understood that the acquisition of current skills would improve their future job prospects), but it was mostly stick, the threat of losing their positions and having to look for other work.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is 68 years old and not known as a technological sophisticate, went to extraordinary lengths to set up an offsite e-mail operation in the toilet of some obscure mom-and-pop firm in what seems to be, even by the account of the remarkably gentle State Department report, a fairly straightforward effort to avoid ordinary oversight. The attorney and commentator Mark Levin, among others, has made a fairly persuasive case that this is illegal, a violation of the Federal Records Act, which contemplates up to three years in prison for anyone who “willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, or destroys, or attempts to do so, or, with intent to do so takes and carries away any record, proceeding, map, book, paper, document, or other thing, filed or deposited with any clerk or officer of any court of the United States, or in any public office.”