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Ruth King

The Scourge of Jewish Self-Division, or The ‘Court Jews’ Are Busy at Work By David Solway

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2023/03/27/the-scourge-of-jewish-self-division-or-the-court-jews-are-busy-at-work-n1681976

I have seen these people, and, behold, it is a stiffnecked people. (Exodus 32:9).

EXCERPTS

The Jewish epic across the wilderness of history may be described as divide and be conquered. Surah 59:14 of the Koran tells us something very true about us Jews: “There is much hostility between them: their hearts are divided…” It seems that the wise counsel of Judaism’s great sage Maimonides in the Mishneh Torah has no resonance for the backsliders: “All of Israel and those who are joined to it are to each other like brothers. If brother shows no compassion to brother, who will show compassion to him?”

Who, indeed? We see the sorry spectacle of division acting itself out today in the violent civil protests against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to reform a hard-core, self-appointing, Leftist Supreme Court, which regularly thwarts the will of legitimate right-wing governments. It was on this platform that Netanyahu was elected by a massive majority of the vote. But the Left is good at civil disruption. There have been resignations and firings of dissident members of the government and raging animosity against the prime minister for his perceived temerity in trying to overhaul the judicial system and redress a long-festering political sore. The Left is having none of it. Netanyahu’s critics argue that the plan is pushing Israel down a path to autocracy, a path they themselves appear to be treading.

Similarly, Melanie Phillips remarks that Netanyahu is reacting against the anti-democratic rule of an interventionist judicial activism, a system in which “judges have substituted politics and ideology for law,” superseding duly elected parliaments. Seen from a larger perspective, the demonstrations and irruptions express the principle of “liberal universalism that…would prefer rule by judges” who promulgate universal laws determined by the globalist Left over rule by an elected government administering the laws of the nation. Military and security professional Ben Kerido aptly comments in The Western Standard that “Israeli protests against Netanyahu resemble the American radical Left.” What we are observing, in my estimation, is another manifestation of the Court Jews at work.

This history of self-estrangement, political strife, and cultural rupture has been played out from the biblical era through the centuries of religious factionalism and reciprocal ex-communication culminating in our own epoch. The legacy of the celebrated Jewish philosopher Martin Buber and the equally acclaimed Jewish political writer Hannah Arendt, who could never forget their German patrimony and were corrosively suspicious of the Zionist project, has been broadly and unambiguously noxious. In the present moment we observe their offspring, that is, left-wing “peace activists,” liberal rabbis, “post-Zionist” intellectuals, power nabobs, social ingratiators — in other words, Court Jews — who strive to erode the Jewish character of the state of Israel and so deprive it of its legitimacy. The Jewish Left, as it dances around the golden calf of a utopian project, represents perhaps the gravest danger to the survival of the country.

Thus, its adherents pursue their fugitive merit, ignoring the rain clouds until they are drenched and catch pneumonia, as the 19th-century Jewish philosopher Max Nordau put it.

These are the “degraded” Jews whom the great Jewish patriot Vladimir Jabotinsky denounced. They are reminiscent of the spies that Moses sent out to reconnoiter enemy territory, ten of whom on returning compared themselves to frail grasshoppers before the fearsome Anakim and recoiled from their destiny (Numbers 13: 33). They do not understand, in the words of Nurit Greenger, that “Israel is the last station in the Jews’ Via Dolorosa” and that “beyond this station is the Jews’ final crucifixion,” nor do they realize how profoundly they themselves are at risk. They have forgotten that the Jewish sense of security is always a false sense of security, that over the past 2,000 years, as Melvin Konner points out in Unsettled: An Anthropology of the Jews, Jews have been expelled from 94 countries. They do not think to ask themselves why the future should be any different.

Man Who Stabbed Rand Paul Senate Aide in Broad Daylight Had Just Been Released from Prison By Victoria Taft

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2023/03/28/man-who-stabbed-rand-paul-senate-aide-in-broad-daylight-had-just-been-released-from-prison-n1682037

A staffer for Republican Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was stabbed “in broad daylight” by a man who had just been released from prison the day before. The unidentified staffer is in serious condition in a D.C. hospital.

Washington, D.C., has been growing more unsafe by the day because of local policies that reward criminal acts instead of punishing criminals. And this reality is getting better known because Capitol Hill workers are becoming more frequent victims of the Democrat-run city’s laissez-faire attitude about crime. Indeed, it nearly required a literal act of Congress and a presidential decree to get the woke city council to back off yet another easy-on-crime bright idea to reduce penalties for robberies and carjackings.

The New York Post reported that “the attack occurred on the same street as, and less than a mile away from, Rep. Angie Craig’s (D-Minn.) apartment building, where she was attacked by a crazed suspect with a long rap sheet inside the building’s lobby elevator last month.”

Liz Peek: Will the White House dump Fed Chair Jerome Powell?

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/3920055-will-the-white-house-dump-fed-chair-jerome-powell/

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wants to oust Jerome Powell. Last week she went after the Federal Reserve chair, saying in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press”: “My views on Jay Powell are well-known at this point. He has had two jobs. One is to deal with monetary policy. One is to deal with regulation. He has failed at both.”

It is hard to disagree with the Massachusetts senator, though Powell is certainly not the only one responsible for bringing us to the brink of recession. Democrats recklessly spent too much, heedless of the overheating economy, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has been AWOL throughout; and bank supervisors did a lousy job preventing problems even as alarm bells rang.

But Powell is in the driver’s seat and is coming under increased scrutiny. Democrats, worried that a recession could hurt them badly in the elections of 2024, need a scapegoat. But it’s not just Democrats who are critical of Powell’s actions.

Ed Hyman, Wall Street’s top economist and a generally optimistic fellow, wrote clients a cryptic message last week titled: “Not Good.” His email alert came the day after Powell announced another rate hike, of 25 basis points. 

Employers Need to Put the Squeeze on Woke Intolerance Young people like the Stanford students who heckled Kyle Duncan should be unemployable. Gerard Baker

https://www.wsj.com/articles/employers-need-to-put-the-squeeze-on-woke-intolerance-stanford-law-school-duncan-steinbach-free-speech-13f4ed90?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Stanford Law School’s career services website boasts the kind of professional opportunities the school’s graduates can expect when they venture beyond the safe spaces of the palm-speckled campus.

Ninety-seven of the nation’s top 100 law firms employ Stanford graduates as partners; 92 have Stanford alums as attorneys. For 48 consecutive years Stanford graduates have clerked on the Supreme Court. Microsoft, Google, Cisco and many other top firms have employed a graduate as general counsel.

So my question to the senior partners of law firms, corporate chief executives, judges and others who will employ these privileged people is: Do you stand with Jenny Martinez or do you cower behind Tirien Steinbach? Do you want your institutions to be places where the law is respected as the authority that mediates our disputes is blindfolded or are you going to continue to connive at the transformation of the law into a tool of the new identity-class struggle? Are you going to keep facilitating the degradation of the most basic of our freedoms—speech—or will you begin the long struggle against the controlling zeitgeist of totalitarianism?

Netanyahu announces freeze of judicial reforms PM officially announces that the judicial reform legislation will not be advanced during this Knesset session

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/369298

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered an address to the nation this evening (Monday) on the government’s planned judicial reforms.

“There is an extreme minority that is ready to tear our country into parts. It tends towards violence. It ignites fire. It threatens to harm elected officials. It talks about civil war. And it calls for insubordination, which is a terrible crime,” Netanyahu said.

“The State of Israel cannot exist without the IDF, and the IDF cannot exist with insubordination. Insubordination by one side will bring about insubordination on the other side. Insubordination is the end of our state. Therefore I demand that our security forces and the IDF’s commanders to oppose the phenomenon of insubordination. Not to contain it, not to understand it. To stop it,” he said.

“For three months, I have called for dialogue. I also said that I would leave no stone unturned in order to reach a solution. Because I remember, we remember, that we are not facing enemies: we are facing our brothers. I say here and now: we must not have a civil war.

“We are now on a path towards a very dangerous collision in Israeli society, which jeopardizes the basic unity between us, and such a crisis obligates all of us to act responsibly.

“Out of national responsibility, out of a desire to prevent a rift in the nation, I have decided to postpone the second third reading of the law in this session of the Knesset in order to give time to try to reach a wide agreement on the legislation in the next session of the Knesset. This way, we will bring about a reform that will restore the balance which has been lost, while maintaining and even strengthening human and individual rights,” he declared.

Who Says That Chance Rules in the Affairs of Men? Our foresight is always an adventure, practiced at the pleasure of the unpredictable. By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2023/03/26/who-says-that-chance-rules-in-the-affairs-of-men/

Some years ago, while driving into Boston to attend a conference on “Changing and Unchanging Values in the World of the Future,” I noticed a billboard advertising not the latest consumer gadget but a sage observation attributed to Winston Churchill.  “The farther backward you can look,” it said in large black letters, “the farther forward you are likely to see.” 

It seemed more than a coincidence that the conference I was attending was at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University.  Had some representative of that institution contrived to place Churchill’s fortifying admonition at the city gates?

I was disappointed to learn that the message had been arranged, not by the Pardee Center, but by some other civic-minded entity or individual. Nevertheless, if Churchill’s observation is not the motto of the Pardee Center, perhaps it should be.

The past does not provide a window overlooking the future, exactly; nothing short of clairvoyance can promise that. Nor is it even quite true, as George Santayana famously remarked, that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (I recently had something to say about that in this space.)

History is not a form of prophylaxis. But knowledge of history does acquaint us with the permanent moral and political alternatives that mankind confronts in its journey through time.

It reminds us, for example, how regularly tyranny masquerades as virtue, how inhumanity is apt to cloak itself in the rhetoric of righteousness. (This is not, as St. Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians reminds us, a new insight: “Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness; whose end shall be according to their works.”)

Above all, perhaps, knowledge of history can serve to temper our presumption. As I reflected on Churchill’s observation and the subject of the conference, I was struck anew by the large quota of optimism that language budgets into our lives.

The Real Meaning Of ‘Pro-Palestinian’ by Bassam Tawil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19532/meaning-of-pro-palestinian

Inviting Hamas and PIJ officials to participate in such events shows that the real aim of the so-called pro-Palestinian groups is not to help the Palestinians, but to incite and spread hate and libels against the only democracy in the Middle East: Israel.

[I]t sends a message to the Palestinians that the students and professors at the universities around the world support terrorism as a means to kill Jews and destroy Israel.

The participation of the terror leaders in the “Israel Apartheid Week” shows that the real intention of the anti-Israel groups on campus is not to criticize Israel, but to eliminate it.

If the “pro-Palestinian” groups really cared about the Palestinians, they would be speaking out against the repressive measures and human rights violations perpetrated by Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

It is hard to see how support for a mass murderer such as Soleimani and Iran’s proxy terror groups – Hamas, PIJ and Hezbollah – does anything good for the Palestinians. On the contrary, those who are empowering these terrorists are doing a massive disservice to the Palestinians, especially those who continue to suffer under the rule of Hamas and PIJ in the Gaza Strip.

Instead of building schools and hospitals for their people, Hamas and PIJ are investing millions of dollars in smuggling and manufacturing weapons and digging tunnels that would be used to infiltrate Israel and kill Jews. Instead of improving the living conditions of their people, Hamas and PIJ leaders are imposing new taxes and leading comfortable lives in Qatar, Lebanon and other countries. Instead of bringing democracy and freedom of speech to their people, the terror groups are arresting and intimidating journalists, human rights activists and political opponents.

All these violations are, needless to say, of no concern to the so-called “pro-Palestinian” students on the campuses. Have these students ever denounced Hamas for suppressing public freedoms and depriving its people of a good life? No. Will these students ever call out the Palestinian leadership for the financial corruption and persecution of political opponents and critics? No.

The “pro-Palestinian” individuals and groups might also understand that by siding with Hamas and PIJ, they are harming, not helping, the same people — the Palestinians — they claim to support.

The silence of the “pro-Palestinian” students towards these arrests actually causes harm to Palestinians: it allows Hamas to continue its brutality without having to worry about negative reactions from the international community.

The real “pro-Palestinian” advocates are those who want to see a good life for the Palestinians, not those who encourage them to embrace terror groups.

[T]he “pro-Palestinian” activists should, for example, wage campaigns to demand democracy and freedom of speech for the Palestinians living under the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

These activists should be defending the rights of women and gays in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip. That is the way to be a real “pro-Palestinian” activist. Being “pro-Palestinian” does not necessarily mean that one has to be anti-Israel.

Instead of calling for boycotts and sanctions against Israel, the “pro-Palestinian” students should invite Israelis and Palestinians to their campuses to build, not destroy, bridges between the two peoples. If these students want Palestinians to boycott Israel, they should offer the Palestinians jobs and salaries, not more messages of hate.

An anti-Israel group called Palestinian Solidarity Forum (PSF) on March 20 invited officials from the Iranian-backed Palestinian terror groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) to speak at an event at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.

Soft War for Chaos Francesco Sisci

http://www.settimananews.it/news/soft-war-for-chaos/

As Russian failures on the Ukrainian battleground emerge more starkly by the day, so former successes of Russian propaganda in the West become more naked and are being exposed daily. China’s TikTok, whose CEO was recently grilled at a U.S. Congressional hearing, apparently is not faring much better. Still, perhaps we must step back to gain some perspective on this.

According to some Cold War stories, perhaps America’s significant blow to the renewed ambitions of Soviet politics, galvanized by the students’ protests in America and Europe after the 1960s, was favoring a strategy of chaos. It moved the rebellious proto-revolutionaries in the West to compete and rebel against each other.

Another element then was undermining the leftist high discourse. The systematic penetration of derision, levity, astrologers, beauty counselors, fashion shows, and makeup artists was a mine under the feet of leftist ideology’s high and noble discourse.

Putin’s systemic weakness

In the last ten years in the West, Russian President Vladimir Putin has possibly used American lessons against America. He supported the left as pro-communist and backed the right as a champion of the defenders of betrayed traditional values. He turned everything against everyone through the easy and cheap new tool of the internet.

Who Owns the University? The megalomania of the current crop of students, faculty, and administrators at our radical universities blinds them to the claims of their generations of benefactors. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2023/03/26/who-owns-the-university/

The most recent shout-down debacle at Stanford’s law school, one of many such recent sordid episodes, prompts the question: “Who owns our universities?” 

The law students who are in residence for three years apparently assume they embody the university. And so, they believe they represent and speak for a score of diverse Stanford interests when they shout down federal Judge Kyle Duncan, as if he were an intruder into their own woke private domain. 

After all, Stanford, like most of the Ivy League universities, is a private institution. Are then its board of trustees, its faculty, its students, and its administration de facto overseers and owners? 

Not really. 

In the case of public institutions of higher learning, there is no controversy: The people own the university and, through their elected representatives, pay for and approve its entire budget. Again, through their selected regents and overseers, the taxpayers adjudicate the laws of these universities.  

But private universities, while different, are not really so different.  

Take again Stanford as a typical example. It receives about $1.5 billion per year in federal taxpayer grants alone to its various faculty, labs, research centers, and programs. 

Its annual budget exceeds $8 billion. If Stanford accepts such huge federal and state direct largess, do the taxpayers who provide it have some say about how and under what conditions their recipients use their money? 

Second, the university also has accumulated a $36 billion endowment. At normal annual investment returns, such an enormous fund may earn well over $2 billion a year.  That income is almost all tax-free, based on the principle that Stanford is a nonprofit, apolitical institution. 

But is it? 

One could imagine what would have happened had, say, a radical abortion proponent been shouted down at Stanford Law School. Further, conceive that conservative law students had called her scum and wished for her daughters to be raped. Envision obscene placards flashing in her face—before she was stopped speaking entirely by a conservative Stanford dean who hijacked her talk and informed the pro-abortion speaker that she more or less asked for such a mob reception. The perpetrators, we know, would have been expelled from the law school within 24 hours, and the dean fired in 12. And, alternately, had the architects of this real, vile demonstration faced an open hearing, where evidence of the event was presented, and had been found guilty of violating university policy and then had been expelled and ostracized from the law school, even after much chest-thumping and performance-art braggadocio, it is unlikely the debacle would be repeated. 

A Cunning Plan to Help Trump Win? Christopher Carr

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/america/2023/03/a-cunning-plan-to-help-trump-win/

What is widely reported to be the impending indictment of Donald Trump by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg provides an example of many things — politically motivated prosecution, for starters, and, intriguingly, perhaps a hidden agenda. Here is a Democrat operative of the progressive Left, a man whose rise has been financially supported by George Soros, who turns hundreds of serious criminal offenders free without bail every month, yet who zealously pursues a matter other agencies have examined and rejected as a triviality unlikely to result in conviction.

Yes, we can reasonably suspect that Trump lied about a liaison with Stormy Daniels. Bragg’s case, such as it is, posits that a sex scandal would have hurt his chances of being elected to the White House, therefore the $130,000 allegedly paid to Ms Daniels to secure her silence counts as an unreported campaign expense. It is as doubtful that anyone but a candidate named ‘Trump’ would ever have become the target of such a grand jury inquisition as it is that such a scandal would have hobbled Trump in the least. Had it been, say, George W. Bush credibly accused of cavorting with a porn actress, then the shock would have been real — it’s just not W’s style. But there would have been no dropped jaws about Trump’s covert horizontalism coming to light, none whatsoever. This is, after all, the man who boasted on the front page of the New York Post of having left first wife Ivana for “the best sex I ever had” with soon-to-be second wife Marla Maples. Go on, DA Bragg, pull the other one.

Even from the distance of half a world away it all looks very much like the further partisan weaponising of American justice and, most worryingly, suggests an accelerating descent into the sort of Third World legal bedlam that would do Malaysia proud.