RUTHFULLY YOURS

Mr. Soloveichik is the rabbi and minister of Congregation Shearith Israel in Manhattan and director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought of Yeshiva University.

On July 4, 1776, after voting to approve the Declaration of Independence, the Continental Congress advanced the following resolution: “That Dr. Franklin, Mr. J. Adams and Mr. Jefferson, be a committee, to bring in a device for a seal for the United States of America.”

Of these three founders, two suggested seals that incorporated profoundly biblical images. Franklin, according to his own notes, proposed the following as the national seal: a picture of “Moses standing on the Shore, and extending his Hand over the Sea, thereby causing the same to overwhelm Pharaoh who is sitting in an open Chariot, a Crown on his Head and a Sword in his Hand. Rays from a Pillar of Fire in the Clouds reaching to Moses, to express that he acts by Command of the Deity.” Underneath the image, Franklin added, would appear the following motto: “Rebellion to Tyrants is obedience to God.”

Jefferson, as described by John Adams in his correspondence, suggested a seal that bore a different image, but also from the Hebrew Bible: “the Children of Israel in the Wilderness, led by a Cloud by day, and a Pillar of Fire by night.”

While the Declaration’s approval on the Fourth of July is still celebrated throughout the land, the tale of the seal that began on the same day in 1776 has been all but forgotten. Bruce Feiler, author of “America’s Prophet: Moses and the American Story” (2009), reflected that when he first encountered the story, it “stunned me. Why hadn’t I heard about this before?” The legal historian Michael I. Meyerson, in his 2012 book “Endowed by Our Creator,” reported that he had used Google Books to search more than 200 Thomas Jefferson biographies published since 1950 and had found only 12 describing Jefferson’s national-seal proposal.
The messages behind the two Founders’ proposed images are quite different. In the biblical tale of the splitting of the sea, Franklin chose a scriptural story in which God himself miraculously intervenes into the natural order and redeems his people. The book of Exodus emphasizes that, in this event, only the Almighty was actively engaged: “And the Lord saved Israel from the hands of Egypt, and Israel saw Egypt dead on the shores of the sea.”

Jefferson’s symbol, by contrast, focused on the courage of the people of Israel in journeying into the desert; it celebrated not so much the miracle performed by God as much as the human spirit. This, too, is lauded by the Bible, in the book of Jeremiah: “I remember thee, the loyalty of thy youth, the love of thine espousals, when thou wentest after me in the wilderness, in a land that was not sown.” CONTINUE AT SITE

The Food and Drug Administration is sitting on a therapy for Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and the agency may have days to waste but the boys don’t. Bureaucratic malpractice on a safe and effective treatment is corroding the agency’s scientific credibility and the public’s trust.

FDA in May delayed a decision on eteplirsen by Boston-based Sarepta Therapeutics. There is no treatment for Duchenne, a fatal disease that claims a boy’s ability to walk before organ failure in his 20s. Eteplirsen jumps over genetic code to produce a missing protein known as dystrophin.

Eight of 10 boys who seemed headed for wheelchairs still walk after four years of treatment; only one of 11 in a control group could walk. FDA reviewers say the drug doesn’t produce “enough” dystrophin or maybe the kids had motivated moms. Yes, the public pays for that analysis.

The agency last month asked Sarepta for dystrophin data from an ongoing trial. The results are likely to show that the treatment is delivering on its promise to pump out the protein, as dozens of experts, clinicians and scientists tried to tell the agency at an April meeting. A readout consistent with earlier findings would give Janet Woodcock, the drug evaluation center chief who can overrule her technical staff, ample reason to say yes.

An approval would have the added advantage of obeying the law. Legislation from 2012 allows FDA to sign off on a first-in-class drug that is “reasonably likely” to predict a clinical benefit based on small or innovative trials. FDA can pull the treatment if later studies fail. This process is called “accelerated approval,” though that is a dark joke to boys who lost walking or gripping abilities in the year since Sarepta filed an application.

Sarepta will soon start a required confirmation trial that deploys the same technology to treat boys with a different strain of Duchenne. Last week the company said that the investigation would last two years instead of one. The trial will be placebo-controlled, in which some patients receive saline. CONTINUE AT SITE

Loretta Lynch did herself, the Department of Justice and Hillary Clinton no favors on Friday when she tried to repair the damage she had done by meeting privately with Bill Clinton this week.

In a televised interview from Aspen, Colorado, with the Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart, the Attorney General struggled to defend her department’s ability to make an honest decision about whether to indict Mrs. Clinton over her handling of classified information on her personal email server. “I fully expect” to accept the recommendations of FBI investigators and career Justice officials, she said, in damage-control mode.

Ms. Lynch created this mess when she welcomed the former President onto her plane in Phoenix for a 30-minute private meeting—while her department is investigating his spouse. The public might not even have known about the meeting if someone hadn’t tipped off a reporter. When first asked about the propriety of the meeting earlier this week, Ms. Lynch explained it was “primarily” social.

That didn’t satisfy anyone, and the pressure built. Prosecutors don’t meet privately with the spouses of people who are under investigation, and even White House spokesman Josh Earnest admitted that questions about Ms. Lynch’s meeting are “entirely legitimate.” Ms. Lynch said Friday at Aspen that she understands why her behavior has “cast a shadow” over the integrity of the Justice Department.

Yet her Clintonian answers show as much bad judgment as the original meeting. She is now passing the buck to career officials while still retaining the ability to overrule them. This is trying to have it both ways. She knows there will be a political price to pay no matter what the decision. Her ethical straddle allows her to say she had nothing to do with a decision not to indict while retaining the authority to overrule an FBI recommendation to indict. CONTINUE AT SITE

On July 4, 1900, Samuel Hoffman and his father, Moshe, walked across the gangplank of a ferryboat that unceremoniously dumped them, along with a large group of fellow immigrants, at a dock on 14th Street in Manhattan. Independence Day for these newcomers meant liberation from czarist Russia.

New Yorkers were used to seeing confused, freshly arrived immigrants walking through lower Manhattan, but these two stood out. It was a searing-hot summer day and both father and son wore winter overcoats and boots.
“Our clothing and awkward bundles on our backs, as we walked along 14th Street, drew everyone’s attention to us,” Samuel Hoffman wrote at age 83 in an account for his family. “I was 15 years old, bewildered and almost overcome by the alien and unfamiliar scenes that stretched and throbbed all around father and me.”

Like most immigrants, they couldn’t speak the language. Coming from a small village in Russia, they had never seen anything even remotely like New York City. They could have arrived from another planet. All they had to guide them was a piece of paper with the address of a distant relative who lived on the Lower East Side.

After generations of extreme poverty and religious persecution, Moshe and his more savvy wife, Yetta, had decided to sell their house and borrow enough money to pay for two tickets to America. The plan was that father and son would then earn enough money in the New World to bring over the rest of the family. Constant hunger was a hallmark of Samuel’s childhood in Russia. His daily diet had consisted of one piece of black bread and a potato dipped in herring sauce for flavor. Occasionally there were onions and radishes and a glass of milk for the children. It had been that way for generations and there was little chance it would ever change.

Breaking with tradition, Yetta chose to send Samuel instead of her eldest son. Although Samuel looked even younger than 15, Yetta believed that he would fare better than his older brother. She knew her son.

There was no government assistance for the giant wave of immigrants to America at the turn of the 20th century. Instead, like all the immigrants that had come before, they would fend for themselves. They also helped each other. The distant relative on the Lower East Side took in Samuel and Moshe, even though, with three children and two boarders in only three rooms, that was a challenge. Another distant cousin, with a larger home in Brooklyn, soon took them in until they could afford a room of their own.

After a series of jobs that brought in more money, and going to school at night to learn English, Samuel started his own business. He bought nine sewing machines on credit and hired employees. Many trades were closed to Jews, but the garment industry seemed to belong to them.

The ill-fated prosecution of six Baltimore police officers for the accidental death of Freddie Gray in April 2015 was the spawn of the Black Lives Matter movement. The preposterously unjustified charges against the officers grew out of the BLM conceit that cops are racist murderers. On May 1, 2015, state’s attorney Marilyn Mosby invoked Al Sharpton’s extortionist chant of “No Justice, No Peace” as a motivation for her charging decisions, after rioters had destroyed the livelihoods of dozens of Baltimore’s workers and small businessmen.

It is therefore fitting that Mosby’s vendetta is collapsing all around her, based as it is on an ideology composed of demonstrable lies about law enforcement. Judge Barry Williams handed Mosby her third and most devastating defeat on June 23, acquitting Officer Caesar Goodson of all seven counts against him, including the ludicrous second-degree murder charge.

Gray, a 25-year-old drug dealer with a long criminal record, had been arrested for possession of an illegal knife on April 1, 2015, after running from a bike patrol officer who had made eye contact with him. During transport in a police van driven by Officer Goodson, Gray suffered a spinal cord injury that led to his death a week later. The exact timing and cause of that injury are still in dispute.

A hostile crowd was forming at the site of Gray’s arrest, so the arresting officers put Gray in Goodson’s van and instructed Goodson to drive to another location where they could complete the paperwork without interference. Goodson would make five more stops thereafter; he never spoke to Gray. Gray’s injury occurred at some still unknown point during that journey. At stop two, the three arresting officers removed Gray from the wagon, placed leg shackles and flexicuffs on him, documented the arrest, put him back in the wagon on his stomach, and left. Gray had been going limp and passively resisting the officers during that second stop; once they left him in the van he began screaming, kicking, and throwing himself around so violently that outside observers saw the van rocking. At stop three, Goodson went to the back of the van for less than 11 seconds, and then called for assistance. Judge Williams found that there was not enough time at stop three for Goodson to actually check and assess Gray. Officer William Porter answered Goodson’s call for assistance at stop four. Porter asked Gray, who was on the floor on his stomach as at stop two, how he was doing; Gray answered: “Help.” Porter asked him what he wanted help with, and Gray responded: “Help me up,” according to Porter’s testimony. Porter helped Gray get on the bench inside the van. Porter asked Gray if he wanted to go to the hospital; Gray answered yes. Porter did not believe that Gray was in need of medical treatment, but told Goodson after stop four that he did not think that Gray would be admitted to Central Booking, and that for purely administrative reasons they should take him to the hospital instead. Goodson did not call for medical assistance but proceeded to stop five to pick up another arrestee, Donta Allen. At stop five, Porter saw Gray kneeling on the floor and leaning on the bench. Porter again asked Gray if he wanted to go to the hospital; Gray again answered yes. Gray seemed lethargic but was otherwise breathing normally and showed no other signs of distress. By the final, sixth stop, Gray was unconscious, not breathing, and in visible need of urgent medical care. Goodson called for help and took him to the hospital.

Immediately after the massacre in Orlando, the gay press was full of articles that adamantly refused to admit the reality of Islamic homophobia.

The same organisations that obsess over which bakeries in the U.S. and Europe will or will not bake wedding cakes for gay couples, and rightly have no trouble berating homophobic Christian pastors, seemed wholly uninterested in the motivations of the Pulse nightclub killer. Instead, these papers and websites were filled with articles, petitions and joint letters, enjoining people not to notice the Islamic element.

These gay activists have a vision of the world where only “patriarchal” white males of Jewish or Christian heritage can cause the world’s problems.

A small minority of very vocal “far-left” activists are now using their LGBT status as a smokescreen not to advance gay rights but to advance “far-left” politics.

The recent shootings at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando Florida have already begun to be submerged by the news cycle. Shock at the worst mass-shooting in American history — which saw the death of forty-nine people and the wounding of even more, fifty-three — has been further dulled by various distractions in the debate. This time, these have included a debate on America’s gun laws and speculation around the sexuality of the gunman.

All of these matters have been fought backwards and forwards and should certainly be components of any argument. But the part of the debate that has been the most important and — as usual — the most covered over, has been the religious motivation of the gunman. This, and the response it has entailed, is worth dwelling on: it reveals a concerted effort not to learn from events.

Just as it is inevitable that those obsessed with gun legislation should wish to make the debate about gun legislation, so it is inevitable that those with any other over-riding political agenda should wish to pin responsibility for the shooting on whatever is their particular obsession. It seems inevitable, for instance, that “Black Lives Matter” would blame the shooting on “the four threats of white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, and militarism.”

The recent sexual assault of a five-year-old girl in Twin Falls, Idaho, and the reaction by public officials and the media amounting to a cover-up dramatically illustrate, yet again, how the West battles against the harsh reality of unlimited Islamic immigration. The incident occurred June 2 at the Fawnbrook Apartments in Twin Falls where prosecutors allege a 5-year-old girl was sexually assaulted. Two juvenile suspects, boys, ages 14 and 10, were detained, charged and released. A third, a 7-year-old boy involved in the incident, was not charged. The boys are from Iraqi and Sudanese families, but it’s unclear if they are refugees or how long they’ve been in the community.

Public officials released few details about the incident, stating that the suspects are juveniles about whom information is routinely withheld. This only caused outcry from locals who were incensed by the incident itself, failure of officials to provide information, lack of media attention and release of the boys from a juvenile detention center within six days of their arrest. Outraged residents reignited calls to close the Twin Falls refugee center, a drive that failed a year earlier.

Further outrage occurred when the Justice Department stepped in, allegedly to address the concerns of distressed residents. Obama-appointed U.S. Attorney Wendy J. Olson threatened the community and media with federal prosecution if they “spread false information or inflammatory statements about the perpetrators.” Although Olson later explained that her comments were made because Twin Falls City Council members had received threats of violence against them, her statements convinced many critics that she was attempting to silence the community and not merely quell outrage or assuage the concerns of locals that the incident will be thoroughly investigated and the perpetrators brought to justice.

The crisis in Twin Falls is understandable given its history of refugee immigration. The small city has only about 47,000 residents, yet is has became a beachhead for Muslim immigration as a result of the work of a refugee center there managed by the College of Southern Idaho. The CSI refugee center dates back to the 1980s and is one of four agencies in Idaho working with refugees over the years.

Together they have brought in refugees from countries spanning the globe, including Czechoslovakia, Vietnam, the Congo, Bhutan and more recently, Iraq and Afghanistan. Some put the total number of refugees in the state at 20,000 since 1970. Since September 2001 alone, the U.S. State Department has sent more than 11,000 refugees to Idaho, more than 96% Muslim, from Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan and Syria.

The FBI is trying to control what the public learns about the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11, the Orlando Sentinel reports:

A June 20 letter from the FBI, attached to the City [of] Orlando’s lawsuit over withholding 911 calls and other records from 25 media outlets including the Orlando Sentinel, was also sent to the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office with instructions pertaining to how they should respond to records requests.

The letter requests that agencies deny inquiries and directs departments to “immediately notify the FBI of any requests your agency received” so “the FBI can seek to prevent disclosure through appropriate channels, as necessary.”

The Seminole County Sheriff’s Office sent the Sentinel the letter Tuesday night in response to a request for documents, video and audio recordings from the early morning hours of June 12.

A spokeswoman for the Sheriff’s Office said the FBI sent them the letter Monday night and “instructed us to forward it to anyone requesting records.”

Seminole County is to the north and east of Orange County, which includes Orlando. On Twitter, Sentinel reporter Gal Tziperman Lotan posted the full letter, signed by Tampa-based Special Agent Paul Wysopal. “He refused comment Wednesday,” according to the Sentinel report.

The FBI’s position here is not without logic. The investigation of a terrorist attack is primarily a federal responsibility, so one might expect decisions related to the case, including about public disclosure of information, would be made centrally. The Sentinel notes that the lawsuit—which seeks a declaratory judgment as to what documents should be released—was moved from Orange County Circuit Court to federal court after the city named the U.S. Justice Department as a defendant.

But one is inclined to view the FBI’s actions with suspicion, in light of last week’s hamhanded nondisclosure. As we noted, the bureau released a transcript of one of the attacker’s calls to 911 with his declarations of fealty to the Islamic State and its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, censored. (He made other calls, whose content has yet to be made public.)

After enduring several hours of ridicule, the FBI released the transcript. It was surely no coincidence that the nondisclosure was consistent with the Obama administration’s agenda, both political (playing down terrorism during an election year) and ideological (denying that Islamic terrorism is Islamic).