RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/forgetting-justice-marshall-11621806240?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

The University of Illinois board of trustees last week entered a no-confidence vote against America’s greatest Supreme Court Chief Justice. Starting in July, the John Marshall Law School in Chicago will be known simply as the University of Illinois Chicago School of Law. The press release cites Marshall’s “role as a slave trader, slave owner of hundreds of slaves, pro-slavery jurisprudence, and racist views.”

This is the go-to progressive indictment of American historical figures. Never mind that Marshall’s muscular jurisprudence as Chief Justice from 1801 to 1835 forged a national government and economy powerful enough to finally smash slavery a generation after his death.

The U.S. is awash in iconoclasm, from Washington, D.C.’s bid to erase Benjamin Franklin from a city building, to the San Francisco school board’s vote to rename Abraham Lincoln High School. But the astonishing progressive turn on Marshall—law blogger Josh Blackman notes another law school may also cut ties—carries its own significance, intended or not.

Marshall’s legacy is at the heart of current Supreme Court debates. In a speech last month cautioning against Court-packing, Justice Stephen Breyer appealed to Marshall’s legal authority. He explained how Marshall deftly “strengthened the norm of judicial review” despite resistance from Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson.

https://freebeacon.com/culture/the-jews-vs-the-world/

As a weak and sclerotic Democratic leadership cowers before the anti-Israel zealotry of the Squad and its acolytes in the House of Representatives, American Jews are getting a glimpse of what the future may hold: a return to a not-so-distant past in which Jews stood alone to face either slaughter or survival.

There are differences between now and then, of course. The Jews now have a state and an army, facts that provide the fig leaf for the new anti-Semitism now exhibited by left-wing Democrats, academics, and Jewish radicals. The old hatred has found new life in characterizing Jews as oppressors and the genocidal Hamas as victim.

In a kind of provincial stupidity the left would abhor in almost any other context, the liberal elite has conflated caricatures of the Palestinian experience with that of the minority experience in the United States.

The left-wing congressman Jamaal Bowman (D., N.Y.), his anti-Semitism cloaked in the argot of the social justice warrior, has called on Israel to stop brutalizing and murdering “Black and brown bodies.”

Members of the Princeton University faculty on Tuesday released a similar statement of solidarity with the Palestinian people that rejects what they call “Jewish supremacy”—an inartful attempt to liken Jews to their tormentors in the Ku Klux Klan.

The faculty statement will have no impact on world events, but it sends a clear message to Jewish students at the university. It will be familiar to any Jew who managed to sneak into Princeton between its founding in 1746 and the infamous “dirty bicker” of 1958, in which Jews were systematically excluded from the school’s social clubs. University-sanctioned anti-Semitism has been the rule, not the exception, at Princeton.

Finally, there are the Jews who will give cover for this Jew-hatred. Many signed the Princeton letter. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.), who made a name for herself arguing that congressional support for Israel is “all about the Benjamins,” has a Jewish spokesman. Hamas has retained a Jewish lawyer, too.

We don’t despair for two reasons.

First, the enmity of the world around us is the strand that connects the Jews of today to their ancient ancestors.

The brief moment in which the majority of the world’s remaining Jews found safety in Israel and the United States is a historical aberration, but Jewish culture has well preserved the outsider mentality that will be necessary as we brace for the return to normalcy.

Second, Zionism was incubated and refined for moments just like this. The good will of the United States was a blessing for Israel; it was not, however, a prerequisite for Zionism’s success. The very premise of the movement was that the Jews could rely on no one but themselves for their own survival.

And for American Jews who can imagine no other home and no other life, we still have righteous and stalwart allies, from our Evangelical Christian friends to Republicans in Congress (with the notable and ignoble exception of Indiana senator Todd Young) to the vast majority of the American people.

Despite a steady diet of anti-Israel invective by the media, Americans seem largely immune to the prejudices and fads of the country’s elite: The latest Economist/YouGov poll shows that 63 percent of Americans have the decency and common sense to say that protecting Israel should be either “very important” or “somewhat important” to the United States.

The future may yet be as dark as the past, but not yet. Hamas and its many sympathizers here and around the world will have to endure at least another day of unrepentant Jewish survival.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/05/social_justice_rabbinic_students_betray_the_jewish_people_in_time_of_war.html

While the young men and women of Israel are putting their lives on the line defending their homes and family, here in America we have a comfortable and self-indulgent group of rabbinical students verbally attacking Israel and giving moral support to the Hamas and Palestinian Arabs trying to destroy Israeli families. Most are from the Boston Hebrew College, the Reconstructionist Jewish Seminary, and Hebrew Union College, and they are trying to influence world opinion against Israel, which enhances the ability of the terrorists to murder more Jews.

It is a despicable act of betrayal and cowardice and should not be construed as coming from people with a higher moral standard. Sitting in their protected ivory towers – never being forced into a draft for either the American or Israeli army – they announce with detached pontification how much better they are than those “warmongering” Israelis who man their tanks, pilot fighter bombers, and raise their rifles while soldiering forward into danger.

By now, it is obvious that Hamas and other jihadists, unlike Israel, are not interested in peace and, instead, represent the most barbaric actions and attitudes, even to their own people – in contrast to Israel which tries exceedingly hard to defend itself in the least harmful and most humane way possible. Whereas, for example, Israel protects its civilians by placing women and children behind soldiers, the jihadists put their women and children in front of their men to protect the men and disarm their opponents. Whereas Israel has forfeited vast segments of its land and made other sacrificial peace offers, no P.L.O or Hamas leader has ever agreed to any formula for peace except to brazenly announce his intention that a Muslim Palestine will replace all of Israel.

But these rabbinical students seem so immersed in self-righteousness and virtue signaling, so intoxicated by a feeling that they know better than those “morally inferior” to them, they do not seem able to see the obvious Jewish side of the conflict. Rather, they identify totally with those who would gleefully murder their brothers and sisters, not because they are Israelis but precisely because they are Jews.

What they think is social justice is actually injustice and ignorance. Worse, it is an indifference to the plight of the Jewish people they hope one day to lead. They are not to be admired for “idealism;” instead, they should be scorned for taking the easy way out and masking their cowardice in lofty sounding principles of “social justice.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/violent-attacks-on-american-jews-prove-anti-zionism-is-anti-semitism/?utm_source

Tell me it’s not about Jews.

T his week, a wave of Jew-hatred broke out across the United States. You may not have heard much about it, since the media — so skilled at detecting every racist dog whistle and secret Nazi handshake — have been largely AWOL on the issue.

In West Los Angeles, men waving Palestinian flags drove in a caravan through a Jewish neighborhood, shouting slogans like “Israel kills children” through a megaphone and getting out of their cars to attack Jewish diners at tables on the sidewalk. In Manhattan, another caravan of men with Palestinian flags drove to the Diamond District, burning one person and attacking others whom they believed to be Jewish. Also in New York City, a gang of men chanting anti-Israel slogans harassed and spat at people eating outside. If there were such attacks against Muslims, the media would rightly speak of nothing else right now.

Note, these weren’t clashes between pro-Israel demonstrators and pro-Palestinian demonstrators. These were attacks by the latter on whatever Jews they could find. And they should prove the falsehood of the narrative that “anti-Zionism” is distinct from anti-Semitism.

What is consequential in the long term is the normalization of the sentiments that drive this hatred. If it’s not the Washington Post running op-eds arguing that “justice” and a Jewish homeland can’t co-exist, it’s the Obama Bros, who helped to transform the Democratic Party on the Israel issue, asking their millions of followers to donate to the Islamic Relief charity even after the Biden State Department cut ties to that organization for promoting anti-Semitism (the tweet making this appeal has since been deleted). The union at The New Yorker — once the most prestigious magazine of culture in America, with central importance to many American Jews — tweeted out “solidarity with Palestinians from the river to the sea,” the latter phrase a Hamas-inspired genocidal slogan the plain meaning of which is the elimination of Israel. (That tweet, too, was deleted and replaced with a revised one still expressing “solidarity” but, you know, sorry about that Hamas language.)

Perhaps The New Yorker union was inspired by Representative Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.), a member of the “Squad” and one of a contingent of Hamas supporters now vocally present in one of the major American political parties. One wishes the media gave the Squad’s recent House floor statements slandering the Jewish State a fraction of the attention they give the rantings of largely powerless white supremacists. The Squad gins up anti-Jewish anger by lying about U.S. aid to Israel, falsely (and ludicrously) alleging that Israel practices apartheid, lying about Israel’s counterterrorism efforts and the causes of the present conflict, and comparing Hamas’s openly anti-Semitic mission to the struggle of black Americans against police brutality. All this is going on as craven Democrats cower.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/new-york-man-arrested-for-setting-fire-to-jewish-school-synagogue-doj_3824932.html

A New York man was been arrested and charged for setting fire to a Jewish school and synagogue in Brooklyn, the Justice Department said.

The man, Ali Alaheri, 29, from Brooklyn is accused of piling garbage bags against the side of a yeshiva, or a Jewish school, and synagogue on 36th Street in Brooklyn, and setting the bags on fire in the early hours of May 19, according to a criminal complaint (pdf).

Alaheri was captured on surveillance footage allegedly committing the act as well as punching a man wearing traditional Hasidic garb several hours later without provocation. Federal prosecutors said Alaheri and the victim had no prior interactions before the alleged assault.

The task force officer responsible for Alaheri’s investigation said he identified the 29-year-old from photographs available in the New York Police Department database. Alaheri was arrested allegedly wearing the same clothing as was seen on the suspect in the video footage of the assault.

The criminal complaint also alleges that Alaheri was in possession of a stolen bicycle during the course of the incident.

“As alleged in the complaint and detention letter, Alaheri deliberately set fire to the sacred home of a yeshiva and synagogue, and viciously attacked a man wearing traditional Hasidic garb, demonstrating a violent hatred that cannot be tolerated,” Acting U.S. Attorney Mark J. Lesko said in a statement. “This Office strongly condemns these sorts of intentional acts of violence and we will go to every length possible to prosecute this type of conduct to the fullest extent possible.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/we-dont-need-a-commission-to-investigate-the-capitol-riot/

This Democrat-driven project would be hopelessly politicized.

W hy do we need a commission for this?

That’s one of the questions Rich Lowry and I batted around on The McCarthy Report podcast a couple of Fridays ago. We happened to be recording just as news broke that House Homeland Security Committee chairman Bennie Thompson (D., Miss.) and ranking member John Katko (R., N.Y.), had reached an agreement to create a special bipartisan commission to examine the Capitol riot.

We should not be astonished that this agreement proved fleeting. Congressman Katko is a moderate who voted to impeach President Trump after the latter’s instigation of the rally that devolved into an uprising, which the media-Democrat complex monotonously brands as an “insurrection” (though when even worse mayhem is perpetrated by leftists, it is branded “mostly peaceful protest” by the same partisans). Recall that House Republicans voted overwhelmingly against impeachment, and Senate Republicans lopsidedly opposed conviction. Although he is hardly alone in his views, Katko is out of step with most of his party on what we should make of January 6.

The commission concept, at least as he negotiated it with Thompson, was quickly panned in pro-Trump circles. That prompted the usual hand-wringing in the GOP mainstream, which is on fret-alert about offending the former president and his supporters. Within days, the Republican minority leaders of the House and Senate, Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell, respectively, announced their opposition. On Thursday, as NR’s Caroline Downey reports, the Democrat-controlled House comfortably approved the commission proposal, 252–175, with 36 Republicans on board — considerably more than the ten who voted with House Democrats to impeach Trump in January over the Capitol riot. The legislation now heads to the Senate, where its fate is uncertain as this is written.

I oppose the commission. It’s not that I don’t think the events of January 6 are important. I do, and if there is going to be a commission, I’d want it to do a good job, which would require a strong set of Republican commissioners, determined both to get to the bottom of what happened and to thwart the Democrats’ ceaseless politicization of it. Still, I oppose commissions of this kind for the same reason that we should be outraged by the events of January 6: They undermine our constitutional system.

https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/554628-so-wrong-chicago-mayor-declares-she-will-only-grant-interviews-to

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” — Martin Luther King, Jr., Aug. 28, 1963. 

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot was just two years old when Dr. King gave that speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. But like many Americans, she probably read or watched it in its entirety when she got older. And that’s one reason why it’s so stunning that Lightfoot, the first Black woman elected as the Windy City’s mayor, would declare the exact opposite regarding race this week, in terms of granting media interviews. 

“By now, you may have heard the news that on the occasion of the two-year anniversary of my inauguration as Mayor of this great City, I will be exclusively providing one-on-one interviews with journalists of color,” Lightfoot said in a letter to Chicago media. “As a person of color, I have throughout my adult life done everything that I can to fight for diversity and inclusion in every institution that I have been a part of and being Mayor makes me uniquely situated to shine a spotlight on this most important issue.” 

So, there you have it: An elected official of one the country’s biggest cities states, openly and without apology, that interviews marking her second year in office (as if that’s some kind of big deal) will not be given to anyone in Chicago media who is white. Lightfoot says she is fighting against what she believes is systemic racism in the media, but she excludes certain races in her quest to do so. 

If that’s not irony, I’m not sure what is. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/palestinian-demonstrators-accost-jews-in-nycs-diamond-district/?utm_source=recirc-

“While President Joe Biden signaled his support for a “ceasefire” as well as his insistence that innocent lives be spared in recent phone conversations with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he has yet to condemn the anti-semitic comments and verbal attack on America’s greatest peacetime and military ally in the Middle East stemming from the congressional chamber.”

EXCERPTS:

Palestinian protestors paraded through the Manhattan Diamond District, a historically Jewish neighborhood, Thursday evening chanting anti-semitic language, disrupting traffic, and accosting patrons of local businesses.

Standing atop a pick-up truck waving a Palestinian flag, a demonstrator shouted, “Any Jews in here, suck my d***.”

“Get the f*** out, get the f*** out,” another reportedly told an Orthodox Jewish man hurrying away from the commotion. The demonstrators also tossed a firecracker at bystanders, sending one woman and two police officers to the hospital with injuries.

The unrest in New York City came hours after Israel and Hamas reached a ceasefire agreement, which took effect early Friday morning local time.

The latest round of violence in Gaza has divided American lawmakers. The progressive wing of the Democratic party has staunchly criticized Israel for its aggressive response to Hamas strikes on its civilian population.

The Biden administration has taken a lukewarm public stance on the existential threat posed to Israel by Hamas, although it has reiterated the nation’s right to defend itself from indiscriminate rocket assault.

Before a ceasefire was declared, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) responded to the attacks on its territory and population by launching strategic retaliatory airstrikes on the Gaza Strip, targeting weapons stockpile locations, Hamas military headquarters, and underground tunnels sheltering terrorists and supplies. Before striking an area populated by civilians, Israel notifies Palestinian civilians on the ground via multiple communication channels, warning them to evacuate to safety.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and fellow members of the progressive “squad” have pushed to cancel an arms sale to Israel, which would provide the embattled state with the mechanism to convert “dumb” bombs into precision-guided weapons.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/05/20/sen-tim-scotts-reply-to-biden-exposes-dems-jim-crow-past/

These days, one can barely finish a first cup of coffee without confronting more accusations of racism in America. Cable news, print and social media, and even congressional proceedings are all now geared toward convincing the nation of its systemic bigotry.

Today, everything is racist. Biden’s congressional address in late April wallowed in assertions of our supposed collective racist ills. Even his recent Infrastructure bill defines highways as racist.

Senator Tim Scott, R-S.C., pushed back on that canard in his bold response to Biden’s congressional snooze-fest, declaring: “America is not a racist country”.  Then began the left’s racist attacks.

Within minutes, progressives on Twitter trended the hashtag “Uncle Tim”, a disturbing moniker dismissing Senator Scott’s remarks because of the color of his skin. Leftwing guests on cable news ridiculed Scott as the only black Republican in the U.S. Senate.  Odd, because the Democrats currently only field two (Booker and Warnock).  In fact, there were no Democrat Senators until 1996.  Republicans have the honor of electing the first in 1870 and several more since. 

Earlier in April, in an effort to again tar Republicans with the racist mantle, Democrats in the Senate held a day-long examination of what they identified as “Jim Crow” laws revisited, specifically those evils underpinning the new Georgia voting statutes.