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The Trial Still in Search of a Crime Victoria Taft

Posted By on May 16th, 2024

https://pjmedia.com/victoria-taft/2024/05/15/cohen-testimony-cross-x-n4929037

Even after five weeks, the Trump bookkeeping case in Manhattan is a “Potemkin Village,” according to law professor Jonathan Turley. That means it has all the appearance of being real, but upon closer inspection, there’s no there there. Indeed, the indictment of former President Donald Trump on 34 counts of bookkeeping errors, statute-expired misdemeanors that have been miraculously spun into a series of felonies, is the Seinfeld of criminal cases. But a jury could still find him guilty. “It’s Trump,” Manhattan jurors could say to themselves. “Of course, Cheeto-man must be guilty of something.” 

But after the prosecutors told Judge Juan Merchan that their case-in-chief was wrapped, though not officially rested yet, after Michael Cohen’s direct examination on Tuesday, there’s still confusion over what crimes Trump is alleged to have committed. It’s not a good look for the prosecutors and it’s disqualifying for a judge to allow this farce. If wizened legal minds can’t figure out the game prosecutors are playing, then what is the jury supposed to do with this smoke-and-mirrors monstrosity?

The running theory is that “election denier” District Attorney Alvin Bragg believes that Donald Trump stole the election from Hillary Clinton, and, to further that aim, paid lawyer fees to Michael Cohen who carried out the task of getting nondisclosure agreements from people telling bad stories and paying them to keep quiet. That part of the story isn’t illegal. What prosecutors allege is Trump knew that by putting these in the books as lawyer fees, he was committing a federal campaign finance violation. 

At least that’s what we think is going on. We’re left to wonder because the conspiracy they’ve told the jury they’ll reveal to prove fraudulent intent isn’t charged. Indeed, the case so far has shown that Trump had a hands-off policy on money issues, letting his CFO handle all of it. The case is a teetering Jenga-like mess with a sexy mattress actress and provable liar thrown in for background color. 

ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Jews at Haverford sue Haverford College in federal court Andrew Bernard

Posted By on May 16th, 2024

https://www.jns.org/jewish-students-sue-haverford-alleging-antisemitic-civil-rights-violations/

A Jewish group at Haverford College in Pennsylvania filed a lawsuit on Monday in federal court alleging that the highly-ranked private liberal arts school violated students’ civil rights and created a pervasively hostile environment for Jews on campus.

The plaintiffs in the case are five students—one of them named—who are all part of the group, which consists of faculty, students, alumni and parents. The five say that the college has engaged in discrimination against pro-Israel Jewish students in violation of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

The suit is the latest in a wave of legal actions against colleges and universities that Jewish students have filed in court or with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. Harvard University, Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania and New York University are among the institutions that have been sued by Jewish students for antisemitic discrimination in the wake of Oct. 7.

Jews at Haverford is represented in Monday’s suit by the Deborah Project, a public interest law firm that defends the civil rights of Jews on campus.

In its suit, the group details what Jewish students at Haverford have experienced since Oct. 7 and how administrators have responded—or failed to do so—to their complaints about antisemitic violations of Haverford’s conduct policies. (Haverford told JNS it doesn’t comment on pending litigation.)

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AMERICANS FOR PEACE NOW BROKE ITS PROMISES By Moshe Phillips

Posted By on May 16th, 2024

https://jewishwebsite.com/opinion/americans-for-peace-now-broke-its-promises/98703/

The decision by Americans for Peace Now to publicly endorse suspending U.S. military aid to Israel directly violates the promises it made in order to gain admittance to the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. It’s time for the Conference to reconsider Peace Now’s status.

When Americans for Peace Now (APN) applied for membership in the Conference of Presidents in 1993, some Jewish organizations were wary. They wondered whether the controversial group would be loyal to the pro-Israel consensus that the Conference represents.

Every member-organization in the Conference is entitled to its own opinions, on Israel and everything else. At the same time, the Conference stands for certain bedrock principles that all its members must support. 

 

That’s why extreme anti-Israel groups have never been admitted. J Street’s application was rejected. The anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace would never be welcomed. Neither would the anti-Zionist Neturei Karta.

Three of the Conference’s core principles are rejection of all Arab violence against Israel; support for an undivided Jerusalem under Israel’s sole control; and complete, unequivocal support for U.S. aid to Israel.

In their appeals to be admitted to the Conference, APN spokespeople repeatedly pledged that they would adhere to those positions.

 

“We are revolted by terrorism,” APN executive committee chair Shifra Bronznick insisted in a widely-circulated op-ed in March 1993. 

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Watch: “Israel Undiplomatic” on JNS-TV, with Ruthie Blum and Mark Regev

Posted By on May 16th, 2024

PREMIERE: Are the hostages in Gaza doomed after Rafah? – JNS.org

Episode 2: https://www.jns.org/is-israel-being-prevented-from-winning-the-war/

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Why Trials Like Trump’s Must Be Televised by Alan M. Dershowitz

Posted By on May 15th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20639/televise-trump-trials

The result of making us rely on partisan secondary sources rather than our own direct observations is inevitable distrust in the justice system. If “Sunlight is the best disinfectant,” lack of visibility is a major source of distrust.

The framers of the Constitution intended all judicial proceedings to be public – no secret trials. At the time of the framing, public meant open to print journalists. Today, public means audio and video publication.

The New York trial of Trump is a national scandal. There is no real crime. The judge has allowed testimony that is highly prejudicial and irrelevant. He has made numerous unfair rulings, of which the prosecution has taken advantage. The public has the right to see this abuse… so that we all can judge for ourselves and not allow possibly biased reporters to judge for us.

If you were flipping between CNN and Fox News following the cross-examination of Stormy Daniels in the New York criminal case against former President Donald Trump, you would have had the impression that the CNN commentator, who professed to be reporting what happened in the courtroom, described a completely different event from what the Fox News reporter, who was also in the courtroom, described. It was as if they had seen two different witnesses and two different lawyers.

The CNN commentator reported that Daniels had done a great job holding up against the incompetent cross-examination of Trump’s lawyer. The Fox News commentator reported that the extraordinarily effective Trump lawyer had totally destroyed Daniels’ credibility. Who were you to believe? The CNN commentator was an experienced lawyer who was purporting to describe accurately what had happened without bias or subjectivity. The Fox News commentator was a former judge and prosecutor with vast experience, who also claimed to be describing the cross-examination without bias. Neither of the commentators even pretended to paint a gray picture. One was starkly black, the other unambiguously white. No nuance in either account.

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Over Half of Illegal Aliens in U.S. Are Unemployed: Report By Eric Lendrum

Posted By on May 15th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/14/over-half-of-illegal-aliens-in-u-s-are-unemployed-report/

A new report reveals that over half of the population of illegal aliens that have come into the United States under Joe Biden’s watch are unemployed, thus creating an even greater strain on the country.

As reported by Breitbart, the report from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) released on Monday revealed that only 46% of illegals who came to the U.S. “in 2022 or later” were employed at the start of 2024.

“Immigration clearly adds workers to the country, but it just as clearly adds non-workers who need to be supported by the labor of others,” said CIS researchers Steven Camarota and Karen Zeigler in the report. “This was the case in the past, it is true today, and it will surely be the case for immigrants who arrive in the future. Those who simply see immigration as a source of labor need to understand it is also a source of school children, retirees, and many other non-workers.”

The numbers in CIS’s report appear to debunk one of the most common arguments used by advocates of mass migration and open borders, who claim that illegals must be brought into the country to fill jobs that American citizens will not do.

Furthermore, CIS reported that the population of illegals in the U.S. has risen by at least 6.6 million since Joe Biden first took power in January of 2021. As of March of this year, there are over 51.6 million foreign-born illegals in the country, an increase of approximately 5.1 million since 2022. This accounts for at least 15.6% of the entire population of the United States.

“Many advocates for the unauthorized argue they should be given work permits so they can support themselves while they await a court date,” the report noted. “Of course, others worry that this would only incentivize more illegal immigration. In 2024, a larger share of new arrivals were unauthorized relative to prior years due to the ongoing border crisis.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Bambie Thug has exposed the rottenness of the new Ireland Ireland’s hostility to Israel is a grotesque betrayal of its own liberatory history. Brendan O’Neill

Posted By on May 15th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/05/13/bambie-thug-has-exposed-the-rottenness-of-the-new-ireland/

What a thing of beauty that Israel beat Ireland in Saturday’s Eurovision Song Contest. That Israel’s serene songstress, Eden Golan, got more points than Ireland’s warbling, gurning, pseudo-Satanic they / them, Bambie Thug. That an actually decent song trumped the caterwauling of a fake punk who mistakes having tattoos, identifying as ‘nonbinary’ and saying ‘I’m queer!’ for a personality. More importantly, that a singer who was harangued by baying mobs of Hamas fanboys did better than the ‘singer’ who helped to whip up this orgy of cruelty by saying she cried when she heard Israel had made it to the final. Boo-fucking-hoo. I bet you’re crying even more now, Ms Thug.

This is the news – the beautiful news – that Israel came fifth and Ireland sixth in the Eurovision Song Contest. Of course – because they are racist and mentally unstable – Israel haters on social media are saying the Zionist octopus helped to bump up Israel’s points. One pictures Mossad agents taking a break from hunting down the anti-Semites who slaughtered a thousand of their compatriots to post memes on Facebook saying ‘Screw Bambie, Vote Eden!’. In truth, the reason Israel did so well in the public vote – getting the maximum ‘douze points’ from no fewer than 14 of the 37 nations eligible to vote in Eurovision – is because normal people don’t share the Euro-bourgeoisie’s feverish loathing for the Jewish State. It wasn’t only the emotionally incontinent Israelophobe Bambie Thug who took a beating last night – so did the entire anti-Israel middle class whose cries for a boycott of Eurovision clearly fell on deaf ears.

We shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves, of course, given it’s only Eurovision, and given that some people (me, for example) were highly motivated to vote for Israel in order to wind up the wankers of Europe. But it is undeniably delicious that, despite the pompous pleas of drag queens and other paragons of morality for everyone to switch off Eurovision this year, millions watched. Around 7.6million Brits tuned in. Yes, that’s lower than last year – when we were the hosts – but it’s higher than every year between 2015 and 2021. It will be a source of mirth for me for some time that while the LGBTQ lobby was self-importantly putting away the glitter, locking the drinks cabinet and doing their very best not to check X for Eurovision updates, the general public were watching and enjoying the daftness of it all. Rarely has the moral gulf between us and our preening cultural overlords been so starkly exposed.

Then there were the votes for Israel. It felt like a tiny rebellion against the hysteria of the elites. Brits gave Israel 12 points. So did France, Germany, Belgium, Italy and others. This was people saying ‘We don’t agree with your bullying of a young woman and your obsessive hatred for her homeland’.

ANTI-SEMITISM, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden can’t be trusted to take on anti-Semitism The same identitarian worldview that is driving campus anti-Semitism is rife within Joe Biden’s White House. Heather MacDonald

Posted By on May 15th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/05/15/biden-cant-be-trusted-to-take-on-anti-semitism/

On 7 May, Joe Biden condemned the ‘anti-Semitic posters’, the ‘slogans calling for the annihilation of Israel’ and the ‘rationalising’ of 7 October on colleges across the US. Such practices ‘must stop’, he said in a speech marking the annual Days of Remembrance ceremony at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Yet where does the US president think that campus anti-Semitism comes from?

Pro-Hamas hysteria is the foreseeable outcome of a belief system dominant not only in academia, but also in Biden’s own administration – a belief system in which the West is damned as ‘systemically racist’, and the world divided between ‘marginalised groups’ and the white, male, heterosexual power structure that oppresses them. Campus anti-Semitism will not stop until the university is transformed and the Democratic Party rejects identity politics.

The stunningly incoherent alliances that have sprung up since the 7 October terror attacks on Israel can only be understood in the context of academic theory. Queers and radical feminists for Palestine would seem to be logical impossibilities but for the dominance of such concepts as anti-whiteness and intersectionality. A sampling of Columbia University’s anti-whiteness offerings includes an ‘uprooting whiteness’ group, ‘deconstructing whiteness’ workshops and an ‘unlearning whiteness’ research award from the dean. Other colleges no doubt provide a similar menu.

According to the university worldview, whites and the West (the two categories are interchangeable) are responsible for everything wrong with the world, from inequality to poverty. ‘Persons of colour’ are the antidote. Heterosexuality and maleness are subcategories of whiteness, against which the intersectional coalition of queers, radical feminists and members of the Global South must mobilise. Israel today is hated as the embodiment of Western civilisation. Its modernity and economic success in a region where both are largely absent mark it out as hegemonic and illegitimate.

Of course, the ‘enemy of my enemy’ logic only works in one direction. Queers may be for Palestine, but despite their common nemesis, it is unlikely that Palestine is for queers.

What is being called anti-Semitism on college campuses today has little to do with traditional anti-Semitism. Had the university not taken its anti-white, anti-Western turn in the 1980s, students who know nothing of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion would not be baying for ‘intifada’. The exception comes from Muslim and black students, whose anti-Semitism has longer and more conventional roots.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

A President Who Cannot Conceive of Victory By Noah Rothman

Posted By on May 15th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/a-president-who-cannot-conceive-of-victory/

Yesterday, I wrote of President Joe Biden and his administration’s extraordinary facility for self-sabotage that this White House “cannot envision victory, either for America or its allies.” Indeed, “it sees only the prospect of ambiguous outcomes, to which it can muster the contribution of only half measures.” It was only hours later that one ranking administration official proved the observation correct.

Israel and the United States are “struggling over what the theory of victory is,” Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell told CNN reporter Kylie Atwood on Monday. “They talk about mostly the idea of some sort of sweeping victory on the battlefield, total victory,” he said of his Israeli counterparts. “I don’t think we believe that that is likely or possible.”

As CNN’s Alex Marquardt observed, Cam’s comments dovetail with Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s befuddling remarks on Sunday. Then, Blinken insisted that Israel’s small-footprint strategy in Gaza — the very strategy the U.S. lobbied Israel to adopt — was failing because it had allowed Hamas to reconstitute itself in areas the Israeli Defense Forces had already cleared. Since that calibrated approach had been unable to achieve its tactical goals, Israel should abandon its strategic objectives entirely. Victory over Hamas is unachievable “no matter what they do in Rafah,” Blinken said, “or if they leave and get out of Gaza, as we believe they need to do.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

What Must the Jury Be Thinking about Why Trump Is on Trial? Andrew McCarthy

Posted By on May 15th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/what-must-the-jury-be-thinking-about-why-trump-is-on-trial/

With former president Trump’s criminal trial now in its fourth week of testimony, I wonder what the Manhattan jury must be thinking about the resources the elected Democratic district attorney is devoting to it.

The majority of crime goes unreported. Of that which is reported, the number of crime cases that are “solved” — what police call the “clearance rate” — is alarmingly low. That is especially the case in Manhattan. Last week, the Manhattan Institute’s Tim Rosenberger noted in the City Journal that less than three in ten cases (29.8 percent) are cleared.

In New York City in 2022 (the last year for which there are complete annual stats), there were over 156,000 arrests. A little less than half of them, about 72,000, were felony arrests — nearly 29,000 categorized as violent felonies. All of these arrests resulted in less than 12,000 indictments. More disturbing, still, is the bottom line: Those 156,000 arrests yielded a grand total of just 4,375 prison sentences — i.e., sentences of incarceration were imposed in less than 3 percent of arrest cases.

As you think about that, bear in mind that many attacks that normal people would consider violent are deemed non-violent in New York if no serious injuries result. Consequently, many forcible attacks that result in arrests are charged by prosecutors as misdemeanor assaults. The Manhattan Institute’s Hannah Meyers points out on X/Twitter that many misdemeanor assault cases are “disposed” by simply being dismissed: Last year, the dismissal rate in New York City was 66 percent, having surged from 45 percent a decade ago.

Meyers further reports that recidivism is at its highest level in seven years — a fact acknowledged by NYPD Crime Control Strategies Chief Michael Lipetri, correcting false claims of improvement by public advocate and gubernatorial hopeful Jumaane Williams, one of the city’s many progressive champions of criminal-justice “reform.” An extraordinary amount of crime is committed by repeat offenders, who are on the streets rather than behind bars because of Democratic-dominated New York’s hostility to prosecution and imprisonment.