RUTHFULLY YOURS

WASHINGTON (JTA) — Kenneth Marcus has worked for years inside and outside government to advocate for civil liberties. He has also been involved for years in Jewish community advocacy.

Now Marcus, the founder and president of the Louis S. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, is up for a prestigious job at the Department of Education — assistant secretary for civil rights. On Thursday, the Senate Health and Education Committee approved Marcus along party lines, and now his nomination goes to the full Senate.

In recent weeks, my inbox has been cluttered with statements pushing a narrative that what’s keeping Democrats from backing Marcus is his role in fighting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement targeting Israel.

What’s remarkable is that both sides of the BDS equation — the movement’s supporters and opponents — are colluding unintentionally in advancing the narrative.

Groups that back BDS have argued against Marcus’ nomination, pointing to his aggressive tactics while heading the Brandeis Center to counter anti-Israel activities on campus by defining them as an attack on the civil rights of Jewish students. Two organizations, Palestine Legal and Jewish Voice for Peace, have lobbied hard against Marcus.

“Marcus not only poses a danger to those who advocate for Palestinian human rights, but to all students and to the spirit of the university itself,” Jewish Voice for Peace said in a statement following the committee vote.

Which makes sense — interest groups nudging their issue to the center is not new. What is not immediately clear is why organizations ostensibly committed to making BDS go away are giving their issue oxygen.

A coalition of 60 pro-Israel groups wrote a letter Jan. 15, before the committee vote, urging the panel to approve Marcus across party lines. It included a statement from Jeff Robbins, a Democrat and Clinton-era U.S. delegate to what was then the U.N. Human Rights Commission, noting that the nomination “has been bitterly criticized by the fringe and unhinged groups who operate something of an anti-Semitism lobby. Democrats in the Senate would do well not to fall for it.”

But why bring it up when Democrats in the Senate barely seem to be paying attention to criticism of the nominee’s posture on Israel or anti-Semitism? Notably, no major centrist or liberal group signed on to the letter; the signatories trend conservative and hawkish in Israel, including Americans for a Safe Israel, CAMERA and the Zionist Organization of America. I asked the publicist who is touting the letter why the groups are making Israel a central issue when there is little evidence it is a central issue. She said she would canvas the signatories, but by press time she did not come up with a reply.

On Dec. 5, I logged into the Senate Health and Education Committee website and listened to hours of Marcus being grilled and praised. Not once did BDS come up.

Yet now The New York Times has taken up the narrative, framing Marcus’ Israel advocacy as central to the controversy over his nomination. “An Advocate for Israel Draws Fire as He Nears Confirmation to Civil Rights Post” was the headline Thursday on its website.

Only twice did I hear a reference to Marcus’ Jewish advocacy during his committee appearance. The first time, in introducing Marcus, the committee’s chairman, Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., picked from a pile of endorsements before him a letter from Hillel International describing Marcus as “a longtime champion for civil rights and for college students.”

Hours after Houthi militants in Yemen launched a new missile at Saudi Arabia on December 19, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, took her blue seat at the horseshoe-shaped table of the Security Council. “Thankfully,” she said, “the missile was intercepted before it could hit its intended target,” which apparently was a palace in Riyadh, the Saudi capital. “But the very fact of this attack is a flashing red siren for this council.” Backed by Iran, Haley said, the Houthis have fired missiles at civilians before. “Unless we act,” she warned, the latest one “won’t be the last.”

Haley’s remarks came during the most intense week of her yearlong tenure at Turtle Bay, at a time when most of the rest of the U.N. preferred not to discuss Iranian threats and instead wanted to jabber about Israel — in other words, to ignore literal missiles and instead lob figurative ones at President Trump for his decision to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. On December 18, as the 14 non-American members of the Security Council rushed to approve a resolution condemning Trump’s decision, Haley cast her first veto.

“It was an unfortunate moment but a proud moment, knowing we were in the right,” she said the next day, in an interview with National Review at her office across the street from U.N. headquarters. “Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. Everyone knows this. We have to acknowledge the truth. Once you get the truth out of the way, you can do so much.”

Ambrose Bierce once defined “diplomacy” as “the patriotic art of lying for one’s country.” Haley nevertheless has become America’s great truth-teller, flouting diplomatic conventions to speak plainly and with toughness about the provocations of Iran, the rights of Israel, U.S. sovereignty, and much more. Before Trump tapped her for the United Nations, she was the young and attractive Republican governor of South Carolina with a bright future in domestic politics.

A year later, she has transformed herself into a hero of many foreign-policy conservatives, even drawing comparisons to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, her predecessor who in 1975 famously denounced the U.N.’s efforts to equate Zionism with racism. Moynihan’s moment of moral clarity propelled him to the U.S. Senate, where he served four terms. Haley’s future is anybody’s guess: Will she succeed Rex Tillerson as secretary of state? Does she harbor presidential ambitions? It remains as bright as ever, even as it now appears headed in new and unexpected directions.

Haley’s parents are Sikhs from the Punjab. The birthplaces of her three siblings trace the family’s journey around the globe: India, Canada, and the United States, where her father took a job as a biology professor at Voorhees College in South Carolina. The future ambassador was born in nearby Bamberg in 1972 as Nimrata Randhawa. She soon became known to everyone as “Nikki,” a childhood nickname that means “little one.” Accounts of her youth often mention her participation as a four-year-old in the Wee Miss Bamberg pageant. Traditionally, the town had picked two winners, one black and one white. The judges didn’t know what to do with Nikki, whose father wore a turban and her mother a sari. So they disqualified her.

Is there a “three strikes and you’re out” law for political narratives?

Democrats and their media allies were back at the Collusion Reclamation Project this week. The new and improved version is: The NRA did it.

As we have recently recounted, the first breathless attempt to suggest a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin to subvert the 2016 presidential election centered on Carter Page. A tangential foreign-policy adviser to the Trump campaign, Page featured prominently in the Steele dossier. Anonymous Russian sources reporting to former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele placed him at the core of an espionage enterprise that entailed hacking Democratic-party emails and negotiating a corrupt quid pro quo arrangement with Putin operatives to give Russia sanctions relief.

That storyline appears to have gone by the boards with the revelation that the dossier — already in disrepute as salacious, unverified, and convincingly refuted in key particulars — was actually an opposition-research project funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Facing libel lawsuits, Steele himself has taken the position that his third- and fourth-hand hearsay information was “raw” and “unverified,” passed along to American law enforcement because he thought it should be investigated, not because he was vouching for its truthfulness. His collaborator, Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson, has similarly offered nothing meaningful in the way of corroboration in testimony before Senate and House investigators. At the moment, the more pressing question about the dossier involves not the contents of its sensational allegations but whether they were used by the Obama Justice Department and FBI in obtaining a FISA-court warrant to spy on Page and the Trump campaign.

The collapse of the dossier led the media to cobble together a new foundation for their rickety collusion tale. We were treated to gin-mill chatter between an even more obscure Trump-campaign figure, twentysomething climber George Papadopoulos, and an Australian diplomat. Papadopoulos told his companion that he’d heard from Kremlin-connected sources that Russia had emails that could be damaging to the Clinton campaign. Australian intelligence thought so little of the exchange that they waited months to alert their American counterparts, and the FBI thought so little of it that they waited for months — i.e., until after the election — to interview Papadopoulos.

Similarly, Special Counsel Robert Mueller thought so little of it that he let Papadopoulos plead out to a process crime of lying to FBI agents. It is no wonder: While his story is titillating for the media and Democrats because it feeds the Trump-Russia banter, it is a body blow to a prosecutor trying to establish a Trump-Russia espionage conspiracy (which you may vaguely remember as the original “collusion” claim). At best, Papadopoulos’s version of events means the Trump campaign had nothing to do with Russia’s acquisition of Clinton emails. More likely, Papadopoulos’s contacts were bluffing — neither he nor the Trump campaign got emails from Russia and there is, to date, no proof that the Kremlin had them in the first place. There being no actionable collusion evidence, Mueller was in no position to induce Papadopoulos into a collusion-based guilty plea.