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President Trump Did Not Obstruct Justice by Alan M. Dershowitz

Posted By on May 12th, 2017

An absurd argument is now being put forward by some Democratic ideologues: namely that President Trump engaged in the crime of obstructing justice by firing FBI Director James Comey. Whatever one may think of the President’s decision to fire Comey as a matter of policy, there is absolutely no basis for concluding that the President engaged in a crime by exercising his statutory and constitutional authority to fire director Comey. As Comey himself wrote in his letter to the FBI, no one should doubt the authority of the President to fire the Director for any reason or no reason.

It simply cannot be a crime for a public official, whether the President or anyone else, to exercise his or her statutory and constitutional authority to hire or fire another public official. For something to be a crime there must be both an actus reus and mens rea – that is, a criminal act accompanied by a criminal state of mind. Even assuming that President Trump was improperly motivated in firing Comey, motive alone can never constitute a crime. There must be an unlawful act. And exercising constitutional and statutory power cannot be the actus reusof a crime.

So let’s put this nonsense behind us and not criminalize policy differences as extremists in both parties have tried to do. Republican and Democratic partisans often resort to the criminal law as a way of demonizing their political enemies. “Lock her up,” was the cry of Republican partisans against Hillary Clinton regarding her misuse of her email server. Now “obstruction of justice” is the “lock him up” cry of partisan Democrats who disagree with President Trump’s decision to fire Comey. I opposed the criminalization of policy differences when Texas Governor Perry and Congressman Tom Delay were indicted, and I strongly oppose the investigation now being conducted against Prime Minister Netanyahu. The criminal law should be used as the last resort against elected officials, not as the opening salvo in a political knife-fight.

EDUCATION, MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

‘Hate Spaces’: The Politics of Intolerance on Campus A disturbing, in-depth look at the new campus Brownshirts. Frontpagemag.com

Posted By on May 11th, 2017

Americans for Peace and Tolerance (APT) has released a new documentary called Hate Spaces: The Politics of Intolerance on Campus to address the worsening anti-Semitic environment on our country’s college campuses.

APT is a Boston-based non-profit organization dedicated to promoting peaceful coexistence in an ethnically diverse America by educating the American public about the need for a moderate political leadership that supports tolerance and core American values in communities across the nation.

Hate Spaces goes beyond the by-now familiar accounts of a hostile school environment to document the dynamics on campus that perpetuate the problem. It illustrates how anti-Semitism is being made fashionable at many American universities through the on-going academic de-legitimization of Israel, the normalization of hatred in the name of social justice, the growth of Muslim students on campus, and massive donations of Arab oil money to universities.

The film includes commentary and analysis from distinguished writers and academics including:

• Alan Dershowitz of Harvard
• William Jacobson of Cornell
• Richard Landes of Boston University
• Bret Stephens of The Wall Street Journal
• the Freedom Center’s own Caroline Glick of The Jerusalem Post

Connecticut College Professor Andrew Pessin says this of the film:

“Hate Spaces is an essential and timely film. Campus antisemitism, masquerading as anti-Israelism, is on the rise. Responding to this phenomenon requires a deep and honest analysis of its causes. Hate Spaces does this meticulously, thoroughly, and grippingly. A must-see for all those concerned about the worsening situation on campus.”

Please check out the trailer above.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Nonie Darwish’s “Wholly Different” Half her life in Egypt, half her life in the U.S. — an insider’s insights on Islam and the West. Danusha V. Goska

Posted By on May 11th, 2017

Nonie Darwish’s 2017 Regnery Faith book, Wholly Different: Why I Chose Biblical Values over Islamic Values, is a wide-ranging, reader-friendly view into the thinking of an Egyptian, Muslim woman who immigrated to America at age 30 and began to compare and contrast the values she was steeped in to those found in Judeo-Christian-influenced, Western culture.

Darwish was born in 1949 in Cairo, Egypt. She grew up in Egypt and Gaza. Her father, Mustafa Hafez, created and oversaw an anti-Israel terror group. When Darwish was eight, her father was assassinated by Israel. Egyptian President Nasser praised Darwish’s father as a shahid, or martyr. Darwish immigrated to the US in 1978, and she has lived here ever since. She converted to Christianity.

Wholly Different is part memoir, part sociological observation, and part prophetic clarion. Darwish’s style is cozy and conversational. Her sentences are short and easy to read. Darwish paints a vast, impressionistic landscape comparing the Muslim world to the West. She makes a series of thought-provoking points in a rapid style. She quotes relevant passages from Islamic scripture and shows how that scripture plays out in modern societies. In contrast, she quotes important Biblical passages and demonstrates how those have influenced the West.

Darwish combines the maternal love one might find in a wise grandmother, the kind who bakes cookies and contains a storehouse of folkloric wisdom, with the stripped-to-the-bone truth-telling and no-time-to-waste urgency of an Old Testament prophet. With every sentence, Darwish conveys the deep care she feels for every reader with an insistence on being heard, and heard for every last syllable.

As is often the case, this book by a former Muslim is more fearlessly blunt than many a counter-jihad statement by someone who has never been a Muslim. “Islamic values versus Biblical values is a bloody collision waiting to happen. The West must be warned,” she writes. Darwish has seen jihad up close and personal. She knows what is at stake, she has taken the measure of the wolf at the door, and her call bursts forth like a trumpet. Just one example of the kind of unique insights she can offer: in thirty years of living as a Muslim in the most populous Arab state, she never heard anyone question why Mohammed, at over fifty years old, took a six-year-old as his wife.

“A fish doesn’t know it is in water,” goes the old saying. Perhaps nothing dramatizes this point so vividly as Western women who marry Muslim men, travel with those men to their natal countries, and are shocked to discover that rights they took for granted as universal ceased to exist once they stepped across a border and put their Western homeland at their back. One can see one such woman, Stephanie, sobbing in a 2016 EXMNA video. “I was certain that I was going to find a way to bring my daughters back, so I bought them a bunch of clothes, but they haven’t had a chance to wear them yet,” Stephanie says, with unbearable poignancy. The camera shows Stephanie’s slender fingers fondling princess dresses she had purchased for her daughters, dresses that her daughters will never wear.

Stephanie was born in Canada and married a Muslim man. She had two children by him. She convinced herself that she and her Libyan husband could create a Canadian version of Islam. She could prevent her husband from forcing hijab on her daughters, allow the girls to listen to music, and take gymnastics. “We can mix both and be happy,” she thought. Islam, though, she said, demanded that her husband “protect” his children from Stephanie; indeed, to protect Stephanie from herself. Her husband, over the course of eighteen months, hatched a plot to convince Stephanie to put her daughters on a plane so that he could attend grad school in Europe. This was a lie. He had no plans for a European PhD. He lured Stephanie into Libya, at which point she had no rights whatsoever. Stephanie says that in Islamic terms, her husband was kind – because he had the right to kill her, and he did not. It’s five years later, and Stephanie has not seen her children since. She may never see them again.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Dissing English (not just England) at the E.U. The boundless arrogance of a Brussels big shot. Bruce Bawer

Posted By on May 11th, 2017

Ever since the British electorate voted to bow out of the European Union, the hacks and mediocrities who run that power-obsessed, democracy-despising organization have been taking every opportunity, big and small, to diss the U.K. The latest insult came from Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, who in a speech to “diplomats and experts” in Florence proffered the snotty assertion that, thanks to Brexit, “English is losing importance in Europe.” He made that statement in English, but then, to underscore his point and enhance the snottiness quotient, switched into French.

Juncker called Brexit a tragedy. Yes, it’s a tragedy for Juncker and other stuffed shirts whose collect a hefty paycheck, at the expense of European taxpayers, for doing little more than flying around the continent giving speeches to “diplomats and experts.” Of course, that’s not all the EU does. At the lower levels of its EU hierarchy, sitting behind big desks in handsome offices in shiny, impressive buildings all over Brussels (and elsewhere), are innumerable unelected technocrats who earn huge sums to hold unnecessary meetings, write unnecessary reports, and impose restrictions on Europeans that are not only unnecessary but positively destructive of individual liberty, entrepreneurship, and economic prosperity. Brexit is a tragedy for all of these EU apparatchiks because it’s the first step in a process that will almost certainly end with them having to look for a real job.

Juncker’s focus on the so-called decline in the importance of English was typical EU rhetoric – implicitly equating the continent and its people with himself and his fellow EU drudges. Will Brexit make English somewhat less important in this silly, solemn, self-regarding body? Who cares? Look at it this way: the UN, itself a nonsensical enough sodality, has 193 members but only six official languages – English, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, and Arabic. The EU, with 28 members, boasts no fewer than 24 official languages, plus five that are designated as “semi-official.” (Hence, one of the big upsides of EU is that it provides a staggering amount of employment for translators.)

When contemplating the EU, one should never lose sight of the fact that in some sense, the whole sprawling operation exists primarily to do what all bureaucracies exist to do – namely, to churn out documents. In the case of the EU, these documents number in the tens of thousands. Most of them are effectively meaningless. Some of them, however, turn yet another screw in the ever-intensifying control of Brussels over ordinary Europeans’ lives. In any event, every one of those documents needs to be translated into every one of those 24 languages. The mind boggles: how many trees are cut down every year to produce documents for an organization that piously pretends to be obsessed with preserving the environment? (I found it interesting to read the other day that at least one of the EU’s 24 official languages, Irish, has sort of been put on hold as an official language because so few Irish people actually know it – 99% speak English – that it’s hard to find people capable of translating to or from it.)

To be sure, the European Commission (the part of the EU that Juncker runs) has three “procedural” languages – English, French, and German – and Brexit may change that. Or perhaps not. After all, two other EU countries besides the U.K. – Ireland (as noted) and Malta (where 88% speak English) – have English as a native tongue. More important, in virtually all of the countries of the EU, English is, practically speaking, the only real second language. Yes, in the Netherlands, most people also speak French and German – but rarely as well as they do English. German is also pretty big in some central European countries – but more with old folks than younger ones. The fact is that when you come right down to it, the only truly universally shared language in Europe is English, period, and Brexit’s not going to change that.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

How Dare Trump Fire Comey! The Left’s shameless hypocrisy on the firing of the FBI Director. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on May 11th, 2017

Before the election, Nancy Pelosi had hinted that Hillary would fire FBI Director James Comey.

“Maybe he’s not in the right job,” the House Dem leader had coyly suggested. “I think that we have to just get through this election and just see what the casualties are along the way.”

The FBI Director was at risk of becoming a “casualty” over his handling of the Hillary investigation.

There was no outrage and no front page editorials at the New York Times and the Washington Post. No comparisons to Watergate or calls for an investigation. A top Dem suggesting that the FBI Director would have to leave because he was investigating another top Dem was just “good government.”

And there would have been none of the hypocritical media outcry if the election had gone another way and Comey were being told to pack his bags by President Hillary Clinton.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager had also hinted that Comey might have to step down because of his bias against Hillary. Now he claims that Trump’s firing of Comey “terrifies” him.

After Comey’s letter, Schumer had declared, “I do not have confidence in him any longer.” That is what top government officials say before demanding someone’s job. But now Schumer is outraged. “If we don’t get a special prosecutor, every American will rightfully suspect that the decision to fire #Comey was part of a cover-up,” he tweeted.

Were the Dem calls for Comey to resign also part of a cover-up?

Harry Reid had called on Comey to resign. Congressman Steve Cohen even wrote an op-ed titled, “For the Sake of the FBI, Comey Should Resign.” Now he touts Comey as a recipient for the Profiles in Courage award and accuses Trump of firing him because Comey “threatened his presidency.”

From Comey must go for investigating Hillary to Comey must get an award for investigating Trump. Did Cohen want Comey to resign then because he threatened Hillary Clinton’s presidency?

The incoherently official position of the Dems is that Comey should have been forced out for investigating Hillary. But that Trump shouldn’t be allowed to fire him because that’s a cover-up.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

U of Arizona Is Hiring Students to Tattle on Others for ‘Bias Incidents’ What kind of person wants to get a job policing ‘microaggressions’? By Katherine Timpf —

Posted By on May 11th, 2017

The University of Arizona is hiring students to be “social-justice activists,” and the job description demands that they “report any bias incidents or claims to appropriate Residence Life staff.”

In other words: These kids are being paid to tattle on other kids for anything they might consider to be a microaggression, and any students who gets these jobs should probably identify themselves so that other students will know to never invite them to their parties.

According to the university’s website, the official title of the position is “social-justice activist,” and it pays $10 per hour. They can expect to work about 15 hours per week, which, as the Daily Caller notes, means that they will be making roughly $600 per month to behave like self-righteous, meddling nightmares.

In addition to reporting the potentially offensive behavior of their peers, other parts of the job include planning social-justice programs for the residence halls, increasing “awareness and knowledge of diverse identities and how they influence interactions,” and promoting “inclusive communities through positive interactions.” And all of that is fine. I’m all for being a nice, sensitive person, but encouraging outside sources to report “bias incidents” whenever they feel that other students have been wronged is a terrible idea. It’s one thing to give students a place to report any problems that they’ve experienced themselves, but shouldn’t it be up to the person who was involved to decide whether or not there even was a problem in the first place? After all, we’re living in a world where many schools consider “you guys” to be a sexist phrase, and chances are that there will be reports of incidents committed against “victims” who never even felt that they were victims to begin with.

It’s a very likely scenario, especially when you think about what kind of person would apply for a job as a “social-justice advocate.” No doubt, the people who are hired will be the kind of buzzword-salad-spewing sycophants who do think that “you guys” is problematic, or else they wouldn’t be interested in having that sort of job in the first place. No one would want a job policing microaggressions unless he or she is the type of person who loves policing microaggressions, and we all know that those sorts of people are growing more and more ridiculous by the day. Students should feel comfortable at school, absolutely, but it’s also important to remember that these students are adults — which means that we should trust them to decide how to handle their own social problems the way that they themselves see fit.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Comey Ouster By The Editors NRO

Posted By on May 11th, 2017

President Trump has fired FBI director James Comey, who had made himself eminently fireable.

Last July, Comey took it upon himself to become not only the nation’s top policeman, but its top prosecutor, explaining in a long press conference that Hillary Clinton had clearly broken the law by hosting classified information on her private e-mail server, but that there was not “clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws.” As we observed at the time, the relevant statute does not require “intent,” only “gross negligence” — which adequately described the behavior Comey termed “reckless” and “extremely careless” — and, in any event, deciding whether to prosecute was not up to him, but to then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch. The entire event was, as longtime Justice Department hands noted, unprecedented.

Democrats, who in the wake of Tuesday evening’s news are breathless with Watergate comparisons, seem suddenly to have recalled their past enthusiasm for Comey’s “independence” and “integrity.”

Most Democrats have spent the last several months incensed at Comey, after he announced just days before November’s presidential election that the FBI was reopening its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, based on evidence found on the computer of Anthony Weiner, husband of Clinton’s right-hand woman Huma Abedin. (Yesterday, the Justice Department confirmed that Abedin did in fact send classified information to Weiner’s unsecured e-mail account.) Democrats, among them then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, suggested that Comey’s letter may have violated the Hatch Act, which restricts political activity by certain government officials. That anger intensified when, a few days later, Comey said, in effect, “Never mind,” and re-closed the reopened investigation, reaffirming the FBI’s previous conclusion: She broke the law, but so what?

On Tuesday evening, accounting for Comey’s termination, this sequence of events was laid out in a long memo by Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, whose tenure at the Department of Justice began just two weeks ago. Rosenstein’s presentation of the facts is fair and scrupulous. In addition to explaining how Comey repeatedly defied longstanding Justice Department precedent throughout the Clinton e-mail investigation, he cites critical comments from attorneys and deputy attorneys general from the last several administrations, both Republican and Democratic. Rosenstein rightly observes: “Almost everyone agrees that the Director made serious mistakes; it is one of the few issues that unites people of diverse perspectives.” Indeed, the only person who did not agree is James Comey, who has seemed incapable of admitting obvious errors, and has in effect asserted that his investigative “independence” makes him accountable to no one.

Democrats, having spent the last several months accusing Comey of intervening to throw the presidential election to Donald Trump, are now suggesting that he is an indispensable man. Senator Brian Schatz declared on Twitter: “We are in a full-fledged constitutional crisis.”

Deep breaths, Senator.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

Experts Now Agree: The Deplorables Really Are Deplorable New social-science surveys help Democrats explain away Trump’s win: Yes, his voters are racist. By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Posted By on May 11th, 2017

Scene: The lab-coated man comes in from the room. “It was a troubling case,” he admits. “This question of why you voted for Trump.” He snaps on his surgical glove and probes his patient’s mouth in the usual way “A real brain crusher! The boys and I really went a few rounds on the diagnosis. Were you the sympathetic sort? You know, just down on your luck, jobless maybe. Suffering from inequality. Or were you the ‘take my country back’ type. You know? Worked up about Central Americans or whatever. In other words, were you more a case of inequality?”

“You mean you wanted to know whether I had problems or whether I was the problem?” the patient offers.

The doctor: “More or less. So, we came up with a new battery of tests. A whole new data set!” The man in the lab coat was clearly excited about the new spreadsheets — he loved them. But then he turned to the man in the chair and started to wince. “We’ve run the numbers, and it turns out . . . ”

“No, doc, give me a chance!” the patient protests.

“You’ve come back deplorable,” the doctor sighs. “It’s really unfortunate.

“If the test had shown that you were financially put-out enough, we might have tried a trade policy, some shovel-ready infrastructure projects, or maybe a handout. But, owing to your manifest condition, I can recommend only a limited number of options.”

The patient: “Diversity training?”

The doctor laughs, “Oh no! Liable to make things worse, really. You’d resist. It’s complicated. No, perhaps we could try the implementation of a fairness doctrine, to turn off your Fox News. After observing your gut health, that’s an option we should explore. But the other way is just to let nature take its course, you know. Deplorables are generally older and so, closer to the end.”

“I’m a goner, then? No future.”

“It’s painful to contemplate. But pain, we can treat. Would you like a prescription opioid?” the doctors says with a faint leer.

And . . . scene!

And so it goes. The political and chattering classes, mostly exiled from official positions of power are still trying to figure out why they lost. And so they’ve returned to a debate that never needed to take place: Were Trump’s base of voters motivated primarily by “economic anxiety” or by racism and a host of other backward cultural attitudes?

Emma Green, a staff writer at The Atlantic, summed up the new surveys conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and her magazine.

Evidence suggests financially troubled voters in the white working class were more likely to prefer Clinton over Trump. Besides partisan affiliation, it was cultural anxiety — feeling like a stranger in America, supporting the deportation of immigrants, and hesitating about educational investment — that best predicted support for Trump.

Green adds:

Polling is a notoriously clumsy instrument for understanding people’s lives, and provides only a sketch of who they are. But it’s useful for debunking myths and narratives — particularly the ubiquitous idea that economic anxiety drove white working-class voters to support Trump.

She goes on to argue that working-class white voters are “attuned to cultural change and anxiety about America’s multicultural future.” It’s a very strong conclusion and the Twitterati immediately jumped all over it, essentially saying, “They’re just racists after all.”

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Can Trump Successfully Remodel the GOP? If Trumpism succeeds, it could replace mainstream Republicanism. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on May 11th, 2017

The Republican-party establishment is caught in an existential paradox.

Without Donald Trump’s populist and nationalist 2016 campaign, the GOP probably would not have won the presidency. Nor would Republicans now enjoy such lopsided control of state legislatures and governorships, as well as majorities in the House and Senate, and likely control of the Supreme Court for a generation.

So are conservatives angry at the apostate Trump or indebted to him for helping them politically when they were not able to help themselves?

For a similar sense of the paradox, imagine if a novice outsider such as billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban had captured the Democratic nomination and then won the presidency — but did not run on either Bernie Sanders’s progressive redistributionism, Barack Obama’s identity politics, or Hillary Clinton’s high taxes and increased regulation. Would liberals be happy, conflicted, or seething?

For now, most Republicans are overlooking Trump’s bothersome character excesses — without conceding that his impulsiveness and bluntness may well have contributed to his success after Republican sobriety and traditionalism failed.

Republicans concentrate on what they like in the Trump agenda — military spending increases, energy expansion, deterrence abroad, tax and regulatory reform, and the repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act — and they ignore the inherent contradictions between Trumpism and their own political creed.

But there are many fault lines that will loom large in the next few years.

Doctrinaire conservatives believe that unfettered free trade is essential, even if it is sometimes not fair or reciprocal.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Class focused on great Greco-Roman books may be changed after students complain it’s too white Max Diamond

Posted By on May 11th, 2017

At Reed College, a mandatory freshman literature course focused on the works of great thinkers underpinning Western Civilization has come under fire from campus activists, who allege the mandate is systemically racist because the class only assigns the works of white authors and therefore perpetuates white privilege and racism. https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/32453/

The target is Humanities 110, “Greece and the Ancient Mediterranean,” an introduction to the works of celebrated Greco-Roman thinkers such as Aristotle, Plato, Epictetus and Ovid.

Humanities 110, which has evolved over the years, has been a required course at the private, Portland, Ore.-based liberal arts college for decades, but a group of students calling themselves Reedies Against Racism want the curriculum changed.

In their words, it must be “reformed to represent the voices of people of color.”

Last fall they launched frequent protests against the class — an effort that continued through spring semester and prompted scholars to now consider revising the course.

During many of the lecture sessions of Hum 110 throughout the school year, while professors spoke on “The Rise of Rome” or “On the Nature of Things,” protesters sat or stood in the lecture hall holding up signs that read “I am more than a way to get federal funding” or “We cannot be erased.”

Some even wore tape across their mouths to signify that “Greece and the Ancient Mediterranean” is silencing them by only teaching white authors. Some professors asked the students not to crash their lecture halls, but those pleas were ignored.

The protests prompted scholars to move up the course’s review to this year. The results of that review, and any possible changes to the Humanities 110 syllabus as a result, may be announced this summer, a campus spokesman told The College Fix.

“The current humanities course focuses on the Classical world in its ancient Mediterranean context; this has not always been the case and the faculty differ on how important they think this focus is to the course,” Reed spokesman Kevin Myers said via email, noting faculty make all curricular decisions.

“Among other questions, the review will consider the focus for the next iteration of the course​. Regardless of its content, the main emphasis of the humanities course is ​for students to ​develop the skills that will help ​them succeed in their classes at Reed and their lives after graduation,” Myers stated.

Western Civ on trial

Despite the criticisms from the vocal minority, many Reed students have appreciated the course as is.

It aims “to understand the philosophical underpinnings of Western society, and goes a long way towards giving students the context to think through the great problems of government and society themselves,” senior economics major Zachary Harding, who has taken the course, told The College Fix.

Another former student of the class, 2016 Reed College alumnus Aristomenes Spanos, agreed. “There is value in learning the different methods people used to tackle the same problems we deal with today,” Spanos told The Fix.