RUTHFULLY YOURS

A federal appeals court rebukes his immigration order.America’s most powerful former law professor is getting a re-education in the Constitution, and on present course President Obama might flunk out. Witness Tuesday’s federal appeals-court rebuke of his 2014 immigration order, including language that suggests the Administration will also lose on the legal and policy merits.

Mr. Obama caused a furor in November when he suddenly claimed powers he had previously said he didn’t have to award legal status and work permits to millions of illegal immigrants. Texas and 25 other states sued, claiming injury and a violation of their sovereign powers under the Constitution. Federal Judge Andrew Hanen issued a preliminary injunction for the states in February, and on Tuesday the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals shot down the Administration’s request to lift the injunction.

The 2-1 ruling by a three-judge panel found that the Administration had failed to make its case that Texas and the other states suffered no injury if Mr. Obama’s rule was implemented. Texas cited the fact that it would have to issue driver’s licenses to the newly legal immigrants, and the court agreed this was a cost. Even if Texas raised its license fees to cover the costs, the fact that it had to change its law to accommodate the federal rule was also an injury.

Op-Ed: Does the Jewish Federation of Orange County Aid Pro-Israel Advocacy?

Far from encouraging potent and effective activities to counter the barrage of anti-Semitic attacks on Jews and Israel at UCI, the JFOC has added to the problem.

In defense of recent criticism for attacking Jewish activists on the University of California, Irvine (UCI) campus, the leadership of the JewishFederation of Orange County (JFOC – ed. note: Irvine is in Orange County, California) attempted to vindicate themselves and affirm their “pro-Israel bona fides” in the media. Certainly, many of JFOC’s actions, past and present, are indefensible and run contrary to those expected of an organization embracing Israel support as a core mission.

Earlier I pointed out that Sidney Blumenthal, a man widely despised even within his own party, had been passing pro-Muslim Brotherhood material [1]from his even crazier son Max Blumenthal; a bigot who has called for the destruction of Israel.

Max Blumenthal is so out there that his anti-Israel material was used by the Jewish Community Center shooter [2]. It was also used by Hillary Clinton.

Now we know that Max Blumenthal’s views shaped Hillary Clinton’s understanding of Benghazi.

Mark Tapson is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

Last Friday, as the week downshifted into the Memorial Day three-day holiday, the official Twitter account of the Democratic Party wished the country a “Happy Memorial Day weekend, everyone!” and tweeted [2] a pic of – whom else? – President Obama lapping at an ice cream cone while media lapdogs zoomed their cameras in to capture the photo op. CNN anchor Jake Tapper injected a note of perspective by tweeting [3] back, “Respectfully, @TheDemocrats, this is not what Memorial Day weekend is about.”

Indeed it is not, but for Barack Obama, of course, everything is about Barack Obama. And for the Democratic Party, everything is about selling the American people a crock of big-government idolatry, and so they followed up the Obama photo with tweets about a 15% off holiday sale at their website store – because nothing memorializes the men and women of our armed forces who paid the ultimate price for their country quite like a discounted “I Heart O’bama” Shamrock Lapel Sticker [4] or a “Like a Boss” POTUS t-shirt [5].

It has been said that nature abhors a vacuum. The Obama administration’s policies around the world have created power vacuums with severe and often deadly consequences. These vacuums are profoundly impacting the Middle East and the rampage of ISIS and other terror organizations.

Today my focus will be on the massive numbers of refugees fleeing the chaos and violence of the Middle East and what this is likely to mean for the United States from a number of perspectives.

Millions of people are quite literally running for their lives and are heading to countries around the world. Make no mistake, this is a humanitarian crisis that pulls at people’s heartstrings, and rightfully so. As the grandson of a woman who was slaughtered in Poland during World War II, I understand how important it is for countries around the world to try to save lives.

Our primary concern, however, must be on how any actions to address this will impact the United States and its citizens. We will begin by considering the impact large numbers of refugees would likely have on American workers, particularly focusing on a proposal for the resettlement of 50,000 Syrian refugees in Detroit, Michigan.

The latest round of Israel scandals began on March 17, which was Israel’s election day, when Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu wrote in a Facebook post: “The right-wing government is in danger. Arab voters are coming out in droves to the polls. Left-wing organizations are busing them out.”

It sounded bigoted toward Arab voters. It was atypical of Netanyahu, and just a few days later he apologized [2] to representatives of the Israeli Arab sector at his Prime Minister’s Residence in Jerusalem, saying, “I know the things I said several days ago offended some of Israel’s citizens, hurt the Arab citizens. This was never my intent. I apologize for this.”

We all know Bush’s Iraq War, but we don’t know much about Obama’s Iraq War. Republicans fight wars. Democrats engage in police actions, impose No-Fly Zones and provide security for humanitarian missions. They don’t do anything as vulgar as fight wars. That would be warmongering.

Even by the war-shy standards of Democrats, Obama’s word games with war have been something else.

Obama’s wars are complex shell games. When he goes to war, he claims that it was at the request of a third party, which was actually fulfilling his request to file a request that it later takes back, based on a pretext that turns out to be false, to carry out a mission that turns out to be a pretext for regime change.

At least that’s how it happened in Libya.

The Thugs of India ingratiated themselves with trusting travellers and strangled them to honour the goddess Kali. If only writers and politicians of the Victorian Age had been less judgmental, more inclined to focus on un-radicalised Thugs, how much more kindly might we remember them?
In a parallel universe, someone who resembled the Earthbound Sir Robert Peel explained to the British Parliament in early 1835 that it was wrong to blame peaceful Thuggees for the actions of a few. Radical Thuggees, who might be called Thugs for short, he suggested, were the problem. Hence the word thugs entered the lexicon.

I was thinking of this piece of pseudo-historical trivia when reading Wikipedia on the topic of Thuggees. Here is an excerpt:

There was a time, now fading from memory, when laws were made by legislatures. Today, look not to elected representatives for the setting of laws, but to the judges whose keen eye for identifying formerly unrecognised “rights” would appear to be boundless
For a considerable time, judicial power in Britain has been expanding at the expense of legislative and executive powers, and promises to continue to do so. But if this is to continue – and there are powerful reasons why it should not – it should be brought about not just by changes in the thinking of legal elites such as academics and judges, but with the understanding and assent of the public, or at least of those elected to represent the public. Furthermore, they must possess the knowledge needed to decide whether to assent or to oppose the change. This lecture is intended to provide some of that knowledge by describing recent developments and setting them within a broader philosophical and comparative context. This should be of interest elsewhere in the Anglosphere, wherever parliamentary government and the common law have grown from the same British stock.

While I will sometimes speak critically of judges expanding their own powers, I do not intend to impugn their motives. Decisions that have expanded judicial power have always been motivated by the laudable goal of promoting justice or the rule of law, and often with success. It should be acknowledged that the philosophical and political issues I will discuss are difficult ones, about which well informed and reasonable minds can and do disagree. On the other hand, it is this very fact – the existence of reasonable disagreement – that underpins the case for substantial constitutional change being brought about only through democratic reforms, and not by unilateral judicial innovation.

In the aftermath of the Shoah, horrified Europeans wanted to turn over a new leaf. Yet, as the Yad Vashem professor of Holocaust studies ruefully observed, the modern left tirelessly updates and amplifies all the ancient blood libels under the guise of ‘anti-Zionism’
Robert Wistrich, who died of a heart attack on May 19, 2015, was arguably the most important public intellectual of the past twenty-five years. He was, fittingly, about to address the Italian Senate on the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe. I met him only once, in January 12, 2012, when he addressed a group of twenty-three Australian educators at the International School for Holocaust Studies in Yad Vashem, Jerusalem. The first part of his two-and-a-half hour presentation was titled “The Intellectuals and Rise of Modern anti-Semitism in Europe – 19th and 20th Centuries”, and that was followed by “Reflection on the Phenomenon of anti-Semitism in the Modern World (focus on Europe)”.

Wistrich would not be especially impressed by the “public intellectual” moniker, given that he placed much of the blame for modern-day anti-Semitism on – I quote from his lecture – “intellectuals, ideologues and second-rate journalists”, not excluding Wilhelm Marr, who first coined the term “anti-Semitism” in 1879 to differentiate his new-style anti-Jewishness, as outlined in The Victory of Jewry over Germandom, from traditional Christian anti-Judaism. In fact, Wistrich reminded us that the “intellectuals, ideologues and second-rate journalists” of almost every imperial, universalist or millennialist movement have identified “the Jewish problem” as an impediment to their would-be emancipatory projects. Each new rebellion and revolution in Europe, from Luther to Voltaire to Marx and beyond has somehow managed to “reproduce all the stereotypes of medieval Europe”.