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Ruth King

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Ending the Trial Bar’s Road Trips A pair of Supreme Court cases could rein in abusive forum shopping.

By on April 25th, 2017

Plaintiffs lawyers have a business model built around litigation tourism, suing in state courts known for friendly verdicts and big jury awards. The Supreme Court hears a pair of cases Tuesday that could upend this violation of federalism and due process.

In Bristol Meyers Squibb v. Superior Court of California, the Justices will consider whether some 600 plaintiffs who live outside California can sue the New York-based company in the Golden State by joining 86 local plaintiffs. The plaintiffs, who allege injuries related to the drug Plavix, sued in California because of its plaintiff-friendly reputation. (The other case, BNSF Railway v. Tyrell, concerns a similar play in Montana.)

The Constitution’s Due Process Clause says no person shall “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” which protects defendants from being dragged into courts for improper claims. In Tuesday’s cases the claims filed have no connection to the state court exercising jurisdiction, a practice the High Court has already rejected.

In 2014 the Justices ruled in Daimler v. Bauman that for a court to have jurisdiction a lawsuit must be filed where a company is headquartered or uses as its main place of business. The same year in Walden v. Fiore, the Court held unanimously that “[f]or a State to exercise jurisdiction consistent with due process, the defendant’s suit-related conduct must create a substantial connection with the forum State.”

Yet the California Supreme Court ruled 4-3 in 2016 that California courts had jurisdiction over the Plavix lawsuits though the alleged injuries didn’t occur there, the company isn’t incorporated there and Plavix isn’t made there. The California judges, in willful disregard of the U.S. Supreme Court, said the state had jurisdiction because the company did a lot of business there. By that standard nearly any business could sue in California.

Justice Kathryn Werdegar noted in dissent that allowing a lawsuit with such a tenuous connection to the state “threatens to subject companies to the jurisdiction of California courts to an extent unpredictable from their business activities in California” and extends jurisdiction over liability claims “well beyond our state’s legitimate regulatory interest.” This violates a basic tenet of federalism. Justice Werdegar offers the High Court a road map to enforce its precedents and rein in the trial bar.

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Freud’s Government Shutdown Maybe it’s time to kill the filibuster for appropriations.

By on April 25th, 2017

Congress returns to work Tuesday, funding for the government runs out Friday, and seemingly all of Washington is promising high drama and an epic budget battle. Don’t fall for the hype. A more accurate term for this week’s scuffle is Freud’s shutdown, because the stakes aren’t much higher than the narcissism of small differences.

Congress is debating a stopgap omnibus that will last through Sept. 30, which is presumably when the next fake crisis will arrive. For now, talks between Republican and Democratic leaders in the House and Senate are deadlocked over funding for President Trump’s Mexican border wall, the Pentagon and Obama Care subsidies. But the politics on both sides are hotter than the policy details. Democratic obstructionism and Mr. Trump’s hyperbole are becoming an unvirtuous cycle.

Take the White House demand for funding border security. “The Democrats don’t want money from budget going to border wall despite the fact that it will stop drugs and very bad MS 13 gang members,” Mr. Trump tweeted over the weekend, while Nancy Pelosi averred Sunday that Democrats won’t approve a penny for this “immoral, expensive, unwise” exercise.

The House Minority Leader has a point that completing the wall—652 miles of the 1,954-mile U.S.-Mexico border are already fenced—would be wasteful and unnecessary. The full project would run $15 billion to $25 billion, and there are better uses of scarce taxpayer dollars than antagonizing a neighbor.

Then again, the White House request is for all of—$1.5 billion. About $500 million would finance immigration enforcement with the balance going to the wall. This is pocket change in the $3.9 trillion federal budget, and in practice it might pay for logistical planning, site reviews and perhaps building a couple miles of fence after years of federal and state permitting and Nimby opposition.

Yet Mr. Trump is portraying these fiscal peanuts as the coming of the “great, great wall” he promised. Democrats have decided they’ll defy him anyway—though they know his policy is more moderate than his rhetoric and they were ready to spend $40 billion to militarize the border in the failed 2013 immigration bill.

Democrats have thus set up a game of political chicken, and Chuck Schumer has an eight-vote Senate margin to filibuster a deal. Either they box Mr. Trump into a retreat that demoralizes his voters, frustrates a White House impatient for legislative success, and energizes the progressive base. Or maybe their true goal is to force a partial shutdown that they can blame on Republicans.

Refusing to negotiate adds to disorder in Washington, which benefits Democrats, and a government work stoppage that Democrats caused would amplify the media narrative that Mr. Trump and the GOP can’t govern. Democrats think they can retake the House in 2018, and they’ll campaign as the party that at least knows how to run the joint.

Republicans have offered to compromise by passing an appropriation bill for a corner of ObamaCare in return for the border $1.5 billion and a defense supplemental bill of about $30 billion. So-called cost-sharing reduction subsidies offset out-of-pocket insurance costs for some individuals, and their spending formula was included in the 2010 law.

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ANTI-SEMITISM, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump Lauds ‘Unbreakable Spirit of the Jewish People’ in Yom HaShoah Remarks to Leading Group

By on April 25th, 2017

US President Donald Trump paid tribute to the victims of the Holocaust on Sunday and lauded Jewish courage in the face of genocide, in Holocaust Remembrance Day remarks to a leading international Jewish group.

“On this Holocaust Remembrance Day, we tell the stories of the fathers, mothers and children, whose lives were extinguished and whose love was torn from this earth,” Trump said, in a pre-recorded video address to the World Jewish Congress Plenary Assembly in New York. “We also tell the stories of courage in the face of death, humanity in the face of barbarity, and the unbreakable spirit of the Jewish people.”

He added, “On Yom HaShoah, we look back at the darkest chapter of human history. We mourn, we remember, we pray, and we pledge: Never again. I say it, never again.”

Trump also spoke about the achievements of the state of Israel and about the importance of combating antisemitism, including from the Iranian regime.

“Today, only decades removed from the Holocaust, we see a great nation risen from the desert and we see a proud Star of David waving above the State of Israel.” he said. “That star is a symbol of Jewish perseverance. It’s a monument to unyielding strength. We recall the famous words attributed to Theodor Herzl: If you will, it is no dream. If you will it, it is no dream.”

He continued, “Jews across the world have proved the truth of these words day after day. In the memory of those who were lost, we renew our commitment and our determination not to disregard the warnings of our own times. We must stamp out prejudice and antisemitism everywhere it is found. We must defeat terrorism, and we must not ignore the threats of a regime that talks openly of Israel’s destruction. We cannot let that ever even be thought of.”

Trump’s remarks stood in contrast to the White House’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day statement in January which was roundly criticized for neglecting to specifically mention Jews.

The president also had words of praise for WJC president Ronald Lauder, with whom he reportedly attended the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1960s.

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Obama’s hidden Iran deal giveaway By dropping charges against major arms targets, the administration infuriated Justice Department officials — and undermined its own counter proliferation task forces by Josh Meyer

By on April 25th, 2017

“Good reporting for a change by Politico, which otherwise remains focused on DJT’s supposed “Russia connection.” from e-pal Craig K
When President Barack Obama announced the “one-time gesture” of releasing Iranian-born prisoners who “were not charged with terrorism or any violent offenses” last year, his administration presented the move as a modest trade-off for the greater good of the Iran nuclear agreement and Tehran’s pledge to free five Americans.

“Iran had a significantly higher number of individuals, of course, at the beginning of this negotiation that they would have liked to have seen released,” one senior Obama administration official told reporters in a background briefing arranged by the White House, adding that “we were able to winnow that down to these seven individuals, six of whom are Iranian-Americans.”

But Obama, the senior official and other administration representatives weren’t telling the whole story on Jan. 17, 2016, in their highly choreographed rollout of the prisoner swap and simultaneous implementation of the six-party nuclear deal, according to a POLITICO investigation.

In his Sunday morning address to the American people, Obama portrayed the seven men he freed as “civilians.” The senior official described them as businessmen convicted of or awaiting trial for mere “sanctions-related offenses, violations of the trade embargo.”

In reality, some of them were accused by Obama’s own Justice Department of posing threats to national security. Three allegedly were part of an illegal procurement network supplying Iran with U.S.-made microelectronics with applications in surface-to-air and cruise missiles like the kind Tehran test-fired recently, prompting a still-escalating exchange of threats with the Trump administration. Another was serving an eight-year sentence for conspiring to supply Iran with satellite technology and hardware. As part of the deal, U.S. officials even dropped their demand for $10 million that a jury said the aerospace engineer illegally received from Tehran.

And in a series of unpublicized court filings, the Justice Department dropped charges and international arrest warrants against 14 other men, all of them fugitives. The administration didn’t disclose their names or what they were accused of doing, noting only in an unattributed, 152-word statement about the swap that the U.S. “also removed any Interpol red notices and dismissed any charges against 14 Iranians for whom it was assessed that extradition requests were unlikely to be successful.”

Three of the fugitives allegedly sought to lease Boeing aircraft for an Iranian airline that authorities say had supported Hezbollah, the U.S.-designated terrorist organization. A fourth, Behrouz Dolatzadeh, was charged with conspiring to buy thousands of U.S.-made assault rifles and illegally import them into Iran.

A fifth, Amin Ravan, was charged with smuggling U.S. military antennas to Hong Kong and Singapore for use in Iran. U.S. authorities also believe he was part of a procurement network providing Iran with high-tech components for an especially deadly type of IED used by Shiite militias to kill hundreds of American troops in Iraq.

The biggest fish, though, was Seyed Abolfazl Shahab Jamili, who had been charged with being part of a conspiracy that from 2005 to 2012 procured thousands of parts with nuclear applications for Iran via China. That included hundreds of U.S.-made sensors for the uranium enrichment centrifuges in Iran whose progress had prompted the nuclear deal talks in the first place.

When federal prosecutors and agents learned the true extent of the releases, many were shocked and angry. Some had spent years, if not decades, working to penetrate the global proliferation networks that allowed Iranian arms traders both to obtain crucial materials for Tehran’s illicit nuclear and ballistic missile programs and, in some cases, to provide dangerous materials to other countries.

“They didn’t just dismiss a bunch of innocent business guys,” said one former federal law enforcement supervisor centrally involved in the hunt for Iranian arms traffickers and nuclear smugglers. “And then they didn’t give a full story of it.”

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A Fearful White Leftist’s Black Nationalism Chris Hayes goes all in on Black Nationalism with “A Colony in a Nation.” Daniel Greenfield

By on April 24th, 2017

Black Nationalism is hot.

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, in which publishing’s answer to Kanye West contended that the white firefighters of 9/11 were “not human”, won a National Book Award. Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning, which indicted a post-racial society as racist, won the next one.

But the dirty little secret is that the target audience for these Black Nationalist tracts is as lily white as the MSNBC lineup.

So it’s no wonder that a brother from the MSNBC hood and The Nation barrio decided to get on board with the revolution. Chris Hayes, who is the same shade as Shaun King, takes his own Rachel Dolezal shot at monetizing Ferguson and writing a Black Nationalist tract with A Colony in a Nation.

A Colony in a Nation boasts an appropriate black and white color scheme. If you’re not very bright and want to understand Hayes’ thesis, “Colony” has a black background and “Nation” has a white one.

America is a nation for white people and a colony for black people. We’re an Apartheid state.

Except it’s not Hayes’ thesis. It’s just another case of white lefties stealing ideas from black people and then marketing them. Chris Hayes just dived into his closet, reached into a moldy pile of back issues and dug out Internal Colonialism. Now Hayes is presenting that old moldy idea as a provocative new thesis.

But that’s the Black Nationalist revival in a nutshell. Black Lives Matter’s totem is seventies terrorist Assata Shakur. Ibram X. Kendi’s model in Stamped is Angela Davis. The Black Nationalist revival is a laughably Black-ish effort by the Kanye Wests of a rising African-American middle class to compensate for their privileged lives with the radical tantrums of Black-ish Nationalism by privileged racists.

Black-ish Nationalism by college students is both racist and silly. But Coates still makes a much more convincing racial revolutionary than MSNBC’s less masculine version of Rachel Maddow.

Chris Hayes writes about black people without knowing anything about them. He approaches the black people he talks to with the awed enthusiasm of an anthropologist discovering a lost tribe in the Borneo. Worse still he’s clearly writing for an audience to whom black lives are equally exotic and obscure.

It’s awkward, racist and ignorant. He insists that in the white “Nation” the ”citizens call the police to protect them” but in the black “Colony, subjects flee the police, who offer the opposite of protection.”

That silly pompous rant would embarrass any decently ignorant Bard College sophomore.

How, one wonders, does Hayes think that police respond to calls in black communities at all? Is Detroit’s tiny white minority responsible for all the 911 calls? What does he think that black people do when someone is breaking into their house? Turn on MSNBC? Throw a copy of A Colony in a Nation at them?

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“A Mortal Enemy Called Radical Islam.” Gen. John Kelly charts how jihadists target the USA with “exported violence.” Lloyd Billingsley

By on April 24th, 2017

“For a brief moment after the attacks of 9/11,” Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly said Tuesday, “our nation shook off its complacency, and realized our American values had a mortal enemy called radical Islam.” This threat, Kelly said, “has metastasized and decentralized, and the risk is as threatening today as it was that September morning almost 16 years ago.”

Part of the problem, Gen. Kelly said, is that many “holy warriors” will depart their home countries, and because of the Visa Waiver Program, “they can more easily travel to the United States which makes us a prime target for their exported violence.”

To address this problem, President Donald Trump issued an executive order temporarily restricting travel from seven predominantly Muslim nations with terrorist issues, only to have the order blocked by federal judge James Robart. Last month, President Trump issued “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States.” Federal judge Derrick Watson blocked the order, ruling that a reasonable person would conclude that the measure was “issued with a purpose to disfavor a particular religion,” not to prevent terrorists from entering the United States.

Neither judge made any reference to the way terrorists had gained entry to the United States in the past, particularly before September 11, 2001. As it happens, the United States government has already addressed that subject at considerable length.

“It is perhaps obvious to state that terrorists cannot plan and carry out attacks in the

United States if they are unable to enter the country.”

That is from the introduction to 9/11 and Terrorist Travel: Staff Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States, which the 9/11 Commission failed to include in their larger report in July of 2004. It emerged on August 21, 2004, the same day the 9/11 Commission disbanded. The 19 radical Islamic terrorists responsible for 9/11 were able to enter the United States, and the report explains how they did so.

Those involved in that attack successfully entered the United States 33 times over 21 months through nine airports. A ballpark figure for the number who should have got in is zero. As the report notes, all 19 of the 9/11 terrorist visa applications were incomplete in some way, with data fields left blank and questions not fully answered.

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The Green Cult’s Holy Week The Left’s religion of destruction on full display. Bruce Thornton

By on April 24th, 2017

Hard upon Passover and Easter Week comes the two high holy days for the Green Cult, last Saturday’s Earth Day, and next Saturday’s People’s Climate March. This two-bit nature-worship calls itself “environmentalism,” but like another pseudo-science that ravaged the modern world, Marxism, this “ism” is definitely a “wasm,” its contradictions, hypocrisies, and cognitive incoherence patent. But just as Marx’s poltergeist lives on in various collectivists ideologies, environmentalism exacts a huge cost from those who can least afford it.

Resource management is an obvious imperative for human beings. We are practically and morally obliged to use nature in such a way that we maximize benefits for all people, and leave for those who come after us the resources for maintaining and improving their lives. Our earthly home is not the wild, the untouched nature that excites our romantic sensibilities, but the garden. We develop and improve nature so that people can survive, but also have clean air and water, and find aesthetic pleasure and solace in its beauty. But nature per se has no intrinsic value or meaning. Nature is matter and the laws of physics, literally inhuman and meaningless. It is indifferent to us, this one species of millions, most of which have disappeared. We give meaning and value to nature, because we are conscious of our uniqueness and its necessary end. Thus nature’s importance rests solely on how it sustains and benefits human beings.

Until the modern world and the development of revolutionary technologies that freed us from nature’s cruelty, people rarely idealized nature. The hard task of providing food made our relationship to nature an adversarial one, and our efforts often failed. It wasn’t until improvements in agricultural techniques in the 18th century began to liberate more and more people from this drudgery. As late as the early 20th century the majority of people farmed. Today two people produce food for a hundred. Freed from the harsh and destructive forces of nature, we began to idealize it. Taking for granted a steady supply of abundant, nutritious, and safe food, protected from nature’s daily cruelty and violence, we indulge fantasies of “harmony” with nature, and curse our encroachments on it. We have turned what Joseph Conrad called a “the shackled form of a conquered monster” into a house-pet.

Industrial capitalism, of course, and its soul-killing technologies are the villains responsible for a modern world that pollutes for profit and ravages mother earth. This stance is blatantly hypocritical, since most of us today would not last five minutes without the technologies that have given us clean water, abundant food, and protection from nature’s fury. Idealizing nature is a luxury of the well fed who don’t have to wrestle sustenance from a harsh indifferent environment.

Worse yet, environmentalism has become the ally of post-Marxist leftism, since both find an enemy in free-market capitalism. Raymond Aron explains why: capitalism “has succeeded by means which were not laid down in the revolutionary code. Prosperity, power, the tendency towards uniformity of economic conditions––these results have been achieved by private initiative, by competition, rather than State intervention, in other words by capitalism.” That’s why at every G8, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank protest, the Greenpeace flag can be seen waving side-by-side with the hammer and sickle. Anything that undermines the politico-economic order that kicked Marxism into the dustbin of history is collectivism’s ally.

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French Presidential Run-off Battle between Globalist and France-First Populist Macron versus Le Pen: the two major parties lose out. Joseph Klein

By on April 24th, 2017

Amid tightened security following last Thursday’s deadly terrorist attack in Paris, French voters turned out in high numbers to the polls on Sunday for the first round of the country’s presidential election. Globalist Emmanuel Macron and populist Marine Le Pen, the two top finishers amongst the eleven candidates running to replace the Socialist French President Francois Hollande, will face each other in a run-off on Sunday, May 7th. Mr. Macron came out on top, with slightly over 23 percent of vote, and is the favorite to win the presidency outright in the May 7th run-off. Ms. Le Pen ran a close second. Neither of the top two finishers were candidates of France’s major mainstream left and right parties. The incumbent president is very unpopular, which no doubt burdened the Socialist candidate. The major right-of-center candidate has been mired in a scandal.

Not surprisingly, the lackluster economy, including 10 percent unemployment, and security concerns emanating from repeated terrorist attacks emerged as the leading issues in the race.

French voters will be choosing as their next president between two individuals with starkly different world views. As of now, according to Politico, Emmanuel Macron is ahead of Marine Le Pen by 20 to 30 percent in a one-on-one match-up. Moreover, in an initial positive response from investors to Mr. Macron’s first-place finish and prospects in the run-off, the Euro rose to a 5½-month high against the dollar. Nevertheless, given Ms. Le Pen’s close finish in the first round and her enthusiastic constituency, it is premature to count her out. After all, the pundits and pollsters were virtually unanimous in picking Hillary Clinton to win last fall over Donald Trump. We know how that turned out.

Emmanuel Macron, 39, who founded his own independent party just a year ago, is a pro-European Union centrist. He believes in gradual deregulation and fiscal discipline, while at the same time espousing even closer cooperation among the EU’s 28 member states. Several EU leaders expressed delight with Mr. Macron’s strong finish and prospects in the run-off. For example, German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel said, “He is the only pro-EU candidate.” Luxembourg Prime Minister Xavier Bettel said he was “happy that Macron will represent in the second round democratic and European values that I share.”

Mr. Macron, speaking after the election results came in, congratulated the other candidates he ran against, except Ms. Le Pen. In a barb at his opponent in the May 7th run-off, he said he would lead “the patriots facing the nationalists.”

Marine Le Pen, 48, is the leader of the nationalist Front National party. She ran on a platform combining anti-globalist sentiments with economic populism.

In a recent debate, Ms. Le Pen summed up how she viewed her candidacy: “I’m a French woman, a mother and a candidate for the presidency. For me this election is about a choice of civilizations. Our country is overrun by insecurity, economic and social disorder and Islamist terrorism. Our values and identity are under threat.”

While not endorsing Ms. Le Pen outright, President Trump remarked that she was “strongest on borders, and she’s the strongest on what’s been going on in France.”

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America is experiencing ‘zugzwang.’ It needs a game-changer The global outlook for American interests is dismal. David Goldman

By on April 24th, 2017

The global outlook for American interests is dismal. The country’s best hopes may well lie in the destructive power of its own innovation

Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel The Castle tells of a palace perched above a Bohemian village. Ineffable emissaries leave and enter in sealed coaches. The townspeople barely glimpse the denizens of the Castle, who govern the town by mysterious means. A telephone connects to the Castle, but the villagers can only speak to whomever might be listening on the other end of the line, without hearing a word of reply. It is interpreted variously as an allegory for the relation of the divine to the human, or as a satire on the Imperial Austrian bureaucracy.

An appropriate ending would be a visit to the Castle, where the inscrutable beings would sit in cavernous offices and complain about their inability to influence events. It would resemble the Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House, where the tyros of the Trump administration are learning how little influence America has in the world after eight years of Barack Obama (not to mention eight years of George W Bush), and how difficult it is to change a game in which America no longer sets the rules.

There is very little the United States can do about the Levant and Mesopotamia, and nothing it can do about the Korean Peninsula – not, in any case, without a long-term effort to change the game.

Bottom of Form

America has no European partner except for German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the European Union, whether we like it or not. The press chatter about personalities is irrelevant. The problem is not a “Wall Street” group (Gary Cohn, Steven Mnuchin, Jared Kusher) versus the “nationalists” (Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway). The problem is that no matter which adviser has the president’s ear, or whether the president acts on his own impulses, there are no good short-term outcomes.

Among Trump’s inner circle, the one individual whose star has risen fastest belongs to neither the “Wall Street” nor the “nationalist” wing of the administration. That is Wilbur Ross, the most influential Secretary of Commerce since Herbert Hoover and a billionaire investor who rescued Korean and Japanese banks after the 1997 Asian financial crisis. A past president of the Japan Society, Ross is Trump’s key man for Asian trade issues.

Japan is not only an American ally; it is a credible counterweight to China’s rising economic influence in Asia, where the US$100 billion One Belt, One Road infrastructure scheme is winning influence for Beijing among former American allies such as Thailand and the Philippines. There is a great deal of scope for Japanese-American collaboration in Asia, but that is a sole bright spot in an otherwise dismal world picture.

Probing Washington’s resolve

The sarin gas attack in Syria’s Idlib province earlier this month perplexed many America analysts: Why would the Assad regime, and its Russian and Iranian backers, subject itself to global condemnation, just after UN Ambassador Nikki Haley allowed that Washington was not focused on removing Assad? The plain facts, as I understand them, show that the Assad government ordered the attack at the highest level, and that Russia was aware of it beforehand and therefore complicit. US officials believe that they can establish these facts with virtual certainty, which means that the Russians knew that Washington would learn what occurred. I conclude that the Syrian government and its Russian ally used poison gas because they could, and wanted to probe Washington’s resolve.

That required a sharp American response, which came in the form of a cruise missile attack on Syria’s Al Shayrat airfield on April 6. There was no follow-up to the American gesture. Nor could there be.
Iran cannot be forced out of Syria. As I reported on March 14, Iran is arming tens of thousands of South Asian Shi’ites to join Hezbollah in its Levantine International Brigade. It can draw on practically inexhaustible resources of manpower from the oppressed Shia minorities of Pakistan and Afghanistan, and its objective is to replace the Syrian Sunni majority with Shi’ite settlers. It has the backing of Moscow and Beijing, who have to contend with Sunni rather than Shi’ite jihadists in their own territories (and, in the case of China, on its Asian periphery). Saudi-funded madrassas are proliferating through East Asia, as Asia Times warned a year ago.

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How New is the New Hamas Charter? by Denis MacEoin

By on April 24th, 2017

The Arab states that reject Israel today forget that they themselves would not exist without the Mandate system – a point seldom if ever acknowledged in public forums where the legitimacy of Israel is debated.

If there is any Palestinian desire for a two-state solution, it is questionable: according to current maps of “Palestine,” and the New Hamas Charter, it is supposed to be on its neighbouring state, Israel; not next to it. The wish of Palestinian leaders to have a Palestinian state is never realized solely due to the unending rejection of their Jewish neighbour.

Article 19 of the New Charter repeats that there will never be peace so long as Israel still exists. It declares: “We do not leave any part of the Palestinians’ land, under any circumstances, conditions or pressure, as long as the occupation remains. Hamas refuses any alternative which is not the whole liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.”

Anyone with a serious interest in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians will be familiar with the oft-cited Charter (or Covenant [mithaq]) of the terrorist group currently ruling the Gaza Strip, Hamas. The Charter (in Arabic here) was published on 18 August 1988. Its proper title is “The Charter/Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement ‘Hamas’ Palestine”, Hamas being an acronym for “the Islamic Resistance Movement”.

This April, the Lebanese news site al-Mayadeen leaked a draft version of a much-revised version of the 1988 Charter, due to be released “in the coming days”. The anti-Israel website Mondoweiss subsequently provided an English translation of the draft, made by someone from the Ayda refugee camp in the West Bank. So far, I have been unable to find the Arabic text of the draft online, even though it has been discussed many times in the wider Arabic media. We shall turn to it later, but it is obviously sensible to look first at the 1988 version as a basis of comparison. And even before that, we need to see how the Hamas Covenant differed from, and resembled, the PLO Covenants of 1964 and 1968.

The full title of the movement is crucial to an understanding of the document and its aims. Hamas had been founded in 1987 as an intransigent extension of the Palestinian Mujamma linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, and was explicitly hardline and neo-Salafi in its religious orientation. This was in conspicuous contrast to its rival Palestinian movement, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), founded by the Arab League in 1964 as an overtly secular and nationalist entity. The two PLO National Covenants of 1964 and 1968 exclude religion as a basis for the anti-Israel struggle.[1]

But in those versions, that secular nationalism takes two distinct forms. The 1964 PLO Charter is based on the concept of pan-Arabism as inspired by the Arab League and Egypt’s president at the time, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Palestinians are simply Arabs among millions of Arabs, and their struggle for liberation was carried out with little emphasis on the creation of a Palestinian state. This view changed, however, after 1967, when the Six-Day War showed the powerlessness of the Arab states to resolve the Palestinian issue. When Egypt and Jordan attacked Israel (Egypt’s closing the Strait of Tiran was a legitimate casus belli, cause for war), Israel repelled them and ended up sitting on land — Gaza, the Sinai Peninsula, Judaea and Samaria — which it immediately offered to return in exchange for recognition and peace. That offer was rejected in a matter of weeks at the Khartoum Conference.

During and after the “peace process” and the Oslo Accords of the 1990s, the Palestinian leadership promised that it would delete the most offensive and anti-peace clauses of the 1968 Charter. Many years later, nothing has been done, and the existing Charter remains unchanged.

Nationalism is not an Islamic concept. Even pan-Arabism falls outside the remit of Islamic ideology and practice. Almost from the beginning, Islam has been predicated on the idea of a global community (the umma), which embraces all Muslims and Islamic regions, allegedly since the beginning of time, with a promise of eventual Islamic control over the Earth. According to a sound tradition in the canonical collection by al-Bukhari, among the five things given to Muhammad that had not been given to any previous prophet was that, “Every Prophet used to be sent to his nation only but I have been sent to all mankind.”[2] In another version, he is recorded as saying: “I have been sent to all mankind and the line of prophets is closed with me.”[3]

This sense of global scale has characterized the Islamic world from its beginning in the form of empires. These started with the Umayyads (661-750) and ended with the Ottomans (1299-1922). The long history of Islamic imperialism had two imperishable effects: it prevented the development of nation-state polity and imposed the theory of religious rule. Self-identification for imperial citizens functioned only through the family, clan, tribe, village or town or city; or according to religious affiliations of various kinds. Everywhere, the only true citizens were orthodox Muslims; subjugated minorities such as Jews and Christians were kept strictly as inferiors, with a separate set of harsh laws and a special tax, the jizya, to pay for “protection”.

This legacy of Islamic dominance, of jihad as a legitimate and regular policy towards non-Muslim Europe, African regions, Central Asia and India, combined with the illegitimacy and unacceptability of Jewish, Christian or secular rule over Islamic territory, has left a deep mark on the Palestinian sense of identity. Formerly subjects of the Ottoman Empire in Syria, almost overnight in the 1920s the Arab Palestinians found themselves adrift in a sea of international rules and regulations concerning territory and national identity. This was the never-acknowledged pivot around which the growing conflict with the Jewish Palestinians revolved — and still revolves.

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