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Ruth King

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Peter Smith: Good Riddance…*****

By on December 28th, 2016

“A first thing to note is that the idea of a two-state solution is fanciful. The Palestinians hate and are taught to hate Israelis from an early age. Nothing short of Israel’s demise will ever satisfy them. Any leader offering less, without being tongue in cheek (i.e. practicing taqiyya), is likely to be assassinated. In case there is any doubt, Israel is not bordered by Belgians or by the Swiss. Second, the 1967, pre Six-Day War, borders are indefensible. Israel will never withdraw to them and if it ever did it would be no more than a first course for the Palestinians and their Arab allies, as Israelis know. Third retreating to 1967 borders would mean giving up historical Jewish sites, including the Western Wall in East Jerusalem. That is unthinkable for Israel. Now look at the resolution (particularly clause 1) which the United States was deeply complicit in passing. It effectively calls for the dismemberment and eventual destruction of Israel. Words have meaning. You can make all the excuses in the world for Obama’s legacy; this is an indelible stain. I use ‘indelible’ advisedly because the resolution can’t be undone. Any counter resolution is sure to be vetoed by Russia or China and probably (and pathetically) by France or the UK.This infamy is Obama’s lasting legacy. Was his personal enmity towards Netanyahu behind it? Unfortunately, it would not be the least surprising. His going can’t come soon enough. Good riddance!”
…..A petty, vainglorious and failed president has made a scorched-earth policy his exit strategy, sowing his successor’s path with last-minute executive edicts. No surprise, really. Slipping away from the messes he creates has been the Obama style for eight disastrous years.
It is seldom that we know that a new year will start well. Or, to put it more circumspectly, lest the jealous gods take umbrage, that one hugely pleasant event will occur in January – on the 20th to be precise. No, I am not referring to Donald Trump’s inauguration (though that is hugely pleasant too) but to Barack Obama’s exit.

Hussein is his middle name and mayhem and malaise will be his lasting shame. His legacy is a weakened America and, correspondingly, an infinitely more dysfunctional and violent Middle East than when he came to power. Russia, China, Iran and North Korea have all grown more belligerent. ISIS – “the JV team” — was spawned and grew on his feckless watch. Millions of Syrian and other Muslim refugees fleeing conflicts have streamed into Europe creating havoc. And then we have his last dastardly deed; an abject betrayal of Israel, which I will come to.

At home in the US he encouraged identity politics and racial division. Among numbers of prejudicial utterances, who can forget him saying that the black thug Trayvon Martin, killed in self-defense by George Zimmerman, could have been his son. And how about the frequent visits of Black Lives Matter shysters to the White House – you know, the leaders of a racist anti-cop rabble, built on the lie that another black thug, Michael Brown, was unjustifiable killed by a cop. And the result: cops gunned down and inner-city black neighborhoods less safe for law-abiding people. According to the Chicago Tribune, shooting victims numbered 2989 in Chicago in 2015. By Christmas Day in 2016 the number had reached 4291.

He also presided over an insipid economic performance. He is the first president in history to not have one year of 3% GDP growth. Incomes have been stagnant. Millions more people have been forced out of the workforce and onto food stamps. The national debt has doubled. A stream of new regulations, including EPA rules forlornly designed to cool the planet, are estimated by the Heritage Foundation to cost business over $100 billion per year. They have dampened growth and killed jobs. Then we have Obamacare, “the craziest thing in the world,” according to Bill Clinton before he tried to walk-back his ‘honest’ verdict.

Unfortunately, President Obama lives in his own world where all of his policies are meritorious. I would like to know his secret. That way I could see my own life of missteps and mishaps in a more positive light. Okay, it would be delusional but I would be happier. As it is brutal reality breaks through. This makes me much less happy but at least, maybe, I have learnt something. Maybe!

There is no chance of Obama learning anything. Hence he intends to go out trying to augment his lame legacy whatever the cost to the USA. He shows no class in his lame-duck days. His plan is to queer the pitch for The Donald, whose success, if it were to occur, would leave Obama’s legacy in shreds, in the dustbin of history. He would qualify to join the likes of James Buchanan (1857-61) and Warren Harding (1921-23) among the worst of presidential flops.

His rearguard trick is to do things which are not reversible or at least reversible only with time-consuming difficulty. Giving away $1.7 billion to the Iranians is irreversible. The Iranians are not going to give it back. He is hurrying to transfer another 22 Islamic terrorists from Guantanamo Bay (GITMO) before Trump gets the White House keys. They won’t volunteer to return.

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FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

John Kerry to Give Speech Wednesday on Middle East Peace Process Speech expected to lay out administration’s vision for resolving conflict between Israel, Palestinians By Felicia Schwartz

By on December 28th, 2016

WASHINGTON—Secretary of State John Kerry will give a speech Wednesday laying out the Obama administration’s vision for resolving the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, State Department spokesman Mark Toner said.

Mr. Kerry’s speech comes nearly a week after the Obama administration allowed the passage of a United Nations resolution harshly criticizing Israel’s expansion of Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territories, a move that inflamed tensions between the longtime allies. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu summoned the U.S. ambassador to Israel over the weekend to lodge a formal complaint.

Mr. Toner said Tuesday that Mr. Kerry would touch on the United Nations resolution, but that he would more broadly address a path forward toward peace. Frank Lowenstein, the State Department’s special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, told reporters Friday that Mr. Kerry’s talk would be informed by his experience trying to broker peace between the Israelis and Palestinians while serving as the U.S.’s top diplomat.

“The secretary has obviously put a great deal of time and effort over the course of the last four years to negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians…not only with the parties but also with key players in the region and other stakeholders around the world,” Mr. Lowenstein said. “Out of that, I think he’s got some ideas about where we go from here.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

‘If I Had Run Again’ Coach Obama says his team’s big loss wasn’t his fault.

By on December 28th, 2016

In the post-election annals of “woulda, coulda, shoulda,” it will be hard to top departing President Barack Obama’s boast that he would have defeated Donald Trump “if I had run again.”

This, it goes without saying, triggered a tweet from Mr. Trump: “He should say that but I say NO WAY!”

How edifying to witness an American President and President-elect exchanging taunts like two eighth-graders in the schoolyard.

Mr. Obama unburdened himself of this analysis in a podcast with his former White House adviser David Axelrod. Though Mr. Obama is fond of sports analogies, one he seems not to have noticed is that most coaches after a Super Bowl loss don’t blame it on their own quarterback, the diabolical opposition or the media.

Mr. Obama said that Hillary Clinton, who ran as a third Obama term, “played it safe.” People felt the country was on the wrong track because Mitch McConnell threw “sand in the gears” of Washington. His advice to Democrats now is “not thinking that somehow just a great set of progressive policies that we present to the New York Times editorial board will win the day.”

The serious thought inside Mr. Obama’s late hit is whether progressive ideas need revision, or merely need to be recycled with a different messenger, like him. We doubt all Democrats will be as enthusiastic about running again on the economic and foreign-policy record of 2009-2016.

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FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Trump Could Be Even More Wrong on Israel Rejecting a two-state solution would be worse than Obama’s U.N. abstention. By William A. Galston see note please

By on December 28th, 2016

But Mr. Galston was also outraged when Netanayhu addressed the U. S. Congress in 2015…
Netanyahu’s Capitol Hill Debacle The Israeli leader and House speaker are risking a rupture in U.S.-Israel relations.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/william-a-galston-netanyahus-capitol-hill-debacle-1424218804
Netanyahu’s Forceful but Misguided Address His logic should lead him to urge an Iranian regime change, but he knows that won’t sell in the U.S.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/william-a-galston-netanyahus-forceful-but-misguided-address-1425427204

As children we are taught that two wrongs don’t make a right. And when we grow up, we learn that this maxim harbors a deep, sad truth—nowhere more so than in the Middle East.

The Obama administration’s decision to abstain on U.N. Security Council resolution 2334, which condemns Israel for its settlements on the West Bank and east Jerusalem, was a mistake. Understandable, perhaps, but still a mistake. It has given false hope to Israel’s adversaries while uniting Israelis across the political spectrum against an institution they see as one-sided and hypocritical.

The resolution makes no discernible contribution to the cause of peace in the Middle East. Most Israelis regard it as the final act of an expiring administration, not a long-term change in U.S. policy.

The recent resolution is most accurately understood as a continuation of past Security Council and U.S. policy in the region. As my Brookings colleague Natan Sachs points out, by abstaining in 1987, the Reagan administration allowed the passage of the Security Council’s Resolution 605, which included “Jerusalem” in the “Palestinian and Arab Territories, occupied by Israel since 1967.”

When it comes to the Middle East, it is Donald Trump who represents a breach with the past, not Barack Obama. blah,blah, blah….

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Climateers Can’t Handle the Truth Lee Raymond’s 1997 climate speech in China is looking better than ever. By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

By on December 28th, 2016

Congrats are due for the term “climate denialist,” which in 2016 migrated from Paul Krugman’s column to the news pages of the New York Times.

On Dec. 7, the term ascended to a place of ultimate honor when it figured in the headline, “Trump Picks Scott Pruitt, Climate Change Denialist, to Lead E.P.A.”

Unfortunately, never to be explained is precisely which climate propositions one must deny in order to qualify as a denialist. In zinging Mr. Pruitt, currently Oklahoma’s attorney general, the Times rests its unspoken case on a quote from an article this year in National Review, in which he and a coauthor wrote: “Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind.”

But this statement is plainly true. No climate scientist would dispute it. Through all five “assessment reports” of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—sharer of Al Gore’s Nobel prize—the central puzzle has been “climate sensitivity,” aka the “degree and extent” of human impact on climate.

Greenpeace adopts the same National Review article to attack Mr. Pruitt, lying that he and a coauthor “claimed the science of climate change is ‘far from settled.’”

The science is not settled (science never is), but this is not what Mr. Pruitt was referring to. His plain, unmistakable words refer to a “major policy debate” that is “far from settled”—a statement that indisputably applies even among ardent believers in climate doom. Witness the battle between wings of the environmental movement over the role of nuclear power. Witness veteran campaigner James Hansen’s dismissal of the Paris agreement, which other climate campaigners celebrate, as “worthless words.”

These lies about what Mr. Pruitt wrote in a widely available article aren’t the lies of authors carried away by enthusiasm for their cause. They are the lies of people who know their employers and audiences are beyond caring.

Which brings us a two-part article in the New York Review of Books by representatives of the Rockefeller family charity, desperately trying to make the world care about their fantasy that Exxon is somehow a decisive player in the policy debate—Exxon, not voters who oppose higher energy taxes; Exxon, not the governments that control 80% of the world’s fossil fuel reserves and show no tendency to forgo the money available from them.

The Rockefeller family’s charitable attachment to the climate cause is understandable, though. Their money might instead be used to bring clean water to poor villages, immunize kids against disease, or improve education. But such programs can be evaluated and found wanting due to fraud or incompetence, whereas climate change is a cause to which money can safely be devoted to no effect whatsoever without fear of criticism. CONTINUE AT SITE

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The EU vs. the Nation State? by George Igler

By on December 28th, 2016

The question remains, however, why any nation would want to throw out its sovereignty to institutions that are fundamentally unaccountable, that provide no mechanism for reversing direction, and whose only “solution” to problems involves arrogating to itself ever more authoritarian, rather than democratically legitimate, power.

Previous worries over unemployment and the economy have been side-lined: the issues now vexing European voters the most, according to the EU’s own figures, are mass immigration (45%) and terrorism (32%).

The Netherlands’ Partij Voor de Vrijheid, France’s Front National and Germany’s Alternativ für Deutschland are each pushing for a referendum on EU membership in their respective nations.

Given that the EU’s institutions have been so instrumental as a causal factor in the mass migration and terrorism that are now dominating the minds of national electorates, some might argue that the sooner Europeans get rid of the EU, which is now doing more harm than good, the better.

Attention is beginning to focus on elections due to take place in three separate European countries in 2017. The outcomes in the Netherlands, France and Germany will determine the likely future of the European Union (EU).

In the Netherlands, on March 15, all 150 members of the country’s House of Representatives will face the ballot box. The nation is currently led by Prime Minister Mark Rutte, whose VVD party holds 40 seats in the legislative chamber, ruling in a coalition with the Dutch Labour party, which holds 35 seats.

In contrast, the Party for Freedom – Partij Voor de Vrijheid (PVV) – led by Geert Wilders, currently holds 12 seats.

According to an opinion poll, issued on December 21, Wilders’s party has leapt to 24% in the polls, while Rutte’s party has slid to 15%. Were an election to happen now, this would translate to 23 MPs for Rutte’s VVD, and 36 MPs for Wilders’s PVV.

Given the strict formula of proportional representation in the Netherlands, however, coalition governments are the norm. Should Wilders’s PVV come first in March, he will likely need to negotiate with one of his staunchest critics to form a government.

In France, two rounds of voting in the presidential elections are set to take place on April 23 and May 7 – with the two leading candidates from the first round facing each other in a runoff in the second round.

The most likely candidates to make it through to the second round, François Fillon, of the centre-right Les Républicains, and Marine Le Pen, of the populist Front National, remain tied in first-round polling.

A survey, published on December 7, gave each candidate 24%. Le Pen’s party, however, has previously fallen afoul of France’s dual-round voting system, in which voters for other parties have used the second round to swing behind the more moderate candidate.

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HOMELAND SECURITY, IMMIGRATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Berlin Truck Massacre Shows the Soundness of Trump’s Views on Illegal-Alien Criminals Pro-sanctuary mayors and the New York Times are appalled by the suggestion there’s any connection between immigration and terror. By Heather Mac Donald

By on December 27th, 2016

Donald Trump was asked on Wednesday if the Christmas-market truck massacre in Berlin had caused him to reevaluate his various proposals regarding immigration from terror-spawning regions. His answer sent the liberal media into another nervous breakdown: “I’ve been proven to be right,” Trump responded. “One hundred percent correct.”

And so he has. To the New York Times, however, Trump’s words were front-page news. “Trump Suggests Berlin Attack Affirms His Plan to Bar Muslims,” read the headline (even though Trump had not specifically addressed the temporary ban in his response to the reporter’s question). The Times assumes that its readers will be shocked by any suggested connection between Islamic terror attacks and immigration policy. The Times, for its part, treats the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism” like the Ebola virus, inoculating itself from any misperception that it would independently pen such scandalous words by the liberal use of scare quotes. “One area where Mr. Trump and his advisers have been unswerving is their repeated denunciation of ‘radical Islamic terrorism,’” writes the Times incredulously.

Despite the Times’ protestation, the problem of Islamic terrorism in the West is, among other things, an immigration issue, whether an attack has been committed by first-generation immigrants or second. But the Berlin massacre does more than vindicate Trump’s planned reassessment of entry protocols. It also vindicates his intention to eliminate local sanctuary policies. The suspected Berlin attacker was, like many previous Islamic terrorists, a thug first, a terrorist second. Anis Amri had been arrested several times in his home country of Tunisia for various street crimes, including petty theft; he was sentenced in absentia to five years in prison for stealing a car. He committed arson in Italy. He assaulted fellow prisoners while jailed in Italy. He sold drugs in a Berlin park.

Such crimes, if committed by an illegal alien in San Francisco, Chicago, New York City, or the 300 other sanctuary jurisdictions in the U.S., would induce local jail authorities and police chiefs to hold that alien in order to protect him against any federal effort to deport him. Politicians in sanctuary cities work feverishly to bury this core fact: The sanctuary policies they have rushed to defend in the wake of Trump’s election are designed to shield street criminals and thugs from deportation. Such policies forbid jail authorities from honoring a federal request to hold an illegal-alien criminal beyond his release date so that federal agents can start removal proceedings against him.

On Friday, BBC Radio interviewed Seattle mayor Ed Murray about his city’s recently reaffirmed sanctuary policy. Murray ducked any question that would have clarified the fact that it was criminal law-breakers Seattle was shielding. Instead, Murray waxed self-righteous about his “moral obligation” to defeat immigration enforcement, with not a peep of acknowledgment that Seattle’s defiance of federal authority meant that law-abiding Seattle residents would be forced to pay the costs of illegal-alien crime.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

THE ANCIENT FOREIGN POLICY: VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

By on December 27th, 2016

Nations are collections of human beings, and human nature has not changed, despite Obama’s pleadings. For the last eight years, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Samantha Power, Ben Rhodes, and Susan Rice have sought to rewrite the traditional approach to foreign policy. In various ways, they have warned us about the dangers that a reactionary Trump presidency would pose, on the assumption that their new world order now operates more along the lines of an Ivy League conference than according to the machinations and self-interests of the dog-eat-dog Manhattan real-estate cosmos.

It would be nice if the international order had safe spaces, prohibitions against micro-aggressions, and trigger warnings that warn of hurtful speech, but is the world really one big Harvard or Stanford that runs on loud assertions of sensitivity, guilt, apologies, or even the cynical progressive pieties found in WikiLeaks?

The tempo abroad in the last eight years would suggest that the answer is no: half a million dead in Syria, over a million young Muslim men flooding into Europe, an Iraq in ruins (though Biden once bragged it would be the Obama administration’s “greatest achievement”), the Benghazi catastrophe, North Africa a wasteland and terrorist incubator, Israel and the Gulf states estranged from America, Iran empowered and soon to be nuclear, Russia hell-bent on humiliating the U.S., China quietly forming its own updated Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, an impoverished Cuba and much of Latin America gnawing the limp wrist of U.S. outreach, and the European Union gradually imploding.

Obama’s lead-from-behind foreign policy has becoming something like the seduction of an old house. Its wiring, plumbing, and foundation are shot, but the majestic structure, when given a thin coat of new paint by the seller, proudly goes on the market as “restored” — at least until the new buyer discovers that the Potemkin façade is about to collapse from lax maintenance and deliberate indifference. In other words, Obama’s periodic declamations, Nobel Prize, and adulation from a toady press are all veneers of shiny paint; the Middle East, Russia, China, Iran, and ISIS terrorism are the insidious frayed wiring, corroded pipes, and termites that are about to take down the entire structure from the inside out. Note that the unrepentant seller is always loudly petulant that the new owner, as he makes endless vital repairs, did not appreciate the paint job he inherited.

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EDUCATION, MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

A New Documentary Shows the Extent and Nature of Anti-Zionist ‘Hate Spaces’ on Campus by Jeffrey Barken

By on December 27th, 2016

Americans for Peace and Tolerance’s (APT) new documentary, Hate Spaces: The Politics of Intolerance on Campus, explores the roots of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement waged against Israel, and reveals the mob mentality that characterizes antisemitic student groups on college campuses across the US.https://www.algemeiner.com/2016/12/26/a-new-documentary-shows-the-extent-and-nature-of-anti-zionist-hate-spaces-on-campus/

The 70-minute film strikes a nerve, and an emotional punch.

Authenticated cell-phone videos and recorded interviews transport viewers to hate-crime scenes where Jewish students are subjected to verbal and physical abuse, and are intimidated even by college professors and administrators.

British singer George Michael, who became one of the pop idols of the 1980s with Wham! and then forged a…

This is not a propaganda film about the Middle East conflict, Avi Goldwasser, the documentary’s executive producer, tells JNS.org. It is strictly “a film about what’s happening on campus,” he says.

Indeed, recent events at schools like Northeastern University in Boston deserve scrutiny. On that campus, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) protesters have chanted, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, the state of Israel has got to go!” Statues of Jewish donors have been vandalized, while cruel sticker campaigns and “apartheid walls” are used to single out and shame individual Jewish students regardless of their opinions about Israel.

In April 2013, Northeastern University SJP activists stormed into a classroom and interrupted a Holocaust memorial service. “The lessons of the Holocaust were not learned, you are child murderers,” SJP members are caught shouting on camera. Going beyond Northeastern, Hate Spaces tours the country, revealing a long list of hotspots where the BDS movement is spiraling out of control.

The rigid ideology of BDS

A quote from George Packer’s 2011 New Yorker article, “Deepest Cuts,” gets to the core of what is wrong with BDS: “Ideology knows the answer before the question has been asked.” The scenes depicted in the documentary clearly demonstrate that a rigid ideology has taken hold of BDS supporters on college campuses. Groups like SJP use megaphones to shout their rallying slogans, but adherents are fundamentally uninterested in engaging in a serious, civil debate with anyone who questions their self-proclaimed righteous position.

APT is a Boston-based non-profit whose stated mission is to advocate for “peaceful coexistence and tolerance in an ethnically diverse America.” According to Goldwasser, Hate Spaces is geared at engaging “decent people in America who would look at an indecent situation … and understand the obvious unfairness.”

“No other minority group would stand for such treatment on campus,” Goldwasser says of Jewish students’ plight.

Hate Spaces meticulously charts the flow of money from dictators in Muslim countries to American universities, suggesting that this transfer of capital buttresses support for Islamic causes among academics. Devoid of intellectual integrity, professors choose a path of least resistance when discussing Israel and the Palestinian territories, and are unfairly sympathetic to the BDS agenda. The result is a classroom where one side of the debate is permitted to demonize the other, and pro-Israel students are systematically denied a voice.

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EDUCATION, MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Hate Spaces: The Politics of Intolerance on Campus A new film exposes academic Jew-Hatred . Andrew Harrod

By on December 27th, 2016

“Today on American college campuses, there is only one group of students that you are allowed to attack and you can attack at will, and those are Jews,” states the narrator in the new film Hate Spaces: The Politics of Intolerance on Campus. This latest production from Americans for Peace & Tolerance, the makers of the J Street Challenge, engagingly examines how demonization of Israel’s Jewish state is reviving anti-Semitism in American academia.

Hate Spaces extensively documents what has become a nationwide campus “hostile environment” for Jews, according to Susan Tuchman from the Zionist Organization of America. Student signs at colleges like Columbia University appear in the film with statements such as “Israel is a swollen parasite…the Jews: Too fat…Too greedy…Too powerful…Fight the Jewish mafia.”

Quoted in Hate Spaces, University of California (UC)-Los Angeles Hillel President Natalie Charney notes an “anti-Israel culture” in which “singling out the only Jewish state creates an environment where it’s ok to single out Jewish students.” The film focuses on one of Israel’s main campus adversaries, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a leading supporter of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel with deep links to the Muslim Brotherhood. The film notes SJP members chanting “Allahu Akbar” to celebrate the nonbinding 2013 UC-San Diego student council decision for BDS and a SJP chapter president’s 2010 assault upon a Jewish UC-Berkeley student.

Former SJP member and current “pro-Israeli Muslim” Rezwan Ovo Haq notes that “SJP largely masquerades behind the human rights issue” of support Palestinians as part of a broader human rights agenda. Yet in SJP he was “slandering Israel and I had deep-seated hatred for Israel.” Corresponding to this ugly reality, a University of Tennessee SJP member once tweeted: “What is the difference between a Jew and a pizza? The pizza leaves the oven.”

Eminent law professor Alan Dershowitz notes in a film interview that “antisemitism used to come mostly from the right, now it’s coming mostly from the hard left.” Hereby “one of the strangest alliances on university campuses today is between the hard left” of minorities like blacks and Islamist groups like SJP. Accordingly, San Diego State University student journalist Anthony Berteaux discusses once identifying with SJP as a gay, Asian man.

Wall Street Journal editor Bret Stephens wonders at such leftwing “useful idiots of the twenty-first century.” “Why is it that the liberals and progressives who espouse a certain set of values are so intent on demonizing and de-legitimatizing the one country that shares their values” in the Middle East, he asks. By contrast, past African-American civil rights leaders such as W.E.B Dubois, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and Bayard Rustin “have been Zionists, from socialists to liberals to conservatives,” notes African-American Zionist Chloe Valdary.

Faux progressive condemnation of Israel, Dershowitz notes, arises largely because “there is no subject today in the world which has more distortion, more lies, more dissembling, than discussion about Israel.” Hate Spaces shows women from Israel’s Arab minority joining Israel’s parliament and winning the Miss Israel beauty contest, belying a sign in the film condemning Israel as the “Fourth Reich. During speaking engagements, Dershowitz challenges listeners “to name a single country in the history of the world faced with threats comparable to those threats faced by Israel both internal and external that have had a better record of human rights.”

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