RUTHFULLY YOURS

If you want to know where the abuse-of-power indictment of Texas governor Rick Perry may be headed, look no further than how a similar indictment of then–U.S. senator Kay Bailey Hutchison crashed exactly 20 years ago.

Republican Hutchison was indicted only four months after her landslide win in a special election in 1993. Travis County district attorney Ronnie Earle — whose successor, Rosemary Lehmberg, is at the center of the Perry indictment — persuaded a grand jury made up of residents from the liberal Austin area to indict Hutchison on charges of misusing her prior office of state treasurer. (The Travis County district attorney’s office runs the Public Integrity Unit, which enforces ethics laws for all state officials, and Austin is the county seat.) Hutchison was accused of using state employees and her state offices to conduct personal and political business and then ordering records of her activities to be destroyed. Among the specific accusations was that she used state employees to plan her Christmas vacation in Colorado and write thank-you notes.

Hutchison pressed for a quick resolution of the case because she was running for reelection in 1994, much as Governor Perry has to worry his indictment will hang over any 2016 presidential race he might run. The case against Hutchison slowly began to fall apart. The first indictment had to be thrown out because one of the grand-jury members who heard the case was ineligible to serve. A defense motion to move the trial from the politically charged climate of liberal Austin to Fort Worth was granted. Then, when the trial began in February of 1994, it ended after only 30 minutes, when Hutchison was found not guilty on all charges.

The breathtaking denouement began as soon as District Attorney Earle was forced to present his case. He began by telling the court he couldn’t go forward without knowing for certain whether records seized from Hutchison’s office without a search warrant only five days after her Senate victory would be allowed into evidence. Judge John F. Onion Jr. declined to make such an early decision — and ordered the jury, which had been seated only minutes before, to return a verdict of not guilty.

After her acquittal, Hutchison requested that all records seized during the raid be publicly released. “The case was not there,” she said at a press conference. “They turned around and ran because they knew the longer they went, the more embarrassing it was going to be. . . . They thought the lady would crack. Well, the lady wouldn’t crack.”

For his part, Earle had only excuses for his fiasco. As the Los Angeles Times reported, he said he was “shocked by the speed with which the judge proceeded in the case, and in general we feel that justice has been denied.” He accused Judge Onion of running a “rocket docket.”

Elia Kazan’s classic A Face in the Crowd [2] is a good primer on Barack Obama’s rise and fall. Lonesome Rhodes arises out of nowhere in the 1957 film, romancing the nation as a phony populist [3] who serially spins yarns in the most folksy ways — confident that he should never be held to account. Kazan’s point (in the film Rhodes is a patsy for conservative business interests) is that the “folks” are fickle and prefer to be charmed rather than informed and told the truth. Rhodes’s new first name, Lonesome, resonates in the film in a way that Barack does now [4]. Finally, an open mic captures Rhodes’s true disdain for the people he champions, and his career crashes.

So what is collapsing the presidency of the once mellifluous Obama? It is not the IRS, AP, VA, or NSA scandals. Nor did the nation especially fault him for Benghazi or the complete collapse of U.S. foreign policy, from failed reset to a Middle East afire. In each case, he either blamed Bush or denied there was a smidgeon of wrongdoing on his part.

Certainly, the stampede at the border, as disastrous as it was, did not ipso facto sink Obama’s ratings. Ditto the embarrassing Bergdahl deal, in which we traded a likely deserter for five Islamist kingpins. Was it the ISIS ascendance that is leading to genocide and a nascent caliphate? Not in and of itself.

We could go on, but you get the picture that it was all of the above that finally became too much, as Americans turned Obama off because they were all lied out. In all of these scandals a charismatic Barack wheeled out the teleprompter, smiled, dropped his g’s, soared with “make no mistake about it” and “let me perfectly clear,” and then, like Lonesome Rhodes, told the “folks” [5] things that could not be true or at least were the exact opposite of what he himself had earlier asserted.

The result is that should Obama claim again that he is going to lower the seas, cool the planet, or that he is the man whom we are waiting for, Americans would laugh. They would chuckle about more promised recoveries, millions of new green jobs, an expanding economy, or a safer world abroad. Again, we are just too lied out to believe anything our slick version of Lonesome Rhodes says anymore. And that fact may best explain his 39-41% approval rating.

The old saying goes that a grand jury could indict a ham sandwich. In reality, it’s worse.

Forget innocuous sandwiches, with or without Russian dressing. In Texas, at least in Austin’s Travis County, you can indict the state’s governor, Rick Perry, for doing the job any intelligent citizen would want him to do — trying to get rid of an absolutely atrocious public official.

That official was District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg, a dimwitted and abusive drunk driver who ran that county’s — wait for it — “Public Integrity Unit.” Perry threatened to veto funding for said unit as long as Lehmberg was in control. Maybe he had a little actual concern for public integrity — not that the good burghers of Austin would care. Perry’s fortunate Lehmberg wasn’t found guilty of DUW (driving under weed) rather than alcohol, as she was. Given the preferred lifestyle thereabouts, they would have erected a statue to her and summarily sent Perry off to Guantanamo without trial to be swapped out for the last remaining al Qaeda maniacs.

(In case, you’re one of the 12 people left who hasn’t seen the video of Lehmberg’s DUI booking, it’s an eye-roller. You can find it here [1]. Even more of an eye-roller are these dashboard videos [2]of the DA’s arrest.)

Oh, Orwell, where art thou?

Scratch that — Orwell was far too subtle a writer to populate Animal Farm with nincompoops on the level of Lehmberg, the “special prosecutor” operating a rinky-dink Star Chamber at her request or even the know-nothing hypocrites in a local watchdog group defending her with that equally Orwellian name “Texans for Public Justice.” (Doesn’t that just sound like it’s from the wrong side of High Noon?)

But wait. Nothing’s ever as bad as it seems — i.e., we’re in the last scene of Dr. Strangelove and Slim Pickens has just climbed atop the bomb.

Already David Axelrod, of all people, has taken to Twitter to defend Perry, writing “Perry indictment looks pretty sketchy [3].” (I’ll say!) Since Axelrod is Obama’s chief campaign honcho, what’s up with that?

Robert Gates, who is the Captain Renault of our time, recounts the following White House exchange between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, back when she was serving the president loyally as secretary of state and he was taking notes as secretary of defense.

“In strongly supporting a surge in Afghanistan,” Mr. Gates writes in his memoir, “Duty,” “Hillary told the president that her opposition in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the primary. She went on to say, ‘The Iraq surge worked.’ The president conceded vaguely that opposition to the surge had been political. To hear the two of them making these admissions, and in front of me, was as surprising as it was dismaying.”

Here’s a fit subject for an undergraduate philosophy seminar: What, or who, is your true self? Are you Kierkegaardian or Aristotelian? Is the real “you” the interior and subjective you; the you of your private whispers and good intentions? Or are you only the sum of your public behavior, statements and actions? Are you the you that you have been, and are? Or are you what you are, perhaps, becoming?

And if Mrs. Clinton supported the surge in private—because she thought it would help America win a war—but opposed it in public—because she needed to win a primary—shall we conclude that she is (a) despicable; (b) clever; (c) both; or (d) “what difference, at this point, does it make?”
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All this comes to mind after reading Mrs. Clinton’s remarkable interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic. “Great nations need organizing principles,” she said, in the interview’s most quotable line, “and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.”

Cutting and pasting the old prejudice of Jews as infanticidal global masterminds onto Israel.

Britain’s leftists are patting themselves on the back for having resisted the lure of anti-Semitism. Sure, there were some ugly incidents in the U.K. during the Gaza conflict in recent weeks, including the smashing of a Belfast synagogue’s window and the pasting of a sign saying “Child Murderers” on a synagogue in Surrey. But for the most part, Britain’s anti-Israel protesters trill, we avoided the orgies of Jew-hate that stained protests about Gaza in Paris, Berlin and other European cities.

I don’t buy that Britain is an oasis of prejudice-free anti-Zionism in a European desert of anti-Semitic sentiment. Rather, Brits have simply proven themselves more adept than their Continental counterparts at dolling up their prejudices as political stands. In Britain, the meshing of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, the expression of ancient prejudices in the seemingly legitimate guise of opposing Israel, is more accomplished than it is in other European countries. Britain isn’t free of anti-Semitism—we’re just better than our cousins on the Continent at expressing that poisonous outlook in a more coded, clever way.

What has been most striking about the British response to the Gaza conflict is the extent to which all the things that were once said about Jews are now said about Israel. Everywhere, from the spittle-flecked newspaper commentary to angry street protests, the old view of Jews as infanticidal masterminds of global affairs has been cut-and-pasted onto Israel.

Consider the constant branding of Israelis as “child murderers.” The belief that Israel takes perverse pleasure in killing children is widespread. It was seen in the big London demonstrations where protesters waved placards featuring caricatured Israeli politicians saying “I love killing women and children.” It could be heard in claims by the U.K.-based group Save the Children that Israel launched a “war on children.” It was most explicitly expressed in the Independent newspaper last week when a columnist described Israel as a “child murdering community” and wondered how long it would be before Israeli politicians hold a “Child Murderer Pride” festival.

Cheeseburgers Won’t Melt the Polar Ice Caps
The next targets of the climate change enforcers will be livestock and all Americans who eat meat.

The documentary film “Cowspiracy,” released this week in select cities, builds on the growing cultural notion that the single greatest environmental threat to the planet is the hamburger you had for lunch the other day. As director Kip Andersen recently told the Source magazine: “A lot of us are waking up and realizing we can choose to either support all life on this planet or kill all life on this planet, simply by virtue of what we eat day in and day out. One way to eat takes life, while another spares as many lives (plant, animal and otherwise) as possible.”

James McWilliams, vegan author of the 2013 book “The Politics of the Pasture,” argues that modern agricultural, and the cattle industry in particular, are part of a global food-supply system so damaging that the only moral solution is to give up eating meat entirely.
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Zuma Press

Each to his own, you might say. But these ideas are working their way into government policy proposals. For example, Angela Tagtow, a self-described “environmental nutritionist” formerly with the Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture, was recently tapped to head the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s effort to revise federal dietary guidelines. This is a sign that the new recommendations are likely to go beyond nutritional science to incorporate environmental considerations. Many observers believe that meat will be specifically targeted for scrutiny.

Prosecutorial abuse for partisan purposes is common these days, and the latest display is taking place in the all-too-familiar venue of Austin, Texas. On Friday a Travis County prosecutor indicted Governor Rick Perry for the high crime of exercising his constitutional right to free speech and his legal power to veto legislation.

Lest you think we oversimplify, read the two-count indictment. It’s all of two pages. It charges Mr. Perry with abusing his office by “threatening to veto legislation that had been approved and authorized by the Legislature of the State of Texas to provide funding for the continued operation of the Public Integrity Unit of the Travis County District Attorney’s office unless Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg resigned from her official position as elected District Attorney.”
Yes, that’s all they’ve got. Usually when prosecutors want to use the criminal statutes to cripple a political opponent, they come up with at least some claims of personal or political venality. In this case the D.A.’s office is trying to criminalize the normal process of constitutional government.

The background facts don’t make the case any more compelling. In 2013 police found Travis D.A. Lehmberg drunk in her car with a blood alcohol level of 0.23, or nearly three times the legal limit. A video made at the time shows her ranting against and abusing the police attempting to book her. The Democrat eventually did jail time.

Mr. Perry saw a political opening and said he would veto $7.5 million in funds for Ms. Lehmberg’s Public Integrity Unit unless she resigned. He argued, plausibly enough, that a prosecutor who breaks the law and abuses law enforcement shouldn’t judge the “public integrity” of others in government. Ms. Lehmberg refused to step down, and Mr. Perry used his line-item veto to strike the appropriation.

You can disagree with his decision, as many in the media and politics did, but that is a political dispute. Even if Mr. Perry was motivated by political animus toward the public-integrity unit, which has a history of politicized prosecutions, so what? A Texas Governor under the state Constitution has wide veto power. The legislature lacked the votes to override the veto.

To the extent people know the amazing story of the rebirth of Hebrew as a modern language, they are apt to identify it with the single-handed efforts of Eliezer Ben Yehuda, famous for having refused to allow his infant son to hear a word of any other language in his first years.

While not disputing Ben Yehuda’s role, Berdichevsky gives us a wealth of fascinating information about what he calls “the epic transformation of the classic language of the Bible into modern ‘Ivrit’, the national language of the dynamic state of Israel, its everyday vernacular spoken by seven million people.” He describes Hebrew’s influence on English, the inspirational example of modern Hebrew for the revival of a host of “minor languages” including, among many others, Irish, Welsh, Basque, Catalan and Maltese, and the influence on Hebrew of the many languages that bear witness to the three thousand years of Jewish experience, among them Akkadian, Greek, Persian, Arabic, German and Yiddish. None of this is academic or difficult to follow: Berdichevsky never loses sight of his goal of keeping the interest of the lay reader.
In an interesting sidelight, we learn of the parallels between Ben Yehuda and Lazar Ludwig Zamenhof, who created Esperanto. Born within a year of one another in similar homes only 250 miles apart, both sought a career in medicine (although Ben Yehuda’s health forced him to drop out) and both saw their work as a means to enhance the standing of the Jews, in Zamenhof’s case through fostering international solidarity via a common language. (His last major project was translating the Old Testament into Esperanto). Berdichevsky, himself something of an expert on Esperanto, demonstrates how Zamenhof used the logical structure of Hebrew in creating it. Although Ben Yehuda would have to be counted far more successful in achieving the mission he set for himself, Berdichevsky offers the interesting factoid that, after Einstein, Zamenhof is the Jew whose portrait has appeared on the postage stamps of more countries than anyone else. As far as postage stamps go, Ben Yehuda is the loser.

There’s a chapter on Hebrew’s at times bitter rivalry with Yiddish to serve as the national language. And Hebrew’s victory was at times marred by harsh tactics. Berdichevsky writes that as late as 1951, for example, the government agency charged with approving the public showing of films and plays issued a directive banning presentation of a play in Yiddish in Tel Aviv and threatened fines for the actors. Similarly the Yiddish newspaper was allotted very limited access to the government’s control of the supply of paper and had to resort to the black market where the only paper obtainable was yellow, green and red, leading to comical multi-colored editions.

In the Soviet Union, where the heavy hand of government was no laughing matter, Hebrew was condemned as a “reactionary tool” and only Yiddish considered the legitimate tongue of the “toiling masses.” The result was an almost total prohibition of any expression of thought or cultural activity in Hebrew. Berdichevsky writes: “Nowhere else and against no other language (except Esperanto in Nazi-occupied Europe) was such a policy invoked by any regime to strangle a language into total silence.”

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Dr. Norman Berdichevsky, an author, freelance writer, editor, researcher, translator and lecturer of history and culture for several major cruise lines. Formerly a lecturer of Hebrew at the University of Central Florida, the Theological Faculty of Aarhus University in Denmark, and the Jews’ Free School in London, as well as an experienced translator (From Hebrew and Danish to English), he is the author of six books and lives in Orlando, Florida. He is the author of the new book, Modern Hebrew: The Past and Future of a Revitalized Language.

FP: Dr. Norman Berdichevsky welcome to Frontpage Interview. Let’s begin with what inspired you to write this new book.

Berdichevsky: Thanks Jamie.

My knowledge of Hebrew, my experience teaching the language in the Diaspora and the eleven years I spent in Israel working as a professional translator, opened up new horizons and enabled me to participate in the resilience of spirit that Israelis feel in the face of adversity. My goal in writing this book is to reach as wide an audience as possible of both Jews and Gentiles, including those with no prior knowledge of the language, to make them more aware of the importance Hebrew has played in the forging of contemporary Israeli society and culture and its function worldwide as the new Jewish international language.

A dynamic nation has been created with a determined belief in a common origin, destiny and struggle with a unifying common language adapted and modernized by the only people who identified with it and its ancient homeland. Anyone wishing to understand modern Israel, its history and development towards a more inclusive society for all its people including non-Jews should be familiar with Modern Hebrew and how this language grew and changed over the past mere one hundred and thirty years through challenges and dilemmas resulting in startling achievements and new prospects.

FP: Expand for us on the transformation of Hebrew and why this book is so important in touching on this issue.

Berdichevsky: Few subjects have commanded the attention and provoked, fascinated, excited, and enchanted so many readers as the saga of the Zionist rebirth of Israel. Yet in this monumental literature, relatively little space has been devoted to the epic transformation of the classical language of the Bible into Modern “Ivrit”, the national language of the State of Israel, its everyday vernacular spoken by more than seven million people. It was grafted successfully onto an older literature and longer historical continuity than Latin or Greek and is the official language of business, research, the law, and government of the dynamic State of Israel.

The book explores the historical background, past and current controversies, challenges, dilemmas and prospects facing the Israeli people that stem from the choice made four generations ago to create a renewed nation in the Land of Israel with Hebrew as their national language. It is a study in the politics, linguistics and sociology of language, exploring the relationship of the Israelis with the Jewish Diaspora as well as their fellow non-Jewish citizens, the largely bilingual Arabic and Hebrew-speaking Arab population.

The war against jihadism has been chronically misunderstood because of our failure to acknowledge the religious motives of Muslim jihadists. This failure began in 1979 with the Iranian revolution. Trapped in our Western secularist paradigms, we interpreted the uprising against the Shah as an anti-colonial revolt against a “brutal” autocrat propped up by the West for its own exploitative economic and geostrategic purposes. The aim of the revolution, the argument went, was to create a government more sympathetic to national sovereignty and Western pluralistic government. However, it soon became clear with the political triumph of the Ayatollah Khomeini that the revolution was in the main a religious one, inspired in part by anger at the Shah’s secularization, modernization, and liberalization policies. As Khomeini said in 1962, the Shah’s regime was “fundamentally opposed to Islam itself and the existence of a religious class.”

Despite that lesson, the rise of al Qaeda in the 90s was also explained as anything and everything other than what it was and still is–– a movement with deep religious roots. Under administrations of both parties, the mantra of our leaders has been “nothing to do with Islam.” We created various euphemisms like “Islamism,” “Radical Islam,” “Islamic extremists,” or “Islamofascism,” to explain an ideology that is firmly rooted in traditional Islamic theology and historical practice. We were anxiously assured that Islam was a “religion of peace,” its adherents tolerant and ecumenical. Popular figures like Osama bin Laden were “heretics” who had “highjacked” this wonderful faith, distorting its doctrines to serve their evil lust for power. We looked upon them as “beards from the fringe,” malignant cranks like Jim Jones, Charles Manson, or David Koresh.

This fundamental error continues today, as Muslim violence and anti-Semitism are explained by every factor instead of the essential one––the theology, jurisprudence, and history of Islam.

When one asks for evidence for this detachment of Muslim violence from the tenets of Islam, the best most apologists can do is produce a Westernized nominal Muslim, a propagandist like Tariq Ramadan, or a left-wing academic who reflexively considers any enemy of the colonialist, imperialist, capitalist West to be a friend of the left. Jihad is not, they assure us, the theological imperative to “fight all men until they say there is no god but Allah,” as Mohammed himself commanded. Jihad is merely a form of self-improvement and community service. “Allahu Akbar” is not the traditional Muslim battle cry, but merely a way of saying “Thank God.” Revered Muslim scholars like the Ayatollah Khomeini––educated in Qom, the “Oxford and Harvard of Iranian Shi’ism,” as Barry Rubin put it, and honored as a “grand sign of Allah” for his theological knowledge––was simply wrong when he said, “Islam says: Kill all the unbelievers just as they would kill you,” and “Islam is a religion of blood for the infidels.”