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Against Court and Constitution: A Never-Before-Translated Speech by David Ben-Gurion Israel famously has no constitution. It turns out that’s no accident but rather the will of its first prime minister, who explains his thinking here.

By on March 11th, 2021

https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/israel-zionism/2021/03/against-court-and-constitution-a-never-before-translated-speech-by-david-ben-gurion

“Idon’t think it’s possible to delegate authority to the court to decide whether the laws are kosher or not.” These incendiary words were not uttered by a contemporary right-wing critic of the power of the Israeli Supreme Court. They were made, rather, by Israel’s founding father, first prime minister, final editor and ultimate author of Israel’s Declaration of Independence, and promoter of liberty and rights for all: David Ben-Gurion. And he spoke them not in off-the-cuff remarks to a journalist but in a prepared speech to the committee charged with drafting a constitution in Israel’s first Knesset.

Delivered on the morning of July 13, 1949, Ben-Gurion’s address to the members of the Knesset’s committee on “Constitution, Law, and Justice” expresses his forthright opposition to “judicial review”—a possibility still rather abstract in the Israel of 1949. Ben-Gurion’s opposition was vociferous and fierce, and he uses the occasion to present a resounding case for the supremacy of the parliamentary process as well as popular authority, and utter rejection of the possibility of investing judges with the power to throw out laws duly passed by the Knesset.

As followers of its politics perhaps know, Israel today is embroiled in a bitter battle over the proper role of judges and the Supreme Court within the political system. Since the 1990s, the Supreme Court has arrogated to itself broad prerogatives to strike down laws. The Israeli right has in response become fiercely critical of the court, and seeks to rein it in both through changing its composition and through passing legislation—such as the controversial nation-state law—that would constrain it. The court has responded with an attempt to expand its remit even further, while many on the left insist that curtailing the prerogatives of the judiciary will undermine democracy itself.

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How the 1957 Flu Pandemic Was Stopped Early in Its Path By the time the virus reached the U.S., the country already had a vaccine ready. Becky Little

By on March 2nd, 2021

https://www.history.com/news/1957-flu-pandemic-vaccine-hilleman?li_source=LI&li_medium=m2m-rcw-history

On April 17, 1957, Maurice Hilleman realized a pandemic was on its way to the United States. That day, The New York Times reported on a large influenza outbreak in Hong Kong. One detail in particular caught the doctor’s eye: in the long waiting lines for clinics, the paper said “women carried glassy-eyed children tied to their backs.” He quickly got to work, putting out the word that there was a pandemic coming and pushing to develop a vaccine by the time school started again in the fall.

The first case of the pandemic had appeared in the Guizhou Province of southwestern China in February 1957. By the time Hilleman read about it in April, the Times reported that an estimated 250,000 Hong Kong residents—or 10 percent of the region’s population—were receiving treatment for it.

“We all missed it,” he later recalled for The Vaccine Makers Project. “The military missed it, and the World Health Organization missed it.”

The day after reading the story, he sent a cable to an Army Medical General Laboratory in Zama, Japan, asking the staff to investigate what was going on in Hong Kong. A medical officer identified a member of the U.S. Navy who’d become infected in Hong Kong, and sent the serviceman’s saliva back to Hilleman in the United States so he could study the virus.

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Muslim Life in 2021, as Predicted in 1921 by Daniel Pipes

By on February 25th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17096/lothrop-stoddard-muslim-life

The Muslim world “sunk to the lowest depth of its decrepitude” in the eighteenth century; “the life had apparently gone out of Islam, leaving naught but a dry husk of soulless ritual and degrading superstition behind.” Meanwhile, Europe discovered ocean routes, established economic hegemony, and exploited its power as “mistress of the world” to indulge in “recklessly imperialistic policies.” Its conquests of Muslim-majority lands prompted a massive “flood of mingled despair and rage” against the West.

The “great Mohammedan Revival” began with the Wahhabis in eighteenth-century Arabia and entailed a “profound ferment” and a “stirring to new ideas, new impulses, new aspirations. A gigantic transformation is taking place whose results must affect all mankind.” This process was well underway by 1921: “The world of Islam, mentally and spiritually quiescent for almost a thousand years, is once more astir, once more on the march.”

The “great Mohammedan Revival” began with the Wahhabis in eighteenth-century Arabia and entailed a “profound ferment” and a “stirring to new ideas, new impulses, new aspirations. A gigantic transformation is taking place whose results must affect all mankind.” This process was well underway by 1921: “The world of Islam, mentally and spiritually quiescent for almost a thousand years, is once more astir, once more on the march.”

Do not try to reduce causation to interests. Beliefs and passions count at least as much.

When Lothrop Stoddard (1883-1950) is still recalled, it is as a prominent racist who had a major but malign influence on the budding field of international relations, who acted as theoretician for the Ku Klux Klan, and who contributed the concept of Untermensch (sub-human) to the Nazis.

Stoddard, however enjoyed a high and favorable profile during the 1920s. He had earned a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University and traveled widely. President Warren Harding praised him, and F. Scott Fitzgerald obliquely referenced him in The Great Gatsby.

Stoddard also wrote a prescient 1921 study, The New World of Islam, a survey of 250 million Muslims “from Morocco to China and from Turkestan to the Congo.” Despite his consuming racism, Stoddard impressively recognized trends underway in Islam. As Ian Frazier observed in the New Yorker, “Whatever his philosophy and methods, his guesses sometimes proved out.”

His book had a substantial impact on public opinion, including on such notable figures as the German strategist Karl Haushofer, the Lebanese pan-Islamist Chekib Arslan, the Indian scholar S. Khuda Bukhsh, and Indonesia’s President Soekarno. So, despite Stoddard’s well-deserved ignominy, his New World of Islam is well worthy of scrutiny on its centenary.

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The Denial of Evil Why it’s a moral obligation to know what communism did – and does. Dennis Prager

By on February 25th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/denial-evil-dennis-prager/

One of the most highly regarded books of the 20th century was Ernest Becker’s “The Denial of Death.” Winner of the 1974 Pulitzer Prize, the book is regarded as a classic for its analysis of how human beings deny their mortality.

But there is something people deny more than mortality: evil. Someone should write a book on the denial of evil; that would be much more important because while we cannot prevent death, we can prevent evil.

The most glaring example of the denial of evil is communism, an ideology that, within a period of only 60 years, created modern totalitarianism and deprived of human rights, tortured, starved and killed more people than any other ideology in history.

Why people ignore, or even deny, communist evil is the subject of a previous column as well as a Prager University video, “Why Isn’t Communism as Hated as Nazism?” I will, therefore, not address that question here.

I will simply lay out the facts.

But before I do, I need to address another question: Why is it important that everyone know what communism did?

Here are three reasons:

First, we have a moral obligation to the victims not to forget them. Just as Americans have a moral obligation to remember the victims of American slavery, we have the same obligation to the billion victims of communism, especially the 100 million who were murdered.

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Purim Guide for the Perplexed 2021 Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger,

By on February 24th, 2021

1. Purim’s historical background.  The 586 BCE destruction of the 1st Jewish Temple and the expulsion of Jews from Judea and Samaria – by the Babylonian Emperor, Nebuchadnezzar – triggered a wave of Jewish emigration to Babylon and Persia.  The latter replaced Babylon as the leading regional power.  In 538 BCE, Xerxes the Great, Persia’s King Ahasuerus, the successor of Darius the Great, proclaimed his support for the reconstruction of the Jewish Temple and the resurrection of national Jewish life in the Land of Israel, recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish Homeland.  In 499-449 BCE, Ahasuerus established a coalition of countries – from India to Ethiopia – which launched the Greco-Persian Wars, attempting to expand the Persian Empire westward. However, Persia was resoundingly defeated (e.g., the 490 BCE and 480 BCE battles of Marathon and Salamis), and Ahasuerus’ authority in Persia was gravely eroded.

2. Purim is a Jewish national liberation holiday – just like Passover and Chanukah – which commemorates the transformation of the Jewish people from subjugation to liberty. It is celebrated seven days following the birth and death date of Moses, who is the role model of liberty, leadership and humility.

Purim is celebrated, annually, at a time when the relatively cold and stormy winter shifts into the relatively warm and pleasant spring.

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1776 truth vs 1619 falsehoods by Larry Arnn

By on February 22nd, 2021

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/the-1776-commission-and-american-education

One of the clearest signs that we are in a debate over the central meaning of our country, and therefore of our rights and of us, is the controversy about the status of the American founding. That controversy rages. I was appointed chairman of the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission by former President Donald Trump. Its purpose was to advise on chiefly two things: preparing for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 2026 and proposing ways to teach American history better.

The commission issued its report unanimously a few days before President Biden took office. He canceled it and removed its report from the White House website on the first afternoon he was president. Since then, he has said several things to excoriate the report and its authors. The chief cry is that it seeks to whitewash the story of slavery. In fact, the story of slavery is extensively addressed. The main points are simple and indubitably true: Slavery existed in the United States for 150 years before the nation was formed by the Declaration of Independence. Those who wrote that Declaration of Independence stated emphatically and repeatedly that slavery was wrong. The leading founders are nearly uniform in this view, and it seems to have been the sense of most of the public.

The immediate fruit of this sentiment was that slavery was abolished in more than half of the country within 20 years. In 1787, when the Northwest Ordinance was passed, our government grew for the first time. It was the first time a free government had done so. It did so without the benefit of colonies but rather with a plan quickly to form states and the citizens of those states to be equal with those of the existing states. This ordinance concerned the five states in the Northwest Territory, regarded by the founders as a precious resource. Article 6 of the Northwest Ordinance provides that there is to be no slavery with these words:

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The Significance of San Remo Eugene Kontorovich thinks that the 1920 San Remo conference sits at the foundation of Israel’s legal legitimacy. Martin Kramer disagrees. Who’s right?

By on February 15th, 2021

https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/israel-zionism/2021/02/the-significance-of-san-remo/

In December 2020, the historian and regular Mosaic contributor Martin Kramer asked whether those recently celebrating the 100th anniversary of the 1920 San Remo Conference were justified in seeing it as a cornerstone of Israeli sovereignty. In particular, he found that the historical case for San Remo’s importance was overstated, even as he sympathized with the celebrants’ impulse to strengthen Israel’s legitimacy. Below, we present an exchange between Eugene Kontorovich—another Mosaic contributor and a frequent commentator on international law as it applies to Israel—who writes to dispute Kramer’s argument, and a last word in response from Kramer himself. —The Editors

Eugene Kontorovich: The San Remo Treaty Sits at the Foundation of Israel’s Legitimacy in International Law

This spring, I was among those arguing that the centennial of the San Remo conference—where the League of Nations assigned the mandate for Palestine to Great Britain—should be celebrated as a milestone in Israel’s pre-history, and remembered alongside the more widely-known Balfour Declaration and the UN General Assembly’s stillborn 1947 partition proposal. Martin Kramer recently criticized this stance, contending that the conference did little to advance the Zionist project of establishing a sovereign state in the Land of Israel. As he mentions with particular disapproval my suggestion that a street in Jerusalem currently named in honor of the UN resolution should be redubbed to commemorate San Remo, I thought I’d respond. At stake is more than street signs and civic commemorations festivals. Such engagements with the past, along with the work of careful scholars like Kramer himself, together amount to the reconstruction of Zionism’s legal and political history.

Kramer’s disagreement centers on the fine points of historical emphasis. He does not claim that the League of Nations’ actions were unimportant. Rather, he claims that San Remo was a disappointment relative to the other events.

But first, let’s summarize these key events in order. On November 2, 1917, the British foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, issued his famous declaration that “His Majesty’s government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” At that moment Palestine was still part of the Ottoman empire, although parts of it had been occupied by Britain, which would go on to conquer the rest in the remaining year of World War I. But only at the April 1920 San Remo conference would the victors in the war—by this time acting under the supervision of the newly created and broadly-based League of Nations—award the territories west of the Jordan River to the United Kingdom. The text of the corresponding “mandate” included phrases from the Balfour Declaration about establishing a Jewish national home there. Finally, in 1947, the United Nations General Assembly voted in favor of dividing parts of the mandatory territory into Arab and Jewish states. The Arabs rejected the suggestion, Israel declared independence, and the rest, as they say, is history.

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1689 or 1776? The Enlightenment Era did begin in 1689 and America is the quintessential Enlightenment nation, but 1776 is still the right choice for America’s founding year. By Robert Curry

By on February 9th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/08/1689-or-1776/

K. S. Bruce has written a thoughtful and informed commentary urging America to adopt the “1689 Project” in place of the 1619 Project. 

As you probably already know, the 1619 Project is an ugly attempt by the Left to persuade the uninformed that America was founded as a slave nation and is still today a systemically racist one. Bruce proposes 1689 instead because that year marks the beginning of the Enlightenment Era. The year 1689 misses the target, however, as surely as 1619 does. The Enlightenment Era did begin in 1689 and America is the quintessential Enlightenment nation, but 1776 is still the right choice for America’s founding year—which means President Trump’s 1776 Advisory Commission picked the correct year for its report to the nation. 

Because the Enlightenment Era began in Britain, 1689 marks the beginning of the British Enlightenment—but the American Enlightenment was a far cry from the British Enlightenment, and by 1776 the differences were deep and wide. 1689 might be a good pick for the year the British should rally around, but let’s leave that decision to them. 

Enlightenment thinking spread from Britain, but its fate was very different wherever it traveled. The French Enlightenment took a significantly different direction than the British one, and the American Enlightenment took yet another direction from both the British and the French. Voltaire in France was as different from John Locke in England as Thomas Jefferson was from either one of them.

Bruce notes a key distinction between the British Enlightenment and the American Enlightenment in this way:

Locke’s own writings described “life, liberty and the pursuit of property,” which the American Framers adapted to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

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‘The Queen’s Gambit’: The Accelerated Polgár Variation Joe Dolce

By on February 7th, 2021

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/01/the-queens-gambit-the-accelerated-polgar-variation/

EXCERPTS

When Walter Tevis’s novel The Queen’s Gambit came out in 1983, it slipped past the mainstream media, but everyone I knew in the Melbourne chess world was familiar with it. Little did anyone at the time suspect that Tevis’s fantasy about a female chess prodigy would be incarnated in the true story of the three Hungarian-Jewish Polgár sisters, who emerged in the mid-1980s, the eldest, Susan, becoming in 1986 the first woman to qualify for the World Championship.

The closest the world of chess has come to the tale in The Queen’s Gambit is in the true story of the Hungarian-Jewish Polgár sisters, Susan, Sofia and Judit, who were raised from birth as chess prodigies by their father, Laszlo Polgár. Polgár’s father survived Auschwitz but his father’s first wife and five children were murdered there. Laszlo Polgár believed that geniuses were made, not born, and that if children were taught a single intellectual activity from early childhood, they would master it. He used his three daughters, and chess, as his grand experiment in child-rearing psychology.

Polgár and his wife Klára were both teachers. They home-schooled the girls, developing a regime of early morning sports, including high-velocity ping-pong, for the girls’ physical stamina, before six to eight hours a day of chess training, lasting until well after dark.

Polgár created a card catalogue system, assembled from chess magazine clippings, with over 200,000 games cut and pasted onto index cards, the “cartotech”, for the girls to use during their study. This was the biggest chess archive outside the USSR.

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When a Far-Left, Female-Led Domestic Terrorism Group Bombed the U.S. Capitol Forgotten in the wake of January 6.

By on February 3rd, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/when-far-left-female-led-domestic-terrorism-group-lloyd-billingsley/

In the furor over the January 6 riot, which Sen. Mitt Romney called an “insurrection incited by the president of the United States,” a more serious assault on the Capitol has been overlooked. For those who weren’t around or may have forgotten, here’s what went down on the evening of November 7, 1983.

“Listen carefully, I’m only going to tell you this one time,” a caller from the “Armed Resistance Unit,” told the operator at the Capitol switchboard. “There is a bomb in the Capitol building. It will go off in five minutes. Evacuate the building.” A Senate document, “Bomb Explodes in Capitol,” describes what happened.

The caller warned that “a bomb had been placed near the chamber in retaliation for recent U.S. military involvement in Grenada and Lebanon.” At 10:58 p.m. “a thunderous explosion tore through the second floor of the Capitol’s north wing.” The device, hidden under a bench at the eastern end of the corridor outside the Senate chamber, “blew off the door to the office of Democratic Leader Robert C. Byrd.  The blast also punched a potentially lethal hole in a wall partition sending a shower of pulverized brick, plaster, and glass into the Republican cloakroom.” The adjacent halls were virtually deserted, so “many lives had been spared.”

Later than night, the Armed Resistance Unit called National Public Radio and proclaimed, “Tonight we bombed the U.S. Capitol.” The bombers “purposely aimed our attack at the institutions of imperialist rule rather than at individual members of the ruling class and government. We did not choose to kill any of them at this time. But their lives are not sacred and their hands are stained with the blood of millions.”

Tonight We Bombed the U.S. Capitol is the title of the 2020 book by historian William Rosenau. In a Smithsonian magazine article headlined “In the 1980s a Far-Left, Female-Led Domestic Terrorism Group Bombed the U.S. Capitol,” Rosenau outlined the group’s back story.

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