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ANTI-SEMITISM

Due Process for Judge Kavanaugh Senators eager to destroy his nomination must be restrained by the rule of law. Adam Freedman

https://www.city-journal.org/due-process-for-brett-kavanaugh-16192.html

Nobody in the United States Senate knows whether Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s accusers are telling the truth. And yet, quite a few of its members—all Democrats—have already decided that they are telling the truth. Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal and New York’s Kirsten Gillibrand, for example, have declared that they believe the allegations of Professor Christine Blasey Ford, though she has yet to testify. Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii insists that Ford “needs to be believed,” and that men need to “just shut up and step up.”

Oddly enough, the same Democratic politicians who seem to have made up their minds about the matter are the very ones calling for a “full investigation” into Ford’s accusations, as well as those of Kavanaugh’s former Yale classmate Deborah Ramirez. This should set off alarms for anyone concerned about the old-fashioned notion of due process—that is, the procedural fairness that Anglo-American law guarantees to those accused of crimes.

The hallmark of due process is the presumption of innocence. Imagine a judge who announces—before the trial even begins—that he thinks that the accused is lying. Defense counsel would rightly demand that the judge recuse himself. But no recusal has been offered by those senators who would sit in judgment on the Supreme Court nominee.

Because every defendant is presumed innocent, due process also requires that one’s accusers bear the burden of proof. Today, however, this tradition has been turned on its head, with politicians and commentators on the left asserting that the burden is on Kavanaugh—and any other man accused of sexual misconduct—to disprove the accusations against them. Blumenthal, for example, tweets that Kavanaugh has “a responsibility to come forward with evidence to rebut” Ramirez’s accusations of sexual assault. Anita Hill, the law school professor who accused Justice Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment during Thomas’s 1991 confirmation hearings, has argued that Kavanaugh bears the burden of disproving Ford’s allegations.

TARGETS OF MALICE: EDWARD CLINE

https://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/

This column is a follow-up of my “Amazon Bans Cline” column, in which I emulate Jeff Bezos’s fictional announcement that he is banning all my books from the Amazon sales platform. Now I link the ongoing, all-too-real farce of Brett Kavanaugh’s Judiciary nomination hearing to a fictional inquest in the Cyrus Skeen series, set mostly in San Mateo, California, in 1927. In this story, Inquest, a local assistant district attorney tries to pin a manslaughter charge on Skeen. The similarities between Skeen’s inquest, about whether or not he murdered a criminal, and Kavanaugh’s confirmation circus, are too similar to ignore.
Definition of inquest

1a : a judicial or official inquiry or examination especially before a jury a coroner’s inquest

b : a body of people (such as a jury) assembled to hold such an inquiry

c : the finding of the jury upon such inquiry or the document recording it

A succinct definition from Wikipedia is:

An inquest is a judicial inquiry in common law jurisdictions, particularly one held to determine the cause of a person’s death. Conducted by a judge, jury, or government official, an inquest may or may not require an autopsy carried out by a coroner or medical examiner. Generally, inquests are conducted only when deaths are sudden or unexplained.

The inquest in San Mateo was focused on the deceased Josephus Kringal. The Foreword to my novel reads:

Struggling to make a success of his detective agency, Skeen finds himself the target of an ambitious local assistant district attorney after an inquest is held surrounding the death of a criminal Skeen had tried to subdue and have him arrested; but the criminal resisted and chose to fight, resulting in the criminal’s death.

Skeen may be charged with manslaughter. The inquest is ended, over the medical examiner’s objections, with the assistant district attorney attempting to charge Skeen with manslaughter and demanding that he be arraigned on the charge. It is early February 1927. This is the twenty-seventh Cyrus Skeen detective novel. Skeen reflects on a case from earlier in his detective career, shortly after he had set up shop in San Francisco as a private detective.

Feminism’s Male Enablers By David Solway

https://pjmedia.com/trending/feminisms-male-enablers/

It is hard not to feel a certain Schadenfreude for that community of men in the universities and professions who are feminism’s enablers, “femimen,” as we may call them. These “white knights” have jumped on the feminist bandwagon in an access of estrogen complicity, for a number of parallel reasons: career prospects, self-doubt, cultural acquiescence, fear of exclusion, docility of character, self-promotion, or sexual advantage. Some may even regard themselves as “survivors.” I give three notable instances of the pathology at work.

Michael Kimmel is the founder of the journal Men and Masculinities, the voice of the National Organization for Men Against Sexism, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Stony Brook, author of many popular books, and a committed feminist. His Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era, described in his university bio as “a comparative study of the extreme right, White Supremacists, and neo-Nazis in the United States, Germany, and Scandinavia,” has acquired near-legendary status. His reputation in the field of gender studies is immense and, until recently, untouchable. Now, Kimmel has himself been accused of sexual harassment, a case of a strenuous advocate for women’s rights hoist on his own petard.

So far as I can tell, Kimmel is an unabashed and self-aggrandizing careerist who has never understood the lives of working men. He has thrived on his university authority, popular books and speaking engagements touting the need for understanding of and sensitivity to the plight of women on the part of men enslaved to their own raw and turbulent masculinity. Though he assumes the mantle of enlightened fairness, I regard him as a fraud who has done much harm in promoting the social and cultural dysfunction from which we now suffer. There is a kind of poetic justice in his recent troubles. Naturally, Kimmel immediately played the apology card and lobbied for survival by wishing to “make amends to those who believe I have injured them.” The creepy and patently insincere mawkishness of this star feminist is par for the course. Kimmel is not to be pitied, nor is the feminist sorority to be pardoned. They are equally complicit in acts of malfeasance.

Why the Left Is Consumed With Hate Lacking worthy menaces to fight, it is driven to find a replacement for racism. Failing this, what is left? By Shelby Steele

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-left-is-consumed-with-hate-1537723198

Even before President Trump’s election, hatred had begun to emerge on the American left—counterintuitively, as an assertion of guilelessness and moral superiority. At the Women’s March in Washington the weekend after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, the pop star Madonna said, “I have thought an awful lot of blowing up the White House.” Here hatred was a vanity, a braggadocio meant to signal her innocence of the sort of evil that, in her mind, the White House represented. (She later said the comment was “taken wildly out of context.”)

For many on the left a hateful anti-Americanism has become a self-congratulatory lifestyle. “America was never that great,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo recently said. For radical groups like Black Lives Matter, hatred of America is a theme of identity, a display of racial pride.

For other leftists, hate is a license. Conservative speakers can be shouted down, even assaulted, on university campuses. Republican officials can be harassed in restaurants, in the street, in front of their homes. Certain leaders of the left—Rep. Maxine Waters comes to mind—are self-appointed practitioners of hate, urging their followers to think of hatred as power itself.

How did the American left—conceived to bring more compassion and justice to the world—become so given to hate? It began in the 1960s, when America finally accepted that slavery and segregation were profound moral failings. That acceptance changed America forever. It imposed a new moral imperative: America would have to show itself redeemed of these immoralities in order to stand as a legitimate democracy.

The genius of the left in the ’60s was simply to perceive the new moral imperative, and then to identify itself with it. Thus the labor of redeeming the nation from its immoral past would fall on the left. This is how the left put itself in charge of America’s moral legitimacy. The left, not the right—not conservatism—would set the terms of this legitimacy and deliver America from shame to decency.

This bestowed enormous political and cultural power on the American left, and led to the greatest array of government-sponsored social programs in history—at an expense, by some estimates, of more than $22 trillion. But for the left to wield this power, there had to be a great menace to fight against—a tenacious menace that kept America uncertain of its legitimacy, afraid for its good name.

Sukkot (Feast of Tabernacles) guide for the perplexed, 2018 Yoram Ettinger

1. US-Israel special ties are accentuated by Columbus Day (October 8, 2018), which is always celebrated around Sukkot (September 24-30, 2018). According to “Columbus Then and Now” (Miles Davidson, 1997, p. 268), Columbus landed in America on Friday afternoon, October 12, 1492, the 21st day of the Jewish month of Tishrei, in the Jewish year 5235, on the 7th day of Sukkot, Hosha’na’ Rabbah – a day of special universal deliverance and miracles. Hosha’ (הושע) is “deliverance” in Hebrew, Na’ (נא) is the Hebrew word for “please” and Rabbah (רבה) is “The Sublime.” The numerical value of Na’ in Hebrew is 51 (נ – 50, א – 1), which corresponds to the celebration of Hoshaa’na’ Rabbah on the 51st day following Moses’ ascension up to Mt. Sinai.

2. Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles named after the first stop during the Exodus from Egypt, the town of Sukkota (סכותה) – Exodus 13:20-22 and Numbers 33:3-5.
It commemorates the transition of the Jewish people from bondage in Egypt to sovereignty in the Land of Israel; from nomadic life in the desert to permanence in the Promised Land; from oblivion to deliverance; and from the spiritual state-of-mind during the High Holidays to the mundane of the rest of the year. Sukkot aims at universal – not only Jewish – deliverance.

3. However, Sukkot is celebrated six month after Passover. According to the Jewish mystical Zohar (“Radiance” in Hebrew) – which was written by Rabbi Shimon bar-Yochai in the 2nd century and published by Moses de Leon in the 13th century – Sukkot commemorates the divine clouds of glory, which expressed the presence of God, sheltering the Jewish people throughout the Exodus until the return to the Land of Israel. The first appearance of the divine clouds of glory occurred in the first stop of the Exodus, Sukkota.

The holiday of Sukkot follows Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, which reaffirm the faith in God’s moral and material supremacy. It is followed by the holiday of Simchat Torah – celebrated a day after Sukkot – which highlights the centrality of the Torah (the Five Books of Moses) in Jewish life. The Sukkot holiday represents a human effort to be worthy of the presence and benefits of the divine clouds of glory.

4. The Hebrew root of Sukkot stands for the key characteristics of the relationship between the Jewish people, the Jewish Homeland and faith in God. The Hebrew word Sukkah (סכה) means “wholeness” and “totality” (סכ), the “shelter” of the tabernacle (סכך), “to anoint” (סוך), “divine curtain/shelter” (מסך) and “attentiveness” (סכת).

Are We on the Verge of Civil War? By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2018/09/20/are-we-on

Americans keep dividing into two hostile camps.

It seems the country is back to 1860 on the eve of the Civil War, rather than in 2018, during the greatest age of affluence, leisure and freedom in the history of civilization.

The ancient historian Thucydides called the civil discord that tore apart the fifth-century B.C. Greek city-states “stasis.” He saw stasis as a bitter civil war between the revolutionary masses and the traditionalist middle and upper classes.

Something like that ancient divide is now infecting every aspect of American life.

Americans increasingly are either proud of past U.S. traditions, ongoing reform, and current American exceptionalism, or they insist that the country was hopelessly flawed at its birth and must be radically reinvented to rectify its original sins.

No sphere of life is immune from the subsequent politicization: not movies, television, professional sports, late-night comedy or colleges. Even hurricanes are typically leveraged to advance political agendas.

What is causing America to turn differences into these bitter hatreds—and why now?

The internet and social media often descend into an electronic lynch mob. In a nanosecond, an insignificant local news story goes viral. Immediately hundreds of millions of people use it to drum up the evils or virtues of either progressivism or conservatism.

Anonymity is a force multiplier of these tensions. Fake online identities provide cover for ever greater extremism—on the logic that no one is ever called to account for his or her words.

Speed is also the enemy of common sense and restraint. Millions of bloggers rush to be the first to post their take on a news event, without much worry about whether it soon becomes a “fake news” moment of unsubstantiated gossip and fiction.

Ladies, We Don’t Need To Be Part of Your Group Therapy By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2018/09/20/ladies-we-dont-

Do we really have to be here for this?

By “we,” I mean America. And by “this,” I mean some form of forced group therapy session for adult women who cannot move past an ugly event from their teen years and feel the need to relitigate it in public nearly four decades later. A serious vetting process for a Supreme Court nominee has suddenly devolved into the GenX version of “The Big Chill.”

Here’s the deal: Christine Blasey Ford is one year older than I am. We came of age in the hard-partying 1980s when binge drinking among Americans teens was at an all-time high. A huge cultural shift was happening: Moms were entering the workforce and divorce rates were surging. Teenagers had extra latitude to do naughty things while our parents were busy working or finding new relationships post-divorce.

Plenty of GenX women have at least one story somewhat similar to the one Ford now says happened to her in the early 1980s: Attending a “house party” with a small group of drunk teens at a home where no parent was present; getting so blitzed you can’t later recall important details—like the exact date it happened or how you got home. Having inebriated boys take advantage of the situation—getting sloppy and aggressive, maybe even trying to force themselves on you. While the behavior was not excusable or acceptable, nor was it criminal. Especially if it ended after a firm “no.” (And, before any of you morons say it, NO I AM NOT DEFENDING RAPE.)

Human Nature Doesn’t Change
Moreover, these kinds of situations are not unique to the 1980s because they still happen every weekend in towns and on campuses across the country. Something that is definitely different today than it was in the 1980s is that responsible parents of boys now caution their sons about the dangers of even the perception of mistreating a girl. Parents now are keenly aware of the legal and long term consequences of alleged abusive behavior. And girls are more informed about how to defend themselves, whether its moving in groups, watching your drinks, or having each other’s backs to mitigate situations that may get out of control.

My generation, as parents, do not pretend that the impulses of teenagers and young adults do not exist, or that these impulses are not fueled by drugs and alcohol. Human nature does not adapt to conform to any particular cultural moment.

Which brings me back to Ford. I don’t doubt that some version of the incident she described did happen to her—or to someone she knew—at some point during her teen years. It appears to be traumatizing enough that it was brought up during her marriage counseling.

Yom Kippur guide for the perplexed, 2018 Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

bit.ly/2MCHiLl
1. The Yom Kippur-matchmaking connection. According to Rabbi Simeon ben Gamliel, the 6th President of the Sanhedrin (the ancient Jewish Supreme Court of 71 Sages), during 50 CE – 70 CE, a direct descendant of King David and a great-grandson of Hillel the Elder: “Jews never had happier days than the 15th of the month of Av [the beginning of the grape harvest – Holiday of Love] and Yom Kippur [the end of the grape harvest]. On those days the daughters of Jerusalem would go out wearing white clothing… dance in the vineyards and say: ‘young man, lift up your eyes and see what you choose. Do not seek beauty… [since] it is a woman that is God fearing that should be praised.’”

Prof. Shalom Rosenberg, from the Hebrew University’s Department of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, suggests that the Yom Kippur-matchmaking connection attests to the centrality of marriage and family in Judaism. While Yom Kippur focuses the attention of Jews to core values, the marriage institution – which is increasingly threatened by modernity – focuses the attention of human beings to the core cell of the human society, the value-based family.

Yom Kippur aims at bringing one closest to God, while marriage aims at bringing man and woman closest to one another.

Yom Kippur aims at coalescing the entire Jewish public – not just observant Jews – around critical values. Hence the Hebrew word for “public” – צבור – which is an acronym for Righteous persons (צדיקים), Average persons (בינוניים) and Evil persons (ורשעים).

2. The Hebrew word Kippur, כיפור (atonement/repentance), is a derivative of the Biblical word Kaporetכפורת ,, the cover of the Holy Ark in the Sanctuary, and Kopher, כופר, the cover of Noah’s Ark and the Holy Altar in the Temple. Yom Kippur resembles a spiritual cover (dome), which separates between the holy and the mundane, between spiritualism and materialism. The Kippah, כיפה (skullcap, yarmulke’), which covers one’s head during prayers, reflects a spiritual dome. Yom Kippur is translated into “the day of Kippur.”

Why Can’t I Criticize My Religion? by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12944/islam-criticism

On the surface, for those who wanted to reform Islam, the only place to do so appeared to be the West. We all assumed that here in the West, it would be safe to question and criticize. Instead, so many institutions utilize a far more subtle method of silencing criticism.
The more you conceal or disregard constructive criticism of Islam, the harder you are making it for reforms to occur in the religion and the easier you are making it for Muslim radicals to prevail.
The reason I criticize the radical elements of my religion is not because I have hatred in my heart, but because I desire to protect those who have been abused and abandoned by their leaders.

When I received a letter from a Shiite religious preacher from the United Kingdom, it did not surprise me. I receive many similar letters from extremist Muslims all over the world, as well as Western liberals, socialists, and others. Each time, opening these letters, I prepare for criticism of my careful scrutiny of my religion. As expected, the letter began with a familiar suggestion: “Stop criticizing your own religion.”

The letter went on to support this instruction with promises of the media and Western progressives favoring me and becoming far more supportive of me, if I were to align my views with their preferred talking points:

“If you stop criticizing Islam, the West will certainly be more welcoming of you, and you will receive more offers and opportunities to further your career.”

What is it that I say that rankles the left so much? I refuse to be apologetic for radical Islam in the West. I refuse to gloss over the darkest consequences to which rampant extremism has led. I do not waffle beneath the idea of multiculturalism or tolerance; some things are not meant to be tolerated. The message of the apologists is clear: Get in line. Send out the same messages that others are: about all aspects of Islam being a loving and benevolent religion. Focus on this and sweep the crimes against humanity under the carpet.

I truly wish I could.

Islam and the Culling Foot-Bridge By Amil Imani

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/09/islam_and_the_culling_footbridge.html

Islam operates by two powerful schemes: reward and punishment. It mesmerizes the believer by its encyclopedic descriptions of Allah’s lush paradise that awaits the worthy faithful. For the kefir and a not-so-true Muslim, the destination is Allah’s dreadful hell.

Muslim clergy tirelessly preach about these two locations with great success. Fear of hell, for some, even out-muscles the attractions of paradise and works wonders in keeping the flock servile to the parasitic clergy.

A powerful, well honed scheme involves pol-e As-Sirāt (the footbridge of the path). The kefirs, after they die, do not even get a chance to see if they can cross this footbridge; they go directly to Allah’s hell. Yet all Muslims approach the footbridge. The problem is in crossing it. The preachers describe at great length how difficult it is to cross this bridge over the gorge of hell to the other side, where paradise is located.

A great majority of blindly faithful Muslims are either illiterate or semi-literate. These people tend to take everything the charlatan preachers say as literal truth; many panic with fear and beg the preachers to tell them what they need do to cross that dreadful footbridge. They become ripe for the picking. The preachers, well trained con artists that they are, burden these simpletons with all kinds of well rehearsed fabricated demands to keep the flock in their pen. The preachers say, for instance, that they must do this and they must do that to earn the good graces of Allah. And when they die, Allah will commission two angels to hold them on both sides and safely transport them over the bridge. Wayward Muslims, on the other hand, are all on their own and most likely will fall into the dreadful hell with their very first steps.

When asked about the mercy of Allah, since he is billed as the most merciful, can they count on his mercy to send them the helpful angel if they somehow, themselves, fail to live completely up to the standards of the faith? The preachers have a pet response to that, too. Allah’s mercy has limits. You had best not to count on it too much. He has already shown you his abundance of mercy by sending you his beloved messenger Muhammad. Allah guides, and it is your duty to follow. And if you are confused or in doubt about things, just go to the preachers. They will clarify things for you and set you on the straight path. The crafty preachers claim that they have spent their lives learning the intricacies of the faith, and it is their humble task to serve the believers.