RUTHFULLY YOURS

Hugh Hefner insisted he made the world a better place by way of large breasts and air-brushed pudenda, while Harvey Weinstein reckoned being a champion of liberal causes entitled him to starlets on demand. Neither noticed how times, as they say, are changing.

It is less than three weeks since the “American icon,” Hugh Hefner, breathed his last in the Playboy mansion and was transported to California to be interred in a mausoleum next door to the body of Marilyn Monroe. He and Monroe never met, but she was the first of the naked celebrities who became the hallmark of Playboy, appearing both on the cover of its first 1953 issue and as its first centerfold and apparently ensuring that the magazine sold out. Ever the sentimentalist, Hefner spent a full $75,000 on a grave in this desirable location. He liked the idea, he said, of spending eternity next to the famous and fragile movie-star.

Marilyn was not available for comment, but she might have been annoyed that none of the $75,000 went to her, just as she never received any payment from Playboy for the photographs that began the making of its fortune. Four years earlier, badly needing the cash, she had received $50 for the photographs which, in the manner of these things, passed through several hands until they reached Hefner’s and those of his customers.

If Hefner and Monroe end up in the same part of the Next World, which is questionable, she might have something to say about this pay differential. But then so might a large number of other “playmates.”

These and other details of “Hef’s” iconic life were revealed with a sympathy at times amounting to reverence in most of the media obituaries that followed his death. Their theme was that he was the man who brought the sexual revolution to America, advanced the civil rights revolution alongside it, and combined these two revolutions in a sophisticated liberal lifestyle package that appealed to an American middle class then emerging from a restrictive puritan ideal.

There were, of course, qualifications. Hefner had some help in spreading the Playboy philosophy from the Pill, the Kinsey Report, and the growing liberalism of American law. The philosophy itself, together with the consumer lifestyle it promoted, were obviously directed more to the tastes and interests of men, in particular bachelors, than to those of women. (Indeed, Hefner was quick to identify the feminists of the Sixties and Seventies as enemies of the entire Playboy phenomenon.) As a result of such changing tastes, Playboyism, like its leading exponent, looked increasingly dated and “unsophisticated.” And, finally, it was impossible to ignore that the high-minded philosophizing and consumer empire both rested on naked female flesh.

The New York Times got the balance right. Its obituary leaned to the favourable:

“Hefner the man and Playboy the brand . . . . both advertised themselves as emblems of the sexual revolution, an escape from American priggishness and wider social intolerance. Both were derided over the years — as vulgar, as adolescent, as exploitative and finally as anachronistic. But Mr. Hefner was a stunning success from the moment he emerged in the early 1950s.”

And an assessment by the paper’s leading conservative columnist, Ross Douthat, was close to an exorcism:

“Hugh Hefner, gone to his reward at the age of 91, was a pornographer and chauvinist who got rich on masturbation, consumerism and the exploitation of women, aged into a leering grotesque in a captain’s hat, and died a pack rat in a decaying manse where porn blared during his pathetic orgies.

Hef was the grinning pimp of the sexual revolution, with Quaaludes for the ladies and Viagra for himself — a father of smut addictions and eating disorders, abortions and divorce and syphilis, a pretentious huckster who published Updike stories no one read while doing flesh procurement for celebrities, a revolutionary whose revolution chiefly benefited men much like himself.”

When I read Mr. Douthat’s words of brimstone, I thought he might be stoned by righteously indignant libertines. He did attract some abuse, but also a surprising number of sympathizers who began along such lines as: “I never thought I would agree with Mr. Douthat but . . .” That becomes more understandable when you read both Douthat and the anonymous editorialist carefully and realize that they contain more overlap and less contradiction than a hasty reading might suggest.

Their rhetoric is sharply different; the facts they describe are much the same. What makes the difference is the attitude each writer takes to Hefner’s life. Planting himself firmly on traditional Christian ground, Mr. Douthat, a believing Catholic, thinks he opened a gateway to the moral squalor of today’s American popular culture; the NYT scribe, standing on a surfboard as it hurtles down the stream of that culture, treats Hefner as, on balance, a pioneer who (doubtless reacting to an oppressive puritanism) went too far in the right direction and so into seedy, exploitative, and vulgar territory.

The reaction after every mass shooting follows a predictable script written by progressives to serve their political agenda. No claim about the efficacy of gun control, no matter how many times repudiated by facts, can stop the Dems and their media spaniels from ritually invoking it to demonize conservatives.

Why should we be surprised? By now it should be clear that the “party of science” is interested not in truth and evidence, but in ideology and partisan advantage. Yet those with common sense and an awareness of the facts still have to restate the obvious, even though it will make no difference to partisans either ignorant of or indifferent to any reality that doesn’t serve their interests. For what is at stake is not just one right, but the foundations of our political freedom in self-evident, God-given rights.

We all know the worn-out ideas that the progressives predictably trot out after every massacre. And we know they are fallacious. More guns do not lead to more gun murder. Between 1993 and 2013, private gun ownership increased 56%, and gun homicides declined 49%. No, the point is not that more guns account for the declines, a straw-man correlation the media burns down to discredit this fact. The point is, the left’s call for more gun control after every mass shooting implies that fewer guns or more regulations would decrease murder rates. Not only is that idea false, the opposite is true: higher murder rates invariably follow more gun control.

“Common sense regulations” is another nostrum of the left. We’ve had several laboratories for testing this hypothesis––Chicago, D.C., Baltimore, and most blue-state big cities have strict controls on guns, at the same time they have some of the highest rates of gun deaths. That’s because regulations on firearms are effective only for law-abiding citizens who don’t need such restraints. But for criminals they are “parchment barriers” easily ignored. If such government regulations were effective, we wouldn’t still be waging a decades-long war on drugs, which hasn’t stopped any teenager in America from getting any drug he wants. It’s unclear how the most draconian restrictions on gun ownership would be any more effective than the numerous laws that have failed to keep drugs from pouring into our country and being widely distributed.

Most important, the left is indifferent to the fact that the Constitution explicitly states that citizens have the right to “keep and bear arms.” Like all the enumerated rights, this one is not a gift of government, but an “inalienable” right, like the right of self-defense, we possess by virtue of being a human being. The bar for restricting these rights is very high, as it is for the right to free speech.

But the left has always despised the notion of natural rights and consider them a relic of our more ignorant and superstitious past, not to mention a check on their desire to concentrate and expand the government’s power. Contrary to the belief that rights are gifts of “nature and nature’s God,” the progressives argue that a benevolent government should create rights compatible with the its alleged purpose to achieve “equality” and “social justice.” Hence Franklin Roosevelt’s “new bill of rights,” which was promulgated in his 1944 State of the Union address, and included a “useful and remunerative job” and “adequate medical care”––good things to have, but not rights properly understood. But if government can invent such “rights,” the government can also modify or eliminate those it now deems have become dangerous anachronisms or impediments to social improvement.

After the Las Vegas massacre, the Daily Kos gave a typical example of this sentiment:

America needs to declare total war on guns, and that means reinterpreting or repealing the Second Amendment. The latter would be best. There is no sane reason why you or I should be granted the sacred and inviolable right to bear pistols, shotguns, automatic rifles, submachine guns, machine guns, flamethrowers, grenade launchers, anti-tank guns, and other “hunting and self-defense tools.”

After pistols, of course, the rest of the weapons are already illegal or strictly controlled. But misinformation and exaggeration are necessary tactics for making this specious argument against natural rights.

The sentiment, however, is an old staple of the left. Last year Rolling Stone made this same argument, saying the “Founders were wrong” about a Second Amendment that is “outdated, a threat to liberty, and a suicide pact.” Hence “the Second Amendment is wrong for this country and needs to be jettisoned.” Like the progressives of a hundred years ago, the author argues that technological change has made the right to bear arms a dangerous anachronism.

The Left hijacked the label “Liberal.” Yet they favor an empowered government and diminished rights for individuals. Is it liberal to hamper free speech on the nation’s campuses, for fear that alternative speech may offer preferred venues, or lest conservative speech may offend sensitive ears? Are liberals progressive, when they put the wishes of union bosses ahead of workers who would rather not pay dues that fund policies and politicians with which and with whom they disagree? Is it liberal to protect entrenched, unionized businesses against “disruptive” technologies such as Uber, in London and New York City?

Labels can be misleading. Democrats are better than Republicans in framing arguments with grandiloquent words and phrases. They create slogans and acronyms that can be contrary to the policies they represent. Those on the Right are less nuanced – less imaginative. The word “conservative,” for example, conjures images of old white men in club chairs, drinking brandy and soda. Yet, most Republicans live in “Red” states, less affluent than states that house Democrats. They do not look backward to privilege, wealth and biases against race, gender, creed and sexual orientation. Their wants are simple. They cherish the dignity of a good-paying job. They want the opportunity a good education provides. They want to conserve a culture that encourage faithfulness, thrift, hard work, respectfulness, responsibility and accountability. They believe in JFKs assertion: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what can you do for your country.”

Today, liberals want to protect people against speech they deem harmful. When I was a child and teased at school, I would come home in tears. My mother would repeat an adage whose roots go back to an 1862 publication of the African Methodist Episcopal Church: “Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” Such stoicism is no longer deemed appropriate. Words can be hurtful, Leftists claim, so “safe places” must be available. Limits on speech are, thus, permitted.

Consider “net neutrality.” How could any free-market pundit be against a label that suggests openness and unfettered access? But net neutrality is a directive issued by the Obama Administration that turns the internet into a regulated utility. It was marketed as a defense against big internet service providers (ISPs), cable and telecom companies. Proponents of Net Neutrality claim they have too much power – to speed up or slow down internet access. Liberals want them regulated, like public utilities. What proponents do not say is that ISPs, like Comcast and AT&T, owe their bigness to regulation. Better service and lower prices do not come from the beneficence of government, but from competition. As well, net neutrality says nothing about far bigger internet players, like Amazon, Facebook and Google, who monopolize content. With billions of subscribers, our values today are more influenced by Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg than all the churches, synagogues and mosques in the country.

Think of “sanctuary cities.” They were once havens to shelter the innocent, but have become asylums to protect criminal aliens. Sanctuary cities claim to be humanitarian, yet they destabilize civil society by ignoring the rule of law; for example, federal detention orders from ICE (Immigration and Custom Enforcement). We saw this in 2015 when Mexican-illegal Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, who had been deported five times for seven felony convictions and who found in San Francisco a sanctuary, shot and killed Kate Steinle. Last fall, in Twin Falls, Idaho a city that declared itself as “welcoming”, three young Muslim migrants raped and then urinated in the mouth of a five-year-old girl. Wendy Olson, an Obama-appointed U.S, Attorney, threatened to prosecute any who spoke out about the crime in ways she considered “false” or “inflammatory.” Yet, words could not have exceeded the brutality of what those thugs did. Prosecutors are supposed to enforce laws, not create them. There was nothing “humanitarian” or “welcoming” about either incident. Civil society depends on obeisance to laws. In a democracy, no one, no town, no city, stands above the law.

If your ancestors, dear reader, were Europeans of any sort, know that they threw us out of their countries, or stood aside while we were persecuted, evicted and murdered. So emulate us and get a life! As individuals we have not spent 3,500 years wallowing in self-pity. We get on with it and so should you.

So you belong to a group of people who are feeling offended by other people’s attitudes towards you? Is that right?

Well, here is some advice from someone whose people have been offended by other peoples’ attitudes, hate speech, assaults, random and mob murders, mass evictions, and organised genocides on a scale not known before or since. The advice – “Get a life! Get on with living!”

My people have been insulted, humiliated, despised and rejected to such an extent that it is the Western tradition and the vituperation directed against us is the longest hatred. This venom goes back more than 3,000 years.

Since we first lived amongst the ancient Egyptians, we were despised by them and then by their conquerors, the ancient Greeks and Romans. We have been evicted from every European country, unless we were first killed or handed over to organised killers.

If your ancestors, dear reader, are European of any sort, they threw us of their countries, or stood aside while we were evicted, persecuted and murdered. If you’re a Muslim, your ancestors, in the days of the great Islamic Empires, relegated us to the inferior status of dhimmi.

Many of you are descended from ancestors who participated in the Crusades, which ‘incidentally’ killed my people while plundering through Europe en route to ‘liberating’ Jerusalem from the Muslims.

We were evicted from England in 1290, from Spain and Portugal in 1492, confined to the Pale of Settlement in Czarist Russia and forced into paying Russian “candle” and “box” taxes levied only on us.

We were not welcomed, despite being on the electoral roll, in the British Parliament, until 1885. Our numbers at Harvard, Princeton and Yale universities were limited. We were excluded from the Royal Sydney Golf Club and the Melbourne Club.

More recently, of course, the Final Solution, to which but a gallant and courageous few of your recent forebears objected. Your grandparents were citizens of countries, including Australia, which refused sanctuary to my people trying to flee Nazi terror.

And, after we finally managed to establish a sanctuary on a tiny piece of ancestral Mediterranean land, from which we had repeatedly been ejected over the past 2,500 years, 900,000 of us were thrown out of nearby Islamic countries. Having established that tiny sanctuary, my people have been repeatedly attacked, not only by invading armies, but by international organisations whose constituent nations are so dependent on Islamic oil that they care nothing for criticising or opposing those attacks.

And you are offended! Offended by something said about, or denied to, your people in the last few years or centuries. Sorry, but that does not compare with our multi-millennial entitlement to take genuine offence.

So emulate us and get a life! That is what we have done – and still do. As individuals. We have not spent 3,500 years wallowing in self-pity. We have got on with it.

Above all, we have valued education. Our Nobel Prize and Fields Medal recipients are totally disproportionate to our numbers. Imagine 0.2% of the world’s population winning more than 22% of Nobel prizes in medicine and the sciences! Our little strip of Mediterranean land provides the technology you use every day in you iPhone, your USB sticks and your computers.

Oh, you might still be wondering which group of people I belong to. The group of people still hated by tens of thousands – as expressed in their websites and blogs, and whose existence is threatened daily by Iranian mullahs. A clue… our motto is “To life!” Does that ring a bell? What about Fiddler on the Roof?

So, to my fellow citizens who feel offended, who feel insulted, by the way some bigot refers to them, who feel that “the others” owe you something , to you I say get over it! Get a life! By all means possible, draw attention to your critics’ and tormenters’ stupidity, but don’t let hurt feelings dominate your life. Get on with making the most of what you can, with your own talents.

We Jews have done it for 3,500 years. You can too.

Tonight begins the Jewish Holiday of Sukkot- The feast of the Tabernacles. As Yoram Ettinger explains:

The Book of Ecclesiastes, written by King Solomon accentuates Solomon’s philosophy of the importance of humility, morality, patience, learning from past mistakes, commemoration and historical perspective, family, friendship, long-term thinking, proper timing, realism and knowledge. The Hebrew name of Ecclesiastes is Kohelet, (), which is similar to the Biblical commandment to celebrate the community-oriented Sukkot holiday – Hakhel (), which means “to assemble,” as well as “public” () and “community” (). Solomon’s call for the realization of human fallibility, vulnerabilities and limitations is consistent with a central message of Sukkot: a seven day relocation from one’s permanent residence to the temporary, humble, wooden Sukkah (booth).

3. The temporary structure of the Sukkah highlights the historical significance of the permanent Jewish State in the Land of Israel – which must not be taken for granted – while commemorating the fragile and vulnerable nature of Jewish sovereignty and the Jewish people: the destruction of the two Temples (586 BCE and 70 CE), the ensuing exiles, the expulsion of Jews from England (1290), Venice (1421), Koln (1424), Milan (1489) and Spain (1492) and the Holocaust.

It is an important and joyous holiday. rsk

As often in America, it was met with a great deal of heroism by ordinary men and women rising to the occasion: There was, for example, an Englishwoman in a wheelchair who’d been seated on a raised platform so she could get a better view of the concert. If it were every man for himself, it would have been easy to leave her there, trapped on the dais, exposed to the gunman. Instead, as everyone fled, those around her nevertheless carried her to safety and raised her wheelchair over the fence they scrambled over. There were many stories like that throughout the day, far outweighing the grotesque Tweets glorying in the slaughter of presumed Trump voters. Twitter is an idiotic medium, but not, happily, a representative one.

I had thought by last night we would know more about Stephen Craig Paddock. By now the usual social-media non-paper trail and petty-crime police records and mental-health issues have emerged. Instead, nothing has – except some bizarrely distinctive details: He wasn’t a loner, but lived with his girlfriend – an Australian citizen currently in Japan, but planning to return to the US today. He was not the usual loser, but a multi-millionaire. He had no apparent interest in guns and no military training, but he demonstrated remarkably lethal proficiency, either with semi-automatics he modified or with a genuine automatic he somehow acquired, a weapon that has been used in precisely three crimes in America since 1934. He didn’t “snap”, but instead calmly planned his act, identifying and securing the perfect corner suite in a massive hotel and then discreetly moving in dozens of weapons over four days and constructing platforms in front of those two windows.

Some of these quirks do not appear to be particularly consistent, and the Aussie in the adjoining room, for one, says there were “multiple shooters” and “they killed a security guard on my floor”. On the face of it, “multiple shooters” would seem more plausible than Isis’ claim that Mr Paddock had converted to Islam and changed his name to “Abu Abd Abdulbar al-Ameriki”. But, pending any further revelations, it may well be that a wealthy retiree with no interest in guns got sufficiently interested sufficiently quickly to pull off America’s all-time deadliest single-shooter massacre: An old dog taught himself a new trick, on a spectacular scale.

As I said on stage at the Guthrie Theatre, I had intended to talk about other matters – about the weekend’s latest “vehicle attack” in Edmonton, Alberta, by a Somali immigrant (with an Isis flag on the seat of his car), who stabbed one policeman and ran over four people at Commonwealth Stadium; and about the two young women fatally stabbed (one with her throat slit) at the main rail station in Marseilles, by an illegal immigrant from the Maghreb; and the seventeen-year-old from the northern Caucasus who’s just gone on trial in Oslo after being found with a bomb the day after the Stockholm jihad-motorist struck. But all these events, by fiercely committed ideologues in multiple jurisdictions in service of a global civilizational struggle, were all but forgotten, banished to the in-brief sidebars at the foot of page 37 by one apparently non-ideological American retiree who, unlike the aforementioned, was extremely good at killing large numbers of people.

I confess to a certain resentment at this. I regard the Albertan, French and Norwegian stories as far more relevant to where our world is heading. It is not a small thing when a young Frenchwoman can have her throat slit in broad daylight at a major public venue in a European metropolis, notwithstanding that the Mayor of London and others tell us we have to accept that it’s now part and parcel of life in a big city. Yet in a certain sense these events are ineffectual – as the corpse count of a Stephen Paddock reminds us. And every Stephen Paddock makes it easier for all those who want to brush off Islamic supremacism and retreat to all those lame-o lines about how you’ve got more chance of being killed by a toppling household appliance than by a terrorist, and anyway, even when the shooting starts, half-a-dozen Isis cells can’t match one white-male gun nut. Why didn’t the Somali guy, the North African, the Caucasian jihadist figure out what one 64-year-old from a Nevada retirement community did? That all over the map there are soft targets with large numbers of people penned into small, tight, open-air spaces – and right across the street tall hotels whose upper floors offer easy opportunities for a bloodbath.

We have been, for the most part, very lucky. The foot-soldiers of the jihad are mostly dimwit Mohammedans: they have youth and energy and ideological fervor, but they are also largely stupid and unimaginative. The old guys are less energetic, but also less stupid: if Isis were right and there really were Islamic Stephen Paddocks – 40-50-60-somethings, worldly and full of low cunning – things would be very different.

Consider this year’s two pop-concert atrocities: at Ariana Grande’s in Manchester, 23 people died – in the cause of the new global caliphate; at Jason Aldean’s in Vegas, 59 died – for no reason at all. It is a glum thought, but Paddock’s all-time record will likely not stand for long. America’s four deadliest single-shooter mass murders occurred in the last decade. Only one of them – the Orlando nightclub massacre – can be said to have a political or ideological component. The rest seem to be a peculiarly contemporary form of narcissism – that, when my life heads south, the only way to give it meaning is to take large numbers of people with me. There is no cause, no fealty, no “Allahu Akbar!” – because pointless slaughter is the supreme triumph of amoral will: Who needs Allah? You’re your own Allah. Unlike Manchester or Nice or Paris or Berlin or Brussels, there is no meaning: Indeed, the only meaning is the meaninglessness; that is the point – the black void at the heart of the act.

There are many claims floating around that Russia colluded with Trump/the Trump campaign during the 2016 Presidential election resulting in the victory of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. While there are general claims about collusion, there are no claims of specific actions. This, of course, ties in with Hillary’s book, “What Happened”.

You can’t claim collusion without pointing to actual acts. That the Mueller investigation teamhas not leaked claims of actual acts throws doubt on his whole enterprise.Here is what I think happened.

What Russia didn’t make happen:

Russia didn’t make Hillary refuse to protect the Consulate in Benghazi.

Russia didn’t make Hillary lie to the people about a video causing the Benghazi attack while she told her daughter it was terrorism.

Russia didn’t make Hillary have an unsecured server in her house and in the bathroom of an apartment in Colorado.

Russia didn’t make people send Huma Abedin emails at home to Anthony Weiner’s personal computer. Weiner had no security clearance and his computer was unsecured.

Russia didn’t make Hillary have her lawyers permanently delete 30,000 emails from her private server.

Russia didn’t make Hillary and Bill create the Clinton Foundation.

Russia didn’t make the Clinton’s take huge “speaking” fees from Wall Street while publicly damning Wall Street.

Russia didn’t make Hillary, her aids, and the press push for Trump to win the Republican primary in the belief that he would be easy to beat.

Russia didn’t make Hillary’s pollsters weight the result to show Hillary as unbeatable.

Russia didn’t make Hillary believe those polls.

Russia didn’t make Hillary believe that she had Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin locked-up and that she didn’t have to go there.

Russia did not make Hillary go to West Virginia and announce that she would shut down the coal industry, which affected Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Ohio and Colorado.

Russia didn’t make Donna Brazil give Hillary debate questions in advance if the debate.

Russia didn’t make Hillary proclaim that half the voters were “deplorables”.

Russia didn’t make Hillary issue invitations to her speeches, as she did to me in Virginia, where you had to pay $35 to hear her campaign talk.

Russia didn’t make the Clintons make speeches for large amounts of money to people who wanted favors from the government.

Russia didn’t make the DNC cause violence at Trump events.

What Russia may have done:

Russia may have hacked Hillary’s and others’ unsecured servers and released the information to Wikileaks.

What Russia did do:

Russia bought 20% of America’s uranium mines. $145 million of the proceeds wound up in the coffers of the Clinton Foundation.

Russia is reported to have employed Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta, and paid him about $35 million.

Conclusion:

Someone, and it may have been Russia, leaked information from John Podesta’s server to the public through Wikileaks. The information was damming to the Democrats. The release of this information doomed Hillary’s campaign. Her supporters said, in effect, if you didn’t know what she did, you would have voted for her and she would have won.

This summer, Nazi symbols and the slogan “Jews will not replace us” at a rally of white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia, generated a rare clarifying moment in an otherwise politically scrambled time. Since the United States led the Allies to victory in the Second World War and the Nuremburg Trials condemned the perpetrators of genocide, Nazism has been the most powerful symbol of evil in our culture and Jews its most identifiable victims. Though it may be said in some sense that “both sides” at Charlottesville — the demonstrators and counter-demonstrators — bore some responsibility for the event, President Trump’s failure to single out the Nazi element in his condemnation of the two was perceived by many Americans as a moral offense against his country, let alone against its Jewish citizens. Those who enlist Nazism for the advancement of their political goals deserve harsh, unequivocal censure. The president ought to have led, not followed, in singling them out.

Yet the very clarity of judgment on Nazism threatens to obscure graver threats to our constitutional democracy. Jews in particular are harmed by the exclusive identification of anti-Semitism with Nazism, which is so far the only form of anti-Jewish politics that has gone down to defeat. Just as tuberculosis is no longer our chief medical hazard, so Nazism is no longer the main threat to the Jews and what they represent. The tale of evil enshrined in the Holocaust Memorial Museum has been overtaken by more sinister political forms of grievance and blame.

Before Charlottesville, some politicians, professors, and community leaders had begun to address the escalation of anti-Jewish politics in America. But those initiatives could use a sharper focus on the real character of anti-Semitism. On December 1, 2016, for instance, the United States Senate passed the “Anti-Semitism Awareness Act,” or AAA, framed as an extension of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Civil Rights Act was originally designed to combat discrimination against African Americans. It sought to cover all its bases in protecting them through its triple targeting of discrimination on the basis of “race, color, or national origin.” Title VI focuses particularly on institutions that receive federal funds, and includes protections against discrimination on college campuses. But over several decades, the prime targets of hostile discrimination on American campuses from Brooklyn College to the University of California, Irvine, ceased to be traditional racial minorities and became instead the most habitual of scapegoats — the Jews — though they are themselves a diverse group of many colors and national origins.

Well before the passage of the AAA, interpretation of the original Civil Rights Act had already been stretched by the Departments of Justice and Education to prohibit “discrimination against Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, and members of other religious groups when the discrimination is based on the group’s actual or perceived shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics.” The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) duly investigated hundreds of claims of harassment, threats, and intimidation against Jewish students on college campuses under this interpretation. Yet despite the broadly extended definition and the documented causes for concern, the OCR failed to identify any violations against Jews because anti-Semitism did not comfortably fit the original legislative framework of the Civil Rights Act. The AAA was therefore passed in an attempt to further empower the OCR to protect Jewish students.

But there has always been a problem with the logic of this well-intentioned exercise. Anti-Semitism cannot be subsumed into the framework of the Civil Rights Act because anti-Semitism is not discrimination. It may exhibit the key features of prejudice, bias, and bigotry — and therefore result in discrimination. But it is different in kind. Anti-Semitism is a modern political phenomenon — an ideology that anchors or forms part of a political movement and serves a political purpose. It arose alongside other ideologies like liberalism, conservatism, socialism, communism, anarchism, and (somewhat later) fascism, opposing some of them and merging with others. Anti-Semitism was the most protean of these ideologies and was therefore valuable in forging coalitions even among otherwise competing groups. To take anti-Semitism seriously, let alone to subdue it, requires first recognizing its political nature.

An ideology may be defined as a system of beliefs or ideals, a shaping concept in politics, held by an individual or a group. As a political ideology, anti-Semitism enjoys the protection of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, which prohibits laws abridging “the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble.” This provision affords champions of an ideology like communism the right to free speech and assembly even though they aim at the destruction of our liberal democracy, so one can hardly deny the same protection to champions of anti-Semitism ostensibly targeting only the Jews.

The AAA was no sooner passed than protests against abridgment of the right to free speech arose, including from administrators of colleges that had seen some of the worst harassment of Jewish students. They asked, in effect, whether Jews must be protected at the expense of the First Amendment. They deserve an answer. But such an answer would require looking into just what anti-Semitism is.

Hurricanes in the Caribbean and the U.S., earthquakes in Mexico and forest fires out west dominated the news. The New York Times, in reporting on the devastation and sounding like an Old Testament prophet, noted, people could be excused for believing that an angry God (perhaps Al Gore?) had let loose His wrath for destroying what He had created – God, that is, not Al Gore. Hyperbole sells news, so perhaps the folks at the Times could be excused for trying to make an extra buck out of other people’s misery.

Torrents were not limited to Mexico, the Caribbean and the Texas/Florida coasts. At the United Nations, President Trump gave a Reagan-like speech, as he did in Poland. He praised the work of the UN, and cited the principles on which it was founded: “pillars of peace, sovereignty, security and prosperity.” He spoke of its cooperation: “Strong sovereign nations let diverse countries with different values, different cultures and different dreams not just coexist, but work side by side, on the basis of mutual respect.” He reminded those listening that Americans “have paid the ultimate price to defend our freedom and the freedom of many nations represented in this great hall.” He emphasized he was an American leader, not a world leader.

He warned that if the UN is to be an effective partner reform is necessary to confront those who would dismantle the world we know: “Too often the focus of this organization has not been on results, but on bureaucracy and process. In some cases, states that seek to subvert this institution’s noble ends have hijacked the very systems that are supposed to advance them.” He reminded his audience that “some governments with egregious human rights records sit on the Human Rights Council.”

President Trump called out North Korea for what they are, a country that impoverishes its people and risks catastrophe in the Pacific region. Bully’s intimidate, he asserted, and must be confronted. He did add a sentence, the last part of which became headline news in much of the media: “The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.” Most press accounts left off the final two sentences of the paragraph: “The United States is ready, willing and able, but hopefully this will not be necessary. That’s what the United Nations is all about. That’s what the United Nations is for. Let’s see how they do.” Mr. Trump spoke frankly of the Maduro regime in Venezuela, using two of the best sentences in the speech: “The problem in Venezuela is not that socialism has been poorly implemented, but that socialism has been faithfully implemented. From the Soviet Union to Cuba to Venezuela, whenever true socialism or communism has been adopted, it has delivered anguish and devastation and failure.”

As do many in politics, Mr. Trump has multiple personalities, like Joanne Woodward as Eve in, “Three Faces of Eve,” or the two faces of Janus. He reminds one of Dr. Doolittle’s Pushmi-Pullyu. We do not know which way he is headed. The weekend after his speech to the UN, he became embroiled in an argument with NFL players, who prefer to kneel rather than stand during the National Anthem. Mr. Trump is right about the disrespect they show, but who cares what those morons do? Don’t we have bigger issues, like economic growth; addressing the inequities embedded in the miss-named Affordable Care Act; fixing Dodd-Frank, which has allowed “too-big-to-fail” banks to proliferate, or doing something about our unsustainable debt? Should not tax reform take priority, or the geopolitical concerns in the Middle East and Southeast Asia? Why take on the NFL? My father warned me: never argue with an idiot, for a passerby would be unable to distinguish between the two. The consequence for Mr. Trump was that a great speech disappeared into a miasma of kneeling, self-righteous, juvenile football players.