ISRAEL Comments turned off

What Israel’s Protests Are Really About By Josh Hammer

Posted By on July 30th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/07/28/what-israels-protests-are-really-about/

“The new, modern Israel is more nationalist, more religious and more traditionalist. That is a wonderful thing. And that reality is not changing anytime soon.”

Many Israelis have once again taken to mass protests in the streets, both in the lead-up to and in the aftermath of the Benjamin Netanyahu-led government’s successful passing on Monday of one tiny sliver of the broader judicial reforms that it had previously floated earlier this year. But any sober analysis of the perhaps-unprecedented civil strife now afflicting the Jewish state leads to one conclusion: The vitriolic pushback has nothing to do with substantive separation-of-powers concerns or the particulars of constitutional theory, and everything to do with the Left’s insatiable personal loathing of Prime Minister Netanyahu and its deep-set cultural anxiety over the more nationalist and religious direction Israel is now heading.

For the first four and a half decades after modern Israel’s founding in 1948, the Jewish state operated according to the British model of governance: no written constitution, parliamentary supremacy, and a subordinate, common law-based judiciary. Israel lacks a written constitution to this day, but things began to change in the early 1990s, when former Supreme Court of Israel President Aharon Barak self-pronounced a so-called “constitutional revolution.”

By snapping his fingers, Barak – absent any statutory basis for doing so – arrogated to the Supreme Court of Israel powers that no other judicial tribunal in the world possesses. Those powers include, among other things, the power to hear any issue – no matter how transparently political, and regardless of a plaintiff’s legal “standing” to bring the suit – at any time, for any reason; the ability to overturn any law, policy or even cabinet/ministerial appointment for effectively any reason, from judicial review grounded in Israel’s 13 quasi-constitutional “Basic Laws” to judicial nullification based on an ultra-subjective finding of “unreasonableness”; and the nepotistic power to veto the justices’ own successors, due to the idiosyncratic makeup of Israel’s Judicial Selection Committee.

Anyone vaguely familiar with comparative constitutionalism, to say nothing of American constitutionalism as propounded in The Federalist Papers and ratified in the U.S. Constitution, can spot the glaring problems here. Judge Robert H. Bork, who was nominated by President Ronald Reagan to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1987 before having his nomination derailed by a loathsome Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.)-led character assassination, wrote in his 2003 book Coercing Virtue: “Pride of place in the international judicial deformation of democratic government goes not to the United States, nor to Canada, but to the State of Israel. The Israeli Supreme Court is making itself the dominant institution in the nation, an authority no other court in the world has achieved.” And the situation has actually gotten markedly worse in the two decades since Bork made that observation.

Netanyahu’s Likud party and other allied right-wing parties made reform of the imperious, leftist-dominated Israeli Supreme Court a key campaign plank ahead of the Jewish state’s election last November, which resulted in a 64-seat (out of 120) majority conservative coalition in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. The coalition advanced a wide-ranging suite of reform measures, from amending the Judicial Selection Committee’s composition to adding the hotly contested Knesset “override clause” provision to paring down the binding powers of Israel’s overweening “attorney general,” earlier this year; this column wrote in favor of those broader reforms, at the time. However, amidst a secularist-leftist national meltdown that saw myriad of highways shut down by protestors, army reservists threaten not to report for duty, billions of investment dollars flow out of the country, and the country’s lone international airport briefly close due to a strike, Netanyahu backed down in late March.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

America’s Razor’s Edge Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on July 30th, 2023

https://victorhanson.com/americas-razors-edge/

We are the most powerful country in civilization’s history but not invulnerable. Even America will finally bleed out if we continue to open our own veins.

Was it $40, $50, or $60 billion in equipment, weapons, supplies, and infrastructure that the U.S. simply abandoned in Afghanistan? That was that—no problem?

We had too much military junk anyway? We can just print the money to buy more replacement stuff?

Our enemies took no notice and instead thought, “Wow, what a powerful adversary just to scram out of Kabul and leave priceless weaponry behind—my God, we don’t wish to tangle with such a formidable power!”

Was that the idea in leaving as we did?

Was that “Flight of the Americans” the fitting epitaph to 20 years of blood-and-treasure nation-building to ensure another Bin Laden did not partner with the Taliban to attack the U.S.? Are we safer in 2020 from Talibanian terrorism than in 2001, given the two decades of costly occupation?

Are we so wealthy in treasure and blood, that Americans can fly pride flags, paint George Floyd murals, and birth gender studies programs in Islamic Kabul, while losing 2,400 lives, and seeing 24,000 wounded—before abandoning a $1 billion new embassy and a $300 million refitted secure airbase to the Taliban?

Is it no big thing that it will take years to resupply our 155mm artillery shell stocks, our Javelin missiles, our short-range missiles, after giving Ukraine $100, $120, or is it $130 billion in weapons, economic aid, training, and supplies?

Is America so internally secure that it can normalize shoplifting in its major cities?

Exempt smash-and-grab destruction of parked cars in San Francisco?

Hector the middle class on their incorrect use of gas water heaters while allowing flumes of feces to stream in the bays of Los Angeles and San Francisco, on the theory that such organic pollution is not pollution if the excrement emanates from the homeless?

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Hunter’s grift was really the whole family’s business That business had only one product: selling political influence: Charles Lipson

Posted By on July 30th, 2023

https://thespectator.com/topic/hunter-biden-grift-whole-family-business/

The Biden administration has repeatedly told the public that Hunter’s lucrative consulting business doesn’t matter unless it is directly connected to his father. That’s true. Moreover, they add, that connection is not just unproven, it cannot be proved because it didn’t exist. That’s false, although the mainstream media has repeated it faithfully. But even the most feckless are finding it increasingly difficult to sustain this awkward lip-syncing with the White House press office.

Actually, the Biden grifting operation extends well beyond Hunter to include multiple family members. It always centered on Joe’s public position and the political access it ensured, first as the sitting vice president and then as a prospective Democratic nominee after Hillary Clinton’s defeat. 

The clearest indication of the enterprise’s corrupt purpose is its construction of a web of nearly thirty LLCs to hide the distribution of profits from the operation. There is no legitimate business purpose for this tangled web of pass-through entities. The only purpose is to hide the sources and distribution of this outside money. That should be obvious even to the Washington Post, though it doesn’t seem to be. They might want to pay attention to another painful fact: all this money was paid for services that have never been disclosed to the public. You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to know the purpose. My dear Watson, all the clues point to political access.

That access hinged on Joe Biden’s political position. His family (and especially Hunter) went to great lengths to hide any direct, criminal connection and, it appears, to pay taxes on all the proceeds. 

Proving a criminal connection to Joe Biden is a difficult, complex task — and it has not yet been done.

The main reason is hasn’t been proved, we now know, is that official investigations were deliberately blocked by higher-level officials at the IRS and, most likely, the Department of Justice. In private meetings at the Internal Revenue Service, those officials acknowledged that there were sufficient legal grounds to pursue those connections to Joe Biden, which emerged from the IRS investigation of Hunter. Then, for reasons that have not been explained, the same higher-level officials reversed themselves and prevented any investigation that would touch on Joe Biden himself.

We need to know the names of people who blocked that inquiry. We need to know if anyone higher up the chain of command ordered this cover-up or if they simply did it themselves to curry favor. We need all that testimony under oath.

And we need to know who disclosed to Hunter and his lawyer that some of Hunter’s documents were about to be searched and some of his associates interviewed. Miraculously, those documents disappeared before the search and the associates were nowhere to be found. Another avenue of inquiry had been successfully blocked.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Enough With Half Measures, Throw All U.S. Code at Trump By Roger Kimball

Posted By on July 30th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/07/30/enough-with-half-measures-throw-all-u-s-code-at-trump/

I have a suggestion for Jack Smith, one of Joe Biden’s official Rottweilers in charge of taking out Donald Trump. Throw the book at him. I mean the whole book.

So far, Smith has taken a sort of piecemeal approach to suffocating the former president. His opening gambit was a 37-count felony indictment over Trump’s possession and handling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach. A couple of days ago, he added three more counts and yet another defendant, Trump employee Carlos De Oliveira, to the list.

But I say: enough with half measures. The obscenely bloated, contradictory, and embarrassing compendium of the laws that supposedly govern this country is known as the U.S. Code. Among other things, it is a monument to the malevolent frivolousness of the people we elect to govern us. The Greek lawgiver Solon believed that a good society should have few laws but that those laws ought to be strictly and impartially enforced.

Our anti-Solons believe in the indiscriminate, rabbit-like multiplication of laws, the more the merrier, in order to increase the potential for obfuscation and partisan deployment. Currently, the U.S. Code contains thousands upon thousands of laws regarding everything from agriculture and the armed forces to telecommunications, space programs, and voting.

Who knows how many of the provisions contained in that Leviathan’s Bible Trump may have violated? For example, chapter 15 of Title 48 (“Territories and Insular Possessions”) concerns “Conveyance Of Submerged Lands To Territories.” Section §1707 of that chapter has this to say about “Payment of rents, royalties, and fees to local government”:

“On and after the date of enactment of this Act, all rents, royalties, or fees from leases, permits, or use rights, issued prior to such date of enactment by the United States with respect to the land conveyed by this Act, or by the amendment made by this Act, and rights of action for damages for trespass occupancies of such lands shall accrue and belong to the appropriate local government under whose jurisdiction the land is located.”

Are we sure that Donald Trump, well known as a New York real estate developer, has strictly abided by all the provisions of the law? Has he snagged any rents, royalties, or fees from any lands covered by this act? If so, has he handed the pelf over to the “appropriate local government under whose jurisdiction the land is located?” How do you know?

In this country, it is a hallowed principle that a person is innocent until indicted. You hear people say that all the time. They say it in jest, or half in jest. But they know that it is true. But they overcome the resulting cognitive dissonance by pretending that it is only half true, that really, “deep down,” we are still a “nation of laws, not men” and that the FBI, for example, actually acts in the service of the public, not as the semi-secret police force of the Democratic party. If they’re on TV they say it with a straight face.

Among the most amusing video clips I have seen recently was Jack Smith’s first announcement of his indictment of Trump. “We have one set of laws in this country,” Smith said, face straight as a meter stick, “and they apply to everyone.” I’m not sure when I have laughed so hard.

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Oppenheimer: A Dishonest Masterpiece Was the father of the A-bomb a patriot or a traitor? by Bruce Bawer

Posted By on July 30th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/oppenheimer-a-dishonest-masterpiece/

Although biopics about great scientists have been a Hollywood staple ever since the early days of the talkies, they pose distinct challenges to filmmakers. How, after all, to make the sight of somebody working out a mathematical problem in his head visually exciting? Still, from The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936) and Madame Curie (1943) to The Theory of Everything and The Imitation Game (both 2014), the genre has yielded some first-rate results. The latest such achievement is the epical Oppenheimer, written and directed by Christopher Nolan (Memento, The Dark Knight, Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk).

It’s the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-67), “the father of the atom bomb” – not to be confused with Edward Teller, “the father of the hydrogen bomb.” Before seeing it, I read American Prometheus, the 2007 biography by Martin J. Sherwin and Kai Bird on which it’s based. The book is fascinating, but after finishing it I wondered how Nolan had managed to make it cinematic. Yes, in films like this, sooner or later you know you’re going to see the hero excitedly scribbling complex equations on a blackboard. But in The Theory of Everything we also experienced the human drama of Stephen Hawking becoming increasingly weakened by ALS; in The Imitation Game, Alan Turing’s autistic personality made for plenty of interpersonal conflict; and A Beautiful Mind actually put John Nash’s imaginary friends onscreen.

But what to do with Oppenheimer? The man was a puzzlement, complex and contradictory. Obsessed with the paradoxes of the cosmos, he nonetheless found time to become a multilingual polymath of surpassing erudition — an aficionado of Picasso, Stravinsky, and The Waste Land who taught himself Italian so he could read Dante and learned Sanskrit just for the hell of it. Different people described him in strikingly different ways: for one, he was “angelic, true and honest”; for another, he was a guy who “could cut you cold and humiliate you down to the ground.” In more than one way, his story is similar to Turing’s. Both were geniuses who played outsized roles in winning World War II but who, years later, were punished by their governments for matters unrelated to their work (in Turing’s case, his homosexuality; in Oppenheimer’s, his intimacy with Communists). While Turing’s wartime work gave birth to the computer age, Oppenheimer’s ushered in the atomic age. Both men’s discoveries had their positive and negative consequences; but while the downsides of computers took decades to come into focus, the downsides of nuclear energy were clear from the git-go.

In Oppenheimer’s youth, to be sure, physics seemed innocuous — a matter of working out abstruse calculations about the behavior of atoms and the movements of galaxies that had no conceivable connection to everyday human life. Inclined, in any event, far more to theoretical than to applied science (in chem lab, he was a klutz), he took his undergraduate degree at Harvard, then — in order to immerse himself in quantum mechanics, which back then (it was the 1920s) had yet to gain a foothold in the U.S. — did advanced work at Cambridge, Göttingen, Leiden (where he picked up the nickname Opje, later anglicized to Oppie), and Zurich. Reading American Prometheus, I feared that any film about Oppenheimer would have to jettison these years in Europe, which, though colorful, might be dismissed by some screenwriters as tangential. But my concerns were unfounded: Nolan works just enough of this stuff in to get the gist of it all, and, bless him, puts in every last one of the details I was particularly fond of — such as the spectacle of Oppenheimer, newly arrived in Leiden, delivering a lecture in Dutch, which he’s just taught himself for the occasion.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Biden’s Legacy: The Axis of Tyrannies A New World Order Dominated by China, Russia and the Iranian Regime, with North Korea Heading Up the Rear by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on July 30th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19836/biden-axis-of-tyrannies

[T]he weak and possibly compromised administration of U.S. President Joe Biden appears to have enabled and empowered the autocrats of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, all of whom seem to be working overtime to create a new authoritarian world order with themselves at the helm.

Iran, which has already declared a new world order, is, even beyond its accelerating nuclear weapons program, swiftly trying to reshape the world militarily and geopolitically wherever Western nations appear to be losing power. The Iranian regime also appears to be wasting no time indoctrinating it citizens with anti-Western and anti-American points of view.

Since the Biden Administration assumed office in 2021, its vacuum of leadership in the Middle East has led to the increasing influence of China and Iran in the region; the decision by the Gulf nations to dodge the US and tilt towards China, and even to the China-brokered deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran that further sidelines the U.S.

“The Chinese have a strategy they’ve been following. We kind of wander around from day to day.” – Former National Security Adviser John R. Bolton, WABC 770 radio, March 12, 2023.

In November 2022, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei vowed, “Death to America will happen. In the new order I am talking about America will no longer have any important role.” The Iranian regime, now that it is aligned with Putin’s Russia and the Chinese Communist Party, would probably be delighted to conquer the US.

As the Biden Administration has unfortunately created a leadership vacuum throughout the world, its apparent risk-paralysis and feeble leadership seem quickly to be leading to a new world order led by the Axis of Tyrannies: China, Russia and Iran, with North Korea heading up the rear.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Team Biden Outmaneuvered by China? by Eric Rozenman

Posted By on July 30th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19839/china-outmaneuvered-biden

U.S. policy toward China appears to be suffering from a belief in magic – that, for instance, withdrawing from Afghanistan would be a great idea; that Putin would be happy with a “minor incursion” into Ukraine; that the Chinese spy balloon was “silly;” that the mission of education and the military should be to ensure “equity,” leading one veteran to say that the US is “trying to out-pronoun our enemies;” and that America’s southern border, with agents trying to process reportedly 8,000 illegal migrants each day, thereby leaving vast swaths of land open to traffickers, smugglers and terrorists, is “secure.”

Regrettably, the Biden Administration seems to be letting itself be outmaneuvered in countering the imminent threat of war posed by China’s leader Xi Jinping and his ruling Communist Party.

Blinken swallowed the airport insult and met anyway with, among others, his Chinese counterpart and Xi himself. They held what the State Department called “a productive conversation, a real exchange.” Chinese officials likewise said the talks were “candid, in-depth and constructive.” Oh good! Then we have nothing to worry about!

At home, Xi has continued to tighten party control over the economy even as economic growth has faltered and unemployment climbed. Why pursue antagonistic policies abroad and counter-productive ones at home?

Xi’s objectives are not economic growth or good relations but rather to insulate China from outside sanctions and other pressure like that, orchestrated by the United States and NATO against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. — J. Kyle Bass, founder of Texas-based Hayman Capital Management, July 12, 2023.

“The day Yellen landed in China, Xi told the Eastern Military Command to prepare for war. I think it’s highly likely he invades Taiwan.” Not by 2027, as estimated by U.S. intelligence, but “in 12 to 18 months.” — J. Kyle Bass, July 12, 2023.

U.S. policy toward China appears to be suffering from a belief in magic – that, for instance, withdrawing from Afghanistan would be a great idea; that Putin would be happy with a “minor incursion” into Ukraine; that the Chinese spy balloon was “silly;” that the mission of education and the military should be to ensure “equity,” leading one veteran to say that the US is “trying to out-pronoun our enemies;” and that America’s southern border, with agents trying to process reportedly 8,000 illegal migrants each day, thereby leaving vast swaths of land open to traffickers, smugglers and terrorists, is “secure.”

Regrettably, the Biden Administration seems to be letting itself be outmaneuvered in countering the imminent threat of war posed by China’s leader Xi Jinping and his ruling Communist Party.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

INTERMISSION UNTIL JULY 31ST

Posted By on July 21st, 2023

I WILL BE ON VACATION

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Erdoğan’s Most Eminent Men: Turkey’s New Spymasters by Burak Bekdil

Posted By on July 21st, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19819/turkey-erdogan-fidan-kalin

Turkey’s two key appointments are new foreign minister and former intelligence chief, Hakan Fidan; and the newly-appointed intelligence chief, Ibrahim Kalın, also an Erdoğan confidant.

Both men have interesting and impressive careers. How both of them have become the only two people who make policy and share power with Erdoğan is illuminating, especially where their careers intersected under the president.

During that meeting, Fidan told the others that if they decided to go to war with Syria he could easily arrange a false flag operation: “Easy for me. I can send four men into Syria, they send eight missiles [into Turkish soil], and there you go.”

The appointments mark formalizing executive cabinet jobs for two most important men in Erdoğan’s most inner circle.

As Turkey’s post-election dust is settling down, the international community has turned its attention to two key appointments announced by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who on May 28 won his 17th election victory in 21 years, and entered his third decade in power.

Turkey’s two key appointments are new foreign minister and former intelligence chief, Hakan Fidan; and the newly-appointed intelligence chief, Ibrahim Kalın, also an Erdoğan confidant.

Both men have interesting and impressive careers. How both of them have become the only two people who make policy and share power with Erdoğan is illuminating, especially where their careers intersected under the president.

BOOKS Comments turned off

America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything Christopher Rufo

Posted By on July 21st, 2023

America’s most effective conservative intellectual proves once and for all that Marxist radicals have taken over our nation’s institutions.

In the 1960s, Mao launched China’s Cultural Revolution. Cities grew overcrowded. Technocrats demanded progress from above. Anyone opposed was sent to be “re-educated.” China’s revolution was bloody, fast, and a failure, but what if America started a revolution at the same time, based on the same bad ideas, and it’s just been slower, calmer, and more effective?

In his powerful new book, Christopher F. Rufo uncovers the hidden history of left-wing intellectuals and activists who systematically took control of America’s institutions to undermine them from within.America’s Cultural Revolution finally answers so many of the questions normal Americans have, such as:

• Why is nearly every major corporation bending the knee to a far-left agenda?

• How did DEI suddenly become the department no institution can continue without?

• Why is race the main thing America’s rich, white elite wants to talk about? 

• When did the left adopt all this doublespeak, saying progress is a lack of progress, equality is not equality, speech is violence, and violence is speech?

• Has the goal of the left, for a century, actually been the destruction of every Western institution? 

Readers may not know the names of Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, and Derrick Bell, but they will recognize the ideas they spread. How their radical, destructive ideology slowly worked its way from prisons to academia to classrooms to your human resources department will come as a shock.

Failing to act soon, Rufo warns, could allow the radical left to achieve their ultimate objective: replacing constitutional equality with a race-based redistribution system overseen by bureaucratic ‘diversity and inclusion’ officials. Most Americans don’t want this, but most Americans are no longer in control of our institutions. If the mainstream media’s depiction of a failing dystopia in need of a fresh start never sounded right to you, this expose and call to arms is the book you’ve been looking for.