RUTHFULLY YOURS

There are certain things those who “know and understand the world” purport to know and understand. These things are the seeds for most opinion journalism and “news” reporting in the current era.

The perils of climate change are certainly near the top for the informed commentariat, despite the fact that most people, certainly most Americans, rate this a virtual nonissue, not even among their top 10 issues of concern. The planet may have experienced an average temperature increase of one degree centigrade or less over the last 165 years since the start of the industrial revolution. But supposedly, according to the media, catastrophe is at hand.

The need for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is another one of those “big” stories that are never far from the news lead, on which the groupthink consensus is never challenged. This week, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman managed in one column to repeat pretty much every accepted wisdom about Israel today that counts as opinion journalism among the “well informed.” This is no particular achievement for Friedman, who has been recycling his columns on Israel for decades, always with the same sage advice for Israel, a country he is trying to save from itself.

According to Friedman, the government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is destroying Israel by building settlements in the West Bank and by including ministers who happen to represent segments of the population that agree with Netanyahu on security issues. Netanyahu has shifted Israel hard to the right and is thereby closing off chances for peace with the Palestinians, Friedman claims. In time, he adds, the window to achieve a two-state solution will close (as it has presumably closed after every prior unsuccessful peace processing period, until it reopened with the next one).

One of the highlights of the annual report released on Tuesday by Israeli State Comptroller Judge Yosef Shapira is the government’s failure to combat the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement and other attempts at delegitimizing the Jewish state.

According to Shapira, no significant victories have been won in this battle, because the two ministries charged with waging it — Foreign Affairs and Strategic Affairs — have been too busy bickering with each other over purviews and powers to join forces in what should be a common war with a shared goal.

One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry about such a critique.

Though it’s healthy to have an independent body monitoring government activities, certain phenomena are so inherent, self-evident and redundant that they’re not worth wasting paper to expose. Two of these can’t be stressed enough.

The first is that democratic governments by their nature are bureaucracies whose biggest claim to fame is inefficiency. This is true in general and of countries like Israel in particular. Though headed by a highly savvy, free-market maven, it continues to operate like a socialist apparatus. And though its citizens have ample evidence at their disposal to grasp that private endeavors always get things done better and more cheaply, they still can’t get it through their simultaneously innovative and thick skulls that the government is a necessary pill to swallow, not some doctor capable of curing all ills. This is an irrefutable truth.

Another is that no amount of quality “hasbara” — an untranslatable Hebrew word for public diplomacy, the field of Israel’s making a case for itself in the international arena — can prevent or eliminate anti-Semitism.

‘Progressive” government officials have launched an Orwellian effort to outlaw research that dares question the soundness of computer-predicted climate catastrophes or costly policy proposals aimed at mitigating climate change.

Much has been written about how this attempt to criminalize inquiry and debate threatens fundamental First Amendment and due process rights. But how they are going about it is equally troubling.

Some state attorneys general are hiring profit-seeking, private-sector personal-injury lawyers to do their legal dirty work. Moreover, any contingency fees collected by these lawyers through settlements arising from these cases could be used, in part, to fund the campaigns of allied politicians who embrace the “one, true belief” of man-made global warming.

This is more than an attempt to suppress political and scientific dissent. Deputizing self-interested personal-injury lawyers with the awesome power of the state subverts the public interest.

We have seen this unseemly dynamic in action before. Two years ago, a Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times series focused on the business model of the class-action specialists at Cohen Milstein, a law firm that seeks to create “big paydays by coaxing attorneys general to sue” large, sometimes politically unpopular corporations or industries. The firm brags about being the “most effective law firm in the United States for lawsuits with a strong social and political component.”

By e-mail, a Cohen Milstein spokeswoman said the firm did not participate in a then-secret but now widely reported Manhattan meeting of climate-change activists and political operatives in January. But it certainly appears as though the class-action bar’s interests were well represented during the discussions.

A draft agenda for the meeting obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, shows a determination to use their powers to push a political agenda. Among their goals: “To establish in public’s mind that Exxon is a corrupt institution that has pushed humanity (and all creation) toward climate chaos,” and “To drive Exxon and climate into center of 2016 election cycle.” But money is a big motivator as well.

A bitter divide over the Middle East could threaten Democratic Party unity as representatives of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont vowed to upend what they see as the party’s lopsided support of Israel.http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/26/us/politics/bernie-sanders-israel-democratic-convention.html

Two of the senator’s appointees to the party’s platform drafting committee, Cornel West and James Zogby, on Wednesday denounced Israel’s “occupation” of the West Bank and Gaza and said they believed that rank-and-file Democrats no longer hewed to the party’s staunch support of the Israeli government. They said they would try to get their views incorporated into the platform, the party’s statement of core beliefs, at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in July.

“Justice for Palestinians cannot be attained without the lifting of the occupation,” Dr. West, one of Mr. Sanders’s five representatives on the platform committee, said in an interview. Dr. West said that while he recognized the necessity to provide for the security of Jews, who for thousands of years have been a “hated people,” he thought that the platform needed to bring more balance to “the plight of an occupied people.”

The presence of Dr. Zogby and Dr. West on the 15-member panel, which also has six appointees of Hillary Clinton and four from the party chairwoman, does not guarantee their views will prevail. But it raises the prospect that one of the party’s most sensitive issues will be open to public debate while Mrs. Clinton is in a fight to unify her party and appeal to voters turned off by Donald J. Trump.

It also laid bare a steady shift in the Democratic Party, whose members have been less willing to back Israel’s government than in years past. According to a Pew Research Center survey in April, self-described liberal Democrats were twice as likely to sympathize with Palestinians over Israel than they were only two years ago. Forty percent of liberals sympathized more with Palestinians, the most since 2001, while 33 percent sympathized more with Israel.

This month, a British feminist historian, Dr. Catharine Hall, refused a half a million dollars because the money is connected to an Israel-based foundation.

The Dan David Foundation had absolutely no trouble finding two other European feminist historians (Drs. Arlette Farge and Dr. Inga Clendinnen) and awarding them the distinguished prize.

The matter is a curious one. First, because Hall herself not only declined the prize; her supporters, the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine, released the news of her rejection. Hall and her supporters/handlers clearly want credit for her “politically correct” sacrifice. Perhaps a pro-Islamic or a British anti-Zionist foundation will soon find a way to reward her. Perhaps others will then follow suit.

The British Committee for the Universities of Palestine described Hall’s decision as “a significant endorsement of the campaign to end ties with Israeli institutions.”

The matter is also curious because the Committee posted a press release on May 10th—andHa’aretz did not report this until May 22nd. Ha’aretz states that Hall declines this prize “after many discussions with those who are deeply involved with the politics of Israel-Palestine.”

The Dan David Prize was founded in 2000 with a one hundred million dollar endowment and awards were given for the first time in 2002. It seems to be an end-of-career or a later-in-one’s-career kind of award. Scientists, novelists, musicians, thinkers, and academics, mainly historians, have been recipients of this largesse. Many undeniably great historians have received this prize such as Sir Martin Gilbert and Robert Conquest, who shared the prize in 2012.