Male brain.
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I seldom trust government and history is on my side. I am a very modest contributor to Judicial Watch and thus, receive VERDICT, their house organ.
In the latest issue of VERDICT (April 2018, Volume 24/Issue 4) Judicial Watch continues it's legal pursuit of The Clinton-DNC Dossier FISA Documents, it has found more classified information on Clinton's unsecured e Mail System, it believes The FBI is actually protecting Comey and they have now sued for text messages between FBI's Strzok and Page who have not been fired, remain employed by The FBI and retain their security clearances. (Talk about insantity.)
Meanwhile, The Justice Department refused to release Mueller's budget proposal for Special Counsel Office.
Finally, Verdict , on page 16, reports on how Robert Mueller helped cover up Florida 9/11 Probe while serving s FBI Director.
When all of the skulduggery is revealed, if it ever is, I suspect we will learn the most senior government bureaucrats are immersed in cover-ups, have engaged law breaking and remain the biggest internal threat to our republic's survival.
I further believe Obama was fully aware of much of what was happening and that he hired many of the run away horses who were engaged.
Were it not be for a very few competent Congress persons who continue to threaten various agencies for continuing to slow walk their demand for information we would not have any hope whatsoever. Congress has constitutional oversight and they are being stiffed by "un-elected" bureaucrats. When will America wake up to what is happening to our freedoms, our privacy rights because these bureaucrats know they can out wait and escape scott free?
Am I an alarmist? Perhaps!
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Israel planning for direct retaliatory attack from Iran
http://m.jpost.com/Arab-Israeli-Conflict/Israel-planning-for-direct-attack-from-Iran-in-Syria-550073?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=17-4-2018&utm_content=Israel-planning-for-direct-attack-from-Iran-in-Syria-550073
And
Does the truth matter?
Last weekend’s demonstrations in Gaza produced smaller crowds and fewer casualties than the protests that occurred over the previous two weekends. What’s more, they were overshadowed by the Western airstrikes on Syria. But earlier and more chaotic demonstrations prompted all the usual suspects (Europe, the UN, and “human rights” organizations) to accuse Israel of using disproportionate, indiscriminate force, and shooting “unarmed civilian demonstrators,” all while dismissing Israel’s insistence that it only targeted terrorists, mainly Hamas members, who were using the demonstrators for cover. Yet it now turns out that one Palestinian organization agrees with Israel–Hamas itself.
In a column published in Haaretz last week, Gaza native Muhammad Shehada defended the demonstrations as a necessary response to Israel’s partial blockade, on which he blamed all of Gaza’s woes. His younger brother, he said, has participated in them almost daily. He himself is currently studying in Sweden but formerly worked for an anti-Israel “human rights” organization in Gaza. In short, he’s hardly an Israeli shill. Nevertheless, he noted that even Hamas believes Israel’s fire has been far from indiscriminate:
Despite the seemingly arbitrary live-fire and tear gas raining down on the protestors … Hamas believes the victims are carefully selected. “Israel knows who to wound, maim or kill,” a Hamas leader told me by phone. At least 10 young men, affiliated with Hamas and its Qassam brigades, have been shot while maintaining order at the protest.
Hamas believes Israel is deploying facial recognition technologies besides the numerous war-drones that obliterate the sky above. The movement warned its members to keep their faces covered, and leave their phones at home.
This is what Israel has said all along. A report published last week by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (an organization founded by former Israeli intelligence officials that maintain close ties with the intelligence agencies) concluded that 80 percent of the people killed during the Gaza demonstrations–26 out of 32–were members of terrorist organizations. This conclusion wasn’t based on any secret intelligence; in each case, a terrorist organization publicly claimed the deceased as a member and buried him in the organization’s flag or published pictures of him in military dress holding a gun. This finding also explains why all but two of the dead were men between the ages of 19 and 45: Unlike the terrorists, actual civilians have largely kept their distance from the border fence.
Of course, Shehada argued that the Hamas men were only present at the demonstrations to ensure that demonstrators didn’t engage in anti-Israel violence or try to cross the border into Israel – the implication being that Israel deliberately tried to provoke Palestinian violence by killing the people working to stop it. And what Shehada merely implied, the demonstrations’ organizers have openly charged: Israel, they say, is intentionally trying to provoke the demonstrators into violence.
To be fair, Hamas does have a record of trying to stop violence in those rare cases where violence doesn’t suit its own agenda. But in this case, it’s hard to argue that efforts to breach the border don’t fit in with its plans, because the organization’s leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, has repeatedly and explicitly declared that this is precisely what the demonstrations are intended to do.
At the March 30 demonstration, Sinwar asserted that the protest “will not stop until we remove this transient border [between Gaza and Israel . . . The protests will continue until the Palestinians return to the lands they were expelled from 70 years ago” – i.e., pre-1967 Israel, the state established 70 years ago. And lest anyone think this was a fluke, he reiterated it at the following week’s demonstration, saying the world should “wait for our great move, when we breach the borders and pray at Al-Aqsa,” Jerusalem’s principal mosque.
Thus, believing that Hamas operatives are at the border to stop it from being breached requires believing that Hamas sent its men there specifically to undermine its own leader’s stated goal. By any ordinary standard of logic, it’s far more likely that they were there to do exactly what Sinwar said he wanted to do: use the demonstrations as cover for vandalizing the border fence and attacking the soldiers guarding it, with the ultimate goal of opening a breach through which thousands of Gazans could pour into Israel.
This is all the more plausible because Hamas used that exact same tactic to breach the Egyptian border 10 years ago. On January 22, 2008, a group of unarmed Hamas demonstrators–mostly women–rushed the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt and managed to break through. That night, Hamas operatives planted explosives along the border wall in several places, creating huge gaps in it. The next day, anywhere from 200,000 to 750,000 Gazans (estimates vary) poured through those breaches into Egypt.
Needless to say, this conclusion is also supported by the testimony of Israeli soldiers, who have reported numerous incidents of “demonstrators” trying to vandalize the fence or throw Molotov cocktails and improvised explosive devices at soldiers. The latest Palestinian tactic is flying kites with Molotov cocktails attached over the border; those “innocent” kites have so far started four fires in Israel. These are the terrorists, not “innocent civilians,” whom Israeli soldiers have targeted.
Israel and Hamas are in almost perfect agreement over what has been happening over the last few weeks. Both agree that the goal of the demonstrations is to breach the border with Israel, and both agree that Israeli gunfire during these demonstrations has been aimed almost exclusively at operatives for Hamas and other terrorist organizations.
The only people who don’t agree with this description are European, UN, and NGO officials sitting in their comfortable offices in Brussels and New York. At best, they’re guilty of monstrous arrogance in believing that they know what’s happening on another continent better than the parties actually on the ground. And at worst, they simply don’t care what really happened–because in those circles, the politically correct anti-Israel narrative almost always trumps the facts.
Finally:
Does history suggest anything discernible when it comes to gun control? (See 1 below.)
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++This from an admirer. "Dick -Spot on... again.
His comment made me think about the phrase "You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time but never all the people all the time." +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++. Most J Street members are misguided. Freedom of speech demands we tolerate them. They are fortunate they live in a democracy because their pitiful immaturity is protected.
The one thing J Streeter's did that makes sense is they invited Sen. Bernie Sanders to be a main speaker. Mercury, which is poisonous, generally finds its own when separated. (See 2 below.) ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Hanson's insights need to be re-posted and re-read. (See 3 below.)
In the interest of balance there is one other thing Trump does I find unhelpful. He tweets without allowing his staff to fact check them. This causes his staff to be caught flat footed and that simply provides additional logs the mass media uses to stake burn Trump.. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Rest in Peace Barbara Bush. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ For an interesting article on increasing homelessness - Weekly Standard, April 16,2018 issue PP 23.
An amazing story about how various cities and towns sanction drugs which lead to health issues while tolerating increasing homeless populations.
In Savannah we now have a budding population of homeless living under The Truman Parkway and it will only grow as the local administration seems to have given up.
We have President Carter to thank for much of the problem's genesis. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Dick
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1)
Last week I noted an op-ed by Professor Laurie R. Blank, clinical professor of law and director of the International Humanitarian Law Clinic at Emory University School of Law, which discussed application of the law of war rule of “proportionality” in targeting in armed conflict and Gaza. A number of readers offered thoughtful comments and questions, many of which caused me to realize that readers might benefit from a deeper introduction to proportionality, stepping back to situate it within the larger context of the law of war. I’ve invited Professor Blank (whose op-ed, on which I commented last week, appeared in TheHill.com, “Asymmetries and Proportionalities”) to give Volokh readers a more extensive introduction to proportionality in the law of war and, I believe, answer some of the very good questions posed by readers in the comments last week. Professor Blank is one of the leading scholars of the laws of war, including author of a fine textbook on this topic, International Law and Armed Conflict: Fundamental Principles (Aspen 2013), and our thanks to her for this comment:
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Proportionality: Principle, Perception, and ProcessWhat does it mean to say something is “proportionate” or “disproportionate”? We may feel we have an instinctive sense of what those words and concepts mean in every day life, but in the context of war, these terms have very specific meanings and purposes — with the starkest of consequences. To that end, thanks to Ken Anderson and the Volokh Conspiracy for this invitation to follow up on some key questions about proportionality in armed conflict.A brief introduction: the law of war is the body of international law that governs the conduct of both states and individuals during armed conflict. It seeks to minimize suffering in war by protecting persons not participating in hostilities and by regulating how parties conduct hostilities. Other terms often used for this body of law are: the law of armed conflict, international humanitarian law, or jus in bello.Another body of international law—the jus ad bellum—governs when it is lawful for a state to go to war, including in self-defense. These two legal frameworks, the law of war and the jus ad bellum, are independent of each other and international law steadfastly maintains this separation.The law of war applies equally to both sides fighting in a conflict, regardless of why they are fighting, who claims to be right or just, who is a state, who is a terrorist group, or any other such considerations. This equal application is essential to ensure the protection of civilians and maximize the law’s effectiveness. As a result, the justness or unjustness of one side’s resort to force (a jus ad bellum question) does not change any obligations to follow the rules under the law of war. Imagine if it did: each side would simply justify any and all atrocities, including summary executions, indiscriminate attacks, even crimes against humanity, by saying it fights on the side of “right”. The result: an invitation to unregulated warfare.IIWith that as background, back to proportionality and its meaning and implementation during armed conflict.Proportionality is a foundational principle of the law of war. It is defined as prohibiting attacks in which the expected civilian casualties will be excessive in light of the anticipated military advantage gained. As a first step, it is important to understand the difference between these two statements—the foundational principle and the specific operational definition—and what that means for understanding proportionality.Proportionality as a principle is a manifestation of the law of war’s delicate balance between the military imperative of defeating the enemy as quickly as possible and the humanitarian imperative of mitigating suffering during war as much as possible. Parties to a conflict must not only refrain from attacking civilians and civilian objects deliberately, but they must also make extensive efforts to minimize the incidental harm from their attacks on lawful military targets.That means that sometimes attacking even a lawful enemy objective is impermissible because the collateral consequences clearly outweigh whatever advantage would result from the attack. At the same time, the law accepts the inevitability of some civilian harm during war—the legal proscription on targeting civilians does not extend to a complete prohibition on all civilian deaths. Like the law of war overall, proportionality seeks to minimize civilian harm, not eliminate it altogether (an eminently laudable, although wholly unrealistic goal).The definition of proportionality, in contrast, is about methodology and process. The definition thus puts the principle into practice. It is about how those who are fighting and their commanders implement this obligation to minimize incidental harm to civilians in the course of lawful military operations. Although media coverage and the public discourse creates the impression that proportionality is either impenetrable or a simple game of numbers, it is neither.Rather, proportionality is one component of a comprehensive process to assess the lawfulness of an attack on a target or as part of a more complex mission. What does this part of the process require? Once a lawful target is identified, implementing proportionality requires an understanding of why a target is militarily valuable. How will destroying, capturing or neutralizing the target contribute to the tactical and operational goals? How will the use of suppressing fire or other fire support for ground forces, for example, contribute to those forces’ ability to fulfill the mission? How will any such actions weaken the enemy’s forces, and in what way? How will they strengthen the commander’s own forces, and in what way? That analysis is key to understanding the “anticipated military advantage gained” component of proportionality.Careful consideration of the risk to civilians and the likely numbers of civilian casualties is equally essential—a commander must gather information regarding civilians who live and work in the area, their patterns of movement, whether they would be susceptible to the methods and means of attack under consideration, how many might be present at the time of and within the blast radius of the attack, and any other information relevant to understanding the potential consequences for civilians in the area. Based on all of this prospective information, the commander then makes a determination as to whether the attack can go forward.Is this hard? In many cases, yes. But commanders do this every time they apply combat power with consequences for civilians, sometimes in a longer, deliberative process and sometimes in a split second. In addition, proportionality as a methodology helps commanders make these difficult decisions that may have tragic consequences for civilians.IIIIt is therefore important to emphasize that proportionality is more than just a principle; it is a methodology for assessing lawfulness in advance through careful consideration of both the value of the military advantage and the likelihood of civilian casualties. The principle tells us what we are trying to achieve — a balance between military needs and humanitarian concerns that minimizes civilian harm as much as possible. The methodology provides guidance on how to achieve that goal — by gathering and analyzing information about both the military value of the target and the consequences to the civilian population and making choices among various operational alternatives to achieve the mission while minimizing harm to civilians.What happens after the fact – how does any observer, whether the international community, the commander’s superiors, a court or international tribunal, assess this proportionality process? As I note in my earlier piece, “Asymmetries and Proportionalities,” assessing the legality of an attack that results in civilian casualties must be done prospectively, based on the information the commander knew or should have known at the time of the attack. The standard is “reasonableness” — whether a reasonable commander in the same position would determine, based on the information available at the time, that the expected civilian casualties would be excessive in light of the anticipated military advantage.Key to this assessment is not whether the court, the media, or anyone else thinks the decision was right or would have actually made the very same decision. Nor is it whether any resulting casualties seemed or even were excessive afterwards. The controlling factor in assessing proportionality after an attack is whether the commander’s determination—that the likely civilian casualties in that operation would not be excessive—was reasonable. This reasonableness assessment can only be made with a full understanding of the situation and all relevant information at the time of the attack — and, just as important — an awareness of what is considered to be reasonable in light of general practice.International tribunals have rarely undertaken this analysis. This may well be simply because they have no lack of much easier and obvious cases. Their dockets can easily be filled to overflowing with the staggering number of deliberate crimes against civilians that demand accountability—such as genocide, crimes against humanity, torture and a host of other categorical violations that require no difficult judgments about the reasonableness of a commander’s judgment. The difficulty in translating the proportionality rule from the operational dynamic of the battlefield and the fog of war to the evidence-bound confines of the courtroom is certainly another factor. The few instances of adjudication, however, consistently reinforce both the prospective approach and reasonableness as the touchstones of the analysis. Responsible militaries, for their part, investigate and review every incident involving civilian casualties to determine whether further investigation or prosecution is warranted—and simply to improve training and implementation to mitigate civilian harm in future missions. Both internal and international inquiries have often explored, or attempted to explore, proportionality with respect to specific incidents.IVLast, a note about another rule of proportionality. The international law governing when states may use force in self-defense (the jus ad bellum) also has a requirement of proportionality, but it is quite distinct (and serves a different purpose) from the law of war rule of proportionality discussed above. This jus ad bellum rule of proportionality mandates that a state acting in self-defense in response to an armed attack can only use force that is proportionate to the needs and goals of repelling or deterring the attack. This is not a “tit-for-tat” requirement, however, limiting the state acting in self-defense to only what its attackers did. There is no obligation of symmetry between the original attack and the force used in self-defense; indeed, the force needed to repel an attack may well be disproportionate relative to the the original attack, in order to stop it and deter continuing attacks. What it must be, instead, is proportionate to the ends of stopping and deterring the original attack and further attacks.In the case of the current Israel-Hamas conflict, Israel’s “Operation Protective Edge” seeks to repel and deter Hamas rocket and tunnel-borne attacks on Israel. Israel’s proportionate measure of force is not constrained to only rocket and tunnel attacks on Hamas; rather, international law assesses the lawfulness of Israel’s resort to force based on Israel’s goals of repelling the attack. Destroying rocket launchers, tunnels, weapons caches, Hamas command posts and bunkers — these objectives are directly proportionate to the need to repel the attacks.Importantly, this rule of proportionality does not address civilian casualties. That is the task of the law of war principle of proportionality analyzed above. Unfortunately, these two concepts of proportionality are regularly conflated, leading to misunderstandings and ineffective legal analyses. First, if the bare fact of civilian casualties were to become the measure of whether the overall use of force in self-defense is lawful, the international legal framework governing the use of force in self-defense would be undermined. Any military operation causing civilian casualties would then be considered unlawful, even if a valid exercise of self-defense, emasculating state options for protecting their own civilians against attack.Second, focusing on civilian casualties, without any legal analysis of proportionality, the targeting process or the nature of the objective attacked, simply incentivizes insurgent groups to co-mingle military personnel and assets within the civilian population and use civilians as a shield, thus causing greater and greater numbers of civilian casualties and louder claims of unjust war and war crimes. Facilitating the defending party’s exploitation of the law for its own defensive and propaganda purposes in this way gravely endangers the very persons the law of war seeks to protect—the civilians caught up in the combat zone—and thus undermines the essential fabric of the law of war.VAt the same time, self-defense is not a trump card in the law of war proportionality analysis above. If the military advantage of every application of military combat power in a conflict were the overall self-defense of the nation in response to an attack, proportionality in the law of war would have no meaning. Few, if any, measures of civilian casualties would be considered excessive in such a framework. Military advantage must therefore be assessed in the context of the particular attack or operation at issue.Observing and trying to understand proportionality from afar – through media reports and the blogosphere, for example – is fraught with uncertainty and ambiguity, because almost all of the information integral to the actual methodology and decision-making is not available or communicated to the public. The instinct to make judgments after the fact based merely on numbers of casualties or which side’s civilians were killed in greater numbers is thus strong, because it often is the only information at hand. But this is not the actual law of proportionality. Nor is it an effective way to maximize the law’s core purposes. The uncertainty and ambiguity does not mean that proportionality is not being applied or implemented in a lawful way – it merely means that we cannot peer into the processing factory to see how the sausage is made.
Does history suggest anything discernible when it comes to gun control? (See 1 below.)
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Tragedy is that your talents are wasted on folks like me. Too bad that we can't figure a way that you can go national.
Even so, keep it up! J---"
Dick
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1)
GUN CONTROL!
In 1911, Turkey established gun control:
From 1915 to 1917, 1.5 million Armenians, unable to
defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
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In 1929, the Soviet Union established gun control:
From 1929 to 1953, about 20 million dissidents, unable to
defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
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In 1935 China established gun control:
From 1948 to 1952, 20 million political dissidents, unable
to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
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In 1938 Germany established gun control:
From 1939 to 1945, a total of 13 million Jews and others
who were unable to defend themselves were rounded up
and exterminated.
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In 1956 Cambodia established gun control:
From 1975 to 1977, one million educated people, unable
to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
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In 1964 Guatemala established gun control:
From 1964 to 1981, 100,000 Mayan Indians, unable to
defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
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In 1970 Uganda established gun control:
From 1971 to 1979, 300,000 Christians, unable to defend
themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
-----------------------
56 million defenseless people were rounded up and
exterminated in the 20th Century because of gun control.
----------------------- 2) Never mind J Street ByJONATHAN S. TOBIN
The issue isn’t whether they’re “anti-Israel,” but how their backing for the Palestinian Authority and even Hamas makes them irrelevant to even a theoretical peace process.
Sen. Bernie Sanders is right about one thing. The former and perhaps future candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination is correct when he told the J Street conference this past weekend that opposing the policies of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “does not make us anti-Israel.” That’s true. Many Israelis don’t like Netanyahu, and many oppose his policies. Americans can support the Jewish state—and its right to exist and to defend itself—while still thinking that its government is wrong on key issues. To the extent that the group lives up to its slogan of being “pro-Israel” as well as “pro-peace,” it is entitled to a place in the proverbial Jewish tent. But to acquit it, at least in principle, of the charge of being “anti-Israel” is not the same thing as saying that the group is innocent of taking stands on the Middle East that are profoundly disingenuous, if not completely dishonest. Moreover, to the extent that members provide cover for a Palestinian Authority that continues to be the main obstacle to peace and to try to obfuscate the truth about the conflict with the Islamist terrorists of Hamas, they neither help Israel nor further the cause of peace.
All of which goes to explain why, despite the array of Democratic Party officeholders and Obama administration alumni at their conference, J Street is utterly irrelevant to efforts to solve the conflict with the Palestinians.
J Street’s purpose for most of the last decade was to serve as a Jewish cheering section for the Obama administration’s policies of creating more daylight between the United States and Israel, as well as to support the Iran nuclear deal. The unpopularity of those stands among most pro-Israel activists, including liberals who backed President Barack Obama, explains why J Street has fallen far short of its goal of eclipsing the mainstream AIPAC lobby.
Since January 2017, J Street has defended Obama’s legacy and reflexively opposes the policies of President Donald Trump’s administration even when they’re supported by most Jews, such as his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and demands that the P.A. stop subsidizing terrorism. Such stands are wrongheaded and mindlessly partisan, but as long as it’s still willing to oppose the BDS movement that targets economic warfare against Israel, then it places the organization in the Zionist camp.
Moreover, the focus on J Street misses what has become the real change to the pro-Israel cause among American Jews. The rise of Jewish Voices for Peace, an openly anti-Zionist organization dedicated to opposing Israel’s existence as a Jewish state, has diminished J Street’s importance. JVP’s support for the Palestinian “right of return,” which is synonymous with Israel’s destruction and other anti-Semitic stands, makes it a more natural partner for pro-Palestinian and leftist groups active on American college campuses. With leftist opposition to Israel being driven by intersectionalism—the belief that the war against Zionism is the same as the struggle against racism—J Street has lost ground to its more radical left-wing competitor. Indeed, to the extent that J Street serves as a liberal opponent of BDS, it could actually serve a useful purpose.
But the problem is that the organization is so committed to the struggle against Israel’s government that it often makes common cause with some of the Jewish state’s enemies on campus, and as such spends more time attacking Israeli measures of self-defense against terror than in fighting BDS and anti-Zionism. The same is true of its official pronouncements at its conference when it provided a platform for the P.A.
At the J Street conference, a P.A. representative claimed that a Palestinian state would “celebrate the Jewish connection to Jerusalem.” The crowd at the conference applauded this statement, as well as his claim that the P.A. wants a two-state solution, even though it has repeatedly rejected offers of statehood and won’t recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders are drawn.
Only a few days earlier, P.A. leader Mahmoud Abbas told WAFA, its official news agency, that it would not “surrender . . . any part of Jerusalem.” As always, the P.A. says one thing to its own people and another to its foolish apologists in the West. J Street also opposes the Taylor Force Act, which conditions American aid to the P.A. on ending its practice of paying salaries and pensions to terrorists and their families, and ignores the P.A.’s daily incitement of hatred against Israel and Jews in its official media and schools.
Many at the conference, including Sanders, denounced the “blockade” of Gaza, in addition to the conduct of the Israel Defense Forces in fending off attacks on the border by continued Hamas-organized “Marches of Return.” To oppose the blockade is to support the free flow of arms and munitions to a terrorist state. And to treat a march, whose purpose is Israel’s destruction and whose participants consider hurling firebombs to be a form of nonviolence, as anything but an attack is not consistent with being “pro-Israel” or “pro-peace.”
Unlike J Street’s supporters, the overwhelming majority of Israelis understand the truth about the P.A.’s repeated rejection of peace. They know that neither Abbas nor his Hamas rivals want a two-state solution. Until that changes, most Israelis regard any talk of territorial withdrawal as madness. Israelis who share J Street’s views, like the left-wing Meretz Party, remain marginalized.
What’s wrong about J Street is how far it strays from the job of supporting Zionism from a liberal perspective, rather than just hating Trump and Netanyahu, and how out of touch it is with Israeli public opinion. Despite the obsessive attention it gets from some on the left and right, the most important thing to know about J Street is not what it believes, but how irrelevant it is to the reality of the Middle East.
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3) Donald Trump, Tragic Hero
His very flaws may be his strengths
The very idea that Donald Trump could, even in a perverse way, be heroic may appall half the country. Nonetheless, one way of understanding both Trump’s personal excesses and his accomplishments is that his not being traditionally presidential may have been valuable in bringing long-overdue changes in foreign and domestic policy.
Tragic heroes, as they have been portrayed from Sophocles’ plays (e.g., Ajax, Antigone, Oedipus Rex, Philoctetes) to the modern western film, are not intrinsically noble. Much less are they likeable. Certainly, they can often be obnoxious and petty, if not dangerous, especially to those around them. These mercurial sorts never end well — and on occasion neither do those in their vicinity. Oedipus was rudely narcissistic, Hombre’s John Russell (Paul Newman) arrogant and off-putting.
Tragic heroes are loners, both by preference and because of society’s understandable unease with them. Ajax’s soliloquies about a rigged system and the lack of recognition accorded his undeniable accomplishments are Trumpian to the core — something akin to the sensational rumors that at night Trump is holed up alone, petulant, brooding, eating fast food, and watching Fox News shows.
Outlaw leader Pike Bishop (William Holden), in director Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, is a killer whose final gory sacrifice results in the slaughter of the toxic General Mapache and his corrupt local Federales. A foreboding Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), of John Ford’s classic 1956 film The Searchers, alone can track down his kidnapped niece. But his methods and his recent past as a Confederate renegade make him suspect and largely unfit for a civilizing frontier after the expiration of his transitory usefulness. These characters are not the sorts that we would associate with Bob Dole, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, or Mitt Romney.
The tragic hero’s change of fortune — often from good to bad, as Aristotle reminds us — is due to an innate flaw (hamartia), or at least in some cases an intrinsic and usually uncivilized trait that can be of service to the community, albeit usually expressed fully only at the expense of the hero’s own fortune. The problem for civilization is that the creation of those skill sets often brings with it past baggage of lawlessness and comfortability with violence. Trump’s cunning and mercurialness, honed in Manhattan real estate, global salesmanship, reality TV, and wheeler-dealer investments, may have earned him ostracism from polite Washington society. But these talents also may for a time be suited for dealing with many of the outlaws of the global frontier.
At rare times, a General George S. Patton (“Give me an army of West Point graduates and I’ll win a battle. Give me a handful of Texas Aggies and I’ll win a war”) could be harnessed to serve the country in extremis. General Curtis LeMay did what others could not — and would not: “I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal. . . . Every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you’re not a good soldier.” Later, the public exposure given to the mentalities and behaviors of such controversial figures would only ensure that they would likely be estranged from or even caricatured by their peers — once, of course, they were no longer needed by those whom they had benefited. When one is willing to burn down with napalm 75 percent of the industrial core of an often-genocidal wartime Japan, and thereby help bring a vicious war to an end, then one looks for sorts like Curtis LeMay and his B-29s. In the later calm of peace, one is often shocked that one ever had. A sober and judicious General Omar Bradley grows on us in peace even if he was hardly Patton in war.
So what makes such men and women both tragic and heroic is their full knowledge that the natural expression of their personas can lead only to their own destruction or ostracism. Yet for a variety of reasons, both personal and civic, their characters not only should not be altered but could not be, even if the tragic hero wished to change, given his megalomania and Manichean views of the human experience. Clint Eastwood’s Inspector “Dirty” Harry Callahan cannot serve as the official face of the San Francisco police department. But Dirty Harry alone has the skills and ruthlessness to ensure that the mass murderer Scorpio will never harm the innocent again. So, in the finale, he taunts and then shoots the psychopathic Scorpio, ending both their careers, and walks off — after throwing his inspector’s badge into the water. Marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper) of High Noon did about the same thing, but only after gunning down (with the help of his wife) four killers whom the law-abiding but temporizing elders of Hadleyville proved utterly incapable of stopping.
The out-of-place Ajax in Sophocles’ tragedy of the same name cannot function apart from the battlefield. Unlike Odysseus, he lacks the tact and fluidity to succeed in a new world of nuanced civic rules. So he would rather “live nobly, or nobly die” — “nobly” meaning according to an obsolete black-and-white code that is no longer compatible with the ascendant polis.
In other words, tragic heroes are often simply too volatile to continue in polite society. In George Stevens’s classic 1953 western Shane, even the reforming and soft-spoken gunslinger Shane (Alan Ladd) understands his own dilemma all too well: He alone possesses the violent skills necessary to free the homesteaders from the insidious threats of hired guns and murderous cattle barons. (And how he got those skills worries those he plans to help.) Yet by the time of his final resort to lethal violence, Shane has sacrificed all prior chances of reform and claims on reentering the civilized world of the stable “sodbuster” community. As Shane tells young Joey after gunning down the three villains of the film and thereby saving the small farming community: “Can’t break the mold. I tried it, and it didn’t work for me. . . . Joey, there’s no living with . . . a killing. There’s no going back from one. Right or wrong, it’s a brand. A brand sticks. There’s no going back.”
Trump could not cease tweeting, not cease his rallies, not cease his feuding, and not cease his nonstop motion and unbridled speech if he wished to. It is his brand, and such overbearing made Trump, for good or evil, what he is — and will likely eventually banish him from establishment Washington, whether after or during his elected term. His raucousness can be managed, perhaps mitigated for a time — thus the effective tenure of his sober cabinet choices and his chief of staff, the ex–Marine general, no-nonsense John Kelly — but not eliminated. His blunt views cannot really thrive, and indeed can scarcely survive, in the nuance, complexity, and ambiguity of Washington.
Trump is not a mannered Mitt Romney, who would never have left the Paris climate agreement. He is not a veteran who knew the whiz of real bullets and remains a Washington icon, such as John McCain, who would never have moved the American embassy to Jerusalem. Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush certainly would never have waded into no-win controversies such as the take-a-knee NFL debacle and unvetted immigration from suspect countries in the Middle East and Africa, or called to account sanctuary cities that thwarted federal law. Our modern Agamemnon, Speaker Paul Ryan, is too circumspect to get caught up with Trump’s wall or a mini-trade war with China.
Trump does not seem to care whether he is acting “presidential.” The word — as he admits — is foreign to him. He does not worry whether his furious tweets, his revolving-door firing and hiring, and his rally counterpunches reveal a lack of stature or are becoming an embarrassing window into his own insecurities and apprehensions as a Beltway media world closes in upon him in the manner that, as the trapped western hero felt, the shrinking landscape was increasingly without options in the new 20th century.
The real moral question is not whether the gunslinger Trump could or should become civilized (again, defined in our context as becoming normalized as “presidential”) but whether he could be of service at the opportune time and right place for his country, crude as he is. After all, despite their decency, in extremis did the frontier farmers have a solution without Shane, or the Mexican peasants a realistic alternative to the Magnificent Seven, or the town elders a viable plan without Will Kane?
Perhaps we could not withstand the fire and smoke of a series of Trump presidencies, but given the direction of the country over the last 16 years, half the population, the proverbial townspeople of the western, wanted some outsider, even with a dubious past, to ride in and do things that most normal politicians not only would not but could not do — before exiting stage left or riding off into the sunset, to the relief of most and the regrets of a few.
The best and the brightest résumés of the Bush and Obama administrations had doubled the national debt — twice. Three prior presidents had helped to empower North Korea, now with nuclear-tipped missiles pointing at the West Coast. Supposedly refined and sophisticated diplomats of the last quarter century, who would never utter the name “Rocket Man” or stoop to call Kim Jong-un “short and fat,” nonetheless had gone through the “agreed framework,” “six-party talks,” and “strategic patience,” in which three administrations gave Pyongyang quite massive aid to behave and either not to proliferate or at least to denuclearize. And it was all a failure, and a deadly one at that.
For all of Obama’s sophisticated discourse about “spread the wealth around” and “You didn’t build that,” quantitative easing, zero interest rates, massive new regulations, the stimulus, and shovel-ready, government-inspired jobs, he could not achieve 3 percent annualized economic growth. Half the country, the more desperate half, believed that the remedy for a government in which the IRS, the FBI, the DOJ, and the NSA were weaponized, often in partisan fashion and without worry about the civil liberties of American citizens, was not more temporizing technicians but a pariah who cleaned house and moved on. Certainly Obama was not willing to have a showdown with the Chinese over their widely acknowledged cheating and coerced expropriation of U.S. technology, with the NATO allies over their chronic welching on prior defense commitments, with the North Koreans after they achieved the capability of hitting U.S. West Coast cities, or with the European Union over its mostly empty climate-change accords.
Moving on, sometimes fatally so, is the tragic hero’s operative exit. Antigone certainly makes her point about the absurdity of small men’s sexism and moral emptiness in such an uncompromising way that her own doom is assured. Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, unheroically kills the thuggish Liberty Valance, births the career of Ranse Stoddard and his marriage to Doniphon’s girlfriend, and thereby ensures civilization is Shinbone’s frontier future. His service done, he burns down his house and degenerates from feared rancher to alcoholic outcast.
The remnants of The Magnificent Seven would no longer be magnificent had they stayed on in the village, settled down to age, and endlessly rehashed the morality and utility of slaughtering the outlaw Calvera and his banditos. As Chris rides out, he sums up to Vin their dilemma: “The old man was right. Only the farmers won. We lost. We always lose.” He knows that few appreciate that the tragic heroes in their midst are either tragic or heroic — until they are safely gone and what they have done in time can be attributed to someone else. Worse, he knows that the tragic hero’s existence is solitary and without the nourishing networks and affirmation of the peasant’s agrarian life.
John Ford’s most moving scene in his best film, The Searchers, is Ethan Edwards’s final exit from a house of shadows, swinging open the door and walking alone into sunlit oblivion. If he is lucky, Trump may well experience the same self-inflicted fate.
By his very excesses Trump has already lost, but in his losing he might alone be able to end some things that long ago should have been ended.
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