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| Keep Reading → And: ++++++++++++++++++++++ Pollack sees Biden's prospective Iranian policies as "...: putting the region back on a path to war..." Pollak: Biden Risks
Putting the Middle East Back on a Path to War Joel B. Pollak 29
Jan 2021 Presidents like to say
that their predecessors left them a mess. Yet in Middle East policy, President
Donald Trump left his successor an extraordinary gift of peace and stability. Peace agreements were
emerging almost weekly between Israel and her Arab neighbors. Iran, struggling
under the burden of U.S. sanctions, was isolated, broke, and wracked by internal
turmoil. In Afghanistan, a tentative deal with the Taliban meant that U.S.
troops could look forward to coming home. Trump left the U.S. in a
position of historic strategic advantage. But like President Barack Obama, who
squandered the gains of the Iraq “surge” and withdrew before the country was
stable enough to prevent the rise of the terrorist “Islamic State,” Biden is
throwing away many of the gains Trump achieved in the region. If he simply stays on
the course Trump charted, Biden can maximize his leverage on Iran and entice
Saudi Arabia to make peace with Israel. Those prospects are
dimming. On Friday, for example,
the White House confirmed that President Biden had named Robert Malley his
envoy on Iran. Malley is a radical with a long record of foreign policy
failure. In 2008, the Obama
campaign booted Malley after it emerged he met
with Palestinian terror group Hamas. In 2015, he was brought into the
Obama administration to work on the hopelessly weak Iran nuclear deal. Malley
was then named as ISIS “czar,” leading Obama’s hapless effort. Malley appeared to
learned nothing from his mistakes. In 2018, when President Trump supported
protests against the Iranian regime, Malley joined the critics
who said Trump should “be quiet.” Though Biden had
campaigned on returning to the Iran deal, there was still hope that he might
have pushed for a tougher agreement — one that did not give Iran a clear path
to a nuclear weapon. Malley’s appointment is a clear sign that Biden intends to
appease the regime, as Obama did. That increases the
likelihood that Israel will have to take preemptive military action to stop
Iran’s nuclear program. There is no way that
Israel, or her Arab allies, can accept a nuclear-armed Iran. And after the
experience of the Obama years — in which the administration accepted a deal
that allowed Iran eventually to emerge as a nuclear power, and even reneged on
public commitments to stop Iran’s ballistic missile program, there is no reason
for Israel to trust Biden with its security. In addition, this week
the administration suspended arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab
Emirates (UAE), two key Arab allies. While there are serious
questions about Saudi Arabia’s involvement in Yemen’s civil war, it is
important to note that the Saudis are opposing the Iranian-backed Houthis, who
started it. Cutting off weapons sales to Saudi Arabia allows Iran to support
the Houthis, and to gain influence across the Bab el-Mabndeb strait from U.S.
forces in Djibouti. (The Houthi motto: “God is great, death to America,
death to Israel, curse on the Jews, victory to Islam.”) By backing away from the
UAE deal, Biden risks unraveling the diplomacy that led the UAE and several
other Arab states to embrace Israel. The big winner is Iran, which wants to
weaken the Arab states and discourage Israel-Arab partnerships. In addition, the
administration said it will renew ties with the Palestinian Authority and
restore aid to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNWRA), which focuses solely
on Palestinian “refugees.” When asked what the U.S. received in return, the
White House could not say. The real answer is: nothing. While Secretary of State
Tony Blinken has said the U.S. would keep its embassy in Jerusalem, Biden is
rewarding Palestinians in every other way for refusing to negotiate peace. Meanwhile, the Taliban
are reneging on their agreement with the U.S., allowing Al Qaeda a foothold.
Both Obama and Trump sought diplomacy as a way out of Afghanistan. Trump, at
least, punished the Taliban for killing Americans, and they stopped. It is doubtful that
Biden will do the same; he has not even done anything to punish Russia for
poisoning opposition leader Alexei Navalny, despite four years of Democratic
fulminating about Trump and Russian “collusion.” Blinken is thus far the
only member of the Biden administration to acknowledge that Trump succeeded —
in confronting China, forging ties between Serbia and Kosovo, and orchestrating
the Abraham Accords. Blinken was also forced to acknowledge, during his Senate
confirmation hearing, that he had been wrong about the Iraq War, the Libya War,
and the Syrian Civil War. Those who hope for
continued progress in the Middle East are pinning their hopes on the idea that
Blinken is the best of a bad lot who appear to have “failed upwards” into their
jobs. But the rest of the
administration will not accept that the Obama-Biden approach to the Middle East
failed, or that Trump’s “America first” approach succeeded. As a result, instead of
peace, Biden may be putting the region back on a path to war. Joel B. Pollak is Senior
Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM
Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His
newest e-book is How Not to Be a Sh!thole Country: Lessons from South
Africa. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells
the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative
perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni
Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak ++++++++++++++++ Finally, a fascinating article, somewhat legally technical, on ridding Section 230 protection and why. The
Constitution Can Crack Section 230 Tech companies think the statute allows
them to censor with impunity. The law is seldom so simple. By Philip Hamburger
Section numbers of federal statutes
rarely stir the soul, but one of them, 230, stirs up much fear, for it has
seemed to justify censorship. Relying on it, tech companies including Google
and Twitter increasingly
pull the plug on disfavored posts, websites and even people. Online moderation
can be valuable, but this censorship is different. It harms Americans’
livelihoods, muzzles them in the increasingly electronic public square,
distorts political and cultural conversations, influences elections, and limits
our freedom to sort out the truth for ourselves. But does the 1996 Communications Decency Act really justify Big
Tech censorship? The key language, Section 230(c)(2), provides: “No provider or
user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of
. . . any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access
to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be
obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise
objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.” The
companies take this as a license to censor with impunity. That understanding is questionable. Law is rarely as clear-cut
as a binary switch. To be sure, courts emphasize the breadth of Section 230’s
immunity for website operators. But there is little if any federal appellate
precedent upholding censorship by the big tech companies. The question
therefore comes down to the statute itself. The answers should give pause to
the companies and courage to those they’ve censored. The fundamental problems are constitutional—the first concerning the Commerce Clause. Congress’s authority to enact Section 230 may seem indisputable because the Supreme Court has, since the New Deal, adopted an almost open-ended view of Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce. Yet congressionally emboldened censorship poses unique questions. Originally, the Constitution’s broadest protection for free
expression lay in Congress’s limited power. James Wilson reassured Americans in
1787—four years before the First Amendment’s ratification—that “a power similar
to that which has been granted for the regulation of commerce” was not “granted
to regulate literary publications,” and thus “the proposed system possesses no
influence whatever upon the press.” The expansion of the commerce power to include regulation of speech is therefore worrisome. This is not to dispute whether communication and information are “commerce,” but rather to recognize the constitutional reality of lost freedom. The expansion of the commerce power endangers Americans’ liberty to speak and publish. That doesn’t necessarily mean Section 230 is unconstitutional.
But when a statute regulating speech rests on the power to regulate commerce,
there are constitutional dangers, and ambiguities in the statute should be read
narrowly. A second constitutional question arises from the First
Amendment. The companies brush this aside because they are private and the
amendment prohibits only government censorship. Yet one must worry that the
government has privatized censorship. If that sounds too dramatic, read Section
230(c)(2) again. It protects tech companies from liability for restricting
various material “whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.”
Congress makes explicit that it is immunizing companies from liability for
speech restrictions that would be unconstitutional if lawmakers themselves
imposed them. Seventeenth-century censorship, which the First Amendment
clearly prohibited, was also imposed largely through private entities, such as
universities and the Stationers’ Company, England’s printers trade guild.
Whereas privatized censorship then was often mandatory, the contemporary
version is voluntary. But the tech companies are protected for restricting
Congress’s list of disfavored materials, and this means that the government
still sets the censorship agenda. Some of the material that can be restricted under Section 230 is
clearly protected speech. Consider its enumeration of “objectionable” material.
The vagueness of this term would be enough to make the restriction
unconstitutional if Congress directly imposed it. That doesn’t mean the
companies are violating the First Amendment, but it does suggest that the
government, in working through private companies, is abridging the freedom of
speech. This constitutional concern doesn’t extend to ordinary websites
that moderate commentary and comments; such controls are their right not only
under Section 230 but also probably under the First Amendment. Instead, the
danger lies in the statutory protection for massive companies that are akin to
common carriers and that function as public forums. The First Amendment
protects Americans even in privately owned public forums, such as company
towns, and the law ordinarily obliges common carriers to serve all customers on
terms that are fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory. Here, however, it is the
reverse. Being unable to impose the full breadth of Section 230’s censorship,
Congress protects the companies so they can do it. Some Southern sheriffs, long ago, used to assure Klansmen that
they would face no repercussions for suppressing the speech of civil-rights
marchers. Under the Constitution, government cannot immunize powerful private
parties in the hope that they will voluntarily carry out unconstitutional
policy. Perhaps judges can avoid the constitutional problem, but this
will be more difficult if they read Section 230(c)(2) broadly. The tech
companies can’t have it both ways. If the statute is constitutional, it can’t
be as broad as they claim, and if it is that broad, it can’t be constitutional. The statute itself also poses problems for Big Tech. The first
question is what Section 230(c) means when it protects tech companies from
being “held liable” for restricting various sorts of speech. This is widely
assumed to mean they can’t be sued. But the word “liable” has two meanings. In a civil suit, a court must first consider whether the
defendant has violated a legal duty or someone else’s right and is therefore
legally responsible. If the answer is yes, the court must decide on a remedy,
which can include damages, injunctive relief and so forth. The term “held
liable” as used in Section 230(c) can fall into either category. Thus, the
protection of tech companies from being “held liable” may merely mean they
can’t be made to pay damages, not that they can’t be held responsible and
subjected to other remedies. The former interpretation seems more plausible, if
only because a mere ambiguity seems a weak basis for barring a vast class of
plaintiffs from recourse to the courts on a matter as central as their speech. After protecting tech companies from being held liable, the
statute recites: “No cause of action may be brought and no liability may be
imposed under any State or local law that is inconsistent with this section.”
This clause, Section 230(e), may seem to vindicate the companies, but it
distinguishes between a “cause of action” and “liability” and thereby clarifies
the ambiguity. Evidently, when Section 230(c) protects tech companies from
being held liable, it does not generally immunize them from causes of action.
It merely protects them from “liability” in the sense of damages. To be sure, when a company is sued for damages, Section 230(e)
bars not only the imposition of such liability but also the underlying cause of
action. But the statute apparently protects tech companies only from being sued
for damages, not for other remedies. Another question concerns the “material” that the companies can
restrict without fear of being sued for damages. Section 230(c) protects them
for “any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or
availability of material” of various sorts. Even before getting to the
enumerated categories of material, it is important to recognize that the
statute refers only to “material.” It says nothing about restricting persons or
websites. To be sure, the statute protects the companies for “any action”
restricting the relevant material, and if taken literally “any action” could
include various nuclear options, such as barring persons and demonetizing or
shutting down websites. But the term “any action” can’t be taken to include
actions that restrict not only the pertinent material but also other things.
”Any action” has to be focused on such material. The statute, moreover, requires that such action be taken “in
good faith.” At common law, that can mean not acting with the effect of
destroying or injuring the rights of others and, more specifically, not acting
disproportionately to terminate relations. The statute thus doesn’t protect the
companies when they take disproportionate action against material, let alone
when they unnecessarily restrict other things, such as websites and persons. What is in good faith for a website may be different from what
is in good faith for a tech company that operates like a common carrier or
public forum. But at least for such tech companies, the statute’s focus on “material”—combined
with the requirement of “good faith”—stands in the way of any categorical
protection for suppressing websites, let alone demonetizing them or barring
persons. What does this mean in practice? Even if a company technically
can’t bar some material without taking down the entire website, it at least
must give the operators an opportunity to remove the objectionable material
before suppressing the website altogether. As for demonetizing sites or barring
persons, such actions will rarely if ever be necessary for restricting
material. Such is the statute’s text. If you nonetheless want large
common-carrier-like companies to go beyond “good faith” actions against
“material,” pause to consider a little history, if only as a reality check
about the proportionality of your desires. Even the Inquisition gave heretics
formal opportunities to recant. And even the Star Chamber required its private
censors to bar offensive material, not authors. The next question is viewpoint discrimination. Section 230(c) specifies
protection for restricting “material that the provider or user considers to be
obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise
objectionable.” The companies understand this to include nearly anything to
which they object. But Section 230(c) enumerates only categories of content, not
viewpoints. The distinction between content and viewpoint is crucial in
free-speech law: Government can’t discriminate against disfavored viewpoints
even when regulating unprotected speech such as “fighting words.” It is
therefore telling that the list focuses on content. One may protest that
“otherwise objectionable” could include objectionable viewpoints. But it is
obviously a catchall, and following a list of types of content, it would seem
to refer only to additional objectionable content. The tech companies could argue that the catchall is still
ambiguous. But at stake is viewpoint discrimination by vast companies that are
akin to common carriers, whose operations function as public forums, and that
are carrying out government speech policy. Are we really to believe that a mere
ambiguity should be interpreted to mean something so extraordinary? Section 230’s text offers the tech companies less shelter than
they think. It protects them only from damage claims and not at all when they
go beyond a constitutional reading of the statute. The implications are far-reaching. As litigation comes before
the courts, they will have to decide the limits of Section 230 and the
lawfulness of privatized censorship. In the meantime, some state legislatures
will probably adopt civil-rights statutes protecting freedom of speech from the
tech companies. Recognizing that such legislation isn’t barred by Section 230,
lawmakers in several states are already contemplating it. One way or another,
Section 230 does not, and will not, bar remedies for government privatization
of censorship.
Mr. Hamburger is a professor at Columbia Law School and
president of the New Civil Liberties Alliance. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ |
Sunday, January 31, 2021
Fla. Booming. Cities Democrats Allowed To Be Destroyed. Garland Questioned About Hunter. Increasing Risk of War. Cracking 230.
Our son and his family were here this weekend. Daniel is a real estate developer with most of his projects in Pittsburgh where he formerly lived. Now his company is still involved in Pa. but he has moved to Hollywood, Fl. and works from there while his two partners remain in Pittsburgh. They have joined with another Arizona Developer whose founding partner started Century 21. Daniel position in the combined company is to develop a presence in Florida and to raise capital for ongoing development.
He tells me Florida's population is over 20 million, an increase of 4 million in the last few years, and the labor force is plentiful, well qualified and compares well with Pittsburgh. He says that working with the state government versus Pittsburgh is night and dy. Florida is efficient, well organized and applications flow. Real estate rice area bit inflated but his Arizona partners are very efficient and have developed n ability to construct at lower costs than their competitors and still offer a well built rehabilitated structure.
Cities Democrats allowed thugs to destroy.
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