My Darvick Family.
Top is our Grandson, his wife and Olivia.
To the right is our granddaughter attending wedding of her very close friend whose mom did not live to see her daughter married.
Granddaughter with my oldest daughter and her husband. Bridesmaids and bride.
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Another article about how shooting one's self in their foot might mean losing toes but the word is always ready to pay compensation for victim-hood, even when self-inflicted.. (See 1 below.)
and the potential consequences. (See 1a below.)
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The Fourth Circuit Court has decided it is capable of defending our nation and not the president because, after parsing his campaign speeches, they decided he was a racist. (See 2 below.)
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Dick
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1)Nakba
The Arab Self-Inflicted Catastrophe
By Eli E. Hertz
As the British began to dismantle their Mandate [The British Mandate] and leave western Palestine, Israel's War of Independence began (November 30, 1947-May 14, 1948). During the war, Palestinian Arabs became belligerents in the conflict, and by its end, rather than accept a Jewish state after five-and-a-half months of warfare, Palestinian Arabs called upon their brethren from seven surrounding countries to invade and crush the nascent Jewish state. Six thousand Jews - 1 percent of Israel's Jewish population - lost their lives during the War of Independence.
The Arab League's April 10, 1948 decision to invade Israel and "save Palestine," marked a watershed event, for it changed the rules of the conflict. With the pending invasion following Israel's declaration of independence, it is no exaggeration to say that the new Jewish state's very existence hung in the balance.
Dislodging all Arab inhabitants from sensitive areas in proximity to Jewish settlements, establishing territorial continuity between blocs under Jewish control, and ensuring control of key transportation arteries were military necessities. As May 14th approached, Israel could not afford to risk a Fifth Column at its rear to add to all other aspects of its militarily inferior situation.
The cost of defeat was hammered home by a stream of dire warnings from Arab capitals, with perhaps the most chilling for Israel coming from Jamal Al-Husseini as vice-chairman of the Arab Higher Committee [AHC], who publicly declared:
"The Arabs have taken into their own hands, the Final Solution of the Jewish problem. The problem will be solved only in blood and fire. The Jews will be driven out."
Three years after world Jewry had lost a third of its people in the Holocaust, Israelis were not about to test whether Al-Husseini's words were merely rhetoric or a real threat, and so they prepared for the worst. The cost to Israel to halt the Arab onslaught and gain the upper hand was horrendous. During the first four weeks following the Arab invasion, 1,600 Israelis were killed - a quarter of all the war's casualties.
Objectively, the claim that Palestinian Arabs were innocent bystanders ignores the facts: The sides in the conflict were not two rival empires or caliphs. It was a conflict between two national or ethnic groups. Palestinian Arabs represented one side in the conflict - the side responsible for starting the war. By their own behavior, Palestinians assumed the role of belligerents in the conflict, invalidating any claim to be hapless victims. Explains scholar Benny Morris:
"One of the characteristics of the Palestinian national movement has been the Palestinians' view of themselves as perpetual victims of others: Ottoman Turks, British officials, Zionists, Americans." Arabs never recognize that they are victims of their own doing.
1a)
There’s Still Time to Avert War in Lebanon
Hezbollah’s strength has multiplied, and conflict is inevitable unless the world acts.
ByRon Prosor
Donald Trump called out Hezbollah at both stops on his Middle East trip last week. In Saudi Arabia he praised the Gulf Cooperation Council for designating the Iranian-backed Lebanese Shiite militia a terrorist organization and noted that Riyadh had placed sanctions on a senior Hezbollah figure. In Jerusalem Mr. Trump scored Hezbollah for launching rockets “into Israeli communities where schoolchildren have to be trained to hear the sirens and run to the bomb shelters—with fear, but with speed.”
The president and his national-security team must have taken a good look across Israel’s northern border. Lebanon is at a crossroads. Decisions the president makes now could help prevent a devastating war between Israel and Hezbollah. Such a war would severely damage Lebanon and could drag the U.S. into another complex and costly entanglement in the Middle East. Engagement today can prevent risks to American lives tomorrow.
Hezbollah is sponsored by Iran and has become increasingly brazen in the last decade. It is now more militarily powerful than most North Atlantic Treaty Organization members. It has 150,000 missiles and could launch 1,500 of them a day. From the ground, air or sea, it can strike anywhere in Israel. Lebanon’s president, Michel Aoun, hasn’t distanced the Lebanese army from Iran’s proxy. Rather, he has embraced it. “Hezbollah’s weapons do not contradict the national project,” he said in February, but are “a principal element of Lebanon’s defense.”
Yet when Hezbollah acts, it does so with Iran’s interests in mind—not Lebanon’s. Iran would have no qualms spilling Lebanese blood in a war with Israel. Just look at Syria, where under Iranian direction, the Assad regime has unleashed genocide against the Sunni Arab population using Hezbollah as its storm troops.
War between Israel and Lebanon is avoidable, but only if the world acts now—with American leadership. Hezbollah’s ability to destabilize the region stems from the abject failure of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701 and the peacekeeping force tasked with enforcing it, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, or Unifil.
Resolution 1701 was adopted unanimously after Israel was forced to fight a defensive war against Hezbollah in 2006. It mandated that Unifil keep southern Lebanon “free of any armed personnel, assets and weapons” and prevent the area from being used “for hostile activities of any kind.”
Like many U.N. resolutions, 1701 has been thoroughly ineffective. Hezbollah is 10 times as strong now as it was in 2006, and its military infrastructure permeates Lebanon. Yet Unifil claims ignorance of the terror organization’s arms buildup. Unifil’s March 2017 report reaches new heights of absurdity, even for a U.N. organization: “To date, Unifil has neither been provided with, nor found, evidence of an unauthorized transfer of arms into its area of operations.”
Hezbollah must not be allowed to impose war on the region and tragedy on Lebanon while the Iranian regime rubs its hands. What can Mr. Trump do?
The U.S. should seek a U.N. Security Council resolution amending 1701 and providing Unifil with explicit powers to disarm Hezbollah and demilitarize South Lebanon under Chapter 7 of the U.N. charter, the section that deals with peace enforcement. Currently Unifil derives its legal mandate from Chapter 6, which deals with peacekeeping. Peacekeeping helps local restaurants stay in business but does little to enforce peace.
As usual, the tab for U.N. failure in Lebanon is being paid by American taxpayers. The U.S. picks up 43% of Unifil’s $488 million annual budget. Congress should make that funding conditional on performance.
Now is the time to update Resolution 1701. War between Lebanon and Israel would be detrimental to Russian interests in Syria, so Vladimir Putin could be convinced to help rein in Hezbollah. For the Arab states, led by Saudi Arabia and Egypt, containing Hezbollah and Iran is a priority. Western Europe should be eager to avoid a war that would worsen its refugee crisis. Meanwhile, finding common ground over Lebanon and Syria could strengthen cooperation between Israel and the Sunni Arab states searching for a lasting solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem.
President Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson have a historic opportunity to do the right thing, at the right time, in the right place: to show that U.S. diplomatic intervention today can prevent the need to make terrible decisions about U.S. military intervention tomorrow.
Mr. Prosor, a former Israeli ambassador to the U.N., is chairman of the Interdisciplinary Center’s International Diplomacy Institute and an executive-in-residence at Liontree.
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2) The Fourth Circuit Joins the ‘Resistance’
Taking a stand against Trump, the judges are also defying Supreme Court precedent.
By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey
Another court has weighed in against President Trump’s executive order temporarily limiting entry to the U.S. of aliens from six terrorist hotspot countries in Africa and the Middle East. In ruling against the order last week, the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals defied Supreme Court precedent and engaged the judicial branch in areas of policy that the Constitution plainly reserves to the president and Congress. The high court should reverse the decision.
In International Refugee Assistance Project v. Trump, the Fourth Circuit affirmed a Maryland district judge’s nationwide injunction halting enforcement of the president’s order. Chief Judge Roger Gregory, writing for the 10-3 majority, acknowledged that the “stated national security interest is, on its face, a valid reason” for the order. But he went on to conclude that the administration acted in bad faith based on, among other things, “then-candidate Trump’s numerous campaign statements expressing animus towards the Islamic faith.”
Whatever one may think of that conclusion as a political matter, as a legal matter the judges overstepped their bounds. The controlling case is Kleindienst v. Mandel (1972), in which the Supreme Court rejected a petition from American scholars seeking admission to the country on behalf of a foreign colleague who had been kept out because he advocated communism. The plaintiffs argued that the government’s refusal to admit their colleague on account of his views violated their First Amendment rights. The justices upheld his exclusion and made three things clear: first, aliens have no constitutional right to enter the U.S.; second, American citizens have no constitutional right to demand entry for aliens; and third, the decision to deny admission to an alien must be upheld if it is based on “a facially legitimate and bona fide reason.”
The high court has repeatedly reaffirmed and followed Mandel. Fiallo v. Bell (1977) rejected a challenge to immigration preferences that openly favored legitimate over illegitimate children and female U.S. nationals over male—distinctions that almost certainly would have been found unconstitutional in a domestic-policy context. In Kerry v. Din (2015), the justices upheld visa denial for the complainant’s husband, who had been a member of the Taliban. When the executive branch makes a decision “on the basis of a facially legitimate and bona fide reason,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote, quoting Mandel, the judiciary can “ ‘neither look behind the exercise of that discretion, nor test it by balancing its justification against’ the constitutional interests of the citizens the visa denial might implicate.”
In holding that Mr. Trump acted in bad faith, the Fourth Circuit fundamentally misconstrued Justice Kennedy’s opinion in Din, which nowhere suggested that, once the government had articulated a facially legitimate purpose, the courts could weigh whether there might have been an additional, improper purpose. As the Fourth Circuit dissenters explained, Mandel requires only a facially legitimate and facially bona fide reason.
Any other standard would constitute an invitation to the judiciary to direct the nation’s foreign and defense policies. Having misapplied Din, the Fourth Circuit went on to apply a standard domestic case-law analysis, under which the existence of a discriminatory purpose essentially dooms the exercise of governmental authority irrespective of other justifications. Under that approach, the government would have lost in Mandel, Fiallo and Din.
If the Fourth Circuit’s reasoning were to stand, it could cripple the president’s ability to defend the country. The judges claim Mr. Trump’s campaign statements, supposedly hostile to Islam rather than Islamist terror, transform his order into an “establishment” of religion in violation of the First Amendment. If the president is forbidden to impose temporary limitations on immigration from any Muslim-majority nations, it would follow that he is prohibited from taking any hostile or unfavorable actions, including the use of economic sanctions or military force, toward any Muslim-majority nation.
Making foreign policy is not the judiciary’s job, and the court’s decision in this case is in direct conflict with the Supreme Court’s admonition in Mandel that courts may not review the president’s exercise of discretion on foreign affairs—or balance it against asserted constitutional interests—once a facially legitimate and bona fide reason has been articulated. Further, the executive order is clearly authorized by Congress under the Immigration and Nationality Act. As Justice Robert Jackson famously observed in Youngstown v. Sawyer (1952), the president’s authority is most formidable when he is acting with Congress’s consent.
It is therefore difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Fourth Circuit and the other courts that have stayed Mr. Trump’s executive orders on immigration are engaged in the judicial equivalent of the “resistance” to his presidency. Judges are, in effect, punishing the American electorate for having chosen the wrong president. That is not the judiciary’s role. Every federal judge has an obligation to accept the limitations imposed by the Constitution on his power—to exercise “neither force nor will, but merely judgment,” as Hamilton put it in Federalist No. 78.
The government is likely to seek an emergency Supreme Court stay of the Fourth Circuit’s decision. That may be difficult, because it requires a showing of “irreparable harm.” But even without a stay, there is little doubt the Supreme Court will remain faithful to its precedents and reverse the Fourth Circuit’s wrongheaded decision.
Messrs. Rivkin and Casey practice appellate and constitutional law in Washington.
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