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https://www.youtube.com/watch?
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Hanson on Mueller's legacy. (See 1 below.)
Is Mueller the manager of a baseball team of assorted crooks and liars comprised of: McCabe, Comey, Strzok, Page, Weissmann, Ohr, Clapper, Brennan and Steele?
If so, as most everyone should now suspect, they beat the sox off Tinkers, to Evers to Chase.
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More news regarding Israel. (See 2 and 2a below.)
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Finally, the mass media take action against one of their own. (See 3 below.)
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Tolerance can become something else. Bigotry can take subtle forms. (See 4 below.)
And:
Takes all kinds to make up the universe. Who are the Black Israelites? (See 4a below.)
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St John's College, on whose board I served for 8 years, points the way. (See 5 and 5a below.)
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1)The Mueller Squirrel Cage
Round and round the investigation goes. Where it stops…
Special Counsel Robert Mueller recently indicted yet another peripheral character in his Trump probe, Russian attorney Natalia V. Veselnitskaya, for alleged money laundering in a matter quite separate from Trump.
Like almost all of Mueller’s indictments of the past 20 months, the charges against Veselnitskaya had nothing to do with his original mandate of finding any possible Trump–Russia collusion. No matter; within minutes, Veselnitskaya’s name was injected into the media cycle as if the fact that she was Russian and connected to the name Mueller were de facto proof that Trump was guilty of something — if not collusion, something worse.
If Mueller was not a special counsel, and if he was not looking for anyone deemed useful to flip to find dirt on Donald Trump, then Veselnitskaya would have been just another daily Washington foreign influence-peddler being courted with impunity by her American influence-peddling and often equally suspect counterparts.
To date, in almost every one of his indictments of Americans, Mueller has gone after Trump staffers, often quite minor, for alleged crimes that either were committed well before Mueller began his investigations, or came as a result of plea bargaining in exchange for providing expected dirt on Trump, or were the result of government surveillance or the use of government informants, or all of that and more. And all that sensationalism, through leaks and insinuations, was packaged by the media as “bombshells” and “watersheds” and “turning points” ad nauseam for 20 months.
When Mueller indicted and obtained a confession from Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national-security adviser, it followed from an elaborate perjury ambush set up by the now fired, ethically conflicted, disgraced, and perhaps soon to be indicted deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe. McCabe sent the now fired, ethically conflicted, and disgraced agent Peter Strzok to interview Flynn — a process overseen by the now fired, ethically conflicted, and disgraced James Comey.
And even then, Mueller seemed to be the beneficiary of leaks from someone in the Department of Justice who sent to the media elements of surveillance transcripts of Flynn’s conversations.
We sometimes forget that Mueller would not now exist if Hillary had just done what she was supposed to do — win the Electoral College vote. Nor would it exist if she had not paid Christopher Steele to author a hit piece, hide her hand prints, and then salt it among officials at the Obama DOJ and FBI to spawn a media frenzy, first to ensure Trump’s defeat in 2016 and then, after his victory, to explain the supposedly inexplicable blown election.
The Mueller team’s modus operandi starts with the assumption that President Donald J. Trump is responsible for Russian collusion. Or he must at least be found guilty of something or other from his past decades as a wheeler-dealer, high-profile Manhattan provocateur.
Given that starting point, the special counsel then tries to prove his particular charge by rounding up those who have worked for Trump, examining in detail their personal history, discovering that they were imperfect, and threatening to ruin them (or their family members) with long prison sentences or crippling legal bills unless they aid what are becoming his Captain Ahab–like obsessions.
Far worse, Mueller has overlooked dozens of likely tangential felonies related to his investigations — they are not deemed useful to his zealous pursuit of Donald Trump.
Deputy Director Andrew McCabe probably lied to federal investigators. He faces no charges.
James Comey, the former FBI director, probably misled a FISA court and likely lied under oath to a congressional committee by claiming 245 times that he did not know or did not remember various important facts. It’s also likely that Comey broke the law by deliberately leaking secret and confidential FBI memos to friends and the press for his own particular agendas. Comey’s FBI team knew as early as July 31, 2016, that the Steele dossier was an unverified, biased product of Hillary Clinton’s opposition research, and yet he helped to send it to the FISA court as the primary evidence used to justify surveillance of Carter Page — in order to look for something on Trump.
Comey earlier had warped the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private server and emails by his own admission that he assumed she was going to be president and therefore deserved special treatment rather than a process that followed the letter of the law. He apparently faces no criminal liability on any of these issues.
Comey — and later, after his firing, his lieutenants — apparently conducted a counterintelligence investigation of President Trump. The likely illegal move was based on the ridiculous notion that Trump had colluded with Russia, either as a dupe and fool or as a canny and treasonous Russian operative. These fantasies were the pretext for using Clinton opposition research to prompt their investigations.
Worse still, the FBI later was apparently terrified that a President Trump would eventually demand the release of documents disproving the FBI canard that it was generically investigating “collusion” rather than Trump himself. Recall that Comey, according to his sworn testimony, assured Trump three times that he was not the object of a FBI official investigation.
Yet just such an investigation of the president of the United States was under way. It occurred in a landscape in which Comey himself, later Mueller team members Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, and recently journalists as diverse as Michael Isikoff and Jonathan Karl have admitted either that there is likely to be no proof of collusion, or that the Mueller team will not find any evidence of collusion, or that the Steele dossier was mostly inaccurate and made up — or all that and more.
Andrew Weissmann, Mueller’s blue-chip prosecutor, was briefed in August 2016 by Bruce Ohr, the fourth-ranking official in the Obama Department of Justice, that the Steele dossier was unverified, that it was a campaign opposition hit piece paid for by Hillary Clinton, and that Ohr’s own wife worked with Steele on it.
Those facts about the prior role of Weissmann seemed of no interest to Mueller. Nor did Mueller seem bothered by the fact that the DOJ and the FBI went to a FISA court on four occasions to use that very dossier to obtain surveillance on Carter Page, who was to become a subject of Mueller’s own investigation.
One would have thought that at some point Mueller might have gone down the hall and asked, “Hey, Andy, did you guys at DOJ ever hear anything worrisome about that dossier before you used it to get wiretaps and intercepts on an American citizen?”
In sum, one result of the entire Mueller inquest is that we are now witnessing one of the greatest political scandals in U.S. history, given that:
1) the FBI conducted a secret investigation of the sitting president of the United States and kept it from all oversight, based on nothing other than unfounded accusations from untrustworthy sources and the FBI’s policy differences with candidate and later President Trump;
2) presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in the middle of the 2016 campaign hired a foreign national, British subject Christopher Steele, to conduct opposition research on her rival Donald Trump, and she hid her use of campaign funds to pay for the ensuing dossier by funneling the payments as “legal fees” through both a law firm and an opposition-research firm;
3) members of Obama’s Department of Justice and FBI deliberately and repeatedly misled FISA courts by presenting a dossier as evidence without disclosing that it was unverifiable, paid for by Hillary Clinton, used circularly for “corroborating” news accounts, and authored by a fired FBI informant — all of which was previously known to the top echelon of the FBI and DOJ;
4) key members of the U.S. government in the FBI, DOJ, CIA, and State Department took great pains in the midst of a presidential campaign to spread knowledge of the unverified dossier among top government officials and to ensure leaks of the dossier to the media;
5) few involved in any of these felonious acts are currently under investigation, and fewer are apt to be subject to criminal prosecution, given the hysteria over the supposed Trump collusion;
6) Mueller’s top lieutenant, Andrew Weissmann, by intent or default, probably had a role in the deception of a federal FISA court that was deliberately misled by fellow DOJ attorneys who withheld information that they knew would impugn their own evidence.
Again, the reason Mueller is not interested in such lawbreaking seems to be that it does not serve his interests. He shows little concern that both former FBI director John Brennan and former director of national intelligence James Clapper — figures who have popped in and out of his investigation — have lied under oath to Congress and probably have also lied about their knowledge of the Fusion GPS dossier compiled by Steele and the leaking of its contents. These lies of the nation’s three top intelligence officials — Brennan, Clapper, and Comey — are of far more importance to the sanctity of the republic than whether George Papadopoulos got his stories straight.
Finally, Mueller’s own team has been at times as mendacious as those they have hounded.
When FBI agent Peter Strzok and lawyer Lisa Page were let go from the Mueller team for bias and unethical behavior, Mueller’s staff for weeks hid the real reason for their departures. Their firings were staggered to suggest that they were unconnected, again misleading the media and the public.
When these two fired FBI employees turned in their government phones, on which they had sent each other thousands of relevant personal texts, the Inspector General belatedly discovered that months of messages had “disappeared” — according to the Mueller team due to bureaucratic sloppiness, technical glitches, or determinations that the messages were irrelevant and thus destroyed.
Had any of Mueller’s own targets lost key communications on their phones or pads and then claimed such extenuating circumstances, they likely would have been indicted. Had they, under oath, pled poor memories or no knowledge on 245 occasions, they would have been indicted. Had they misled a federal court with inexact or fraudulent evidence, they would have been indicted. Had they destroyed evidence under subpoena, they would have been indicted. Had they leaked confidential information, they would have been indicted.
In sum, Robert Mueller’s investigation has turned American jurisprudence upside down . In this country, we investigate crimes to see who committed them. We do not start by assuming the guilt of a person and then search for his necessary wrongdoing, although the perverse notion of “guilty until proven innocent” has now permeated throughout a frenzied American culture.
The latest BuzzFeed scandal is a good example. The online news magazine alleged that it had documentary evidence from the special counsel’s office proving that Trump ordered his consigliere Michael Cohen to lie about the Trump organization’s business dealings with Russians.
For an entire news cycle, that yarn prompted journalists and Democratic congressional members to call for Trump’s immediate impeachment — until Mueller himself issued a denial of the BuzzFeedstory. (One wonders why he had not done so immediately, whether he was worried that some of his own staffers were the sources for the BuzzFeed pseudo-news story, and why in the past he has not stepped up to discredit earlier false stories supposedly leaked from his team about his impending actions. Perhaps because other fake news did not so endanger the reputation of his investigation?)
But stranger still was the attitude of supposed journalists calling for impeachment: They believed that Trump was capable of ordering Cohen to lie; it was therefore excusable to assume that Trump had in fact done so, even in the absence of any evidence that he had.
In other words, we have abandoned the idea of innocent until proven guilty and instead appropriated a number of Bolshevik protocols: Find the person first, the crime second; if a suspect in theory could commit a crime, then he most likely did; waiting to pass judgement until all the facts are in is telling proof of pro-Trump bias.
In America, there is still an idea of equality under the law. But Mueller has taught us that whether you go to jail for perjury, illegal leaking, lying to federal investigators, destroying key evidence, obstructing a federal court, or trying, as a foreign citizen, to warp the outcome of a U.S. presidential election, all depend entirely on the particular agendas of a particular prosecutor, not the law per se.
Mueller’s legacy will likely be that he has now institutionalized the idea of inequality under the law — seeking out bothersome outsider minnows while establishment sharks devoured the Constitution
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2)
'Historic day' as Israel opens new international airport
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By Eytan Halon
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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hailed a “historic day” for the State of Israel as the new Ramon Airport near Eilat was inaugurated on Monday.
The NIS 1.7 billion ($460 million) airport, named in memory of Ilan and Assaf Ramon and located 18 kilometers north of Eilat in the Timna Valley, will replace the Eilat and Ovda airports currently serving domestic and an increasing number of international flights. “The Zionist vision is being realized here, from the foundations up to the rafters: planting a root into the earth of the homeland – and at the same time taking off to the peak of success, on the wings of great imagination,” said Netanyahu at the inauguration ceremony. “Here, in Timna, we are fulfilling three key national goals: first, the advancement of national aviation; second, the blooming of the Negev and Arava; and third, adding layers to the building of our relations with the countries of the world.” Ramon Airport, the first entirely civilian airport to open since Israel’s independence, is set to welcome up to two million passengers a year, with expansion works planned to more than double its capacity to 4.2 million passengers by 2030. It will also serve as an option to re-route large aircraft from Ben-Gurion Airport in the case of rocket fire targeting Israel’s main international transport hub – as was threatened by Gaza terrorist groups in 2014 – or inclement weather. Eilat has witnessed rapid growth in tourist demand and, accordingly, the number of flights to and from the city. As recently as 2015, there were only four weekly flights between Israel and Europe from Eilat. This winter alone, an estimated 165,000 tourists made the resort town their vacation destination, as they take advantage of some 57 weekly flights. The new airport will enable larger planes and more flights to serve the South, as well as operating as a gateway for tourists seeking to travel to southern Jordan and the Sinai Peninsula. “The territory which will now be freed up in Eilat will help the city grow and develop its tourism infrastructure to enable it to absorb the millions of tourists arriving from all over the world to the new airport,” said Transportation and Intelligence Minister Israel Katz. “With the inauguration of the Ramon Airport, all the restrictions [of the other airports] have been removed,” he said. Speakers also paid tribute to the late Rona Ramon, wife of Ilan and mother of Assaf, who died of cancer last month at the age of 54. “One special woman should have been with us today: Rona Ramon,” said Katz. “Rona took part in a moving ceremony that took place at the airport a few months ago, where she said: ‘This is proof that dreams come true.’” The three living children of the Ramon family, Tal, Yiftach and Noa, joined Netanyahu and Katz to cut the ribbon opening the new airport. The first domestic flights are expected to touch down at the airport in February, with all domestic arrivals due to land at Ramon by mid-March, enabling the closure of Eilat Airport. Later this year, the airport will begin welcoming international arrivals, eventually leading to the closure of Ovda’s civilian flights terminal. Seeking to incentivize airlines to travel to Eilat, the Tourism Ministry launched a range of subsidies for European airlines during the current winter season. The ministry reimburses airlines flying to Eilat €60 per passenger, with a 10% bonus for airlines flying more than 14 weekly flights, including at least two new flights this season. Airlines flying to Ramon Airport will receive a three-year waiver from airport taxes. Major international airlines currently serving Ovda and likely to fly to Ramon include Ryanair, WizzAir, Transavia, Lufthansa and FinnAir. The airport offers a 3.6 km. runway with a 45 meter width, as well as apron parking space for 16 general aviation aircraft, nine large and wide-body aircraft used primarily by European low-cost airlines and four turboprop aircraft used on domestic flights. There are also facilities for cargo and freight operations. The sleek and futuristic terminal building awaiting passengers traveling through Ramon Airport was designed by the Mann-Shinar and Moshe Zur architect firms. “This is the only airport in Israel and among few in the world that was built and planned without any prior existing infrastructure,” said Amir Mann, head of the Ramon Airport planning team. “The planning and design of the project were greatly influenced by the futuristic aviation world and the natural surroundings of the desert. The airport is destined to become a magnet for tourists and will be of the utmost importance in the map of regional and international tourism for Israel.” Due to the airport’s proximity to the Jordanian border, a 4.5 km., 26-meter-high smart fence was constructed to protect incoming and departing aircraft from a range of cross-border threats, including missile fire. On Sunday, Jordanian authorities protested the opening of the airport, accusing Israel of deviating from international norms and standards, and stating that its location violates Jordan’s airspace sovereignty.
2a)
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Israel’s heavy rains reveal ancient horse figurines over 2,000 years old
Horse figurine from the Hellinistic period found in Acre. (Nir Distfeld)
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Israel’s unusually heavy rains after a five-year drought have washed into the open two remarkable archaeological finds.
By World Israel News Staff January 22, 2019
Two clay horse figurines were discovered last month in northern Israel, the Israel Antiquities Authority reports.
The figurines were found by civilians at two different sites; One was discovered in the area of Kfar Ruppin in the Beit Shean Valley and dated to the period of the Kingdom of Israel (about 2,800 years old).
The second was located near Tel Akko and dated to the Hellenistic period – about 2,200 years ago. The sculptures were handed over to the State of Israel and the Antiquities Authority will award the people with a certificate of recognition for their good citizenship.
“On one of the weekends I went with my daughters Hadas and Maya to collect mushrooms in the area of Kfar Ruppin,” said Ayelet Kidder-Goldberg, who is also an archaeologist at the Israel Antiquities Authority.
“We did not find any mushrooms, but suddenly my daughters picked up this beautiful figurine from the ground. I immediately recognized that this was an ancient figurine from the Iron Age – the period of the Kingdom of Israel. We were very excited. This is a fascinating and spectacular find,” she said.
Michael Markin, a resident of Acre, discovered the second horse figurine. It dates to the Hellenistic period (2nd to 3rd century B.C.E). On the horse the harness, ears and red-colored mane can be made out. The body of the horse did not survive, but according to Dr. Erlich, most of the horses known from this period would appear with riders on their backs.
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According to Nir Distelfeld, the inspector of the Antiquities Authority’s Antiquities theft unit, “The heavy rains on the ground occasionally reveal archival findings that are close to the surface. And sometimes animals, such as porcupines and foxes, push ancient artifacts buried deep in the ground.”
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3)
First Leftist Journalist To Face Punishment for Covington Scandal
A journalist has been fired for widely spreading fake news and hate regarding the Covington high school “incident” in Washington. The Wrap reports:
Digital company INE Entertainment has fired a journalist who publicly wished for the death of several Covington Catholic High School students and their parents in a pair of tweets over the weekend. Aside from his job as a post-production supervisor at INE, Erik Abriss is a contributor to New York Media’s pop culture site Vulture.“We were surprised and upset to see the inflammatory and offensive rhetoric used on Erik Abriss’ Twitter account this weekend. He worked with the company in our post-production department and never as a writer,” the company said in a statement to TheWrap on Monday.“While we appreciated his work, it is clear that he is no longer aligned with our company’s core values of respect and tolerance. Therefore, as of January 21, 2019, we have severed ties with Abriss.”Passions ran high on social media Saturday after video emerged of several students from Covington, many of whom were wearing “Make America Great Again” hats, surrounding a Native American elder who was in Washington, D.C. for the Indigenous Peoples’ March. Many viewers believed the teens were attempting to taunt the elder, Nathan Phillips.
This will hopefully the beginning of a mass punishment against those who purposefully spread fake news and called for harm to come to those boys. Civil suits against them would be the next step.
4) Don't tolerate hate in the name of inclusion
By Jonathan Tobin
Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) is the poster child for the Republican Party's problem with right-wing extremism. His fate also provides an object lesson in how American democracy has always had a knack for dealing with people who challenge the nation's basic values. Unfortunately, Democrats who felt that the GOP was engaging in selective discipline for their members aren't prepared
to apply the same standards to their own caucus.
In the same week that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) stripped King of all of his committee assignments (a move that not only marginalizes him, but also makes it far more likely that the end of his long tenure in Congress is in sight) for making a series of statements that seemed to endorse white supremacy and white nationalism, Democrats rewarded one of their own extremists when they gave Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) a coveted seat on the House Foreign Relations Committee.
Omar was a major part of one of the 2018 midterm elections most uplifting stories: the election of a record number of women to Congress. She also became the first Somali-American immigrant elected to the House of Representatives and did so alongside Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) who similarly became the first Palestinian-American woman to enter Congress.
As such, the pair's political success is a tribute to American democracy that continues to prove that neither religion nor immigrant background of any kind is a barrier to high office in the United States.
However, while both of them seem to exemplify the American dream, they also demonstrate that expressions of hatred and prejudice are not the exclusive preserve of middle-aged white males like King. Yet it would appear that Omar's and Tlaib's status as groundbreakers for women, immigrants and Muslims seems to have given them a degree of impunity for bad behavior that bodes ill for the future of American public discourse.
King's defenders on the far-right claim that he was unfairly pilloried when the House voted to rebuke him last week after he was quoted in The New York Times as questioning why terms like "white nationalism" and "white supremacy" or "Western civilization" had become offensive. While one can parse those comments in a manner that might be defensible, he has a long history of hateful comments, as well as associating with hatemongers, such as his endorsement of white supremacist Faith Goldy for mayor of Toronto. His offensive suggestion that "other people's babies" (meaning, non-WASPs) couldn't preserve Western civilization was hateful as well as inaccurate.
As I pointed out in National Review at the time, those who could be called "other people's babies" had been fighting and dying to preserve American democracy since before Iowa had become a state. It was high time for House Republicans to make it clear that King's brand of nativist hate had no place in their party.
But while Democrats may feel that Republicans should also upbraid U.S. President Donald Trump for some of his own offensive comments, their silence about Tlaib and Omar exposes them as hypocrites.
Tlaib made headlines for using profanity when vowing to impeach Trump. She received less attention from the mainstream press for tweeting that those who support an anti-BDS bill being debated in the Senate were guilty of dual loyalty, a classic anti-Semitic smear intended to brand supporters of Israel as part of a nefarious conspiracy.
Like Tlaib, Omar is a supporter of BDS — a movement that aims to single out the one Jewish state on the planet for pariah status. While it's possible to oppose the anti-BDS bill without embracing hate (though the claim that the legislation, which bans compliance with discriminatory commercial conduct, violates the right to free speech is utterly bogus), advocacy for BDS is an expression of prejudice against Jews and therefore indistinguishable from anti-Semitism.
Support for BDS is not the only proof of Omar's hate. In 2012, she invoked classic anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about the nefarious powers of Jews when she tweeted that "Israel has hypnotized the world. May Allah awaken the people and make them see the evil doings of Israel."
When given a chance to disavow that comment this week in an interview with CNN's Christiane Amanpour, she refused, and instead merely said they "were the only words I could think about expressing at the moment," and that Jews shouldn't be offended by her attacks on the Israeli "regime."
4a)
Who are the Black Israelites at the center of
the viral standoff at the Lincoln Memorial?
By Sam Kestenbaum
In the initial media churn, they were nearly missed.
But a small band of Hebrew Israelites, members of a historic but little-known American religious movement, may actually be at the center of a roiling controversy that has gripped the nation in recent days.
It began with a now-viral video clip, filmed Friday at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, in which high school students from a Catholic school in Kentucky appeared to be in a faceoff with a Native American elder, who was beating on a drum. The boys, some wearing red hats with President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign slogan, appeared in the clip to be mocking the man, a Vietnam veteran named Nathan Phillips. The clip was widely understood as being centrally about the dangers of Trumpism, and the teens were condemned.
But a longer video soon bubbled to the surface, widening the lens. It showed how a group of half a dozen Hebrew Israelites had, in fact, been goading and preaching at both the Native Americans and high schoolers, using profanity and highly provocative language, for nearly an hour. Phillips later told journalists that he was seeking to defuse tensions between the Israelite group and the high school students by stepping in between them.
But who are these Hebrew Israelites?
Dressed in fringed black garb, some with scarves tied around their heads, they preached what to many were both abrasive and unfamiliar End Times messages - calling Native Americans literal descendants of the Israelite "Tribe of Gad," the white students cursed "Edomites" and preaching that a nuclear apocalypse was around the corner.
How did this relatively obscure group shoot into the national spotlight?
They are members of the House of Israel, which draws from what scholars call Black Israelism, a complex American religious movement that can be dated to the 18th century, at least. Beliefs vary widely, but groups are bound together by the central tenet that African-Americans are the literal descendants of the Israelites of the Bible and have been severed from their true heritage. A related belief holds that white people are Edomites, the genealogical descendants of Esau - the twin of Jacob.
Several distinct denominations or traditions have emerged over the years. Congregations and leaders differ widely, making neat generalizations tricky. Some read the Christian Bible and believe that Jesus was the prophesied Messiah; others read only the Hebrew Bible. Some have moved into tentative dialogue and collaboration with wider American Jewish organizations. Others have not.
The 1970s and '80s saw the rise of an innovative new branch of Black Israelism centered around an organization named the Israeli Tanack School, known colloquially as One West, after its address on 125th Street in Harlem.
The One Westers saw themselves as radical reformers of earlier generations of Hebrew Israelites who had gone astray. They would troop out to street corners dressed in colorful and ornate capes and leather - vivid imaginings of what ancient Israelites might look like transported into the urban culture of New York City. They were also early and eager adopters of new media, hosting local television slots and filming their often-confrontational street ministry.
Doctrinal innovations, said by insiders to be the product of divine revelation, came to the One West school as the years passed.
Leaders developed their own modified version of Hebrew - which they claimed was, in fact, the true and ancient version of the language, free from modern impurities. Unlike standard Hebrew, which has several vowels, their language was spoken with only one wide "a" sound and other idiosyncratic pronunciations ("Shalom," for example,' becomes "Shalawam.")
Around the same time, their outreach also expanded. Significantly, One Westers began teaching that it wasn't just African-Americans who comprised the true Israelites - other nationalities and ethnicities were also descended from the Israelites of the Bible. Puerto Ricans, for example, comprised the Tribe of Ephraim and Native Americans were the Tribe of Gad.
These people were the downtrodden of the earth, they argued, whose past hardships were the result of their having strayed from the commandments of God. Contemporary hardships facing these groups - such as poverty, police brutality, racism and gun violence - could be overcome only when they recognized their forgotten history as Israelites.
"These are the people who constitute the nation of Israel," a leading teacher known as Masha said in a 1990s television appearance as an assistant held up a hand-drawn chart of the Twelve Tribes of Israel and their supposed modern-day corollaries. "This is their true identity."
Leaders also embraced an apocalyptic worldview, teaching that the world would soon come to an end, ushering in a time when the Israelites would assume their rightful place as rulers and the white man's time would come to a close.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, doctrinal disputes and an End Times prophecy gone awry caused the school to fracture several times. Today there are at least a dozen organizations that have roots in the early One West school, with many other smaller groups, or "camps," as they are often called, drawing influence.
House of Israel is one of them. Headquartered in New York, the group is led by a onetime member of the original One West school known as Zabach. According to the group's website, it has branches in three other cities, including Washington
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5
St. John’s College in the News
Just months after Frank Bruni published the New York Times article that led to more than 250 news articles about St. John’s College, our momentum continues to build.
The college was part of a front-page article in today’s Washington Post’s print edition and Wednesday morning, NPR will feature Annapolis President Pano Kanelos on the show On Point (see more information below).
The Washington Post’s article, which focuses on pricing structures at private colleges, emphasizes St. John’s new financial model, in which philanthropy and our Freeing Minds capital campaign have allowed us to dramatically reduce our tuition. The Post’s education reporter Nick Anderson recognizes us as a courageous leader in the emerging nationwide trend towards lowering tuition.
“At St. John’s, with about 900 students in Annapolis and Santa Fe, the price cut coincides with a fundraising campaign to support what the college calls ‘an honest education at an honest price,’” he writes. “The rollback pegged tuition to a level not seen for more than a decade.”
In addition, the article highlights our distinctive Program and campuses in Annapolis and Santa Fe, calling it a “one-of-a-kind liberal arts experience.”
We’re excited to have yet another high-profile publication share our good news. We hope you will help share it, too.
Read the Washington Post article →
5a)
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January 25, 7:30 p.m., Peterson Student Center, Great Hall
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