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HOOVER DAILY
Far too many American Universities would rather accept money from radical Islamists and hire radical Islamist professors than ban and/or stop the spewing of false hatred.HOOVER DAILY
| by Lee Ohanian via California On Your Mind California governor Gavin Newsom sharply criticized a judge’s recent injunction that prevents San Francisco from clearing homeless encampments within the city, calling the injunction “preposterous” and “inhumane.” And: When liberals start clueing their feet to stadium concrete you know their brains have fried. +++ The Weaponized Left Is Completely Out of Control ++++ Democrats' Hypocritical Plea For Help As Migrants Take Over Their Cities Is Laughable By Sarah Arnold ++++++++++++++++++++++++++ |
Everything in this world seems to be driven and/or besmirched by money. Money may not be the root of evil but in the hands of hateful humans possessing a vengeance it can prove dangerous.
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Jewish Students Need Our Help - EMET
As we head back into a new school year, we know that our American Jewish students will be on the front lines of the battle against rising anti-Semitism. Many of our students, whom we have taught to cherish and protect their Jewish identity, their Zionism, and their deeply nurtured connections to the state of Israel, may face much hostility from both their anti-Zionist peers and their professors.
As they head back to their campuses, over the course of the year, many will be confronted with chants of "From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free." They may have to endure mock "Apartheid walls" or "die-ins." Many professors, particularly in Middle East Studies, will libel Israel as "an apartheid state.", "a colonial state" or a "racist state." Jewish students may see swastikas drawn somewhere on the campus and might have their mezuzah ripped down from their doorposts. They might be excluded from certain clubs or extra-curricular activities if their peers discover they are Zionists or even Jewish. Their professors might single them out for ridicule if and when they find out that they are Zionists. One recent graduate had told me his professor said, "Had I realized you were a Zionist when grading your paper, I would have given you a lower grade."
As students head back to Princeton, they might be taking a humanity course featuring a book, "The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability" by Jasbir Puar, where she argues that Israel harvests Palestinian organs. Or they might be unfortunate enough to have her as a professor at Rutgers University, where she is the Director of the Women's and Gender Studies Program.
Jewish students might be unlucky enough to go to Oberlin College, where Islamic Studies Professor Mohammad Jafar Mahalati has argued that the Iranian massacre of over 5,000 of its citizens is simply "a minor detail." Or they might be unfortunate enough to go to Columbia University, where Joseph Massad calls Israel "a racist and colonizing state." Or George Saliba, who once notoriously said to a Zionist student, ': "You have no voice in this debate. You have green eyes. You're not a Semite. I have brown eyes. I am a true Semite. You have no claim to the land of Israel." Or Hamid Dabashi, who recently posted on Facebook, "Every dirty treacherous ugly and pernicious act happening in the world just wait for a few days and the ugly name of 'Israel' will pop up as a key actor in the atrocities..."
Some may attend the City University of New York, where Marc Lamont Hill, who was fired from CNN because of anti-Semitism, now holds an endowed chair in urban education. This is the same Marc Lamont Hill who says that "justice requires a free Palestine from the river to the sea."
These sentiments are nearly ubiquitous. From professors in the classrooms who hold the very hopes and dreams of the future of their Jewish students in their hands to peers who have been filled with anti-Israel propaganda, the line between hateful ideology aimed at eliminating the one Jewish state and anti-Semitism is frequently crossed. All of this makes our Jewish or Zionist students feel alienated from their fellow students, angry or, at its worst, ashamed over who they are, at the very core of their beings.
Our educational settings have certain protections for every other minority group, whether they be black or Hispanic. LGBTQ or handicapped. These are protections that are aimed at making students feel welcome, all aimed to make students amenable to learning in a comfortable, educational environment.
Not, however, if you happen to be Zionist or Jewish.
There are First Amendment protections for what might be said in the town's square. As disgusting and wholly unacceptable as it is, it is considered protected free speech under the Constitution to say "F" using the "N-word" on the town's square. It is NOT acceptable to say it in the college quad or the classroom. A student or professor who says anything mildly resembling that would most probably be expelled or immediately removed from his position in the university. That is because there are certain protections that students have that are made to ensure that no student feels demonized or ashamed of their very identity.
Again—Not if you happen to be Zionist or Jewish.
However, EMET is doing everything it can to rectify this.
There is one "Gold Standard" definition of antisemitism, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition that is employed today by 42 nations and over 1,000 organizations, including Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres and Special UN Rapporteur for Religious Freedom, Ahmed Shaheed, as well as the Council and Parliament of the European Union.
At any moment now, a bill will be introduced in the House, led by Congressman Mike Lawler (R-NY) and Ritchie Torres (D-NY), recommending consideration of only the IHRA definition.
EMET is the ONLY organization that has been on Capitol Hill almost every day for the last nine months, trying to codify---across the United States-- the International Holocaust Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism as the one, unambiguous definition of anti-Semitism employed by our US Department of Education, to protect our Jewish and Zionist students.
We have been leading the charge here.
As opposed to the President's National Strategy to Combat Anti-Semitism, this legislation does not recommend other definitions, including the Nexus Definition, which states that "Even contentious, strident or harsh criticism of Israel for its policies and actions, including those that led to the creation of Israel is not per se illegitimate or anti-Semitic."
Israel is the only nation in the world whose very existence is called into question almost every day on scores and scores of college campuses throughout the United States.
Not Iran, Not Russia, Not China, Not Venezuela. But Israel is the one Jewish state in the world.
If that is not antisemitism, I ask you, what is?
And that is one of the many reasons why, as our kids go back to school this September, you must support the extremely important work of EMET.
EMET, on a daily basis, takes the ideas that you cherish and hold dear and meets with our nation's lawmakers to turn those ideas into policy.
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US Beltway-watchers have been buzzing over a long conversation in Tablet between David Samuels and David Garrow, author of a biography of Barack Obama called Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama.
Garrow, a prize-winning civil rights historian who specialises in excavating details overlooked by others, became a pariah on the left with his previous book about Martin Luther King in which he revealed from FBI wiretaps evidence of King’s drinking and womanizing.
In Rising Star, Garrow effectively took apart Obama’s autobiography, Dreams From My Father. Garrow interviewed a number of people to whom Obama had referred or whom he had quoted. These interviewees gave Garrow a radically different account from the one that Obama had written, leading Garrow to conclude that Obama’s narrative couldn’t be true.
The most explosive claims in Rising Star were made by Obama’s former live-in girlfriend in the 1980s, Sheila Miyoshi Jager. In Obama’s own book, he described a major row with a girlfriend (who was a composite of various girlfriends) after they had seen a play. He depicted the row as pitting his own black consciousness against the girlfriend’s white liberal universalism — for him, the defining existential struggle.
But Garrow tracked down Jager, who told him that the row that ended their relationship — he twice asked her to marry him, but was turned down — was not about Obama’s black consciousness but his refusal to condemn black anti-Semitism.
In 1988, they had been to see an exhibition in Chicago about Adolf Eichmann. Around that time, a scandal had erupted in Chicago over a black mayoral assistant, Steve Cokely, who was sacked for antisemitism.
Jager’s Dutch grandfather had been prominent during the Second World War in an underground network sheltering Jewish children from the Nazis. He and his wife themselves sheltered a Jewish girl for three years, and are accordingly named on Yad Vashem’s Wall of Honour in its Garden of the Righteous.
Sheila Miyoshi Jager told Garrow that, after leaving the Eichmann exhibition, she had asked Obama why so many prominent black people in Chicago had sprung to Cokely’s defence. This led to a blazing row between them about which she told Garrow: “I challenged him on… the question of black racism… I blamed him for not having the courage to confront the racial divide between us”.
With hindsight, wrote Garrow, Jager concluded that the chasm between them wasn’t so much over race as her perception of Obama’s lack of courage. For Samuels however, the anecdote demonstrated that Obama has a problem with the Jewish people who present an obstacle to his view of the world.
This is because the Jews’ survival as a group and their continuing insistence on Jewish historical particularity gets in the way of his governing belief that the supreme crime of history is the oppression of back people by white people.
As Samuels writes:
Ghettos were invented for Jews. Concentration camps, too. How can Jews be “privileged white people” if they are clearly among history’s victims? And if Jews aren’t white people, then perhaps lots of other white people are also victims and therefore aren’t “white,” in the theological sense in which that term gains its significance in progressive ideology. Maybe “Black people” aren’t always or primarily Black. Maybe the whole progressive race-based theology is, historically and ideologically speaking, a load of crap. Which is why the Jews are and will remain a problem.
This problem with Jewish particularity is not only surely the case with Obama, but unfortunately characteristic of the mindset of many progressive people throughout the west.
However, Rising Star was published six years ago. So why has Garrow suddenly given this interview to Samuels (who manages to say rather more than Garrow himself, another curious feature of this “Q&A”)? Why are so many in Washington DC only now noticing from this account what was so obvious to some of us that we wrote about many of these things when Obama was president? Why didn’t they react like this to what Garrow had written when his book was published in 2017? And why are they so exercised about it now?
Various reasons suggest themselves. There’s the refusal of the left to entertain any challenge whatsoever to their dogmatic mindset, nor to accept any flaws in their cultural heroes and avatars. They construct instead a universe of fantasies and lies, and any writer who exposes these delusions will be disdained, denounced and dismissed. Those of us who wrote in these terms about Obama when he was president were mostly deprived of mainstream media platforms on which to do so, and scorned when we did.
Elsewhere today, there’s an acute awareness of the current parlous, indeed desperate state of America and the breakdown there of social cohesion. As Garrow observes, contrary to the hope that America’s first black president would cure the legacy of American racial prejudice, today’s vicious culture wars over intersectionality, Black Lives Matter and the rest of the left’s poisonous doctrines have made race relations worse than they were when Obama came to power.
Then there’s the baleful legacy of disastrous policies that Obama started and that continue under the Biden administration — most notably and infamously, the insane obsession with appeasing and empowering the Islamic regime in Iran which not only poses an unconscionable threat to America, Israel and the west but continues to be actively engaged in mounting terrorist attacks on American, Israeli and western interests.
And this is connected to what is perhaps the main reason this piece has struck such a nerve — the strong suspicion that the Biden administration is in effect the third Obama administration.
First, and incontrovertibly, the Biden administration is stuffed with Obama retreads.
Then there’s the fact that, when the Obamas left the White House, they moved just down the road into a mansion in the Washington DC neighborhood of Kalorama. As Samuels observes, this violated
a norm governing the transfer of presidential power which has been breached only once in post-Civil War American history, by Woodrow Wilson, who couldn’t physically be moved after suffering a series of debilitating strokes.
As I and others have previously noted, various Democratic Party operatives and former Obama staffers have often been observed coming and going at the Obama mansion. The suspicion has grown that it has functioned as a kind of alternative White House.
Samuels links this with the Russian collusion hoax which was used to hound Donald Trump during most of his presidency and was orchestrated by the Obama-appointed CIA director John Brennan. Subsequently, as President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline became ever more apparent, it was hard not to wonder who was really making the decisions taken by an administration stuffed to the gunnels with Obama retreads and loyalists, and with Obama himself just down the road.
Samuels further recalls the remarkable clue left by Obama himself pointing to precisely this development. In 2015 he told talk show host Steven Colbert:
I used to say if I can make an arrangement where I had a stand-in or front man or front woman, and they had an earpiece in, and I was just in my basement in my sweats looking through the stuff, and I could sort of deliver the lines while someone was doing all the talking and ceremony. I’d be fine with that because I found the work fascinating.
Yet the American media never questioned Obama’s continuing public advocacy, despite the evidence of this. Samuels writes:
Near the end of June, for example, Politico ran a long article noting Biden’s cognitive decline, with the coy headline “Is Obama Ready to Reassert Himself?”—as if the ex-president hadn’t been living in the middle of Washington and playing politics since the day he left office.
Indeed, in previous weeks Obama had continued his role as central advocate for government censorship of the internet while launching a new campaign against gun ownership, claiming it is historically linked to racism. Surely, the spectacle of an ex-president simultaneously leading campaigns against both the First and Second Amendments might have led even a spectacularly incurious old-school D.C. reporter to file a story on the nuts and bolts of Obama’s political operation and on who was going in and out of his mansion.
But the DC press was no longer in the business of maintaining transparency. Instead, they had become servants of power, whose job was to broadcast whatever myths helped advance the interests of the powerful.
This is why America is in the state it is in today. This is why Garrow’s book never got the attention it deserved when it was published in 2017. And this is why the Tablet piece has caused such a sensation
And:
House Judiciary Probing Office of Special Counsel Jack Smith
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) sent a letter to special counsel Jack Smith after launching an inquiry into one of Mr. Smith's top aides.
Mr. Smith was appointed special counsel last November on matters related to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol breach events, and the Department of Justice has since brought cases against more than 1,000 citizens who were present at the Capitol that day. He is also prosecuting two criminal cases against former President Donald Trump, who is now campaigning for a 2024 presidential run.
The probe comes after the former lawyer of a witness in one of the Trump cases revealed in a new filing that he was threatened with prosecution by Mr. Smith's office.
Stanley Woodward had been representing an unnamed "Employee 4" in the Mar-a-Lago case where President Trump is accused of allegedly mishandling classified documents; the employee previously testified no knowledge of deleting security footage, and later said otherwise. Mr. Woodward had claimed that the employee had been threatened with prosecution before he agreed to become a key witness.
Mr. Woodward no longer represents the employee but still represents Walt Nauta, a co-defendant in the case.
Mr. Jordan, in his letter (pdf), says his office has information that Jay Bratt, one of Mr. Smith's senior prosecutors, "allegedly improperly pressured Stanley Woodward ... by implying that the Administration would look more favorably on Mr. Woodward's candidacy for a judgeship if Mr. Woodward's client cooperated with the Office of the Special Counsel."
The inquiry is part of the Judiciary Committee's ongoing oversight of the Department of Justice, Mr. Jordan wrote, and the "attempt to inappropriately coerce Mr. Woodward raises serious concerns about the abusive tactics of the Office of the Special Counsel and the Department's commitment in its mission to upload the rule of law and ensure impartial justice."
Mr. Jordan is requesting all documents and communications concerning Mr. Woodward or concerning legal representation for Mr. Nauta by the end of the business day on Sept. 21.
Mr. Smith's office was not immediately available for comment.
According to Mr. Woodward, Mr. Bratt said in the conversation that because he did not take him for a "Trump guy," he was confident he "would do the right thing" and brought up Mr. Woodward's application for judgeship in Washington, D.C.
Later, in August, Mr. Bratt had also filed a motion arguing there was a conflict of interest with Mr. Woodward representing both Mr. Nauta and potential witnesses the prosecution may want to call upon to testify in trial.
Conflict of Interest Hearing
In August, the special counsel's office asked for a conflict of interest hearing, also known as a Garcia hearing, regarding legal representation for Carlos de Oliveira, the third defendant in the classified documents case.
The prosecution is saying that John Irving, who represents Mr. de Oliveira, is also representing three potential witnesses for the case. Both Mr. Irving and Mr. Woodward have asked that the hearing be a sealed hearing, arguing that evidence and witness testimonies from the prosecution's grand jury in Washington, D.C., are now being used in a case being tried in Florida.
After an inquiry from Judge Aileen Cannon, the prosecution ended the grand jury in Washington.
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