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,so the American people are reviled by the incessant attacks and bullying by his haters, as they should be. This is not what our democracy is about nor why our nation was founded. Attached are Trump's own words.
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Why Public Schools Should Want School Choice | PragerU
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Biden sets the tone. He blames everyone, never knows what is happening, never takes responsibility or corrects anything and no one else takes responsibility. I observed Yellen from my brokerage days and was not impressed then. Her voice tells it all.
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Janet Yellen Blames Everybody Else for the Financial Panic
The Editorial Board
Ms. Yellen has an admittedly heavy explanatory lift because this financial trouble wasn’t supposed to happen. The economy was in great shape, she and President Biden kept telling us. Inflation was transitory, and when she suddenly had to admit it wasn’t, she said it would fall soon enough.
The banking system was also supposedly strong thanks to the Dodd-Frank Act regulations that she and the others now in power had written. Yet here we are with major banks failing, and the government having to bail out uninsured depositors and offer lifelines to protect bank assets that are underwater.
What went wrong? In Ms. Yellen’s telling, the failures of Silicon Valley and Signature banks are really signs of strength. “It is notable that neither of these events triggered the worst-case scenario—a financial meltdown like we saw in 2007 and 2008,” she told the National Association for Business Economics. “In large part, this was due to the post-crisis reforms we put in place.”
Are we now measuring regulatory success by anything that doesn’t become a once-a-century meltdown? Apparently she is. But even the Treasury secretary has to concede that responding to the bank failures required “substantial interventions” to prevent a larger panic. And, wait for it, “this means that more work must be done.”
By this she doesn’t mean introspection about what went wrong with the 2010 reforms. She means giving even more power to regulators to prevent the failures that the vast regulatory power they gained last time didn’t prevent this time.
That didn’t work this time? Well, she says, “when the President and I took office in January 2021, we inherited a financial stability apparatus at Treasury that had been decimated.” Of course: It’s Donald Trump’s fault. Everything else is his fault, so why not a financial panic that has broken out two years into the Biden Administration? Despite what she suggests were her heroic efforts, Ms. Yellen couldn’t rebuild “the analysis team” at the Financial Stability Oversight Council fast enough.
We are supposed to believe that this explains the FSOC’s failure in its annual reports in 2021 and 2022 to assess the magnitude of the risk to the banking system from rising interest rates. Here’s how the FSOC home page at Treasury’s website describes its work in the Biden years:
“In 2021, the Council identified three key priorities related to significant vulnerabilities in the financial system: nonbank financial intermediation, climate-related financial risk, and Treasury market resilience. In 2022, the Council identified a fourth key priority: risks related to digital assets.”
None of these caused the failure at Silicon Valley Bank or the deposit run at midsize banks. The main culprit was duration risk from the failure to properly hedge against rising interest rates. The 117-page October 2022 report devotes as much space to climate risk as it does to duration risk. But at least the FSOC mentioned duration risk. There’s no excuse for the examiners at the San Francisco Federal Reserve not to have acted on the problem as the West coast bank regulator.
Ms. Yellen goes on to list a long series of what she calls “unfinished business”—or all the parts of the financial system that still pose risks but that she says the feds need more power to regulate. Money-market funds, open-end funds, hedge funds, nonbanks, digital assets and more. As always with Washington regulators, failure is an excuse to give them even more power.
The systemic risk she fails to mention is what caused the rapid rise in interest rates that has imperiled the financial system: the fiscal and monetary excesses that produced inflation. Apparently, in Ms. Yellen’s world, the 12 years of near-zero interest rates had nothing to do with banks and other institutions deciding to take financial risks that look very different at a fed-funds rate of 5% than at 0.25%.
Ms. Yellen has presided over this era at the Federal Reserve and now at Treasury. If she told the truth, she’d have to indict her own policies.
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IDF scrambles fighter jets, downs aircraft near Syrian border
IAF fighters, helicopters scrambled after aircraft violates Israeli airspace from Syria.
IDF helicopters and fighter jets were scrambled Sunday night, after an unidentified aircraft crossed into Israeli airspace from Syria.
The aircraft was monitored by the IAF throughout the incident, an IDF spokesperson said.
The aircraft was shot down in an open area, the spokesperson added, saying that the aircraft in question did not pose a threat at any stage. According to protocol, an alarm was not activated.
The incident is under review.
IDF forces are currently searching the area for remains of the downed aircraft.
And:
Mystery drone downed by IDF in Israeli airspace was sent by Iran
Iran sent the drone into Israel following reports attributing several attacks by Israel on Iranian targets and their proxies in Syria in recent days.
The IDF confirmed that the drone that invaded Israeli airspace from Syria and that it brought down on Sunday was Iranian.
It also said it was shot down using special physical electronic means.
Initially, the details of the identity of the drone and how it was brought down were partially censored, since usually the IDF has shot down such invading drones in the past and wants to keep its various electronic capabilities quiet so as not to tip off its enemies.
It was unclear why the IDF used different means this time to bring down the drone and what the significance was of temporarily delaying putting out some of the key information about the incident, followed by a decision on Monday to reveal more.
Even on Sunday night, the IDF had said it had tracked the drone throughout its flight from Syria and that it had never posed a threat.
The IDF is still investigating the specifics of the incident, and part of the reason for revealing more information could be that the drone was located and collected for further study in the Hula Valley area on Monday morning.
Why was the drone sent by Iran into Israel?
Iran sent the drone into Israel following reports attributing several attacks by Israel on Iranian targets and their proxies in Syria in recent days.
The increase in attacks attributed to the IDF came shortly after Hezbollah sent an operative to set off explosives in Israel.
The operative set off an explosive in Megiddo in March, but was killed by security forces before he could set off more explosives.
The Upper Galilee Council was notified about the situation and assured that there were no additional immediate threats.
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Gun battle breaks out in Shechem, 2 terrorists eliminated
IDF forces engage terrorists in Shechem during arrest operation for suspects wanted in shooting of soldiers in Huwara.
Israeli security forces operating in Samaria killed two terrorists and seriously wounded a third, after a gun battle broke out in the Palestinian Authority-administered city of Shechem (Nablus) Monday morning.
IDF and Border Police forces were deployed to the Askar refugee camp adjacent to Shechem (Nablus) Monday morning, as part of an operation to arrest two terrorists responsible for a March 25th shooting attack in Huwara that left two IDF soldiers wounded.
During the arrest operation, however, a gun battle erupted when terrorists opened fire on the IDF soldiers and Border Police officers.
The Palestinian Authority’s WAFA media outlet reported that two terrorists were killed during the gun battle, while a third was seriously wounded.
The two wanted terrorists - Izz al-Din Touqan and Nidal Tabanga – were arrested during the operation.
WAFA also reported that 55 Arab rioters were treated for injuries from exposure to tear gas.
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More Biden Communist candidates to wreck our nation and spread discord
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Washington state wants to make every class ethnic studies. Here’s why that’s wrong.
By DAVID J FERRERO
Following in the footsteps of states like California and Oregon, my home state of Washington seeks to make ethnic studies a high school graduation requirement. After two years of deliberations and public communications, it isn’t yet clear what Washington’s governing bodies have in mind. According to some public communications, schools will be required to retool some courses in their existing curricula so that they can satisfy the ethnic studies requirement and a core subject area requirement at the same time. According to others, the requirement will not be a single course or course sequence, but a critical lens to be embedded in learning standards across all subjects in all grades.
I don’t strenuously object to the single course requirement. I have elsewhere argued for ways schools can make room for ethnic studies courses in high schools without adding to existing credit-hour requirements. Because ethnic and other critical studies are so firmly embedded in American universities, familiarity with their tenets is now part of what it means for high school graduates to be “college ready.” Besides, I know from my work with school systems and charter management organizations over the last two decades that in many secondary schools English and social studies courses are often already ethnic and gender studies courses in all but name.
But I find the comprehensive K-12 lens version misguided. There are several reasons for this, but for brevity’s sake I will focus on the two most basic.
First, according to proponents, ethnic studies nurtures students’ racial and ethnic identities by emphasizing ethnic and racial differences, and power struggles between racial groupings. It views racial and ethnic identities as paramount and regards American society, culture, and institutions as oppressive encroachments on those identities.
This strikes me as a peculiar position for a state education agency to adopt, and an especially perverse one in a diverse democratic society where the political will to promote shared social goods depends on solidarity among disparate groups. It is also a profound departure from one of the founding rationales for universal public education, which is to bridge ethnic and religious differences in the service of forging a shared civic identity—e pluribus unum. To do this, schools should help students recognize the aspirations, ideals, commitments, and identities they have in common, not accentuate their differences or sow mutual distrust.
Second, critics are right to characterize the ethnic studies lens as reductive, tendentious, divisive, and doctrinaire. The indiscriminate use of white supremacy, oppression, racial trauma, colonial trauma, resistance, and healing in the ethnic studies literature ought to make this evident. This isn’t the conceptual vocabulary of the dispassionate historian or social scientist, but the histrionic rhetoric of the zealot.
It is the rhetoric of ethnic studies, not ethnic histories. The two are not synonymous. Ethnic and racial histories—the experiences and contributions of different ethnic and racial groups in the US, the rivalries among them, the especially egregious injustices inflicted on some of them, the struggles to overcome those injustices, and instances of injustice and racism today— are taught in schools throughout the country. The best version of these classes teach ethnic and racial histories through multiple lenses, giving students a rich understanding of how these histories are connected to different ideas today.
Ethnic studies, on the other hand, is the lens. Its origins lie in the radical student movement of the 1960s and was created explicitly to underwrite a liberationist cultural politics. The development of the field over the last 50 years has stayed true to those origins. That is why ethnic studies advocates vigorously insist that ethnic studies is not “liberal multiculturalism,” which they disparage as “white-washing”—white supremacy with a smiley face. They know that the agonistic racial lens isn’t incidental to ethnic studies, it’s the defining feature.
Pointing out the origins and political aims of ethnic studies doesn’t discredit its point of view. But it does remind us that it is a point of view. Despite proponents’ claims, ethnic studies does not promote the teaching of multiple perspectives. It applies a single perspective to teaching about multiple ethnic groups. It is not just social conservatives who object to it. The ethnic studies perspective is contested by reputable scholars in the humanities and social sciences, and rejected by many members of the ethnic and racial groups for whom ethnic studies claims to speak.
Requiring the ethnic studies lens across K-12 learning standards is therefore akin to requiring a feminist or libertarian lens. Those ideologies and others should be taught somewhere in the school curriculum, but they should be taught as rival interpretive frameworks and objects of analysis. None should be enshrined in state learning standards or local curricula as settled doctrine.
Though it contravenes the most basic tenets of a sound education, the prospect that Washington might take this radical step is not as alarming as it might initially seem. Education policies tend to get watered down by the time they get from statehouse to schoolhouse. The enforcement mechanisms are weak, and the professional training given to teachers weaker. Moreover, I have taught a graduate course in critical social justice-rooted educational leadership that included the ethnic studies lens, listened to my own adolescent children (who are mixed-race) lampoon crude ethnic studies scripts, and reviewed enough ethnic studies literature to see how riddled it is with inconsistencies and contradictions. For these reasons, I expect ethnic studies to show up in most classrooms as a neutered and incoherent muddle. Disagreeable maybe, but not disastrous.
I am nonetheless bemused. I simply cannot comprehend how state legislators and education leaders became convinced that it was sensible educational policy in the first place.
True, schools and other public institutions have often failed to live up to the principles that undergird e pluribus unum—principles of liberty, equality, and justice. But it is also true that over the last half century educators have succeeded in making curricula more multicultural, classrooms more inclusive, and schools more welcoming to all students. Meanwhile, they have made great strides toward raising graduation rates, narrowing achievement gaps, and equalizing opportunities for students from increasingly diverse backgrounds. That their job isn’t finished is all the more reason to double-down on our commitment to those founding principles, not abjure them.
Public education should not divide students by race, ethnicity, or other ascribed identity; it should instead help them bridge their differences, recognize their shared humanity, and nurture a common civic identity that will enable them to pursue liberal democratic aspirations together. Legislatures, school boards, and educators should reject ethnic studies’ divisive doctrines and instead encourage schools to reclaim their founding purpose in forging e pluribus unum.
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Trump Seems Pretty Certain on Who Leaked Unconfirmed Details of Indictment Against Him
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Liberal Jews and their anti-democratic, anti-liberal critique of Israel
BY DANIEL GORDIS
Could the relationship between American Jews and Israel be healed, at least partially, if we stopped expecting the other to act as we would and instead learned to appreciate how different are our instincts, values and priorities?
My recent book, We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel, argues that the answer is “yes.” Israelis need to learn a great deal more about American Jewish life and its admirable successes, while American Jews ought to stop expecting Israel to behave as a Hebrew-speaking, falafel-eating miniature version of the United States. Both communities are too rich and accomplished for the other to expect them to mimic something that is, essentially, entirely different.
In writing the book, I did not believe I was saying anything particularly controversial. But it turns out that I was wrong. Reviewers on the Left have assailed the book, in large measure because they believe I failed to focus sufficiently on the occupation. They’re right. Since I think that even if the occupation ended tomorrow, matters would not improve much, I focused on what seem to me the more bedrock reasons for our divide – the ways in which we are radically different.
The most recent rejection of my argument came in the form of a review in Haaretz by Rabbi Eric Yoffie, formerly the head of the Reform movement in North America. In fine American style, Yoffie opens his take-down of my book with some nice comments. He is kind enough to call me a “serious and thoughtful scholar,” and says We Stand Divided is “an important, valuable book” and “should be studied by anyone who cares about Israel’s well-being.”
Since I wouldn’t want my credentials as an upstanding American impugned, I will therefore begin in similar fashion. Yoffie’s call for greater tradition in the Reform movement was and remains vitally important, as was his urging the Reform movement to embrace joy-filled worship in its synagogues. Whether or not one agrees with him on all matters political or religious, for a lifetime of devoted service to American Jewish life, he deserves our collective admiration and gratitude.
It does not take long for Yoffie to take off the gloves, however, as he calls parts of the book’s argument “wrong” (perfectly legitimate), “absurd” (a bit less kind), “bizarre” and “disconcerting.” (“Patronizing” and “ungrounded,” which appear in the headline and which, I assume, Yoffie did not write, were apparently added by zealous Haaretz editors, evidently swept away by their enthusiasm for Yoffie’s worldview.)
I will therefore permit myself a bit of bluntness, as well, because Yoffie’s review is so scattershot, responding is a challenge. To see what I mean, do that old exercise we all did when we were in college: Write in the margin the thesis statement of each paragraph, and then see how the argument progresses. What emerges, frustratingly, is not an argument, but something much more reminiscent of the contrails of Space Shuttle Challenger, twisting and turning in all directions, but headed mostly nowhere.
What is clear, however, is that one of Yoffie’s chief frustrations with my book is that I do not share his level of frustration about Israel’s Orthodox establishment. Yoffie argues that though I don’t dwell on it enough, Israel “must take into account the urgent pleas of half of that people, living in the Diaspora, to recognize the Jewish streams they’re identified with, and to offer support to Reform and Conservative Jews in Israel.”
IT SOUNDS reasonable, and Yoffie is right; in an ideal world, Israelis (like Americans) would be more open-minded and more embracing of ideas that are not consonant with their own. (For the record, I’m a Conservative rabbi, and regularly perform weddings in Israel in blatant violation of Israeli law.) But what does Yoffie mean when he says that Israel “must” do this? He knows, of course, that Israel’s haredi (ultra-Orthodox) parties can, and will, bring down any government that moves in his proposed direction.
What, then, should Israeli prime ministers do? Lose their governments over this issue, when what would follow would simply be another government equally beholden to the haredim? What does Yoffie actually expect Israeli leaders to do? Change Israel’s entire system of government? Violate its democratic principles? He offers us no hint.
In his anger about Israel’s failure to embrace Reform Judaism, Yoffie also reveals how little he knows about religious trends in Israeli society. “It shouldn’t matter whether there are many or few liberal Jews in Israel is large or small,” [sic] he writes “or whether you think non-Orthodox Judaism has a real future in Israel or not (Gordis, in my view incorrectly, thinks not).”
Aside from the fact that that is simply not an English sentence, Yoffie gets three things completely wrong. First, I never said (because I do not believe) that non-Orthodox Judaism in Israel does not have a real future, because I believe that it (thankfully) does. Second, Yoffie assumes that for those seeking something other than Orthodoxy, the alternative is Reform or Conservative. That may be (decreasingly) true in the United States, but it is certainly not the case in Israel. Israel is exploding with religious options and creativity – they just have nothing at all to do with Reform or Conservative Judaism, which are profoundly American phenomena, shaped to meet the needs of an American Jewish population.
But it is Yoffie’s third and final mistake on this front of which American Jews should most take note. As many liberal Jews are keenly aware, Israel’s treatment of Mizrahi Jews (descendants of Jews from Middle Eastern and North African communities) in the early years of the state was reprehensible.
Upon their arrival from multiple places in the Levant, David Ben-Gurion (the liberal, socialist prime minister American Jews still hold up as their ideal of Israel’s values), had this to say about their way of life: “The dispersions that are being terminated... and which are gathering in Israel still do not constitute a people, but a motley crowd, human dust lacking language, education, roots, tradition or national dreams.... Turning this human dust into a civilized, independent nation with a vision... is no easy task.”
While Mizrahim in Israel have not yet achieved economic parity with Ashkenazim, they have made tremendous progress. The entry of Mizrahim into the nuclei of Israeli society – politically, economically, culturally and religiously – is one of Israel’s great accomplishments. Despite all the work that remains, the story of the Mizrahim is a civil rights success that should be the envy of any democracy, and American Jews, living as they do in a country mired in racial hatred with no apparent way out, ought to note what Israel has achieved.
Yet here is the rub. Civil rights progress means not only giving people their economic due, but also taking their ideas and their culture seriously. And Mizrahi Jews, who now constitute a majority of Israel’s Jews, are in no hurry to make peace with the Palestinians or to embrace liberal forms of Judaism. On the Palestinian front, what Mizrahi Jews essentially have to say is this: “We are actually the children and grandchildren of Jews who were forced out of their countries by that culture. Forgive us if we don’t share your instinctive benevolence, but we are the ones who actually know that culture, and we believe that their hatred for us is far more powerful than any instinct for peace might be. We are the protective buffer between Israel’s security and your liberal naiveté.”
EACH OF us can agree or disagree with that worldview. But what we have to acknowledge is that we cannot both insist that Israel make concessions for peace now and respect the intellectual independence of Mizrahi Jews. American Jews who want to impose their views on Israelis must at least acknowledge that they would do so at the expense of Israel’s democracy and even more tellingly, at the expense of taking seriously those Jews who are finally, after decades of struggle, beginning to be heard. Is that really what Yoffie wants?
Mizrahi Jews are also making a profound contribution to Israeli religious life. They have brought to Israel a deep and abiding reverence for Jewish tradition, even if they are not punctiliously observant. What they are teaching Israeli society is that the relentlessly theological project called modern Western Judaism is far from the only way to embrace Jewish life. Thousands of young Ashkenazi Israelis are engaging tradition without adopting Orthodoxy, precisely because Mizrahi Jews have modeled for them how that is possible.
That, American Jews are likely to celebrate. But, and here’s the rub again, Mizrahi Jews are in no hurry to change gender roles in Judaism. Women in Mizrahi communities are making huge progress, but ritual egalitarianism is for the most part nowhere on their agenda. Is it for us to tell them that our way of Jewish life is more enlightened? When they look at the reverence that pervades their own communities and the utter lack of reverence that is the standard in American liberal Jewish life, Mizrahim are not inclined in the least to emulate the little that they know about what is happening across the ocean. But where do they, their views, their rights to opinions get reflected in Yoffie’s assertion that “Israel” (whatever that is) “must” recognize Reform and Conservative Judaism? What if “Israel” – meaning large numbers of Israeli citizens – just doesn’t want to? Where is this massive Mizrahi influence reflected in Yoffie’s prescription for Israel? Nowhere, actually. Which, ironically, is precisely where David Ben-Gurion wanted them.
All of this ultimately proves the central thesis of my book. What separates American Jews and Israel is, well, everything. The majority of Israeli Jews and the majority of American Jews are demographically different, have different instincts when it comes to concessions for peace, and differ when it comes to visions for Jewish life. It was inevitable that Jews who constitute 2% of the population of the country in which they live and those who constitute some 80% would see the world differently and create radically different visions of what Jewish life can and should be.
Israel was not created in order to enable American Jews to feel virtuous – it was created to be a sanctuary of Jewish survival. Israelis have fashioned different instincts than American Jews on the ideal balance between risk and the quest for peace and have made their own unique determinations about what Jewish cultural survival looks like.
We ought to celebrate those differences, not bemoan them, for it is our disagreements that give us what to learn from each other. The first step toward that mutual learning, however, is not preaching, but listening, seeing each other through the most generous lens we possibly can. Sadly, condescending and paternalistic attitudes to each other (in Rabbi Yoffie’s concluding words, “It may be that Israelis themselves don’t see as clearly what US Jews see from there”) take us in precisely the wrong direction.
The writer is senior vice president and Koret Distinguished Fellow at Shalem College in Jerusalem. His latest book is We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel (Ecco/ Harp)
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A market viewpoint for you to digest.
Oil Production Cut Stalls Stocks After Record Quarter, Creates Great Buying Opportunity
Dear Richard,
Following record gains in the first three months of 2023, the stock market partially slipped today after The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC+) announced a surprise oil production cut over the weekend. That sent oil prices spiking and reinvigorated inflation fears, which naturally weighed on stocks, especially growth and tech stocks.
We view this oil market drama as short-term noise. Ultimately, it is just creating a fabulous buying opportunity.
Oil prices shouldn’t spike much more. Lots of media headlines out there right now are suggesting the opposite.
But we believe they’re wrong.
This was a cut to stabilize prices – not stimulate them. The March ISM Manufacturing report released this morning confirmed as much. The U.S. manufacturing sector is a huge source of global economic demand, and it is falling apart right now.
This recent OPEC+ production cut will simply offset deteriorating demand conditions and stabilize oil prices in the $75- to $85-per-barrel range.
At those levels, oil prices will be down about 25% year-over-year. That is deflationary – not inflationary. Meanwhile, the latest economic data continues to show collapsing inflation pressures everywhere else in the U.S. economy, as well as weakening labor conditions. We’re also seeing increasing signs of financial market stress, with reports emerging that Blackstone (BX) continues to deny withdrawal requests from its commercial real estate fund.
Altogether, the bulk of evidence continues to strongly suggest inflation will collapse into the summer; the labor market will crack, the lending markets will dry up, and the Fed will be forced to pause its rate-hike campaign.
That pause will spark a massive stock market rally, just as every Fed pause in history has done before.
Our two cents from today, then, is to just ignore all this oil market drama and buy the dip. The trend remains falling inflation and rising stocks. Buy the dip in growth/tech stocks. We expect this quarter to be just as good as the last.
IDEA OF THE DAY
Stay Bullish on a Housing Market Rebound
Opendoor (OPEN) – Stick with the breakout in OPEN. Over the past several weeks, we’ve consistently revisited Opendoor stock as our “Idea of the Day” because we absolutely love the setup here. The housing market is rebounding with vigor because Treasury yields – and, by extension, mortgage rates – are collapsing. Uncoincidentally, this collapse in Treasury yields and mortgage rates coincided with a huge rebound in OPEN stock. Technically, this looks like a massive multi-quarter reversal and not just a multi-week phenomenon. Treasury yields and mortgage rates are in the first inning of a big multi-quarter drop. Consequently, OPEN stock is in the first inning of a big multi-quarter rebound. We’d continue to be buyers of OPEN on this breakout.
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Biden and America are now getting our payback from The Saudi's. Biden blew it again. Even Jeb Bush is defending Trump.
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Prosecuting political foes is incompatible with democracy
Comparisons between the legal problems of Trump and Netanyahu illustrate the way the left in both countries is wrongly trying to use lawfare tactics to take down foes.
By Jonathan S. Tobin
U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a bilateral meeting at the White House on Jan. 27, 2020. Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead.
U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a bilateral meeting at the White House on Jan. 27, 2020. Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead.
These are heady times for those who hate both Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. The news that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg had persuaded a grand jury to indict the former president on charges that have yet to be made public was greeted with chortles of satisfaction from the Jewish left, which was already celebrating the recent setback suffered by the Israeli prime minister after he put judicial reform on hold.
The prospect of Trump being booked in New York is not only being celebrated by those who call Netanyahu “crime minister” because of the long-running legal case on corruption charges that he has been fighting in and out of the courts for years. It has also allowed them to see the pair, despite the obvious differences between the two men and the legal stratagems that have been deployed against them, and their predicaments as part of a common struggle against what Haaretz called the way they both attack their respective countries’ democratic institutions.
To the left, that’s the important point.
Their claim is that both Trump and Netanyahu are enemies of democracy. That makes achieving their downfall not so much a matter of alleged wrongdoers getting their comeuppance but can be portrayed as a righteous cause in which threats to the common good are eliminated by lawfare. In that way, even the flimsiest of charges or the use of tactics that target an individual rather than enforcing the law is normalized rather than condemned as violating legal ethics. Actions that would easily be seen as an abuse of power are justified because of a supposedly higher purpose to the prosecution.
As different as the cases against Trump and Netanyahu are, what they have in common is that both men are political leaders being singled out by prosecutors for charges that weren’t so much tailored to their circumstances as they were invented for the sole purpose of taking them down.
The cases against Trump and Netanyahu
While we haven’t seen the indictment of Trump yet, by all accounts it’s driven largely by a novel legal tactic focused on his alleged payment of hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels. While such actions are deplorable, they are not illegal; nevertheless, it’s being treated as a form of fraud because it is considered an unreported campaign contribution. This is an absurd argument that has never been successfully used against any politician and is unlikely to withstand scrutiny by higher courts even if the deep-blue courts of New York City railroad it through. It’s possible that Trump’s businesses have also been scrutinized for some possible illegal behavior in ways that practically no other New York real estate firm has been treated.
Other charges that may be pending against Trump in either the District of Columbia, where he might be charged for inciting the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, or in Georgia, where he is accused of trying to swing the 2020 presidential election in his favor by looking for more votes, may have more merit. Still, both of those cases run afoul of other pitfalls, such as the fact that even foolish or bad speech isn’t normally treated as criminal.
But while Trump is a singular figure who has shattered all sorts of precedents, both good and bad, the only reason any prosecutor is looking for a way to charge him is because he’s a hated political foe.
The same is true of the charges against Netanyahu, even if the person ultimately responsible for the case—former Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit—was a former supporter turned political enemy.
The three cases against him that are being tried in a Jerusalem District Court have, if anything, even less substance to them than the ones against Trump. One concerns his acceptance of expensive gifts of champagne and cigars from admirers, though the notion that doing so constituted a breach of trust or fraud is absurd. The second involves discussions between the prime minister and the publisher of the hostile Yediot Achronot newspaper in which Netanyahu suggested that he might support legislation that undermined the Israel Hayom newspaper (Yediot’s pro-Bibi competition) in exchange for favorable coverage. The prosecutors involved labeled that a “breach of trust” but, here again, it’s not clear what existing law the conversation (which led to nothing) broke. The third charge sounds more substantial since it alleges that Netanyahu traded regulatory decisions that favored the Bezeq Company for favorable coverage on its Walla news site. But since Walla remained critical of the prime minister, the claim that it was bribery lacks substance. Even if the outlet had changed its tune, here again, there is no law in Israel that states that obtaining favorable coverage is bribery.
As with the complicated attempt to use the Stormy Daniels affair against Trump, Netanyahu’s foes don’t care that the cases against him lack substance. They believe him to be a criminal simply because he is a hated political foe who is difficult to beat at the ballot box. If it takes cases in which a man will be convicted of violating laws that don’t actually exist on fake claims of fraud, that’s OK because they see it as similar to charging Jazz Age crime boss Al Capone with not paying his taxes rather than for murder.
The difference is that Capone really was the head of a criminal enterprise. Dislike or disagree with them all you want, but Trump and Netanyahu are not criminals. They are political opponents. And so, their foes justify using the legal system against them because they claim they are enemies of democracy against whom the normal rules of political conduct cannot apply.
The real threat to democracy
In recent years, one of the standard talking points of the political left in both Israel and the United States has been to state their fears about an alleged war on democracy being waged by their political rivals. In the United States, the claim that Republicans were “semi-fascists” and bigots who had to be defeated in order to save democracy was a rallying cry for Democrats in the 2022 midterm elections. In Israel in the past three months, hundreds of thousands of opponents of Netanyahu have also been employing the same kind of hyperbole about saving democracy. They believe that the stakes are sufficiently high to justify blocking highways and sabotaging their country’s economy and national defense purportedly to stop judicial reform legislation, but whose main purpose appears to be toppling the government.
The arguments in favor of their opposition to judicial reform don’t stand up to scrutiny and, when stripped down to their essentials, amount to a belief on the part of many Israelis that the nationalist and religious voters who favor Netanyahu and his allies can’t be allowed to govern. That is why even people like opposition leader Yair Lapid and others in his camp—once ardent critics of the out-of-control and essentially lawless Israeli Supreme Court—now oppose judicial reform.
The claims of Democrats that Republicans oppose democracy because of differences over voter integrity laws are just as lacking in substance. Trump may be deserving of criticism for not accepting the legitimacy of election results, yet the willingness of Democrats to shamelessly sabotage his administration with conspiracy theories about Russian collusion, and to use their media and Big Tech allies to silence negative stories about the Biden family corruption in 2020, shows that they are just as guilty of behaving badly in pursuit of political power.
That’s why we should ignore the claims that the defense of democracy requires political prosecutions.
On the contrary, the willingness of so much of the chattering classes to justify attempts to jail political opponents is antithetical to the survival of democracy in both countries. Contrary to the claims of their detractors, the legal wars against Trump and Netanyahu are not a matter of demonstrating that no one, no matter how powerful, is above the law. In fact, both men are being treated as if they are below the law.
Such prosecutions only serve to undermine public confidence in the justice system. They convince supporters of those charged that there is a two-tiered system where political foes not favored by the legal apparatus are treated differently.
No matter what they think of the two men, Israelis and Americans who care about preserving democracy should be hoping that the cases against Trump and Netanyahu end as quickly as possible with neither man being convicted. The alternative is a scenario in which democracy, which relies on both sides accepting each other’s legitimacy, is in real jeopardy of failing. The real threat to it doesn’t come from conservatives in either country. It can be found in a political culture that has been embraced by the left that is willing to stop at nothing to crush opponents.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin.
An Oil Price Warning for Democrats
Making themselves hostage to the Saudi Crown prince is unwise.
The Editorial Board
Oil prices surged 6.3% on Monday, to close to $85 a barrel on the global market, after a group of Saudi-led producers said they’ll reduce production by a million barrels a day starting in May. That’s another fist bump to the stomach from President Biden’s admirers in Riyadh, and it’s a warning to Democrats in the U.S. of how vulnerable they are to oil producers abroad.
Not too long ago, before Joe Biden became President, the U.S. produced enough oil to be a price setter in the global market. But Mr. Biden unleashed an assault on U.S. fossil-fuel production that includes permit delays and regulatory hostility that have reduced the incentive to invest in more wells.
Mr. Biden finally approved the Willow project in Alaska last month, though that won’t help in the near term. Mr. Biden tried to reduce prices by tapping the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, but he doesn’t have too many political tricks left.
Regarding oil prices, Mr. Biden and his party are now hostage to fortune as an election year approaches. A global recession would reduce demand and prices, but that has its own political risks. But if demand and prices surge, consumers paying more to fill up the SUV or truck won’t be happy.
As it happens, House Republicans are offering Democrats a lifeline in the form of H.R.1, the energy bill they passed last week. Mr. Biden is promising a veto, and Democrats may want to filibuster in the Senate. But the better part of political prudence would be to work out a Senate compromise. It’s unwise to count on Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
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