THE FURTHER CORRESPONDENCES OF MARC SUSSELMAN PART 23
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8 April 2024
MS said:
Fareed Zakaria provides an informative analysis of how the increasing secularization in the US, and the concomitant decline in religious participation, has led to reliance on authoritarian political views to fill the void that many feel in their lives as a result.
"https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/04/05/trump-religion-secularism-authoritarian-populism/"
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MS said:
Being a creature of habit, I hope Trump repeats his past conduct and looks directly at the sun during the eclipse, and shows up at his next court hearing with a cane and a seeing-eye dog.
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10 April 2024
MS said:
Noa Tishby on “Why the world loves Hamas and hates Israel”:
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fxTNZa5G7E"
She is right – American Jews have been oblivious to the anti-Semitism that has been increasing for decades. I experienced it in the courts. And it comes from so-called “progressives,” including “progressive” liberal Jews. As she states, these “progressive’ Jews think they can ingratiate themselves by saying, “I am a good Jews. I hate Israel.” They are fools.
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11 April 2024
MS said:
wallerstein asserts that he reads Adorno and Nietzsche to keep himself sane. He is failing, prodigiously.
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12 April 2024
MS said:
According to the idiot wallerstein, all Israelis are pure white Caucasians. He has never seen the darker toned Sabra or Sephardic Jews.
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MS said:
Anonymous said...
[DZ, I don't know that you'll agree, but I think you could have pointed out to that other anonymous that it was israeli hostility towards Arafat and the PLO that caused them to facilitate the rise of Hamas (part of their policy of divide and rule)--and now their creation has come home to bite them.]
Another ignorant idiot. Israeli (notice not capitalized in the idiot’s comment) hostility towards Arafat and the PLO? Including the multiple efforts to reach a peace settlement with Arafat and the PLO, all of which would have given them the separate state they purportedly clamor for, all of which were rejected, including the offer made by Ehud Barak at the 2000 peace talks at Camp David, which even included an agreement that the Palestinians would have total access to the Al Aqsa mosque and make East Jerusalem the capital of the new Palestinian state, the rejection of which, causing the collapse of the peace talks. President Clinton blamed on Arafat.
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MS said:
They don’t look like they used to, but they’re still breathing – except for Bob Barker.
"https://natureworldtoday.com/ageless-glamorous-celebrities-who-continue-to-shine-at-85-plus/24/"
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MS said:
My bad. Actually, several of them have passed on.
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13 April 2024
MS said:
The obnoxious idiot wallerstein makes his nonsensical effort to compare Israel’s invasion of Gaza, in reaction to the Hamas October 7 massacre of Israelis, to the U.S. military action in Vietnam, referring to the Palestinians as “gooks.” I am not aware of any invasion of the U.S. by the Vietnamese, nor of any massacre of U.S. citizens perpetrated by the Vietnamese in the U.S. And he thinks he is being cute.
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14 April 2024
MS said:
Last night, after seeing a movie (Argyle), my wife and I went to a nearby ice cream parlor. The music being played at the parlor was mesmerizing, unusual. I asked who was performing and was told it was “2Cellos,” whom I had never heard of. Wikipedia tells me that they are two classically trained cellists from Croatia and Slovenia. You can hear them at the link below.
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcW1SsTBXyQ"
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MS said:
aaall states: “I believe that the environmental and human rights issues raised by forcibly moving a couple million folks out to camps one has built in the desert are obvious. That's all.”
“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” Oscar Wilde
“The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.” Leo Tolstoy, 1897
“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” H.L. Mencken
“Of all the extreme fanaticism which plays havoc in man’s nature, there is not one as irrational as anti-Semitism. … If the Jews are rich [these fanatics] are victims of theft. If they are poor, they are victims of ridicule. If they take sides in a war, it is because they wish to take advantage from the spilling of non-Jewish blood. If they espouse peace, it is because they are scared by their natures or traitors. If the Jew dwells in a foreign land he is persecuted and expelled. If he wishes to return to his own land, he is prevented from doing so.” Lloyd George
So, aaall would prefer that the IDF not forcibly evacuate Palestinians civilians from Rafah, while it completes its annihilation of the Hamas terrorists, as is its right and duty of self-defense. So, then, when the Palestinian civilians are killed in the assault on Rafah, aaall, and the other anti-Semites who routinely comment on Wolff’s blog, can accuse Israel in engaging in “genocide.” As Lloyd George accurately pointed out, the Jews are damned if they do, and damned if they don’t. And, please, don’t tell me that aaall cannot be anti-Semitic because he is, himself, Jewish. A lot of so-called Jews have bought into the anti-Semitic propaganda and stereotypes propagated by the Palestinians and their supporters. Like the Jews who resewed their foreskins during the Hellenistic era to be accepted by the Greeks, referred to as preputial restoration, these so-called Jews seek to ingratiate themselves by adopting the anti-Semitic stereotypes.
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MS said:
David,
You are misinterpreting Michael’s syllogism. By proving the general category above it, he is not asserting that the general category above it is a universal. His syllogism is as follows:
Some cats are fickle.
Therefore, it follows that some mammals are fickle.
This, you would agree, is a valid syllogism.
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MS said:
wallerstein now writes, referring to me: “[H]e spends much of his time insulting me and others, often for no clear reason except his apparent mood disorders and gut dislike for many of us.”
No, I do not suffer from a “mood disorder.” I have a fundamental, constitutional dislike of individuals who persistently engage in nonsensical claims, distortions of the truth, and anti-Semitic sophistry, in order to buttress their sense of self-worth, and primary among these individuals is s. wallerstein. He has this grandiose view of himself that if he engages in iconoclastic critiques of conventional society and conventional politics, and repudiates his Jewish heritage, he will distinguish himself as the most superior, most moral human being on Earth, deserving of homage and respect among the right-thinking commenters and sycophants on Wolff’s blog.
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MS said:
John Rapko has just posted a comment on Wolff’s blog in which he refers to “a remarkable document that includes many, many thousands of words of comments about posts on the professor’s blog, and with particular attention to remarks about the comments.” I assume that Rapko is referring to Michael Llenos’s inclusion of my comments about Wolff’s blog and the comments on it on Michael’s website. In that vein, since Rapko, at the end of his comment, invites readers to comment regarding what he represents are the three criteria he claims to have extracted from my comments to qualify one as being anti-Semitic, let me be the first to offer a response.
As a preliminary matter, I do not believe that I have accused Rapko of being anti-Semitic, nor do I recall any comment by him on Wolff’s blog which I believe was anti-Semitic. I did take issue with his reference to a joke by Stewart Lee, which, in the context in which it was raised, struck me as extremely inappropriate. If he believes that I am mistaken, aside from certain comments he makes in the comment at hand, that he has indeed made one or more comments which qualify under 1 or more of the 3 qualifiers which he lists as identifying one as being anti-Semitic, according to my protocol, I invite him to identify such. Moreover, I once submitted a comment in regard to a biographical synopsis which he included on the blog, indicating that I was immensely impressed by his academic achievements and the breadth of his interests and skills, in light of his background, which, if I recall, was less than hospitable to such achievements.
Preliminaries aside, I do disagree with his observation that the central point of my comments have been about Israel and anti-Semitism. I have not counted all of my comments which Michael has included on his website in order to make a valid comparison, but a significant number of them have not been about Israel or anti-Semitism at all, but about the Republican party and my intense dislike of Trump. It is true that since the Hamas massacre on October 7, and Israel’s retaliatory, and justified, invasion of Gaza with the objective of destroying Hamas, the bulk of my comments (but not all, e.g., my comments about the Oscars and the movie “Freud’s Last Session”) have been about Israel, and the anti-Semitism which I have seen displayed on Wolff’s blog with respect to Israel’s response to the Hamas massacre.
At the end of his comment, Rapko asks, “[I]s it (as it seems to me) that the disagreement concerns the completeness of the set of criteria, and especially the application of the criteria?” Since he questions the completeness of the three criteria, I can only conclude that he is proposing that there are criteria to qualify one as an anti-Semite which, according to his account of my protocol, I have failed to identify. If that is, indeed, what he is suggesting, than I would respond that, No, I believe that the three criteria he has identified are sufficient, if all have been satisfied, to designate a person meeting them as an anti-Semite. Moreover, not all of them are necessary. Criterion 2(b), making comments which are “infected with the (massively documented) anti-Semitism so prominent globally,” which he lists as criterion (1) in his second iteration of the criteria, e.g., comments about Jewish control of world finances, world media, and American politics would suffice in and of itself as marking the proponent as anti-Semitic.
Rapko has graciously acknowledged as among the criteria which he has extracted from my comments is not “criticisms of Israel, its policies, its politicians, etc.” I believe that criticism about some of Israel’s policies, as well as its politicians, is legitimate, and, indeed, necessary. I have myself engaged in such criticism, publicly. I have written letters to Netanyahu’s office, demanding that he resign. I have called Israel out for not prosecuting Israeli settlers who have engaged in vigilantism against Palestinian civilians. I have criticized expansion of the settlements in the West Bank. Therefore, legitimate criticism of Israel is neither a necessary, not a sufficient condition, to qualify one as an anti-Semite.
But I do take issue with the following statement by Rapko, which does suggest that he may harbor some anti-Semitic views. Regarding criterion 1 that, “The state of Israel is the legitimate political entity governing (very roughly) its current territory,” he states, “Setting aside philosophical qualms about the unqualified and non-context-specific use of the concept of legitimacy, noting the contentiousness of claim #1,” and proceeds to invite comments about the “completeness” of the three criteria. By virtue of Rapko’s comment, I infer that he questions the validity of the claim that Israel is the legitimate political entity governing (roughly) its current territory. Rapko is obviously a learned man, and well read. I will not repeat here my lengthy historical analysis which I have included in prior comments demonstrating Israel’s right to exist where it currently exists as the state of the Jewish people, a history which goes back at least to 800 B.C., which continued through the Roman occupation, and continued after the Roman expulsion, with a Jewish presence in Palestrina uninterrupted for the next 1,800 years, through the Crusades, the medieval Dark Ages, the existence of the Ottoman empire, culminating in Jews joining their brethren in Palestine, their purchase of plots of land from the Ottoman landlords, their cultivation of that land, and other arid land left fellow by the native Arabs, and the proposed partition of the land by the UN, a partition which the Jews accepted, but the Arabs rejected – rejected not because they claim the partition was topographically unfair, but because they wanted it all for themselves, refused to share it, and vowed to drive the Jews into the sea. If Rapko, or anyone else, regards this history as inadequate to justify Israel’s right to exist, then yes, I regard that rejection as a sufficient condition to mark that individual as an anti-Semite.
I wish to note the hypocrisy of the liberals (which I continue to regard myself as being on domestic and political matters) who criticize the U.S. policy on immigration as not being humanistic enough in placing obstructions in the way of impoverished migrants from South America and elsewhere seeking asylum in, and entering, the U.S., but they question Israel’s right to exist, whose citizens are not illegal immigrants in their ancestral home.
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15 April 2024
MS said:
I recently purchased and am reading “To Be A Jew Today,” by Noah Feldman, law professor at Harvard. He has come to s. wallerstein’s defense. He writes:
There are so many ways to be Jewish, so many beliefs and practices and worldviews consistent with sincere and conscientious Jewishness, that we should avoid calling anyone a bad Jew, seriously or even in jest. This impulse to include, not exclude, and to embrace, rather than condemn, can be traced back to the medieval rabbis. Faced with mass baptism of Jews, they fell back on a maxim of Talmudic origin that they made into a principle of Jewish law: “An Israelite, though he has sinned, is an Israelite.” Even a Jew who goes so far as to embrace a competing religious tradition remains a Jew. According to this perspective, a Jew can do wrong. But by wrongdoing he does not cease to be a Jew. In fact, I know of no expression in the whole vast sea of Jewish teaching that corresponds precisely to the phrase “bad Jew.” According to classical Jewish thought, one may become a bad person by doing bad deeds. But the sinner is not defined as a bad Jew. The biblical commandment to love your fellow applies with equal force to the Jew who disidentifies with the Jewish community to the point of becoming an apostate.
Prof. Feldman proceeds to point out that when Jesus is reported to have stated, “Judge not, that ye be not judged” (Matthew, 7:1), he was encapsulating Jewish doctrine.
So, s. wallerstein, you have an excellent lawyer in your corner.
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MS said:
I just realized, O. J. Simpson did not make a deathbed confession.
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MS said:
John Pillette, in his warped mind, thinks that anti-Semitism, and opposition to it, is a subject of levity. He applies to one who is an anti-anti-semite the acronym “AAS,” which he thinks is quite funny for its obvious resemblance to a word which refers to the posterior of one’s anatomy. How witty! How utterly hilarious!!
Pillette proceeds to accuse those who accuse others of being anti-Semitic of engaging in “witchfinding,’ and states, “insofar as an AAS operates as a kind of moral witchfinder general, there is a strong—nay, overwhelming—incentive to discover antisemitism in as many places as possible.” From this the reader is to conclude that all accusations of anti-Semitism are unfounded, specious nonsense. After all, we all know anti-Semitism died with the Holocaust. There are no more anti-Semites in contemporary society – certainly not in the United States, and most certainly not on Wolff’s blog. Congratulations, Pillette, for your superb detective work and cultural analysis! You are a prince among men!
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16 April 2024
MS said:
Bravo for LFC:
Hudson says: "The genocide that we are seeing today is the explicit policy of Israel’s founders...."
This is a rather absurd statement. I don't have time for a debate right now so I'll leave it at that.
The fact that Fresia would even contemplate that this absurd statement is plausible says a lot about Fresia’s intellect and bias.
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MS said:
I wish to compliment LFC on his excellent rebuttal of the specious claims made by Anonymous and MAD regarding the meaning of “genocide” and the intentions of the founders of Israel and the original Zionists.
Supplementing what he wrote, according to Anonymous if I deliberately drive my car into a crowd at an ethnic festival celebrating Arab, or Polish, or Hungarian, or Eritrean, or … culture, and kill several of the attendees at the festival, I have committed a genocide. Anonymous is conflating actions which are intended to kill multiple members of an ethnic or religious group, with actions intended to destroy the ethnic or religious group itself. The definition of “genocide” uses the word “destroy”; conduct intended to kill does not equate with conduct intended to destroy. Moreover, the IDF has maintained that their actions intended to kill members of Hamas have not been intended to kill Palestinians who are not members of Hamas; Palestinians have died, they maintain, because Hamas has used them as human shields.
Query: Do Anonymous’s and MAD’s distortion of the words they are using raise legitimate suspicions of anti-Semitism? According to Rapko and Pillette, only an overly paranoid, witch hunting AAS would think so.
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MS said:
MAD, in his anti-Semitic zeal (yes, I will not mince words – his efforts to distort Zionism and Ben Gurion’s legacy mark him as an anti-Semite, regardless what Rapko and Pillette may say about “witch hunting”) smears Ben Gurion and Zionists as xenophobic, stating, “anybody that reads on the subject and is honest must conclude that Zionist thinkers including the most important figures in the founding of Israel had incredibly monstrous disregard for the dignity of the Palestinians.” In his essay “Distorting Ben-Gurion,”
"https://besacenter.org/distorting-ben-gurion/"
Prof. Efraim Karsh, reviewing Tom Segev’s “A State at Any Cost,” debunks this libel, stating:
“Nor did Herzl show the slightest interest in expelling the Palestinian Arabs once he dropped his Argentine ruminations and embraced the Zionist cause: not in his famous political treatise, The Jewish State (1896), and not in his 1902 Zionist novel Altneuland (Old-New Land), where he painted an idyllic picture of Arab-Jewish co-existence in a future Palestine. Nor for that matter is there any allusion to the expulsion of Arabs in Herzl’s public writings, his private correspondence, or his speeches.
The truth is that, far from seeking to dispossess the Palestinian Arabs as claimed by Segev, the Zionist movement had always been amenable to the existence of a substantial Arab minority in the prospective Jewish state. No less than Ze’ev Jabotinsky, founder of the faction that was the forebear of today’s Likud Party, voiced his readiness (in a famous 1923 essay) “to take an oath binding ourselves and our descendants that we shall never do anything contrary to the principle of equal rights, and that we shall never try to eject anyone.” And if this was the position of the more “militant” faction of the Jewish national movement, small wonder that mainstream Zionism took for granted the full equality of the Arab minority in the prospective Jewish state.
Ben-Gurion himself argued as early as 1918 that ‘had Zionism desired to evict the inhabitants of Palestine it would have been a dangerous utopia and a harmful, reactionary mirage.’ And as late as December 1947, shortly after Palestinian Arabs had unleashed wholesale violence to subvert the newly passed United Nations partition resolution, he told his Labor Party that ‘in our state there will be non-Jews as well—and all of them will be equal citizens; equal in everything without any exception; that is: the state will be their state as well.’ In line with this conception, committees laying the groundwork for the nascent Jewish state discussed the establishment of an Arabic-language press, the incorporation of Arab officials in the administration, and Arab-Jewish cultural interaction.”
For Rapko and Pillette, anti-Semite is too harsh an epithet to apply to an individual who repeatedly distorts the truth about Israel and its founders in order to demonize them. To me, the epithet is perfectly appropriate.
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MS said:
I wish to take issue with my good friend s. wallerstein’s assertion: “Sometimes in life (and life is unfair) it's wise to accept an offer which seems unfair to you because it's the best deal that you're going to be offered.”
The Palestinians (who did not yet exist in 1948 as a national entity; they only existed after Yasir Arafat designated them as a nation in 1964) did not reject the proposed UN partition plan because they deemed it geographically unfair and as giving too much of the land to the Jews. They objected to any partition plan which gave the Jews any land. Their objective, repeated numerous times as the Arab armies invaded to annihilate the Jews, that they would “Drive the Jews into the sea.” This was not a protest of inequity; it was a protest demanding monopoly.
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MS said:
MAD doubles down: “Most of the wars Israel started since 1956 until 2000 were with expansionist aims. According to US media, most specially NYT, Israel against its wishes had to wage war for its existence.”
Ahistorical nonsense. Did Israel invite the 1967 invasion by 4 Arab nations? Will anyone on Wolff’s blog besides LFC stand up to MAD’s distortions and libels?
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17 April 2024
MS said:
More ahistorical nonsense from MAD. He states: “They [the Palestinians] could not look into the future and their leadership was not very competent. But again, it was difficult enough for the Zionists (who had no moral claim on other people's land) to accept the plan, since they wanted a lot more.”
He has a strange concept of “moral.” How does he think the Arabs came to Palestine and proceeded to occupy all of North Africa? Were these places “a land without a people, for a people without a land”? They took these areas by force, at the point of a sword and forced conversion to Islam. The Zionists did not come to Palestine with swords, after Herzl’s call for them to join their brethren in Palestine, who had been living there for centuries after the Roman victory at Masada. They did not set out to kill the Arabs living there, nor to convert them to Judaism. They cultivated the arid land which the Arabs had left fallow for decades, and made it fertile, and offered to share the bounty with the Arabs, an offer the Arabs rejected. They did not "take" Palestinian land. MAD is making up a false narrative to suit his anti-Semitic views.
Regarding Ben-Gurion, in addition to reading Tom Segev’s distorted version of Ben-Gurion’s views, LFC should read Prof. Karsh’s debunking of Segev’s distortions. I will repeat it here:
“Nor did Herzl show the slightest interest in expelling the Palestinian Arabs once he dropped his Argentine ruminations and embraced the Zionist cause: not in his famous political treatise, The Jewish State (1896), and not in his 1902 Zionist novel Altneuland (Old-New Land), where he painted an idyllic picture of Arab-Jewish co-existence in a future Palestine. Nor for that matter is there any allusion to the expulsion of Arabs in Herzl’s public writings, his private correspondence, or his speeches.
The truth is that, far from seeking to dispossess the Palestinian Arabs as claimed by Segev, the Zionist movement had always been amenable to the existence of a substantial Arab minority in the prospective Jewish state. No less than Ze’ev Jabotinsky, founder of the faction that was the forebear of today’s Likud Party, voiced his readiness (in a famous 1923 essay) “to take an oath binding ourselves and our descendants that we shall never do anything contrary to the principle of equal rights, and that we shall never try to eject anyone.” And if this was the position of the more “militant” faction of the Jewish national movement, small wonder that mainstream Zionism took for granted the full equality of the Arab minority in the prospective Jewish state.
Ben-Gurion himself argued as early as 1918 that ‘had Zionism desired to evict the inhabitants of Palestine it would have been a dangerous utopia and a harmful, reactionary mirage.’ And as late as December 1947, shortly after Palestinian Arabs had unleashed wholesale violence to subvert the newly passed United Nations partition resolution, he told his Labor Party that ‘in our state there will be non-Jews as well—and all of them will be equal citizens; equal in everything without any exception; that is: the state will be their state as well.’ In line with this conception, committees laying the groundwork for the nascent Jewish state discussed the establishment of an Arabic-language press, the incorporation of Arab officials in the administration, and Arab-Jewish cultural interaction.”
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MS said:
Yesterday, PBS broadcast an interview with Alex Garland, the writer and director of the newly released film, “Civil War,” which portrays a conflict between two factions which has consumed the U.S. and upended its democracy. Garland explained that he was not making a political statement about Democrats and Republicans, or about Trump, but about the breakdown in society when extremists on both sides pursue their radical positions, to the detriment of society as a whole.
Then, yesterday evening, I watched the conclusion of the excellent British documentary about Julius Caesar, and how his ambitions culminated in the destruction of the 500-year-old Roman Republic. The message: Democracy must be protected and guarded in every generation. If it is taken for granted, a new Caesar is likely to emerge and destroy it.
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Michael said:
Personally I believe Caesar was a good man. So was Napoleon.
We Americans should be grateful to Julius Caesar for Caesar salad
& dry salami--the latter which helped feed Caesar's troops in Gaul. And we should be thankful to Napoleon
for the Louisiana Purchase. If we're talking about getting our money back
in our pockets we just need to remember Louis and Clark &
their adventures getting to the Pacific Northwest of the Continental United States of America.
Plus our military leaders
have gained much from studying both men's martial experiences--which is no game.
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MS said:
So many Americans are totally ignorant regarding what the first 10 Amendments of the Constitution protect. They protect against government infringing on certain enumerated rights, e.g., freedom of religion; freedom of speech; freedom of the press; freedom from searches without probable cause; etc. The Amendments do not apply to action by private, non-government entities. A private employer, who, for example, does not like speech about rock and roll can prohibit such speech in its workplace.
Which brings me to a story which made headlines today. Asna Tabassum was selected to be valedictorian by Southern California University. As valedictorian, she was scheduled to give the graduation commencement speech. Ms. Tabassum is Muslim. When information regarding her views relating to Israel and the Middle East were disclosed, e.g., she has advocated on her Facebook page for “the complete abolishment of Israel,” the University cancelled her commencement speech.
See
"https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/16/us/usc-valedictorian-commencement-speech-canceled/index.html"
The school cited concerns about safety as the basis for the decision.
Ms. Tabassum has denounced the decision as violating her “freedom of expression.” Now I would agree that the purported basis for the cancellation is likely a pretext. In any case, if Ms. Tabassum believes that the cancellation violated her right to free speech under the First Amendment, she is mistaken. The University of Southern California is not a public educational institution. It is a private university. Ms. Tabassum has no free speech rights while attending USC which are protected by the First Amendment. If Ms. Tabassum has evidence that the reason her commencement speech was canceled was not because of the expected content of her speech, but because she is Muslim, the university’s decision would violate California’s civil rights law. But if it was canceled because, as it appears, the administration disagreed with the opinions she was expected to present during the speech regarding Israel, her First Amendment right was not violated. If a comparable decision were made at the University of Michigan, which is a public university subject to the U.S. Constitution, or at any other public college or university, then a student whose freedom of speech was curtailed, would under those circumstances have a right to sue for violation of his/her constitutional right. Ms. Tabassum has no such legal right.
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18 April 2024
MS said:
"https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/17/world/video/shahed-young-girl-killed-gaza-israeli-airstrike-children-diamond-pkg-digvid"
Netanyahu should be tied to a chair and forced to watch this video, for his criminal incompetence in failing to monitor the Gaza border, as he pursued Israeli Supreme Court legislative limitations on its authority, in order to alleviate his prosecution for corruption.
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MS said:
aaall has asked for link to Michael Oren's essay, "Clarity with Michael Oren"
A friend sent me the essay this morning. I have attached it to this email Feel free to provide it to aaall.
Marc
"1ClaritywithMichaelOren.docx"
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19 April 2024
MS said:
Reviewing the list of jurors who were selected for Trump’s trial in Manhattan, two things surprised me. Two of the jurors are attorneys, one a corporate lawyer, the other a civil litigator. Attorneys rarely become jurors, because the parties’ attorneys are concerned that the other jurors will defer to their legal expertise. Second, one of the jurors indicated that she did not like Trump, and regarded him as selfish. I am surprised that Trump’s lawyers did not use a peremptory challenge to strike her from being a juror.
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20 April 2024
MS said:
They are saying Michael Johnson is the modern-day Churchill.
Oy vey.
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21 April 2024
MS said:
I have just read the article, linked by Anonymous, written by Norman Finkelstein, titled, “The sheer craziness of Israel today.” Prof. Finkelstein claims that Israel is populated by a bunch of lunatics, obsessed with destroying its enemies, even if it means in doing so it commits suicide, and brings the rest of the world down with it. He claims that this is a psychosis which has plagued the Jewish people throughout its history, as symbolized by the biblical story of Samson, who, blinded and tethered to the pillars of the Temple at Dagon, finding his strength restored as his hair grows back, brings destruction on the Philistines as he destroys the Temple, killing himself in the process.
At the center of Prof. Finkelstein’s metaphorical parable is a fallacy, which he ignores – Samson was going to die anyway, so why shouldn’t he kill all of his enemies as they are about to kill him? Throughout history, the Jews have been the victims of persecution and murder by other civilizations – the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Christian Crusaders, the Spanish Inquisition, the marauding Arabs, culminating with the Nazis – and now Hamas and Iran. Hamas states in its charter that it is dedicated to Israel’s annihilation. Iran has threatened repeatedly to destroy Israel. Why wait until they have nuclear weapons, and are capable of carrying out their threat? There is a saying in Yiddish, if a person threatens to kill you, believe him the first time.
Finkelstein asserts that it is the Jews who suffer from a psychosis. He has it backwards. It is the rest of the world which suffers from a psychosis – an obsession with hating Jews. Why it suffers from this psychosis of despising the stiff-necked Jews may be a sociological paradox, but that it is historically accurate cannot be doubted.
Moreover, not everything Finkelstein states can be believed. He claims, for example, that, “Before October 7 Hamas had gestured toward a two-state settlement while Iran consistently voted with the UN General Assembly majority in support of the two-state consensus. Israel rebuffed it.” What does “gestured toward” mean? I am unaware of Hamas ever agreeing to a two-state solution, certainly not one in which Israel’s security and right to exist were guaranteed.
Everything Finkelstein claims to be true must be taken with a grain of salt, as I learned when I attended a lecture he delivered when visiting the University of Michigan in 2010. Speaking to the student Palestinian support organization, he claimed that Hamas had agreed to recognize Israel’s right to exist. During the question-and-answer session, I asked him for the basis of his claim that Hamas had expressed a willingness to recognize Israel, and asserted that the claim was false. Finkelstein became defensive and accused me of being an Alan Dershowitz plant, with whom he had been having an ongoing feud, because Prof. Dershowitz had successfully opposed his getting tenure at DePaul University. Finkelstein never responded to my request for the basis of his claim about Hamas.
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MS said:
"https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/20/us/2-children-killed-michigan-birthday-party/index.html"
The ways of the Lord are indeed inscrutable. Atheists who question the existence of a benevolent, omnipotent Supreme Being are told that the source of evil in this world is not the Supreme Being, but the inestimable gift of free will. What punishment would be appropriate for the way this woman exercised her free will?
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MS said:
The NYT had a discussion this week between two former federal prosecutors regarding the merits of the fraudulent business records prosecution of Trump related to his hush money payment to Stormy Daniels. They both agreed that the prosecution has a winnable case. However, one of the prosecutors offered a comment which I thought was quite sagacious:
“The rule of law is not a deus ex machina that will save us from ignorance, prejudice and laziness. It’s not designed to, and is certainly inadequate to, fix our terrible politics. For that matter our political system might not be equipped to reject a populist like Trump. John Adams wrote: ‘Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.’ He was probably talking about shared communal values rather than religious dogma. Without a shared set of values about what we expect from a leader, our system is probably not capable of defeating a tyrant.”
Which reminded me of the documentary I watched this past week about Julius Caesar. Brutus, a favorite of Julius Caesar, and rumored to actually be his son (I know, a split infinitive), becoming increasingly concerned about Caesar’s growing thirst for power, in conjunction with Cassius organized the plot to assassinate Caesar (not something, I want to make clear, I am advocating against Trump). The assassination did not save the Republic, but plunged Rome into a civil war, with Marc Antony and Octavius (Caesar’s nephew) launching a war against Brutus and Cassius, culminating in the latter’s defeat at the Battle of Phillipi, with both Cassius and Brutus committing suicide. Octavius then declared war against Marc Antony, defeating him and Cleopatra at the naval battle of Actium, making Octavius Emperor of Rome, with the demise of the Republic, and authoritarian rule by Roman emperors for the next 500 years. As George Santayana warned us, those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. But who among Trump’s supporters read history?
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MS said:
Post-script: Before David and s. wallerstein pounce on me, I would not disagree that Netanyahu is Israel’s Julius Caesar (and I do not advocate his assassination either). It is up to the people of Israel to save themselves from Netanyahu, and the demise of their democracy, but without an assassination.
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MS said:
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwFmc6ouWQc"
I recommend the above video as presenting the perspectives of the competing positions on the Israel/Gaza/Iran conflict. The Iranian-British-American attorney is superb.
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MS said:
I agree with you. It is being reported by reliable news sources that Israel launched airstrikes on Rafah, killing Palestinian civilians, including children. Israel stated that it was going to arrange for the evacuation of Rafah’s civilians before it launched its campaign against Rafah. This is a war crime!! Netanyahu has got to go!
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22 April 2024
MS said:
I am compelled to take issue with my good friend s. wallerstein’s assertion that comparing Israel’s policies to the apartheid in South Africa “seems apt.” It is neither apt, nor accurate. South Africa instituted its apartheid policies via legislation which discriminated against its African majority population in every aspect of their lives – where they lived, worked, and attended schools, as well as in government. No such form of discrimination against Palestinians exists in Israel. They are allowed to go to the same schools as Israel’s Jewish students; they work side by side with Jews; and they are represented in the Knesset. While I deplore and condemn the kind of humiliation MAD reports was committed by an Israeli soldier, if true, it does not represent any approved policy of the Israeli government, and is not, I believe, representative of how Palestinians are treated in Israel West of the Green Line. Anecdotal evidence of tensions between Jews and Palestinians in the West Bank is, likewise, not representative of the Israeli people, and, to the extent it occurs by renegade settlers, it is to be vigorously condemned, as I do, by all people of good conscience. But it does not constitute apartheid, and it serves no purpose to compare unequal situations and claim they are equal, when they are not.
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MS said:
How things have changed, and not for the better. In 1968-70, I protested against the Vietnam War, at Rutgers and in Washington D.C. I and my fellow protesters did not block streets, roads or highways. We were protesting the United States’ involvement in a civil war, using napalm and mass bombing which were killing and disfiguring thousands of Vietnamese civilians. The Vietnamese had not invaded the U.S.; had not massacred any U.S. citizens in the U.S.; and had not kidnapped any U.S. citizens and held them for ransom.
Over the week-end, and this morning, I have watched with disgust as students at Columbia and Yale have been blocking streets and using bullhorns to shout, repeatedly, “From The River To the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free!” This mantra calling for the annihilation of the State of Israel (look at a map) and the murder of all the Jews living there is anti-Semitism masquerading as calls for liberation. It is despicable, and sickens me, not just as Jew, but as a student of history. And these students believe they have the right of free speech to engage in this nonsense. They do not. Both Columbia and Yale are private institutions. The protesters are trespassing on private property, and have absolutely no freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment, whereas Rutgers, where the anti-Vietnam protesters did not bloc streets or access to buildings, is a public university, and our protests were protected by the First Amendment. These ignorant, self-glorifying students should be arrested, and then expelled.
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MS said:
Anonymous asks, “Does it now require a judicial ruling to validate that something is genocide? Did it take a judicial ruling to validate that what the Nazis were doing was genocide?” No, it takes comparable facts, and nothing Israel has done in self-defense comes anywhere to being comparable to the genocide which the Nazis committed against the Jews, against Poles, against the Roma, and against homosexuals. And Anonymous’s ignorant comment is another example of anti-Semitism on Wolff’s blog, on which anti-Semitism flourishes.
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MS said:
Wolff posted a comment today to correct the terminological misuse of the word “apartheid” as applied to Israel. He correctly points out that the system of de jure apartheid instituted by the Afrikans regime in South Africa has no analogue in Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians.
He then proceeds to state the following:
“I may be wrong, but it is not my impression that the Israeli policy toward the Palestinians is based on a desire to exploit their labor. I think many Israelis would be quite happy if the Palestinians were simply to disappear. In that way, their attitude toward the Palestinians is much closer to the attitude of the European settlers toward Native Americans. By and large, the European settlers sought to exterminate the Native Americans, and when they could not quite accomplish that, to push them into reservations on land for which the settlers did not have much use. Needing large amounts of labor to develop the New World in ways that would make them money, the settlers first brought a good many indentured servants from England, and then brought Africans whom, over more than a century, they enslaved after revising the English Common Law to permit such a status to exist.”
So Wolff replaces the slander attributing apartheid to the Israelis with the even greater slander of attributing a plan of genocide to the Israelis. This is a man who purports to be a “philosopher” in search of the truth, who has spent decades deciphering the esoteric works of Kant and Marx, but who cannot spend a few weeks, or even days, to educate himself about the history of Zionism and the Jewish settlements in Palestine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He would prefer to expostulate based on his ignorance, and attribute to the Israelis a program of extermination comparable to that committed by the British colonists against the indigenous Native Americans. He states that he assumes the Israelis “would be quite happy if the Palestinians were simply to disappear.” The history is to the contrary – it was the so-called Palestinians who would have been quite happy to see the Jews disappear. There is no record – NONE - of Israelis attempting to exterminate the Palestinians. That a so-called eminent professor would state such nonsense on his blog is despicable, and it is even more despicable that he would post such libel on the first day of Passover, a holiday which no doubt he does not celebrate, as he boasts about how he took his parents’ offer to accept money in lieu of being bar-mitzvahed.
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The End.