So far, Trump has been mercifully incompetent

Washington Post

“The world is laughing at us. They’re laughing at the stupidity of our president.”

— Donald Trump, October 2016

Stupid is as stupid does. 

During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump remarked often on the stupidity of our leaders. He was under the impression that the rest of the planet was indulging in some sort of global guffaw at our expense. “How stupid are we? The world is laughing.” If so, what must the mirthful world think of our current state of affairs? This past week alone:

The House and Senate intelligence committees said they saw no evidence for President Trump’s wild claim that President Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower, and Britain protested that the White House falsely alleged that British intelligence was involved. White House press secretary Sean Spicer has been arguing that Trump didn’t mean wiretapping when he said Obama had Trump’s “wires tapped.” Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway suggested that eavesdropping could have been accomplished using microwave ovens. 

Trump’s fellow Republicans pronounced his budget dead on arrival in Congress — “draconian, careless and counterproductive” were the words used by Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), former House Appropriations Committee chairman — because it recklessly cuts (slashing the State Department by nearly a third and targeting Meals on Wheels for the elderly) yet still adds to the debt Trump promised to eliminate.

Legislation to replace Obamacare stalled in Congress and had to be rewritten because of a rebellion within Trump’s own party.

A judge halted Trump’s second attempt at a ban on travel from several Muslim countries.

And Republican lawmakers probing Trump’s ties to Russia threatened subpoenas over the executive branch’s stonewalling.

In one of the presidential debates, CNBC’s John Harwood asked Trump if he was running “a comic book version of a presidential campaign.” Now Trump seems to be running a cartoon version of a presidency, and he’s Elmer Fudd. His proposals could, if successfully implemented, be ruinous. But so far, at least, Trump has been mercifully incompetent. [...]

Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, lasted just 24 days on the job after misrepresenting his contacts with Russia. Attorney General Jeff Sessions falsely testified that he’d had no contacts with the Russians, forcing his recusal from Russia investigations once the truth came out.

Trump’s nominee to be labor secretary withdrew in the face of broad opposition. His education secretary, who suggested that schools need guns to defend against grizzlies, was confirmed only when the vice president broke a tie vote. 

Trump blamed a “so-called” judge for striking down his first travel ban and proposed blaming the court system if there was a terrorist attack; his own Supreme Court nominee called such remarks disheartening.

Trump conducted sensitive diplomacy over a North Korean missile launch with the Japanese prime minister surrounded by diners at his Mar-a-Lago country club, one of whom posted online a photo of the man carrying the nuclear football.

Trump, after inflating the crowd size at his inauguration and embracing a conspiracy theory that 3 million to 5 million Americans voted illegally, falsely accused the media of not covering terrorist attacks. The White House then produced a badly spelled list of attacks, most of which had been covered. Conway invented one attack, the “Bowling Green massacre.”

Conway pitched Ivanka Trump’s fashion line on Fox News. Taxpayers have subsidized millions of dollars’ worth of expenses related to Mar-a-Lago and the Trump sons’ foreign travel.

Trump marked Black History Month with remarks suggesting he thought abolitionist Frederick Douglass was still alive.

Trump opened a rift with Australia in an angry phone call with that ally’s prime minister. He provoked the Mexican president to cancel a trip to Washington, and he baffled the Swedes by alluding to fictitious refugee-related violence “last night in Sweden.” Britain postponed a visit from Trump in hopes that anti-Trump protests would cool.[...]

This tragicomedy adds irony when you consider that the main character is the same one who campaigned by saying “they laugh at our stupidity” and “we are led by very, very stupid people” and “I have the best words, but there’s no better word than ‘stupid.’ ”

Now the world has reason to laugh at us — because we’re with stupid.

Elad Zadikov dismissed from coalition and Torah culture portfolio for opposition to anti-family value dissemination ​​in kindergartens

Arutz7

Herzliya city council member Elad Zadikov was dismissed from the coalition and the Torah culture portfolio due to his opposition to the dissemination of anti-family values ​​in kindergartens.

Zadikov wrote a strongly worded letter to the mayor, Moshe Fadlon following articles on Arutz Sheva revealing the Hoshen organization's infiltration into kindergarten activities in various places, including Herzliya.

Zadikov - who is a council member from the Gesher faction, which represents mainly baalei teshuva - returnees to Torah observance - claimed to the mayor that he is turning the Herzliya education system "into the first in Israel to impart deviant tendency values ​​as a normal model, even to be emulated."

"On behalf of what public," he asked, "were you allowed to poison the minds of our kindergarten children and introduce a spirit of lasciviousness and confusion into the tender souls of Herzliya's 3,4,5-year-olds!? The fact that they are affiliated with the general public education system does not allow anyone to confuse basic concepts and the traditional values ​​of home and family unit."

Fadlon responded to Zadikov that "the education system in our city is among the most advanced and enlightened in the State of Israel. This is not the case with your letter which is full of inaccuracies, scientific and ethical ignorance, fear and lack of understanding of the age we live in. Perhaps if during your childhood, the education system was somewhat different, your letter would not represent so deep a confusion between superstition and fact."

He added:

"In 1920 women's suffrage was recognized in the United States, in 2001 the first female combat pilot finished the pilot's course in Israel, and ever since then the civilized world has realized that there is nothing to prevent women from also being in 'men's' trades, this does not hurt femininity in the family unit or in future education - the opposite is correct.

"In Israel, like in the entire world, the right is recognized to choose one's spouse, irrespective of sex, to establish a family unit, and live a dignified and equal life.

"Sexual orientation is not an incurable disease, is not contagious, and according to all the studies is not subject to education. What is given to education is accepting people as people, and the ability to look at difference, whether physical, emotional, or sexual, and this without making generalizations.

"Unfortunately, your approach is what has often brought harm to another in an attempt to expel him rather than to accept him, leading to physical injury.

"What you say in your letter, as well as in the committee you attended in the Israeli Knesset, carries libelous and offensive themes in their spoken parts, and constitutes incitement and is misleading in the written parts.

"In the old days special religious police were established who acted to harm non-virtuous girls and people with homosexual orientation, all under the shadow of a law which was canceled in 1988 (prohibiting homosexual relations in Israel).

"It would be proper for a Herzliya city council member to undergo broad educational training on individual rights, science, and human nature, accepting those who are different, and educational methods, so that a compilation of such nonsense will never again be written.

"The education system in Herzliya will continue to educate their children to love and accept one another, to mutual support and full equality, both among the religious public and different communities, and also on the subject of women.

"I do not see a place for a council member in the coalition who subscribes to dark medieval views against women and whole communities, to yet serve in a post responsible for Torah culture.

"In light of your words, and until you wise up and accept those different from you, on my authority, I am informing you that you are dismissed from your job in the coalition, and as holder of the Torah culture portfolio.

"Parenthetically I will note that I reserve for myself the right to take legal measures, if asked, for your words of slander and lies to the Israeli Knesset.

"Best regards,

Moshe Fadlon

Mayor"

White House Tries to Soothe British Officials Over Trump Wiretap Claim

NY Times

The White House has tried to soothe an angry Britain after suggesting that President Barack Obama used London’s spy agency to conduct secret surveillance on President Trump while he was a candidate last year but offered no public apology on Friday.

A spokesman for Prime Minister Theresa May said on Friday that the White House had backed off the allegation. “We’ve made clear to the administration that these claims are ridiculous and should be ignored,” the spokesman said on condition of anonymity in keeping with British protocol. “We’ve received assurances these allegations won’t be repeated.”

The reassurances came after British officials complained to Trump administration officials. Kim Darroch, the British ambassador to Washington, spoke with Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, at a St. Patrick’s Day reception in Washington on Thursday night just hours after Mr. Spicer aired the assertion at his daily briefing. Mark Lyall Grant, the prime minister’s national security adviser, spoke separately with his American counterpart, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster.

“Ambassador Kim Darroch and Sir Mark Lyall expressed their concerns to Sean Spicer and General McMaster,” a White House official said on condition of anonymity to confirm private conversations. “Mr. Spicer and General McMaster explained that Mr. Spicer was simply pointing to public reports, not endorsing any specific story.”

Other White House officials, who also would not be named, said Mr. Spicer offered no regret to the ambassador. “He didn’t apologize, no way, no how,” said a senior West Wing official. The officials said they did not know whether General McMaster had apologized.

The controversy over Mr. Trump’s two-week-old unsubstantiated accusation that Mr. Obama had wiretapped his telephones last year continued to unnerve even Mr. Trump’s fellow Republicans. Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma, said Friday that Mr. Trump had not proven his case and should tell Mr. Obama he was sorry.

“Frankly, unless you can produce some pretty compelling truth, I think President Obama is owed an apology,” Mr. Cole told reporters. “If he didn’t do it, we shouldn’t be reckless in accusations that he did.”

The flap with Britain started when Mr. Spicer, in the course of defending Mr. Trump’s original accusation against Mr. Obama, on Thursday read from the White House lectern comments by a Fox News commentator asserting that the British spy agency was involved. Andrew Napolitano, the commentator, said on air that Mr. Obama had used Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, the signals agency known as the GCHQ, to spy on Mr. Trump.

The GCHQ quickly and vehemently denied the contention on Thursday in a rare statement issued by the spy agency, calling the assertions “nonsense” and “utterly ridiculous.” By Friday morning, Mr. Spicer’s briefing had turned into a full-blown international incident. British politicians expressed outrage and demanded apologies and retractions from the American government.

Mr. Trump’s critics assailed the White House for alienating America’s friend. “The cost of falsely blaming our closest ally for something this consequential cannot be overstated,” Susan E. Rice, who was Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, wrote on Twitter. “And from the PODIUM.”

Mr. Trump has continued to stick by his claim about Mr. Obama even after it has been refuted by a host of current and former officials, including leaders of his own party. Mr. Obama denied it, as did the former director of national intelligence. The F.B.I. director has privately told other officials that it is false. After being briefed by intelligence officials, the Republican chairmen of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees have in the last few days said they have seen no indication that Mr. Trump’s claim is true.[...]

Ki Sisa; Why Did Moshe Rabbeinu Suddenly Bow by Rabbi Shlomo Pollak

Guest post by Rabbi Shlomo Pollak

In Parshas Ki Sisa , after the י''ג מדות של רחמים the Torah says [34;8] וימהר משה ויקד ארצה וישתחו - and Moshe Rabbeinu quickly bowed to Hashem... But, what was the rush?

Many different approaches are taken, one of which the Even Ezra says only ריקי מוח("Empty minds") can believe... The only problem is that many prominent Rishonom and even The Medrosh explain it that way?!?....

For questions and comments please email us at salmahshleima@gmail.com .

https://youtu.be/jS1dQfswSyM

Truth, Trust and Honesty:How to react to problematic leadership - religious or political by Joe Orlow

Guest post by Joe Orlow

Truth. Trust. Honesty. These are the oxygen for stable communities. The Torah brings this out numerous times. For example, cheating on weights is juxtaposed with the rise of our enemies.

So when Rabbinical leaders issue rulings that are out of whack, Rabbi Eidensohn steps to the plate and rebalances things.

And personal experience demonstrates just how unpleasant a community can be when some of its would-be leaders are out of order. The rank-and-file either consciously, or in a more subtle manner, end up mimicking the traits -- whether good or bad -- of its leaders. Sneaky leader: sneaky populace.

I'm writing this post in response to n invitation from Rabbi Eidensohn. My audience is the Z'kanim who follow this blog. Z'kanim: the Torah scholars who follow this blog and care what is written here, but don't care to take the extra step of commenting publicly here. So we have been told via the grapevine. I am reminded of the Z'kanim who start out escorting Moshe and Aharon on the way to confront Pharaoh. A funny thing happened on the way to the palace. At each corner a man was lost here, a man was lost there. Till it was just Moshe and Aharon to present the message of G-d to the earthly king.

These Z'kanim wonder why Rabbi Eidensohn has veered into the realm of politics. Is it not obvious? What is true of the Torah leaders holds true of civil leaders.

A Torah community with a fraudulent leadership is like a bridge that is rusting and corroded; like a highway with signs that misdirects drivers. Would you get in a road where the traffic lights routinely malfunction? Why in the world would anyone follow in the Derech of Gadokim who are off the Derech?!

A President that acts callously to protocol, precedent, and procedure can easily upend what a quarter of a millennia of statecraft has established. The cumulative effect of millions of citizens over centuries to build a more perfect form of government through blood, sweat and tears can come tumbling down like a majestic skyscraper shot through with passenger jet arrows.

I think that would be a good outcome. From the political ashes and rhetorical rubble we will build a moral foundation for the future. To me, Mr. Trump is like Noach, his ascendancy to the White House buoyed by my vote and the votes of sixty million of my friends.

I respect those who feel the flood of populism is really washing away the good, not the bad. So, the fact that I may disagree with Rabbi Eidensohn doesn't diminish my regard for him. Just the opposite, I've gained a new admiration for his courage in running this blog.

But for those who snip and snipe from the sidelines, they gather my disdain. Why haven't they started their own blogs? Where are their bold hearted Drashas calling out the misdeeds of a lazy leadership? Oh. I know. They don't want to lose their jobs. Or affect the marriage potential of their offspring. Risk averse cowards. Pulling back as we turn the corner of a momentous moment in history.

Donald Trump’s Big Health-Care Lie Puts Barack Obama’s Weak One to Shame

Daily Beast   Let’s first travel back in time to 2013, when Barack Obama was pilloried for saying “if you like your health-care plan, you can keep it.” Remember the furor over that?

Because he said it a lot, and it turned out to be untrue. And the right went absolutely ballistic—not only was Obama a bald-faced liar, but it showed what a shell game the whole health-care overhaul law was. It turned out that only 4 million people out of a total of more than 250 million insured lost their health-care plans, but still, 4 million is 4 million flesh-and-blood Americans. Obama’s lie was, as you might recall, named the “Lie of the Year” for 2013 by Politifact, which counted 37 separate times Obama had said with no caveats that everyone would be able to keep their coverage.

Well, I don’t know exactly how many times candidate and President Donald Trump has said things like everyone will have coverage under his Obamacare replacement. But it was a lot. His plan would be “something terrific.” “I am going to take care of everybody.” “Everybody’s going to be taken care of much better than they’re taken care of now.” It must be dozens. And that’s on top of the dozens of denunciations of Obamacare as a “disaster” that wasn’t helping people.

Well, now we have the Congressional Budget Office’s assessment of the Republican replacement plan (which technically burst from the womb as Ryancare rather than Trumpcare, thought the White House pledged late last week to move heaven and earth to pass it even as it remains the one thing that Trump emphatically doesn’t want to smack his name on). And what does the CBO have to say about this terrific plan that’s going to take care of everybody and rescue America from the disaster?

It has to say: 14 million more uninsured by 2018. That’s a year and change! Fourteen million people thrown back to the wolves. And more—another 7 million by 2020, and another 3 million by 2024, making for a grand total of 24 million people who currently have health coverage thrown off the rolls as a direct result of this bill, the Republican “replacement” bill.

If Obama got Lie of the Year over 4 million, what does Trump get over 24 million? True, the competition for lies is a lot more robust than it was in that now innocent-seeming year of 2013. But surely this deserves some kind of prize.

Oh, there’s more. Remember all those times you heard Trump trash the premium increases under Obamacare? Not, I will note, without justification. Premium increases and high deductibles have been a bane of Obamacare for many consumers.

But what does the CBO say TRyancare will accomplish on the premium front? It projects increases in 2018 and 2019 of about 15 or 20 percent higher than under Obamacare.

Also, the CBO says that the Republican plan really socks it to a group that it’s never politically very wise to sock it to. I refer you to Table Four on page 34 of this .pdf, listing the CBO’s estimated premium increases for 21-, 40-, and 64-year-olds at different income levels under the GOP plan. The most striking thing is this: Under current law (Obamacare), a 64-year-old earning $26,500 a year pays a net premium (after the tax credit) of $1,700. RyanTrumpCare whacks away at that earner’s tax credit such that he is left paying a whopping $14,600.[....]

Because there are two styles of duplicity afoot in Washington right now. There’s Trumpian dishonesty, which consists of his plain-faced lies about his behavior and his evidence-free outbursts like the one he directed at Obama two weekends ago.

Then there’s your more standard Republican duplicity, like promises that health care would be easy to bring to everyone if we just got government out of the way and let the market work its wondrous magic. That may be how it works in Ayn Rand novels, but that isn’t how it works in the actual world. In the actual world, anyone who’s given the matter five minutes of honest thought (emphasis on honest thought) comes to the obvious realization that the only thing that can bring premiums and deductibles down is for more healthy people to have to buy insurance.[...]

And from there, if you’re being honest, you then realize that the only entity that can make people buy insurance is the federal government; and that you have to give them an incentive to do so, which means subsidies. And all that spells Obamacare. It’s complicated and flawed, sure. But any attempt to do it any other way will wind up where the CBO just tossed RyanTrumpCare: in the garbage, where it belongs.

Paul Ryan must know this deep down. Or no—lately we’ve begun to realize that maybe he doesn’t, right? That jaw-dropping line of his about it being the “fatal conceit” of Obamacare that the healthy pay for the sick revealed, as many have by now observed, that he doesn’t seem to understand what insurance even is.

And Donald Trump clearly doesn’t know it. That line of his a couple weeks ago, equally jaw-dropping, that “nobody knew that health care could be so complicated” was a howler. No, Donald. We all knew. It’s just that you didn’t, because while you were out there on the stump lying repeatedly about giving people the best possible coverage, you weren’t bothering to actually learn anything about the topic. Now you have to.[...]

Using Air Quotes, White House Walks Back ‘Wiretap’ Talk

NY Times

Two senior White House officials suggested on Monday that President Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that President Barack Obama had tapped his telephone was not meant to be taken literally, arguing that Mr. Trump had been referring more broadly to a variety of surveillance efforts during the 2016 campaign when he made the incendiary accusation.

“He doesn’t really think that President Obama went up and tapped his phone personally,” said Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary.

In fact, Mr. Spicer said, when Mr. Trump charged in a Twitter post last weekend that Mr. Obama “had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower,” he was referring generally to surveillance activities during the 2016 race — not to an actual telephone wiretap.

“The president was very clear in his tweet that it was, you know, ‘wiretapping,’” Mr. Spicer said, using his fingers to make a gesture suggesting quotation marks. “That spans a whole host of surveillance types of options.”

Continue reading the main story

Mr. Spicer said there have been “numerous reports from a variety of outlets over the last couple months that seemed to indicate that there has been different types of surveillance that occurred during the 2016 election.”

The remarks were the first time the White House sought to explain the accusation Mr. Trump made in a series of posts on Twitter saying Mr. Obama “was tapping my phones” and calling the former president a “bad (or sick) guy.”

The explanations came as the Justice Department asked the leaders of the House Intelligence Committee, who had given a Monday deadline to produce proof of Mr. Trump’s claim, for more time “to determine what if any responsive documents exist.”

Kellyanne Conway, Mr. Trump’s senior adviser, said in an interview on Sunday that Mr. Obama could have employed any number of devices other than a traditional telephone wiretap, even including a microwave oven.

Ms. Conway clarified on Monday that she was not accusing the former president of snooping via a kitchen appliance, arguing that her comments had been taken out of context.

“I’m not Inspector Gadget,” she said Monday on CNN. “I don’t believe people are using the microwave to spy on the Trump campaign.”

But in an interview with a columnist for The Record of Bergen County, N.J., the day before, she said Mr. Obama’s alleged spying efforts against Mr. Trump could have been far more extensive than a telephone wiretap.

“What I can say is there are many ways to surveil each other,” Ms. Conway told the paper. “You can surveil someone through their phones, certainly through their television sets — any number of ways.”

Surveillance can even be carried out with “microwaves that turn into cameras,” she added. “We know this is a fact of modern life.”

The unusual and shifting explanations from Mr. Spicer and Ms. Conway reflected the contortions that members of Mr. Trump’s inner circle have employed to explain the president’s explosive accusation, which he has yet to address personally. Neither Mr. Trump nor anyone at the White House has presented any evidence for the claim, instead asking Congress to investigate it as part of its inquiry into Russia’s interference in the presidential election.[...]

Understanding the true meaning of Purim - Trump as Achashverous and Rav Shmuel as Mordechai

Purim is always a special time of year in terms of simcha – but trying to understand it is mind bending. In fact we have a mitzva to get drunk to clear our minds of the rational categories which interfere with proper understanding.

This year I realized there is a rather obvious way of presenting the complexities of Purim to the modern mind.

========================================================

Once upon a time there was a king – we will call him Trump because I like the sound of the name. He was filthy rich and obsessed not only with money and power – but also women. In fact King Trump was married to his third wife when this story opens. Due to his third wife getting a bit uppity – because she was taking the problem of women’s issues too seriously – he got rid of her. He felt it was important not only that his wife but all women realize that they are inferior and subordinate to their husbands. So he sacrified her for the common good.

However after she was disposed of – he realized he needed a new wife.

He was advised that this time he should only take the best wife in his kingdom and therefore he encouraged all the unmarried women in the kingdom to apply. He was to interview all of them – sort of like trying out an apprentice – and pick the finalist as his wife.

At that time there was a problem for the Jews of “left wingers”. Mamash Satan incarnated. Satan had a number of manifestations – sometimes he was known as Obama while other times he was known as the Clintons! They planned the Final Solution of the Jews in the Kingdom with the help of Deep Government forces.

The Gadol HaDor at that time was a tzadik by the name of Rav Shmuel. He had the assistance (some say he was manipulated) of his son Shalom. When they realized the danger the Jews were in they devised a plan that was not only pure genius but also was truly inspired by ruach hakodesh. Rav Shmuel told his wife to apply to the contest to be Achashverous wife. She initially resisted – after all it was violently against the Torah and her Beis Yakov education – and it was clearly against her inherent feelings and sensitivities of modesty. Besides she had a very good marriage to the gadol hador – why would anyone trade that to be the wife of that buffon and lecher – Achashverous?

However her husband told her that it was Daas Torah that she had to commit adultery to save the Jewish people and of course she eventually accepted her fate – as any true Baas Yisroel would do. He told her that this was true hishtadlus. She tried to convince him that segulos such as magnets and crystals would works better - but he put his foot down and told her this was what G-d wanted! [To be continued - feel free to submit your own version]

The Dangerous Safety of College

NY Times

The moral of the recent melee at Middlebury College, where students shouted down and chased away a controversial social scientist, isn’t just about free speech, though that’s the rubric under which the ugly incident has been tucked. It’s about emotional coddling. It’s about intellectual impoverishment.

Somewhere along the way, those young men and women — our future leaders, perhaps — got the idea that they should be able to purge their world of perspectives offensive to them. They came to believe that it’s morally dignified and politically constructive to scream rather than to reason, to hurl slurs in place of arguments.

They have been done a terrible disservice. All of us have, and we need to reacquaint ourselves with what education really means and what colleges do and don’t owe their charges.

Physical safety? Absolutely. A smooth, validating passage across the ocean of ideas? No. If anything, colleges owe students turbulence, because it’s from a contest of perspectives and an assault on presumptions that truth emerges — and, with it, true confidence.

What happened at Middlebury was this: A group of conservative students invited Charles Murray to speak, and administrators rightly consented to it. Although his latest writings about class divisions in America have been perceptive, even prescient, his 1994 book “The Bell Curve” trafficked in race-based theories of intelligence and was broadly (and, in my opinion, correctly) denounced. The Southern Poverty Law Center labeled him a white nationalist.

He arrived on campus wearing that tag, to encounter hundreds of protesters intent on registering their disgust. Many jammed the auditorium where he was supposed to be interviewed — by, mind you, a liberal professor — and stood with their backs to him. That much was fine, even commendable, but the protest didn’t stop there.

Chanting that Murray was “racist, sexist, anti-gay,” the students wouldn’t let him talk. And when he and the professor moved their planned interchange to a private room where it could be recorded on camera, protesters disrupted that, too, by pulling fire alarms and banging on windows. A subsequent confrontation between some of them and Murray grew physical enough that the professor with him sought medical treatment for a wrenched neck.

Middlebury isn’t every school, and only a small fraction of Middlebury students were involved. But we’d be foolish not to treat this as a wake-up call, because it’s of a piece with some of the extraordinary demands that students at other campuses have made, and it’s the fruit of a dangerous ideological conformity in too much of higher education.

It put me in mind of important remarks that the commentator Van Jones, a prominent Democrat, made just six days beforehand at the University of Chicago, where he upbraided students for insisting on being swaddled in Bubble Wrap.

“I don’t want you to be safe, ideologically,” he told them. “I don’t want you to be safe, emotionally. I want you to be strong. That’s different. I’m not going to pave the jungle for you. Put on some boots, and learn how to deal with adversity.”

“You are creating a kind of liberalism that the minute it crosses the street into the real world is not just useless, but obnoxious and dangerous,” he added. “I want you to be offended every single day on this campus. I want you to be deeply aggrieved and offended and upset, and then to learn how to speak back. Because that is what we need from you.”[...]

Protests aren’t the problem, not in and of themselves. They’re vital, and so is work to end racism, sexism, homophobia and other bigotry. But much of the policing of imperfect language, silencing of dissent and shaming of dissenters runs counter to that goal, alienating the very onlookers who need illumination.

It’s an approach less practical than passionate, less strategic than cathartic, and partly for that reason, both McWhorter and the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt have likened it to a religion.

“When something becomes a religion, we don’t choose the actions that are most likely to solve the problem,” said Haidt, the author of the 2012 best seller “The Righteous Mind” and a professor at New York University. “We do the things that are the most ritually satisfying.”

He added that what he saw in footage of the confrontation at Middlebury “was a modern-day auto-da-fé: the celebration of a religious rite by burning the blasphemer.”

The protesters didn’t use Murray’s presence as an occasion to hone the most eloquent, irrefutable retort to him. They swarmed and swore.

McWhorter recalled that back when “The Bell Curve” was published, there was disagreement about whether journalists should give it currency by paying it heed. But he said that it was because they engaged the material in detail, rather than just branding it sacrilegious, that he learned enough to conclude on his own that its assertions were wrong — and why.

Both he and Haidt belong to Heterodox Academy, a group of hundreds of professors who, in joining, have pledged to support a diversity of viewpoints at colleges and universities. It was founded in 2015. It’s distressing that there was — and is — even a need for it.

But according to an essay in Bloomberg View last week by Stephen Carter, a professor of law at Yale, the impulse to squelch upsetting words with “odious behavior” is so common “that it’s tempting to greet it with a shrug.”

“The downshouters will go on behaving deplorably,” Carter wrote, “and reminding the rest of us that the true harbinger of an authoritarian future lives not in the White House but in the groves of academe.”[...]

IDF lowers standards after realizing women can't keep up, provides benches to help climbing. Will Hamas do the same?

Arutz 7

An IDF officers' training base added benches to help female soldiers climb over walls during fitness tests. The "unfair" fitness test was videotaped and shown on Channel 10 during the summer of 2016.

The Forum for IDF Fortitude explained, "The IDF discovered that women in combat units suffered many physiological injuries, failed the entrance tests and fitness routines, and fell behind during any strenuous physical activities.

"Therefore, the IDF have adapted the training and courses, and lowered the bar to enable more women to participate.

"For example, during officer training, the military reduced the entrance exam in navigation from 10-12 kilometers to six kilometers for women. Distance in a later exam was reduced from 18 kilometers to 10 kilometers for women. The way effort is measured in the course takes physical and navigational abilities into account, and adapts them according to gender.

"In one of the fitness tests in the IDF Officers' School, the women run with one canteen and two magazines, and they climb over a wall using a bench. Men run with two canteens, five magazines, and must climb the wall without help. The maximum time given to men is seven minutes; the women have nine minutes.

"In the tests before they enter Officers' School, men's and women's abilities are measured differently. As a result, men who have higher abilities are not accepted to the course, and women take their places."

'Corruption entered the rabbinical establishment

Arutz 7

The Supreme Court submitted its ruling on the "Rabbis Affair" in which the Chief Rabbinate issued fictitious certificates of higher Torah scholarship to security personnel from the IDF, police and the Prison Authority.

In 1999-2003, the Chief Rabbinate issued thousands of certificates of Higher Torah Scholarship to security personnel from the IDF, police and the Prison Authority. The students studied halachic topics in special frameworks set up for them in various places in the country in order to obtain the Higher Torah Scholarship certificates which gave them a significant addition to their publicly funded wages.

The Jerusalem District Court, headed by judge Amnon Cohen, ruled that the study frameworks opened around the country had not been officially authorized by the Chief Rabbinate, the Education Ministry and the security establishment and did not meet the base standard required for receiving wage benefits. In order to meet the requirements and obtain the benefits, certain documents were forged and false reports were issued to present a facade of a study program which meets requirements.

The certificates were issued despite the fact that those who received them did not even meet the minimal requirements of the authoritative bodies and were not eligible for wage benefits. This caused significant losses to the public. The accused in this case were party to acts of deception in issuing these fictitious certificates.

Judges Neil Hendel, Yitzhak Amit and Dafna Barak-Erez all rejected the appeal against the conviction of senior members of the Rabbinate, stating that " public corruption has entered places we would never have dreamt of. In this case it entered the rabbinical establishment, the IDF and the police."

Murderer of 7 schoolgirls given hero's welcome in Jordan - "He simply fulfilled his national and religious duty"

Arutz 7   A hero's welcome is planned for the Jordanian soldier released last night after serving 20 years in prison for murdering seven Israeli schoolgirls during a class trip in 1997.

Ahmed Daqamseh was a soldier in the Jordanian army when he opened fire on a group of students who were visiting the “Island of Peace” of Naharayim on March 13, 1997, as part of a class trip.

Daqamseh was sentenced to life in prison for the massacre, which in Jordan usually means 25 years in prison. However, he was released five years early following repeated calls for his release. In 2013, 110 out of 150 Jordanian MPs signed a petition calling for his release.

In 2011, then-Jordanian Justice Minister Hussein Mjali caused an uproar when he called for Daqamseh’s release, claiming that he is “a hero. He does not deserve prison. If a Jewish person killed Arabs, his country would have built a statue for him instead of imprisonment."

Following the deadly terror attack, Jordan’s King Hussein personally visited Israel and, alongside Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, expressed his condolences to the girls' parents.

Daqamseh has denied committing any crime and has said that he should be freed from prison since he had simply fulfilled his national and religious duty by killing the students.

What Happens When You Fight a ‘Deep State’ That Doesn’t Exist

NY Times

The Trump administration, in its fight against the “deep state,” could risk exacerbating the very problems it has pinned on shadowy bureaucratic forces: leaking, internal conflict and the politicization of institutions like intelligence agencies.

American institutions do not resemble the powerful deep states of countries like Egypt or Pakistan, experts say. Nor do individual leaks, a number of which have come from President Trump’s own team, amount to a conspiracy.

The diagnosis of a “deep state,” those experts say, has the problem backward.

Mr. Trump has put institutions under enormous stress. He has attacked them publicly, implied he would reject intelligence findings that cast his election in a poor light, hobbled agencies by failing to fill critical positions and cut off bodies like the National Security Council from shaping policy.

That has forced civil servants into an impossible dilemma: acquiesce, allowing their institution to be sidelined, or mount a defense, for example through leaks that counter Mr. Trump’s accusations or pressure him into restoring normal policy-maker practices.

Those defensive acts have deepened perceptions in the Trump administration of a “deep state” that must be rooted out. This tit-for-tat cycle, scholars say, risks substantially weakening both Mr. Trump and government institutions. In the long term, they warn, this could undermine the government’s ability to function — and to serve the millions of Americans who depend on it.

A Repurposed Term

Though Mr. Trump has not publicly used the phrase, allies and sympathetic news media outlets have repurposed “deep state” from its formal meaning — a network of civilian and military officials who control or undermine democratically elected governments — to a pejorative meant to accuse civil servants of illegitimacy and political animus.

It is akin to Mr. Trump’s appropriation of “fake news,” a term that originally described rumor mills but one that he has used against any outlet that reports real news unfavorable to his administration.

Much as his use of “fake news” miscasts reporting as lying, “deep state” presents apolitical civil servants as partisan agents. And it mischaracterizes those officials, who seek to defend their place within the system, by presenting them as acting against that system.

Both phrases have become tools that Mr. Trump or his allies use to deflect perceived criticism by attacking the legitimacy of the critic.

The effect is to twist basic functions of democratic governance into partisan disputes. This might serve Mr. Trump in the short term, but in the long run it carries risks.[...]

When, for example, Mr. Trump accused former President Barack Obama of tapping his phones, he forced the F.B.I. into an unappealing choice: Let the accusation slide, though it implies the bureau broke the law, or rebuke the president and risk the appearance of playing politics.

Either way, the bureau loses some of its internal influence, public stature or, quite possibly, both. Losing stature can be especially dangerous, as the bureau needs public trust to effectively operate.[...]

Susan Hennessey, a former National Security Agency lawyer, and Helen Klein Murillo, a law student, wrote in Lawfare that Mr. Trump’s accusations that career civil servants are partisan agents, along with his administration’s aggressive internal investigations, could be read as “an intention to use the pretense of leak investigations to engage in political retaliation.”

This risks deepening rank-and-file mistrust of Mr. Trump, which Ms. Hennessey and Ms. Murillo believe helped motivate initial leaks.

The cycle of mutual suspicion could well spiral, further breaking down the relationship between the president and the institutions through which he is meant to govern.[...]

Each round, even if it ends in a policy defeat for the White House, galvanizes supporters against the institution blamed for his setback. This is driven by political polarization, in which Americans who see themselves as aligned with a political tribe come to support that group’s positions and oppose its perceived adversaries.

Mr. Trump, for instance, portrayed his immigration ban’s legal defeat as the fault of politicized judges. The attacks did not resurrect his order, but it did tell millions of supporters to distrust the judiciary as politically motivated. His attacks on the news media send similar messages.

This undermines the ability of these institutions to act as checks on the president or other powerful actors, because they can be more readily dismissed as serving narrow partisan agendas.

Polarizing supporters against intelligence agencies — which, in response to leaks, he has called “un-American” and has said echo “Nazi Germany” — makes it easier to reject their policy recommendations, freeing up Mr. Trump to pursue policies at home or abroad that those agencies might oppose.

That is one potential parallel with real deep states, which leaders such as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey have used as foils to justify consolidating power.

Timur Kuran, a Duke University professor of political science, wrote on Twitter, “Team Erdogan used the ‘deep state’ narrative to destroy political institutions and restructure the bureaucracy. Happening now in USA.”

That polarization can work both ways. Some critics of Mr. Trump have championed the perception that institutions are working to broadly oppose Mr. Trump.

Representative Ted Lieu, a Democrat from California, wrote on Twitter: “We are whistle-blowers, press, judges, legislators, cooks, teachers. We are #DeepState. We are the American people.”

When it was suggested that “deep state” could be a risky rallying cry and that institutions could suffer if they were seen as a political opposition, Mr. Lieu wrote in response, “Unless you believe the President is a danger to the Republic, which I do.”

But Dr. Saunders saw the administration as shooting itself in the foot. Treating the bureaucracy as an adversary, she said, had mostly served to mire Mr. Trump in controversies and weaken his ability to put policy into effect.

“You get the feeling that Trump doesn’t understand that working invisibly through the bureaucracy would strengthen him,” she said.

The great anti-Semitism panic of 2017

Washington Post

I’m not insensitive to anti-Semitism. Despite growing up in Jew-friendly New York City, I experienced my share of it — kids throwing rocks at my Jewish Day School bus, anti-Semitic graffiti on our home’s fence, among other incidents. And as Volokh Conspiracy readers know, I’ve blogged quite a bit about anti-Semitism. I’ve mostly written about anti-Semitism coming from the far left, but I’m not at all naive about the existence and virulence of anti-Semitism on the far right.

Nevertheless, I’ve been rather taken aback by the panic in the Jewish community over American anti-Semitism since Donald Trump won the election. The recent spate of hoax bombing threats to Jewish community centers and other Jewish institutions around the country has been a precipitating factor, but the fear is drastically out of proportion to the threat; no bombs have been found, and there are no indications that there is any real physical threat to Jews. By contrast, in the past decade or so there have been actual murders at a JCC and a Jewish federation office without precipitating such panic.

It seems that much of the panic is in fact due to Trump, with the JCC threats seen as a potential first sign of the deteriorating status of American Jews. While Jews are the most-liked religious group in the United Sates, some degree of trepidation is not unreasonable. As Andrew Silow-Carroll points out,

Most Jews didn’t vote for him, and regarded his campaign antics as particularly unsettling, from his appeal among white supremacists and ethno-nationalists to his willingness to exploit the country’s racial and ethnic divides.

In his embrace of a fiercely chauvinistic “economic nationalism,” White House strategist Steve Bannon represents something “unprecedented and inconceivable” in the minds of many Jews. Until Trump, resurgent nationalism seemed a problem for Europe, where economic malaise, fear of immigrants and the ghosts of the 20th century have combined into a particularly toxic brew on the right.

Yet, just looking at my Facebook feed, the origins of the fear bear only a tangential relationship to the actual Trump campaign. For example, I’ve lost track of how many times Jewish friends and acquaintances in my Facebook feed have asserted, as a matter of settled fact, that Bannon’s website Breitbart News is a white-supremacist, anti-Semitic site. I took the liberty of searching for every article published at Breitbart that has the words Jew, Jewish, Israel or anti-Semitism in it, and can vouch for the fact that the website is not only not anti-Semitic, but often criticizes anti-Semitism (though it is quite ideologically selective in which types of anti-Semitism it chooses to focus on). I’ve invited Bannon’s Facebook critics to actually look at Breitbart and do a similar search on the site, and each has declined, generally suggesting that it would be beneath them to look at such a site, when they already know it’s anti-Semitic.

There is also a general sense among Jews, at least liberal Jews, that Trump’s supporters are significantly more anti-Semitic than the public at large. I have many times asked for empirical evidence that supports this proposition, and have so far come up empty. I don’t rule out the possibility that it’s true, but there doesn’t seem to be any survey or other evidence supporting it. Given that American subgroups with the highest proportions of anti-Semites — African Americans, first-generation Hispanic immigrants, Muslims and high school dropouts — are strong Democratic constituencies (though the latter group appears to have gone narrowly for Trump this time), one certainly can’t simply presume that Trump has a disproportionate number of anti-Semitic supporters.

Often living in a blue bubble, liberal Jews easily can panic when they don’t know anyone who voted for the other side’s candidate(s), and can assume the worst about the other side’s supporters. Indeed, liberal Jews tend to panic whenever “the right” is doing well in American politics. Consider this Wall Street Journal headline from exactly 22 years ago: “Religious Fervor: Some Liberal Jews, To Their Own Surprise, See a Rise in Bigotry — And, Unlike Many Orthodox, They’re Concerned About The Right’s New Power.” The article elaborates:

These are anxious times for American Jews. Still reeling from the results of the November election, many liberal Jews are alarmed by the rise of the religious right. They are increasingly uncomfortable with verbal attacks by conservative commentators on the “cultural elite” and on “Hollywood,” both of which they believe are code words for Jews. And they are shaken by well-publicized reports of neo-Nazi groups and of anti-Semitic violence by teenage “skinheads.” Suddenly, secular Jews — for whom anti-Semitism was always something remote — are feeling a new vulnerability and wondering whether the political and religious tide is turning against them.

Remember the great anti-Semitic pogroms of 1995? Neither do I. To take another example, I’m not sure what, if anything, Philip Roth was trying to say with his 2004 book “The Plot Against America,” but I know liberal Jewish reviewers welcomed it as a warning of the ever-present threat of anti-Semitic right-wing fascism looming over the United States in Republican-dominated America.

Meanwhile, Jewish “defense” groups, most prominently the Anti-Defamation League, have stoked the panic with wildly exaggerated rhetoric. Jonathan Greenblatt, a former Democratic politico who now runs the ADL, stated in November that the “American Jewish community … has not seen this level of anti-Semitism in mainstream political and public discourse since the 1930s.” Among other omissions, Greenblatt must have slept through the George W. Bush administration, when mainstream “experts,” mostly on the left, were claiming that the small number of Jews in the Bush administration had somehow manipulated the Gentiles running the administration into leading the United States into a war against Iraq to benefit Israel. Unlike the current anti-Semitic rhetoric coming from the neo-Nazi fringes, these allegations were coming from places such as the Harvard University and the University of Chicago faculties.[....]

Lo and behold, along comes Trump, and left-wing Jewish activists are portraying Jews as one of the many groups threatened by him. Trump, and, more specifically, exaggerating the threat of anti-Semitism from Trump and his supporters, gives these Jews an opportunity to, for example, stand side by side with Muslim activists in opposing various “isms” and “phobias,” rather than quarreling with them over Israel.

The irony of all this is that if you talk privately to those who work in the Jewish organization world, many will confide that the greatest threat to the security of the American Jewish community is “changing demographics,” which is a euphemism for a growing population of Arab migrants to the United States. Anti-Semitism is rife in the Arab world, with over 80 percent of the public holding strongly anti-Semitic views in many countries. The issue of whether and to what extent the United States should expand refugee admissions is a complex one, and a potential rise in (potentially violent) anti-Semitism, at least in the short term until refugees and their families assimilate, is hardly the only factor to be considered. But it’s surely a paradox that the groups and individuals who express the most public fear of potential anti-Semitism emanating from the Trump administration express little if any concern about the potential problems of admitting an untold number of refugees and immigrants from countries where extreme anti-Semitic sentiments are mundane.