The writing on the wall: Being a Jew in Trumpland

Ynet

It started during the presidential campaign with anti-Semitic attacks on Jewish journalists, but since Donald Trump’s election the ripples of hatred have turned into a giant wave. In a special coast-to-coast project, Yedioth Ahronoth presents excerpts demonstrating the extent to which American Jews have become consumed with trepidation and who are beginning to realize that ‘never again’ is a very fragile phrase in the current climate.

Last Monday morning, local television channels in the United States were flooded with footage of small children holding the hands of adults walking next to them and trying to catch up with them. The adults, meanwhile, were trying to get the little ones to walk a bit faster, without making them panic. From North Carolina to Maryland, from Alabama to Rhode Island, thousands of children were evacuated from at least 12 Jewish community centers and schools.

It was the fifth wave in a month and a half of telephone bomb threats against Jewish centers. Only one day earlier, desecrated headstones were discovered in Philadelphia’s Jewish cemetery.

A week earlier, vandalized gravestones were discovered in the St. Louis Jewish cemetery. Several days prior, dozens of Jewish centers were evacuated. A week earlier, swastikas were taped to the front doors of a synagogue in downtown Chicago, and swastikas were scrawled on the windows of a New York City subway train.

The day before that, and a day after, and pretty much every day since the change of administration in the US, America’s Jews have been facing provocations and insults which they never thought they would experience there, in that enlightened democracy.

In the middle of the week, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) issued a new security advisory to workers and visitors of Jewish institutions. This followed 90 bomb threats in a week and a half, including one threat directly against the ADL headquarters in New York, although they all eventually turned out to be false threats.

According to the new advisory, the different institutions must review their evacuation procedures, in case of bomb threats, as well as the security arrangements at the entrances to the buildings.

These troubling phenomena are now a matter of routine, and a direct result of the freedom felt by anti-Semites, racists and other ignorant people to bring their hatred out into the open.

It began during the presidential campaign, when Jewish journalists were the main victims of anti-Semitic harassment, whether on social media or in emails with images of ovens. But since Donald Trump’s election—after gaining the support of neo-Nazi organizations, leaders of the Ku Klux Klan and the new generation of white supremacists—the ripples of anti-Semitism have turned into a big wave.

Under the anti-political correctness guise, real poison has been discharged into the American air. In the meantime, no one is actually trying to stop it, before something really bad happens. The result is that America’s Jews wake up in the morning without knowing where the next insult, in the best-case scenario, or the next physical threat, in the worst-case scenario, will come from.

The following excerpts—some using their full name, some using only their first name for fear of being exposed—describe what the US Jewry is going through right now. This relatively small segment of the population—proud, pluralistic and esteemed—knows its history and is beginning to understand that “never again” is a very fragile phrase these days:

The toxic strain of liberalism that makes blacks—and Jews—invisible

Tablet Magazine

Early on in Get Out, Jordan Peele’s directorial debut and one of the most significant American films of the last three decades, a couple runs over a deer on a country road. It’s all downhill from there: Soon, the cops arrive, and the film’s real drama begins to unfurl. The driver, Rose, is white. Her boyfriend, Chris, is black. A policeman asks Chris for his driver’s license. Rose insists Chris was never behind the wheel, and so shouldn’t have to present his papers. Tense looks are exchanged. The drama of race in America simmers, threatening to boil over.

It does, but not as you might expect. Soon, Chris and Rose arrive at the elegant home of her parents, the Armitages. Dad’s a surgeon with a white beard and twinkly eyes. Mom’s a therapist with a soft smile. They’re huge fans of Obama, as they make a point of telling Chris right away. They’re every bit as welcoming as that cop was suspicious. They’re enlightened folk, good progressives who hold all the right ideas. And they may also be homicidal maniacs.[...]

What’s truly terrifying about Get Out is that its monsters aren’t the stock bigots we’re used to seeing—the sweaty, swaggering sheriffs with Southern drawls, the oily Republican preppies—but a novel, and much more realistic, kind of menace. Peele’s villains say all the pretty things about white guilt and black empowerment and racial equality, but when it comes to doing, they’re very much proponents of more coercion from on high, more social engineering, more bad ideas that put the bodies and the minds of black people at mortal risk. Chris’ experience may be more macabre than usual, but it’s not fundamentally different than, say, that of the folks living on Chicago’s West or South sides—where 762 people were murdered last year alone, and where the response of the progressive administration was to call for making the already stringent and clearly ineffective gun laws even more stringent and ineffective—or that of the kids in Detroit, where decades of progressive policies have turned the public schools into crumbling monuments to hopelessness. In those cases and too many more, black lives matter mostly as abstractions, the moving background in the morality play designed to reinforce liberal pieties, vilify anyone who doesn’t hold the right opinions as racists, and, most tragically, ignore the real lives of real people in need of real help.

American Jews, thankfully, are considerably more fortunate, but the dread evoked by Get Out is not entirely unfamiliar. In most of polite society, Jewishness is treated in much the same way as the murderous Armitages treat blackness: an idea to be celebrated while the actual people who embody it are destroyed. For proof, look no further than Linda Sarsour, one of the organizers of the massive Women’s March, protesting the inauguration of Donald Trump: Having raised tens of thousands of dollars to help rebuild a Jewish synagogue desecrated by anti-Semitic vandals in St. Louis, she thinks nothing of siding with Islamic Jihad operatives or embracing convicted terrorists who have murdered two young Jewish men. To our progressive betters, this is not a problem: They embrace Judaism but have no problem with those who kill Jews. Platitudes are offered, power is preserved, and the parade of folly goes on.

Like many, I’ve witnessed it firsthand. Spending a few years as a professor at New York University, I soon realized that while my colleagues would, if asked, go to great lengths to denounce anti-Semitism as vile, they had little patience for anyone, myself included, who believed that Jews were people who deserved basic rights. When I emailed a fellow professor and asked to participate in a weekend seminar she was organizing to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—a subject I know a thing or two about—I was ignored, and eventually informed that the event was by invitation only, and that I wasn’t invited. It was, of course, dedicated to discussing the singling out of Israel for boycotts, divestments, and sanctions, a plot that would hardly benefit from the perspective of a proud Israeli-born Jew who insists his people have as much of a right to self-determination as everyone else in the world.

It was this kind of corrosive ideology—extolling the values of diversity while enforcing a crippling orthodoxy that had little patience for Jewish identity—that eventually drove me to get out of academia. It didn’t take long for me to learn the same lesson Chris does in the movie, namely that the point of this new strain of toxic liberalism isn’t really to help victims of racism or anti-Semitism or any other sort of discrimination; rather, it’s to reconfigure the identities of white people so that they may go on and enjoy the same exact comforts to which they’re accustomed. It’s the same prejudices wearing better clothes. And it works because it projects its disdain for the unruly lower orders onto poor whites—working stiffs like that hapless cop, schlubs who probably eat at Denny’s and listen to Toby Keith and vote for Donald Trump—while continuing to deny actual black people the right to cast themselves as the protagonists of their own dramas outside of the rigid scripts written for them by the white elite. The same is true for anti-Semitism, which the same elites can now project onto Israel: The Jewish State, our intellectual and moral betters insist, is the home of the bad Jews, murderous thugs who massacre innocent Palestinian babies and therefore can expect nothing less than the knife, the bomb, and the rocket, while the good Jews are those who nod in agreement, smile politely, think little, and say less.

Chris’ purgatory, like mine, wasn’t one specific moneyed estate occupied by one specific set of psychopaths. It was, and is, the twisted version of multicultural meritocracy peddled everywhere from our finest universities to our most revered newspapers, institutions once devoted to free inquiry and now committed to nothing more than laundering the inherited privilege of the children of the enlightened elites who can then emerge, after four years of devouring the doctrine, as social justice warriors who can safely inherit their parents’ fortunes and get jobs in cool start-up tech companies, which, surprisingly or not, look like the exact opposite of the quota-based politically correct heaven-on-earth to which they aspired so fervently just a few months earlier. It’s a scam, and, as Jordan Peele reminds us, it can be a deadly one.

Watching Get Out, then, I felt the old sense of dread that gnawed at me every day of my academic career creep back. I know what it’s like to be in a room full of people who smile but don’t really believe you matter. And in life, just like in that fine movie, there’s really only one thing to do in such situations: acknowledge that the threat is real, refuse to play the game, and get the hell out.

Republicans wave a white flag on repealing Obamacare

Washington Post

Democrats denouncing the new House GOP health-care bill should actually be dancing in the streets. Perhaps, in the privacy of their own homes, the savvier ones are popping the champagne corks. The true meaning of the proposed legislation is that, after eight years of all-out political and ideological struggle against Obamacare, Republicans have surrendered — pretty much on all fronts.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) should have written the bill on a large white tablecloth and run it up the nearest flagpole.

Yes, yes, the plan is labeled “repeal and replace.” And, true, it does away with many of the Obamacare provisions that conservatives most reviled, including the individual mandate to buy insurance and a bevy of taxes. If enacted and fully implemented, the plan probably would insure fewer people and shift more of the cost down the income distribution scale, in part by restricting the flow of Medicaid funds to the states.

Democrats and their allies in the liberal policy community are not wrong to fret about that. However, when they look up from their spreadsheets, what they’ll notice is that much of Obamacare’s architecture remains: The GOP bill relies on regulated and subsidized individual insurance, plus a Medicaid program that would be smaller than it has been since Obamacare began, but still larger than it was before, to fill coverage gaps left by the mainstays of U.S. health care: Medicare and employer-paid plans.

After vilifying that set of interlocking policy compromises as a budget-busting, freedom-destroying ticket to second-rate medical care, the leaders of the GOP House have now declared, in writing, that they don’t have a fundamentally different idea, much less a better one. Even the individual mandate, and the “tax penalty” that enforced it, isn’t really gone. It is recast as a requirement to maintain continous coverage, enforced by a surcharge payable to insurance companies.

Heretofore, the health-care debate was a contest between Republicans, who were bent on repealing “every word of Obamacare,” and Democrats, who defended it.

Now it’s an argument about whose subsidized-regulated-individual-market-plus-some-Medicaid thingy works better.[...]

Conservative true believers certainly aren’t impressed. “Many Americans seeking health insurance on the individual market will notice no significant difference between the Affordable Care Act (i.e., Obamacare) and the American Health Care Act,” wrote Michael A. Needham of Heritage Action for America. “That is bad politics and, more importantly, bad policy.”[...]

Donald Trump got elected president by promising to repeal Obamacare — except for all the good stuff such as preexisting-condition coverage and up-to-26-year-olds staying on their parents’ plans — as well as to protect Medicare.

A not-unfair summary of the typical American voter’s view on health care might go like this: “Give me a plan with abundant covered services and choice, and shift as much of the cost as possible onto someone else, while protecting the poor, but for heaven’s sake don’t make it ‘government-run.’ ”

That inconsistent set of demands pretty much defined public opinion back in 2009, too, which is partly why Obamacare came out as it did. It represented the maximum politically feasible distance Democrats could move toward their top goal, universal coverage.

The GOP bill conversely — and revealingly — represents the maximum progress House Republicans think they can make toward free-market health care without committing political suicide. They sure didn’t get very far.

MK Shuli Muallem works to increase sanctions against recalcitrant husbands, but not wives. Why the discrimination? Muallem refuses to say.

Arutz 7

Jewish Home Knesset faction chairman MK Shuli Mualem, together with the Emunah women's movement, is promoting a bill to mandate stricter sanctions against recalcitrant husbands in divorce cases. But what about fractious females? On this topic Muallem becomes uncommunicative.

The Knesset yesterday approved the first reading of the law to deprive recalcitrant prisoners of privileges granted to observe religious life, including billeting in the Torah wing, study and keeping books, attending Torah classes and access to holy books. In addition, the objector will not be allowed to get special kosher meals.

The explanatory annex accompanying the bill clarifies that it is intended to bring pressure to bear upon male objectors. "A person who chooses to live according to Jewish law can not decide on the parts he accepts and those he rejects," Muallem said. "Judaism encompasses the fundamental principle of 'Love thy neighbor as thyself'."

More female recalcitrants than male

Arutz Sheva asked MK Muallem if she would promote sanctions against recalcitrant women. This in light of data recently published by the management of the Rabbinical Courts that indicate that there are more female recalcitrants - that is, women who refuse to accept divorce from their husbands - than recalcitrant husbands.

According to the court management, unlike male objectors, female objectors are not sent to prison. Whenever they maintain their refusal, they are still entitled to receive alimony, if not working. While husbands of recalcitrant wives may get "permission of one hundred rabbis" to remarry, as opposed to refused women, these permits are rare.

MK Muallem told us that she does not want to answer our question.[...]

The macabre trial of Prof. George Bensoussan: Verdict today

Update: He was acquitted!

Times of Israel  In their ruling, the tribunal said the plaintiffs failed to substantiate the hate speech charges and concluded that Bensoussan merely “misspoke” in quoting Laacher without intention to incite hatred, AFP reported.

The trial pitted anti-racism activists against one another, including within LICRA. One of France’s most revered thinkers, the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, resigned from its honorary board in protest over what French media called “l’Affaire Bensoussan.”

Long frustrated over what they regard as politically correct censorship, right-leaning French Jews reacted with outrage over Bensoussan’s prosecution.
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Arutz 7

[...]

George Bensoussan also is a highly reputed authority in the specialized area of Jewish communities in Arab countries. He is a hard-working, productive academic who has contributed significantly to humanitarian causes.

Observing the current macabre-trial-in-progress, one cannot help but think of just two possibilities regarding the incomprehensible, completely irrational behaviour of both French organizations and the juridical authorities: either the Dreyfus Affair mentality is still thriving in the country of the officer who was utterly loyal to his country but had ‘sinned by default’ - that is, by being born Jewish; or French society's way of life in the 21st century makes it prone to a recurrence of the one of the most shameful episodes of French history.

The resurrection of the Dreyfus Affair seems to be perceived by much of the French public and juridical institutions with shocking enthusiasm. In fact, since October 2015, France has been galvanized by what is known as the Bensoussan Trial.[...]

The chronicle of distinguished historian George Bensoussan is in the public domain. To recapitulate briefly, in October 2015, Bensoussan, head of of the Memorial de la Shoah editorial department, was invited by famous French philosopher and member of the French Academy Alain Finkielkraut to participate in a radio program and discussion. In the course of the discussion, Bensoussan, who was born in Morocco and knows the reality of life in the Arab world first-hand, referred to remarks made by Algerian-born Professor Smain Laacheron of Strasbourg University on the topic of anti-Semitism among the Arab families in France, in a film shown on French TV3.

In his portrayal of the anti-Semitic atmosphere which has become the norm in the Arab milieu of France, but is still regarded as an unspoken taboo in France, at least publically, Laacher described extensively the phenomenon of what he called ‘domestic anti-Semitism’ in Arab families, with such details as “one of the parents’ insults to their children when they want to reprimand them, is to call them ‘Jews.'“ Laacher also said on the record, in the movie broadcast on French TV3, that “anti-Semitism in Arab families is first of all domestic (...), it is in the air that one breathes” – all this according to the transcript of the film.

In the radio program discussion which caused the entire brouhaha, George Bensoussan praised professor Laacher for his bravery, and said, re-phrasing Laacher: “ as Laacher very bravely said ( ...), in France, in Arab families ( ...) anti-Semitism is imbibed with one's mother’s milk.”

It took only three days for a group of pro-Islamic activists to bring their claim against George Bensoussan to the French media watch-dog, CSA, accusing the historian of propagating "biological racism.” The absurd accusations snowballed with maddening energy and speed. The absurd does have the characteristic of multiplying in no time, as George Orwell could tell you.

The pro-Islamist organization Le Collectif Contre l'Islamophobie en France (Collective Against Islamophobia in France, CCIF) wasted no time in bringing the case against George Bensoussan to the Paris prefecture which, in a surprising move, decided to prosecute.

That, in our view, was and is the essential point of yet another shameful public trial in France, astonishingly similar to the Stalin show-trials.

There are many organizations involved by now in the Bensoussan Affair, and the French public is also able to observe the intensifying battle within French Jewry, itself divided on what its position should be regarding the senseless witch-hunt of a distinguished Jewish historian.

But in our opinion, these are not the essential things to concentrate on, because the story is hardly surprising.

The core of the matter goes back to November 2015 and the hurried decision of the Paris prefecture to prosecute the distinguished historian in criminal court for paraphrasing another academic. Not only France, but the rest of the world must become familiar with the name of the prosecutor and anyone else who contributed to the Kafka-like realities that occurred in Paris in late January 2017 when the trial took place. George Bensoussan himself, most perceptively, named it ‘intellectual terror.’

It is chilling to admit that George, his friends and people in similar positions in France are living in a literally Kafkian reality.

Remarkably, the film, in which sociologist Laacher gave a long tirade explaining the roots of the current anti-Semitism in Arab families in France, was publically aired in France back in 2015 two weeks after George Bensoussan talked about it, without any consequences for Laacher. Moreover, Laacher published several articles in the leading French media, including Le Monde, both before and after the radio program in which George Bensoussan mentioned him, with no reaction from any of those enthusiastic organizations and activists, and no prosecutor’s interest in him at all.

In the process of the public defense of Bensoussan, several well-known academics of Arab origins were named, men who analyze the phenomenon of anti-Semitism in Arab families in their works and who expressing the same opinion, facts, and analyses publically as did Bensoussan; none of them had ever become the subject of any punitive action or reprimand.

The court hearings in Paris at the end of January 2017 were surreal, with witnesses for the prosecution stating that ‘anti-Semitism, indeed, is rooted in many Arab families in France, but not in every family’; with experts issuing delusional opinions like ‘while Arab families indeed call their children Jews, it is not regarded as an insult, but rather a normal part language and life.’[...]

The supposed justification for prosecuting him, a distinguished historian with an impeccable record of academic research and many books to his credit, a man of high international reputation - boggles the mind. Charged in criminal court for a metaphor? Why should George Bensoussan now have a criminal record? What about his and his family's nerves, health, and emotions? What about the moral consequences of this ongoing witch-hunt, persecution and trial? [...]

Trump and his allies view Obama as Satan!

Chicago Tribune

President Donald Trump's weekend allegations of a "Nixon/Watergate" plot to wiretap his 2016 campaign confused intelligence analysts, befuddled members of Congress and created fresh work for fact-checkers. Within 24 hours of his allegations, made on Twitter, the administration conceded that the president was basing his claim not on closely held information, but on a Breitbart News story quoting the conservative radio host and author Mark Levin.

But in conservative media, where the claim originated, Trump has gotten credit for cracking open a plot by a "deep state" of critics and conspirators to bring down his presidency. And the perpetrator is former president Barack Obama.

"It would [seem] that the 'Russia hacking' story was concocted not just to explain away an embarrassing election defeat, but to cover up the real scandal," wrote Breitbart's senior editor-at-large Joel Pollak.

"Trump confounds these people because he's always a step or two ahead," Rush Limbaugh told his listeners on Monday. "It's a direct line to the Democrat Party and Obama and members of the Obama administration that Trump is signaling, 'You don't face the usual feckless bunch of opponents who never fight you back.'"

Trump's wiretap allegations completed a feedback loop that started during the presidential campaign and has gotten sturdier since. The president's media diet includes cable television news shows, like "Fox and Friends," where guests and hosts regularly defend him. On Twitter, he frequently elevates stories that grew in conservative talk radio, or on sites like Breitbart News and InfoWars, out of view of a startled mainstream media. Monday's news cycle demonstrated just how strong the loop was, as Levin himself appeared on Fox News for 12 barely interrupted minutes to share his theory that the alleged wiretapping was a political hit job.

"Donald Trump is the victim. His campaign is the victim," said Levin, as a Fox News "alert" scrolled over the screen. "These are police state tactics. If this had been done to Barack Obama, all hell would break loose. And it should."[...]

Republicans in Congress tend to give the president the benefit of their doubt. In interviews and comments since Saturday, they have suggested that Trump overstated what was known - conflating, for example, media reports on wiretapping with a growing theory that the Obama administration seeded operatives throughout the government to undo his presidency. But they have paired that critique with promises to study what he's alleged.

"The president has at his fingertips tens of billions of dollars in intelligence apparatus," said Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, in a Monday interview with CBS News. "I think he might have something there, but if not, we're going to find out." [...]

. "Obama's goal to 'oust' Trump from presidency via impeachment or resignation," wrote InfoWars commentator Paul Joseph Watson on Thursday. On Friday, the site blew up a report about banks settling with nonprofit groups after fraud lawsuits to tell readers that Obama had "funneled billions to liberal activist groups."

More mainstream sites have also stoked theories that Obama was pulling strings. Last Wednesday, the Daily Mail published an interview with an unnamed "close family friend," who claimed that former White House adviser Valerie Jarrett had moved into Obama's D.C. home to help "mastermind the insurgency" against Trump.

"The Daily Mail story is completely false," said Kevin Lewis, a spokesman for the former president.

But the Jarrett story went viral on the right; on a Fox Business segment over the weekend, the radio host Tammy Bruce cited as an "under-covered" revelation that demonstrated the forces arrayed against Trump. In her Monday interview with Gowdy, Ingraham argued that a Watergate-level scandal was building - but at one point, she suggested, hopefully, that the president was not simply basing his rhetoric on what was in conservative media.

"He must know something beyond what's on Breitbart," Ingraham said.

"I would hope," said Gowdy, "given the fact that he's the leader of the free world."

I will be in Brooklyn March 14-30

I will be coming to Brooklyn right after Purim for two weeks.

Latest lie from Trump - about number of prisoners released by Obama from Guantánamo

NY Times  Trump said on Tuesday on Twitter that “122 vicious prisoners, released by the Obama Administration from Gitmo, have returned to the battlefield. Just another terrible decision!”

Is that true?

No, what Mr. Trump wrote is false.

What is true?

According to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, of the 714 former Guantánamo Bay detainees who were transferred to other countries by Jan. 15, 2017 — dating back to when the Bush administration opened the prison in Cuba in January 2002 — 121 are “confirmed” to have engaged in militant activity after their release.

However, the overwhelming majority of those 121 men, 113 of them, were transferred under President George W. Bush, not President Barack Obama.

Notably, about half of the men deemed recidivists are dead or in custody.[...]

High Court, rabbinical court decide to expose gett refuser

YNET

After agreeing and then refusing his wife a traditional Jewish divorce, the High Court stands with the rabbinical court that decided to publish the photo and details of Sharon Ben Haim, in an effort to get him to finally release his wife from marriage

The Haifa Rabbinical Court has published the details and photo of divorce-refuser Sharon Ben Haim.

The publishing came after Ben Haim petitioned to the High Court to stop the Rabbinical Court from publishing his details and photos and imposing religious and social sanctions on him. His petition was denied.

The publishing came after Ben Haim petitioned to the High Court to stop the Rabbinical Court from publishing his details and photos and imposing religious and social sanctions on him. His petition was denied.

Ben Haim has denied his wife, who lives in New Jersey, a divorce for the past seven years. The two married in 2008. They lived in the United States, where their daughter was born.

But their relationship ran into difficulties when, according to his estranged wife, Ben Haim and used verbal violence against her, humiliated her and her family and even demanded her to report to him on every financial decision she makes.

Attorney Tal Itkin, who is representing the wife in Israel, said that during a joint visit to Israel in 2010, the wife petitioned for a gett (a traditional Jewish divorce). Ben Haim originally agreed and even signed the gett, but did not hand it over due to a disagreement over a stay of exit order issued against him. Eventually, the stay expired, at which point he fled the country.

Since then, and despite consistent efforts by the rabbinical court, Ben Haim has refused to grant his wife a gett that would release her from the marriage. In 2012, a rabbinical court declared him to be a felon, informing Jewish communities around the world of this and calling on them to enact several sanctions. Among them are excluding him from prayer minyans and not allowing him to be buried in a Jewish cemetery.

A representative of Ben Haim appealed the rabbinical court's decision, claiming that he is willing to grant a gett, but that he is afraid to return to Israel to do so, for fear that he will be arrested. After the rabbinical court rejected his appeal, he petitioned the High Court, which also rejected his case. [....]

Ben Carson Refers to Slaves as ‘Immigrants’ in First Remarks to HUD Staff

NY Times

Ben Carson’s first full week as secretary of Housing and Urban Development got off to a rough start on Monday after he described African slaves as “immigrants” during his first speech to hundreds of assembled department employees. The remark, which came as part of a 40-minute address on the theme of America as “a land of dreams and opportunity,” was met with swift outrage online.

Mr. Carson turned his attention to slavery after describing photographs of poor immigrants displayed at the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration. These new arrivals worked long hours, six or seven days a week, with little pay, he said. And before them, there were slaves.

“That’s what America is about, a land of dreams and opportunity,’’ he said. “There were other immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships, worked even longer, even harder for less. But they too had a dream that one day their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, great-grandsons, great-granddaughters, might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land.”

The comparison was first reported by USA Today and quickly drew the ire of social media users who attacked the secretary, who is African-American, for what they saw as racially insensitive comments. On Twitter, the comedian and actress Whoopi Goldberg recommended Mr. Carson watch the 1980s mini-series “Roots.”[...]

The Department of Housing and Urban Development was stunned by the uproar and spent part of the afternoon responding to the news media on Twitter. In a statement, it said critics were watching only a short clip from a 30-minute speech and were viewing the remarks in bad faith.

“This is the most cynical interpretation of the secretary’s remarks to an army of welcoming HUD employees,” the department said in a statement. “No one honestly believes he equates voluntary immigration with involuntary servitude!”

A spokesman for the department said Mr. Carson’s speech appeared to cause little upset among the employees who had gathered to hear him speak. Several hundred people attended the event and many lingered afterward to snap selfies with Mr. Carson, who was sworn in last Thursday.

On Monday night, following a radio interview in which he defended his remarks earlier in the day, Mr. Carson also did so on Twitter. “You can be an involuntary immigrant,” he said, adding that “slaves didn’t just give up and die, our ancestors made something of themselves.” He continued, “An immigrant is: ‘a person who comes to live permanently in a foreign country.’”[...]

As president, Trump can easily get answers on Obama wiretap claims

Times of Israel

If Trump wants to know if he was the subject of surveillance, as he’s alleged, he hardly needs Congress to investigate

A series of weekend tweets by the president focused public attention on intelligence collection authorities long shrouded in secrecy. Trump accused former President Barack Obama of ordering wiretaps on his phones but offered no proof to back the claim, and the White House then called on Congress to investigate the allegations.

But former government lawyers say Trump hardly needs Congress to answer this question.

“The intelligence community works for the president, so if a president wanted to know whether surveillance had been conducted on a particular target, all he’d have to do is ask,” said Todd Hinnen, head of the Justice Department’s National Security Division during the Obama administration and a National Security Council staff member under George W. Bush.

The latest storm began Saturday when Trump tweeted: “Is it legal for a sitting President to be ‘wire tapping’ a race for president prior to an election? Turned down by court earlier. A NEW LOW!” He followed up with: “How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!”

The Justice Department, not the president, would have the authority to conduct such surveillance, and officials have not confirmed any such action. Through a spokesman, Obama said neither he nor any White House official had ever ordered surveillance on any US citizen. Obama’s top intelligence official, James Clapper, also said Trump’s claims were false, and a US official said the FBI asked the Justice Department to rebut Trump’s assertions.

Why turn to Congress, Trump spokesman Sean Spicer was asked Monday.

“My understanding is that the president directing the Department of Justice to do something with respect to an investigation that may or may not occur with evidence may be seen as trying to interfere,” Spicer said. “And I think that we’re trying to do this in the proper way.”

He indicated that Trump was responding to media reports rather than any word from the intelligence community. Other officials have suggested the president was acting on other information.

Sen. John McCain, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said Monday that Trump needs to give more information to the American people and Congress about his wiretapping accusations. “The dimensions of this are huge,” McCain said. “It’s accusing a former president of the United States of violating the law. That’s never happened before.”

As for the genesis of a possible wiretap, it is possible the president was referring to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a 1978 law that permits investigators, with a warrant, to collect the communications of someone they suspect of being an agent of a foreign power. That can include foreign ambassadors or other foreign officials who operate in the US whose communications are monitored as a matter of routine for counterintelligence purposes.

The warrant application process is done in secret in a classified process. But, as president, Trump has the authority to declassify anything. And were such a warrant to exist, he could theoretically move to make it public as well.

If the president demands to know what happened, “the Justice Department can decide what’s appropriate to share and what’s not,” said Amy Jeffress, another former Obama administration national security lawyer.

The Justice Department applies for the warrants in a one-sided process before judges of the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Permission is granted if a judge agrees that there’s probable cause that the target is an agent of a foreign power. Though the standard is a high bar to meet, applications are hardly ever denied.[...]

The White House turned Sunday to Congress — which is already investigating ties between Trump associates and Russians — for help finding evidence to support his assertions. Some Republicans seemed inclined to try to help Trump get answers.

For Congress, getting to the bottom of this should not be difficult, said Dan Jones, a former Senate investigator and currently president of the Penn Quarter Research and Investigations Group.

“It’s a knowable, ‘yes or no,'” Jones said. If the answer is there was no such warrant, he said, the next step would be to ask the president why he made the claim. “That information would then be investigated to find out if it’s right or wrong.”