We're all learning to navigate uncharted territory.
Tuesday, April 16, 2024
More From Dershowitz On Israel vs Iran
Alan Dershoweitz has a new essay on Substack that is a condensed version of yesterday's YouTube post linked above. He makes several points that I think clarify the legal and moral background for potential reprisals by Israel against Iran. First, as I more or less intuited from the start, Iran's drone and missile attack on Israel over the weekewnd was an act of war, defined in Wiktionary as "An action that would justify the initiation of hostilities against the perpetrator; an action that by its nature comprises a cessation of peace." Dershowitz says,
As a matter of law and morality, Israel is entitled to respond to this act of war by overwhelming, even disproportionate, force against Iranian military targets.
Iran declared war on Israel by sending more than 300 bombs in Israel’s direction, aimed at civilian as well as military targets in Jerusalem and other locations. As a matter of law and morality, Israel is entitled to respond to this act of war by overwhelming, even disproportionate, force against Iranian military targets.
In the YouTube presentation, he goes into the question of proportionality, which he raises above, at greater length, arguing that there is no moral requirement that the Israeli response be in some way "proportionate" to the Iranian act of war. Dershowitz is, as far as I can determine, a not fully observant Jew, and he makes no reference to specific moral guidance on proportionality. But this sent me to the Roman Catholic definition of just war doctrine in CCC 2309:
The strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force require rigorous consideration. The gravity of such a decision makes it subject to rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy. At one and the same time
the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
there must be serious prospects of success;
the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.
The specific initial damage in this case, inflicted by the Iranian proxy Hamas in an invasion of Israeli territory on October 7, 2023, was over 1000 civilian deaths, often accompanied by torture and rape, and the seizure of hundreds of hostages, many of which haven't been released and appear to have been tortured, raped, and killed in captivity. Every indication is that given the opportunity, Hamas would repeat this act, and demonstrators on Hamas's behalf frequently repeat the motto "death to Israel", which in light of historical records like the Holocaust appears to be a statement of ultimate intent.
Israel's ultimate aim in response, at least as interpreted by Dershowitz, should be an elimination of this threat to Israel and the community of nations:
Even if Israel were to respond moderately, Iran would continue to wage war against Israel. As long as the Mullahs run Iran, the Mideast will remain in turmoil from Iranian aggression, either direct or through its terrorist surrogates.
A new Holocaust would certainly be lasting, grave, and certain damage to Israel and the community of nations. Even piecemeal attacks like October 7, intended to kill over a thousand Jewish civilians, are unacceptable especially insofar as they're intended as partial steps toward the overall goal. Dershowitz sees only one practical solution to the problem:
Accordingly, the ultimate goal of any Israeli retaliation should be regime change. The means can include destruction of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, which would considerably weaken the regime. . . . if the majority of Iranians support regime change, it is simply a matter of time before it occurs. This is unlikely to occur if the regime develops a nuclear arsenal which can shield it from outside pressures.
But this brings up the question of whether there are serious prospects for success. Dershowitz makes no specific argument in this direction, and this may be a weakness in his position -- we may agree, as I did at the start of the Russo-Ukraine war, that it's desirable to evict Russia from Ukraine's legal boundaries, but as experience has shown, this isn't proving practical given the level of resources the US and NATO are able to comnmit to do this.
Dershowitz himself acknowledges that he doesn't know what specific measures Israel plans for its retaliation; considering how close he is to both Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Herzog, this may not be entirely ingenuous, but there can be no question that feckless macho gestures like Iran's drone attack over the weekend would be insuficient to achieve any serious goal. But it's also clear that Israel would not deliberately inflict damage on civilians simply for the sake of killing civilians.
All we can be fairly certain about is that President Biden is not on board with any of Dershowitz's arguments, which strikes me as yet another indication of his overall deep moral confusion.
In May 2012, graphic artist Mara Zebest -- who was reportedly “working closely” with Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio's quest to prove Obama's birth certificate a forgery -- posted articles at American Thinker claiming that two famous photographs taken in the Situation Room on the day of the Bin Laden raid had been Photoshopped in order to create “The Illusion of Obama's Bin Laden Situation Room Leadership.”
. . . Six months before Zebest parsed the Situation Room photos, prominent conservative blogger Jim Hoft posted a story at his website headlined, “Swedish Paper: Obama Photoshopped into Famous Situation Room Photo.”
Citing a comment thread at Free Republic, Hoft embedded a picture from Swedish tabloid Afton Bladet featuring a caption asking readers “Do you see what is wrong with this picture?” In Hoft's telling, the tabloid concluded that the picture “must be a fake.”
I don't endorse those theories, but I'm never comfortable with an image that's just too good, which this one is. Which brings me to another photo from the Sit Room that was released yesterday in the belated wake of the Iranian missile and drone attack on Israel:
Former FBI Director James Comey recalled in his book that “Obama would have a series of exchanges heading a conversation very clearly and crisply in Direction A. Then, at some point, Biden would jump in with, ‘Can I ask something, Mr. President?’”
Comey continued: “Obama would politely agree, but something in his expression suggested he knew full well that for the next five or 10 minutes we would all be heading in Direction Z. After listening and patiently waiting, President Obama would then bring the conversation back on course.”
Except in the meeting over the weekend, there was no President Obama to bring things back on course. Having been in my share of completely useless meetings over the course of my life, my spidey sense tells me this must have been one of those, and everyone in the room was there for the photo op while they listened to Joe drone on for at least the fifth time about what he told Winston Churchill. Here's a hint of what must actually have happened:
The president knew a massive attack was in the works against our only ally in the Middle East, and he decided to go to the beach. Sure, Biden returned Saturday, but we’re back to these silly games from a most unserious administration.
. . . An unprecedented attack is about to happen against one of our allies, and this guy goes to the beach. Is it arrogance? Is it stupidity? Is it senility? Or is it a combination of all three?
But if you look at the actual timeline of the attack, which I discussed in yesterday's post, if the drones and missiles began to arrive in Israel at about 2:00 AM their time on Saturday, then the hundred or more slow-moving drones in particular had to have left Iran some hours earlier and had to have been tracked by US satellites from the start, which means Biden had to have been aware that things were under way before lunchtime in Washington, but it wasn't until 5:15 PM on Friday that he left for the beach -- just as, according to the timeline in my post yesterday, those drones were actually arriving in Israeli airspace, although US and Jordanian resources had already been shooting them down before they got that far.
So Joe knew exactly what would happen well before he left for the beach, and it was indeed happening as he was stepping onto Marine One to make the trip. But then, why did he have to cut the trip short the next morning? One theory might be that his handlers finally convinced him that it would be a bad look for him to stay in Rehoboth while this was going on, but I would almost say that the early return was scripted into the whole charade from the start, Joe races back to handle the crisis and avert World War III. By holding a useless meeting in the Sit Room. Right.
Iran informed Turkey in advance of its planned operation against Israel, a Turkish diplomatic source told Reuters on Sunday, adding that Washington had conveyed to Tehran via Ankara that any action it took had to be "within certain limits."
. . . The Turkish source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan had spoken to both his US and Iranian counterparts in the past week to discuss the planned Iranian operation, adding Ankara had been made aware of possible developments.
Earlier this week, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke to Fidan to make clear that escalation in the Middle East was not in anyone's interest.
"Iran informed us in advance of what would happen. Possible developments also came up during the meeting with Blinken, and they (the US) conveyed to Iran through us that this reaction must be within certain limits," the source said.
"In response, Iran said the reaction would be a response to Israel's attack on its embassy in Damascus and that it would not go beyond this."
One of my favorite contrarians is a YouTuber on the channel Romanian Tvee. Here's his take on the whole attack narrative:
At 1:24, he says,
When it comes to the Middle East, you got to understand that they do business a little bit differently than Western nations, especially when it comes to international politics. Like first of all, you need to understand how the nations are structured. You have the people at the top, the inner circle of oligarchs, and then you have everyone else. And the people at the top, they want to live normal lives. They want to drive their expensive cars, they want to live in their expensive mansions, they just, you know, want to enjoy the luxuries of life, but unfortunately in order to do that, they have to oppress everyone else, because it's a dictatorship.
. . . So they are kept in a level of ingorance that is far deeper than what's happening here in the West or in China. And a lot of the things that happen there are very masculine in nature, like their societies are also very patriarchal. So what they want the most is to see strength, right, like even though they are being oppressed by the oligarchy, they want the oligarchy to display strength, like that is the thing that they admire. Even if that strength is used against them, it doesn't matter, they want to see that their leaders are powerful.
. . . When you have something like it happened with Israel and the embassy, if you're the leader who just wants to drive the expensive cars and have a good life, you need to show the display of strength, because otherwise, you get uprisings, and it's not the type of uprisings that you get, oh, the truckers in Canada, or oh, look, some people are protesting in the streets, no, you can get, like generals that are switching sides, you can get the military doing an uprising, or you can get even assassinated.
. . . When something like this happens, the leaders do not want the conflict, they do not want war, because if they actually get war, then they don't get to drive around their expensive cars, they don't get to live their luxurious lives, but at the same time, they need to show the strength. So what they do is like this display, oh, we fired a hundred rockets, but they usually like phone the people they're firing the rockets at, and thy're telling them, yeah, by the way, clear those military bases, make sure that the airfield is empty by the time we fire it.
. . . A lot of these things are for show. A lot of these things are for the public.
This is insightful and correct, and it applies completely to the Iranian drone attack over the weekend. It was scripted by all parties, or maybe we should say by all parties except maybe the Israelis. The problem for the Israelis is that the October 7 attack wasn't a charade. Over 1000 Israeli civilians were killed, often after being raped and tortured. So Israel hit a consulate in Lebanon and killed the Iranian general who organized the attack. That wasn't a charade, either.
Biden's position is now pretty clearly that everyone's had their little kabuki, the Iranians have made a pro forma drone attack, we've had our big meeting in the Sit Room, and Israel now should shut up and play the game, no further reprisals, especially no reprisals that actually accomplish anything and make the Iranians at the top want to make another feckless show of strength. Let's all go back to driving our expensive cars and living the good life.
I don't think Israel works that way, even if Joe does. Israel is tired of that game; every few years, it costs real money and real lives to play by those rules. This is what Joe doesn't seem to grasp, and it's at the heart of the problem.
Very Quick Early Reaction To Iran's Attack On Israel
Here's my puzzle. According to this link, the first wave of Iranian drones and missiles arrived in Israel about 2:00 AM Saturday morning Israel time, which would have been 5:00 PM Friday night on the US East Coast. I spend a lot of my day on my computer, and I check the news a lot. The only headlines I saw all day yesterday (Saturday) was breathless reports that an Iranian drone strike could happpen -- but as far as the US was concerned, the strike had already taken place, early Friday evening on the East Coast, midafternoon Friday on the West Coast.
Yet the first reports that it had already taken place didn't appear, at least for me, until this morning, Sunday, nearly two days later. Nothing yesterday afternoon on YouTube, nothing on the conservative aggregators, nothing on Real Clear Politics. By midafternoon in Washington, nearly a day after the attacks began, the White House didn't quite know what to say:
The explanation is what I've believed for a couple of years: the holidays extend through each other, spring break extends to Memorial Day, probably the toughest stretch of the year, but then Memorial Day extends to Juneteenth, which extends to July 4, which extends to Labor Day, which extends to Indigenous Peoples Day, and so forth. Conservative writers and reporters are in on the scam as much as anyone else.
At 9:30 AM yesterday, Kaitlan Collins posted,
President Biden, who is currently in Rehoboth Beach, will return to the White House this afternoon to “consult with his national security team about events in the Middle East,” the admin says.
As of 9:30 AM on the East Coast, the whole attack, I would guess, had been over for some hours, as it would have been 16:30, or 4:30 PM, at that time in Israel, which is 7 hours ahead. The big National Security Council meeting that took place that afternoon was over yesterday's papers.
There isn't a single person in this picture that gives me even the slightest bit of confidence. Not one.
They can't even get the proper drug cocktail mixed in time for Biden to address the nation tonight. https://t.co/6drwf4RlHU
My biggest problem at this point is that long-form reporting and opinion writing has been out to lunch for at least the past year. Short-form talking heads on news reports and YouTube have been losing credibility since early 2023 when the Ukraine war turned south and the retired generals' predictions of driving Putin out of Crimea came to naught.
Here's a Fox report time stamped 3:25, but whether that was 3:25 PM yeterday or 3:25 AM today, I can't tell:
It doesn't matter if it was midafternoon yesterday or early this morning, the voice says breathlessly,
So the drones are on their way from Iran, apparently some have already been engaged, possibly or maybe probably, shot down. . .
No, this was concluded the night before.
Everyone's still on spring break, and they're already getting ready for Memorial Day. It doesn't matter which side of the political spectrum anyone's on, they're all coasting.
THE ANTI-TRUMP DREAM COME TRUE. Barring some last-second surprise, on Monday a dream will come true for the Democrats, resistance warriors, Never Trumpers, and lawfare specialists who have hoped for years to put former President Donald Trump on trial. It finally happens Monday in a courtroom in Manhattan.
Many legal experts, and not just those on the Right, have said the case against Trump is weak. But that doesn’t really matter. The fact is, Trump will be on trial, charged with 34 dubious felonies, and a jury in deep-blue Manhattan will likely find him guilty of something. That’s the point. After this trial, if things turn out like Trump’s enemies hope, every single Democratic reference to the former president, every single political ad, every party utterance will refer to Trump as convicted felon Donald Trump.
Even Alan Dershowitz seems slightly off the mark here:
At about 12:47, he says,
Donald Trump may very well be convicted, starting next week, the case will take a while because the jury has to be selected, but Donald Trump may very well be convicted of a non-crime. What he is charged with is simply not a crime. It's not a federal crime; it could have been a federal crime; the federal government didn't think it was, and they didn't prosecute him for it; it's not a state crime, and if it is a state crime, it's a misdemeanor, and what the prosecution did is that they cobbled together a federal crime which isn't really a crime and a state crime which isn't a crime, and they created what I call the Alexander Hamilton crime. Remember Alexander Hamilton paid hush money to Mrs Reynolds to make sure that she didn't disclose their consensual affair, exactly the same as the Donald Trump situation, and I doubt that Alexander Hamilton put that on his forms. He was the Secretary of the Treasury! But I doubt that anyone in American history has ever been charged with failing to disclose hush money payments on a corporate or even a government form.
This is odd, because although Dershowitz is a legal scholar, he's also a brilliant media strategist (I note that as of that YouTube from this past Tuesday, he appears to be back in Israel). A much more apposite case is one he's discussed himself recently, and I quoted him here over that Chicago Seven case:
I was a consultant on the case, because there were free speech issues, and the trial turned into a farce, because they had picked a judge named Julius Hoffman, who was a very right-wing jurist to preside over the trial, and he hated these radical defendants, and the radical defendants hated him, and Abby Hoffman came up with a tactic, he said basically to his lawyers and everybody else, "Look, we can't win this case in front of Judge Julius Hoffman. Let's see if we can go about getting it reversed on appeal, and the best way to do it is to provoke this judge, he has a short fuse, and provoke him into making error after error."
It seems to me that Trump and his attorneys are following a twofold strategy not much different from Abby Hoffman's: they've been filing motion after motion in recent weeks, in the view of the media aimed at delaying the trial, but I'm sure Trump and his attorneys are fully aware that the game is rigged, and there isn't going to be any delay. The motions are meant to build a record for post-conviction appeal -- the attorneys are professionally obligated to do this, but they're also fully aware that the intent of the trial is to convict Trump of something -- anythng -- before the election, and the appeals will be after the election. So all their motions are pro forma and not important to Trump's actual strategy.
But Abby Hoffman's strategy wasn't just to build an appellate record, it was to turn the trial itself into a circus. This was brilliantly successful, and it worked right away, no need to wait for the appeals court. It turned Hoffman and his codefendants into celebrities -- their celebrity status even outshone their status as martyrs, which was entirely secondary. Trump is a brilliant media strategist himself -- he has even Dershowitz's grudging admiration.
The upcoming trial is likely to put Trump in a perfect storm of media attention, with tabloid-style allegations of an affair with a porn star, but with the added feature of additional lowlifes like Michael Cohen and Michael Avenatti doing what comes naturally, namely, trying to extort Trump. We had a preview of this with E Jean Carroll. By that point, the public had tuned out the legal issues and focused on the circus, the narcissistic old woman who fantasized about being raped by Donald Trump. He kept edging up in the polls throughout the case. The media won't be able to turn their attention away from this case, either, which is the sort of environment in which Trump thrives. Abby Hoffman could have cooked this up himself.
As far as anyone knows, Joe Biden was the one who thought up the lawfare strategy. How's that been working out for him so far? The problem with this case for the Democrats is that nothing can go wrong -- but they're relying on a wonky cast of characters for whom much has already gone wrong. Frankly, I can't wait for the circus to start.
Mike McCormick, who served as Joe Biden’s stenographer traveling with him around the world including to Ukraine, recently published a book revealing what he saw, which included criminal activity in regards to the Burisma kickback scheme. “The Case to Impeach and Imprison Joe Biden” lays out probably the most comprehensive account ever written about the scheme.
I'm less concerned about Burisma, because it really isn't figuring into the current campaign, and I'm still puzzled that the amounts of money involved are so trivial, especially when spread around among Hunter and maybe a dozen other family members. A vice president ought to be getting more than a million here and a million there -- how can this be worth his time? That's the really interesting question, and if we ever get an anmswer, it'll say a lot more about the roots of his character. Is he a combination of kinda greedy but really dumb?
McCormick's remarks on Biden's overall persona seem consistent with those of Obama advisers and cabinet members we've already seen:
“When I worked for him, I thought Joe was harmless — egotistical, buffoonish, and unpresidential, but harmless,” he said.
Here's a problem worth working through: current conventional wisdom claims Joe has been in decline at least since his time as vice president, but this guy Mike McCormick served as his stenographer and traveled with him around the world -- and his impression as of ten or 15 years ago was that he was "egotistical, buffoonish, and unpresidential", pretty much what we have now. But if this was the case, how was he ever sold as presidential material?
What people do remember is that Biden began the current presidential cycle as the Democrats' putative front-runner, that he stumbled along the way and nearly washed out early. The Real Clear Politics average of polls showed him leading — but not dominating — the field throughout 2019. In a field that at one point teemed with more than 20 other hopefuls, Biden's polling rarely surpassed 30%.
. . . As the debates ground on and impeachment proceedings in Washington diverted media attention, Biden struggled to break away from the field. When his main challenger, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, had a heart attack in October, some Sanders backers gravitated to Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and other candidates, not Biden.
By the end of the Iowa caucuses on Feb. 3, Biden found himself an also-ran, just as in 2008. It was upstart candidate Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., who shared the winner's circle with Sanders. Biden finished fourth.
But Sanders won primaries until South Carolina, when
James Clyburn, the highest ranking black member of Congress as the House majority whip, announced his endorsement of Biden. According to NPR, this changed the momentum.
After Nevada, Sanders had been poised to win most of the 14 states voting in the March 3rd Super Tuesday contests. But South Carolina shifted the momentum. Sanders won in California, Colorado, Utah and his home state of Vermont. Biden swept the rest, including Texas and five other Southern states where he won at least 55% of votes among African Americans.
The shift in momentum dimmed Sanders' hopes for recovery in states where he had done well in 2016 — such as Missouri, Michigan and Washington. After Wisconsin joined that list on April 7, Sanders dropped out. Within a week, he endorsed Biden.
It appears that the lizard people Democrat establishment thought Sanders was too far left -- or at least, he seemed too far left and threatened to give up the game -- to succeed against Trump. In hindsight, it looks like there was never mich daylight between Biden and other putatively farther-left candidates like Sanders or Warren, which is a question someone needs to pursue.
As best anyone can tell, the lizard people then conducted a campaign based on a strategy of keeping Joe out of the public eye as much as possible while portraying him as a moderate. At the same time, COVID restrictions kept Trump from holding rallies, which reduced his visibility. But it looks like Biden's weakness as a candidate was fully apparent to insiders as of 2020, which may be behind more recent moves as reported by Politico last week:
President Joe Biden’s campaign is bringing on a slate of new pollsters to lead its number-crunching operation.
The group, which features several pollsters involved in efforts around Democrats’ stronger-than-expected 2022 midterms, reflect a continued shift to broaden Biden’s polling operation beyond the team that worked on his first successful campaign against former President Donald Trump. The moves were shared first with POLITICO.
. . . The expansion of Biden’s polling team comes at a complicated moment, given Biden’s stubbornly low approval ratings and pollsters’ struggles to measure the electorate accurately in the past two presidential races.
This may also reflect the lizard people's discomfort at Joe's, and now Dr Jill's, insistence that Joe is up in the polls, and the media is just reporting the wrong ones. The problem overall is that Joe is Caesar, which isn't much different from the problem the Romans had, which was that Caesar was Caesar.
This afternoon, President Trump shared an image of a 2018 letter from Stormy Daniels on his Truth Social Account.
Above the image of the letter from the porn star, turned darling of the Democrat Party, President Trump wrote:
“LOOK WHAT I JUST FOUND!”
He asked, “WILL THE FAKE NEWS REPORT IT??”
The image and part of the post are shown above. (Click on the image for a larger view.) It reads in part:
Over the past few weeks, I have been asked countless times to comment on reports of an alleged sexual relationship I had with Donald Trump many, many, many years ago.
The fact of the matter is that each party to this alleged affair denied its existence in 2006, 20011, 2016, 2017 and now again in 2018. I am not denying this affair because I was paid “hush money” as has been reported in overseas owned tabloids. I am denying this affair because it never happened.
This piqued my curiosity, since I posted two weeks ago on Michael Avenatti's reported allegation that the Trump hush money story was cooked up by Michael Cohen to extort the Trump Organization before the 2016 election, and in fact it was done while Cohen and Daniels were themselves having an affair.
Just about all anyone can conclude at this point is that the whole thing is hokum from start to finish, and anything anyone can possibly say about it is unprovable. But it turns out that this isn't the first time even this purported letter has come out. Factcheck.org had this to say about an earlier incarnation of the story in 2023:
Trump has denied the affair, claiming the payment was “to stop the false and extortionist accusations made by her about an affair.” Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, has said multiple times that she and Trump did have sex.
But a January 2018 letter in which Daniels denied that they had intercourse is being misleadingly cited by some conservatives on social media as proof that there is no case against Trump.
Daniels has said that, although the letter was not true, she signed it under pressure from her representatives, who warned that her life could become “hell in many different ways” if she did not sign it.
She doesn't identity her "representatives" in the statement, but according to Wikipedia, Michael Avenatti filed a lawsuit on her behalf against Trump for defamation in March 2018. According to the same entry, she terminated her arrangemeent with Avenatti in March 2019. In other words, it's hard not to conclude that it was Avenatti who pressured her to do the letter.
Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, tried to sue Trump for defamation in 2018, specifically taking aim at a tweet attacking her account of being threatened by a stranger in 2011 to stay quiet on her Trump story. Trump attacked the account as a "con job, playing the Fake News Media."
Federal Judge S. James Otero dismissed the lawsuit, saying Trump's tweet constitutes " 'rhetorical hyperbole' normally associated with politics and public discourse" and is protected by the First Amendment.
Daniels tried to appeal the decision in 2022, saying her then-attorney Michael Avenatti filed the defamation suit "without my permission and against my wishes." But a judge ruled against her, leaving her on the hook for nearly $300,000 in Trump's legal fees.
Former President Trump’s legal team on Monday asked the judge in his hush money case to subpoena adult film actress Stormy Daniels’ communications with Michael Cohen, the former president’s ex-fixer. . .
In a letter to Justice Juan Merchan, Trump’s attorneys asked the judge to enforce a subpoena for the communications Daniels — whose real name is Stephanie Clifford — had with Cohen and former Playboy model Karen McDougal, who are both expected to testify in the hush money trial starting later this month.
It sounds as though this trial, and the cross-examination of witnesses like Stormy Daniels and Michael Cohen, is going to be quite a circus. So far, the outcomes of trials and court hearings in the various lawfare cases against Trump have served only to create figures of ridicule like Judge Engoron, Fani Willis, and Nathan Wade, and their cumulative effect has been to drive Trump higher in the polls.
It's hard to avoid thinking the New York criminal trial will have an equivalent effect -- although delaying any such trial is Criminal Defense 101, I have a feeling that the efforts by Trump's attorneys to delay it here are actually something of a head fake, and they can't wait to get this bizarre assortment of crooks, perjurers, and hookers on the stand.
Whether the trial is completely rigged and the verdict a foregone conclusion, the whole affair will play out against this cast of characters, and finding Trump guilty will only boost his standing. I think Trump himself is fully aware of this, probably more than anyone.
I mentioned David Gelernter, a Yale professor of computer science, Orthodox Jew, and Republican yesterday as someone I've followed in the past for his views on America and Israel. So far, I haven't found much from him on the current situation, but he wrote a 2006 essay that bears on the problem, Why do so many American Jews hate the president who stands by Israel? Here's his key point:
For those who continue to insist on voting Democratic, the future is written in a recent column by Richard Cohen--who explains that the "greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake." Who advises Israel to "hunker down," while "waiting (and hoping) that history will get distracted and move on to something else." It is hard to understand why Israel is a mistake if Switzerland isn't--or the United States, or any other nation or (for that matter) human being. Cohen himself is occupying space right now that someone else could be using, and maybe wants to. The earth's surface did not expand to make room for him. Births have outstripped deaths on this planet for many generations. But we are not in the habit of demanding that human beings justify their existence or be mowed down, and the idea is equally bad in the case of nations.
Life is valuable in itself--human life or the life of nations; one of the main differences being that it is so much harder to create a nation. That the Israelis have done so--have created in fact a free nation and a hugely productive one that treats all its citizens humanely and is a world center of science, medicine, scholarship, and argument (all flavors)--is one of the stunning facts of modern history.
And, of course,
the origins of no two nations more resemble each other than Israel's and America's, both created by Europeans clutching Bibles, searching for freedom, prepared to fight for a room of their own. Both populated by human beings, a species not noted for perfection. Yet both strongholds of democracy, freedom, and tolerance nonetheless. Anyone who has decided that Israel is a mistake is likely to come around to the same view of the United States.
So we're back to the question I raised yesterday -- why do the people who call for "death to Israel" see such internal logic in also calling for "death to America"? I keep coming back to the question of natural law. The US Declaration of Independence refers to "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" -- Thomas Jefferson, the author, was a freethinker himself and surrounded by like-minded Freemasons and deists, but he still clearly believed in a natural law. He also refers to "self-evident" truths. Abraham Lincoln referred to the Declaration as “a rebuke and a stumbling-block to tyranny and oppression,” with the strong implication that this rebuke comes from natural law itself.
Gelernter accuses US Jews of acting against their own interests, at least as of his 2006 article, which is remarkably prophetic:
Most Democratic politicians speak up for Israel. But grassroots Democrats are increasingly dangerous to the Jewish state (not to mention the American state). Still, American Jews vote for (and bankroll!) Democrats. And each time they repeat this performance, the risk is greater.
. . . American Jews (especially the intellectual leadership) have a tragic history of acting against their own professed interests. In the years before Pearl Harbor, U.S. intellectuals on the whole (especially New York intellectuals) vehemently opposed American entry alongside Britain into the war against Nazi Germany. Of course many New York intellectuals were not Jews, and many American Jews didn't care for New York intellectuals. But journals like Partisan Review helped shape the cultural climate--and were fiercely antiwar until Pearl Harbor--and were shaped, themselves, by Jewish intellectuals. Leading Jewish intellectuals signed a Partisan Review statement explaining that "Our entry into the war, under the slogan of 'Stop Hitler!' would actually result in the immediate introduction of totalitarianism over here. . . . The American masses can best help [the German people] by fighting at home to keep their own liberties."
He mentions Pearl Harbor several times as a key turning point, and I think that's significant, because Pearl Harbor is the main justification for US involvement in World War II, which had several implications. Had it not taken place, the eventual Western reponse to the Holocaust, as well as the circumstances of Israel's creation, would have been different. The Allied effort in World War II appears, with some exceptions if one considers the fire bomb raids on German cities or the atomic bomb on Japan, to have been consistent with just war doctrine as enumerated in Paragraph 2309 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which amounts to yet another attempt to make natural law concrete.
So we're effectively back to the Old Testament, the dialectic by which natural law was in large measure expressed and developed in Western Civilization, and the particular effort to realize an understanding of natural law in the founding and operation of a country. Gelernter's main conmplaint about Jewish Democrats is that they're dangerously inconsistent in their support for natural law, which is to say Jewish, principles.
The question of Israeli "atrocities" in Gaza in the current conflict is something I haven't seen Gelernter address yet, if indeed he ever will. Dershowitz makes the frequent point that the Israeli military does far more than any other country to avoid civilian casualties. But we still have the uncomfortable issue that God's intent for ancient Israel was that they occupy a particular territory and subdue the aboriginal inhabitants (insofar as any particular group is aboriginal anywhere).
This is a messy question. The Catholic philosopher Edward Feser, who argues that there is scriptural authority for the death penalty, also argues that use of the atomic bomb against the Japanese was an atrocity, when God Himself delivered nuclear-level destruction against Sodom and Gomorrah, and Joshua was clearly executing the divine will in the siege of Jericho, when, "Following God's law, the Israelites killed every man and woman of every age, as well as the oxen, sheep, and donkeys."
About all we can say is that these things are working themselves out day by day.
