OUCH: David Harsanyi: Israel Has Every Right To Block Rashida Tlaib And Ilhan Omar. “In 2012, the Obama administration denied a visa to Michael Ben-Ari, a member of the hard-right Israeli Kach party [sic: At that point, Ben-Ari was a member of the more moderate National Union party]. Ben-Ari is no more radical than Tlaib or Omar. I don’t remember widespread angst about the state of American democracy. Surely we were secure enough in our beliefs to handle his presence, right?”

UPDATE: Jonathan Greenberg, @JGreenbergSez: “It’s totally different bc rage blargle!”-every leftist in my feed.

WE SHOULD GO BACK TO BLAMING “CULTURE” AND “DESPERATION” FOR HORRIFIC VIOLENT CRIMES, BECAUSE FOCUS ON PURPORTED ROOT CAUSES WORKED SO WELL IN THE ’60s: Here is how a daughter and her mom react to a violent daylight rape in their neighborhood:

“That somebody was raped here at 7:30 — we live in a rape culture, and I think we’re going in the wrong direction with it. It doesn’t feel like we’re progressing right now,” Melanie Flaxer, 26, said. “It’s horrifying, it’s horrifying, and it’s really a shame that there’s so much desperation,” her mother, Linda Flaxer, added.

So police should put out an APB for “rape culture” and “desperation?”

CHUTZPAH, THY NAME IS NEW YORK TIMES: Times: Epstein Suicide Conspiracy Theories Show How Our Information System is Poisoned. This is the same New York Times that, just for example, completely misreported the Trayvon Martin case (going so far as to deem George Zimmerman a “white Hispanic” to further its narrative, a phrase the Times never otherwise used) and was the leader of the lynch mob over phony rape allegations against the Duke lacrosse team. Just last week oped columnist Michelle Goldberg reiterated the myth that Trump called neo-Nazis “very fine people.” But it’s the rest of the “information system” that’s poisoned. Physician, heal thyself.

LET THEM IN, BUT THROUGH THE HAMAS TERROR TUNNELS IN GAZA INSTEAD OF THE TEL AVIV AIRPORT: Trump tells advisers Israel should bar entry to Reps. Omar and Tlaib.

Given that they oppose Israel’s existence and are apologists for terrorism, this would be fitting.

YESTERDAY, TRUMP WAS A NAZI WHOSE SUPPORT FOR ISRAEL WAS INSINCERE; TODAY: Donald Trump and the perils of loving Israel just a little too much.

THE EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES WASN’T MEANT TO BE A HOW-TOO BOOK: First, we’re told that fourteen year-old girls are supposed to pretend that the classmate in their locker room with the penis is really a girl. Today, we’re told that women on the slightly darker side of European-Caucasian skin tone (that is, Reps. AOC and Tlaib) have “brown skin.” Aaron Blake: The unmistakable ugliness of Trump urging brown-skinned congresswomen to ‘go back’ to their countries.

And it’s not just the U.S. Remember when the fair-skinned Algerian Malia Bouattia was declared to be “first Black president” of the UK’s National Union of Students?

“WHY DON’T WE JUST RELEASE MIGRANT CHILDREN IN DETENTION TO THEIR RELATIVES IN THE U.S. WHO WANT TO TAKE THEM IN?”: Here’s one reason: Rapid DNA testing reveals a THIRD of migrants faked family relationship with children to claim asylum during ICE pilot of the procedure in Texas.

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: I watched a lifeguard quickly and efficiently scoop a drowning boy of our local public pool today. This pool has excellent, well-trained life guards. But not all pools do, and even excellent life guards can miss things. The kid was with a county camp group, and clearly shouldn’t have been in deep water. I know this pool gives the camp kids a swim test and then tells them where they are allowed to go, but no one is really watching them, given maybe 2 or 3 counselors and 18 or so kids. In short, if your kid doesn’t know how to swim, don’t let him go on a day camp trip to a public pool that has water over his head. And btw, this wasn’t the first camp kid I’ve seen fished out of the deep (i.e., 3.5 feet) water by a lifeguard over the years.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I post this every summer, but one more time: Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning. “Drowning is almost always a deceptively quiet event. The waving, splashing and yelling that dramatic conditioning (television) prepares us to look for is rarely seen in real life.”

IT’S ALMOST LIKE THEY HAVE AN AGENDA OR SOMETHING: Since its founding in 1998, Birthright has sent approximately six hundred thousand young Jews to Israel on free ten-day tours to connect them with their Jewish heritage. Other than a couple “stranded or brave tourists during wartime” type stories, the Times has covered these trips exactly twice. Once in 2000, when the focus was on a controversy over the costs of the trip and who, if anyone,  should be paying for them, and once in 2007, albeit relegated for some reason to the “New York region” section of the paper.

Over the past year, several groups on the left have protested Birthright, on the typical leftist theory that any nonprofit organization must have a left-wing agenda or die. As a result, the Times has run no less than two anti-Birthright stories, one in June focusing on protests against Birthright for not focusing on “the occupation,” the second yesterday on a politicized “alternative” trip sponsored by the left-leaning JStreet.

It doesn’t take a news maven to see what is objectively the bigger story: Birthright itself, with its 600K participants and one of the most innovative and successful religious/ethnic programs in recent American (most participants are American, as are most diaspora Jews) history, or the handful of activists protesting Birthright plus the forty participants on the “alternative” tour. But the Times has determined that the latter is actually the more important story, because it fits their agenda of hostility to the mainstream Jewish community’s support for Israel.

This is less interesting as a comment on the Times and Israel, and moreso, in my opinion, as an excellent example of how the Times and other MSM outlets don’t simply report the news, they actually shape it by deciding based on their own agendas what to cover and how much.

NOTICE ANYTHING MISSING?: Latest Suicide Data Show the Depth of U.S. Mental Health Crisis.

Mental health problems manifest in a number of ways and encapsulate a wide range of conditions, including substance abuse disorders, crippling anxiety, schizophrenia, and suicidality. A person’s susceptibility depends on genetic, social, and environmental factors. These contributors are believed to be intertwined; psychological stressors can activate a genetic predisposition, so life circumstances matter a lot. And the U.S. is home to some particularly challenging ones: stagnant wages; rising health-care costs; the proliferation of highly addictive opioids after a marketing push from major drug companies; the disappearance of well-paid blue-collar jobs and the emergence of the gig economy; the lack or limited availability of treatment and services. The destructive powers of technology, be it in the form of social isolation or cyberbullying, have been cited in the rising number of teens killing themselves. Suicide is the second-leading cause of death for 10- to 34-year-olds. Then there’s the prevalence of guns, which are used in half of all suicides. 

These articles (this one is from Bloomberg Business) almost always leave out the most obvious psychological stressor in the U.S., the breakdown of the family.  We have a 40% divorce rate and a 40% out of wedlock birth rate, each significantly higher among those with fewer economic resources. There seems to be a tacit conspiracy of silence among the journalistic elite and the “experts” to not mention that this may have something to do with the feelings of desperation of loneliness and desperation that could lead to mental health crises (including substance abuse).

SJW LOGIC VS. COMMON SENSE: No wonder Oberlin got socked with a huge punitive damages award for libeling a local bakery as racist after detaining students who wound up pleading guilty to shoplifting. Here’s Oberlin’s litigation position, from its court filings: “Gibson bakery’s archaic chase-and-detain policy regarding suspected shoplifters was the catalyst for the protests. The guilt or innocence of the students is irrelevant to both the root cause of the protests and this litigation.” Get that? Whether the students accused of shoplifting had actually been shoplifting or not was irrelevant to whether it was fair to accuse the store of racism etc for detaining the students as shoplifters. The fault lay with the bakery owners for daring to actually stop and prosecute shoplifters!

This is the kind of b.s. that gets you A’s at Oberlin with a certain type of SJW professor, but that normal people rightly think defies common sense. But it can pay off in academia. A very prominent law professor got an Ivy League job after writing a silly book which, among other things, argued that whether the Al Sharpton-promoted Tawana Brawley hoax was true or not was besides the point, because the real issue was whether society was silencing African American girls like her who surely had something bad happen to them.

BARGAIN ALERT: Amazon has my book Lawless, with a foreword by Senator Cruz, for only $5.24 with free Prime shipping, which I believe is the lowest price it’s ever sold for.

UPDATE, 6:48 pm: Well, that was quick, Instareaders bought up all of Amazon’s copies, and now it’s only available from third-party sellers for $13.00. You can still get the Kindle for $5.22, though.

THE IRAN NUCLEAR DEAL WAS BASED ON LIES AND MISREPRESENTATIONS: Iran-linked terrorists caught stockpiling explosives in north-west London. But this was hidden from the public, lest opinion turn against the nuclear deal, then pending, which was based on false representations of cooperation with Iranian “moderates.” I have what I think is the most comprehensive (and footnoted) collection of the lies, misrepresentations, and illegal activities undertaken by the Obama administration in support of the nuclear deal in Part III of this paper.

WHY BUREAUCRATS TEND TO IGNORE CONSTITUTIONAL LIMITS ON THEIR POWER: A Skeptic’s Look at Administrative Constitutionalism. Now a Notre Dame Law Review article, by yours truly.

HISTORIANS HAVE ADOPTED AN INACCURATE, POLITICIZED PRISM THROUGH WHICH TO UNDERSTAND AMERICAN ETHNIC HISTORY? SAY IT AIN’T SO!: The Weakness of the “Whiteness” Literature.

WHEN YOU CAN’T TELL THE KKK FROM THE “PROGRESSIVES” PROTESTING IT: Israeli Flag Burned At KKK Rally…By The Counterprotesters.

MORE ON BOGREN VS. HAWLEY: Ed Whelan at NRO:

With all respect for Senator Hawley, I am less enamored than others are of his criticism of Bogren.

For starters, from my review of the exchange, Bogren was making exactly the point of principle that I have made: To argue that a principle that applies to A also applies to B is not to “compare” A and B or to assert that they are equivalent.

Further, Bogren made it clear that he was advancing legal arguments on behalf of his client, not expressing his personal views. (Hawley seems to have understood the exchange otherwise.) Bogren’s arguments strike me as exactly what you’d expect from someone representing his client.

Do conservatives really want to embrace the general proposition that arguments that a lawyer makes on behalf of a client should, without more, be held against the lawyer? That’s a proposition that, apart from being unsound, could redound to the detriment of conservative nominees who have defended religious liberty or pro-life legislation in unpopular contexts.

And here’s the link to my Volokh post on Hawley’s demagoguery.

IT’S ONE WAY FOR A FRESHMAN SENATOR TO GET ATTENTION FOR HIMSELF, BUT NOT  A GOOD WAY: Senator Josh Hawley is becoming a first-class demagogue.

ARE YOUNG AMERICAN JEWS MORE SUPPORTIVE OF TRUMP THAN YOUNG AMERICANS IN GENERAL?: Some surprising news from the world of politics: An outfit called the Jewish Electorate Institute conducted a survey of American Jews’ attitudes on politics. The resulting headline was that American Jews prioritize domestic issues over Israel, which wasn’t a surprise to anyone who pays attention to such things.

Much more surprising, and not in the headlines, was that the survey found that 31% of Jews under 30 (and at least 18) approve of President Trump, higher than any other Jewish age demographic except for slightly higher approval among millenials. But wait, there’s more.

The summary published by the JEI mysteriously excludes Orthodox Jews from its data on Trump approval by age group, but only from the younger cohorts. Thanks to high Orthodox birth rates, Orthodox outreach efforts, and widespread assimilation among the non-Orthodox, Orthodox Jews are a much larger percentage of the younger Jewish cohort than of older Jewish cohorts. 20% is a reasonable estimate of the percentage of American Jews under 30 who are Orthodox. And 57% of Orthodox Jews approve of Trump, but let’s round that up to 60% for the younger cohort, since younger Jews in general are more approving of Trump. That means approximately 37% of American Jews under 30 approve of Trump. By contrast, a recent poll showed that only 33% of Americans ages 15-34 approve of Trump.

If true, this would be especially remarkable because young American Jews tend to not be “religious” and live in coastal urban areas, two demographic indicators that strongly predict hostility to Trump.

Of course, the JEI poll needs to be confirmed by other data. But I should note that JEI hired the Greenberg firm, a liberal Democratic polling outfit, to do its polling, so there was no incentive to exaggerate support for Trump.

WILLIAMS COLLEGE STUDENTS PUT DAVID IRVING TO SHAME: Holocaust Revisionism at Williams College. Williams students are quoted as claiming that the Palestinians are facing worse oppression than Jews during the Holocaust, because “unlike the seemingly unending Israeli occupation of the West Bank, ‘the purpose of these [World War II] ghettos were basically to control, segregate, and separate the Jewish people for short periods of time.'” Apparently, having even a modicum of knowledge of twentieth century history, or the ability to put current events in a reasonable context, are not prerequisites for admission this “elite” college.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Former associate White House counsel Ian Bassin suggests that people harass a law firm’s clients because a partner at the law firm is zealously protecting client confidentiality. It’s amazing the extent to which Democrats are willing to tear down the system to get at Trump and his associates. Just for fun, someone with the power to do so should subpoena Bassin regarding his work at the White House counsel’s office, and see whether he immediately complies and cooperates.

IT’S NOT AN “OPEN AIR CONCENTRATION CAMP” IF YOU CAN’T BLAME ISRAEL: Hamas said to impose restrictions after young, educated Gazans exited for ‘vacations’ through reopened Rafah Crossing to escape and seek better lives in Europe.

What percentage of those who complain about Israel imposing restrictions on Gaza for security reasons are going to complain about Hamas imposing further restrictions to prevent people from escaping Hamas rule? An initial estimate of “zero” seems right.

GENEALOGY BLEG: In building a family tree I’ve been frustrated by my inability to find any record of my great-grandfather’s family from Kėdainiai [Keidan] Lithuania. His name was Yehuda Stravinsky (phonetic), his father was Koppel and his mother Raisza (Rose). Stravinsky was a very unusual name for Jews, so you would think it would be easy to track down, but I haven’t had any luck. I’ve been told that given the vagaries of dialect, the name could have been spelled in different ways–Stravunsky, Strawinksy, Strapinsky, etc. Yehuda was a shoemaker, and came to the U.S. in 1887, owned a shoe store, and at some point the family’s name was changed to Stein. In English, he was variously known as Louis, Edward, or Julius Stein. According to an interview I did with my great-grandmother, he had eight siblings, all or most of whom also came to the U.S. I don’t know whether they all also became “Steins.” I have DNA samples at several genealogy websites, but no unknown Steins or Stravinksys have come up. The Ellis Island records are no help, because his arrival was before Ellis Island opened. And his citizenship card lists an arrival date into the U.S., but it doesn’t match records on that date. Anyway, given the rarity of the surname, perhaps by posting this some distant cousin will get in touch. The only other clue I have is that my great aunt once told me that some of her cousins immigrated to South Africa, though I’m not sure if that was on the Stein side.

SOVIET COMMUNISM–THE GIFT THAT KEEPS ON GIVING: Soviet Anti-Zionism and Contemporary Left Antisemitism:

The messaging emanating from today’s far-left anti-Zionist camp is strikingly similar to the messaging of the Soviet anti-Zionist campaigns. From the claims of Zionist collaboration with the Nazis in the Holocaust, to the idea of Zionism as an inherently racist and oppressive ideology, to the concept of Israel as a settler-colonialist state that engages in genocidal behavior and apartheid – all of these ideas were part and parcel of the Soviet anti-Zionist narrative.

An important essay on a much-neglected topic. Read the whole thing.

ASIDE: When I was a senior in college in 1988, a classmate went to the USSR on a peace tour. When he came back, he wrote an essay about the trip for the school paper. He mentioned that he had met with “Soviet Jewish leaders” and that while some reform was in order, the Jewish population of the USSR was generally content and didn’t want to leave. Within three years, given the opportunity, over a million of them left. This particular useful idiocy has stayed with me…

“CLEARLY ANTISEMITIC” STATEMENTS MADE AT WILLIAMS COLLEGE STUDENT GOVERNMENT MEETING: As I noted previously, the Williams College student government denied official recognition to a pro-Israel student group, Williams Initiative for Israel, even though the group met all criteria for recognition. The decision had obvious antisemitic undertones, but a source just sent me the minutes of the next student government meeting (which I also found online here). At that meeting, a student named Lance acknowledged that when he took the minutes of the previous meeting, he didn’t “type down” “clearly anti-Semitic things.” Open antisemitism at an elite college. Why is the college administration silent?

Lance: Hi there, I’m the minutekeeper. My name is Lance. Anyways, thank you so much for your thoughtful email. If you’d like to tell me… so, just a procedure from CC, because I want to be done with it too, I understand. If you say that a certain thing was misattributed to the wrong person, I was handling 12 different guests that were sitting in geographically different locations, I had to look down while typing, right? So it is a bit challenging, but for instance, I don’t remember which guest number you were and I don’t remember which guest number you were. I also don’t know which guest number I attributed your guest number to, right? But if you want to send me a quick correction, because clearly you know which ones are misattributed, I can easily change those numbers real quick. That is always how we do it, that is why we approve them in the next week’s minutes. As for ‘in shambles’, I only didn’t type down two things: 1) personally identifying information – if someone who said something that was deeply personal, I tried to limit that to preserve anonymity; 2) clearly anti-Semitic things I didn’t type down. I want [sic, won’t?] repeat them, but I didn’t type those things down. So those are the only two things I didn’t type. If that is a mischaracterization that you are uncomfortable with, I don’t know what to tell you. Those are the only two things I didn’t type. Again, there is an audio recording. I can’t actually, accurately 100% transcribe things, though I do try my best. But that is really all I can say. If there are specific edits, I’d love to hear them. I can just edit them real quick, we can vote on it, and we can move on to this training.