EPIC TAKEDOWN BY RABBI DANIEL GORDIS OF THE JEWISH PROGRESSIVE LEFT’S PRETENSIONS:  The American ‘Zionist’ Assault on Israel. Excerpt:

Jonathan Weisman (the author of a very interesting recent book on American anti-Semitism), quotes Rabbi Daniel Zemel of Washington, DC…. Weisman writes that on Yom Kippur, “Rabbi Zemel implored his congregation to act before it is too late, to save Israel from itself.”

A Reform Congregation in DC should save Israel before it is too late? Does no one see the hubris (and the humor, frankly) in such a suggestion? Who are these people who are being urged to save Israel? Can they read the op-ed page of a Hebrew newspaper? Since they cannot, and since the vast majority of the Hebrew press is not translated into English, why do they imagine that they know what’s best for Israel without being exposed to what millions of Israelis think, without access to Israeli discourse on the subject? (Not speaking Hebrew is no crime, of course, but should it not engender at least some humility when it comes to speaking about Israel?) American progressives imagine that they have what to teach liberal, secular Israelis because they are… more intelligent than Israelis? Better educated? More moral? More deeply committed to Israel’s decency?

How well do these people know the country they’re being asked to save? What can they say about the ideological worlds represented by readers of Haaretz and Makor Rishon and what animates the worldviews of each? Can they name five Jewish communities along the Gaza border and speak about how they’re different? How those communities see the conflict? They cannot, of course, and as very few have spoken at length to people trying to raise their families in Sderot or Sha’ar HaNegev, they have no real idea what life is like there.

… one can, and should, at least acknowledge that Beinart and Zemel both care about Israel and believe that what they are doing is best for Israel.

That, though, cannot be said for more extremist elements in the American progressive community, where positions that are ostensibly meant to make Israel “better” are clearly just camouflage for a desire to do Israel harm. No group embodies this better than IfNotNow, which, as a recent New York Magazine article noted, had participants say Kaddish for Palestinians who were killed by Israeli soldiers along the Gaza border. “‘We do not organize Kaddish prayers for ‘Arab terrorists’ or ‘Hamas members.’ We say Kaddish and mourn the unconscionable Israeli violence on Palestinian protesters,” one of INN’s leaders said to New York Magazine.

Many of the young people who are involved in or leaders of INN are bright and sophisticated, the graduates of America’s finest colleges [? America’s finest colleges are among the most parochial institutions in the country–DB]. So it is rather astonishing that they did not apply any of the critical thinking skills that got them into college and then through it to bear on this issue. If the killing of Palestinian protesters along the Gaza border (which is unquestionably sad) is so obviously “unconscionable Israeli violence,” why did the Israeli political left not protest? Why were even Meretz and Labor mostly silent after many Gazans were killed at the border? Do American Jewish progressives ever ask themselves what they know that Israelis do not?

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: How “sophisticated” are the likes of IfNotNow activists? Their level of “sophistication” stretches little further than the (obviously bogus) notion that Israeli Jews are white, Palestinian Arabs are “people of color,” and the latter therefore win the intersectional sweepstakes and require unquestioned devotion. Beyond that, it’s leftist dogma all the way down.

THE MEDIA IS LETTING THE ACLU GET AWAY WITH MASSIVE HYPOCRISY: The ACLU has been very active both politically and in litigation in opposing federal and state legislation that in various ways penalizes boycotting Israel. Commentators up and down the progressive left have been relying on the ACLU for the proposition that this legislation is a violation of First Amendment free speech rights.

For the record, the ACLU is misstating various Supreme Court holdings; as Eugene Volokh has explained, as a general rule there is no recognized right to engage in, as opposed to advocating, an economic boycott.

But let’s assume that the ACLU sincerely believes there is, or there should be, such a constitutional right. One would logically expect that ACLU to therefore be on the side of religious bakers, photographers, caterers, and so on, who choose to boycott same-sex weddings despite civil rights laws that require the contrary. In fact, the ACLU not only hasn’t supported the service providers, it has strongly supported government suppression of these boycotts.

But wait, some interlocutors have told me, there’s a difference between supporting antidiscrimination laws protecting Americans from discrimination, and laws protecting a foreign government from discrimination. There may be all sorts of ideological, moral, and practical differences; there are no constitutional differences. (And note that protecting same-sex weddings from discrimination is not quite the same thing as protecting homosexual individuals from discrimination.)

So from a constitutional perspective, either you support the right to boycott in the face of government attempts to protect a class from discrimination, or you don’t. The ACLU, however, wants to have its (same-sex wedding) cake and eat it too: boycotts against disfavored entities (Israel, or the military in FAIR v. Rumsfeld) are constitutionally protected, but boycotts contrary to laws it likes are not. It doesn’t work that way, and certainly won’t under the current Supreme Court. If any reporter that’s quoted the ACLU on the Israel legislation has asked how the ACLU justifies its hypocrisy on the issue of boycotts and the First Amendment, I haven’t seen it.

UPDATE: RELATED: American Thinker: AntiSemitism, BDS, and the ACLU

NON-SCANDAL OF THE DAY: Yorktown Elitist and Bronx Hoaxer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Went by “Sandy” Well into College at Boston U.

I’m no fan of Ocasio-Cortez, but “young adult drops cutesy nickname for more imposing-sounding given name when entering the professional world” hardly seems newsworthy, much less a scandal. Focus on issues of actual importance that don’t make you look like obsessive nut jobs, people.

REMINDER: When a Democrat is president, and he and Congress can’t agree on a spending bill and the government shuts down, it’s Congress’s fault. When a Republican is president, and he and Congress can’t agree on a spending bill and the government shuts down, it’s the president’s fault. Or so our media and intellectual elites would have us believe.

It’s also true, though, that Trump didn’t help his own p.r. on this one by announcing that he was willing to shut down the government over the border wall, instead of playing it like Obama and Clinton and insisting that Congress was shutting down the government by not acceding to their budgetary demands.

UPDATE: RELATED: Josh Kraushaar: Why Trump is Losing the Shutdown Fight. The shutdown appeals to Trump’s base, but Trump’s base of 40-45% of the voting public won’t be enough to win reelection, unless the Democrats are dumb enough to nominate someone as unpopular as Hillary Clinton, leading even a significant cohort of Trump-haters to vote for him as the lesser evil.

PROJECTION, THY NAME IS RASHIDA TLAIB: Tlaib tweets, in reference to Congressional support for a bill expanding the law banning business boycotts of Israel: “They forgot what country they represent.”

Also Tlaib:

Tlaib shared that her family members still living in the West Bank where her roots are “still very strong” ― were “absolutely proud” of her win, particularly her grandmother. “I’m going to be a voice for them,” Tlaib said.

PAUL KRUGMAN “EVOLVES” ON YET ANOTHER ISSUE TO ALIGN HIS ECONOMIC VIEWS WITH PROGRESSIVE POLITICS: Krugman: The Economics of Soaking the Rich.

Krugman argues in favor of marginal tax rates in the 80% range for the “rich.” Economist Bill Anderson comments on my Facebook page (reprinted with permission): “At the 2004 Southern Economic Association meetings in New Orleans, I asked Krugman in a room full of economists if he believed we should go back to the 1980 top rates [of 70%]. His answer: ‘Oh, no! Those rates were insane!’ His exact words. So, it is official; Krugman now endorses insanity. How appropriate.”

ALL THE NEWS THAT’S FIT TO PRINT TO SUPPORT OUR NARRATIVE: Several days after the Cleveland Clinic acknowledged that it fired a doctor for anti-Semitic tweets, including, shockingly, a threat to “give all the yahoods [Jews] the wrong meds,” the New York Times still hasn’t found the story newsworthy. Any guesses as to whether the doctor in question is affiliated with “white nationalism,” or is instead an “anti-Zionist” Arab-American?

THIS IS YOUR MIND ON GLENN GREENWALD: Everyone is misreporting the Texas BDS lawsuit:

In short, this story is being widely misreported, the hysterical claims that Amawi is being forced to sign a pro-Israel pledge or personally do or not do anything in particular regarding Israel outside the context of her business are false, and the First Amendment lawsuit will almost certainly lose. Moreover, it’s nearly impossible to think of a way in which Ms. Amawi’s speech pathology business would ever have an opportunity to in any way boycott or otherwise economically harm Israel, rendering this pure political theater.

MEMORIAL TO TREE OF LIFE SYNAGOGUE SHOOTING VICTIMS VANDALIZED AT POMONA COLLEGE: But the perpetrators were apparently leftist activists, not neo-Nazis, so no one at Pomona cares. As the saying goes, if the left didn’t have double standards, they’d have no standards at all.

DOWNLOAD IT WHILE IT’S HOT: Constitutional Hardball Yes, Asymmetric Not so Much. In which I demur from the academic consensus that the Republicans have been shattering constitutional norms while the innocent Democrats have been quiescent.

INTERESTED IN GETTING A MASTER’S DEGREE IN LAW WHILE WORKING FULL-TIME? GMU Antonin Scalia Law School is Launching a New Juris Master (JM) Degree Program.

UPDATE: Got a few emails asking under what sort of circumstances someone might be interested in this degree. IMHO: (1) professionals like HR professionals, Capital Hill staff (we are 2 miles from DC), etc., who deal with legal issues all the time, and want to be better-versed in legal reasoning and lingo. (2) Someone who is pursuing a career in public policy, and wants the analytical rigor of law school without taking the LSAT or spending four years in part-time study. (3) Someone whose employer rewards/demands a master’s degree, but who wants to not just go through the motions but actually learn something important and useful.

VIRTUE SIGNALING IS A POWERFUL DRUG: 48 Yale Students Arrested During Protest.

In the annals of pointless protests, this may be the most pointless:

Forty-eight students at Yale University were arrested Friday during a protest in the investment office calling on the university to divest from Puerto Rican debt and fossil fuel companies. According to a press release from Fossil Free Yale, the student group organizing the protest, the sit-in began at noon Friday and continued until 5 p.m., when police began making arrests. More than 350 students rallied outside the office, cheering on the students being escorted by the police.

Let’s imagine the students “won,” and the university divested on Day X from Puerto Rican debt and fossil fuels. You know what would have changed in the world on Day X plus whatever? Exactly nothing. Of course, if the students really, truly wanted to help Puerto Ricans, I’m sure there are plenty of charities that would love to accept the difference between their $73K a year cost of Yale attendance and the cost of attending State U., if students were inclined to make a real sacrifice rather than engaging in political theater.

HOW THE GRASSROOTS WOMEN’S MARCH GOT TAKEN OVER BY PROFESSIONAL LEFTIST ACTIVIST ANTI-SEMITES: Tablet: Is the Women’s March Melting Down? This is great reporting from The Tablet, and the sort of investigative reporting the New York Times and NPR would be doing is they valued real journalism over being part of the resistance.

BUT THE NARRATIVE: I can’t vouch for the robustness of these results, but according to this Morning Consult poll from August, 11% of liberals and 3% of conservatives have a very or somewhat favorable opinion of neo-Nazis.

THE IMMORALITY OF SOCIALISTS: Noam Chomsky: Neoliberalism Is Destroying Our Democracy.

Chomsky goes on and on about the horrors of what he calls “neoliberalism” since 1979. As with other leftists of a similar ilk, he simply ignores the fact that the rate of extreme poverty globally has fallen from around 27% to around 4% (!). Indeed, poverty rates worldwide have fallen dramatically more generally. You’d think if you were a socialist (or really almost anyone, but especially socialists), this would be the greatest thing to happen in the history of mankind. And yet, they not only don’t celebrate it, they don’t even acknowledge it. Which makes you think that their purported concern for the poor and downtrodden isn’t really what’s motivating them.

NOT IF YOU’RE CONSISTENT, BUT: Anti-Zionism Isn’t the Same as Anti-Semitism.

Goldberg writes, “certainly, some criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic, but it’s entirely possible to oppose Jewish ethno-nationalism without being a bigot.” Sure, if you’re a libertarian or socialist type that rejects ethnicity and/or nationalism for anyone, then having the same view of Jewish nationalism is not anti-Semitic. But very few critics of Israel who support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS) are actually against ethno-nationalism; indeed, they want Israel to be replaced by an Arab/Muslim majority state ruled by that majority (and not, as Goldberg suggests, a “bi-national state”), and thus not only don’t oppose ethno-nationalism, they support replacing a liberal ethno-nationalist state that grants autonomy to its domestic Arab population to be exempt from military service, to study in Arabic in public school, and so forth, with an Arab one that would almost certainly be illiberal.

What would be the fate of the Jews of Israel under that scenario? Let’s hear from the late Edward Said, the leading Palestinian nationalist intellectual in the English-speaking world before his death:  “I worry about that. The history of minorities in the Middle East has not been as bad as in Europe, but I wonder what would happen. It worries me a great deal. The question of what is going to be the fate of the Jews is very difficult for me. I really don’t know. It worries me.” In short, while Said apparently hoped the Jews would make out all right, the strong possibility (I’d say great likelihood) that they would be murdered, exiled, and/or oppressed was not sufficient to tame his desire for a Palestinian state replacing Israel. That’s what most BDS supporters and anti-Zionists think, and that’s why declaring that “Palestine should be free from the river to the sea” is an implicitly genocidal slogan.

MAX BOOT IS JUST AS GRATING as a former conservative as he was as a leading necon. In today’s example, he writes about an Israeli-based company that sells spy software to dubious governments. The headline blames this on “Israel,” not the company. Rather than correcting this, Max sends out a tweet itself suggesting that “Israel” is responsible for “enabling foreign oppression.” Meanwhile, it turns out that the company is actually owned by a San Francisco-based private equity fund, and has been since 2013, making it all the more opaque why “Israel” is the focus of the op-ed.

REMINDER: All modern American presidents exercise power that is morally and constitutionally illegitimate.

Also, the U.S. has no nobility or official ranks, and over-the-top state funerals and public mourning for retired leaders are more reminiscent of monarchies than redolent of the principles of a constitutional republic. Before the growth of the modern federal behemoth, we had funerals like Grover Cleveland’s, “marked by simplicity and absence of pomp.” Carry on.

WHOM SHOULD JEWS EXCOMMUNICATE NOW? Man tries to run down Jews leaving Los Angeles synagogue.

So someone else tried to murder American Jews at a synagogue, this time unsuccessfully. After the Pittsburgh shooting, the Jewish left went nuts, blaming Trump, Trump-supporting Jews, and Israel (!) for the incident. The Atlantic’s Franklin Foer wrote, “Any strategy for enhancing the security of American Jewry should involve shunning Trump’s Jewish enablers. Their money should be refused, their presence in synagogues not welcome. They have placed their community in danger.”

The perp in L.A., however, was not a “white nationalist” but a Muslim named Mohammed Mohammed. I want Foer to follow his own logic. If “Trump’s Jewish enablers” were to blame for Pittsburgh, who in the Jewish community is to blame for Los Angeles? And who should be “shunned” now?

A NICE RECOMMENDATION FROM QUIN HILLYER OF THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR: Books! Books! For Christmas, for the Reader You Love:

Rehabilitating Lochner: Defending Individual Rights Against Progressive Reform, By David E. Bernstein call to arms for libertarian constitutionalists, this is an excellent, eminently readable (and sometimes persuasive) history of how the “progressive” legal movement hid its original racism, stole the image of liberty lovers, and undermined the proper reading of the Constitution.

DEFENDING A LIBERTARIAN POSITION ON ANTIDISCRIMINATION LAWS: My latest essay, downloadable at the link: The Boundaries of Antidiscrimination Laws.

A BALANCED ASSESSMENT OF GEORGE SOROS: Jamie Kirchik: The Truth about George Soros.

One sentence summary: Soros did a lot of good in promoting democracy and the rule of law in post-Communist Europe. He has done a lot of harm in the U.S. by being a shrill partisan who funds extremists.

THAT DEPENDS ON WHO YOU ASK: The New York Times asks, Are Jared and Ivanka Good for the Jews?

Arrgh. The Times adopts the narrative, popular on the left, that the only reason any Jews support Trump is that he is pro-Israel. Look, surveys show that 25-30% of American Jews are Republican or lean Republican. Orthodox Jews and older immigrants from the former Soviet Union are especially likely to be Republicans. Most American Jews don’t vote on “Jewish issues” as such, and Republican Jews, like other Republicans, will be inclined to support any Republican president unless they affirmatively strongly disagree with particular policies, though I assume a blatantly anti-Semitic president of either party would change voting patterns significantly. Ninety percent of Republicans in general approve of Trump, and if you are outside the liberal bubble that blames Trump for anti-Semitism, there is no reason to expect that figure to be significantly lower among Jewish Republicans unless you think that Jewish Republicans are especially likely to disapprove of Trump otherwise. And indeed, last I looked surveys show that 25-30% of American Jews approve of Trump.

In my experience, some of Trump’s most controversial policies, including the so-called Muslim ban, are reasonably popular with my Republican Jewish friends (real and Facebook) and family. Indeed, many of them are very concerned about the anti-Semitism immigrants from the Middle East bring with them, though it’s generally considered impolitic to talk about this in public. And not only are these Republican Jews not using Trump’s pro-Israel policies to excuse his contribution to anti-Semitism, as the Times suggests, but in fact they see those policies, along with appointments like Nikki Haley (who withdrew the U.S. from the anti-Semitic UN Human Rights Commission that Obama had rejoined) and Ken Marcus as policies of a very philo-Semitic presidency. Some of my Jewish Facebook friends routinely pronounce the Trump administration to be the most pro-Jewish in history. It’s far more accurate to conclude that Jews see Trump’s Jewish-related policies through the lens of their preexisting approval or disapproval of Trump than to suggest, as the Times does, that Trump’s Jewish-related policies are what drive Jewish voters one way or the other.

As usual, the New York Times reports on subcultures it doesn’t understand as if it is visiting Mars.

THE ACLU NO LONGER EVEN PRETENDS TO BELIEVE IN CIVIL LIBERTIES: American Civil Liberties Union, RIP.

AS GLENN NOTES BELOW, the guy shouting “Heil Hitler, Heil Trump” during intermission at a production of Fiddler on the Roof, which was reported nationwide as yet another symptom of anti-Semitism run amok thanks to Trump, tuned out to be a drunk guy who hates Trump and was therefore comparing him to Hitler. This is exactly what I expected. If you are actually a Hitler fan, would you (a) buy a ticket to Fiddler on the Roof; (b) sit quietly through the first act; and (c) make your pro-Hitler remark during intermission, rather than disrupting the show? Besides, there are way more Americans who think Trump is like Hitler in a negative way than in a positive way.  The question is, why couldn’t the New York Time, Washington Post, etc., (a) figure out that this was unlikely to be an actual pro-Nazi guy; or (b) at least consider the possibility that the guy might actually be anti-Trump and anti-Nazi, and not rush to breathlessly report nonsense?