TRUMP TO MOVE U.S. EMBASSY FROM TEL AVIV TO JERUSALEM, HYPOCRITES WORLDWIDE HARDEST HIT: The U.S. State Department, European diplomats and “moderate” Palestinian officials all claim that any future peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians must be based on the 1948 armistice lines. In 1948, Israel was in full control of the Western half of Jerusalem, and established its capital there. By contrast, the original U.N. partition plan, rejected by the Arabs, would have placed all of Jerusalem under international control. If everyone supposedly recognizes the 1948 armistice lines as a starting point for negotiations, why shouldn’t the United States recognize at least the Western half of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, regardless of whether Israel claims the whole city, as it does? Locating the U.S. embassy in West Jerusalem does not prejudice any claims the Palestinians have in future negotiations to East Jerusalem. So according to what diplomats worldwide purport to believe, moving the U.S. embassy is completely proper, and the loud opposition to such a move suggests that these diplomats have never really accepted the 1948 lines as the basis for negotiations as they claim.

LAKE WOBEGON: Where all the sexual harassment settlements are above-average. H/t Lowell Jacobson

SNATCHING DEFEAT FROM THE JAWS OF VICTORY: Trump’s invoking “Pocahontas” to criticize Elizabeth Warren at a ceremony to honor Navajo war heroes was to say the least highly inappropriate and buffoonish. Yet somehow, the Democrats and their media allies have shifted the focus to a clear loser, the question of Warren’s phony claim to Native American heritage. Meanwhile, media outlets keep referring to Warren as having “claimed” or “unsubstantiated” Native American heritage. Five years after the controversy over her “claim” originally broke, if there were any evidence, DNA or genealogical, supporting the claim she would have produced it by now. Why can’t reporters bring themselves to write something like “apparently false claim…” at this point? I think we know the answer. You want more Trump? This is how you get more Trump.

SENATOR WARREN IS LYING: Elizabeth Warren denies using Native American heritage to ‘get ahead’. If Warren or her defenders have a plausible explanation as to why she listed herself as a “minority” law professor until she got her job at Harvard, and then removed herself from that list, I’ve yet to hear it.

Related: It’s time for Elizabeth Warren to apologize for her Native American deception: “The details of what Warren did, and how she tried to conceal it, are set forth at Elizabeth Warren Wiki, a website we created to put in one place the research documenting Warren’s deception. It’s all there, including the rundown of her highly questionable, if not downright debunked, family lore stories.”

BLAMING THE MESSENGER: Defending Anti-Semites, Rutgers President Takes Aim at the Algemeiner

President Barchi rightly noted that the controversies facing the three members of his faculty staff originated with exposés published by The Algemeiner – but his goal wasn’t to offer a vote of thanks to Shiri Moshe, our reputable journalist who brought these vital issues to the public attention. Instead, his intention was clearly to disparage, undermine and delegitimize our reporting. And on what basis? On the basis that the stories had originated in a Jewish newspaper.

HATE CRIMES IN THE AGE OF TRUMP: I’ve long suspected that the purported massive increase in hate crimes resulting from the Trump campaign was wildly exaggerated. The new FBI hate crimes stats are out, and hate crimes rose only 5% between 2015 and 2016. The increase isn’t good news, but between what certainly looks like an increase in hate crimes hoaxes and the greater attention paid by the media to real hate crimes, which encourages reporting, there may not be any real increase at all. Certainly, the whole “2016 in the United States is like 1933 in Germany” crowd should be embarrassed. Relatedly, the ADL recently reported a 67% surge in anti-Semitic incidents in 2017, which preposterously includes bomb threats made to Jewish institutions that were ultimately traced to a mentally disturbed Jew in Israel.

THE QUAKERS WON’T BE MISSED: Quakerism is a dying religion, with only seventy thousand or so adherents left in the United States, and falling. Instead of tending to their dying religion, the leadership has been investing in Palestinian rejectionism with echoes of anti-Semitism. Unfortunately, the Quakers still have disproportionate ideological influence through their prestigious private “Friends” schools.

CLARENCE THOMAS IS NO HARVEY WEINSTEIN: I keep seeing articles mentioning that Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas of “sexual harassment,” and lumping him in with Harvey Weinstein et al. Hill accused Thomas of asking her out insistently, and making several lewd comments about porn movies, pubic hairs, and his own sexual prowess. Hill herself acknowledged that her allegations didn’t amount to “sexual harassment” as defined by law, just that they made her uncomfortable and she thought them inappropriate. I don’t want to relitigate the Thomas-Hill he said-she said, but even accepting Hill’s allegations at face value, they were nothing approaching what Weinstein or some of the others who have been in the spotlight lately, have been accused of–no assault, no battery, no exposing himself, no quid pro quo, no drugging victims, no shenanigans with minors. Surely we want to distinguish between those allegations and alleged rude and obnoxious behavior.