This story raises the question of when pure anti-Semitism breaches the protection of academic freedom, or if it ever does.
Georgetown Law Center maintains an online “Scholarly Commons,” a portal where faculty members can post law journal articles, completed or in progress, and other papers and materials. Professor Lama Abu-Odeh, who teaches two courses at GULC on “conservative legal thought,” posted “working papers” to the portal with no academic citations, which presumably would be added if the papers ever develop into scholarly treatises. Their subject is what Abu-Odeh calls the “genocide in Gaza,” and her rhetoric frequently crosses into classic anti-Semite tropes
“Gaza Shoah: Zionism’s Efficacious Role as Ideological Supplement in the US,” for example, uses the familiar anti-Israel slur that it is “an apartheid state.” The paper also endorses “resistance to the Zionist project,” excusing Hamas, and even denies that Hamas terrorists raped Israelis during the October 7 terrorist attack. Another anti-Semitic trope that Professor Abud-Odeh embraces is the claim that Jews manipulate the American media and bribe U.S. politicians. “It is true that the American political class, Democrats and Republicans alike, is on AIPAC’s dole,” Abu-Odeh writes. “It is also true that legacy media is dominated by Zionist Jews.”
I keep thinking some day, Democrats with ethics alarms and functioning cerebral cortexes are going to wake up, slap themselves sharply in the face, and shout, “This entire party is based on lies, deception, and hypocrisy! What the hell have I been doing?”
Since the Times here is carefully trying to inform readers about an organized effort by their readers favorite party that should be received as an indictment on its face, the article proceeds as if there are legitimate arguments pro- and con. “An army of lawyers aims to challenge the steadily advancing ballot-access efforts of independent candidates, who Democrats fear could peel votes away in swing states,” begins the Times. “The aim ”is to ensure all the candidates are playing by the rules, and to seek to hold them accountable when they are not,’ “the Times explains quoting one of the leaders of the party’s efforts. It doesn’t mention that this is pure deceit, as the paper has already explained the motivation for the assault on ballot access:
Kristel Candelario left on a summer vacation in Puerto Rico with a male friend, leaving her 16 month daughter Jailyn alone in a playpen with a few bottles of milk. The neighbor’s doorbell camera recorded the baby’s anguished screams as she suffered from abandonment and separation, hunger and dehydration. After a few days at the beach and another stopover in Detroit, Jailyn’s mother returned tp her Cleveland home to find her daughter dead, though she had the gall to call 911 in a panic. She’d been gone for about 10 days. I wonder what she expected to find.
Don Surber is a former journalist and current conservative pundit whose blog and substack I occasionally peruse, usually without too much alarm. However, he has issued a substack essay that, if I had to summarize in three words my objections to it and any culture wars guerilla who cited him as authority would be, “This doesn’t help.” A longer version follows.
Surber’s piece is called “In praise of ties” and carries the subheading, “They helped build a society that we are destroying.” If Glenn Reynolds had not endorsed the link, I would have stopped reading right there. I know ties are going to be used as a metaphor for the decline of elegance, respect, adulthood, civility, dignity, elan and eclat, blattity-blah, but still. Don’t insult my intelligence. This is the equivalent of “In praise of stovepipe hats,” “In praise of spats,” “In praise of derbies” or “In praise of bustles.” These are all fashions, and fashions rise and fall like steam and autumn leaves. We get used to them, if they hang around long enough, and yes, sometimes their demise are linked to cultural factors that have little to do with fashion. Nonetheless, longing for a time when men wore ties as a matter of societal conformity makes one seem like Grandpa Simpson, screaming at clouds. Worse, in fact.
Sure, Don. I always thought those pictures of men wearing ties at baseball games were ridiculous. Ted Williams, one of my father’s heroes whom he passed on to me, famously refused to wear a tie: he had a very long neck and didn’t think ties looked good on him. Ben was right, but when the tie as a symbol of wanting to appear formal and serious wane—it hasn’t waned completely —then people will adopt other ways of “dressing to please.” It is the way of the world, and there is nothing about these transitions to lament.
But Surber was just getting started. Here he is at full speed:
After embarrassing herself, a distinguished Supreme Court nominee and Senate Democrats with her despicable late-hit testimony impugning the character of now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Christine Blasey Ford was good enough to disappear for five years. Unfortunately, that time was apparently occupied with the process of cashing in. Her “memoir”—if collected dubious re-discovered memories can be fairly that, “One Way Back,” is out on Amazon and book stores.
Like Anita Hill before her,Ford was dredged up by unethical Democrats to try to derail the Supreme Court nomination of a conservative jurist by a Republican President by an accusation of sexual misconduct that was decades old and never reported at the time. Compared to Ford, however, Hill was the epitome of rectitude. Ford’s tale, conveniently “recovered” in therapy, was more than thirty years old and involved an alleged attack by Kavanaugh when he and she were both teenagers, at a party nobody could place in locale and time (besides the year, 1983). Not one witness claimed by Ford has confirmed her allegations. Kavanaugh denied them.
EA discussed George Stephanopoulos’s unethical, partisan, and thoroughly biased interrogation of Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC.) about her endorsement of Donald Trump during the March 10 interview on ABC’s Sunday talking heads show, “This Week.” It was one of the more blatant examples of how the mainstream media’s partisan biases and “Get Trump!” slant has rampaged through U.S. journalism like a cancer, but nobody should have been shocked r surprised. Stephanopoulos was a Democratic operative and a Clinton minion when he was hired. His performance against Mace was George being George; it was not the first time his biases and dishonesty were put on display. ABC should never have hired him, but then ABC, like NBC, CBS, NPR, the New York Times, the Washington Post et al. have virtually abandoned ethical journalism for partisan advocacy.
Yesterday Trump’s lawyers filed a lawsuit over Stephanopoulos saying that Trump had been found “liable for rape.” The jury specifically found Trump liable for sexual abuse under New York law, but not rape. Under classic defamation law, falsely stating that a woman has engaged in illicit sexual activity was per se defamation, but 1) Trump isn’t a woman 2) defamation by a news source against a public figure is measured by a tougher standard under the New York Times decision, requiring “actual malice,” and 3) George was carefully tip-toeing around the edges of acceptable (under the law) celebrity smearing. I highly doubt that Trump can prevail. Nonetheless, I’m glad he filed the lawsuit…hell, I’m not paying for his lawyers. If significant numbers of Americans who have been metaphorically sleep-walking for the past 30 years or so finally see Stephanopoulos for what he is, and can connect the dots to realize what this tells us about American journalism, it will be a good thing.
The latest kerfuffle spawned by Donald Trump’s loose lips ensnared Keith Olbermann. In an interview with Newsmax’s Greg Kelly last week, Trump blathered about persecuted Presidents, “I was always told that Andrew Jackson was treated the absolute worst. I heard Abraham Lincoln was second. I don’t care,” Trump said. “Andrew Jackson or anybody else. Nobody, when you think of the fake things, nobody’s been treated like Trump in terms of badly.”
Olbermann, being the jerk that he is, re-tweeted the Biden Campaign’s “Trump says he has been treated worse than Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated,” with the comment, “There’s always the hope.” This isn’t the point of this post, but 1) Trump was referring to Lincoln’s vilification in both the South and much of the North when he spoke of bad treatment, and 2) Olbermann’s snark was inevitable, in character, and obviously not a “true threat.”
But then people, including some Fox talking heads, started calling for him to be kicked off Twitter/”X,” and Keith pulled his tweet. Then he lied about what he meant, tweeting, “I know nobody with an IQ greater than a halibut’s has believed @FoxNews since 1996 but even from their whores this is idiotic The RT clearly shows I’m hoping Trump’s right, that he IS treated worse than Lincoln. As I’ve said for 9 years: THAT HE’S CONVICTED, THEN DIES IN PRISON ”
Sure Keith. Do you really believe anyone but a few halibut, Fox News, and the nearly million idiots who follow you on Twitter give a fig what you tweet, ever?
But I digress. What I want to point out is that neither Lincoln nor Andrew Jackson top the list of mistreated Presidents. It’s an especially dumb thing to say about Jackson. Jackson was the most popular President since George Washington, cruised to re-election, and left office an icon. I assume what Trump is alluding to is the scandal over Jackson’s wife Rachel, because of her inadvertent bigamy when she eloped with Andy. Jackson didn’t take any criticism well, but he was still mostly worshiped as President, though roundly hated by his political foes for consistently besting them.
Trump has a slightly stronger case with Lincoln, but Abe still was re-elected, and almost immediately deified after he was killed. The following Presidents were treated much worse than Jackson; whether they were treated worse than Lincoln is a matter of perspective: John Adams, Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, Andrew Johnson, Rutherford B. Hayes, Herbert Hoover, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon. I could even make an argument for Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
Trump has a strong case that he was the most unfairly and viciously treated of all, but the two Johnsons, Hoover and Nixon have strong cases as well. I do give Trump the award for knowing less about American Presidential history than any other POTUS.
Director Jonathan Glazer was warmly received when he delivered a repulsive and ignorant acceptance speech at the Oscars on March 10 after his Holocaust film “The Zone of Interest” won the best international film award. With producer James Wilson and financier Len Blavatnik standing with him, Glazer said: “All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present, not to say look what they did then, but rather look what we do now. Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It’s shaped all of our past and present. Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October — whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?”
Despite the positive reaction this fatuous virtue-signaling outburst attracted from the Hollywood glitterati, more than 450 Jewish artists and executives signed an open letter denouncing the speech. The group’s statement says: “We refute our Jewishness being hijacked for the purpose of drawing a moral equivalence between a Nazi regime that sought to exterminate a race of people, and an Israeli nation that seeks to avert its own extermination.”
Guess which one. Three tries, and the first two don’t count.
Yes, it’s journalism of course. I hate to keep harping on this, but until I stop seeing, reading and hearing corrupted individuals who were once fair and honest insisting that there is no mainstream media bias (or telling me that they get their news from MSNBC), attention must be paid. This year is already an orgy of disgraceful, slanted reporting employing flaming double standards, and it is sure to get much, much worse.
Here is a column in the Columbia Journalism Review, a publication of perhaps our most respected journalism school (though not by me). The author is Jon Alsop, who writes for the New York Review of Books, Foreign Policy, and The Nation (a red flag there, and by “red” I mean “Marxist”) , among other outlets, and he authors CJR’s newsletter “The Media Today.” It is an unapologetic argument for reporters to deliberately report on Donald Trump negatively and with the explicit purpose of undermining his image and support.
Some, Alsop writes, “claimed that the media was taking the ‘bloodbath’ comment out of context: it came during a section of Trump’s speech about the state of the US auto industry, and was clearly meant, these people said, in an economic sense.” “Claimed”? It was taken out of context and deliberately distorted. Later in the piece, Alsop even concedes “on balance, that he was using the word in an economic sense.” So why does Alsop excuse and offer support those who “countered that it was fair to highlight the remark, arguing, variously, thatTrump doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt given his long history of violent rhetoric, thatit’s not at all clear that he was only referring to the auto industry, and that even if he was, his use of the word ‘bloodbath’ was still hyperbolic to the point of demagoguery”? Alsop thinks this is a dilemma, you see: it’s ” the latest installment in the debate (which we’ve covered often here at CJR) as to how the media ought to handle [Trump’s] rhetoric, given its frequent violence and dishonesty.”
Great. We now have a U.S. Supreme Court Justice who doesn’t like the First Amendment. The Babylon Bee hardly had to be satirical to come up with that headline. During yesterday’s oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in Murthy v. Missouri, the newest Justice and the only one appointed by President Biden, Kentanji Brown Jackson revealed a frightening hostility to the most important guaranteed principle of American freedom from oppressive government.
“My biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways in the most important time periods,” Jackson told Louisiana Solicitor General Benjamin Aguiñaga as he argued against allowing Big Brother to recruit Big Tech as a political ally by intimidating social media platforms into removing posts the government finds inconvenient. I read Jackson’s quotes yesterday with genuine horror. My sister, a federal litigator of liberal tendencies, had assured me that Jackson was a smart, solid, trustworthy jurist based on her experiences appearing before her. Justice Jackson may be smart, but trustworthy she isn’t. Intentionally or accidentally, President Biden’s openly DEI appointment to fill the Court slot vacated by Stephen Breyer installed the perfect tool to assist aspiring Democrat totalitarians to achieve their agendas.
Oh please, tell us again how Donald Trump is the existential threat to democracy.
Ethics Alarms 
