Image 01 Image 03
Sign In or RegisterLogout

August 2014

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 12, 2014 26 Comments
For years we have been documenting the rise of anti-Semitic violence in Europe masquerading as anti-Zionism, in a coalition of Islamists and Leftists in places like Malmö, Sweden. Copenhagen, Denmark also has this history, so much so that the small (6,000-8,000) Jewish community all but stopped showing Jewish symbols in public. In 2012, the Israeli Embassy advised Israelis visiting Denmark not to wear a Yarmulke (aka Kippah or skull-cap) or other similar religious symbols in public. The threat on the streets continues, with a Jewish school in Copenhagen just this month forbidding its students from wearing yarmulkes in public:
A Jewish school in Denmark informed parents that its pupils are no longer allowed to wear religious symbols near school grounds. The private Caroline School in Copenhagen informed parents of the policy in a recent letter, the Jyllands-Posten daily reported Friday. The letter said it was not permissible for students of the 7th, 8th and 9th grades to leave school premises if they are wearing visible Jewish symbols.... Hansen also said the move was “pure preventative.” He added: “I know there has been an increase in the number of Jews who have been accosted over the summer in connection with the conflict in Gaza.”
When actor Seth Menachem traveled recently in Denmark and Sweden, his group encountered numerous acts of anti-Semitism:

Posted by David Gerstman on August 12, 2014 14 Comments
The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) has decided that Israel's self-defense needs to be investigated. (Note in the UN"s announcement the words "Hamas" and "rockets" are nowhere to be found.) After Operation Cast Lead the UNHRC picked a panel of four individuals, all of whom had prejudged Israel's guilt. The leader of that investigation, Judge Richard Goldstone of South Africa later recanted his group's conclusions, but the damage was done. The UNHRC has decided that having a committee that is biased against Israel is necessary and selected an Irish professor of human rights law named William Schabas to head the new committee. Schabas has been involved in the travesty called the Russell Tribunal on Palestine along with crackpots such as Cynthia McKinney. At a hearing this "tribunal" in 2012, Schabas said "[m]y favorite would be Netanyahu within the dock of the International Criminal Court." UN Watch has compiled a list of statements and from Schabas showing his bias against Israel, including:
- A few years earlier, Schabas called for “going after” Israeli president Shimon Peres in the ICC, saying, “Why are we going after the president of Sudan for Darfur and not the president of Israel for Gaza?” - In a 2009 blog post about the UN’s infamous Durban II conference on racism, Schabas urged the world not only to “ignore” Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s statements, but to stop “exaggerating” them. According to Schabas, those who “deserve the blame” are “Israel and its friends, who have manipulated the truth about the nature of the work of the United Nations by gross exaggeration of the role and intervention of certain fanatics.” Schabas described Ahmadinejad as nothing more than a “provocative politician,” and not a torturer of dissidents, inciter of genocidal anti-Semitism, and arch-sponsor of terrorism.

Posted by Amy Miller on August 12, 2014 34 Comments
At this year's American Bar Association annual meeting in Boston, ABA President James R. Silkenat took the opportunity to tout the ABA's Standing Committee on Gun Violence. The Standing Committee is one of the ABA's advocacy wings, and is affiliated closely with the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
"Part of our mission as an association is to defend liberty and deliver justice," Silkenat said at the program, "Combatting Gun Violence: A Role for Lawyers and the Bar." Someone "who cannot go to the laundromat, the movie theater or school, without fear for their safety, is not truly free—even if he or she can vote or have the right to legal counsel," he said.
Other gun control advocates went on to trot out the recent death of James Brady as a boon to their argument for stricter background checks and waiting periods:
Opponents of gun regulations cite the inconvenience to potential gun buyers of waiting periods associated with background checks, said Jonathan Lowy, director of the legal advocacy project of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. He noted that James Brady once said, from his wheelchair, "I guess I'm paying for their convenience." Lowy cited a well-known argument from the head of the National Rifle Association, that "the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." He noted that victims of the assassination attempt were protected with the guns of the Secret Service.
James Brady was the victim of a terrible act of political violence. He spent over three decades in a wheelchair because of his injuries, and lawyers and policymakers owe it to people like Brady to take care in their examination of the law. There is a difference, however, between advocating for strong, constitutionally-sound policy, and using worst case scenarios to swindle the public into believing that the mere presence of a gun bodes ill for the safety of the American people:

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on August 11, 2014 154 Comments
All hell broke loose in Ferguson, Missouri after a police officer killed an unarmed teen. Michael Brown got into an altercation with local law enforcement, and was shot and killed by one of the police officers. According to ABC News:
The struggle began when the officer encountered two men, one of whom was Brown, in the street outside of an apartment complex, and one of the men pushed the office [sic] back toward his squad car, according to police. A shot was fired inside the squad car and then multiple shots were fired at Brown outside the car, killing him, authorities said.
The identification of the officer responsible for the shooting will be released tomorrow at 2:00 in a press conference, ABC News reports. A vigil held Sunday night in Brown's memory turned violent as attendees began looting and destroying local businesses:

Posted by New Neo on August 11, 2014 45 Comments
ISIS is the embodiment of evil. But:
“We don’t understand real evil, organized evil very well,” said America’s former ambassador to Iraq and Afghanistan, Ryan Crocker, in an interview with The New York Times. “This is evil incarnate.” “People like [Islamic State commander] Abu Bakar al-Baghdadi have been in a fight for a decade,” he added. “They are messianic in their vision, and they are not going to stop.”
My question is: does anyone ever "understand" evil? I don't think so. Evil's very nature is to be inscrutable. Evil is altogether mysterious and altogether different from the way most people operate or could even imagine operating. In all the biographies and histories that have dealt with Hitler, for example, who has ever really explained him? No one. Religious people posit a spiritual origin for evil. Non-religious people tend to doubt its existence, until they look into its eyes. If it were necessary to fully understand evil in order to fight it, World War II would have never been won by the Allies. What is necessary is to be able to recognize evil and see it for what it is quite early in the game. Those are the important first steps. The next steps are finding the will and the tools to fight it. Evil is very strong, because it doesn't know the same restraints and limits as morality or good. Regarding ISIS, Elizabeth Warren pipes up:

Posted by Amy Miller on August 11, 2014 32 Comments
Last month, the Justice Department asked for an injunction to prevent the state of North Carolina from implementing changes the legislators made to state election law. The lawsuit, first filed in 2013, is backed by the NAACP and the League of Women Voters, and claims that the new law--namely, its strict voter ID requirement--was passed in violation of the 14th, 15th, and 16th Amendments, as well as section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. However, a federal district judge has ruled against the DoJ, which means that North Carolina's new election laws will be in force for the midterm elections come November. The court held that, although the DoJ's lawsuit has merit (meaning that the court can't justify simply dismissing it,) attorneys for the plaintiffs failed to provide a "clear showing" of entitlement (meaning that they failed to show the court that they would succeed on the merits of their legal claims.) The court also said that, with regards to several of the claims, the plaintiffs had failed to show that they would suffer irreparable harm before trial in the absence of an injunction. North Carolina's new election laws contain a complete overhaul of the state's policies. Although the main point of contention rests with the new voter ID laws, the bill also reforms existing law. From the opinion:

Posted by Bruce Carroll on August 11, 2014 14 Comments
Jonathan Krohn has become to the first western journalist to reach the mountains in Northern Iraq where tens of thousands of Yazidis, a Middle Eastern religious sect, took flight to escape the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) forces that moved into the Kurdish parts of Iraq last week. Krohn describes the scene of human suffering in stark terms in his first dispatch for The Telegraph.
I was on board an Iraqi Army helicopter, and watched as hundreds of refugees ran towards it to receive one of the few deliveries of aid to make it to the mountain. The helicopter dropped water and food from its open gun bays to them as they waited below. General Ahmed Ithwany, who led the mission, told me: “It is death valley. Up to 70 per cent of them are dead.” Two American aid flights have also made it to the mountain, where they have dropped off more than 36,000 meals and 7,000 gallons of drinking water to help the refugees, and last night two RAF C-130 transport planes were also on the way. However, Iraqi officials said that much of the US aid had been “useless” because it was dropped from 15,000 ft without parachutes and exploded on impact.
Perhaps in response to Krohn's report, late Sunday the U.S. Department of Defense released these two videos showing Iraqi refugees on the ground retrieving the humanitarian aid after being dropped by U.S. forces.

Posted by A.F. Branco on August 10, 2014 5 Comments

Note: You may reprint this cartoon provided you link back to this source.  To see more Legal Insurrection Branco cartoons, click here. Branco’s page is Cartoonist A.F.Branco...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 10, 2014 15 Comments
On July 26, we reported on anti-Semitic protests that had taken place in The Hague in which Death to Jews was shouted to the dismay of local officials. This video of ISIS supporters shouting Death to Jews was posted on June 24. It's not clear if it was the same protest, but it was the same chant, as reported by YNET News:
A protest in Holland, that was approved by the Dutch government and meant to be a peaceful demonstration against Israel's Gaza operation and against the arrest of an Islamist operative, turned into a terrifying rally of hundreds of ISIS supporters. The Dutch were shocked of the protest, and The Hague's mayor was called to resign after his staff were the ones to approve the protest without realizing the danger it poses. The Dutch were also shocked to see pictures posted by ISIS recently that show a Muslim Dutch national alongside severed heads of Syrian soldiers he murdered in cold blood. Analysts estimated that the extremist organization was using this protest rally to recruit youths to its religious war in European cities. Some 3,000 European youths of Muslim descent are believed to have joined ISIS for fighting in Syria and Iraq, some of which have already returned home after having trained with ISIS and murdered many.
Jonathan Hoenig has been photographing and filming an anti-Israel rally in Chicago today. He tweeted out a flyer that was handed out:

Posted by Mike LaChance on August 10, 2014 17 Comments
If Hillary Clinton runs for president in 2016, will she pull an Obama, and blame everything on her predecessor, the way Obama still blames Bush for everything? Even if it's a President from her own party?  And an administration she participated in? And a Foreign Policy she helped develop? From recent interviews, looks like Hillary has found her George Bush, and it's Obama. A new report from FOX News seems to indicate that when it comes to foreign policy, she she'll be running against Obama's legacy:
Clinton critical of Obama foreign policy, says 'failure' to act in Syria created vacuum for jihad Hillary Clinton, the front-runner among potential 2016 Democratic presidential candidates, is sharply distancing herself from President Obama's foreign policy, particularly in Syria, as Americans appear to continue losing confidence in his handling of key international affairs. Clinton, who as secretary of state was Obama’s top diplomat, suggested during an in-depth interview with The Atlantic magazine that the president’s foreign-policy mantra of “don’t do stupid stuff” lacked sufficient depth. “Great nations need organizing principles,” she said in the roughly 8,000-word interview released Sunday. “And ‘don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.” The interview comes as Americans’ opinion of how Obama is handling crises in Israel, Ukraine, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere, continues to sink. A Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll released Tuesday, three days before Obama ordered airstrikes and humanitarian airdrops in Syria, showed a record-high disapproval rating. Sixty percent of those polled disapprove of Obama’s foreign policy efforts, compared to 36 percent who approved. The interview also could help or hurt the former first lady’s effort to burnish her own foreign policy credentials ahead of an official 2016 campaign.
The significance of Hillary's position wasn't lost on Maggie Haberman of Politico:

Posted by Amy Miller on August 10, 2014 35 Comments
Wendy Davis's run for governor against Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott is one of the most high profile top-ticket races in the country. The political class (if not yet voters at large) is keeping a close eye on the back-and-forth battle for control of the narrative, and the latest ad from the Wendy Davis campaign has ignited a firestorm of controversy. The ad, titled "A Texas Story," tells the story of a woman from Seguin, Texas who was raped in her home by a door-to-door Kirby vacuum cleaner salesman. The woman's attempt to sue Kirby for damages went all the way to the Texas Supreme Court, which eventually held that the victim did have a right to sue the corporation for the actions of the salesman. Then-Justice Greg Abbott, however, dissented. He said that the Kirby corporation had "no duty" to the victim because the salesman in question was hired by a distributor. (Two other justices agreed with him.) The controversy surrounding this ad obviously doesn't center on the issue of which Justices booked their 1L Torts exam; instead, it centers on the issue that has defined these campaigns from the beginning--gender. Also, emotions (because of course) and the shock of seeing a political ad about a brutal rape. (Some may say the shock of seeing a political ad that exploits rape to gain points with voters, but who's counting?)

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 10, 2014 20 Comments
Less than a week ago we wrote about how The anti-Semitic shame of Malmö, Sweden continues with attack on Rabbi. It's part of an outburst of open, unabashed anti-Semitism throughout Europe and the world, but particularly Europe, under the mask of opposition to Israel's Gaza war. This trend did not start with the Gaza war. We covered almost exactly a year ago how many parts of Europe were becoming unlivable for Jews due mostly to anti-Semitic violence from Muslim communities, tolerated and egged on by anti-Zionist leftists, Jews in Europe past their expiration date. Anti-Semitism masquerading as anti-Zionism is so open now that even The Guardian in Britain issued an Editorial denouncing the practice. The Editors of The Guardian likely did not consider how their own biased anti-Israel coverage contributes to this atmosphere. Annika Hernroth-Rothstein, a Swedish Jewish writer and political commentator, writes in The Jerusalem Post about how Sweden has become unlivable for Jews, so she is leaving for Israel permanently, Hold on, I’m coming home:
My friend tells me that Sweden ever so quickly has gone from so-called anti-Zionism to open anti-Semitism, and that no one seems to care. “Don’t come back.” That’s what he said to me; “Don’t come back here, you have no idea how bad it has become since you left.” I went to Israel on July 23....

Posted by Amy Miller on August 10, 2014 10 Comments
A Media Trackers open records request has revealed a secret Google group aimed at helping liberals influence public policy by driving the media narrative. "Gamechanger Salon" is a (now not-so-) secret Google group with a membership of over 1000 left wing influencers. Media Trackers discovered the group after filing an open records request concerning a professor and activist at the University of Wisconsin. Members include journalists from outlets like the Huffington Post, MSNBC, ThinkProgress, and Media Matters, and activists from groups like the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Change.org, Planned Parenthood, and the AFL-CIO. Screen Shot 2014-08-09 at 11.56.11 AM In 2010, Legal Insurrection reported on the first "Journolist," a similar group used to stack the deck against Republicans and conservatives:
For those of you who haven’t been here long, the JournoList was an email list serve organized prior to the 2008 election by Ezra Klein, now one of the lead writers at The Washington Post, in which various young bucks (uh oh, is that a dog whistle) and doe in the emerging melding of blogging and journalism traded various strategies.
MORE POSTS
Accessibility by WAH