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Posted by William A. Jacobson on April 28, 2014 17 Comments
Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day. A two minute siren is sounded in Israel and everything comes to a stop. On this day we remember not only the 6 million Jews, but the millions of non-Jews killed by the Nazis, the "righteous gentiles" who risked their lives and the lives of their families to hide and shelter Jews, and the soldiers who liberated the camps. Like Vernon Tott and others, about whom we wrote in 2009:
When I think of the exceptional nature of this country, I also think of the rows upon rows of white crosses in cemetaries above the beaches of Normandy, of thousands of mostly Christian soldiers floating on the shores of islands in the Pacific, and the mostly Christian American soldiers who liberated numerous concentration camps. I think of Christian Americans like Vernon Tott of Iowa who not only liberated concentration camps, but took the time thereafter to bear witness to what he saw (and decades later to reunite with one of the prisoners he liberated):

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Posted by A.F. Branco on April 28, 2014 2 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 April 27, 2014 4 Comments
The video below is causing quite a stir, as reported by The Times of Israel:
The video, titled “Christy a Palestinian Christian’s plea to Dr. Saeb Erekat,” was posted to YouTube on Saturday, featuring clips from separate events. In the first, Christy Anastas directs questions at Erekat, a senior Palestinian negotiator, and the second, longer segment, shows Anastas giving a presentation in which she talks about life as a Christian in Bethlehem. “I believe God has given this land to the Jews as an everlasting covenant,” Anastas said. Anastas said that Palestinian children are encouraged to violently confront Israel Defense Forces soldiers in order to die as martyrs, and that incentives included payoffs by former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and the Palestinian Authority, given to the families of Palestinians that were killed. “How many Muslim countries do we have in the world?” she said. “Why can’t the Jews have one country?”
After that last quoted statement about Jews having one country, she details how a family member threatened to put a bullet in her head (at 22:35). She also has been threatened in England. (at 25:25) Pay special attention to the video starting at 3:25 when she details how children were used as fighters during the Second Intifada, and how the wall built by the Israelis separating Bethlehem from Israel has stopped "my people from killing themselves, blowing themselves up." (at 13:45) Not surprisingly, her family is abandoning her, as further reported by The Times of Israel:

Posted by Mandy Nagy on April 27, 2014 2 Comments
One monitor was freed Sunday after pro-Russian separatists seized a group of eight European monitors with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in eastern Ukraine earlier this weekend. From CNN:
Pro-Russian separatists holding a European military observer team in eastern Ukraine released one of the observers for medical reasons Sunday, shortly after parading them before cameras, officials on both sides of the dispute said. At least seven of the inspectors from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe appeared at a news conference staged by the self-declared mayor of Slavyansk, Vyacheslav Ponomarev, who referred to them as "prisoners of war." The freed observer was from Sweden and had been suffering from diabetes, Ponomarev spokeswoman Stella Khorosheva told CNN. And Michael Bociurkiw, an OSCE spokesman in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, called it "a welcome development." Holger Schmuck, one of the German members of the team, said earlier that their captors had ensured the ailing observer had all the water and sugar he needed and were taking particular care of him. The monitors were seized Friday outside Slavyansk, one of the flashpoints in the standoff between Ukraine's interim government and pro-Russian factions challenging its authority in the east. They said that although they have diplomatic status, they went along with Sunday's news conference because the mayor asked them to.
The bus on which the group was traveling earlier was reportedly commandeered and driven to the headquarters of the separatists in Slovyansk, according to a Wall Street Journal report earlier this weekend. Reuters reported Saturday that the separatists suspected the monitors of spying, and offered to release them in exchange for prisoners.

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Posted by Laurel Conrad on April 27, 2014 17 Comments
Welcome to the age of Hashtag Diplomacy. For those unfamiliar with the concept, this is what it looks like: Jen Psaki The above tweet is U.S. State Department Spokeswoman Jen Psaki giving a thumbs-up to Ukraine. It illustrates the State Department's latest foreign policy strategy, a twitter campaign for #UnitedForUkraine. However, this Twitter campaign must not be a very formidable or convincing strategy, because it did not take long before the hashtag was "hijacked" by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation. Below is just one example of the various MFA Russia taunts at the Obama Administration:

MFA tweet

On Thursday,  Jen Psaki responded to the MFA by tweeting:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on April 27, 2014 13 Comments
One of the beauties -- and sometimes nightmares -- of Twitter is that sometimes people tell you how they really feel without filters. Such as the NYU Dorm Stormers at Students for Justice in Palestine, who sent out the tweet in the featured image above. That tweet puts the lie to the claims of SJP and similar anti-Israel groups on campus that they do not seek the destruction of Israel, and merely want to have Israel leave Judea and Samaria (aka the West Bank). http://youtu.be/TQxzojmhWW0?t=53s There are naïve followers of these groups who actually believe that spin, but that's not what the groups are about. When they say "Justice in Palestine," what they really mean is that Israel has no right even to exist. NYU SJP was called out on the tweet at Truth Revolt: Truth Revolt NYU SJP denies Israel's right to exist A funny thing then happened. The tweet was deleted, rendering this image at the Truth Revolt post:

Posted by Andrew Branca on April 27, 2014 19 Comments
The past several days I've been attending the National Rifle Associations's Annual Meeting in Indianapolis, having been invited to speak at the NRA's 17th Annual Firearms Law Symposium as part of the larger gathering. The Annual Meeting is a massive event, with something on the order of 70,000 people attending, hundreds of exhibiting vendors covering more than 9 acres of exhibit space, and talks by pro-2nd Amendment Senators, Governors, and television/radio personalities. Given that context, my own little talk on Stand-Your-Ground ranks perhaps among the most modest of the Annual Meeting's constituent components. Even taken just within the context of the other Firearms Law Symposium--which included such well-known civil rights scholars as Stephen Halbrook and David Kopel, as well as Indiana Supreme Court Justice Stephen David (whose talk was particularly outstanding)--I was a small fish, indeed. Nevertheless, I've received repeated requests for video of my small talk, and I aim to please. Much of the substantive content of the talk--and, really, I talk substantively only for about 25 minutes--will be familiar to those who have previously seen my Stand-Your-Ground commentary from the pro-SYG victory at the UC Berkeley debate, from my posts here and elsewhere, or from my book and seminars. In the interests of avoiding a straight-forward droning delivery of the law, I've interlaced what humor I could into the talk, and in particular the last four minutes or so consists of the "Downfall" parody that was prepared following CNN legal analyst Sunny Hostin's refusal to honor her "Zimmerman wager" with me following the Berkeley debate, as covered at length here: CNN analyst welches on bet after Andrew Branca wins “Stand-Your-Ground” Debate.

Posted by Mandy Nagy on April 27, 2014 5 Comments

A roundup of links for your Sunday morning reading. As the NRA has its annual meeting, Piers Morgan couldn't help himself...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on April 26, 2014 7 Comments
We mentioned before how Christian Zionist college student Chloe Valdary has come under highly racialized attack from anti-Israel Jewish leftists like Richard Silverstein, The ugly, repugnant attack on a pro-Israel black American student: https://twitter.com/richards1052/status/437086594546536448 She also is a frequent target of other anti-Zionist fanatics who find a unique threat in a black American female Zionist, because dividing people along racial lines is a key anti-Israel boycott tactic. In this interview at the AIPAC conference, Valdary explains how she has dealt with the attacks, how her Zionism is consistent with that of the great civil rights leaders of the 1960s and why (at 2:20):
"As a free woman of color, of course I would be a Zionist, it's only natural"
Valdary also discussed her own experiences in Israel, and the modern blood libel that Israel is an Apartheid state (at 8:45):
"There is no Apartheid in Israeli society ... it's an insult to the people who suffered from Apartheid in South Africa"
(Via CiFWatch) Valdary goes into even more depth about the racism of the anti-Israel left in this interview:

Posted by Mike LaChance on April 26, 2014 17 Comments
Democrats in politics and media are still beating a constant drum about the GOP's supposed war on women. I wonder if any of the Democrats making the rounds on the Sunday news shows this week will be asked to comment on Gurbaksh Chahal, the California high-tech mogul who likes to give Democrats large amounts of money when he isn't busy beating up his girlfriend. The Washington Free Beacon reported...
Major Obama Donor Avoids Jail Time After Brutally Beating Girlfriend A high-dollar Obama donor who was caught on video brutally beating his girlfriend got off with 25 hours of community service last week after he pled guilty to domestic battery charges. CCTV footage caught Gurbaksh Chahal, the CEO of San Francisco tech startup RadiumOne, kicking his girlfriend 117 times, including blows to the head, and trying to smother her with a pillow during a vicious 30-minute assault. He faced 45 felony charges until the footage was deemed inadmissible. As a result, Chahal has managed to avoid jail time, the Daily Mail reported on Thursday. According to police reports, Chahal also threated to kill his girlfriend several times...

Posted by Mike LaChance on April 26, 2014 3 Comments

The Obama administration's relationship with the media is hardly and adversarial one. In fact, at times it has seemed more like a partnership and there's a logical explanation for that. A surprisingly high number of people have moved back and forth from the media to the...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on April 26, 2014 14 Comments
We covered the NYU "Dorm Storming" by Students for Justice for Palestine. It's now received national attention through Greta Van Susteren, who I think did a good job in this interview with Laura Adkins at focusing on the provocative nature of the act. That's something we've focused on. Of course it's part of a greater BDS movement to demonize Israel, but it's also an attempt to intimidate students in their bedrooms. Local ABC News reports (if video doesn't load, click on link): It violated NYU rules, which protect the privacy of students. If NYU takes no action, which is what I expect, then it has rendered students captives in their own dorm rooms. Rowan v. U.S. Post Office Dept., 397 U.S. 728, 738 (1970)
“We therefore categorically reject the argument that a vendor has a right under the Constitution or otherwise to send unwanted material into the home of another…. That we are often ‘captives’ outside the sanctuary of the home and subject to objectionable speech and other sound does not mean we must be captives everywhere.”
So what is NYU going to do?

Posted by Andrew Branca on April 26, 2014 76 Comments
This past Tuesday, April 22, I participated in a debate on Stand-Your-Ground hosted by UC Berkeley Law School. As you might expect, hilarity ensued. It turned out there were actually three sides to the debate. The two lawyers on the anti-SYG side of the issue were opposed to the debate proposition that "Florida state law may be flawed, but Stand Your Ground is a fundamentally sound policy that protects the innocent." I, of course, was on the pro-SYG side. My debate partner, a lovely woman and law professor, Andrea Roth, was nominally on my side, but in fact did not take a pro-SYG position. Her position would more accurately be described as "undecided on SYG." The way the debate was structured was we each had a 6 minute slot for opening statements. I spoke first (awesome). You can see my opening statements here (the full-length video of debate is at bottom of post): The way the debate winner was determined was by greatest change in audience opinion. The audience voted prior to the start of the debate, and again at the conclusion. The starting vote had me at 18, the anti-SYG side at 53, and the rest undecided.
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