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Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 17, 2017 15 Comments
I appeared on January 16, 2017, on The Dennis Prager Show to discuss the shutdown of Legal Insurrection's YouTube account, as detailed in these prior posts: We frequently run PragerU videos, which are excellent both as to topic and production quality. Scroll through the PragerU Videos tag to see the ones we have posted.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 16, 2017 5 Comments
I appeared on the Lars Larson Show in the evening on January 16, 2017, to talk about the shutdown of Legal Insurection's YouTube account, as described in these prior posts: Hope you enjoy the interview, I should have more posted in the coming days.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 14, 2016 9 Comments
I appeared on the Mark Levin radio show on Wednesday night, December 14, 2016, to talk about my post, VIDEO: Activists manipulate third-graders into hating Israel. Video of the event is at the link above, which also has extensive background. The short version is that Ariel Gold from Code Pink and Jewish Voice for Peace arranged for Bassem Tamimi to appear before the third grade classes at an elementary school in Ithaca, NY. Tamimi is best known for using children, including his own, to confront Israeli soldiers in the hope of creating viral photos and videos. Tamimi urged the children to become activists and "freedom fighters for Palestine."

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 26, 2016 6 Comments
Americans for Peace and Tolerance is releasing a 70-minute documentary on the rise of antisemitism and anti-Israel activity on campuses and the role played by the BDS movement and Students for Justice in Palestine. The movie is titled Hate Spaces: The Politics of Intolerance on Campus. I was interviewed for the documentary, along with others such as Alan Dershowitz of Harvard, Richard Landes of Boston University, Bret Stephens of The Wall Street Journal and Caroline Glick of The Jerusalem Post. Here is one early review of the film:
I’ve written about the phenomenon more than once, so I didn’t expect to be surprised by anything in the film. But despite knowing about the various incidents described, the sheer volume and intensity of them taken together left me shaken. Yes, shaken, and I’m not easy to shake....

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 20, 2016 2 Comments
This is the first time this semester I'll have a public speaking engagement. My travel schedule and other commitments just haven't permitted it otherwise. In the past, it's been great to meet LI readers at such events, so if you are within driving distance of Cambridge, MA, bookmark December 4. Or maybe you have relatives, friends or children in the area who might be interested. The event title is "War By Other Means: Israel, BDS and the Campus." The day-long event will be held at Harvard Law School, my alma mater. It is open to the public, but non-students have to pay a registration fee (it is free for students). The "early-bird" sign up price is good only through November 23. You can sign up here. My hour-long presentation will be on the history of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (something I write about *occasionally*). LI author Prof. Miriam Elman will be speaking on issues of faculty promotion of BDS and free speech/academic freedom.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 06, 2016 29 Comments
I was a guest on The Michael Koolidge Show on 1440 WROK in Rockford, Illinois and numerous other stations. The discussion started with my take on the VP debate.
"I was left with the feeling wondering why Mike Pence wasn't the presidential nominee because he was so much better on his feet than Donald Trump. And I wonder if Trump had given the performance that Pence gave, I think the polling would be very different nowadays. Trump was rising in the polls as we approached the presidential debate, it was not a good night for him by any account, and he has sunk pretty significantly, several percentage points, since then. And I just think that if he were as prepared as Pence was prepared, if he was on message as much, if he didn't take the bait the way Pence never took the bait, I think we could be in a very different spot here.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on April 27, 2016 123 Comments
Last night was the night Mr. Donald J. Trump took a big step towards a first ballot win. As abhorrent at that result may be, there's no sense deluding ourselves. Trump still isn't there, however, and isn't yet on a trajectory to be there. But he's a lot closer as a result of small Republican electorates in northeast blue states which will vote Democrat in the general election. California will decide the fate of the Republican nomination process. Who could have predicted that? Perhaps recognizing what a Trump nomination means, RNC Chair Reince Priebus appealed last night for party unity. My response was to state the obvious, the Party is over. https://twitter.com/LegInsurrection/status/725161440257183744

Posted by William A. Jacobson on April 06, 2016 4 Comments
On March 28, 2016, I gave a lecture at the University of Chicago Law School, When Does Anti-Israelism Turn Into Anti-Semitism. The lecture was sponsored by the Office of the Dean of Students and the Louis D. Brandeis Center, Inc. The video is embedded below and includes PowerPoint slides, which also are embedded below. After laying out the background on the rise of anti-Semitism tied to the gross demonization of Israel by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, I discussed the Sharansky 3-D Test, and the State Department guidelines, as to when anti-Zionism crosses into anti-Semitism. I then used various images as a Rorschach test. Here are a couple of the images (all the images are in the video and slide show). Slide - Carlos Latuff Octopus

Posted by William A. Jacobson on March 23, 2016 13 Comments
It doesn't sound quite as good as "on the cover of The Rolling Stone." A reader emailed me a photo of a NY Times front page story today in which I am quoted. Thing is, the Times article suggests I opposed the proposal:
Ever since Mr. Myrick, 29, unveiled a plan last month for what he called a “supervised injection facility,” critics have pounced on it as a harebrained idea that would just enable more drug abuse. A Republican state legislator, Tom O’Mara, called it “preposterous” and “asinine,” and a Cornell law professor, William A. Jacobson, said it would be a “government-run heroin shooting gallery.”
In fact, in my blog post from which the quote was taken, to which The Times links in the online version, I was ambivalent:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on March 16, 2016 40 Comments
Numerous news reports indicate that at 11 a.m. this morning Obama will hold a press appearance to introduce Merrick Garland, currently Chief Judge of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, as his nominee to fill the vacancy created by the death of Antonin Scalia. We will add additional information regarding Garland soon. Not that it likely matters, since Republicans in the Senate have promised not to act on any nomination until the next president. Though, wondering if that will change if Trump is the Republican presidential nominee and it becomes obvious he will lose the presidency and Republicans might lose the Senate, in which case Garland may be less bad than whoever Hillary picks. I predict some wobbling. But first, the really important question: Do you really think he looks like me? https://twitter.com/alwaysonoffense/status/710107700558958592

Posted by William A. Jacobson on February 23, 2016 39 Comments
I'll never forget my one and only visit to a heroin shooting gallery. It was my first summer of law school, and I was working at the Manhattan (New York County) District Attorney's Office. It didn't pay much; we were paid $100 a week, in crisp $100 bills handed out at the cashier's window every Friday. Seriously. The extra-curricular part of the job was the most interesting. We took a tour of the Medical Examiner's Museum, not open to the public. Use your imagination as to what we saw there. We viewed an autopsy; the one I attended was of a guy found burned in a dumpster. I walked out on it. But by far the most exciting part was my police ride-along. My law school friend and I randomly were assigned to the same patrol, West Harlem on a Friday night. The cops we rode with thought it was really funny to have two young Harvard Law School students with them that night, so they decided to show us a good time.

Posted by Mike LaChance on January 29, 2016 18 Comments
Bernie Sanders has done plenty of favors for Hillary in this election cycle but instead of having his good will returned, he's coming up against the Clinton smear machine. A rumor is circulating that Sanders supporters are planning to win the Iowa caucus by flooding it with college students from out of state. The rumor is nothing more than a delivery system for the smear which would give Clinton supporters an opportunity to taint a Sanders win in the state. Chuck Ross reported at The Daily Caller:
Sanders Is Furious At David Brock, Hillary’s Loyal Servant And Spin Master Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders ripped into David Brock, the head of the pro-Hillary Clinton super PAC, Correct the Record, after being asked about rumors on Thursday that his campaign was planning to bus out-of-state students into Iowa to take part in Monday’s caucuses.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 17, 2016 142 Comments
I was a guest on Caffeinated Thoughts Radio on 93.3 FM in Iowa on Saturday, January 16, 2016. (Full audio at bottom of post.) The topic was Ted Cruz and the "natural born Citizen" controversy. For my prior analysis, which is referred to in the radio discussion, see my September 3, 2013 post, natural born Citizens: Marco Rubio, Bobby Jindal, Ted Cruz. In the past 2.5 years, many people have sent me complaints and supposed analyses of things I missed; I track those down and not a one has persuaded me one iota that my analysis was wrong. As I said in that post:
I also am not trying to “win” the argument. I have no intention (hah!) of getting into the endless argument streams this topic engenders, where for every answer there is a new obscure historical reference or convoluted theory until someone gives up. There are some things you just can’t “win” on the internet, and this is one of them.
Yet it sickens me the way Donald Trump and Ann Coulter have demagogued the issue. They may be successful in creating doubts in voters' minds; that's the nature of propaganda, it sometimes works. Here are excerpts from my interview; the full audio is at the bottom of the post:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 27, 2015 4 Comments
I was interviewed recently by Legal Insurrection reader Dr. Kenneth Friedman, for the Baltimore Jewish family magazine, Where What When:
The WHERE WHAT WHEN is a monthly family magazine of Jewish information, inspiration, and opinion. Established in 1985, it is Baltimore's liveliest Jewish magazine, approximate readership is 40,000. The Where What When is directed to the wide spectrum of Baltimore's Jewish population and has become a powerful voice in the community.
The topic was the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Here is the full interview, At the Forefront of the Fight against BDS: Eleven Questions for Prof. William A. Jacobson: KF: Talk a little bit about how you got involved as an activist and particularly as it pertains to the fight against BDS.

Posted by Andrew Branca on December 19, 2015 12 Comments
A reader alerted Professor Jacobson that Legal Insurrection and I got a mention on the Mark Levin Show.  Naturally we tracked down the mention in order to crow about it and share it with you loyal readers (but mostly to crow about it). In fairness, it's probably more accurate to say that Andrew McCarthy mentioned us in his (as always) very good blog post over at National Review about the Freddie Gray prosecutions, The Travesty in Baltimore.  Levin essentially reads McCarthy's post on the air and so includes that mention. Levin does, however, also throw in a bit of a kudos of his own into the mix, interjecting "Legal Insurrection, another great web site." Here's that audio clip.  First there's just the short bit in which we're actually mentioned, then a pause, and then the clip starts playing the entirety of the ~6 1/2 minute segment in which Levin reads McCarthy's post (starting with "I want to address this.").  Enjoy:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 21, 2015 7 Comments
I was a guest earlier today on The Craig Silverman Show on 710 KNUS in Denver. For almost 20 minutes we talked about the use or refusal to use the term "radical Islam," Obama's world view and foreign policy, Jesse Watters' visit to Cornell, and the vote at the American Anthropological Association last night to send an anti-Israel academic boycott resolution to a vote by the full membership in the spring. If you didn't hear about the vote, you can read about it at the Times of Israel. I previously wrote about how over the course of several years anti-Israel professors and graduate students put together misleading and dishonest seminars and publications which presented a completely one-sided view of the conflict. That was compounded by a study commissioned by the AAA in which the authors adopted a settler colonial approach to predetermine the outcome of the study by framing it as Israel being illegitimate, then finding facts to support the narrative while ignoring or diminishing contrary facts. This series of maps, displayed outside the voting session purporting to show Palestinian loss of land, reflects the type of propaganda used to pass the boycott on to the membership. It's the false and misleading series of maps that MSNBC apologized for using because it is wrong. Yet it was on full display at AAA.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 17, 2015 2 Comments
I was a guest last night on the Mark Levin Show, the 4th highest rated talk show in the country with over 7 million weekly listeners, regarding our post, ALERT: Faculty Association anti-Israel Boycott season has started. This is the second time I have discussed the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement on Mark's show. This time I discussed not just the problem, but a solution. First, the background:
WAJ: "A combination of left-wing and Islamist-type professors have done at the campus level something which really is unbelievable. They've singled out Israel in their faculty associations, and they are trying, slowly but surely, to get more and more faculty groups to endorse the boycott of Israel, the complete academic boycott of Israel.... This season they're really coming up to a big busy season. The National Women's Studies Association is voting, as we speak, for the next 10 days, the membership is voting on the full boycott of Israel. How insane is that, of all the problems with ISIS attacking in Paris, with all of the problems of women being abused in the Middle East, the Women's Studies Association is singling out Israel....

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 22, 2015 5 Comments
A storm of controversy erupted when the Ithaca, NY, chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace brought Palestinian activist Bassem Tamimi to a third grade class. Tamimi is best known for the viral videos and photos he creates by sending children, including his own, to confront Israeli soldiers. Tamimi, who argues that it is the “duty” of children to engage in acts of resistance, was on a now-concluded U.S. national tour co-sponsored by JVP and the Chicago branch of Amnesty International. [caption id="attachment_146972" align="alignnone" width="600"]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1qrE-MRBPs [Image capture Ithaca Week video][/caption]The Superintendent of the Ithaca school district, after an investigation, denounced the visit,finding that Tamimi was not invited by the school and the event was “not developmentally appropriate for third graders, nor aligned with the New York State standards. The statements were politically skewed, inflammatory, and not endorsed by the Ithaca City School District.”
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