Israel addresses the UN – plus, all you never wanted to know about UNRWA
Gilad Erdan tells the UN General Assembly members how morally bankrupt they are, although he realizes the vast vast majority of the representatives there – and their governments – could not care less. One of the things I find most interesting about this speech is his tone. He doesn’t sound like a diplomat, or a politician, or any of the usual speech-makers. He sounds like a person talking to other people:
The UN has been highly instrumental in nurturing Jew-hatred among the Palestinians. The following video is from the Jerusalem Center. It’s a highly informative discussion that describes the pernicious role that UNRWA has played in Gaza. Recall, as you watch it, that President Trump cut US UNRWA funding back in 2018, and that Biden restored most of it early in his term. Just another fabulous accomplishment of the Biden administration. The reason the Biden administration gave for doing this:
Mr Biden wants to “restore credible engagement” by the Palestinians in long-stalled peace talks with Israel.
How’d that work out for ya, Joe?
I think Trump should point all of this out in his 2024 campaign.
Anyway, here’s the video (I again suggest going to “settings” and listening at a faster speed):
Open thread 12/18/23
Confronting a coyote
During my trip out west, I tried to keep up with my walking regimen. On one particular leg of the journey, I was in a Los Angeles suburb, walking along a well-traveled path near homes. There were some plantings on a small hill along the path, and one day as I walked I heard some loud rustling in the low bushes.
I looked up and saw a large coyote staring at me, maybe ten to fifteen feet away. I’ve seen coyotes in LA suburbs before, most prominently one night around 2 AM years ago when my pet dog started barking and scratching at the front door, wanting to go out onto the street. The door had a little window in it, and I looked out to see an entire coyote pack sauntering up the road.
Needless to say, I didn’t let my 25-pound dog out.
But the other day I was very surprised to see this one lone animal at around 2 PM rather than 2 AM. We stared at each other for what seemed a long time, while I tried to remember instructions for what to do. Should I yell? Beat my chest? I knew better than to run, but what I decided to do was simply walk away.
Luckily, the coyote was only mildly interested in me. But it was a reminder that even in LA suburbia, the wild world isn’t so far away.
DC jury sets absurdly high punitive damages for Giuliani in defamation suit
They are trying their best to destroy him. Here’s the latest effort:
A jury comprising eight Washington, D.C., residents awarded ex-Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss $148,169,000 in their defamation suit against Rudy Giuliani on Friday.
More here:
There was an audible gasp in the courtroom when the jury foreperson read aloud the $75 million award in punitive damages for the women. Moss and Freeman were each awarded another roughly $36 million in other damages.
Giuliani didn’t appear to show any emotion as the verdict was read after about 10 hours of deliberations. Moss and Freeman hugged their attorneys after the jury left the courtroom and didn’t look at Giuliani as he left with his lawyer.
Giuliani told reporters outside Washington’s federal courthouse that he will appeal, saying the “absurdity of the number merely underscores the absurdity of the entire proceeding.”
“It will be reversed so quickly it will make your head spin, and the absurd number that just came in will help that actually,” he said.
Why DC for this particular case? You know why – DC juries will be as Draconian as possible. Plus, if the suit had occurred in Georgia, such an award would not have happened:
A $250,000 cap in punitive damages is constitutional, the Georgia Supreme Court has confirmed, upholding the trial court’s decision to substantially reduce a $50 million verdict to $250,000. Taylor v. Devereux Found., Inc., Nos. S22A1060, S22X1061, 2023 Ga. LEXIS 63 (Mar. 15, 2023).
Additionally, the Court ruled that the cap imposed by the law did not infringe on the right to a fair trial by jury, separation of powers, or the guarantee of equal protection.
Like many states, Georgia imposes a statutory cap on punitive damages. The cap limits punitive damages to a specific dollar amount of $250,000. There are some limited exceptions to this cap, however. For example, in cases of product liability, when the defendant acted with the specific intent to harm, or when the defendant was under the influence of alcohol or drugs, the $250,000 cap does not apply.
In addition, in the Giuliani case, the harm to the plaintiffs was from death threats, although no one had attacked the women and Giuliani did not threaten them or tell people to do so.
Giuliani also faces criminal charges in the Georgia case against Trump.
SCOTUS has ruled previously on limits to punitive damages, but usually the guidelines involve punitive damages as a multiple of compensatory damages. In the Giuliani defamation case, the compensatory damages are also hugely out of whack already, so I believe the huge punitive award wouldn’t violate the letter of those previous rulings, although it might violate the spirit. Many of these cases are against large companies rather than private individuals.
Giuliani doesn’t have that kind of money, so he could go into bankruptcy, but apparently he’d always be liable because bankruptcy wouldn’t cancel the debt (see the Alex Jones case – which also had the element of Jones’ defamatory statements being held to have been “willful and malicious” with “intent to harm.”)
Here’s more background on the case, which has been complicated. The present jury trial was only about compensation because the judge had previously ruled against Giuliani on the merits, but for what I consider an unusual reason related to the lawfare against Giuliani and his reaction to it:
A federal judge has determined that Rudy Giuliani has lost a defamation lawsuit from two Georgia election workers against him after he failed to provide information sought in subpoenas. …
In court in recent weeks, Giuliani said he could no longer contest that he made false and defamatory statements about Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss …
Giuliani said he struggled to maintain his own access to his electronic records – partly because of the cost – and didn’t adequately respond to subpoenas for information from Moss and Freeman as the case moved forward.
Among other things, Giuliani has been required to pay not only his own attorney’s fees but also those of the plaintiffs. What’s more:
Giuliani has been struggling financially, buried under 2020 election legal proceedings, a new criminal case against him in Georgia related to efforts to overturn the election and other matters. …
Ted Goodman, a political adviser to Giuliani, said in a statement that Howell’s decision was “a prime example of the weaponization of our justice system, where the process is the punishment.” Goodman added that Giuliani was “wrongly accused” of failing to preserve his own records and that he wanted Howell’s decision to be reversed. …
Giuliani had claimed that the FBI seizure of his electronic devices years ago had complicated his ability to access his records and that he had struggled under pricey legal fees. But Howell said he could have taken steps at an earlier point to keep his records in case litigation arose in the future.
The judge also noted that while Giuliani complained to the court that he was buried in litigation costs, he was able to get Trump’s reimbursement for his electronic legal debts, listed his Manhattan co-op apartment for $6.5 million and traveled on a private plane to report to jail for processing in Fulton County, Georgia, last week.
Doesn’t putting one’s residence up for sale indicate the need to raise money?
That said, I think Giuliani was very unwise to claim what he did about these workers without ironclad proof. I understand having suspicions, but he should have known better than to make such strong and detailed accusations. That doesn’t mean that this award amount is anywhere near correct, though. It is not. Will it stand? I certainly hope not.
[NOTE: I haven’t seen many bloggers on the right covering this. I’m not sure why that is.]
I suppose you’ve heard …
… about this:
The U.S. Senate staffer who filmed himself having sex with his boyfriend inside a Capitol Building meeting room has been fired. That news was delivered in a statement put out by Sen. Ben Cardin’s office, the Democrat who employed the staffer.
As RedState reported, the saga first came to light on Friday afternoon, with the only real details being that the staffer was a member of Cardin’s office. Shortly after, the staffer was identified as Aidan Maese-Czeropski, and the video he produced was obtained and publicized. I won’t go into detail describing it except to say it was the hardcore variety.
Cardin’s announcement that Maese-Czeropski was fired could not been less informative.
More here. And here’s a post in which John Hinderaker goes into Maese-Czeropski’s sort-of-denial.
Apparently this incident hasn’t been covered much if at all in the MSM. I’m not inclined to say much about it either, although probably for different reasons. My reason is that it gives me a sense of exhaustion. These days, I find that many stories that are the sensation du jour fill me with that same feeling.
This story puts me in mind of that old saying variously attributed to many different well-known people: “I don’t care what anybody does, so long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.” Posting this video online is the equivalent, I suppose, of “doing it in the street.” As for horses, I don’t think they’re watching the internet, nor are they in Congress. Yet.
Hamas knows Israelis care about children. And so they set a trap for the IDF.
Israeli soldiers foiled “an elaborate Hamas ambush” that used dolls and children’s backpacks rigged with speakers playing sounds of crying to lure them into a terrorist tunnel in the Gaza Strip, the Israel Defense Forces said Friday.
Footage released by the IDF showed the alley where the ambush would have been staged. …
The forces subsequently found children’s dolls and backpacks with speakers to imitate crying sounds and songs, the footage showed.
“The goal is to draw us in to look for, to see these things … they play voices in Hebrew so we’ll think there are hostages and missing persons here. In order to draw us into the area that’s rigged with explosives,” the soldier explained while gesturing at the pile of troubling objects.
In 2014 I wrote a post about the use – and sacrifice – of children by terrorists. In that post, I also go into how the approach was employed by the enemy in Vietnam.
It’s interesting to go back and read that post of mine, which quotes heavily from this contemporaneous article by Caroline Glick. At the time, Israel was engaged in trying to destroy some of the Hamas tunnels in Gaza. Here’s Glick on the role of the Obama administration:
As Israel has uncovered the scope of Hamas’s infrastructure of murder and terror, the US has acted with the UN, Turkey and Qatar to pressure Israel (and Egypt) to agree to a cease-fire and so end IDF operations against Hamas before the mission is completed.
To advance this goal, US Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Cairo on Monday night with an aggressive plan to force on Israel a cease-fire Hamas and its state sponsors will accept. …
Rather than notice that Qatar and Turkey are playing a double game, and treat them with suspicion, the Obama administration has embraced them.
Chances that Kerry will secure a cease-fire in the near future are small. In all likelihood, the government will be able to buy the time necessary to complete the mission in whole or large part. But the fact that the US has chosen at this juncture in the operation – with Israel enjoying unprecedented support from the most important Sunni states in the region – to side with Hamas and its state sponsors in their demand for an immediate cease-fire speaks volumes about the transformation of US foreign policy under Obama’s leadership.
Glick’s essay has aged well, unfortunately. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Open thread 12/16/23
On my recent travels out west, I saw many sights in many many places. This is one you probably recognize:
Sunsets
It’s not the shortest day of the year yet, but we’ve already had the earliest sunset. Sunsets are getting later now, day by day, which brings me joy.
Israeli hostages killed by friendly fire
This is terrible and heartbreaking. And yet inevitable:
The IDF cleared for publication on Friday evening that, during combat in Shejaiya, the IDF mistakenly identified three Israeli hostages as a threat. As a result, the troops fired toward them and they were killed.
During searches and checks in the area in which the incident occurred, a suspicion arose over the identities of the deceased. Their bodies were transferred to Israeli territory for examination, after which it was confirmed that they were three Israeli hostages. …
The IDF believes that the three hostages who were accidentally shot either escaped from captivity or were abandoned by the terrorists who were holding them because of the fighting, but the incident is still being investigated.
“The IDF began reviewing the incident immediately. The IDF emphasizes that this is an active combat zone in which ongoing fighting over the last few days has occurred. Immediate lessons from the event have been learned, which have been passed on to all IDF troops in the field,” the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit said.
Under such terrible conditions, errors of this sort will be happening. It is horrible for everyone involved (except Hamas, of course), especially the families of the three hostages and also the troops who made the error. For the hostages to have survived this long, and to have been so close to being liberated, and then to be killed this way … words fail. RIP.
Reforming American colleges
I agree with this:
The issues in Academia go well beyond anti-Semitism; they go directly to the heart of what it means to be educated rather than indoctrinated. For the last several decades, progressive activists have transformed the former into the latter and imposed tribalism via DEI. That has created an environment on most campuses of extreme intolerance to differing points of view, and created leadership that quashes debate and dissent from the progressive-woke orthodoxy.
The proper approach is to defund Academia entirely, at least at the federal level. The federal government had no business goosing Academia’s business model in the first place, and the six-decade experiment has utterly failed. It has not improved education, but contributed to its destruction. The federalized loan program has turned at least two generations into debt paupers, and incentivized “debt forgiveness” at the expense of taxpayers who pay their own bills. And the tuition-support flood has created a massive administration class that operates politically rather than scholastically.
American education has become, for the most part, leftist indoctrination. That must change. Enormous damage has already been done to several generations, and it has consequences we’ve already seen. The hour is very very late. Those of us who’ve been writing about this for over a decade are happy to see the problem getting more attention, but until more is done it will remain a huge danger.
Caring about how Jews vote?
In almost every article or post on the right that deals with the war in Gaza, the terrorist attacks on Israel, anti-Semitism on US campuses, and the like, I see many comments to the effect of: “And yet Jews vote Democrat, and nothing will make them change.” Just to take one of countless examples, see the first few comments here.
Progressive Jews are ethnic Jews. Most know little to nothing about Judaism and are often actively hostile to both religion and Israel. They are typical of progressives everywhere, who tend to be urban and well-educated. Jews fit that profile. The vast majority of Jews in the US live in New York or Los Angeles, and vote more or less like other groups in those places – except for black people, who vote in far greater percentages for the left.
Also, although the Jews of Israel have their share of leftists, as a whole in recent years they’ve voted for the right, although the parliamentary system sometimes has allowed coalitions that put leftists in power.
But back to the US and its Jewish voters. The following was written after the 2022 midterms:
The Republican party increased its share of the national Jewish vote to a new high not seen in a generation, according to results of a midterm election exit poll conducted Tuesday by Fox News.
According to the data, 33% of Jewish voters polled voted Republican in the 2022 midterm election, up from 30% in 2020 and 24% in 2016. …
Markstein said Tuesday’s election saw “a record-smashing level of support in Florida, at 45% of the Jewish vote.”
In New York’s hotly contested gubernatorial race, Republican candidate Rep. Lee Zeldin won between 85-95% in Hasidic Brooklyn neighborhoods in Borough Park and Williamsburg where voter turnout averaged 50%, according to New York city polls, despite being ultimately defeated by Democratic incumbent challenger Gov. Kathy Hochul.
“Jews” are not unitary. They vote very differently from each other, depending on many things, but especially on how religious they are, with religious Jews voting on the right. Also important is where they live. They vote Democrat in higher percentages in blue states, much like just about everyone else in blue states and especially blue urban areas.
Jews are also a tiny tiny percentage of the voting public, and usually their vote doesn’t matter at all because they are concentrated in blue states where even without them, Democrats would be winning. Jewish donors are a different story – they are more influential, and lately quite a few of them have been pulling back from supporting Democrats.
NOTE: For a typical example of what I’m talking about, see many of the comments here.