You may as well watch these while you wait.
From yesterday, Alan Dershowitz:
Also from yesterday, Megyn Kelly:
One thing I’ve learned about waiting for a verdict …
… is not to read tea leaves.
Did this juror look at Michael Cohen funny? Why did the jury ask for those instructions to be read to them again? What does it mean that they’re still deliberating?
Impossible to know.
In the Trump case, I feel a great deal of anxiety while waiting. But I’m not sure why because the trial has already been terrible in its most basic aspects: that it was brought at all, the extreme bias of the judge in his rulings during the trial, and his charge to the jury right out of the Alice stories.
So, what difference will the verdict make? Perhaps not much, as any lingering trust in the fairness of the court has been destroyed. But I still hope for a hung jury, because that may at least offer us the bare bones of a campaign season in which Trump is allowed to move around freely and meet the people.
Open thread 5/30/24
What will happen if Trump is convicted and imprisoned?
Commenter “physicsguy” writes: “I haven’t seen anyone else express my real fear: a conviction and tossing Trump into jail is the spark that ignites CW2. Again, maybe that’s the Democrat long game to force marshal law, as well as keep Trump out of the WH.”
I don’t know the answer. We are in uncharted waters, at least in the history of this country. The left is in power and wants to make sure it never again relinquishes it. They have already gone much further than ever before in the US, but it comes from a combination of confidence and fear.
Confidence because they hold the reins of so many institutions: the presidency, the Senate, much of the judiciary, the MSM, much of social media and search engines, the DOJ, the FBI, the State Department, education at all levels, Hollywood, book publishing, the arts, the CEOs and higher-ups of many corporations and even of much of the military, and I’ve probably left out a thing or two.
And what’s the origin of the fear? It’s that, now that the left’s mask is off or at least partially off, they are afraid of the wrath of the people. They know that this is a top-down imposition of leftist values on a reluctant populace, and there’s strength in numbers. They talk about “our democracy” but are tremendously afraid of it, which is why they must control sources of information and also are not above election fraud if necessary. The fact that they are executing lawfare against Trump makes it crystal clear that cheating is something they are willing to do; is it any wonder people don’t trust the election process anymore?
Personally, I don’t think there will be any CW2. There certainly might be violence, though. For that reason, I think the left may stop at merely convicting Trump rather than imprisoning him, and may be satisfied – for the moment – with merely labeling Trump a felon. If so, I sincerely hope it backfires on them in November by encouraging Trump’s election.
By the way, the point of the persecution of the J6 defendants was to let it be known how any sort of violence from the right will be met by the government.
Caroline Glick: what Hamas expected to happen, the international courts, and the function of anti-Semitism
This is an excellent talk by Caroline Glick. I’ve cued up sections that I find of particular interest. If you’re impatient like me, click on “settings” and speed the video up for listening.
First is a very short section I want to especially highlight about a certain Muslim leader in Michigan; it’s about two minutes long:
Here’s another extremely interesting (and short; about 3 minutes) section that describes something Trump did to the ICC during his presidency of which I was previously unaware, but which is just another reason he must be elected. She also says something very important about anti-Semitism:
Here’s a much longer segment. In it, Glick discusses many topics, including what Hamas expected would happen as a result of 10/7:
American Jews and “Christophobia”
[Hat tip: commenter “Cornflour.”]
Arnold Kling has written a fairly short piece entitled “Jewish Christophobia.” In it, he says:
One reason that most Jews are reluctant to move right is that they have what I call Christophobia. This is not a fear of Christ. It is a fear of Christians. Many Jews fear that Christians are either out to convert Jews or otherwise make American Jews feel uncomfortable and unwelcome.
I was surprised, though, when I read the piece, that it leaves out quite a bit. What is left out is what I’d roughly call “history,” although there are other things left out, too. So I’ll try to fill them in a bit.
(1) Many of the Jews that Kling mentions are ethnic Jews only, and as atheists or agnostics some of them fear traditional religion and the religious in general. They believe – in some cases correctly – that some people who are extremely religious are out to impose their beliefs on others. Not all Jews of the atheist variety support Israel, either, for similar reasons, nor do they identify with it. The rise of anti-Semitism post-10/7 may have given them cause to re-evaluate these points of view, because it’s not the religious Christians who are visibly anti-Semitic these days, it’s their fellow atheists and leftists. But that realization is new.
(2) And then there’s history. The history of anti-Semitism has a long long Christian phase. One doesn’t have to go all the way back to the Crusades to find it, either. Although the Holocaust and the Nazis were NOT a Christian undertaking – the Nazi leaders themselves were anti-Christian for the most part and many members of the German resistance and in particular the plot to kill Hitler were devout Christians – the truth is that the Holocaust happened in Christian nations. Most of those who participated and/or cooperated in a lesser way would probably have described themselves as Christians.
It wasn’t just the Holocaust, either. Pogroms happened in Christian countries, in particular in Eastern Europe and Russia, in times so recent that many American Jews heard grandparents or even parents talk about them, depending on the age of the listener. It’s not at all unusual for American Jews to have had grandparents or great-grandparents murdered in a pogrom, and although pogroms had many motivators one of the things that was often present was the anger of Christians at the alleged Christ-killers, the Jews. This was especially the case the further back in time you go, and it’s mostly absent today. But that’s a relatively recent phenomenon. You can read about the history here, and note that there were Jew-blaming portions of Christian liturgy until quite recently. And apparently some Christian branches still contain such things as this:
The Holy Friday liturgy of the Eastern Orthodox Church, as well as the Byzantine Rite Catholic churches, uses the expression “impious and transgressing people”, but the strongest expressions are in the Holy Thursday liturgy, which includes the same chant, after the eleventh Gospel reading, but also speaks of “the murderers of God, the lawless nation of the Jews”, and, referring to “the assembly of the Jews”, prays: “But give them, Lord, their reward, because they devised vain things against Thee.”
(3) Kling writes, “many Jews will say that ‘the only reason Evangelicals support Israel is because they believe in a prophecy that when all the Jews move to Israel they will be converted to Christianity.’” I think that’s a correct statement of the beliefs of at least some Jews, and for the most part I think it’s a false belief. But note that I say “for the most part.” It is certainly the case – I see it over and over – that at least some Evangelicals support Israel for exactly that reason. Christianity, unlike Judaism, is after all a proselytizing religion, and the goal and hope of some – not all, but a significant number of – devout Christians is that the Jews will indeed convert to Christianity some day. In the very olden days, that was sometimes accomplished by violent and/or coercive means, and these days it’s peaceful. But the idea that some Jews might still see the goal of conversion as a potential threat is neither crazy nor completely unjustified, and it is up to Christians to show otherwise.
I believe that more and more Jews are realizing as time goes on that Christians are their best friends and allies. But there are very strong reasons why this understanding has been somewhat slow in coming.
NOTE: In 2015 I wrote this long post on a related theme, entitled “On Jews disliking evangelicals.”
Open thread 5/29/24
Duck Lake plus Swan Lake, very weird but with an odd charm:
What do you get when you cross Alice’s trial with Kafka’s The Trial? Judge Merchan charging the NY jury in the Trump case, that’s what
This afternoon I was trying to explain to a friend what’s been going on today in the NY “hush money” trial and why I’m so perturbed about it.
It’s not easy to capture in its full surreal horror, although Lewis Carroll and Franz Kafka have given similar trials a go. But what I told my friend was something like this: The judge has told the jury they don’t have to agree on the elements of the supposed crime that elevated at most a misdemeanor barred by the statute of limitations into a felony that could be tried. They don’t even have to agree on what that crime might be. They just have to figure there was some sort of crime and Trump was some sort of guilty. And oh, by the way, in their summation Trump’s defense attorneys can’t criticize this monstrous ruling by the bench.
Ghastly. Outrageous. But hey, Merchan has the power and he’s going to use it. The left isn’t even pretending to play by the rules. They know there is no check on them from the MSM or leftist lawyers, who will say anything to get Trump.
So in the end it rests on the wisdom of the American public to see through all of this. Or perhaps on the shoulders of one juror with integrity, if there is such a thing in this case.
As Ace writes:
The prosecution wants a Choose Your Own Adventure style verdict — jurors can pick from three offered predicate crimes. And they don’t even have to agree on which of the three possibilities they’re convicting Trump under; five jurors can pick Possible Predicate #1, four can pick Possible Predicate #2, two can pick Possible Predicate #3, and one can even make up his own predicate. As long as they all say that some predicate is present, they can convict.
This is against the law. The Supreme Court has ruled that juries must be unanimous about all elements of a crime to convict.
Now we know why the crime that supposedly occurred was never specified: it didn’t have to be, as long as a compliant judge was willing to prostitute himself and twist the law into something unrecognizable, and a New York jury would take his word for it that they could pretty much wing it and give vent to their imaginings about the evil crimes Trump must have committed or intended to commit.
For what it’s worth, here’s information about the defense’s closing arguments, which have been completed. This is an unusual order of things; ordinarily the prosecution goes first with its closing arguments and the defense gets to go last, although the prosecution gets to rebut briefly at the end.
Newsweek writes that “It is common practice in criminal trials for prosecutors to summarize their closing arguments last … .” Actually, it’s not common at all for the prosecution to give its closing arguments last. What does Newsweek mean by “summarize”? Do they mean the rebuttal? This is deliberately vague. The rest of the article is filled with quotes from attorneys saying that Trump is so incredibly stupid and ignorant to expect to have the last word. But this is, once again, deliberately confusing the closing argument order with the final rebuttal.
This is rather obviously what Trump was referring to – the reversal in this trial of the usual order for closing arguments themselves. Here’s the usual order:
Under the Sixth Amendment, defendants have a right to present a defense. They are also entitled to give a closing argument. Usually, the prosecution first makes a closing argument, then the defense attorney. The prosecutor, who has the burden of proof, frequently gets the chance to respond to the defense’s final argument.
So yes, the prosecution ordinarily gets a chance to be last, but not for its main closing argument – it’s just an opportunity to rebut what the defense has said. In the Trump trial, with the defense going first for their main closing arguments and then the prosecution last for their main closing arguments, will Trump’s lawyers get a chance to rebut? Apparently not.
I’m curious if there are any trial lawyers out there who can say how often it is that the prosecution goes first for the main closing argument, and how it is handled and why it would happen.
ADDENDUM:
You can read more on the subject here (from Scott Johnson) and here (from Byron York).
And here’s Jonathan Turley. His whole Twitter (“X”) page is of interest, but here’s one tweet from it:
…The problem is that, under New York law, the defense was forced to go first unlike most jurisdictions. That denied the defense the change to respond to such sweeping claims. It is huge advantage to the prosecution.
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) May 28, 2024
I guess the anti-Trump lawyers quoted in that Newsweek piece would say Turley is stupid and ignorant, too.
Now the EU says it wants to sanction Israel
Has the EU ever done a single thing that’s good? I’m drawing a blank on that. Here’s the latest action it’s considering that’s not good:
The European Union is considering sanctions against Israel as member states Spain, Ireland and Norway officially recognize “Palestinian state.”
The threat of sanctions is aimed at forcing Israel to stop the ongoing military operation against Hamas terrorists in the Rafah terrorist stronghold, European media reports suggest. The EU “foreign affairs ministers raised the prospect of placing sanctions on Israel in a “real way” for the first time over its continued military campaign in the besieged city of Rafah in Gaza,” the Irish Times reported Monday evening citing the country’s foreign minister.
I find it darkly ironic that people criticized the Jews in WWII for not fighting back sufficiently against the Nazis (although one of these days I plan to write a post showing that they fought back much more than people know), and now the Jews are criticized for fighting back against an enemy that is at least equally murderous.
It is also darkly ironic that most European countries that were occupied by the Nazis had a great many citizens who voluntarily cooperated with rounding up their own Jews for the slaughter. Now the European Union would like to give Israel Hobson’s choice: let yourself be murdered by barbarous neighbors, or we will squeeze you to death financially.
Fortunately, I don’t think the Eastern European countries will go along with this – although I could be wrong – and Germany would have an “interesting” dilemma in deciding what to do. Also, I don’t think that Europe is the biggest source of Israel’s trade (see this). Then again, I wouldn’t put it past Biden to join in the anti-Israel sanction festivities.
Anti-Israel sanctions are exactly the sort of thing the language of “apartheid state” and “genocide,” the recent international court decisions against Israel, and the MSM propaganda are all meant to engender. The aim is to isolate and cripple the Israeli state.
The Rafah attack: another day, another lie by the anti-Israel crowd
It’s no mystery why they lie: lies work, especially with the full weight of the MSM behind them. In fact, the Palestinian cause is mostly lies, but on the strength of those lies they gain more and more supporters. The lies have managed to unite the Jew-hating left and Jew-hating right, which is a neat trick. And the lies pull in people like my friends who are not Jew-hating at all but merely read the MSM and mostly believe it.
And so we have this (and please note the subtitle of the Melanie Phillips piece, which is, “Another murderous lie travels round the world before the truth gets its boots on”) [emphasis mine]:
On Sunday, Israel’s air force carried out a strike in Rafah targeting two senior Hamas commanders whom it had tracked by aerial surveillance to a compound in the Tal as Sultan area.
Following this strike, a terrible fire broke out in a number of refugee tents where Gazans displaced by the war were burned alive. The Hamas-run health ministry says 45 civilians were killed here and many more injured. …
The western media, politicians and “humanitarian” groups parroted the Hamas claim that the Israelis had willfully targeted a refugee camp that Israel itself had designated as a protected humanitarian area. …
The fact that Israel had done what the world had demanded but said was impossible, by moving almost one million Gazans for their safety out of the area of Rafah where the IDF was about to conduct its military operations, counted for nothing. The strike on this humanitarian area, said the world — from the UN to the EU to the French president Emmanuel Macron — showed that there was “no safe space anywhere”. This apparently proved that the IDF assault on Rafah, in the teeth of the global requirement to desist, demonstrated the Israelis’ callous disregard for human life and the rules of war and therefore that they were truly monstrous.
Except that this was totally untrue. The Israeli strike had taken place one and half kilometres away from the designated humanitarian area. The IDF’s target location was inside the Rafah combat zone. You can see this clearly on the IDF map above. …
Israeli jets had used two small bombs to minimise civilian casualties. The IDF said it had taken steps ahead of the attack to ensure that no women or children were in the Hamas compound. The strike took place more than 100 metres away from the shelters that caught fire. …
Earlier, Israeli officials told the Biden administration that shrapnel from the strike may have ignited a nearby fuel tank. Further information that has come to light, however, suggests that the tents were actually ignited by Hamas munitions.
This video footage, reportedly filmed by a Gaza resident in the immediate aftermath of the Israeli strike and obtained by the website Abu Ali Express, features an onlooker saying that what was hit was a Hamas Jeep “filled with ammo and weapons,” and he expressed a worry that “any moment a [Hamas] rocket can fly at us…”
The IDF says it now suspects that ammunition, weapons, or some other inflammatory material was stored in the area of the strike, causing a secondary blast and the fire that spread to the civilian tents.
The IDF has released an intercepted conversation between two Gazans suggesting that an ammunition store in the area had ignited.
If you recall the false Hamas story of the hospital strike by Israel early in the war, widely reported to have killed 500 people and destroyed much of the hospital (fake news which traveled swiftly around the world), you will find this familiar. In both cases there are civilians taking refuge, an unfortunate incident that kills many of them which is blamed on Israel, and a reality that the cause was Hamas rather than Israel. With the hospital incident there was the additional claim of 500 deaths reduced to a few dozen (we never have learned the true number; at least I’ve never seen it), as well as a bomb Hamas had fired at Israel that fell short and landed in the hospital parking lot only and not on the hospital itself. In the current incident it may be that the number of casualties was properly reported, but once again this does not appear to be Israel’s fault and is a direct result of Hamas’ own methods of warfare.
How many people realize even now that the hospital story was false? I doubt it’s even anywhere near half of those who heard the initial story. How many will ever get the facts on this one? Vanishingly few.
What’s more, after so many lies of this sort, the newspeople as well as heads of state should know enough to keep their mouths shut for a while until the facts emerge. But they cannot and will not do this. They are not interested in telling the truth. They are interested in pushing the anti-Israel narrative.
Many people criticize Israel’s messaging. But how on earth is Israel supposed to counter the enormous number of sources spreading the lies? I really don’t see how that can be done. Richard Landes, who specializes in these issues and coined the term “Pallywood” (and who is a friend of mine), wrote Can the Whole World Be Wrong, a book that was published in 2022. The subtitle is “Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad.” As far as I know, Landes also coined the phrase “lethal journalism,” and it is apt. Things have only gotten worse since 2022, and yes – the “whole world” can indeed be wrong.
And if the exploded Hamas ammunition story turns out to be incorrect, and Israel is responsible for these deaths, I will point out that mistakes are made in war all the time that lead to the unintended deaths of civilians. There is no army on earth – none – that takes more steps to avoid this than the IDF, as “Cynical Publius” (great name) points out in Tablet. And although he is talking about a particular person here, the MSM obviously is to be included in the group of “people like” that person:
But it’s people like my fellow soldier on X who trouble me more. When you know that Israel is the freest, most liberal state in the region; when you know that war is hell and civilians die in all wars; when you know that the IDF engages in state-of-the-art mitigation measures to protect innocent civilians; when you know all of these things and still engage in the blood libelish lies of “Israel is committing genocide,” No. 2 is the only logical conclusion. The only stain is the one on that person’s soul—a black stain of Jew hatred that goes back millennia.
Open thread 5/28/24
I was going to add the earlier (1971) studio version. But then I saw this and couldn’t resist, because of the spoken intro and how it connects to the added verse in the above video. The circle coming round, indeed:
For Memorial Day: on nationalism and patriotism
[NOTE: Both are more threatened in this country now than ever before in my lifetime, due to a frontal assault from the left which controls the media and educational system as well as the federal government. The following is a repeat of a previous post, slightly edited and updated.]
The story “The Man Without a Country” used to be standard reading matter for seventh graders. In fact, it was the first “real” book—as opposed to those tedious Dick and Jane readers—that I was assigned in school.
It was exciting compared to Dick and Jane and the rest, since it dealt with an actual story with some actual drama to it. It struck me as terribly sad—and unfair, too—that Philip Nolan was forced to wander the world, exiled, for one moment of cursing the United States. “The Man Without a Country” was the sort of paean to patriotism that I would guess is rarely or never assigned nowadays to students – au contraire.
Patriotism has gotten a very bad name during the last few decades.
I think this feeling gathered more adherents (at least in this country) during the Vietnam era, and certainly the same is true lately. But patriotism and nationalism seem to have been rejected by a large segment of Europeans even earlier, as a result of the devastation both sentiments were thought to have wrought on that continent during WWI and WWII. Of course, WWII in Europe was a result mainly of German nationalism run amok, coupled with a lot more than nationalism itself. But the experience seemed to have given nationalism as a whole a very bad name.
Here’s author Thomas Mann on the subject, writing in 1947 in the introduction to the American edition of Herman Hesse’s Demian:
If today, when national individualism lies dying, when no single problem can any longer be solved from a purely national point of view, when everything connected with the “fatherland” has become stifling provincialism and no spirit that does not represent the European tradition as a whole any longer merits consideration…
A strong statement of the post-WWII idea of nationalism as a dangerous force, mercifully dead or dying, to be replaced (hopefully) by a pan-national (or, rather, anational) Europeanism. Mann was a German exile from his own country who had learned to his bitter regret the excesses to which a particular type of amoral nationalism can lead. His was an understandable and common response at the time, one that many decades later helped lead to the formation of the EU. The waning but still relatively strong nationalism of the US (as shown by the election of Donald Trump, for example) has been seen by those who agree with Mann as a relic of those dangerous days of nationalism gone mad without any curb of morality or consideration for others.
But the US is not Nazi Germany or anything like it, however much the far left may try to make that analogy. There’s a place for nationalism, and for love of country. Not a nationalism that ignores or tramples on human rights (like that of the Nazis), but one that embraces and strives for and tries to preserve them here and abroad, keeping in mind that—human nature being what it is—no nation on earth can be perfect or anywhere near perfect. The US is far from perfect, but has been a good country nevertheless, always working to be better, with a nationalism that traditionally recognizes that sometimes liberty must be fought for, and that the struggle involves some sacrifice.
So, I’ll echo the verse that figured so prominently in “The Man Without a Country,” and say (corny, but true): …this is my own, my native land. And I’ll also echo Francis Scott Key and add: …the star-spangled banner, O long may it wave, O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave. Those lines from the anthem express a hope that has been fading. But even though things are looking dim for both liberty and courage these days, it is not over.
When I looked back at my original, longer version of this post, I saw that it was written on Memorial Day in 2005, not that long after I began blogging. Seems longer ago than that. This is another portion of what I wrote then, and although I was describing my post-9/11 thoughts, I think it’s especially appropriate now [updates in brackets]:
I’d known the words to [our national anthem] for [over sixty years], and even had to learn about Francis Scott Key and the circumstances under which he wrote them. But I never really thought much about those words. It was just a song that was difficult to sing, and not as pretty as America the Beautiful or God Bless America (the latter, in those very un-PC days of my youth, we used to sing as we marched out of assembly).
The whole first stanza of the national anthem is a protracted version of a question: does the American flag still wave over the fort? Has the US been successful in the battle? As a child, the answer seemed to me to have been a foregone conclusion–of course it waved, of course the US prevailed in the battle; how could it be otherwise? America rah-rah. America always was the winner. Even our withdrawal from Vietnam, so many years later, seemed to me to be an act of choice. Our very existence as a nation had never for a moment felt threatened.
The only threat I’d ever faced to this country was the nightmarish threat of nuclear war. But that seemed more a threat to the entire planet, to humankind itself, rather than to this country specifically. And so I never really heard or felt the vulnerability and fear expressed in Key’s question, which he asked during the War of 1812, so shortly after the birth of the country itself: does that star-spangled banner yet wave, o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
But now I heard his doubt, and I felt it, too. I saw quite suddenly that there was no “given” in the existence of this country–its continuance, and its preciousness, began to seem to me to be as important and as precarious as they must have seemed to Key during that night in 1814.
And then other memorized writings came to me as well–the Gettysburg Address, whose words those crabby old teachers of mine had made us memorize in their entirety: and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. Here it was again, the sense of the nation as an experiment in democracy and freedom, and inherently special but vulnerable to destruction, an idea I had never until that moment grasped. But now I did, on a visceral level.
We certainly feel the threat now, don’t we?
