SCOTUS rules 7-2 in favor of the Masterpiece baker…

The New Neo Posted on by

…but it’s a narrow ruling:

The verdict criticized the [Colorado’s] treatment of [baker] Jack Phillips’ religious objections to gay marriage, ruling that a civil rights commission was biased against him. As a result, the decision did not resolve whether other opponents of same-sex marriage, such as florists and photographers, can refuse commercial wedding services to gay couples.

Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the court’s 7-2 decision against the same-sex couple, departing from his long history of opinions in favor of gay rights dating back a generation.

The text of the decision can be found here (there are separate concurring opinions by Gorsuch, Kagan, and Thomas, with separate dissenting opinions by Ginsburg and Sotomayor). The gist of it appears to be that in this particular case the religious rights of the baker were infringed upon, because the Coloado commission did not take them into account, but that the ruling does not mean the court would rule in favor of all bakers in every case. The ruling is “tailored to the case at hand,” and:

The [Colorado] Commission’s hostility was inconsistent with the First Amendment’s guarantee that our laws be applied in a manner that is neutral toward religion. Philli was entitled to a neutral decisionmaker who would give full and fair consideration to his religious objection as he sought to assert it in all of the circumstances in which this case was presented, considered, and decided…

The outcome of cases like this in other circumstances must await further elaboration in the courts, all in the context of recognizing that these disputes must be resolved with tolerance, without undue disrespect to sincere religious beliefs, and without subjecting gay persons to indignities when they seek goods and services in an open market.

In other words, it’s a balancing act, but the rights of each side should be protected as much as possible without trampling on one or the other. Another interesting statement refers to the rights of clergy, although they were not the subject of this case:

When it comes to weddings, it can be assumed that a member of the clergy who objects to gay marriage on moral and religious grounds could not be compelled to perform the ceremony without denial of his or her right to the free exercise of religion.

However—and I’m doing this in part from my memory of things learned in law school, which is pretty long ago—I do not think that the statement on clergy creates any sort of binding precedent, because “resolution of that question” was not “necessary to the disposition of the precedent case,” one of the requirements for a precedent to be binding. However, it’s an indication of the way this particular Supreme Court would be ruling if such a case came up. As for future SCOTUS courts, all bets are off and it depends on their left/right composition.

I haven’t read the 59-page decision, although I hope to at least skim it. I’m very curious about the deeper reasoning involved, but I agree with the outcome as I understand it so far. I also think it’s interesting that it didn’t break down exactly along the usual liberal/conservative lines. That’s encouraging.

The nougat and divinity quest

The New Neo Posted on by

I can’t eat chocolate because it gives me migraines—alas—but I’ve always had a passion for nougat, particularly the kind that’s usually made in Italy or France. This brand is relatively easy to find, and it’s pretty darn tasty. But I like other kinds better, and they can be more difficult to locate, although (strangely enough) T.J. Maxx is often a good source.

Go figure.

About twenty-five years ago my husband, teenage son, and I went to France. We were driving somewhere (in Provence, I think) and came across a place called Chez Nougat (translation: Nougat House).

No, it wasn’t a dream, but it was the fulfillment of a dream. An entire store—a very large store, at that—filled with all kinds of nougat. Plain. Flavored. With nuts of all kinds. With fruit of all kinds. Hard. Soft. In-between. I can’t even remember all the variations worked on the nougat theme, but I still remember my intense joy and excitement.

And I still think about Chez Nougat sometimes, although an internet search has failed to locate anything of the sort. Is it gone from this earth? That possibility makes me sad.

In the meantime, I used to repeatedly try my hand at making something called divinity fudge, which is a nougat-y confection that is fiendishly difficult to make. In all my efforts, I only succeeded one memorable time, and I have no idea why that batch worked when a thousand others failed.

I long ago stopped trying to make divinity. I did buy it once somewhere and it was a disappointment; nothing like the wonderfulness of nougat, which it is supposed to greatly resemble.

Recently, in a nougat reverie, I started wondering what is the exact difference between nougat and divinity (as no doubt you’ve wondered too; hasn’t everybody?). I came across this article. If you take a look, you’ll realize that candy-makers are obsessives, as well as why I stopped trying to make any of the stuff. What a process!

Alan Dershowitz, Devil incarnate

The New Neo Posted on by

One of the things that struck me about this article excoriating Alan Dershowitz for his recent defense (not support, but defense) of Trump is that author Elie Mystal doesn’t actually engage with any arguments, nor does he cite anything Dershowitz has actually done or said that is factually or conceptually wrong.

It’s a completely ad hominem attack, as is his discussion of Trump. I assume we’re just supposed to take what the author says at face value. Or perhaps he assumes that if we’re reading him, we already agree with him.

Remember the Devil speech from “A Man For All Seasons”? I’ve posted the video many times before here. Here it is again in a shorter version:

Although Mystal went to law school (Harvard, actually) he doesn’t seem to understand the principle under which Dershowitz has been laboring lately: giving the Devil the benefit of law. But it’s really a tweet by Laurence Tribe, Harvard professor, that ties in quite well with the “Devil” speech from the Man For All seasons:

Clearly, Tribe is on the side of Roper in the play—cutting down the law to get after the Devil, Donald Trump. This is practically demented.

Apparently, Dershowitz has offered to debate Tribe, and so far Tribe hasn’t taken him up on it, at least according to this:

They would rather not engage on the merits, because of the danger (in my opinion, the certainty) that Dershowitz would win.

Here’s what Dershowitz has to say, and to me it sounds obviously true, having following Dershowitz’s arguments and articles regarding legal issues involving the investigation of Trump:

In March, Jeffrey Toobin, a New Yorker staff writer and CNN senior legal analyst, confronted Dershowitz on TV about “carrying water” for Trump. “This is not who you used to be,” Toobin told him. “And you are doing this over and over again in situations that are just obviously ripe with conflict of interest. And it’s just, like, what’s happened with you?”

“I’m not carrying his water,” Dershowitz replied. “I’m saying exactly the same thing I’ve said for 50 years.” He echoed this response when I asked why he thought liberals were criticizing him so much. “There’s such a hyper-partisan passion to get President Trump that anything that’s seen as trying to help President Trump is seen as supporting Trump,” he said.

There’s also this:

“People can’t just accept that I’m saying what I believe and I would be saying the same thing if Hillary Clinton were president.”

And yet they can’t see it, so eager are they to cut down the law to get after the Devil. Or, if they do see it, they must block it out:

Dershowitz said he “got an email today from a very prominent friend ”” I’m not going to disclose his name because it was a private email ”” admitting that I’m right and saying ”˜My hatred toward Trump blinds me to your truths.’ That was his email. ”˜My hatred for Trump blinds me to your truths. Please stop.’

“And then he said to me, ”˜Don’t ever send me another tweet that includes an article that you wrote that helps that son of a b”‘”‘”‘”‘.’

I guess it depends what the meaning of “truth” is.

New college admission standards recommendation to further diversity at the high school level

The New Neo Posted on by

Educators and people who set education policy are constantly tweaking college admissions standards in order to reach the holy grail of enough diversity, or the right kind of diversity. Here’s an article appearing in The Atlantic which offers a new and unusual suggestion. See if you can follow the logic here:

Universities tend to give a leg up to affluent, high test-scoring suburban [secondary] schools””which then incentivizes wealthier parents to seek out segregation. But what if those incentives could be changed?

And thus Scott-Railton’s idea was born: to take demographics of schools into account in college admissions””giving priority to applicants who attended schools with a certain threshold of low-income students (say, above 40 percent). In other words, admissions officers would look favorably on students who attended an economically integrated school, much as they do those who have had unusual travel experiences or outstanding extracurricular achievements.

In a nutshell, he argues, this idea would drive integration in three ways: It would create an incentive for middle class and wealthy parents to enroll their students in socioeconomically integrated schools, it would create countervailing considerations for white parents considering leaving currently integrated school districts, and it would provide an incentive for private schools to enroll more low-income students.

But the issue for most parents isn’t race per se: it’s the academic and social atmosphere of a school. The article completely ignores that fact—as well as the fact that affluent black parents in good school districts tend to have “white flight” (black flight?) if the demographics of the school change in a negative way by taking in a lot of low income students (I have a post about that somewhere; don’t have time to locate it now).

The reality is that economic demographics (which is what we’re talking about here) are linked with a host of things that affect the atmosphere—academic and social and even safety—of a school. I don’t think some slight advantage in the admissions process at colleges would compensate in most affluent parents’ minds (white or black parents) for what they perceive as a reduced atmosphere for learning and an increased amount of danger in the high school environment in which their children spend four long years. If the people proposing this new college admissions policy think it will stop white (or affluent) parents from pulling their children out of schools they perceive as creating a bad academic and/or social environment, they’ve got another think coming.

Another thing the article completely ignores is the issue of what happens to students who are given a leg up in the admissions process and who would not get into the college if they hadn’t been given those extra points. They tend to not succeed in college, or at least to have a great deal of difficulty there. This phenomenon has been documented many times, including in The Atlantic:

Over time, it has become a political lightning rod and one of our most divisive social policies. It has evolved into a regime of racial preferences at almost all selective schools — preferences so strikingly large and politically unpopular that administrators work hard to conceal them. The largest, most aggressive preferences are usually reserved for upper-middle-class minorities on whom they often inflict significant academic harm, whereas more modest policies that could help working-class and poor people of all races are given short shrift. Academic leaders often find themselves flouting the law and acting in ways that aggravate the worst consequences of large preferences. They have become prisoners of a system that many privately deplore for its often-perverse unintended effects but feel they cannot escape.

The single biggest problem in this system — a problem documented by a vast and growing array of research — is the tendency of large preferences to boomerang and harm their intended beneficiaries. Large preferences often place students in environments where they can neither learn nor compete effectively — even though these same students would thrive had they gone to less competitive but still quite good schools.

We refer to this problem as “mismatch,” a word that largely explains why, even though blacks are more likely to enter college than are whites with similar backgrounds, they will usually get much lower grades, rank toward the bottom of the class, and far more often drop out. Because of mismatch, racial preference policies often stigmatize minorities, reinforce pernicious stereotypes, and undermine the self-confidence of beneficiaries, rather than creating the diverse racial utopias so often advertised in college campus brochures.

The problems are vast, and the sort of tweaking recommended by Scott-Railton and company seem doomed to failure, or to make the problem even worse.

Pardon them: D’Souza, Stewart, Johnson

The New Neo Posted on by

Once again, President Trump does what I consider to be the right thing. If I had pardon power, I would have pardoned d’Souza, whose conviction (for something ordinarily not prosecuted at all) seemed a clear case of vindictive political pursuit by the Obama administration.

Andrew C. McCarthy agrees:

The selective, politicized prosecution of conservative author, producer, and activist Dinesh D’Souza was an exercise in gratuitous severity. President Trump’s pardon of D’Souza, announced today, is the remedy the Framers had in mind.

D’Souza was (and is) a strident anti-Obama critic. He committed a trivial campaign-finance violation. This is not to excuse the conduct; it is to reaffirm the principle that the punishment should fit the crime, and to observe that the conduct at issue is typically not treated as a crime at all. Routinely, misconduct of the kind engaged in by D’Souza is settled by payment of an administrative fine to the Federal Election Commission. In stark contrast, the Obama Justice Department not only selectively prosecuted D’Souza; prosecutors turned the case into a multiple felony indictment.

And Martha Stewart’s conviction, although not political, is another case in which I believe a pardon is very much in order, too. No doubt Trump’s motive is to undo some of the work of his nemesis, James Comey, who was in charge of that case. But it’s also the right thing to do.

And by the way, Stewart was a Hillary supporter. Not only that, she had lots to say during the campaign about what an awful person Trump is (they had a history of altercations, too):

In 2006, Stewart and Trump had a falling out over low ratings from her show, “The Apprentice: Martha Stewart,” which he created and was an executive producer for. Trump has previously said he believes the spin-off dragged down his own show.

Two years after the incident, Stewart said Trump’s actions were “unforgivable.”

“There is so much to know and so much to learn and so much diplomacy and kindness and introspection that goes with that kind of job,” Stewart said. “And it does not exist in the world of Donald Trump.”

If Trump were to pardon her, I wonder if she’d find it in her heart to revise that evaluation.

That CNN article I linked to earlier in this post ends with the following sentence:

Last week, Trump also pardoned the deceased boxer Jack Johnson.

Neither the writer nor CNN saw fit to clue the reader in on who Jack Johnson might be or why that pardon was issued—not even by offering the bare minimum, a link to something about Johnson. Perhaps the omission is because this one doesn’t fit the usual Trump-is-a-foul-racist narrative:

U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday issued a posthumous pardon to boxer Jack Johnson, the first African-American heavyweight champion, who was jailed a century ago due to his relationship with a white woman.

“I believe Jack Johnson is a worthy person to receive a pardon, to correct a wrong in our history,” Trump said.

In a case that came to symbolize racial injustice, Johnson was arrested in 1912 with Lucille Cameron, who later became his wife, for violating the Mann Act. The law was passed two years earlier and made it a crime to take a woman across state lines for immoral purposes.

James Earl Jones first became a star portraying a character based on Johnson in the play “The Great White Hope,” which I saw in the original production.

Speaking of theater, this post has started an earworm for me, which I’ll now share with you. The genesis of the earworm was the phrase “So pardon us, so pardon us…”—although this is referring to a different sort of pardon. I love, love, love “The Mikado” and know just about every word, having learned it in childhood from records:

[ADDENDUM: Let me add that Trump also spoke of the possibility of commuting Blagojevich’s sentence, which is not the same as a pardon but would get him out of prison. Blago’s sentence was 14 years, which I consider to have been excessive. Trump said:

“There was a lot of bravado. … plenty of other politicians have said a lot worse. And it doesn’t, he shouldn’t have been put in jail. And he’s a Democrat. He’s not my party. But I thought that he was treated unfairly.”

The president may have been referring to what the then-governor was picked up saying on secret federal wiretaps about his authority to appoint someone to Obama’s seat.

“I’ve got this thing and it’s f—ing golden,” Blagojevich said in the conversation with another state official on tapes that were played in court. “And I’m just not giving it up for f—ing nothing.”

Trump also suggested he was more interested in “curtailment” of Blagojevich’s sentence than in granting a full pardon.

Fascinating that Blagojevich is indeed a Democrat.

Another aspect of the D’Souza pardon is that Ted Cruz was instrumental in pressing for it.]

Commenter attrition

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s been some discussion in this recent thread about pro-Trump and anti-Trump commenters here, and whether one group or the other has left in significant numbers.

Actually, the majority of commenters who left this blog during the 2016 campaign and after were pro-Trump, and they left because I was perceived as too critical of him. But we still have people here who are pro- and anti-Trump (sometimes both combined in one person!), and I hope the blog remains a respectful atmosphere for those on each side.

Also, some of you may not be aware of the fact that commenters are always coming and going on this blog and others. I’ve been blogging for over 13 years, and the turnover has been immense and constant. There are only a few old hands here.

That’s the way it is. It has nothing to do with Trump or circle dancing, and it is not a new phenomenon. People get busy—a move, a new job, a family. People get sick. People even die (the anniversary of FredHJr’s death is coming up this month, but there have been others). People get bored with blogs.

All sorts of reasons. Most of the time I don’t learn the reasons. Sometimes I do, because people sometimes explain, but more often not. The hardest of all is when a prolific commenter just plain disappears, and suddenly (Occam’s Beard, where are you?). It’s hard not to imagine the worst, but I hope for the best.

Caching problem at the host

The New Neo Posted on by

About a year or two ago there was a caching problem here with the comments. Lately there’s been another cache problem connected with comments. This time the autofill for comments wasn’t working—a fact which some of you have noticed and complained about, because it’s rather annoying, I know.

I just talked to the host, they fiddled with their cache, and now autofill works—only problem is that it’s working in a screwy manner. At least for me, it seems to be filling in other commenters’ information in some random fashion.

That’s exactly what happened last time (a year ago? two years ago?) They fixed it then, and they should be able to fix it now, but it won’t happen immediately.

My apologies. They’ve opened a ticket and sent it to the bigger, supposedly more knowledgeable, team. So we’ll see.

In the meantime, you can try filling in a random fake email address if you feel a bit nervous about it all. I think that should work. Let me know if you’re experiencing the problem or not.

By the way, I’m still planning to make the move to thenewneo.com, but there’s been a delay due to the schedule of the kindly web developer I finally located.

But I soldier on.

ADDENDUM 5:30 PM: All of a sudden, the comment edit function wasn’t working, either. So I deactivated that plug-in. Lo and behold, when I did that, although the basic comment autofill problem wasn’t solved, the “preview” plugin (which hadn’t worked for a long time) started working again.

Curiouser and curiouser.

Please let me know what you’re experiencing on your end.

John Brennan’s Communist vote

The New Neo Posted on by

I had previously ignored this story, but it came up again in a comment by “AesopFan” and I thought I’d delve into it.

Here’s the tale as told by John Brennan, who later become director of the CIA under Obama:

John Brennan…recalled being asked a standard question for a top security clearance at his early CIA lie detector test [administered in 1980]: Have you ever worked with or for a group that was dedicated to overthrowing the US?

“I froze,” Brennan said during a panel discussion about diversity in the intelligence community at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s annual conference. “This was back in 1980, and I thought back to a previous election [1976] where I voted, and I voted for the Communist Party candidate” [Gus Hall]…

Brennan decided to come clean, because he thought the lie detector would detect it if he lied. So he gave the following explanation for his vote:

“I said I was neither Democratic or Republican, but it was my way, as I was going to college, of signaling my unhappiness with the system, and the need for change. I said I’m not a member of the Communist Party, so the polygrapher looked at me and said, ‘OK,’ and when I was finished with the polygraph and I left and said, ‘Well, I’m screwed.'”

Obviously, he wasn’t screwed. Not at all. But I find the story rather shocking, particularly since it occurred in 1976 (the year of his vote) and 1980 (the year of the lie detector test).

Brennan was born in 1955. That would make him 21 in 1976, an election in which Jimmy Carter was running against Gerald Ford. If he wanted change, why not vote for Carter, who (I remember it well) presented himself as a breath of fresh air, an outsider to DC who carried his own suitcases?

Brennan speaks in cliches of the time: “the system,” for example. Ah, the system! It’s a bit suspect that someone who was so against “the system” in 1976, at the age of 21, is joining that system big time by 1980. Now, that’s not impossible; minds can change, as we know. But that sort of change requires an explanation, one I’ve not seen Brennan offer, although I can’t say I’ve made an exhaustive search for one. I’d certainly be curious to know.

And if you hate “the system” and want change, let’s assume it’s change for the better. Why, then, would you vote for a Communist as a protest vote? By 1976 it was crystal clear that Communism wasn’t going to represent that change for the better. Brennan wasn’t an impressionable child, either, and this would have been his very first vote for president, which is often a time of great solemnity and importance (at least it was for me). To throw it away like that—if indeed that’s what was happening—is the mark of a rather impulsive and immature person, and that’s putting it kindly.

It’s not as though the 1976 election lacked for people to vote for if a protest needed to be lodged. Here were the major alternatives to Ford and Carter:

Roger MacBride, who had gained fame in the 1972 election as a faithless elector, ran as the nominee of the Libertarian Party.

Eugene McCarthy, a former Democratic Senator from Minnesota, ran as an independent candidate.

Ben Bubar, Prohibition Party nominee.

Frank Zeidler, former mayor of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, ran as the nominee of Socialist Party USA, which was founded in a split with Socialist Party of America.

Gus Hall, 4 time Communist Party Candidate.

Lots of choices there, all of them more innocuous than Hall and plenty good for protests, if it was protests Brennan wanted. But somehow it was Gus Hall for whom Brennan decided to vote. Among other things, this was Hall’s position:

Hall had a reputation of being one of the most convinced supporters of the actions and interests of the Soviet Union outside the USSR’s political sphere of influence. From 1959 onward, Hall spent some time in Moscow each year and was one of the most widely known American politicians in the USSR, where he was received by high-level Soviet politicians such as Leonid Brezhnev. Hall defended the Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, and supported the Stalinist principle of “Socialism in One Country”.

Brennan was apparently never asked by the CIA to explain his vote in any greater detail than that, and he just went higher and higher in the agency. He describes the incident as a free speech issue, but that’s absurd. I defend his right to vote for any candidate he prefers at any time. But that doesn’t mean that he should be hired by the CIA or has some absolute right to be hired by the CIA whatever his political points of view. The CIA has every right to screen its potential agents for their beliefs about the US and its place in the world. It seems quite clear to me that they didn’t do their job here.

Are malls dying?

The New Neo Posted on by

I think they are.

The biggest one in my neck of the woods opened around 1980. I remember how exciting it was to have a spiffy new mall within just a few minutes of my house. Now that mall is a ghost town. When I drive by at night and think of stopping by, it is so dark and forbidding that I don’t do it.

I still go to stores to buy clothes and a host of other items. I need to try on the clothes, and I like to actually see what I’m getting with many things (such as, for example, a new carry-on, which I’m presently in the process of researching and buying). But it seems I’m more and more in the minority these days.

The fox, the bunny, and the eagle

The New Neo Posted on by

If this were a fable, I’m sure there’d be a moral to the story. But I’m not sure what it would be, except that if you’re a fox, don’t mess with an eagle. But you have to admire this fox for trying.

As for the bunny—well, nature red in tooth and claw, I guess:

[Bald eagles are] also masters of something scientists call kleptoparasitism: the art of stealing food from others. In my book The Year of the Eagle, I documented bald eagles stealing food from crows, great blue herons and even other eagles.

A couple of days ago, however, I captured an especially dramatic act of thievery. I saw a bald eagle steal a rabbit from a young red fox. Even more impressive: at times, this battle played out more than 20 feet in the air.

Author Kevin Ebi is a wildlife photographer, and he got a series of fabulous photos. You can view them at the link, but here’s just one:

There’s also an amazing video that I can’t embed, but you can find it if you scroll down here.

Honoring hero terrorists

The New Neo Posted on by

How do you get more terrorists? Reward and honor them:

The terrorists honored most highly amongst Palestinian society are those who have killed the greatest number. Abd Al-Baset Udeh, killer of 30 at the Passover Seder massacre, had a soccer tournament for 14-year-olds named for him. His brother was honored with distributing the trophies. Dalal Mughrabi, terrorist bus hijacker (led the most lethal terror attack in Israel’s history in 1978, when she and other terrorists killed 37 civilians, 12 of them children) has had summer camps, schools, graduation ceremonies and sporting events named for her, as well as many TV documentaries honoring her. Palestinian newspapers also frequently glorify Mughrabi, as in the Al-Ayyam article which described Mughrabi as writing “the most glorious page of heroism in the history of the Palestinian struggle. [Aug. 2, 2009]. Thaer Hammad, who as a lone gunman murdered 10 Israelis in 2002, was glorified by the official PA daily as “the hero of the Intifada.”

Most people on the right are well aware of this. But I think it’s interesting to note how long this has been happening—for many many decades. And it is mind-boggling that so many people still don’t know about it, because it’s not as though the information hasn’t been out there. It just hasn’t been covered much if at all by the MSM, who want to present an alternate narrative, shall we say.

And of course, some on the left would say that terrorists are freedom fighters, and should be rewarded and honored. Long ago I wrote an article about this romance with terrorists; you can find it here. In it, I wrote:

So, who are the Romantics of today? From the foregoing discussion, it should be clear: Romanticism has found a cozy home on the Left. Romanticism (and Leftism) dictates not just sympathy for the Third World, but near-veneration of those there who combine a sense of victimhood (real or imagined) with what the poet Yeats called “passionate intensity,” which is the essence of Romanticism.

Interestingly enough, however, Facebook has recently been trying to stop the glorification of terrorists on its pages:

During 2017, Facebook took action against 200 Palestinian accounts, the statement said. The measures also included the removal of posts and photos deemed inflammatory and supportive of terrorism.

Earlier this week [February 2018], Facebook removed the Hamas-affiliated “Palestine.net” page, which had more than 180,000 likes.

And then there’s the issue of payment:

The PA’s relationship with the Israeli government is a bundle of contradictions. Israel recognizes the PA as the Palestinians’ political leadership. Israel collects taxes for it and turns revenues over to it. Security forces of Israel and the PA cooperate against some terrorists who threaten common interests. Abbas says he opposes widespread violence of the type that occurred during the First and Second Intifadas (1987”“1993 and 2000”“2005) and his security forces work with Israelis to prevent the outbreak of a new intifada.3

At the same time, however, the PA stokes hatred of Israel (and of Jews), urges anti-Israel attacks, and rewards terrorists. In other words, the PA encourages small-scale terrorism but cooperates with Israeli authorities to prevent larger-scale terrorism…

In the case of “pay for slay,” the relevant legislation is the PA’s “Amended Palestinian Prisoners Law No. 19 (2004).”

It guarantees “a dignified life” to anyone Israel has imprisoned “for his participation in the struggle against the occupation.” That is, it promises benefits to anyone caught for knifing, shooting, running over, or bombing people in Israel. The law lauds current and former terrorist prisoners as “a fighting sector and an integral part of the fabric of the Arab Palestinian society.”

Articles 5 and 8 apply to terrorists released from Israeli prisons. Those who served a year or more are exempted from

a. tuition fees at government schools and universities.

b. health insurance payments.

c. tuition fees for all professional training programs offered by the relevant official bodies.

Some released prisoners work as PA civil servants. For each of these, prison time served is accounted for as if it had been civil-service work: The law says the PA “shall pay his social security and pension fees”‰.”‰.”‰.”‰for the years he spent in prison.”

Articles 6 and 7 apply to terrorists still incarcerated. “Every incarcerated prisoner” is entitled to a monthly salary “linked to the cost-of-living index.” A portion thereof goes directly to the prisoner’s family…

The law guarantees a “salaried position in a State institution” to any male ex-prisoner incarcerated for 10 or more years, and any female who served five years. The positions for such prisoners are high-ranking and highly paid, ensuring not only that long-incarcerated terrorists are financially comfortable but that they dominate the PA’s various bureaucracies. The PA has organized itself not only to be for terrorists, but also of and by terrorists.

There’s much much more. But you get the idea.