Taping Would Only Hurt Him, People
Podcast: Circumspection isn't in the left's vocabulary these days.
John Podhoretz 2017-05-15The first Commentary podcast of the week finds me, Abe Greenwald, and Noah Rothman puzzling out the idea that Trump taping people in the Oval Office represents the rise of American totalitarianism rather than an insanely self-destructive act that (if it’s happening) would only hasten Trump’s own demise. We also point out that mainstream media types and liberals (but I repeat myself) are so eager to attach Trump to Republicans that they now deny Trump-resistant Republicans exist. Give a listen.
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Taping Would Only Hurt Him, People
Must-Reads from Magazine
The British Speech Police Target Alfie Supporters
A threat to decency and to free speech
Sohrab Ahmari 2018-04-25
Well, they did it. Britain’s bureaucratic-medical-juridical elite triumphed over a toddler who, in defiance of elite opinion, refuses to die. On Wednesday evening, an appeals court ruling dashed what was probably the last legal hope for saving Alfie Evans, the 23-month-old boy who is being held against his parents’ will at Alder Hey hospital in Liverpool, England.
Doctors determined that Alfie’s little-understood degenerative brain disorder meant further treatment was futile, and a High Court judge barred his parents from seeking additional treatment at a Vatican hospital (at Italian expense). By Justice Anthony Hayden’s dim lights, the best Alfie could hope for was a death with “dignity.” So he ordered Alfie’s respirator to be removed, having predicted that the boy wouldn’t survive without it. To implement Justice Hayden’s sentence, Alder Hey staff withdrew oxygen, hydration, and nutritional support.
But then Alfie kept on living, and living . . . and living. He has now, as of this writing, been breathing without the respirator for nearly two days. His oxygen was restored Tuesday, but the hospital continues to withhold sustenance. So much for “death with dignity.” Outside, a phalanx of Liverpool’s finest stood watch lest Alfie’s supporters attempt to rescue him. The officers also expelled a pair of German helicopter pilots dispatched by Pope Francis for the air evacuation.
As if the authoritarian aspect of all this weren’t crystal clear, local police also warned social-media users to be careful what they say online about the matter. “I would like to make people aware that these posts are being monitored,” said Chief Inspector Chris Gibson, “and remind social media users that any offences including malicious communications and threatening behaviour will be investigated and where necessary will be acted upon.”
Threatening speech that puts people in fear of imminent harm is illegal in most Western jurisdictions, and if any of Alfie’s supporters have engaged in such speech, they have only damaged the cause and should be held accountable. But bear in mind that police in England take a very expansive view of what counts as “malicious communication” and online hate; they are quite explicit about their censorious aims.
Last year, the Crown Prosecution Service, which oversees public prosecutions in England and Wales, revised its guidelines for addressing online hate crimes. “People all over the world are questioning how those in positions of power can counter the kinds of extreme views that are increasingly being aired,” Alison Saunders, director for public prosecutions, wrote in a Guardian op-ed announcing the new guidelines. The answer, she said, was to treat “online hate crimes as seriously as those committed face to face.”
Put another way, the yahoo who drunkenly posts racist material on his Facebook page is as culpable as the neo-Nazi who physically desecrates a Jewish cemetery. The new guidelines were added to already overbroad hate-crime laws that restrict speech based purely on the subjective views of the alleged victims. In England, the authorities define as a hate crime “any criminal offence which is perceived by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice, based on a person’s disability or perceived disability; race or perceived race; or religion or perceived religion; or sexual orientation or perceived sexual orientation or a person who is transgender or perceived to be transgender.”
New rules that came into effect in 2014, moreover, require police to investigate hate-crimes complaints “regardless of whether or not those making the complaint are the victim and irrespective of whether or not there is any evidence to identify the hate crime incident.”
That was why Home Secretary Amber Rudd found herself the subject of a hate-crime probe over a speech she delivered at 2016’s Tory party conference, in which she fulminated against foreigners “taking jobs British workers could do.” More recently, police investigated the columnist Rod Liddle for making fun of the Welsh. The bridge that connects England and Wales, he had written, links the latter’s “rain-sodden valleys with the First World.” The cases are silly, but the chilling effect on free speech in Britain is all too serious—and real.
That brings us back to Alfie. As the case has progressed, the political, religious, and class fault lines running through it have become ever more visible. Alfie’s parents are working class and Catholic. Judging by the social-media outpouring, many of their supporters hail from a similar class firmament: the type who voted for Brexit, who read the Sun and the Daily Mail, who are puzzled by all this talk about gender and newfangled pronouns, and who quietly cheer Donald Trump across the pond.
On the other side stands an administrative elite that has had it with “these people”—with their voting habits, their sentimentality and patriotism, their common sense on Islam and integration, and, well, their failure to understand that it is up to experts, not parents, to discern the “best interests” of a toddler like Alfie. The members of this elite worry a lot these days about the health of liberal-democratic order. An entire cottage industry has sprung up, churning out books and policy briefs on how to preserve democracy against populists and uncouth, excitable majorities. But fair-minded observers of the Alfie Evans debacle can decide for themselves which camp poses the greater threat to freedom in Britain.
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Podcast: Deal or No Deal
The Iran deal and the VA.
John Podhoretz 2018-04-25Will Donald Trump pull us out of the Iran deal two days before a big celebration of the Israel embassy move to Jerusalem—and at a time when the big news will still be the North Korea negotiations? We wonder, and wonder what the plan would be if he would. Then we talk about how you never really want to know the name of the Secretary of Veterans Affairs because if you do, it means nothing good. Give a listen.
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A Miracle in Liverpool
A witness against the culture of death.
Sohrab Ahmari 2018-04-24
Alfie Evans was supposed to die. On Monday evening, doctors at Alder Hey hospital in Liverpool, England, removed the 23-month-old toddler’s respirator following an effective death sentence handed down by Britain’s High Court of Justice. The court ruled that “continued ventilatory support is no longer in Alfie’s best interest” and prohibited his parents from flying their baby to Rome’s Bambino Gesù hospital for additional treatment at the Italian government’s expense. An international outcry led by Pope Francis failed to move British authorities.
In his decision, Justice Anthony Hayden of the High Court predicted that, owing to a little-understood and rapidly progressing brain condition, “Alfie can not sustain his life on his own. It is the ventilator that has been keeping him alive for many months, he is unable to sustain his own respiratory effort.” Some 30 police officers were posted outside the hospital to prevent Alfie’s supporters from attempting to rescue him overnight, and his parents were barred from supplying their own oxygen.
The most mother and father could offer their son was skin-to-skin contact—and love. He was, as I say, supposed to die. But he didn’t. Alfie continued to breathe independently for five, ten, fifteen hours. As I write, he has been going strong for more than 21 hours. Under moral pressure, the hospital finally relented and offered some oxygen and fluids on Tuesday morning. Yet the fluids were subsequently withdrawn, a source familiar with the situation tells me.
The Italian government granted Alfie citizenship on Monday, and the following day Italian diplomats sought to evacuate him by military air ambulance from his death chamber at Alder Hey. That final legal hope was dashed Tuesday evening, after the court dismissed the Italian appeal. It is unlikely that Alfie will survive for much longer. Even so, what has transpired in Alfie’s room—between Alfie and his parents, Tom and Kate—is nothing short of a miracle of love. It is also a rebuke to the callous judges and experts who would substitute their own judgement for that of parents in matters of life and death.
The medical complexities of the case, played up by the court and its defenders, serve to obscure this basic moral principle. No one is asking the U.K. National Health Service to expend extraordinary resources to keep Alfie alive. All Alfie’s parents ask is to be allowed to seek treatment elsewhere—again, at Italian expense—even if such treatment proves to be futile in the end. The same principle was at stake in last year’s Charlie Gard case. Once more, British courts have distorted the relevant legal standard—“the best interests of the child”—to usurp parents’ natural rights.
Laws that were enacted to give children a voice when parents were divided, or to protect children against neglectful or abusive parents, are now being used against parents who are united and determined to keep their children alive. As London-based canon lawyer Ed Condon wrote recently in the Catholic Herald, U.K. courts have broadened the relevant statutes “to include disagreements between unified parents and other authorities, be they educational, medical, or governmental.”
Nor is it possible to rule out the baleful influence of the European culture of death in Alfie’s case. It is true that the hospital is not proactively terminating Alfie’s life. Even so, Justice Hayden’s decision is full of references to dying with “dignity,” a favorite euphemism of the euthanasia movement. In reality, “death with dignity” in Alfie’s case involves withholding oxygen, hydration, and nutrition from a toddler and restraining his parents as they try to do what comes naturally to all parents.
Meanwhile, Alfie keeps fighting. His bed is festooned with several rosaries, I am told, including one sent directly from Rome by the pope.
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Get Your Free Jobs Here!
Going full Bernie.
Abe Greenwald 2018-04-24
Conservatives who criticize socialist schemes are often met with a particularly droll challenge from of our friends on the left. “You don’t like socialism?” they say. “Then I guess you want to get rid of the police force, paved roads, and NASA.” Or, as Bernie Sanders once put it: “When you go to your public library, when you call your fire department or the police department, what do you think you’re calling? These are socialist institutions.”
Given the array of potential “triggers” lurking in the average American library and the supposedly blood-thirsty racists lurking in our police forces, I’d think that Sanders’s claim might sour progressives on socialism altogether. In any event, the point is that this “gotcha” retort is no gotcha at all. Not every government program is a manifestation of socialism. According to that little-known tome of arcane political thought, Merriam-Webster, socialism is “any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.”
In other words, this, as reported in yesterday’s Washington Post, is socialism: “Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will announce a plan for the federal government to guarantee a job paying $15 an hour and health-care benefits to every American worker ‘who wants or needs one,’ embracing the kind of large-scale government works project that Democrats have shied away from in recent decades.”
Like all good socialist projects, Sanders’s employment scheme is the result of rigorous economic thinking and exhaustive analysis: “A representative from Sanders’s office said they had not yet done a cost estimate for the plan or decided how it would be funded, saying they were still crafting the proposal.” That’s the thing about socialism: It can accomplish miracles so long as you leave the details out. Introduce actual people and markets and economies into your socialist fantasy and the whole thing falls apart.
Sanders undoubtedly knows that his proposition is dead on arrival given the Republican-led Congress. But it serves as a declaration of where he and his followers want to push the Democratic Party. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York is on board with the idea and Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey is at work on his own job-guarantee bill. But seeing as unemployment is at a historic low of 4.1 percent, these make-work proponents are going to have a hard time convincing anyone, no matter who dominates Congress, that a radical shift in jobs policy is just what the country needs. If ideas like Sanders’s gain greater traction among Democrats, the only beneficiaries will be those across the aisle.
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Natalie Portman Is No Prize
Toddler-esque petulance.
Vivian Bercovici 2018-04-24
Local gossip among the chattering classes in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem has it that the Israel Genesis Prize is a response of Russian-Israeli oligarchs who resented feeling sidelined in the fishbowl of Jewish power, which tends to be dominated by Americans. So, they pooled their considerable resources to create what some refer to as the “Jewish Nobel Prize.”
The Prize is awarded annually at a lavish ceremony in Jerusalem attended by the A-list of the Jewish world, including the Israeli Prime Minister and other public figures. Past prize recipients have tended to be bankable celebrities with American reach and “liberal” pedigree: Michael Bloomberg, Michael Douglas, Yitzhak Perlman. Along with the accolades comes $1 million in prize money ,which the recipient may allocate to pet charities and causes. As with many such awards, the public buzz around the recipient is clearly calculated to draw positive attention to the benefactor, in this case, wealthy, well-intentioned men working together with the State of Israel.
Announced in November as this year’s recipient, Natalie Portman was to receive a hefty $2 million to bestow on her preferred social justice causes. At the time, Ms. Portman—the daughter of an Israeli geneticist who recently wrote, directed, and starred in a Hebrew-language movie based on an Amos Oz memoir—seemed free from any symptoms of remorse or moral disquietude. Quite the opposite.
And then, something happened.
Last week at some point, Ms. Portman’s staff advised the Genesis Prize Committee that the actress would not attend the gala ceremony as “recent events in Israel have been extremely distressing to her and that she do not feel comfortable participating in any public events in Israel….and that she cannot in good conscience move forward with the ceremony.”
It was all very abrupt and vague, requiring the public to engage in clairvoyance to understand Ms. Portman’s anguish. There was a rush to denounce her for having joined the “BDS” movement,” which promotes international isolation of Israel through boycotts, divestment strategies, and sanctions.
A day or so after the publication of her refusal to attend the ceremony, which sparked sharp criticism, Ms. Portman dropped this bombshell:
My decision not to attend the Genesis Prize ceremony has been mischaracterized by others. Let me speak for myself. I chose not to attend because I did not want to appear as endorsing Benjamin Netanyahu, who was to be giving a speech at the ceremony. By the same token, I am not part of the BDS movement and do not endorse it. Like many Israelis and Jews around the world, I can be critical of the leadership in Israel without wanting to boycott the entire nation. I treasure my Israeli friends and family, Israeli food, books, art, cinema, and dance. Israel was created exactly 70 years ago as a haven for refugees from the Holocaust. But the mistreatment of those suffering from today’s atrocities is simply not in line with my Jewish values. Because I care about Israel, I must stand up against violence, corruption, inequality, and abuse of power.
Whoa!
Most people, myself included, assumed that Ms. Portman’s comment about “atrocities” was a somewhat oblique reference to the recent riots along the Gaza-Israel border during the last few weeks in which more than 20 Palestinians have been killed so far. But, who knows? Initially, she objected to recent “distressing” events which were, apparently, so triggering that she felt unable participate in any public events in Israel.
Then, upon reflection, Portman made it clear that she could not bring herself to attend the ceremony because of the mere presence of PM Netanyahu. Her loathing of him is so extreme, it seems, that she cannot be in the same room and appear to “endorse” him.
So. What is it? Bibi? Gaza? Something else?
(On a side-note, it is heartening to know that Ms. Portman still “treasures” her Israeli friends, family, food, books, and arts. However, it is difficult to reconcile how such a morally wayward nation could support such a rich cultural life.)
Whether or not Ms. Portman is a good actress is utterly irrelevant. More relevant is the fact that her analytical prowess is less than impressive, as is her appreciation of a complex society and democracy.
And whereas her opinion is no more important than the next person’s, we live in an era when fame is revered. Regrettably, Ms. Portman appears to confuse her ability to generate headlines with the importance and sagacity of her views.
Ms. Portman may be surprised to learn that not everyone in Israel is a knuckle-dragging simpleton. Many Israelis and Jews (and others) are “distressed” by all manner of events here and abroad. But we do not stomp our feet and storm out of the room because things are not going our way. We do what we have always done: we stubbornly carry on and work to effect change.
Among the members of the various Genesis Prize committees are more than a few internationally renowned champions of all manner of liberal causes who have found a dignified, constructive way to express their strong disagreement with events in Israel and elsewhere. In fact, this year’s recipient of the Inaugural Genesis Lifetime Achievement Award—United States Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg—is a poster-girl of Ms. Portman’s crowd.
There were many more responsible and mature options available to Ms. Portman short of toddler-esque petulance to express her views. She could have crafted a clever speech to deliver at the ceremony but chose not to. She could have written a thoughtful opinion piece for any number of publications but chose not to. She could have conveyed her sensitivities to the Genesis organizers and a reasonable solution would likely have been conceived.
The silver lining in all this is the possibility that the Genesis Prize directors and others may use this opportunity to re-calibrate their approach. Rather than pandering to bankable stars who draw glitter and gold, perhaps they will refocus on the many exceptionally deserving individuals beavering away in obscurity and bereft of the obnoxious hubris with which Natalie Portman is afflicted.
The author served as Canada’s ambassador to Israel from 2014 to 2016 and lives there now.
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