| High school cheerleader cleared of murdering her baby to maintain ‘perfect life’ Posted: 13 Sep 2019 12:49 AM PDT  A woman who gave birth as a teenager and buried her newborn child in a garden has been acquitted of murder.Brooke Skylar Richardson was found not guilty on charges of aggravated murder, involuntary manslaughter and child endangerment by a jury on Thursday.
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| The 14 Best Starchitect-Designed University Buildings in the U.S. Posted: 12 Sep 2019 01:55 PM PDT |
| Greenpeace protesters dangle from Fred Hartman Bridge ahead of Democratic debate Posted: 12 Sep 2019 11:53 AM PDT  Greenpeace protesters are trying to stop the flow of oil and gas through the Houston Ship Channel ahead of the third 2020 Democratic debate.
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| Moscow asks U.S. to confirm location of ex-official named as possible spy Posted: 12 Sep 2019 06:52 AM PDT ![Moscow asks U.S. to confirm location of ex-official named as possible spy]( "Moscow asks U.S. to confirm location of ex-official named as possible spy") Russia has asked the United States via Interpol to confirm the whereabouts of a former Kremlin official who Russian media have said may have been a U.S. spy exfiltrated in 2017, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Thursday. Zakharova made the comment after U.S. media reports, confirmed to Reuters by two sources, said a CIA informant in the Russian government had been extracted and brought to the United States in 2017.
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| Crisis at the boar-der: panic as Canadian feral hogs approach the US Posted: 12 Sep 2019 06:12 AM PDT  They are exceptionally large, often aggressive, can be difficult to track down and breed copiouslyAccording to USDA officials, sightings of feral hogs along the US-Canadian border have increased in recent years. Photograph: Rebecca Santana/APAmerica is facing a crisis at the border. It's just not the one you might have heard about. According to officials with the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), sightings of feral hogs along the northern US-Canadian border have increased in recent years, and the prospect of the invasive species has wildlife experts worried.The roving swine have reportedly set their itinerary for Montana, according to the Daily Inter Lake."Multiple people say that if we were to design an invasive species that would do the most widespread damage, feral swine aren't too far off from being the perfect specimen," Dale Nolte of the USDA's National Feral Swine Program told the Daily Inter Lake. "It would be a disaster."The feral hogs can present all manner of complications for environments: they don't belong, are exceptionally large, are often aggressive, can be difficult to track down and breed copiously. There is also the potential they may carry diseases such as African swine fever and foot-and-mouth disease.Ryan Brook, a researcher at the University of Saskatchewan, told the Daily Inter Lake that the hogs are also capable of covering significant distances. "There is a general denial that wild pigs are a critical issue," he said.> Legit question for rural Americans - How do I kill the 30-50 feral hogs that run into my yard within 3-5 mins while my small kids play?> > — William McNabb (@WillieMcNabb) August 4, 2019As many on social media have been quick to point out, the prospect of a feral hog invasion harkens back to a short-lived but widely spread meme about the animals from August in which a man said assault weapons were necessary in rural areas throughout the country in order to stem the invasion. "How do I kill the 30-50 feral hogs that run into my yard within 3-5 mins while my small kids play?" he asked on Twitter.> OH MY GOD HE WAS RIGHT https://t.co/sjTbHWHsNo> > — National Security Counselors (@NatlSecCnslrs) September 12, 2019> He tried to warn us...https://t.co/jC37O0SyLm> > — incorrigible mozart stan (@TrevorWoggon) September 11, 2019More than 6 million feral swine can be found in 32 states in the US, according to the USDA, which estimates the annual damage they cause at over $1.5b.
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| Jeep's Hot-Selling Gladiator under Stop-Sale Order for Driveshaft Problem Posted: 12 Sep 2019 01:36 PM PDT  Jeep's Gladiator pickup truck has been on sale for just a handful of months, but it's already being recalled for a flaw with the rear driveshaft.
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| Arizona state trooper arrested on 61 counts of sex abuse, kidnapping and harassment Posted: 11 Sep 2019 12:29 PM PDT ![Arizona state trooper arrested on 61 counts of sex abuse, kidnapping and harassment]( "Arizona state trooper arrested on 61 counts of sex abuse, kidnapping and harassment") Tremaine Jackson, a 13-year DPS veteran, is facing 61 criminal counts of sex abuse, kidnapping, unlawful imprisonment and more, officials said.
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| Doctors alarmed by Trump's health care plan but confused by Democratic presidential candidates' plans Posted: 12 Sep 2019 08:53 AM PDT  A day before the Democratic presidential debate in Houston, doctors affiliated with a progressive group held a rally to denounce the Trump administration's proposals to strip Americans of health care coverage.
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| US jets smashed an island ISIS was using 'like a hotel' and troops found rockets and bombs stashed in caves Posted: 11 Sep 2019 12:34 PM PDT  At least 25 ISIS fighters are dead after a successful US air strike that dropped 80,000 pounds of ordnance, an Iraqi CTS spokesperson told Insider.
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| Cubans fear return to 90s austerity amid cuts Posted: 12 Sep 2019 02:23 PM PDT  Havana awoke Thursday to long lines at gas stations and public transportation stops after President Miguel Diaz-Canel warned fellow Cubans to expect fuel shortages and blackouts that he blamed on US sanctions. Terrified!" said Katia Morfa, 36, as she took her seven-year-old daughter to school. It's inevitable that we think of the dark and very sad days of the Special Period," Morfa told AFP.
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| Elizabeth Warren Proposes Boosting Social Security by Hiking Taxes on the Rich Posted: 12 Sep 2019 05:00 AM PDT  (Bloomberg) -- Elizabeth Warren released a plan Thursday to expand Social Security benefits by $200 per month with a payroll tax increase on incomes above $250,000, her latest attempt to court voters who want a larger safety net.Her proposal would impose a 14.8% tax on annual earnings above $250,000 (or $400,000 for joint filers), split evenly between employers and employees. It would impose a separate 14.8% tax on investment income.The policy, if enacted, would raise average monthly Social Security benefits from $1,395 to $1,595 if implemented in 2020, according to an analysis by economist Mark Zandi of Moody's Analytics that was shared by Warren's campaign.It would index Social Security benefits to a faster rate of inflation and bolster benefits for widows and widowers and caregivers of children younger than six.Quiz: Can You Tell the 2020 Democrats Apart? All told, Warren's plan would extend the solvency of Social Security by about two decades to 2054, Zandi said."We need to get our priorities straight. We should be increasing Social Security benefits and asking the richest Americans to contribute their fair share to the program," Warren wrote in a post for medium.com, calling her plan "the biggest and most progressive increase in Social Security benefits in nearly half a century."Warren's proposal indicates how far Democrats have moved since 2011, when President Barack Obama offered to cut Social Security benefits as part of a "grand bargain" compromise with Republicans to reduce the deficit. It's in keeping with Warren's broader policy pitch to enhance the middle class safety net by taxing upper incomes.Her policy paper comes on the day of the third Democratic debate in Houston, the first time all of the four leading contenders will be on stage together.She follows rival Bernie Sanders, a fellow senator and rival for the Democratic nomination, who pushed for an expansion of Social Security benefits during his unsuccessful 2016 presidential campaign. Legislation by Sanders to expand Social Security has been cosponsored by 2020 contenders Kamala Harris and Cory Booker.The Warren and Sanders plans are unlikely to become law in the near future as Republicans, who control the White House and the Senate, oppose raising payroll taxes and prefer to tackle Social Security's long-term problems by reducing benefits.To contact the reporter on this story: Sahil Kapur in Washington at skapur39@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Joe Sobczyk at jsobczyk@bloomberg.net, Max Berley, John HarneyFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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| Current, past UAW leaders implicated in spreading corruption probe Posted: 13 Sep 2019 07:06 AM PDT  DETROIT/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - United Auto Workers (UAW) President Gary Jones and his predecessor are unnamed officials listed in a federal criminal complaint detailing alleged corruption and embezzlement by union leaders, a source familiar with the matter said on Friday. The complaint was released on Thursday, just two days before the UAW's contracts with Detroit's automakers General Motors Co, Ford Motor Co and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV (FCA) expire on Sept. 14, raising questions about the status of ongoing contract talks. The complaint detailed charges against Jones' former second in command and successor as head of the UAW's "Region 5" Vance Pearson.
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| How Russia's Su-57 Stealth Fighter Plans to Fight the U.S. Navy Posted: 12 Sep 2019 08:00 PM PDT  Is that possible?
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| 'Every right to call that out': Booker defends Castro on Biden attacks at Democratic debate Posted: 13 Sep 2019 07:41 AM PDT  During the testy exchange, Castro claimed Biden said Americans would have to "buy in" for health care coverage under Biden's proposal.
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| NASA says a new comet is likely an 'interstellar visitor' from another star system — the second ever detected Posted: 12 Sep 2019 02:10 PM PDT  If the comet-like object has interstellar origins, "it's the next best thing to sending a probe to a different solar system," one astronomer said.
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| Crew members were asleep on doomed California dive boat: report Posted: 12 Sep 2019 05:35 PM PDT  All six crew members were asleep when a fire broke out last week on board a California dive boat, leaving 34 people dead, the National Transportation Safety Board said Thursday. Under federal law, the 75-foot Conception was required to have a night watchman who was awake and able to alert others to a fire or other mishaps, NTSB board member Jennifer Homendy told the Los Angeles Times. It added that five crew members frantically tried to reach the 33 passengers and one fellow crew member sleeping in the lower deck but jumped overboard after they were unable to open a forward window and were overwhelmed by smoke.
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| Fox News Contributor: Beto O’Rourke Can’t ‘Take My Girl,’ How’s He ‘Going to Take My Guns?’ Posted: 13 Sep 2019 08:14 AM PDT  Reacting to Democratic presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke's declaration to confiscate assault-style weapons like the AR-15, Fox News contributor Johnny "Joey" Jones on Friday essentially called the former Texas congressman a beta soy boy or whatever.During Thursday night's Democratic presidential primary debate, O'Rourke reiterated his support for an assault-weapons buyback program in the wake of recent mass shootings. "Hell yes, we're going to take your AR-15, your AK-47," he exclaimed. "We're not going to allow it to be used against our fellow Americans anymore."O'Rourke's remarks got a lot of play on President Trump's favorite morning show Fox & Friends on Friday. Bringing on Jones at one point, co-host Brian Kilmeade asked the ex-Marine for his thoughts on O'Rourke's proposal to ban certain weapons."No, you won't, Beto," Jones replied. "No, you won't. You couldn't take my girl and you haven't earned my respect. How are you going to take my guns? That's my response there."Jones' insult of O'Rourke comes the morning after a Texas lawmaker told the presidential hopeful that "my AR is ready for you," a tweet that was later taken down for violating Twitter's standards on threats of violence.After his 4chan-like attack on O'Rourke, Jones went on to say there are no current pieces of legislation in Congress that would actually stem gun violence because "guns used in places like Chicago" are "already owned and used illegally.""And so this is a red herring," Jones added. "It's an emotional talking point the Democrats are using and to an extent it's working."Jones further noted that there is no need to pass "universal background checks" because the government is "so inept at doing its own job" that firearms dealers will just hand over weapons while the government processes the background checks. (The Odessa shooter, meanwhile, did not pass a federal check.)"That's the type of system we have in place," he declared. "And that's how bad the government is at enacting it. By all means, let's pass legislation that's tremendously more burdensome and that much harder to enforce."Kilmeade would go on to credit the president for signing the Fix NICS Act that improved current background checks and banned bump stocks, prompting Jones to agree with these specific moves. The military veteran then proposed another idea."The second thing I would do is I would love to have law enforcement in every city in this country have the ability to throw the book at people that commit gun crime instead of using things like their ethnic background or low income as reasons for them not to go to jail," Jones opined. "Those things are things we can fix through other programs. People that are of a certain race should never be targeted. But to use that as a reason to not put someone in jail who has used a gun in a crime makes no sense."Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
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| Vietnam Fights China Moves to Hinder Offshore Energy Exploration Posted: 12 Sep 2019 10:45 PM PDT ![Vietnam Fights China Moves to Hinder Offshore Energy Exploration]( "Vietnam Fights China Moves to Hinder Offshore Energy Exploration") (Bloomberg) -- Vietnam is pushing back harder against China's efforts to isolate it diplomatically on a territorial dispute in an energy-rich part of the South China Sea.The foreign ministry in Hanoi on Thursday called on China to immediately order a state-owned survey vessel along with several Coast Guard escorts to leave Vietnamese-claimed waters in its exclusive economic zone, which stretches 200 nautical miles from its coast. It also said a multi-billion dollar oil and gas project being carried out by state-owned Vietnam Oil & Gas Group and Exxon Mobil Corp. in block 118 of the waters would continue unimpeded."Any activities that hamper Vietnam's oil and gas exploration in Vietnamese water are violations of international laws," Le Thi Thu Hang, a spokeswoman for Vietnam's foreign ministry, told reporters during a briefing on Thursday.The Chinese-owned Haiyang Dizhi 8 has intermittently zigzagged across a Vietnam-demarcated block of water to study the seabed in an active drilling block operated by Russia's state-owned Rosneft Oil PJSC since early July. China claims most of the South China Sea with a map of a nine-dash line stretching far from the mainland, and has sought to negotiate one-on-one deals with countries in the region on sharing energy and fish resources.The latest Vietnamese statements came after China scored diplomatic wins with other South China Sea claimants. On Monday, China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi agreed with his Malaysian counterpart Saifuddin Abdullah on the establishment of a bilateral consultation mechanism to "properly handle" disputes in the South China Sea.China also appears to be making progress on a joint exploration deal with the Philippines, with President Rodrigo Duterte saying earlier this week he would ignore an international court ruling affirming his country's territorial claims in order to advance energy cooperation with Beijing. Duterte said the deal would entail a 60-40 revenue-sharing scheme favoring the Philippines."We're seeing a full court press with China to push its nine-dash line, press foreign oil companies and pressure countries into joint development deals," said Carl Thayer, emeritus professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia who has written about Southeast Asia security issues for more than two decades..To contact the reporters on this story: Nguyen Dieu Tu Uyen in Hanoi at uyen1@bloomberg.net;Peter Martin in Beijing at pmartin138@bloomberg.net;Philip J. Heijmans in Singapore at pheijmans1@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Ruth Pollard at rpollard2@bloomberg.netFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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| What to expect for CNN contributor Andrew McCabe after US attorney recommends charges Posted: 12 Sep 2019 02:28 PM PDT  Judge Andrew Napolitano weighs in on the latest recommendation by the US attorney to proceed with charges against CNN contributor and former FBI official Andrew McCabe.
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| What Would Happen If the U.S. F-15 Eagle Fought China's J-10? Posted: 12 Sep 2019 04:00 PM PDT  Let's consider the odds.
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| Protesters greet Trump in Baltimore after his tweets blasting city Posted: 12 Sep 2019 05:32 PM PDT  Dozens of protesters gathered in downtown Baltimore on Thursday as President Donald Trump made his first visit to the city since he blasted it as "disgusting" and "rodent-infested" in hotly debated tweets in July. Trump gave a speech to Republicans from the House of Representatives holding an annual retreat in the predominantly black city, after protesters greeted his motorcade with signs depicting Trump as a rat and telling him to return to the swamp. The chilly reception came after Trump lashed out on Twitter at Elijah Cummings, a prominent African-American congressman from Baltimore, calling him a "brutal bully" who should concentrate on cleaning up his "disgusting, rat and rodent infested" district rather than criticizing the work of U.S. immigration officers on the Mexican border.
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| Amy Klobuchar hits hard against Bernie Sanders' Medicare for All plan at 3rd Dem debate Posted: 12 Sep 2019 06:02 PM PDT  "And while Bernie wrote the bill, l read the bill," Sen. Amy Klobuchar said, knocking Sen. Bernie Sanders' Medicare for All plan.
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| The Latest: All 34 victims of California boat fire ID'd Posted: 12 Sep 2019 06:14 PM PDT  Authorities say they have now identified all 34 victims of a boat fire off the Southern California coast. The Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Office added the last seven names on Thursday. The scuba diving boat Conception burned and sank off Santa Cruz Island before dawn on Sept. 2.
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| Philippines arrests 270 Chinese citizens in fraud raid Posted: 13 Sep 2019 01:08 AM PDT  Philippine police have arrested more than 270 Chinese nationals in a raid on a gang wanted over a vast investment fraud that cost victims in China millions of dollars, authorities said Friday. Agents swooped on an office building in the capital Manila on Wednesday to take four suspects into custody in connection with the 100 million yuan ($14 million) scam, but stumbled upon many more. "The operation then yielded the incidental arrest of 273 other Chinese nationals who were caught in the act of conducting illegal online operations," immigration authorities said, without elaborating.
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| MIT President: Oh Yeah, We DID Cover Up Epstein’s Donations Posted: 12 Sep 2019 12:58 PM PDT  Paul Marotta/GettyThe president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is admitting that not only did the school hide donations from Jeffrey Epstein—he wrote the accused sex trafficker a thank-you letter."It is now clear that senior members of the administration were aware of gifts the Media Lab received between 2013 and 2017 from Jeffrey Epstein's foundations," MIT President L. Rafael Reif said in a statement Thursday afternoon."Because the members of my team involved believed it was important that Epstein not use gifts to MIT for publicity or to enhance his own reputation, they asked [MIT Media Lab Director Joi Ito] to agree to make clear to Epstein that he could not put his name on them publicly." MIT Media Lab Rocked by New Jeffrey Epstein RevelationsReif said he also was present at a meeting of his senior team where attendees discussed Epstein's crimes and donations.The disclosure is the latest to rock the elite research institution, which has been roiled by a slow drip of revelations about close ties between the MIT Media Lab and Epstein, a registered sex-offender.Reif's Thursday statement summarized the preliminary findings of an investigation by outside law firm Goodwin Procter into Epstein's connections to the Media Lab—an institute that exercised broad influence over the technology industry—and to Ito and the university writ large. Reif noted that the law firm's probe revealed that he had signed an acknowledgment letter thanking Epstein—listed as a "disqualified donor" in MIT's own records—for a donation after he had pleaded guilty to a prostitution charge stemming from a sex-trafficking investigation."I apparently signed this letter on August 16, 2012, about six weeks into my presidency," Reif wrote. "Although I do not recall it, it does bear my signature."Reif wrote that Ito asked members of MIT's senior team for permission to keep an Epstein donation in 2013, and they allowed it."They knew in general terms about Epstein's history–that he had been convicted and had served a sentence and that Joi believed that he had stopped his criminal behavior. They accepted Joi's assessment of the situation. Of course they did not know what we all know about Epstein now," Reif said.In July, federal prosecutors in New York charged Epstein with sex trafficking and accused him of paying dozens, if not hundreds, of underage girls for sexual acts. A money manager with a deep Rolodex of famous people, Epstein killed himself in jail while awaiting trial.MIT Media Lab Director Joi Ito Resigns Amid New Jeffrey Epstein RevelationsIto resigned as head of the Media Lab after the New Yorker reported he had hidden the extent of Epstein's involvement with the institute. Ito had also taken Epstein's money for his own personal investments.Reif concluded the letter by saying that "flaws in our processes" needed to be addressed. Goodwin Procter's investigation is ongoing.Epstein served as a liaison for the lab, courting prominent donors like Bill Gates, who gave $2 million to the lab after Epstein made overtures to him, according to emails published by the New Yorker. A spokesperson for Gates denied that Epstein ever directed Gates' giving, and Ito hid Epstein's involvement as an ambassador from his MIT superiors.MIT did not immediately respond to request for comment, nor did Goodwin Procter.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
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| Fox News Ordered to Face Suit by Deceased DNC Staffer’s Parents Posted: 13 Sep 2019 06:24 AM PDT  (Bloomberg) -- Fox News must defend a lawsuit by the parents of a Democratic Party staffer whose unsolved 2016 murder touched off a flurry of right-wing conspiracy theories, an appeals court said Friday in reinstating the case.The parents of Seth Rich sued Fox News over what they said was a "sham" 2017 story claiming their son leaked Democratic National Committee emails in the run-up to the 2016 election. A lower-court judge in Manhattan dismissed the case last year.The suit over the report accused Fox News of intentionally causing severe emotional distress to the parents of the 27-year-old Rich. As of last year, the Washington DC police hadn't identified any suspects in what they believe was a botched robbery, but the killing led to accusations in conservative media that Rich -- and not Russian-backed hackers -- provided emails to WikiLeaks.Fox News's May 2017 story, which it later retracted, cited unidentified law-enforcement sources for such a claim.To contact the reporter on this story: Chris Dolmetsch in Federal Court in Manhattan at cdolmetsch@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: David Glovin at dglovin@bloomberg.netFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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| Rare external investigation finds wrongdoing in the CIA's watchdog office Posted: 12 Sep 2019 02:00 AM PDT  Five years after a CIA employee was escorted out of the office for allegedly accessing information he wasn't supposed to have, external investigators showed that Andrew Bakaj's dismissal was a matter of retribution.
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| The F-35 of Helicopters: Meet the RAH-66 Comanche (It Flopped) Posted: 12 Sep 2019 06:22 AM PDT  Lots of money down the drain.
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| Trump struggles to say Mike Pence's name and blames energy efficient light bulbs for making him 'look orange' during bizarre speech Posted: 13 Sep 2019 05:38 AM PDT  Donald Trump inadvertently renamed his vice-president by mispronouncing Mike Pence's name during a speech.The US president referred to "Mike Pounce" as he reeled off a list of Republicans in attendance at the party's annual retreat in Baltimore.
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| Three New Jersey vapers sue Juul Labs over e-cigarettes Posted: 12 Sep 2019 11:53 AM PDT  Lawsuits allege Juul Lab Inc. endangers the health of minors through their use of e-cigarettes
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| Why are you not in parliament? Heckler interrupts UK PM Johnson Posted: 13 Sep 2019 05:43 AM PDT  Boris Johnson was heckled by a protester in northern England on Friday over his controversial decision to suspend parliament for more than a month in the weeks before Britain is due to leave the European Union. Johnson, a former London mayor who helped lead the campaign to leave the EU, has angered his critics by suspending parliament until Oct. 14.
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| The Words Missing from a New York Times Essay about Religious Liberty Posted: 12 Sep 2019 11:40 AM PDT  The headline is jolting. "Religious Crusaders at the Supreme Court's Gates." Thus starts Linda Greenhouse's analysis of the actual and potential religion cases before the Court during its October term. Her thesis is that the Court's relative restraint in its religion cases the previous term represented the justices' merely "biding their time." This term the gloves may come off. Now the Court may well "go further and adopt new rules for lowering the barrier between church and state across the board."She focuses on an Institute for Justice case that the Court has accepted for review, Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue. It involves a Montana supreme-court-ordered termination of a state tax-credit scholarship program that "helped needy children attend the private school of their families' choice," including religious and nonreligious schools. The precise issue before the Court, in dry legalese, is this: whether the Montana court's decision "violates the religion clauses or the equal protection clause of the United States Constitution to invalidate a generally available and religiously neutral student-aid program simply because the program affords students the choice of attending religious schools."Greenhouse is incredulous. If SCOTUS rules against Montana, then, according to her, "the logical consequence is that a state that once had a program offering financial support to religious and nonreligious schools alike . . . and that subsequently shut down the program entirely can be deemed to have violated a principle of religious neutrality.""Can that possibly be the law?" she asks. But her summary isn't exactly right. She pays short shrift to the key fact of the case. The Montana court's ruling was based on the state's Blaine amendment, an artifact of odious 19th-century anti-Catholic bigotry. In fact, the words "Blaine amendment" appear nowhere in her piece.A brief history lesson is in order. As Mike McShane explained in an instructive Forbes piece last year, in the latter part of the 19th century, America's public schools were often "nominally Protestant." They would frequently start their days with prayer, the students would read from the King James Version of the Bible, and they'd sometimes even sing hymns.So when Senator James Blaine proposed amending the United States Constitution to state that "no money raised by taxation in any State for the support of public schools, or derived from any public fund therefor, nor any public lands devoted thereto, shall ever be under the control of any religious sect; nor shall any money so raised or lands so devoted be divided between religious sects or denominations," he was not attempting to stamp out public-school religiosity. He was attempting to deny aid to Catholic parochial schools.Blaine's federal amendment failed, but his language found its way into 37 state constitutions. As McShane notes, the anti-Catholicism of the amendments is betrayed by the words "sect" or "sectarian." In the language of the time, Protestant instruction was "nonsectarian." Catholic instruction was "sectarian."Let's look at the relevant language of the Montana constitution. The section at issue is entitled "Aid prohibited to sectarian schools" and prohibits the use of public funds "for any sectarian purpose or to aid any church, school, academy, seminary, college, university, or other literary or scientific institution, controlled in whole or in part by any church, sect, or denomination."Mr. Blaine, meet your amendment.So let's go back to the question posed by Linda Greenhouse. "Could that possibly be the law" that states are prohibited from ending "a program offering financial support to religious and nonreligious schools alike"? Yes, it can possibly be the law. Indeed, it should be the law — when the state ends support because it's enforcing a legal provision that in purpose and effect engages in blatant religious discrimination.The twin constitutional pillars of religious liberty in the United States — the free-exercise clause and the establishment clause — don't just protect liberty by disestablishing religion (by preventing the formation of a state church). They protect liberty by preventing punitive anti-religious policies. They prevent the state from targeting religion for disfavored treatment.Targeting religion for disfavored treatment is exactly what Blaine amendments do. They were aimed squarely at Catholics. Yet as so often happens with attacks on liberty that are allegedly narrowly targeted, the government expanded its scope. Now the law aimed at Catholics affects all people of faith. When it comes to participation in public programs — programs they bought and paid for with their own dollars — Montana's religious citizens and religious institutions are entitled to equal treatment under the law.
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| Event cancellations mount in protest-wracked Hong Kong Posted: 13 Sep 2019 01:48 AM PDT  One of Hong Kong's most prestigious sporting tournaments on Friday became the latest victim of the huge protests convulsing the city as a growing roster of events and entertainment acts pull out of the financial hub. Organisers of the WTA Hong Kong Open women's tennis tournament said they were postponing next month's competition because of the "present situation" after months of sometimes violent pro-democracy protests. "After extensive discussions with our key stakeholders, we conclude that a smooth running of the tournament can be better assured at a later time," the Hong Kong Tennis Association said in a statement.
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| Cuban man deported despite traffic-blocking protest Posted: 12 Sep 2019 03:52 PM PDT ![Cuban man deported despite traffic-blocking protest]( "Cuban man deported despite traffic-blocking protest") An asylum seeker whose pending deportation sparked a traffic-stopping protest this week in New Orleans was deported to Cuba on Thursday, a spokesman for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement service said. Yoel Alonso Leal was returned to his homeland despite his supporters' contentions that he was too ill to travel and would likely face mistreatment in Cuba. Immigration documents provided by his lawyer show that Leal said he was detained and assaulted by Cuban authorities in 2016 and 2018 before seeking asylum in the U.S.
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| One of the photographers behind the iconic Tiananmen Square image has died. He once said he wrapped the film up and stashed it in the toilet to hide it from Chinese security. Posted: 12 Sep 2019 11:35 PM PDT  Cole was one of four photographers who captured the iconic 1989 standoff which became a defining image of the bloody Tiananmen Square massacre.
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| Tropical depression likely to form in Gulf of Mexico Posted: 12 Sep 2019 10:09 AM PDT  A tropical depression is likely to form in the Gulf of Mexico by the weekend.
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| These Are the Signs That Iran's Regime Is Close to Crumbling Posted: 12 Sep 2019 10:15 PM PDT  But what happens next?
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| Israel reportedly planted tiny surveillance devices near the White House to spy on Donald Trump, but faced no consequences Posted: 12 Sep 2019 05:39 AM PDT  "It was pretty clear that the Israelis were responsible," one former intelligence official told Politico after the discovery of the devices.
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| Republicans air ad about the dangers of 'socialism' and AOC during the Democratic debate Posted: 12 Sep 2019 07:03 PM PDT  "This is the face of socialism," Elizabeth Heng says, as a picture of Ocasio-Cortez burns and cuts away to scenes of the Cambodian genocide.
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| Peru ex-president denied bail in U.S., wife dragged from court after outburst Posted: 12 Sep 2019 01:51 PM PDT  A former Peruvian first lady was dragged out of a courtroom in San Francisco on Thursday as she cursed a judge's decision to keep her husband, ex-president Alejandro Toledo, in jail pending extradition proceedings. Toledo, 73, is wanted in Peru to stand trial over accusations that he took a $20 million bribe from Brazilian construction company Odebrecht during his 2001-2006 term. Toledo denies wrongdoing.
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| Anti-Semitism: The Fight That Never Flags Posted: 13 Sep 2019 03:30 AM PDT  In the course of a review of The Plot against America, Philip Roth's dystopian novel that has the United States adopting a form of Nazi rule after the election of America-Firster Charles Lindbergh, the Australian writer Clive James confessed to never quite suspending his disbelief in this lurid alternative history. The United States, wrote James, "will never be free of racial prejudice for the same reason that it will never enshrine racial prejudice in anything like the Nuremberg Laws: it's a free country." He pithily concluded that "the insuperable problem with The Plot against America is that America is against the plot."Bari Weiss, a staff writer and editor for the opinion section of the New York Times, used to hold the same iron conviction that the United States would never succumb to the plague of anti-Semitism. In her slim new book, How to Fight Anti-Semitism, Weiss confesses she is no longer so sanguine about the status of the "Jewish question" in the land of the free, even if the symptoms of a resurgent anti-Semitism aren't as acute as they are in the Old World. A fair reading of the times suggests that her newfound anxiety is prudent.Not so long ago, sounding the alarm about the Jewish place in American life would have been dismissed as hyperbolic or hysterical. By the standards of Jewish history, the asylum discovered in the United States after the Shoah was an almost unimaginable gift. Weiss recounts that growing up on American soil around the turn of the 21st century, members of her community knew they were "the lucky ones." The faint echoes of anti-Semitism were at a safe remove in this secular republic so profoundly shaped by its confrontations with both the Nazi abattoir and the Soviet gulag. "Survival had no longer been our concern," she writes. In America, the sons and daughters of Abraham and Sarah managed to flourish "like no other diaspora in history," even if ample evidence of the vehemence ranged against their tribe could be found in the foreign press: pictures of buses blown apart by suicide bombers in Jerusalem, the YouTube video showing Daniel Pearl's gruesome beheading in Karachi, firebombed synagogues in Stockholm, Jewish cemeteries desecrated in Paris, or attacks on those wearing a kippah in Berlin.Weiss suspects that the failure of anti-Semitism to take hold on this side of the Atlantic can be credited to the American regime's early efforts to inoculate the country against this venomous mania. In 1790, George Washington gave his assurance to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, R.I., that American Jews would "possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship." In the same letter, America's first president promised that the new republic would give "to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance." As a nation founded on the universalist claims of the Declaration of Independence, the United States has seemed, for all its flaws, particularly ill-suited to federally sanctioned prejudice. In addition, the "special nature of America," in Weiss's telling, includes an attachment to the Hebraic tradition as reflected in the dizzying array of biblical place names that dot its landscape. This, in turn, has nourished America's long-standing alliance with the State of Israel. All of this has predisposed America to be "a New Jerusalem for the Jewish people."This is not to deny that American Jews occasionally found themselves (as the author did, growing up in Pittsburgh) on the receiving end of rancid jokes about "picking up pennies," along with creepy "questions about horns." More often than not, however, these insults didn't escalate into injuries, in large part because this ill-concealed prejudice was understood by mainstream society to be anathema to American politics and philosophy. It was tempting, therefore, to write off these churlish anti-Jewish outbursts as nothing more than "vestiges of an uglier, more violent past." Any suggestion that they were harbingers of a resurgent chauvinism threatening Jewish life and limb would have been greeted with mirth.Weiss's visceral confidence that Jews (along with other religious minorities) would continue to enjoy the fruits of an apparently eternal American exceptionalism was shattered when her kehilla, or community, was visited by evil. In October 2018, eleven Jews were murdered in the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh where Weiss became a bat mitzvah. In that event, her hometown temple earned the awful distinction of suffering the deadliest attack on Jews in American history. The perpetrator of this heinous act was decidedly "homegrown," to use the contemporary argot, attacking a synagogue that had opened its doors to persecuted people of all faiths as part of National Refugee Shabbat, a project of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.Those who insisted that this was a singular episode of mass murder would be proved wrong a few months later when another white supremacist struck a synagogue in San Diego. The roots of anti-Jewish violence (if not yet anti-Jewish pogroms) that had long found infertile soil in the United States at last discovered a more hospitable patch of terrain.Anyone familiar with the sordid record of fear and loathing toward Jews knows that severing these roots will be a task fraught with difficulty. (If you are not familiar, procuring a copy of How to Fight Anti-Semitism would be a very good place to start.) The first problem in understanding this complex phenomenon is that Judaism itself is properly understood not merely as a religion or an ethnicity, but as a people and a civilization. It follows, as Weiss succinctly explains, that there is no single reason for anti-Semitism.Considering this hatred, one cannot fail to be struck — as Jean-Paul Sartre was in his essay "Anti-Semite and Jew" — by its lack of any recognizable logic save "the logic of passion." Call me unlucky, but in the past year alone, in places as diverse as Dubai, Beirut, and Istanbul, your obedient servant has encountered this fit of illogic at close range. Over dinner or drinks, elite members of these societies (anti-Semitism frequently infects the pseudo-intellectual) unburdened themselves of the opinion that the official narrative about the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks is a cheap ruse, and al-Qaeda's holy warriors were not responsible for this obscenity. (No prizes for guessing which intelligence service of a certain Levantine nation was fingered instead.)This ancient animosity would not have proved so dynamic and durable down the centuries if it weren't essentially protean. Though it's often thought of as a neurosis, Saul Bellow insisted that it was a psychosis. It involves no exaggeration to say that the Weltanschauung of Jew-hatred is so replete with contradiction as to be schizophrenic.After originating in Egypt, Judeophobia has been maintained as a fashion by such discrepant forces as medieval Christianity and modern Islam. In the 20th century, virulent forms of the virus broke out in the Roman Catholic Church and the Russian Orthodox Church (the former being in sympathy with fascism and the latter blessing the execrable Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion that is the source of many conspiracy theories relating to the Jews, which were later reproduced in Hamas's charter). In its various permutations, anti-Semitism has conscripted the Jew as a nefarious partisan and practitioner of capitalism and, alternately, of Bolshevism. (As Marx proved, not even being born a Jew according to the strict matrilineal principles of Jewish law is a guarantee against indulging this primitive stupidity.) Jews have been portrayed as vicious race contaminators as well as an all-powerful tribe standing apart from society. Anti-Semitism is not, in other words, a run-of-the-mill prejudice akin to racism against, say, "black" Africans. Rather, in the words of the historian Peter Hayes, it is "a kind of superstition" that conceives of a universal conspiracy in which the Jews are the sinister vanguard.How to Fight Anti-Semitism focuses more on present than past manifestations of this "disease of the mind," as Weiss dubs it, in echo of the historian Paul Johnson. The primary targets of her sharp pen are not the Gospel of John or even Marxist revolutionaries (it's not for nothing that the German socialist August Bebel described anti-Semitism as the socialism of fools). Anti-Semitism has spread and mutated, appearing in the guise of a modern theocratic fascism while also poisoning diverse political movements in the West.As Weiss is fully aware, her book is most apt to court controversy by providing a political guide to these fresh outbreaks of anti-Semitism. She begins rather dauntingly by noting that Jews in the West, especially in Europe, are confronted by a "three-headed dragon." First, there is an antagonistic environment for Jews, thanks in large measure to the rapid growth of Islamism on the Old Continent. Second, there is ideological vilification by the political Left, which increasingly regards Israel as an illegitimate state serving no other purpose than as a bastion of Western (read: white) colonialism. Third, there is a recrudescence of reactionary populism on the political right that, while often professing sympathy for Israel, evinces a fervent commitment to blood-and-soil politics that seldom ends well for Jews.Not everybody will agree with Weiss's portrait of the hydra-headed enemy, which itself points to part of the problem. The tribal impulse in our political life has grown so pronounced that it has overwhelmed a common civic culture, rendering many classical liberals politically homeless. There is a well-oiled habit among the political class and in the press of excusing obvious, often deplorable, transgressions by one's "own" side. The acid test for fighting anti-Semitism, as with so many other derangements, is to face it down with equal enthusiasm and commitment when it flares up on one's team — or, better yet, to be more discriminating about which team one belongs to in the first place.The Left The true anti-Semite is easy enough to spot on the lunatic fringe, but it's another matter if you're not aware of the existence of plural lunatic fringes. Most children of the Enlightenment have been trained to discern this toxic ideology when religious fanatics inveigh against the Jews' supposed responsibility for the murder of Christ or when voices of the "alt-right" curse the Jews for deriving from the racial gutter. But symptoms of the toxin are no less definitive when one hears of an occult world government whose "lobby" distorts U.S. foreign policy and global financial markets, or is treated to the filthy argument that, in its methods of warfare against Hamas — a terrorist organization as well as a regime based in large measure on the desire to stamp international Jewry out of existence — the Israel Defense Forces have taken a leaf from Hitler's book.As the Democratic party's center of gravity has moved sharply to the left in recent years, the anti-imperialist mindset has gained traction, attributing the ills of the Middle East to British and French (and, latterly, Israeli and American) power. This political evolution has been exemplified by the now-famous freshman congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, who have brought critical (if maladroit) scrutiny to bear against the U.S.-Israel alliance. Another member of "the Squad," Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has openly consorted with Jeremy Corbyn of Britain's Labour party, a fellow traveler with Islamist movements whose tenure as Leader of Her Majesty's Opposition has been marred by one anti-Semitic scandal after another.At its worst, this mindset is prone to detecting arcane Jewish manipulations behind all earthly power. More commonly, the insurgent progressive perspective masquerades as merely anti-Zionist, conceiving of Jews as part of the coalition of the oppressor while Israel, "the Jew among the nations," is treated with frenzied derision. In addition to being indicted as the sole party responsible for the conflict with the Palestinians, and therefore almost entirely to blame for their miserable plight, Israel is portrayed as a uniquely malevolent force in the world. The dramatic rise of the BDS movement (deemed by the German Bundestag, not unjustifiably, as anti-Semitic) across the West today capably demonstrates that these vicious and extreme detractors of the Zionist entity are on the march.This palpable and supercharged hostility has taken by surprise many liberal Zionists — as appears to have been the case for Weiss — who are given to assuming that the Left instinctively takes the side of the underdog, the immigrant, and the outsider. Although the Left has largely come by this reputation honestly, it does little good for Jews, who, despite being the principal target of hate crimes in the United States and most of Europe, scarcely qualify as an oppressed minority in the eyes of today's Left. Weiss is keen to announce and decry progressives' evolving hierarchy of privilege, whereby Zionists (i.e., the vast majority of worldwide Jewry) generally occupy the top rung as defenders of a colonial state embodying the "white man's burden." (This narrative seldom accounts for the Mizrahi Jews, more than half of Israel's population, whose roots lie in the Middle East.)The progressive temper does not merely direct suspicion and ire toward Israel and all its works but shows every sign of failing to recognize an enemy even when it meets one. The mainstream Left is proving increasingly blind to the clear and present danger posed by Islamist ideology and, worse, often lends aid and comfort to its cause. This vile tendency crops up regularly, but two prominent examples include the Southern Poverty Law Center (which designated the liberal Muslim reformer Maajid Nawaz an "anti-Muslim extremist" and was later compelled to pay damages) and the Women's March (whose unscrupulous leaders Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour embraced the anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan).Weiss does not make the common mistake of conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. This has always been a self-refuting standard, since, as Weiss reminds us, the earliest anti-Zionists to scorn Theodor Herzl's dream of der judenstaat were themselves Jewish (not only the left-wing critics of Palestinian-Arab dispossession but the Orthodox sects that regarded Jewish political sovereignty prior to the arrival of the messiah as blasphemous). Incidentally, some Zionists have also been quite nasty anti-Semites, including British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour whose famous 1917 declaration "viewed with favor" a Jewish home in the mandate of Palestine in order to empty Britain of its Jewish population.Nor does Weiss argue that stinging dissent from the Israeli government, let alone a harmlessly critical HBO mini-series, constitutes anti-Semitism, or even anti-Zionism. Nonetheless, it has become difficult in practice to disentangle anti-Semitism from anti-Zionism, given that manifestations of both often share the purpose of demonization and delegitimization of the only Jewish state. (By contrast, try to imagine, if you can, a movement of similar breadth and depth aimed against another "faith-based" state, Pakistan, that was similarly cobbled together out of rival ethno-religious nationalisms amid the collapsing British imperial order in 1947.)Weiss shrewdly analogizes modern anti-Zionism to the situation of a young couple weighing whether to have a child. All of the credible and practical concerns fall away once they have the baby, or else the parents are behaving immorally. Such is the case today, when the State of Israel is an established fact. To have questioned or opposed the project of building a Jewish state in the Jews' ancestral homeland before the U.N. Partition Plan of 1947 is one thing. It is quite another to endorse tearing down that living, breathing state today, in full knowledge of the enormity that would ensue. The offense here is compounded when those agitating to make Israel a pariah state demonstrate little knowledge or concern about formulating and executing a strategy to confront bellicose regimes and militant Islamist groups that imperil the Jewish state and the civilized world.The Right In addition to being more diffuse than many imagine, the lunatic fringe is also thicker than is generally understood. Weiss is justly concerned by the spike in violence against Jews and other minorities from the identitarian right and about the grisly ideology behind it. After some years of dormancy, in August 2017 it flared into the open in Charlottesville when a "Unite the Right" rally of white supremacists gathered at the University of Virginia to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. Carrying tiki torches, these doughy goons shouted the slogans: "Blood and soil," "White Lives Matter," and, in a nod to the ancient anti-Semitic notion of the Jew as the evil puppeteer, "Jews will not replace us." Lest we forget, President Trump's reflexive response to this wicked nonsense was to put in a good word for such "very fine people."Weiss's handling of the ugly movement known as the "alt-right" is fairly comprehensive, and the reader emerges on guard against this ethno-religious movement in our midst. She is also alert to the threat posed by unsavory authoritarian populists across the West who, though generally willing to dispel any impression of being motivated by racism, aim to turn their societies away from the liberal tradition. In either of these guises, the chauvinist Right tends to regard Muslims as the "other" and casts Israel (in Weiss's wry description) as a "kind of anti-Muslim Sparta" rather than a pluralist democracy preserving its Jewish character even under existential threat.The longer Israel and America remain in the saddle of populist nationalism, the more this crude description of Israel risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. (As Weiss must know, Israel's occupation of the West Bank will eventually become all but irrevocable, at which point the Zionist project will cease to be recognizable as a democratic Jewish state.) Stuck in a defensive crouch, Israel's conservative partisans in both countries tend to dismiss liberal scruples about the Israeli government's innumerable follies and injustices. They cheer Prime Minister Netanyahu's no-holds-barred posture against the Left, and the actions taken in self-defense against a militant Sunni gang in Gaza and a swelling "Shiite crescent" across Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. These conservatives also cite the new U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, among other items, as reason to embrace Trump for being in the running for "the best friend Israel has ever had in the White House."Among Zionists, Weiss helpfully distinguishes between "the David people and the Goliath people." The former think that Zion is always under siege, that any Israeli weakness will be exploited by its enemies, and that most other considerations are secondary. The latter think that Israel has accumulated such a preponderance of power that its vulnerability has been greatly diminished, and that illiberal aspects of Israel's character (consider last year's Jewish nation-state law that privileges Israel's sectarian features over its secular pluralist claims) are sapping precious legitimacy at home and abroad. Weiss's conclusion that each of these tendencies contains partial truths is fair enough as far as it goes, which is not far enough. In reality, the difference cannot be so evenly split.As long as the political Right believes Israel's society and government require an unqualified defense, the David people cannot be acquitted on the charge of loving the Jewish state "not wisely, but too well." By refusing to hold Israel to its own standards as an exemplar of liberal democracy, such ostensible friends are rendering a grave disservice to the Zionist cause. Weiss can hardly be counted among them. She posits that "supporting Israel . . . means demanding that Israel live up to its ideals," but never gets around to spelling out just what those ideals dictate in relation to the pressing need to reach a decent accommodation with the Palestinians. To be fair, Weiss does mention in passing the settlement enterprise as a valid point of criticism of Israel, and not a species of the phenomenon that is her subject. What's more, she registers a genuine sense of "despair" when observing Palestinians waiting at checkpoints, and says that Palestinian suffering in the course of occupation constitutes a "stain" on her Jewish soul.Nonetheless, the dogma of a "chosen people" has enabled a strident intolerance among many of Weiss's coreligionists that demands a more thoroughgoing critique than it receives in How to Fight Anti-Semitism. This is not because anti-Semitism is a response to the behavior of Jews (it absolutely is not). Rather, Israel's "accidental empire" of systematic land seizure in biblical Judea and Samaria is premised on a "civilization state" model of nationalism profoundly at odds with the liberal ideal that will render the case for Israel increasingly toxic.Many years ago, Yehoshua Leibowitz, the editor of the Encyclopaedia Hebraica, warned of a "Judeo-Nazi" tendency among the messianic settlers who moved onto the occupied West Bank after 1967. One need not go that far to recognize that Israel's defensive occupation of the post-1967 territories has unloosed a xenophobic current that not only serves to deprive Palestinians of their rights and sovereignty, but also cements sectarian and racist feelings within Israel proper. (To instance one example, courtesy of the Israel Democracy Institute, 70 percent of Jewish Israelis now oppose appointing Arab Israelis to cabinet posts.)Weiss appears more panicked by the related matter of Israel's new nationalist allies (e.g., Victor Orbán's government in Hungary) who are self-proclaimed illiberal democrats and give off more than a whiff of anti-Semitism. Weiss also passionately criticizes the rabbinate's suffocating influence among Israeli Jews, and scorches Netanyahu's unfathomably crude move to pull the racist party Otzma Yehudit into his governing coalition. This is all to the good, but the failure to offer a straightforward denunciation of Israel's occupation of land claimed and inhabited by Palestinians is a baffling omission in a book about fighting anti-Semitism — again, not because Jewish settlement beyond the Green Line is in any way related to anti-Semitism, but because it weakens Israel's moral defenses when it needs them most.If the populist-nationalist view of Israel continues to dominate the right side of the ballot in both Israel and America, and if that view continues to command electoral majorities, it will help vindicate the Left's suspicion that Israel is in essence an ethnocracy, or will soon evolve into one. As progressive politics lurches to the left, the Israeli Right will find new support in subverting democratic institutions and entrenching the occupation. In place of a smaller, plucky Israel punching above its weight against fearsome enemies while upholding a laudable multiethnic democracy, the cycle of dueling left and right populisms risks helping to foster a Greater Israel that loses sight of the liberal Zionism that birthed it. If this comes to pass, it will be a moral and political catastrophe, no matter where America's embassy in Israel is situated.Conclusion As I turned the final page of How to Fight Anti-Semitism, my mind returned to a vignette that Weiss had earlier extracted from Joachim Fest's memoir of growing up in interwar Berlin, Not I. Fest recalls his father, a pious Catholic and adamant anti-Nazi, begging his Jewish friends to leave Hitler's Germany before it was too late. Fest's father heaped praise on those in this dark time who resolutely persisted in classifying themselves "German citizens of Jewish faith": "In their self-discipline, their quiet civility and unsentimental brilliance, they had really been the last Prussians." They had "only one failing," he said, "which became their undoing: being overwhelmingly governed by their heads, they had, in tolerant Prussia, lost their instinct for danger, which had preserved them through the ages."Only a small number of Jews in the Third Reich lived up to the Jewish reputation for pessimism and understood what lay in wait for them. Victor Klemperer was one of them: The German-Jewish diarist whose writings eerily predicted the Holocaust said that the fate of the Jews was to be a "seismic people." It would be rash for Jews anywhere, even in America, to allow this premonitory instinct to atrophy, and Weiss deserves credit for keeping it alive.The most mournful realization generated by How to Fight Anti-Semitism involves the fantastic resilience of this disease and its protean nature, which augurs a fight that is decidedly unlikely to culminate in a decisive victory. To the contrary. Anti-Semitism is a plague whose latent tenacity ensures that Jews will not enjoy a quiet life anytime soon, but are rather condemned to live in a kind of exile — even if they happen to reside in the "safe haven" of the Jewish state.As this malignant disease is confronted and engaged, the ability of Jews and philo-Semites to hold a tension within themselves between vigilance and realism is vital. Weiss's book is unbeatable at showing that "never again" is a necessary but insufficient responsibility of Zionism. "Jews did not sustain their magnificent civilization because they were anti-anti-Semites," Weiss sagely observes. There is a growing peril in allowing an imagination of disaster to disorient Jews and obscure their duties and interests in the world beyond mere survival.It has been said that Jews must have a bag mentally packed, ready to flee. This paranoia is deeply embedded in the Jewish psyche, and for understandable reasons. Although past generations of Jews could be forgiven for harboring that mental luggage and little else, in fact their achievements proved to be more formidable and enduring; for modern Jews, even while they attend to their perennial fears — and their fanatical enemies' designs — of a world without Jews, it is important also to bear in mind that Hitler is dead, and there is work to be done outside the realm of security. Modern Jewish power has furnished the moral space to advance and vindicate modern Jewish values.The peculiar coincidence of great power but also abiding vulnerability demands the acknowledgement, after Jewish fashion, of a rich irony. In his essay "Why We Remain Jews," the philosopher Leo Strauss laid great emphasis on the tenuousness of existence as well as the illusion of salvation. He argued that "the Jewish people and their fate are the living witness for the absence of redemption. This, one could say, is the meaning of the chosen people; the Jews are chosen to prove the absence of redemption." The absence of redemption should recommend to Jews (and their well-wishers) a vigorous pursuit of self-defense and self-respect that recognizes ultimate security as a mirage.As the political center gives way to the ethno-nationalist Right and the anti-colonialist Left, which feed off of and reinforce each other, Weiss and many Jews have begun to ask the breathless question: Could it happen here? Gentiles should by all means join them, though "it" will not be a totalitarian future replete with book burnings and goose-stepping soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division. It is safe to surmise that America remains firmly against that "plot," even as the erosion of trust in the institutions of free government, at home and abroad, is well under way. If this cycle persists or accelerates, it will be a striking historical anomaly if the Jews do not suffer grievously, though this time their suffering may not be appreciably greater than the rest of ours.
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