by Rabbi Prof. Dov Fischer
The risk is when corruption and brazen hypocrisy aggregate to supersede right and wrong. That is happening in the US and Israel.
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| Rabbi Prof. Dov Fischer Courtesy |
In Israel, driven by the same Leftist hypocrisies and double standards, another nation’s soul is threatened by a rabidly Leftist cynical minority, but Israel stands an infinitely better probability of surviving it because the eternity of Israel is indestructible. (Samuel 15:29).
Reasonable minds fairly will differ. Unanimity of thought happens only in dictatorships and on college campuses (same thing). Candidates in Russia and Iran and in Arab countries get 98 percent of the vote (when votes are held). By contrast, in reasonable societies legitimate differences of opinion reflect the understandable tendency for random cross-sections of people to differ. One time this side wins, and one time that side wins, but the show goes on honorably enough.
The risk is when corruption and brazen hypocrisy aggregate to supersede right and wrong. This is true for all sides. In America, Rep. Adam Schiff has been brazenly lying for years. In an honest world, Democrats also would recoil from him. Instead, he plans to run for U.S. Senator from California. Likewise, across the aisle, George Santos is a case study for psychologists, and honest Republicans should pounce on him without regard to political consequences. Honesty should matter.
In America, Kamala Harris rose in politics by shamelessly socially escorting a publicly married man and California kingmaker, Willie Brown. Elizabeth Warren rose by falsely claiming to be an Indian. Richard Blumenthal rose by falsely claiming to have fought in Vietnam. Hillary Clinton lied so often — Whitewater scandal, White House Travel Agency scandal, the 33,000 yoga and wedding-dress emails. Joe Biden lied about his school years, and he even lied about his very life when he read the biography of British Labour leader Neil Kinnock, claiming it was his own.
In Israel, the society and legal system have prosecuted and convicted a president (Moshe Katsav), a prime minister (Ehud Olmert), and a powerful political leader (Aryeh Deri).
But in Israel, the legal system that roots out some corruption is corrupt itself. They self-select Supreme Court justices, bar brilliant legal minds that do not accord with their own, allow for attorneys with obvious conflicts of interest to participate in selecting them. A recent case sees the representative of the bar association accused of engaging in sexual misconduct towards a judicial candidate, leveraging his power to select judges. And there is more.
Our political society is rooted in a soulless determination to win all battles at all costs. Benjamin Netanyahu has engaged in aggressive political rhetoric that is common in democracies, but he never used language implying that Yitzchak Rabin should be killed. And yet the Left still blames him for the killing thirty years later — even as daily explicit assassination threats are directed at him from microphones manned by well known figures and on social media. He is the target of a kangaroo court probe, a corrupt investigation, and it has morphed into a bogus Trial Forever that is like the song that never ends. If Israeli courts and the Shin Bet had treated Pharaoh of Egypt that way, there would be no need for a Haggadah to relate the story of the Exodus because he still would be on trial today, with testimony still leaking from witnesses to the Ten Plagues. No wonder Deri pleaded quickly (after five years!) and got it over with.
Nasty and even vicious politics is a core element of democracy. Although people tell pollsters they despise negative campaigning, disparaging ads typically decide elections. Nothing is worse for the national soul than the brazen hypocrisy. When a crime takes place, Yair Lapid instantly mocks Itamar Ben-Gvir for failing to control crime. Any fair-minded person knows that the new government just got started. The crime system, over which Lapid had authority, deteriorated on his watch, and now it takes time to clean up. What does Lapid want of Ben-Gvir — that he suspend democracy and declare a police state? No.
And yes. Lapid would love that. It would prove that this government is the dictatorship it is not. Instead, Ben-Gvir has been a statesman.
The hypocrisy is everywhere. When Elon Musk bought Twitter and announced a new direction for that corrupted social medium with all their fake bots and phony followers, a fifth column that helped throw the 2020 presidential election by blacking out all reportage about Hunter Biden’s laptop and Biden Family corruption, the Washington Post — among others who dominate the American Left media — bewailed the threat to democracy unfolding as a billionaire gained control over a means of communication. Uh-huh. And who owns that Washington Post itself? Jeff Bezos, a billionaire who controls that means of communication.
For decades, it was the Democrats who condemned illegal immigration at America’s southern border. Their main constituencies, White ethnic Catholic male union labor in the Midwestern Rust Belt — and Blacks everywhere else — were being devastated financially by the influx of desperate laborers willing to accept dirt-cheap wages at their expense. Meanwhile, the Republican upper class promoted mass illegal immigration because cheap labor maximizes profits.
And then the Democrats found that millions of Illegals, once granted amnesty, along with their subsequent generations born on United States soil, change elections. Conservative states like California turned Woke. Although the Illegals still wreaked havoc on the wages of lower-income Blacks, the Democrats determined they own Blacks anyway, no matter how poorly Blacks fare under them. So, overnight, Democrats became the party of mass illegal immigration while Republicans suddenly cared about border security.
And what indeed of security? Until Eric Swalwell, the expression of “sleeping with the enemy” merely conjured an idiom. Thanks to him, it now conjures an idiot. Imagine: a member of the House Intelligence Committee and Homeland Security Committee literally devoting intimate bedtime with Fang Fang, a spy for China. Talk about China digging its fangs in. Similarly, Dianne Feinstein, another California Democrat, this one on the Senate Intelligence Committee, had a Chinese spy as her chauffeur. And Americans wonder what gave China the brazenness to fly a spy balloon over the country?
Yet Democrats denounce their despised Donald Trump as the national security threat. As proof, they pointed to classified documents he took from Washington to his private custody. Law-enforcement agents were dispatched to promenade through his Mar-a-Lago compound in an FBI raid while Attorney-General Merrick Garland named a special counsel to investigate. And then it turned out that Joe Biden also snatched highly classified documents from Washington. One batch landed in an office in Pennsylvania. Another batch in his garage. Right near his Corvette. And a few years earlier, thousands of documents, including classified emails, ended up on a computer server in Hillary Clinton’s bathroom. But no FBI raids on Clinton or Joe.
In an honest world, Hillary would have been prosecuted for spoliation of evidence when her 33,000 emails about yoga and wedding dresses were scrubbed clean from her servers, and her hard drives smashed by hammer. And in an honest world, an Israeli Supreme Court that bars Rabbi Meir Kahane and Baruch Marzel and Bentzi Gopstein and Michael Ben-Ari from the Knesset also would bar Arab candidates and parties who hatefully incite against Jews and want to destroy Israel. But the Israeli Supreme Court system is corrupt. Ask the people uprooted from Gush Katif. If only they had argued to the Supreme Court that, now forced to wander, they should be treated like Arab Bedouin whom the Court allows to live in illegal homes forever. Ask the 14 year old girls left to languish in jails for demonstrating against the expulsion.
The Israeli Left assembles outdoors for Western media (note their English-language signs) to bewail that “democracy is dead” after their bloc of Jewish leftists loses five consecutive national elections to the right-wing Jewish bloc in under four years. Actually, it is they and their socialist secularism who are dead. Indeed, the Israeli Left have been the ultimate corrupters of democracy:
1. The majority of voters oppose an Oslo Accord that would give Arafat a polity to “govern,” so Rabin bribes a handful of mercenaries elected on a right-wing ticket to vote with the Left on Oslo anyway. Democracy?
2. A party runs under the name “Yemina” — “Right Wing” — and then negotiates away their mandate; they flip the government to the Left in return for their party leader being designated Prime Minister by virtue of his having received 6 percent of the vote. Democracy?
And the brazen hypocrisies over both countries’ Supreme Courts. In America, Democrats never were bothered that their left-wing SCOTUS majority dominated American law, often supplanting Congress as an ultra vires legislative branch, for nearly half a century. They fabricated legal rulings like Roe v. Wade based on justices’ personal whims, not rooted in stare decisis and actual legal precedent. Unexpectedly, a conservative majority emerged, and suddenly the rules governing the Supreme Court no longer were just. With today’s 6-3 conservative tilt, the Democrats suddenly determined that the Court needs exactly four more justices, increasing its bench to thirteen. By coincidence, that would give the Left a new 7-6 majority.
Meanwhile in Israel, the Left says it wants a Supreme Court just like America’s. Anything less is the death of democracy, justifying assassinations. And on the subject of America’s system, just for starters:
1. The American Supreme Court can be overridden by the voters and their elected representatives.
2. American Supreme Court justices have no say in who can become the next set of justices.
3. Lawyers have no special vote, no seat on a panel deciding who gets to be a justice or any judge.
4. No case can come before the Court unless the plaintiff has standing and can show personal injury directly injuring himself.
-In the 220 years since the American Court began reviewing cases, not once in American jurisprudential history has the U.S. Supreme Court attempted to assert the power to instruct a President to fire a person he has appointed as a cabinet member. If the President names a convicted tax cheat as his Treasury Secretary, the Supreme Court has no say. Rather, it is up to the voters at the next elections to decide, weighing all the arguments, whether that was “reasonable” under the circumstances.
-It is OK in Israel to call Itamar Ben-Gvir a “terrorist” but not to call out homosexuality and transgenderism as perversions of Judaic values embedded in 3,300 years of Judaism.
-It is OK to have lesbians in Israel getting married online by Zoom with a Utah court, but none dare demand that the Law of Return be limited only to Jews, real Jews, Jews as defined by thousands of years of Judaic law — not Ukrainian anti-Semites looking for a temporary transit stop to pick up a few shekels on the way to a final destination far from Putin, and not for Marilyn Monroes who “convert” non-Orthodox and their next two generations of non-Jewish offspring.
Ah, and American Jews. We hear from left-wing Jewish Congressmen, present and past, like Ted Deutch, Brad Sherman, and Jerold Nadler who warn the government of Israel and lecture her about Jewish values. But when their own Congress votes to kick Jew-hating Ilhan Omar off the Foreign Affairs Committee, not a single one of them voted with the majority to throw her out. Hypocrites and cowards.
And in America, what of a Supreme Court nominee so dishonest and phony that, despite (or because of) her supposed Harvard law education, she cannot define what a woman is? Ironically, that jurisprudential mediocrity never would have been nominated if she were not female — and Black. That’s the American ticket: Biden’s press secretary, his Supreme Court justice, his U.N. ambassador, his Vice President — all Black women. So it turns out that at least someone in Biden’s circles knows what a “woman” is. It is left for this writer to care for Black men.
Meanwhile, in Israel, Supreme Court justices hire each others’ kids for career-elevating clerkships, and at least one Supreme Court chief justice sat in judgment on cases involving companies that her husband represented at the time.
The great national danger is that we will learn to coexist copacetic with hypocrisy and come to accept that “Oh well, that’s politics!” As long as we recoil from the brazen lies on all sides, hope for the national soul remains. Once we capitulate, we fall.
Adapted by the writer for Arutz Sheva from a version of this article that first appeared here in The American Spectator.
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Rabbi Prof. Dov Fischer
Source: https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/367125
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