Posted on May 19, 2013 by Scott Johnson in Anti-Semitism, Israel, Media

A durable libel

Charles Enderlin is the France 2 Jerusalem correspondent who broadcast the incendiary account of the death of 12-year-old Muhammad al-Dura at the hands of Israeli troops operating in the Gaza Strip in September 2000. Based on film footage provided by a Palestinian cameraman, Enderlin’s report has become infamous among students of Arab propaganda both for its destructive effects and for its probable falsity. The al-Dura affair bids to join the Dreyfus affair in the French hall of shame.

Dreyfus was innocent, of course, and now an Israeli government report has concluded that al-Dura survived the incident depicted in Enderlin’s report. Historian Richard Landes has done a great job of compiling the evidence of Israel’s innocence in the al-Dura case over the years at The Second Draft. Now Mitch Ginsburg updates the saga in this Times of Israel report:

Muhammad al-Dura, the Palestinian child who appeared to have been shockingly killed at his father’s feet in Gaza on September 30, 2000 — an iconic image that helped fuel the Second Intifada — was not harmed by Israeli forces and did not die in the exchange of fire, according to an Israeli government report released Sunday, three days before a French court rules on a related matter.

“Contrary to the report’s claim that the boy was killed, the committee’s review of the raw footage showed that in the final scenes, which were not broadcast by France 2, the boy is seen to be alive,” the Ministry of International Affairs and Strategy report stated regarding the television report.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who tasked the ministry with assembling the report in 2012, said the accusations aired on France 2 were “a manifestation of the ongoing, mendacious campaign to delegitimize Israel.”

Minister of International Affairs and Strategy Yuval Steinitz called the accusations baseless and said the affair was “a modern-day blood libel against the State of Israel.”

The 55 seconds of edited footage, filmed two days after Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, contributed to the October 2000 protest in which 13 Arab citizens of Israel were killed and quickly became the defining image of that Palestinian uprising against Israel.

The picture of Dura, apparently dead across his father’s knees, was shown for days on Arab and international TV stations and was cited as inspiration by both Osama bin Laden and the killers of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

Israel initially did not dispute that IDF troops had inadvertently killed the child. “It could very much be — this is an estimation — that a soldier in our position, who has a very narrow field of vision, saw somebody hiding behind a cement block in the direction from which he was being fired at, and he shot in that direction,” Maj. Gen. Yom-Tov Samia said at the time.

Only months later did the army complete an investigation that it said showed with certainty that, if Dura was killed, it could not have been from shots fired from the IDF position.

Is al-Dura alive? It would be nice to know what happened to him.

The variations on the blood libel are endless. Most recently, we have had the BBC, the Washington Post and others falsely asserting that Israeli forces killed the son of the aptly named BBC cameraman Jihad Masharawi on the first day of Operation Cast Lead. I wrote about that in the five-part series “Tools of Jihad.” By contrast with Muhammad al-Dura, the young Masharawi was killed (if by friendly fire). In any event, Jihad lives.

Posted on by Paul Mirengoff in 2012 Presidential Election, Benghazigate, Mitt Romney

What would you expect Romney to say?

Mitt Romney says that the Benghazi talking points had no bearing on the outcome of the 2012 presidential election. He made this remark in response to a question by an inquisitive Jay Leno.

Romney added that he doesn’t spend a lot of time reflecting on what could have been done differently during his campaign. “I don’t go back and look at: ‘Gee, if this would have happened differently, could I have won?’” Romney explained.

For Romney’s sake, I hope he has been able to move beyond that sort of thinking. I don’t imagine it’s easy to do so.

As for Benghazi, it is clearly in Romney’s interest to talk down the impact Benghazi could have made. Why? Because Romney made a hash out his justified attempt to use the issue during the second debate.

It wasn’t entirely Romney’s fault; moderator Candy Crowley disgraced herself by vouching for President Obama’s misleading statements on the subject. But there’s no getting around the fact that Romney didn’t have the necessary command of the facts to refute Obama’s contention that he called the attacks terrorism. And Romney erred, in my opinion, by steering clear of Benghazi in the final debate.

Moreover, quite apart from Romney’s performance, it is not in his interest to whine about the talking points at this late date. Doing so, especially on Leno’s show, would only make him look like a bad loser.

Whether intentionally or not, Leno was asking a win-win question from the Obama perspective. Either Romney would admit that the talking points controversy is irrelevant to Obama’s victory or Romney would cast himself in a bad light. Romney took the shrewder, and higher, road.

Romney also happens to be right. As John has said, Benghazi could not have changed the outcome of the 2012 election. But we didn’t know this at the time, and I wish Romney had made a better run at making it an issue.

Posted on by Scott Johnson in Barack Obama, Benghazigate

Analyze this

What did President Obama do on the evening of 9/11/12 when our men were under attack in Benghazi? The invaluable Andrew McCarthy reminds us that Obama and Secretary Clinton had a 10:00 p.m. phone call of which many (including, I think, Chris Wallace) have lost sight. This morning when Wallace asked Obama aide Dan Pfeiffer what Obama was up to that evening, Pfeiffer declared the line of inquiry “offensive.” Translation: Obama and his minions would prefer to “move on” and are warning the likes of FNC off:

The Weekly Standard’s Daniel Halper has posted the rush transcript of this illuminating exchange. Obama to the contrary notwithstanding, it’s almost enough to make one think that there is something there there.

Posted on by Scott Johnson in History, IRS, Media, Obama Administration Scandals

On first looking into Chapman’s Nixon

Our friends at RealClearPolitics have posted Steve Chapman’s Chicago Tribune column “The false Nixon equivalence.” It addresses the subject I took up in “Nixon’s IRS” and, more broadly, in “A Watergate footnote.”

Chapman makes the case that comparisons of Obama with Nixon in the matter of the current IRS scandal are misguided. I think the comparison is useful. The outrages committed by the IRS under Obama in the past few years have just begun to come to light. It is way too early to absolve Obama of responsibility, and his lawyerly denial of knowledge last week of the Inspector General’s report (as opposed to the abuses themselves) ought to raise your eyebrows if you’re paying attention. At the least, I think the comparisons of Obama with Nixon in the case of the IRS lead to a better understanding of the outrages that have come to light.

In my post on Nixon’s purported abuse of the IRS I pointed out the futility of Nixon’s efforts. Nixon’s desire to harass his political enemies through the IRS went unrequited. You have to read Chapman’s column closely to see that he confirms this point in every jot and tittle, though I’m not sure he understands it.

Chapman simply quotes Nixon’s colorful private statements seeking to harass his opponents via the IRS. Nixon’s efforts, however, went approximately nowhere, and Nixon vowed to make headway in his second term. In his second term, IRS Commissioner Donald Alexander refused to execute Nixon’s wishes. Nixon’s failures with the IRS are almost funny. Here is Chapman:

On multiple occasions, at the behest of the president or his top aides, the IRS was told to audit individuals whose activities created dissatisfaction in the Oval Office.

The chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Lawrence O’Brien, got special attention. One of Nixon’s top aides called the commissioner of the IRS and demanded action, hoping to “send him to jail before the elections.” Nixon ordered investigations of Democrats who might run against him.

So how did it go? Chapman doesn’t say.

Chapman contrasts Nixon speaking in private expressing his desire to misuse the IRS with Obama’s public condemnation of the IRS abuses that have just come to light. This is fatuous. Does Chapman suppose that Nixon would have spoken the same in public as he did in private? He would have proclaimed the IRS an “independent agency” just as Obama (falsely) did last week. We have no idea what Obama has said in private regarding the IRS abuses that served him so well. Yet Chapman gives every indication of thinking this is serous analysis. Is this some kind of a joke?

Nixon and his henchmen fruitlessly desired the IRS to “screw” their political opponents. Their efforts were a pathetic failure. It was a case of unrequited hatred. Chapman omits the explanation of Nixon henchman Jack Caulfield, who astutely complained that the IRS was a “monstrous bureaucracy…dominated and controlled by Democrats.” Caulfield was on to something.

By contrast with Nixon’s failures to misuse the IRS, the IRS has very effectively “screwed” Obama’s political opponents, and we have yet to learn what the president knew and when he knew it. Chapman finds those of us who make the comparison (or contrast) of Nixon with Obama as guilty of thought crime, but the comparison is illuminating for anyone with eyes to see.

Posted on by Steven Hayward in Campaign finance regulation, IRS, Obama Administration Scandals

How the IRS Scandal Could Backfire

CBS News reported yesterday that senior officials in the Treasury Department knew of the IRS targeting of conservative groups during the 2012 campaign.  While this doesn’t yet place the matter inside the West Wing, it assures another leg to the scandal at least.  To paraphrase an old Watergate-era slogan, “Follow the money-grubbers.”

(CBS News) WASHINGTON – There were new questions Saturday night concerning if anyone in the White House was aware of the IRS’ targeting of conservative groups.  Inspector General Russell George said he informed a deputy at the Treasury Department in June of 2012 about the probe into the IRS.

In a separate story, however, CBS News notes that the IRS didn’t seem to scrutinize larger politically-oriented groups like Karl Rove’s American Crossroads or Obama’s Priorities USA.  Only a mainstream news organization would be surprised by this; larger, more establishment connected groups, like large established crony-capitalist corporations, are always able to deploy more resources and more expensive K Street lawyers to speed their way through the government thicket.  Like all other forms of government regulation, it is the little guy—like local Tea Party groups—that the regulators will target.

I’ve always said that the way to get rid of corruption in high places is to get rid of high places, and surely that’s the right answer here: let’s get rid of the byzantine campaign finance rules that stifle political expression or limit it to the insiders like Rove and Axelrod.  But the opposite is likely to happen.  The so-called “reform community” (Fred Wertheimer, chief nanny), which is very well organized and has media sympathy, is going to argue that the IRS scandal shows that we need more regulation of political speech, or at the very least, disclosure of donors, so that more people can receive the Koch brothers treatment by the left.  (Of course, the so-called “reformers” always want to change the subject when you bring up the exemption from campaign contribution disclosure that the Socialist Workers Party still enjoys; most reporters don’t even know it exists.)  At the very least, the IRS will argue that it needs a bigger staff to handle the workload from the confusing and admittedly vague regulations in this area.  The New York Times, furiously working on the counter-narrative, says the IRS Ohio office was “unprepared and unclear about the rules.”  Isn’t that always the way of government failure?  If a government agency screws something up, obviously they need a bigger budget.  For example:

Some congressional Democrats, fearful of being tied to the scandal, are backing the push for more aggressive enforcement of these groups. . .  Wertheimer, of Democracy 21, said the “laundering of secret money into elections” will become a greater scandal than IRS misconduct unless something is done.

Want to hear some really bad news?  John McCain is on the case.  Which means we’re doomed:

A Senate investigative panel led by Democrat Carl Levin of Michigan and Republican John McCain of Arizona has been reviewing the use of social welfare groups for political causes for the past year and now is examining the agency’s handling of the tax-exempt reviews.

Keep you eye on this.  Months from now, or maybe next year, after the scandal has died down, look for an attempt in the Senate to ratchet up regulation of campaign speech in the cause of “reform.”  They’ll say it will be to prevent the IRS from targeting conservative groups, but what it will mean in practice is that the hurdles to even applying for tax-exempt status will become that much higher.  Can’t target anything if there’s nothing to target in the first place.  It’s another case study in the irrepressible nature of the administrative state.  Can’t wait to see how the IRS handles enforcement of Obamacare.

Posted on May 18, 2013 by John Hinderaker

North America’s Strangest Mayor

Rob Ford, the Mayor of Toronto, has been in the news lately because someone allegedly has a video of him smoking crack. I have no idea whether the video is genuine or not, but Ford is a distinctly odd character. He makes Rahm Emanuel look like a normal human being; in some respects, anyway. New York Magazine compiled a list of 20 things you should know about Rob Ford. Not all are suitable for a family web site.

This sort of thing is typical:

On St. Patrick’s Day, Ford was escorted out of the bar Bier Markt after “storming the dance floor” and exhibiting generally drunken and “incoherent” behavior.

On the other hand, some of the items listed by NY Magazine sound like bad raps, perhaps motivated by the fact that Ford is a member of Canada’s Conservative Party. Some are merely outbursts of political incorrectness. Politics aside, though, some of Ford’s misadventures are pretty funny. Like this collision with a television camera, which prompted a loud and profane exclamation:

Then there was Mayor Ford’s brief stint as a quarterback. If you think he doesn’t look like an athlete, you are correct. This is reminiscent of the famous butt-fumble. Only, to his credit, Ford hung on to the ball:

The question I can’t answer is, how does a guy like that get elected to public office? Is it some kind of a joke, like when we Minnesotans elected Jesse Ventura governor? Does he have some other virtues that we aren’t hearing about? I really don’t get it. On the other hand, there are a lot of political careers that I don’t understand. Harry Reid? Maxine Waters? Joe Biden? The list goes on and on; but, whatever your political persuasion, Rob Ford belongs on it.

Posted on by Paul Mirengoff in gun control

Five dollars worth of “adorable”

Organizing for America, the Democratic Party’s successor organization to Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign, is asking folks to “forward” Joe Biden’s response to a letter from a seven year-old boy on the theory that it is “adorable,” and to “chip in” a $5 dollar contribution, as well. I’m not sure whom Organizing for America finds adorable — Biden or the boy. Both, I guess, since it says the exchange is “adorable in every way.”

Anyway, consider the following forwarded:

[Name] –

This is just adorable in every way.

Myles, a 7-year-old from Milwaukee, wrote Vice President Biden a letter to suggest that if guns shot chocolate bullets, no one would get hurt.

The Vice President wrote back. Take a look at his response, then share it with your friends:

Dear Myles –

I am sorry it took me so very long to respond to your letter.

I really like your idea. If we had guns that shot chocolate, not only would our country be safer, it would be happier. People love chocolate.

You are a good boy.

– Joe Biden

Thanks,

Organizing for Action

—————-
A movement of millions elected President Obama. Let’s keep fighting for change. Chip in $5 or more to support Organizing for Action today.