Why Did Media And Democrats Abandon Their Investigation Into Brett Kavanaugh?

By Mollie Hemingway    

Wednesday, October 31, 2018

What happened to the multiple allegations of sexual misconduct levied against Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation battle? The claims ranged from Christine Blasey Ford’s remotely plausible if unsubstantiated allegation of a violent attempted rape to Michael Avenatti’s completely outlandish and also unsubstantiated allegation of hosting serial gang rape parties.

From September 12 to October 6, the claims absolutely dominated all major media. They ran on the front pages of all major newspapers and filled the hours on cable and network news. Magazine journalists at The New Yorker ran with the claims, despite massive corroboration problems.

The claims were taken so seriously by the media and some U.S. senators it led to serious delays of the confirmation voting process. A hearing was held during and after which all the talking heads on cable asserted Blasey Ford was completely “credible.” Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Arizona, even maneuvered to reopen an FBI investigation to dig into the claims. Then they disappeared. Overnight.

The argument for delaying the confirmation process indefinitely was that everyone needed time to investigate the allegations. The argument underlying the media coverage was that these allegations were “credible” and needed to be investigated and reported on given the importance of the lifetime position for which Kavanaugh was nominated. The allegations were hitting in the midst of the Me Too movement, which claims to address sexual assault by powerful men. It should be noted that for a claim to be declared “credible,” it doesn’t need to be verified or have any substantiating evidence but merely that journalists and pundits “believe” it or find it possible.

If it was important to investigate the claims because Kavanaugh was up for a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, it remains just as important to investigate it now that he’s been confirmed. This would be true even if impeachment were not an option if the allegations were ever substantiated. That impeachment is an option makes the October silence even weirder. Why did media outlets go from hourly updates on this story to dropping it like it’s hot?

Recent coverage is limited and devoted to political considerations of the allegations, but not the merit of them. If Kavanaugh had credible sexual assault allegations against him, as the media claimed, they should be fully investigated even after his confirmation, since he continues to work with and around women, and has children at home. Right? Why would his confirmation change anything about the tenacity with which the media covered this story? Is it less scandalous to have a “credibly accused” rapist on the Supreme Court than to have a “credibly accused” nominee to the court?

Many Americans did not find any of the accusations against Kavanaugh believable, but nearly every media figure and Democratic politician and seemed to swallow one or more of the claims whole. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., even read Avenatti’s client Julie Swetnick into the record. Swetnick claimed without evidence that Kavanaugh was the secret ringleader of a serial gang rape cartel in high school. She claimed that, as an adult, she attended 10 gang rape parties that he organized as a high school student. As recently as a few days ago, abortion corporation Planned Parenthood and abortion lobbying group NARAL said they “believe” Swetnick.

The Senate Judiciary Committee, by contrast, just made a criminal referral of Swetnick and Avenatti to the Department of Justice for making false claims. After each outlandish claim was made, the media would dutifully report that an “additional” claim had been made. One journalist admitted she’d reported on a story the claimant was unable to substantiate precisely because additional claims would make the first more believable.

Even leaving aside the claim of an underground serial gang rape cartel, and The New Yorker’s Kavanaugh accuser Deborah Ramirez — who a few days after his hearings ended claimed to sort of recover decades-old memories of a Kavanaugh assault, and the various anonymous and recanted claims about rapes from Colorado to Rhode Island: What happened to Blasey Ford?

Blasey Ford’s muddled claim about a violent attempted rape at an undetermined location and time in high school could not have been more generously treated by online, print, and broadcast media. It was given nothing but the most respectful hearing by the media. The Washington Post ran a very favorable version of the story to break the news. CNN, FOX News, and MSNBC all said her claims were credible and that her testimony at the reopened Kavanaugh hearing was devastating to Kavanaugh’s confirmation case.

Obviously the media coverage was misaligned from the political mood of the non-progressive portion of the country, but it was well aligned with the progressive political movement. Do they no longer care about Blasey Ford?

We’re told that she had no incentive to lie and gave up a great deal by coming forward — although one journalist has reported on the nearly $1 million she raised from progressive donors. All the media that reported she had no incentive to lie owe it to her to fully investigate her claims, don’t they?

While Blasey Ford is unclear on the precise location of the claimed assault, Maryland police said they would fully investigate any allegations brought to them. Has that been done? The argument was that the multi-week delay in September was insufficient for a proper investigation of her claims. If that’s true, what has been done in October? Why have we heard nothing?

If the media and other Democratic leaders wanted to have any credibility at all that the post-hearing release of multiple allegations wasn’t a pure political stunt for which they were willing to destroy a man, they’d continue to fight for justice every day, wouldn’t they? They would ask every Democratic candidate whether he believed Ford and supported impeaching Kavanaugh.

If the Kavanaugh confirmation circus were about justice for his alleged victims, instead of about killing his nomination by any means, we’d still be getting updates on this story, wouldn’t we?

So what does it mean that we’re not getting updates? What does it mean that Democrats are not being asked by mainstream journalists about whether they support Kavanaugh’s impeachment? Why have the media given up on investigating this story that they obsessed over for a few weeks in September and October?

Any reporter who was able to verify the claims against Kavanaugh would be an instant hero and awarded all the journalism prizes. Is anyone even attempting to do so? Democrats took the claims so seriously that they charged Kavanaugh with the crimes in Senate hearings. Did they mean what they said? If they’re telling the truth, he should be impeached and imprisoned.

Conversely, if Kavanaugh was falsely accused, had his reputation obliterated, and nearly had his life destroyed in the process, his accusers should be held accountable. If the Justice Department responds to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s criminal referral of Avenatti and Swetnick, some will be. But what about the rest? What’s going on with this story?

If The Left Truly Opposed Bigotry, They Would Stop Ignoring Anti-Semitism

By Chad Felix Greene     

Wednesday, October 31, 2018

One of the very first things a Jew ever told me was that choosing to become Jewish meant choosing to become a target of hatred and potential violence. I would be told many times over the years, “When they come for the Jews, they will come for you too.”

Whenever I visited the synagogue to explore this new faith, Jewish congregants would quiz me on my intentions. Upon learning I was considering conversion they would always, always, warn me away. Comments like, “That is a very risky thing to do, you know” and “You are choosing a difficult life” were more common than I had expected.

The books I read, while celebrating the choice itself, all warned of the same concerns faced by all Jews all over the world. But I pressed on, believing myself to be fortunate enough to live in a more open, enlightened, and safe world.

When our synagogue welcomed a new rabbi, a convert herself, one of the first things she did was suggest that our community invest in a nice big sign outside the building with our service days and hours, directions to enter the building, and perhaps a humorous biblically inspired quote now and then. She unsuspectingly set off a wildfire of outrage that caused enough controversy to require a temple meeting and her to back away slowly from the notion.

At the time I was utterly baffled at the reaction, thinking back to the first time I had unsuccessfully tried to find the right door to enter for an evening service at which I had arrived an hour early because I couldn’t find the service information anywhere, including the internet. But my Jewish family patiently explained to me that the reason behind the controversy was that the congregation did not want people who intended to harm us to know how and where to find us.

The building was designed to mimic the structure of a cathedral, built during a time when Reform Jews shunned even the wearing of yarmulkes inside the temple and insisted upon playing a pipe organ so passersby would think it was a church. When I began innocently wearing a yarmulke around town, I received similar displeased reactions that essentially boiled down to a fear of drawing unnecessary attention.

Few things confused me more than the obsession with safety and maintaining a low profile. In my world, people didn’t care what religion you were, and no one I ever knew had ever expressed anything I would interpret as anti-Semitic. The fear just did not make sense to me in a modern setting.

It took a personal experience of being the target of hatred to appreciate the root of this anxiety. In the spring of 2009, a Muslim friend sent me a Facebook invite to an event on my college campus. The event was presented as an open dialogue on Middle East politics based on the documentary “Occupation 101.”

I had taken several Arabic and religious studies classes and had many Muslim friends. I was active in my congregation and part of the Yiddish choir, and so I knew enough about Israel to feel interested in going. I felt torn, however, as the more I found out about the film, the more I realized how much of a conflict it would force me into.

“Occupation 101,” according to IMBD, is a “thought-provoking and powerful documentary film on the current and historical root causes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and U.S. political involvement.” But, like much of the pro-Palestinian discussion, it was far from unbiased.

I went to my synagogue, spoke with Jewish leaders, and reviewed the film. Once we realized it went beyond political discussion into overt anti-Semitism, we organized a response event. Within a day the event blew up into a massive controversy. The Muslim students, unanimously on the pro-Palestinian side, quickly began accusing the university of being controlled by Jewish influences attempting to silence the film. My Muslim friend accused me of being an advocate of genocide, a baby-killer, and a racist.

At the event, Muslim and liberal students loudly protested and screamed at Jewish and Christian counter-protesters, taking our fliers out of our hands and declaring our very presence to be hate. The dean of the liberal arts college opened the event cautioning us that a suicide bomber was truly a freedom fighter when put in the right context. The question and answer period devolved into shouting and flying accusations, which dissolved into an hour or more of people arguing afterwards.

This is not uncommon on American college campuses. The Daily Beast reported a shocking level of anti-Semitic hate at the University of California at Berkeley in 2015. Alongside swastikas and anti-Semitic graffiti, they report “sidewalk graffiti on campus that exhorted ‘Death to Israel’ and ‘Kill all the Jews.'”

The AMCHA Initiative, a Jewish organization, stated that their 2015 study “provided for the first time a quantitative account of the prevalence of anti-Semitic activity at schools most popular with Jewish students, as well as ample empirical evidence showing that the presence of anti-Zionist student groups, faculty boycotters and anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) activity are each strong predictors of anti-Jewish hostility.” The study also confirmed that anti-Semitic incidents were more common when faculty members engaged in anti-Israel boycotting.

The BDS movement, the anti-Zionist movement, and pro-Palestinian activity are almost exclusively left-leaning or Islamic-driven efforts on college campuses as well. The co-founder of the Women’s March, Tamika D. Mallory, attended a remarkably anti-Semitic event by Louis Farrakhan, who recently compared Jews to termites. Yet Mallory praised him on social media.

Linda Sarsour, another leader in the Women’s March, openly embraces anti-Israel sentiment and has expressed anti-Semitic stereotypes about “Jews in the media.” The Anti-Defamation League has addressed many anti-Semitic and anti-Israel positions taken by Black Lives Matter leaders and supporters and listed the Nation of Islam and multiple imams for perpetuating anti-Jewish hatred, in their 2017 study on anti-Semitism.

Unfortunately, Islamic and progressive anti-Semitism tend to get dismissed or excused, while white supremacist rhetoric gets a lot of attention. It cannot be denied that there has been a more aggressive and vocal presence of this rhetoric. Paul Nehlen, a Republican who ran against Paul Ryan, posted a hate list of Jews he accused of publicly attacking him (which included me). Nehlen has been a vocally anti-Semitic voice, and he gathered a disturbingly large following on social media before he was banned. But pretending the issue is exclusively in this domain denies a great deal of evidence on how anti-Jewish bigotry impacts our country.

When I read about the lives lost in Pittsburgh over the weekend and how the victims were all of the age group that expressed such concern over a building sign in my own congregation, I realized how deep the pain of anti-Semitism runs. While I grew up completely unaware of the realities of this specific and profoundly destructive form of hatred, the people I would one day choose to join knew it with a nuance I would never master.

But I also know that the modern left and the media seem determined to ignore what amounts to politically inconvenient facts in favor of their “blame Trump, ask questions later” obsession. Instead of recognizing the horror that a generation of Jewish Americans watched a deeply held fear come true despite decades of being told that threat was over, they seem content to focus on petty, vindictive politics.

What we saw was an act of pure hatred. It was terrorism. It was irrational and unpredictable, and it was devastating. But it was not caused by the current sitting president or Fox News or any content on the internet. When I walked into that conference room I saw genuine disgust and hatred in the eyes of many people there. I know that feeling today when I encounter far too many on the left who judge me as a person based on their prejudices of what they think I believe and therefore who they think I am.

If the left wishes to fight “hate,” they have a great deal of self-reflection to work through first. It is not Farrakhan that scares me, but the hundreds of cheering people at his rallies when he says hateful things about Jews. It is not various platforms allowing anti-Semitic speech that worries me, it is the underground of radicalization we cannot see or prepare for.

When I see Twitter ignore Farrakhan’s anti-Semitic tweets and mainstream progressive voices dismiss concerns, it is far more disturbing to me than any green frog ever could be. Professors on college campuses and leftist advocacy groups spreading lies and hatred of Israel are just as much of an incubator of radicalization as online groups sharing conspiracy videos of Jews controlling the world. Sometimes they are difficult to distinguish from one another.

I am a Jew and I am grateful for the choice I made, even knowing what I was first warned about so many years ago is true. After years as an advocate for Israel and as a conservative voice, I understand the anxiety surrounding anti-Semitism and the helplessness of not understanding why people hate you so deeply. But I also know there are genuinely good people in the world, as this tweet I posted demonstrates.

Fighting hate is a much larger challenge than simply banning random Nazis from the internet or blaming President Trump for “dog whistles.” It takes the recognition that hatred itself is a choice that is only conquered through acts of kindness and community. But this also requires rejecting the exploitation of tragedy for politics and the dismissal of hate when inconvenient, and agreement as a society to treat anti-Semitism as a threat wherever it shows itself.

Attempting To Appease Islamists By Enforcing Blasphemy Laws Will Only Make Europe More Dangerous

By Helen Raleigh             

Tuesday, October 30, 2018

What do Europe and Pakistan have in common? Recent events demonstrate that both set limits on a person’s freedom of speech and expression by enforcing blasphemy laws, laws that penalize the act or offense of speaking sacrilegiously about God or sacred things.

In Pakistan, Asia Bibi, a 53-year-old Christian woman, has been on death row since 2010. Her alleged crime? Back in 2009 in Punjab, two Muslim women accused Bibi, a mother of five children, of polluting a cup by drinking from it on a hot summer day. In the heat of argument, Bibi allegedly said to the Muslim women: “Jesus had died on the cross for the sins of mankind” and asked, “What did your Prophet Muhammad ever do to save mankind?”

In Pakistan, which enforces the most severe form of blasphemy law and where religious minorities are frequent targets, making a blasphemous comment is itself considered a punishable blasphemous act. Thus, Bibi was quickly arrested on the charge of blasphemy and was sentenced to death in 2010.

She appealed to Pakistan’s Supreme Court. The court reviewed her appeal in early October of this year, but decided to postpone making any verdict indefinitely amid protests led by a hard-line Islamic party, which threatens “terrible consequences” if Bibi is allowed to live and flee to another country. This isn’t an empty threat, because in Punjab, former Christian Gov. Salmaan Taseer, who called Pakistan’s blasphemy statute a “black law” prone to abuse, was murdered by his own body guard in 2011.

If in the end Pakistan’s Supreme Court spares Bibi’s life and lets her flee, she may not want to settle in Europe, because last Thursday, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) upheld an Austrian woman’s conviction by an Austrian court for defaming Muhammad.

According to the court ruling, the woman in this case, Mrs. S., held several seminars, entitled “Basic Information on Islam” between 2008 to 2009. In these seminars, she made several statements regarding Muhammad’s marriage to Aisha (Islamic traditions hold that Aisha was six at the time of their marriage and nine at its consummation). An undercover journalist reported her comments to Austrian authorities.

The Vienna Regional Criminal Court found her “guilty of publicly disparaging an object of veneration of a domestic church or religious society, namely Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, in a manner capable of arousing justified indignation.” Thus, she was convicted in 2011 of “disparaging religious doctrines pursuant to Article 188 of the Criminal Code concerning three statements.” She was ordered to “pay the costs of the proceedings and a day‑fine of 4 euros (EUR) for a period of 120 days (amounting to EUR 480 in total), which would result in sixty days’ imprisonment in the event of default.”

Mrs. S appealed the verdict by arguing her comments were protected by freedom of expression and her goal was not to defame Muhammad, but to contribute to a public debate. Her appeal was first denied by the Regional Criminal Court and later by the Austrian Supreme Court in 2014. Both courts upheld the lower court’s verdict by concluding that “the interference with the applicant’s freedom of expression in the form of a criminal conviction had been justified as it had been based in law and had been necessary in a democratic society, namely in order to protect religious peace in Austria.”

Last Thursday, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled that Mrs. S’s conviction didn’t violate Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights, covering freedom of expression, even though the ECHR acknowledges that “freedom of expression constitutes one of the essential foundations of a democratic society and one of the basic conditions for its progress and for each individual’s self-fulfillment. It is applicable not only to ‘information’ or ‘ideas’ that are favorably received or regarded as inoffensive or as a matter of indifference, but also to those that offend, shock or disturb. ”

In other words, freedom of expression includes the right to offend. However, after giving the traditional definition of freedom of expression, the ECHR insists “the exercise of the freedom of expression carries with it duties and responsibilities.” Mrs. S’s right to freedom of expression “must be balanced with the right of others to have their religious feelings protected, and served the legitimate aim of preserving religious peace in Austria.”

So just like Pakistan, the ECHR ruled that a blasphemous comment is itself a punishable blasphemous act because it may disturb “religious peace.” Similarly, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan justifies his support of the death penalty for blasphemy, arguing it helps maintain peace in society.

Unlike Pakistan, Europe pretends to be an enlightened and progressive place, even though it has long retreated from defending freedom of expression and protecting religious freedom. In 2006, after Danish and Norwegian media published controversial cartoons mocking Muhammad, Javier Solana, then the EU’s coordinator of foreign policy, traveled to Saudi Arabia and promised the EU would “do our utmost for this not to happen again.”

That’s why Graeme Wood, a staff writer for The Atlantic, wrote recently that we shouldn’t believe “the ECHR’s decision represents a sudden change in European norms and law about free speech.” The truth is, “European laws (and, indeed, laws in most of the world) have long treated freedom of speech as a dispensable, very much alienable right,” he wrote.

If Europe believes enforcing blasphemy laws in order to suppress offensive speech is necessary for maintaining “religious peace,” it’s dead wrong. Blasphemy laws protect no one and certainly don’t maintain religious peace. They represent a disguised bigotry — the progressives in the EU don’t trust that Muslims are peace-loving and are capable of civil discourse without resorting to violence.

The Europeans like to take pride in saying they enjoy a multicultural society. Yet it seems the more diverse its population gets, the less Europe knows how to integrate them. Rather than helping its immigrants assimilate into the liberal, democratic norm, Europe self-censors its own liberal values. But its appeasement hasn’t bought it peace and its retreat has only invited more repression. Europe has seen some of the deadliest attacks in recent years against novelists, journalists, and cartoonists.

According to a report by United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, 71 countries, including several nations in Europe, still punish blasphemy. Thankfully, there are some bright spots in Europe. The day after the ECHR’s ruling, Ireland voted to remove a blasphemy reference from its constitution, making it possible to repeal a law that punishes blasphemy according to religious sensibilities.

Don’t get me wrong. We should unequivocally condemn any act that causes physical harm to others because of their beliefs. We should count on our criminal laws to punish those who commit violence. But blasphemy laws are relics from the dark ages that have no place in today’s liberal democracies. One of the reasons that liberal democracies are able to enjoy peace and prosperity much more than any form of political systems is the diverse and free exchange of ideas.

As the ECHR admits, “Freedom of expression constitutes one of the essential foundations of a democratic society.” Without such a foundation, a liberal democratic society will cease to exist.