Category: The Dish

Enshrining Inequality In Israel

Last Sunday, Israel’s cabinet advanced a controversial bill that would amend the country’s Basic Laws to define it explicitly as “the national state of the Jewish people”:

According to many critics, the new wording would weaken the wording of Israel’s declaration of independence, which states that the new state would “be based on the principles of liberty, justice and freedom expressed by the prophets of Israel [and] affirm complete social and political equality for all its citizens, regardless of religion, race or gender”. … Netanyahu argued that the law was necessary because people were challenging the notion of Israel as a Jewish homeland.

For my part, I see it as a natural evolution of Israel’s settler policies and the end of any pretense at aiming for a two-state solution. The claim on the West Bank is a religious and racial claim – and that identity is far deeper at this point than any commitment to Western ideas of democracy, and deepening by the day. It’s also a way, of course, to ensure that the slow annexation of the West Bank can continue, because it all but ends any hope of negotiation with the Palestinian leadership. It comes at a time when the Knesset is also considering a proposal (unlikely to pass) that would enshrine punitive home demolitions in Israeli counterterrorism policy, strip citizenship from anyone who expresses support for terrorism, and have anyone brandishing a Palestinian flag arrested for “incitement”. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman openly wants to pay Arab Israelis to leave the country. In such a climate, what can prevent a further weakening of Israeli democracy in favor of racial and religious fundamentalism?

Dahlia Scheindlin nonetheless thinks such a law would be very bad for the Jewish state:

Some insist that it is hypocritical and maybe even anti-Semitic to protest a simple law of national self-definition, when ‘France is for the French people,’ or ‘Germany is the land of the German people.’ Can we lay this argument to rest already? In those examples citizenship overlaps with nationhood. Yes, France is for the French. But what makes someone French is not birth or ethnicity alone, but citizenship. This proposed basic law would codify and demarcate the State of Israel as something that belongs only to a subset of its citizens.

State rights will not overlap with citizenship; they privilege a subset of citizens. Non-Jewish citizens have no route to sharing in the privileged national group. Being Israeli won’t be enough to live equally in this country. In fact, the state has consistently rejected the very idea that there is an Israeli nationality. The true comparison is simple: the law says Israel is for the Jews, just as America once said America is for whites.

The Guardian’s editors come out against it:

Arab citizens of Israel, who make up at least 20% of the population, would be granted civil rights as individuals, but denied “national rights” as a people. This is not a charge levelled by critics. Prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who voted for the bill, unabashedly admits that, should it become law – and it still faces parliamentary obstacles – only Jews would be granted national rights. An immediate manifestation of the change could be the downgrading of Arabic from its current status as an official language of Israel.

For nearly half a century, Israel’s defenders have insisted that – whatever the world’s misgivings about the 47-year occupation of lands gained in the 1967 war — the country itself, Israel-proper, is a full-blooded democracy, with Palestinian citizens of the country enjoying full equality. This would render that claim false. The basic laws would enshrine inequality, ensuring Jews had fuller rights than Arabs.

Gershon Baskin also opposes the bill:

How could the State of Israel be less to Muhammad who was born in Kafr Kara, whose father, grandfather, great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather were born in Kafr Kara, than it is to me, who was born in the United States and immigrated here 36 years ago? How could Israel belong more to Svetlana who arrived here a few years ago than to Samira whose family has been living in Haifa for 50 generations? Israel demands loyalty from its Palestinian citizens. Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman even wanted them to take a loyalty oath. What are they expected to be loyal to? Israel continues to discriminate against its Palestinian citizens. There is absolutely no excuse for discrimination on national or religious grounds in Israel after more than 65 years of statehood. The proposed law for the Jewish state would push us in the exact opposite direction.

But Haviv Rettig Gur downplays the controversy, noting that the idea of a “Jewish nation-state law” has been kicking around for years and emerged from the political center, not the far right:

In the summer of 2009, [Institute for Zionist Strategies] staff working on the bill met with former Shin Bet head and then-Kadima MK Avi Dichter, who adopted the initiative eagerly. Dichter is known as a political centrist, a critic of the far-right and an advocate of separation from the Palestinians.

In fact, in explaining his own support for the bill, he described it as an end-run around Netanyahu’s demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people – a demand Netanyahu saw as a litmus test for the Palestinian willingness to end the conflict. By defining Israel as the Jewish nation-state in its own constitution, simple recognition of Israel, which moderate Palestinian leaders have been willing to do, would necessarily constitute acceptance of the state’s constitutional identification with the Jewish nation, Dichter reasoned. It would remove a small but significant obstacle on the road to peace.

That sounds like whistling past the graveyard of democracy to me. What road to peace? And doesn’t this law all but make Palestinian engagement a dead letter?

Christie And Cruelty

I think it’s pretty clear by now that governor Chris Christie of New Jersey has one over-riding principle in his political life: getting to be president. That was the key rationale behind the campaign to punish pigsany Democratic mayors who refused to give him an aura of bipartisanship he could take to the national stage. And that’s the only rationale behind his contemptuous veto of the state legislature’s second attempt to ban the use of gestation crates for sows in factory farms. The crates prevent a pig from moving or turning around for her entire life. They’ve been banned in nine states and throughout the EU. The law was passed by the state Assembly by a vote of 60 to 5 and the state Senate by a vote of 29 to 4. It has the support of close to 90 percent of New Jerseyans in a recent poll. But it would tar Christie’s rep with the hog-farmers in Iowa, and so had to be vetoed. Christie denies that there is a widespread problem at all in New Jersey, with a mere 9,000 pigs, but fails to argue why signing the law wouldn’t merely prevent such cruelty in a few cases or in the future. What’s the harm? He calls a very bipartisan vote a partisan plot.

The veto was not unexpected – but need not be the last word. The state Assembly and the Senate can simply over-ride the veto – and it appears they have the votes to do so. Whether the GOP will follow through – they sure didn’t the last time – is an open question. But I fail to see why they shouldn’t. Christie gets to claim he tried to stop it, and New Jersey can end capricious, money-grubbing cruelty. Win-win no? Especially for the pigs.

A Month-Long Black Friday?

Peter Weber highlights a new survey:

According to the [National Federation of Retailers]’s survey, by Prosper Insights & Analytics, weekend sales dropped to an estimated $50.9 billion, from $57.4 billion in 2013, and about 133.7 million people said they shopped online or in stores over the four days, a 5.2 percent drop from last year. The retail trade group stood by its forecast that over the entire season, spending will rise 4.1 percent from 2013, but it had a bunch of conflicting explanations for why Black Friday weekend was a relative bust, especially given dropping gas prices and increasing consumer confidence.

Steven Perlberg sums it up:

The fact remains that while Black Friday has become an American institution – with its brawls and stampedes well-documented across social media – it has also decreased in economic relevance as shopping habits shift.

But Barry Ritholtz questions the survey’s methodology:

Ask a person a specific question, and you will typically get a specific answer. The problem is that the answer is either guesswork or fabricated, bearing little if any resemblance to reality. You have no idea what you spent on holiday shopping last year. You have no idea what you are going to spend on holiday shopping this year. The net result of comparing one made-up number with a second made-up number is a random outcome lacking any relationship to actual spending.

These are facts of human behavior. Credible survey methods seem to be wholly unfamiliar to the NRF. Why bother when the fiction works so well? In truth, no one has an idea what the holiday sales were as of yet.

Ed Morrissey notes that sales are hardly limited to the immediate aftermath of Thanksgiving:

If people find good deals before Thanksgiving, they’ll be a lot more inclined to take advantage of them at the moment rather than enter the Thunderdome on the day after Thanksgiving, especially given the contrivances and artificial shortages that would force them into the lines early in the morning. If Black Friday is dying, as some early data suggested, it’s because retailers themselves are making the day less relevant. It may also be because die-hard discount shoppers know they can get the same deals or better by holding out to the end [.] …

Shoppers are wising up, and retailers will get a little more competitive as a result. That doesn’t make Black Friday a dud, but in a couple of more years, it might become an irrelevant measure — and perhaps an object lesson in desensitizing consumers after repeated panic tactics. One can only cry “Wolf!” or “Limited supply!” so often before losing all credibility.

Joe Pinsker elaborates on how clever shoppers can see through sales tactics:

Many retailers depend on cultivating a sense of urgency in shoppers, which leads them to spend irrationally on a deal they believe could evaporate any minute. Cutting through that anxiety might be possible with a shift in mindset: A recent study suggests that when people reflect on a time when they felt grateful, they can become less intent on instant gratification. In fact, those who were merely happy or amused were willing to sacrifice $100 in a year for $18 immediately, but those who were primed to feel grateful were patient enough to draw the line at $30. Another study, to be published early next year, suggests that disciplined people aren’t actually less impulsive in the moment; they just choose to limit the number of tough decisions they have to make.

Walking While Black

More black men need to bring their cell-phones to these police interactions. The rest of us have to see this shit with our own eyes before we’ll begin to understand the rage that simmers beneath the headlines:

Update: the police department defended the interaction:

Oakland County Undersheriff Michael McCabe said Sunday that the deputy acted properly, and took exception to bloggers and social media commenters who he said took the video out of context, and didn’t bother checking to get the rest of the story.

“The store that called about the man has been robbed multiple times in the last year,” McCabe said. “In addition, employees have been robbed while making deliveries. According to the caller, this man was walking back and forth in front of the store five or six times.

Thoughts On Affirmative Action, Ctd

A reader starts the debate over a big post you might have missed over Thanksgiving:

I make no claim of expertise on this topic, but your mention of the GI bill caught my attention. You seem to see it as a great equalizer, and I do not wish to challenge the fact that the GI bill created tremendous educational opportunities.  However, there is considerable evidence to suggest that the policies of the GI bill disproportionately benefitted whites.  So, a policy that you portray as an equalizer arguably helped ossify and perhaps expand the racial gap in educational opportunities.  Just like so many of the social and housing policies of that era, the GI bill seems to have helped cement not ameliorate racial disparities.  Ira Katznelson has covered this topic well in his scholarly work, as well as in his book When Affirmative Action Was White.  In particular, he engages in a compelling dialogue with Suzanne Mettler, who argues that the GI bill was “relatively inclusive”.

Another expands on that reader’s point:

You claimed that the G.I. Bill “was a huge step forward for meritocracy in America.” You should be very careful with your history here.

As pointed out by Ira Katznelson in his book When Affirmative Action Was White, Jim Crow laws and practices were baked into the G.I. Bill. The congressional “Dixiecrats” at the time ensured that the administration of G.I. Bill benefits (and Federal Housing Administration loan insurance and WPA jobs) was left up to each state individually. This meant that Black soldiers in the South returning from WWII were often denied government benefits from these so-called meritocratic programs. Black veterans in the North were barred from buying houses in white neighborhoods and couldn’t obtain loans in Black neighborhoods due to housing shortages and the practice of redlining. From the NY Times book review (which is easier to copy-paste than my copy of Katznelson’s book):

The statistics on disparate treatment are staggering. By October 1946, 6,500 former soldiers had been placed in nonfarm jobs by the employment service in Mississippi; 86 percent of the skilled and semiskilled jobs were filled by whites, 92 percent of the unskilled ones by blacks. In New York and northern New Jersey, ”fewer than 100 of the 67,000 mortgages insured by the G.I. Bill supported home purchases by nonwhites.”

Discrimination continued as well in elite Northern colleges. The University of Pennsylvania, along with Columbia the least discriminatory of the Ivy League colleges, enrolled only 46 black students in its student body of 9,000 in 1946. The traditional black colleges did not have places for an estimated 70,000 black veterans in 1947. At the same time, white universities were doubling their enrollments and prospering with the infusion of public and private funds, and of students with their G.I. benefits.

I challenge you to do dig deeper into this history before opining that government assistance programs represent anything approaching a meritocracy. In fact, citing the G.I. Bill provides a powerful refutal to that notion. White men were able to attain government-backed housing loans and government-subsidized post-graduate education via the G.I Bill. This allowed them to accumulate wealth in the decades since, while Black people were actively excluded from that process. It’s almost like action was taken to affirm the place of white men in this country!

Many more of your emails to come regarding the debate over affirmative action itself.

Reasons To Hope On Race

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William H. Frey marks the slow, steady decline of segregation:

The average white resident, for example, lives in a far less diverse neighborhood—one that is more than three-quarters white—than residents of any other group. Nonetheless, the average white person today lives in a neighborhood that includes more minorities than was the case in 1980, when such neighborhoods were nearly 90 percent white. Moreover, the average member of each of the nation’s major minority groups lives in a neighborhood that is at least one-third white, and in the case of Asians, nearly one-half white.

He expects the continuation of these trends:

Population shifts that are bringing Hispanics and Asians to previously whiter New Sun Belt and Heartland regions will most certainly continue to alter the neighborhood experiences of these groups by bringing them into more contact with whites. The nation’s blacks are moving onto a path that more closely follows that of other racial minorities and immigrant groups as more blacks move to more suburban and integrated communities. The broader migration patterns are moving in the direction of greater neighborhood racial integration, even if segregation is far from being eliminated.

And then it seems to me you have to factor in the increasing number of interracial marriages:

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What Chris Rock was referring to with respect to his young daughters is the impact of this big generation of non-white babies. They’ll form yet another new minority – alongside Hispanics and Asians – until all such non-white minorities become a majority in 2050. At some point, it is conceivable that “race” will become so alloyed and meaningless a term it could become irrelevant, or that racism will become more nuanced and diffuse, revealing new variously-hued racial coalitions and identities. Or that at some point, the whole fixation with race will begin to dissipate and disappear in the face of our experience of our common humanity.

Yes, I can hope. And after Ferguson, it feels important to do so.

Freeing The Pharaoh

https://twitter.com/arabiaenquirer/statuses/538726526129152000

On Saturday, an Egyptian judge dismissed murder charges against former president Hosni Mubarak over the killing of hundreds of protesters during the 2011 uprising:

The Cairo court erupted in cheers when the judge said Mubarak should not have been a defendant in the case as the charges against him were added late. Charges against seven senior ex-officials were also dropped. The decision could be appealed. Victims’ relatives waiting outside expressed dismay and frustration. And later police fired tear gas to disperse a crowd of about 2,000 people who gathered near Tahrir Square to voice their opposition to the decision. …

As well as the murder charge, Mubarak was also cleared of a corruption charge involving gas exports to Israel. His sons Gamal and Alaa were also cleared of separate corruption charges by the same court on Saturday.

Mubarak remains in prison on a separate, three-year sentence for embezzlement but could walk free soon, as his pretrial detention for the murder charges will now count as time served. Hossam Bahgat explains the technicality that could set the ex-dictator free:

Following Mubarak’s abdication of power in February 2011, Public Prosecutor Abdel Meguid Mahmoud decided to investigate the killing of protesters during the 18 days of revolt that ended Mubarak’s tenure. On March 23, 2011, Mahmoud, who had served under Mubarak and remained in office until late 2012, indicted Mubarak’s Interior Minister Habib al-Adly and his senior assistants, but not Mubarak himself, for having ordered or otherwise abetted the killing of protesters throughout the country. Two months later, the Supreme Council of Armed Forces, which had succeeded Mubarak in power, faced pressure from street demonstrations demanding accountability for Mubarak too. On May 24, 2011, the public prosecutor added Mubarak as a co-defendant in the case.

The fact that Mubarak was only added as a defendant two months after the case had been referred to trial is the technicality the judge used today to dismiss the charge against him. By not indicting Mubarak from the beginning, the judge reasoned, the prosecution had made “an implied decision that there were no grounds for criminal proceedings” against him. This “no-grounds” decision can be formally reversed by the public prosecutor within a window of three months. Mubarak’s defense lawyers argued, and today the court agreed, that the prosecution reversed the implied no-grounds designation of Mubarak without following proper procedures. For that technical error, the judge ruled the charge against Mubarak for the killing of protesters as inadmissible and dismissed that charge without considering it or ruling on its merits.

Though not unexpected, the ruling serves as a depressing coda to Egypt’s failed revolution and subsequent regression into military dictatorship. That the ruling seemed to follow the public mood, which has soured on revolution over the past three years, is part of the problem, Tamara Cofman Wittes adds:

[T]he trial’s outcome is symbolic of a broken, enfeebled justice system where outcomes often seem arbitrary and where prosecutors and judges often seem to follow public sentiment — first heeding calls for blood by charging the former president on hastily constructed evidence, then dismissing the charges after three years of chaos made Mubarak’s thirty years of dictatorship look rosy in retrospect. The biased workings of this system are also evident in the fact that this judge properly dismissed Mubarak’s charges on technical grounds, whereas preposterously flimsy and/or irrelevant evidence and testimony were allowed to stand in the conviction of three journalists this year and the convictions of 43 NGO workers in 2013. In some ways, this broken system is just one small example of the broken Egyptian state that is the legacy of Mubarak’s long rule.

Juan Cole attempts to find some cause for hope:

The only silver lining of the current situation is that the old Mubarak political and financial elite, the fulul or left-overs, are being reincorporated into public life. Those who committed criminal acts should not be rehabilitated, of course. But South Africa dealt with former regime elements by having them confess in detail to their crimes, after which they were released. What’s wrong here is that Mubarak and his gang are still unwilling to confess. For left-overs who had not been guilty of committing any obvious crimes, it is probably healthier to have them come back into public life than be excluded and sullen (the wealthy are in a position to make a lot of trouble).

One big difference between so far relatively stable Tunisia and unstable Libya is that after the first two years, members of the party of former Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali were allowed to come back into politics in 2014. In Libya, as in Iraq, the old elite was excluded and stigmatized, and instability ensued. In Egypt there is the wrinkle that the secondary elite, the Muslim Brotherhood, has been more thoroughly excluded from public life than the fulul ever were.

And Bruce Riedel identifies one group of people who are perfectly happy with the ruling, namely the Saudi monarchy:

The Kingdom supported the 2013 coup immediately, with the King publicly endorsing the putsch minutes after it took place. Riyadh has organized the Gulf states to bankroll the generals’ regime since — at a cost of billions. Getting Mubarak out of prison has been a Saudi priority ever since the coup. The coup reversed the momentum of the Arab Spring and extinguished the most important experiment in Arab democracy ever, two key Saudi goals. The defeat of the Muslim Brotherhood was another major objective for Riyadh. The Saudis believe the coup substantially reduced the danger of unrest inside the Kingdom by terminating a dangerous role model.

When Is A Facebook Post A Crime?

US Supreme Court Declines To Hear Appeals On Same-Sex Marriage Cases

Today SCOTUS is hearing oral arguments for Elonis v. United States. Amy Howe provides background:

In the fall of 2010, [Anthony] Elonis’s Facebook posts included several that discussed harming his ex-wife. One post was a take-off on a comedy routine available on YouTube: Elonis asked his Facebook friends whether they knew that it was illegal for him to say that he wanted to kill his ex-wife, and he added that it would be “incredibly illegal” to suggest that someone could kill his ex-wife by firing a mortar launcher from the cornfield behind her house. A day later, Elonis put up a post about shooting a kindergarten class.

These posts earned Elonis a visit from an FBI agent. After the visit, he posted about that encounter too, suggesting in rap lyrics that he had strapped a bomb to his body and would have detonated it if he had been arrested. This post was apparently the last straw for the FBI: a few weeks later, Elonis was arrested and charged with violating 18 U.S.C. § 875(c), which makes it a crime to communicate threats in interstate commerce – for example, over the Internet.

Damon Root examines Elonis’ defense:

“I’m just an aspiring rapper,” Elonis declared several times on Facebook, likening his bloody odes to the work of bestselling rapper Eminem, whose hit song “97 Bonnie and Clyde” also featured the murder of an estranged wife.

In fact, in his main brief to the Supreme Court, Elonis and his lawyers characterize his Facebook writings as part of a long, colorful tradition in American music, one where artists as different as Bob Dylan, Guns N’ Roses, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Body Count all detail “first-person revenge fantasies” via song. “However hateful or offensive,” the Elonis brief argues, “those songs are entitled to full First Amendment protection. The same protections extend to the efforts of amateurs writing on comparable themes, moved by similar experiences.”

The federal government, however, is not buying it. Elonis’ assertion “that his own speech was indistinguishable from the speech of the various commercial artists he claims to have imitated wholly disregards the very different contexts in which his own statements were made,” the government argues in its reply brief. For one thing, the government points out, after Elonis’ wife sought and received a restraining order against him in response to one set of graphic Facebook posts, he promptly returned to the social networking site to ask whether her restraining order is “thick enough to stop a bullet?”

More of what Elonis wrote can be read here. How Garrett Epps understands the case:

The Facebook posts have attracted a lot of attention—many commentators see this as a case about rap lyrics and Internet speech—but really, it’s only relevant as part of a general question about context. If Elonis had sent the threats to the targets by mail, there would be little doubt of his intent. If he had written them in a diary that was discovered by accident, there’d be little doubt that they were protected. Where do Facebook postings fall?

Lyle Denniston thinks SCOTUS has two choices – “to look at the issue of intent from a subjective perspective, focusing on the speaker, or to look at it from an objective view, focusing on both the speaker and on a hypothetical ‘reasonable person’ exposed to the message”:

Anthony Elonis and his supporters argue that his postings on Facebook were not “true threats” because he actually had no “subjective intent to threaten another person.”  If that is the test, a jury would have to make its own assessment of what an Internet user like Elonis did have in mind, examining the specific words used and their context.

The federal government and its supporters, however, argue that Elonis’s statements were judged — and should have been judged — by two measures: first, did he make his statements intentionally (without regard to what he was thinking), and, second, would “a reasonable person” read the words used and their context as conveying to the target of the message that they would be injured or killed?

Eric Goldman also contemplates the subjective vs objective standard:

If the legal test is subjective, social media posters can freely discuss violence towards others and then claim (possibly retrospectively) they didn’t intend to make a threat. Thus, we’d anticipate many defendants will say they are just emulating rappers like Eminem, no matter how vicious or threatening their posts sound. In light of the obvious problems that would create for criminal enforcement, I would be surprised if the Supreme Court adopted the subjective test.

Still, the objective test has its own problems. First, to determine if a social media post communicated a threat to a reasonable person, we have to understand the post. The post may contain internal signals–an emoticon, an LOL, a Rickroll–that tell readers about the author’s true intent…but only if the readers recognize those signals, and sometimes signals are sufficiently obscure. Second, we have to contextualize the post by reviewing posts before or after the one in question. Even if a post in isolation might sound threatening, the surrounding posts may cause the post in question to take on a new meaning. Third, we have to know more about the likely readers of the post. People in niche communities develop their own norms and language that outsiders may not understand. For example, if all of the readers are quite familiar with Eminem, they may understand a threatening-sounding lyric quotation in a way that anyone unfamiliar with those lyrics would miss.

Geoffrey R. Stone wants SCOTUS to “hold that Elonis is entitled to a new trial at which, in order to convict him, the jury must find, not just that a reasonable person would be frightened by his words, but that he intended his words to instill fear”:

Any other decision would run the risk of vastly expanding the concept of “threat” to the point where frightening speech more generally might be thought to be outside the protection of the First Amendment. That would be a disaster.

Of course, this does not mean that Elonis will be acquitted. On a re-trial, the jury might well find, not only that a reasonable person would interpret his words as a threat, but that he in fact intended them as a threat, despite his protestations to the contrary. But without that finding, Elonis’s conviction should be held to violate the First Amendment.

Jessica Valenti differs:

If the court rules for Elonis, those who are harassed and threatened online every day – women, people of color, rape victims and young bullied teens – will have even less protection than they do now. Which is to say: not damn much.

But Jack Linshi wonders what will happen if the conviction is upheld:

Several experts agree that such a decision could stifle freedom of speech online and offline, particularly among artists. If the court rules against Elonis, artists could be more hesitant to share anything that could be perceived as threatening — a slippery slope. On the other hand, such a ruling could increase the number of online harassment cases aggressively pursued by law enforcement. And there could also be a censorship effect on social media companies like Facebook.

“You have the potential for creating a chilling effect both on the part of speakers, but possibly even more on the part of entities that host potentially threatening speech,” said Paul Levy, an attorney at the Public Citizen Litigation Group. “If intent [to threat] isn’t needed [to prosecute], then it seems that the Facebooks of the world have to worry that they, too, can be prosecuted. It could have a serious censoring effect.”

(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)