Update II: The Genius Of Ancient Hebrew Law

Anti-Semitism, Ethics, Hebrew Testament, Ilana Mercer, Judaism & Jews, Justice, Law, Natural Law, Reason

I’m not a religious Jew; I’m a Hebrew—of the civilization that invented equality under the law; a principle that is dictated in Deuteronomy and Exodus centuries before classical Greek philosophy. I believe the passion for justice is in my genes, as transmitted to me by a father—a rabbi—who’d repeat the phrase most repeated in the Hebrew Bible: “Justice, and justice alone, you shall pursue.” (Deuteronomy 16: 18-20)

While the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, “the first written code of laws in human history,” put in place different laws for the aristocrat, the slave, and the commoner; my tribe, commensurate with the ethical monotheism it was instructed to practice, was being hammered about applying the same laws to the king (Samuel advised the people against having one), the commoner, the alien, the orphan, the widow, the slave, the rich and the poor.

One of my favorite injunctions comes from Exodus 23: 2-3. I know you’ll share in my admiration for its unadulterated exhortation of individualism and justice:

“You shall not be led into wrongdoing by the majority, nor when you give evidence in a lawsuit, shall you side with the majority to prevent justice, nor shall you favor the poor man in his suit.”

How wonderful; how brilliant! And how modern-day religious sects—the churches and the Jews—flout the law of immutable justice by demonizing, for example, those who possess the ability to accrue wealth while deifying those who don’t.

Update (May 24): One of the ignoramuses who frequent the site accuses me of “Jewish supremacy.” That, after I wrote a post explicitly extolling the “teachings” of the Torah as a pioneering text—not the Jewish people.

As I commented hereunder to a reader; then, as now, the stiff-necked people did not often heed the classical prophets.

Against Posting Policy, I’ve posted “Dan’s” missive even though he did not provide a valid email address, so you’ve not been spared his post. But let us provide the evidence of my “Jewish supremacy” for the research-averse Dan, in the form of my writings on matters Jewish:

Your Godless Government At Work (The teachings are praised, not the people.)

Jews Against Judaism

Chronicle of Jewish Community Omits Capitalism

Soul and Moral Tradition (Here I am quite scathing about the contribution of Jews to the popularization of psychology.)

More here.

Clever Anti-Semitic writers often point out that Jewish thinkers are chronically critical. I fall into that category, in as much as I find it impossible to refrain from pointing out contradictions and corruptions wherever I see them, irrespective of tribal affiliation.

Dan’s logic works in the Age of the Idiot, where making clear distinctions is obsolete.

Update II (May 25): This is getting a little personal for my taste, however, to reply to my friend, The Judge: I’m not sure I love my own, as you put it. In fact, I very much doubt that. I am not part of a Jewish community, don’t have Jewish friends, and am married to a WASP. What I am positive about— crystal clear, in fact—is that I love, and know a bit about, the Hebrew Bible (is it 39 books?). I can read it in the original prose (Hebrew). And as a writer, I have to agree with historian Paul Johnson’s assessment that very many of the biblical writers were geniuses, with a unique, pioneering creativity.

As for the principles of justice that are found in the early books we’ve been discussing and are developed by the classical prophets: this is the stuff upon which our concepts of justice rest. What else?

I’m not a person of faith, but for those who are: who other than the ancient Hebrews brought into being the “concept of a single non-corporeal God and its ethical and moral commandments”?

When Jews went into the diaspora and became a sickly, disembodied, landless people, the rabbis took over, implementing a faith dominated by particularist, legalistic, ritualistic elements.

Statists Struggle With States' Rights

Constitution, Federalism, Founding Fathers, States' Rights

From my new, column, which you can now read on Taki’s Magazine (“10th Division”):

“States across the country are rediscovering and reasserting the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Quaint, I know, but to the federal government were delegated only limited and enumerated powers (Article I, Section 8): 17 to be precise. Most everything it does these days is extra-constitutional.

Forced to accept piles of paper from the federales, for “federally mandated increases in spending on Medicaid and education,” some states have realized that the price is too steep. Not only would they have to obey the occupying force; but the states could expect to splinter under the statist burden of a panoply of programs prescribed by the Healer-in-Chief, who would play them like hooked fish.

So, governors and state representatives are invoking that which ought to have been the law of the land: the ingenious Tenth Amendment

Miss the weekly column on WND? Catch it on Taki’s Magazine, every Saturday.

Statists Struggle With States’ Rights

Constitution, Federalism, Founding Fathers, States' Rights

From my new, column, which you can now read on Taki’s Magazine (“10th Division”):

“States across the country are rediscovering and reasserting the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Quaint, I know, but to the federal government were delegated only limited and enumerated powers (Article I, Section 8): 17 to be precise. Most everything it does these days is extra-constitutional.

Forced to accept piles of paper from the federales, for “federally mandated increases in spending on Medicaid and education,” some states have realized that the price is too steep. Not only would they have to obey the occupying force; but the states could expect to splinter under the statist burden of a panoply of programs prescribed by the Healer-in-Chief, who would play them like hooked fish.

So, governors and state representatives are invoking that which ought to have been the law of the land: the ingenious Tenth Amendment

Miss the weekly column on WND? Catch it on Taki’s Magazine, every Saturday.

Updated: The Politics Of Torture

America, Barack Obama, Bush, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Homeland Security, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Neoconservatism, Republicans, Terrorism

When I think of a libertarian-leaning patriotic warrior, I think of Michael Scheuer. The chief of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999, Scheuer is also the man behind the enhanced interrogation methods, which the hard-left and their friends on the libertarian left would have you believe are as heinous as the war crime at Hiroshima.

Like myself, Scheuer opposed the invasion of Iraq, opposes the occupation of Afghanistan, the presence of permanent troops across the world, and the nation-building farce. Scheuer, like this classical liberal writer, has excoriated Bush as much as he has Obama (adjusted for time in office).

Scheuer told Glenn Beck (May 21) that the Clinton administration practiced exactly the same interrogation methods with terrorists—including rendition and water boarding — methods he had a hand in devising. Both Republicans and Democrats, said Scheuer, are playing politics with the security of Americans, and that includes Mr. Hannity’s hero: Dick Cheney.

I wrote this about the hysteria: “The two parties are exchanging fusillades over ten interrogation techniques deployed with fourteen ‘high value al-Qaida detainees,’ three of whom endured the most controversial method of all, because they were purported to possess ‘credible intelligence of an imminent terrorist attack,’ as well as ‘actionable intelligence’ to ‘prevent, disrupt or delay an attack.’ …
there is a vigorless, extinction-courting quality to those who squeal about placing a bug in the bug-phobic Abu Zubaydah’s ‘confinement box.’ These are just the type of insects the likes of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would delight in squashing.”

Scheuer nails it in a Washington Post op-ed: This “episode of political theater [is] another major step in the bipartisan dismantling of America’s defenses based on the requirements of presidential ideology. George W. Bush’s democracy-spreading philosophy yielded the invasion of Iraq and set the United States at war with much of the Muslim world. Bush’s worldview thereby produced an enemy that quickly outpaced the limited but proven threat-containing capacities of the major U.S. counterterrorism programs — rendition, interrogation and unmanned aerial vehicle attacks.”

And this important insight as to the self-righteous, reality averse Utopianism which unites neoconservatives, liberals and libertarians:

“Obama now stands alongside Bush as a genuine American Jacobin, both of them seeing the world as they want it to be, not as it is. Whereas Bush saw a world of Muslims yearning to betray their God for Western secularism, Obama gazes upon a globe that he regards as largely carnivore-free and believes that remaining threats can be defused by semantic warfare; just stop saying ‘War on Terror’ and give talks in Turkey and on al-Arabiyah television, for example.”

“Incorrigibly anti-American” all.

Update (May 23): Andrew C. McCarthy (via reader Robert Glisson) raises a perfectly good point about ex post facto prosecutions, which the Constitution prohibits for obvious reasons.
The point about the Democrats conducting a political fishing expedition is true too. For, the invasion of Iraq, as I’ve said, repeatedly, not the dunking of the unlovely KSM and Abu Zubaydah, is the real issue here. You’re following the wrong scent, and I have no idea why:
“The torture kerfuffle is secondary to—and subsumed within—the broader category of an unjust war, waged by George Bush with Democratic assent.”
Given that the jack-ass Democrats welcomed the opportunity to “lug an army across the ocean to occupy a third-world country that was no danger to us and had not threatened us,” it behooves them to focus on bubkiss, minutia.
That our friend Myron is following the scent of the females and pacifists is, well, baffling. The greatest sin of all is pacifism.
I’d trust the patriotic and moral Scheuer, who knew a thing or two about the capabilities of al-Qaida, to protect me, over the Pussy Brigade (PB).
If someone suggests prosecuting Bush and the gang for invading Iraq, they’ll get my full attention. Until such an unlikely day, please spare me the self-righteous fussing over what the PB decries as torture and the loss of Our Values (what values?).