As Alana reported yesterday, the Jewish Funds for Justice twisted itself into a pretzel in an effort to avoid criticizing left-wing financier George Soros for his comments on CNN on Sunday in which he compared FOX News to Nazi propagandists. According to the group, all Soros was doing was discussing the history of the press in the Weimar Republic.

Nice try. But we doubt that the group that organized an ad denouncing Glenn Beck and FOX News honcho Roger Aisles for their inappropriate allusions to the Nazis when referring to the left — and that scrupulously avoided referencing any of the numerous instances of left-wing hate speech wherein Nazi terms were wrongly thrown around — wouldn’t accept that sort of a weasel-worded rationalization from supporters of Beck or anybody else on the right.

But this isn’t the first time that George Soros has played the Nazi-comparison game. In fact, it is hard to think of anyone who is fonder of this sort of insult than Soros. Here are two of the more celebrated instances of his use of this kind of language:

In November 2003, Soros told the Guardian that defeating George W. Bush’s re-election was crucial because of the administration’s “supremacist ideology.”

He uses the emotive terms like “supremacist ideology” deliberately, saying that some of the rhetoric coming from the White House reminded him of his childhood in Nazi-occupied Hungary. “When I hear Bush say, ‘You’re either with us or against us,’ it reminds me of the Germans,” he said in yesterday’s interview. “My experiences under Nazi and Soviet rule have sensitized me.”

And in 2006, in his book The Age of Fallibility, Soros compared Bush’s campaign to “the Nazi and Communist propaganda machine.” Read More

A federal judge in Seattle has ruled that county officials didn’t violate the First Amendment when they refused to run anti-Israel advertisements on public buses. The ad, which accused the Jewish state of war crimes, was sponsored by the Seattle Mideast Awareness Campaign. The Washington chapter of the ACLU recently took up the organization’s case and argued that the county’s rejection of the ads was unconstitutional. But according to the Seattle judge, county officials had a reasonable basis for limiting the content of advertisements on public buses:

A federal judge ruled Friday that King County officials had “a reasonable basis” for refusing to allow an ad to appear on Metro Transitå buses that alleged Israeli war crimes.

U.S. District Court Judge Richard Jones denied a preliminary injunction sought by the Seattle Mideast Awareness Campaign that would have ordered the county to display the ad.

“The threats of violence and disruption from members of the public (in the form of e-mails, phone calls and anonymous photographs) led bus drivers and law-enforcement officials to express safety concerns, and the court finds that it was reasonable” for the county to cancel the ad, Jones wrote in an 18-page order.

This ruling does seem reasonable. Public buses shouldn’t be forced to run politically controversial advertisements, just as they aren’t forced to run sexually explicit advertisements.

But the fight may not be over yet. The Washington ACLU said it would continue to pursue this case, either by appealing the federal judge’s decision or through a District Court trial.

Press reports suggest that Somali pirates have executed the four Americans they seized on a yacht. While this is tragic for the families, it is also an affront to the United States. After we won our independence from Great Britain, we fought our first war both to avenge and prevent piracy against Americans. Perhaps it is time to draw a lesson from history. While many captains in the politically correct U.S. Navy will avoid hanging the pirates they catch on the high seas, and spending millions to try pirates in U.S. courts is an obnoxious waste of taxpayer money, there are other options.

Many of the pirates base themselves in Puntland. There, the fruits of piracy are obvious, as pirates—and their families—have used both booty and ransoms to build palatial mansions.  Piracy thrives because of the profits. Perhaps it is time for U.S. drones to raise the cost and let any surviving Puntland pirates make an honest buck salvaging the rebar. Of course, just to assuage international concern, we might leaflet-bomb first to give the pirates’ family members fair warning that their villas have been condemned.

American honor matters. The world is watching. If we do not remind these pirates that they shouldn’t mess with America, we may just find that every two-bit criminal and terrorist believes he has an open invitation.

For all those Neanderthals who haven’t been able to grasp the rules of the New Era of Civil Discourse, the University of Arizona has announced that it’s launching the National Institute on Civil Discourse to point you in the right direction. The center will reportedly “support research and policy generation and a set of innovative programs advocating for civility in public discourse, while encouraging vigorous public debate, civic engagement, and civic leadership.”

While the institute’s website says it was inspired by the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, it does add that “the tragedy was not linked in any way to contemporary public discourse.”

According to the website, the center’s purpose is based in part on the principle that the “process of publicly and civilly defending our ideas before others, and respecting others’ right to do likewise, improves the chances that diverse ideas inform our own opinions, and increases the likelihood that decisions are fully vetted.”

No word on when the institute will officially open, but the board is already reported to include former presidents Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush as honorary chairmen, and Sandra Day O’Connor and Tom DeLay as co-chairs.

If you need an example of just how much liberals live in the past, in their glory days of the New Deal, instead of in the present, consider Paul Krugman’s latest column. He writes:

On paper, we’re a one-person-one-vote nation; in reality, we’re more than a bit of an oligarchy, in which a handful of wealthy people dominate. Given this reality, it’s important to have institutions that can act as counterweights to the power of big money. And unions are among the most important of these institutions. You don’t have to love unions, you don’t have to believe that their policy positions are always right, to recognize that they’re among the few influential players in our political system representing the interests of middle- and working-class Americans, as opposed to the wealthy. Indeed, if America has become more oligarchic and less democratic over the last 30 years — which it has — that’s to an important extent due to the decline of private-sector unions.

You can practically see the top-hatted plutocrats of turn-of-the-20th-century cartoons in that paragraph. Only the brave men of labor stand between American democracy and the dark night of overweening capitalist power. Aux barricades!

But as Timothy P. Carney of the Washington Examiner points out, this is nonsense. Of the top 10 contributors to federal campaigns over the past 20 years, five are labor unions; and the top giver, ActBlue, gives exclusively to Democrats. Of the top 20 PACs in the last election, 10 were labor unions. You have to go down to number six, the National Association of Realtors, before you get to an organization that isn’t firmly of the left. Of the 10 top contributing industries in the last election, all 10 gave more money to Democrats than to Republicans. Number one were lawyers, who gave a lot more to Democrats.

No wonder the left is so up in arms in Madison. They see their biggest money bags in mortal peril.

One of the problems in America’s practice of diplomacy is that we seldom play offense. After Frank Ricciardone commented on Turkey’s ongoing crackdown against the free press, Turkey’s interior minister, Beşir Atalay, shot back: “Turkey in terms of press freedom is much more independent a country than America. … Turkey is a country where there is more press freedom than other democratic countries.”

If only we had a State Department that was proud enough of America’s virtues to challenge such statements. Secretary Clinton might call in Turkey’s ambassador, for example, and demand an explanation. This might create a minor diplomatic spat, but it would be one that the United States would win: not only would we sustain a conversation about free press in Turkey that would ultimately benefit that country and empower the few remaining independent journalists Prime Minister Erdoğan hasn’t dumped in prison, but also Turkey’s fiercely anti-American ruling party would realize that it could not badmouth the United States without ending up with egg on its face.

The same principle extends to defending our allies. Namik Tan, who as Turkey’s ambassador to the United States is the smiling face of an anti-Semitic regime, took to the pages of the Washington Post to demand that Israel apologize for its raid on the Gaza flotilla. Tan was dishonest in his denial of Turkish-government involvement. The flotilla was planned by a senior AKP adviser and sponsored by a radical Turkish charity that the prime minister himself has embraced. The AKP even provided the ship to the Islamist radicals. But let’s put Namik Tan’s fudging of the truth aside for the moment.

Earlier this month, the Turkish Mavi Marmara delegation visited Tehran. The head of the Turkish delegation told President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:

We are here today with the longing and the determination to build a Middle East without Israel and America, and to refresh our pledge to continue on the path of the Mavi Marmara shahids. This meeting is a symbol of the unity of the umma, and the brotherhood between Muslims of Iran and Turkey. As the members of the Islamic umma, and as Muslims of Iran and Turkey we will be hand in hand, and all together we will have our Friday prayer in a free al-Quds [Jerusalem].

Because Turkey does not enjoy a free press, it will be hard for Ambassador Ricciardone to pen a column for any Turkish newspaper comparable to the op-ed Namik Tan contributed to the Washington Post. Perhaps, then, it is time for Secretary of State Clinton to have a chat with Namik Tan about Turkish incitement, anti-Semitism, and anti-Americanism. It might not be a bad thing for her to demand an explanation from Ambassador Tan and perhaps even an apology.

Good news from Israel, where the Knesset has just approved an important transparency measure. It requires NGO—non-governmental organizations like human-rights groups and aid providers—to issue quarterly reports disclosing any foreign funding, and to state on their websites and in advertisements that they are foreign-funded.

It might seem strange to the casual observer that a seemingly obscure issue like foreign funding of NGO’s could be important. But Israel faces challenges different from other democracies. The intense media and political interest in Israel and its geographic isolation (which makes the media one of the only means by which the outside world learns anything about the country) make Israel’s image particularly vulnerable to manipulation.

The NGO’s—such as B’Tselem, Yesh Din, Shatil, Breaking the Silence, Adalah, Peace Now, and so on—promote what is by now a familiar narrative: that Israel is a war criminal, a cruel oppressor of the Palestinians, a human rights violator, and an aggressor uninterested in peace. They invest heavily in media outreach and PR firms, and enjoy credulous treatment in the media. All told, they receive over $100 million a year, mostly from the EU, European embassies, and the U.S.-based New Israel Fund, and operate as the political home for a desperately small fringe of radicals who cannot exercise political power by normal democratic means—say, by raising money for their cause from their fellow citizens, or by persuading voters and winning elections. Shorn of foreign funding, they would fade into obscurity. But with their millions, and their PR savvy, and the media’s infatuation with negative stories about Israel, and the desire of many westerners to be convinced that Israel is an embarrassment and a problem, they have flourished.

Ironically, the issuance of the Goldstone Report regarding Israel’s handling of the war with Hamas in Gaza probably changed their fortunes. It was largely a copy-and-paste job from material produced by the NGO’s, and was heavily supported by them. This profoundly unjust and one-sided document drew unprecedented attention both outside Israel and inside its borders to the poisonous role the groups play in assaulting Israel’s legitimacy. And upon scratching the surface, Israelis discovered something that troubled them even more: these groups aren’t even Israeli, as far as their funding is concerned. Read More

Many have noted the irony that the public-employee crisis of 2011 is unfolding in Wisconsin, home of America’s original progressive movement. The irony is sharpened by the fact that Wisconsin is by no means in the worst fiscal shape among the 50 states. California, Illinois, New York – all face considerably worse debt problems. Governor Scott Walker is certainly correct that things will only get worse if adjustments aren’t made today. But the relative freedom Wisconsin has at the moment – the ability to choose a course rather than have it dictated by creditors and an empty public treasury – highlights the fact that Walker and the statehouse Republicans are making a choice. They are rejecting the quintessential idea of progressivism: that government is best managed by a cadre of public employees whose professional activities are (in theory) isolated from “partisan politics.”

The term “progressive” has been batted around in various incarnations over the last decade, but in its original sense in U.S. politics – the sense popularized by the Wisconsin Progressives and the spinoffs from their movement – progressivism was about enlarging the government’s supervisory role over society and entrusting the administration of that role to experts employed in public agencies. Read More

In a good indication that the Wisconsin protests have become a liability for Democrats, the White House and the DNC have clumsily attempted to distance themselves from the event in the New York Times:

Administration officials said Sunday that the White House had done nothing to encourage the demonstrations in Wisconsin — nor was it doing so in Ohio, Florida and other states where new Republican governors are trying to make deep cuts to balance their budget. …

And, officials and union leaders said, reports of the involvement of the Democratic National Committee — specifically Organizing for America, the grass-roots network born of Mr. Obama’s 2008 campaign — were overblown to start with. …

“This is a Wisconsin story, not a Washington one,” said Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director. “False claims of White House involvement are attempts to distract from the organic grass-roots opposition that is happening in Wisconsin.”

But apparently someone forget to tell the DNC’s communication director Bob Woodhouse to scrub his Twitter feed to reflect this new strategy. Doug Ross has pointed out a Feb. 17 Tweet from Woodhouse saying that the White House was “proudly” playing a role in the protest.

With all of the baseless claims made by Democrats that the Tea Party movement was Republican Party Astroturf, it doesn’t seem likely that the GOP will let this blunder by the DNC slide.