January 16, 2024

DEI in the sky; IRGC in Yemen; Asymmetric polarization on the border

---

---

The Big Story

Is diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) going to make planes fall out of the sky?

On Jan. 5, an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 was forced to make an emergency landing after part of the fuselage fell off the plane mid-flight, reportedly due to a faulty door plug. Life-threatening malfunctions seem to be par for the course for Boeing’s new planes. The Max 9 is the slightly larger cousin of the Max 8, which had to be grounded for more than a year from 2019 to 2020 following fatal crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia. Those were caused by a combination of pilot error and poorly designed anti-stall software, the coding of which had been outsourced to temp workers in India who made $9 an hour (not a joke). On Friday, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced it was grounding all Max 9s until Boeing provides it with more data to carry out safety inspections. 

While air travel is overall safer than ever, the Alaska Airlines emergency was the latest in a series of dangerous aviation incidents over the past few years, not all of which can be blamed on Boeing’s outsourcing and poor quality control. For instance, in 2023 The New York Times ran a series of investigations on “an alarming pattern of safety lapses and near misses in the skies and on the runways of the United States,” including several incidents of planes nearly colliding with each other on runways, usually due to errors from air traffic controllers. In one of those articles, the Times described controllers sleeping on the job, showing up to work drunk and high, and generally suffering from overwork, staffing shortages, and demoralization.

How does any of this relate to DEI? Well, as social media users and certain journalists at Taki’s Magazine have pointed out, both major airlines and the federal agencies tasked with ensuring airline safety have embraced DEI hiring in the past decade. For instance, in a bid to diversify the nation’s pool of air traffic controllers, the Obama administration in 2014 scrapped the AC-SAT—a standardized test that questioned candidates about air-traffic-control scenarios and measured their applied mathematics and spatial reasoning skills—and replaced it with a “biographical assessment” that awarded points based on various proxies for race, including low grades in high-school science, a recent history of unemployment, and participation in high-school sports (also not a joke). According to a lawsuit from the Mountain States Legal Foundation, the assessment effectively screened out qualified white applicants from the hiring process, contributing to the current staffing shortages. 

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the New York Post reported Sunday that as part of its current “Diversity and Inclusion” hiring plan, the FAA puts a “special emphasis in recruitment and hiring” candidates with “severe intellectual disability” and “psychiatric disability” as well as “complete paralysis.” Apparently, the DEI craze apparently extends to pilot training, too. Over the past week, social media users resurfaced United Airlines’ 2021 promise that by 2030 it would train 5,000 commercial airline pilots “who will be guaranteed jobs with United”—and that “at least half” of them will be women and people of color. Of course, there’s no reason why women and people of color can’t be qualified pilots. The problem is selecting them on the basis of their race and sex, rather than their qualifications. 

Should we panic? Several commentators have pointed out that we live in a golden age of aviation safety and that planes are becoming more automated all the time, allegedly reducing the need for skilled pilots. But that’s no excuse for proactively decreasing the number of competent pilots and air traffic controllers. The increasing sophistication of technology means that when crashes do happen, it’s often because of the human element: About half of commercial airline crashes, and 80% of crashes overall, are primarily due to pilot error. As our greatest writer on aviation, William Langewiesche, put it 2014, “Automation has made it more and more unlikely that ordinary airline pilots will ever have to face a raw crisis in flight—but also more and more unlikely that they will be able to cope with such a crisis if one arises.”

Now one can add DEI hiring of air traffic controllers as a reason pilots might be more likely to face a crisis, and DEI hiring of pilots as a reason to doubt their ability to cope with one. That may not translate to a crash in the near future—and it definitely shouldn’t let Boeing off the hook for its consistent safety issues—but it doesn’t inspire much confidence, either.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Gadi Taub on Israel’s thin-skinned Supreme Court

---

The Rest

→Donald Trump decisively won the Iowa caucuses last night with over 50% of the vote, cementing his status as the overwhelming favorite to capture the Republican nomination for president. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis narrowly defeated Nikki Haley in the race for second place, winning just over 21% of the vote to Haley’s 19%.

→Iran launched several ballistic missiles at a target near the U.S. consulate in Erbil, a city in Iraqi Kurdistan, late on Monday night. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps claimed the attacks were targeting “Mossad bases” and the “headquarters of spies,” but the only reported casualties were Peshraw Dizayee, a multimillionaire businessman reportedly close to Kurdistan’s influential Barzani clan, and four members of his family. “We oppose Iran’s reckless missile strikes, which undermine Iraq’s stability,” read a Monday night press release from the State Department. Perhaps we can send the Iranians another $6 billion and see if that gets them to stop.

→The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has stationed commanders and technical advisors in Yemen to help direct the Houthis’ attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea, Semafor’s Jay Solomon reports. According to the report:

The IRGC has stationed missile and drone trainers and operators in Yemen, as well as personnel providing tactical intelligence support to the Houthis, U.S. and Middle East officials told Semafor. The IRGC, through its overseas Qods Force, has also overseen the transfer to the Houthis of the attack drones, cruise missiles, and medium-range ballistic missiles used in a string of strikes on Red Sea and Israeli targets in recent weeks, these officials said.

The Iranian effort is being overseen by Abdul Reza Shahlai, the deputy commander of the Quds Force, the IRGC’s external operations wing. The Houthis, apparently undeterred by last week’s U.S. airstrikes, hit a U.S.-owned-and-operated container ship, the Gibraltar Eagle, with a ballistic missile on Monday. 

Read the rest here: https://www.semafor.com/article/01/15/2024/irans-revolutionary-guard-deployed-in-yemen 

→John Spencer, a former Army Ranger and current chair of urban warfare studies at West Point’s Modern War Institute, explains what’s wrong with comparisons between the Gaza war and recent U.S. wars in the Middle East in our Thread of the Day:

→California’s attorney general warned the state’s public schools last Thursday that “forced outing policies”—meaning policies that require schools to notify parents if their child assumes a different gender at school—were unconstitutional. That’s significant for Golden State parents, since so-called social transition—assuming a new name, gender, and pronouns, but without receiving medical interventions—is often the first step toward medical transition. California also passed a “medical privacy” law in 2021 that prevents insurers from disclosing information about “sensitive health services,” including abortion and gender-affirming care, to the primary holder of an insurance policy without the consent of the patient. What that means, in plain English, is that in California, minors over the age of 12 can use their parents’ insurance to pay for puberty blockers, hormones, and transition surgeries, and insurers are prohibited from telling their parents about it.

→Chart of the Day: 

That’s from Jason Willick’s latest column in The Washington Post, debunking the old argument that “asymmetric polarization”—the idea that Republicans are becoming far-right while Democrats remain in the center—is behind our political divisions. Citing a recent paper by political scientists Trent Ollerenshaw and Ashley Jardina, Willick notes that over the past few decades, Democratic opinion on immigration has radicalized to the left, while Republican opinion has either stayed the same or liberalized at a more moderate rate. For instance:

• In 1994, 5% of Republicans and 5% of Democrats wanted immigration levels to increase. In 2022, 41% of Democrats and 10% of Republicans wanted more immigration.

• In 2010, 20% of Republicans supported amnesty for “law-abiding” illegal immigrants, compared to 58% of Democrats. In 2022, it was 44% of Republicans and 88% of Democrats.

•  In 2004, 14% of Republicans and 14% of Democrats said immigrants were “not at all likely” to take Americans’ jobs. In 2020, 16% of Republicans and 53% of Democrats agreed with that statement. 

Read the rest here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/01/14/democrats-immigration-polarization-move-left/ 

→The British government announced Monday that it was moving to ban Hizb ut-Tahrir (HTB), an Islamist organization that is already banned in Germany, Russia, Pakistan, and most of the Arab world, for antisemitism and glorification of terrorism. HTB, which maintains a headquarters and a network of schools and front groups in London and has hosted several conferences in the United Kingdom over the years, preaches the establishment of a caliphate under sharia law that will eventually conquer the world—although, unlike al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, it advocates doing so by infiltrating Muslim militaries and then staging coups d’etat, rather than through terrorism. All of that was apparently fine with British authorities, but celebrating Oct. 7 was a step too far. 

---

SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

---

Israel’s Thin-Skinned Supreme Court Messes Up Twice

The country’s top legal authority compounds its worrisome anti-democratic tendencies by showing it is deaf to the national mood

By Gadi Taub

If there was one positive development in the wake of the Oct. 7 horrors, it was the widespread call for unity among Israelis. People who were at each other's throats over judicial reform, just over three months ago, are now serving together, risking life and limb united in the common cause. There's even a "shut your mouths" video trend on social media: Reservists on active duty, recording themselves in battle gear and fatigues conveying short blunt messages, Israeli style, to journalists and politicians: "If you don't have something unifying to say, then shut your mouths."

But there are those who won't shut their mouths because they don’t care about national unity. Prominent among these are our Supreme Court judges, who picked this of all times to drop two bombshells on the country’s emerging spirit of solidarity, in two controversial decisions, that are clearly political and that make little judicial sense.

Reigniting a controversy over legal reform that almost tore the country apart, in the midst of war, is bad enough. But the court did more than that. It attempted to use the war as cover for a final unilateral resolution of the country’s most controversial political question in a way that grants one side total victory and the other a humiliating defeat. It did so by striking down the only remaining element of the now-defunct reform, the constitutional amendment that forbade the court from using the "reasonableness" criterion to nullify political decisions.

Augmenting the power of judicial review to include the process of constitution-making means that the court has now appointed itself the complete master of the legislative function of government. In the process the court has offhandedly transformed Israel’s political system from a democracy into a juristocracy. As Supremre Court Judge Noam Sohlberg put it in his dissenting opinion, the court's decision "de facto cancels the basic democratic element" of our government, "the sovereignty of the people through their elected representatives."

Until recently, the court claimed to exercise its already vast authority of judicial review, which is unparalleled in any Western democracy, subject to the country’s Basic Laws—which function as Israel’s semiformal equivalent of a written constitution. Now, through a bizarre process of legal levitation, the court has granted itself the power of judicial review over the same Basic Laws from which it had claimed to derive its power of judicial review. Rudolph Erich Raspe's Baron Munchausen was a parody. Our Supreme Court is a reality.

With the new judicial superpower that the judges have invented for themselves, they have created a situation in which no majority of the Knesset, not even a unanimous vote, can enact any law, about anything, if the court doesn't approve of it, according to whatever criteria the court decides should apply. The court is now our sitting, permanent, unelected, ongoing constitutional convention. No less importantly, it has reaffirmed its power to invent more powers for itself, on a continuing basis, subject to its own reviews of itself. Forget about constitutions and Basic Laws: Israel’s Supreme Court has appointed itself to be the country’s living constitution, which is the kind of declaration that one can imagine Woody Allen issuing in Bananas.

***

If you think that's as crazy as the country’s Supreme Court can get during wartime, you haven't heard of last week's second outrageous decision: Apparently, according to the court, the attorney general, who reports to the court, can remove Benjamin Netanyahu from the premiership at will, without the tedious bother of legal due process. This can now be done by stretching the incapacitation clause in our Basic Law: the Executive, beyond its original intention to something called "essential incapacitation."

Now if you don't recall hearing of essential incapacitation, that is because no such thing exists, except in the minds of Israel's jurists. Incapacitation clauses, common in democracies, spell out what should be done when the chief executive is unable to perform his or her duties due to a mental or physical condition, such as being comatose, like Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was at the end of his career. Our former attorney general, Avichai Mandelblit, however, has invented "essential incapacitation" for cases where the prime minister appears to be physically and mentally fit to perform his duties, but is "essentially" not fit.

For example, if the prime minister is alleged to have a conflict of interest or is too busy defending himself in court against invented charges that the same attorney general indicted him on, the AG can skip the legal processes required to demonstrate his claims by suggesting to the Supreme Court that the prime minister is essentially incapacitated. Together, they can remove the prime minister, without ever winning—or bringing—a case to court, and over the objections of the government and the elected legislators.

The story of the court’s new decision is no less Munchausenesque than this bizarre new doctrine. It began in 2020 when AG Mandelblit first aired his innovative thoughts about "essential incapacitation." Things got more complicated when, in January 2023, Netanyahu's government presented the plan for legal reform, designed to curb the excessive powers of the Supreme Court. Netanyahu wanted to insure himself against removal by a rogue AG, in the person of Gali Baharav Miara, who is strongly associated with the anti-reform crowd. Based on that reasonable-enough concern, his coalition made the mistake of trying to beat Israel’s "judicial junta" at its own game, by amending the Basic Law: the Executive to make clear that incapacitation has no other meaning save mental or physical incapacity; and that when such a condition exists, only the prime minister himself, his ministers and the Knesset, can put the Basic Law into action.

But the court always has a pseudo-judicial trick up its sleeve exactly for such cases, where other branches of government attempt to exercise any real authority. So, it reasserted the power of the AG to remove our elected chief executive. How? Well, this time it didn't exactly strike down the amendment; it just declared that the amendment would come into force only in the next Knesset, and that it therefore does not apply to Netanyahu.

One can close one's eyes and imagine the Red Queen shouting "Off with his head!" Because in truth, it's no less arbitrary. The reasoning in this decision offers a penetrating insight into the court's utter lack of self-awareness. The amendment, the court said, was "personalized": It was passed in order to take care of the specific personal case of Mr. Netanyahu, and is therefore not kosher.

This is, of course, ridiculous. In the first place, laws designed for the case of a specific person, though undesirable, are not unconstitutional. In the second place, the law never gave the court any authority to decide when legislation should start taking effect; the court simply arrogated that authority to itself. In the third place, the law—the amendment in this case—is not personal, but generally applicable. The court itself made that clear by approving it for all future Knessets. In fact, as legal scholar and former president of the College of Law and Business, professor Moshe Cohen-Eliya, observed, it is the court's ruling that is personal, because while the law will be applicable to all future prime ministers, the ruling applies only to Netanyahu.

It is also transparently political. After the AG failed to hurt Netanyahu's electoral prospects by initiating controversial criminal procedures, he came up with a new method to cancel the results of Israel’s elections. So now, besides the power to write our constitution, the "judicial junta" can nullify an election if it doesn't like the results.

Why do all this in a time of war? There seem to be two reasons. One is that Esther Hayut, the former president of the court, had only 90 days after retirement to participate in court rulings. The decision was given a mere fortnight before that time elapsed. Without her and Anat Baron, another retiring judge, there would not be a majority among the judges to strike down the "reasonableness" amendment. Secondly, she and her associates knew that the supporters of legal reform, who wanted to limit the court's power and now see it augmented beyond their worst nightmares, will not move against the court in the midst of a war, obeying, as all patriots should, the dictum of unity.

But public anger is seething beneath the surface. It found one expression in a cartoon by artist Or Reichert, who drew Hayut standing on a dead soldier's body, planting a flag in the soldier's back. While reminiscent of Israel's flag, it is not in Israeli blue; the flag is in Hamas green, and instead of the Star of David it features the scales of justice. In other words, a political cartoon.

If you want to know how far the hubris of our court has progressed, here's the latest: The legal adviser to the courts issued a stern letter to the paper that planned to run the cartoon, that the work was an "incitement to violence," and therefore possibly merits criminal prosecution, a threat that was scary enough to cause the paper to remove it from its print edition. Apparently as one wit on social media put it, cartoons are a great medium for political satire, except in the cases of the Prophet Muhammad and Judge Esther Hayut.

George Orwell once said that if you want to identify where real political power resides, ask whom you are not allowed to criticize. In the case of Israel, that's an easy enough question to answer.