What Happened Today: January 4, 2024

Dark money backs Trump ballot ban; Jeffrey Epstein’s John Does; CAIR’s library intifada

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The Big Story

Let’s consider the rich tapestry that is progressive dark-money-funded lawfare. We’ll take, as our example, the group behind the successful lawsuit to remove Donald Trump from the ballot in Colorado: Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW. 

CREW, founded by Democratic lawyers Norm Eisen and Melanie Sloan, is a 501(c)(3) “watchdog” that bills itself as fighting for an “ethical, accountable, and open government.” Sounds nice. In reality, CREW is another front for... guess who? On Thursday, the Washington Examiner’s Gabe Kaminsky reported that CREW received $2.85 million from George Soros’ Foundation to Promote Open Society between 2017 and 2021. That’s in addition to the even larger sum of $5.9 million it received between 2020 and 2022 from the Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund, the “donor-advised fund” of investment giant Fidelity. Donor-advised funds allow wealthy donors to give their money through third parties in order to avoid having to disclose their identity. The Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund, for instance, which gave $440,000 to CREW, was also used by Marxist multimillionaire Neville Roy Singham to channel tens of millions of dollars to the far-left People’s Forum, which has organized several anti-Israel events in New York City. Who gave all that money to CREW through Fidelity? That one’s still a mystery. 

And consider some of CREW’s other legal actions. The group has filed amicus briefs in support of the 14th Amendment disqualification of Trump in Minnesota and Michigan. It’s been front and center in the campaign to discredit Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas over his receipt of gifts from Republican donors, filing both civil and criminal lawsuits against Thomas and demanding that he resign. (This one ties back to the issue of Trump’s disqualification, since elected Democrats such as Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin are now calling on Thomas to recuse himself if the Supreme Court takes the case.) And in October CREW—along with old Tablet friends Bend the Arc, the Rockefeller-funded faux-Jewish group—sent a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, demanding that DHS take action to address the rising threat of “domestic violent extremism” within its ranks. 

Now, that last one is pretty interesting. As The Scroll reported yesterday, similar claims about rising extremism were made about the Department of Defense, including by top DoD officials, and endlessly retailed in the press for years, despite being being not only completely fake but also actively damaging to DoD’s mission, as a Pentagon report confirmed. DHS hasn’t commissioned a report to disprove these extremism allegations, but we think it’s a strong bet they’re also baseless, given their almost identical language to the debunked DoD allegations and origin in Democratic nonprofits and lawfare shops. 

The better questions in our minds are: What advantage do partisan PR flaks hope to gain from falsely casting large numbers of American public servants as racist would-be terrorists? Why are senior bureaucrats and political appointees willing to go along with the charade? And why do both groups find it so easy to launder their propaganda through the press? 

Read the rest here: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/transparency-watchdog-trump-ballot-effort-dark-money

IN THE BACK PAGES: Gadi Taub’s close reading of an interview with the mother of a fallen IDF soldier underscores the chasm between Israel’s ordinary citizens and its elites

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The Rest

→On Wednesday evening, a number of documents from the Virginia Giuffre v. Ghislaine Maxwell case were unsealed, revealing the names of some of the “John Does” mentioned in litigation surrounding Jeffrey Epstein’s underage sex-trafficking operation. Most of those John Does were not accused of any wrongdoing, but as for the more “salacious” revelations, Techno Fog provides some highlights:

• Bill Clinton: Johanna Sjoberg, who worked as a “masseuse” for Epstein, testified that Epstein had once told her of the former president: “He said one time that Clinton likes them young, referring to girls.”

• Thomas Pritzker: Pritzker is the billionaire head of the Hyatt hotel chain and the cousin of Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Obama administration Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, who now serves as the chair of the Harvard Board and led the search committee that hired Claudine Gay. Virginia Giuffre testified that she had sex with Tom Pritzker “once.”

• Prince Andrew: Giuffre testified that Maxwell “directed [her] to go have sex with” the disgraced British royal.

Read the rest here:

The Epstein Files - John Does Identified

→The United States and 12 other countries issued a joint warning on Wednesday to the Houthis, the Iran-backed Yemeni militia, demanding an “immediate” end to the group’s attacks on commercial shipping and promising that the group will “bear the responsibility of the consequences” if it fails to comply. The warning is Washington’s strongest statement yet on the Houthis, who have carried out at least 24 attacks on ships in the Red Sea since mid-November. It’s a start, but notably absent from the statement is any mention of the Houthis’ patron, Iran. That’s a significant omission, as The Wall Street Journal reported in late December that an Iranian spy ship has been providing the Houthis with “real-time intelligence and weaponry” to target commercial vessels. It would appear that in the Red Sea, the Biden administration is running the same “see no evil” playbook it’s perfected in Gaza and Lebanon since Oct. 7. If you pretend not to notice Tehran’s involvement in the hostile actions of its proxies—in the face of not only common sense but also publicly reported evidence to the contrary—then you don’t have to do anything about it. 

→Another American foreign-policy success story: 

That’s Gen. Abdul Amir Yarallah, chief of staff of the Iraqi army, walking on an American flag. The video was taken during a Tuesday ceremony commemorating Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qassem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the former leader of the pro-Iran Popular Mobilization Forces, both of whom were killed in an American airstrike in 2020. Yarallah, who cooperated closely with Muhandis and praised him in the past as “his leader and commander,” was feted by the Pentagon during an August visit to the United States, where he met with senior U.S. defense officials. Yarallah’s attitude toward Washington, which has showered his military with close to $1 billion in DoD funding since 2020, may help to explain why there have been more than 100 attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria since October. 

→For a glimpse into the sort of thinking that leads successive American governments to pour billions of dollars and endless diplomatic capital into courting our enemies, here’s our Quote of the Day, from Angelo Codevilla’s book Advice to War Presidents:

Only American statesmen think it strange that human beings’ resentments, rapacity, and lust for primacy—collective even more than individual—override desires for peace and productivity. Because our statesmen assume that the tendency to cut off one’s nose to spite another’s face abides only in a few leaders rather than in broad populations, they are constantly surprised when the foreign leaders whom they sponsor in the hope that they will transcend their peoples’ conflicts rather than resolve them by war (e.g., in Israel and among Palestinians) end up disavowed by their peoples—and then that those peoples end up blaming America for their troubles. They ought to know better than to pretend to stand on a plane from which they can raise others above their conflicts. Rather, they should look to winning our own. 

→Profiles in courage: 17 Biden campaign staffers have anonymously called on the president to back an immediate cease-fire in Gaza, end unconditional military aid to Israel, investigate Israeli human-rights violations, and “take concrete steps to end the conditions of apartheid, occupation, and ethnic cleansing that are the root causes of this conflict.” In a letter posted to Medium on Wednesday, the campaign staffers added that they had “seen volunteers quit in droves” over the conflict. The staffers told Politico “they were motivated to organize their letter out of a sense of moral responsibility,” but remained anonymous “because of their concern of backlash.” Which about sums up the state of professional-class progressive sentiment on Gaza: We must obey our conscience in the face of searing injustice, but only if doing so doesn’t personally inconvenience us in any way. 

→Coming soon to a public library near you:

That’s a map of “Palestine,” sans Israeli cities and Jewish place names, from Baba, What Does My Name Mean?, a children’s book by Palestinian activist Rifk Ebeid. And, thanks to a video reading of the book on YouTube, we can say confidently that while Ebeid’s book includes illustrations of mosques and churches, it makes no mention of synagogues or other symbols of Jewish culture. The Washington Free Beacon reports that the book was included in a “community toolkit” released by the Council on American-Islamic Relations—the Hamas-linked NGO that has nonetheless branded itself as the nation’s leading “Muslim civil rights organization”—to “encourage libraries and bookstores to feature book displays on Palestine.” Also included in the toolkit was P Is for Palestine, a children’s book that includes the page “I is for Intifada,” which defines the term as “Arabic for rising up for what is right.”

Read the rest here: https://freebeacon.com/israel/anti-israel-group-peddles-childrens-book-that-glorifies-jewish-states-eradication/ 

→The motif of an Arab Palestine cleansed of Jews isn’t limited to books aimed at American schoolchildren—it was also on display in Berlin, where pro-Hamas New Year’s Eve crowds vandalized a memorial to the Kindertransport, the Jewish-organized rescue effort that evacuated roughly 10,000 Jewish children from Germany to England from 1938 to 1939. Images on social media showed the memorial defaced with images of mosques and churches:

“The daubing reflects the motif of defining Muslims and Christians as Palestinians who are oppressed by the Israeli state,” Benjamin Steinitz of the Berlin-based Antisemitism Research and Information Center explained to The Times of Israel. The pro-Hamas rallies took place despite a formal ban by German police. 

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

Life During Wartime, by Dana Kessler

The view from the boulevards, buses, and Zumba classes of Tel Aviv

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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.

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Do You Have Any Other Place to Live?

The mother of a fallen IDF soldier underscores the divergent worldviews of Israel’s patriotic citizens and its privileged elites

By Gadi Taub

It's hard to understand what Israel is going through without taking measure of the yawning chasm between Israel's patriotic citizenry and its progressive elites. For most Israelis, a powerful instinct of self-preservation kicked in on Oct. 7, and they responded with the rage and determination one would expect from a healthy society. Israel's progressive elites also responded as one would expect: Regaining their balance after the initial shock, they fell back on their usual wariness of patriotism. For them, the instinct of self-preservation itself is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

This chasm has vast political implications, though it's not, itself, strictly political. This is why it can be elusive. But it was captured with force in a one-minute-and-47-second excerpt from a TV interview. The interview with Galit Valdman, the mother of IDF Major Ariel Ben-Moshe, who fell on Oct. 7, was conducted by journalist Ilana Dayan. A screenwriter could not have done a better job of conveying so much about Israel's current state of mind with so little dialogue. It's worth looking at closely, line by line.

Ilana Dayan is the unrivaled star of Israeli highbrow broadcast journalism. She's the anchor of Israel's most influential investigative journalism show, Uvda (Fact), roughly equivalent to CBS’ 60 Minutes. She embodies the spirit of Israel's progressive elites not just in the views she expresses but also in her persona. She wears sparse makeup and rimless glasses, and she sports a crisp Ashkenazi, modern Israeli accent, which flows softly and effortlessly in well-formed sentences. But not so much this time.

Granted, it's never easy to interview the close relatives of recently fallen soldiers. The media's hunger for the sensational is at odds with ordinary decency, and it is a delicate act to straddle the contradiction. But Dayan is a true master of the genre. With her unassuming appearance and soft demeanor, she bestows a veneer of journalistic dignity on what is, in fact, media voyeurism. She therefore did not start this conversation as so many others may have, with a hushed "So how are you?" Rather, she signaled awareness of the danger of vulgarity. "Is there any point in asking you how you are?" she said.

Valdman, who seemed to sense where this was going, just said, "Yes." So Dayan went ahead.

Ilana Dayan: How are you?

Galit Valdman: Very proud.

That answer was clearly unexpected. Dayan hoped to elicit a display of emotions. But she didn't miss a beat, coming back with what sounded like a subtle reprimand:

ID: A mother who lost her son three and a half weeks ago …

GV: Correct.

ID: And sits in front of me, and it's clear to me that … I don't know if you'll cry or not cry, but you're saying here, they won't see …

Valdman cut her off.

GV: I'm not going to cry here.

ID: Here no one will see a broken woman.

GV: No.

ID: Here they'll see a proud woman.

GV: Correct.

ID: Because this is what you want people to see, or because this is how you feel?

GV: Because I want … IDF officers, and the soldiers under their command should hold their heads high. This is our moment as a people. A soldier assumes the risk of falling.

ID: But the person who should not be prepared for this in any way, is a mother who has to bury her own son.

In screenwriting, we tell students that the subtext is more important than the text. What the characters are saying is not as important as the underlying meaning of their words. Here, the subtext is simple: If you're not overwhelmed by pain, Dayan seems to be saying, then what kind of a mother are you?

It is to this subtext that Valdman responded sharply:

GV: I sent him there. My sons are soldiers from age 14 1/2. In the Haifa military boarding school. I have another son like that.

ID: Who is only 15.

GV: Who is only 15.

ID: And you'll need to sign for him.

(A soldier who has lost a sibling in the military cannot apply to serve in combat without parental permission, referred to colloquially in Israel as “signing.")

GV: Of course.

ID: Because you are a bereaved mother.

GV: Of course [I will sign]. You talk to him, he'll tell you. Of course.

ID: But I'm talking to you.

GV: Of course [I will sign].

ID: Why?

GV: Do you have any other place to live?

ID: Can you stand losing another son?

GV: No, it almost happened.

Valdman was referring here to another son of hers, Shavit, who was also fighting Hamas on that terrible Sabbath. When in the midst of the great chaos Shavit learned his brother had been killed, he called his mother to ask if she needed him by her side. She told him he must not return for her sake. He should stay with his fighting comrades. He did. He was later seriously wounded in a battle in Kibbutz Holit, near southern Gaza and the border with Egypt.

In Dayan's therapeutic worldview, where personal feelings are sacred and anything collective is suspicious, losing a son in battle is potentially the kind of case that would vindicate her moral priorities, elevating personal pain over the national cause. But Valdman did not let Dayan deploy maternal love against patriotism. And for a journalist, there's a limit to how far you can push a mother in the name of a pain that is hers, not yours. So, strikingly, Dayan turned to herself and to her own feelings to counter Valdman's defiance. She did not ask what Valdman meant by "it almost happened." Rather, like a psychoanalyst working with counter-transference, she asked herself what feelings (not what thoughts) Valdman's words evoke—in herself.

Valdman rejected this therapeutic mode of conversation right off the bat.

ID: I … I’m trying … trying to understand how I feel about you talking this way. And the first thing I want to find out is how you square this for yourself. I'm convinced that you are …

Valdman cut her off again.

GV: I'm taking charge of a situation.

ID: No, and you're … proud to death?

GV: Yes.

ID: But how do you reconcile this [pride] with the pain?

GV: There's a time for everything. There's a lifetime for mourning. Now, we need to win.

ID: But you don't need to win.

GV: I need to win.

On the face of it, this is a very simple argument, which Dayan is nevertheless content to ignore: The personal is predicated on the collective—literally for its very physical existence. When Valdman asked Dayan whether she had any other place to live, she underscored that this is a matter of life and death. For all Israelis.

I interviewed Valdman on the radio later, and she elaborated her point. The danger, she said, had reached our homes, and our beds. And we need to wake up, or none of us will be safe. Without the IDF defending us, she said, we all would have been pushed into the sea by now. Or worse.

All this should be clear enough to any sensible observer. But there was also, it seems, something more subtle going on: a counterargument to Dayan's attempt to place private feelings at odds with collective imperatives. If you see the world only through the lens of personal feelings, you end up making those very feelings harder to bear.

I don’t want to put words in Valdman's mouth, but this is how I interpret what she said: To accept Dayan's position—pitting motherhood against patriotism—means to rob her son's death of its meaning. For Valdman, the private and public are not at odds. They are intertwined. What she insisted on—that we need to win—is not simply a comment on politics. It goes right down to the source of the personal and the maternal: My son will not have died in vain.

Dayan’s worldview threatened to make Valdman's tremendous sacrifice merely a personal loss, thereby limiting its significance. If this were only personal, it would rob her of what she put front and center in this interview: her pride.

Most Israelis, it seems safe to say, are less like Dayan and more like Valdman—if rarely quite like her. But this newly found determination, what Ran Baratz referred to as the revival of the spirit of 1948, has not yet filtered up into the establishment. Politics, the bureaucracy, the media, academia, and the upper echelons of Israel's security apparatus, including the top IDF brass, have not yet adjusted to the tectonic shift that society has undergone. They will have to adapt, since the Israeli public will not tolerate a return to the mentality of Oct. 6. As Valdman put it, this is our moment as a people. To a very large extent private feelings are now aligned with the momentous collective task ahead. The people have changed. Now the institutions of yesterday will have to adapt if Israel is to overcome the formidable challenges it faces.