Saturday roundup

At the Gatestone Institute's website, Alan Dershowitz recounts his recent debate with Cornel West over the boycott-divestiture-sanction (BDS) movement:

West argued that Israel was a "colonialist-settler" state and that apartheid in the West Bank was "worse" than it was in white-ruled South Africa and should be subject to the same kind of economic and cultural isolation that helped bring about the fall of that regime.

I replied that the Jews who emigrated to Israel – a land in which Jews have lived continuously for thousands of years – were escaping from the countries that persecuted them, not acting as colonial settlers for those countries. Indeed, Israel fought against British Colonial rule. Zionism was the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, not a colonial enterprise. Nor is Israel in any way like South Africa, where a minority of whites ruled over a majority of Blacks, who were denied the most fundamental human rights. In Israel, Arabs, Druze and Christians have equal rights and serve in high positions in government, business, the arts and academia. Jews were a majority in Israel, both when the U.S. divided mandatory Palestine (Eretz Yisrael) into "two states for two people," and at present, although the Arab population has increased considerably since 1948. Even the situation on the West Bank – where Palestinians have the right to vote for their leaders and criticize Israel, and where in cities such as Ramallah there is no Israeli military or police presence – the situation is no way comparable to apartheid South Africa.

West then argued that BDS was a non-violent movement that was the best way to protest Israel's "occupation" and settlement policies.

I responded that BDS is not a "movement" – a movement requires universality, like the feminist, gay rights and civil rights movements. BDS is an anti-Semitic tactic directed only against the Jewish citizens and supporters of Israel. The boycott against Israel and its Jewish supporters (to many Palestinians, all of Israel is one big "settlement;" just look at any map of Palestine) began before any "occupation" or "settlements" and picked up steam just as Israel offered to end the "occupation" and settlements as part of a two state solution that the Palestinians rejected. BDS is not a protest against Israel's policies. It is a protest against Israel's very existence.

West argued that BDS would help the Palestinians. I argued that it has hurt them by causing unemployment among Palestinian workers in companies such as SodaStream, which was pressured to move out of the West Bank, where it paid high wages to Palestinian men and women who worked side by side with Israeli men and women. I explained that the leadership of the Palestinian Authority is opposed to broad boycotts of Israeli products, artist and academics.

West argued that BDS would encourage Israel to make peace with the Palestinians. I replied that Israel would never be blackmailed into compromising its security, and that the Palestinians are disincentivized into making compromises by the fantasy that they will get a state through economic and cultural extortion. The Palestinians will get a state only by sitting down and negotiating directly with Israel. I told my mother's favorite joke about Sam, an Orthodox Jew, who prayed every day to win the N.Y. Lottery before he turned 80. On his 80th birthday, he complains to God that he hasn't won. God replies, "Sam, help me out a little – buy a ticket." I argued that the Palestinians expect to "win" a state without "buying a ticket" -- sitting down to negotiate a compromise solution.

BDS isn't as popular as its adherents would have you believe, There were yay-or-nay audience votes taken before and after the debate. The "before" tally was 93 to 14. Dershowitz swayed 36 votes his way by the conclusion.

Heather MacDonald at NRO says that some are using the newly released statistic about the NYC homicide rate being at a 60-year low as an excuse to call for an end to proactive policing. Not so fast, she advises:

The high-crime areas of Baltimore and Chicago have not been gentrified. Baltimore is experiencing its highest per capita murder rate for the third year in a row. While Chicago’s homicide numbers are down somewhat this year, thanks to the aggressive use of shot-spotter technology, they remain at a level far higher than in the past decade. The year 2017 will mark only the second time since 2003 that homicides surpassed 600, according to the Chicago Tribune. The de-policing that hit Baltimore and Chicago in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, the Freddie Gray Baltimore riots, and the protests over the shooting in Chicago of Laquan McDonald has not been counteracted by significant demographic change, unlike in New York City. Law-abiding residents of Baltimore and Chicago’s high-crime areas remain dependent on the police to maintain order. Unfortunately, the Baltimore Police Department will be even harder pressed to provide that order, thanks to a federal consent decree finalized in the last week of the Obama administration. That consent decree puts crippling bureaucratic roadblocks in the way of low-level public-order enforcement, such as the enforcement of loitering and trespass laws. Residents of high-crime areas beg the police to clear their corners of miscreants, but the officers’ hands are tied. U.S. attorney general Jeff Sessions rightly sought a delay in the implementation of the Baltimore consent decree, but the federal judge overseeing the case denied his request. Baltimore’s law-abiding poor citizens will just have to hope for some other form of intervention.

The claim that proactive policing is a useless crime-fighting strategy ignores a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences. An overwhelmingly liberal group of criminologists concluded that stop, question, and frisk shows statistically significant short-term crime-reduction effects; the long-term effects have not been measured. Hot-spots policing, often just another name for stop, question, and frisk, also produces statistically significant crime-reduction effects, according to experimental evidence. No other policing strategies assessed by the NAS team produced more powerful results. If, after two decades of proactive-policing enabled gentrification, New York has maintained its crime drop despite the drop in documented stops, that doesn’t mean that places like Chicago and Baltimore can do without such interventions. Stops in Chicago dropped 82 percent in 2016; there were 4,300 people shot there last year, overwhelmingly black, or one person every two hours.

In New York, however, informal social controls are now supplementing if not supplanting formal police control in formerly high-crime areas. That is the ideal world. An active police presence is a second-best solution to public safety; the best solution is family. The NYPD’s unwavering commitment to Compstat — the weekly crime-analysis meetings in which top brass grill precinct commanders about crime in their jurisdictions — has also kept crime under control, by imposing accountability on police leaders and focusing attention relentlessly on emerging crime patterns.

Libertarians and the anti-cop Left have also seized on this year’s 33 percent drop in gun murders of police officers to declare that there has been no war on cops. Tell that to officers in the streets who lived for three years under the pall of the ubiquitous false narrative that policing is systemically racist and that cops are engaged in an epidemic of racially biased police shootings of black men. Tell it to officers who encountered acute levels of hostility during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, like the Chicago cop who said that he had never experienced so much hatred in his 19 years on the job. The war on cops was always predominantly a rhetorical one. But last year, at the height of the anti-cop frenzy, gun murders of officers rose 53 percent. Back then, the cop-haters assiduously ignored that increase. Now, however, they are trumpeting this year’s drop in gun murders.

Recently, protests of an economic nature (back-pay issues, rising prices) arose in cities across Iran. They have turned political, with slogans denouncing the country's top leadership becoming more visible and audible. Looks like a groundswell.  Memo to the Trump administration: Don't turn a blind eye the way the Most Equal Comrade did the last time this happened, in 2009.

The Freedom-Haters Eat Their own - Today's Edition: Vanity Fair recently had some sound advice for Madame BleachBit, such as "take up a new hobby . . . literally anything that will keep you from running again . . . take more walks in the woods . . . take up knitting . . . put away your James Comey voodoo doll." The backlash was swift and white-hot. Are you surprised to learn that the magazine has now apologized?  Tribalism: It's the way we do politics now in post-America.

The other day, LITD posted about Chinese oil sales to North Korea in violation of UN Security Council sanctions. It seems that Russian oil interests are similarly thumbing their  noses:

Russian ships have supplied North Korea with oil on at least three occasions since the U.N. slapped various sanctions on the communist country, according to a report Friday from Reuters.

The sale of oil from Russia violates sanctions leveled against North Korea over the isolated country’s nuclear program, two Western European security sources told reporters. Russia is a major oil exporter across Europe and holds veto power within the UN security council.

“Russian vessels have made ship-to-ship transfers of petrochemicals to North Korean vessels on several occasions this year in breach of sanctions,” one of the sources said on condition of anonymity.

Another source independently confirmed the cargo ship-to-cargo ship trade did take place but noted that there was no evidence the Russian government was responsible for the transaction.

“There is no evidence that this is backed by the Russian state, but these Russian vessels are giving a lifeline to the North Koreans,” the second security source said.

Okay, but let's see some prosecution of those doing the selling, and some intensified patrolling to prevent more,


Oh, and speaking of leftist publications getting excoriated by even further-left identity-politics jackboots, the New York Times recently reviewed a new NYC restaurant that has Asian flourishes in the cuisine it's offering. The accompanying photo showed a pair of chopsticks on a plate alongside a steak. They weren't placed properly - according to the customs of one or more chopsticks-using cultures, I guess - and the jackboots let them know that that was racist.