Marxist Cannibal Nazis from Kenya!

Barack Obama wants to eat your babies:

"This is so reminiscent of the Twilight Zone episode 'To Serve Man,' " West wrote. "Obama and his liberal progressive disciples are the modern day Kanamits."

For those of you not intimately acquainted with insults taken out of television episodes from 1962, the Kanamits were a race of nine-foot-tall aliens that come to Earth and cure famine, blight, and nuclear warfare. They also bring in advanced technology to solve the world's energy problems. In other words, the Kanamits were acting like dirty, rotten progressives.

The problem, though, is that the Kanamits don't have noble intentions -- their kindness is really just a not-very-elaborate ruse to fatten up the human race so they can be carted back to the Kanamit home planet to be eaten. A Kanamit book called To Serve Man that was discovered by the humans turns out not to be about helping man at all -- it's a cookbook. (Get it? Serving man?)

The man is unreal.

I Have in My Hand....

Rep. Allen West (R-FL) claims that "he's heard" up to 80 U.S. House Democrats are Communist Party members. Naturally, he wouldn't name names.

So let me talk about some of the things I've "heard" about Rep. West. He was forced out of the Army after abusing a bound detainee. He's urged top military officials to resign rather than follow the President's orders. He considers Islam the enemy. He says the President is a "low-level socialist agitator" and that Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schulz (D-FL) is "not a Lady, therefore, shall not be afforded due respect from me!" And he thinks Blacks are being kept on a modern-day "plantation" by the Democratic Party.

The difference is that, unlike Rep. West, I can back up what I've heard.

One Week Out Roundup

I'm one week away from the bar exam. My strongest area is constitutional law. My weakest area is everything else.

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Soccer clubs often break along broader cultural and national faultlines, and certain clubs are typically identified with various political movements. In Israel, for example, Hapoel Tel Aviv is identified with the Israeli left, and Beitar Jerusalem representing the nationalist right. Two liberal American Jews have now bought the team; hopefully, they'll help clean up its act (an interesting fact for folks not privy to how Israeli society divides -- Beitar supporters hail overwhelmingly from Israel's large Mizrachi [Arab] Jewish population).

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman called Yesh Din a "terrorist organization". Board member Shlomo Gazit notes it's a label he's borne before.

That far-right Iowa "marriage" petition also calls for "robust childbearing". How exactly does one birth "robustly"?

Good post by Ta-Nehisi Coates on people feeling a connection to where they're from, even it is a place that is considered a "problem".

A Columbia professor writes a book on how to resolve (or at least ameliorate) intractable conflicts. One notes that his advice could succinctly be summarized as "the opposite of what anti-Israel BDS campaigners propose".

Hussein Ibish underestimates the proportion of the BDS movement which targets Israel as a whole (the UCU academic boycott being perhaps the most prominent case), but he's absolutely right that the Israeli anti-boycott law itself is not designed to protect Israel but protect its settlements.

Rep. Allen West (R-FL) flips out at fellow Floridian Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D). Lest we forget, West is a war criminal.

Obama's Mideast Speech -- a Followup

Ron Kampeas has a roundup of various Jewish groups' reactions to Obama's speech, which, as one might expect, range quite broadly. I do think it's important to push back against the notion that Obama outraged the Jewish or pro-Israel community -- as Kampeas notes, stalwarts like the ADL and the AJC were quite effusive in their praise of President Obama, and Abe Foxman came out hard against the claim by Mitt Romney and other Republicans that President Obama somehow "threw Israel under the bus."

Meanwhile, the dust being kicked up over 1967 frankly baffles me. I guess I'm not surprised at Netanyahu's intransigence, as Bibi lacks any coherent normative commitments beyond his short-term political interests -- exactly the sort of leadership trait Israel needs right now. Having Bibi Netanyahu as Prime Minister during a crisis for Israel offers historians a wonderful glimpse into how the United States would have managed the Civil War if James Buchanan had remained President. But basically anyone with a pulse already knew that 1967 borders, with swaps, would serve as the basis for any future agreement.

I'm not entirely sure what other basis for borders there could be -- I'm assuming whatever extra territory Bibi thinks he'll get by not "basing" a Palestinian state on 1967 lines he's not planning to compensate by ceding Israeli territory elsewhere, but the acreage of the land in question isn't large enough substantially deviate from 1967 and create an economically viable Palestinian state. In particular, the Simon Wiesenthal Center's statement calling 1967 lines "Auschwitz borders" is horrifically insensitive and trivializing to Holocaust victims, and they deserve to be raked over the coals for it. Meanwhile, as Jon Chait observes, the main existential threat to Israel for the foreseeable future isn't Jordanian tank columns rolling in, but rather not being able to extract themselves from an occupation that threatens to eviscerate their civil society and render the Zionist dream of a Jewish, democratic homeland a distant memory.

And that leads me to my final point. Jeffrey Goldberg sardonically asks why Republicans are misreading Obama's speech, a speech which, by any objective metric, should have been seen as "pro-Israel in a red-meat I-heart-Israel, damn-Hamas, Iran-can-go-to-hell, Israel is the eternal Jewish state sort of way." Goldberg, of course, recognizes that the question answers itself -- Republicans are mischaracterizing the speech because Obama was the one who gave it, and because they see a political advantage in trying to cast the hitherto centrist consensus that existed with respect to the resolution of the Israel/Palestine conflict as an attack on Western Civilization.

For years, there has been a tacit agreement with respect to the pro-Israel community -- that while we might disagree about what policies are best for ensuring Israel's long-term viability, security, and liberalism, everyone coming from a genuine position of respect for the state of Israel and its legitimacy as homeland of the Jewish people would be accepted as part of the community. That doesn't include everyone, or every Jew -- there are those who oppose Israel's existence as a Jewish state, and they've always been ostracized (which I don't really mind). But the Zionist, pro-Israel community has always been a big tent, including groups like the modern ZOA, that don't even support a two-state solution, as well as more leftward, Peace Now types.

The conservative response to J Street's emergence has broken that agreement -- they haven't just disagreed with it with respect to policy, but they have engaged in a systematic campaign to declare it intrinsically "anti-Israel", anti-Zionist, and hostile to Israel's very existence. But if those are the new rules -- that a group or person shouldn't be pro-Israel if one honestly believes their policy prescriptions are bad for Israel's future survival -- then I see no reason to concede that folks like Mitt Romney or Tim Pawlenty or Allen West are pro-Israel in any meaningful sense. The policies they lay out place Israel in mortal peril -- possible the gravest danger Israel has faced since 1973. And what's more, I don't think they care all that much about Israel. Yes, obviously, Mitt Romney would think it a bad thing if Israel disappeared tomorrow. But he'd view it as bad because it would represent some sort of lost Western fortress -- an instrumental failure, not something that effects him personally. It doesn't make his life any worse if Israel ceases to be the fulfillment of the Zionist liberal democratic dream. It makes my life worse, and it obviously makes the Israelis' lives worse. But for Mitt? Israel's little more than a symbol, and an expendable one at that.

Again, if the litmus test is a subjective self-assessment of thinking that one's acting in Israel's best interests, then Mitt Romney is precisely as pro-Israel as Barack Obama is. But if we're going to make this a substantive test -- what policies are best for ensuring Israel's continued survival as a Jewish democratic nation -- he fails utterly. And if he wants to start playing on that field, I'm happy to meet him there.

Workshop Roundup

Come to law school for the makeup class, stay for the workshop (actually going to the makeup class is apparently optional).

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Former Utah Gov. and Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman takes the bold (for a GOPer) stance that climate change is real and scientists are worth listening to -- except for the part where we do something about it. Oh well, baby steps.

Newt Gingrich's poll tests -- too extreme even for Rep. Allen West (R-FL).

Cornel West flips out at Barack Obama. Melissa Harris-Perry has the best response. My favorite part was West's outrage that a hotel bellhop could get tickets to Obama's inauguration, but he couldn't. Outrageous!

Ex-Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) declares John McCain knows nothing about torture, McCain's office responds with "who?"

PA President Mahmoud Abbas has a manifesto in the New York Times. Rebecca Lessee lets fly at it, but while I think a lot of her points are well-taken (and Abbas' misleading omissions and use of the passive-voice are aggravating), I'm beginning to come around to the notion that centering the Israel/Palestine discussion around endless sniping over narratives is probably not all that useful (though I continue to hope that respect for each others' stories is the "end game").

Hamas interviews one of the protesters at the Jordanian/Israel border. She misses the good old days when her father "massacred the Jews" of Hebron (she's 92 and originally from Hebron, so she's speaking from experience regarding the 1929 pogrom). Meanwhile, a Hamas official is licking his lips over the opportunity to wipe the Jews out.

As the Worm Turns

One of the upshots of last night's election is that there will be a grand total of zero Black senators in our glorious, color-blind nation (I guess part of being color-blind is I have to not notice that). In fact, we haven't elected a Black person to the Senate since, well, Barack Obama in 2004. And he's otherwise indisposed at the moment.

But the news isn't all bad in terms of Black political achievement. Republicans will be sending their largest contingent of Black Representatives to the House since Reconstruction ... 2! One of whom, Allen West (R-FL), is a war criminal (he resigned from the armed forces after being convicted in a military court of assault and misconduct for shooting a pistol off next to a bound detainee)!

Jamelle Bouie asks whether either West or Tim Scott (R-SC) will gain significant African-American support, before remembering that "black people aren't pure identity voters and don't support politicians with policies they oppose."

In all seriousness, it is a good thing that Republicans are running more Black candidates. It seems like the GOP realizes that, with a Black President, it can't be seen as an all-White party anymore. And while its outreach (such as it is) to the Black community hasn't been particularly successful (as Bouie points out, the key factor influencing Black votes -- like all of us -- is whether they largely support or oppose the policies of the party or candidate in question), it is undoubtedly a good thing that opportunities are opening up for Black Republicans within the Party.