Hat tip Junge Freiheit, Gates of Vienna and Hellequin GB
A few days ago, we posted a translation of a German news article describing a knife attack upon a police car by an Iranian who was shot dead by the cops. The incident occurred in the small town of Lauf-an-der-Pegnitz, near Nuremberg.
Now more is known about the attacker. This article from Junge Freiheit is translated by Hellequin GB and posted on Gates of Vienna.
I am cross-posting an article running in the UCLA campus newspaper, the Daily Bruin. The article examines how various University of California campuses dealt with the anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian encampments and protests this year. The article specifically focuses on UCLA, UC Irvine, UC Riverside, and UC Berkeley. It is a pathetic picture of weakness and indecision on the part of the UC administrators, from UC President Michael Drake down to the respective chancellors. Rather than shutting down the encampments immediately, administrators preferred to negotiate, make proposals, counter-proposals, and wring their hands until the situation on their campuses became intolerable.
Not that the Daily Bruin would agree with my assessment. Like most every other campus newspaper in the land, they sympathize with the pro-Palestinian agitators while condemning police action to clear the encampments. I still feel it is worthwhile to cross-post the article as examples of the weakness of the UC administrators. (I have added my own comment in the Daily Bruin reader commentary thread.)
Overall, I was pleased with the Supreme Court Decision giving former President Trump immunity for official acts done while president largely because I believe the prosecutions against him are wrong and politically motivated, as well as the opinion that he is not being provided due process in any of these cases including the one in which he was recently convicted in New York. I should state at this juncture that I am not a lawyer or constitutional expert, though I have three decades of federal law enforcement experience with all the court time that goes with it. I won't go into the details as to whether this decision will wipe out all the pending trials against Trump and force a retrial in the case where he was convicted. I personally hope so, but I cannot predict.
As for the decision, I do feel that it leaves some loose ends that will have to be dealt with in the future. This decision obviously goes beyond Trump and will apply to future presidents. Most importantly, what are official acts and unofficial acts? One example of that was the checks that Trump signed for Stormy Daniels while acting as president. Official acts? On the surface, I don't think so, but some smart lawyer could probably define it in a different way.
I don't believe any president should be above the law, but there is a reason why the Justice Department has a policy that it will not prosecute a sitting president. Till now, the Constitution has not been clear on this though a former president can be prosecuted. Imagine if a rogue prosecutor anywhere in the US, federal or local, decided that the sitting president did something illegal and decided to bring charges? We cannot cripple a sitting president and bring chaos to our executive branch. It would be a national security disaster. (And as we have learned, we do have rogue prosecutors.)
Does the decision give Trump and other presidents total immunity? Of course not. If a president were to murder or rape someone in the Oval Office, that is clearly not an official act. Other actions can be argued, however, and I suppose every president has taken some official action that his critics have said were illegal, unconstitutional, or abusing his authority, etc. This week, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, with whom I never agree, had an interesting comment saying (I paraphrase) that if no actions taken by a president can be prosecuted, Richard Nixon would like to have his presidency back. I assume she was referring to the infamous audio tape of Nixon instructing his surrogates in the Oval Office to have the CIA call off the FBI (from the Watergate Investigation) on the grounds that the whole thing was a national security issue.
Of course, Nixon was never prosecuted. He resigned in the face of almost certainly being impeached and removed from office. President Ford then gave him a pardon for any and all crimes he may have committed in Watergate. Nixon had no recourse for resigning in the face of impeachment and removal from office for his actions in Watergate. Maddow still has a point. When Richard Nixon ordered his surrogates to use the CIA to get the FBI off the Watergate case, was that an official act? I wonder what today's Supreme Court would say about that. I would say that was an official act even if it was illegal because it was part of a coverup of the Watergate investigation. The example that some on the left have used is what if the president ordered his attorney general to assassinate a political rival? Certainly illegal. Official act? I would say yes. Any order a president gives to his attorney general is an official act in my view, legal or illegal. If that is the case, then I see a need for some fine-tuning of the Supreme Court's decision.
On the other hand, going back to Maddow, suppose for the sake of argument that a future Trump Justice Department were to investigate and bring convincing evidence that President Obama ordered his Justice Department and FBI to whitewash the Hillary Clinton case and concoct a false narrative about Trump being tied to the Russians, and for the FBI to use a false justification to get a FISA warrant on Carter Page, etc. (Again, I am speaking hypothetically. I am not saying Obama ever gave such orders.) Would those have been considered official acts? I would say yes. What would you say, Ms. Maddow?
There is another interesting aspect to all this, which came out in the recent debate. Trump was asked if elected, would he attempt retribution against his enemies (in the form of prosecution, etc.). Trump, in his usual fashion, did not immediately give an answer until after being pressed and said that the best revenge was a successful administration. Good answer. Previously, Trump has made statements that implied that if elected, it would be payback time, "military tribunals" etc. All that did was give fodder to the media and the Biden campaign (which is still breathing as I write).
While I do believe crimes have been committed by many people in attempts to destroy Trump, including these malicious prosecutions (not to mention Biden's own corruption issues), I see a disturbing trend here where incoming administrations might try to prosecute the previous administration.
If we go back in history, would it have been justifiable if President Reagan had sent his Justice Department to bring charges against former President Carter for giving the Panama Canal to Panama? Could President Clinton have gone after former President Reagan for the Iran-Contra deal? Could President George W. Bush have gone after former President Bill Clinton for say, assaulting Kathleen Willey in the Oval Office (as she alleged)? Should Bush have ordered his Justice Department to investigate and possibly bring charges for the shady dealings of the Clinton Global Initiative (established after Clinton left the presidency)? Could President Obama have ordered his Justice Department to bring charges against George W Bush for the Iraq invasion? Should President Trump have used his Justice Department to restart the investigation of AG Eric Holder (and Obama) in Operation Fast and Furious? With the exception of the two Clinton examples, all of the above hypothetical examples involved official acts by presidents while in office. (Rachel Maddow can rest easy. If Clinton, indeed, sexually assaulted Willey in the White House, it could never be considered an official act. I'm not claiming he did or didn't. It was alleged.)
Hopefully, you see where I'm going with this. Were I a better historian and wanted to write a longer article, we could go all the way back to George Washington and find something they did in office that was deemed illegal by a succeeding president (of an opposing party, naturally). If we start doing this, virtually every president would find themselves in the dock after they left the presidency. That is what banana republics do.
Note that I didn't even go into the Supreme Court's ruling in the same decision that official acts by a president while in office cannot be used by prosecutors to prove other alleged crimes. I have no problem with it, but it would require a better legal expert to thoroughly examine it.
At some point, all this has to end. What also has to end is weaponizing our law enforcement agencies to bring down political rivals. But how? The problem is that corruption in politics has increased in recent decades and corrupt politicians have to be held accountable. Am I suggesting that we should turn a blind eye to this corruption and just let presidents do what they want? Not at all. Thus, we have a conundrum: How do we stop this trend of using prosecutors and law enforcement to go after presidents and former presidents while still holding future presidents accountable? The Supreme Court decision gives us a start, but I think more is needed. How do we accomplish all that and create a perfect system? At this point, I find myself a bit too deep in the weeds.
University of Michigan comedian Juan Cole is understandably not happy with last week's debate debacle on the part of President Biden. However, in his post-debate "analysis" in his curiously-named blog, Informed Comment, he focuses on one minor moment in the debate when former President Trump called Biden a "bad/weak Palestinian". In the same debate, Biden called Trump a "child" and in 2020, called him a "clown". Most voters are not pleased with the back-and-forth insults that pose as debate, but Cole, in his usual fashion, is describing the "weak Palestinian" comment as racist. Cole asks if the "P-word" is the new "N-word".
"It is unprecedented for someone to call a sitting US president a “Palestinian,” and the use of the term as an insult is a measure of how racist American society is."
Cole conveniently forgets Biden's insults to Trump in 2020-when Trump was the sitting president. In 2020, Biden called Trump a "clown" and also told him to shut up. That was unprecedented too. No matter. The point is that the "P-word" can hardly be compared to the "N- word". The term" Palestinian" is not an ethnic slur word-no matter how unpopular pro-Palestinian protesters have made themselves in the US-especially since October 7. It is also ironic since it was the Palestinians themselves, most prominently Yassir Arafat, who adopted the designation back in the 1960s even though there has never been a nation called Palestine. During the 800 years it was under the dominion of the Ottoman Empire, Palestine was just a geographic term, much like New England. If you go back to the early 20th century and used the term "Palestinian" you could have been referring to an Arab resident or a Jewish resident of the area.
"And it is ironic that someone universally despised as a genocide enabler by Palestinians should be thusly associated with them."
As with Trump, it can be said of Joe Biden that he is many things. He is not a genocide enabler, and he certainly is not universally despised as such. He is despised by the pro-Palestinian crowd, which loves to throw out charges of Israeli genocide, which in itself, is a false narrative. In their world, and in Cole's world, unless you march in lockstep with the Israel-haters, you are complicit in genocide. Biden, for his part, is trying to walk a thin line in the current fighting in Gaza. In other words, he has angered both sides.
Cole then goes back in history when the N-word was used with regularity even by politicians and newspapers. To draw a parallel with the current war in Gaza and compare blacks who were lynched during the Jim Crow era with the Palestinians who have been killed in the Gaza fighting is absurd.
"Those at the bottom of the hierarchy, in authoritarian thinking, have to be kept down by violence, and may even be killed for this purpose. Some 4,000 African Americans were lynched by bigoted whites during the Jim Crow era in a standing exercise in terror."
Today it is the Palestinians who are killed with impunity, over 40,000 of them in Gaza if you count the civilians under the rubble.
No doubt Cole accepts the 40,000 figure provided by the Gazan Health Ministry-which operates under Hamas. Whether Cole includes the actual Hamas terrorists killed by the IDF, is unclear. At any rate, I do know one thing about American history. Blacks living in the Jim Crow South were not going around murdering whites or carrying out acts of terror as Hamas has done against innocent Israeli civilians-including women and infants. The KKK was not carrying out a justified military response against black invaders or terrorists-as Israeli is doing in Gaza as they fight Hamas. Those blacks killed during the Jim Crow era were deliberately targeted as opposed to being collateral victims who died because their leaders used them as human shields-as does Hamas. The situation is much different.
But not to Professor Cole.
"But the problem of hatred of Palestinians is not limited to Israel. In the US, three Palestinian-American students in Vermont were shot down for wearing kuffiyehs and speaking Arabic. A six-year-old Palestinian-American boy was killed by a white landlord in Chicago, and his mother was wounded. In Texas at a public pool, a woman asked a Palestinian-American mother where she was from, and when the answer was Palestine, the woman tried to drown her children."
The incidents Cole cites above, while terrible, are not representative of our country, our society, or our people. No decent American would celebrate those crimes-as so many Palestinians celebrate the deaths of Israelis. In addition, the US-and Israel- both have effective justice systems to deal with offenses like these-unlike the Palestinians, especially in Gaza.
Finally, there is this:
"Congress is trying to pass a law forbidding the use of casualty counts by the Gaza Ministry of Health, attempting to erase an entire genocide. The Ministry of Health is staffed with professionals and its numbers have been used in the past by the US government and are even acknowledged by many Israelis."
"That’s the same Congress that kept Black people enslaved until 1863 and that did nothing to stop Southern states from rolling back Reconstruction and denying the vote to African-Americans until 1964."
I know nothing about this law that Cole says Congress is trying to pass. If true, it would seem unconstitutional since people in this country are free to use whatever statistics from whatever sources they please. Others can question the numbers and the sources. As stated above, the Gazan Ministry of Health is under Hamas. It is also true that many international news sources, when quoting Palestinian casualty figures from the Gazan Health Ministry, inform their readers/audiences that the numbers cannot be independently verified.
And no, Mr Cole, this is not the same Congress today that kept black people enslaved until 1863 and was disgracefully negligent in protecting the civil rights of blacks up to 1964. It bears the same name, but the people are different, and the times are different.
My suggestion to Juan Cole is this: If he is really so concerned about hate, maybe he should pay more attention to the anti-Jewish hate on his own campus, the University of Michigan. Once he opens his eyes and sees it, he can ask himself just who the primary instigators are on campus.
Here's a hint: It's a P-word.
It's an all-too-familiar story in Europe these days. Some asylum-seeker or migrant goes on a knife-wielding rampage and has to be taken down by police. Today's German press is reporting that in the Franconian (Bavaria) town of Lauf-an-der-Pegnitz, a 34-year-old Iranian guy went after three cops with a knife at the train station on Sunday. One of the cops, a female, shot the attacker dead.
The below article from today's Welt is translated by Fousesquawk.
Germany Knife attack in Bavaria
Police shoot attacker-Perpetrator is Iranian known to police
Posted 18:11 Reading time 3 minutes.
Caption: At the train station in Lauf-on-the-Pegnitz in Bavaria, a 34-year-old man was shot after a knife attack on a federal police officer. Background (details) for the incident still unclear.
In Lauf-on-the-Pegnitz near Nuremberg, a federal policewoman shot a 34-year-old who had just attacked three officers with a knife. He died at the scene. What is known about the incident up to now.
First Mannheim, now Lauf-on-the-Pegnitz. Once again, a man has attacked people with a knife in public. In Lauf-on-the-Pegnitz, the attacks were against three officers of the federal police. One officer shot the perpetrator.
According to police, the alleged attacker first went after a federal police patrol car. According to DPA (German Press Agency) information, he shook the vehicle door- with no knife visible. When the three officers got out of the vehicle, he reportedly attacked them with a knife.
Security sources say that the officers first used pepper spray. When that had no effect, according to media reports, the policewoman then fired a shot in the air.
When that failed to (deter) the alleged attacker, she shot him. He was hit in the stomach. According to police, the officers immediately provided first aid, (and) later an emergency doctor arrived. However, they could not save him.
What is known about the attacker in Lauf-on-the-Pegnitz?
The man is a 34-year-old with Iranian nationality. According to German Press Agency information, the man was known to police prior to the incident. Among other things, he was known for resisting arrest.
Caption: Police cordons and emergency responders after the attack in Lauf-on-the-Pegnitz.
Where he lived, the prosecutor's office was initially unable to answer. In addition, as to his residency status, there was initially no information from the Bavarian Interior Ministry. In an interview with Bavarian Radio, Interior Minister Joachim Hermann (CSU) referred (to him) as a refugee.
How are the three police officers?
The federal policewoman and both of her colleagues were uninjured in the attack. As to whether they could continue their duties or be put on leave during the investigation is not clear. The State Prosecutor's Office referred questions (pertaing to) service regulations to the federal police, who referred them back to the State Prosecutor's office.
What do investigators know about the background?
The motive for the crime was still not known the day after the attack. The State Prosecutor's Office in Nuremberg and the Criminal Police have taken over the investigation. They will now evaluate the clues from the scene and question witnesses.
On that day in Lauf-on-the-Pegnitz, there was an Old Town festival and, accordingly, many people were walking about. The investigators must also clarify how the (incident) occurred. Whether there was one or more shots fired, they could not immediately answer.
How are the reactions?
From the view of the Bavarian Police Union, the knife attack shows an example of the security situation in Germany. Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser and all responsible politicians must take more responsibility for internal security, the deputy chairman for federal police, Uwe Steinbrecher, demanded. "Enough with empty phrases - now actions are in order".
Bavarian Interior Minister Hermann told Bavarian Radio that we must take the danger very seriously. "Here we must react concretely in each individual case," for example, with proper sentences and deportation from Germany, according to Hermann.
