Squad member Pramila Jayapal merits protection, too (July 12): Once again, a public official has been threatened near her own home. And once again, the official response was fumbled because of wrongheaded “progressive” notions of criminal justice.
In a scene that sounds quite reminiscent of the attempted June 8 assassination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a Seattle man bearing a handgun was arrested in front of the home of Democratic U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) after threatening to kill her.
One need not approve of Jayapal’s hard-left politics to be appalled by the threat. The political temperature is running way too hot now, and it behooves all of us to tone it down.
That said, the “woke” approach to criminal justice — leniency combined with an unhealthy obsession with “identity politics” — may leave Jayapal less protected going forward than she should be.
That concern stems from two elements of the Seattle-area law enforcement response to the arrest….
Small favors: Biden refuses to abandon Israel (July 15): President Joe Biden doesn’t get many things right these days, and he hasn’t done much right in his trip to the Middle East, but at least he defended Israel’s legitimacy.
Considering the truly noxious anti-Israel trend in his own Democratic Party, Biden’s statements amount to a rare instance of this president bucking his party’s base. It may have been only a small act of political courage, but it is welcome nonetheless.
In an interview with an Israeli TV news outlet, Biden was asked what he thinks of the Democratic “voices” who say, maliciously and falsely, that Israel is “an apartheid state.” Anti-Zionism, or at least a skepticism of Zionism, is not an insignificant problem among Democrats — just four months ago, Pew Research found that self-identified Democrats feel more favorably toward the Palestinian people and Palestinian government than they do toward the Israeli government and Israel’s people….
