After watching the 7th public hearing of the January 6th Committee, I'm so disgusted by their manipulation of evidence, their abuse of witnesses, their denial of due process, and their outright lies that I've concluded the only honorable course of action left for a witness is to resist and accept jail time.
As you know, if you've followed me for long enough, I opposed the January 6 rally; I considered the election neither free nor fair, NOR fraudulent, and congratulated Joe Biden when he won the Electoral College; yet I consider this Inquisition a grotesque abuse of civil liberties that will do lasting damage.
There is precedent, in the noble tradition of the civil rights movement, to be prepared to accept imprisonment as the penalty for disobeying an unjust law. That, I believe, is what future witnesses hauled before the committee must be prepared to face. It is a hard choice, but it is also the only moral choice.
I'm not giving legal advice here, nor am I judging those who have testified already. Probably, they imagine that because no one takes these hearings seriously anyway, it does not matter. But it does. The rules of due process are the glue that holds our society together. It is worth self-sacrifice to save them.
This week's show will be slightly different from the norm: we'll focus on clips and topics, rather than guests -- and that, hopefully, will mean more input from the callers (unless you are all watching football on opening weekend).
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This week's Torah portion includes several laws about conduct in civic and personal life, the common theme of which is boundaries -- setting bounds to what one may do at home, at work, and even in the battlefield.
One noteworthy passage concerns Amalek, the evil nation that attacked the Children of Israel as they made their Exodus from slavery to freedom. Deuteronomy 25:17-19 commands Jews to obliterate Amalek's memory.
The South African government accused Israel of genocide on the basis of a story about Amalek in the Book of Samuel, in which King Saul was commanded to wipe out the entire evil Amalekite nation.
Because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quoted this week's portion -- "Remember what Amalek did to you" (25:17), the South African government claimed he was commanding soldiers to commit genocide.
It was an absurd and malevolent misreading of the Bible and of Jewish tradition. The commandment, as observed by Jews today, is to remember the evil of Amalek and fight ...