Saturday Miscellany

First, Dan Hannan sums up the case against the International Criminal Court. He sheds light onto the darkness of their thinking:

Just who the hell do they think they are? By what right does a group of human rights lawyers demand the arrest of an elected prime minister?

In issuing warrants for Israel's leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has crossed a line.

Second, we are anxiously awaiting the Biden administration response to the rogue court. Dave de Camp reports that Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Congress that he wanted to help Congress prepare legislation to punish the court’s members:

Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday said he wanted to work with Congress on legislation to punish the International Criminal Court (ICC) for seeking arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

Third, you might or might not be surprised, but the Biden administration has been negotiating with Iran about how to overthrow the government of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.

Plotting may be a bit strong, but not much. According to an report from Middle East Eye, the US was in secret negotiations with Iran, discussing, among other things, their shared desire for a different government in Israel.

The US and Iran were discussing changing Israel's government. Biden thinks the US shares an interest regarding Israel.

The talks focused on three subjects: a shared desire for a change in government in Israel; ending Israel’s war on Gaza; and preventing the conflict from spreading elsewhere in the region.

So, when Sen. Chuck Schumer declaimed against the Israeli government and when Tommy Friedman placed all the blame on the Israeli prime minister, the Biden administration was conniving with Iran to produce regime change in Jerusalem, but not in Tehran.

Fourth, the news from the Netherlands is not good. That absurd excuse for a country is not prosecuting a lawyer for having expressed her disapproval over the nation’s immigration policies. She is being tarred as a racist.

Paul Joseph Watson reports:

A Dutch conservative female lawyer is being prosecuted on charges of “racism” and “inciting hatred” after she expressed fury over mass migration in response to a viral video showing a white boy being beaten up and thrown onto a railway track by a gang of migrants.

Fifth, one Sterlin Waters, an advisor to the Biden National Security Council, affirmed what we have suggested. If Biden wins the election, he will feel free to attack Israel.

Project Veritas reports:

BREAKING: Biden National Security Council Advisor: We Can't Go Against Israel until Reelection; Israel 'Lies, Bombs, and Kills All These Kids'

“We can help you [Israel] in the way that we can, but you’re not going to continue to lie, and bomb, and kill all these kids without facing serious consequences. But that’s a second term decision.”

“If Biden won again he could be much more forthright about saying ‘No’ [to Israel].”

Sixth, Alan Dershowitz spent a day observing the trial of Donald Trump. Being a noted civil libertarian and a lifelong Democrat, he cannot be charged with prejudice in Trump’s favor.

What he saw shocked and appalled him. It was the worst abuse of judicial process that he had ever seen. Which is saying a lot. 

I have observed and participated in trials throughout the world. I have seen justice and injustice in China, Russia, Ukraine, England, France, Italy, Israel, as well as in nearly 40 of our 50 states.

But in my 60 years as a lawyer and law professor, I have never seen a spectacle such as the one I observed sitting in the front row of the courthouse yesterday.

The judge in Donald Trump’s trial was an absolute tyrant, though he appeared to the jury to be a benevolent despot. He seemed automatically to be ruling against the defendant at every turn.

Many experienced lawyers raised their eyebrows when the judge excluded obviously relevant evidence when offered by the defense, while including irrelevant evidence offered by the prosecution.

But when the defense’s only substantive witness, the experienced attorney Robert Costello, raised his eyebrows at one of New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan’s rulings, the court went berserk.

Losing his cool and showing his thin skin, the judge cleared the courtroom of everyone including the media.

For some reason, I was allowed to stay, and I observed one of the most remarkable wrong-headed biases I have ever seen. The judge actually threatened to strike all of Costello’s testimony if he raised his eyebrows again.

That of course would have been unconstitutional because it would have denied the defendant his Sixth Amendment right to confront witnesses and to raise a defense.

It would have punished the defendant for something a witness was accused of doing.

Even if what Costello did was wrong, and it was not, it would be utterly improper and unlawful to strike his testimony — testimony that undercut and contradicted the government’s star witness.

The judge’s threat was absolutely outrageous, unethical, unlawful and petty.

Whatever the outcome of the trial, Judge Juan Merchan will forever be branded the lowest form of political hack. Nothing will salvage his reputation. I hope he finds it a good tradeoff.

Seventh, the UCLA medical school hired a fanatic proponent of diversity as dean of admissions. Single handedly she has managed to compromise the quality of medical training, to damage the school’s reputation and to produce physicians who know precious little about medicine.

Aaron Sibarium broke the story for the Washington Free Beacon. The Daily Mail reports:

A DEI-fixated dean at UCLA's world-famous medical school has allowed standards to plummet by discriminating against white and Asian applicants, it is claimed. 

The David Geffen School of Medicine in Los Angeles boasts Nobel Prize winners on its faculty and accepts just 173 students out of the 14,000 who apply to it each year.

But it has plunged from sixth to 18th place in the rankings since the appointment of Jennifer Lucerno as dean of admissions in June 2020 amid claims that the admissions bar for underrepresented minorities is now 'as low as you could possibly imagine'.

All the normal criteria for getting into medical school only apply to people of certain races,' an admissions officer told the Washington Free Beacon. Lucerno has been accused of flouting California's affirmative action ban and hindering the career of a highly-qualified doctor because he is a white man. 

'For other people, those criteria are completely disregarded.' Among the disturbing anecdotes shared are of a student lashing out in an operating room and accusing a surgeon of picking on her after being asked to locate a major artery - a basic medical request. 

The number of students failing tests on basic medical knowledge has increased 10-fold in some subjects since 2020, the Free Beacon reported.

And a majority of students are now flunking standardized tests on emergency medicine, family medicine, internal medicine, and pediatrics among some cohorts.

The collapse in standards has turned the institution into a 'failed medical school' according to one former member of the admissions staff.

Lucerno has also compromised the curriculum, forcing students to be indoctrinated in leftist ideology.

Now students spend seven hours a week on 'Foundations of Practice' which includes modules on 'interpersonal communication skills', described by one student as 'telling us how to be a good person'.

They are also required to spend at least three hours of fortnight in a class on 'Structural Racism and Health Equity'.

That has featured lectures from a Hamas-supporting homeless campaigner who demanded students kneel with her on the floor and pray to 'mama Earth'.

Lisa Gray-Garcia led students in a chant of 'Free, Free Palestine' during her two-hour presentation in March, to the visible discomfort of Jewish students.

She later posted an account of the class on her social media pages in which she denounced the 'myth of clean', and what she described as 'HELLthcare'.

Another compulsory part of the curriculum is now an essay by self-proclaimed 'fat liberationist' Marquisele Mercedes, who claims that 'fatphobia is medicine's status quo' and that weight loss is a 'hopeless endeavor'.

Lucero's tenure has coincided with an exodus of Asian students whose numbers fell by almost a third between 2019 and 2022.

And the students that remain have become increasingly entitled about their ignorance with one professor reporting that he was berated by a student in the operating room who accused him of putting her on the spot when she could not identify a major artery.

Of course, the school is trying to fight back. And yet, the story has seriously damaged its reputation, reputation that had already been tossed aside with the medical waste.

Please subscribe to my Substack, for free or preferably for a fee.