Dr. Anthony Fauci not only had the right to plead the Fifth Amendment before a congressional committee, he was probably right to do so.

The Fifth Amendment protects the innocent and the guilty alike. No one should infer guilt from anyone invoking that constitutional privilege. Had I been Dr. Fauci’s lawyer I probably would have advised him to do exactly what he did, despite the fact that many people will wrongly infer guilt from his refusal to testify.

The committee that was examining Fauci has an agenda. It is not seeking the whole truth. It is seeking partisan advantage.

Members of congress and their staff frequently use these hearings to bully witnesses. They often cut them off in the middle of their answers and refuse to allow them to comply with their oath to “tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” Congressmen and their staff then have the ability to distort the testimony out of context and create soundbites for their campaigns.

Let me begin with Fauci’s constitutional right to invoke the Fifth Amendment. Yes, he was pardoned for any past crimes but the pardon does not operate prospectively. The committee was trying to prove that he had committed crimes not only before his pardon but after it. He surely had the right to invoke the Fifth Amendment as to any potentially incriminating information that would allow prosecution for post-pardoned crimes. To refuse to answer is not to acknowledge guilt; it’s to acknowledge prosecutors can indict innocent defendants using evidence obtained in congressional hearings.

Senator Rand Paul tried to avoid this constitutional barrier by specifically asking him questions that are clearly covered by the pardon President Biden gave him. This may make it appear that Dr. Fauci had nothing to fear from answering questions limited to that period. But that ignores a line of Supreme Court cases that hold that if a defendant answers some questions about a particular subject, he may not refuse to answer other questions about that subject. He may not turn the spigot on and off. Once he opens the door by answering questions about a subject, he may not close it in response to other questions.

So any good lawyer will always advise a client who seeks to invoke the Fifth Amendment to invoke it across the board and not try to pick and choose safe areas. That’s what Dr. Fauci’s lawyer did here, and that’s what I would’ve done had I been Dr. Fauci’s lawyer.

There is of course a price to pay in the court of public opinion for invoking the Fifth Amendment in response to hundreds of questions. Opportunistic politicians are eager to cite the number of times a witness has invoked the privilege, without explaining that there is no real difference between invoking it once and continuing to invoke it as for every question. This tactic was used commonly during the McCarthy era, when witnesses refused even to give their names or dates of birth. Similarly, Dr. Fauci refused to answer questions about the color of his tie for fear that he might be waiving his Fifth Amendment right as to other questions.

So whether you like dr Fauci or not, all Americans who care about const rights should be supporting his fifth amendment right to refuse to incriminate himself. 

The fact that Dr. Fauci was within his constitutional rights does not mean that he is out of trouble. The congressional committee may well recommend that he be held in contempt. And congress may vote to hold him in contempt. The Trump Justice department could indict him and he would have to litigate these issues. Although there is no guarantee that he will win, the law seems clearly to be on his side. Moreover it may take a considerable amount of time for this case to work its way through congress and the courts.

If the committee were seriously interested in learning the facts rather than going after dr Fauci, it could recommend that congress bestow total immunity on dr Fauci up until the present. This would not give him immunity from a perjury prosecution if he were to testify falsely, but it would immunize him from all other crimes and deny him the right to invoke the fifth amendment. But congress seems more interested in Fauci’s blood than in his truthful testimony.

We will never know the whole truth about the sources and causes of the terrible virus that killed so many people. But we can truly learn from our collective mistakes in responding to the pandemic once it occurred. Dr. Fauci almost certainly has useful information that would help in this process. So the best thing for our nation and for the world, would be to give Dr. Fauci total immunity and question him about everything he knows without giving him the right to refuse to answer question on the ground that his answers might tend to incriminate him.

The words goy and goyim are thrown around by Jews and non-Jews to mean very different things and to convey very, very different impressions. Some antisemites try to weaponize these terms to accuse Jews of being exclusionary or discriminatory against goyim (the correct Hebrew pluralization of goy, rather than the anglicized “goys”).

Some Jews have also weaponized the term against their enemies: Ben Shapiro has accused, Tucker Carlson, of “goyslop” for falsely claiming that Jews want “goyim” to die defending Israel.

The original meaning of the word goy is neutral. It simply means “nation.” The Bible describes the Jewish people as “goy Kadosh” – a holy nation. In post-biblical eras goy has come to mean “gentile” – any person or nation that is not Jewish. In its linguistic meaning it is descriptive, neither pejorative nor positive. But in common usage, it has taken both connotations.

When I was a kid growing up in Brooklyn, our non-Jewish neighbors used to do favors for us by performing tasks on the sabbath that we were religiously prohibited from doing, such as turning on lights. We referred to these friend positively as “shabbos goys”– non-Jews who helped us evade our religious strictures. On the other hand, my grandmother who grew up among Polish anti-Semites in the old country, used to word more pejoratively: whenever I whistled, which I loved to do, she would refer to it’s as a “goyish” activity. She also referred to her once a month house cleaner as “the goya” – female for goy.

It all depended on who is saying it and what they intend to convey.

When Jeffrey Epstein used that word, as he frequently did in his emails, he meant it pejoratively, as he did when he used the word shvartza to refer to African-American people. Epstein was racist, in every sense of that horrible concept, and he was proud of it. I told him never to use either pejorative in my presence, but I couldn’t control his emails or his conversations with others.

I personally never use the word goy because of its possible negative connotation and the risk of being misunderstood, and I know that others do the same. Even Holocaust museums, which honor “righteous Gentiles”, stay away from using the technical Hebrew word for gentile (goy) and use the euphemism “righteous among the nations” which they translate into Hebrew as “chasidai umot haolam”– pious among the nations of the world.

So context is everything. When a Jew-hating organization names itself “the Goyim Defense League” – a takeoff on “The Jewish Defense League” – you don’t need a dictionary or history lesson to understand what they are trying to do: use the word goyim to disparage Jews.

In light of all this, can the biblical word goy or its derivatives goyim, goyish or goya now be used in its original neutral way? Or has it been so corrupted by its misuse and weaponization that it has become too loaded to employ without the risk of misunderstanding?

The Yiddish word svartza has suffered a similar fate. In its original definition it means “black person.” Svartch means dark or black. Many Jews are named Swartz, suggesting that their forebears were dark-skinned. The name Weiss suggests light skin, as the names Gross and Klein suggest tall and short. But polite people no longer call black people svartzas, because the connotation has become pejorative.

Language is a living organism with no fixed boundaries. So perhaps we should retire the word goy, rather than try to explain that it is not intended pejoratively. Fortunately, we have other synonyms – such as nation and gentile – which are less ambiguous and subject to misunderstanding and weaponization.

There is no good reason – in logic, history, philosophy – for the left, especially the hard left, to so vehemently oppose Israel and Zionism, its national liberation movement. Being anti-Israel has become a litmus test for today’s left. It hasn’t always been that way. When the nation-state of the Jewish people was first recognized by the United Nations in 1947, left-wing countries, individuals, and even the Communist Party rallied to its support.

Communist countries provided arms and intelligence to Israel when it fought Arab nations in 1948 for its very survival. Shimon Peres was a featured speaker at many socialist gatherings.

This remained the case until the Soviet Union decided to court oil-rich reactionary Arab and Muslim dictatorships. Predictably, most domestic communist entities around the world followed the party line and turned against Israel. The academic left soon followed suit.

When this about-face took place, Israel was a socialist country with religious freedom, gender equality, freedom of speech, and an independent judiciary. Its Arab and Muslim enemies had not begun to reform. Saudi Arabia still had slaves, decapitated blasphemers, and denied women the right to walk in the streets without a male escort. No Arab or Muslim state had freedom or equality of religion, freedom of speech, gender equality, or an independent judiciary. Almost none had elections.

This disparity did not seem to faze left-wing followers of Soviet dictats. They slavishly changed sides, ignoring the reality that Israel’s policies were far more in tune with their own ideology than the policies of Arab and Muslim theocracies.

Suddenly Israel was transformed into a “colonialist,” “imperialist,” “settler” state that was occupying the land of its aboriginal population. This was never true: Israel fought British colonialism, and most Israelis are descendants of Middle Eastern Jews who had lived for centuries in the region. Even after Israel and President Bill Clinton offered a deal to end Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza – which began after it won its defensive war in 1967 – many on the left still denied Israel’s right to exist and to defend itself.

We saw the toxic fruits of the intellectual subversion in October 2023. After Hamas terrorists and Gaza civilians broke down barriers, crossed into Israel proper, and murdered, raped. and kidnapped thousands of Israelis (mostly civilians), the hard left doubled down in its opposition to Israel. More importantly, anti-Israel attitudes morphed from the hard left to many on the center left. The alleged justification was Israel’s response to the Hamas atrocities. New accusations – all false – were now directed against Israel: genocide, war crimes, aggressors.

Thoughtful Americans on the center-left, including Rahm Emanuel and Rep. Jamie Raskin, have now decided to cast their lot against Israel’s ability to defend itself, even knowing that the slanders leveled against Israel are false. They have said so. But they can’t resist the pressure from the hard left to join the chorus of condemnation against Israel.

Democrats in Congress know that if they are perceived as supportive of Israel, they will be primaried by a candidate from the Democratic Socialist Party. They saw what happened in New York where liberal supporters of Israel were defeated in Democratic primaries by rabidly anti-Israel opponents. They know which way the political winds are blowing in blue cities among Democratic primary voters. Many are prepared to compromise their long held pro-Israel principles in the interests of not being primaried out of office.

The New York Times and CNN also know that these accusations are false, but they pander to their readers and viewers in an effort to increase clicks and revenue.

Reasonable university professors, administrators, and students also know that Israel is not the villain it is portrayed as in campus demonstrations, newspapers, and often in classrooms. But many of them fear pushback and recriminations from radical Israel-haters among their peers.

Today it is much safer and more career-protecting to be mendaciously anti-Israel than to be honestly pro-Israel, even while expressing misgivings about Israel’s political leadership. Being anti-Israel has become good for politics, business, and friendships, much as being anti-Jewish served the interests of ambitious Germans, regardless of whether they believed the lies against Jews they were parroting.

There a few courageous Democrats willing to buck the prevailing tide in their party. Two bright lights, Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and New Jersey Rep. Josh Gottheimer, are willing to tell the complex truth about the world’s only nation-state of the Jewish people.

Hopefully others will arise.