Recently the New York Times ran the following headline: “Pig Organ Transplants May Pose a Dilemma for Some Jews and Muslims.” Anyone reading this headline would assume that some members of both these groups are so zealous in their beliefs that they would be prepared to die — and make loved ones die — rather than accept a life saving transplant of a pig organ.

The problem with the headline is that the reporter herself, Roni Caryn Rabin, fails to find a single Jew who believes that their religion poses a “dilemma” for potential recipients of life saving pig organs. Indeed she herself reports that “for Jews, the short answer [to the question whether it is religiously acceptable for a Jew to receive a pig organ] is a clear and unequivocal yes. It is one of the exceedingly rare instances in which the maxim ‘two Jews three opinions’ does not apply.”

Ms. Rabin then quotes a rabbi saying, “It’s 100 percent permitted even for the most orthodox of Jews.” Nor must the transplant be required to actually save life. It is enough that it promotes health and is medically advisable.

The Jewish religious prohibition on eating pork simply does not apply to any organ transplants. I know because my mother, an  orthodox Jew, received a pig valve 25 years ago with the blessing of her rabbi. Yes, we joked about it, but it was never a religious issue. There is simply no dilemma for Jews.

Yet after learning that pig organ transplants do not pose a dilemma for any Jews, the Times persisted in running the totally false and somewhat defamatory headline suggesting the opposite. Why?

It seems obvious to me what happened. The editors and/or the author decided to disrespect religious Jews by publishing an article saying that some Jews may refuse to accept pig organ transplants. The implication is that these Jews must be zealots who do not value life or health. They prefer adhering to the taboo against eating pork rather than accepting life saving or health promoting transplants.

I imagine that the Times searched for a single rabbi, indeed a single Jew, who would say they must refuse such a transplant. When they couldn’t find anyone — not one single overzealous Jew of any denomination — they had two options: the first was to change the article to suggest that only some Muslims, but not any Jews, might have a problem.

Indeed they report that for Muslims “the bar for overcoming the pig taboo is higher” than for Jews, because the Quran has been interpreted to declare that “the animal itself is filthy or corrupt, so it is not permissible to use it for any purpose.” 

Sharia law makes an exception only when the need is dire, life itself is at stake, and there is no alternative.  For example, Jews may opt for a pig transplant to avoid the inconveniences of dialysis. Muslims may not unless there is no life saving alternative.

So the Times could have limited the dilemma to Muslims and totally eliminated any reference to Jews, who have no such dilemma. Or they could have contrasted the more permissive Jewish approach to the less permissive Muslim approach. The second option was to cancel the story completely, after learning that the reporting did not support the headline. That’s what any decent editor would do. Apparently, though, the Times would not want to give up on the opportunity to dis religious Jews, regardless of the inconsistency that they themselves reported.

So they chose not to cancel the story and to keep a headline that is not only demonstrably false and insulting but that is contradicted by its own reporting. The vast majority of New York Times readers would focus on the headline itself and probably not reach the contradictory reporting.

The end result is that a lot of its readers now believe that some Jews would prefer to die or suffer serious health consequences rather than to accept a pig organ. The fact that this is false and insulting is irrelevant to the newspaper “of record.” What’s next: a Times headline proclaiming that “some Jews have a dilemma playing football with a pigskin?”

The ink was not even dry on the US Department of Justice's hastily drafted two-count indictment of former FBI Director James Comey when partisans chose sides.

Most on the "left" insisted that this was a revenge lawfare indictment with no basis in law or fact. Many on the "right" saw nothing amiss, arguing that the defendant did in fact lie to Congress.

The nonpartisan reality is that it is too early to make a full assessment of the merits or demerits of the case. The other reality is that the indictment raises several distinct if overlapping issues.

First and foremost is whether it properly alleges crimes. Put another way, if there is evidence to establish the allegations, would that evidence be sufficient for a conviction? In order to convict, the government must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant intentionally and under oath lied or deceived legislators about a material fact. So if a jury were to conclude that Comey knew that he had authorized an FBI assistant to leak material, his negative answer to a material question from Senator Ted Cruz might well be found to be a crime. Complicating matters, the assistant apparently referenced now denies that Comey was aware of the leak. Perhaps someone else was involved, such as a law professor through whom Comey allegedly laundered leaks. In any event, factual issues are for juries to resolve.

Second, Comey's lawyers are sure to argue that even if Comey did cross the line into criminality, he would not have been indicted if he had not alienated President Donald J. Trump.

The defense of selective or targeted prosecution is generally difficult to establish in the courts of law because of its inherently speculative nature, as distinguished from the courts of public opinion. But Trump's statement demanding that Comey be prosecuted might make it somewhat easier in the eyes of a sympathetic judge.

Third is whether Trump's statement so poisoned potential jury pools that a fair trial is impossible in northern Virginia.

Fourth is whether the trial should be held in Virginia rather than in the District of Columbia. The crimes charged are geographically complex. They involve an answer, which took place in Virginia, to a question asked in DC. Comey was home with COVID and was answering remotely. The constitution requires that the trial be conducted in "the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed." The crimes alleged here were not committed by the general answer alone -- essentially a simple denial -- that was given in Virginia, but required the more specific question asked in DC, indicating what he had illegally done. Comey would almost certainly prefer a DC jury to a northern Virginia jury, but the district court is likely to rule that enough of the crime was committed in Virginia to justify it being tried there.

Before the case reaches a jury, the judge must make several critical rulings. To begin with, the defendant will probably seek a bill of particulars specifying the precise nature of the alleged lies, leaks and testimony comprising the alleged crime. The indictment itself is bare-bones, obviously rushed to beat the statute of limitations, which was imminent. There is also likely to be a superseding indictment that will provide more specificity.

Beyond all these important legal and constitutional issues lies the overriding ethical issue of whether this case would have been brought if the shoe were on the other foot -- if the same acts had been committed by a friend rather than an enemy of the administration. The same question can be asked of the prosecutions that targeted Trump, especially the Manhattan prosecution regarding hush money payments. There was simply no crime there. The prosecutor had to make one up. With Comey, there is a claimed crime. The question is, did he commit it?

Lawfare and selective prosecution are fundamentally wrong. It would be best if neither side misused the legal system to "get" their enemies. The Trump administration obviously believes that asking nicely is not likely to work, and that those who distort the legal system by turning it into "lawfare" must be held to account in order to stop it.

It has become fashionable among anti-Israel zealots — including hard-left academics — to use the term “genocide” to characterize Israel’s response to the murder, rape, beheadings and kidnapping of more than 1,400 innocent Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023.

Self-proclaimed “genocide scholar” Omer Bartov wrote in The New York Times this week that he knows genocide when he sees it, and he sees it in Gaza. (Not in Israel on Oct. 7, though).

The king of Jordan accused Israel of genocide on Monday, following the lead of the UN rapporteur on Palestine.

The label will no doubt be a central part of campus rallies this fall.

But this accusation is false as a matter of fact, morality, logic and law — and a dangerous distortion of history that amounts to Holocaust denial.

It trivializes the powerful term “genocide” and applies it to nearly every war fought by democracies during the last century, especially those directed against terrorism and other forms of modern asymmetrical warfare.

By doing so, it encourages terrorism and emboldens terrorists who use civilian human shields to force their enemies into making tragic and deadly choices.

Most distressingly, it makes genocide a meaningless epithet to be invoked promiscuously by those opposed to particular wars or nations.

The Holocaust was the personification of genocide. Its expressed aim was the destruction of the entire Jewish race, wherever they were located.

Not only did the systematic mass murder of six million Jewish civilians serve no military purpose, on many occasions the Nazis actually compromised military goals to accomplish their non-military goal of murdering every baby who had a Jewish grandparent.

They went so far as to ingather Jews from areas that were not military targets and transfer them to death camps.

These willful and systematic efforts to exterminate an entire “race” bears absolutely no relationship to what Israel is doing in Gaza: Every civilian death in Gaza is collateral to achieving legitimate military goals.

Even those who believe that Israel has gone too far in killing a disproportionate number of Palestinian civilians must acknowledge that Israeli actions do not parallel the gas chambers and mobile killing units that characterized the Nazi genocide.

To compare these two very different efforts is to suggest one of two possible conclusions: Either the Nazis did not employ gas chambers and other systematic methods of deliberately murdering every Jew they could find; or the Israeli government’s military campaign is morally indistinguishable from the Nazi death camps.

What Israel is doing is in no way comparable to the genocide planned and implemented at the Wannsee Conference of 1942.

It is comparable, though not in degree, to the hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths caused by American and British military actions following D-Day — including firebombing Dresden, Berlin and Tokyo and dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

These military attacks were designed to destroy Nazism, defeat the armies that had started World War II and prevent a recurrence — just as Israel’s actions in Gaza are designed to destroy Hamas and prevent a recurrence of Oct. 7.

If anything, the allied bombings were worse: They were not directed primarily at military targets, but at civilian populations in an effort to demoralize them and to get them to demand surrender.

The number and proportion of civilian casualties in those Allied operations well exceeded even the exaggerated numbers provided by the Hamas health authorities.

In other words, accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza constitutes a false claim that the United States did practiced it, too, in the heroic battle to defeat Nazi Germany and imperial Japan.

So did many other nations that have waged wars since the end of World War II.

We may still compare and contrast what Israel is doing now to what the Allies did then. Any such comparison favors Israel.

Consider the ratio of civilian to combatant deaths, which is lower for Israel than for any army facing comparable enemies — especially those using civilians as human shields to protect their combatants.

In addition to bragging about using civilians as martyrs, Hamas hides its terrorists in protected tunnels while requiring civilians to remain above ground and vulnerable to attack.

Israel gains nothing and loses much whenever it kills a civilian in the course of trying to neutralize terrorists — but Hamas gains sympathy every time Israel accidentally kills a civilian, especially a child.

That is the Hamas strategy, and those who falsely accuse Israel of genocide incentivize the continuing use of this murderous gambit.