Hearing Foreign Info about Political Opponents

I have heard enough criticism of Trump for saying he would listen if a foreign government representative said they had deleterious information about his political opponent.  What gets lost in demanded that he should not listen to it, is freedom of speech and the truth.  I think a politician should be able to talk to anyone he wants to. He should not be placed in a cage by the FBI and told whom he can talk to and whom he cannot talk to.  And what if a foreign government has seriously damaging information about a politician?  What if Putin wanted to tall Trump that when Hillary was Secretary of State, she used to tell him highly classified information about how the CIA was collecting intelligence on him.  Shouldn’t Trump be allowed to hear this, or would Hillary be safe forever because Putin was not allowed to speak of it to Trump.  To the Democrats, truth is unimportant; only the process is important. 

The Democratic Party’s position on talking to foreign people about politics is opposed to free speech and opposed to learning the truth. 

In order to operate in the world today, you need to talk to foreigners.  Yet the Democratic Party would prohibit Americans from talking to foreigners.  It’s a bad, bad policy.  It’s ironic that the Democratic policy is not “America first,” but “America only.”   If you talk to someone who is not an American citizen, how do you know that he might not causally mention something nasty about your political opponent, while making conversation?  Even if you talk only to Americans, there is the risk that a foreign government will hire an American to say something nasty about your opponent.  Foreign governments routinely hire American lobbyists. 

Even the strictest interpretation of the law seems to require that whatever you get has to have monetary value.  It’s not clear that political scuttlebutt would have real value to which you could assign a dollar amount.  The law is clearly meant to bar foreign political contributions, not conversations.  And what about foreign lobbies.  Under the Democratic interpretation, AIPAC should be disbanded as a prohibited organization. 

Art Exhibit on Anti-Semitism

The New York Review of Books reviews an art exhibit about anti-Semitic art, “A Terribly Durable Myth,” by Sara Lipton, who has written a book on the subject.  The earliest artwork she describes of an unflattering depiction of Jews dates from 1233.  In her article she lays a lot of the blame for the creation of anti-Semitism on Saint Paul’s epistles in the New Testament Bible, although Paul was a Jew.  She cites Paul’s distinction between materialistic Jews and spiritually minded Christians.  She quotes the 1933 Oxford English Dictionary definition of Jew, “… a name of opprobrium: spec. applied to a grasping or extortionate person.”  The first question that arose for me was, “If this myth of Jewish financial rapaciousness is unfounded, how has it lasted 2,000 years?” 

To offset the unfavorable images of Jews, she says the show displays art that characterizes Jews as charitable givers helping the poor, and art that depicts the most common Jews in Britain as poor tradesmen, rather than bankers.  She says that many Jews went into banking in Britain because that was the only occupation open to them, but she says little else to discredit the stereotype.  She mainly emphasizes how it has endured through centuries.  So, I ask, “Why aren’t there contrasting caricatures?”  The Jewish hooked nose she describes as common in art, is also a Roman nose.  Why is it so unflattering for Jews and not for Italians?  Where are the counter-examples? 

She doesn’t mention what to me is the main lesson of today’s emphasis on “diversity,” that not all Jews are the same.  Some may be rapacious; others may be indistinguishable from their non-Jewish counterparts.  She doesn’t mention that 20% of Nobel prize laureates are Jewish.  Are there no portraits of them?