So, what the Israelis continue to find are body parts, the humans with which those parts were once associated blown up or burned beyond recognition, such that extracting and examining DNA is impossible.

And this, of course, doesn’t count the 5,800 Israelis who, maimed and mutilated on Oct. 7, are still alive. It doesn’t count the 230 people – the elderly, the disabled, the frail, the wounded, the helpless, children and babies, all terrified – abducted at gunpoint and held in Hamas’ tunnels, constructed under hospitals, homes and mosques so that Israel is constrained from going after them. And it doesn’t count the rest of Israel’s families, virtually all of whom know someone killed, maimed or held hostage by Hamas.

While Israelis were being blown or burned to unrecognizable pieces by a joyful Hamas, here in America the academic year had barely begun at colleges and universities where students pay upwards of $100,000 annually for the privilege of studying the humanities and liberal values. Comfortable faculty members were returning to the familiar pleasant routine of attending to personal jealousies and intra-departmental rivalries. Students resumed arguing on social media about just how egregiously the disturbing prospect of knowing that a speaker had been invited to campus prepared to express a view contrary to their own would constitute a violation of their safe spaces. News that 1,400 Israelis – including  many hundreds their own age – had been butchered to death and 5,800 more maimed barely piqued their interest. After all, these were Israelis – and whether Israelis were even entitled to live life free of being butchered was politically debatable.

As for the 230 souls who have been kidnapped and are forcibly held in dank Hamas tunnels, either near dead or scared to death, among faculty members and students who fancy themselves “progressive,” this has elicited a Big Yawn.

But when Israel, like any other country not only on the planet but in the history of the planet, determined that of course this could neither be tolerated nor permitted to recur, the ears of faculty and students perked up. And not only perked up. Promptly and self-confidently, they assessed that the outrage was not Hamas’ slaughter of Israelis, but Israel’s determination not to permit the slaughter from happening again.

So it is now a “thing” for pious defenders of “free speech” in all context other than those involving Israel to rip down posters with pictures of kidnapped Israelis held in captivity, posted so that we can see their faces and hold them in our hearts.

On innumerable American campuses, in settings in which students are charged to learn that humans are to be respected, not massacred, vigils are held to honor as “martyrs” those who pulverized Israeli children – and boasted about it.

Faculty members compete to ingratiate themselves with pro-Hamas students by proclaiming themselves “exhilarated” by the killings, and “in solidarity” with the murders as acts of “resistance.”  Students cheer on the murders as contributions to the “cleaning” of Israel. Professors at Columbia University inform us that the slaughter of Jews demands “contextualization.”

Here’s where we are. When it comes to the slaughter of Jews, many in American academia are down with it. But ask them if they’re antisemites?

Of course not.

Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer and former U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission.

Biden’s personal courage was accompanied by wisdom, all displayed with the knowledge that his immediate, resolute commitment to Israel would unleash rage from the predictable quarters. The leaders of Arab countries that American taxpayers help sustain nonetheless refused to meet with Biden on his Mideast trip, fearful of being toppled by the spillover of raw Jew-hatred on the Arab street. This is not Biden’s first rodeo: he tipped his cap to these leaders and stayed diplomatically mum.

Meanwhile, in order to warn the Iranian mullahs who fund and control both Hamas and Hezbollah that we had Israel’s back more than nominally, Biden moved promptly to bolster Israel’s military capacity, and sent two warplane-packed aircraft carriers to Israel’s coast. Thus far Biden’s move has restrained Iran from directing Hezbollah to unleash its 130,000 rockets from Lebanon into Israel.

Here at home, Biden has remained unbowed by his party’s hard left wing, which adjudges itself “progressive” while whitewashing Hamas’ murder and maiming of 5,000 Israelis and while condemning Israel for having the nerve to try to prevent the slaughter, decapitation, burning alive, raping and abduction from happening yet again. From the moment news emerged on Oct. 7 of the mini-Holocaust perpetrated by the ISIS emulators who brutally rule Gaza, the president has been a forceful, unapologetic voice of moral clarity, denouncing the massacres as the massive crimes against humanity that anyone with decency can see they are. By asserting over and over that the United States stands with Israel, he purposefully informed America and the rest of the world that one either backed Israel on this or stood for nothing.

Europe, host of the Nazis’ extermination of 6 million Jews, followed Biden’s lead, one hopes without too much moral difficulty. In America, Republicans and the vast majority of Democrats comprehended the obvious: if Israel cannot stop Hamas from slaughtering Israelis, then Hamas will continue to slaughter Israelis. Pretty simple.

Some in the president’s party either do not grasp the obvious or are not excessively bothered by it, any more than they have been excessively bothered by the smaller bore versions of the same thing that have been happening for the last 20 years preceding this month’s murder spree: tens of thousands of rockets fired by Hamas while hiding behind Palestinian innocents in order to kill Israeli innocents. The so-called Squad, Democratic Socialists of America and comfortable faculty and students on America’s most fashionable campuses have been perfectly down with this for years, and nothing about this latest massacre moves the moral needle for them a centimeter.

The embrace by some of Hamas’ Slaughter Incorporated isn’t merely tough to dislodge. It is impossible. When Palestinian Islamic Jihad fired a rocket from Gaza intended to kill Israelis but which instead killed Palestinians in a Gaza hospital, Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar and others bitterly denounced Israel for “targeting” the hospital. No matter that every intelligence service and independent analyst evaluating this concluded that Israel was innocent and Palestinian Jihad to blame. As always, facts present no obstacle: Tlaib, Omar and the usual sources in Hamas’ corner continue a thoroughly dishonest refrain and, to boot, condemn Biden for declining to buy the hogwash they enthusiastically buy – and peddle.

To the president’s great credit, he is not buying. And he is not pretending to do so.

Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer and former U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission.

“Planet Earth” came to more than one person’s mind about 36 hours after the news emerged about Israelis slaughtered in cold blood, babies riddled with machine gun bullets in their cribs, hundreds of young people mowed down at a music festival, human beings decapitated, raped and abducted by Hamas,1,300 Israelis murdered, 3,700 Israelis maimed. Over 150 terrified innocents held hostage in the terror state established in Gaza by Hamas for the purpose of annihilating Israel.

At a solidarity rally for Israel in Boston, Massachusetts Senator Edward Markey announced that what was called for was “de-escalation” of “the conflict.” He was booed by several thousand incredulous people gathered there, since “de-escalation” would mean that Israel simply ignore the mass slaughter, move on and pray that nothing like this happened again – or at least not too soon.

Unless Israel consigns itself to simply absorbing the mass slaughter visited upon it by a neighboring terror state, it has literally no choice but to attempt to dismantle Hamas, no easy task. No nation that gives a fig about its own existence could do otherwise – and Israel has plenty of reason to be concerned about its existence, a point about which its critics could not care less.

Some concluded that Markey was simply addled, but he is addled like a fox. Once a stalwart supporter of Israel when it helped him politically, Markey, a shrewd student of raw politics, correctly adjudged that when he wished to secure and then hold the Democratic nomination for Senator in Massachusetts, his best move was to prioritize locking up the support of the AOC wing of the Democratic Party. That’s a wing which has adopted a “see-no-evil” policy about tens of thousands of Hamas rockets slamming into Israeli civilian centers over the past 15 years, and which ritualistically condemns Israel’s attempts to defend itself as “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity.”

If Markey’s call for Israel to “de-escalate” after 5,000 of its citizens were murdered or maimed was mindless, others’ pronouncements were risible. MSNBC commentator Peter Beinart, who has called for Israel to self-dissolve, claimed that Hamas had little choice but to be violent because Palestinians lacked a “pathway” for “ethical protest.” This, of course, is drivel: Hamas was founded in the 1980s in order to obliterate Israel, and since then it has devoted itself to blocking an independent Palestinian state next to Israel. After Israel uprooted 11,000 Israelis living in Gaza in 2005 in order to pave the way for a Palestinian state, Hamas forcibly seized control of Gaza and expelled the Palestinian Authority, for the purpose of scuttling the very Palestinian state that Palestinians assert they want. After Beinart delivered himself of this balderdash on national television, MSNBC host Jen Psaki thanked him for his “insight.”

Israel’s critics now demand that it somehow achieve the magic trick of responding to Hamas without hurting civilians, even though even those who don’t know the Gaza Strip from the Louisiana Purchase know that Hamas deliberately makes that impossible, embedding its fighters and their weapons in apartment buildings, mosques and hospitals, forcibly making civilians human shields. Longtime Hamas whitewasher Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley conceded over the weekend that “the murder of innocent Israeli civilians at the hands of Hamas is unacceptable,” but demanded that Israeli ensure that civilians are not hurt. Has she not a clue about what happens in Gaza? And if the massacre of Israeli civilians is “unacceptable,” then what exactly is Israel supposed to do to avoid accepting it? Must Israeli permit it to happen again – and then again after that?

When it comes to Israel, some people have simply departed planet Earth. The challenge now is to keep others from joining them.

Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer and former U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission.

We have seen so many photos like this in the 80 years since the Holocaust, and we have professed to wonder: how could this depravity be tolerated? How could so many be complicit by their silence?

Now we know.

For 20 years, Hamas has fired tens of thousands of rockets at Israeli civilians in order to murder them or, failing that, maim them or, failing that, terrify them. In 2008-9, then 2012, then 2014, then 2018 and then again in 2021, Hamas, pledged to Israel’s annihilation, forced Israeli families into bomb shelters.

These were, of course, crimes against humanity. But the Left did not see it that way. Indeed, when Israel was given quite literally no choice but to try to stop the rocketing, and Palestinian civilians were unavoidably killed just as Hamas planned it, it was Israel that the Left blamed – not Hamas.

Now Hamas has fired 5,500 more rockets at Israeli civilians since Saturday, sent 1,000 butchers into a music festival and Israeli villages to execute Jews at gunpoint, chop their heads off, burn them alive, rape and abduct them — 1,300 dead, 3,500 wounded. Women, men, children, grandparents, babies and the disabled.

For 20 years the Left watched smaller versions of this take place, and said nothing – except to denounce Israel. In May 2021, when Hamas did a practice run of last Saturday’s massacre, U.S. Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) denounced not Hamas but Israel, comparing it to “white supremacists” who in trying to stop Hamas were committing “police brutality.”

She wasn’t alone. At Tufts University, Students for Justice in Palestine tried to force the student body to disavow any feeling of identity with the Jewish state. At Williams College the student government, which approved the formation of a pro-Palestinian group, denied students the right to form a pro-Israel one. At the University of Vermont a federal investigation was required to address the safe space afforded anti-Semites. “Is it unethical for me, a TA, to not give Zionists credit for participation?,” one instructor tweeted, boasting about her “serotonin rush at bullying Zionists in the public domain.”

There’s been all of this and much more, as self-styled progressives have coddled anti-Semitism or embraced it. The intimidation of Jewish students has been not only tolerated but encouraged.

So when last week’s massacre of Israeli innocents occurred, it wasn’t surprising to see some on the Left engage in their own form of depravity – cheering on a slaughter. At Harvard, over 30 student organizations announced that they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible.” At Tufts, SJP praised the “creativity” of the slaughter.

And so it went. Many college presidents, cowed by the venomous anti-Semitism that they have permitted to engulf their campuses, were unable to denounce sheer evil. The prize for gutless pablum may go to the President of Smith College. “Dear friends,” she wrote, “I am profoundly saddened by the human capacity for violence that we have seen in our world over the past weeks. Ongoing conflicts in Sudan, Libya and Ethiopia; war in Ukraine; mass shootings in the United States; and the latest violence in Israel and Gaza show us that our work for a just world is ongoing.”

Banal drivel where moral clarity is required. And that’s how these things happen.

Jeff Robbins, a former assistant U.S. attorney and U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, is a longtime columnist for the Herald.

Descending on the terrified youngsters, who ran for their lives, the Hamas gunmen mowed down the children with everything they had, chasing them by car, surrounding them and blowing them to pieces. They slit these youngster’s throats. They bound the limbs of these kids, some lifeless and some barely clinging to life, and rammed their bloody bodies onto their vehicles, speeding back into Gaza, where Palestinians on the street screamed with joy, passed around celebratory sweets and once again displayed the bloodlust which so tragically has come to characterize significant segments of Palestinian society.

When Hamas’ rampage at the festival was over, 260 young Israeli bodies were found. That doesn’t count those wounded, kidnapped or still missing.

Meanwhile, other Hamas gunmen were invading 22 Israeli villages, going from home to home, executing the elderly, the disabled, women, husbands, children and babies at point-blank range while the victims begged for their lives. This should surprise no one: Hamas has functioned as a kind of Palestinian SS, the Nazi organization which carried out the genocidal murder of 6 million Jews, ever since its founding as a radical Islamic killing enterprise in 1987. Hamas’ very raison d’etre has always been the annihilation of Israel.

After Hamas violently seized control of the Gaza Strip from the Palestinian Authority in 2007, it commenced intermittent mass rocket attacks on Israeli civilian centers, using Palestinian innocents as human shields from which to fire several tens of thousands of rockets at Israeli innocents. Each time this occurred, it was funded and equipped by Iran, long regarded by our State Department as the world’s foremost state sponsor of terror, which, like Hamas, vows to wipe Israel off the face of the map.

And each time this has occurred, Israel has found itself reeling under the rocket attacks, while its armed forces were required to stop the rocketing. Each time, it took the Left but seconds to decide that it was Israel that was to blame for trying to stop its civilians from being blown to smithereens. The truth is simple: Hamas’ apologists, among them The Squad in the Democratic caucus in Congress and academics in fashionable faculty lounges on elite college campuses, are not troubled by Hamas’ determination to terminate Israel’s existence. Progressive poseurs operating under the umbrella of groups with clever names like “Students for Justice in Palestine” work 24/7 at intimidating pro-Israel students and, indeed, at driving Jewish students underground with fear.

Since Saturday’s sunrise, Hamas has not confined itself to murdering at gunpoint, slitting throats and abductions. It has fired about 5,000 more rockets into Israeli communities, smashing houses, apartment buildings and hospitals. Emboldened by the hatred of Israel that has spread like a virus on the far Left, indulged by supposed human rights advocates who do not recognize Israelis’ rights to live in peace and armed to the teeth by Iran, Hamas is a chicken that has come home to roost.

By Sunday night, it had emerged that over 700 Israelis had been murdered by Hamas,  more Jews murdered on any day since the Holocaust. Over 2,200 had been wounded.  Israel’s death toll is the proportional equivalent of over 21,000 Americans massacred in a single day, the equivalent of seven times the number of those killed on September 11, 2001.

If there is a meaningful distinction between Hamas and ISIS, it is not apparent. Nevertheless, Hamas has benefited from international support in malign quarters and, incredibly, from people who actually hold themselves out as progressives. Hamas has blood on its hands, and plenty of it. But it isn’t the only one.

Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer, former assistant United States attorney and U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council.

Asked by NBC’s Ryan Nobles how a document dated August 2017 could suggest that Biden had used public office to benefit his son when Biden held no office at the time, Congressman Smith sounded a very great deal like Jackie Gleason’s iconic Ralph Kramden character failing miserably at answering basic questions from his wife Alice. “I’m not an expert on the timeline,” Smith blathered. “I would love to have President Biden and his family to tell us all about the timelines.”

“But if he’s not the president or the vice-president at the time,” asked the perplexed reporter, “where’s the wrongdoing? He wasn’t even a candidate for president at the time.”

“Apparently you’ll never believe us,” came Smith’s brilliant reply, as he turned to another questioner.

The hearing itself proved to be just as much of a lead balloon as Congressman Smith’s hemming, hawing and stammering presaged. It was led by House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R.-KY), who has spent the last year predicting that, any decade now, there would be evidence of wrongdoing by Joe Biden or, as Comer put it on Fox News, “I sure hope so.”  Notable in his Committee’s stellar investigation thus far was his triumphant announcement that they finally had a witness, only to have to admit that the witness had gone missing. It emerged that he hadn’t gone missing so much as he turned out to be an international fugitive, indicted on a series of felony charges and hiding from law enforcement. Let’s put it this way: the “investigation” into Joe Biden has not exactly yielded results.

Comer’s hearing got off to an inauspicious start, and proceeded directly downhill from there. The Republicans’ panel of “witnesses” commenced one by one to announce that, actually, they were unaware of any evidence of wrongdoing by President Biden. Jonathan Turley, a former Justice Department tax attorney who up until now has been a reliably go-to lawyer for Trump World, got things rolling by volunteering that he saw no basis for claiming that Biden had committed any impeachable offense. “I do not believe that the current evidence would support articles of impeachment,” he admitted. But exactly what “the current evidence” is of any wrongdoing by Joe Biden other than having won the 2020 election has remained rather elusive, or an extremely closely guarded secret by House Republicans who, after months of subpoenaing bank records and repeating the phrase “Biden Crime Family,” still cannot tell us what it is.

At this point, one would have expected the Republicans to produce evidence of something: parking in a loading zone or an overdue library book if they cannot identify a high crime or misdemeanor. But evidently they cannot. It isn’t weak tea the House Committee was serving up. It was Kool Aid.

Across the country in Arizona, President Biden was paying tribute to the late Senator John McCain, a conservative Republican who, as Biden pointed out, believed with all his heart in “country first: honor, duty, decency, freedom, liberty, democracy.” Biden recalled just how completely McCain, shot down while flying a Navy jet over Vietnam, put his faith in these things. “Imprisoned five and a half years,” Biden noted, “Solitary confinement for two years. Given an opportunity to come home if he just said a couple things. He was beaten, bloodied, bones broken, isolated, tortured, unable to raise his arm above his shoulders again.”

How sad John McCain would be to see his fellow Congressional Republicans now, five years after his passing. How sad all the rest of us should be.

Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer, former assistant United States attorney and U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council.

Still recovering from the Great Depression and unpersuaded that Hitler’s aggression was any of our business, Americans were tepid at best about lifting a finger to help the United Kingdom, out of cash and staring defeat in the face, defend itself against the Third Reich. Begging for help from its last and only hope, Churchill implored the United States famously “Give us the tools and we’ll finish the job.”

Tens of millions of Americans were unmoved, and did not see that what seemed to be Europe’s war threatened the entire world order, and that playing ostrich was no substitute for paying attention to history.

President Franklin Roosevelt, who had secured a third term by promising that American sons would not fight overseas again, devised a scheme to help our ally – and a “scheme” is what it was. The Lend-Lease program served first as a “loan” of 50 destroyers to the British, followed by $50 billion – the equivalent of about $700 billion today – worth of aircraft, ships and weapons to our allies to hold off the Germans and ultimately deplete them.

The Lend-Lease legislation passed Congress on a nearly party line vote, with Republicans bitterly opposed to it. “You can dress this measure up all you please, you can sprinkle it with perfume and pour powder on it, masquerade it in any form you please,” proclaimed Republican Congressman Dewey Short of Missouri, “but it is still foul and it stinks to high heaven. It does not need a doctor, it needs an undertaker.”

It did not take long, however, before Roosevelt was proven decisively correct, and his opponents disastrously wrong. The aid that Roosevelt’s adversaries fought so hard to block was instrumental in the defeat of Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito, and enabled the world to avoid another global conflict over the four generations since the end of World War II. “We are,” argued Secretary of War Henry Stimson in urging support for Great Britain, “buying our own security,” and he was right. Those who opposed the aid were wrong – very wrong.

On his trip to North America to shore up weakening support for his brave people last week, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russia of attempting genocide in Ukraine. Call it what you will: it is the mass slaughter of the Ukrainian people for the purpose of strangling them into submission in order to forcibly  bring them under the heel of a murderous despot. “I believe you’re supporting either Ukraine or Russia,” said Zelenskyy. “By weakening the support of Ukraine, you’re reinforcing Russia.”

It really is that simple. And yet the financial costs of maintaining support for Ukraine, coupled with the toll taken by a witches’ brew of pro-Putin proselytizers, partisan madness and shortsightedness have combined to erode American resolve for doing what Americans need to do if Putin isn’t to enslave Ukrainians and threaten a wider swathe of Europe. A CNN poll taken last month found that 55% of Americans believe Congress should cease funding for Ukraine, with 71% of Republicans telling pollsters that America should call it quits.

It doesn’t take a moment’s reflection to appreciate that delivering over 100 billion of American taxpayers’ dollars to a country many of us couldn’t locate on a map two years ago is not politically advantageous to President Biden. This is particularly true at a time when American voters disapprove of his handling of the economy. All the more proof that what Biden has done and is doing to keep Putin from flattening Ukraine is historic for its courage and leadership. Historians will recognize it as such, even if by the time that history is written many of us won’t be around to read it.

Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer, former assistant United States attorney and U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council.

In the case of Congressional Republicans, it isn’t: imagined history, imagined facts, imagined rigged elections, imagined declassification of documents – this sort of thing has been the Republicans’ staple since Trump took his famous escalator ride down Trump Tower in 2015.

The inquiry was ordered up by former President Trump, who is keen to divert attention from the 91 separate criminal charges pending against him in four separate jurisdictions, for everything from falsifying records to hide his hush money payments to a porn star, to trying to block the counting of electoral votes in order to illegally stay in office, to racketeering, to stealing classified military secrets. He claims that he is innocent of all 91 charges, but he also claimed that ingesting cleaning fluid might be a neat way of avoiding COVID. So, a little bit of distraction is highly desirable from his perspective, in order to interrupt the diet of the once and, he hopes, future president’s rich assortment of apparent felonies.

Ergo the announcement by Speaker Kevin McCarthy that the GOP-controlled House was starting impeachment proceedings into Biden. What the basis of them is, we do not know, and he could not say, but if Trump and his acolytes want an impeachment inquiry then that is what they – and the country – shall get. The gist of it all is that Hunter Biden, the president’s son, whose personal life has been a self-inflicted disaster for 20 years, took advantage of his father’s name in order to generate business opportunities he wouldn’t otherwise have gotten.

What a bombshell! If grifting off of a famous family member’s name was a crime, Donald Trump, Jr., Eric Trump and Jared Kushner would be doing time in Leavenworth.

But Buck cannot find any there there that makes Joe Biden responsible for anything at all, let alone anything impeachable, having to do with his son. “What’s missing,” Buck wrote, “despite years of investigation, is the smoking gun that connects Joe Biden.” And which connects Joe Biden to what? Republican Congressman Mike Lawler put it gingerly: “The question for me right now is, the investigations, are they producing enough facts and evidence that arranges taking it to the next step? I don’t think it’s there at the moment.”

Of course, it isn’t that GOP investigations, with the accompanying huffing and puffing about “the Biden crime family,” haven’t produced “enough” evidence of any wrongdoing by Joe Biden. It’s that they have produced nothing – as in zero. Thus far they have recollections of a couple of handful of pleasantries offered by then-Vice President Biden to business associates of his son, no doubt knowing that his son wanted to make himself look good, over six years before Joe Biden became president. Now there’s a high crime and misdemeanor for you!

Not only do the Republicans have nothing on Joe Biden, apparently – they don’t even seem to have anything on his son other than the gun and tax charges already filed against him by Biden’s Justice Department, all related to his addiction. The House Oversight Committee chaired by MAGA maven James Comer keeps promising to subpoena the younger Biden, but keeps backing off. “Well, he can fight the subpoena in court,” stammered Comer on Fox News. “It’s very difficult.”

No, it’s not. It’s simple. What’s difficult is cooking up something out of nothing, even if that happens to be a House specialty.

Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer, former assistant United States attorney and U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council.

When Irish statesman Eamon de Valera came to America in 1919 to generate support for the Irish cause, he naturally came first to Boston. There he told a huge rally in Fenway Park what the phrase meant. “What we actually mean when we talk about it,” he explained, “is an indomitable spirit, a commitment, never tentative, always fully committed, to life itself…..that’s really the spirit of ‘the Fighting Irish.”

Ireland’s magic is plain to anyone who visits the Emerald Isle, but it is hardly the country’s physical beauty alone that furnishes the magic. Since time immemorial the Irish have been gifted at community – at nurturing and preserving communal celebration of tradition, music, humor, literature and memory. They’ve been gifted as well at transplanting community to the places to which painful circumstances have forced them to emigrate – and then nurturing and preserving community in those places.

America has been a blessed beneficiary of this Irish gift, and Boston has perhaps been the most blessed of the blessed. Those who have interacted with Boston – as students, or as patients or as transplants themselves – have reason to know that the phrase should be “the giving Irish.” The imprint of Irish-Americans on Massachusetts is vast and deep. But you can see and breathe it all over Boston. There is a great deal that is generous and good here, and so much of it has an Irish-American aspect.

A walking illustration of this is John Connors, Jr., the justly iconic philanthropist who has done as much good for Bostonians over the last two generations as anyone, and who at 81 continues to do it. The grandson of Irish immigrants, Connors grew up in a lower middle class home in a humble Boston neighborhood, and was the first in his family to go to college. What the Connors family lacked in discretionary income it possessed in values passed down from forebears. Connors sold peanuts at Fenway, drove a cab, served in the Army National Guard and supported his sister and her children when his sister’s husband abandoned them.

A self-professed “peddler,” Connor went on to found the advertising agency Hill Holliday, which under his leadership became a behemoth. There isn’t much in Boston that hasn’t benefited from Connors’ relentless philanthropy – hospitals, shelters and treatment centers, colleges, camps for underprivileged kids, improved education for inner city children, and, of course, an uncountable number of families who have been quietly, or anonymously, uplifted by Connors’ acts of kindness.

Uncomfortable talking about what he had done, Connors, who has been to Ireland 55 times, makes clear that he has been moved and motivated by his Irish heritage. His generosity to those who are disadvantaged and discriminated against is a visceral reaction to the Irish-American experience of his grandparents’ and parents’ generations.

In Boston later this month, the Irish Cultural Center of Greater Boston, a collaboration of the Irish government and local Irish-Americans, will gather to ensure that the appreciation of Irish heritage that meant much to the likes of Jack Connors and so many others stays vibrant for years to come. It will give an award named after the late U.S. Congressman Brian Donnelly, spearhead of a visa program that strengthened the American-Ireland relationship, to longtime CEO of the New England Council Jim Brett. Those in attendance will honor what Center head Jerry McDermott describes as the core Irish legacy that he hopes will always flourish here: “the yearning to make things better for the next generation.” It will be yet another one of those occasions when Irish-Americans demonstrate that, at the end of the day, it is all about the giving.

Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer, former assistant United States attorney and U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council.

This latest targeted killing by white Americans of Black Americans for being Black Americans came only hours before America marked the 60th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s iconic “I have a dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial in August 1963. One might say that flagrantly racist assaults by whites against Blacks take place every day in one place or another in our country, except they occur multiple times a day in more than one place, and generally go unnoticed. Writing in the 1950s about our race problem, James Baldwin noted that “(w)hat it comes to, finally, is that this Nation has spent a large part of its time and energy looking away from one of the principal facts of its life.”

Dr. King’s speech to a crowd of 250,000 in Washington that day is so iconic that there’s a danger his personal courage – his heroism, in fact – and his historic role in galvanizing support for civil rights will be forgotten in the passage of time, and that what he meant to this country will seem remote to those who only associate his name with a day off from work or school. Jonathan Eig, the author of the new biography “King: A Life,” aims to prevent that. Subjected to beatings, fire bombings, trumped-up jailings and death threats, the young minister inspired boycotts, protests, sit-ins, marches and legislation, in turn spawning countless acts of courage and belief that have not stopped reshaping America, even as events like that which occurred in Jacksonville illustrate the steepness of the remaining climb.

Setting the stage for the recounting of King’s role in leading the boycott against Montgomery, Alabama’s segregationist bus companies in the mid-1950s, Eig writes about the lasting legacy of slavery there. Alabama’s slaves comprised about half of its population by the Civil War. “Many of those enslaved men, women and children,” Eig writes, “were bought and sold in downtown Montgomery, marched through the city’s streets, made to stand on auction blocks, shackled, inspected and traded for cash or animals. More than half of all enslaved families were broken up.”

Rosa Parks, the quiet seamstress who in refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus sparked the boycott intended to bury slavery’s legacy for good, told a historian “Treading the tight rope of Jim Crow from birth to death, from almost our first knowledge of life to our last conscious thought, is a major mental acrobatic feat.”

On her 56th straight day of walking to and from her job as a domestic worker rather than riding a segregated bus, a Montgomery woman named Dealy Cooksy told an interviewer that she was indeed tired, but had no intention of backing down. “I ain’t begging, and I sure ain’t getting back on the bus ‘til Reverend King say so, and he says we ain’t going back ‘til they treat us right. There ain’t nothing they can do but try to scare me. But we ain’t rabbit no more.”

The white supremacists and assorted racists have their moments – in Jacksonville, Charlestown and Buffalo, and elsewhere. Gone three generations now, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s most enduring legacy has been motivating millions of Americans who, in Dealy Cooksy’s words, “ain’t rabbit no more.”

Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer, former assistant United States attorney and U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council.

Those dreadfully humbled included former president Donald Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, former Trump lawyers Sidney Powell, John Eastman, Ken Chesebro and Jenna Ellis, former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark and Trump’s uber-consigliere Rudy Giuliani.

Of that sorry band, no one has been humiliated more thoroughly than Giuliani, who has gone from being America’s Mayor in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001 to being a broke, broken and bankrupt laughingstock. Stripped of licenses to practice law, sanctioned by courts for contemptuous misconduct and reduced to begging a disdainful Trump for the legal fees necessary to defend himself against civil lawsuits and criminal cases, Giuliani stands a real chance of going to prison, which is no laughing matter.

Along the way he has had his hair dye drip down his face in full public view during a fraudulent press conference held between a crematorium and a sex shop, and been obliged to ask for a bail bond at Second Chance Bail Bondsmen across the street from the jail in which he may find himself residing if found guilty of the various felonies with which he is currently charged.

On Thursday night came The Mother Of All Mug Shots. Flying into Atlanta on a private plane that is racking up some serious miles ping-ponging from arraignment to arraignment, Trump himself swept into the Fulton County jail complex in a motorcade fit for a former president, complete with flashing lights. He emerged 21 minutes later as the first former president with his very own inmate number: PO1135809.

Posing for his mug shot in the sheriff’s office, the former president got off just the menacing glower he had practiced for the occasion, succeeding in projecting a sort of “Super Felon” look he knew would thrill his faithful base. And, boy, are they ever faithful. ABC anchor Kyra Phillips put her finger on what Trump’s flock is worshipping: it is “defiance,” and all that goes with it. But defiance of what? Of laws that prohibit every citizen, including presidents, from stealing nuclear secrets, obstructing grand jury investigations and trying to steamroll elected officials into falsifying election results?

Apparently so.

The epic snake oil salesman has bamboozled students into paying to attend a bogus “university” named after himself, cheated charities, stiffed vendors, paid off porn stars and conned innumerable hard-working Americans into forking over to him hard-earned dollars to the self-professed billionaire in order to pay his criminal defense lawyers, so that he could be spared having to pay his criminal defense lawyers himself. Small wonder that he had no difficulty selling $7 million worth of merchandise bearing his prison photo within hours.

Trump’s most recent indictment brings the total number of felony charges against him in the four jurisdictions in which he’s a criminal defendant to 90. The months ahead will feature a daily diet of hearings held, trial dates set (and postponed), and judicial rulings issued and digested, as Americans grapple with the stone-cold realization that roughly half of us will support this guy in 2024, inmate number and all. It’s increasingly clear that the wild ride we are on in the United States is very far from over.

Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer, former assistant United States attorney and U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council.

In the 20 years following Sept. 11, 2001, untold numbers of Afghans chose to help American forces attempt to ensure that the kind of mass murder visited upon us when planes smashed into lower Manhattan never happened again. They were drivers, interpreters, soldiers, nurses, social workers, cooks, construction workers and more, and they enlisted alongside our own men and women serving us in far off Afghanistan as we tried to rid that country of a brutally repressive regime, and one that threatened our own security. They wanted to believe in America, and they did believe in it, and they trusted that in return for having America’s back, America would have theirs.

When the U.S. military hastily departed Afghanistan in 2021, these families faced deadly retribution by the Taliban. About 80,000 Afghans who had risked their lives on our behalf were urgently evacuated, transferred first to other countries where American military personnel screened and vetted them. They were then flown to the United States for further screening and then resettled in communities across the country.

But with a big and painful catch. Under current law, they are only permitted to stay here temporarily. Whether and when they will be forced to leave America and are left to their own meager devices is entirely up in the air, which means that they live not only in legal limbo, but under a very frightening cloud.

In a rare display of bipartisan problem-solving, Congressional leaders from both sides of the aisle came to the following sensible conclusion: Number 1, this can’t be right. Number 2, this has to be fixed. Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar and Republican Lindsey Graham, along with colleagues from both houses of Congress, have fashioned the Afghan Adjustment Act as a means of providing permanent status here for eligible Afghans who have passed screening measures and who pass additional ones. Backed by a long list of veterans organizations with particular sensitivity to what Afghans temporarily resettled or still living in Afghanistan have given to our country, the Act ensures that everyone permitted to stay here first undergoes multiple levels of rigorous scrutiny and then streamlines a path for them to start new lives in the country for which they risked their old ones.

The one impediment to the bill’s passage is the effort by some to link relief to the Afghans – whose right to it merits little disagreement – to a comprehensive solution to our immigration problems – about which there is nothing but disagreement. At best, holding the Afghans hostage to the illusory hope for broad agreement on immigration anytime soon makes the perfect the enemy of the good. At worst it is cruel to those who we know deserve better.

Klobuchar, who has spearheaded the Act, has been particularly dogged about it. “It’s about a covenant,” she said on the Senate floor in late July. “A covenant that we have made and we must keep to those who stand with us on the battlefield. This bill does right by Afghans who worked alongside our troops, and shows the world that the United States of America, when we make a promise, we keep it.”

As with virtually all of Americans’ forebears, the Afghans no doubt regard it as miraculous that they have made it to this fabulous country. Now it is up to us to do the right thing by them.

Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer, former assistant United States attorney and U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council.

The younger Biden’s demand that the Justice Department declare that it was absolving him of any further criminal jeopardy left Department lawyers with no choice but to tell him to pound sand. And it left Attorney General Merrick Garland, whose fealty to the rule of law exceeds that of all of his Congressional critics combined, with no choice but to appoint a Special Counsel to investigate anything and everything Hunter Biden-related. And speaking of fealty to the rule of law, the man Garland appointed was David Weiss, the United States Attorney for Delaware, appointed by none other than Donald Trump and asked by Joe Biden to stay on precisely so that the criminal investigation of his son could be completed by a federal prosecutor installed by his Republican predecessor, not by him. When it comes to integrity, not all presidents are created equal.

As Special Counsel, Weiss will not only have the unquestioned authority to follow the trail of any evidence of Hunter Biden’s misconduct but to write a report documenting that evidence. The decision by Hunter Biden and his legal team to play “chicken” with the Justice Department may bring other adverse consequences home to roost. At a minimum, it means Biden will face extended uncertainty about his legal fate, and the Department probably will feel obliged to seek jail time for charges on which it had previously offered him probation.

How dumb was that?

Very. Not only for him, but for a Biden family that has already suffered badly from the terrible choices he’s made. This includes a father who, like most loving fathers would, has done everything he could to demonstrate his love for a son not only bent on self-destruction but prepared to hurt his family as well.

The GOP’s claim that they have “evidence” that incriminates President Biden has not withstood scrutiny, to put it mildly. House Oversight Chairman James Comer’s  absent “star witness” against the President, one Gal Luft, turns out to be an international fugitive. Indicted earlier this year on a slew of federal charges, Luft was arrested in Cyprus and jumped bail while awaiting extradition. He’s in hiding somewhere.

Then there was Fox News’ Peter Doocy, who confronted President Biden claiming that Hunter’s former business partner had testified to Congress that the elder Biden was frequently “talking business” with his son’s business associates. Except that the former partner had actually testified that he had not heard any such discussions.

The GOP response to Weiss’ appointment as Special Counsel captures the moral quality of their Say Anything caucus. Last year 33 Republican Senators wrote Garland demanding he appoint Weiss as Special Counsel. Sen. Ted Cruz now denounces Weiss as “a wildly inappropriate person to be a Special Counsel.” Sen. Marsha Blackburn, another signatory, denounces Weiss as a “collaborator.” Sen. Ron Johnson now says Weiss “is probably the least independent person that Merrick Garland could have appointed.”

In other words: just another day of hooey-spewing in the Grand Old Party.

Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer and former U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council. He was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

In truth, Trump did not seem all that honored when he stopped at Reagan National Airport on Thursday to speak to reporters after being arraigned. He lashed out at trash collection in Washington before boarding his private plane.

That Trump was not feeling quite as honored by the new criminal indictment was strongly suggested by his furious reaction to it. “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M GOING AFTER YOU” proclaimed our model citizen on his social media platform, which sounded an awful lot like a threat to potential witnesses against him, of which there is no shortage. Among those that he appears to be going after is the federal judge assigned to the new case, who has been no-nonsense when it comes to handling the criminal cases in front of her brought against Trump’s Jan. 6 foot soldiers. Trump is demanding that she recuse herself.

His lawyers are also demanding that the case be transferred out of Washington, D.C. to a venue that they feel will be more hospitable to him. They seek a trial in West Virginia, a state that voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2016 and 2020. Moscow is unavailable.

Trump’s team is auditioning two principal defenses to the latest indictment charging him with fraudulently and corruptly attempting to block the constitutionally-mandated counting of the electoral votes cast in the 2020 election won by Joe Biden. One is that Trump’s intent was innocent, because either (1) he actually won the election or (2) he honestly believed he had won it. This defense has a number of problems with it, starting with the fact that both theories are laughable. Another drawback is that for Trump to try to convince the jury that he actually believed he had won the election he would have to take the stand in his own behalf. The cross-examination of Trump by prosecutors would lend new meaning to the phrase “shooting fish in a barrel.”

Trump’s second defense is that any conspiracy by him to obstruct the counting of electoral votes, any effort to pressure Vice President Mike Pence into blocking the certification of those votes and any scheme to substitute phony electors for legitimate ones was protected by the First Amendment. This is also a tough one. All conspiracies to violate the law involve “speech” to some degree, which doesn’t immunize them from criminal prosecution.

A 2012 Supreme Court decision illustrates the uphill battle Trump faces to wriggle out of the latest indictment on First Amendment grounds. The Court listed a number of contexts in which deceitful “speech” is criminal, including “advocacy intended and likely to incite imminent lawless action,” “speech integral to criminal conduct” and lies aimed at undermining “the integrity of governmental processes.” This bodes ill for Trump.

And Trump is also charged with fraud. “Where false claims are made to affect a fraud or to secure valuable consideration,” the Supreme Court held, “it is well-established that the Government may restrict speech without affronting the First Amendment.”

“You’re too honest,”  Donald Trump is alleged to have admonished Mike Pence. That is one reason why Trump is in the dock, and Pence isn’t.

Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer, former ,former assistant United States attorney and U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council. 

If the allegations in the superseding indictment handed down by a federal jury against former President Trump last week are accurate, he was at the center of a conspiracy to obstruct justice comprised of The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.

After the FBI observed surveillance cameras located at Mar-a-Lago near where Trump was illegally retaining the classified documents he had illegally pilfered, the Justice Department notified Team Trump that it was subpoenaing the surveillance footage from those cameras. Trump’s lawyers informed Trump in New Jersey, who promptly summoned loyal aide and co-defendant Walt Nauta for a meeting. Nauta immediately made arrangements to fly to Mar-a-Lago, texting a colleague that he was returning there on a “family emergency,” using a “shushing” emoji.

No joke.

Trump’s property manager at Mar-a-Lago, one newly indicted Carlos de Oliviera, told another Trump employee that Nauta was changing his plans and coming to Mar-a-Lago, but that he should not tell anyone because Nauta wanted it kept secret.

When Nauta arrived, he and de Oliveira made a cloak-and-dagger trip to the surveillance booth. De Oliviera asked how long the server retained the surveillance footage, stating that “the boss” wanted the server deleted. Told that this could not be done, de Oliviera repeated that “the boss” nevertheless wanted it done.

It is of course possible that when de Oliveira insisted that “the boss” wanted the server deleted, he was referring to Bruce Springsteen, but since Springsteen has not played a major role in Trump’s various Espionage Act violations, it is likelier that this was instead a reference to Trump. And that poses a real migraine for Trump’s lawyers, because if Trump didn’t know that he was in illegal possession of classified documents, or if the documents he was hoarding really were just double cheeseburger order forms from the White House mess kept as a memento, there wouldn’t be any need to delete surveillance footage of the documents. Jurors will not need to be Sherlock Holmes to get this.

Put another way, “shushing” emojis and “The boss wants the server deleted” are not where you want to be as a criminal defendant charged with conspiracy to obstruct justice.

Still, Donald Trump’s base remained enthralled by, and Republican leaders remain terrified of, “the boss,” and therein lies the rub of the tipping point on which American democracy hinges.

While Trump remains generally unpopular – a recent Pew survey found that 63% of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of him – nearly four out of ten Americans regard him approvingly — insurrection, obstruction, Espionage Act, falsification of business records, porn stars and all. The 2024 presidential election promises to be what the Battle of the Bulge was to World War II – determinative of whether democracy prevails or something very dark does.

We aren’t the only ones gripped in this battle. In Israel, the present coalition government, led by someone who, like Trump, searches desperately for a get out of jail card, is supported by only half the country. But this has been enough to do grievous damage to Israeli democracy. In Italy, Prime Minister Georgia Meloni is an ardent admirer of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. Hungary’s Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, has done his best to undermine democratic norms, assaulting judicial independence and freedom of the press.

“How to combat this authoritarian ascendancy is one of the most pressing matters of our time, “ writes Ruth Ben-Ghiat  in her book “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.” Writing recently in The New Republic, Michael Tomasky observed that “fascism is a sensibility more than it is a political program,” noting that it revolved around support for absolute state power, the notion that majority groups are racially superior and peoples’ “compete obeisance” to the would-be dictator.

Whether we call it fascism or we don’t, millions of our countrymen have demonstrated their “complete obeisance” to a crooked autocrat. What that tells us about ourselves isn’t pretty.

Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer and former assistant United States attorney and U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council, and was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

But there’s piddling, twiddling and resolving, and then there’s other stuff. The debasement of Congress to which we were treated last week was something else again, not merely a national embarrassment but one which made us a global laughingstock. Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene had blown up and then displayed for television cameras photographs of President Biden’s son Hunter nude, having sexual relations with various women. This was for the simple purpose of humiliating the son and inflicting pain on the rest of his family.

Everyone knows by now that Hunter Biden, who lost his mother and sister tragically as a young boy, almost lost his father several times and then lost his brother to brain cancer, spent several years in the depths of a severe drug addiction, and went through everything that goes along with it. Millions of American families have suffered the kinds of agony the Bidens have suffered.

Neither Greene nor her GOP colleagues who control the House of Representatives care a whit about any of that. The flimsy pretext for Greene’s “presentation” of photographs of Hunter Biden having sex was a hearing of the House Oversight and Accounting Committee, on which Greene, remarkably, sits, into whether or not the younger Biden should have been charged with more serious tax crimes than the ones to which he has agreed to plead guilty.

Never mind that it was Donald Trump’s Justice Department that initiated and spearheaded the prosecution of the younger Biden. Never mind that it was a Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney who decided what charges were warranted. Never mind that the son’s crimes have nothing to do with his father. Never mind any of that: the indecency reflected in this hearing was that of Congresswoman Greene. As Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez put it: “I don’t care who you are in this country. No one deserves that.”

Greene may be appalling, but she is no rogue operator. The Republican-controlled committee’s Twitter account tweeted out her photographs.

GOP Congressman Matt Gaetz is a bird of similar feathers. In 2019, the day before Donald Trump fixer Michael Cohen was scheduled to testify about his former boss’s payoffs to a porn star, Gaetz sent him this mob-like warning: “Hey @MichaelCohen212,” Gaetz tweeted, “Do your wife and father-in-law know about you and your girlfriends? Maybe tonight would be a good time for a chat. I wonder if she’ll be faithful when you’re in prison. She’s about to learn a lot.” The House Ethics Committee reprimanded Gaetz for “not [meet]ing the standards by which Members of the House should govern themselves.”

In 2021, Congressman Paul Gosar posted an animated video of himself murdering Ocasio-Ortez. He was censured by the House, then controlled by Democrats, with only two Republicans prepared to agree that this was conduct unbecoming of someone in Congress. The rest of the Republican conference gathered around him after the censure vote to affirm their support for him.

These are the same folks, of course, who continue to support their colleague George Santos, the indicted fraud artist soon headed for an extended vocational course in license plate-making. They have turned Congress into a national zoo, and their fellow citizens can only stop, shake their heads and point.

Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer and former U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission

One was that Joe Biden and his associated fundraising arms raised $72 million between his late April re-election launch and June 30th. This financial haul, double what Donald Trump raised in the second quarter, poured 72 buckets of cold water on the “Dementia-Joe-isn’t-supported-by-Democrats” narrative that had gained currency, pushed and peddled by Republicans.

And it was similarly unhelpful to the wishful thinking in Republican circles that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the candidate from Pluto, poses a “headache” for the President. This isn’t the case, except perhaps on Pluto.

The other news was that former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, whose uphill battle for the GOP presidential nomination was initially deemed by pundits to be destined for a rapid flame-out, had already collected contributions from over 40,000 donors in the first 35 days of his candidacy. This lifted him over one of the qualifying thresholds for Republicans hoping to participate in the party’s August 23rd presidential debate.

Christie is not on the debate stage yet – he has to poll at 1% or more among Republicans in three approved polls. But with a recent Morning Consult poll showing him at 3%, he is getting there. Meanwhile, a Super PAC supporting Christie, called Tell It Like It Is, seems likely to generate substantial financial backing from those who would like to see Trump flattened in the debate, and who see Christie as the only challenger capable of exposing the twice-indicted former president for the fraud that he is in prime time.

A former prosecutor, Christie has not minced words about Trump, which sets him very far apart from his fellow candidates, who are all mince, all the time. The reason for Trump’s felonious pilfering of classified documents, Christie says, is because “he wants to pretend he’s still president.”

While other Republicans have hemmed, hawed and hidden when asked whether they would pardon Trump if he’s convicted and they’re elected, Christie is unhesitatingly unafraid of heresy. “I would have a hard time considering any pardon,” he says.

As for Trump’s threat to skip next month’s debate, Christie is blunt about the old draft dodger’s latest case of bone spurs. “If Donald Trump doesn’t show up,” Christie says, “he’s a coward.”

When it comes to Trump, Christie goes where no other Republican dares to go, which, of course, isn’t necessarily saying much. When it recently emerged that the Money-Funneler-In-Chief had had one of his committees pay Melania Trump $155,000 for “event planning and consulting,” Christie unloaded on them both.

“Trump is shameless,” he tweeted. “A billionaire using donor money to pay personal legal fees and now paying his wife more than 2x what the average American makes just to pick some tableware. There’s grifting, and then there’s Trump grifting. Undisputed champs.”

On matters relating to Donald Trump, the Republican field runs the gamut from kneeling to groveling. To say that Christie stands out is an understatement. A “tell” that Trump doesn’t relish having Christie hanging around on a prolonged basis to tell the truth about him came with the former president’s attack on Christie for recommending that he appoint FBI Director Christopher Wray. “[Wray] was recommended very strongly by Chris Christie, who is, you know, a sad case,” Trump told Fox’s Maria Bartiromo this past weekend.

Christie isn’t inclined to back down. “I think Chris Wray has done a very good job,” he says.

A new poll of New Hampshire Republican voters showed Christie in a tie for second place with Ron DeSantis, and poised to overtake the Florida governor, who is in free-fall.

Evidently tens of millions in cash on hand cannot cure a repellant personality. But an awful lot would have to happen in order for a Republican base so ill-disposed to acknowledging the truth about Donald Trump to reward someone like Chris Christie for telling it. In the meantime, however, Christie, a congenital brawler, seems to be all in, and is serving notice that he intends to keep on punching.

Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer and former U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission.

The two heavily armed groups, recognized by the international community as Iranian-funded terrorist enterprises that have vowed to violently eliminate Israel, have carried out nearly 300 separate attacks on Israelis in the last 12 months alone. These have killed over 50 Israelis and injured hundreds more just since last July 4. One of the principal launching pads for these attacks is Jenin, located on the West Bank, which has become one large manufacturing facility for missiles and bombs, and a staging ground for the rocketing, shooting, bombing, stabbing and car-ramming of Israeli civilians.

One might imagine that it would be commonly understood that Israel cannot simply permit this to go on ad infinitum. But evidently there are those who do not in fact understand it. The Palestinian Authority, which professes to want an independent Palestinian state despite having repeatedly rejected one, is incapable of governing Jenin, which it nominally controls. Riven by clan warfare and rife with corruption, the Palestinian Authority is a hot mess.

That leaves Israel with two options. Option 1 is for it to do nothing to stop its civilians from being murdered at will. This is the option of choice of the terminally sophomoric, the Blame-Israel-No-Matter-What crowd, who constitute a booming if not wholly intelligible cottage industry. It is not, however, the ideal option for Israel which, all things considered, would prefer not to have its civilians blown to bits, shot, stabbed or rammed to death.

That would appear to leave Option 2, which is to try to stop those who would commit murder. This does seem like a no-brainer. But there is a certain set indisposed to use their heads when it comes to Israel. So when Israeli troops finally entered the weapons factory that is Jenin last week to try to slow down Murder, Incorporated, the predictable crowd proclaimed the predictable things. Amidst all the idiocy it wasn’t easy to rank the most untethered comments, but the top prize surely went to the British Broadcasting Corporation anchor who alleged that “Israeli forces are happy to kill children.”

A close second was commentator Peter Beinart, whose take on Islamic jihad and Hamas murdering innocents was that “The fundamental problem is that Palestinians lack the most basic rights.” No, it isn’t. It was Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas himself who explained Palestinian leadership’s rejection of a Palestinian state to the Washington Post thus: “In the West Bank we have a good reality. We are living a good life.” And the attacks by these groups have nothing to do with “rights.” They have to do with the express pledge to eradicate Israel, full stop.

The bronze went to Squad members Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, who called Israel’s efforts to protect its civilians a “pogrom.” Sure it is. The dismantling of missile factories, weapon storage depots and IEDs is a “pogrom.”

Now, Israel’s current coalition government is comprised of some miserable characters – autocrats, fanatics and charlatans. Their plan to jettison an independent judiciary deserves every bit of the opprobrium it has generated.

But those who dismiss the self-defense-based entry into Jenin as the expression of right wing ideology don’t know what they are talking about. It had the backing of the entire spectrum of Israeli society, which is plenty sick of seeing their grieving countrymen at funerals. It was, as opposition leader Yair Lapid put it, “a justified operation.”

Still, there are a whole lot of sophomores out there, with a whole lot of megaphones. You can only hope that at some point they will graduate to something a little bit fairer.

Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer and former U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission

The arrogance displayed by certain of the Justices in insisting that they are free to violate self-evident ethical norms has not exactly burnished the Court’s sagging reputation. Clarence Thomas’ serial acceptance of lavish vacations and other financial assistance from wealthy Republican donor Harlan Crow has strained whatever existed of his credibility, and his repeated, deliberate failures to disclose any of this speaks volumes. Thomas’ claim that he relied on people he declined to identify for advice he declined to describe has made him a laughingstock.

Now it emerges that conservative firebrand Samuel Alito is of the same let-them-eat-cake mindset when it comes to judicial ethics. Alito confirmed reports that he had been treated to a spectacular Alaska vacation by conservative megadonor and hedge fund titan Paul Singer, and then not only did not disclose it, but proceeded to vote on cases in which Singer’s businesses were litigants before him. This was quite the display of disregard for fundamental judicial ethics, but as far as Alito was concerned, the only wrongdoers were the investigative reporters who disclosed that which he refused to. Requested by the Senate to answer questions that surely interest the American people about what, precisely, the Court’s Justices perceive to be their ethical obligations, Chief Justice John Roberts declined.

It isn’t only contempt for obvious ethics that has placed the Court’s credibility in the tank. When it came to reversing the 50-year-old precedent recognizing women’s right to determine whether to terminate their own pregnancies, the right’s braying about keeping government out of citizens’ lives proved to be balderdash. Americans’ overwhelming disapproval of the Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade further eroded its legitimacy.

Last week the Court again jettisoned judicial precedent, reversing its 1978 decision permitting the use of affirmative action to admit minority students for the purpose of promoting educational diversity. It had reaffirmed that decision just 20 years ago, authorizing the “narrowly-tailored use of race in admissions decisions to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body.”

In its decision now holding that the very affirmative action that it has held for 45 years was constitutional is now unconstitutional, the Court was good enough to acknowledge that the two centuries of slavery followed by the century of state-mandated segregation to which Black Americans were subjected were “regrettable.”  But it found that the discriminatory legacy of those three centuries was now over, which was nice of it, but also dead wrong. The baked-in, unjust and adverse effects of 200 years of slavery and then a hundred years of legalized discrimination do not simply evaporate overnight. The Justices who argued that affirmative action is warranted as a means of remedying centuries of restraints – physical, legal or institutional – were correct.

The Trump Court is a gift from the Hillary-haters and the Bernie Bros who decided in 2016 either that there wasn’t sufficient difference between Clinton and Trump to warrant voting – or that a Trump presidency would be “cleansing” for the country.

Some cleansing. If those who whine about how Joe Biden doesn’t agree with them on everything don’t cut it out, this country is really going to be taken to the cleaners, maybe for good.

Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer and former U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission

The Berkshires are known for the explosion of performing arts during the summer months. Among the artistic institutions that attract the highest quality talent is Pittsfield’s Barrington Stage Company, which chose to begin the season by staging a revival of the musical “Cabaret,”’ a deeply sobering portrayal of Germany’s descent into Nazism during the 1930s. It centers on two characters, Clifford Bradshaw, an American who has come to Berlin to write, and Sally Bowles, an English entertainer who headlines a raunchy nightclub. It is principally through these two characters that the story of the metastasis of Jew hatred in Nazi Germany, which would lead to the extermination of six million European Jews, is told.

“Cabaret” seems to have been a purposeful choice given the “tsunami of antisemitism,” as Anti-Defamation League head Jonathan Greenblatt has put it, convulsing America. This particular production opened contemporaneously with the criminal conviction of the neo-Nazi gunman who killed 11 worshipers in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018. That killing is just one stitch in a tapestry of anti-Jewish terror of the sort that has never been seen in America before, emanating both from White supremacists on the far right and some of those who look into their mirrors and manage to see “progressives” on the left.

The ADL’s tracking of antisemitic incidents in the United States tells part of the story. The approximately 3,700 incidents of harassment, vandalism and assault targeting Jewish people formally reported last year represent a 36% increase over 2021. The number has steadily increased year after year. But hatred of Jews is hardly the only kind of hatred that has prospered here in recent years. According to statistics recently released by the FBI, reported incidents of hate crimes more generally increased about 12% between 2020 and 2021. Black Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic and Latino Americans, Muslim Americans and LGBTQ Americans join Jewish Americans as the most popular victims.

America has been a favorable spawning ground for hatred these last years, with the inhibitions against taunting and bullying not merely lifted but shredded. Roughly half the country embraces a cult that relishes in-your-face cruelty toward the marginalized. Threats against public officials struggling to protect the public health against COVID and calls for the banning of books are somehow touted as pro-American. Comparisons between 1930s Germany and present day America, which once seemed melodramatic, no longer do.

“Sally, don’t you understand that if you’re not against all of this, you’re for it?” Bradshaw asks Bowles toward the end of the play, but the question falls as flat as it has generally fallen when posed today. The chilling Nazi anthem “Tomorrow Belongs To Me” evokes the crazed fervor of this country’s domestic extremist groups operating under rocks – but operating nonetheless – throughout our land.

The warning attributed to philosopher George Santayana that “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it” resonates as much now as ever. One leaves “Cabaret” feeling that it needs to be seen less by those middle aged and older than by younger Americans, who are so spectacularly ignorant about the extermination of 6 million Jews and about the domination of Europe by fascists a mere 80 years ago.

The Barrington Stage Company’s production of “Cabaret” is simultaneously sparkling and deeply dark. “I was dancing with Sally Bowles, and we were fast asleep,” laments Bradshaw as he prepares to depart the horror he has seen consume Berlin. Four generations later, in a country we all thought was comfortably safe from being overrun by hatred, the question whether America will sleep on or awaken is an open one.

Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer and former U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission

It wouldn’t be an indictment of Donald Trump if it did not contain at least one count of making false statements. One surmises that this is the only count that truly shocked Trump, who was assessed by the Washington Post to have made over 35,000 false statements during his presidency alone, and that only counts public ones.

Trump apparently doesn’t have any attorneys, at least in The Case of The Stolen National Security Secrets, because more or less contemporaneously with the unsealing of the indictment, the two principal lawyers representing him quit. True to form, Trump insisted that he had fired them. But apart from the fact that nothing Trump says is truthful, no rational attorney appreciates being associated with a debacle.

Both the evidence and the law disfavor Trump – lopsidedly. Of the hundreds of classified documents that Trump deliberately took with him to Mar-a-Lago and deliberately withheld knowing that he could not lawfully do so, the Justice Department chose to confine itself to charging Trump on 31, marked either “secret” or “top secret.” These included documents regarding White House intelligence briefings, documents concerning our military capabilities and those of foreign countries, documents concerning our military planning, documents concerning our vulnerability to military attack – and documents concerning our nuclear weapons. “The unauthorized disclosure of these classified documents,” the grand jury charged, “could put at risk the national security of the United States, foreign relations, the safety of the United States military and human sources and the continued viability of sensitive intelligence collection methods.”

Trump had these sensitive documents strewn all over Mar-a-Lago – in his office, in his bathroom and in a ballroom, and actively schemed to keep representatives of the United States government from finding them. He suggested to certain of his lawyers that they lie to the FBI and the grand jury about his retention of the documents, and suggested to another that he hide or destroy documents. In familiar mob boss fashion — familiar to mob bosses and familiar to Trump – he caused another of his attorneys to falsely certify that all classified documents had been turned over, knowing, of course, that that was a lie. We will never know the scope of the harm that Trump has caused the women and men of our armed forces, or to the country as a whole. All we really now, from experience, is that Donald Trump couldn’t care less.

MAGA World responded with the usual risible nonsense, chalking the indictment up to retaliation by “the Biden Crime Family,” and so forth. William Barr, Trump’s former Attorney General, was somewhat more tethered. “These documents are among the most sensitive secrets the country has,” Barr told Fox News. “If even half of (the indictment) is true then he’s toast.” Donald Trump may indeed be headed to prison at long last. But it is the country he falsely claims to give a damn about that’s gotten burnt.

Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer and former U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission.

It was a time when Republicans and Democrats viewed themselves as competitors, with different ideas about getting to the same place, rather than as bitter enemies. Despite the GOP’s venom toward President Franklin Roosevelt, just elected to his third term, and plenty of division about whether American should enter the European war, Americans still fundamentally rowed in the same direction.

It was, in short, a different time. Truman, a Democrat, proposed to run an investigation that would expose and publicize the failures of a Democratic administration that was trying to rally the country for eventual entry into the war. The Roosevelt administration approved the investigation and cooperated with it. The Democrat-run committee held hearings and issued reports that pointed out what a Democratic administration was doing wrong. The Republicans on the committee were treated as equals and, for their part, refrained from partisanship.

The result was an improved national defense program, one which, after delays when the attack on Pearl Harbor abruptly accelerated our need to defend ourselves, succeeded in providing the materiel needed to liberate Europe and defeat the Japanese.

America got a taste of old-fashioned bipartisanship last week, and  a much-needed one at that. With our government on the brink of default on its debt and financial calamity imminent, Democrats and Republicans, led by President Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy, respectively, functioned as the proverbial grown-ups in the room, striking a compromise that extended the debt limit for two years and protected Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other vital programs while also cutting some spending. Biden and McCarthy stared down their parties’ fringes to get the deal done, with 77% of House Democrats and 70% of House Republicans approving a compromise that passed by a 314 to 117 vote.

Neither Biden nor McCarthy had an easy task. Progressive Democrats were prepared to play a dangerous game of “chicken,” risking a disastrous default rather than agreeing to an even modest rollback in spending. MAGA Republicans seemed positively eager to implode the economy and the markets so that Biden could be blamed. To his credit, McCarthy opted to be the adult in the Republican conference, a particularly unenviable assignment given its composition and the frayed thread by which McCarthy’s speakership hangs.

The president may have driven home the deal that saved America from economic collapse, and fresh jobs and growth reports may have sent the financial markets soaring, but the week wasn’t a total loss for his detractors. The man tripped on a sandbag protruding on a stage at the Air Force Academy, giving Biden-haters the opportunity to crow because, well, the man tripped. Thus did Sandbag-Gate become an issue in the 2024 presidential campaign.

Still, it was a good week for the big girls and boys, and one which could not help but make one remember what once was and what might be – even if barely conceivably – once again. “Our teams were able to get along, get things done, were straightforward with one another, completely honest with one another,” said Biden in an Oval Office address the night the compromise passed Congress. “Both sides operated in good faith. Both sides kept their word.” Somewhere, maybe, Harry Truman is nodding approvingly.

Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer and former U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission

That was back when Lindsay Graham had credibility. Those were also the days when he described Donald Trump as a “nut job,” “a loser as a person” and “ill-suited to be president.”

Graham was of course right about both Biden and Trump. But that was before his sad servility to Trump led him to assist Trump in trying to overthrow the 2020 Georgia election – assistance which may lead him to be indicted this August.

Graham is far from the only national Republican to continue to cower before Trump, too intimidated by Mar-a-Lago’s Classified Document Collector-in-Chief to cross him and risk being insulted. As the 2024 election season gets underway, and the Republican case against Biden is that he has an arthritic spine, an occasional stutter and a son with a former addiction problem, the GOP nomination appears to be the indicted insurrectionist’s to lose. His challengers have nether the courage nor the inclination to speak plainly about what a threat Trump is to our democracy and, indeed, to the country’s ability to survive as we have known it.

After due consideration of the nature of Republican primary voters, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis settled on this for his campaign message: “You want crazy? I’ll give you crazy.” What he is selling is snarling attacks on marginalized Americans, like communities of color and the LGBTQ community, which want celebrate their identities and want others in this diverse nation we’re privileged to live in to have the opportunity to do the same.

Then there are the snarling attacks on books, on learning, on science and on tolerance itself. It is a particular quality of vileness that many Americans thought we had put in our rear view mirror. But that isn’t so, and it is the essence of DeSantis’ campaign.

DeSantis’ calculation that what Republicans want in their standard-bearer is a crude, swaggering bully of the sort we all remember from schoolyards may be loathsome, but it isn’t wrong. What is questionable is his thesis that Republicans would prefer a crude, swaggering bully who isn’t a felon. The truth is that the Republican base is so off-base that Trump’s very criminality is seen as a virtue by a sizable segment of Republicans.

And the Republican contenders for president know it. No candidate with a likelihood of obtaining the GOP nomination will be caught saying what would have been a no-brainer in times past: It really would be good if the president of the United States were not a criminal, all other things being equal.

Trump’s less serious challengers are little better. Former Vice President Mike Pence, who showed real principle on Jan. 6, seems to have decided that once was enough. Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who said that Trump was “everything a governor doesn’t want in a president” before happily accepting a position in his cabinet, has ricocheted between distancing herself from Trump and prostrating herself before him. “I don’t think he’s going to be in the picture. I don’t think he can. He’s fallen so far,” Haley said about The Boss after Jan. 6. But nine months later, she was kissing his ring. “He’d has the ability to get strong people elected,” she gushed. “He has the ability to move the ball, and I hope he continues to do that.” Senator Tim Scott, a recent entrant into the race, has blamed Democrats for inciting the violence on Jan. 6. “The one person I don’t blame is President Trump,” he said.

It’s quite a crew the GOP has assembled. It is, however, one which is serving up what its voters want to see served up.

Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer and former U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission

Now it is the Republicans’ turn for a field day. Hours before the release of reports by the Justice Department’s Inspector General and the U.S. Office of Special Counsel detailing her arrogant spree of rule-breaking and law-breaking, United States Attorney for the District of Massachusetts Rachael Rollins announced that she would be resigning.

The reports documented a series of violations of the Hatch Act – the federal criminal statute prohibiting one in Rollins’ position from using her office for partisan political purposes – as well as ethical rules and the law making it a federal crime to knowingly make false statements under oath. Rollins had committed them all, and with a sense of privilege that made her a poster child for what a federal prosecutor should not be.

It’s the Republicans’ turn to spotlight a disgrace, and the Democrats’ turn, evidently, to attempt to whitewash it. Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas had loudly warned about President Biden’s nomination of Rollins to the powerful U.S. Attorney post, pointing out that she demonstrably lacked the temperament and judgment to wield federal prosecutorial power.

She had credibly been alleged to have used her position as a local district attorney to bully a motorist and had threatened a reporter who’d had the temerity to ask her about it. “Get out of here!” she reportedly snarled. “You know what I’ll do? I’ll call the police on you and make an allegation. Rantings of a white woman. I swear to God, I’m dead serious. I will find your name. I will have you arrested.”

In his letter to Biden transmitting his report on Rollins’ leaking of confidential Justice Department information in order to help her friend defeat a public official Rollins wanted defeated as well as her insistence on attending a Democratic National Committee fundraiser she had been advised not to attend, the Special Counsel called Rollins’ conduct “among the most egregious transgressions of the (Hatch) Act” his office had ever seen. He described Rollins’ practice of secretly leaking Justice Department information to service her own personal agenda “an extraordinary abuse of her authority, (one which) threatens to erode public confidence in the integrity of federal law enforcement actions.”

But that wasn’t all. When the Inspector General interviewed Rollins about what she had done, she lied. Under oath. Repeatedly.

Rollins has splattered egg all over the faces of prominent Democrats who, like everyone else in the progressive establishment, swooned over her, too intimidated by her backers to acknowledge she was unfit to be U.S. Attorney. “She has the values, the vision and the courage,” gushed Sen. Elizabeth Warren at the self-congratulatory, “pay-attention-to-me” extravaganza Rollins threw for herself for her swearing-in. Sen. Ed Markey, Rollins’ other sponsor, blamed the debacle on the president. “We sent the names over to the Biden White House for them to do the vetting,” backpedaled Markey last week, “so we were reliant upon the White House vetting.”

Nor has the Justice Department covered itself in glory. The Inspector General referred his findings that Rollins had deliberately lied under oath to the department in order for it to consider criminal charges. It did so on December 16, 2022. By January 7, 2023, the Department had already declined prosecution. That’s all of 18 days of careful consideration, including Christmas, New Year’s and weekends.

Congressional Republicans will use L’affaire Rollins to blacken those who demand that Trump and his felonious friends be prosecuted, invoking the kid gloves treatment of Rollins. They will say that “what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.” This will come precisely when the Justice Department will need all of the credibility and public confidence it can muster to prosecute Trump, the most dangerous domestic threat to our democracy the country has ever faced.

Jeff Robbins is a longtime columnist for the Boston Herald, writing on politics, national security, human rights and the Mideast.

But it got a boost last month, when a subpoena issued jointly by Senate Budget Committee Chairman Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Ranking Member Charles Grassley (R-IA) forced into daylight a transparent attempt by banking giant Credit Suisse to abruptly terminate an investigation that was in the process of reinforcing its reputation for scandal. The investigation had already uncovered new evidence that Credit Suisse had actively, ardently serviced high-ranking Nazi leaders while Hitler was in power, facilitated the Nazis’ retention of assets plundered from their victims and helped Nazis escape prosecution after the war.

Thanks to Whitehouse and Grassley, the Budget Committee issued its first subpoena since 1991, compelling the handover of a report prepared by two prominent investigators hired by Credit Suisse in 2021 in order to placate its critics. Those investigators were suddenly axed last year, when they unearthed additional evidence that the bank, long known to have been a FON (Friend of the Nazis), was even worse than previously understood. The bank not only sacked the two investigators, former federal prosecutor Neil Barofsky and former U.S. Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism Ira Forman, but blocked the report they had prepared before being fired from being published.

Because of the Congressional subpoena, that document, entitled “Report of the Independent Ombudsman and Independent Advisor to Credit Suisse,” was turned over and has now been made public. It is yet another indictment of Credit Suisse, not just because of the new disclosures of its hand-in-glove relationship with Hitler’s murderers during the war and long afterward but for the patently obstructionist moves it made to prevent those disclosures from seeing daylight.

Credit Suisse had professed to come clean about is role facilitating Nazi war crimes after a number of investigations in the 1990s shined light on its historic guilt. As the report now made public states, those investigations, while limited, incomplete and impeded in various ways, “uncovered significant bodies of information about how some Swiss banks, especially that era’s large banks, including Credit Suisse, assisted in exploiting the victims of the Holocaust; retained assets belonging to Holocaust  victims and their heirs, and supported the economic foundations of the Nazi regime.”

Several years ago, however, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a human rights organization named after the famed Holocaust survivor who devoted decades to documenting the Holocaust’s atrocities and the actions of those who committed or enabled them, presented Credit Suisse with information that the bank had not in fact engaged in a complete reckoning – either to itself or to the world. The Center informed the bank that there was significant additional evidence that it had financially supported Nazis in their escape to Argentina after 1945, and safeguarded the funds of such individuals, and  benefited from the accounts of other Nazis whose identities it had not previously disclosed. There was evidence of what the report’s authors euphemistically call “lack of candor” on the bank’s part.

This “lack of candor” paled next to the bank’s termination of the investigation it had agreed to undertake after the Wiesenthal Center produced its evidence. Its new management claimed that there was no need for the investigators to complete their work. There is a distinct, and distinctly unpleasant, odor to Credit Suisse’s reversal. To their credit, Senators Whitehouse and Grassley have not only forced the disclosure of the report the bank sought to hide, but extracted promises to follow up on the investigators’ work.

It remains to be seen whether Credit Suisse will act honorably. If it does, it will be a refreshing departure from its historical record.

Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer and former U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission

She knows the drill. There is a university security guy who must have had a Golden as a boy, because he waits for her every week, and before the hatchback is open he is out of his car and heading over, calling “Charlie! I missed you!” The fellow just turned 50, but you’d never know it by the way he gets on the ground in the parking lot, his face glued to the dog’s until order can be restored.

Down the sidewalk Charlie goes with her tail wagging over the familiarity of it all, students streaming over to ask if they can pet her. Charlie makes it clear not only that they can but that they’d better, mushing her head between the legs of everyone who stops, besotted with everyone as everyone is besotted with her. It takes some time to get down the street. When she finally does, Charlie recognizes the receptionists in the lobby of the political science department, and, weeping with emotion, takes her leash in her mouth as the sidewalk scene is repeated.

Here is what the faculty and the students in the department know by now: some dogs are wary, some prone to agitation, some diffident. Charlie is a lover, and she loves every human being who so much as makes a move in her direction, unreservedly and, frankly, indiscriminately. And if you don’t make a move in her direction, she will assume it was an oversight.

Charlie proceeds to “office-surf,” trotting down the hall to visit every faculty member who happened to leave their office door open. It’s clear from the tail movement that she expects her arrival to be the best thing that could have happened to everyone concerned.

On to class. If the idea is that Charlie’s  presence can help create a warm setting, Charlie embraces the mission with gusto. She makes the rounds of the students before picking a (seemingly) random spot on the floor, usually on someone’s feet, and eventually falls into a deep sleep, the stuffed animal between her paws and in her mouth. Every once in a while someone will get up and come over to stroke her. This seems to please Charlie, but it is equally possible that by this point she’s oblivious. Two and a half hours later, dog and friends say their goodbyes until the following week.

Last week U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an “Advisory on Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation,” reporting that even before COVID, 50% of American adults experienced significant feelings of loneliness. There is, he said, “an underappreciated public health crisis that has harmed individual and societal health.” According to Murthy, more than one in five adults are living with mental illness – and more than one third of all young adults do.

As if there were much doubt about it, study after study has shown that interacting with animals decreases stress, lowers blood pressure, reduces loneliness, increases feelings of social support and just simply improves moods. From the National Institute of Health to the American Psychiatric Association, the data is clear.

Charlie is not what you’d call “data-driven”. But she knows who she likes, and that’s everyone. They don’t call them man’s best friend for nothing.

Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer and former U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission

Writer E. Jean Carroll has sued Trump for battery and defamation. The battery claim is based on Carroll’s charge that Trump sexually assaulted her; the alleged defamation arises from Trump’s accusations that she is lying. There is really only one question that the jury which began hearing testimony last week will have to answer: did Trump rape Carroll or didn’t he?

Carroll provided a highly detailed account of what she maintains Trump did: where she was, what transpired in the minutes preceding the alleged assault and precisely what she contends occurred in a dressing room in the lingerie department of a fashionable New York department store.

Trump’s lawyers have a few arrows in their quiver. An event as shocking and traumatic as the one Carroll describes, they argue, would be sufficiently memorable that the victim would remember when it occurred – if not the date, then at least the week, if not the week then at least the month, and if not the month then at least the year. Carroll cannot do this, and there will be jurors for whom that’s a problem.

Then there’s the evidence of the potential motivations for Carroll’s allegation, which Trump’s team hopes will make jurors doubt her. Carroll has made few bones about despising Trump and opposing his presidential candidacies. But it isn’t hard to imagine why the victim of a violent sexual assault might have a misgiving or two about electing the man who committed the assault the leader of the free world.

Then there’s Carroll’s admission that she hoped that her charge that Trump raped her would help her sell her book. Her comeback that it unfortunately did not turn out that way didn’t exactly dilute the point.

Trump argues that it’s odd that Carroll would stay silent as long as she did about the assault she asserts took place. His problem is that it isn’t. There are obvious reasons for sexual assault victims to stay silent for decades, if not a lifetime, and it happens all the time.  And where the man on the other end is tremendously wealthy, with battalions of lawyers at his disposal regularly deployed by him to file frivolous lawsuits for sport, why Carroll would have chosen to keep private what occurred is not difficult to understand.

If Carroll’s lawyers have some minor headaches, Trump’s have migraines, beginning with their client’s refusal even to show up to tell the jury that he denies Carroll’s testimony. This isn’t a case of “She said, he said,” so much as one of “She said, and he headed for the hills.” It is reasonable for jurors to infer that if Trump isn’t willing to appear to deny Carroll’s claim, there’s a reason, and not one that reflects favorably on his case.

The cross-examination of Trump would have been a bloodbath, and the bloodletting would have gone on for quite a long while. For starters, jurors will be shown the infamous 2005 “Access Hollywood” tape, wherein a decade after Carroll claims Trump decided he could do whatever he wanted to do to her, Trump bragged that that is what he had always done, and he was damned proud of it. This is Trump himself on Trump assaulting women as he pleased: “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything….Grab ‘em by the (private parts). You can do anything.”

There’s a Latin term that every first year law student learns about evidence that is self-explanatory: “Res ipsa loquitur,” or “The thing speaks for itself.” Coupled with Carroll’s  testimony and Trump’s absence from the courtroom in which he might have been expected to defend himself if Carroll’s  charge was untrue, Trump’s own braggadocio seems likely to speak for itself. And if it does, the former president is headed for an unpleasant verdict.

Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer and former U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission

Israel is one issue on which a combination of ingrained hatreds and an addiction to blurring facts encourages fictions. Sixteen straight weeks of massive pro-democracy demonstrations on Israeli streets have spotlighted the noxious coalition government that presently prevails, one dominated by some truly repugnant figures and led by a Prime Minister willing to sacrifice Israeli democracy to save his own skin.

As usual, however, when it comes to Israel, distinctions are often disfavored. The scope and size of the protests are evidence of Israel’s essential character, evidence that is unwelcome for those determined to despise it. The same holds for its multicultural, pluralistic society, which does not produce a citizenry in lockstep. It is a society, moreover, which is densely packed with social justice warriors.

A case in point is Mouna Maroun,  Professor of Neurobiology, Vice President and Dean of Research and Development at the University of Haifa. A dynamic woman with a ready smile, Maroun grew up in an Arab village just outside of Haifa, a city known for its heterogeneity. Her father’s family came from Lebanon, and Maroun recalls with a laugh that while her childhood friends dreamed of becoming pop stars, she dreamed of becoming Israel’s Ambassador to Lebanon.

Neither of Maroun’s parents even finished elementary school. “But I was lucky,” she says, “because they both believed that their four daughters should get higher education, and they did everything they could to make it happen.” Her father was able to provide the barest basics by running a small grocery store, and once a month bartered groceries so that Maroun, an avid reader from the outset, could get French lessons. She passed the University of Haifa campus every morning going from her village to her school, “dreaming that one day I would be one of its students.”

Maroun had no money and knew no Hebrew. “But the University provided us, the Arab students, with academic support that enabled me and many other Arabs to keep from  dropping out,” she recalled, “and to be able to continue our studies and succeed.”

Succeed she has. Fascinated by the brain, she proceed to earn a Bachelor’s Degree, Master’s Degree and Ph.D. from the University of Haifa, all in psychology. Her appointment as head of the Neurosciences Department made her the first Arab woman to head a university science department in Israel.

But her influence extends much further. Her emphasis on promoting Israeli Arabs in academia and in the sciences, in particular, is one of the reasons that the University has become an exemplar of diversity. Nearly half of its students are Israeli Arabs. Maroun’s awareness of how well-positioned she is to showcase opportunities and to help provide them is keen. “I am a minority within minorities,” she says. “ I am an Israeli, an Arab, a Christian, a Catholic Maronite and a woman.”

She helps lead a number of national commissions formed to lift Israeli Arabs further up the academic ladder. She is a ubiquitous presence in Israeli Arab communities, where she mentors, lectures, exhorts, pushes and prods. Once named among Israel’s fifty most influential women, she organizes partnerships with the Ministry of Education, the European Union and philanthropic foundations devoted to elevating those on the periphery.

“I was blessed to be born in Israel,” she says. “Israel is facing difficult times these days. But the University of Haifa is an island of sanity. It represents a real shared society, with a mosaic of different ethnic groups, which represents Israeli society.”

Maroun’s life is notable in more than one respect. Only one of them is a reminder that things are rarely as simple as they are portrayed.

Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer and former U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission

“And all the old songs. And nothing to lose.”

The bond between America and Ireland is a powerful one. It has been forged in part by the vibrant role Irish Americans have played in the building of this country, and also by the profound connection the 32 million Americans of Irish descent feel in their hearts for the land of their forebears, a connection that has not withered even approaching two centuries since the Irish started arriving in America in large numbers.

Anyone who visits Ireland and fails to feel the magic of the Irish is made of stone, and President Biden’s trip there last week placed Ireland’s magic on display. “Joe Biden’s big day out in Dublin was a joy,” wrote Miriam Lord, long time columnist for The Irish Times. And the joyousness appeared to go in both directions. The Irish were thrilled to see one of their own – 27,000 of them showed up to greet Biden outside St. Muredach’s Cathedral in Ballina, a town of 10,000 inhabitants. After all, Biden’s great-great-great grandfather set sail from Ireland to America in 1851. And that Ireland is dear to the president’s heart is not a secret.

Biden himself does not present as a joyous person, the successful politician’s broad grin to the contrary. It’s not that he’s morose, or a pessimist. But he has suffered a whole lot of loss. And he seems to feel that loss and the loss experienced by others much too keenly to ever look as though the shadows are very far off.

In Ireland, however, the president seemed rejuvenated, as though he were at home. Even the trip’s painful aspects seem cathartic. His visit to the Knock Shrine, the famous Roman Catholic pilgrimage site in County Mayo, was buoyed by an unplanned, emotional reunion with the local priest, who while assigned to the Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C. administered the last rites to Biden’s son Beau before he died of brain cancer in 2015. From there he went to a hospice he had dedicated when he was last in the country, where a plaque has been laid in memory of his late son.

Biden’s joy may have been in his homecoming and the obvious warmth the Irish have for him. But he took repeated opportunities to emphasize that America is itself the product of the industriousness and the perseverance, the spirit and the drive, of immigrants – of those who have left their homes all over the world to come here. They have given their all – including their children and grandchildren – to the continuing American experiment. From Africa, from Asia, from South and Central America, from Europe, immigrants refresh and refuel our country on an hourly basis. America’s not-so-secret weapon is the people who come here from other places.

“Just as I imagine their life in County Mayo,” the president said of the Irishmen who braved the frightening journey to America, “I can only imagine how hard it must have been to leave it all behind, to leave the only place they ever called home. They became the untiring backbone of America’s progress as a nation, even as they endured the discrimination and they were denied opportunity.”

This immigrant story of America is not one to be sugarcoated. But it does remain one to be honored. It is yet something else that redounds to Joe Biden’s credit that he understands this, and understands it to his core.

Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer and former U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission

His confirmation was marred by a sweeping under the rug of compelling evidence that while he was head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Thomas had engaged in repeated acts of crude sexual harassment. On the nation’s highest court for almost one-third of a century, his lack of anything resembling intellectual engagement has been the only notable thing about him. Even to call Thomas an ideologue would seem to elevate him, because the term presupposes that his votes are the thoughtful product of ideology rather than the rapid determination of which political “team” the parties to any case before the Court seem to be on.

However, it’s one thing for a Supreme Court Justice to be intellectually languid and reflexively, implacably partisan. It’s another to emit the strong appearance of a conflict of interest and then to affirmatively worsen it.

Thomas’ wife Ginni, a longtime and, one may fairly say, rabidly right-wing lobbyist both for a living and as an avocation, was as zealous a proponent of Donald Trump’s “the-election-was-a-hoax” hoax as anyone not under federal indictment. The January 6th Committee unearthed some 21 texts from her to Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows exhorting Team Trump to overturn Joe Biden’s election to keep Trump in power. “Help The Great President stand firm, Mark!!!” she implored Meadows. “You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice,” she wrote in another text. “The majority knows Biden and the left is (sic) attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”

Referring to disgraced and disciplined crackpot Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, Thomas wrote “Sounds like Sidney and her team are getting inundated with evidence of fraud. Make a plan. Release the Kraken and save us from the left taking America down.” She also emailed Arizona state legislators urging them to impanel a phony pro-Trump slate of electors after Biden carried the state.

Justice Thomas was legally required to recuse himself from any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned, or if he knew his wife had “an interest [in the proceeding] that could be substantially affected by [its] actions.” But in February, 2021, when the Supreme Court voted to refuse to hear Trump’s challenge to the 2020 presidential election, Thomas not only refused to recuse himself from voting. He dissented, criticizing his colleagues’ decision as “befuddling.”

Now it emerges that Thomas has accepted (along with his wife) hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of lavish trips on private planes and yachts from conservative mega-donor Harlan Crow, and failed to disclose any of this, year after lucky year, for over 20 years, in violation of Supreme Court rules. Crow has been a board member of the American Enterprise Institute since 1996, during which time the Institute has frequently filed friend-of-the-court briefs with the Court on which Crow’s friend Clarence Thomas sits. Just to make things more optically appealing, Crow turns out to be an avid collector of Nazi memorabilia, including a signed copy of Adolf Hitler’s manifesto, “Mein Kampf.” For his part, Thomas assures us that he consulted with unnamed associates who in turn assured him that violating the express terms of Supreme Court ethics rules was okay.

It seems pointless to have Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts investigate a member of his own Court. But the rules seem to have been flouted in a way which further damages the Court’s credibility. One hates to add another investigation to Attorney General Merrick Garland’s plate. But looking the other way once again when it comes to Clarence Thomas doesn’t seem like an option.

Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer and former U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission.