Judge Roy Altman speaks up... (UPDATED)

 ...and I'm very grateful he is doing so in defense of Israel and against the terrorists.  John Byrne detailed his UM speech and article in this post.  This time, he writes a total and justified smack down of Yale professor Zareena Grewal in this National Review article, which starts this way:

On October 7, just hours after Hamas terrorists invaded Israel and slaughtered some 1,400 Jews — including women, children, and 260 college-age kids who were dancing at a music festival for peace­ — Zareena Grewal (a professor in the ethnicity, race, and migration program and the American studies department at Yale College) had this to say on social media: “Settlers are not civilians. This is not hard.” There’s already a petition seeking Grewal’s termination that’s been making its way around the Yale alumni community (of which I’m a proud member). But that petition — which focuses mainly (and rightly) on Grewal’s support for the gruesome murders of toddlers and octogenarians — misses a more obvious point: Grewal is just wrong on the law and the facts.

Grewal’s underlying premise, after all, is that the Israelis who were butchered on October 7 were interlopers (“occupiers,” to use the fashionable term), living in some illegal settlement on Arab lands. But the people who were slaughtered were not settlers (and, even if they were, they weren’t legitimate military targets under any legal regime I’m aware of). On the contrary, under international law, they had just as much right to be where they were as an American does in New York City. 

And finishes with:

Just hours after Hamas terrorists threw live grenades into bunkers full of terrified Jewish families, Grewal tweeted something I haven’t yet mentioned: “It’s been,” she gloated, retweeting a news video about the onslaught, “such an extraordinary day!”

Here’s the point: If Grewal (and people like her) subscribe to Hamas’s genocidal mission statement, they probably shouldn’t be serving as role models for our college-age children. But even if they don’t subscribe to Hamas’s hateful charter — if they’re just wrong about the basic facts — then they shouldn’t be teaching our children, the custodians of America’s future.

I've heard people ask whether a federal judge should be speaking out on issues like this.  The answer is absolutely YES.  This isn't an issue that will come before Judge Altman.  And it's important for smart and respected people to be speaking out against antisemitism.  Thank you, Judge.

UPDATE -- I should also thank Judge Milton Hirsch for speaking up.  Here's his Constitutional Calendar email, which is so powerful and moving.  I share it in its entirety:

(This Constitutional Calendar item is associated with December 7.  But given the present crisis -- given that scarcely three weeks have passed since bloodthirsty Hamas terrorists murdered and kidnapped innocent Israeli men, women, and children -- I'm distributing it today.)

The Constitution acknowledges the existence, and the applicability to American government, of international law.  See, e.g., Art I § 8 (Congress is given power to “define and punish . . . offences against the law of nations”); Art. VI (supreme law of the land includes the Constitution, laws, “and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States”).  Of course at the time of the founding, international law, apart from treaties and the works of some noted treatise-writers, was almost exclusively customary.

But that is not to say that it was not law.  Certain principles were universally, or all-but-universally, accepted.  One such principle was that a nation at peace with another, seeking to wage war against that other, was obliged to declare war before commencing hostilities.  In ancient Greece Thucydides bitterly condemned the Thebans, allies of Sparta, for launching a surprise attack against an ally of Athens without a declaration of war.

On December 7, 1941, the Empire of Japan launched a devastating attack against the United States at Pearl Harbor.  Over 2,400 Americans were killed, and about 1,200 wounded.  Of the eight battleships in the Pacific fleet, all were damaged and four sunk.  (Six were later returned to service and went on to fight in the war.  The USS Arizona, marked by a memorial to all those who died, lies at the bottom of the harbor still.)

Japan's written declaration of war was not conveyed till the following day -- after the attack had been completed.  The untimely Japanese declaration of war cites Japan’s imagined grievances against the United States and Great Britain, claiming that by declining to provide Japan with oil, steel, and other natural resources, the U.S. and the U.K. had wrongfully interfered with Japan’s “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” – an Orwellian term for Japan’s brutal conquest of Manchuria, and its plans for similarly brutal treatment of Korea and all of southeast Asia.  

The United Nations did not then exist, so there was no Secretary General Antonio Guterres to embrace Japan’s declaration and to bloviate that the attack on Pearl Harbor “did not happen in a vacuum.”

Of course nothing – absolutely nothing – happens in a vacuum.  Our parents and grandparents, however, weren’t foolish enough to concern themselves with such irrelevancies.  Having been savagely attacked in violation of international law, America declared war on Japan, and committed its entire strength to the war effort.  There was no prattle about a “proportional response,” or about a “ceasefire.”  Any such prattle would have been dismissed for what it was.

The Japanese target at Pearl Harbor was a military target: America's Pacific fleet was all that stood between Japan and Asian conquest.  The attack of December 7 was not directed against civilians, and of all casualties only 68 civilians died in that attack.  The Japanese force did not kidnap hostages, rape women (and then post videos of the rapes on social media), or slaughter children.

The United States fought for, and demanded, unconditional surrender; and the war was not over till that surrender took place on the deck of the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.  Consistent with international law, then and now, America used any and all forms of force at its disposal to protect its homeland, its people, and its armed forces.  Consistent with international law, then and now, every nation, when the outlaw's knife is at its throat, has the right to do the same.

Every nation.  Then and now.