Sunday: Hili dialogue

Welcome to Sabbath for goyische cats: it’s April 27, 2025 and we’re coming on to May.  It’s National Gummi Bear Day, a confection I used to love but no longer hanker for (I discovered them as a teenager in Germany). They were created in Germany in 1922. Here’s how they’re made:

It’s also Babe Ruth Day, the day in 1947 that the Bambino, fatally ill with cancer, was honored at Yankee Stadium.  He died the next year.  It’s also International Crow and Raven Appreciation Day, World Tapir Day, National Prime Rib Day, and National Devil Dog Day.

Here’s a short video on the Bambino and his day (you can hear his speech here).

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 27 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The WSJ reports that Trump and Zelensky finally met. It was brief, and occasioned by Pope Francis’s funeral, but here’s the latest (archived here):

In their first meeting since a shouting match in the Oval Office, President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky sat face-to-face on simple chairs on marble floors near the Baptistery Chapel of St. Peter’s Basilica.

The two leaders were among 54 heads of state and 12 reigning monarchs who gathered in Rome Saturday for the funeral of Pope Francis. For Trump, who is at the center of an escalating global trade conflict and fraught negotiations to end two wars, the trip was bound to lead to some tense encounters.

Zelensky described it as a good meeting. “We discussed a lot one-on-one,” he wrote on X shortly after. Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, said the meeting was “very productive.”

The two leaders, looking earnest, sat close together without any staff or interpreters near them and spoke for 15 minutes below a painting of the baptism of Jesus. French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer greeted them briefly.

Zelensky said they discussed a full and unconditional cease-fire as well as conditions for a lasting peace. He added it had the potential to become a “historic” meeting and thanked Trump.

Lord, what could have happened in 15 minutes? I do not have a good feeling about it.  But at least Trump continues to criticize Putin, going after him for firing at Kiev.

Trump later criticized Russian President Vladimir Putin in a post on social media, threatening to hit Moscow with further sanctions. “There was no reason for Putin to be shooting missiles into civilian areas, cities and towns, over the last few days. It makes me think that maybe he doesn’t want to stop the war, he’s just tapping me along, and has to be dealt with differently,” he said.

Yes, that sounds about right: Putin, who doesn’t care how many Russian or North Korean soldiers die in the battle for Ukraine, doesn’t want a cease-fire unless it includes a juicy slice of eastern Ukraine.  And I can’t imagine the war ending without that happening–unless Putin wants all of Ukraine. Nobody seems able or willing to stop him, and that, of course, will hearten China in its hunger for Taiwan.

*Two more deportation nightmares, including a U.S. citizen, a girl born here, are in play. The bolding is mine, as ICE’s behavior outrages me:

 Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have in recent days deported a Cuban-born mother of a 1-year-old girl, separating them indefinitely, and in another case a 2-year-old girl who is a U.S. citizen along with her Honduran-born mother, their lawyers say.

Both cases raise questions about who is being deported, and why, and come amid a battle in federal courts over whether President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown has gone too far and too quickly at the expense of fundamental rights.

Lawyers in the two cases described how their clients were arrested at routine check-ins at ICE offices, given virtually no opportunity to speak with lawyers or their family members and then deported within two or three days.

A federal judge in Louisiana raised questions about the deportation of the 2-year-old girl, saying the government had not proven that it had done so properly.

The American Civil Liberties Union, National Immigration Project and several other allied groups said in a statement that that case and another in New Orleans that involves deporting children who are U.S. citizens are a “shocking – although increasingly common -– abuse of power.”

Lawyers for the girl’s father insisted he wanted the girl to remain with him in the U.S., while ICE contended the mother had wanted the girl to be deported with her to Honduras, claims that weren’t fully vetted by U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty in Louisiana.

Doughty in a Friday order scheduled a hearing on May 16 “in the interest of dispelling our strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process,” he wrote.

The Honduran-born mother was arrested Tuesday along with the 2-year-old girl and her 11-year-old Honduran-born sister during a check-in appointment at an ICE office in New Orleans. Both the mother and 11-year-old girl apparently had outstanding deportation orders. The family lived in Baton Rouge.

. . .In Florida, meanwhile, a Cuban-born woman who is the mother of a 1-year-old girl and the wife of a U.S. citizen was detained at a scheduled check-in appointment at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Tampa, her lawyer said Saturday.

Heidy Sánchez was held without any communication and flown to Cuba two days later. She is still breastfeeding her daughter, who suffers from seizures, her lawyer, Claudia Cañizares, said.

Cañizares said she tried to file paperwork with ICE to contest the deportation Thursday morning but ICE refused to accept it, saying Sánchez was already gone, although Cañizares said she doesn’t think that was true.

In the case of the girl/citizen, it needs to be made clear who the girl wants to be with, and really, is a two-year-old competent to make that decision? Nope, so just send her away with her mother. In the Cuban case, it’s not clear why the mother was deported, but separating a mother and 1-year-old child nearly instantly is simply cruel. Both of these cases involve depriving the deported from legal help, and one involves deporting a young U.S. citizen (the father seems to be an undocumented immigrant.  The solution to all of these is to have a legal hearing and adhere to the motto: “no deportation with hearings and legal assistance to those who have been detaiined.”  The cruelty and illegality of ICE’s behavior is beyond belief. It falls at Trump’s doorstep, and I don’t think this is what the American people wanted when they figured a curb on illegal immigration into their votes last November.

*UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees, a beehive of terrorism and anti-Israel propaganda, has been stripped of its legal immunity by the Trump Administration. This means that Americans can now sue it, and they’re doing that already.

The U.S. Department of Justice told the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on Thursday that the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees has been stripped of its legal immunity.

The decision was taken as part of a case filed last year in which families of victims of the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, sued UNRWA for its ties to terrorism. Israel has said that at least 18 UNRWA staff members took part directly in the assault across the Gaza border into southern Israel.

The plaintiffs also allege long-term fraud and corruption in handling financial aid routed through UNRWA into the Gaza Strip—$1 billion of which critics say has fallen into the hands of Hamas and other terror groups.

“The complaint in this case alleges atrocious crimes committed by Hamas on Oct. 7, and its factual allegations, taken as true, detail how UNRWA played a significant role in those heinous offenses,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York wrote to the U.S. district judge Analisa Torres.

“Previously, the government expressed the view that certain immunities shielded UNRWA from having to answer those allegations in American courts,” per the filing. “The government has since re-evaluated that position and now concludes that UNRWA is not immune from this litigation. Nor are the bulk of other defendants.”

The claim by the U.S. attorney’s office added that UNRWA is not legally considered an affiliated organ of the United Nations since it was formed and continues to hold its mandate as a result of a resolution by the U.N. General Assembly. The U.S. Justice Department said the General Assembly may have lacked the authority to create the agency.

. . .If found not to have immunity, UNRWA, its leaders and employees—and perhaps the United Nations at large—could be ordered to pay large compensation to victims and their families.

Stripping diplomatic immunity from UNRWA might also call into question the future of U.N. headquarters in New York and could impact the Knesset’s decision, effective this past January, to ban UNRWA from operating within Israeli territory.

The UN disagrees, of course, but I’d be delighted if UNRWA, an organ of hatred and propaganda, were put out of business, and its task bundled in with the other UN refugee organization (Palestine is the only territory to have its own refugee organization, and you’ve probably read my posts on UNRWA’s unsavory activities.

*Andrew Sullivan is a Catholic, of course, and if you’re nonreligious you may find his latest piece, “Why I loved Pope Francis,” a bit cloying (The subtitle is “Yes, love is the right word”) but I read it because I pay for it. I know very little about the man save that he’s the prime purvey of a widespread delusion but was also humble, abstemious, and apparently devoted to uplifting individual humans.  I don’t know from Popes, but he seemed to be a decent specimen of the genre.  And of course Sullivan loved him. A few quotes:

Now, here was a man who referred to himself as merely a “bishop for the diocesan community of Rome” and who asked us, the faithful, to pray to God for him. He wore simple vestments, eschewing the intricate and fabulous outfits of his predecessor, remarking as he turned them down: “The Carnival is over.” After the flinty Pole and the prissy German, here, at last, was a warm Italian again, like John XXIII — even though he was from Argentina.

His voice was clear but quiet and softly pitched. And then, rather than assert papal authority as Benedict had done so often and so rigidly, he sought a simple moral authority — by embracing the grotesquely disfigured, listening intently to small children, washing the feet of male and female prisoners, eschewing the Papal palace for a simple apartment, and inviting transgender men and women on the streets to lunch with him in the Vatican.

Faith for Francis was not rigidity, it was not always certain, and it was not words. It was a way of life, of giving, of loving, of emptying oneself to listen to God without trying to force a conclusion — of discernment, as the Jesuits like to say. . .

. . .The church needs doctrine, it needs an infallible magisterium, and those who want this to suddenly change are guilty of a category error. Francis didn’t change an iota of doctrine, to some “progressive” dismay. But he did something more important. He reminded us that doctrine without love is what Jesus rejected.

And he insisted that faith without doubt was not faith at all:

In this quest to seek and find God in all things there is still an area of uncertainty. There must be. If one has the answers to all the questions — that is the proof that God is not with him.

For those who seek in Catholicism a psychological, intellectual, and even political anchor, Francis was maddening. He told them not to be so certain. He told them there was room for dialogue, that the clergy were too full of themselves, and that there were no areas where conversation could not happen. There was divine truth and then there was the mess of human existence, and the church was about where the two meet, denying neither, a field-hospital full of groans and blood, not a pristine, distant, well-kept Cathedral. After the authoritarian papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, it felt as if window had opened and the fetid air banished.

Sullivan said he almost left Catholicism because of its pervasive scandals, but stayed for two reasons: “AIDS and his belief in the tenets of Catholicism: “Because I never lost my faith in Jesus or the Gospels or the Church itself, regardless of its all-too-human priesthood. In fact, I had found faith indispensable to surviving the devastating young death I saw all around me in my twenties and thirties and also faced myself.”

Faith needs doctrine, of course. But it also needs doctrinal perspective — and the obsessive focus on relatively minor issues, like communion for faithful but divorced Catholics rather than, say, the far harder commands to love one’s enemy or to renounce all wealth, is more neurosis than religion. In fact, for faith to live in and respond with new language to modernity, it needs the space Francis has created to breathe again, to get away from petty certainties and doctrinal spats, to discern and embrace the unruly freedom of wherever God seems to be leading us.

And the very person of Francis showed to many, far beyond the ranks of Catholics, that in seeking meaning, the weird, strange figure of Jesus of Nazareth still beckons us, is still essential, still there. Francis showed us this meaning, as Jesus did, not by what he said so much as how he lived. Religion, as Oakeshott put it,

Well, I’m sorry to say that Jesus is not essential for me, and I doubt whether he even existed as a person, much less God made Man.  It always puzzles me when Sullivan professes to accept all of these unevidenced tenets of a rather rigid faith, and he’s never explicit in what tenets he does believe. The essay shows, as always, that Sullivan is a smart and eloquent man. And this makes me even more puzzled, because the part of his rational faculties that keeps him from committing his life ot what is likely a total falsehood seems to have disappeared.

*The latest in the Spring, 2025 series of Futile Pro-Palestinian demonstrations was at the City College of New York (CCNY) campus in Harlem.

CUNY public safety officers and the NYPD quickly quashed an attempt by students to establish a ‘Liberated Zone’ on the quad of City College of New York on Thursday afternoon.

A group of several dozen pro-Palestinian protesters on the campus announced they’d set up a “liberated zone” around 2 p.m. but were swiftly confronted by CUNY officers who forced them out of the area, dousing some in pepper spray. At least one student was arrested, an NYPD spokesperson later confirmed.

One video posted by a photojournalist Marcos Gabriel Quiñones showed a CUNY officer waving the pepper spray at the crowd, which also appeared to waft onto an adjacent public safety officer who covered his face, backing away from the students.

One CUNY undergraduate student named Aria, who declined to give her name and age because of worries about retaliation from administrators, said she’d hopped a fence to avoid the cloud.

“They began indiscriminately pepper spraying us,” she said.

Yes, it’s protest seasons again, and you can get an idea of the scene by watching this tweet:

Once again the Jews at work, Jews in class, Jews studying for exams while the future baristas of America are clogging up the quad playing their drums and singing their songs. In ten years they’ll be posting “the Jews control everything” with zero sense of personal responsibility

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