This past week’s “blood libel” comment from Sarah Palin brought forth the seeming unlikeliest of defenders, Alan Dershowitz, who, in an exclusive to Big Government, defended the former governor’s comments from her obsessed detractors.

Conservatives are justifiably pleased that their erstwhile foe has become their ally on this. They think that maybe the spirit of civil in our politics really is happening and we need look no further than Professor Dershowitz.

But to those of us who know Professor Dershowitz well, it is par for the course for Professor Dershowitz is a national treasure. He is perhaps America’s last honest liberal – and a genuine friend of America’s only real ally in the Middle East, Israel. I hope what I am writing here should finally put to rest any lingering doubts that conservatives have about him.

A couple of examples will illustrate my point:

• For years Professor Dershowitz has been a one-man publishing house in defense of Israel, hand writing (yes, really) the impressive The Case for Israel, The Case for Peace: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Can Be Resolved, The Case Against Israel’s Enemies: Exposing Jimmy Carter and Others Who Stand in the Way of Peace, and The Case for Moral Clarity: Israel, Hamas and Gaza, each of which is a must read for Americans struggling to make sense of the Middle East. In each, and in innumerable op-eds, with a prosecutor’s panache, Dershowitz brings the fight to the increasingly unhinged enemies of the Jewish state. Professor Dershowitz defends Israel from the left – as a secular, multi-cultural, human rights-respecting, gay-friendly, technologically-advanced democracy in a land where militant extremists run oil fiefdoms masquerading states.

• Dershowitz endorsed my friend, Joel Pollak, a Big Government contributor, former Dershowitz R.A., and one-time candidate for congress, over the reliably socialist, Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky. Dershowitz even went so far as to fundraise with Joel, while Schakowsky, to her shame, fundraised with the Jew-hating Helen Thomas.

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“The denial of the possibility that there is an endpoint [to the welfare state] is crucial to the liberal enterprise,” says Dr. William Voegeli, author of the new book, Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State and a visiting scholar at Claremont McKenna College’s Henry Salvatori Center for the Study of Individual Freedom in the Modern World.

In this Reason.tv interview, Voegeli traces recent federal government expansions to President Franklin Roosevelt’s introduction of a “second Bill of Rights” that included the right to housing, education, and medical care.

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March 31^st is Cesar Chávez Day. In California and six other states, government offices are closed. At my college, Claremont McKenna and the Claremont Colleges, we celebrate Cesar Chavez for one full month. (It is widely known that even white liberals tire after that much self-flagellation – although how much they can take is still a matter of dispute.)

If that month long celebration seems excessive, it is because it is. If history is any indication, however, it may not be that long until all Americans must submit to Chavez Day because Barack Obama, as a presidential candidate, thought that it ought to be a federal holiday.

It’s tough to tell how much Obama was pandering to a certain wing of the Hispanic vote and how much he sincerely believes in the struggle of La Raza, but I submit to you, dear reader, that Cesar Chavez Day ought not to have been a holiday in the first place.

There are several myths about Chávez that deserve explanation, clarification, and explication, but the most pressing of these myths is that Chavez helped Latino fruit pickers get a living wage. He did no such thing.

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Many of my friends are currently unemployed or underemployed. They graduated from Claremont McKenna, one of the finest colleges in America, but have found it tough to get jobs.

But one alum from our college, Jordan Barab, CMC ‘75, is making it tougher still in his capacity as acting head of the Office Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

But with Barab, we have the opportunity to not only examine the implication of his appointment but also surmise what he will do and what he has already one in office by carefully considering his and OSHA’s history.

During the past eight years, Barab spent his time excoriating the Bush administration’s laissez faire labor policies from his blog, Confined Space. Left unexamined, of course, is whether those same labor policies account for us having one of the lowest unemployment levels in U.S. history during the Bush years.

Among other things, Barab argued that the Bush administration was refusing to enforce OSHA regulations and statutes that allegedly would have helped workplace safety. He published scary (and utterly unfounded) statistics pushed by organized labor:

More than 15 workers are killed every day on the job in this country and a worker becomes injured or ill on the job every 2.5 seconds. The overwhelming majority of deaths, injuries and illnesses could have been easily prevented had the employers simply provided a safe workplace and complied with well-recognized OSHA regulations or other safe practices.

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Writer Jamaica Kincaid has a long tradition of embarrassing comments at my college, Claremont McKenna, where she is a professor of literature. Remember, though, before you insist on calling her Professor Kincaid, that she only has a high school degree.

Jamaica Kincaid

Her essay, A Small Place, is written about her native Antigua and attacks British civilization and capitalism itself. The most revealing selection from that essay? Here it is, from pages 36 to 37 as she is discussing that the white colonizer is to blame for the very corrupt government of Antigua.

You will forget your part in the whole setup, that bureaucracy is one of your inventions, that Gross National Product is one of your inventions, and all the laws that you know mysteriously favour you. Do you know why people like me are shy about being capitalists? Well, it’s because we, for as long as we have known you, were capital, like bales of cotton and sacks of sugar, and you were the commanding, cruel capitalists, and the memory of this is so strong, the experience so recent, that we can’t bring ourselves to embrace this idea that you think so much of. As for what we were like before we met you, I no longer care. No periods of time over my ancestors held sway, no documentation of complex civilizations, is any comfort to me. Even if I really came from people who were living like monkeys in trees, it was better to be that than what happened to me, what I became after I met you.

And so yes, she’s teaches writing at a college whose motto is “civilization prospers with commerce,” even though it looks like she’s in favor of neither.

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Imam Zaid Shakir came to speak at my school, Claremont McKenna, on December 9^th to respond to the “tragedy of Ft. Hood.” Rather than respond to the massacre of American servicemen, Shakir spent the evening indicting the United States – saying “we were born in genocide.” The reason for the Ft. Hood Massacre, according to Shakir? Not jihad or Islamic fundamentalism, but the “pervasiveness of violence in our society” and because of Americans’ “easy access to guns.”

Zaid Shakir – Final from The Claremont Conservative on Vimeo.

For those wondering who Mr. Shakir is, he’s the go-to expert on Islamic issues for the mainstream media. The New York Times describes him as a “leading intellectual light,” while rap scholar, Cornel West says “he is one of the towering principle [sic] voices not only in contemporary Islam, but in American society,” according to this biography.   Most recently, he was described by John Esposito as one of the “500 Most Influential Muslims.”

After comparing the massacres at Ft. Hood by Major Nidal Hassan to the Columbine killers and Maurice Clemmons, of Mike Huckabee pardon fame, Shakir said that the violence we have seen was not a “Muslim problem,” but a problem for everyone. You never quite know when someone will “snap.” [The following is extracted from a transcript from audio I took of the public lecture at my college.] (more…)