National Review highlights Katon Dawson

The campaign spot, a National Review blog, is posting a short interview with Katon Dawson, the SC Republican Party chairman and candidate for the Republican National Committee chair.

Dawson, who attributes the GOP’s recent troubles “to the party trying to compete with Democrats … in terms of spending,” thinks building party unity through grassroots initiatives is crucial.

To that end, he’s laid out Project 3141, which seeks to have a viable county party in every county in the US.

Port of Charleston to lose biggest customer

FITSNews highlights Maersk-Sealand’s announcement that it will pull out of the Port of Charleston by the end of 2010.

The Danish-based shipping company failed to reach an agreement with the S.C. State Ports Authority and members of the International Longshoremen’s Association. Maersk accounts for 25 percent of the container traffic to flow through the Port each year, FITS says.

The move is particularly ironic given that, according to FITS, “as recently as three years ago Maersk was looking to pump over a billion dollars in new capital investment into our state.”

The State Ports Authority rejected that offer, however, FITS says.

Brandeis contravened British, US policy

The Jerusalem Post reports that Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish US Supreme Court Justice, supported illegal Jewish immigration to Palestine in the 1930s, in defiance of British policy.

Brandeis recognized the need to provide European Jews with a place to immigrate to, given increasing anti-Semitism evident in Nazi policies and actions after their rise to power in Germany, the paper reports.

In 1939, the British government severely restricted immigration to Palestine, limiting it to 75,000 individuals for a period of five years, after which immigration was to end completely.

Britain administered Palestine following World War I up until the state of Israel was created in 1948.

Recently uncovered documentation reveals that Brandeis “held views on Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel that were in direct opposition to those of the British government, the Roosevelt administration and mainstream American Jewish groups and leaders,” the Post reports.

Brandeis, who served on the high court from 1916-39, believed that such immigration was legal, despite British mandates against it, because a law that doomed innocent Jews to persecution and death could not be legal.

Dr. Rafael Medoff, director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, is quoted by the Post as saying that Brandeis believed that the law ultimately was not just words on a piece of paper, but had to relate meaningfully to real life.

“A law that doomed innocent Jews to their deaths could not be truly legal, not in the sense that Brandeis understood the law – and the campaign of taking Jews out of the Nazi inferno and smuggling them to freedom and safety, could not be illegal,” Dr. Medoff adds.