David and Linda Morrow were a prominent part of the Orthodox Jewish community of Beverly Hills.
The wife of a Rancho Mirage plastic surgeon was returned to the United States and entered not guilty pleas on Monday in federal court in Los Angeles to new charges involving flight while on probation and contempt of court, records show.
Linda Morrow, 67, with her husband and their business, Morrow Institute Medical Group Inc., were charged in 2016 with dozens of counts of fraudulently billing insurance companies for surgeries that were not covered.
David M. Morrow, 74, worked out a plea deal in 2017 with federal prosecutors in which he admitted guilt to one count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud. But both fled the country to Israel before he could be sentenced and she could be charged.
“Linda Morrow arrived today in Southern California after being deported from Israel,” Thom Mrozek, spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles said in an emailed response to questions on Monday. “She is pending charges in the health care fraud case.”
He said David Morrow is pending extradition from Israel.
Both were taken into custody in Israel on June 16.
In his plea deal, Morrow admitted he participated in a scheme to obtain money from insurance companies by “false or fraudulent pretenses.”
Morrow operated two plastic surgery centers in Rancho Mirage and authorities said that for four years his medical practice billed insurance companies for cosmetic surgeries falsely described as “medically necessary.” The loss to insurance companies was estimated at $3.5 million.
He faced up to 20 years in prison — and charges against Linda Morrow had not yet proceeded to trial — when they disappeared in 2017 and later turned up in Israel.
Investigators say the Morrows sold their Beverly Hills home for about $9.5 million and also sold several of their vehicles shortly before disappearing.
“Before slinking away, they had wire-transferred millions of dollars, most likely to fund their flight and disappearance,” officials wrote in 2017 in a summary of the case.
Political Science professor Rupert Emerson defined nation: “the largest community, which when the chips are down, effectively commands men’s loyalty, overriding the claims both of lesser communities within it and those which cut across it or potentially enfold it within a still greater society.”
PDF of Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding by Walker Connor
…Connor is best known for his work on nationalism, and is considered one of the founders of the interdisciplinary field of nationalism studies.[1]
Before the collapse of European communism that began in the late 1980s, nationalism was not a subject of significant academic study and was generally neglected,[citation needed] with the exception of some major contributions by authors such as Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson, and Anthony D. Smith.[2][3][4] Connor’s work is another exception to this rule, and today he is regarded as “one of the scholars of nationalism and ethnic conflict who has contributed most towards establishing a conceptual grounding” for the study of nationalism.[5]
Widely cited for his insistence on the inherently ethnic character of nationalism, which he calls ethnonationalism to emphasize the point, Connor has long held that the most significant obstacle to advancing the study of nationalism is terminological imprecision. Particularly problematic, he contends, is the tendency to conflate the distinct concepts of state and nation, as well as the respective concepts of patriotism and nationalism which derive from them.[6]
Another significant theme in Connor’s work is the passionate, nonrational character of nationalism. When trying to understand national sentiment, he argues, the key is not chronological or factual history, but sentient or felt history. National identity is based on the emotional psychology of perceived kinship ties – a sense of the nation as the fully extended family – and accordingly belongs to the realm of the subconscious and nonrational.
Mons writes:
The notion of ethnic group or nation as arbitrary social construct can be likened to the construction of a cathedral or pyramid. True, the artifice is distinctly human and can be said to be commanded by elites. But the act of building the cathedral cannot be a hollow order but must involve labor brought forth from the masses. Without the buy-in of the people, no progress can be made. Secondly, it is an act of great effort. Cathedrals can be built, but doing so takes many, many years and much treasure. It cannot be done on a whim.
All such criticisms of social constructs are founded on the notion that the social construct is arbitrary and also that it can be destroyed and remade at a whim. But houses are social constructs. There can be significant variation in the form of a house, but certain key characteristics remain cross-culturally. This is because the house must always satisfy the needs of a house. A house that is a shitty house ceases to be built. You can have brutalist houses, Modernist houses, rococo houses, but all houses fundamentally must shelter the inhabitants in a reasonably pleasant way.
Nations are ultimately the greatest social constructs. They are constructed, yes, but through the efforts of generations and the treasure of whole states. To do so lightly is folly. To ignore the existing construction to start anew is almost always an act of madness.
Such things cannot be boiled down to mere feelz. Law is a social construct, but law is one of the most real things a person has to deal with. The unreality of social constructs is one of the key push points of the Left, and we must clarify that socially constructed is not the same as arbitrary.
Academic Robert M. Hayden writes in 1996:
In 1934, as the guarantees of the minority treaties of the Versailles settlement proved utterly illusory and as Hitler consolidated power in Germany, C. A. Macartney, the secretary to the Minorities Committee of the League of Nations published a detailed analysis of the minority problem in Europe and came to the conclusion that “the real root of the problem lies in the philosophy of the national state as it is practiced today in central and eastern Europe. . . . It is true that the [minorities] Treaties provide in general terms for the equality of all nationals of the contracting state before the law, and as regards enjoyment of civil and political rights, and for the same treatment and security in law and fact. . . . [However], since the whole conception of the national state implies a violation of the principle of equality to the detriment of the minorities, the guarantee of equality might be construed as involving the renunciation by the state of its national character. . . . A national state and national minorities are incompatibles.'”
The “philosophy of the national state” referred to by Macartney was that the state, a territory with a government, is an expression of the sovereignty of a “nation,” a group that is in American terms defined ethnically (even religion being considered more a matter of heritage than necessarily of faith). He also noted that the new states after Versailles defined themselves constitutionally in national terms, each as the state of the single nation that forms the majority of its population. Macartney noted that when a minority exists in such a state, only three solutions are possible: the revision of frontiers to match the distribution of populations, the elimination of the minorities by emigration “perhaps through exchange of populations,” or the altering of the basis of the state, so that it is no longer a national state. He also noted that a fourth possibility could be seen in “physical slaughter,” but that “although this most effective of remedies is still in vogue in certain countries it shall not be discussed in this…analysis…
