Monday, July 01, 2019
Elder of ZiyonMichael Elgort traced the evolution of their Twitter account:
I think this is more insidious than Elgort is saying.Few days ago this account was created to provide coverage for @aoc shameful words and it was created by a group of marginalized Jews from @IfNotNowOrg. Account had 30 followers day before yesterday. Today it has more than 4000 and Beinart is promoting it
This is how it looked 3 days ago. First followers were Sophie-Ellman Golan and If Not Now. Now it suddenly came into the spotlight, gained thousands of followers and RTs from blue ticks. Of course @aoc follows it now, it fully supports her wildest claims.Sophie started to promote account she was a first follower of.
Immediately after other blue ticks followed to promote it (including Beinart in my first tweet above) and list of followers grew to Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, @popchassid, Simone Zimmerman and @aoc of courseAnd now a sitting American congresswoman @aoc is promoting an unknown org created few days ago by @IfNotNowOrg - an organization that supports BDS and other antisemitic orgs. Will anyone ask her does she support BDS now? Look at the screenshots. She moneyraises for them. WTF?
Never Again Action 
It is bad enough that they are using the Holocaust and their supposed Jewish identities to push their agenda. This cheapens the Holocaust by comparing it to whatever is the flavor of the week. (Their video of saying Kaddish for people who died crossing the border, when they never said Kaddish for actual Holocaust victims, speaks volumes.)
This, however, is not about ICE. This is about Israel.
It was started by IfNotNow, which is an anti-Israel organization (which in turn seems to have been spun off from Jewish Voice for Peace.)
The purpose of Never Again Action is twofold, and neither have to do with ICE.
One is to hijack the Holocaust so that Israel's purpose to be a safe haven for Jews that was so obvious in the 1940s is weakened as just one more Holocaust analogy. Here is theirs:
We’ve seen this groundwork laid before. We were taught to never let anything like the Holocaust happen again.Not to defend how the US is dealing with a very difficult problem, but it is incredibly offensive to directly compare the conditions in these detainment facilities and the Nazi concentration camps.
We refuse to wait and see -- we know from our own history what happens when a government targets, dehumanizes and strips an entire group of people of all their civil and human rights. Never again is now.
Many of our ancestors narrowly escaped from conditions like what we are seeing today in concentration camps at the border and detention centers around the country. We repeated the phrase "Never Again" within our synagogues, day schools and summer camps. We learned our history so that we, as Jews, would never allow for this scale of injustice and horror to occur again.
The other, and primary, goal of Never Again Action is to enmesh hatred of Israel in every single liberal cause.
Never Again Action is trying to mobilize young people to get angry and demonstrate against Trump and his policies - to get them to protest, write letters, get active.
Once they are active in that cause, then they are primed to be active against Israel. They will be exposed to a constant barrage of explicit and implicit anti-Israel messages (comparing US policy towards illegal immigrants to how Israel treats Palestinians.) Never Again Action is a preparatory school for IfNotNow.
Right now, IfNotNow has a lot of publicity but not a lot of members. They need to recruit more Jewish youth, but most of them don't care about Israel one way or another. These extremist anti-Israel activists are trying to get Jews involved in any liberal cause so they can then join their recruiters in their main purpose: to destroy the Jewish state by pretending to uphold Jewish values.
This is a refinement of the strategy the Palestinians have used since the UN General Assembly declared them a state. The PLO joined lots of international organizations, but all they really do is try to hijack their causes against Israel. This has not been very effective.
It has been more effective in the West, as anti-Israel activists use Black Lives Matter and the Women's March to push their messages along the others in the name of "intersectionality." But there has been pushback there as well, as the antisemitism of some leaders of both organizations have been exposed.
The main weapon the IfNotNow folks have is to claim that they represent a significant number of Jews. Surveys show that they don't, and that they make more noise than real impact. So this is the tactic they came upon: recruit Jews for a completely unrelated liberal cause, make a bogus linkage (like they try to link police brutality with Israel,) and then they have new recruits to go on anti-Israel marches.
This isn't about human rights. This is a cynical hijacking of a human rights cause with the ultimate aim of depriving Jews in Israel of their human rights.
