Friday, January 24, 2025
From Ian:
Arsen Ostrovsky: Enough promises: Unleash the law in the fight against antisemitism
Arsen Ostrovsky: Enough promises: Unleash the law in the fight against antisemitism
What should be doneIsraeli Victory Protects American Jews By Abe Greenwald
A much more aggressive legal approach also needs to be added.
In Canada, lawsuits targeted Toronto Metropolitan University and unions, while court injunctions were sought and obtained to protect synagogues, Jewish schools, and Jewish community centers. In Australia, legal proceedings have also been initiated against the University ofSydney, under racial vilification laws, paving the way for the first broad class action lawsuit tackling post-October 7 campus antisemitism, with new laws also introduced against doxing, the display of neo-Nazi material and ensuring that glorifying and praising acts of terrorism are criminal offenses under Commonwealth law.
However, laws and task forces are only as good if they are backed by political willpower andenforced by the police and judicial authorities.
The police and security agencies cannot continue to allow the perpetrators of antisemitic attacks or those expressing support for proscribed terror groups to continue evading justice. Doing so will only encourage more attacks, as the perpetrators know they can act withimpunity.
Legislation should also be considered mandating graver levels of punishment, including mandatory prison sentences for some of the most violent forms of antisemitic attacks and hate crimes, such as fire-bombings of Synagogues or Jewish schools.
There must also be a recognition that chanting phrases like “Globalize the Intifada” or “Free Palestine” are not calls for peace, and do not depend on ‘intent’ or ‘context’, but are a clear and unmistakable incitement to violence, directly targeting Jews. This should be codified into law.
Moreover, we should consider whether non-citizens who commit acts of antisemitism and terror should be deported. There can be zero tolerance or place for such hatred in our democratic societies.
Political leaders must also understand that when they effectively throw Israel under the bus in the international legal arena, such as the United Nations and the international courts in The Hague, for their own domestic expedience, this leads to a more pervasive discourse on Israel and a direct correlation in the surge of antisemitism, as does repeatedly singling out the Stateof Israel for opprobrium, lecturing and differential treatment at home. This only emboldens perpetrators of antisemitism with a warped sense of justification to carry out their attacks against Jews and Jewish institutions.
The sad truth is that once great democracies, Australia and Canada, have failed to protect their Jewish communities.
Unremitting campaign of terror
Today, whereas the world’s only Jewish state has been forced to defend itself from Hamas and existential wars being waged by Iran and their terror proxies, another unremitting campaign of terror has been unleashed upon the Jewish communities of Canada and Australia.
Many Jews are increasingly asking if they are still welcome in the countries they have called home for generations, or if they have been abandoned by the political leadership and society at large.
Britain’s former Chief Rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sacks, once noted that a society that has no space for Jews has no space for humanity. As we look ahead to 2025, and on the eve of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz death camp, both Australia and Canada must therefore ask if they still have space for Jews and what kind of societies they wish to have.
Via Commentary Magazine Newsletter Sign Up HereJust how useful are the ‘useful idiots’?
A friend once remarked to me that liberals love Jews so long as those Jews don’t have power. There’s a lot to this. The liberal worldview romanticizes the cute Jew, the funny Jew, and even the brilliant Jew. The strong Jew, however, the armed Jew ready to fight, is treated as an unsettling deviation from type. Take this to its logical end and you arrive at the writer Dara Horn’s formulation: “People Love Dead Jews.”
If this is true, and I believe it is, then how do we explain that the recent rise in global anti-Semitism, including in the United States, began not when Israel showed its strength and invaded Gaza but the instant it broadcast vulnerability on October 7, 2023? Recall that it was on October 8, one day after the Hamas attack, that protesters took to Times Square and elsewhere to chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” And on social media, the Jew-haters didn’t even wait that long to speak up. Anti-Semitic posts came spewing forth at the first word of Hamas’s massacre.
Here was the weak, or weakened, Jewish state having suffered the worst day in its history—and its very weakness was summoning a deluge of worldwide anti-Semitism that seemed unimaginable days earlier. Israel was mourning 1,200 dead Jews. So where was the love?
Getting at the answer requires that we differentiate between liberalism and leftism. Liberals are discomfited by Jewish strength; leftists are deterred by it. For the left, Jewish weakness signals an opportunity to attack. And attack they did. Leftist organizations, in coordination with Islamists, swung into action to advance Jew-hatred on city streets and university campuses while the Jews were wounded and traumatized.
As with all radical protest movements, some liberals followed the leftists into the fire, imagining that they were somehow still on the side of the angels. Others, particular Jewish liberals, were forced to reevaluate the aims of their revolutionary compadres.
The idea that Jews of any social class in Israel would abandon their own state to become a minority in an Arab-dominated, Soviet-controlled republic was always outlandish. But for the Israeli Communists—and even the handful of Israelis further to the left, such as the Matzpen group that actively identified with Palestinian terrorist groups—the abiding belief was that Jews would be a welcome presence in the socialist Palestinian state that would replace Israel.
It is on this last point that the current crop of Jewish anti-Zionists has shifted. However ridiculous all the old slogans about a “joint struggle” with the Arabs against Zionism were, and however shameful the political alliances these beliefs nurtured, all this was preferable to what we have now. This generation of anti-Zionists fervently believes that Jews have no rightful place in the Middle East at all, regardless of who governs them.
In the last 20 years, social media has dramatically amplified the voices of the miniscule number of Jews who hold this position. Some readers might remember Israel Shamir, a Russian-Israeli writer who converted to Christianity and whom many were convinced was an agent of the Russian secret services, and Gilad Atzmon, an Israeli jazz musician who relocated to London, both of whom delighted in baiting other Jews with antisemitic tropes and who spoke and wrote about Israel in demonic terms, particularly during the wars in Gaza in 2008-09 and 2014. A decade on, Shamir and Atzmon have become pretty much invisible, but their inheritors are out there.
The best, and therefore the worst, current example of what I’m talking about is an individual I’d never heard of before the Hamas atrocities in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. His name is Alon Mizrahi, and from what I can tell from his social-media presence, he is a former Israeli who quite literally sees his homeland as the root of all the evil in the world. In a sane environment, someone like this would have only a handful of followers, but Mizrahi has close to 100,000. His imbecilic posts are lauded by Hamas supporters and attract the ire of Jews. Even the identity he adopts—an “Arab Jew” because his family are Mizrahim—is scorned by other Jews of Mizrahi and Sephardi origin, me among them.
What distinguishes Mizrahi is the unvarnished pathology he displays. Whereas Meir Wilner was guilty of holding the ludicrous belief that the promise of the Soviet Union could sway the Jews away from Zionism, Mizrahi is guilty of spitting uncontrolled bile in their direction. In one post, he said the claim that the Nazis were driven by antisemitism is rooted in Jewish “narcissism.” In another post after last week’s release of three female Israeli hostages, he viciously mocked concerns about sexual abuse in captivity, in turn, sparked by the ordeals of the Israeli women raped and violated on Oct. 7. “Deep sense of disappointment in Israel: None of the returning hostages is pregnant,” he wrote.
The question persists: How useful is this latest iteration of “useful idiocy”? Not that useful. Unlike the PLO, Hamas doesn’t care whether it has Jewish cheerleaders since its goal is to eradicate Jews from the face of the earth. The millions across the globe who have attended pro-Hamas demonstrations similarly don’t care whether they are joined by dissenting Jews because theirs is the Palestinian cause, and Jews are simply in the way. There’s no need, anymore, for people on the left to protest that some of their best friends are Jews because in these circles, Jews are not a historically persecuted minority but the most affluent white community out there. Therefore, the function of someone like Alon Mizrahi is to entertain Hamas supporters when he trolls Jews and Jewish concerns, but nothing more than that. He may think of himself in heroic terms, but he is actually one of the clowns in the circus of the left.
If history is any guide, there will be other Jews and Israelis tempted to follow in the footsteps of Mizrahi and his forebears. At one time, I might have said that solid, informed political argument was the best way to win them over. But now, I would advise those friends and family members who love them to get them in front of a therapist. Because what today’s Jewish anti-Zionism shows us is it is no longer political. It is a mental disorder that traffics in antisemitic hate to win the respect and admiration of non-Jews. Don’t be that guy.
