Never in a million years did I believe there would be a deal in my lifetime where an Arab Gulf state would recognize the Jewish state. Watching the news this week of Israel and the United Arab Emirates normalizing relations was something of a dream come true.
From the age of eight until adulthood, I called the UAE home. It was a place I enjoyed most of my firsts: my first day of school, the first time I ditched school, my first kiss, my first chicken shawarma, crashing my first car.
It’s also where I had my first experience with anti-Semitism. Of course, I didn’t know what that actually was at the time.
Calling Israel and its Jewish inhabitants the enemy of Islam and God was as common as breathing while I was growing up. Anti-Semitism was in my home. It was in the school hallways and yard. You heard it at the café while having a hookah, enjoying a chicken shawarma and playing a hand of tarneeb.
At Friday prayers, a religious cleric at any given mosque was sure to make a comment about how Allah will one day destroy Israel from the map and all the yahoud that live in it so that our brothers may finally be free.
Believing in conspiracies like the idea that Israel was the true mastermind behind 9/11 or that Israel is funding ISIS was prevalent, mainstream, part of the culture. It was a hate taught and passed down through generations by people who had never once interacted with a Jew.
It’s so weird looking back at it now, trying to understand how it is that I had this hate in my heart for an entire group of people I had never met.
I myself didn’t meet a Jewish person until I was about 25 years old and traveling through New York. He also happened to be an Israeli.
I’m not going to lie: I was nervous when he first told me where he was from. I didn’t know how to feel about, if I was supposed to walk away, or punch him in the face.
But something came over me, a curiosity, a deep desire to know more about this person I was taught to just hate. We talked about a wide range of topics in the short time we spent together, but the one that interested me the most was Israel.
You could tell he loved his country; there was a glow about him when talking about his favorite bakery that he would go to on the marina, or how he enjoys his chicken shawarma with pickles and garlic paste — just the way I would eat it as a kid in the UAE.
From my interview on @WIONews on why peace agreement between #Israel & #UAE is so historic!
I should add, as #India 🇮🇳 has important strategic relations with all 3 countries - 🇮🇱 🇦🇪 🇺🇸 - they can have crucial role to play in advancing this peace process!https://t.co/V8Vy5bg7wC
To say that Israel is reeling today is a cosmic understatement.
All of Israel–left, right, center–was dealt a knockout blow by the indefatigable Netanyahu on Thursday when the Oval Office announced on Thursday the agreement between Israel and the UAE to immediately formalize “full normalization” of diplomatic, economic and all relations.
The revelation was so surreal, in fact, that in this hopelessly gossipy nation, where everything leaks, nothing did. It was the equivalent of an atomic bomb. In terms of sheer force, not devastation. A good atomic bomb.
For the Emiratis to engage openly, fully, and proudly has left this nation stunned. In the best way. It was totally unexpected.
Perhaps it was best expressed in a tweet by former MK Einat Wilf, who wrote: “Israeli Jews are keenly aware of their minority status in an Arab and Islamic region and so yearn for peace with the Arab and Islamic world. The #UAE showed today yet again that when the Arab world comes to us with offers of genuine peace, they always find in us willing partners.”
Mired in an evergreen domestic political morass, PM Netanyahu, “the magician,” has clearly worked for years to pull off the impossible, as he was sliced and diced six ways to Sunday by local scandal and subterfuge.
“Full normalization.”
Peace, in the vernacular. With one of the most important, progressive, influential Middle Eastern countries, the UAE.
Israeli media reports that this agreement has been brokered by Jared Kushner, Mossad Chief Yossi Cohen, and others. But foremost, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed, ruler of the UAE, has boldly led the Middle East into what will not just re-align the region’s geopolitics, but quite likely those of the world. And, in a flash, the notoriously aggressive Israeli media was rocked back on its heels, collective mouths agape, at the unsurpassed brilliance of Bibi.
If Shakespeare were alive, he would have to reinvent his canon, which has become the literary foundation of Western story-telling. With Bibi, there simply is no Act V–no denouement. We are stuck in Act III, where the hero is unstoppable. Where his brilliance and unsurpassed triumphs continue, mere human frailties notwithstanding.
“On regional strategy, this shows the benefit of the U.S. standing by its historic allies in the Middle East. Pres Obama shunned Israel & the Gulf states and sought to normalize Iran. His nuclear deal, an economic boon to Tehran, was a means to that end.”https://t.co/IFnZRW4ajj
The American-born Israeli novelist Hillel Halkin asked, “What binds American Jews together today? Most of us are secular; the religious bond is gone. Few of us speak Hebrew; the language bond is gone. What remains is the historical narrative of 80 generations and Israel, the realization of that dream and the spiritual and cultural light that radiates to the rest of the world. If we abandon Israel, we abandon our future. If Israel is gone, Jewish life will be gone in one or two generations. … If we forget that narrative, gone is our Jewishness. Throughout our history, the driving engine of survival has been the hope for returning to sovereignty in the birthplace of our history—Eretz Israel. The State of Israel is the culmination of this dream.”
Today’s young Jewish Americans don’t relate to Israel, as their cultural immersion from middle school through graduate school has painted Israel as the last illegitimate remnant of imperialism, which should be expunged for society to advance. If they care about their Judaism, it is overwhelmingly defined by tikkun olam, repairing the world—a lovely universalist concept that is an important part, but not in itself enough, to make one Jewish. If that is your primary identification with Judaism, you may be a wonderful person, but there is no compelling reason to pass your Jewish identity on. If you also see the Jewish state as anachronistic and militaristic—something that you cannot be associated with to live with your progressive ideology—then you take a step towards Beinart and Rogen.
This all sounds harsh, perhaps a little over the top. But to ignore the facts and reality of what is happening to liberal American Judaism, especially if you care about Judaism’s future in the diaspora, is to bury your head in the sand.
Since most American Jews will not become religious, much less Orthodox, and don’t identify in religious terms in the contemporary post-denominational era, the only sure way to have a continuation of Jewish identify in the Diaspora for the future is to connect to Israel in some way. If you are an atheist and a Zionist, you have a much better chance that your progeny will be meaningfully Jewish than if you are estranged or hostile to Israel and consider your Jewishness to consist of being a really nice person.
With an overwhelming intermarriage rate—and most American Jews uninterested in Judaism as a religion except for maybe a family Passover seder—then a re-engagement with Zionism may be the last hope for maintaining the Jewish census in America. This should begin by ending the false narrative of only seeing Israel through the prism of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and defining it completely by its “occupation” of the disputed territories. Otherwise, Peter Beinart and Seth Rogan are truly the handwriting on the wall for American Judaism.
Learn to love Israel on your own terms and pass it on to your children. It will preserve your 3,000-year-old heritage and legacy for future generations, with all its beauty and complexities.
According to Rogen, all this stems from his experience in a Jewish summer camp, where he learned about Israel and apparently disliked his Israeli camp counselors.
To which Shany Mor, an associate fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College and a researcher at the Israel Democracy Institute, retorted: “I understand; I get it. You were 12, you were at summer camp, and someone gave you a heroic version of Israel’s history, and now that you’re suddenly surrounded at university by theologians of the grand church of intersectionality, you feel the need to renounce. Fine. Renounce your summer camp. Renounce your parents. But leave us out.”
Mor challenged him to confront his fellow Americans with the failings of their country before deriding Israel, “then tell me if you still want to use the word ‘brave’ the next time you and your bunkmate trash talk your camp counselors.”
Refusing to let bad enough alone, Rogen shared his theory that the iconic wizards of fantasy worlds, like Tolkien’s Gandalf, are modeled on Hasidic Jews, and that this community is not doing the rest of us Jews “any favors.” Oy.
As Irene Connelly noted in The Forward, “Here, he’s just leaning into stereotypes for laughs. … It’s one thing to enjoy some self-referential humor, and another to joke at the expense of vulnerable Jewish communities they’re not part of.”
Seth Rogen’s disparagement of Orthodox Jews and Israel is particularly painful to Jews everywhere because he is so widely known as a Jewish personality and has been willing to take on others, including Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, for tolerating white supremacists and antisemitic rhetoric.
Hopefully, Rogen will extend his Israel education past his summer-camp experience and BDS talking points. Then, I am sure, we will all be happy to hear from him again on the subject.
This doesn’t mean lecturing kids about what Judaism or Israel means to you. Rather, it represents an opportunity to learn together from the host of online resources available in the 21st century. Indeed, family education — the key to success in any Jewish format — has never been easier to pursue. For all of the challenges of life during COVID-19, the time and amenities to devote to Jewish learning and practice are there. All it requires is the effort and commitment.
Jewish and Zionist education has never really been the mind-control propaganda session that Rogen and Israel’s critics make it out to be.
While enthusiasm for Israel’s miraculous rebirth and survival is atypical and well-deserved, American Jews have never been shy about talking about both sides of the conflict with the Palestinians — something especially true of the Labor Zionist summer camp that Rogen attended. Empathy for the tragedy of the Palestinians is typical of most Jewish educational and even religious systems. If anything has generally been in short supply, it’s the sort of in-depth learning about Zionist history that would better define to youngsters the justice of Israel’s cause.
While misinformation about the Middle East is commonplace, the main source of falsehoods is the mainstream media, and not the overworked and underfinanced Jewish educational system. If parents don’t want the next generation to grow up both ignorant and resentful about the inadequate Jewish education they received, then the place to start is at home by demonstrating that learning is as important to the busy heads of the household as it is to children who right now have too much time on their hands. The outcome isn’t dependent on other people or institutions, as important as they may be. The impact of at-home learning activities, coupled with family trips to Israel once they become possible again, is incalculable.
Seth Rogen’s complaints about what he did or didn’t learn about Israel, the Jewish people, and the Palestinians when he was young aren’t important. Ensuring that other Jewish children in America won’t grow up without knowing the beauty of living traditions and the glories of their heritage is dependent on their families and their extended communities. If they can’t get that right, then there is no one to blame but themselves.
Western ideologies generally include a parable about villainous Jews. Because this is a set of ideas that sees itself as a political critique, the parable doesn’t come, as past versions have, from Scripture (in the case of Christianity), or from economic theory (as it did in Marxism), or pseudo-scientific racial doctrines (National Socialism). It comes from the news—specifically, from the mythology that I saw being constructed as a reporter a decade ago. A strange antagonism to something called “Israel” came up if you went to a Women’s March against Donald Trump in New York, or protested violence against African Americans in Ferguson, Missouri, or joined the Dyke March in Chicago, or presented an academic paper at the American Studies Association. It appears in the platform of Black Lives Matter from 2016, in left-wing politics in Britain and France, and in gender studies courses at California colleges.
These diverse applications are unique, if not entirely unprecedented, for a news story. But they make sense if we understand the Israel story as a kind of sacred template that can be used to explain many different situations. A good example became visible this spring in the wake of the protests that followed the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis: the myth that Israel trains American police officers in the same methods of brutality that killed Floyd, and which are deployed more generally against people of color. This conspiracy theory has been promoted as factual by (among many others) senior journalists, members of the British Labour Party, and, in early July, by the biggest Lutheran denomination in America.
That last detail supports the idea that new religions are never completely removed from the old ones. Indeed, the unique power of the Israel story is the way it takes the central preoccupation of the new thought system—the inequality of white Western power versus nonwhite Third World innocence—and projects it onto a setting already loaded with religious resonance. If you’re looking for a parable about human inequality, places called Jerusalem or Bethlehem are potent in ways that can’t be rivaled by Xinjiang or Laayoune, or Minneapolis.
A good illustration of this merger came in the form of a speech given to a convention of the Episcopal church in 2018 by a Massachusetts bishop who described atrocities she claimed to have personally witnessed in Israel. She described the murder of an innocent 15-year-old Palestinian by Jewish soldiers—“they shot him in the back four times, he fell on the ground and they shot him another six”—and the aggressive handcuffing by soldiers of a 3-year-old Palestinian boy whose ball rolled off the Temple Mount.
It later turned out that the bishop hadn’t seen any such thing, and she apologized profusely. But in a religious mindset, the question isn’t whether a story happened. The question is whether a story can mobilize believers to achieve good. If the answer is yes, the story is “true.”
This kind of thinking has now bled into newsrooms and university departments, precisely the bodies that are supposed to be engaged in observation and reasoned debate. If important parts of the press and the academy are beginning to sound like ministries, it’s happening at a time when religion and quasi-religion are on the rise everywhere—not just on the progressive left but also on the right, and not only in the West. Some of these trends are evident in Israel, too. As we speak, as if to symbolize the moment, the Hagia Sophia is being changed from a public museum back into a mosque—though in Istanbul, at least, the conversion is being done in the open.
Americans are experiencing a summer of discontent in a way that exceeds any in living memory. The nation is divided not just along political lines but seems increasingly immersed in something much more dangerous – a culture war in which both sides truly believe that not only will a triumph by their opponents bring ruin, but that the very existence of the republic and American democracy is at stake.
That's why both Jews and non-Jews need to pause this week and consider the lessons that the observance of Tisha B'Av: the day on the Hebrew calendar that marks the destruction of both ancient holy temples in Jerusalem, as well as many other catastrophes of Jewish history. The day of fasting and reflection, which begins this year on the evening of July 29, is not observed by most non-Orthodox Jews and generally considered too depressing to have become part of secular American Jewish culture, which prefers holidays that follow a model that runs along the lines of "they tried to kill us, we won, let's eat."
But if there was ever a year when its lessons were needed by Americans of all faiths, it is 2020.
Tradition teaches us that the fall of the Second Temple in 70 CE occurred because of "sinat hinam" – senseless or baseless hatred—that undermined Jewish resistance during the siege of Jerusalem and great revolt against the forces of the Roman Empire.
A war that pitted the forces of a small nation against the world's only superpower wasn't going to have a happy ending, no matter how united the defenders of Jerusalem had been. But the rabbis who subsequently reconstituted Jewish faith emphasized the way that the Jewish rebels were divided into competing factions within Jerusalem's walls. In the civil war that raged inside the doomed city, a Zealot faction destroyed food supplies that could have prolonged resistance. Their self-destructive behavior made the task of Roman conquest that much easier and provided Jewish history with a lesson of what not to do to survive in a hostile world.
It's an important lesson, but not one that most Jews – or non-Jews for that matter – find easy to follow.
The political lines dividing Americans are starker than at any moment in living memory. It's not just that Republicans and Democrats disagree about the issues. Most of the supporters of President Donald Trump and most of those who support his opponents seem unprepared to credit each other with good intentions, period.
For those of us that are children of Holocaust survivors, we know well the hell our parents went through to survive.
They hid, had no food, no clothes, no medical attention, and no help.
They were cramped in hiding places with no fresh air and couldn' t make a sound or Nazis would kill them.
It lasted a lot longer than this will last, some for up to 4 or 5 years.
They lost their education, their souls, their youth.
There were no supermarkets,no cell phones, no radios and no outside interference.
What we can compare with deadly accuracy is 1933 Nazi Germany and the inaction of our Jewish leadership and the Stockholm Syndrome response of many liberal Jews in the face of rising, hateful antisemitism.
Just as then when the voices of the leadership might have made a difference, but was barely heard, today most liberal leaders and clergy prefer to be politically correct and support our enemies.
Had Hitler conquered America or the area that is now Israel but was then the British Mandate, no Jews would have been left alive. That means many of those reading this article would never have been born.
What is it that left liberal and progressive Jews do not understand? When I hear the rabid antisemitic lies on videos and social media, I sense that another Hitler is coming - while you are sleeping, not 'woke,' dreaming about meeting the demands of the antisemitic Black Lives Matter.
Cogwar 8 Years on: BLM BDS & the Wokeocracy
In 2012 Prof Richard Landes said "Its not every generation that gets to defend a civilisation" and he advised that silence is not an option. In view of the extraordinary events since January 2020 when he was last in London, Campaign4Truth asked him how we have done in these 8 years: Have we been silent?
Bari Weiss, the centrist opinion page editor at the New York Times, resigned from her position on Tuesday with a blistering resignation letter that went viral and was damning to the newspaper.
Many people have been writing about the resignation; her critics are cheering and criticizing her letter and her fans doing the opposite. But nearly no one has explained exactly why she had to resign.
Weiss wants to frame her resignation as a consequence of this supposed hostile takeover—that she’s a free thinker cast out by an intolerant, illiberal regime. But her letter, while long on invective (and just plain long), is short on evidence, and what she’s done instead amounts to auto-cancellation: quitting, then blaming her peers for driving her out. It’s a rhetorical mode that many of her fellow travelers in the “Intellectual Dark Web” are familiar with.
The “short on evidence” accusation is strange; her resignation letter has plenty of examples of why the work environment was difficult but is hardly an appropriate place to show screenshots or name names. However, the accusation of her “quitting and them blaming her peers for driving her out” is worth examining. In order to do that one must understand how the Opinion section works at the New York Times.
At the NYT, there are many opinion editors whose jobs are to find and encourage good opinion pieces, all working under a managing editor. Historically, most of these editors have been blatantly anti-Israel, and it was therefore easy for anti-Israel op-eds to get published – often with little regard to fact checking. Up until a few years ago, most of the pro-Israel pieces would be from far-right Israelis (who could be easily dismissed as lunatics) or Israeli government officials. Those pieces would be assigned by the managing editor who is responsible for the overall tenor of the page and who would feel an obligation to run some unpopular pieces every once in a while to appear even-handed. Before 2017, the ratio of anti- to pro- Israel opinion pieces was typically 5-1. For a decent pro-Israel piece to be published the writer would need to find an editor who was not hostile to Israel to begin with and then the piece would be sent back numerous times for edits – while anti-Israel pieces would sail through the process.
Weiss was hired specifically to add different voices to the Times in the wake of Donald Trump’s unexpected win. While Bret Stephens was hired at the same time, he was hired as a columnist; Weiss was an editor. Both Weiss and Stephens dislike Trump immensely. But Weiss was there to increase the number of thoughtful op-eds from conservative and other voices that would normally not be heard. From all the evidence, she succeeded.
Weiss was always disliked at the Times, mostly because her views – while solidly liberal and centrist – were far to the right of the other opinion editors. Those other editors were also jealous of her success (one of her own columns became a Saturday Night Live sketch, and her book on antisemitism was a best seller as she appeared on numerous TV shows.) Of course, Weiss is also a Zionist and a proud Jew, not shy about calling out antisemitism, and the other editors were unhappy with both of those – she mentioned in her letter that she heard negative comments that she was “writing about the Jews again.”
I am told that even NYT workers who are perceived to be friends with Weiss and Stephens are looked down upon by the intolerant Leftist employees.
Weiss’ letter describes a hostile work environment with very specific, outrageous examples. However, that is not the major reason why she was forced to leave. Weiss had to leave because she literally could not do her job.
After the Tom Cotton op-ed controversy, where there was a virtual revolt at the NYT resulting in managing opinion editor James Bennett’s ouster, a new policy was implemented at the Times called the “red flag” system, which allows even junior editors to “stop or delay the publication of an article containing a controversial view or position.”
This truly stupid policy allows any editor to veto the work of any other editor on the op-ed page.
If a piece is deemed too controversial or microaggressive, it would be stopped or delayed. Editors can now refuse to edit pieces they are assigned, something that would have resulted in being fired not that long ago. The young millennials have essentially taken over the op-ed page and they are so far Left – and have so little regard for tolerating others’ ideas – that the entire op-ed section is a disaster.
There was another side effect of the policy, though: it ensured that unpopular editors like Bari would be censored. Since she wasn’t liked, any of her co-workers could silence her.
Suddenly, every single opinion piece that Weiss would spend hours working on with promising writers would be quashed by her coworkers who disliked her. Anything she would write herself would be rejected by the crowd.
She was drawing a salary but could not do what she was hired to do. And obviously the new woke managing editor who is herself hostile to Zionism was not going to protect the proudly Zionist Weiss from this bullying the way a supervisor in a normal job is supposed to.
Weiss had no choice but to quit if she ever wanted to be heard again.
From all indications, Weiss was an excellent editor, better than most there. This can be seen by this letter that Weiss wrote to Marisa Kabas rejecting her op-ed idea and making constructive suggestions on how she can be published. Kabas, instead of recognizing that most editors wouldn’t spend any time trying to groom a young writer for success, tweeted this very nice letter as if it was a negative!
So many writers responded that the letter makes Weiss look good and Kabas look like a self-centered idiot that Kabas deleted her tweet.
That tweet is the New York Times op-ed department in a nutshell – the young know-it-alls saying they know better than the people with skill and experience. The millennials who have taken over the Times op-ed page cannot distinguish between diversity in hiring and diversity in thought, and they think that their supposedly fresh ideas can replace skill and competence.
Bari Weiss will land on her feet. She is smart and talented. Meanwhile, the inmates have taken over the asylum at the New York Times op-ed department.
Some time ago I became aware that I no longer trusted it even on issues that I didn’t know about. Because on every issue I did know about, I discovered that the paper was spreading untruths and lies. Take the bizarre animus against Britain (which I have written about a number of times here). It appears that the NYT at some stage made a decision that Brexit had something to do with Trump, and since the NYT hated Trump, it must not just report negatively against Brexit Britain, but campaign against it. Its London ‘correspondents’ must be among the least informed and most campaign-minded journalists in the paper’s history. The misinformation that the NYT has now published against this country is so extraordinary that nobody who actually knows the UK could possibly trust its coverage. And if you see that this is the case with things you do know about, then why would you remotely trust the NYT on things you don’t know about? And at that stage, what is the point of the paper? It’s not as though it is worth reading for the wit.
Anyhow – after recent sackings at the paper (relating to the publication of a perfectly reasonable opinion piece by Senator Tom Cotton) it became clear that Bari Weiss was one of the last couple of liberal voices (in the true sense) left at the paper. And as you could see from the deranged online behaviour of her colleagues towards her, it was clear she was not going to be long for the role.
Her resignation letter is damning. She alleges ‘constant bullying by colleagues.’ And in a memorable line she says, ‘Twitter is not on the masthead of the New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor.’ Ouch.
Of course there will doubtless now be more bullying and hectoring. All once again done by ‘liberal’ voices presuming that they are acting in the name of good. It is an extraordinary thing this, and in some ways emblematic of the age. Publications like the NYT, who profess to be most opposed to ‘fake news’, continuously turn out to have been the era’s biggest purveyors of the thing they complain of. And campaigning journalists, imagining that they are acting in the name of decency, turn out to behave so indecently that they bully out a minority, dissenting opinion from their ranks.
Bari Weiss has a bright future ahead of her. The same cannot be said of the paper she has just left.
New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss has resigned her post and, in so doing, indicted the entire enterprise of modern journalism and its woke arbiters. The podcast on that and the epistemological crisis afflicting the left.
In a sense, I am a rather unusual spokesperson for the idea that a morally neutral discursive pluralism is an inherently valuable end unto itself. Indeed, I have spent no shortage of (digital) ink arguing, in accordance with the natural and common law traditions, for the imperative of making moral judgments based on the underlying substantive content of a certain modality of speech.
But, again, I am a conservative. Bari Weiss is a liberal. And all of us, outside the echo chambers of oppressive “wokeness” that constitute the Left’s self-congratulatory institutional bastions, have an acute interest in aiding the liberals mount a comeback in their civil war struggle.
A viable Right and a viable Left have historically existed in a relationship that is, ironically, simultaneously adversarial and symbiotic. Partisans of both camps have not shied away, when need be, from the grueling work required by intellectual fisticuffs in the public square. But, crucially, both camps have also depended upon one another to refine their arguments. There is to be no argumentative refinement, alas, when the Left is overrun by the Jacobins. Robespierre was not known to take kindly to heterodoxy.
For traditional liberals, the choice is clear. As Yoram Hazony frames it, liberals can either submit to the Left or make common cause with conservatives, traditionalists, and nationalists in our struggle against the successor ideology.
Liberals have two choices:
1 Submit to the Left.
2 Alliance with nationalists, conservatives, and Christians.
There are no other choices.— Yoram Hazony (@yhazony) June 13, 2020
In making such a choice, liberals should bear in mind that they, too, will be made to care. For liberal Jews, like Weiss, the choice is even clearer. The successor ideology mollycoddles inveterate Jew-haters, peddles an intersectionality that is inherently at loggerheads with the very notion of Jewish particularism, and cavils when a proud Jewish commentator “writ[es] about the Jews again.” The successor ideology has no tolerance whatsoever for Zionism, the Jewish people’s right to national self-determination in their ancient homeland.
Cory Booker Talking by the Forward
Perhaps a more pluralistic, intellectually diverse “mainstream media” opinion will emerge from the ashes of this rock bottom. For now, the Jacobins have found the proverbial guillotine. And in forcing out Weiss, an anodyne, centrist Jewish woman, the radicals have clarified for all to see the battle lines now drawn in the fight for a nation’s soul.
In her letter, Weiss wrote that she had joined the paper to help publish “voices that would not otherwise appear in the paper of record, such as first-time writers, centrists, conservatives and others who would not naturally think of the Times as their home.” She had been hired, she wrote, after the paper failed to anticipate Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election victory because it “didn’t have a firm grasp of the country it covers.” But after three years at the paper, she wrote in her open letter, Weiss had concluded, “with sadness,” that she could no longer perform this mission at the nation’s ostensible paper of record, given the bullying that she had experienced within the newsroom and the almost daily attacks on her, often from Times colleagues, on social media. She deplored the paper’s unwillingness to defend her or act to stop the online intimidation. “They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m ‘writing about the Jews again,’” she wrote.
Her criticism of Sulzberger rang true to several Times veterans, who note that he has been accused before of yielding to disgruntled liberal staff members. A publisher said to have intervened often in the paper’s news decisions, Sulzberger initially defended James Bennet and the decision to publish the Cotton op-ed, for instance. But faced with a staff revolt, he criticized the essay and the paper’s publication of it, saying that the editorial process had been too “rushed” and that the essay “did not meet our standards.”
Weiss’s departure was quickly hailed by her many critics within and outside of the paper on social media, among them Glenn Greenwald, who has called her a “hypocrite” for her alleged efforts to suppress Arab professors while in college, and for her defense of Israel and some of its controversial policies as a newspaper writer. But her stinging letter rang true to many others, among them former presidential aspirant Andrew Yang and talk-show host Bill Maher. “As a longtime reader who has in recent years read the paper with increasing dismay over just the reasons outlined here, I hope this letter finds receptive ears at the paper. But for the reasons outlined here, I doubt it,” Maher wrote on Twitter.
Her resignation was also lamented by such leading right-of-center thinkers as Glenn Loury. “What a shame—for the country, and on the Times,” wrote Loury, an economics professor at Brown University, in an email. Calling Weiss “courageous,” he added that while the climate she described at the paper was “no surprise,” that it had “driven her to this point is, indeed, shocking.” He also noted that Weiss was one of the few Times writers to sign the controversial “Harpers letter,” which he speculated might have been “the last straw” for the paper.
As a result of the global Corona crisis many Israelis living abroad have decided to return home and Jews from communities across the globe are asking to make aliyah. Will Corona Zionism bring with it another wave of Israeli settlers, similar to the waves of immigrants in the 60s and 70s? Which are the most attractive cities for new neighborhoods? What are the prominent characteristics immigrants take into account before purchasing an apartment?
Since the founding of the state to the current day, history has proved that global crises leave their mark on Jewish communities across the world, increasing the number of those making aliyah to Israel. Israel’s coping abilities and high functioning throughout the crisis have coined a new phrase, Corona Zionism.
The global Corona crisis has resulted in many Israelis, who emigrated abroad for various reasons, asking to return home and many Jews living in various communities across the globe taking an interest in making aliyah. Have you too found yourself examining places to live? Attractive areas for employment? Quality education? Life in an enveloping and embracing community? And who are the real estate entrepreneurs who make it possible to realize your dream of a home and move forward economically without giving up financial security and peace of mind?
“Avney Derech” Group, who have been active for over a decade, have so far populated 1,000 housing units and are in the planning and construction stages of an additional 2,500 housing units, leading a unique and original business world view that combines business thinking, creative social Zionist measured thinking, allowing hundreds of families whose dream of buying an apartment seemed far from possible, to purchase an apartment, and even move forward financially. The company specializes in finding housing solutions for young couples and families with children thanks to the perfect professional envelope they provide their customers. And as part of that, they are the only entrepreneurs with a subsidiary that currently manages about 500 units owned by home buyers from Israel and abroad.
In addition, the group owns a mortgage consultation firm that accompanies buyers throughout the financial process of taking out a mortgage or other loans.
One of the reasons for the precipitous drop in synagogue membership and ritual observance is costs. Today, there are already extraordinary programs in Israel that train young rabbis to serve as community rabbis in Diaspora Jewish communities. The young rabbis and their families move to far-flung communities for five years where they build, organize and serve the communities. The rabbis provide religious leadership and training and religious services like supervising the preparation and sale of kosher food enabling local community members to open kosher restaurants and supermarkets.
The government should support and expand these programs. By sending young Israeli rabbis abroad, Israel will lower synagogue membership costs—and through them the cost of living Jewish lives. These rabbis and their families will develop strong, lasting grassroots relationships between Israeli Jews and Diaspora Jewry.
The rise in violent attacks on synagogues and Jewish schools, grocery stores and other Jewish institutions worldwide over the past several years has made many Jews fearful of participating in communal life. Israel can and should help Jewish communities protect themselves by providing them with the means to protect their institutions.
Again, at marginal cost in terms of manpower and financial outlays, Israel can and should provide training for local Jewish security officers and when necessary, provide security officers to protect Jewish institutions from attack.
By every measure, the position of Jewish Diaspora communities is deteriorating. The steep rise in anti-Semitism; the high rates of assimilation and the rising cost of membership in synagogues and tuition costs for Jewish schools amid economic turndowns all contribute to the rapid emptying out of Jewish communities worldwide; the weakening of their ties with Israel and the rise of radical forces within the weakened communities.
The government made a critical decision on Sunday. Israel has to develop and begin implementing a strategic plan to reconnect Diaspora Jewry to Israel and to Judaism. Israel has the professional and human resources to accomplish this vital goal. Given the gravity of the situation, the government must define clear methods and goals now to ensure the success of its efforts.
A talk with Raymund Schütz, whose doctorate exposed the role of the notaries who made money from transactions and mortgages of stolen Jewish real estate during the German occupation of the Netherlands..
"Holocaust and restitution issues keep coming up regularly in new Dutch public debates even though it is seventy-five years after the Second World War. The post-war restitution of stolen Jewish real estate during the war is one of several such topics currently in the media. The journalist platform Follow the Money and the TV program Pointer have brought it to the public's attention. Thereafter it has been picked up by local papers.
“The official reason why this issue has not been discussed publicly earlier was that no historic data was available about what happened to Jewish-owned real estate robbed during the German occupation. This was a false argument because the relevant transactions had to be registered in the land register, which is accessible to the public. It was not easy to find the data, but my past research has proven that this was possible years ago."
Dr. Raymund Schütz, born in 1964, is an independent researcher, formerly of the Netherlands Red Cross, where he worked in its war-time archive in The Hague. The title of his doctorate on the role of the notaries during the German occupation is Cold Fog: The Dutch Notaries and the Heritage of the War.
“It took until 2008 when another Dutch historian, Eric Slot, found one of the war time books of these sales of robbed assets (Verkaufsbücher) at the National Archives. The books listed the first transactions of expropriated Jewish real estate. There were 18 volumes with transactions, one of which is missing In 2016, I published my doctorate about the role of the notaries who made money from such transactions and the resulting mortgages.
“My estimate is that there were 10,565 assets involved. In 2013, scholars claimed --on the basis of sampling --that in almost all cases, restitution had taken place. In many cases the original owner was dead. Yet I have since found by studying only one town, Hoorn, that 40 assets have not been restituted there. Generally, it is interesting to note that in the Netherlands a substantial number of robbed Jewish assets were purchased by municipalities.
“Besides buildings, now also robbed shops, building plots, heathlands, and forests owned by Jews are in the public eye. Jews also owned some agricultural lands. Yet one finds little about these in the sources because when expropriated no notarial act was required for their sale. One could transfer ownership via an agent through a private act. The historian Rob Bakker claims that 17 million guilders was received for these, which were not passed to the original Jewish owners.. They represented 0.9 percent of the Dutch territory. In order to find out more information about this, one would have to do research in individual localities.
In August 2005, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd invoked a mother's moral authority against President Bush on the issue of the Iraq War.
Cindy Sheehan's son had been killed in Iraq the previous year and insisted on camping outside the Bush ranch until the president agreed to speak to her. Bush had already spoken to her, but she insisted on speaking to him again, so she could tell him why the war was wrong and the US should pull out its forces. Dowd attacked Bush's failure to meet with her, proclaiming that regardless of his own justifications for the war
his humanitarianism will remain inhumane as long as he fails to understand that the moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute.
Putting aside the moral authority of parents whose children were killed in the war yet agreed with the reasons for it -- the fact remains that the idea of this kind of moral authority resonates.
Over 300 Survivors and Descendants of Survivors of Victims of the Nazi Genocide Condemn Israel’s Assault on Gaza
313 Jewish survivors and descendants of survivors and victims of the Nazi genocide have signed this letter written in response to Elie Wiesel’s manipulation of the Nazi Genocide to attempt to justify the attacks on Gaza.
The 'letter' neglects to link to or even quote what Wiesel said. But it does make clear that it opposed the "ongoing genocide" of the ever-increasing Palestinian Arab population.
Looking through the 312 signatures -- and the moral authority they represent -- the breakdown is that the letter was signed by:
o 39 Holocaust survivors o 97 children of survivors o 112 grandchildren o 13 great-grandchildren o 51 other relatives
The underlying assumption is that not only does the respect due to Holocaust survivors extend to how Israel should defend itself against the genocidal intentions of Palestinian terrorists, but that this 'authority' is somehow hereditary and passed down to all descendants.
Part of the problem is that the definition of moral authority, which Dowd took for granted, may not be what these people think it means.
Wikipedia, while by no means authoritative on the issue, defines Moral Authority as
authority premised on principles, or fundamental truths, which are independent of written, or positive, laws...the authoritativeness or force of moral authority is applied to the conscience of each individual, who is free to act according to or against its dictates.
This definition of the relativeness of moral truth to each individual may explain why Dowd helpfully declared that Sheehan had absolute moral truth -- and that it should apply broadly.
Fast forward to today.
With the current wave of riots following the police killing of George Floyd, we have been subjected to a different kind of authority -- a collectivist moral authority -- one in which not everyone has a say, but which we are expected to abide by nevertheless, lest one suffers from the kind of collective demonization that was prevalent in Soviet Russia.
Writing about The American Soviet Mentality, Izabella Tabarovsky notes a change in social media reminiscent of Soviet Russia:
Twitter has been used as a platform for exercises in unanimous condemnation for as long as it has existed. Countless careers and lives have been ruined as outraged mobs have descended on people whose social media gaffes or old teenage behavior were held up to public scorn and judged to be deplorable and unforgivable. But it wasn’t until the past couple of weeks that the similarity of our current culture with the Soviet practice of collective hounding presented itself to me with such stark clarity.
Here in the US, we are subject to the punitive authority of a mob that has draped itself in the guise of moral superiority. After all, who can (dare) argue against the idea that Black Lives Matter?
Yet these mobs are different from the ones back in the day of the Soviet Union:
The mobs that perform the unanimous condemnation rituals of today do not follow orders from above. But that does not diminish their power to exert pressure on those under their influence.
This has resulted in a cancel culture that attacks more than just statues to be torn down.
Ira Stoll has been maintaining a List of People Canceled in Post-George-Floyd Antiracism Purges. Starting with James Bennet, who lost his job over the backlash to the Tom Cotton op-ed, the list includes editors, CEOs, and employees at universities and media -- over 20 people so far.
To take an example of the 'moral authority' at the university level -- we have gone way beyond the usual mob harassment and intimidation of invited speakers that we have been used to talking about, where the students harass and the university sits idly by and allows it to happen.
Campus professors, administrators, and graduate student instructors publicly smeared UMass Amherst student Louis Shenker as a dangerous racist and falsely charged him with hate crimes to get him expelled from school, claiming that his “views are not the kind we want to cultivate at the University.”
In December 2018, Shenker -- a "Jewish, a conservative, an outspoken Zionist, and a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump" -- attended a protest against racism and white supremacy while wearing a MAGA cap and carrying a sign supporting Trump. He was harassed by students, who blocked him from displaying his sign, calling him a “Nazi” and a “fascist."
That is when a graduate student who teaches undergraduate students grabbed his hat and screamed curses at him. The campus police determined that Shenker was "the victim of larceny and assault and battery motivated by anti-white and anti-Jewish bias."
The university did nothing.
Then things got worse.
On October 13, 2019, two faculty members and an assistant dean exchanged emails formulating a harassment and defamation plan to force Louis to leave the university. In possession of the emails, Louis’s attorneys confirmed that Professor Maryann Barakso wrote, “We need to talk about Louis. He is becoming a major problem…. As you know he is Jewish, so we have to be very careful and smart in how we deal with this problem.” Professor Lauren McCarthy responded, “We’ve dealt with other problem students in the past successfully and you know nobody likes a racist so we can handle it.” [emphasis added]
In other words, as Shenker's lawyer put it in a letter to the university, "They formulated a plan to terminate Louis’s contractual relationship with the university by defaming him as a racist."
The article goes on to describe how the university staff put their premeditate plan into action:
On campus, their graduate student sympathizers disseminated hundreds of flyers depicting Louis’s face with big block letters: “ALERT! WHITE SUPREMACIST LOUIS SHENKER.” The flyer went viral on UMass-connected social media where Louis was called a Nazi and threatened with physical violence.
Beth Peller is a long-time militant activist. She proselytizes her students with stories about her past radical escapades including Occupy Oakland and writing articles from Lebanon defending Hezbollah in its 2006 war against Israel. Peller knows how to work the system. She filed a series of false charges against Louis with the municipal police, alleging that he was a white supremacist who was threatening her. These legal actions were vacated by Louis’s counsel for lack of evidence, but not before Louis spent two nights in jail.
Peller then orchestrated an online petition calling on the university administration to expel the dangerous white supremacist Shenker. Hundreds of professors from across the country, including Cornel West, Judith Butler, Mark Bray, Johnny Williams, and professors from Louis’s own university signed on to this slander.
The petition was published by the Campus Anti-Fascist Network (CAN), an Antifa-associated group founded by Stanford Professor David Palumbo-Liu, a virulently anti-Israel academic, and Purdue Professor William Mullen, who wrote “we need to de-Zionize our campuses.” Mullen claims CAN’s purpose is “to drive racists off campuses.” He asserts that his group includes a large number of students and faculty and has been endorsed by several university departments. CAN was eager to help with the malicious campaign, given that the organization’s goal is to silence anybody with whom it disagrees, especially Trump supporters and conservative speakers. [emphasis added]
Fearing for his safety, Shenker was forced to flee the campus.
One of the ominous elements of this account is how easily professors across the country -- hundreds of them -- were mobilized into attacking, slandering and endangering the life of Louis Shenker. University professors may not be noted as moral authority figures, but historically, professors and "intellectuals" are generally recognized as authority figures and historically such people are looked up to for guidance and inspiration.
Those days are apparently gone. These days, when the media covers for violent riots as peaceful protests, it seems that anyone can lay claim to the mantle of being an "intellectual."
According to the article, one of those who signed on to the attack on Shenker was Cornel West -- a supporter of BDS who also makes excuses for Palestinian terrorism, writing that the actions of Hamas “pale in the face of the US-supported Israeli slaughter of innocent civilians.” West once accused President Obama of being “most comfortable with upper middle-class white and Jewish men who consider themselves very smart, very savvy and very effective in getting what they want.”
Another of those mentioned in the article is Judith Butler, who believes that "understanding Hamas-Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important."
Note the applause Butler receives to this comment.
This is the same Judith Butler, as Elder of Ziyon notes, who is impressed by Edward Said's thesis that
Moses, an Egyptian, is the founder of the Jewish people, which means that Judaism is not possible without this defining implication in what is Arab.’
In other words, neither Said nor Butler are aware that the early Egyptians were not Arabs.
Mark Bray is a college professor and author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook. Bray is a big fan of Antifa:
Bray argues that “fascism cannot be defeated through speech” and that the lessons of history suggest that Neo-Nazis and white supremacists have to be shut down before they become too powerful or normalized.
...For Bray, violence is not simply a question of kicking a fascist if a fascist kicks you but of “preemptively” shutting down “fascist organizing efforts . . . before they turn deadly.”
It is not surprising that he would jump right in to smear someone without checking the facts -- or perhaps the fact that Shenker wore a MAGA cap was all the proof he needed.
Bray said that while anti-Zionism is not a focus of antifa, many members tend to be anti-Zionist as part of their far-left activism. Anti-Racist Action groups, he said, had taken part in anti-Zionist events in the past.
[Jewish antifa member] Sieradski said, however, that Jews play a significant role in the movement because “we’re fighting Nazis and anti-Semitism is the prime ideological viewpoint of Nazis.”
Given what has taken place in academic discourse regarding Israel in the last 20 years, I find this to be a truly outrageous contention and makes me wonder whether Mr. Williams has been living under a rock
Apparently, Williams found time to come out from under that rock to join in an attack on a student.
Monyak concludes
Mr. Williams advocates “critical and untampered public debate” and erroneously concludes that he and his cohort “unnerve people because we go beyond the commonly accepted or officially defined version of human events.” That’s not it at all. The unnerving takes place because their primary interest is not in debate, but in flinging as much populist muck as he can at Israel without regard for intellectual accuracy or conceptual clarity. [emphasis added]
Mr. Williams's attack on a student is apparently consistent with his past mudslinging.
All in all, such is the level of heroism we can expect these days from our role models in academia, as it becomes difficult to distinguish them from the unruly mobs -- with nary a word from the media.
Allan Bloom wrote about The Closing of the American Mind.
These days we may well be witnessing The Collapse of the American Mind.
Applying Israeli civilian law to West Bank settlements wouldn't preclude peace or violate Palestinian rights. It is widely described as an Israeli "annexation." But annexation has a precise meaning in international law: the forcible incorporation by one state of the territory of another state.
The land to which Israel seeks to apply its laws isn't legally the territory of any other state. Neither the U.S. nor the European Union recognizes the existence of a Palestinian state, and Israel's sovereign claim to the territory is superior to any other country's.
Over the past 53 years, Jews have returned to Judea and Samaria, territories from which they had been ethnically cleansed by the Jordanians in 1949. After five decades of Palestinian rejectionism, it is hard to argue that the legal regulation of these communities must remain in limbo until a far-off peace deal is signed.
Past peace efforts have been based on the morally repugnant and impractical assumption that the creation of a Palestinian state must be preceded by the expulsion of all Jews from its territory.
The application of Israeli law wouldn't affect the treatment of Palestinians. In the West Bank, they would continue to be governed by the Palestinian Authority.
The Israeli move may help bring the Palestinians to the table, as it would show Palestinian leaders that turning down negotiations weakens their hand.
Many in the international community, too lazy or ideologically blinded to distinguish between cause and effect, have castigated Israel through the decades for the ostensible crime of defending itself against those who have sought our destruction, when the most cursory of inspections would confirm that the “Middle East conflict” would end if the aggression against Israel were to halt.
But Israel itself has known the truth. Its very resilience — its capacity not merely to survive but to thrive through decades of warfare, terrorism, and efforts to demonize it — is the greatest testament to that domestic confidence in our cause and legitimacy.
Unilaterally extending Israeli rule into the West Bank — preempting the Trump administration’s declared effort to foster a negotiated accord, with a land grab that turns Israel into the rejectionist party — marks the very opposite of our national interest. It not only damages the way we are perceived around the world, it remakes the way we present and see ourselves.
The Palestinian Authority rejected the Trump plan before it was even unveiled. It routinely incites against Israel, and its president, Mahmoud Abbas, in incendiary speeches designed to foster intolerance and intransigence, repeatedly seeks to separate modern Israel from its historic Jewish heritage. We cannot safely relinquish territory to this Palestinian leadership, not in the toxic climate it has helped create. We are also, of course, mindful of the devastating consequences of having relinquished adjacent territory to the north (the South Lebanon “security zone” in 2000) and south (the Gaza Strip in 2005), where in both cases terrorist organizations filled the vacuum, sparked wars and conflict, and pose ongoing danger.
But neither should we subvert our own long-term goals, the foundational principles of our own Declaration of Independence — to flourish as a Jewish and a democratic state ready and willing to defend itself against its enemies, and with its hand stretched out in peace to those neighbors who truly wish to live in tranquility alongside it.
Why Netanyahu purports to see a “historic opportunity” in the declarative extension of Israeli sovereignty to disputed parts of the West Bank, deepening Israel’s entanglement among the hostile Palestinians and ceding the moral high ground that is central to Israel’s own resilience and self-confidence, is hard to fathom. He was previously wary of the dangers of a bi-national state between Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea in which Israel would either lose its Jewish majority or have to subvert its democracy.
But he has said he will only go ahead with the approval of the US, our most important, trusted and closest ally. And so it falls to the Trump administration, now deliberating whether to green light Netanyahu’s gambit, to just say no.
In January, US President Donald Trump unveiled a proposal avowedly designed “for the benefit of Palestinians, Israelis and the region as a whole” as a recommended basis for direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiation on a “realistic two-state solution.”
COMMUNAL leaders have lauded the Australian government’s stance at the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), after it was the only country to vote against all five anti-Israel resolutions at UNHRC’s 43rd session.
The UNHRC, which has a history of systemic bias against the Jewish State, passed five resolutions against Israel, leading the Australian Mission to the United Nations to blast its “disproportionate focus”.
“Australia has been consistent in its principled opposition to biased and one-sided resolutions targeting Israel in multilateral forums,” the mission said.
Stating, “Our position has not changed,” it added the resolutions “do nothing to contribute to lasting peace and stability for Israelis and Palestinians”.
Meanwhile, Australia’s ambassador to the UN Sally Mansfield said the UNHRC “holds Israel to a higher degree of scrutiny than any other state”.
Noting that Australia has “insisted on bringing these resolutions to a vote, so that they cannot simply be waved though as consensus resolutions”, Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-CEO Peter Wertheim said, “The Australian government is to be highly commended for consistently voting against these resolutions, and for exposing the bias and puncturing the hypocrisy which motivates them.”
Zionist Federation of Australia president Jeremy Leibler said the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister had refused to “kowtow to the UN’s obsessive focus on Israel”.
French anti-racism protesters shouted antisemitic slogans including "dirty Jews" and waved placards reading "Israel, laboratory of police violence" at a rally in Paris's Place de la République on Saturday.
In light of the Black Lives Matter rallies that have been taking place in protest against police brutality in the US, French protesters gathered in the city to protest the death of Adama Traoré, a Malian French man who died in police custody in 2016. According to Valeurs, tensions were running high as police first blocked the march from taking place, holding protesters in the square, and then a counter protest group dropped a banner from a nearby building reading "Justice for the victims of anti-white terrorism."
In response, protesters were heard yelling "dirty Jews," at the counter-protesters. The police prefect has reported these remarks to the magistrates, they said on their Twitter account.
In addition to the chants, to which the protesters raised their fists, i24 reported that protesters were seen wearing t-shirts reading "Justice for Palestine," and waving Palestinian flags at the event. Placards being held aloft included the phrase "Israel, laboratory of police violence," and another banner read "Stop the massacres by Israel. Liberty and justice for Palestine."
Last week an American organization, the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, likewise blamed the deaths of a number of African-Americans on Israel, claiming that the IDF trains American police offers in tactics that lead to human rights violations. The group tweeted: "The Israeli military trains US police in racist and repressive policing tactics, which systematically targets Black and Brown bodies," with a link to a 2016 Amnesty International report making the same claim.
Crif, the umbrella organization for French Jewry, denounced the incident, saying “there cannot be a fight against racism which directly or indirectly tolerates antisemitism in its ranks.”
Israel Advocacy Movement: Europe descend into antisemitic chaos!
Anti-racists in Paris screamed “dirty Jews” at white supremacists
Google removed Churchill’s image, but not Hitler’s
‘Patriots’ in London defended Churchill’s statue by Nazi saluting it
A Jew was stabbed 2 miles from Corbyn’s house… he said nothing
Can someone cancel 2020?
There is a growing inclination to frame the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in terms of race. According to this narrative, Israel was established as a refuge for oppressed white European Jews who in turn became oppressors of people of color, the Palestinians. As an Israeli, and the son of an Iraqi Jewish mother and North African Jewish father, it's gut-wrenching to witness this shift.
The majority of Jews in Israel today are of Middle Eastern and North African descent. I am baffled as to why mainstream media and politicians around the world ignore or misrepresent these facts. Israel was established for all Jews from every part of the world - the Middle East, North Africa, Ethiopia, Asia and, yes, Europe. No matter where Jews physically reside, they maintain a connection to the Land of Israel, where our story started and where today we continue to craft it.
Those who misrepresent Israel try to position it as a colonialist aggressor rather than a haven for those fleeing oppression. That all but erases the story of my family. In Iraq, my family experienced ongoing persecution. My great-grandfather was falsely accused of being a Zionist spy and executed in Baghdad in 1951.
Any erasure of the Mizrahi experience negates the lives of 850,000 Jewish refugees. They would also deny the existence of almost 200,000 descendants of Ethiopian Jews who were airlifted to Israel in the early 1990s in a daring rescue operation.
Israel is a place where an indigenous people have reclaimed their land and revived their ancient language, despite being surrounded by hostile neighbors and hounded by radicalized Arab nationalists who cannot tolerate any political entity in the region other than their own. Jews that were expelled from nations across the Middle East, who sacrificed all they had, have been crucial in building and defending the Jewish state since its outset.
"They now see themselves as autonomous, neutral critics (who are) not of the culture but somehow outside the culture and above it," he said. "They now see themselves not as servants of American democracy, but as servants of the truth in some wider sense."
These days, journalists no longer see themselves as mere 'servants of American democracy.' Then, again, they don't necessarily see themselves as 'servants of the truth' either.
...To Activists For A Cause
In 2013, former New York Times editor Bill Keller published a "conversation" with Glenn Greenwald, whom he described as "an advocate of a more activist, more partisan kind of journalism." In explaining how he does journalism differently, Greenwald complained that
this suffocating constraint on how reporters are permitted to express themselves produces a self-neutering form of journalism that becomes as ineffectual as it is boring...all journalism is a form of activism. Every journalistic choice necessarily embraces highly subjective assumptions — cultural, political or nationalistic — and serves the interests of one faction or another. [emphasis added]
As activists, there are an awful lot of journalists out there who see themselves as members of a cause. The problem is that at least when you see yourself as serving Truth, you are inclined to accept criticism of error and make corrections. But if you see yourself as an activist to a cause -- are you really as likely to accept criticism and correct a mistake? For that matter, how far will you be willing to go to stretch a point (or two)? After all, it's for the cause. Another consideration is that, as an activist dedicated to a cause, journalists are susceptible to the pressures of other members of the cause, who now feel free to criticize your statements, and expect you to toe the line. That would explain how newspapers publish headlines that do not just give an idea of the story, but actually tilt the story.
If You Thought The Headlines of Reports on Palestinian Terrorists Were Bad...
In a recent post, I reviewed biased headlines that twist stories of attacks by Palestinian terrorists. I gave 2 examples where it took not one but 3 headlines in order to get the story straight. CBS online news went from -- 3 Palestinians Killed as Daily Violence Grinds On to: Israeli Police Kill 3 Alleged Palestinian Attackers to: Palestinians Kill Israeli Officer, Wound Another Before Being Killed The Associated Press went from -- Israeli Police Shoot Man in East Jerusalem to: Car Slams Into East Jerusalem Train Station to: Palestinian Kills Baby at Jerusalem Station But now, in the course of the past year, we have seen news stories in the US where The New York Times has felt obliged to rewrite its headlines multiple times -- by public, or political, demand. Last year, Trump spoke after mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton. The New York Times dutifully reported on his comments and used the headline: Trump Urges Unity vs. Racism.The headline was obviously not nearly anti-Trump enough. So following critical tweets from politicians, presidential candidates and others, the New York Times dutifully changed the headline to: Assailing Hate But Not Guns But this is not a one-time occurrence. Just last week, The New York Times again changed its headline after pressure from Democrats. When Trump threatened that he was ready to bring out the military as riots spread throughout the country in reaction to the police killing of George Floyd -- The New York Times reported with the headline: As Chaos Spreads, Trump Vows to ‘End It Now' Opposing the neutrality of the headline, Democrats condemned it as not sufficiently anti-Trump. So The New York Times obliged: Trump Threatens to Send Troops into States However, a personal best was probably achieved earlier this year, in March. Within the space of an hour, The New York Times produced 4 different headlines as it desperately tried to satisfy Democrats. The story was about the stalled coronavirus relief bill. The problem was how to write the headline so as not to be too harsh on the Democrats. Democrats Block Action on $1.8 Trillion Stimulus (that of course would never do) Democrats Block Action on Stimulus Plan, Seeking Worker Protections (toned down; they're doing it for the workers!) Partisan Divide Threatens Deal on Rescue Bill (it's not the Democrats! No, it's that darned 'cycle of partisanship' we hear so much about...) As State Pleas Mount, Trump Outlines Some Federal Action; Senate Democrats Block Stimulus Package (reflecting complaints from conservative leaders who were tired of The New York Times game)
Since then, there have been multiple explanations, excuses, denials and James Bennet resigned as The New York Times Opinion Editor. As the paper itself admits in the 'contextual' comments that now introduce the op-ed (sort of a warning label) it was The New York Times itself that created the headline -- not Senator Cotton. And the paper admits that the headline they chose is "incendiary". But that admission hasn't stopped The New York Times from continuing to mischaracterize what Cotton wrote:
The point is that contrary to the headline and what The New York Times claims in the above tweet, Senator Cotton did not "call for military force against protesters in American cities." What he did write is advise the use of the military to either back up and support the outnumbered police and National Guard or help out where elected officials have refused to take any action where violent riots have broken out. This would be accomplished by invoking the Insurrection Act, which in the past has been used by both Republican presidents as well as by presidents Kennedy and Johnson. Whether one agrees or disagrees with this opinion piece, the headline chosen was neither neutral nor accurate, and apparently was intended to provoke a reaction. And it did:
You would have to stop reading at New York Times headline, without reading what Senator Cotton actually wrote, in order to claim that Blacks -- or anyone for that matter -- would be put in danger. Yet among New York Times reporters there were 800 staff members who signed a letter condemning the op-ed. Then, of course, there are other members of the media and social media, and politicians who have joined in to help spin this out of control. After all, how many people actually read beyond the headlines?
Spinning The Narrative
But it is important to keep in mind that the headline manipulation in this case is different from the others mentioned above. The other headline manipulations, as shown by the subsequent changes, are meant to soften the blow and play down what is reported in the article itself. But in the case of the Cotton op-ed, the headline was meant to deliberately provoke. It was inaccurate and designed to influence in advance how the reader would understand the op-ed itself. Previous posts have looked at examples of New York Times bias when it comes to Israel as well as bias against Jews.
The manipulation of headlines and the distortions in dealing with the Senator Cottom op-ed are problems we are familiar with from The New York Times reporting on Israel. And to tell you the truth, when James Bennet tweeted proudly, if not boastfully about the "patriotic protests"...
...we also remember the insistence of The New York Times on reporting on violent Gazan riots on the border with Israel as "peaceful protests," even as attempts were made (and some, successfully) to infiltrate into Israel. In the current situation, you don't have to minimize the tragedy of the killing of George Floyd or deny the validity of the protests in order to take note of the cases of violence and the need to deal with them and report on them accurately.
Former MK Yehudah Glick was severely beaten on Thursday when he visited the bereaved family of Iyad al-Halak, a Palestinian man who was shot by Border Police last Friday.
Halak was autistic and, according to his family, had the mental capacity of a child.
Glick was beaten when he left the bereaved family, who lives in east Jerusalem, and taken to Shaarei Zedek Medical Center, N12 reported.
The Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem Rabbi Aryeh Stern visited the mourning tent on Tuesday.
The shooting of an autistic man, leading to his death, led to wide condemnation across the country.
Norway’s foreign minister on Thursday announced that funds earmarked for the Palestinian Authority’s education sector would be withheld until changes were made to schoolbooks that promoted antisemitism and terrorist violence against Israelis.
The decision followed a vote last December in the Norwegian parliament to demand such changes after the publication of a report by IMPACT-se — an NGO that analyzes school textbooks around the world for signs of intolerance — that demonstrated systematic insertions of violence, martyrdom and jihad across all grades and subjects in the textbooks used by the PA.
Foreign Minister Ine Eriksen Søreide said that when she met with PA Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh in Ramallah in February, she had “communicated the government’s views on the matter, stressing that lack of improvements in the school curriculum could have budgetary implications for future Norwegian aid.”
Søreide expressed optimism that changes to the textbooks would be implemented. “We feel that there is a good and close dialogue with the Palestinian education authorities on the issue,” she said. “Some of the curriculum changes have already been made by Palestine’s own textbook quality control committee.”
A statement from IMPACT-se praised Søreide for her “unprecedented decision.”
“This remarkable pronouncement is a clear message that Norway’s elected leaders will not allow their generosity to be abused, to deliver a daily diet of violence, bigotry and incitement against Jews and Israel in Palestinian schools,” the NGO declared.
My synagogue is using the scrolls my grandfather once used as a military chaplain in WWII. Now, once again, his Torah brings comfort during a time of danger and uncertainty.
When our family moved to New York, we brought the Torah with us and loaned it to our new shul, the Park Avenue Synagogue, as our Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove instantly understood the significance of this family treasure.
And now the Torah is back in action during a crisis. When I saw Cantor Azi Schwartz holding my grandfather’s Torah snug to his chest, I was overwhelmed by emotions about how our tradition has the capacity to travel over time and space in a troubled world. He has incorporated this scroll into some of the online services that we watch in our virtual world, part of how he brings relief to all of us who are trying to stay healthy and be patient until this viral storm passes so we can return to normalcy. As he held that Torah, the cantor offered a small taste of what so many observant Jews dearly miss, the spiritual wonder of attending services on Friday night and Saturday morning as we connect with our congregational friends and take time away from the demands of the secular world to pray and learn.
And yet, I couldn’t also help feeling that my grandfather’s Torah needs to be returned to a physical home as soon as possible. While the Jewish community is rightly focused on making sure that public health guidelines are followed, we must be prepared, when this pandemic is over, to do everything possible to repair our social fabric, which includes the synagogue, church, and mosque. Jews and other places of social bonds—educational, cultural, and other nonprofit groups—will struggle to survive when this ends.
COVID-19 has wreaked havoc on the institutions that are so vital to the emotional health of our world—the places where people come together for common interests and experiences, the organizations that offer cultural education and celebration, and the physical religious rooms that help us achieve spiritual vitality. A new normal cannot exist without them. We can’t be virtual forever.
In the years ahead, we must do everything that is necessary to fix the broken spaces where Torahs like my grandfather’s are housed and where we come together as a people to worship. Just as my grandfather did almost 75 years ago, we will need to bring the Torahs back home, as soon as this war is over.
Not everyone welcomed the visibly distinctive insignia of the Jewish chaplain. Some Protestants, reported the American Israelite in November 1918, bristled at the notion that the Jews had an “emblem peculiar to themselves,” anxious lest they use the war “as a time for their own denominational propaganda work.” A number of American Jews, in turn, bristled at the use of Roman numerals rather than the letters of the Hebrew alphabet to designate the commandments. If, as representatives of the Jewish community claimed, the Ten Commandments was to the Jews (aka the “Hebrews”), what the cross was to Christians, why stop short of heralding it as a Jewish symbol, through and through?
Fear of desecration, of exposing the sacred Hebrew letters to the most frightful of wartime conditions, was one response; the difficulty of procuring Hebrew letters another. Left unsaid but implicit all the same: By WWI, American visual culture, which prized the Ten Commandments, commonly depicted them with Roman numerals, not Hebrew letters. (By then, the “Tablets of the Law” had become as much an American phenomenon as a Jewish one, but that’s another story.)
Though quelled at the time and for several decades thereafter, concern over the nomenclature by which the Ten Commandments was identified repeatedly surfaced. Writing more than 50 years later, in 1972, Rabbi Judah Nadich, General Eisenhower’s adviser on Jewish affairs, called the concern a “perennial” one, while Rabbi Aryeh Lev, director of the National Jewish Welfare Board’s Commission on Jewish Chaplaincy, across whose desk passed any number of suggestions—among them, replacing both the Hebrew letters and the Roman numerals with “short straight horizontal lines”—described it as “really an interesting matter.”
It would take another decade—a total of 65 years—before Hebrew lettering finally made its way onto the Jewish chaplain’s Ten Commandments insignia. In 1983, it became official.
The substitution of a “J” for an “H” and of the Hebrew alphabet for Roman numerals may not appear on anyone’s list of triumphant historical moments or victories. Perhaps they should. Gestures of inclusion and public recognition, these two visual declarations not only stabilized American Jewry’s footing, but also bolstered its confidence, its self-assertion, as a minority culture. By my reckoning, that qualifies as a victory.
📽 VIDEO: President Truman meets with Chaim Weizmann, President of the newly proclaimed State of Israel, at the White House #OnThisDay in 1948. https://t.co/PpC76dXDDL
At some point, the people who run the European Union will have to get used to the idea that Israel is here to stay.
So far, it’s been a tough sell, mostly because old habits die hard.
Amid the flurry of denunciations against Israel, for even thinking about going ahead with sovereignty for parts of Judea and Samaria, most telling is this remark from Josep Borrell, EU’s High Commissioner for Foreign Affairs, as follows: “We strongly urge Israel to refrain from any unilateral decision that would lead to the annexation of any occupied Palestinian territory, and would be, as such, contrary to international law.”
Regarding international law, the high commissioner is highly mistaken, as we read here from the Gatestone Institute.
From time immemorial, or precisely the Revelation at Sinai, which the Sage Judah Halevi referred to as the defining moment of all world history, the land, all of it, belongs to the Jews, verified over and over again from Balfour, to the League of Nations, to the San Remo Conference, back to The Kuzari and ultimately to the Hebrew Bible.
It is written in parchment. It is written in stone. It is written in the DNA of every Jewish person, man, woman, and child.
So what’s troubling those European commissioners, high and low, particularly from France, and now even the Vatican?
Yes, France, still famous for the Roundup of Paris, which even amazed the Gestapo at how smartly the gendarmes rushed to the task.
Suddenly, the French were more efficient even than the Germans…and today, incidentally, Germany has also voiced “concern” about Israel’s possible move toward partial annexation.
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Saturday, August 15, 2020
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