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Wednesday, September 30, 2020

09/30 Links Pt1: The Abraham Accords trumps the Oslo Accords; Netanyahu Highlights Hezbollah Use of Human Shields; Iranian Chess Referee Reveals Jewish Heritage as She Seeks Asylum in UK

From Ian:

The Abraham Accords trumps the Oslo Accords
The signing of the Abraham Accords is an incredible achievement for the Trump administration. For the last three and a half years President Trump disregarded all conventional wisdom regarding the Middle East despite warnings from past presidents, State Department officials and diplomats around the world. Many thought that his new policies would end in death and destruction. How did he know what no one else did? How did he see peace when everyone else saw war? The answer lies with a concept called faith-based diplomacy.

President Trump looks at Israel from a biblical point of view. He understands how the base of his voters looks at Israel, and when Bible-believing Christians voted for him, they made it clear that they wanted him to improve relations with Israel. Trump changed the course of America’s policy toward Israel, drastically altering the trajectory set by past presidents. He used the fact that his base was behind him to implement major policy shifts. These shifts were not necessarily politically correct, but they were biblically correct.

Since former president Carter, the US’s Middle East policy had viewed Israel’s “occupation” as responsible for the absence of peace in the Middle East. The PLO’s aggression and refusal to either disavow terrorism or accept Israel’s right to exist were brushed aside. The Obama administration adopted the 1978 Hansell Memorandum, which condemned Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria, as US official policy. This State Department document was based on an erroneous interpretation of the Fourth Geneva Convention from 1949 and had no basis in international law. But Obama’s acceptance of it enabled the UN Security Council to pass a resolution criminalizing Jewish communities beyond the 1949 armistice line.

The Trump administration recognized the false narrative, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the administration was replacing the Hansell memo with an accurate assessment of international law. “It is important that we speak the truth when the facts lead us to it. And that’s what we’ve done,” Pompeo announced in January 2020. President Trump’s policies expose the corrupted narrative of his predecessors’ policies toward Iran and Israel.

Trump ended the Obama doctrine on Israel. He stopped blaming Israel for the problems of the Middle East, and he started looking at how to strengthen the alliance between Israel and America. He refocused the story by seeing the situation as it is: that Israel is a small but flourishing democracy amid the hostile Middle East. This shift in perspective has allowed America and Israel to once again work together in harmony.
The EU’s Hypocrisy on Housing Demolitions in Israel
Entering the phrase “housing demolitions” in the EU’s official site yields a shocking result: 18 of the first documents to appear concern Israeli demolitions of Palestinian homes in the West Bank. In other words, 80% of the EU’s reports on this worldwide phenomenon involve a population and an area less that one-tenth of 1% of the world’s population or landmass.

To fully absorb how warped this result is, one must recognize that housing demolitions and evictions are a global phenomenon that is sometimes carried out in accordance with deliberate policies to discriminate against minorities. A report by the EU itself, albeit from 2005, acknowledged widespread discrimination via housing demolitions and evictions within the Union against Gypsy, Roma, and Sinti populations in countries as varied as Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Portugal. These countries do not provide figures on the relative use of this tool between minority and majority groups.

Punitive or discriminatory housing demolition occurs around the world. India accuses Pakistan of the practice in Hindu areas in Pakistan’s Punjab, and Pakistan claims that India does the same to India’s Muslim citizens. Egypt has been criticized for evicting thousands of Bedouin to clear a path for housing projects for Egyptians outside Sinai in the peninsula. The Kurdish government has evicted Sunnis from Kurdish areas, and local newspapers in the US frequently report evictions and demolitions of the homes of minorities in the name of urban renewal. The list of countries that practice housing demolition is almost as long as the list of member states in the UN.

The difference is that one has to dig deep into the EU archives to find any mention of discriminatory housing demolition and evictions anywhere other than in Israel. The EU’s limelight focuses almost exclusively on the Jewish State.

Though the EU always claims it is impartial, a simple Google search demonstrates that this is a falsehood. The search produces long lists of links to pieces on housing demolitions in the West Bank or among the Negev Bedouin — pieces that are churned out by human rights groups supported either directly by the EU, by member states, or both. Thus, Google (and other new media) become tools with which the EU condemns Israel in a blatantly partial and unfair way.
Using the settlements to whitewash terrorism
Last Thursday, 24th September, the outgoing Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Palestine and MP for Aberavon, Stephen Kinnock, led a debate in the House of Commons on the issue of “annexation” vis a vis Israel.

Watching the debate, one could be forgiven for assuming that too many of the participants were simply unaware that there were two sides in this decades-old conflict and that the absence of its preferred resolution – i.e. a secure Israeli state alongside a peaceful and viable Palestinian state, is solely down to Israel and its settlements.

The UN is often referred to as the “theatre of the absurd” but last week’s Commons debate was worthy of that title too, thanks to Mr Kinnock and his allies. In Mr Kinnock’s world, the Israel-Palestinian conflict is all about the settlements and only about the settlements. The misrepresentation and obfuscation of facts, the obsessive focus and emphasis on just one of what in reality are many issues that define and contribute to this conflict from BOTH sides, as well as the disregard for historical and more recent international and legal treaties, was and remains a deeply troubling spectacle to have watched. It is simply beyond the bounds of this piece to touch upon all the issues, so its focus is on just some of what Mr Kinnock said, and didn’t say.

Mr Kinnock’s obsession with the settlements deserves some context here. It deserves mention and acknowledgement that the claims of illegality of Israel’s settlements in the disputed territories in Judea and Samaria / the West Bank are highly politicised and ignore previous internationally and legally ratified treaties such as the San Remo Convention and the League of Nations (LoN) Mandate for Palestine. The LoN Mandate for Palestine’s Article 6 testifies to the legality of Jewish settlement in Palestine and Article 80 of the United Nations’ Charter implicitly recognises the Mandate for Palestine, a Mandate which granted Jews the irrevocable right to settle in the area of Palestine, anywhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. These rights remain and no treaties, agreements or accords since have abrogated them. In fact, even the Oslo accords support construction by either side in areas of Judea and Samaria / the West Bank under their respective administrative control. That said, there are many Israelis, as well as Jews and non-Jewish supporters of Israel in the Diaspora, who are against the settlements and see them as an obstacle to peace. Being against the settlements does not make one anti-Israel. Not at all. Putting aside political charges and those historical treaties and agreements which refute such charges, the settlements ARE an issue in the conflict. But they are not the root cause of the conflict nor the biggest obstacle to peace as Mr Kinnock would like to have us believe. Not by far!

Sunday, September 20, 2020

09/20 Links: Ruthie Blum: Trumping Palestinian lies and Tehran’s agenda; Ruth Bader Ginsburg, first Jewish woman on Supreme Court, dies at 87

From Ian:

Ruthie Blum: Trumping Palestinian lies and Tehran’s agenda
Moreover, in stark contrast to his predecessor, Barack Obama, Trump welcomed – rather than warned against – Israeli strikes on Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Syria. Meanwhile, his message to the Palestinians was that they could choose to remain in the Dark Ages or opt to embrace peace and prosperity. It was up to them, and no figure in Washington was going to beg. They’d never been treated this way by a world leader.

From the get-go, then, Abbas and his henchmen rejected all US contact, other than when stomping on or burning the American flag. While the anti-Trump European Union continued to assure them that they were right to feel oppressed by “evil occupier” Israel, the Arab League grew even more disinterested in their self-imposed plight than it already was.

In fact, it could barely muster up the energy to pay lip service to their “cause” anymore. In fairness, its members had and still have their own interests to safeguard. Trump, it turns out, has been tapping into these interests skillfully.

Additional evidence of this lies in the talks that he brokered between Belgrade and Pristina earlier this month, resulting in Serbia’s announcement that it would move its embassy to Jerusalem and a recognition of Israel by Muslim-majority Kosovo.

His claim on Tuesday, thus, that “at least five or six” other countries are soon to follow the UAE’s and Bahrain’s lead is utterly plausible. The upbeat attitude of Mossad chief Yossi Cohen and the hysterical reaction on the part of the Palestinians indicates that it’s practically a done deal.

PA Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh, for example, called the signing of the Abraham Accords a “black day in the history of the Arab nation... added to the Palestinian calendar of pain.”

He also said that such “normalization with Israel is harmful to Arab dignity.”

Neither this sentiment nor the rocket barrages that were launched into Israel during the Emirati foreign minister’s speech – in Arabic, with a token reference to the Palestinians – could camouflage the reality on the ground in a shifting Middle East: The Palestinian jig, like the lie that Trump exposed about al-Aqsa, is up.
Jon Gabriel: Trump takes a step toward peace in the Middle East, and somehow, that's horrible?
Everyone said a deal was impossible

The glum reception to Mideast peace comes from a place of shock. For decades, foreign policy panjandrums on the right and left insisted these agreements were utterly impossible. First, the U.S. needed to solve the impasse between the Israelis and Palestinians, then perhaps peace could follow.

The corrupt leaders of the Palestinian Authority rejected proposal after proposal, but the U.S. learned nothing. Obama’s Secretary of State John Kerry mocked anyone who thought otherwise.

“There will be no advanced and separate peace with the Arab world without the Palestinian process and Palestinian peace,” Kerry said at the Brookings Institute’s Saban Forum in 2016. “Everybody needs to understand that. That is a hard reality.”

Whether by wise counsel or gut instinct, Trump decided this was nonsense. He isolated Iran, strengthened ties with Saudi Arabia and the gulf states, and brought everyone to the negotiating table.

Within a few years, he proved Kerry, Rhodes and every other Foggy Bottom dilletante wrong. Somehow, Trump did the impossible

Moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem was supposed to light the Middle Eastern powder keg. As was pulling U.S. troops out of Kurdish-held regions of northeast Syria. As was the assassination of Qassim Suleimani, head of Iran’s murderous Quds Force.

Again and again, Trump keeps accomplishing things that foreign policy experts promised were impossible.

At the signing ceremony, Bahrani Foreign Minister Abdullatif al-Zayani said, “Today is a truly historic occasion. A moment for hope and opportunity.”

I don’t know if Abraham would be a Donald Trump fan. But he’s definitely smiling down on his sons today.


21see Presents: Israel, UAE and Bahrain sign historic Abraham Accords
On Tuesday, we took a camera out into the streets of Tel Aviv to find out what locals think about the historic Abraham Accords signed this week between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain.

The excitement was genuine. “There’s no why for peace,” said one Tel Avivian. “Peace in itself is the answer.”

“It’s a great start,” said another.

But a peace agreement… most agree that this is normalization of relations, rather than a peace deal. As one local asks: “How can you have peace, if you haven’t had war?”


Dominic Green: The thinking behind Pompeo’s Middle East mission
The Abraham Accords, Pompeo says, are the fruit of ‘years of hard work’ by the Trump administration, the Department of Defense, the State Department and teams from the White House. President Trump, he says, made it possible by flipping the received wisdom ‘on its head’.

‘That theory was, you had to solve the Palestinian problem before nations could recognize Israel. We’ve said, “No, we have to break the mould.” We need to move forward in a different direction.’ After the Obama administration’s tilt toward Iran, the Trump administration, Pompeo said, had assured Israel and the Gulf states that they have ‘a real partner in the United States’.

Reviving the Iran Deal, Pompeo warns, would be ‘the wrong policy’ and would endanger the US-brokered Israeli-Arab breakthrough: ‘I think all of that would be at risk.’

The UAE and Bahrain, he says, ‘realise it is in their shared interest to acknowledge Israel's right to exist and to have normal relationships, commercial relationships with them, security relationships with them... If the United States’ foreign policy were to return to where it was four years ago, I think there’s a real risk that this common threat from the Islamic Republic of Iran would undermine all the good work that has been done to date, that the normalisations won't continue.’


Monday, September 14, 2020

09/14 Links Pt2: David Collier: Fake Jews, the Scottish PSC and anti-Jewish hostility in Scotland; Medieval libels in today’s PA: “Israel openly murders Palestinian children”

From Ian:
David Collier: Fake Jews, the Scottish PSC and anti-Jewish hostility in Scotland
In Scotland they have antisemites who pretend to be Jews. The fake ‘Jewish’ activist is then promoted by the antisemites in the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign (SPSC). In turn the SPSC has access to the heart of the Scottish Government and Justice system. In Scotland Jews can be stalked and have their complaints fall on deaf ears. Jewish business has already been chased out of the country. When they eventually try to defend themselves, Jews end up being smeared by a hostile press. Nobody can fairly say that Scotland is safe for Jews.
The ‘Jewish’ activist at the football match.

Last week I reported on a vile demonstration that took place in Glasgow, when a few extremist groups protested about Scotland playing against a football team from the Jewish state. My article focussed on the presence of several notable antisemites. A recent video from the pro-Iranian Press TV brought to light something even more sinister. Their reporter Robert Carter tweeted a video of an interview that took place during the demonstration. Carter introduces the person as a ‘Jewish activist’. The footage went viral.

The person in the video is called Jola AlJakhbeer. In 2018 she married a Palestinian from Gaza, Younis Al Jakhbeer. Her name on Facebook is currently AlJakhbeer Jola but the Facebook URL suggests she may also have used Lola Hazel at some point.

In the interview AlJakhbeer says she is there representing ‘Scottish Jews against Zionism’. It is worth watching the interview and listening to her talk about ‘us’ and ‘we’ and ‘Jewish values’.

Jola is a key campaigner for the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign (SPSC). She appears to have used many aliases, such as Daria Krysta and Daria Auerman.

After the invention of ‘Scottish Jews against Zionism’, the name ‘Jola Litwitz’ began to appear on letters from Scottish Jewish anti-Zionists. I found occurrences in the National, IJAN and on posts belonging to the SPSC and JVL. It is possible that there are two women with the name Jola in Glasgow that are running Scottish Jews Against Zionism, but it is highly unlikely. Far more logical is that Jola AlJakhbeer has used a surname that sounds more Jewish.

For about three years, Jola went by the name of Jolanta Hadzic. She claimed she was the wife of Bosnian Muslim Muhammed Hadz. At the time this is what Hadz had to say about Jews – that we are all ‘Khazars‘.
Israel Advocacy Movement: Chris Williamson shared a 'Jewish' Holocaust denier


Lib Dems drop shortlisted London mayor candidate over ‘don’t vote for a Jew’ footage
A Liberal Democrat shortlisted to stand for London mayor has been dropped by her party it emerged she had called on voters not to back a Jewish candidate.

The JC has seen footage of Geeta Sidhu-Robb using a megaphone during the 1997 election campaign in Blackburn to urge Muslim voters not to vote for her Labour opponent, former Labour Secretary Jack Straw, because he is “a Jew.”

After the Lib Dems were sent a complaint about the candidate’s remarks, which were filmed for a Channel 5 documentary, the party released a statement saying: “Geeta Sidhu-Robb has been suspended from the Liberal Democrats and will not be on the ballot paper to be the Liberal Democrat candidate for Mayor of London.

“There is an investigation underway in accordance with due process."

Then a Conservative candidate, the health food entrepreneur was shown in the footage saying she was going to “take the gloves off” after accusing the local Labour Party of telling Muslim voters she was “against Islam”.

Ms Sidhu-Robb, once a senior figure in the People’s Vote campaign, could be seen making allegations about the local Labour campaign, accusing it of “making it racist, it's making it personal….. particularly considering the fact that my husband actually is Muslim.”

She then announces: "So, we are just going to pull the gloves off. I am going to get a car and walk around, and drive through town telling everyone Jack Straw is a Jew. How is a Muslim going to vote for someone who is Jewish?


Why Jews would vote for Trump: Answering Abe Foxman
The “more in sadness than in anger” trope is on full display in a recent Times of Israel op-ed by Abe Foxman about Jewish voters and President Trump. Foxman, who served as head of the Anti-Defamation League for decades and oversaw its shift from mainstream community defense organization to a shill for the left, offers a harsh critique of President Donald Trump’s record of unparalleled support for Israel and fails to make mention of the virulent anti-Semitism that now flows from the lips of the ascendant “progressive leadership” of the Democrat party; including Ilhan Omar, Rashid Tlaib and AOC. Let me set the record straight.

President Trump’s record is a story of perseverance and success in the face of overwhelming opposition – and his every success has benefited the United States and the Jewish community.

By removing onerous regulations at home and negotiating fair trade agreements abroad, President Trump pushed opened the door to the greatest period of economic growth we’ve seen in this country in decades. Unemployment fell to historically low levels, in particular for minorities, improving the lives of millions of American families. Likewise, the Trump administration has opened educational opportunities for underserved students, safeguarding the rights of parents and students to choose the education that is best for them, including Jewish students.

Foxman pays lip service to President Trump’s pro-Israel actions, such as moving the US embassy to Jerusalem. But there is much more to praise in the President’s Middle East policy. First is the President’s decision to take the US out of the disastrous Obama-Biden Iran nuclear deal, a badly conceived effort that let Iran continue to cheat its way toward nuclear weapons and the ballistic missiles to carry them. Trump’s “maximum pressure” policy against Iran has deprived the mullahs of the resources to pursue their nuclear dreams and limited their ongoing nefarious deeds as the largest state sponsor of terrorism – which was funded by American cash as part of the nuclear deal.

Next was President Trump’s decision to buck the warnings of failed diplomats and show true friendship to Israel. He recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and began discussions with the Israeli government about the extension of Israeli sovereignty in the West Bank, moves that made it clear that the US backs Israel’s national and sovereign rights. Trump’s policies implicitly called on the Arab world to recognize the State of Israel’s legitimacy and permanency. This not only strengthened the US-Israel alliance, but made possible the incredible diplomatic successes of the UAE-Israel peace treaty and the Bahrain-Israel agreement. Real, concrete peace has begun between Israel and Arab states, for the first time in 25 years. That is truly historic.

Friday, August 28, 2020

08/28 Links Pt2: The Plot for America: Remembering Civil Rights Leader Joachim Prinz; The Pope, the Jews, and the Secrets in the Archives

From Ian:
The Plot for America: Remembering Civil Rights Leader Joachim Prinz
The influential Newark rabbi was a confidante of Martin Luther King, but he’s been all but ignored by history

On the evening of June 26, 1937, thousands of Berlin Jews packed the city’s grand Brüdervereinshaus to bid farewell to Rabbi Joachim Prinz, who had been ordered by the Gestapo to leave Germany immediately or face an almost certain death sentence for political subversion. Prinz had been the most popular, outspoken, and inspirational champion of Jewish national rights and Zionism in the dark years since the Nazis’ rise to power, preaching to overflow crowds at Berlin’s most important temples about the need to leave Germany and immigrate to Palestine. By the summer of 1937 he had already been arrested a half-dozen times by the Gestapo, but he always managed to elude deportation. This time, however, he was warned by his “friend” and informant, Gestapo Obersturmbanführer Kuchman, that his days were numbered, and he reluctantly decided to emigrate to the United States, sponsored by his friend and patron Rabbi Stephen S. Wise. Among the uninvited guests at Prinz’s farewell was a Nazi functionary, Adolf Eichmann.

Eichmann’s presence was to have important legal ramifications more than two decades later. In the initial discovery proceedings to establish Eichmann’s identity before his 1961 trial in Jerusalem, Benno Cohen, the foremost Zionist leader in pre-war Berlin, positively identified the defendant, testifying as follows:

We held a valedictory meeting to take leave of Rabbi Dr. Joachim Prinz who was leaving the country. He was one of the finest speakers, the best Zionist propagandist in those years. The large hall was packed full. The public thronged to this meeting. Suddenly, as chairman of the event, I was called to the door and my office clerk told me, “Mr Eichmann is here.” I saw this same man, for the first time in civilian clothing, and he shouted at me, “Who is responsible for order here? This is disorder of the first degree.” … I watched him the entire time from my place in the chair.

As a young rabbi in his late twenties, Prinz was already addressing congregations of thousands in Berlin’s largest temple, the magnificent Neue Synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse, whose stunning façade has recently been restored. And less than two years after arriving in the United States after his expulsion from Germany by Eichmann’s goons, he was appointed rabbi of New Jersey’s largest Jewish house of worship, the magnificent Greek Revival Temple B’nai Abraham, which towered over Newark’s then-fashionable and heavily Jewish Clinton Hill section, where hundreds of young people swarmed to hear his Friday-night orations.

As Prinz so evidently delights in repeatedly recalling in his posthumously published memoir, Rebellious Rabbi, the Jews of both Berlin and Newark—especially “the younger generation” to whom he mainly dedicated his ministries—did not so much “go to shul” for an encounter with the divine as they “went to Prinz” for an encounter with the rabbi. The combination of Prinz’s charismatic personality and his distinctly un-theological and nationalistic understanding of the essence of Judaism proved as attractive to the nervously Americanizing Jews of mid-20th-century New Jersey as it had been to the deeply assimilated and newly imperiled Jews of early Nazi Germany. Prinz’s nationalist theology was first expressed in his classic work of Jewish defiance, Wir Juden, which was published in Berlin in 1934 and quickly became a best-seller among Germany’s deeply demoralized Jews. He used his experiences leading the Jews of Nazi Berlin to develop an almost metaphysical notion of Jewish national identity, which he referred to as the “doctrine of Jewish inescapability.”

Prinz’s initial, exploratory visit to the United States, in March 1937, just a half year before his final emigration from Germany, was marked by all manner of disappointments with the “Golden Land.” Prinz complained bitterly about America’s complacence in the face of the threat posed by Nazi Germany. In his first recorded impressions of the country, he found almost nothing that compared favorably with his native Germany. America’s cities are depicted as ugly and rundown, racism against blacks disturbingly pervasive, its political culture naïve and intellectual life second-rate, and its people primitive and poorly dressed.

The Pope, the Jews, and the Secrets in the Archives
In early 1953, the photograph of a prominent nun being arrested was splashed across the front pages of French newspapers. Over the next several weeks, other French clergy—monks and nuns—would also be arrested. The charge: kidnapping two young Jewish boys, Robert and Gérald Finaly, whose parents had perished in a Nazi death camp. The case sparked intense public controversy. Le Monde, typical of much of the French media, devoted 178 articles in the first half of the year to the story of the brothers—secretly baptized at the direction of the Catholic woman who had cared for them—and the desperate attempts by surviving relatives to get them back. It was a struggle that pitted France’s Jewish community, so recently devastated by the Holocaust, against the country’s Roman Catholic hierarchy, which insisted that the boys were now Catholic and must not be raised by Jews.

What was not known at the time—and what, in fact, could not be known until the opening, earlier this year, of the Vatican archives covering the papacy of Pius XII—is the central role that the Vatican and the pope himself played in the kidnapping drama. The Vatican helped direct efforts by local Church authorities to resist French court rulings and to keep the boys hidden, while at the same time carefully concealing the role that Rome was playing behind the scenes.

There is more. At the center of this drama was an official of the Vatican curia who, as we now know from other newly revealed documents, helped persuade Pope Pius XII not to speak out in protest after the Germans rounded up and deported Rome’s Jews in 1943—“the pope’s Jews,” as Jews in Rome had often been referred to. The silence of Pius XII during the Holocaust has long engendered bitter debates about the Roman Catholic Church and Jews. The memoranda, steeped in anti-Semitic language, involve discussions at the highest level about whether the pope should lodge a formal protest against the actions of Nazi authorities in Rome. Meanwhile, conservatives in the Church continue to push for the canonization of Pius XII as a saint.

The newly available Vatican documents, reported here for the first time, offer fresh insights into larger questions of how the Vatican thought about and reacted to the mass murder of Europe’s Jews, and into the Vatican’s mindset immediately after the war about the Holocaust, the Jewish people, and the Roman Catholic Church’s role and prerogatives as an institution.

Tuesday, August 25, 2020

08/25 Links Pt2: We need to talk about the ethnic cleansing of Middle Eastern Jews; The Mind-Bendingly Insane, Completely Craven, Utterly Unconscionable Redemption of Al Sharpton

From Ian:
We need to talk about the ethnic cleansing of Middle Eastern Jews
One million Jewish refugees were driven from nine Arab countries and Iran during the 20th Century. The governments and peoples which pushed them out did not just aim to destroy their lives. They aimed to destroy the brilliant history of Jews in the region. Jews had lived in Iraq ever since Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylonians exiled them from their homeland in the 6th Century BCE. There, the Farhud, a bloody Nazi-influenced pogrom in 1941, was an early episode in an ever-mounting persecution. The Farhud slew nearly 300 Jews and injured more than 2000. Sporadic violence made it impossible for Iraqi Jews to stay and initiated their flight to Israel.

When, in 1948, Iraq went to war with the new State of Israel, Zionism was criminalized, leading to further state-sponsored persecution. Yet more Jews fled to Israel in great numbers, until, in 1952, Iraq banned emigration. In 1969, nine men were hanged as an alleged “spy ring”. Today, there are fewer than ten Jews in Iraq. That is the story of just one community. Similar stories unfolded in communities across the region, ruining lives and desecrating a unique culture. These were stories of thorough dispossession, usually sponsored and promoted by antisemitic states, hellbent on ridding themselves of the Jews.

This is the story of Yemen too, a story of a once vibrant Jewish community, smashed to pieces in the 20th Century. For millennia, perhaps as early as the time of King Solomon, Jews flourished in Yemen, despite prejudice and oppression. They developed a rich culture of their own. The 17th Century’s Rabbi Shalom Shabazi, for example, wrote a celebrated canon of 850 poems. He was revered by Jew and non-Jew alike.

As early as 1922, the flames of hatred were being fanned in Yemen: an old law was invoked, forcing all Jewish orphans under 12 to be converted to Islam. When the UN partition plan for a Jewish and Arab state in the British Mandate of Palestine was announced in 1947, a pogrom swept through the port of Aden. It killed an estimated 82 Jews, destroyed nearly all the Jewish shops and four synagogues.

From 1949-50, Israel airlifted the vast majority of the Yemeni community to safety. There, the Yemeni community remain a cultural powerhouse. Now, in the 21st Century, the minuscule remaining fragment of Yemen’s Jews is being crushed, using the same excuses as seventy years ago. Yet again, the same “anti-Zionist” antisemitism is fulfilling its evil role.

Yet again, Jews are being put to flight by hateful zealots and murderers in one of the cradles of Jewish civilization and history.

There is a vile irony to the Houthis’ actions, and those of their predecessors in the 40s and 50s: the same hatred which says that a Jew cannot be a loyal citizen in the countries of the Diaspora, and does not deserve to be an equal citizen, also claims that Jews have no place in Israel, the land of our indigenous roots and the birthplace of our nation. The handful of Jews who, if these terrifying reports are to be believed, are being hounded out of Yemen, are the latest victims of this murderous catch-22. They are the victims of the pernicious hatred which says that there can be no refuge, no rest, no human kindness for a Jew.

When the brothers and sisters of these Yemeni Jews were being expelled all those decades ago, the world did not care. This time, as the latest chapter in the persecution of Mizrahim is written in plain sight, it is time to end the erasure which says that Jewish suffering began and ended in Europe and forgets the Jews of the Middle East.
The Mind-Bendingly Insane, Completely Craven, Utterly Unconscionable Redemption of Al Sharpton
This past weekend, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, an umbrella group uniting 125 local Jewish communities and 17 national Jewish organizations, sent an email to its followers proudly announcing that it has signed on as a partner in the Virtual March on Washington this week, an event organized by Al Sharpton.

Because last week also marked the 29th anniversary of the Crown Heights riots, it’s worth it to stop and recall that among his many distinctions—MSNBC pundit, and an adviser who reportedly regularly speaks to Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, collector of innumerable sateen suits—Al Sharpton is also currently America’s only living pogrom leader.

After a car driven by a Hasidic Jew accidentally swerved and struck a young African American boy, killing him, hundreds of the neighborhood’s Black residents rioted in the streets, chanting “death to the Jews!” as well as looting stores, attacking anyone who was visibly Jewish, and ripping mezuzot off of door posts. Sharpton was quick to arrive on the scene, leading a march in which participants burned an Israeli flag and called to kill all Jews. At the young boy’s funeral a few days later, Sharpton delivered a eulogy that borrowed heavily from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, saying that the Jewish residents of the neighborhood practiced “apartheid” and were there only to further the Jewish global grip on money and power. He ended by ominously shouting: “pay for your deeds.”

At least one Jew had already paid the ultimate price for Sharpton’s incitement: A few days earlier, 20 Black men surrounded Yankel Rosenbaum, a 29-year-old student, stabbing him in the back and beating him so badly they smashed in his skull. Rosenbaum succumbed to his wounds later that night. Sharpton showed up on the scene soon after, ensuring that the rioting continued for days.

As the years went by, Sharpton was given ample opportunity to apologize for his prominent role in this modern day anti-Semitic bloodletting. He never did.

Why, then, is this unrepentant hater being supported by a major Jewish organization? Why, barely a year after a spree in which visibly observant Jews were violently attacked in record numbers, are Jewish organizations sidling up to kiss Sharpton's ring?
What is Europe funding?
According to a report by the research institute NGO Monitor, the EU and other European governments gave the Refugee Council, and through it to the local organizations, more than $20 million between 2016-2020. An official document of the British government claims that between 2013-2016 the British have transferred £1.4 million "directly for legal cases against house demolitions or evacuations. 2,541 evacuations or demolitions were delayed as a result."

European intervention is not limited to the funding of legal procedures. Official documents of various countries show an attempt to change Israeli policy and create facts on the ground in strategic areas, using the legal system. The program's goals include "litigation of cases that are of public interest and challenge Israeli policy, through Israeli courts and international bodies"; "change of policy and practices", and "a lobby in the EU and UN." The program is executed in coordination and tight cooperation with the Palestinian Authority, which directs the cases of illegal building to the organization and its partners.

The discussions in the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on the European-funded battle for land in Area C are the first and important attempt to deal with the issue, but it's only one example of many. Europe has for years funded radical groups disguised as humanitarian NGOs, involved in campaigns against Israel such as BDS and the campaign against it at the Hague.

The Europeans even fund organizations that are connected to the Popular Front terror group. Just recently it was revealed that a few senior officials from Palestinian "human rights" groups funded by Europe were charged with the murder of Rina Shnerb. The person accused of her murder and his commander in the terror cell acted as financial managers in the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC), which is largely funded by Europe, under the title of humanitarian aid, to execute agricultural takeovers in Area C.

No country in the world would be willing to accept the fact that against any diplomatic norms, friendly governments would transfer millions of dollars to organizations trying to hurt it under the guise of aid and humanitarian groups. It's time the government and lawmakers act directly against these funding governments and parliaments, in order to bring a fundamental change in the policy of how groups are funded by European governments.

Saturday, August 15, 2020

08/15 Links: I grew up with anti-Semitism in the UAE. Peace with Israel is a dream come true; Iran, Turkey, Ben Rhodes, Tlaib united in criticism of UAE-Israel deal; Don’t Let Iran Blow Up the U.N. Security Council

From Ian:
Mujahed Kobbe (Siraj Hashmi's co-host): I grew up with anti-Semitism in the UAE. Peace with Israel is a dream come true.
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.


Vivian Bercovici: A Dream of Peace Made Real
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.



Wednesday, August 05, 2020

08/05 Links Pt2: Beinart and Rogen: The Handwriting on the Wall for Diaspora Jewry?; Nancy Pelosi Stands with Anti-Semites; BDS ‘Jew-hater’ convicted for violent assault in Germany

From Ian:
Beinart and Rogen: The Handwriting on the Wall for Diaspora Jewry?
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.
What Jews Have to Say to Seth Rogen
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.
Jonathan S. Tobin: What to Teach (and Not Teach) Your Children About Israel
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.

Wednesday, July 29, 2020

07/29 Links Pt2: Matti Friedman: Israel Was Ground Zero for the New Woke Religion; Jonathan Tobin: On Tisha B'Av, it's time for Americans to step back from apocalyptic rhetoric

From Ian:
Matti Friedman: Israel Was Ground Zero for the New Woke Religion
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.
Jonathan Tobin: On Tisha B'Av, it's time for Americans to step back from apocalyptic rhetoric
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.
The deafening silence of liberal Jewish leadership in the face of BLM anitsemitism
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?



Friday, July 17, 2020

  • Friday, July 17, 2020
  • Elder of Ziyon

Why Bari Weiss had to resign

Bari-Weiss-NYT-2

 

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.

Instead, we see accusations like Alex Shephard’s at TNR:

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!

 

Ec96BnwXkAEHa2R

 

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.

Wednesday, July 15, 2020

07/15 Links Pt1: Douglas Murray: What is the point of the New York Times?; Gil Troy: Lies my anti-annexationists allies told me; Turkey is increasingly becoming a threat to Israel

From Ian:
Douglas Murray: What is the point of the New York Times?
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.
Commentary Magazine Podcast: The Resignation Heard Round the Woke World
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.


Josh Hammer: Bari Weiss is a casualty of the Left’s woke culture war
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.

Je suis Bari Weiss.
Judith Miller: The Illiberal Liberal Media
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.


Monday, July 13, 2020

07/13 Links Pt2: Zionism 2020 is Alive and Kicking: A wave of many Jews and Israelis are asking to return home; In first, Saudi researcher contributes article to Israeli academic journal

From Ian:
JPost Real Estate Feature: Zionism 2020 is Alive and Kicking: A wave of many Jews and Israelis are asking to return home
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.
Caroline Glick: How can Israel help Diaspora Jewry?
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.
Dutch Holocaust theft of Jewish assets has finally been revealed
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.

Monday, June 29, 2020

The Collapsing of the American Mind (Daled Amos)

By Daled Amos

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.

For example, in 2014 the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network announced on its website:
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.

Instead, at UMass Amherst, University Targets Its Own Student for ‘White Supremacy’
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.

Antifa also is "anti-Zionist"
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.”
The last "intellectual" mentioned above as participating in the smear attack on Shenker is Johnny Williams, who wrote an opinion piece in 2014 in the West Hartford News, Another view: Academics remaining silent about the perils of Zionism is not an option. Yes, that's right, Williams wants you to know that
In academia, most scholars shun speaking and writing about the state of Israel’s siege and wars in Palestine.
If only.

In a response, Rob Monyak writes Another view: Academics are expressing anti-Israel 'invective'
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.
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Elder of Ziyon - حـكـيـم صـهـيـون



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