Wednesday, November 20, 2024
From Ian:
Brendan O'Neill: Why they refuse to see Jews as victims
Brendan O'Neill: Why they refuse to see Jews as victims
It was the speed with which the racism fearmongers became racism deniers that was most unnerving. Virtually overnight, as men whose only crime was their Jewishness were still being patched up in Amsterdam hospitals, the preening racism denouncers of what passes for the Euro-left were saying this wasn’t racism. The very people who see racism everywhere could not see it here, in the broken teeth, black eyes and bloodied faces of Israelis who became the prey of a self-described Jew hunt earlier this month in Amsterdam. Confronted with beaten, bruised Jews, they said, for the first time I can remember, ‘Maybe it wasn’t a hate crime. Maybe it was something else.’Kassy Akiva: Ketanji Brown Jackson To Headline Event Featuring Activists Who Justified October 7
It has been extraordinary. The people who wring their hands over the racial microaggression of asking a woman in African garb ‘Where are you from?’ were positively blasé about the racial macroaggression of a mob smashing in a man’s face because he ‘helped a Jew’. The people who cry ‘Islamophobia!’ when a schoolkid lightly scuffs a page of the Koran struggled to see the Judeaophobia in a gang of self-styled Jew-hunters accosting men and asking them: ‘Are you Yehudi? Are you Jewish?’ The people who madly insist that every tabloid piss-take of Meghan Markle is an act of unforgivable ‘racist bullying’ refused to accept that ‘Jew hunters’ on mopeds who fired fireworks at Israelis might have been racist bullies.
The zeal of the downplayers felt alarming. There are prominent British and American leftists who for a whole week devoted every waking hour to disproving the claim that Israeli Jews were the victims of a mass, coordinated racist attack. The moral energy they normally reserve for proving that the West is institutionally racist they now expended on proving that a pogrom did not take place in Amsterdam. That was their main beef: the use of that p-word by Dutch and Israeli politicians, Jewish groups and sections of the media. ‘There were no “anti-Semitic pogroms” in Amsterdam’, they cried, as noisily as they normally cry that racism is the disease our societies will never shake off.
On the rubble of the ‘pogrom’ – their scare quotes – that they feverishly rebutted, they built a new narrative. It was the visiting Israeli Jews, the brutes and bigots who support Maccabi Tel Aviv, who really instigated the violence. They were the real racists. They brought the ‘spirit of Israeli facism’ to Amsterdam. It was these ‘marauding gangs’ of foreign fans who carried out a ‘racist rampage’, cried the BDS movement. They tore down a Palestinian flag, they made offensive anti-Arab chants – ‘incitement to genocide’. These thugs embody ‘the most fascistic, right-wing, racist, misogynist elements of Israeli political culture’, said one observer. The Israeli disease, infecting Europe.
And in this retelling, in this ruthless confiscation of the rights of victimhood from the Israelis battered for being Israelis, the ‘Jew hunt’ came to be reimagined as ‘street justice’. That’s how one left-wing commentator in the UK referred to the hunting and assaulting of the visiting fans – these ‘notoriously thuggish’ football followers started a fight in the Dutch capital and ‘the street justice [was] swift’. You know who else thought that beating Jews to a pulp was a ‘just’ response to alleged misbehaviour by other members of their ‘race’? I’m not even going to say. It’s too easy.
It has added up to one of the most pitiless dismantlings of a people’s experience of racism that I can remember. The very activist class that insists we respect the ‘truth’ of what ethnic-minority people tell us were now giddily shredding the truth of what happened on the streets of Amsterdam, of this jodenjacht organised via Telegram and visited on anyone in the city that night who looked Israeli or Jewish or who just helped a Jew. And here’s the worst thing: the dismantling has been successful. These radicals’ jealous, furious chipping away at the Israeli Jews’ experience of racial hatred has had the desired effect: more people are backing off from the word pogrom. Now even the political class and media elites wonder out loud if it was just a scrap, no big deal, nothing to trouble the history books with.
Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is set to headline a conference in Boston this week that will also feature activists who justified Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel.Canadian-Israeli philanthropist Sylvan Adams challenges Roger Waters to debate
Jackson will deliver a Thursday keynote address at the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) convention. Representing educators from K-12 to college, the 100-year-old organization adopted a 2017 vision calling on members to “apply the power of language and literacy to actively pursue justice and equity.”
The four-day-long convention, which has the theme “Heart, Hope, Humanity,” will also include Sawsan Jaber and Hannah Moushabeck, two activists who have been outspoken in justifying Hamas’s October 7 attack multiple times.
Jackson faced criticism during her confirmation hearings for her membership in Harvard’s Black Student Association, which invited anti-Semitic speaker Leonard Jeffries to speak during her time at the school. Jackson told Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-NC) that she did not attend Jeffries’ speech and does not share his views.
Mika Hackner, a Senior Research Associate for the Jewish Institute For Liberal Values, said it is “distasteful and unconscionable” that NCTE put Jackson in a position where she will be appearing at an event with anti-Israel activists.
“A Supreme Court justice, a representative of the highest court in our land, charged with protecting the laws and values of our liberal democracy, should not be sharing any kind of engagement or platform with activists who promote the view that Hamas are “legitimate resistance,” Hackner said.
Hackner noted that several sessions as a whole focus on “using education as a tool of social justice activism.”
Roger Waters, co-founder of the renowned British rock group Pink Floyd, who has become notorious for his outspoken anti-Israel and antisemitic statements in recent years, may have met his match in Sylvan Adams, the noted Canadian-Israeli philanthropist who made aliyah in 2015 who bills himself as Israel’s “self-appointed ambassador-at-large.”
In October, Adams appeared on the CJN Daily podcast of the Canadian Jewish News, in which he discussed the anti-Israel protests that took place at McGill University in Montreal and the defacement of the $30 million Sylvan Adams Sports Science Institute which he donated to the school – the largest-ever gift to a Canadian university campus.
In the course of the podcast, Adams, who has long promoted Israel to the world through sports, music, and culture, expressed an interest in initiating a commemorative concert after the Swords of Iron War that would feature the two remaining members of Pink Floyd – who have repudiated Waters’ antisemitic views – and Irish musician Bono, who condemned the October 7 attack.
Ideally, he said, the concert would be held in Re’im, where hundreds of Israeli youth were massacred at the Nova Music Festival on October 7.
In response to Adams’ podcast, Waters penned an article that appeared on a progressive Canadian website called “rabble,” in which he termed Adams a “looney Zionist billionaire who thinks that he can reunite Pink Floyd to promote and celebrate the genocide of the Palestinian people.” He called Adams a “racist supremacist” and suggested that he lacked the courage to participate in a debate to discuss whether Israel’s actions in the war could be defined as genocidal.
Waters also accused Adams of bringing Madonna and the Argentine national soccer team to appear in Israel as an attempt to “whitewash Israeli apartheid.”
Speaking with the Jerusalem Post, Adams said, “He accuses me of being a looney Zionist billionaire. I don’t think I’m looney, and I don’t think that being called a Zionist is an insult. I think that Zionism, the love of our Jewish homeland of Israel, and appreciation for our 3,500-year magnificent journey is a beautiful story of a persecuted yet indestructible people who achieved something seemingly impossible by returning home. If Roger Waters thinks that Zionism is a dirty word, I vehemently disagree. It’s simple Jewish nationalism for our homeland of Israel. Not only am I not ashamed, I’m extremely proud and proud to call myself a Zionist.”
