Tuesday, March 03, 2020
JPost Editorial: The bad faith behind ‘Free Palestine’
Today, enemies of the Jewish state use language to indicate Israel should cease to exist. A logical question ensues when calling to “Free Palestine” – what will be of the Jews once “Palestine” is freed? Three options emerge: 1) Israel becomes an Arab country and Jews once again take their historic place in Arab lands as dhimmis (second-class citizens), 2) all Jews will be exiled from Israel or 3) a war will be waged against Israel by her enemies with the goal to eliminate all Jews from the land.Islam, Global Muslim Jew-Hatred, And Failed Jewish “Leadership”
There are real-world consequences to this type of deceptive language. A war is not fantasy. The Palestinian Authority regularly incites violence against the Jewish state. Its arch rival, the terror group Hamas, whose stated goal is the destruction of Israel, is responsible for launching thousands of rockets into Israel from Gaza. More than 1,350 innocent Israeli lives have been taken by Palestinian terrorists since 2000. Iran repeatedly calls for the destruction of Israel, and the leader of the terrorist group Hezbollah stated that it would be easier if all of the Jews moved to “occupied Palestine” in order to be chased down for the “final and decisive battle.”
For anyone truly preoccupied with human rights, all three options, with varying intensity, leave Jews in a dangerous predicament all too familiar.
As this year’s high school seniors prepare to enter college, it’s vital they learn about slogans used to vilify Israel – such as “Free Palestine” – and how to counter them. In Club Z, we expose students to the language antisemitic activists use to demonize Israel. Our teens gain the tools they need to combat antisemitic activism and stand up for the Jewish state before they arrive on college campuses. It is critical that the next generation of proud and proactive Zionist leaders are adequately prepared to fight – and ultimately defeat – the PR battle waged against the Jewish state.
Today, the grotesque myth of Islamic tolerance of Jews, in particular, persists, even as we are in the midst of a global pandemic of Muslim Antisemitism and Anti-Jewish violence. This violent hatred is driven by the same unreformed and unrepentant canonical Islamic themes Perlmann described in the 1940s—which date to the advent of Islam—as promulgated, now, by Islam’s most authoritative religious teaching institutions, Sunni and Shiite alike.Noah Rothman: Whitewashing the Reds
Analyses from the ADL published between 2014 to Nov. 21, 2019, which determined the prevalence (occurrence) of “extreme antisemitism”—i.e., agreement with at least 6/11 antisemitic stereotypes, have demonstrated:
- The 16 most Antisemitic countries in the world are all in the Muslim Middle East, where extreme Antisemitism has a 74 to 93% prevalence.
- Extreme Antisemitism is 50-55% prevalent among Western European Muslims, i.e., ~3-fold the rate of Western European Christians, or non-Muslims overall.
- Extreme Antisemitism in the U.S., a much more philosemitic country, has a 34% prevalence among Muslims, 2.4-fold the 14% rate in non-Muslims
This excess of Muslim Jew-hatred is accompanied not only by endless jihad violence against Israeli Jews (450-500 thwarted attacks per year in 2018, and 2019; additionally, thousands of rocket barrages), but 3- to 10-fold increased rates of anti-Jewish violence, or violent threats, against Western European Jews, by Muslims, relative to violence from the Left, or Right, and 23 Muslim jihadist attacks against American Jews since 9/11, 16 of which were thwarted, thankfully, but 7 that were completed, resulting in 8 deaths and 8 serious injuries—the most recent being Muslim convert Grafton Thomas’s attack on a Monsey, New York synagogue, December 28, 2019, during a Chanukah candle lighting ceremony.
Current Al-Azhar University Grand Imam, and Sunni Muslim Papal equivalent, Ahmad al-Tayeb, during an October, 2013 interview, re-affirmed, authoritatively, the canonical Islamic animus which fuels this global orgy of Muslim Jew-hatred, and violence. Riveting on Koran 5:82, al-Tayeb stated brazenly:
A verse in the Koran explains the Muslims’ relations with the Jews…See how we suffer today from global Zionism and Judaism…Since the inception of Islam 1,400 years ago, we have been suffering from Jewish and Zionist interference in Muslim affairs. The Koran (5:82) said it and history has proven it: ‘You shall find the strongest among men in enmity to the believers to be the Jews…’
Perhaps the guiltiest of perpetrators, in Lowry’s estimation, is the “simple passage of time.” The Millennial and post-Millennial generations were “never exposed to the threats of the Soviet Union,” she writes. They have no first-hand knowledge of how state-run industry affects prices and quality of service. They’ve only heard about the refugee crises that punctuated the Communist epoch second-hand, if they heard about them at all. They never experienced an air-raid drill, never read dissidents or met a Refusenik, and never participated in a black economy that wasn’t built up around the trade in illicit narcotics. For these voters, the Cold War is an academic concept.
What younger voters do know more intimately, Lowry observes, are conditions like “yawning inequality, heavy debt burdens, obscene costs of living, and stagnant wages.” And as these voters have become more favorable toward redistributionist politics, they’ve gravitated toward the “worker-centered” policies of Bernie Sanders, which are tempered by his “consistent” “opposition to totalitarianism and autocracy and street violence.” After all, “the guy has always been clear that he wants the United States to become more like Denmark, not Cuba.” That’s the kind of clarity afforded only to those committed to pretending Sanders’s career in the public eye began in 2015.
It’s difficult to think of a similar example of ignorance that would be waved off with such insouciance. Would American voters with no first-hand memory of the Holocaust be forgiven for drifting into the arms of neo-Nazi movements? Are younger Americans no longer expected to maintain some understanding of America’s experience with slavery and Jim Crow laws? Should we withhold judgment on Americans who “did not live through” the Apartheid era and have never heard the name P.W. Botha? Or is it incumbent on those of us who do have a passing familiarity with these abuses and those responsible for them to educate our benighted fellow citizens? Given the level of commitment popular liberal intellectual culture dedicates to cultivating awareness around these repugnant episodes in recent human history, it is conspicuous that many can only muster a shrug when confronted with post-Soviet amnesia.
Lowry appears to see the Great Forgetting as a source of exculpation for Americans who know nothing of the suffering endured by those who lived under collectivism. In fact, what she’s written is more of an indictment—not just of those voters but the institutions and enterprises devoted to socialism’s rehabilitation. If the right is guilty of seeing a Communist conspiracy down every blind alley, center-left media rarely misses a chance to highlight the virtues of life under the red star.
Karol Markowicz: Imagining what a President Bernie Sanders would mean for Jews (satire)
WASHINGTON, NOV. 20, 2021: When Bernie Sanders won the presidential election in a squeaker last year, progressive Jews enthused that a glorious new era in American Judaism had dawned.Bernie Sanders spouts the anti-Israel and antisemitic libels that the UN inherited from President Idi Amin and Archbishop Desmond Tutu
Synagogues in Park Slope and on the Upper West Side took turns hosting thought leaders such as Peter Beinart (author of “The Crisis of Zionism”) and Max Blumenthal (“Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel”) to explain how American Jews were heading into a “post-Israel” era — and why that was a good thing.
Lefty rabbis published lengthy Facebook posts about how mainstream and center-right Jewish organizations are all actually racist — and how the Sanders administration will help Jews overcome the community’s “particularist obsession” with “Jewish security.”
Yet a year into his term, the first Jewish president hasn’t, in fact, ushered in a Jewish golden age. For one thing, violent attacks against Jews, particularly the Orthodox, continue to escalate, triggering an exodus not seen since that of French Jewry in 2015-16.
The $17 federal minimum wage has sharply increased the unemployment rate among unskilled workers, and Jews have been an immediate scapegoat on the far right and left. Harsh new housing development standards enacted as part of the Green New Deal, meanwhile, have deepened the existing homelessness crisis.
“Jewish landlords” has emerged as a catchphrase seen on many signs at “Free Homes Now” protests. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Linda Sarsour has voiced her support for the movement on Twitter. Confronted with evidence of overt anti-Semitism, she said Team Sanders “deplores all hate,” while urging “privileged communities” to “think and act intersectionally.”
Jews are as likely to be passionately antisemitic as Christians, Muslims, Atheists and others. In fact a Jew who is antisemitic can be the most passionate antisemite of all, blaming himself and/or his own people for introducing Israel-centred, and God-of-Israel-centred, monotheistic faith into the world.Dem Rep Engel Says Sanders’s Israel Stance Is Disqualifying
Indeed, the (halachically-Jewish) father of Socialism, Karl Marx, was also the father of Socialist antisemitism, teaching that the salvation of the Jews will come when the whole of mankind is “saved from Judaism”. Bernie Sanders, even though he tells us he is “proud to be a Jew” is a bird of the same feather (Marxist, Bundist, Bolshevist, Trostkyist…).
For Marx, the fulfilment of historical progress is the internationalist commonwealth in which man has grown out of faith in God, and man puts all faith in man’s own ability. The Soviet Union came to call this “Marxist–Leninist scientific atheism”, or more latterly in the Socialist Bloc, “Scientific Atheism”. As Karl Marx famously said: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it [to its inevitable fulfilment in Socialism/Communism]”. And although this terrible social experiment has failed everywhere in the world it has been tried and is still being tried, Socialism seems to be the only humanist political philosophy that refuses to die, perhaps because its big claims and promises, such as peace on Earth and social justice for all inspire a kind of quasi-religious faith that appeals to the propensity for faith that God has given us, and through which He calls us.
Socialism is a lesser god that denies the existence of the One True God who commands us to have no other gods.
Furthermore, because there is no context of Eternity in Socialism, every committed Socialist – not least ageing Socialists such as Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders – seems to exist in a kind of state of panic in which he must help bring about “social justice” in his lifetime. And for almost all contemporary Socialists, that “social justice” begins with the unleashing of the “Palestinians”, i.e. the Revolutionary Islamic Jihadist Muslim Brotherhood, on the State of Israel.
Rep. Eliot Engel (D., N.Y.) effectively ruled out supporting Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) for president on Monday, saying anyone who favored conditioning aid to Israel would not get his vote.Bernie Sanders and the Question of Antisemitism
"Conditioning aid to Israel has to be just about the stupidest thing I've heard in the 33 years I've been in Congress. It's absolutely outrageous," he said at a panel for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference. "I don't care from what party. Anybody who talks about conditioning aid to Israel doesn't get my vote."
Sanders has repeatedly said he would use the billions in aid the United States gives Israel as leverage, urging it to roll back settlements and negotiate more favorable peace terms with the Palestinians.
"I would use the leverage of $3.8 billion," he told the anti-Israel group J Street in October. "It is a lot of money, and we cannot give it carte blanche to the Israeli government, or for that matter to any government at all. We have a right to demand respect for human rights and democracy."
He has frequently called Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu "racist" and assailed Israel's treatment of Palestinians. Sanders has never attended AIPAC's annual conference and called it a platform for bigotry last month; AIPAC fired back, calling his attack "odious" and "shameful."
For Sanders, all of this means nothing. In effect, it does not exist. In his reduction of what it is to be Jewish to nothing but destruction, he defies what may be Judaism’s most essential admonition: “Therefore, choose life.” Presented with life and death, the blessing and the curse, Sanders chooses death and the curse.Bernie Sanders Is the Wrong Choice for Democrats and Jews
And this may be why, in the end, Sanders derives only the universal from specific Jewish suffering. To him, Judaism is merely the struggle against “white supremacy.” This struggle is admirable in and of itself, but it admits no other possibilities. It refuses to acknowledge that the Jews in particular face other threats. That antisemitism can come from almost anywhere, even from Sanders’ own allies and supporters. It blinds him to an essential truth: The Jews are more than being for others, they must also be for themselves. If they are not, who will be for them? This is something, it appears, that Sanders either cannot or will not comprehend.
In this, we may extend to Sanders some measure of sympathy, because it means that, ultimately, he has nothing. In embracing Jewish death, he denies himself Jewish life, Jewish creativity, Jewish solidarity and even, for lack of a better word, Jewish destiny.
This makes him, in the end, a tragic figure. But unfortunately, it also makes him dangerous, because in his ignorance he has empowered the very forces to which he believes himself implacably opposed. In his blinkered sense of Jewish pride lies an essential Jewish degradation, and it makes him blind to the fact that, in his empowerment of those who would degrade the Jews, he ultimately degrades himself as well.
In this, however, lies the possibility that Sanders may be redeemable. There ought to be an effort to educate him, to bring him back into the fold. This is, unfortunately, likely to be futile, but the attempt must be made. If it is successful, it may help arrest what now appears to be the possible takeover of a major political party by antisemitism.
If it fails, then American Jews will know with absolute certainty that they must take a stand, and Sanders must be fought with the vigor and determination that the Jewish people have always displayed in their long and heroic struggle to remain who they are. To be that which, sadly, Bernie Sanders appears to have chosen not to be.
On Tuesday, I will be voting in the Massachusetts Democratic presidential primary. As a young American Jew whose family emigrated from the Soviet Union, one of my top priorities in the 2020 election is that the next president fights the rising scourge of antisemitism in the United States and supports Israel, the sole Jewish state. I strongly believe that the current national and Massachusetts front-runner in the race, Senator Bernie Sanders, is bad news for American Jewry.Ilhan Omar Blames – Who Else?
Sanders has a history of apologizing for and tacitly supporting antisemitic regimes. My family emigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States as refugees, fleeing pervasive, state-sponsored antisemitism that was often expressed as anti-Zionism. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews were not as lucky as my family, and became known as refuseniks because the Soviet regime denied them exit permits.
In 1987, a quarter of a million American Jews marched on Washington to demand freedom for Soviet Jewry. Bernie Sanders was nowhere to be found. Instead, in 1988, Sanders decided to honeymoon in the Soviet Union and buddy-up to the autocratic regime that discriminated against Soviet Jews, and caused endless suffering in the USSR and across the world.
Sanders has also lavished praised on the repressive and authoritarian Castro regime in Cuba, which was certainly anti-Zionist, if not antisemitic. Sanders also supported the Marxist Sandinista government in Nicaragua, and attended a rally at which people chanted “here and there the Yankee will die.” The Sandinista regime faced accusations of antisemitism, including allegations of the involvement of Sandinistas in the 1978 firebombing of a synagogue in the capital, Managua. Most recently, Sanders has refused to acknowledge that the Maduro regime in Venezuela is dictatorial and should step aside. The Venezuelan regime has engaged in state-sponsored antisemitism and actively supports the terror-sponsoring Iranian government.
Who to blame for this and for that? The Russians were always asking themselves that question: Kto vinovat? – Who is to blame? – was the title of a famous work by Alexander Herzen, a title subsequently recycled by many others, and not only in Russia.More New York Jews Would Vote Trump Than Bernie Sanders
Here in America, someone who enjoys finding non-Muslims to blame for the ills endured by the Muslim lands is Congressman Ilhan Omar, reliably hugging the shore of absurdity. She has yet again delivered her thoughts on Who Is To Blame for all the world’s ills. Apparently, the culprit she has in the past always dragged into kangaroo court of her own untidy mind hasn’t changed – it’s still the United States.
Her version of reality is here.
“When you see a Somali refugee or an Iraqi refugee or a Libyan refugee, we often are like ‘this is my neighbor, they must have survived some struggle,’ we don’t ever pause to think ‘what American policy made them come over here?’” she said at a Democracy Now! and Rising Majority event in Washington, D.C., receiving loud applause.
What makes Somalis or Iraqis or Libyan refugees come to America? It is the wretched and dangerous condition of their own countries, and the assurance that in America they will be living in a secure state, with a government of laws, that respects basic human rights, including freedom of speech and freedom of religion, unlike any of the countries they come from or, indeed, unlike any Muslim-majority country. They know, too, that they will have benefits of many kinds lavished upon them, these economic migrants who convince our immigration officials that they are “asylum seekers” fleeing persecution. The benefits they receive include some or all of the following: free or subsidized housing, free medical care, free education, unemployment benefits, and family allowances. No one knows this better than Ilhan Omar, who is fully aware of just how well her fellow Somalis in Minneapolis have done by taking advantage of every possible benefit offered to them, even beyond the great and unmerited gift of being allowed to settle in America in the first place, among mostly unsuspecting Infidels whom those Muslim migrants have been taught since childhood to despise as “the most vile of created beings.” Yet Omar feels not the tiniest twinge of gratitude to the United States; in her topsy-turvy moral world, it is American policy that is to blame for what makes Somalia such an unpleasant place to live.
Donald J. Trump and Bernie Sanders have one thing in common. They both came out of New York.
But where Trump stayed and built up the city, Bernie absconded to Vermont. And after fifty years in the wilderness, there’s still the accent and the grumbling about the Brooklyn Dodgers to remind you of where he came from. But the Jews of Brooklyn and the other four boroughs don’t want Bernie back.
The latest Siena College poll shows that President Trump has a higher approval rating among New York’s Jews than Senator Sanders.
50% of Jewish people in New York rate Trump positively. Meanwhile 61% rate Sanders negatively.
Only 6% of Jews would vote for Bernie Sanders on Super Tuesday.
And more Jews would vote for Trump over Sanders on Election Day.
Jewish support for Trump is striking in a state where his overall unfavorable rating is 61% negative to 36% positive. At 50%, Jews rate Trump more highly than white people in general (42%), and upstate residents (39%). The White House has worked hard to connect with more traditional and religious Jews in Brooklyn. They were the ones who stayed when Bernie and his peers left. And it shows.
Some would be tempted to dismiss a single poll, but a previous Siena poll in the fall of last year showed that only 4% of Jews in New York supported Sanders. Since then he’s gained a whole 2%.
WATCH: Daughter of Cuban exile @NMalliotakis and son of Holocaust survivors describe the perversity of @BernieSanders’ love affair with communism, dictators, and antisemites and how his dangeorus ideology is a threat to all Americans and the American way of life! pic.twitter.com/74ioNFJJ3l
— Dov Hikind (@HikindDov) March 2, 2020
This is the kind of Goebbels-esque lies coming out of the far left corner of the Democratic Party. Every single one of those bullet points is false. This is where Bernie Sanders is taking the Party. Save your party. Kick them out. Support Bloomberg, Biden, any one but Sanders. https://t.co/ObpeX0cvvI
— AZ (@americanzionism) March 2, 2020
Farrakhan Mourns “Brothers” Soleimani and Qaddafi, AOC Reacts (satire)
Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, recently gave a speech in Detroit in which he called the Iranian Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani and former Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi his “brothers”.
“Mr. Trump killed my brother Qassem Soleimani. Mrs. Clinton killed my other brother Muammar Qaddafi,” Farrakhan said.
The Mideast Beast sat down with US Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) from the Squad for reaction.
“OMG you guys, I am shook!” AOC told The Mideast Beast, “I literally had no idea that GOAT [the Greatest of All Time] actually had, like, close family members killed by the US government. This makes Trump’s action, like, a triple war crime against humanity! When I become Bernie’s Vice President, I’ll always check with Farrakhan before we send any peaceful missiles abroad. I think it’s exciting that his family is so geographically diverse”.
The Mideast Beast asked AOC how she felt about Farrakhan’s notorious antisemitism.
“He just has, like, this amazing, diverse way of talking about Jews. He calls them all sorts of things, like termites, devils, satanic, but it really comes from a very centered and really extraordinary place of love and compassion. When you think about it, like, termites? They are actually an extremely important part of our ecosystem, breaking down plant fibers and dead trees and turning them into new soil. You guys, I even grow them in my own community garden! They totally fight climate change! So Farrakhan, like, was giving Jews a huge eco-compliment, but no one even noticed that because haters are too busy hating”.
At this rate, @zionessmovement will have no credibility left by the time of next @AIPAC https://t.co/OuqaQVA8Qa
— (((David Lange))) (@Israellycool) March 2, 2020
INBOX: @IfNotNow fundraising email: “I was just arrested for shutting down Biden’s HQ”
— Democratic Majority for Israel (@DemMaj4Israel) March 2, 2020
Unbelievable. This anti-Israel group is actually *bragging* about shutting down the campaign HQ of a presidential candidate on the eve of an important election. ⤵️ 1/2 pic.twitter.com/WF6L48elGg
Ilhan Omar Withdraws Support From Bill To Save The Earth After Learning That’s Where Israel Is https://t.co/XrPIDHn5RT
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) March 2, 2020
Haringey councillor requests CLP drop clause on zero-tolerance of antisemitism from motion on Jew-hate
A Haringey councillor has asked Tottenham Constituency Labour Party to drop a clause stating that the group should adopt "a zero-tolerance position" on antisemitism.Frontrunner for BAME representative on Labour’s ruling NEC reportedly suspended for antisemitic social media post
Noah Tucker's amendment to a motion on Jew-hate also proposed that the CLP should remove the claim that when antisemitism claims are not handled properly, it “leads to a perception of complacency and collusion with antisemitism that is not without foundation”.
Last year, Cllr Tucker said former "Jew-baiter" MP Chris Williamson had been punished by the party “for the crime of speaking of the truth” after the former MP said Labour had been “too apologetic” over antisemitism.
The amendment also said that the party’s disciplinary process should not be outsourced to an independent body – one of the Board of Deputies’ ten pledges for Labour leadership candidates.
It added that “it is not antisemitic… to describe Israel, its policies or the circumstances around its foundation as racist because of their discriminatory impact” or “to support a settlement other than a ‘2 state solution’ of the Israel-Palestine conflict”.
The frontrunner for the position of BAME (Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic) representative on the Labour Party’s ruling body has reportedly been suspended for posting an allegedly antisemitic cartoon on social media.Fighting BDS at the UN, ICC, and on Campus
Mehmood Mirza, the vice chair of the West Ham branch of the Labour Party, was considered the favourite for election to the post on the National Executive Committee, but following a complaint back in October 2019 about a cartoon he posted on Facebook, he has now been suspended.
The cartoon apparently depicted a man wearing a headband with the words “free Palestine” who had a sticker with the word “antisemitism” placed over his mouth. The cartoon was drawn by the controversial cartoonist Carlos Latuff, an artist who placed second in Iran’s Holocaust Denial Cartoon Contest.
Some activists expressed disappointment that Mr Mirza was allowed to run at all, given the complaint had been lodged some time ago. Nevertheless, he received 75 local party nominations – more than any other candidate – and was backed by the TSSA union and the Labour Left Alliance group.
The leading BDS event of February was the long awaited publication by the United Nations’ Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights of a list of 112 firms doing business across Israel’s “Green Line” border between Israel proper and the West Bank. The list includes 94 Israeli and 18 American and other firms, compiled with the assistance of BDS-supporting NGOs.A Slap in the Face at Scripps College
While purportedly aimed at companies with “activities that raised particular human rights concerns” the list in fact includes those providing basic services, including transportation, banking, telecommunications, and retail, to both Israelis and Palestinians. Many of the companies are also major employers of Palestinians.
The blacklist is a political guide to boycotting Israeli companies. As such, it is inconsistent with both US Federal and a number of state laws, and has no basis in international law. Nor has the UN created comparable blacklists for other “occupations.” It therefore represents the formal adoption of the Palestinian campaign of boycotts, “anti-normalization,” and rejectionism by an international body.
Responses to the list were swift. Israel immediately suspended contacts with the High Commissioner and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated, “We will contest this with all of our strength.” This was echoed by US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, who noted the list “only confirms the unrelenting anti-Israel bias so prevalent at the United Nations” and added the US “has not provided, and will never provide, any information to the Office of the High Commissioner to support compilation of these lists.” The blacklist was also widely condemned by US senators, a number of governments including the Netherlands, and several major editorial boards.
I’ve written about Rutgers University Professor Jasbir Puar before, so let me limit myself to a few observations.CAA lawyers considering legal action against SOAS if EuroPal, which promoted antisemitic conspiracy myth, is allowed to deliver antisemitism training
Puar, a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, has a problem: BDS wishes to accuse Israel of genocide, but Israel isn’t engaged, and has never been engaged, in one. Puar’s solution is to contend that Israel’s doesn’t respect the Palestinians enough to murder them: “the Palestinians are not even human enough for death.”
As Puar said at Vassar College in 2016, the Israelis cannot “afford to hand over genocide” and thereby their victimhood bonanza, “to another population.” So, yes, those who commit genocide are to be condemned, but the Israelis are to be specially condemned because they are even more demonic than mass murderers. When Puar shared, during that same Vassar lecture, the speculation she attributed to others that Israelis were holding back Palestinian corpses to mine “organs for scientific research,” she wasn’t making an offhand remark or departing from her published views. Whatever may be in Puar’s heart, her message is anti-Semitic. Yet many academics continue to honor and defend her.
Puar will speak at Scripps College, part of the prestigious Claremont Consortium, on March 12th. She will be sponsored not only by the anti-Israel group, Students for Justice in Palestine, but also by multiple academic departments. Her talk is the keynote of “(Re)Centering Wounds,” a series put on by the Humanities Institute at Scripps. Consider those parentheses and the program, and you get a sense of the one-part jargon, one-part justice conception of the humanities at play here.
The controversial organisation, EuroPal, is scheduled to present a session on antisemitism at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London on 7th March, despite the group’s history of promoting an antisemitic conspiracy myth.100 LGBT filmmakers to boycott Tel Aviv festival to support queer Palestinians
The event is part of a day long student workshop titled ‘Advocacy for Palestine on Campus’, hosted by SOAS’s Palestine Society. The particular session is intended to “[look] comprehensively at the ‘new antisemitism’ and how it has affected Palestine advocacy at large, and what it means for pro-Palestinian advocacy moving forwards.”
It is outrageous that EuroPal could be invited to deliver a session on antisemitism, given its own troubling history. The organisation is reported to have published and distributed a pamphlet containing antisemitic conspiracy theories once employed by the Nazis and since by modern-day neo-Nazis and white supremacists such as the KKK.
The pamphlet – ‘Basic Facts on the Palestinian Issue’ – promulgates the Khazar myth, which is a universally discredited, derided, offensive and decidedly unacademic theory that Ashkenazi Jews are descended from a nomadic people in Central Asia who converted to Judaism during the Middle Ages. The theory’s sole purpose is to delegitimise the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in its ancestral homeland. It is unconscionable for an organisation that holds antisemitic views to be allowed on campus by SOAS for the purpose of delivering training in antisemitism.
SOAS has in the past refused to adopt the International Definition of Antisemitism, despite growing concerns over campus antisemitism, thereby affirming the abysmal reputation of the university in the Jewish community.
Over 130 filmmakers from around the world, including at least 100 from the LGBT community, have pledged to boycott an upcoming government-sponsored gay film festival in Tel Aviv, the Hollywood Reporter said Monday.
The boycott targets Tel Aviv’s International LGBT Film Festival, known as TLVFest, and aims to show solidarity with the Palestinian members of the LGBT community.
TLVFest is sponsored by the Culture and Sports Ministry, the Israel Film Council, and the Tel Aviv Municipality.
Those who signed the pledge committed “not to submit films or otherwise participate in TLVFest or other events partially or fully sponsored by complicit Israeli institutions until Israel complies with international law and respects Palestinian human rights,” the report said.
LGBT liberation “is intimately connected to the liberation of all oppressed peoples and communities,” the text reads.
And @Twitter is a fountain of hate. Look what gets allows in the pool. This is what Twitter promotes with the blue check marks. Can’t hide this behind a mask. Any comments @NFL @Chiefs @penn_state? He is your representative. Is this the inclusiveness you promote? https://t.co/UwmcO89bQD
— AZ (@americanzionism) March 2, 2020
Financial Times book review promotes distorted Herzl quote
In other words, the ‘damning’ Herzl quote doesn’t even have anything to do with Palestine or Arabs.Dancers at Spanish carnival equate Jews and Nazis, parade Auschwitz floats
Moreover, the suggestion in the FT review that the story of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of Jews attempting to supplant or ethnically cleans Arabs from the land is a historical inversion.
Even if we leave Arab violence against and hatred of Jews (including the genocidal plans of the pro-Nazi Palestinian mufti) in pre-state Israel aside, Palestinians and Arab leaders have repeatedly tried to rid the land of Jews, whilst Zionist leaders have consistently sought compromise and accommodation. The war against the nascent Jewish state in 1948 was not motivated by a desire to adjust the borders, but to annihilate Israel. Likewise, in 1967, in the lead-up to the war, Arab leaders did not speak of their desire to create a Palestinian state alongside Israel, but, rather, waxed eloquently about how this would be a war of annihilation.
Though we’re not surprised that Khalidi, who described the Balfour declaration as “a declaration of war by the British Empire on the indigenous population”, refuses to commit to supporting Israel’s continued existence, and has evoked antisemitic tropes, would peddle such historical fiction, we do find it surprising, and quite troubling, that a journalist at a serious publication would promote such agitprop.
A second carnival in Spain has referenced the Holocaust with Nazi and concentration camp prisoner uniform costumes. The theme was “the same.”List found of 12,000 Nazis in Argentina with money in Swiss bank
The Holocaust-themed display at the Feb. 23 event in Badajos occurred amid debate on the appropriateness of festive parades apparently making light of the murder of millions of Jews and Romanis by the Nazis. That was spurred by processions the same week in Belgium and in Campo de Criptana, a town about 80 miles south of Madrid.
In Badajos, which is about 200 miles southwest of Madrid, dozens of participants marched on the main street.
The earlier parades had provoked outrage and condemnations from the European Commission and Israel for similar imagery.
In addition to Nazi allusions, the carnival in the Belgian city of Aalst also had caricatures of Jews, including of haredi Orthodox dressed like insects. Both the Aalst and Criptana events were condemned as offensive to the memory of Holocaust victims.
The carnivals take place across the Catholic world during Lent, the 40-day period that precedes Easter.
Though the Badajos procession prompted less criticism than other events, it went further in equating Nazis and their victims. The show included a banner emblazoned with a swastika locked inside a Star of David. There were flags bearing only the swastika and other flags with the German-language word for Jew appearing inside a Star of David.
An investigation by Argentine investigator Pedro Filipuzzi revealed a list of 12,000 Nazis in Argentina that apparently have money in accounts at the Zurich-based Credit Suisse investment bank, the Simon Wiesenthal Center said in a statement.Antisemite who called Jewish parents “dirty Jews” and attacked their baby in pram found guilty of racially aggravated assault
The list, which Filipuzzi gave to Simon Wiesenthal Center's international relations director Dr. Shimon Samuels and Latin America director Dr. Ariel Gelblung, was found in an old storage room at the former Buenos Aires Nazi headquarters.
Nazi presence in Argentina is well documented, and dates back to the pro-Nazi regimes of Argentine president José Félix Uriburu and Agustín Pedro Justo. However, Justo's successor in 1938, Roberto Ortiz, did not share his predecessor's pro-Nazi sympathies, and established the “Special Commission to Research Anti-Argentine Activities” in an effort to root out Nazi influence in the country.
Until that point, there was an official number of German National Socialist Party Foreign Organization (NSDAP/AO) members based in the country, as well as 12,000 members supporting the German Union of Syndicates and a further 8,000 individuals linked to other Nazi organizations.
“These included such German companies as IG Farben [the company that supplied Zyklon-B gas that was used in concentration camps] and financial bodies such as the 'Banco Alemán Transatlántico' and the 'Banco Germánico de América del Sur,'” Samuels explained in the statement. “These two banks apparently served for Nazi transfers on the way to Switzerland.”
A man who called Jewish parents “dirty Jews” three times and attacked their baby in its pram has been found guilty of racially aggravated assault.Fiverr says its freelancers earned over $1 billion since its launch 10 years ago
The incident took place in broad daylight in August 2019 when Adam Cassidy confronted the family outside a Costa coffee shop on a busy high street in St Alban’s, north of London. One of the Jews was wearing a kippah (skullcap). The altercation was filmed and the footage went viral.
Mr Cassidy, a twenty-year-old who according to media reports was raised in Egypt, apparently claimed in court that the victims had called him a “dirty Arab” first, but this suggestion was rejected. Mr Cassidy also kicked hoarding at the family.
The judge said to Mr Cassidy: “I don’t accept your evidence. I don’t accept that anybody called you anything. Whether it was an accident when you bumped into the buggy I don’t know. That doesn’t excuse what you did and doesn’t excuse your response. There are plenty of words you could have used if you just wanted to be rude; this was motivated by a racial motive. It was obvious that they were Jewish because of their skullcaps and for that reason you said ‘dirty Jew’ three times.”
He was found guilty of racially aggravated assault and of using an antisemitic slur.
Israel-based online marketplace Fiverr said that freelancers on the platform have earned over $1 billion since the site’s launch 10 years ago.Lionel Richie says ‘Hello’ to crowd of adoring Israeli fans
Fiverr connects businesses with freelancers offering digital services, such as copyediting or website consulting. The company said it now offers services in 300 categories in 160 countries, and has served over 5.5 million businesses.
“Ten years and more than a billion dollars earned by our community is a great accomplishment and a credit to the work the skilled freelancers on our platform are doing every day supporting businesses globally,” Fiverr co-founder and CEO Micha Kaufman said in a statement. “I look forward to taking part in the continued evolution of the freelance economy in the next 10 years.”
To mark its first decade of operations, Fiverr released a list of 10 jobs it offers that did not exist when it launched. The jobs include esports game coach, Snapchat video editor, drone video editor, Tinder profile writer and augmented reality app developer.
Last month, the company released a tool powered by artificial intelligence for generating an array of company logos in minutes, based on a few preference questions.
There was an audience full of adoring fans for crooner Lionel Richie, as he performed Monday night, March 2, at Tel Aviv’s Menora Mivtachim Arena.
Richie, who began his 90-minute show at 7 p.m., an hour and a half earlier than originally planned, to account for the unexpected third election day, said he was pleased to finally be in Israel.
“My friends have been trying to convince me to come for 40 years,” he said. “Now I know why.”
Richie landed Saturday morning in Israel in a private plane, after performing in Dubai. He planned to be in Israel for five days.
He said the crowd was “amazing,” and spoke about the warmth he had already experienced in Israel, where he was greeted by name on the street by people with both American and French accents.
“What an international crowd,” said Richie.
The 70-year-old balladeer, performing for his first time in Israel, sang all of his greatest 1980s hits, including “Hello,” “Endless Love,” “All Night Long,” and a host of Commodores favorites, such as “Sail On,” “Easy Like Sunday Morning” and “Brick House.”
Meanwhile, after voting, 15,000 Israelis went to see @LionelRichie perform in Tel Aviv tonight.
— Michael Dickson (@michaeldickson) March 2, 2020
As you can see, Lionel couldn’t wait to say “hello” to his “endless love” Israel as he and the huge crowd were “dancing on the ceiling” “all night long”!
Video: Hayley Gray pic.twitter.com/Y7wwIX7szc
This is the story of Takele Mekonen, who bravely partnered with the Mossad to help smuggle countless fellow Ethiopian Jews to freedom in Israel. #AIPACProud pic.twitter.com/tr9941vdC0
— AIPAC (@AIPAC) March 2, 2020
