Thursday, January 21, 2021
Elder of ZiyonThe email that it generates says:
Pick a Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism who will be committed to fighting neo-Nazis and white nationalists, not Palestinians and students.Your Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism must be someone who will be a true leader of this larger effort in building long-term structures that can fight and dismantle the far-right and create a multiracial democracy so that everyone in our country can move forward together.
Of course, IfNotNow and the Jewish socialist Left condone and enable antisemitism. They not only ignore most types of antisemitism, but they use far-Right antisemitism as an excuse to attack their fellow Jews who are politically conservative.
And there is plenty of antisemitism that these groups don't want any US antisemitism envoy to battle. Here are some examples from the new year.
One which happened north of the border was the defacement of a Montreal synagogue this month with swastikas.
While it looks at first glance to be a far right crime, in fact the suspect, Adam Riga, is a left-wing BDS supporter who signed a petition against Concordia University hosting an exhibit about Israeli architecture.
It isn't a surprise that a leftist antisemite would deface a synagogue with swastikas., After all, he can claim not that he is promoting Nazism but pointing out how Zionists are Nazis, which is a perfectly valid form of expression to those who fight against the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism.
The incessant attacks on Israel by the Left also attracts and emboldens more traditional antisemites.
In Portland, three restaurants that serve Middle Eastern food were vandalized last week with graffiti accusing them of stealing cuisine.
The restaurants used to say they served Israeli street food but dropped that months ago. Even if they were proudly serving food they call Israeli, it is still clear that attacking a small business based on its cuisine is a hate crime. Imagine attacking Chinese restaurants because of China's human rights abuses.
IfNotNow and other Jewish socialists are silent for these attacks because they agree with the politics of the vandals.
Of course, the biggest antisemitic meme of the month was the libel that Israeli Jews are racists who are deliberately withholding vaccines from Palestinians. Rashida Tlaib said, "I think it’s really important to understand Israel is a racist state and that they would deny Palestinians, like my grandmother, access to a vaccine, that they don’t believe that she’s an equal human being that deserves to live, deserves to be able to be protected by this global pandemic. And it’s really hard to watch as this apartheid state continues to deny their own neighbors, the people that breathe the same air they breathe, that live in the same communities."
Tlaib doesn't have to say "Jews," when she says "they" it is understood that she is not referring to the 20% of Israelis who aren't Jewish and who are in the government, the army and the medical establishment.
She said this just as B'Tselem accused Jews in Israel of enforcing not only apartheid but "Jewish supremacy," an explicitly antisemitic formulation that wasn't rebuffed by the supposed antiracists of the Left - it was embraced by them.
Another example of how the new antisemitism is like the old antisemitism. Yesterday, someone on Twitter widely circulated this image:
This is a classic antisemitic meme - there are hundreds of similar graphics on the web seemingly showing Jews in positions of power in politics, entertainment, news media or banking.
But this one uses Israeli flags to represent the Jews. The designer is deliberately accusing Jews of dual loyalty, which is a common thread between both Left and Right antisemites, including Ilhan Omar.
This month saw "progressive" Jewish groups start a campaign against the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism because it could be "misused" to show that their political partners engage in antisemitism. Nearly all the examples on this page would fall under the IHRA definition of antisemitism under the examples the far Left wants to exclude.
Ironically, many of the people they claim to be protecting by fighting that definition know very well that anti-Zionism is often a mask for antisemitism. The definition was endorsed by the Global Imams Council, by the Muslim majority nation of Albania, the Mimouna Association of Morocco, and by the Kingdom of Bahrain.
If anyone knows that hating Israel is a proxy for hating Jews, it is Muslims who grew up with that idea.
There was plenty of antisemitism on the Right as well - no one is pretending there wasn't. The "Camp Auschwitz" man at the Capitol and the confederate flag at the Jewish museum in NYC were two prominent examples. The difference is that no one on the Right claims that those attacks weren't antisemitic - but the socialist Left is keen to either deny the obvious antisemitism from their side, or at best to sweep it under the rug.
Which makes them complicit.
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