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Friday, August 12, 2022

08/12 Links Pt2: Melanie Phillips: The closing of the university mind; How six US and UK media moguls aided the nascent Nazi regime; The Sanctification of George Soros

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The closing of the university mind
It takes a brave academic to call out what’s going on. One such is Matthew Goodwin, professor of politics at Kent university. On his Substack blog today, he produces startling evidence to illustrate the extent of the problem. He writes:
Since the 1960s, the ratio of left-wing to right-wing academics has jumped from three to one to eight to one today…[Other studies] similarly find that fewer than 20% of academics today vote for right-leaning parties while 75% vote for Labour, the Liberal Democrats, or the Greens. Last year, in my own work, I found that 76% of my colleagues in the world’s most elite institutions identify on the left while 21% of that group identify as ‘far left’. Just 11% put themselves on the right. And in my own area of political science, a recent study at Harvard found that 72% lean to the left with 14% describing themselves as far left. In America, where this ideological bias is especially pronounced, it is simply no longer unusual to find some departments with not a single registered Republican. Is this healthy for our students? Is this conducive to developing well-rounded, critical thinkers?…

One study finds a third of staff would avoid hiring a known Brexit voter while many openly say they would feel uncomfortable mingling with a colleague who holds gender-critical views. Between one third and one half of left-leaning scholars would consciously mark a bid for a research grant lower if it adopted a right-wing perspective, which really matters because the ability of academics to generate funding has a major impact on their career trajectory. My own survey of academics in the world’s most elite universities similarly found that while two-thirds feel positively about left-wing voters, only one in ten feel the same way about right-wing voters…

Increasingly, in Britain and America, large numbers of academics, around six in ten, support requiring job and research grant applicants to submit ‘diversity statements’ before a decision is made. You don’t have to oppose or question diversity to find the use of these statements deeply problematic. Many influential voices consider them ‘litmus tests’ which are designed to weed out applicants who do not subscribe to the dominant orthodoxy…

One study finds less than half of left-leaning academics think academic freedom should always be put first, even if it violates social justice ideology; another finds that about one-quarter of academics would support some kind of campaign to oust a dissenting academic from their job. Recently, this has been symbolised by prominent cases of academics or honorary academics being harassed, investigated or experiencing negative consequences as a direct result of their beliefs or counter-cultural research, such as Kathleen Stock, Jo Phoenix, Tony Sewell, Selina Todd, Rosa Freedman, Michele Moore, among others. These are not exactly right-wing culture warriors.

This hijack of education has been building up for decades. Back in the sixties and seventies, a mindset became the progressive orthodoxy that the west was fundamentally corrupt — colonialist, imperialist, exploitative, racist and dominated by the “patriarchy” — ie, white heterosexual western men were to blame for all the ills of the world. Western society therefore had to be reconfigured, and the way to achieve this was by the “long march through the institutions” — of which the universities were key — to turn western values inside out.

This has now been achieved to the letter.

The corruption of the universities is at the core of most of our society’s ills. Knowledge and rationality have been replaced by ideological propaganda. Instead of teaching young people how to think, the universities have been instructing them what to think. The identity politics which they have enforced upon so many and turned into unchallengeable dogma has meant that increasingly people have been employed or promoted not on the basis of their intellectual achievement (which has been becoming progressively devalued) but their skin colour or sexual identity. All of which helps explain why, across the board in institutions, professions, businesses, politics and the civil service, so many are so incompetent, know so little and can’t even think straight.

The universities, supposedly the crucible of knowledge, rational thought and the free exchange of ideas, are now responsible instead for the closing of the national mind.
Bad news for the Jews: How six US and UK media moguls aided the nascent Nazi regime
In ‘The Newspaper Axis,’ historian Kathryn S. Olmsted details how prior to WWII, press barons including William Randolph Hearst worked to sway the public toward Hitler’s line

In January 1934, Lord Harold Rothermere, the owner of Britain’s Daily Mail, filed a story from Munich praising Adolf Hitler. The article was published when Jews were being ousted from public life in Germany and the Nazi party had already established a large network of concentration camps across the country.

Rothermere assured his readers that stories of these atrocities were wildly exaggerated. The restaurants and hotels in Munich were bustling with German Jews during the festive season, and none “showed [any] symptoms of insecurity or suffering,” the British newspaper proprietor wrote. This was typical of the pro-Nazi line Britain’s Daily Mail continued to promote that year.

The Nazis needed to control the “alien elements and Israelites of international attachments who were insinuating themselves into the German state,” as Rothermere put it in another article he personally penned in July 1934. The Daily Mail also cheered on the British Union of Fascists — a party led by Sir Oswald Mosley in Britain that was notorious for its support of Hitler and for its anti-Semitic propaganda. “Hurrah for the Blackshirts,” read one infamous Daily Mail headline from January 1934.

California-based historian Kathryn S. Olmsted’s new book, “The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler,” profiles Rothermere and five other powerful media moguls in the Anglophile world on both sides of the Atlantic between 1933 and 1945, all of whom took a pro-Nazi editorial line.

“Lord Rothermere was a pro-fascist who had a deep sympathy for Adolf Hitler,” Olmsted tells The Times of Israel from her office at the University of California, Davis, where she chairs the history department.

As she writes in the introduction to her new book, “For years, Rothermere and his fellow press barons in both Britain and the United States pressured their nations’ leaders to ignore the menace of fascism.”

Olmsted dedicates a chapter to exploring how Britain’s Daily Mail, led by Rothermere, championed Hitler’s Germany throughout the mid- to late-1930s. The paper described Germany under Hitler “as one of the best-governed nations in Europe” and continued to boost Hitler’s popularity, even as the Nazis used terrorist tactics against their political enemies.
The Sanctification of George Soros
All well and good. America is a free country, and Soros has every right to spend his vast fortune however he wants within the boundaries of the law, as well as to justify that spending in the public square. The same applies to those of us inhabiting lower tax brackets, who have no less a right to criticize Soros for how he’s trying to influence American public life—which, to repeat, he is very much, and by his own admission, trying to do. That extremely rich people with grand ideological designs should not be immune to criticism—indeed, that they should be subject to even more of it than the rest of us—is a pretty widely accepted view in America, especially on the political left, where the maxim “behind every great fortune lies a great crime” has long been a guiding principle. Indeed, one might go so far as to say that this lack of deference to the wealthy and the titled is one of our major distinguishing national characteristics.

Or used to be. A week after Soros published his piece in the Journal under his own name, proudly and defiantly justifying his expenditure of vast sums aimed at sparking a revolution in the administration of municipal criminal justice, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio introduced an amendment to the $750 billion climate and tax bill aimed at stymying this agenda by providing funds for local law enforcement to keep violent criminals behind bars. The measure had no chance of passing, and when the Democrat-led Senate predictably rejected it, Rubio took to Twitter. “The democrats just blocked my effort to try & force Soros backed prosecutors to put dangerous criminals in jail,” he tweeted in complaint.

What followed was the sort of Pavlovian response one has come to expect from progressive politicians, activists, journalists, and other social media impact influencers whenever the name of their benefactor is invoked.

Soros, in case you couldn’t tell, happens to be Jewish, a fact that has absolutely nothing to do with his ideas about criminal justice reform, or with Rubio’s opposition to them. Yet it was this utterly irrelevant detail of Soros’ birth that the progressive hive mind seized upon, spurring its minions to attack an unsubstantiated presumption about Rubio’s motives to the exclusion of his substantive arguments. The rebuke from American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten was particularly rich in light of her response to parents upset about their children being denied in-person schooling during the pandemic. “American Jews,” she said in April 2021, “are now part of the ownership class.”

Put aside the merits of the criminal justice policies Soros is trying to advance with his humongous largesse. Also put aside the fact that, while he was alive, the right-wing Jewish casino magnate Sheldon Adelson was routinely denounced by progressives in terms that, by their own lights, are no less “antisemitic” than what they accuse Rubio of fomenting. The question before us today is whether, in the course of criticizing activities that the country’s biggest progressive donor has undertaken “transparently” (his word), it is possible to even utter his name without being accused of bigotry.

The argument that the mere mention of the name “Soros” is tantamount to antisemitism, which is effectively the position of the progressive political, media, and activist elite, is made entirely in bad faith. Stating the plain and observable fact that some prosecutors are “Soros-backed” is no more of an attack on Jews than the broadcaster Soledad O’Brien’s warning to “full-time Florida residents,” an antisemitic dog whistle about God’s waiting room. If the mind of a Soros supporter, upon hearing his name, races immediately to an image of a “Jew,” and one who serves as a stand-in for “the Jews,” it’s probably not the motives of the critic that need questioning. The impulse to connect “Soros” with Judaism and Jewishness is not unlike the bigotry that associates the term “monkeypox” with Black people. It’s a form of essentialism that expects us to agree with the antisemites that “being Jewish” is somehow relevant to what Americans like Soros (or right-wing Jewish billionaires, for that matter) do with their time and money.

Those engaging in this rhetorical tactic are certainly not pursuing the “thoughtful discussion” that Soros says we “desperately need,” but rather the “demagoguery and divisive partisan attacks” he denounces. Worse, they’re minimizing the threat posed by actual antisemitism by cheapening the accusation.


ANTI-SEMITISM IS SURGING IN ACADEMIA & GLOBALLY, SAYS HUMAN RIGHTS LAWYER, BROOKE GOLDSTEIN
BROOKE GOLDSTEIN, an award-winning documentary filmmaker, is a human rights lawyer and the founder and executive director of The Lawfare Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to raising awareness about and facilitating a response to the abuse of Western legal systems and human rights law. She is also the founder and director of the Children’s Rights Institute (CRI), a nonprofit organization whose mission is to track, spotlight, and legally combat violations of children’s basic human rights around the world. CRI has a special focus on the state-sponsored indoctrination and recruitment of children to become suicide-homicide bombers, child soldiers, and human shields. Both The Lawfare Project and End Jew Hatred, which works alongside The Lawfare Project, work diligently to fight Jew hatred in the courts and on social media. Currently, End Jew Hatred has a major push to fight the latest reported cases of Jew hatred in the CUNY university system in New York.

CUNY did not respond to our request for comment.


David Hirsh and Hilary Miller: Durban Antizionism: Its Sources, its Impact, and Its Relation to Older Anti-Jewish Ideologies
Follow this link for the whole paper
The antizionism that dominated the 2001 UN “World Conference against Racism” was neither a completely “new antisemitism” nor was it simply the latest manifestation of an ahistorical and eternal phenomenon. During the peace process in the late 80s and 90s, the intensifying focus on Israel as a key symbol of all that was bad in the world had been in remission, but at Durban, the 1970s “Zionism=Racism” culture returned.

Many participants internalized and embraced the reconfigured antizionism. Others failed to speak out, even when they witnessed the recognizable older antisemitic tropes with which it came intertwined. The proposal to agree that Zionism was the key symbolic form of racism in the world after the fall of apartheid offered unity across different movements and milieus: post-colonialism, human rights and humanitarian law; the women’s movement, anti-racism, much of the global left and NGOs; even oppressive governments if they positioned themselves as anti-imperialist or “Islamic.”

Activists, diplomats, and UN personnel at Durban were not passively infected by this antizionist ideology, they chose actively to embrace it or to tolerate it. Based on elements of truth, exaggeration, and invention, and made plausible by half-visible fragments of older antisemitisms, Durban antizionism was attractive because it offered an emotionally potent way of imagining and communicating all that “good people” oppose and that they have difficulty facing rationally. It portrayed racism, and in the end oppression itself, with an Israeli face.

Delegates brought this worldview home to where they lived and to the spheres in which they operated intellectually and politically. They worked to make Durban antizionism into the radical common sense of the twenty-first century. There were people at the conference and in antihegemonic spaces around the world who understood the dangers of a unity built around opposition to a universal Jewish threat, but they found themselves on the defensive against a self-confident, formidable, and ostensibly coherent ideology or worldview.
Confronting South Africa’s official anti-Zionism
In no other democratic country in the world has anti-Zionism enjoyed the kind of mainstream success that it has in South Africa.

Consider that Israel’s recent military strikes against Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) positions in the Gaza Strip were, by and large, spared the volume of international condemnation that has typically accompanied previous Israeli incursions. In part, that’s because the world has plenty of other issues to worry about, like the war in Ukraine, punishing inflation and a looming fuel crisis this winter, especially in those countries dependent on Russian energy supplies. It’s also because the Israeli security forces completed their operation in the space of three days, sparing us from a lengthy news cycle dominated by images from Gaza alongside the inevitable “Free Palestine” demonstrations that, during the 11- day Israel-Hamas conflict of May 2021, resulted in Jewish bystanders getting beaten up and abused in cities around the world.

South Africa, however, was an exception. As “Operation Breaking Dawn” was drawing to a close, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) issued a statement calling on the international community “to intervene and end the current and continual attacks by apartheid Israel against the people of Palestine”—in essence, a call to the world’s nations to take up arms against the one Jewish state on the planet. That was very much in keeping with South Africa’s response to the May 2021 hostilities, when even President Cyril Ramaphosa, whose name is not usually included in the long roster of Israel-haters within the ANC, told a French broadcaster that Israel’s actions reminded him of the apartheid era in his own country.

The word “apartheid” is key to understanding why South Africa—more than the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, most of Europe and even parts of the Islamic world—has proved so receptive to the core anti-Zionist contention that Israel has no right to a sovereign, independent existence. Apartheid—the system of racial segregation and unequal development that prevailed in South Africa for most of the 20th century—ensured that a white minority of 10% ruled with an iron fist over a black majority of 90%, confining them to crowded townships, denying them the vote, severely limiting their right to education and proscribing interracial marriages and relationships.

The fact that no similar laws exist in Israel hasn’t stopped the ANC, which like many anti-colonial movements in the developing world embraced the Palestinian cause during the Cold War, from franchising the word “apartheid” to the Palestinians. The ANC believes—and has persuaded many ordinary South Africans to believe—that Israel is a carbon copy of the old, unlamented apartheid regime, and that its Jewish citizens, who descend from all corners of the world, are the equivalent of the boorish Boer settlers from Holland who colonized their country during the 19th century.
Don’t compound the injustice done to Jewish refugees from Arab countries
In 1947, the Political Committee of the Arab League (League of Arab States) drafted a law that was to govern the legal status of Jewish residents in all of its member states. This Draft Law of the Arab League provided that “…all Jews – with the exception of citizens of non-Arab countries – were to be considered members of the Jewish ‘minority state of Palestine’; that their bank accounts would be frozen and used to finance resistance to ‘Zionist ambitions in Palestine; Jews believed to be active Zionists would be interned as political prisoners and their assets confiscated; only Jews who accept active service in Arab armies or place themselves at the disposal of these armies would be considered ‘Arabs.”

In the international arena, Arab diplomats pretended to ignore the Arab League’s collusion in encouraging state-sanctioned discrimination against Jews in all its member states, seeking publicly to attribute blame to the Arab “masses” – and even the United Nations itself – for any danger facing the Jews across the region. This covert move was part of the Arab states’ attempt to divert attention from the official discriminatory practices of their governments against the Jewish citizens.

Two hundred and sixty thousand Jews from Arab countries immigrated to Israel between 1948 and 1951, accounting for 56% of the total immigration to the newly founded state. The Israeli government’s policy to accommodate 600,000 immigrants over four years, doubling the existing Jewish population, encountered mixed reactions in the Knesset as there were those within the Jewish Agency and government who opposed promoting a large-scale emigration movement among Jews from Arab lands.

Currently, it is estimated that only around 15,000 Jews remain in Arab countries. (By our estimates, there are 4,000 – ed). This mass expulsion and exodus is part of modern history, but inexplicably, it’s neither taught in schools nor remembered within the context of the conflicts in the Middle East. But more on that later in this editorial.

Edwin Black, the award-winning, New York Times bestselling international investigative writer of 200 editions in 20 languages in 190 countries and the author of the 2016 book, “The Farhud” wrote in December 2021, “Today, we speak of a largely forgotten ethnic cleansing largely unparalleled in the history of humanitarian abuses. Recall the coordinated international expulsion of some 850,000 Jews from Arab and Muslim lands, where they had lived peaceably for as long as 27 centuries. As some know, in 2014, the Israeli government set aside November 30th as a commemoration of this mass atrocity. It has had no real identity or name like “Kristallnacht.” But today, from this day forward, the day will be known as Yom HaGirush: “Expulsion Day.” It has been a years-long road to identify and solidify this identity.”

On September 21, 2012, a special event was held at the United Nations to highlight the issue of Jewish refugees from Arab countries. Then Israeli ambassador Ron Prosor asked the United Nations to “establish a center of documentation and research” that would document the “850,000 untold stories” and “collect the evidence to preserve their history”, which he said was ignored for too long. In Israel alone, there are approximately 4 million descendants of these Jews from Arab lands and a few million around the world. Then Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon said that “We are 64 years late, but we are not too late.” Diplomats from approximately two dozen countries and organizations, including the United States, the European Union, Germany, Canada, Spain, and Hungary attended the event. In addition, Jews from Arab countries attended and spoke at the event.
‘A Piece of Something Bigger’: Why the US-Israel Friendship Has Survived
Understanding the “special relationship” between the United States and Israel requires knowledge of both America’s global vision and the long-held beliefs of its people, Hudson Institute fellow and foreign policy observer Walter Russell Mead told The Algemeiner.

In an interview last week, the Wall Street Journal columnist and author of works including “Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How it Changed the World,” discussed his latest release, “The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People,” a comprehensive analysis on the origins of US support for the Jewish State.

“Israel policy is a piece of something much bigger,” Mead said. “You actually do have to understand America and American history: Why do Americans think the way they do about Israel? How did America develop a culture that was able to accommodate large numbers of Jews without degenerating into some of the worst antisemitism that we see? Once you start getting to the story of the ‘special relationship,’ you have to talk about American foreign policy as a whole.”

Mead explained that common misconceptions about American support for Israel are often based on antisemitic conspiracies holding that American Jews exert inordinate influence on the media and foreign policy officials.

A deeper dive into the subject, however, reveals a very different story going back to the Protestant Reformation, which in the English speaking world led to newfound interest in the Old Testament. It also brought declining belief in “supersessionism,” the idea that the advent of Christianity marked the end of God’s covenant with the Jewish people, and a rising conviction, shared mostly among evangelical dispensationalists, that the Biblical prophecies of Christianity could not be fulfilled until Jews returned to the Holy Land.

Years before Theodore Herzl wrote “The Jewish State,” Mead continued, America’s “Zionism of the Gentiles” attracted evangelicals but also non-evangelical Christians and secularists, who hoped that a Jewish homeland in Palestine would be an American-style democracy that vindicated their belief in the goodness of the American project. Many early supporters of Zionism saw the ideology as part of a larger international project and also supported national self-determination movements in Greek and Italy.

“What people often overlook, for example, is the Blackstone Memorial, which was a petition presented to President Benjamin Harrison in 1891 by evangelical minister William Blackstone with signatures from 400 prominent Americans, urging the establishment of a Jewish state in what was then Ottoman Palestine,” Mead said. “It was signed by non-Jews like J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, neither of whom likely shared Blackstone’s theology, but who, looking at the situation of Jews in Europe and especially in Alexander III’s Russia, believed a Jewish homeland was the best possible solution for ending centuries of state-sponsored cruelty.”
CAIR Loses Appeal on Suit Aimed at Muzzling Arizona Professor
A Scottsdale Community College professor did not violate his Muslim student’s rights when he taught about religious justification in Islamic terrorism, a Federal appeals court ruled on Wednesday.

The Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a district judge’s 2020 ruling dismissing the lawsuit filed by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) on behalf of student Mohamed Sabra.

In her 2020 order, District Judge Susan M. Brnovich found that Nicholas Damask’s World Politics coursework and quizzes did not violate Sabra’s First Amendment rights or require him to abandon his faith as a Muslim.

“Curriculum that merely conflicts with a student’s religious beliefs does not violate the Free Exercise Clause,” she wrote, citing precedent.

“Dr. Damask’s course did not inhibit Mr. Sabra’s personal worship in any way,” Brnovich wrote.

Instead, students merely were asked to “demonstrate an understanding of the material taught.”

The appellate court agreed. In a 2-1 ruling, it found that “Sabra suffered no First Amendment injury through his mere exposure to inflammatory course materials.”

“This is a win for civilization,” Damask told the Investigative Project on Terrorism Thursday morning. “Our values, our institutions are being eroded all around us. It’s an odd coalition of the left and multiculturalists and the psychotic, and they’re working to undermine everything that’s core, that’s central to America.”


McGill student Jonah Fried sues his university and student union for anti-Israel referendum that was ‘discriminatory, biased and antisemitic’
A Jewish and Zionist McGill student is suing his student union, a pro-Palestinian campus club, and the university administration for allegedly failing to protect him from the discrimination and harassment he suffered as a result of a referendum condemning Israel this past semester.

In his deposition in Quebec Superior Court, Jonah Fried names as defendants the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU), Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR) and McGill. He is seeking a declaratory judgment that the Palestine Solidarity Policy advocating boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel proposed by SPHR is “inconsistent with and contrary to the constitution, bylaws and policies” of the SSMU.

That policy, never ratified, is “discriminatory, biased and antisemitic,” it is alleged, because it is “designed to create a climate of fear and intimidation against Jewish students attending McGill.”

Besides advocating BDS, the policy accused Israel of “settler-colonial apartheid,” which Fried claims is coded language for the destruction of the Jewish state.

Fried further argues the policy violates the Quebec Human Rights and Freedoms Charter.

He hopes to block any attempt by SPHR to re-introduce a similar motion.

The action is being financially underwritten by B’nai Brith Canada.

McGill is faulted for not living up to the memorandum of agreement it entered into with the SSMU in May 2021. The administration’s “limited responses” to the referendum on the policy held in March and the campaign leading up to it, Fried alleges “caused (his) dignity, respect and integrity to be seriously compromised, to be brought into disrepute and to be humiliated. Due to the possibility of reprisal in the very bringing of this action” Fried is keeping his home address confidential, the suit states.

McGill has “a duty to divorce itself from the SSMU and to cause the SSMU to no longer use ‘McGill’ in its name” or collect student fees on its behalf, the suit continues.
Jeremy Corbyn is refused permission to lodge an appeal at the Supreme Court in libel case brought by Jewish blogger
Jeremy Corbyn has been refused permission to lodge an appeal at the Supreme Court in a libel claim brought against the former Labour leader by a political blogger.

Commentator Richard Millett, 50, is suing Mr Corbyn over remarks he made during an interview on the BBC's Andrew Marr show in 2018 when he was leader of the opposition.

Mr Corbyn, who now sits as an Independent MP, claims he was defending himself against allegations of antisemitism when he made the comments and is contesting the case.

In April, the Court of Appeal rejected the Islington North MP's challenge against a High Court judge's findings over preliminary issues in the case.

The Supreme Court announced today that permission to appeal to the court is refused because the application 'does not raise an arguable point of law'.

Unless a settlement is reached between Mr Corbyn and Mr Millett, the case is expected to proceed to a full libel trial, which is due to begin on October 10.

During the BBC broadcast nearly four years ago, Mr Corbyn was asked if he was an antisemite and was shown a recording of a speech he made in 2013 in which he referred to 'Zionists' who 'don't understand English irony', judges have previously been told.

In response, Mr Corbyn referred to two people having been 'incredibly disruptive' and 'very abusive' at a meeting in the House of Commons the same year, at which Manuel Hassassian - then Palestinian ambassador to the UK - was speaking.

Mr Millett's legal action is brought on the basis that, although he was not named by Mr Corbyn, he was defamed because national media coverage before the broadcast made him identifiable to viewers as one of those referred to.


The inevitable Zomlotfest returns to BBC TV and radio
Coomarasamy next promoted the bizarre idea that Israeli military operations are based on ‘feelings’:
Coomarasamy: “Hussam Zomlot, I know you have Tweeted about this but do you not agree that Israel has the right to defend itself if it feels…if it feels that it’s going to be attacked?”

Zomlot: “No, no, no I do not agree that Israel has the right to protect itself because this mantra, this sentence has allowed Israel, since its inception, to commit the most heinous crimes against humanity, against the Palestinian people. This very sentence…Israel as an occupying force – illegal occupying force, colonial occupying force, inflicting apartheid regime as per Amnesty International which is a UK based – has no rights. The only rights are for the people under occupation. They have the right to defend themselves and to achieve their internationally agreed…”

Even Zomlot’s citing of the discredited NGO Amnesty International did not prompt a reaction from Coomarasamy who was apparently quite happy to let his interviewee’s blatant distortions go unchallenged.

Coomarasamy: “Husam…Husam Zomlot, we have to leave it there.”

Although Coomarasamy then told listeners that he hoped “to speak to an Israeli official later on”, that did not happen and so listeners heard only the blatantly one-sided distortions and disinformation from Zomlot.

Zomlot was also invited to do an even more pointless and unchallenging interview on BBC World News TV on the same day which was promoted on social media by him and his office.

The BBC has been regularly interviewing Husam Zomlot for at least eight years. That is more than enough time to have grasped that by providing him with platforms from which to spread his unchallenged disinformation and politically motivated smears, the corporation is doing the exact opposite of providing its audiences with information which enhances their understanding of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.


Who is more antisemitic: The right or the left?
Hersh and Royden note that researchers have suggested young adults view Israel and Jews as oppressors, but also note that the far Right "exhibits reactionary attitudes toward tolerance and political correctness" and are attracted by the alt-right movement online. They note that Republicans may support Israel and still harbor antisemitic views, "such as that Jews as a collective seek to dominate institutions of finance, media or government." They cite left-wing journalist Peter Beinart's less convincing argument that the right wants Israel to thrive so American Jews will move there. More credible is the suggestion that many on the right don't particularly like the Jews, but they strongly dislike Muslims. The research paper looks at 18- to 30-year-olds rather than college students specifically, but the results give a reasonable snapshot (and that's all it is without trend data) of what we would expect from those on campus. The authors asked three questions used in ADL surveys to gauge antisemitic attitudes:

"Jews are more loyal to Israel than to America."

"It is appropriate for opponents of Israel's policies and actions to boycott Jewish American-owned businesses in their communities."

"Jews in the United States have too much power."

They also tested results when those questions were preceded by the statement: "Dr. Frank Newport, Editor-in-Chief of the Gallup Poll, concluded in 2019 that '95% of Jews [in the US] have favorable views of Israel.' "

I'm not sure those three questions are the best or sufficient to make judgments. Given that caveat, the authors found that "the ideological left is least likely to agree with the antisemitic statements" and that "the young right is distinctive in that it is much more likely than either the young left or the older right to agree with each of these statements." Using a different scale, they found that "progressives agree the least and the alt-right agrees the most with antisemitic statements."

The researchers asked respondents who agreed Jews have too much power whether this was related to the Israeli-Palestine conflict, the news media, entertainment, US domestic politics, Finance, and/or agricultural production. Less than 10% of any of the groups in the study chose the conflict. Young people focused on the media. This suggests that, contrary to conventional wisdom, antisemitism is not being driven by Israel's actions.

Another interesting finding was that the right is far more likely than the left to believe that American Jews should do more to make Israel a "more responsible country in the world." The left has a double standard of thinking Jews should do more to hold Israel responsible than Indian Americans should make India accountable or Catholics should make the Vatican responsible. "The right," they found, "is much more supportive of the ominous claim that US Jews should be held accountable for Israel's actions."

Based on the overall conclusion about the prevalence of antisemitism on the right – usually associated with white supremacists – it is seemingly paradoxical that research shows that racial minorities have higher rates of antisemitic attitudes than whites. The authors found young Blacks and Latinos held more antisemitic views than White respondents. They cite research showing that identifying with the Palestinian cause is not the primary reason for their antisemitism. Instead, they are upset by the perception that Jewish Americans' success is at their expense and that they see Jews as competition for victimhood.

Only 93 Jews participated in the survey, but their responses show a high degree of consensus on what constitutes antisemitism and are evidence that the likes of Beinart, Jewish Voice for Peace, and other individuals and outlets that seek to redefine the words for their own purposes are outside the mainstream. Of those with an opinion, 86% said the loyalty statement is antisemitic, 92% said the same about the boycott, and 91% agreed about the power statement. The figures for the 18- to 30-year-old cohort were 78%, 93% and 85%, respectively.

I'll let conservatives poke holes in the research if they can. Still, the study, at a minimum, illustrates the problem of antisemitism among young adults is by no means limited to the left and may be more prevalent on the right.


Far-right group Patriotic Alternative hang “White Lives Matter” banner over Clifford’s Tower where 150 Jews were murdered
The far-right group, Patriotic Alternative, hung a “White Lives Matter” banner over Clifford’s Tower in York earlier this week.

In 1190, a massacre of York’s 150 Jews took place after the community gathered there seeking refuge from the belligerent townspeople. The massacre at York was one of a series of antisemitic pogroms in England in 1189-90 which also included Norwich and Lincoln.

Video footage of the stunt depicts dramatic music and drone shots of the Tower as activists from the far-right group unfurl the banner.

In the group’s Telegram, it wrote that it “narrowly avoided disaster and a mob of 40 Hasidic Jews”.

Patriotic Alternative is a UK-based group headed by the former leader of the youth wing of the BNP, Mark Collett. Mr Collett is reported to have dabbled in Holocaust denial, is regularly heard as a guest on the radio show of the former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard, David Duke, and has described the Holocaust as “an instrument of white guilt”.

The group is known for its efforts to recruit youth to its white nationalist ideology. Previously, the far-right group published an online “alternative” home school curriculum condemned as “poison” and “hateful” and attempted to recruit children as young as twelve through livestreaming events on YouTube, according to The Times.
Poster asking if antisemitism is “humane” found on Golders Green bus stop
A poster asking if antisemitism is “humane” was found on a Golders Green bus stop earlier this week.

Also written on the poster were the words “Israel = ISIS” and “Restore Palestine”.

In June, a near-identical poster was discovered, also in Golders Green.

Golders Green is a neighbourhood renowned for its large Jewish population. According to the International Definition of Antisemitism, “Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the State of Israel” and “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination (e.g. by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour)” are both examples of antisemitism.
Wine Bottles With Portrait of Hitler Sell in Italy, Attract German Tourists Despite Years of Outrage
A collection of wine bottles that feature an image of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler on its labels are being sold in Italy as collectible items and are attracting German tourists.

The wine bottles show Hitler in a range of poses with slogans such as “Mein Führer” (“My Leader”), “Sieg Heil” (“Hail to Victory”) and “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer” (One People, One Realm, One Leader”).

The bottles are made by Italian winemaker Vini Lunardelli, who founded his winery in 1967 and and started his Historical Series of wines in 1995. About half of the company’s bottled wine production is dedicated to the Historical Series, which now has over 50 different labels that showcase images of dictators such as Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, Benito Mussolini, Che Guevara, Napoleon Bonaparte and Francisco Franco. The wines have become a “cult object among the collectors,” according to the company’s website.

Austrian cosmetic surgeon Dagmar Millesi, from Vienna, Austria, reportedly told Austrian media this week that German tourists were traveling to the resort of Jesolo near Venice to buy the wine, The Times reported. She said she was shocked to see the items being sold in a supermarket in Jesolo and that she complained to a store employee about the bottles.

“The store employee said Germans very much like to buy these wines, and they are clearly the big hit there,” she said. “The saleswoman was even amused at my outrage . . . nobody is angry about it, no one forbids it . . . I couldn’t believe it.”
Two Israeli Shows Coming to Amazon Prime, Including Inspiration Behind ‘Your Honor’
Amazon’s subscription video streaming and rental service Prime Video has picked up the US rights to two Israeli dramas from the Tel Aviv-based Yes Studios, “Kvodo” and “Just For Today,” Deadline reported on Wednesday.

“Kvodo” is best known as the inspiration behind the Showtime series “Your Honor,” starring Bryan Cranston. The show is about a judge who gets mixed up with the mafia after his teenage son is implicated in a hit-and-run that injures a member of a crime family. “Kvodo,” from creators Shlomo Mashiach and Ron Ninio, was the Grand Prix winner at Series Mania in 2017 and the show has been adapted for audiences in Germany, India, Italy, France, Turkey, Russia and Spain.

Seasons one and two of “Kvodo” are now available on Prime Video.

The first season of “Just for Today” will be released on August 23 on Prime Video and Google Play, according to Deadline. The show from Nir Bergman and Ram Nehari is about a half-way home for newly released prisoners that faces being permanently closed.

“The former prisoners face a dramatic junction – will they be able to integrate back into society or will they be thrown back into their previous lives?” Yes Studios said about the show. “The series centers around Anat, a social worker and current manager of the group home, who deals with both the shutting down of her life’s work and the reemergence of Niko, her former ward and flame.”

“Just For Today” won the Special Jury Prize at Series Mania in 2019, and also won the award for best international TV series at Switzerland’s Zurich Film Festival and Jüdisches Filmfestival Berlin und Brandenburg in Germany.

“We are so pleased to present two of our most awarded and captivating television series to the US viewers,” said a Yes Studios representative, according to Deadline. “’Kvodo’ and ‘Just for Today’ epitomize great Israeli television that translates beautifully to global viewers while offering unique insight into our culture and personal stories.”
Israeli general slams 'antisemitic' German official for defaming Israeli hero
Top military and intelligence experts in Israel, the United States, and in Britain urged the government of the German state of Baden-Württemberg to oust the allegedly antisemitic official Michael Blume for terming Israeli national hero Orde Wingate, who is widely considered the father of the Israel Defense Forces, a “war criminal.”

Brigadier General (Res.) Amir Avivi, Founder and CEO of the Israel Defense and Security Forum, told The Jerusalem Post "The late Orde Wingate was a trailblazer and revolutionary military commander, whose daring raids and tactics are still studied at military schools around the world. Wingate fought gallantly against oppressors on at least three continents, and will forever be enshrined in Israeli memory as a hero.”

Avivi, a former commander of the IDF’s Gaza division, added “To accuse Wingate of war crimes is a reprehensible attempt to rewrite history and blemish the exceptional legacy of a British officer. This attempt should be squarely rejected. The IDSF will continue to advocate exactly the type of military strategy that Wingate embodied: initiative, creativity and a firm belief in the justness of our cause."

Michael Oren, former Israeli ambassador to the US, told the Post that Blume “should resign” for denigrating the British general.

Wingate, an officer steeped in the traditions of Christian Zionism, served in Mandatory Palestine in 1936-39. He created and commanded the Special Night Squads, armed groups of British and Hagana volunteers, to fight Arab saboteurs and terrorists.

Oren, who served as a paratrooper during the 1982 First Lebanon War, is a distinguished military historian and a former deputy minister in the Prime Minister’s Office.

Blume’s remarks that Wingate was a “war criminal” and a “British murderer” first appeared on his private Twitter account. Blume then stated them in an essay on an obscure website that allegedly promotes antisemitism and conspiracy theories.

The late IDF chief of staff and Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan said of Wingate that “he taught us everything we know.”
Kyiv street to be named after Golda Meir
A street in Kyiv will soon be named after Golda Meir, Israel's envoy to Ukraine Michael Brodsky announced Thursday, after meeting with the mayor of the Ukrainian capital Vitali Klitschko.

Meir, Israel's fourth prime minister, was born in 1898 as Golda Mabovitch in Kyiv before her family left due to antisemitic violence. The city was part of the Russian Empire at that time.

In 1906, Meir's family fled Russia for the United States and settled in Wisconsin. The future prime minister moved to Palestine in 1921 with her husband Morris Meyerson.

The only female to ever serve as Israeli prime minister, she was in office from 1969 until 1974.

Ukraine is trying to "de-Russify" street names in the wake of the invasion. Meir's words have since appeared in pro-Ukrainian memes and were even picked up by Ukrainian diplomats.

Brodsky returned to Kyiv from Poland on Tuesday evening to reopen the embassy for another two weeks. He and Klitschko also discussed the arrival in Kyiv of 25,000 prepared meal parcels by Israel.




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