Friday, November 11, 2022
New York Times' fraught history covering Jews, Israel draws fresh backlash amid report on Hasidic schools
The New York Times said last month that a string of investigations – some which were accused of being "politicized hit piece[s]" against Jews – is a part of its "financial success" strategy, adding to a long list of controversy of what some critics have alleged is an "anti-Jewish animus" at one of the nation's leading papers.Mark Regev: Moshe Sneh: The communist who defended Israel
Former New York Times executive editor, Dean Baquet, announced an investigative journalism fellowship he would oversee that was inspired by the apparent "financial success" of investigations on Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn, among others. Dean Baquet, former executive editor at The New York Times, announced an investigative journalism fellowship inspired by controversial stories published about Jews.
The announcement referred to a front-page spotlight article the Times published in September which claimed Jewish private schools were "flush" with government cash and failing their children.
"What's clear is that the NYT is not interested in positive value for our schools, just spreading lies for clicks," Simcha Eichenstein, a NYS Assembly member, who represents a Brooklyn Hasidic Jewish community, said.
Activists – including international human rights attorney Brooke Goldstein – derided the "politicized hit piece" for singularly "targeting" the Jewish community as violent anti-Semitic attacks continue to rise in New York City. It was also a bizarre choice for a front page article on Sept. 11 for the New York-based paper, she said.
"What the hit piece did at The New York Times… [is] accuse [Jews]… of abusing their children. I couldn't think of anything more vicious than that," Goldstein, who runs the Lawfare Project, told Fox News Digital.
She added that "Targeting Jewish Hasidic schools, or any Jewish organization, to leverage for financial success is beyond shameful."
The New York Times has a "longstanding Jewish problem" when it comes to various types of coverage spanning from the Holocaust era to the present, according to its critics.
Josh Hammer, the opinion editor at Newsweek, told Fox News Digital, "The New York Times never ceases to amaze me when it comes to Jewish-related issues."
"This is the same newspaper that consistently buried coverage of the Holocaust far from the front page. Some things never change. The true shame is that far too many liberal Americans still accord the Times far more credibility than it deserves."
This sentiment has also been touched on by current and former Times staff. The paper did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The blatant antisemitism that plagued the Soviet bloc in the final months of Stalin’s rule severely shook Mapam’s faith in the Kremlin, and the party incrementally moved toward an independent socialist position. This change was opposed by the staunchly pro-Soviet Sneh, who bolted Mapam in 1953 to establish the Left Faction, which merged into the communist Maki in 1954.A Lost Novel Describes Arriving at the “Palestinian Ellis Island” in Pre-State Israel
Over the next two decades, Sneh was the foremost leader of Israeli communism, repeatedly representing Maki in the Knesset while editing the party newspaper Kol Ha’am (Voice of the People).
In 1970, Sneh authored an essay titled “Arafat the adored and Lenin the ignored,” where he applied Vladimir Lenin’s communist principles to denounce the global left’s infatuation with Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization.
While embracing Palestinian self-determination, Sneh condemned the PLO’s call for Israel’s destruction. He quoted Lenin’s distinction between progressive nationalism, which seeks national freedom, and bourgeois nationalism, which denies national freedom to others; Lenin’s writings endorsed the former while condemning the latter. According to Sneh, Leninist logic would clearly place the PLO’s negation of the Jews’ right to a state of their own in the second, reactionary category.
Moreover, Sneh elaborated upon Lenin’s critique of terrorism, contrasting it with the PLO’s sanctification of the deliberate targeting of innocent civilians. He also refuted the depiction of Israel as a colonial entity, pointing out that the Jewish state has no imperial mother country.
Sneh reminded his readers of the events surrounding Israel’s creation: the Jewish armed struggle against British imperialism; the communist bloc’s support for the November 1947 UN vote calling for the establishment of a Jewish state; and the masses of survivors of fascist persecution and genocide who found refuge in Israel.
Perhaps today’s radicals, from Brazil’s Lula da Silva to France’s Jean-Luc Melenchon to Ireland’s Mary Lou McDonald, who like Sneh’s 1970 leftist audience uncritically champion Palestinian nationalism, might benefit from familiarizing themselves with the political writings of Israel’s former communist leader.
Postscript: Moshe Sneh’s son, Ephraim, a member of the communist youth movement in his earlier years, nonetheless went on to become an IDF brigadier general and a Labor Party MK. He served as health minister in the governments of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, deputy defense minister to Ehud Barak, and even transportation minister under the Likud’s Ariel Sharon. What would his communist father have said?
Before setting off from New York City to the Land of Israel in 1926, the Yiddish novelist and essayist Miriam Karpilove dashed off a letter to the secretary of the I.L. Peretz Writers’ Union. Therein, she complained of the many things she had to do in preparation for leaving golus [diasporic exile], adding “I am my own [lady messiah] and, as you know, I have no white horse and, as you also know, the subway is on strike to boot.” Her visit to Mandate Palestine would last for two years, and form the basis of an unfinished novel, parts of which will soon be published. Jessica Kirzane excerpts her translation of the opening chapter, which depicts the characters’ arrival at the “Palestinian Ellis Island.”
We had to show a group of British government officers all of our documents so they could see that our coming here to Eretz Yisrael was kosher and we’d followed all the legal requirements they set out for us. These government officials sat at a long table in the middle of a large room. We had to stand. Stand and wait in line until someone looked over our papers and gave them to another official, who gave them to a third official, and so forth.
More than anything, they noticed the stamp on our papers with the word “settler.” They were surprised that American citizens with money had come to settle in Palestine: is it so bad in America, or so good in Eretz Yisrael, that the Jews would want to settle here? Especially during the present crisis? One of the officials asked my brother why he wanted to settle in Palestine, isn’t it good to be an American citizen?
“Oh, very good!” Jacob said. “But I think Palestine has more for us.”
“Remarkable, . . . ” he shrugged his shoulders and asked me what compelled me to settle in Palestine. I looked him straight in his squinty eyes and replied, “historical connections, you know . . .”.
Germany must not engage In Holocaust minimization
This is an open letter written to the Goethe Institute of German Culture, and the Mission of the Federal Republic of Germany in Tel Aviv regarding their upcoming event titled “Understanding the Other’s Pain” scheduled to be held on November 13th.Controversial ‘Shoah, Nakba’ event at German institute in Tel Aviv cancelled
I am writing to you today as a citizen of Germany, as a Jew, and as the descendant of 4 survivors of the Shoah.
Let me begin by saying that I am grateful for the work done by the Goethe Institute in maintaining the connection between my motherland and the fatherland. My family, despite their experiences in Theresienstadt and in exile, remained proud Germans and never abandoned their German heritage.
So then, it comes to the cause for this letter, the event entitled “Understanding the Other’s Pain” to be held on November 13th.
The Shoah is a sensitive subject for all Jews and, we are approaching a time where the last survivors who remember their stories will have passed. The responsibility for preserving the sanctity and the memory of the 6 million Jews who were murdered now increasingly falls on their descendants, with the nations involved, and with the world at large.
The Jewish community has faced increasing challenges which have been well documented in recent years, with everything from Covid responses to Animal Husbandry being compared to the Holocaust in a way which is inappropriate and hurtful.
One of the cruelest current manifestations of this which has become common today is the allegation that Israel is a Nazi state, and that the Jews committed a Holocaust against the Palestinians (or 50 Holocausts as some have claimed, which was appropriately condemned by German officials at the time).
There is no room for comparing the systematic murder of 6 million human beings, with the displacement of 700,000 other human beings, and the continued efforts to do so is harmful, hurtful, and significantly undermines the connection between Israel and Germany which the Goethe Institute was created to foster. Furthermore, actively ignoring the pain of the displacement of nearly 800,0000 Jews from Arab countries who were also displaced during the same period and neglecting their suffering in total is culturally insensitive and historically inaccurate.
To add insult to this injury, the event being held at the Embassy of Germany in Israel (legally: on German soil), it is also being held in the name of Rosa Luxemburg. Rosa Luxemburg would not have approved of this exhibit. It is outrageous to abuse the memory of a Jewish woman, murdered in cold blood by German Nationalists in 1919 to promote the comparison and thus equation of human suffering when it is so obviously incomparable.
The Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial said Friday that after talks were held with the Goethe Institut, the German cultural institute had decided to altogether cancel a controversial planned event that was accused of drawing an equivalence between the Holocaust to the Palestinian Naqba.
Earlier in the week, the Goethe-Institut Israel postponed an event, “Grasping the Pain of the Others – Panel Discussion on the Holocaust, Nakba and German Remembrance Culture,” which had been set to take place in Tel Aviv on Wednesday evening — the 84th anniversary of Kristallnacht.
The institute apologized only for the timing of the event and postponed it until Sunday. However, it now appears to be off completely.
“Earlier today, Yad Vashem Chairman Dani Dayan spoke at length with the Secretary-General of the Worldwide Goethe Institute Mr. Johannes Ebert. At the end of their in-depth conversation, Ebert assured Dayan that the event planned for this coming Sunday will not take place,” Yad Vashem said Friday.
On Tuesday, the institute defended the event amid anger in Israel and Germany.
“The remembrance of the Shoah and the commemoration of the victims is a major concern of the Goethe-Institut, to which we devote ourselves in numerous projects,” the institute said in a German-language statement. “We regret that the choice of date for a panel discussion has currently caused irritation.”
“The Goethe-Institut stands for understanding and dialogue,” the statement continued, “That is what the planned discussion is about.”
The Goethe-Institut is the cultural arm of Germany and is intended to facilitate cultural exchanges around the globe.
How do you say 'chutzpah' in German? The @goetheinstitut & @rosaluxstiftung postpone again event comparing Holocaust to 'Nabka', blaming decision on "public criticism", yet failing to understand, let alone address, there is no excuse for trivialising & diminishing the Holocaust. pic.twitter.com/kA36zIOZ8V
— Arsen Ostrovsky (@Ostrov_A) November 11, 2022
Today’s hatred of Jews has set its focus on one target: the world’s only Jewish state, #Israel. They are concentrating their efforts in high schools, colleges and universities to turn the next generation, even Jewish students, against Israel. https://t.co/GvvKEqyUJF pic.twitter.com/q8umwC4Bnq
— Ronald S. Lauder (@lauder_ronald) November 10, 2022
“Israel Is Part of Who I Am”: College Student and Activist Emily Austin Discusses Antisemitism, the NBA, and Jewish Identity
Rising antisemitism is raising the consciousness of an up and coming Jewish sports journalist and college senior from Long Island, New York.The Image of the Jewish Sexual Deviant, from Voltaire to Kanye West
Born a few months before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Hofstra University student Emily Austin skyrocketed to social media fame during the generational event of her lifetime, the Covid-19 Pandemic. Stuck on the couch and in a rut of binge watching her favorite shows, Austin decided to hit the cellular waves and launch a live-stream broadcast, titled “Daily Vibes with Emily,” on Instagram.
“Daily Vibes” featured interviews with the world’s top professional athletes, many of whom doubted they would have a season in 2020, providing them alternative forms of exposure and a direct link to fans desperate for a connection to the outside world in a time when most Americans were quarantined at home.
Thousands of viewers tuned in, and the bigger the show became, the bigger the stars — Enes Kanter Freedom, Jalen Brunson, and Mitchell Robinson, to name few — who agreed to appear on it. Soon enough, she had befriended celebrities and companies like Puma and BoxyCharm were clamoring for her to model their products. It was a heady time, and working with athletes brought to fruition her childhood dream of being involved with the NBA. Austin attended her first New York Knicks game with her father at age 12. The players, towering over her five foot five frame, became heroes.
This summer, Austin landed interviews with NBA players including 2022’s second overall pick in the draft Chet Holmgren, Scotty Pippen Jr, and Shareef O’Neal, when she hosted NBA Summer League in Las Vegas. The gig, which was followed by another in which she hosted a celebrity boxing match between Le’Veon Bell and Adrian Peterson, raised her profile and ambition in tandem.
Recent events have focused her attention elsewhere, however. In 2021, antisemitic hate crimes occurred across the world at the highest levels record in decades, peaking during Israel’s conflict with Hamas. Anti-Jewish hatred was especially palpable on social media, forcing her to speak out.
“I felt obligated to be someone who educated others about the conflict. Call it ego, call it pride — I don’t care,” Austin told The Algemeiner on Monday.”But I eased my way into it. My followers follow me because I love sports. I don’t want to inundate them with content about Israel, but they also need to understand that Israel is a part of who I am.”
In a recent interview, the rapper Kanye West seemed to blame “Jewish Zionists” for encouraging sexual promiscuity, and specifically seemed to blame Jewish influence for the private life of his ex-wife, who, he stressed, is “a Christian woman.” His probable source for these vile speculations, direct or indirect, was Louis Farrakhan, who holds Jews responsible for the “filth and degenerate behavior” found in Hollywood. As Jonah Cohen explains, the idea of the Jewish man as perverse sexual predator and corruptor of the innocent is both widespread and deeply rooted:Fake AIPAC endorsement of apartheid spreads, Jewish exec exits amid Twitter turmoil
AltRight.com, a website founded by the white nationalist Richard Spencer, declared that the disgraced film producer and serial rapist Harvey Weinstein was “just one degenerate Jew” amid “the massive hive of degenerate Jews at the heart of Hollywood.” Lurid claims about Jewish lust spewed from the pages of the Daily Stormer, whose neo-Nazi founder, Andrew Anglin, laughed that the media is finally waking up to “the revelation that the perverted Jew Harvey Weinstein is in fact a Jewish pervert.”
On the last day of Passover 2019, a teenage gunman opened fire in a synagogue in Poway, California, killing one woman and injuring three other people. Among his reasons for the mass shooting, according to his manifesto, were the Jews’ “role in peddling pornography” and “their degenerate and abominable practices of sexual perversion.” Three years later, another teenager likewise left behind a manifesto accusing Jews of sexual perversion before he went on a racist shooting spree at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York.
It is an arresting fact that medieval pictorial renderings of the “blood libel” legend do sometimes fixate on male genital mutilation. Witness the woodcut by German artist Michael Wolgemut (1434-1519), which portrayed the “Jewish” ritual murder of a Christian child named Simon in the Italian city of Trent. . . . Wolgemut’s imagery likely played a role in the Poway synagogue shooting in 2019. Before the rampage, the shooter felt compelled to write down in his manifesto that “you are not forgotten Simon of Trent, the horror that you and countless children have endured at the hands of the Jews will never be forgiven.” A year later, the well-known Italian painter, Giovanni Gasparro, unveiled on Facebook his own version of Simon of Trent, again combining the imagery of a child’s male sex organ with Jewish torture and pedophilia.
The Poway shooter’s cri de coeur for children can be traced back, almost verbatim, to what was said about Jewish child abuse in the 1700s. “Concerning the horrifying murders of tender, innocent little children by Jews there is much to write,” the orientalist Johann Andreas Eisenmenger wrote in Judaism Unmasked (1710), an influential anti-Semitic polemic that ran to more than 2,000 pages. . . . No less a rationalist than Voltaire (1694-1778), who sternly frowned on the descriptions of promiscuity in the Hebrew Bible, suggested that Jewish men and women hunger for carnal relations with goats (an animal often symbolic of unrepentant sinners).
For a short time Thursday night, Twitter users could see a post that would confuse anyone plugged into the world of Israel advocacy.Case Western University Student Government Endorses BDS
“We love apartheid,” tweeted an account with the handle AIPAC, the acronym for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The account’s profile picture was the same red-and-blue Jewish star that the organization has long used on the social media platform.
The message was shocking because AIPAC is a vociferous defender of Israel against criticism, including the argument that the country perpetuates an apartheid system through its treatment of Palestinians. But it was also fake: The group had fallen victim to a wave of spoofs, falsification and abuse unleashed by Elon Musk’s recent acquisition of Twitter.
Only by looking closely could a user see that the account belonged to “AIPAC_USA,” not “AIPAC,” where the group has long posted. The impersonating account was deleted but not before the tweet had been seen and amplified thousands of times. It even got engagement from accounts impersonating other prominent figures. “Totally agree,” responded @KariLakeAZ, a fake account purporting to belong to the far-right Republican candidate for governor who is lagging in Arizona’s vote count.
The spoof was one of countless instances of impersonation meant to provoke reactions or sow chaos that have unfolded since Musk paid $44 billion to buy the platform two weeks ago. He has swiftly made steep layoffs and abrupt changes to moderation and authentication rules, all while tweeting crass and controversial content himself. The turmoil has sent users, advertisers and employees packing, while opening the floodgates to bad actors on the site.
The Undergraduate Student Government (USG) of Case Western University passed a resolution on Wednesday evening endorsing the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement, drawing an immediate rebuke from president Eric W. Kaler.Boston Mapping Project protest calls for an intifada
The resolution, authored by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), accuses Israel of being an apartheid state, unlawfully imprisoning minors, and assassinating dissidents. Charging that the university is “culpable for the oppression of the Palestinian people,” it demands that the university divest from companies that do business with Israel “within two years.”
“The foundation of this resolution is profoundly anti-Israel and antisemitic,” Kaler said on Thursday. “Passing this resolution last night undermines the safety and comfort on our campus of members of the Jewish community. While the resolution calls for disinvestment in a naïve list of companies that they view as oriented to the military or in support of corporate correction prisons, undoubtedly it promotes antisemitism.”
Kaler added that “a vote for this resolution is clearly a vote against Israel and an aggression towards the Jewish members of our community.”
The BDS movement on campus has been described by Jewish and non-Jewish student leaders as antisemitic for singling Israel out for opprobrium and solely blaming it for the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“I am incredibly devastated by the result of the vote on the BDS resolution on my college campus. It is not the place of a student government in Cleveland, OH to take sweeping stances on the relations and tensions between two governments,” Case Western University USG assembly speaker Ethan Deemer told The Algemeiner on Thursday. “Our sole priority should be to improve the lives of all students on campus, and unfortunately the feelings of Jewish students have been ignored despite their clear expression. Our campus should be working towards equitable solutions and building bridges, not putting up legislative walls that open the floor for hate.”
The anti-Semitic Mapping Project, launched by BDS Boston, led a protest calling for Jewish National Fund-USA to be shot down and for a new intifada against Israel to be launched.NBA commissioner Silver says he doesn’t believe Irving is antisemitic
The protest was held on Nov. 5 outside JNF-USA’s 2022 National Conference in Boston.
The Mapping Project, which came on the scene in June, essentially put a target on the back of Greater Boston’s Jewish community—including synagogues, a teen program and an art center—singling them out as “oppressors” responsible for a long list of societal harms.
Under the hashtag #ShutdownJNF, the Mapping Project brought together a host of anti-Israel groups in the Boston area including Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapters from Tufts University, Boston University and the University of Massachusetts as well as Harvard’s Palestinian Solidarity Committee, the Canary Mission said.
Besides the chants for an intifada, posters could be seen promoting the Lions’ Den, a Palestinian terrorist group that emerged in August in Nablus. Posters also lauded Palestinian terrorist Udai Tamimi, who recently killed Noa Lazar, an 18-year-old female military police officer, and shot a civilian security guard in the head. Tamimi shot a civilian guard in a second attack before he was killed by other guards on Oct. 19.
When it set out to broadcast the names and addresses of Boston-area Jewish leaders and groups, the Mapping Project said, “Our goal in pursuing this collective mapping was to reveal the local entities and networks that enact devastation, so we can dismantle them. Every entity has an address, every network can be disrupted.”
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver has “no doubt” that suspended Brooklyn guard Kyrie Irving is not antisemitic, he said at a conference on Thursday, while LeBron James took to Twitter to defend his former teammate whose status with the Nets remains a mystery.Adidas to partner with ADL on fighting antisemitism in sports
Those developments followed Nike co-founder Phil Knight telling CNBC, in an interview that aired earlier Thursday, that the relationship between the shoe giant and Irving is likely severed for good.
Silver met with Irving earlier this week, and he told attendees at the Sports Business Journal Dealmakers Conference in Washington that he came away from that conversation believing the situation is “incredibly unfortunate.”
“I personally, based on what he said directly to me, have no doubt that he’s not antisemitic,” Silver said. “But I think there’s a process that he’s going to now need to go through.”
That process — and when the Nets lift his suspension — hinges in part on how Irving satisfies a number of team-imposed return-to-play mandates, one of which was completed when he met with Silver earlier this week. There are several others, and the mandates have raised eyebrows of both the National Basketball Players Association — the union on which Irving holds an executive board seat — and James, among others.
“I told you guys that I don’t believe in sharing hurtful information,” James posted on Twitter, echoing comments he made after a Los Angeles Lakers game last week. “And I’ll continue to be that way but Kyrie apologized and he should be able to play. That’s what I think. It’s that simple. Help him learn- but he should be playing. What he’s asked to do to get back on the floor I think is excessive (in my opinion). He’s not the person that’s being portrayed of him.”
Irving’s suspension with the Nets will last at least five games. He’s already missed four, and in theory could return Sunday when Brooklyn visits the Lakers. It’s unclear when the Nets will reinstate him.
Three weeks after saying he was “alarmed” by Adidas’ ties to Kanye West, Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, donned the company’s sneakers for his group’s “Never is Now” conference in New York City.
The about-face happened after Adidas ended its relationship with West weeks after the rapper began making antisemitic comments, satisfying the ADL’s demands. Now, Adidas is making a major donation to the anti-hate group and working with it to fight antisemitism among students and professional athletes.
The news was first reported by eJewishPhilanthropy on Thursday, during the ADL conference where a top Adidas official spoke.
“We don’t always get things right. We are not perfect,” Rupert Campbell, the president of Adidas North America, said at the conference. “But in this case, we know without a doubt, we made the right decision. We know that without a doubt the racist and antisemitic hate speech by our former partner violated our values. We took action to begin dismantling the partnership. This took time given the complexity of the partnership. But we remain committed to living our values.”
The new program includes the creation of an anti-bigotry curriculum to be disseminated among student-athletes, according to eJewishPhilanthropy, and will see Adidas focus on enlisting professional athletes in the fight against antisemitism.
“While I wish they did it sooner, Adidas — to their credit — made it abundantly clear that they would not do business with bigots,” Greenblatt said. “And today I am so pleased that they are here at Never Is Now to announce an incredible commitment that demonstrates that their dedication to fighting antisemitism will last long beyond this moment.”
Shame though Adidas just dropped one antisemite (Kanye) for another (Bella Hadid). Can’t help but ask, how sincerely they really are … https://t.co/3ZfqLrKhYR pic.twitter.com/kTUmEUZcv6
— Arsen Ostrovsky (@Ostrov_A) November 11, 2022
Kanye West Yeezy fashion line inspired by Nazis, skinheads - report
Nazis and skinheads were rapper and fashion designer Kanye West's biggest inspiration for his Yeezy Season 9 collection, a Yeezy employee revealed to Rolling Stone.
These remarks were the latest in a long line of controversies surrounding antisemitism, conspiracy theories and seemingly professed adoration towards the Nazis and Adolf Hitler that have beleaguered the former-billionaire rapper.
As one staffer told Rolling Stone, "It’s a point of inspiration for him because I think there’s so much pain that comes from that place, especially for Black people," noting that West essentially took ownership over it by making money off it.
Kanye West, antisemitism and alleged Nazi admiration
West, once the richest and most successful music artist in the world until his partnership with Adidas ended, has been embroiled in a number of controversies regarding antisemitism.
In West’s recent appearance on the Drink Champs Podcast, he blamed “Jewish Zionists” for the reports that his ex-wife Kim Kardashian and her then-boyfriend Pete Davidson had sexual intercourse next to a fireplace, claimed that “Jewish people have owned the black voice,” and described Disney as a Jewish platform.
In the same Drink Champs podcast, which was removed from Youtube, West also claimed that Jewish people “came into money through the lawyers” divorcing Christians because Catholics refused to do so.
“I’m a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I’m going death con 3 [sic] on Jewish people,” West said in a tweet on October 9, likely incorrectly referring to a stage in the defense readiness condition of the United States military, or DEFCON 3. “You guys have toyed with me and tried to blackball anyone [who] opposes your agenda.”
In 2018, West paid out a settlement to a former employee, who alleged that West had praised Hitler and Nazis.
There will only be peace when the @BDSmovement loves the environment more than they hate Jews! #ClimateChange https://t.co/BG4Pko3BcL
— Arsen Ostrovsky (@Ostrov_A) November 11, 2022
Success for CAA as our complaint to BBC over presenter insisting there is “absolutely no evidence” that Jeremy Corbyn is antisemitic is upheld
Campaign Against Antisemitism’s complaint to the BBC over a presenter who claimed on BBC 5 Live Breakfast earlier this year that there is “absolutely no evidence” that Jeremy Corbyn is antisemitic has been upheld by the Corporation’s Executive Complaints Unit (ECU).Looking behind BBC reporting on the deaths of Palestinian teens
The Unit has also stated that there was a “breach of the BBC’s standards of accuracy”.
Rachel Burden said towards the end of the programme, referring to her interview earlier with the businessman John Caudwell, who described the former Labour Party leader as “a Marxist and antisemite”, that she redirected him back to the topic under discussion but “I should have challenged him on the particular allegation of antisemite [sic] because there is absolutely no evidence that the leader of the Labour Party at that time, Jeremy Corbyn, was or is antisemitic. He had to deal with allegations of that within his party but there is nothing to suggest that he himself as an individual was. So I apologise for not challenging more directly, I should have done, and I want to emphasise there is no evidence for that at all.”
It would have been understandable for Ms Burden to say that Mr Corbyn would dispute the characterisation, but it was unacceptable for her to editorialise and dismiss publicly-available evidence that has been reported in the national media for years.
Over two years ago, for example, Campaign Against Antisemitism published data, using a peer-reviewed research method, showing that Mr Corbyn was personally responsible for 24 incidents relating to antisemitism, which was equal to fifteen percent of all recorded incidents involving parliamentary candidates and party leaders in the lead-up to the 2019 General Election. That meant that, if Jeremy Corbyn were a political party, the ‘Jeremy Corbyn party’ would be responsible for almost four times more incidents than all the other major parties combined.
Readers may recall that on October 1st the BBC News website published a remarkably long report (2109 words) credited to the BBC Jerusalem bureau’s Tom Bateman under the headline “Palestinian deaths toll in West Bank hits 100 this year”.Study finds racist, antisemitic hate speech spikes on Twitter after Musk takeover
The predominant framing in that report concerned individuals described as “children”, with Bateman quoting “human rights groups” (which he did not bother to clarify are linked to a terrorist organisation) and claiming that “nearly a fifth” – i.e. 19 – of the casualties were under 18 years of age.
As we showed at the time, seventeen people who were 18 years old or younger at the time of their deaths were involved in violent activity and a significant proportion were claimed by terrorist organisations.
On October 13th the BBC News website published another report by Bateman which again focused audience attentions on reports of the deaths of “Palestinian teenagers” while failing to provide the full stories, including any affiliations to terrorist organisations:
Instances of racial slurs have soared on Twitter since Elon Musk purchased the influential platform, despite assurances from the platform that it had reduced hateful activity, a digital civil rights group reported Thursday.New Jersey teen charged after Islamist manifesto threatened synagogue attack
Researchers at the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that the number of tweets containing one of several different racial slurs soared in the week after Musk bought Twitter.
A racial epithet used to attack Black people was found more than 26,000 times, three times the average for 2022. The use of a slur that targets trans people increased by 53 percent, while instances of an offensive term for homosexual men went up 39% over the yearly average.
Examples of offensive terms used to target Jews and Hispanics also increased.
All told, the researchers looked at nearly 80,000 English-language tweets and retweets from around the world that contained one of the offensive terms they searched for.
“The figures show that despite claims from Twitter’s Head of Trust and Safety, Yoel Roth, that the platform had succeeded in reducing the number of times hate speech was being seen on Twitter’s search and trending page, the actual volume of hateful tweets has spiked,” according to the analysis from the center, a nonprofit with offices in the US and the United Kingdom.
Federal prosecutors have arrested and charged a New Jersey teenager with extremist Islamist views with making the threat that led to a sweeping FBI warning for the state’s synagogues last week.US judge orders arrest of neo-Nazi website head for inciting antisemitic harassment
Omar Alkattoul, 18, of Sayreville, New Jersey, is charged with one count of transmitting a threat in interstate and foreign commerce for an extremist manifesto he shared on Nov. 1 on an undisclosed social media network. He faces up to five years in prison.
Alkattoul had pledged allegiance to the leader of the Islamic State and researched how to obtain firearms and past mass shootings, according to the criminal complaint against him filed Thursday by the US Attorney’s Office in New Jersey. The complaint alleges that Alkattoul published a manifesto online that had been written as though he had already carried out an attack.
The detection of his manifesto caused the FBI to warn the Jewish community in New Jersey, which immediately activated security protocols at communal institutions. A day later, the FBI said the threat had been eliminated.
“No one should be targeted for violence or with acts of hate because of how they worship,” US Attorney Philip Sellinger said in a statement. “There is nothing the US Attorney’s Office takes more seriously than threats to our communities of faith and places of worship.”
Titled, “When Swords Collide,” Alkattoul’s manifesto was written as if he had already attacked a synagogue, according to prosecutors. Multiple extremists have published manifestos immediately prior to committing violent attacks, including against Jews.
A federal judge on Wednesday ordered the arrest of a neo-Nazi website publisher accused of ignoring a $14 million judgment against him for orchestrating an antisemitic harassment campaign against a Montana woman’s family.Four men hurl slurs, make Hitler salutes at Jewish elementary students
US District Judge Dana Christensen issued a bench warrant for the arrest of Andrew Anglin, founder and operator of The Daily Stormer website.
Attorneys for Montana real estate agent Tanya Gersh have said Anglin did not pay any portion of the August 2019 judgment and has ignored their requests for information about his whereabouts, his operation of the website and other assets.
Gersh says anonymous internet trolls bombarded her family with hateful and threatening messages after Anglin published their personal information, including a photo of her young son. In a string of posts, Anglin accused Gersh and other Jewish residents of Whitefish, Montana, of engaging in an “extortion racket” against the mother of white nationalist Richard Spencer.
Gersh’s April 2017 lawsuit accused Anglin of invasion of privacy, intentional infliction of emotional distress and violation of the Montana Anti-Intimidation Act. An attorney for Gersh did not immediately respond to a telephone message seeking comment Wednesday.
Four men jumped into a school bus full of Jewish elementary students, hurled antisemitic slurs, and performed the Heil Hitler salute at the group of terrified children on Wednesday before the bus driver succeeded in forcing them off the bus.London Jew violently struck, assaulted, and stripped of his yarmulke
The bus was dropping off Jewish elementary students from a local Orthodox Jewish school in Chicago, in the West Rogers Park neighborhood.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a leading global Jewish human rights NGO, has expressed its alarm over the antisemitic hate crime. The organization has been in close contact with the Chicago Police Department and a number of the parents of the children affected by this antisemitic encounter.
“The Simon Wiesenthal Center is urging anyone with information about the antisemitic incident to contact the Chicago PD or the Midwest offices of the Simon Wiesenthal Center,” said Alison Pure Slovin, the SWC Midwest Director.
“This shocking incident took place on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom that destroyed almost all synagogues across Germany in 1938. Many members of the Jewish community have family who lived through those horrors.”
“The Chicago Commission on Human Relations reported that hate crimes targeting Jews are up 75% in the city of Chicago. But for our community, it is not just statistics but the fear and anger such incidents generate,” Slovin said.
London Jewish male was ambushed by a male on a bicycle, who punched him and knocked off his yarmulke, on October 28. Several other incidents involving a man on a bike targeting visible Jews followed later that same day, according to reports from the Stamford Hill Shomrim chapter.London Court Convicts Man Who Traveled 200 Miles to Commit Antisemitic Attack Spree
“I tried but didn’t manage,” the assailant lamented after failing in his attempt to knock a second Jewish victim’s yarmulke off. While this victim was left unscathed, others were not. Another unnamed victim was similarly ambushed by a man on a bike, who successfully knocked his yarmulke off and punched him in the face, leaving him bleeding and bruised.
Related Stamford Hill Attacks
Over the next week, the Shomrim reported a series of other antisemitic incidents that did not only target Jewish males, like the bicycle assaults, but even children and mothers with babies.
“I don’t know why Jews were saved from the war,” a racist female said to a Jewish mother and her baby on a public bus. “I hate Jews.”
In the words of the Shomrim, "the racism pandemic [continued]” that day when a multi-time violent hate-crime offender yelled, “You Jews — you think you own the world,” at a Jewish man, shortly before striking a Jewish witness in the chest.
The Shomrim called for an SOS after detailing another London antisemitic attack, in which an unidentified vehicle threw a firework at a Jewish male, evidently targeting him out of a group of surrounding non-Jewish pedestrians.
A London court on Thursday convicted a man for a spree of antisemitic attacks last year in the London Borough of Hackney as the area’s Jewish community continues to face alarming antisemitic violence.
Abdullah Qureshi, 30, was convicted at Stratford Magistrate’s Court on one count of racially or religiously aggravated grievous bodily harm and two counts of racially or religiously aggravated common assault after attacking Jewish men in the Stamford Hill neighborhood of Hackney, which has a large Hasidic population.
Qureshi traveled more than 200 miles from his home in Yorkshire to carry out his attacks on victims that included a 14-year-old boy and a 64-year-old man walking to a synagogue over the course of two hours on August 18, 2021, according to prosecutors.
Qureshi had previously pleaded guilty to two other related assaults.
Detective Chief Inspector Yasmin Lalani from the area’s police force said that the conviction showed that the police “will not tolerate any form of discrimination or abuse” of the Jewish community, but Stamford Hill in recent months has suffered from a spate of similar attacks on Jews.
In recent weeks Jews in London have faced a spree of antisemitic attacks — what one community watch group called a “hate crimes pandemic.”
Last week, however, police arrested a 16-year-old male in connection to multiple antisemitic attacks in the Stamford Hill neighborhood. Responding to questions from The Algemeiner, the Metropolitan Police press bureau said that the boy was first arrested on October 28 for religiously motivated common assault, criminal damage, and for causing actual bodily harm to an emergency worker in the course of resisting arrest.
“Jews are the new racists and fascists” - this vile graffiti was discovered at the entrance of a Synagogue in Trieste, Italy earlier today @ShapiraSmadar pic.twitter.com/JbSkaLEZG0
— StopAntisemitism (@StopAntisemites) November 11, 2022
Xenophobia caused Jewish and Greek entrepreneurs to flee Egypt
In his review of Najat Abdulhaq’s Jewish and Greek Communities in Egypt: Entrepreneurship and Business before Nasser (Tauris, 2016) SOAS lecturer Yair Wallach writes in the Journal of Levantine Studies (Summer 2018) that the book exposes the xenophobic discrimination to which both long-established groups, which had astonishing involvement in the Egyptian economy out of proportion to their numbers, were exposed. Although they had extensive trading networks, the Greeks and Jews did not owe their success to colonial privileges.New National Library building, a dramatic Jerusalem landmark, nears completion
Jewish and Greek Communities in Egypt offers a view of the breathtaking rise and fall of these minorities, which together constituted no more than one percent of Egypt’s population. During the first half of the twentieth century, Greeks and Jews played a crucial part in the cotton, sugar, railway, banking, retail, and many other enterprises. But with the 1950s promotion of nationalization and Egyptianization, they lost that position and departed Egypt en masse.
Greeks and Jews were the largest ethno-religious groups in modern Egypt, distinct from the Arabic-speaking Muslims and Copts. From the outset, there were significant differences between Greeks and Jews, which the first and second chapters of the book elaborate in detail. Greeks were cohesive in ethnic and linguistic terms, and rarely proficient in Arabic. Jews were an extremely heterogeneous group in terms of language, ethnicity, and nationality, encompassing autochthonous Arabic speaking Jews and Ottoman, Mediterranean, and Eastern European migrants. The Jewish business elite were francophone, with Arabic-speaking elements. Greek business strength developed around the nineteenth-century cotton boom, in which Greeks played a vital role in both the countryside and in Alexandria. The Jewish business elite emerged from urban trading and money changing. As the rich historiographical review here shows, Egypt’s Jews have received greater scholarly interest, and their study has been conducted in the shadow of the Arab-Israeli conflict. As a result, discussion of Jews in Egypt is considerably more charged than the discussion of the Greek minority.
Some six years after the first cornerstone was laid, construction on the new National Library of Israel building in Jerusalem is nearing completion and it is hoped will be ready for visitors next spring.Sheba Medical Center physicians lead Forbes Israel's ranking
The library will become a city landmark and find a new home between the Knesset and the Israel Museum, moving from its current location adjacent to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Givat Ram campus to which it has been bound since its opening in 1925.
Oren Weinberg, library director since 2010, has been working since 2016 on setting up a new home for the largest repository of Israeli and Jewish heritage in the world, since 2016. The new library will cover 45,000 square meters (480,000 square feet), with six above-ground floors and four below, including an auditorium, a visitors center, and an outdoor amphitheater to host all kinds of cultural events.
The library, home to world-class collections of over four million books, 2.5 million photographs, manuscripts, artifacts, and maps, will be open to the general public as well as to researchers and academics.
The library has promised to have a “robotic retrieval system” that “will be an attraction of its own.”
The design of the new library was by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, an office that has worked on national museums, stadiums, and halls worldwide.
Speaking to an international audience as part of Jewish Book Week this week, Herzog & de Meuron senior partner Jason Frantzen said the project has been “an incredible journey.”
“We started out by trying to understand the meaning of a library today, to understand the site and the challenges it posed, and we went out to look at Jerusalem architecture to try to create something that is both contextual and contemporary,” he said.
Over 200 of Israel's leading physicians are currently employed at Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer, according to a new data set from Forbes Israel. Out of some 1,428 physicians ranked by the media company, 222 belong to Sheba Medical center. Furthermore, Sheba's physicians also lead the way in specialist departments, including cardiology, gynecology, oncology and more.As winter approaches, Jewish groups fundraise to ensure Ukrainians able to stay warm
Forbes Israel's method of ranking the physicians has mostly relied on peer reviews, meaning the physicians rank each other. This method is used in order to eliminate unrelated arguments as well as to prevent the misuse of statistics by physicians.
Forbes Israel relies on the physicians themselves to decide who is the better physician. From the database collected, only those with significant recommendations were added to the list.
Sheba's previous honors
This achievement comes after Sheba's inclusion in the Newsweek top-10 world's best hospitals, coming in first among Israeli hospitals, making it the fourth year in a row that the Ramat Gan hospital has been selected as one of the 10 best hospitals in the world.
In September, Sheba was ranked by Newsweek as one of the world's smartest hospitals, coming in 13th place on the list. The Newsweek ranking was based mostly on the implementation and the use of smart technology.
The Newsweek report, also found that Sheba's cardiology, neurosurgery and gastroenterology specialty wards were all within the top 50 in its ranking of best hospitals by medical specialization.
Sheba Medical Center has also contributed to the humanitarian efforts in Ukraine, opening the Kohav Meir field hospital back in March. It was named after former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, who was born in Ukraine.
Since February 24, when Russian troops invaded Ukraine, Jewish groups from around the world have flooded the country with support, from food to medical care to evacuations.
Now, as temperatures fall and Russian attacks on Ukraine’s power grid ramp up, those groups are directing their efforts toward making sure that Ukrainian Jews can remain warm and safe in the coming months.
A Ukraine response group organized by the Orthodox Chabad-Lubavitch movement, whose rabbis are the Jewish leaders in many Ukrainian cities, is raising funds to buy hundreds of generators to equip each its sites and the homes of needy Jews with backup power. Since the war’s start, Chabad houses and synagogues have become places of refuge and distribution sites for aid.
“Everyone knows our address,” Rabbi Shaul Horowitz, who leads Chabad in Vinnytsia, told Chabad.org, the movement’s news site. “Now we need the generators.”
Meanwhile, Jewish Federations of North America on Thursday announced another $7 million infusion for the Ukraine effort, adding to the $78 million that the group and its member federations have donated already. The new funding will pay for both supplies to manage the dangerous winter ahead and to help Russian Jews move to Israel, as tens of thousands have already done this year. (Russian pressure on the group that facilitates emigration to Israel has complicated the efforts of those who are eligible for Israeli citizenship to leave.)
Through the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), a group that aids Jews in peril worldwide, the donation will go to buy blankets, clothing, portable heaters and stoves, shelf-stable foods and other emergency items that will go to roughly 22,000 Ukrainian Jews and the organizations that serve them.
“The winter forecast in Ukraine is extremely concerning, with the potential for an even graver humanitarian crisis and our latest allocation reflects our attention to the evolving needs on the ground and our ongoing commitment to provide relief where it is most needed,” JFNA’s president and CEO, Eric Fingerhut, said in a statement.
A fantastic evening celebrating the awesome Australian Ambassador to Israel, @AusAmbIsrael, who is finishing his term. A mate, a mensch and just a real champion of the ???????? friendship! Also, cheers for bringing out some Aussie ??. L’Chaim and all the best back in Oz! pic.twitter.com/Ms9kauKLfl
— Arsen Ostrovsky (@Ostrov_A) November 10, 2022
✡️ 💙 pic.twitter.com/no6vCDBID9
— Julian Edelman (@Edelman11) November 9, 2022
In First Official Visit to Bahrain, Israel Air Force Chief Attends Regional Aviation Conference
For the first time in history, a high-ranking Israeli Air Force commander has entered the Kingdom of Bahrain to take part in a conference of international air force commanders. The development is yet another sign that defense ties between the two countries are growing.
“This visit continues the strengthening of relations and cooperation between the IDF and the militaries of the region, and the US Central Command in particular,” the Israeli army said in a statement.
IAF Chief of Air Staff, Brig. Gen. Eyal Grinboim, participated in a conference which was hosted by the Commander of the Royal Bahraini Air Force, and was attended by the Deputy Commander of the Ninth Air Force (AFCENT) Maj. Gen. David Harris; Commander of US Naval Forces Central Command Brad Cooper; the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet and Combined Maritime Forces (NAVCENT); and other senior officials from India; Italy; the United Kingdom; Brazil and other countries.
Since Bahrain and Israel agreed to formalize their diplomatic ties in Sept. 2020 under the US-brokered Abraham Accords, direct flights have been launched and a rapprochement of defense ties have been sought. Israel has also normalized ties with other Arab countries like the United Arab Emirates. The historic agreements have helped facilitate coordination between Israeli, American, and Arab forces to address shared threats, including Iran.
Back in June, Israel announced it was building a US-sponsored Middle East air defense alliance as tensions have mounted over Iran’s nuclear program and Teheran attacks in recent years. Seven percent of Israel’s defense exports are now sold to the Gulf, helping fuel a record $11.3 billion in arms sales in 2021.
In October, Bahraini Minister of Industry and Commerce Zayed Alzayani headed an economic delegation to Israel in anticipation that the two countries will sign a free trade agreement by the end of 2022.
Shabbat Shalom from the top of the world ?? ?? pic.twitter.com/LiSnRTW7N9
— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) November 11, 2022
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