Thursday, December 29, 2022
Elder of Ziyon
Their partners are the University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation, the American Federation of Teachers and the American Jewish Committee.
Audrey Azoulay, UNESCO Director General, said, "Antisemitism is an attack on our shared humanity. It must be confronted head-on, without naivety and with perseverance. This is the commitment of UNESCO, the UN agency mandated to promote education on the Holocaust and the prevention of genocide. We are proud to support American teachers to raise young people’s awareness of the nature and impact of this toxic hate speech and ideology that drive discrimination."
The name of the course is "Shine a Light." It does not mention too many details, just a general description: "Participants will develop their knowledge, skills and confidence to teach about antisemitism and to dismantle antisemitic stereotypes. They will also learn strategies to address antisemitic incidents in schools, and to respond effectively to conspiracy theories including Holocaust denial and distortion."
I am all for training teachers about how to combat antisemitism, but I fear that this is only addressing a small subset of the issue. The mention, multiple times, of Holocaust denial seems to indicate that the only flavor of antisemitism it will tackle is far-Right, neo-Nazi antisemitism.
I don't see any indication that it will address false claims popular among Black antisemites that Jews controlled the slave trade or that Blacks are the real Jews and Jews are imposters. I don't see anything about left-wing antisemitic conspiracy theories involving the "Israel lobby."
The USC Shoah Foundation seems to be the driver of the training, and they have had a course for students on antisemitism since 2016, which defined it this way:
Antisemitism is the term for hatred of Jews as a group or a concept. Hatred of Jews has existed since ancient times, and in the nineteenth century it was being influenced by modern scientific ways of thinking. The word “antisemitism” was coined in Germany by political activist Wilhelm Marr to represent this newer way of thinking. “Semitism” supposedly expressed all things Jewish, since at the time national groups were frequently defined by their language and the traditional language of Jews is Hebrew, which is a Semitic language. Of course there is no such thing as “Semitism” and all speakers of Semitic languages never belonged to the same national or ethnic groups. Antisemitism may take the form of religious teachings that proclaim the inferiority of Jews, their supposedly evil nature, or other negative ideas about Jews. It may include political efforts to isolate, oppress, or otherwise injure them. It may also include prejudiced or other stereotyped views about Jews derived from racial or other ideologies.
I can find only a small hint that anti-Zionism may be linked to antisemitism in this handout, no longer online:
One would think after the Holocaust antisemitism would have disappeared. Unfortunately it has continued to exist. Today a constellation of antisemitic stereotypes and motifs still may be found, some elements with older ideas and some with newer variations, chief among them hatred of Jews linked to a demonic image of Israel and Zionism.
Given that UNESCO has adopted the Palestinian fiction that denies or minimizes the Jewish connection to Jerusalem, the Temple Mount and Hebron, it seems apparent that Arab antisemitism will not be covered by these courses. After all, Temple denial is no less antisemitic than Holocaust denial, but UNESCO spreads that lie, explicitly or implicitly.. It would almost certainly not want to accuse Arabs of antisemitism.
The American Jewish Committee, which has strongly condemned UNESCO in the past for its own Jerusalem resolutions, does embrace the IHRA working definition of antisemitism. On the other hand, the American Federation of Teachers is likely to only emphasize neo-Nazi style antisemitism and ignore or deny all others.
It is very unclear what this course is going to look like. UNESCO's involvement and its press release emphasis on Holocaust education and denial gives me pause. Holocaust education is crucial, of course, but today's youth cannot easily link Jews being herded into gas chambers with their view of Jews today as a successful, integrated group in the US.
The entire point of a course on antisemitism should be that no group is immune to being infected hy it, and showing examples from across the board, from Alice Walker to Mahmoud Abbas, from Louis Farrakhan to Roald Dahl, from Richard Nixon to Ilhan Omar, from the murderer at Tree of Life to the murderers in Jersey City and those in Paris, from Henry Ford to Kanye West, from Osama bin Laden to Marjorie Taylor-Greene. The wide range is exactly the point, and if the Shoah is the main focus of the course, it will not achieve its goals.
