Friday, February 10, 2023

02/10 Links Pt2: Melanie Phillips: How Britain has failed to prevent Islamist extremism and to protect Jews; The Massacre That Never Was; The dark side of Roger Waters

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: How Britain has failed to prevent Islamist extremism and to protect Jews
While events in Israel continue to attract disproportionate and distorted global attention, Islamic extremism remains a threat inside Western society. It’s accompanied by the parallel failure of the West even to face up honestly to the true nature of this problem, let alone deal with it adequately.

This week, a review was published in Britain of the government’s anti-extremism program, Prevent. This was set up in the wake of the 2007 Islamist terrorist atrocity in London, when more than 50 people were murdered and hundreds more injured in a series of four bomb attacks.

While the Prevent program itself is obviously particular to Britain, the findings of the independent review, commissioned by the Home Office and headed by the writer William Shawcross, should also strike discomfiting chords in America and among Jewish Diaspora communities in the West.

The message it hammers home is that the government has failed to protect the country in general, and the Jewish community in particular, from Islamism, or Islamic extremism and supremacism.

Shawcross found that Islamist ideology had been “misinterpreted, misunderstood or even overlooked” by officials through a combination of ignorance and terror of being damned as “Islamophobic.”

This failure had produced the perverse result that some organizations in receipt of government funding to fight extremism had actually been promoting antisemitism. Even more astonishingly, the founding chairman of the Muslim police officers’ association, who had worked with government departments on counter-terrorism, shared content which called for the destruction of Israel and described Jews as “filth.”

The program’s officials also applied a troubling double standard. While 80% of counter-terrorism dealt with Islamism and a mere 10% with extreme right-wing threats, only 22% of cases referred to in Prevent involved Islamist extremism.

The officials chose to focus instead on what they decided was far-right extremism. However, they defined this so broadly that it included center-right or “mildly controversial” discourse unrelated to terrorism or radicalisation.

At the same time, they narrowed their definition of Islamist extremism so that they failed to recognize the all-important continuum between non-violent Islamist narratives and terrorist networks.
Melanie Phillips: Westminster Holocaust memorial is a tragic betrayal of the dead
It’s groundhog day all over again for the long-planned Holocaust memorial and learning centre in Westminster’s Victoria Tower Gardens.

This huge, Brutalist construction would destroy a quiet green oasis valued by local residents. Last July, the Court of Appeal upheld a ruling that the structure was prohibited by a 1900 Act of Parliament, passed to protect the park from such developments.

Yet now the government — which previously overrode Westminster council’s objections — has declared it will legislate to cancel out that 1900 law.

It will thus ride roughshod over a historic legal protection for the local community. Is this really a desirable context for a project supposedly devoted to memory and law as a defence against oppressive and arbitrary power?

There are more fundamental objections to the memorial’s supposed message.

Although the Nazis murdered many types of people in the Holocaust, their principal driver was the intention to wipe the Jews alone off the face of the Earth. Yet much Holocaust memorialising denies the unique characteristics of antisemitism and the genocide of the Jews.

A graphic example was provided by the UK Online Commemoration for Holocaust Memorial Day last month. Its 23 sections referred to “genocides” in Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia and Darfur, to “the Nazi persecution of gay people” and to “people being persecuted simply because they were Ordinary People who belonged to a particular group”.

But there was no mention of the genocide of the Jews other than two fleeting references in personal messages from Michael Gove and Sir Keir Starmer. The chief executive and chair of trustees of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust didn’t mention it, urging reflection instead on “the Holocaust, the Nazi persecution of other groups and more recent genocides”.
We need a better definition of antisemitism
To my mind, there are four main ways that the IHRA definition, which suffers from being poorly written and imprecise in key places, could be improved. To begin with, there’s the opening sentence: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.” This is far too vague and quite confusing for the uninitiated, particularly when the primary audience is studying the definition for its practical usage. More accurate and efficient would be a declarative formulation, for example: “Antisemitism is the negative, hostile or hateful perception of the Jewish people as a collective, expressed through a range of rhetorical, violent and discriminatory measures targeting Jews, or those perceived to be Jews, as well as their property and their communal institutions.”

Then there’s the proverbial elephant in the room: the complete absence of the word “Zionism” from the definition. This omission undermines the contention that contemporary anti-Zionism is a specific form of antisemitism that shares many of the same fixations over Jewish wealth and influence as do its other forms. It also dilutes the historic centrality of the Zionist movement over the last century as a focus for Jewish identity and as an instrument for the rejuvenation of the Jews in the wake of the Holocaust. Hence, the sentence in the definition that identifies as antisemitic “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g. by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” might be rewritten to say, “Depicting Zionism, the Jewish national movement, as inherently racist and the State of Israel as an illegitimate entity.”

An additional sentence on anti-Judaism needs to be added, perhaps by acknowledging as antisemitic those efforts to prevent, in my suggested wording, “Jewish communities from observing their most sacred religious practices, such as consuming kosher food and circumcising male infants at the age of eight days, through legislative or other measures.”

Finally, the trend in many countries in eastern and western Europe to appropriate the Jewish victims of the Holocaust—as part of a wider attempt to stress the sufferings of non-Jews under Nazi occupation—should also become part of the definition’s purview. To preserve the historical integrity of the Holocaust, a new clause in the definition might read, “Out of all the victim groups persecuted by the Nazi regime, Jews were held up as the ultimate enemy of humanity, in whose destruction the collusion of non-Jewish populations under Nazi occupation was often encouraged and in many cases received.”

These small but important fixes would make the IHRA definition a much more comprehensive and persuasive text. The counter-argument that the definition is already in its final version, and that amending it would be overly cumbersome, given the number of parties that have already signed up to it, will merely allow the antisemites to stay one step ahead of those whose job it is to combat them.

I’m also acutely aware that the IHRA definition has been attacked by those who resent its identification of antisemitism with anti-Zionism, and I can understand how such a hostile environment might create anxieties about amending the definition among its supporters. Again, though, I don’t find that argument very convincing. If anything, attempts to create an alternative to the definition like the so-called “Jerusalem Declaration” should animate our own intellectual efforts in its defense, to the point that we are willing to make revisions to it when warranted. Otherwise, history will run away from us.


The Massacre That Never Was
In 2002 Israel waged a military operation in the West Bank town of Jenin in response to the fact it was used as a launch pad for Palestinian terror attacks against Israeli civilians.

The next day I went into a newsagents in Great Britain. I was a kid just out of university and living in Oxford. As I walked in a middle-aged, middle-class white guy came up to me holding up a copy of leftwing Guardian newspaper. “Look at this” he said to me a complete stranger. “Look at what those bastards in Israel have done.” In big letters it said MASSACRE IN JENIN on the front page. I knew nothing really about Israel at the time but I knew Jewish history and I knew the general rhythm of our hearts which crave peace over conflict. I instinctively urged caution and said we don’t know what actually happened yet. “Of course those bastards did it” he said quite comfortably to a complete stranger before leaving. When I left the shop I phoned up my brother. “Have you seen the paper? It’s saying Israel has massacred people. That can’t be true can it? There’s no way? If they have there’s no way I can support Israel? I can’t believe they would have actually massacred people?” “I get you” he said. “Lets wait and see…”

I waited and I saw. There was no massacre. The British media had almost uniformly adopted the Hamas line distributed to the Western media without any journalistic standards of enquiry. They had happily spread the lie of a massacre to the world. It turned out that 23 Israeli soldiers had also been killed in what was described as a hard battle that lasted 11 days. The majority of those Palestinians killed were armed combatants engaged in this battle. Not only that - the Palestinian leadership who cried “massacre” to English-speaking audiences and which was eagerly lapped up were describing the battle amongst themselves as a great “VICTORY”. It is still regarded by Palestinian militants as an inspiring victory against the Israelis.

How on earth could it have been a victory and a massacre at the same time?

The Guardian eventually offered a feeble article tucked away somewhere that tried to explore how the British media irresponsibly jumped to apportion blame to Israel, but by then it was too late, the lie and the damage had been done and was seared into people’s hearts.

That pompous man in the newsagent taught me a lesson about a phenomenon I have seen played out over and over again - that people are not only willing to believe the worst about the Jews - but they WANT to believe the worst about Jews.
John Ware: The dark side of Roger Waters
For an “anti-racist, pro-human rights” activist Waters has shown himself oddly tone-deaf to Jewish sensibilities, famously floating a large inflatable pig over one of his concerts with the Jewish Star of David juxtaposed with dollar signs. Just criticizing Israel’s West Bank security fence, insisted Waters, nothing to do with Jews and money. Yeah, right.

Waters has said he’s “not sure that there any much harsher regimes around the world" than Israel. Like armies everywhere, the IDF has done bad things, and personally, I’ve never understood either the moral or legal justification for demolishing the homes of relatives of Palestinians who killed or attempted to kill Israelis, even though they weren’t suspected of colluding in terrorism.

But the world’s "harshest" regime? As any sane person know, there are things going on not far from Israel’s borders much worthier of protest: the estimated 600,000 killed in Syria, 13 million Syrians displaced and 6.7 million forced to flee Syria for starters. Or the slow public strangulation of young human rights activists in Iran being dangled from cranes.

Still, Waters was at his “how very dare you!” self-righteous best last week. There’s “not a single millisecond of anti-Semitism anywhere in my life” he protested.

I don’t know what evidence Polly Samson has for Waters’ alleged “thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip synching, misogynistic” ways. But when it comes to being antisemitic to his “rotten core”, I don’t think she has much to fear from the old boy and his blustering threats of defamation.
'Antisemitism is not Rock ‘N’ Roll!' says Boy George in wake of antisemitic Roger Waters rant
Boy George and Maureen Lipman have voiced their outrage after Pink Floyd musician Roger Waters repeated his comparison of Israel to Nazi Germany and defended Russia in a recent interview.

Culture Club star Boy George told the JC: “I always thought Pink Floyd was part of [the] solution but Roger has fallen out of the dream. When you mix your own hostility with more hostility there is never any peace! Antisemitism is not rock ‘n’ roll!”

Dame Maureen Lipman called Mr Waters “a sad and addled old headbanger and his opinion is worthless”. Ms Lipman said: “He has form for persistent antisemitism as well as rabid anti-Zionism.

"His rant is obsessively centred on blaming Israel for being behind every war on the planet and denouncing Britain’s century-old colonialism whilst cosying up to Russian colonialists today.

“He is like Ken Loach and the BDS bigots somewhat reticent on China, Burma, Congo, Syria, Yemen… None of these conflicts are based on a democratic country being under constant threat of destruction from its neighbours.”


Rashid Khalidi’s fusillade of falsehoods against Israel
Americans faced the “biased, crooked, legalized lawlessness of Israeli law and Israeli planning,” decried Columbia University Professor Rashid Khalidi in a Jan. 31 Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) webinar. Addressing “How the U.S. is Planning to Build Its Embassy on Stolen Land in Jerusalem,” this Palestinian-American former spokesman for the terrorist Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) concocted lie after lie about Israel.

Khalidi and his fellow panelists focused on the fraudulent accusation that the U.S. is currently considering building its new Jerusalem embassy on land “stolen” under Israel’s 1950 Absentee Property Law. Under this law, Israel took custodial possession of real estate and other property left behind by Arabs who fled the fighting in what became Israel during its 1947-1948 independence war. Israel thereby followed standard international norms, under which such abandoned property falls into state possession if, for no other reason, than nonpayment of taxes, as both Israel and Jordan’s Custodian of Enemy Property effectively copied British law.

Against this reality, Khalidi lambasted Israel’s “legalized lawlessness.”

“Like other colonial powers after ethnic cleansing, the Israeli state took over, stole, the property of the indigenous population,” he said. Suhad Bishara, legal director at the anti-Israel Adalah organization, parroted that the Absentee Property Law is a “most arbitrary and draconian, racially designed law,” which is based on the “logic of conquest” and “violates international law.”

As one of the descendants of the original Arab title holders to the building site of the embassy, Khalidi bemoaned that the American government is proceeding with the embassy construction while dismissing these property claims. “The U.S. government is endorsing theft of the property of U.S citizens, so somehow private property is sacrosanct except when Israel decides to take it from U.S citizens,” he asserted. Diala Shamas from the leftist Center for Constitutional Rights, another anti-Israel organization, concurred that “private property is paramount in the U.S legal system.” Yet Israel has provided monetary compensation for Arab property lost in 1948, in contrast to Arab states like Jordan, whose various expulsions of Jewish populations under their control entailed far greater property losses.

Khalidi made numerous other errors in his comments about land ownership and territory during Israel’s modern history. He noted that only about seven to eight percent of the British Palestine Mandate territory was in Jewish private ownership in 1948 when Britain withdrew from its League of Nations mandate and Israel declared independence. Yet Arab private land holdings were hardly greater, as state land inherited by the Israeli government, such as the waste areas of the Negev Desert, comprised most of the mandate territory.
The IRS Came After Pro-Israel Groups, But Protected Hamas
David Boim was only 17 years old when he was shot and killed while waiting at a bus stop north of Jerusalem. The American teenager’s parents, Stanley and Joyce, have spent a quarter of a century since trying to bring Hamas, the Islamic terror group behind the attack, and its funders in the United States to justice. Their lawsuits have targeted, among others, the Holy Land Foundation which was found in federal court to have provided “material aid to Hamas” in what became the largest terrorism financing prosecution case in the United States.

The Justice Department stated that, “from its inception, HLF existed to support Hamas. Before HLF was designated as a Specially Designated Terrorist by the Treasury Department and shut down in December 2001, it was the largest U.S. Muslim charity.”

It was also a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. The IRS had allowed money used to fund Islamic terrorists to be funneled through a tax-deductible organization. And that was not the first time or the last.

The Boims are still fighting in court over what they allege are new non-profits that are really ‘alter egos’ that were set up after the Hamas fundraisers lost criminal and civil lawsuits.

One of those is American Muslims for Palestine.

The Boim family lawsuit alleges that, “American Muslims for Palestine is merely a new name for the same terrorism funding enterprise”. Last year, a federal judge in Illinois allowed the case against AMP to move forward.

But the bereaved family are not the only ones accusing AMP.

Jonathan Schanzer, Vice President of Research for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee that many “high-level and mid-level figures” from the terror charities “gravitated to a new organization called American Muslims for Palestine (AMP).”
Illinois taxpayers footing $1 million bill for group inspired by antisemitic Nation of Islam
So why is the state funding antisemitic groups in already-dangerous times? The governor’s office did not respond to phone and email requests for comment from JNS. Reached by email, the Jewish United Fund, Chicago’s Jewish Federation, declined to comment.

Leonard Matanky, a rabbi and the dean of the modern Orthodox high school Ida Crown Jewish Academy in Skokie, near Chicago, was unaware he and fellow Illinois residents were paying $1 million to a group that is aligned ideologically with the Nation of Islam.

“If such a thing has occurred, I would be very concerned,” he told JNS. “The hate speech by Farrakhan is clearly beyond the pale, and the Nation of Islam, as a result, has always been a concern for our community.”

Were Farrakhan’s followers to act on his teachings, they would exacerbate an already-deteriorating situation with rising U.S. antisemitism.

At Congregation KINS of West Rogers Park, where Matanky has held the pulpit since 1994, there has been vandalism, including broken windows.

“There is no synagogue in this state where the doors are unlocked,” he said. “This is not the case for Muslim or Christian places of worship, even if they are right next to a Jewish house of worship.”

The only way to combat antisemitism effectively in Illinois, and the rest of the country, is via education and working with communities, according to Matanky.

“There needs to be a strong message that antisemitic attacks are not tolerated,” he said.
University of Michigan Event Calling for Israel's Destruction Broke Federal Law, Legal Group Says
The University of Michigan may have broken state and federal law governing hate speech when it hosted a rally on school grounds that featured calls for violent insurrection against Israel and Jews, according to a legal watchdog group.

The Jan. 12 event, which was hosted by a student group as Vice President Kamala Harris appeared on campus, included calls for "intifada revolution" as well as the chant "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," a phrase employed by those who seek the Jewish state's eradication. The school has yet to condemn the rally, and the International Legal Forum (ILF), a global network of more than 4,000 lawyers working to combat anti-Semitism, says the university may have breached Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prevents discrimination based on race.

"Although we firmly believe in the principle of free speech and right to protest on campus, this event was not a mere expression of difference in political opinion, but rather a direct and unadulterated call for violence, placing Jewish students, faculty, and staff in harm's way," the ILF wrote in a Jan. 26 letter to university president Santa Ono, obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

Adding fuel to the fire, the university is scheduled to host an event next week with Mohammed El-Kurd, a Palestinian writer who has compared Jews to Nazis and claimed that Israelis eat Palestinians' organs. Soon after the El-Kurd event, the university is slated to host an event honoring Palestinian "martyrs," or those killed while performing terrorist attacks.

Such events are a sign of growing anti-Semitic attitudes on America's college campus. Attacks on Jewish students, both physical and verbal, doubled in the 2021-2022 academic year, according to Jewish advocacy groups and follow a similar rise in anti-Semitic attitudes in America at large. This includes the promotion of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories by celebrities like rapper Kanye West and basketball star Kyrie Irving.

The Jan. 12 event not only violated "the widely accepted International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of anti-Semitism," but "the direct call to violence and hate speech may also be in breach of federal and state legislation, particularly as the University of Michigan is a public institution," according to the ILF.
PodCast: How An Innovative & Interactive Exhibit Will Be Helping to Fight Antisemitism: A Fireside Chat With Sam Eskenasi, Director Of Advocacy With La’ad Canada
Antisemitism, often called history’s oldest hatred, has a habit of reinventing itself in order to stay a powerful force. In contemporary times, antisemitism has often hidden behind a veneer of anti-Zionism, but its core anti-Jewish nature has not changed.

Despite antisemitism’s changing face, only with continuing ignorance can it be given oxygen, and that’s where an innovative and interactive new exhibit, soon to be launched across Canada, will add a unique voice.

In this week’s podcast, we sit down with Sam Eskenasi. Sam is the Director of Advocacy for La’ad Canada, a non-profit advocacy organization taking a different approach when it comes to educating the general public about Israel and the Jewish People.


Kassy Dillon: New York Times faces billboard campaign from Orthodox Jewish group over ‘crusade’ against religious schools
Following several months of coverage by The New York Times, an Orthodox Jewish umbrella group fired back with a public campaign to counter what it deemed a demonizing "crusade" against Orthodox Jews.

"We resent that the Times are engaged in what appears to be a crusade," said Rabbi David Zwiebel, the executive vice president of Agudath Israel — an organization founded in 1922 that represents various Orthodox Jewish communities. "A crusade to get people to consider Hasidic Jews in a negative light."

Beginning in September, the Times started to publish a series of investigative stories about Orthodox boys schools, also known as yeshivas, particularly singling out the Hasidic community — a smaller group that falls under the Orthodox Jewish umbrella. The articles reported, among other findings, that some yeshivas faced dismal scores on standardized tests and provided minimal secular education while receiving significant public funding.

"There does appear to be a concerted effort that is currently taking place and has been taking place over the last number of months to find various aspects of Orthodox Jewish communal life — education, social activities and others — to portray it in a way that is very negative," Zwiebel told Fox News. "We are concerned that it is not only troubling, but even dangerous to a certain extent."

Agudath Israel leaders said the Times' coverage didn't give the Orthodox community a sufficient chance to showcase the benefits of a yeshiva education and instead included one quote from the organization about graduates' successful career paths. The leaders also said the coverage generalized overall yeshiva education by sharing experiences from individual schools while avoiding mentioning positive attributes of the community.

They said the Times negatively portrayed the community at a time when antisemitism is on the rise — the number of antisemitic hate crimes doubled from 2020 to 2022 and are more frequent than hate crimes on all other minority groups in the city according to the New York Police Department.
The BBC’s ‘one no of Khartoum’
However, the members of the Arab League did not only vow “not to recognise Israel” at that meeting. As Berg is surely aware, they also declared that they would not negotiate or make peace with Israel as a matter of principle:
“The Arab Heads of State have agreed to unite their political efforts at the international and diplomatic level to eliminate the effects of the aggression and to ensure the withdrawal of the aggressive Israeli forces from the Arab lands which have been occupied since the aggression of June 5. This will be done within the framework of the main principles by which the Arab States abide, namely, no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it, and insistence on the rights of the Palestinian people in their own country.”

It would of course have been useful for BBC audiences to be fully informed about the significance of the Arab League “principles” that blocked any negotiations after the Six Day War, prevented any peace agreement being signed for the following twelve years and led to Egypt being suspended from that organisation in 1979.

Berg goes on to state:
“The growing number of Arab countries formalising relations with Israel has been condemned by the Palestinians, who see it as a betrayal of their cause.

For years, Arab countries conditioned peace talks with Israel on its withdrawal from territories occupied in the 1967 war, and the establishment of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.”

However, the BBC’s report has not been updated to inform audiences of precisely such predictable condemnation from two Palestinian terrorist organisations and no information is given regarding the fact that the “cause” of such organisations is not a peaceful two-state solution.
Dutch police probe antisemitic message projected onto Anne Frank House
Dutch police said on Friday they were investigating the projection of an antisemitic laser message onto the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam — an incident the prime minister condemned as “reprehensible.”

The message referenced a far-right conspiracy theory that the teenage Holocaust victim was not the author of her famous diary, and images of the projection were shown on a private US Telegram channel.

“It happened this week. We were notified and we are investigating it,” an Amsterdam police spokesman told AFP, declining to give further details.

The Anne Frank House Museum, which preserves the canalside house where the Jewish Frank family hid from the Nazis during World War II, expressed its “shock and revulsion.”

The museum, which receives around a million visitors a year, told AFP it had “reported the incident to the police” and was in contact with the city council and public prosecutors.

It said the projected message read “Ann Frank, inventor of the ballpoint pen” — referring to false claims that the diary was partly written with a type of pen that only came into use after the war.

“With the projection and the (online) video, the perpetrators are attacking the authenticity of Anne Frank’s diary and inciting hatred. It is an antisemitic and racist film,” the museum said.
‘We cannot normalize this’: Emhoff at UN calls to widen fight against antisemitism
Second Gentleman Douglas Emhoff called for broadening the fight against antisemitism at a special event at the United Nations on Thursday.

Emhoff spoke at the event, his first appearance at the United Nations, alongside US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield, US Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt and American Jewish Committee CEO Ted Deutsch.

The side event at UN headquarters in New York City was aimed at working toward a global effort to combat antisemitism and sharing methods to address the hatred.

The panelists repeatedly called for forming partnerships to combat antisemitism, pervasive Jew-hatred online and repeated prejudice from celebrities and politicians.

Surveys and hate crimes data have repeatedly shown that antisemitism is at alarming levels in the US and Europe.

“We must all speak out against antisemitism and call out those who don’t. Silence is not an option. We must build coalitions to tackle this epidemic of hate. We must bring together people of all backgrounds,” Emhoff said.

“Hate is interconnected. It affects everyone and we must make sure that our communities are safe. All people must be able to live and worship and be who they are freely, without fear and without being subject to violence,” he said.

Emhoff also highlighted the importance of education to combat Holocaust denial and distortion, called for “consequences” for those who engage in antisemitism and decried recent instances of prejudice by the famous.

“Too often we see celebrities, comedians use antisemitism for cheap laughs, high profile entertainers, politicians openly espousing tired antisemitic tropes,” Emhoff said.

“We cannot normalize this. In order to combat antisemitism we need everyone to be committed and unified,” he said. “We need to make clear to the haters, the antisemites that there is no clear harbor.”
Wikipedia’s Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust
ABSTRACT
This essay uncovers the systematic, intentional distortion of Holocaust history on the English-language Wikipedia, the world’s largest encyclopedia. In the last decade, a group of committed Wikipedia editors have been promoting a skewed version of history on Wikipedia, one touted by right-wing Polish nationalists, which whitewashes the role of Polish society in the Holocaust and bolsters stereotypes about Jews. Due to this group’s zealous handiwork, Wikipedia’s articles on the Holocaust in Poland minimize Polish antisemitism, exaggerate the Poles’ role in saving Jews, insinuate that most Jews supported Communism and conspired with Communists to betray Poles (Żydokomuna or Judeo–Bolshevism), blame Jews for their own persecution, and inflate Jewish collaboration with the Nazis. To explain how distortionist editors have succeeded in imposing this narrative, despite the efforts of opposing editors to correct it, we employ an innovative methodology. We examine 25 public-facing Wikipedia articles and nearly 300 of Wikipedia’s back pages, including talk pages, noticeboards, and arbitration cases. We complement these with interviews of editors in the field and statistical data gleaned through Wikipedia’s tool suites. This essay contributes to the study of Holocaust memory, revealing the digital mechanisms by which ideological zeal, prejudice, and bias trump reason and historical accuracy. More broadly, we break new ground in the field of the digital humanities, modelling an in-depth examination of how Wikipedia editors negotiate and manufacture information for the rest of the world to consume.
Man charged with making threats against French Jewish school, site of 2012 shooting
French authorities have placed a man under judicial supervision after he allegedly made threatening phone calls last month to a Jewish school in Toulouse that was the site of a deadly terror attack in 2012.

The 34-year-old suspect made 163 phone calls in total, reports showed, including some to a hospital and to a Marseille surgeon.

“I fear that he could attack the Jewish community,” a public prosecutor told The Times of Israel’s French edition.

In March 2012, an Islamist gunman entered the Ozar Hatorah school and shot dead a rabbi and three young students, wounding four others. He was killed after a 30-hour standoff with police.

The attack was often cited as one of the manifestations of a rise in antisemitism in France that drove a surge in French-Jewish immigration to Israel throughout the 2010s.

In 2019, the shooter’s brother was sentenced to 30 years in prison as an accomplice in the attack.

The defendant who made the phone calls throughout January, and whose identity has not been publicly revealed, was described as without a permanent home and staying in hotels.

Last week, a court in Castres ordered a psychiatric assessment and put him under supervision in his mother’s house in the town of Mazamet, in southern France, and they adjourned his case until March.
Nazi-Era ‘Resistance Fighter’ Exposed as Concentration Camp Guard
Irmgard Kroymann (1921-2005) was renowned as a heroine who was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in the Gross-Rosen concentration camp in Lower Silesia. Following the Second World War, she became a trade union leader known as a vigorous defender of women’s rights and a fighter against antisemitism.

For her bravery, Germany decorated Kroymann with its highest honors including the Grand Cross of Merit, the Order of Merit of North Rhine-Westphalia and the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.

But according to historian Anne Prior, Kroymann’s account of her life during the war was a pack of lies. Prior revealed her findings last month in her essay published in German journalist and Holocaust historian Götz Aly’s “Our National Socialism” anthology.

“Unlike West Germany, documents in East Germany were archived meticulously and when the regime collapsed in 1989 an entire wealth of information was suddenly made available,” Prior told the Jewish Chronicle.

The archive included Kroymann’s work files and her job application to work at the Nazi camp. At the same time, Kroymann revealed to journalists in West Germany that she had applied for financial compensation while claiming she was a victim of the Third Reich.

“Kroymann lied to herself and the public about her true role during the Nazi years,” said Christoph Heubner of the International Auschwitz Committee, who shared Prior’s shock upon learning of the findings.


How Abraham Lincoln Was Convinced the U.S. Army Should Have Jewish Chaplains
Historians have long known that in the midst of the Civil War, a Dutch-American cantor named Arnold Fischel successfully put forth the case to President Lincoln that the Union army should have Jewish, and not only Christian, chaplains. But the details of the story are quite different from the widely circulated version, concludes Adam D. Mendelsohn in his book Jewish Soldiers in the Civil War. Andrew Silow-Carroll writes:

According to a frequently retold version of the story, Fischel had been nominated to replace a Jewish layman named Michael Allen who had been forced out as chaplain of the Fifth Pennsylvania Cavalry, allegedly at the request of a visiting delegation from the YMCA. Horace Greeley’s crusading New York Tribune and other papers picked up the story and made a hero of the Jewish officer who had mustered the cavalry, Colonel Max Friedman, supposedly for “leading the charge against the unjust law.”

In fact, writes Mendelsohn, Allen was not kicked out as chaplain but probably resigned because he wasn’t enjoying his army service far from home. As for the colonel, “There is no evidence of a coordinated campaign by Friedman and his fellow Jews to elect Arnold Fischel in place of Allen.” Instead, Fischel’s contract with Shearith Israel, [the Manhattan synagogue where he served as cantor], was about to expire, and he sought the cavalry job because he was in “urgent need” of the army’s relatively generous pay for chaplains.

Friedman, meanwhile, vigorously denied press reports that his 700-man cavalry, which had fewer than twenty Jewish soldiers, needed a Jewish chaplain. Mendelsohn found evidence that Friedman shrank from the attention, in part because he was a bit of a scammer: like many officers in his day, he charged the government for no-show recruits, sold commissions to officers, and got a cut of the profits from government contractors, known as “sutlers.” Even Michael Allen—who sold liquor—might have been in on the grift.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo: A natural ally of Israel in Africa
I’d always wanted to visit Africa. It’s such a big and diverse continent with so much beauty. Until this year, I had not planned to do so. Then suddenly, plans changed. To be honest, The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) was not on my top-ten list to visit, and then it became the first African nation to do so.

This opportunity was made possible by my friend Rev. Albert Mbenga, who heads a Christian group called Congo Bless Israel. He had come to my home in the Judean mountains last year to share his vision and extend an invitation to join a huge national event he was planning to connect Congolese with Israel.

Congo and Israel have an important relationship. We established diplomatic relations following Congo’s independence in 1960, until after the Yom Kippur War, when African nations were pressured by the Arab League to sever relations with Israel. At the time, Congolese president Mobutu reportedly said he was making a conflicted and difficult choice between relations with a neighbor and relations with a friend. We were the friend and lost out.

Congo: A natural ally of Israel
But my hosts in Congo believe that it was Africa that lost out, and Congo in particular. Congo is the second-largest country in Africa physically, and fourth in terms of population. However, it’s the only one among the top five that is overwhelmingly Christian – more than 90%. That makes Congo and Congolese natural allies with Israel, and my hosts want to see that built up so Congo will be blessed.

An indication of this is embodied in DRC President Felix Tshisekedi, who is a devout Christian and ardent supporter of Israel. As a young man, he spent time living on a kibbutz. As president, he committed to opening an embassy in Jerusalem. He also became a leading advocate for Israel to rejoin the African Union (AU) as an observer.

The AU vote was the catalyst for my trip and the events in which I participated. My Congolese hosts feel that after Congo severed relations with Israel, they became cursed. Indeed, Congo is one of the poorest nations in Africa, if not the world. Where there used to be significant industry, today there is much less.

Now, under the auspices of a leader who is one of the staunchest advocates for relations with Israel in Africa and for Israel to rejoin the AU as an observer, the time is ripe, they believe, to take a proactive approach to enhance relations.
‘Freedom and Tyranny’: Bernard-Henri Lévy and Natan Sharansky, Live & Uncut
Two of the greatest Jewish voices of the past half-century appear on stage together for the first time in what promises to be a significant public intellectual event. French philosopher, essayist, playwright, and filmmaker Bernard-Henri Lévy joins heroic former Soviet prisoner of conscience Natan Sharansky to address and debate the most urgent questions of our moment, starting with Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and ongoing U.S. engagement with Iran’s tottering dictatorship as it pursues a nuclear bomb. Lévy and Sharansky will offer their perspectives, then be joined by moderator David Samuels, the Literary Editor at Tablet.




Legendary songwriter Burt Bacharach dead at 94
Legendary American pop composer, songwriter and pianist Burt Bacharach, whose prolific output provided a chart-topping playlist for the 1960s and 1970s with hits like “I Say a Little Prayer,” has died in Los Angeles at the age of 94.

Bacharach worked with a constellation of stars during his decades-long career, from Dionne Warwick and Aretha Franklin to Dusty Springfield and Tom Jones. He toured with Marlene Dietrich and collaborated with the White Stripes.

Bacharach — who died Wednesday of natural causes at his home, his publicist Tina Brausman told AFP — was known for romantic, melancholic ballads that blurred the line between jazz and pop, and regularly won over fans on both sides of the Atlantic.

He earned a flurry of accolades: three Oscars including for the score of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” an Emmy, eight Grammy awards including a lifetime achievement prize, two Golden Globes and induction in the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

The list of hits is long: “Walk On By,” “Do You Know the Way to San Jose,” and “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head” are only a few of the best known. He penned nearly 50 Top 100 hits and nine songs that went to number one on the charts.

In 2012, he and David earned the prestigious Gershwin Prize for Popular Song from the Library of Congress, presented to him by then-US president Barack Obama.

Demonstrating his longevity and cross-generational fan base, Bacharach sang at the Glastonbury festival in Britain in 2015 at age 87, serenading the crowd with an hour-long set of hits.

The crowd bathed “in the romantic, rose-tinted glow of the easy listening king,” reported The Guardian, adding that pop queen Adele was among those watching in admiration.

Bacharach performed twice in Israel, in 1960 and in 2013.




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