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Wednesday, April 26, 2023

04/26 Links Pt2: Douglas Murray: The pathology of anti-Semitism; Mohammed El-Kurd To Receive Calgary “Peace Prize”; Report: ‘Deep Financial System’ Fueling BDS Movement

From Ian:

Douglas Murray: The pathology of anti-Semitism
It has always been like this. So tell me exactly how you propose to ‘root out’ or ‘end for good’ a pathology which blames Jews for being poor and for being rich, for integrating and for not integrating, for being stateless and for having a state.

People who have thought about this at a facile level can be relied upon to back schemes such as Holocaust education centres and memorials almost everywhere on Earth. One reason why so many MPs back an ugly Holocaust memorial in Victoria Tower Gardens is because they imagine troops of schoolchildren being ‘educated’ about how not to hate Jews. They say that it is important to ‘learn the lessons’ of the Holocaust, as though these lessons are straightforward; as though it was almost generous of Herr Hitler to provide such a massive historical reference point for our own moral betterment.

Such people should read the most recent work of Dara Horn (author of People Love Dead Jews), who recently showed in the Atlantic how the proliferation of Holocaust education centres in America might actually be increasing anti-Semitism among the schoolchildren who are taken there. Well-meaning (generally non-Jewish) curators and guides have no time to analyse the centuries of Jew-hatred that led up to the Holocaust. Instead, the visitor is simply left with the knowledge that in the 1930s and 1940s something terrible happened. A surprising number come away with the belief that the Jews must have done something to provoke such an outrage – that they were, perhaps, disproportionately rich, for instance. What all these displays have in common is that they finish with a sort of facile generalised lesson. Don’t be mean to people. Or the question ‘Who are the Jews of today? What forms of prejudice exist in our own day that should be tackled in order not to end up with Auschwitz again?’

As Horn notes, the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington does not finish by generalising the black American experience. It does not ask whom we treat today in the fashion that American blacks were once treated. It is recognised to be an evil of its own, worthy of its own respect and historical treatment.

Not so with dead Jews. They must forever be used to improve us, available to be used by anyone wishing to make a point about – say – border security in the 21st century.

What Abbott and others consistently demonstrate is precisely what Grossman said: anti-Semitism is a mirror. We use the Jews as victims in our society because we live in a society which celebrates victimhood: victimhood without much serious suffering, of course. And we become so high on that search for victimhood that we can even forget the peoples more victimised than any other.

Tear that out.
Mohammed El-Kurd, An Anti-Israel Activist Journalist Accused Of Antisemitism & Glorifying Palestinian Terrorism To Receive “Peace Prize” By Mount Royal University In Calgary
On May 18, Mount Royal University in Calgary will be presenting the “Calgary Peace Prize 2023” to Mohammed El-Kurd, which according to the university’s official flyer, will recognize El-Kurd “for his exemplary contribution toward peace and justice in the struggle for a more humane, dignified, and free life for oppressed people in Palestine and beyond.”

If Mount Royal University wants to honour an activist for their efforts in making a more humane and dignified life for anyone, Mohammed El-Kurd is hardly the candidate for such an award.

In recent years, Mohammed El-Kurd, the “Palestine correspondent” for The Nation, has become a fixture of the anti-Israel cause.

The 24-year-old resident of eastern Jerusalem describes himself on his official website as an “internationally touring and award-winning poet, writer, journalist, and organizer from Jerusalem, occupied Palestine.”

Alongside his twin sister Mona, Mohammed El-Kurd is regularly interviewed by news media outlets and boasts more than 700,000 followers on Instagram and more than 250,000 on Twitter. In 2021, the El-Kurd siblings were featured by Time Magazine as among the 100 most influential people of the year.

But El-Kurd is no human rights activist, nor is he an objective journalist. He has been accused of spreading hateful anti-Israel propaganda, of publishing antisemitic tropes and inciting violence on social media.
Why the Jewish Race Question Matters
Over the weekend, UK Labour MP Diane Abbott made some ignorant comments about racism. She has since apologized, and is now suspended, but this is not the first time that well-known leaders and/or celebrities have publicly questioned whether Jews (or others) should be considered a race for protections against racial discrimination.This article will just focus on Jews.

Instead of just getting angry, it is time for us to set the record straight, so that people actually understand why the question fundamentally matters.

First, whether Jews are or are not a scientifically separate race may be debatable, as much of modern science regards the category of race itself as a social construct. But that is a wholly different question than whether Jews have experienced and do still face racism and racial discrimination.

Racism is the belief that innate inherited characteristics biologically determine human behavior. It often involves the color of a person’s skin, but not always. Racial discrimination, or discriminating based on race, takes place when people treat other people differently (usually in a bad way) because of their perception of that other person’s race, whether their perception is scientifically accurate or not.

For example, whether or not Jews are scientifically a race, it is undeniably true that the Nazis killed six million Jewish men, women, and children because they believed (as enshrined in the Nuremberg Race Laws) that Jews were racially inferior.

At the same time in the United States, immigration laws (i.e.the Johnson-Reed Act) treated Jews as a distinct racial group — and a less desirable one — thus limiting their immigration, and condemning untold numbers to death in Europe.

So Jews have clearly faced their share of racism and racial discrimination throughout history, and often lost their lives for it. Even today, the vast majority of antisemitic incidents targeting Jewish people in the United States have nothing to do with this or that religious Jewish practice, and everything to do with the target’s perceived race or national origin.

That is why, from a legal perspective, the question about Jews and race is simple: Jews are considered a distinct race for the purposes of civil rights laws.


Keir Starmer must expel Diane Abbott, says writer at centre of letter row
Diane Abbott should be permanently expelled from Labour after her inflammatory letter to the Observer, the writer at the heart of the row has told the JC.

Earlier this month, Tomiwa Owolade wrote an article in the Sunday paper about a report on inequality in Britain, which showed that Jews and Travellers face more racism than black people.

Responding in her now notorious letter to the editor, Abbott wrote that Jewish, Irish and traveller communities did not experience racism but only “prejudice”, claims that Sir Keir Starmer branded “antisemitic”.

Owolade told the JC: “In light of the facts that she has not issued an adequate apology and seems unlikely to do so, and that she was a big supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, I don’t think she should be allowed to run again as a Labour candidate.

“If she were to apologise properly and explain why she wrote the letter in the first place, I might be open to the idea of readmitting her personally. But I think that would be very difficult for her, and politically impossible for Sir Keir Starmer, who has rightly insisted on a zero-tolerance approach to antisemitism.”

His call came as two anonymous Labour frontbenchers said that Abbott should consider resigning from the party, the Guardian reported.
David Hirsh: The Meaning of Diane Abbott’s Astonishing Letter
For the last eight years, probably for the last 40, Diane Abbott has lived in a political world in which antisemitism was an important symbolic issue. It appears that in all that time she never really thought about the specificities of antisemitism and how it relates to anti-black racism.

The Corbyn faction as a whole did not think about it in any serious way. It satisfied itself with the assumption that people who talked about antisemitism were factional enemies running a dishonest campaign to silence criticism of Israel and to smear the Dear Leader. That is to say it satisfied itself with the fantasy that the people on the left who raised the issue of antisemitism were acting as part of a conspiracy to help Israeli apartheid and to harm the left.

This failure to think things through is also bound up with a de facto re-naturalisation of ‘race’. Anti-racists said, originally, that ‘race’ was a social process that endowed particular and inherently insignificant biological differences with huge and unjust social significance. Anti-racism therefore opposed ‘race’ because it was a racist category. This view is uncomfortable because it seems to imply that the self-empowering aspects of freely embraced identity – of pride – also originate in oppression, and in a history of oppression, and in traditions of response to that oppression. It positions ‘Black is beautiful’ and ‘Black Lives Matter’ as responses to a world in which being black is treated as being ugly, and in which black lives are treated as though they don’t matter. Recently, some anti-racists have come to think of ‘race’ as being so deeply embedded in our society that it might as well be treated as a natural rather than a social process; that is to say, ‘race’ is treated as though it was colour, rather than as though it is an unjust social structure that endows colour with huge social significance.

The history of antisemitism shows us that ‘race’ is not colour. The Nazis had to work hard to portray Jews, in their huge diversity, as a ‘race’, but they managed it, at least to their own satisfaction. Half of Israeli Jews today would never pass as ‘white’ in a racist culture that valued ‘whiteness’, while the other half would be in danger of being racialised the moment a racist discovered their name or focused in on the curliness of their hair. The racialisation of Jews is also then linked to the racist ideology and history that came later; Jews are cast as the non-white agent that masterminds the wider non-white threat.

Diane Abbott is an intelligent, able and courageous woman; sometimes her enemies have jumped on her mistakes to portray her as otherwise, but unfairly. Perhaps it is not fair, but being a pioneer might thrust responsibility on her shoulders for continuing to pioneer. She needs to understand that her own role in Labour antisemitism has not been a positive one and she now finds herself in a position to do some real good.
Piggybacking onto Jewish suffering
Piggybacking onto Jewish suffering also diminishes the extent of the genocide the Nazis inflicted on the Jewish population of Europe. Consider the current use of the term “denier.” Of course, anyone who denies something can be considered a denier. But the current “political” use of the term – e.g. climate change denier – clearly is appropriating the word from its etymology regarding the holocaust. So when advocates for climate change label someone who doesn’t agree with them a “denier,” they’re using it to imply that catastrophic climate change – a series of events that hasn’t happened yet – is as real as a documented historical event, and therefore, it’s not enough to call such a person a skeptic, he/she must be a denier, and as ill-intentioned as a holocaust denier.

Using the term denier in a such slipshod way not only diminishes the murder of millions of Jews, it also lessens the stigma associated with holocaust denial.

Unsurprisingly, the Palestinians have latched onto this idea too. For example, in February a Professional Development Day at a Toronto high school included a session entitled: “Anti-Palestinian Racism: Nakba Denial.”

While I have no doubt that from the Palestinian point of view, the events of 1947-48 were catastrophic, this catastrophe (Nakba) was largely of their own doing, and coincided with Israel’s War of Independence, which was the opposite of a Nakba for the nascent Jewish state. Subtly (or not-so-subtly) linking those events to the Jewish holocaust via the use of the word “denial” qualifies as a prime example of piggybacking onto Jewish suffering.

Of course perhaps the best and most egregious example of appropriating Jewish suffering is the claim that Israel is committing “genocide” against the Palestinians. This vicious slur not only appropriates Jewish suffering, it inverts it, making the Israelis the new Nazis. No invective against Jews could be more painful than comparaing them to their recent exterminators, which I suspect is precisely why this calumny is repeated so often.

As the above examples show, progressive leftists generally have few if any qualms about appropriating or piggybacking onto Jewish suffering. And while I’m contemptuous of the practice of using terms like “denier” so inappropriately, it isn’t my intention to have those terms banned or to deny anyone’s right to free speech.

If only those who cancel even the mildest and least egregious examples of cultural appropriation operated in the same manner.
What do Diane Abbott's Jewish constituents think of her remark
Diane Abbott’s strictly-Orthodox constituents have spoken of their outrage over her comments that Jews and Travellers did not face racism, calling them “inexcusable” and “unbelievable”.

One Stamford Hill resident of mixed Roma and Jewish heritage said her letter to the Observer was “nonsense”, while others asked how she would describe the attitude of those behind the Holocaust.

Ephraim, who has lived in the area for 27 years, told the JC: “I went to a secular school in the 1980s, there they called me ‘curls’ because of my simanim. One boy used to ask my permission before taking money out from the bank. Was this racism or not, even though I had the same skin colour as them? It definitely felt like racism at the time.”

Charity worker Bernard Greer, 55, called Abbott’s comments “myopic, thoughtless, and inexcusable.

“I suggest she surround herself with different circles if that’s what she really thinks. I grieve for her short-sightedness. Labour did the right thing by suspending her.”

Manfred, 62, said: “I think we are probably all thinking too hard on why she made the comments she did, perhaps she’s just stupid?

“I’m actually partly of Roma heritage too, so I feel I should be doubly offended. What she implied – that Jews cannot be the recipients of racism - was nonsense.”

Approximately 113 antisemitic incidents were recorded last year in Hackney, an average of over two antisemitic attacks a week. The majority of them took place in Hackney North and Stoke Newington, Abbott’s constituency.


Iran-backed militias are the main cause of unrest in the Middle East - opinion
IRANIAN CONDUCT is fundamentally based on the strategy of waging proxy wars. When debating security and stability in the Middle East, it is untenable to disregard the significance of reinstating national sovereignty and genuine roles for each country in the region.

A key element of reinstating national sovereignty and stability in the Middle East encompasses undertaking resolute measures to counter terrorist organizations and curb their impact in particular countries within the region.

To attain enduring stability in countries such as Lebanon and Yemen, a collective endeavor is needed to terminate the sway of parallel states, where groups like the Houthis and Hezbollah hold sway over decision-making. This, in turn, requires the demobilization of these militias and the dismantlement of their security and authoritarian networks.

The disarmament of the militias that Iran has deployed throughout the Middle East is widely acknowledged as one of the most intricate and delicate issues among the many urgent concerns facing the region.

In order to have a comprehensive discussion on the topic of regional security and stability in the Middle East, it is crucial to acknowledge the significant role played by Iran’s deployed militias in the region. Addressing the issue of disarming these militias is a pressing matter that cannot be overlooked.

Moreover, the notion of establishing a fully functioning nation-state must not remain elusive. When considering regional security and stability, a critical question surfaces: can Hezbollah’s militia arms be disarmed? Under the current circumstances, and for the foreseeable future, achieving the disarmament of Hezbollah’s militia arms is a challenging task.

Hezbollah has emerged as a formidable factor in the Lebanese equation, encompassing political, military and security dimensions. Speculating about the possibility of severing the bond between the Iranian government and Hezbollah seems like a daunting task without a significant transformation that could lead to the end of their affiliation, particularly in military and security terms.

Achieving the desired goal of ending the funding and supplies from Iran to Hezbollah remains tricky under current conditions, even though it could potentially be a means to end the party’s influence. The continued presence and support of Nasrallah, his allies, and their bankrollers mean that Lebanon and the broader region will remain vulnerable to potential threats.


And they’re off: The US is driving a Middle East nuclear arms race
The U.S. is incentivizing regional nuclearization by downplaying the Iranian nuclear threat, excessively restraining its responses to Iranian nuclear violations and other provocations and alienating and undermining its allies in the Middle East. The Saudis have stood out as the target of scorn from President Biden and his administration from even before the 2020 election.

The way to halt and even reverse the Middle East nuclear arms race is straightforward and requires two steps under U.S. leadership.

First, it is well past time to end, rather than enable, Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The U.S. should work with its European allies to activate the JCPOA’s snap-back mechanism, which would reimpose the United Nations arms embargo on Iran and a complete ban on Iranian uranium enrichment. It also would block the lifting of the U.N. missile embargo scheduled for October, which undoubtedly would be welcome news in Kyiv and other European capitals threatened by Iranian missiles in Russian hands.

The United States should lead the imposition of a well-coordinated mix of economic, diplomatic and military pressure on the Islamic Republic until the latter complies with its international nuclear obligations. The administration, Congress and the military should make it clear that the United States is not just willing and able but unequivocally committed to using force to end Iran’s nuclear weapons program if Tehran refuses to do so. Ostensibly because of the administration’s commitment to diplomacy, it has been reticent to pose such a threat. Yet without a credible American military threat, a genuine diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear problem never will be possible.

Second, the United States should take a complementary approach to its allies and partners in the Middle East, by providing them with the diplomatic and military support necessary both to deter Iran and to instill in them sufficient confidence to obviate their own pursuit of nuclear weapons.

The U.S. and Saudi Arabia have obvious differences. President Biden faces a choice about how to resolve them. He could continue to placate Iran and ostracize the Saudis, driving the latter and others to pursue nuclear weapons and into the waiting arms of China.

Alternatively, the president could engage and reassure the Saudis, as well as the Israelis and their neighbors, by taking an unambiguously tough stance against Iran’s nuclear offenses and regional aggression, while demonstrating a renewed American commitment to Middle East security and stability and to addressing disputes collaboratively with U.S. allies and partners. This approach requires resolve and a willingness to break from an Obama legacy issue, but it is the only way to check the nuclear arms race that the JCPOA ignited.
Strikes In Iran Gaining Momentum With Over 80 Plants Joining
Strikes by Iranian energy, petrochemicals and steel workers are gaining momentum as new firms have joined nationwide industrial action.

Workers in more than 80 companies have joined industrial action, protesting poor working conditions, low wages and rising costs of living, according to the Council for Organizing Oil Contract-Workers' Protests.

The council accused the regime of seeking to sow division among workers through ethnic differences. ”It can be seen in some places that our protest rallies have been dispersed on the pretext that workers belong to a certain ethnicity,” the group said in a statement this week.

“This is while all of us workers from every part of the country have common pains and enemies. All of us are protesting the poverty and rising prices and worsening of our working and living conditions every day.”

Almost all of the striking workers in oil, gas, steel, petrochemicals and other industries, are not officially hired by the country’s oil company or relevant ministries and are working on temporary contracts, so risk their only means of livelihood by joining the strikes.

Labor activists believe warn that society is on the verge of explosion as strikes reach new levels. Experts say there is no end in sight as tensions rise amidst a crumbling economy and the biggest anti-regime sentiment in years.
Member of Iran’s Powerful Clerical Body Assassinated: Fars
A member of Iran’s influential clerical body was assassinated in the country’s northern province of Mazandaran on Wednesday, the semi-official Fars news agency reported, adding that the suspected killer had been detained.

Abbasali Soleimani, also a former representative of Iran’s top leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the predominantly Sunni province of Sistan-Baluchistan, died in hospital after being shot at in a bank in the city of Babolsar, Fars said.

The Assembly of Experts is a powerful clerical body that supervises, appoints and in theory can sack the supreme leader.

The southern province of Sistan-Baluchistan, bordering Pakistan and Afghanistan and one of Iran’s poorest, faced months of intensive anti-government protests sparked by the death in custody of a young Iranian woman in September.
‘Deep Financial System’ Fueling BDS Movement, New Report Says
A growing alignment of large philanthropic organizations with the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign is fueling the movement’s growth on American college campuses, a new report released on Wednesday by the National Association of Scholars (NAS), a Manhattan based nonprofit promoting intellectual freedom and reform of American higher education, argues.

“Beyond campus student activism agitating for divestment measures for student governments, and behind the professional organizing that trains student activist organizations, lies a network of legal and financial support that empowers the campus BDS movement to function,” Dr. Ian Oxnevad, a NAS senior research fellow, writes in The Company They Keep: Organizational and Economic Dynamics of the BDS Movement. “The BDS movement relies upon a deep financial system of progressively oriented businesses and nonprofit foundations devoted to a broad array of social justice causes.”

Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP), a left-wing anti-Israel organization which promotes the BDS movement, has received $480,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a philanthropic foundation whose endowment is valued at $1.27 billion, since 2017, the report said, and the Tides Research Fund, a sponsor of Black Lives Matter, has given the group $75,000 since 2019. Between 2014 and 2015 alone, JVP brought in over half a million dollars in grants. Additionally, Palestine Legal, a lawfare group founded in 2012 to support campus BDS groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), is the beneficiary of generous funding from Tides Foundation, a pioneer of activist investment that has given over $1.5 million to anti-Israel initiatives, according to figures included in the report.

Yet, despite the growth of the BDS movement on American campuses over the past decade, the report cites data showing that BDS resolutions proposed in student governments have a 66 percent failure. “With large studies already indicating a limited campus effectiveness of BDS, the question remains regarding how such attempted resolutions take place,” the report says. Such failures, however, have not undermined the ability of pro-BDS activists to wield an immense effect on campus culture. By linking the cause to other left-wing initiatives, it continued, they set the parameters of how students perceive Jewish students, Jewish life organizations, and programs like the Taglit-Birthright Israel program.
Break in at StandWithUs London office – ‘threatening’ message left at scene
The London headquarters of a pro-Israel educational charity was broken into on Tuesday evening, with a lit yahrzeit memorial candle placed next to one of the organisation’s t-shirts.

StandWithUs, based in north London, reported the crime to the police and Community Security Trust (CST), who have launched investigations using the premise’s CCTV footage. The organisation has interpreted the placing of the lit memorial candle beside an item of its branded clothing as “a violent and threatening message aimed at our staff”.

StandWithUS said: “On the morning of Israel Independence Day, staff at StandWithUs UK arrived at their office to find it had been broken into. In a calculated attack, the perpetrators broke through the ceiling into the office and left a lit memorial candle placed next to a StandWithUs t-shirt.

“The implication of this is clear – they are sending a violent and threatening message aimed at our organisation and our staff.

“We want to reassure our community that we take this threat seriously. We have reached out to the Police and the Community Security Trust (CST) and are working closely with them as they investigate.”

StandWithUs UK executive director, Isaac Zarfati said: “Our staff were shaken but are determined. We remain committed to our mission, of working tirelessly towards countering antisemitism and misinformation about Israel, regardless of this hateful attempt to intimidate us. This intimidation is indicative of what Jewish and Zionist students face regularly from those who seek to discriminate against them. It will not stand.”
Harvard Hillel President’s campus fears: lessons from my senior thesis
When I served as President of Harvard Hillel, the center for Jewish life on campus, in the 2021 academic year, I knew that the position required me to navigate extremely difficult conversations related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on campus. As a Jewish student, I had watched from a distance as my predecessors leaped into crisis management mode each time tensions flared in the Middle East, and consequently on Harvard’s campus. In the spring of 2021, violence between Israelis and Palestinians erupted. I felt the emotional weight of Jewish students on campus; my phone constantly pinged with students seeking comfort. I worked around the clock to make sure they did not feel alone. I began to understand the challenges some Harvard students faced, simply because they were Jewish.

These experiences spurred me to dedicate a year of my life to writing a senior thesis on what it is like to be Jewish on a college campus. I interviewed 60 Jewish Harvard students, Harvard Hillel staff members, and students and Hillel staff members at nearby Massachusetts schools to help answer this question.

What I learned was concerning: the most acute examples of discrimination involved Harvard’s Israeli students. One student faced backlash for his involvement with Israel Trek, an Israeli student-led trip to Israel for Harvard students who do not identify as Jewish. He reached out to organizers of the anti-Trek movement on campus, hoping to begin a dialogue and potentially incorporate their feedback. They refused to speak to him. The Harvard Crimson published an article about the outreach effort, and quoted a member of the Palestinian Solidarity Committee, Harvard’s primary pro-Palestinian advocacy group, who had suggested, were they to meet with the Israeli student, that their physical safety might be jeopardized. He was shocked that The Harvard Crimson was willing to publish what felt like a personal attack.

Indeed, social alienation is unavoidable for Harvard’s Israeli students. Students recall moments of feeling like their “humanity was questioned.” One student said to their Israeli peer, “I can only imagine the war crimes you have committed.” Another explained that his friend was not allowed into a social organization when the leadership discovered he was Israeli. At Harvard, students face obstacles — social and otherwise — simply because of their nationality.

Amongst all my interviewees, one of the most pervasive themes was self-censorship. In particular, students felt uncomfortable identifying as “pro-Israel,” irrespective of the term’s definition. Certain students who identify as progressive in the American political system felt they needed to conceal their Israel politics in order to access campus’ liberal spaces. One student revealed that they “chose to not engage because it is a topic where you can be seen as absurd for being pro-Israel, and [I] would rather maintain the reputation of being a ‘normal person’ on campus.” Anti-Zionism, then, has become the norm in most social and intellectual milieux on campus. This affects how Harvard’s largest Jewish institution is perceived. For instance, another student recalled a first-year orientation program that purported to show incoming students the “bad parts of Harvard.” The tour guide, suggesting it was a hostile environment for Palestinian students, stopped at Hillel.
PodCast: My Campus Newspaper Rejected My Column On Antisemitism Because I’m A Zionist: A Fireside Chat With Claire Frankel, HRC Campus Media Fellow At McGill University
Throughout North America, and indeed much of the Western world, college and university campuses are a fulcrum of anti-Israel activism and campaigning. These efforts can manifest through BDS (Boycott Divestment Sanctions) referendums, anti-Israel disinformation being spread in the classroom or by the student government, and also through campus media outlets.

Claire Frankel knows this all too well.

Claire is a Jewish student at McGill University in Montreal, and a Campus Media Fellow with HonestReporting Canada, and in March, she attempted to submit an opinion column, which discussed her views on a student club’s attitudes towards Jews. But when she tried to submit the column to The McGill Tribune, it was rejected by the newspaper’s editors, who cited their opposition to Zionism, characterizing it as “a settler-colonial ideology that has perpetuated the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.” The Tribune further claimed that “Your article doesn’t align with our values as a paper. We’re not going to be able to publish it.”

In this week’s podcast, we sit down with Claire to discuss her experience and the lessons it teaches Jewish students about how to advocate for themselves on campus.


Harvard insults terror victims
Harvard University is building ties with a Palestinian Arab university that supports terrorism, even though some of Harvard’s own students have been murdered by Palestinian terrorists.

Last month, Harvard president Lawrence Bacow paid a friendly visit to Al-Quds University near Jerusalem. According to an Al-Quds press release, “he met some of the students and faculty, who expressed their enthusiasm about collaborating with Harvard on future research and educational projects.”

I wonder if Bacow had a chance to discuss with the students another topic about which they are very enthusiastic—glorifying Palestinian Arab terrorists, including murderers of Americans.

In 2016, the Al-Quds University administration organized a “chain of readers” to publicly honor the multiple-murderer Baha Alyan. A few months earlier, Alyan and an accomplice boarded a Jerusalem bus and began attacking passengers. One of those he murdered was 78-year-old Richard Lakin, an American Jewish civil-rights activist from Connecticut. Alyan stabbed and shot the defenseless elderly man in his face and chest.

The Palestinian TV station Wattan reported on the Al-Quds chain-reading celebration: “More than 2,500 male and female students participated in the chain, and it included the reading of books and letter-writing by the participants, all of this in the presence of the Martyr’s father, the lawyer Muhammad Alyan.” The students wrote letters “to the souls of Martyr Baha Alyan and the other Martyrs and their relatives. … Participants in the activity wore shirts with a picture of Martyr Baha Alyan.”
The Top Ten Jew-Hating Professors in America
Prestigious academic organizations including the American Studies Association and the Middle East Studies Association, among others, have passed measures endorsing an academic boycott of Israeli colleges and universities—a form of the genocidal Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement that aims to isolate and annihilate the Jewish state.

Instead of using their positions to combat this Jew hatred, many faculty at prestigious universities across America instead deliberately fan its flames. They use the official resources of the University, both financial and academic, to promote terrorist propaganda lies accusing Jews and Israelis of being “colonial settlers” and imperialist aggressors. They publish articles and academic works spreading ancient tropes of Jewish blood libel or seeking to obscure the Jews’ historical connection to the land of Israel. They abuse their positions of authority over students in the classroom to deliver diatribes characterizing Israel as an inhumane aggressor and the Palestinians as its innocent victims. They invite extremist, terrorist-supporting speakers to campus to speak at official university functions or as guest lecturers in class.

The ten professors profiled in this report as the “Top Ten Jew-Hating Professors in America” have done all this and more. Some are employed by public universities, some by private educational institutions, but every school among them receives federal monies in one form or another and is thus bound by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in programs and activities receiving federal aid. In an executive order issued in 2019, then-president Donald Trump directed federal agencies to enforce this law against institutions that discriminated against Jews, since Judaism is both a religion and a nationality/race. Despite this clear mandate, American universities have continued to flout the law and harbor academics who perpetrate blatant Jew hatred upon the student population.

We call on the universities implicated in this report to put an immediate end to the Jew hatred infecting their campuses and to take action against faculty who continue to promulgate anti-Semitism on campus, creating an unsafe environment for Jewish students. If they should fail to do so, we urge Congress to withhold all federal funding until they eliminate this cancer in their midst.

#1: Rabab Abdulhadi, San Francisco State University
#2: Hatem Bazian, University of California-Berkeley
#3: Lara Sheehi, George Washington University
#4: Abbas Ghassemi, University of California-Merced
#5: Marc Lamont Hill, Temple University
#6: Jasbir Puar, Rutgers University
#7: Hamid Dabashi, Columbia University
#8: Nader Hashemi, University of Denver
#9: Kylie Broderick, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
#10: Taurean Webb, Indiana University-Bloomington
Daniel Segal - The Holocaust Appropriator
Minimizing the atrocities of the Holocaust, Segal has grossly appropriated the slogan, "never again," nearly 50 times between January 2019 and June 2022, in a malicious attempt to draw a comparison between Israel and Nazi Germany. For example, on:
June 24, 2021, Segal tweeted: "2/2 self-respecting Jews know 'never again' means never again to anyone. Hillel Intl is now a pro-Israeli apartheid and anti-Palestinian organization that deserves no institutional support on any college campus anywhere."

September 15, 2021, Segal tweeted: "To all observing, may this be the Yom Kippur when we seek atonement for the sins done in our Jewish name by the Israeli apartheid state: it's denial of freedom to Palestinians. 'Never again' must mean to any human being or it too is wickedness. #YomKippur2021 #GmarChatimaTova."

November 13, 2021, Segal tweeted: "As a Jew, I am obligated to support #BDS, because 'never again' means for any of us. Seeking security for a people by attaching it to a state, a militarized state, is evil: we know the consequences. #PalestinianFreedom.”

January 25, 2021, Segal tweeted: "How dishonest & evil a person are you willing to be? Never again means never again for any human being: you betray the memory of the Holocaust." Segal was responding to a tweet defending Israel’s vaccine distribution during the coronavirus pandemic. Despite Segal’s claims, All of Israel's citizens, including Arabs, were provided equal and free access to a coronavirus vaccine. Palestinian leaders rejected the initial delivery of the vaccine stating false expiration dates were the factor.

Segal is also an open supporter of convicted Palestinian terrorists such as Leila Khaled, a leading member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) who participated in the hijacking of an aircraft. Khaled has said that the second intifada failed because it was not violent enough, advocated for the use of children in committing terrorist acts, and compared Zionists to Nazis.

Equating Israel with Nazi Germany and comparing Israel to apartheid are blatant examples of Jew-hatred according to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism. Segal fiercely rejects the IHRA’s definition of antisemitism for these reasons.

Pitzer College’s Jewish students deserve to feel safe on campus, free from antisemitic bigots like Daniel Segal. StopAntisemitism needs YOUR help! Email Interim President Jill Klein and demand Pitzer College look into Professor Daniel Segal’s antisemitic history.


Swastika Carved Into Dartmouth ‘Green’ Common Space
An unknown person or group carved a swastika into dirt on The Green of Dartmouth College, a a five- acre, grassy common space at the center of the school’s campus.

Dartmouth’s provost office confirmed that incident took place on Thursday, The Dartmouth reported on Friday. Officials had the symbol removed, which appeared just several days after the campus community observed Holocaust Remembrance Day, “immediately,” the paper said.

“Antisemitism has been on the rise in the US and has no place at Dartmouth,” the provost office wrote in an email sent to students and staff.

Thursday’s incident marks Dartmouth’s first antisemitic incident on the Green since a former student, Carlos Wilcox, vandalized a a public menorah on campus by shooting it with a pellet gun during the 2020 Hanukkah holiday.

The 20-year-old Bronx, New York native also shot the windows of several college buildings, causing $1,500 in damage in total. Wilcox, who managed to dodge a hate crime charge and was charged with felony criminal mischief, was expelled from the college and banned from campus.

In April 2022, according to The Dartmouth, he reached an agreement with the prosecutors of Grafton County, where Dartmouth is located, under which the charges against him were dropped in exchange for his paying the college $2, ooo in damages, completing 100 hours of community service, and attending substance abuse counseling. Wilcox was also ordered to meet with Dartmouth Chabad Rabbi Moshe Leib Gray and other members of the campus community.
Concordia University Newspaper The Link Covers Fringe Anti-Israel Protest & Repeats Organizers’ Baseless Claims
In an April 21 article in The Link, a student newspaper at Concordia University in Montreal entitled: “Montreal Protests in Solidarity with Palestinian Worshippers at Al-Aqsa Mosque,” author Menna Nayel reported on a recent rally where “dozens of Montrealers took to the streets” to protest Israel’s alleged aggression against Palestinian worshippers in Jerusalem.

While it is unclear why a rally organized by at least four local pro-Palestinian groups comprising “dozens of Montrealers” constitutes news for The Link, the real issue with Nayel’s article is less that it covered a clearly fringe movement, but rather that Nayel repeatedly repeated false information about the recent violence in Jerusalem.

Early in the article, Nayel wrote: “On April 5, Israeli occupation forces brutalized Muslim worshippers during the holy month of Ramadan. For Palestinians, the deliberate destruction of the Mosque during Ramadan has become an annual occurrence.”

While violence did erupt in early April, Nayel both omitted critical details, opting to pursue a cartoonishly oversimplified anti-Israel version instead.

Contrary to Nayel’s claim that Israel “brutalized Muslim worshippers” for no apparent reason, as many as 400 Palestinians had holed themselves inside the Al Aqsa Mosque, clearly intent on an armed conflict with Israeli police. Inside, they had stockpiled weapons, including homemade explosive devices, fireworks, and rocks.


Unmoved by antisemitism surge, Guardian again attacks IHRA
Unmoved by the global surge of antisemitism, the Guardian published an article representing the latest in the outlet’s long and obsessive crusade against one the most widely accepted tools to help fight it.

The piece (“UN urged to reject antisemitism definition over ‘misuse’ to shield Israel”), by Chris McGreal, is putatively a straight news article on opposition to the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism. But, as with so many of McGreal’s reports, it’s, in reality, a one-sided promotion of the views of faux human rights groups, like Amnesty International, with zero credibility on the issue of antisemitism.

Many of the charges in the letter by the NGOs parroted by McGreal are either factually incorrect or evoke common antisemitic tropes.

For instance, in the very first sentence, McGreal writes:
More than 100 Israeli and international civil society organisations have asked the United Nations to reject a controversial definition of antisemitism because it is being “misused” to protect Israel from legitimate criticism.

Later, he writes:
the IHRA definition has often been used to wrongly label criticism of Israel as antisemitic, and thus chill and sometimes suppress, non-violent protest, activism and speech critical of Israel and/or Zionism, including in the US and Europe,” the letter said.

Also, there’s this:
The groups say the IHRA definition has been used “to muzzle legitimate speech and activism by critics of Israel’s human rights record and advocates for Palestinian rights”

What McGreal is legitimising is an accusation characterised by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) as antisemitic in their report on antisemitism in the Labour Party: the charge, by Ken Livingstone and others, that Jews dishonestly smear people with false charges of antisemitism to stifle criticism of Israel.

The charge is especially dishonest as the IHRA definition is not legally binding, and specifically says that “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic”.
‘Washington Post’ sows Arab-Jewish discord when positive stories beckon
The Washington Post is making up the news in “Ramadan in Jerusalem’s Old City: A rare calm but familiar worries.”

An April 22 article (“Eid brings a rare calm, familiar worries to Jerusalem’s Old City”) states that Palestinians in Israel and the territories have daily lives that are “often shaped by Israeli government restrictions.” Yes, Israel has laws that protect the safety of its Jewish and Arab citizens. If laws are what the Post calls “restrictions,” that’s a strange interpretation. Violence is against the law in Israel, as well as in most countries. Is The Washington Post not aware?

Likewise, the areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority shape the lives of the Palestinians. To clarify for the reader, the bulk of Arabs in Israel call themselves Israeli Arabs (not Palestinians) and identify with Israel, not some imagined Palestinian state. The Post cannot rewrite history, no matter how much the Palestinian narrative denies it.

The article states that Palestinians have the right to congregate at the Al-Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem “in large numbers and on their own terms.” Also not true. They cannot wreak havoc by rioting and attacking Jews, as they are prone to do, especially on Muslim and Jewish religious holidays. When they riot or throw rocks or firebombs down on Jews praying at the Western Wall below the mosque, Israeli police will break it up.

When the Palestinians choose violence, it’s a misnomer to call them “worshippers” as the Post article does. That would be laughable if it weren’t so cynically false. Moreover, the newspaper has the temerity to claim the Palestinians are the victims of their own riots, that Israeli Police were the initiators. The Post writes that so-called “Israeli raids” are followed by “retaliatory rocket fire and militant attacks.” It’s the other way around; Israel isn’t raiding but responding!


Switzerland approves its first national memorial honoring victims of the Holocaust
Switzerland’s executive body agreed Wednesday to help pay for a national memorial to honor the six million Jews and other victims of the Holocaust and Nazi persecution, in what the leading Swiss Jewish group is calling the country’s first official monument of its kind.

The Federal Council, the seven-member executive branch, approved 2.5 million Swiss francs (about $2.8 million) for the memorial that will be erected at an unspecified “central location” in the capital, Bern, at a time when the number of Holocaust survivors has dwindled and antisemitism has risen again.

“The Federal Council considers it of great importance to keep alive the memory of the consequences of National Socialism, namely the Holocaust and the fate of the six million Jews and all other victims of the National Socialist regime,” a government statement said.

Switzerland and its capital, through the move, were “creating a strong symbol against genocide, antisemitism and racism, and for democracy, the rule of law, freedom and basic individual rights,” it said.

The statement did not mention whether the memorial would make any direct reference to any Swiss role in the persecution of people during the Nazi regime in Germany.

The Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities, an umbrella group, said Switzerland has about 60 small, private sites remembering the Holocaust and other crimes of the Nazis.
German City of Dusseldorf Restitutes to Heirs of Jewish Gallery Owner Portrait From Mayor’s Office
The German city of Dusseldorf announced last week that it settled a long-standing dispute regarding a portrait in the city’s possession that once belonged to a Jewish gallery owner who was forced to sell his art collection and flee Nazi Germany.

As part of a settlement agreement between the city and the Dr. Max and Iris Stern Foundation, Wilhelm von Schadow’s painting The Artist’s Children (1830) will remain in the city’s collection but will be purchased from the heirs of Max Stern for an undisclosed sum. The portrait will be displayed inside the Kunstpalast museum starting in mid-August and the agreement was decided upon even though certain information about the painting’s provenance remain unclear despite research efforts.

“I am glad that with this fair and just solution, this important painting remains in Dusseldorf,” said Dusseldorf Mayor Stephan Keller.

Julius Stern had been an art dealer in Düsseldorf since 1913 and opened a gallery in the city in 1917. His son Max Stern took over the business after Julius died in 1934 but facing persecution by the Nazi regime, Max was forced to give up the business in 1937 and auction off a large part of the gallery’s art collection, according to the city. Max and his family later flee Nazi Germany, after facing substantial economic losses, and moved to Canada.

Max died in 1987 and having no children, he left majority of his estate to the universities Concordia and McGill in Montreal and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, according to The Art Newspaper. The publication added that his estate launched the Max Stern Art Restitution Project in 2002 in an effort to get back the art he once owned.
Andrew Bridgen expelled from Tory Party for comparing Covid jabs to Holocaust
Andrew Bridgen MP has been permanently expelled from the Conservative party after a tweet in which he compared Covid jabs to the Holocaust.

The now-independent MP for North West Leicestershire had the Conservative whip removed for his comments earlier this year but has now had his membership of the party cancelled.

In January, Bridgen tweeted an article about Covid vaccinations and said: “As one consultant cardiologist said to me, this is the biggest crime against humanity since the Holocaust.”

At the time, Chief Whip Simon Hart, who is head of party discipline for the Conservatives, removed the whip from Bridgen pending an investigation, saying that he had “crossed a line” and caused “great offence in the process.”

“As a nation we should be very proud of what has been achieved through the vaccine programme,” Hart said.
Banned driver who "knocked a Jew over" sentenced to 20 months
A Newcastle driver has been jailed for 20 months after a hit-and-run where he hit two Jewish men walking near a synagogue in Gateshead.

Christopher Carr, 23, was disqualified from driving and had no insurance when he knocked a man and his five-year-old son over as they were crossing the road near the Gateshead Hebrew Congregation on Bewick Road.

Officers analysing his phone discovered Snapchat messages Carr sent to his partner after the collision which said he needed somewhere to stay as he had unintentionally "knocked a Jew over".

Carr, who was driving a stolen Audi and was distracted at the time as he was using his mobile phone, quickly drove away from the scene.

He appeared in court for sentencing charges of dangerous driving, failing to stop, aggravated vehicle taking, failing to stop at the scene of a collision and driving whilst disqualified and without insurance. Carr pleaded guilty to all the offences.

The court heard that on September 26 last year, a dad and his five-year-old son were due to cross the road near to the synagogue when they saw an Audi car.

Nicoleta Alistari, prosecuting, said: "The Audi took a hard left towards them and hit them both. They fell to the ground and the defendant drove off, despite the father shouting at him."

After the collision, Carr later drove back round to the scene before once again driving off. A few days later, Carr handed himself in to police.
Turkish president honors Israeli rescue workers who saved lives after quake
A certificate of appreciation from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was presented on Tuesday to the commander of the Israel Defense Forces’ National Rescue Unit, Col. (Ret.) Golan Vach, who commanded Israel’s rescue mission that helped locate survivors and provide aid during the recent earthquake in southern Turkey.

The Israeli rescue mission was one of the first to arrive to provide aid after the earthquake and succeeded in rescuing 19 survivors from the ruins. The IDF sent 230 medical and emergency response experts to set up a field hospital in Kahramanmaraş, in addition to a 150-member Home Front Command team.

The IDF delegation was supported by emergency medical specialists from the defense and health ministries, fire and rescue services, Magen David Adom, United Hatzalah and Zaka, among others.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu welcomed back in February the “Operation Olive Branches” life-saving mission to Turkey.

“The entire people of Israel followed your rescue operation with great excitement. You went on behalf of the country and you brought great honor to the State of Israel. We saw you in action in the cold, in difficult conditions around the clock in the most sacred work a person can do—saving the lives of others. ‘Whoever saves one soul’—you know the rest. You saved 19 worlds,” said Netanyahu.

He was invoking the Talmudic adage that states that whoever saves one person, it is as if he saved an entire universe.

“You did something else,” continued Netanyahu, “You showed the entire world the true and beautiful face of the State of Israel: A small country with a huge soul, a country that rushes to help others around the world and in the harshest conditions, out of humanity and the highest morality.”
In the Netherlands, Christians stage a solidarity-with-Israel flyover
Witnessing a recent anti-Israel demonstration in the Netherlands, Roger van Oordt had an idea: What if his organization, Christians for Israel, flew an airplane overhead trailing a banner with a message of support for the Jewish state?

Van Oordt, Israel’s honorary consul in the city of Nijkerk and previous head of Christians for Israel, an international lobby group based in the city near Amsterdam, never did hire a pilot to provoke his ideological rivals.

Instead, he “channeled the idea in a more positive direction,” as he puts it, and hired a fleet of four planes to stage a flyover across the Netherlands with banners on Israel’s 75th Independence Day.

The 20-meter (65-foot) banners read “The Netherlands congratulate Israel” and feature the address of a website that Christians for Israel set up for the flyover: israel75.nl. The site’s visitors are encouraged to write Israel a greeting or donate a tree that the Jewish National Fund would then plant. Christians for Israel, in turn, have already purchased several dozen trees in connection with the action to compensate for the flyover’s estimated carbon footprint, van Oordt said.

The planes took off from Nijmegen in the country’s east, splitting off to the country’s four corners, flying for five hours. One of the planes also is scheduled to fly over Nijkerk, where Christians for Israel, a group with thousands of members and dozens of affiliates in 30 countries, has its international headquarters.

“We want to show Israel that it has widespread support in the Netherlands and we also want to encourage the Jewish community of the Netherlands through the flyover, to show it’s not alone,” said van Oordt, whose late father, Karel, founded Christians for Israel in 1979. Today, the center, which has conference halls and workshop rooms, features a shop with Israeli products and a training center for beauticians based on Israeli products from the Dead Sea.

The Netherlands flyover was not inspired by the fact that the Israel Air Force does flyovers on Independence Day, van Oordt said, “but it’s a nice touch.”
A Mysterious Jerusalem Inscription Might be Connected to the Kingdom of Sheba
According to the books of Kings and Chronicles, King Solomon was visited by the queen of Sheba—an episode that inspired much folklore and at least three Hollywood films. Most scholars today believe her kingdom, described by the Bible as rich in spices and precious stones, was located in southern Arabia, but others place it in modern-day Ethiopia. Nathan Steinmeyer explains a new theory suggesting that a 3,000-year-old potsherd could provide evidence of contact between Sheba and ancient Israel:

Discovered in 2012 during excavations at the Ophel [area of Jerusalem] by the late Eilat Mazar, the small inscription, which includes just seven letters, has puzzled scholars for years. While most have assumed the inscription is written in Canaanite, Daniel Vainstub of Ben-Gurion University now believes it is written in an ancient South Arabian script known as Sabaic, the language of the ancient kingdom of Saba (biblical Sheba) in the area of modern Yemen.

Dated to the 10th century BCE—the time of the biblical King Solomon—the inscription could provide evidence of trade connections between ancient south Arabia and Jerusalem during this early period. According to Vainstub, . . . the second word, which Vainstub reads as ladanum, is a type of resin possibly to be identified with onycha, one of the ingredients used to create incense burned at the tabernacle (Exodus 30:34).

Not everyone is convinced by Vainstub’s reading or interpretation, however. “Which is more likely, that we have in this Jerusalem inscription the Canaanite script, which is well attested in the Levantine world, or that we have a 10th-century early Arabian script?” cautioned Christopher Rollston, Professor of Northwest Semitic Languages and Literatures at George Washington University.


The Haifa Mural
Sandy Low and Walter Korder’s remarkable Haifa mural for the Jewish temple in Manchester, Connecticut, created in 1948, is one of the most noteworthy artistic statements produced to celebrate Israel at the time of is creation. Why Haifa? We have no written records outlining the reasons for this choice, but to some extent they can be deduced by considering the circumstances of the time. Jerusalem was contested and politically divided between Arabs and Jews, and was sacred to three different religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It would also have transformed the message of the painting from a celebration of the recent creation of the State of Israel, and its promising future, to a meditation on the past. In a painting devoted to the glorious future of Israel, Haifa was the natural choice.

Why not Tel Aviv? Today Tel Aviv is a good deal larger than Haifa, but in 1948 they were about the same size. Interestingly, Tel Aviv did not yet have a port, since the port of Ashdod, which serves Tel Aviv today, was only established in 1956. In the years leading up to the creation of the State of Israel, Haifa was the major port of entry into the country, as well as the site of one of the most widely publicized incidents associated with immigration to Palestine.

In 1947 a rusty old freighter/passenger ship named the Exodus, constructed nearly 30 years before, illegally set sail from France for Israel, crowded with about 4,500 Jewish men, women, and children, all displaced persons or survivors of the Holocaust. While it was en route, British destroyers surrounded the vessel, captured it with a boarding party that killed several of the passengers on board, towed it to Haifa, and then loaded the refugees on Navy transports that carried them back to France. This action quickly exploded into an international incident.The French refused to unload the boat. The refugees on it declared a hunger strike, and were joined by other refugees in camps across Europe. While the British eventually resettled the passengers in a refugee camp in the British zone in Germany, in Hamburg, the incident led to international outrage and stirred up sympathy for the Jewish cause and for unrestricted immigration to Palestine. The emphasis on the Low/Korder mural on the sea and on the curve of Haifa Bay surely celebrates Haifa’s role as the major receiving point for Jewish immigrants to Israel, as well as Haifa’s role as a gateway to the outside world.

The Haifa mural is surely the single most notable artistic statement by Sandy Low, who today is less well known as a painter than as the person who transformed the New Britain Museum of American Art from a modest local art center into one of the country’s greatest repositories of American painting. Known to all his friends as “Sandy,” Sanford Low was born in North Kohala, Hawaii, in the northern sector of the Big Island, on Sept. 21, 1905, and was of mixed New England and Polynesian ancestry. His grandfather John Somes Low, came to the islands from Gloucester, Massachusetts, and married into the Hawaiian royal family. Thus, through his grandmother, Sandy was directly descended from King Kamehameha the First, who united all the tribes on the islands. Sandy was even born very near to where Kamehameha was born, not far from the volcano of Kohala, the oldest of Hawaii’s seven volcanos. Sandy’s mother was a full-blooded Tahitian.




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