During the Netroots Nation conference, at one point Rep. Jan Schakowsky was introduced. She is one of the highest ranking Jewish members of Congress and a strident critic of Israel.
She was roundly booed and protesters started chanting anti-Israel slogans as soon as she was mentioned.
Schakowsky tried to tell the protesters that she is on their side, but they drowned her out, and she briefly considered walking off the stage. But then Jayapal stood up and silenced the protesters by saying, "As somebody who’s been in the streets and participated in a lot of demonstrations, I want you to know that we have been fighting to make it clear that Israel is a racist state." She added that there were nefarious forces trying to silence them, and Schakowsky is not one of them.
Meaning, she is one of the good Jews.
The incident starts around 1:06:00 in this video.
Schakowsky, who almost certainly disagrees that Israel is a racist state, remained silent so as not to anger the mob even more.
The mob sets the agenda for the "progressives."
The wording is telling. Jayapal isn't arguing that Israel is a "racist state." She didn't bring a single fact to support the statement. She is telling the crowd that the progressive Democrat goal is to spread the word that Israel is a racist state, and that she agrees with the protesters - protesters who waited until a Jewish member of Congress was going to speak before interrupting, an hour into the conference.
Facts don't matter - propaganda is the goal. If the Israel haters can find some context-less facts that seem to support that narrative, great, and any counter-evidence is summarily dismissed and ignored. That is the entire content of the Amnesty and HRW "apartheid" reports. The accusation is the important thing, not the facts. And the accusation is seen as an important part of the progressive story.
The accusation itself is absurd. Unlike apartheid-era South Africa, and despite the lies of some NGOs, there are no Israeli laws that discriminate against Arabs or Muslims. On the contrary, equal rights are explciit in many Israeli laws. If equal rights for all is enshrined in the law in hundreds of ways, then clearly Israel is not a racist state. (I gave an example last week of Israel's law against desecrating religious objects, which does not single out Jewish religious objects but applies equally to attacks on all religions.)
Israel does discriminate against non-citizens. So does every other nation on the planet. But only Israel is accused of "racism" or "apartheid" for prioritizing its own citizens over non-citizens, especially non-citizens who are attempting to destroy the State.
The only bigot in this conversation is Pramila Jayapal, who is singling out the world's only Jewish state as being intolerant when it its laws are more tolerant of its Muslim minority than much of Western Europe's are. Not to mention the constitutions of nearly every Arab nation being explicitly discriminatory against non-Muslims and non-Arabs.
There was another accusation of racism against Israel this weekend, and unlike Jayapal, this one pretends to have facts on its side.
The official Palestinian Wafa news agency reports in its English-language site:
The Israeli national water company Mekorot has reduced the daily amount of water supply to the provinces of Hebron and Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank by about 6,000 cups per day, today said the Palestinian Water Authority (PWA), which described the move as ‘racist’.PWA said the move deprives the people of their right to obtain sufficient amounts of water, especially in light of the sharp rise in temperatures.“There are no technical reasons behind this reduction,” PWA said, adding that “no faults were detected in the supplying source, but rather it [the move] comes as a discriminatory measure that adds to the racist policies practiced by the occupation authorities.”
I could find no news stories about this in Hebrew media, so I have no idea if it is true. But let's pretend that it is, and Israel reduced the amount of water to the governorates of Hebron and Bethlehem by 6,000 cups every day. (The word "cups" is consistent in English and Arabic; in fact the word is "kub" in Arabic.)
Given that there are about 900,000 people in those two governorates, that comes out to about one third of a teaspoon of water per person per day. If the "6,000 cups" story is even remotely true, no one would notice. Which is why the accusation is almost certainly false - why would Israel reduce the amount of water by such a minuscule amount?
As with Jayapal, the accusation of "racism" is what drives the story, not any facts. Facts are the enemy of these modern antisemites, which is why they try so hard to drown out the facts with a false, slanderous narrative.
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