Wednesday, November 01, 2023

11/01 Links Pt2: Pessin: When the anti-racists are racists; Amnesty International’s Propaganda on Gaza; Frantz Fanon, Oracle of Decolonization

From Ian:

Andrew Pessin: When the anti-racists are racists
What exactly do you think could possibly justify such barbaric cruelty? To babies, children, disabled people, grandmothers?

When the Nazis showed up at Polish towns and forced all the Jews to strip and walk miles into the woods and dig their own graves and then shot them, mothers holding their babies, would you stop and say, “Wait a minute, I need to hear the Nazis’ perspective on this before I reach a judgment?”

Who watches little girls raped and then dismembered alive (yes) and says, “Well, I need to learn more before making a judgment”?

Who watches a mother and a father and their three small children tied up together and then burned alive (yes) and says, “Well I need to hear the other side before I make up my mind”?

When nine black people were gunned down in South Carolina in 2015, did anyone say, “Wait until we get the gunman’s point of view”? Or in regard to the 2019 mosque shootings in New Zealand in which 51 Muslims died?

Is there any other identity group whose massive slaughter is met with the search for justification, with the “need to learn more”?

Closer to home, when talking about your activism for important causes, you also said, “The George Floyd affair was about the daily police brutality black Americans have faced for centuries and the continued oppression of folks of African descent across the diaspora.”

Imagine someone responded to you and said, “Well, you know, that situation is actually extremely complicated. After all, black people do commit a lot of crime and have a lot of police interactions. And anyway, let’s hear from David Duke and the Proud Boys before we reach any conclusions.”

Do I need to go on to imagine how you would feel, and how pretty much everyone we know in academia would erupt against such a response, which would instantly be branded racist?

1,400 mostly unarmed Jews—babies, children, teenagers, pregnant women, grandmothers—were just slaughtered in the most sadistic manner possible by the members of an openly genocidal group. Their founding charter literally endorses the murder of all Jews on earth. They literally posted footage of the atrocities so everyone could celebrate it. And you need to “learn more”?

But you didn’t stop there.

Given the “complexity” of the conflict, you then endorsed the (otherwise surely laudatory) view that we needn’t play the “Oppression Olympics,” that “we must oppose all oppression, have empathy for every suffering person, etc.”

Of course. But when certain people responded to the Black Lives Matter campaign so dear to you by pointing out that, in fact, “all lives matter” and “unarmed white people are also shot by police,” well we know how that was received, not least as evidence of their racism. Yet when 1,400 Jews were slaughtered in the most cold-blooded manner possible, you responded, “Well, all lives matter.”

You literally just “all lives mattered” every Jewish person on earth.
WSJ Editorial The Global War on the Jews
Jews are under attack not only in Israel and not only by Hamas. The weeks since the barbaric Oct. 7 Hamas invasion of Israel have witnessed physical assaults on Jews the world over, including in the U.S. and Europe.

The Islamist group and its Western enablers are pursuing or justifying a genocidal war against Jews, not merely a territorial dispute with Israel.

This weekend hundreds of rioters in Dagestan, Russia, stormed an airport in search of Jewish travelers. Germany has witnessed a spate of anti-Semitic incidents. Two Jewish schools in London closed for a period over safety concerns. A crowd in Sydney, Australia, chanted "gas the Jews" after the Hamas attack.

Americans like to believe such things couldn't happen in the U.S. They have. The Anti-Defamation League reported a 388% increase in anti-Semitic incidents from Oct. 7-23 compared with the same period a year ago. The ADL tally counts 109 anti-Israel rallies that featured support for Hamas or violence against Jews in Israel.

The West spent the decades after the civilizational catastrophe of the Holocaust vowing never again to allow itself to slide into such barbarism. What we see now in the attacks on Jews is how that slide began.

Before there was a Chancellor Hitler in 1933, there were roving bands of Brownshirts inflicting political and anti-Semitic violence on the streets of Germany. They too often went unchecked by police, prosecutors and politicians who didn't understand the menace.

A Western society that can't or won't muster the will to defend its Jewish neighbors and fellow citizens won't be able to defend itself.
Are We Tipping into a New World War?
A “world spinning out of control.” Those were the words Wall Street Journal Global View columnist Walter Russell Mead used to describe the latest geopolitical developments when Bari interviewed him on the latest episode of Honestly this week. And it’s not hard to see why.

In the past 48 hours alone:
Houthi fighters fired at Israel from Yemen.
An Israeli air strike hit Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza, killing a senior Hamas commander as well as Palestinian civilians.
FBI Director Christopher A. Wray warned senators that the Israel-Hamas war has increased the chances of a terrorist attack against Americans in the United States to “a whole other level.”
Israel vanished overnight from maps on the Chinese search engine Baidu.
Egyptian prime minister Mostafa Madbouly said Egypt was “prepared to sacrifice millions of lives to ensure that no one encroaches upon our territory,” dismissing requests for the settlement of Palestinian refugees in Egypt.

On the podcast, Walter explains why the “pre-war era” we’ve been in for a while is “moving quickly and at an unpredictable pace” toward “something big and something bad.”

Let Walter give you the lay of the land. I can’t promise that it will be reassuring. But it will be clarifying.


NGO Monitor: Any Excuse to Attack Israel: Amnesty International’s Propaganda on Gaza
Amnesty International is among the most active NGOs that systematically promote demonization of Israel , BDS, and antisemitism – under the facade of universal human rights. In recent years, this bias and discrimination has been reflected in its “apartheid” campaign, extensive efforts to exclude antisemitism as a human rights concern, and undermining the implementation of the International Holocaust Remembrance Association (IHRA) definition to combat hatred of Jews.

In the wake of the barbaric Hamas massacre of 1,500 Israelis and the kidnapping of more than 200, Amnesty has exploited these events to amplify demonization and delegitimization of the Jewish state. As with previous rounds of conflict with Palestinian terror groups, Amnesty has disproportionately focused on allegations of Israeli wrongdoing, as opposed to an intensive campaign regarding the murder, torture, rape, hostage-taking, and dismembering corpses that represent one of the most egregious human rights atrocities in the past 30 years.

“Apartheid” – Amnesty Emphasizes “Root Causes”
In multiple statements, Amnesty emphasizes “the root causes” of the conflict, in particular “Israel’s system of apartheid imposed on all Palestinians.” Amnesty does not identify “root causes” on the part of any other actor, including Palestinians and terror groups. Amnesty’s publications and statements by its officials as part of its ongoing apartheid campaign make it clear that the NGO sees Israel’s existence as a Jewish state as the “root cause” and believes that it should not exist as such. (For details, see NGO Monitor’s reports “False Knowledge as Power: Deconstructing Definitions of Apartheid that Delegitimise the Jewish State,” “Neo-Orientalism: Deconstructing claims of apartheid in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict,” and “Amnesty International’s Cruel Assault on Israel: Systematic Lies, Errors, Omissions & Double Standards in Amnesty’s Apartheid Report.”)

In a statement issued on October 7 (Israel/OPT: Civilians on both sides paying the price of unprecedented escalation in hostilities between Israel and Gaza as death toll mounts), as the Hamas massacre of Israelis was taking place, Amnesty asserts that “The root causes of these repeated cycles of violence must be addressed as a matter of urgency.” It specifies the objective of “ending Israel’s 16-year-long illegal blockade on Gaza, and all other aspects of Israel’s system of apartheid imposed on all Palestinians.”

Similarly, in an October 26 statement demanding an “immediate ceasefire” (Israel/OPT: Urgent call for an immediate ceasefire by all parties to end unprecedented civilian suffering), “Amnesty International also reiterates its calls for…The root causes of the conflict to be addressed, including through dismantling Israel’s system of apartheid against all Palestinians.”

In another instance (Damning evidence of war crimes as Israeli attacks wipe out entire families in Gaza, October 20), Amnesty recommends that the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court “Urgently expedite its ongoing investigation in the situation of Palestine, examining alleged crimes by all parties,” adding that this should include “the crime against humanity of apartheid against Palestinians.”


Eli Lake: Frantz Fanon, Oracle of Decolonization
Sartre’s introduction to the first edition of The Wretched of the Earth is the seed of the moral illiteracy that leads so many intellectuals in 2023 to cheer or rationalize the October 7 Hamas atrocities. In this sense, Sartre uses Fanon in his introductory essay as a weapon to shame his fellow French citizens. The context here is important. In 1961 Algeria was still a French colony. Algeria would not win its independence until 1962.

Sartre skewers his liberal neighbors who abhor both the violence of the FLN and the French army. “Our victims know us by their wounds and shackles: that is what makes their testimony irrefutable,” he writes. He then goes on to tap into the guilt many French citizens felt about Algeria on the eve of its independence.

But, you will say once again, ‘we live in the metropolis, and we disapprove of extremes.’ It’s true, you are not colonists, but you are not much better. They were your pioneers, you sent them overseas, they made you rich. You warned them: if they shed too much blood you would pretend to disown them; the same way a State—no matter which one—maintains a mob of agitators, provocateurs, and spies abroad whom it disowns once they are caught. You who are so liberal, so humane, who take the love of culture to the point of affectation, you pretend to forget that you have colonies where massacres are committed in your name.

This is important because Sartre, who at times professed to be a humanist, is making the same mistake so many twentieth-century intellectuals made by negating the individual and speaking only of abstract groups. One has no right to take moral comfort in dissenting from his state’s violence if he still benefits from it.

And one can see a similar dynamic today. Here's a quote from Nathan Tankus, a think-tanker who is writing a book on the Federal Reserve and is very active on X. He tweeted a day after the Hamas pogrom: “I don’t want anyone to die but I also won’t participate in contextless haranguing of military strategy launched from a Ghetto. Whether it’s Jewish partisans during WWII or, yes, even Hamas.”

Let me translate. Tankus demonstrates the mindset that has resulted from years steeped in a simplistic notion of “decolonization.” Jews fighting for their lives during the Holocaust were allowed to use violence. But now that Israel exists, it deserves to be attacked. The powerful are guilty because they have power. In this sense, he elides any moral question about a deliberate massacre of Jews on October 7 by clinically referring to the pogrom as a “military strategy.” Fanon would be proud.

Fanon goes further in his analysis. He not only believes that violence is inevitable in a liberation struggle; he also writes that the act of killing purifies the killer in a war against a colonial oppressor. Fanon writes in the “On Violence” chapter: “At the individual level, violence is a cleansing force. It rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude. It emboldens them, and restores their self-confidence.”

In the rest of the book, however, Fanon does complicate his analysis. For example, he warns that liberation movements can become new oppressors once they attain power, thus exchanging one barbarism for another.

In 1961, it was easy to see how Fanon’s analysis would appeal to the left. But 62 years after its publication, there is ample reason to question his conclusions. Just look at what became of Algeria itself. Like the French before independence, the regime established intelligence services, a brutal military, and its leaders eventually became a new exploitive class.

During Algeria’s civil war in the 1990s, for example, the regime infiltrated the GIA, the Islamic fundamentalist movement that had been waging an insurgency. In the 2000s, a series of former officers wrote books that laid bare how many of the atrocities attributed to the resistance were provocations either known ahead of time or actively planned by the domestic security services.

None of this is to say that the French should reclaim Algeria as a colonial possession. Rather it is to say that the fetishization of violence as an overdue debt or as a process for emancipating the minds of the oppressed leads to more repression once independence is achieved. When the leader of a liberation movement can summon spectacular violence, it’s a great temptation to consolidate personal power. This is why so many third-world countries that gained independence through violent struggle suffer under autocracy today.

All this Fanonism, so popular in academia today, is being used to justify exterminationist rhetoric against the only Jewish state and against Jews anywhere. But Israel is not a colonial power. It is a safe haven. There is no mother country for Jews outside of Israel. The war in 1948 that broke out after Israel was recognized as an independent state was not a battle between colonizer and colonist. It was a struggle between a people who had survived a genocide and the entire Arab world.

In 1948, the goal for the Arab armies was to drive the Jews into the sea, same as it is today for Hamas, and same as it is for the intellectuals so exhilarated by the bloodlust of these fanatics. Celebrating the October 7 pogrom is not solidarity with the wretched of the earth. It is a demented excuse for the mass murder of Jews.


The Biden DOJ Just Tapped This Anti-Israel Group for a ‘United Against Hate’ Initiative. They Say Israel is Guilty of Genocide.
The Biden administration tapped an anti-Israel advocacy group that accuses the Jewish state of genocide to participate in a forum on the surge in hate crimes following Hamas’s attacks.

The Arab American Institute joined the Justice Department’s "United Against Hate" forum Wednesday, the agency announced. Attorney General Merrick Garland and civil rights division chief Kristen Clarke led the event with leaders from several advocacy groups and five U.S. attorneys.

The Arab American Institute, which was represented at the forum by its executive director Maya Berry, supports economic boycotts of Israel and has accused the Israeli government of "genocide" and "apartheid" against Palestinians. The institute’s founder, James Zogby, has referred to Israel as "Nazis" and defended the term "Israel firster," which white supremacists use to suggest American Jews are more loyal to Israel than the United States.

This is the latest example of the Biden administration courting anti-Israel groups to take part in hate crime initiatives. It comes as anti-Semitic incidents have spiked nearly 400 percent in the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel last month. FBI director Christopher Wray warned this week that Hamas’s attack will likely inspire a terror threat "the likes of which we haven’t seen since ISIS."

In May, the White House tapped the Council on American-Islamic Relations for its "national strategy for combating anti-Semitism." CAIR was labeled an unindicted co-conspirator of Hamas in a 2007 federal terrorism case. Nihad Awad, the executive director of CAIR, referred to Israel as a "settler colonial Apartheid state" in the wake of the attacks and wrote "Israel=Russia."

Kristen Clarke, who oversees the Justice Department’s civil rights division, has repeatedly praised anti-Semitic activists and scholars. Clarke touted activists Linda Sarsour and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.), who have pushed anti-Semitic tropes and defended Hamas’s attack on Israel. As a Harvard student, Clarke hosted an event for a scholar who peddled the conspiracy theory that Jews orchestrated the international slave trade.

The Arab American Institute offered some criticism of Hamas after the group slaughtered 1,400 Israelis this month. But like many other anti-Israel groups, the institute blamed Israel and the United States for stoking tensions with Palestinians.

"While all parties share some degree of blame, I mainly fault successive US administrations for failing to play its self-proclaimed role of the promoter of human rights and peace. It has abdicated its responsibility diminishing itself to become Israel’s partner in the oppression of Palestinians. For shame," Zogby said days after the Hamas attack.


Yisrael Medad: Was 'Palestine' Actually Syria?
Let's check on that way back when:

"In 1917, Ramallah-born New York surgeon, Fuad Isa Shatara, and N.A. Katibah founded the Palestine Antizionism Society. It was among the organizers of an anti-Zionist rally on November 8, 1918 in Brooklyn. Besides the two founders, the young Lebanese Orientalist Philip Khoury Hitti made an appearance as a speaker at the event. The rally passed a resolution, describing the Arabs at risk of being dominated by “a race rendered more powerful and wealthy through contact with the western civilization thus applying might against right” and protesting the “artificial importation of Zionists flooding the country against its natural capacities and thus forcing an emigration of the rightful inhabitants.”227 Thus, by 1918, the anti-Zionist Arab-American movement had already found both its central arguments and its leaders. Rihani, Hitti and Shatara would shape the movement over the next two decades. The Arab Americans worked to influence the State Department and other influential elements of the foreign policy strata. Fuad Shatara of the Palestine Antizionism Society wrote two letters to Secretary of State Robert Lansing in November 1918 and February 1919, arguing that Zionism was in contravention to Wilson’s Fourteen Points.228 In December 1918, Hitti and George Khairalla established the New Syria National League. The group lobbied for the establishment of a Greater Syria under American protection, reaching from the Sinai to the Euphrates.229 These groups intensified their activities in light of the upcoming peace conference in Paris. Shatara and Hitti reached out to John Huston Finley, the chief of the Red Cross Commission in Palestine, asking Finley not to detach Palestine from Greater Syria.230 During the conference, Hitti’s New Syria National League also sent a telegram to Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau advocating an American protectorate over Syria. 231"


Free Palestine? No thanks! (The Israeli perspective)

2011: Debunking the Palestine Lie
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has launched an international campaign to achieve recognition by the United Nations for an independent Palestinian state. Abbas and his international supporters claim that only Israel (with the United States) stands in the way of this act of historical justice, which would finally bring about peace in the Middle East.

This video debunks the Palestinians' claim and shows that Abbas has been lying about the origins and history of the conflict. Palestinian leaders have rejected partition plans that would have given them much more land for their independent state than the Jews were offered for theirs. Rather than being the innocent victims of a "dispossession" at the hands of the Israelis, the Palestinians rejected reasonable compromises and instead pursued their aim of getting rid of the only Jewish state in the world.


The Hostility of the Left and the Arab World Toward Israel (and Why You Should Care)
This video is about a very weird connection between the Arab world and parts of the Left when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, actually, the strange connection between the Left and the Arab world in general. I think that you’ll find it interesting regardless of whether you support the Israelis or the Palestinians.


Call Me Back PodCast: Antisemitism. Everywhere.
Next week we will release the new book by Saul Singer and me: “The Genius of Israel: The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World”, which you can order now.

The speech that I reference in today’s episode — in which I discuss the resilience of Israelis in this moment — can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WygtNbwf-tk

As for today’s episode, according to the ADL, from Oct 7-23, anti-semetic incidents in the U.S. were up 388% over the same period last year. Why is it that after an attempted genocide of Jews in the Jewish State, the response by many is too target other Jews in the U.S. and around the world? To target them with violent rhetoric, vandalism, intimidation, and actual physical violence?

Is this new? What are its origins?

What is the difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism?

And what’s with the tearing down of posters of hostage children?

Our guest today is Yossi Klein Halevi who – in addition to being an important voice in our new book – is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. Together with Imam Abdullah Antepli of Duke University, he co-directs the Harmant Institute’s Muslim Leadership Initiative.

Yossi has written a number of books, including “Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation,” and his latest, “Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor,” which was a New York Times bestseller. He has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Times of Israel.
What the Hell Is Going On: WTH is Going On with the Explosion of Antisemitism on the Left? Ruth Wisse Explains
Hosted by Danielle Pletka & Marc Thiessen

There are Charlottesvilles happening every day in America. This time, they’re everywhere, driven by an explosion of antisemitism. And these Charlottesvilles are happening at Harvard, Columbia, and Stanford among other elite havens of academe. This is not the alt-right, fringe antisemitism of years past. The modern version has taken on the flavor of the leftist elite: it equates Zionism with racism; it coalesces the extreme aspects of BLM, feminism, and other groups against a common enemy; it is pro-nothing and entirely anti. The Nazi movement had its roots in professors, Nobel Prize winners – this too, is finding roots in elitist bodies who can intellectualize their way around the pernicious evil of the Hamas attacks. The only way to stand up to a culture of hate? Intolerance of it, and imposing consequences on those who profess it.

Ruth Wisse is the Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and Comparative Literature Emerita at Harvard University. She immigrated to Canada from Romania in 1940 and is a preeminent scholar of Yiddish and American culture, literature, and politics. She is the author of several books, including her memoir Free as a Jew.


Multiple European countries make arrests over Hamas-related terrorism

Senate Approves Jack Lew, Who Backed Obama’s Anti-Israel Policies, as Israel Ambassador Hamas' campaign won't drive Israeli-Arabs to join fight

PMW: Fatah brags it took part in October 7 slaughter. WARNING GRAPHIC IMAGES

PreOccupiedTerritory: Hamas Seeks ‘Paper Dome’ To Intercept IDF Leaflets Warning Gazans Away From Targets (satire)

Queen of the Pogrom-Deniers

MEMRI: Qatar-Based And -Funded International Union Of Muslim Scholars (IUMS) Issues Fatwa Calling For Military Intervention By Arab And Muslim Countries Against Israel And For Gaza

MEMRI: Article In Qatari Daily 'Al-Sharq': Arabs Must Punish West For Supporting Israel By Imposing Oil Embargo On It

MEMRI: Qatar-Based And Funded International Union Of Muslim Scholars (IUMS) Publishes Old Article By Senior Hamas Official Describing Takeover Of Gaza Border Region, Israeli City Of Ashkelon, In Preparation For Liberation Of Palestine And Realization Of Prophetic Promise

MEMRI: Iranian State Broadcaster PressTV, Designated By U.S. Treasury And Sanctioned By Office Of Foreign Asset Control, Films At Anti-Israel Protest Directly In Front Of White House, Possibly For Intelligence Value, Interviews Leader Of Neo-Nazi Anti-Government Group

There is still time for Biden to deter Iran and support Israel

Former Johns Hopkins SAIS Dean Echoes Claim That Israel Is Waging 'Genocide'

'We Only Want One Side to Stop Fighting': Meet the Minneapolis Public School Teacher Who Called For Israel's Eradication at Socialist Rally

What Rockets? International Media Blind to Hamas Missiles Raining Down on Israel

LA Times Owner’s Daughter Says Journalists Should Call Israel ‘Apartheid’ State

NPR Misleads Millions with Biased Coverage of Israel-Hamas War

A CNN “ANALYSIS” EXPLAINS ANTISEMITISM BY ENGAGING IN IT

NY TIMES: MAYBE THE ‘KIDNAPPED’ POSTERS ARE THE PROBLEM?

TIME AUTHOR GASLIGHTS READERS WITH CLAIM HAMAS IS NOT LIKE ISIS

The Guardian’s coverage and my colleagues’ comments mean I don’t feel safe at work

American TikTok Star Claims Hamas ‘Cares About Your Kids’ On Channel That Spreads Anti-Israel Propaganda

Another two Jewish stumbling stones defaced in Rome

The Israeli flags outside his Greek diner prompted a boycott. Then Jewish eaters came to his rescue.

Artists behind viral campaign to free the hostages ‘Bring them home’ campaign representing Israeli hostages showcased at Federation Square
Dozens of red balloons and pairs of shoes have been set up in Melbourne's Federation Square as part of an installation calling for the release of more than 200 Israeli hostages taken by Hamas.

The ‘Bring them home’ campaign has around 240 red balloons each tied to a pair of shoes representing a person who has been taken by Hamas on October 7.

There are five white balloons on the edge of the installation which represent the five people who have so far been released by the terrorist organisation.

The ‘Bring them home’ campaign is a global campaign and is currently in Melbourne to spread recognition and support in calling for Hamas to release the remaining hostages.

The youngest hostage is a nine-month-old baby boy while the oldest hostage is an 85-year-old man.




'Sing it out, boys': Dee Snider reacts to IDF playing 'We're Not Gonna Take It'

OCTOBER 31, 2023 1:55 PM







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