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Tuesday, January 28, 2025

01/28 Links Pt2: The Holocaust Cannot Be Hijacked to Describe Other Conflicts; The religious mania of Owen Jones; What the Irish President Should Have Said about His Country and the Shoah

From Ian:

Elisha Wiesel: Will We Continue Giving Moral Credibility to Voices Who Say Israel Is the Villain for Refusing to Die?
Auschwitz was liberated 80 years ago Monday. The world told itself they were doing all they could - even as the railroad tracks to Auschwitz were not bombed; as the St. Louis ship, full of Jewish refugees, was turned back from Florida to Europe; as Britain froze European Jewish immigration to the British Mandate for Palestine, preventing the escape of hundreds of thousands who could have been saved.

It is hard to look evil in the face. To see the jihadists in Gaza fire rifles in the air as 90 Palestinian prisoners were exchanged for three Israeli women. One of the terrorists set to be released by Israel is Abu Warda, who was responsible for killing 45 civilians in the 1996 bus bombings in Jerusalem. Does he occupy the same moral universe as these women?

It is easier to believe that this militant mob wants their own state than to hear, really hear, what they shout: that their mission is the eradication of Israel. Americans must not forgive Hamas. We must confront evil when and where we see it.

Will we continue explaining away the images of non-uniformed Palestinian civilians celebrating - and actively aiding Hamas - in the Oct. 7 attacks? Will we continue confusing the concepts of perpetrator and victim? Will we continue giving moral credibility to voices who say that the tiny nation of Israel is the villain for refusing to die?
Seth Mandel: Food for Thought for the Anti-Zionists
Perhaps one reason this type of vandalism has so few defenders even among progressives is because they like to claim that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism—and the accusations of food appropriation demolish that ridiculous fiction like almost no other argument.

Israel is the name of a geographic location; if you are upset about Israelis eating or making a particular kind of food it is because you actually object to Jews eating or making that food. The fact that a person in one region of the world would be eating the same food as his neighbor across the street is unremarkable. But when one of those two people is a Jew, it becomes fodder for the fever swamps.

You will not find, for example, vandalism by Syrian activists against Palestinian-identified shops for making a version of a dish in, say, Nablus even though the dish predates Palestinian Arab nationalism. Which is why my Syrian Jewish friends, as they cook their centuries-old family recipes, don’t whine about Palestinians also cooking a similar Syrian dish while putting a slightly modern twist on it and calling it Palestinian. You’d have to be insane to do something like that.

Easily my favorite such controversy, however, is the recurring one over couscous. Pro-Palestinian activists get particularly upset over seeing dishes labeled “Israeli couscous.” Columbia’s anti-Zionist professor Joseph Massad claims he once stomped out of a New York restaurant after seeing it on the menu.

A more recent example comes from Yale. Last year, students posted pictures from the dining hall purportedly showing that Israeli couscous suddenly had the “Israeli” part removed. Things had gotten so tense on campus that the school, it turned out, had decided to remove regional or cultural labels from the dishes they served. But then “Israeli couscous” reappeared. Yale explained to JTA: “In this case, Israeli Couscous is indeed an actual ingredient and is explicitly listed on the ingredient list. Considering it is the main ingredient, it is appropriate to remain in the title, and we will correct this oversight.”

The reason for this is that Israeli couscous isn’t couscous at all, and Israelis never tried to pass it off as such. It’s a relic of Israel’s early days when food manufacturers were pushed to make a grain product that was cheaper than rice. It looked like couscous but wasn’t. Israelis didn’t call it couscous. They called couscous, couscous. They didn’t call it Israeli couscous either. It acquired that name later to differentiate it in stores from couscous.

Which is to say: when something is labeled “Israeli couscous” it is not to “steal” couscous but to announce that it isn’t couscous.

This is indicative of the larger point: There are no winners in the food wars, because merely participating in this stuff makes you sound like a lunatic. Objections to Israeli food are thus helpful only because they identify people who have way bigger problems than ill-formed opinions on geopolitics.
Yisrael Medad: ‘Shofar’s call to ‘rehabilitate’ Zionism
Shofar, an interdisciplinary journal of Jewish studies whose editors are committed “to publishing a diversity of beliefs, ideas and opinions,” is a project of cooperation with Purdue University. The academic institution was beset, as were many campuses, last year with pro-Palestine rallies and demonstrations, and even set up a “Liberation Zone,” although it would seem none for any Israeli hostages. I have no information that those events had a direct influence on the publication of an issue dedicated to anti-Zionism, but it exists.

Shaul Magid of Dartmouth College led that Shofar special issue, which was devoted to “Zionism and Its Jewish Critics.” He claimed that “while some scholars argue that the concept [of Zionism] has biblical origins, most acknowledge that it is a modern Jewish iteration of Western European nationalism that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century.” Who are these “most” scholars who champion perverse purposeful ignorance? What is their academic weight? Are these the instructors properly suited to lecture university students, Jewish and non-Jewish?

Magid and fellow travelers would have us believe that the many dozens of Torah commandments, hundreds of verses of Tanach, thousands of Midrashic, Talmudic and Second Temple literature pieces, as well as thousands of rabbinic dicta and responsa spanning some 2,500 years of Jewish core religion, culture and ritual revolving around Zion, Jerusalem, the Land of Israel and a Jew’s obligations to the same are to be erased and ignored. Similarly, the constant presence of Jews residing in the Land of Israel—immigrating and traveling to it, and sending charitable dollars to those living there all during the 1,800 years of our Exile, not to mention the Return to Zion during the sixth-century BCE—is to be disregarded.

In a follow-up response, Lior Sternfeld of Penn State University addresses the topic of “Settler Colonialism, From the River to the Sea, and the Israeli Case After October 7.” He intends “to offer a way to unpack some of the volatile concepts often used to analyze the Israel-Palestine conflict.” Nevertheless, he promptly engages in a volatile position and, as if objectively, observes that “well-meaning scholars and activists have sought to rehabilitate the concept of Zionism.”

And what is the need for that? Sternfeld knows and suggests that “Zionism, at least in its twenty-first-century form, negates the very existence of Palestinian identity and Palestinian nationalism. As such, the peaceful existence of the two peoples, enjoying freedom, independence, and self-determination, could never be achieved.” All the fault of the Jews. Sorry, the Zionists. For what is Zionism if not, according to Sternfeld, “settler-colonialism”?


The Holocaust Cannot Be Hijacked to Describe Other Conflicts
There is something unique about anti-Semitism. No other racism is so persistent or so virulent. Some of the laments yesterday were against war. But the Holocaust, though facilitated by the opportunities for murder that conflict brings, was not an act of war. It was the ultimate iteration – the “final solution” – of a political theory that the Jews are the source of evil in the world.

If we seek evidence that this belief still exists and still kills, it is in front of our faces. The Hamas massacres of October 7 in Israel were not a military land-grab. They were an attempt to murder, or kidnap for further torment, any Israeli they could find. In the talk recorded on the body cameras of the exultant assassins, it was explicitly “the Jews” they were after: they were not soldiers fighting a military enemy.

This all-embracing hatred is brought home by the fact that, because the liberation was 80 years ago, almost none of today’s survivors were adults then, let alone combatants. The nonagenarians who survive were children destined for death because of their race, spared only by chance. Even as the Holocaust commemorations progress, Hamas, whose anti-Semitism is stated in its Charter, is using the deal with Israel as a means of propaganda, parading its captives as it releases them, to show its murderous power. It forces some of them to thank their captors in public.

Nowadays, the Holocaust is often hijacked as a rhetorical tool to describe other conflicts. That is why the endless pro-Gaza marches in London and elsewhere speak of Israeli “genocide”.

Seeking, as it were, safety in numbers, some who sincerely commemorate the Holocaust tend to play along. Laura Marks, the chairman of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, has complained that “deliberate distortion of facts around people who are different (now particularly Jews and Muslims) is endemic and dangerous just as it was in the Nazi era”.

She is right, in the sense that hatred for religious or racial reasons always lurks and often explodes. But I think she is wrong to link Jews and Muslims in this way. Jews are defined by blood. They have a religion but a non-religious Jew is no less Jewish. Anti-Semitism is the hatred of an entire people.

Muslims do not face such hatred. They are quite different. Like Christians, they are members of a proselytising faith which makes universal truth claims. People have every right, as they do against Christians, to say why they disagree with and even dislike Muslim beliefs.
What the Irish President Should Have Said about His Country and the Shoah
At his country’s annual Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony last year, Ireland’s president, Michael Higgins, used the occasion to speak about the suffering in Gaza, and has since then directed so many untrue and histrionic accusations at Israel that the country decided to shutter its embassy in Dublin. Irish Jews, including the chief rabbi and other leaders, urged Higgins not to speak at this year’s commemoration, but he ignored them. Besides much meaningless claptrap about the evils of generic hatred and hopes for peace on earth, he uttered the following:

The grief inflicted on families by the horrific acts of October 7th, and the response to it, is unimaginable—the loss of civilian life, the majority women and children, their displacement, loss of homes, the necessary institutions for life itself. How can the world continue to look at the empty bowls of the starving?

Thus he seemed to lament a nonexistent famine while equating completely Israel and Hamas. A Jewish scholar who protested was forcibly dragged away by security guards, while other audience members looked on unphased.

Γ‰amann Mac Donnchada, considering Higgins’s “rambling, pseudo-academic, morally dubious” oration and the “moral narcissism” it embodies, imagines what he would have had Higgins say instead:

First, let me say that neither I nor any representatives of Ireland have any right to open our mouths on Holocaust Memorial Day. Ireland chose to stay out of the war that defeated Nazi Germany, a defeat that resulted in stopping the Holocaust before it could be completed. When there was the opportunity to protect Jewish lives we chose to put our own interests first. That’s what states do.

Only the Jewish people can fully commemorate the end of the Holocaust and only they have the right to say what lessons should be learned from it, if it’s at all appropriate to use the language of pedagogy about such a moral catastrophe.

The Jews in mandatory Palestine took up arms, some inspired by our own fight for freedom, expelled the British occupiers and forged a state for themselves in their ancient homeland. They were no longer willing to be dependent on the goodwill of people like us for their survival. . . .

Only of the Jews is it demanded that they abandon their national sovereignty and place themselves under the protection of people like us, who did nothing to protect them in the past.
Joey Borgen, attacked by pro-Palestinian mob in 2021, announces aliyah
Joey Borgen, a New York City native and survivor of a violent antisemitic attack in 2021, has announced plans to make aliyah to Israel this March. Posting in the popular Facebook group "Secret Tel Aviv," Borgen shared on Sunday that he is searching for a short-term apartment in Tel Aviv, stating:

"Hey All - shavua tov! I’m making aliyah in late March. I’m looking for an apartment in Tel Aviv (minimum 2-3 months rental). Please PM me if you have any ideas!" A violent attack that shook the Jewish community

Borgen’s name gained national attention after he was brutally assaulted while en route to a pro-Israel rally in Times Square on May 20, 2021. He was wearing a yarmulke when five attackers targeted him, shouting antisemitic slurs and beating him with crutches, fists, and pepper spray. Borgen suffered a concussion and extensive bruising and was hospitalized at Bellevue Hospital. The incident was caught on camera, sparking outrage and becoming a symbol of the rising tide of antisemitic hate crimes in the United States during the Israel-Hamas conflict of that year.

The attackers, identified as participants in a pro-Palestinian rally, were prosecuted over the following years, with sentences ranging from probation to seven years in prison. Notably, Mahmoud Musa, one of the assailants, received the longest sentence, with seven years behind bars. However, Borgen dismissed Musa’s courtroom apology as insincere, stating: “If you’re going to go attack me in the street because I’m wearing a yarmulke, shout antisemitic slurs at me, and then after the fact celebrate what you did, I don’t think you’re remorseful.”
Yishai Fleisher: Jewish Comedian WRECKS ENTIRE Army of Israel-haters
Yishai Fleisher News Update: Popular Jewish Comedian Yechiel Jacob’s is taking down dozens of Pro-Palestinian Influencers on Social Media. This is a compilation of some of his best work yet.


Experts Underestimated Israel's Wartime Economic Resilience
Throughout 2024, analysts sounded a steady drumbeat of gloom and doom about Israel's economy. In September, Moody's downgraded Israel's credit rating by two notches.

The pessimists were wrong. The Israeli stock market went up more than 30% in 2024, outperforming the major stock indices.

In 2024, Israel also enjoyed the third-highest level of venture capital investment on a per capita basis, trailing only Singapore and the U.S.

Many analysts had focused on dramatic headlines that portrayed Israel as alone and trapped within a "ring of fire" of hostile neighbors, while ignoring its military prowess, technological capacities, and population's resolve (as Hamas, Hizbullah, and Iran have since learned).

They overlooked evidence of Israel's underlying economic, geopolitical, and demographic advantages.

The U.S., Israel, South Korea, and Taiwan form an elite group of innovation leaders that consistently outperform other developed economies in the percentage of GDP invested in R&D ("innovation input") and U.S. patents issued per capita ("innovation output").

Industry observers have long recognized the unconventional perseverance, creativity, and can-do attitude of Israelis - qualities rooted in Jewish history.
Israel Isn't an "Apartheid State" - and I Should Know
While Israel's critics say it is an apartheid state, as someone born and bred in apartheid South Africa, I may be able to shed some light on the deficiencies of this increasingly pervasive analogy. The reckless invective that labels Israel an "apartheid state" is a grotesque injustice - and an affront to those who suffered the long years of discrimination and persecution in South Africa.

Apartheid in South Africa was not merely racial segregation. It was an elaborate project enforced by an authoritarian regime that relied on an unaccountable security force with sweeping powers, a mostly supportive legislature, and a generally pliant judiciary. South Africa's legal system under apartheid disenfranchised every "non-white" person, and the law discriminated against them in almost every facet of social and economic life.

There is little substance to the comparison of Israel and South Africa. Where is the "institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination" by one race over another, as specified in the Rome Statute? Israeli Arabs are enfranchised, are elected to the Knesset, and serve in the judiciary. They have the freedom to attend any hospital, school, or university. They are not denied access to beaches, cinemas, theaters, libraries, or sporting facilities.

Even Richard Goldstone, the former South African judge who headed the censorious inquiry into Israel's 2009 operation in Gaza, conceded that in Israel "there is no apartheid. Nothing there comes close to the definition of apartheid under the 1998 Rome Statute."
Why Palestinian resistance persists: A deep dive into Hamas’s logic
The logic in warfare strategy is entirely based on game theory- if you want to coerce your enemy into defeat, you exact such a high price from them that you incentivize their capitulation. This logic does not work for Israel when dealing with the Palestinians and Hamas.

There are several reasons for this, but the main one is that Israel and the US (and other international actors), which pressure Israel, create a framework in which the idea of resistance (Muquwamah) for Palestinians continually makes sense. In order for Israel to win, it has to recreate the rules of the conflict where Muquwamah is not worthwhile, does not work in the long term, and therefore does not make sense in the eyes of the Palestinians.

The Palestinian ethos, in its essence, is resistance. The idea formulated in one sentence- Israel is the ultimate cosmic evil, the purveyor of everything that is wrong in the world, and the answer to the question of the meaning of life for a Palestinian is to fight Israel, sacrifice oneself (and one’s family) to cause as much destruction as possible for Israel.

It does not matter if the resistance improves the lives of Palestinians because it is not a constructive ethos that is concerned with building something but rather with the destruction of Israel. If causing harm to Israel also causes harm to one’s society, it is a cherished endeavor. This was reiterated by Hamas leader in a speech given after the ceasefire was announced, “We will proceed on the path of the martyred leaders until we achieve victory or martyrdom, Allah willing”.

The Palestinian ethos rests on Israel and bases its entire identity in opposition to it. In short, the Palestinian ethos needs Israel to exist in order to give it purpose – an object to hate and project all evil unto. The Palestinian cause and its ideology, “Palestinianism,” is to Israel what the Joker is to Batman. If Israel were to disappear tomorrow, the propagators of Palestinianism would not know what to do with themselves, just like the Joker’s existence is predicated on fighting Batman.


Brendan O'Neill: The religious mania of Owen Jones
Jones’s commentary on Gaza has become increasingly lurid. It’s more Dante than Lenin, though without the poetry. He writes of ‘the smell of children’s burning flesh’. In reply to a journalist who demurs from the bourgeois conviction that Israel is the most loathsome state on Earth, he posted a clip of a distraught Palestinian kid and said: ‘I hope this boy’s screams haunt you for the rest of your life.’ The old priests threatened us with the torments of Hell – this new priest threatens us with the perpetual wails of suffering children. Imagine thinking you’re on the side of good even as you marshall images of grief-stricken kids to get one over on a hack you hate.

‘I’m not religious’, Jones said recently, ‘but if I was, these depraved pricks would be haunted by the souls of the slaughtered Palestinians they dehumanised until the end of time’. This isn’t normal, is it? Yes, there has long been a streak of vain and insufferable piety in middle-class leftism. I remember being an angry teen and going on anti-war marches and seeing plummy ladies in cashmere pashminas singing ‘Jerusalem’. Like that was going to help anyone. But Jones’s frenzied religiosity is of a wholly different order. He thirsts for nothing less than moral retribution against those he has judged in his godly wisdom to be ‘depraved’. He wants us tortured for eternity by the howls of the wretched of the Earth.

Like all fundamentalists, he permits not so much as a chink of doubt to meddle with his self-aggrandising doctrines. He told The News Agents that he just knows he is right about Israel and Gaza. And because he is privy to such glorious ‘moral clarity’, this means he has no doubts ‘gnawing at me’. ‘I don’t have any doubts’, he proudly announced. None at all? Having convinced himself that the past 15 months represent a ‘genocide’ and not a war, it has not once crossed his mind that there might be another side to this? Or that it might not be a good thing that the West’s activist classes responded to the worst act of anti-Jewish slaughter since the Holocaust by raging against the state that was its victim? Therein lies the problem: in the absence of doubt, arrogance festers. That Jones has no uncertainties ‘gnawing at him’ is nothing to be proud of – it is confirmation that he has fled the land of reason for the deathless embrace of dogma.

Some call Jones a ‘grifter’. His fervent Israel-bashing is a fame-making, money-raising ruse, they say. I disagree. It seems to me that anti-Israel animus has come to fill a howling void in the lives of many leftists. Perhaps this is true of Jones, too?

Following the demise of Corbynism, the crisis of woke and the working classes’ superb and sensible rejection of this middle-class left that defames them as ‘gammon’, leftists have been on the hunt for a sense of purpose, for some kind of mission. Many have found it in the rage against Israel. The intensity of their abhorrence for Israel is directly proportionate to the collapse of every other political programme they ever subscribed to.

That hatred for Israel has become a political life raft for a lost, defeated left is truly tragic. The consequences have been dire. For in this new religion, Israel plays the role of demon, if not outright devil. Every religion needs fiends against which the righteous might fume, and in this religion the fiend is the Jewish State. Daily we see the activist class rage against Israel as ‘the pigs of the Earth’ and the New Nazis and genocidal maniacs and ‘evil’. You don’t need a PhD in European history to know how potentially reckless it is to damn the world’s only Jewish nation as a frothing well of human wickedness.

In his latest column, Jones says the ‘reckoning’ with Israel’s apologists must come soon because the ‘far right’ is surging and we cannot allow ‘depraved violence [to] become normal’. Far right? I’ll show you the far right, Owen. There they are on those ‘pro-Palestine’ marches calling for the Army of Muhammad to return and finish off the Jews or branding ‘Zionists’ as the Nazi-like controllers of the media and world politics.

The reckoning we really need is with the scum that the left has found itself in witless alliance with since the barbarism of 7 October.


Washington Post Cites Sanctioned Terror Financier Samidoun in Sympathetic Piece Highlighting 'Palestinian Prisoners' Freed in Israel-Hamas Hostage Deal
The Washington Post cited the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, an anti-Semitic organization under U.S. sanctions for providing material support to terrorists, in a sympathetic piece highlighting the "Palestinian prisoners" freed as part of the Israel-Hamas hostage deal.

The Post described Samidoun as an "activist network supporting Palestinian prisoners" and linked to a blog post on the group's website titled, "90 Palestinian prisoners liberated by the Resistance on the first day of the Flood of the Free." The blog included photos from Gaza featuring Hamas flags and photos of the terror group's deceased leader, Yahya Sinwar. It also noted that "90 Palestinian prisoners were liberated from the jails of the Zionist occupation regime in the first day of the Flood of the Free (Toufan al-Ahrar) prisoner exchange, achieved by the Palestinian Resistance as part of the first stage of the ceasefire agreement imposed by the occupier."

The Post did not note that the U.S. Department of Treasury slapped sanctions on Samidoun just months ago for providing material support to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a terrorist organization that participated in Hamas's Oct. 7 terror attack. It did, however, cite Samidoun to assert that the freed "Palestinian prisoners" include "journalists, activists, teachers, students, and close relatives of high-profile Hamas figures."

The Post went on to highlight a number of the released "prisoners," including one member of the PFLP, which the outlet described as "a small leftist armed group." In another case, the Post described Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a terror organization that is holding Israeli hostage Arbel Yehoud, a female civilian, as a "militant group."

The piece reflects the extreme anti-Israel bias seen at the Post in the wake of Oct. 7. As of last summer, at least six members of the Post's foreign desk previously wrote for Al Jazeera, the Doha-based news outlet bankrolled in part by Qatar's Hamas-friendly government, the Washington Free Beacon reported.

The Department of Treasury, in a joint action with Canada's government, announced its Samidoun sanctions in October, describing the group as "a sham charity that serves as an international fundraiser for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist organization." The punitive measures bar U.S. citizens from doing business with Samidoun, and the group must forfeit any properties held in the country.

The Post's decision to cite Samidoun in the wake of those sanctions aligns the outlet with some of the country's most extreme anti-Israel student groups.


Anti-Israel Politics Trump Academic Freedom Under AAUP Professor Association’s New President
Wolfson won the election for the group’s national president in a landslide last June. Professor, union activist, and a founding member of the Rutgers chapter of Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP), he was the perfect candidate to lead today’s AAUP in the direction it was already going: hard left and anti-Israel.

Established in 1915 to guard academic freedom and tenure, the AAUP is now for all practical purposes a progressive labor union. In 2022, the national AAUP joined the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Many of its local university chapters, including the Rutgers AAUP, are also affiliated with the AFT.

It’s part of a national trend we observed here, where university faculty and graduate student groups affiliate with broad-based national labor unions, frequently radical groups known for their anti-Israel activism. Prof. Jacobson has warned that these new alliances raise concerns of a renewed BDS effort on college campuses. That’s exactly what happened at the AAUP. The faculty group began walking back its longstanding opposition to the BDS movement in 2018 and 2022—the year it combined collective bargaining forces with the AFT.

Last February 2024, the AAUP took a major stand against the Jewish state when it voted to join with a group of national labor unions calling for an immediate ceasefire in “Israel and Palestine.”

The ceasefire vote was a departure from the group’s time-honored nonpartisanship. Prof. Cary Nelson, AAUP president from 2006 to 2012, said the AAUP had been “slowly transforming itself into an anti-Zionist organization since 2015.” But its call for a ceasefire in Gaza marked the first time the AAUP had “actually abandoned its commitment to political neutrality and adopted what amounts to a foreign policy.”

The anti-Zionist transformation of the AAUP is only accelerating under Wolfson, who told Inside Higher Ed he wants to make the scholarly group a “fighting organization.” The recent Rutgers faculty union vote to divest from the “genocide in Gaza” and cut ties with Tel Aviv University was an early win in that fighting. But it’s just one of “many fights ahead,” Wolfson wrote in a letter with Bryan Sacks of the Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union, announcing the December victory. They signed off in solidarity, “Together we fight, together we win!”

The problem is, engaging in anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian activism undermines the group’s mission. As Nelson argues, “You can’t defend neutral principles and academic freedom at the same time that you take contested political positions.” He believes Wolfson and the current leadership are going to “kill off the AAUP.”




MSNBC Pundit Compares ICE Deportations—Supported By Most Americans—To ‘Gestapo Raids’
MSNBC pundit Anand Giridharadas on Tuesday compared Immigrant and Customs Enforcement’s deportations to "Gestapo raids," though polls have repeatedly shown that most Americans support the agency's efforts.

"When you start having Gestapo raids in America, and we start becoming a country where, as in East Germany, a knock on the door is the thing people are thinking about instead of the brilliant idea they want to go create, then we are moving very, very far from the president worrying about what regular people need," Giridharadas said on Morning Joe. "He is distracting people with this flurry of activity. But none of this, none of these images you’re seeing, are going to make your life better."

Yet several surveys have shown a majority of Americans support what Giridharadas called a distraction. CNN data reporter Henry Enten on Wednesday highlighted New York Times, ABC News, CBS News, and Marquette Law School polls showing as much. In the case of Marquette, 64 percent said they somewhat or strongly favor "deporting immigrants who are living in the United States illegally back to their home countries."

"So what you’re seeing, essentially, here is a very clear indication that a majority of Americans … do, in fact, want to deport all immigrants who are here illegally," Enten said.

"People want less people coming into the country," CNN News Central host Kate Bolduan said.

"Exactly," Enten responded.


Holocaust distortion more dangerous than outright denial, warns departing IHRA chief
As the world marked 80 years on Monday since the liberation of Auschwitz, one of Germany’s most prominent Holocaust scholars said twisting the facts about the Nazi extermination of six million Jews is far more harmful than outright denial — and that such distortion is “a stepping stone from antisemitism into the mainstream.”

Kathrin Meyer, secretary-general of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, or IHRA, said she considers Holocaust distortion particularly dangerous, especially as the number of survivors dwindles with each passing year. This week, when the world focuses on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, only 50 survivors took part in ceremonies at the Nazi death camp in Poland – down from 300 just five years ago.

“Obviously, it’s an insult to the victims, but it’s also a threat to our democracy because you will not find a single radical, anti-democratic, nationalistic, imperialistic group ideology that does not have a distorted view of the Holocaust,” Meyer said about distortions that are often disguised as differing opinions rather than outright lies.

Tracking Holocaust denial and distortion is part of its wider mandate to address “contemporary challenges related to the Holocaust and genocide of the Roma people,” according to its website.

One example Meyer offered is that of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s constant vilification of neighboring Ukraine as a “Nazi government” despite the fact that Ukraine’s Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelensky, was democratically elected.

“It’s always those who attack freedom, liberal views, diversity and pluralistic societies,” said Meyer, who is stepping down from her position after two decades. “They use Holocaust distortion for their political gain.”


Brains behind HMD boycott is ally of Iran regime’s street thugs
The head of the Muslim group promoting a boycott of Holocaust Memorial Day has a history of working with the Iranian regime’s street thugs, the JC can reveal.

Massoud Shadjareh is the chair of the London-based Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC), which won consultative status at the United Nations in 2007 and has an office at the European Union’s headquarters in Brussels.

But the pro-regime firebrand has spoken at numerous events in Iran organised by the Basij Resistance Force, a paramilitary group established by Ayatollah Khomeini that is sanctioned by the UK.

Iran-born Shadjareh – who blamed “Zionist financiers abroad” for the far-right riots last summer – has also backed the October 7 terror attacks and reaffirmed his support for the 1989 fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie a year after the celebrated British author was stabbed in the eye by a Shia extremist.

The Basij, a branch of the brutal Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) – which is also sanctioned by the UK – is notorious for enforcing the regime’s ideology on university campuses and contributing to Iran’s military research, including its nuclear and missile programmes.

In 2008, the Basij’s wing at the University of Tehran put out a call for suicide attackers against Israel and some 7,000 people registered their interest.

At one November 2023 event organised by the IRGC’s Student Basij Organisation in Tehran, Shadjareh appeared on a panel titled “Message of the resistance”.

He spoke alongside Mohammad Sadegh Shahbazi, a senior Basij figure, and Mohammad Sadegh Kowshaki, a founding member of the Ansar-e Hezbollah militia – a vigilante group composed of ex-members of the IRGC and Basij that has launched acid attacks on women for “bad hijab”.

The Wembley-based IHRC recently urged councils to boycott Holocaust Memorial Day, criticising its organiser, the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, for “refusing to include Gaza” on its list of genocides.


Holocaust selfies ring hollow as antisemitism rages in Toronto
While Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and prime minister hopeful Chrystia Freeland do Holocaust selfies, antisemitism is raging in Canada.

While Trudeau takes pictures with Holocaust survivors and Freeland posts a previous picture of her at a Holocaust museum in Israel, you still have on the streets of Toronto people being spit on for being pro-Israel or Jewish.

And a lot of other things.

Politicians do Holocaust photo ops better than they do stopping antisemitism. Spend one day in Toronto and that reality will be on full display. It was Saturday night outside the Eaton Centre, across from Sankofa Square (formerly Yonge-Dundas Square), when independent journalist and lawyer Caryma Sa’d’s photographer was capturing on camera a demonstration.

While we cannot be sure what motivated the woman, the video shows a woman wearing a keffiyeh coming into the shot, saying “oh, this guy again. F— you. F—-n trash. F—-n Zionist little pig.” She can then be seen walking toward him and spitting on him before disappearing inside the shopping mall.

“We have been spat on a few times,” said Sa’d.

In her photographer’s case, she alleges, people have tried to assault him with a goal to try to reveal his name. Other than him being Jewish, in the interest of his own safety, he tries to separate his public media work from his private life. Many of the pro-Hamas crowd who demonstrate every week and harass him are not Palestinian but are part of leftist organizations whose funding is as murky as the people in masks who cause the mayhem.

But the woman in this incident was not wearing a mask. People should be able to tell police who she is. Many in the pro-Hamas crowds have done things like this and usually get away with it, while police often focus more on elderly Jewish men wearing Jewish Defence League sweatshirts.


GMB issues apology after failing to mention Jews in Holocaust Memorial coverage
ITV’s Good Morning Britain has issued an apology after acknowledging that its Holocaust Memorial Day coverage on Monday failed to properly address the genocide of Jewish people.

During yesterday’s coverage Ranvir Singh discussed the millions who died in concentration camps during World War II, saying that “Six million people were killed in concentration camps during the Second World War, as well as millions of others because they were Polish, disabled, gay, or belonged to another ethnic group.”

The word "Jewish" was not mentioned until over two minutes into the segment, and only in reference to a group of history students visiting Krakow's Jewish quarter.

A news anchor from GMB addressed viewers this morning, saying “In yesterday’s news, it was reported that six million people were killed in the Holocaust, but we failed to mention that those six million were predominantly Jewish. That was our mistake, and we apologise.”

Critics were quick to point out the omission, highlighting that the focus on Jewish victims was delayed and downplayed.

The journalist Nicole Lampert, criticising the coverage, wrote on social media: “The whole thing is so strange and shows why for many Jewish people, the pain of Holocaust Memorial Day is compounded by the way it’s used to trivialise Jewish suffering or even attack us.”

North West Friends of Israel said: “GMB you are are missing ONE word... JEWS! Six million JEWS! This is disgraceful.”

The segment also failed to mention antisemitism, prompting further backlash.

Campaign Against Antisemitism stated: “There is bafflingly no mention of the word ‘antisemitism’ whatsoever. If this was meant to pay respect to Holocaust victims, it has utterly missed the mark and ignored the true nature of this horrific event.”

A spokesperson from the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust told the JC: “We are deeply disappointed and saddened by Good Morning Britain’s omission of the word ‘Jews’ in their live coverage of Holocaust Memorial Day. This oversight undermines the core historical truth of the Holocaust – the systematic murder of six million Jewish men, women, and children.


The lessons of Auschwitz are being lost, Ron Lauder warns world
Kings, presidents and the heads of state of 54 nations sat in silence under an enormous tent erected over the infamous watchtower-entrance that, 80 years ago, loomed over the largest mass-slaughter of human beings in history.

They listened to the harrowing testimonies of four Auschwitz-Birkenau survivors – the youngest 86; the oldest 99 – who shared their horrifying memories from the site on which they now stood.

Tova Friedman, who was five when she arrived at the camp, said her memories were “so vivid” that she could easily recall “the cries of desperate women” being separated from their babies, “the terrible stink” that rose from the chimneys and the sight of shoeless children being led through the snow.

Five years ago, at the 75th commemoration ceremony marking the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, there were around 200 survivors. At Monday’s ceremony, five years later, there were 50.

Sitting at the front, the survivors defiantly donned blue and white striped scarves, echoing the camp uniform many were forced to wear. One survivor wore his original tattered cap.

Ronald Lauder, president of World Jewish Congress, has been involved with Auschwitz-Birkenau for more than 50 years, having been at the forefront of efforts to maintain the site for educational purposes since first visiting it for the 25th anniversary in 1970.

Looking frail as he walked up to the podium, he acknowledged that the ceremony may also be his last.

In an impassioned speech, with his loud, deep voice reverberating to the back of the tent, he issued a warning to world leaders that the world “is again in crisis”.

“Today, I cannot stand here and look at these survivors and say that ‘everything is okay’, as I have in the past, because everything is not okay,” he said.

“Jews are the canary in the coalmine. When the canary dies, miners know they have to get out of that mine as fast as possible. That canary died 15 months ago on October 7. It was the most consequential warning for the entire world.”


Tearful King Charles becomes first UK monarch to visit Auschwitz
King Charles has been moved to tears after becoming the first British monarch to visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration camp in Poland.

Laying a wreath inside the site the King was visibly moved with aides saying he was determining to see the reality of what went on there with his own eyes.

Taken to Block 5, accompanied by an exprienced guide, Charles saw the piles of shoes exhibited in a stark reminder of the industrialsed murder of Jews, and other enemies of the Nazis.

Those closest to the King told the BBC his visit to the camp on Monday evening was a “deeply personal pilgramage” for the monarch and something he found “poignant and profound.”

It was when he arrived at Block 11 that the King’s emotions were at their most visible.

He layed a wreath at the death wall where those condemned were executed.

“The King’s face was etched with pain of what had happened here,” reported BBC News at Ten, who were allowed to film the visit.

“As he walked away he stopped to look back tearful and reflective,” added reporter Daniela Relph.

“Like so many who have visited its impact stays with you.”




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