Her questions were designed to embarrass the witnesses, but a lot of the problem was that they were speaking past each other. While her questions were incredibly disrespectful, I will attempt to answer them as respectfully as I can.
Here are the most contentious parts of the exchanges with my notes:
Carrie Prejean Boller: Thank you. Mr. Frankel, this is for you. You had very painful experiences at UCLA and I take it seriously. And at the same time, the students who I talked to in those encampments, they're protesting the tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and university ties to that war. So I need to ask you: In a country built on religious liberty and the First Amendment, do you believe someone can stand firmly against anti-Semitism—including what you experienced—and at the same time condemn the mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza, or reject political Zionism and not support the state of Israel? Or do you believe that speaking out about what many Americans view as genocide in Gaza should be treated as anti-Semitic? Because in my view, the United States cannot and must not make loyalty to a particular theology about Israel a litmus test for protected speech or moral legitimacy.
Boller is purposefully (and consistently, as we will see) conflating criticism of Israel with anti-Zionism. The witness, Yitzchok Frankel, answered that there is no problem with allowing free speech on campus, and the problem with the encampments was that they violated other university policies like prohibitions against masks, against stopping free passage by students, against amplified sounds that disrupt student life.
Carrie Prejean Boller: I'm grateful that we're having this discussion because I think it's a topic that's affecting so many Americans. Rabbi Shapiro is based in New York, I invited him here today, but he's not here today. He says, I would love your opinion on this:
"American Jews are increasingly treated as less fully American, and belonging made conditional because Zionist claims nation state of Jewish state everywhere and tied to it. He says this framing is anti-Semitic at its core, recasts us as foreigners in our own country and arms anti-Semites with divided loyalties and collective guilt for actions we neither control nor condone. No other foreign country does this, no other sovereign states claims to protect a worldwide group defined by heritage and Jews alone bear this unjust burden, that must be opposed firmly. The remedy is clear, civic education that teaches un-American belonging, citizenship alone not through ethnicity, we're Americans full stop and reject any doctrine that treats us otherwise."
Would you say that statement is anti-Semitic?
She is quoting a Satmar rabbi who has practically no following of his own but lots of antisemites love him.
This quote exposes a double standard for Jews in the US. It blames US antisemitism on Israel's policies, which is itself antisemitic. It justifies antisemitism as a reasonable reaction to a false claim of dual loyalty, which is antisemitic. It implies that Jews who are Zionists are un-American, which is antisemitic. The double standard is that Shapiro as well as Boller are saying that Americans who hold political opinions against Israel are simply exercising free speech, but Americans who hold pro-Israel opinions are illegitimate and responsible for attacks on Jews. That double standard is indeed antisemitic, since it does not apply to any other Americans.
Carrie Prejean Boller: To be clear is anti-Zionism anti-Semitism?Rabbi Ari Berman, president of Yeshiva University: I would love to speak to that. Undoubtedly anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. One does not have to support the specific policies of the government of Israel, but to not support the right of Israel to exist, which is what anti-Zionists do, while not taking that same stance to the 28 Muslim countries and 13 Christian countries in this world, is a double standard, is hypocrisy and it's absolutely anti-Semitism.Boller: I think it's also important that we not make Islamophobic remarks while we're here today. I would appreciate that.Berman: I would say God forbid with anything like that. [If] the Jewish people are the only people that you deny the right to have its own state, that is absolutely a double standard hypocrisy and anti-Semitism.
While I am trying to show respect for Boller's position by answering her questions without rancor, but this is pure hypocrisy. She is saying, repeatedly, that opposing a Jewish state is not antisemitic but using the exact same logic that she espouses for Muslim states would be Islamophobic.
Carrie Prejean Boller: Well, as you know, I'm a Catholic, I'm a Catholic and Catholics do not embrace Zionism, as you know. Are all Catholics anti-Semites?
Here she is again conflating non-Zionism with anti-Zionism. The definition of anti-Zionism has been given - saying that Israel does not have the right to exist as a Jewish state. She ignores that and then claims that the definition includes not supporting Zionism as an ideology, which is not the same as anti-Zionism. And she appears to know that.
Berman: What I'm saying is, if somebody states they're an anti-Zionist, they are saying about themselves, that they have a double standard and hypocrisy and they're taking anti-Semitic positions.Boller: I don't agree with that. As a Catholic, I don't agree the new modern state of Israel has any biblical prophecy meaning at all. So that's my stance and I am Catholic.
Again, saying that Israel is not the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy is not the same thing as anti-Zionism. Not even close.
Her positioning herself as a representative of all of Catholicism is a bit absurd.
Later, in a followup question to Shabbos Kestenbaum:
Boller: Since we've mentioned Israel a total of 17 times, are you willing o condemn what Israel has done in Gaza?
Kestenbaum had not spoken about Israel, so to demand a purity test from him because he is a Jew is pretty much antisemitism.
Boller: As a pastor, are you worried or concerned at all that certain parts of the Bible, particularly the New Testament, would be considered antisemitic, specifically in referring to the killing and crucifixion of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ?...That would be considered antisemitic under the IHRA, are you aware of that?
This is simply not true. The IHRA definition does not list merely reciting or discussing the New Testament accounts of the crucifixion, or stating the historical Christian claim in a religious/theological context (without targeting contemporary Jews), as antisemitic. It focuses on manifestations that express hatred toward Jews as such, specifically saying it is antisemitic to refer to the charge of deicide or the blood libel to characterize Israel or Israelis today.
Boller also defended Candace Owens, saying "I listen to her daily. I haven’t heard one thing out of her mouth that I would say is antisemitic."
Here's only a small portion of what the ADL has documented about Owens:
Owens also claimed that Judaism was a “pedophile-centric religion that believes in demons...[and] child sacrifice ...” She added that she is “waking people up to the fact that pedophiles are in power.”Owens also said Sigmund Freud used psychoanalysis to tell women (presumably female Jewish patients) who revealed that they were raped as children that it was just an attraction to their father. “No, they were being raped when they were seven years old because that’s what you do when you worship the Kabbalah,” she said.She then argued that people who questioned information about Kabbalists (presumably Jews) were silenced and labeled insane and insinuated that some were even killed. “They’ve realized the voices that cannot be controlled have to be shut up.”
Owens also promoted the “blood libel” conspiracy, the false charge that Jews used the blood of Christian children for ritual purposes, which in past centuries led to Jews’ being violently attacked. She claimed that the family of Leo Frank (a Jewish man lynched in 1913 by a mob in Georgia after being wrongfully accused of murdering a young girl who worked at his factory) believed in pedophilia and incest “as the sacramental rites and they would commit these acts, things that would normally be termed blood libel were actually happening.”
This is not including her recommendations of antisemitic texts mistranslating the Talmud, "liking" posts accusing Jews of drinking Christian blood, casting doubt on the experiments Josef Mengele did to Jews in Nazi Germany as "bizarre propaganda."
Why would a person who defends these sorts of statements be on a religious liberty commission in the first place?
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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