Showing posts with label ADL. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ADL. Show all posts

Friday, December 30, 2022

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The religious culture war comes to Israel
Far from creating a liberal, tolerant society, progressive ideologies are profoundly illiberal and coercive. Far from producing the brotherhood of mankind, left-wing universalism sets group against group in a battle for power over each other.

A constitutional monarchy, such as exists in Britain, promotes unity because it exists above politics and therefore above division. This was the great insight of King David, who unified the tribes of ancient Israel to form a coherent nation and whose limited monarchy was the inspiration and template for the British Crown.

King Charles’s patent desire to bring the British people together has transformed him from a figure widely disparaged and distrusted as cold and remote into a person viewed affectionately as the benign and genial grandfather of the nation.

The State of Israel, of course, doesn’t have a monarchy. Nor does America, which is being pulled apart over these cultural issues.

For all the unifying strength of the monarchy he represents, however, King Charles is actually in a lonely and perilous position. For the prevailing culture in Britain is actively undermining the religious continuity he realizes is essential.

No political party in Britain is prepared to face down and defeat the culture warriors writing women and conservatives out of the public sphere. No party is prepared to stop children being taught the lie that Britain and the West were born in the original sins of colonialism and oppression. No party is prepared to conserve and defend the classical liberal settlement underpinning freedom, tolerance and democracy. And no party is prepared to challenge radical, pagan environmentalism—to which the King, with his belief in the spiritual unity of all creation, is unfortunately also deeply attached.

In America, the parallel collapse of conservatives’ understanding of what was at risk and needed to be defended led to the implosion of the Republican Party and the rise to power in 2016 of Donald Trump as the only way to defeat the cultural predations of the left.

In Israel, the collapse of the moderate, religious Yamina Party meant that those who believe the combination of Jewish religious integrity with a modern economy, scientific advancement and the duties of citizenship is crucial to Israel’s identity and survival were left with no political representation.

They have been presented instead with a stark choice between religious zealots in one camp and left-wingers in the other screaming about the end of democracy while urging insurrection against an elected democratic government—and with Netanyahu holding the line against the extremism on either side.

Considering the way Netanyahu has been characterized as beyond the pale, this is indeed an irony. He and King Charles, it turns out, have something rather crucial in common.
David Collier: How the Twittersphere spreads antisemitism
We all know that Jew-hate spreads in the Twittersphere, but nobody touches on how much of it is there. Nor do people draw comparisons between the level of ‘anti’ activity, and the level of ‘pro’ that seeks to answer it.

As a quintessential minority group, Jews are drowned out on social media, and because these platforms operate on algorithms that reward ‘popularity’, Jewish people are on a loser from the start. Networks of hate even gang up to have Jews removed from the platform.

‘Zioporn’ addicts. Thousands of accounts in the Twittersphere that indulge their ‘kink’ by watching, liking, or sharing, either fake or butchered images that demonise Israel or Israelis. The more gruesome the image, the better the high. Authenticity is irrelevant. The ‘happy ending’ normally involves a tweeted utterance of disgust or outrage directed towards the state of Israel, or those that support it.

In a world which contains brutal regimes that slaughter millions, this tweet (posted 28/12 at 2:28am) suggests Israel is the ‘most despicable’ nation on earth:

A Twittersphere snapshot
I wanted a snapshot. Analysing a period on Twitter and then quantifying the output that was found. Such an exercise would also allow me to draw a comparison with the way other nations are treated on social media – showing just how exceptional (and therefore antisemitic) the anti-Israel rhetoric is.

I took a 36-hour period, from midnight on the 28 Dec, to noon on the 29th. Only two search terms were used. As nobody has any interest in a troll spamming his way to 100 dormant anti-Israel tweets a day, I set a bar for a minimum number of retweets. This ensured that only the hate that travelled was tallied.
Facts most Arabs and a hostile world would rather not admit
I was complimented some time ago by a reader of one of my earlier published articles, titled, Lies, Myths and Obama, which dealt – as many of them do – with the history of Israel and its enemies: Biblical and post-Biblical.

I had included in the article the following sentence: “Only one people has ever made Jerusalem its capital and only one people ever established their ancestral and Biblical homeland between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea: the Jews.”

I had also added that: “the Jews were the indigenous inhabitants of the Land for millennia long before the Muslim religion was created.”

The reader, nevertheless, had correctly pointed out that most people, because they have been exposed for so long to anti-Israel Arab propaganda, believe that there has not been a continuous Jewish presence in the Land during the last 2,000 years. They are thus unaware that the territory was never Judenrein (that is empty of a Jewish presence). And most Arabs and a hate filled world would rather you forget also that Jews lived for millennia in Mesopotamia or what became later known as British created Iraq.

Indeed, Jews had resided for nearly 3,000 years in that territory from the Babylonian Captivity in 586 BCE onwards. It was when Israel was reborn in 1948 that the Iraqi Arabs drove the Jews from their ancient homes, turning them into penniless refugees who found sanctuary in Israel; an impoverished country barely able to support them at the time.

More Jewish refugees were created than Arab refugees as one Arab state after another in the Middle East and North Africa drove out their Jewish populations. A monumental crime, which hardly is ever recognized.

Arabs and their anti-Israel supporters try to convince the world that the Jews just appeared in the early 20th century after being dispersed for two thousand years from their Biblical homeland. That is a flat out lie and flies in the face of recorded history. Indeed the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians do not even acknowledge ancient Biblical Jewish history ever existed. But facts never seem to matter to Arabs and pro-Arabs. So this brief history lesson will be for them an inconvenient truth.

Let me start by quoting from an article written in The Weekly Standard, May 11, 1998 by Charles Krauthammer:

"Israel is the very embodiment of Jewish continuity: It is the only nation on earth that inhabits the same land, bears the same name, speaks the same language, and worships the same God that it did 3,500 years ago. You dig the soil and you find pottery from Davidic times, coins from Bar Kokhba, and 2,000-year-old scrolls written in a script remarkably like the one today advertising ice cream at an Israeli corner candy store."

Wednesday, December 21, 2022

From Ian:

JPost Editorial: Contemporary antisemitism should be taught in schools
While Mann commended the “great strides” made in promoting greater awareness of genocide, he said antisemitism “can take many forms” and “it is not enough to teach about the Holocaust.”

As Klein pointed out, Mann’s latest recommendations follow significant progress that has been said to have been made in recent years in combating antisemitism in the UK and worldwide, resulting from two landmark reports published by the UK All-Party Parliamentary Group against Antisemitism in 2006 and 2015.

One reason for the new report, supported by valued input from stakeholders across the country, was to identify what more needs to be done.

“If this scale of incidence among young people is not tackled, then we are storing up potentially serious problems for the future as well as for the present,” Mann wrote.

Among the recommendations made by Mann is that school leadership teams should be offered guidance from the government on how to deal with incidents of antisemitic hate. This should include how to report incidents that did not happen at school but involved either the targeting of students or students as perpetrators.

A British government spokesperson said in response to the report: “Antisemitism, as with all forms of bullying and hatred, is abhorrent and has no place in our education system. The atrocities of the Holocaust are a compulsory part of national curriculum for history at key stage 3, and we support schools to construct a curriculum that enables the discussion of important issues such as antisemitism.”

We believe Mann’s findings and recommendations should be taken seriously, not just by the British government but by other governments in Europe and around the world.

It is one thing to teach about the Holocaust in schools; it’s quite another to educate students against hatred of all forms, including antisemitism.

As Mann so elegantly put it, the UK government and others should “act on my new calls for action before this form of racism poisons the minds of many more young people.”


Black America’s Anti-Semitism Problem
The effect was most pronounced among young blacks and Hispanics. Both groups were 16 percentage points more likely to agree than whites in their age group. Anti-Semitism was particularly common among young blacks and Hispanics who called themselves "conservative." But that was a small group, and anti-Semitism was more common even among liberal blacks compared with liberal whites. Black and Hispanic young adults, in fact, were about as likely to agree with at least one of the statements as were white "alt-right" identifiers in the same age group.

Hispanics are often lumped with whites in hate crime data, so it is difficult to trace precisely the implications of this prejudice among Hispanics, which is an under-discussed and undercovered aspect of the story.

Hersh and Royden's survey also allowed them to examine several theories of the causes of anti-Semitism. One was "minority group competition": the idea that fighting over scarce resources like housing provokes anti-Semitism. Another was the idea that anti-Semitism is a manifestation of anti-whiteness: As James Baldwin put it, "Negroes are anti-Semitic because they're anti-white." A third, opposite possibility was the idea that people disliked Jews because they dislike Israel and because they supported the Palestinians. And fourth is that demographic or behavioral differences—for example, that minority groups are less well-educated or more likely to go to church—explains the variation.

None of these explanations stood up to scrutiny.

Take group differences. Hersh and Royden statistically controlled for both church and college attendance. While each mattered for whether or not someone held anti-Semitic beliefs, holding them constant blacks are still much more likely than whites to have anti-Semitic views. The authors also compare respondents in states with and without a lot of Jewish people (doable because most Jews live in just a few states). Again, race still predicts anti-Semitic views, meaning that proximity to Jews—"minority group competition"—doesn't explain the difference.

Similarly, Hersh and Royden argue that black anti-Semitism is more than just anti-white bias. That's because they measure views, like whether Jews are more loyal to Israel than America, that only apply to Jews, not whites. They also rule out the idea that anti-Semitism is just a function of pro-Palestinian views: Remarkably, blacks and Hispanics were more favorable toward Israel than whites across three separate measures.

To supplement this, Hersh and Royden asked respondents who said they believed Jews had too much power in which domains they had such power. Very few respondents—7 percent of blacks/Hispanics and 9 percent of whites—selected only Israel and Palestine. Instead, these respondents said Jews had too much power in areas like news media, finance, and entertainment. This suggests that anti-Semitic bias is not driven by anti-Israel views.

Having ruled out these popular explanations, Hersh and Royden are left only to speculate on the causes of black anti-Semitism. They point to the rising salience of victimhood in American culture, arguing that it may either make people more prone to embracing conspiracy theories or provoke competition over "victim" status. It is also possible, of course, that anti-Semitic views are just a product of prejudice—no need for further explanation.

What is apparent is that the views propounded by individuals like West and Irving are not unusual, particularly among black Americans. Unlike other forms of prejudice, Hersh and Royden observe, anti-Semitism is not fading among younger Americans: At least among minorities, the oldest hatred isn't going away any time soon.


Jonathan Tobin: Jews don’t need another left-wing advocacy group
The federations, whose purpose is to represent and raise funds from the entire Jewish community, were used to the JCPA acting like a Democratic Party auxiliary operation. But the latter’s behavior could be justified as the product of a consensus among the majority of Jews who are politically liberal and vote for the Democrats.

But its endorsement in 2020 of BLM was a bridge too far for many in the mainstream Jewish world. For Jewish federations—led for the most part by liberal professionals and donors—to be tied to a group linked to radical anti-Israel and antisemitic advocacy was intolerable, although in the midst of the moral panic set off by the death of George Floyd, many acquiesced. But it created a rift that caused JCPA activists to want to liberate themselves from even the minimal restraints that the connection to the federations brought.

Were this merely a matter of a tiff between Jewish Democrats and Republicans or generic liberals and conservatives, it wouldn’t warrant much attention. But the road that the new JCPA and a lot of its competition are taking—by adopting the catechisms of BLM and DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion)—is particularly noteworthy and dangerous.

Indeed, the JCPA is siding with forces that are driving left-wing antisemitism and Jew-hatred in the African-American community—highlighted by recent incidents involving celebrities like Kanye West and the epidemic of black attacks on Orthodox Jews in New York City.

Rather than an invigorated Jewish leadership, the new JCPA is additional evidence of the catastrophic and disgraceful failure of the existing liberal establishment. It’s not only a waste of scarce Jewish resources; it also reveals the intellectual bankruptcy of liberals who claim to speak for Jews but are actually working against Jewish interests and security. Redundancy and waste are bad enough. But the current situation is a moral calamity.
Why the ADL abandoned Antisemitism and went woke
The ADL’s education curriculum had started out teaching tolerance, but now teaches intolerance, and advocates partisan politics. Despite the organization’s origins, its handbook is notable for mentioning Jewish people only three times, once in the ADL’s background and twice in its definition of antisemitism.

But the ADL is not a Jewish organization anymore. It’s a generically lucrative leftist group which provides bias insurance to schools while joining in leftist attacks on conservatives.

A few years after Greenblatt came on board, the ADL announced a new program together with eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar: one of the leading funders of the anti-Israel Left. ADL Senior VP Eileen Hershenov was the former general counsel for Soros’ Open Society octopus.

“Kudos to my former boss, George Soros,” she gushed.

Hershenov oversees the ADL’s partnership with the Aspen Institute, funded by Soros. The joint ADL-Aspen program’s civil society fellows included the founding Co-Director of the Open Society Foundation’s Economic Justice Program.

Small wonder that Greenblatt attacks any critics of Soros and the ADL, formerly critical of the Nazi collaborating billionaire, now has a page dedicated to defending the antisemitic leftist.

The ADL’s funders and partners list increasingly resembles those of most leftist activist groups with $1 million from Craigslist’s Craig Newmark, the Rockefellers, the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation. There’s nothing Jewish here.

As an organization, the ADL doesn’t belong in Jewish circles, and its educational curriculum doesn’t belong in any schools.

Monday, December 12, 2022

From Ian:

PMW: Teaching Terror to Tots - reevaluating the Oslo Accords
Many observers have been puzzled why the 1993 Oslo peace accords did not lead to peace but precisely the opposite. Sporadic Palestinian terror attacks prior to 1993 were replaced by repeated Palestinian terror waves murdering more than 2,000 Israelis. PMW’s report "Teaching Terror to Tots” is the key to understanding the post-Oslo terror enigma.

Palestinian Media Watch as been documenting official PA/Fatah ideologies, policies and messages disseminated through every framework they control for over 20 years and everything that PMW has exposed has raised questions about the sincerity of the PA/Fatah in the peace process. PMW recently published a report on Fatah’s Waed magazine for children ages 6 – 15, covering every issue published over the last eight years. The messages for Palestinian children spread through Waed confirm that the PA/Fatah end game was, and remains, Israel’s destruction and Israel’s replacement by “Palestine”.

The hundreds of examples in the 70 page report show that through Waed, Fatah – that has dominated and controlled the PA since its creation – has been teaching Palestinian children that:
“From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free” after “the Zionist invaders will go to the garbage can of history” because “the period of Zionism will eventually pass.” As a last step all “the Jewish settlers in Palestine will disappear.”

Israel must be destroyed because Jews/Israelis are:
“Zionist thieves who stole our land”… “Jewish invaders”… “foreigners from all ends of the earth who did not know Palestine and did not live in it – neither them nor their forefathers.”

Since Jews have no rights, Palestinians have the “right to wage an armed struggle to take back its stolen homeland.” This is the only PA/Fatah path, because “the liberation of Palestine will only be achieved through armed struggle.”


In short, the PA/Fatah’s message to children is that Israel was created by theft, its continued existence is a crime, and its destruction via the armed struggle is justified and inevitable. The children who read Waed are taught that they have the responsibility to bring about the future world without Israel.

The PA/Fatah education that is documented in the report is the driving force behind the current Palestinian terror wave that is led by Palestinian youth who have been raised on these hate messages. If no action is taken to combat the PA/Fatah education to hate and terror, it will continue to be the driving force for Palestinian violence for generations.

PMW’s exposure of the PA/Fatah messages through Waed should have far-reaching political implications. Attitudes towards the Oslo Accords and policy towards the PA must be reassessed based on the reality of what the PA is and not the illusion of what the international community imagined it would be. If Palestinian terror is to be stopped and stability returned to Israel, the newly exposed PA/Fatah teachings must be the impetus for a new attitude towards the PA.

PMW is releasing this report at the GPO’s Christian Media Conference in Jerusalem.

To read PMW's "Teaching Terror to Tots" click here.

The following is an Executive Summary of "Teaching Terror to Tots":
Khaled Abu Toameh: The Apartheid Libel to Destroy Israel
Recently... however, with the UNHRC's persistent allegations that Israel is an apartheid state, that label is being pushed even further in an apparent effort to make it stick. The complicity of recent reports from NGOs such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch appear to be trying to ensure that their libel will be complete.

The campaign emboldens the radicals among the Palestinians, including the Iranian-backed Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), whose declared goal is to eliminate Israel and replace it with an Islamist state.

Terrorist groups such as Hamas and PIJ are undoubtedly happy to see non-Arabs and non-Muslims -- and even ostensible human rights organizations -- join their effort to falsely depict Israel as an apartheid state.

Former UNHRC chief Navi Pillay, despite extensive evidence of massive anti-Israel bias, was recently appointed to chair the UNHRC's first and only open-ended Commission of Inquiry.

Basically, [the New York Times] is saying that although the two countries cannot be equated, the comparison is being forced and twisted into place for the sake of furthering an alternate agenda which has little to do with the facts on the ground.

Israel's founding charter pledges to safeguard the equal rights of all residents: "... It will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations."

Among many of South Africa's Apartheid laws, the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act effectively stripped all Blacks of their South African citizenship and of the right to vote.

Israeli Arabs, however, have full citizenship, including the right to vote and to public demonstration. They are represented in all levels of government, including positions as members of Knesset (parliament), in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and as Supreme Court justices. Israeli Arabs hold positions as high-ranking officers in the Israel Defense Forces, including that of major-general in the Central Command.


David Collier: An open letter to Gary Lineker
Last week a Palestinian tried to attacked Israelis in the car. He then stabbed a nearby border guard in the face. When he lost a struggle to steal a weapon he was shot and killed. A UN spokesperson reduced it to a ‘scuffle’. This vile rewriting of history was then repeated in the Guardian newspaper.

There is no correlation remaining whatsoever between the event (the terror attack) and the way it was reported (an innocent man was shot). It is the lie that goes viral. Raw propaganda packaged for the international virtue signallers.

Why on earth would you want to get involved in this?

Spreading myths empowers the extremists. It perpetuates the conflict and pushes peace further away. Nobody in their right mind seriously believes those people attacking Israelis want a two state solution. Nor do those putting up illegal structures. They have deliberately created a battlefield (it doesn’t actually exist unless they come out to confront Israelis).

All this ends with people on the outside, people such as yourself – making it all worse by promoting the propaganda.

So please, can you virtue signal at someone else’s expense – and leave what you do not understand alone.

Friday, November 25, 2022

The ADL keeps a database of extremist incidents, including antisemitic incidents. They list over 1700 so far for this year. I have been looking though their list for 2022, specifically incidents that mention Israel.

Here are only a few of them:

January, Brooklyn NY: Graffiti that read, "Kill Israel and the Jews" was found on the campus of a middle school.

January, Mountain View CO: In response to a Jewish middle school student's presentation on the Holocaust, the teacher harassed the student about the creation and policies of the State of Israel.

January, Seattle WA: The message "It's okay to be a Zionist genocider" was found spray-painted across the Jewish Family Service.

February, Buffalo NY: An antisemitic flier was posted on the campus of the University of Buffalo. The flier depicted Robert and John F. Kennedy with Stars of David etched over their faces, and the words, "Israel and the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers."

February, University City MO: In a social media post, a campus Birthright program was the target of an anti-Zionist campaign comparing them to Patriot Front, a White Supremacist organization. The campaign strongly suggested that, like the Patriot Front, the Birthright program should not be allowed on campus and the post included the call "Death to all Settler Colonialism!"

March, Storrs CT: A Jewish college student was the target of antisemitic harassment and removal from a campus community group for their pro-Israel activism.

April, New Brunswick NJ: The Israel Fellow for the University of Rutgers Hillel received multiple antisemitic Instagram comments in response to a video they posted regarding the recent terror attack in Israel. One comment read, "die jews die."

May, Santa Barbara CA: "Zionist the evil Jews have got to go" was written in chalk by a bus stop.

May, Champaign IL: "Death to Israel" and "Israelis kill children" was written in chalk on a college campus.

July, Lakewood CO: A Jewish person was approached by an unknown individual on the street who said, "The Zionists will burn."

July, Boulder CO: "ZIONIST SEX PREDITAR (sic) AREA!" was found written in chalk on a sidewalk.

August, Miami FL: A Jewish institution received a threatening phone call in which the caller threatened violence against the Jewish community on behalf of his "Palestinian Wife" in relation to events in Israel. The caller threatened to cut off the heads of Jewish people.

August, Brooklyn NY: Graffiti said that said, "Antisemitism was invented by a Zionist," "Zionism is Anti Semitism (sic) and "Antisemitism is overrated" was found on a train platform.








Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

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Read all about it here!

 

 

Monday, November 21, 2022

From Ian:

Why is the religious left taking sides against Israel?
For the old religious and evangelical left, Israel often represents Western Civilization, colonialism, and imperialism. For aging denizens of Liberation Theology, the Palestinian cause offers the narrative of a Third World people oppressed by First World wealth, technology, and cultural superiority. Israel is an ally of the United States, and from the religious left’s perspective, is an unwelcome extension of American (and British) power into the Mideast. The Palestinians, from that view, are victims of the American imperium, meriting special advocacy by concerned justice-minded American Christians.

The religious left’s animus towards Israel leads to often absurd contradictions and double standards.

Evangelical leftists relate to this narrative, often informed by their own neo-Anabaptist perspective, which is pacifist and anti-empire. Israel of course has by necessity a significant military force, much of it made possible through American aid. This rankles neo-Anabaptists who think anti-violence is the gospel’s chief theme. There is another sometimes-underlying concern for neo-Anabaptists. They are discomfited by ancient biblical Israel, with its divinely ordained kings, warrior heroes, armies, and military victories, all of which defy the neo-Anabaptist stress on God as supremely peaceful. If only unconsciously, they are inclined towards a form of Marcionism, the early church heresy that minimized the canonical authority of the Old Testament. This discomfort with the Hebrew scriptures facilitates unease with modern Israel.

The religious left’s animus towards Israel leads to often absurd contradictions and double standards, especially for a denomination like the PCUSA. It and the other mainline Protestant bodies have countless statements condemning Israel for ostensibly oppressing the Palestinians among other depredations. But they are largely silent about human rights abuses so prevalent among Israel’s Arab neighbors, including the Palestinian Authority, not to mention countless repressive regimes around the world. They ignored Hamas’s July rocket attacks on Israel. A 2011 PCUSA report affirmed calls for democracy during the Arab Spring, but such calls are rare, and it naturally focused on criticizing U.S. Mideast policy.

The PCUSA General Assembly in July did condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But it devoted more verbiage to the United States and NATO having “flooded Ukraine with lethal weapons,” enriching “war profiteers—at the expense of the taxpayers, the poor and the planet,” guided by “powerful geopolitical and financial interests.” It also derided sanctions against Russia and lamented the cost to “planetary survival and social justice.”

The Religious Left descends from the Social Gospel, later radicalized by Liberation Theology. It disdains capitalism, bourgeois democracy, America, Western Civilization, and human rights regarding speech, religion, and property. But its hostility to Israel is especially pernicious, not just for its double standards, but also for its underlying disregard for a people who have been among the world’s most tormented.

Modern Israel arose from the ashes of the Holocaust. From the beginning, Israel has had to fight for its very existence. Christians should understand that opposition to Israel as a Jewish state is opposition to Israel as a nation.
John-Paul Pagano: First Principles
Antisemitism is different from most other forms of racism. In order to combat it, we need to understand what is a conspiracy theory.

It's customary to hear well-meaning people intone something along these lines: "Antisemitism and anti-black racism are part of the same fight.” In a basic sense, this is true: they are both odious forms of hatred that endanger people and corrode society. Diminishing them as much as possible is part of the same overarching defense of our civic health.

But it’s a platitude that papers over essential differences between two opposite forms of racism. Few human phenomena can be described with an algorithm. There are always ambiguities and exceptions. Nevertheless, it’s heuristically valid to arrange racism into two categories: a caste-oriented, “down-punching” form and a conspiracist, “up-punching” form.

By and large, anti-black racism constructs an underclass that the racist regards as inferior, to be segregated, plundered, and exploited. In the main, Antisemitism views the Jews as a preternaturally powerful, evil elite that plunders and exploits the Antisemite—and the broader society he seeks to awaken to the struggle. In the ugliest of ironies, however much he rails about Jewish degeneracy, the Antisemite invests the Jews with traits and abilities that make them seem diabolically superior.
Jonathan Tobin: The ADL is waging war on free speech, not on Trump or Twitter
Yet the ADL has shown a dangerous propensity for Internet censorship—an authoritarian impulse that it usually veils behind a desire to quell the rising tide of antisemitism. Its consultations with the PayPal online payment system, for instance, were geared toward demonetizing anyone, not just far-right extremists, whose opinions were out of favor with the left.

The attempt to sink Twitter by persuading advertisers and users to exit it goes beyond those efforts to harness Big Tech clout to enforce woke orthodoxy on the Web.

What the ADL is now demanding is to set a standard by which no social-media platform or Internet service can survive if it enables conservatives to participate on an equal footing with liberals.

Censored or uncensored, Twitter—or any similar company—will always be something of a sewer, as it prizes angry discourse and discourages thoughtful exchanges. But if the ADL and others succeed, a precedent will be set to ensure that no platform encouraging debate from both ends of the spectrum can survive.

The consequence of the above—such as the Biden administration’s use of social- media companies to squelch COVID-19 debate—will be an even more divided country and greater civil strife.

Just as important, it will create an atmosphere in which free speech is not merely under assault, as it is on college campuses and other places that have been completely captured by the left. It will mean we are moving closer to a society where the norm will be to silence dissent on all important topics.

It is already a disgrace that the ADL treats partisan advocacy as more important than its core mission of fighting antisemitism. But its effort to sink Twitter makes clear that its real goal is to shut up those who don’t toe its political line.

Think what you like about Trump or Musk. But this latest stand shows that there is no greater foe of democracy than the ADL under Greenblatt.

Friday, November 11, 2022

From Ian:

New York Times' fraught history covering Jews, Israel draws fresh backlash amid report on Hasidic schools
The New York Times said last month that a string of investigations – some which were accused of being "politicized hit piece[s]" against Jews – is a part of its "financial success" strategy, adding to a long list of controversy of what some critics have alleged is an "anti-Jewish animus" at one of the nation's leading papers.

Former New York Times executive editor, Dean Baquet, announced an investigative journalism fellowship he would oversee that was inspired by the apparent "financial success" of investigations on Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn, among others. Dean Baquet, former executive editor at The New York Times, announced an investigative journalism fellowship inspired by controversial stories published about Jews.

The announcement referred to a front-page spotlight article the Times published in September which claimed Jewish private schools were "flush" with government cash and failing their children.

"What's clear is that the NYT is not interested in positive value for our schools, just spreading lies for clicks," Simcha Eichenstein, a NYS Assembly member, who represents a Brooklyn Hasidic Jewish community, said.

Activists – including international human rights attorney Brooke Goldstein – derided the "politicized hit piece" for singularly "targeting" the Jewish community as violent anti-Semitic attacks continue to rise in New York City. It was also a bizarre choice for a front page article on Sept. 11 for the New York-based paper, she said.

"What the hit piece did at The New York Times… [is] accuse [Jews]… of abusing their children. I couldn't think of anything more vicious than that," Goldstein, who runs the Lawfare Project, told Fox News Digital.

She added that "Targeting Jewish Hasidic schools, or any Jewish organization, to leverage for financial success is beyond shameful."

The New York Times has a "longstanding Jewish problem" when it comes to various types of coverage spanning from the Holocaust era to the present, according to its critics.

Josh Hammer, the opinion editor at Newsweek, told Fox News Digital, "The New York Times never ceases to amaze me when it comes to Jewish-related issues."

"This is the same newspaper that consistently buried coverage of the Holocaust far from the front page. Some things never change. The true shame is that far too many liberal Americans still accord the Times far more credibility than it deserves."

This sentiment has also been touched on by current and former Times staff. The paper did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Mark Regev: Moshe Sneh: The communist who defended Israel
The blatant antisemitism that plagued the Soviet bloc in the final months of Stalin’s rule severely shook Mapam’s faith in the Kremlin, and the party incrementally moved toward an independent socialist position. This change was opposed by the staunchly pro-Soviet Sneh, who bolted Mapam in 1953 to establish the Left Faction, which merged into the communist Maki in 1954.

Over the next two decades, Sneh was the foremost leader of Israeli communism, repeatedly representing Maki in the Knesset while editing the party newspaper Kol Ha’am (Voice of the People).

In 1970, Sneh authored an essay titled “Arafat the adored and Lenin the ignored,” where he applied Vladimir Lenin’s communist principles to denounce the global left’s infatuation with Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization.

While embracing Palestinian self-determination, Sneh condemned the PLO’s call for Israel’s destruction. He quoted Lenin’s distinction between progressive nationalism, which seeks national freedom, and bourgeois nationalism, which denies national freedom to others; Lenin’s writings endorsed the former while condemning the latter. According to Sneh, Leninist logic would clearly place the PLO’s negation of the Jews’ right to a state of their own in the second, reactionary category.

Moreover, Sneh elaborated upon Lenin’s critique of terrorism, contrasting it with the PLO’s sanctification of the deliberate targeting of innocent civilians. He also refuted the depiction of Israel as a colonial entity, pointing out that the Jewish state has no imperial mother country.

Sneh reminded his readers of the events surrounding Israel’s creation: the Jewish armed struggle against British imperialism; the communist bloc’s support for the November 1947 UN vote calling for the establishment of a Jewish state; and the masses of survivors of fascist persecution and genocide who found refuge in Israel.

Perhaps today’s radicals, from Brazil’s Lula da Silva to France’s Jean-Luc Melenchon to Ireland’s Mary Lou McDonald, who like Sneh’s 1970 leftist audience uncritically champion Palestinian nationalism, might benefit from familiarizing themselves with the political writings of Israel’s former communist leader.

Postscript: Moshe Sneh’s son, Ephraim, a member of the communist youth movement in his earlier years, nonetheless went on to become an IDF brigadier general and a Labor Party MK. He served as health minister in the governments of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, deputy defense minister to Ehud Barak, and even transportation minister under the Likud’s Ariel Sharon. What would his communist father have said?
A Lost Novel Describes Arriving at the “Palestinian Ellis Island” in Pre-State Israel
Before setting off from New York City to the Land of Israel in 1926, the Yiddish novelist and essayist Miriam Karpilove dashed off a letter to the secretary of the I.L. Peretz Writers’ Union. Therein, she complained of the many things she had to do in preparation for leaving golus [diasporic exile], adding “I am my own [lady messiah] and, as you know, I have no white horse and, as you also know, the subway is on strike to boot.” Her visit to Mandate Palestine would last for two years, and form the basis of an unfinished novel, parts of which will soon be published. Jessica Kirzane excerpts her translation of the opening chapter, which depicts the characters’ arrival at the “Palestinian Ellis Island.”

We had to show a group of British government officers all of our documents so they could see that our coming here to Eretz Yisrael was kosher and we’d followed all the legal requirements they set out for us. These government officials sat at a long table in the middle of a large room. We had to stand. Stand and wait in line until someone looked over our papers and gave them to another official, who gave them to a third official, and so forth.

More than anything, they noticed the stamp on our papers with the word “settler.” They were surprised that American citizens with money had come to settle in Palestine: is it so bad in America, or so good in Eretz Yisrael, that the Jews would want to settle here? Especially during the present crisis? One of the officials asked my brother why he wanted to settle in Palestine, isn’t it good to be an American citizen?

“Oh, very good!” Jacob said. “But I think Palestine has more for us.”

“Remarkable, . . . ” he shrugged his shoulders and asked me what compelled me to settle in Palestine. I looked him straight in his squinty eyes and replied, “historical connections, you know . . .”.

Thursday, November 10, 2022

From Ian:

The One Week of World War II That Gave Rise to the Modern Middle East
This week marks the 80th anniversary of three seismic events in North Africa that would change the shape of the entire Middle East. On November 8, 1942, Britain and the U.S. launched Operation Torch—the invasion of French North Africa (today Morocco and Algeria). Germany responded the next day by sending its forces to Tunisia, which until then had remained under Vichy control. Then, on November 11, Britain defeated the Nazis at El Alamein in Egypt—winning their first major victory of the war. Robert Satloff reflects on the long-term consequences of these events:
[T]he most lasting impact of the Nazi presence in Tunisia was to give Arabs an up-close look at a model of all-powerful government infused with supremacist ideology. Along with the 1941 arrival in Berlin of the Jerusalem mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini and Iraqi putschist Rashid Ali, both forced to flee from Baghdad, the Tunisia experience would play a role in building two movements that competed for power in the Middle East for decades to follow—the radical Arab nationalism of Gamal Abdul Nasser and Saddam Hussein and the Islamist extremism of Osama bin Ladin and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Whether both of these movements have been flushed from the Arab political system—or are just passing through a period of reassessment, retrenchment and rebirth—is one of the region’s most profound uncertainties.

As recent scholarship shows, the Germans had designs on Egypt and the Levant that went beyond the purely strategic objectives of controlling the Suez Canal, the eastern Mediterranean, and the oil fields of Arabia. In fact, there is convincing evidence that the Nazis planned to follow on Rommel’s expected sweep into Cairo and then onto Jerusalem with the extermination of the Jewish communities of Egypt, Palestine, and beyond. If the Panzers were not defeated in the Western Desert, this would likely have added more than 600,000 additional Jews to the Holocaust death toll.

This would have aborted any hope of the Zionist dream for a “Jewish national home” in the historic homeland of the Jewish people. The near annihilation of the Jews of Europe fed the desire for Jewish sovereignty; the annihilation of the Jews of the Levant would have killed it. Israel would never have been.
The Schlesinger Diaries - new and troubling revelations
Fourteen years after the passing of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., his diaries continue to provide historians with important new information. The latest beneficiary is John A. Farrell, whose biography of Ted Kennedy contains disturbing new details concerning the Chappaquiddick cover-up, which Farell obtained by gaining access to unpublished sections of Schlesinger’s diaries.

My own experiences with Schlesinger and his diaries concerned a different American political leader, President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The information that emerged was deeply troubling, to say the least.

“We Have No Jewish Blood”

My first encounter with Schlesinger was related to a meeting that President Roosevelt held on August 4, 1939, with a political ally, Sen. Burton Wheeler (D-Montana). They discussed possible Democratic candidates for president and vice president in the event FDR did not seek re-election in 1940; Wheeler composed a memo for his private files recounting their conversation.

According to the memo, FDR dismissed the idea of vice president Jack Garner as the party’s presidential nominee on the grounds that he was too conservative: “[Roosevelt] said ‘I do not want to see a reactionary democrat nominated.’ The President said, ‘I love Jack Garner personally. He is a lovable man,’ but he said, ‘he could not get the n—- vote, and he could not get the labor vote’.” (Wheeler did not use the dashes.)

The president also expressed doubt about the viability of a ticket composed of Secretary of State Cordell Hull for president and Democratic National Committee chairman Jim Farley for vice president. Sen. Wheeler wrote:

I said to the President someone told me that Mrs. Hull was a Jewess, and I said that the Jewish-Catholic issue would be raised [if Hull was nominated for president, and Farley, a Catholic, was his running mate]. He [FDR] said, “Mrs. Hull is about one quarter Jewish.” He said, “You and I, Burt, are old English and Dutch stock. We know who our ancestors are. We know there is no Jewish blood in our veins, but a lot of these people do not know whether there is Jewish blood in their veins or not.”

The memo is located in Wheeler’s papers at Montana State University. The file also contains two letters sent to Wheeler from Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. in 1959. At the time, Schlesinger was working on The Politics of Upheaval, the final installment of his three-volume history of the New Deal. According to the letters, Sen. Wheeler sent Schlesinger a copy of his 1939 memorandum on the “Jewish blood” conversation with FDR. Schlesinger, after reviewing the memo, wrote to Wheeler that the document “offer[s] valuable sidelights on history.”

Nevertheless, Schlesinger never quoted FDR’s remarks about “Jewish blood” in any of the many books and articles he subsequently wrote about Roosevelt and his era. Ironically, in one of those articles (published in Newsweek in 1994), Schlesinger specifically defended FDR against any suspicion that he was unsympathetic to Jews; and he approvingly quoted Trude Lash, a friend of the Roosevelts, as saying, “FDR did not have an anti-Semitic bone in his body.”


Imagining a Jewish Atom Bomb
The early interest in a nuclear reactor, which originated with Weizmann’s appeals to Oppenheimer, passed from Weizmann to Ben-Gurion via Bergmann. It seems that at some point during 1948, Weizmann’s views on nuclear technology began to change: he moved away from ideas of practical science to “pure science.” The existing sources do not directly outline how Weizmann’s thinking evolved, leaving room for some speculation. It is possible that Weizmann felt compelled to join the community of scientists, like Einstein, who by now publicly rejected the development of an atomic arsenal and its handling by the US government, which in their view was not making the required progress toward nuclear disarmament. Another explanation relates to Weizmann’s political decline and his sense of betrayal by his former close confidante, Bergmann.

During 1947, Bergmann drew closer to Ben-Gurion, both personally and professionally. According to his biographers, as of the fall of 1947 Bergmann became “completely absorbed in the task of meeting the immediate wartime needs of Israel, and any plans which he might have been formulating with regard to nuclear energy had to be put on the back burner.” As the academic director of the Weizmann Institute of Science, Bergmann championed the institute’s participation in the Yishuv’s war effort. During the War of Independence, in 1948, Bergman and other scientists persuaded Ben-Gurion that “a national nuclear project was within Israel’s scientific abilities.” Weizmann’s declining interest in atomic energy took place in parallel with Ben-Gurion’s increasing interest in the matter and the close cooperation between Ben-Gurion and Bergmann. It is possible that growing resentment toward Bergmann, who crossed the line into Ben-Gurion’s camp, in some part motivated Weizmann’s rejection of Bergmann’s nuclear activism. In 1951, Bergmann would become Ben-Gurion’s personal scientific adviser and later the chair of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission (1952-1966).

Ben-Gurion first publicly mentioned his fascination with the atom on Sept. 11, 1948, citing the “miraculous make-up” of the atom and the “enormous capacity hidden in its dismantlement.” In March 1949, Ben-Gurion held a meeting with Moshe Moris Sordin, a French nuclear scientist raised in the Yishuv. Sordin, who in 1945 took part in the establishment of the French Atomic Energy Commission, was secretly brought to Israel to meet with Ben-Gurion and discuss “the future of nuclear reactors.” In a 1986 interview, Sordin recalled that at their meeting Ben-Gurion demonstrated deep understanding of and interest in nuclear technology. Around that time, Bergmann also convinced Ben-Gurion to send six promising Israeli graduate students to study nuclear physics abroad.

It was Ben-Gurion, together with Bergmann and the young Shimon Peres, who pushed forward the Israeli nuclear program during the 1950s, bringing about the establishment of two research reactors in Soreq and Dimona. Of the three, it was Peres, the political operator, who cemented the nuclear relationship between France and Israel, paving the way for the French agreement to build the Dimona reactor in the days leading up to the 1956 Suez crisis.

On Feb. 14, 1949, a fragile and almost blind Weizmann inaugurated the opening session of the Constituent Assembly of the new State of Israel. No longer enthusiastic about the role of the Jewish scientists in the Manhattan Project, a more cautious, weary Weizmann took the stand. Though his speech was short and concise, he included in it, remarkably, a warning against the dangers of the atomic bomb. He framed this as the result of scientific development lacking any moral vision:


Yet, for all the decisive importance of science, it is not by science alone that we shall win through. Let us build a new bridge between science and the spirit of man. Where there is no vision the people perish. We have seen what scientific progress leads to when it is not inspired by moral vision—the atomic bomb threatening to destroy the entire planet.

Unpublished memoir passages shed light on Weizmann’s views regarding nuclear technology and its benefits, and how these relate to its so-called Jewish heritage:


“If human folly reaches such a stage that atomic energy will be used extensively in the next war about which one hears so much talk, it will be said that the Jews have conspired to destroy the world. If, however, as I hope and believe is the case, atomic energy will be guided into constructive channels, and humanity will enjoy the benefits of unlimited sources of energy ... I doubt whether people will remember the great number of Jews who will have helped to bring these results about.”
Unpacked: Operation Opera: How Israel Destroyed Iraq's Nuclear Power | History of Israel Explained
On the night before the holiday of Shavuot 1981, Prime Minister Menachem Begin shocked his cabinet by announcing they would be launching a surprise attack called “Operation Opera” on a nuclear reactor in Iraq, known as Osirak.

Should the operation fail, the lives of four million Israelis would be at risk, however Begin chose to go ahead with the plan. Despite the large criticism Israel faced in the aftermath, Operation Opera was successful in protecting Israel and preventing Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein from building nuclear weapons.

Tuesday, November 08, 2022

From Ian:

No More ADL
To understand why, think, for a moment, about Kyrie Irving. What would the head of a serious version of the ADL have done? It’s actually pretty simple. First call attention to how messed up this situation is, not by issuing pompous statements with corporate logos slapped all over but by doing exactly what a bunch of Jewish kids did at a Brooklyn Nets home game earlier this month: wearing a T-shirt that says “Stop Anti-Semitism” in the front row of the stadium. Those kids probably invested a few hundred bucks, and in return received news coverage all over the world, appearing not as shadowy peddlers of indulgences but as what Jews actually are: outsiders getting pummeled left and right by bigots and haters.

Then, this ADL chief would go on TV and instead of cozying up to Sharpton, America’s greatest living pogromist, simply deliver the following speech: “I feel bad for Kyrie. I admire what seems like his willingness to seek out knowledge and to stand alone for what he thinks is true. But for all his alleged seeking, he still can’t find the right answer. He’s making the same mistake that millions have made throughout history—being smart and curious enough to wonder how the world works, but only finding imaginary Jews at the end of every road. This is the road to ignorance and misery, not to knowledge.”

Except, of course, that you can’t give that speech if your current or hoped-for donors are made up of the real thing Kyrie would uncover if he looked a bit more carefully: the very large corporations who have melded with government to create an almost impregnable, opaque, all-containing blob that controls American life, from dictating public health priorities to changing the way we produce and consume food.

Instead, all you can do is shame people who are confused and undereducated using the brute force you have at your disposal: corporate power. Cancel their contracts! Nix their ad campaigns! Make them bleed cash! Which, as we all saw this week, only amplifies the original noxious allegation.

This is why having no ADL would be so much better than having the one we currently have. Because of its own massive conflicts of interests, the ADL under Greenblatt may very well be , inadvertently or otherwise, contributing to the growth of antisemitism, not its diminishment.

This is as much of a philosophical question as it is a practical one. If your goal is to exterminate antisemitism—make the world’s most ancient and persistent hatred disappear, vanish, go kaput—then what we’ve seen from Greenblatt this week is understandable: Let’s educate or punish one hater at a time, until they’ve all reformed or disappeared. But if you believe, like me, that antisemitism will never go away, this approach is nothing more than a silly game of whack-a-mole. If we believe antisemitism is here to stay (and if you doubt it, do I have a few really good history books for you), then what you need is a real defense organization—one that doesn’t waste time with selling indulgences but instead forms bonds with groups and communities across the American spectrum, remains very vigilant to every attack no matter the perpetrator’s identity, and provides real education in large part by, ya know, speaking the truth clearly and unequivocally.

Here, then, is my solution to the problem that is Jonathan Greenblatt’s ADL: Let’s accept that the ADL is no longer a Jewish organization and ask for a divorce. Greenblatt can keep everything: His anti-racism, AstroTurf organization and all the corporate money trees he shakes on its behalf. We amcha Jews walk away with nothing—nothing, that is, but our dignity and our safety, both improved by no longer being pawns in a profit game that is endangering us more by the day.
A Little Piece of Ground
Elizabeth Laird is a renowned British children’s author, twice nominated for the prestigious Carnegie Medal. Ironically, it is her ability to tell a gripping story with vividly realized Arab protagonists that makes her novel A Little Piece of Ground so powerful – and so pernicious. (The metaphoric title reveals the author’s bias: Just as Israeli soldiers deny the boys of Ramallah “a little piece of ground” for soccer practice during the Second Intifada, so Israel denies the Palestinians their “little piece of ground.”)

The book was recently listed as required reading for sixth grade in the Newark, New Jersey public schools, a choice that has been challenged by the Zionist Organization of America.[1] This isn’t the first time the book has raised hackles.

Written in collaboration with Palestinian teacher Sonia Nimr, A Little Piece of Ground met with controversy from the moment it was published in Britain in 2003. Phyllis Simon, co-owner of a Vancouver, Canada, bookstore, urged Laird’s publisher (Macmillan) to reconsider the book, pointing out that “there is not even one mildly positive portrait of an Israeli in the entire book. . . . A Little Piece of Ground . . . is for children, the overwhelming number of whom clearly haven’t a clue about this conflict, and thus depend on books like this for the opinions they form about what goes on in the Middle East.”[2]


Laird’s answer was disingenuous. “The book is written through the eyes of a 12-year-old who just sees men with guns,” she wrote. “It would not have been true to my characters to do otherwise.”[3]

Perhaps, but who made the decision to paint the Middle East conflict exclusively through the eyes of a twelve-year-old Arab boy living in Ramallah during the Second Intifada? Karim sees his father humiliated at checkpoints; not only has he no idea why the Israelis have set these up in the first place, it’s a question he wouldn’t think to ask. Karim and his friends are confined inside by endless curfews which to them seem arbitrary, and there is no voice in the novel to explain them. Soldiers damage his school; are they just throwing their weight around, or are they looking for stashes of weapons? The reader isn’t told.
First Israeli to Be Wounded by Gaza Rocket in Sderot to Become IDF Officer
Shila Naamat was just one year and eight months old when a rocket from the Gaza Strip hit his home in the southern city of Sderot back in March 2002.

Shrapnel from the rocket moderately wounded Naamat, who was playing on the balcony of the home when the projectile landed, and was evacuated to a hospital in moderate condition

Naamat was the first Israeli civilian in Sderot to be wounded by rockets from the Palestinian enclave.

The incident happened when there was no safe space and bomb shelters on every corner of the bombarded city, including private homes. There were also no rocket alert sirens, and certainly, no Iron Dome that could protect the civilians.

Every Qassam rocket that was fired from the Strip at Sderot in the first few years had fatal and destructive consequences. Residents of the city and other communities near the Gaza border were forced to adapt to a new reality, which sadly continues to this day.

Naamat sustained a major wound to his leg and was fitted with platinum in his leg that has accompanied him all his life. But, he decided his injury will not hold him back. On the contrary, the injury eventually provided him with the needed drive to achieve his life goals - becoming an IDF officer.

"The IDF officer's training meant a lot to me, I learned many things about the IDF command, Israeli society, and of course the security system," Naamat says.

"I have more ambitions and I won't let my injury stop me, I want to reach senior commanding positions, and in the future do some public service, especially for the Israeli periphery."

"Me and my cousin, who is an Israeli Air Force officer, are working with the Sderot Youth Council to open up the young people of Sderot to important and commanding positions in the IDF.

Sunday, November 06, 2022

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: How Jew-hatred has to fit the narrative
Last week, a Palestinian Arab terrorist murdered 50-year-old Israeli Ronen Hananya and injured 5 others. But Hananya was murdered in Kiryat Arba in the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria, and so was considered a “settler”. Since such Israelis are thus blamed for their own murder, Hananya’s killing went unreported by western media.

It was part of an escalating campaign of Palestinian Arab terror attacks in which 27 Israelis and others have been killed so far this year. Who can be surprised? For Fatah, the party of Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, has been calling on social media for “an escalation against the… settler herds”. That is, Israeli Jews.

Nazi-style antisemitic tropes demonising Jews constantly pour out of the PA. None of this is reported by the western media, which instead turns the Palestinian Arabs into martyred victims and the Israelis into their oppressors.

The watchdog Honest Reporting has revealed that a letter published last month on the Jew-baiting website Mondoweiss, signed by more than 300 Palestinian and Arab reporters, supported several journalists who had posted pro-Hitler messages on social media.

One signatory herself compared the Israel Defence Forces to Nazis. Another likened Jews to “dirt and rats” and, in response to a tweet about the death of a young Palestinian, replied: “Do you still ask why Hitler killed the Jews?”

Read anything about that in the mainstream media? Of course not. It doesn’t fit the narrative.

West’s views about Jews haven’t appeared in a vacuum. He’s channelling Jewish conspiracy theories and links between the Jews and Satan pushed by Nation of Islam’s leader Louis Farrakhan, as well as claims by the Black Hebrew Israelite group that black people are the real Jews and that “so-called” Jews have stolen their identity and birthright.

These views are commonplace in America’s black community. Yet Farrakhan is still indulged by the Democrats, and you won’t hear a peep about black antisemitism from the mainstream media.

Instead, everyone is “shocked” by a rapper’s Jew-hatred, while a murderous attack by an antisemite on a public figure is turned into a political football.

As if antisemitism weren’t bad enough, this makes it truly heartbreaking.


ADL creates 'more antisemitism,' divides Jews, black people -Candace Owens
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) creates more antisemitism, political commentator Candace Owens said on Saturday night in the wake of the Kanye West and Kyrie Irving antisemitism scandals, sharing a tweet by an anti-Israel activist claiming that the NGO created Jewish insecurity to justify Zionism.

"I think the ADL is like BLM [Black Lives Matter] and the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People]. They create more antisemitism just like BLM created more racism." wrote Owens, explaining why she shared The Grayzone News editor Max Blumenthal's tweet. "They work only to further divide groups—in this circumstance, black and Jewish people."

In the tweet shared by Owens, Blumenthal had written that "White American Jews are living through a golden age of power, affluence and safety," and that "Acceptance of this welcome reality threatens the entire Zionist enterprise, from lobby fronts like the ADL to the State of Israel, because Zionism relies on Jewish insecurity to justify itself."

He added that Irving and West did not threaten American Jews in any concrete way, and the result of the ADL's attempt to justify its existence was "Jewish paranoia and Black humiliation is the result." Owens warned Blumenthal that he could "get into a lot of trouble" for his statements, and that she had experienced backlash over similar statements about BLM.

"When you disrupt the trauma economy and call out the not-for-profits that benefit from it, you become their next target," she said.

The US political commentator further called upon Americans to "fix fractured relations between Jewish and black Americans." She decried the cancel culture response to Irving and West.

Saturday, November 05, 2022

From Ian:

Dore Gold: Diplomatic invective: UN takes its war on Israel to next level
One of its commissioners, an Australian named Chris Sidoti, was explicit on this issue. He allowed the UN to quote him, suggesting that states must move from the report that the COI issued to an actual referral to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague. In short, he called for legal proceedings against Israel.

An initial report by the COI made the charge that Israel was “largely to blame for the continuation” of its conflict with the Palestinians. It was no wonder that State Department spokesperson Ned Price concluded that the COI was “unfairly singling out Israel.”

One of the arguments the COI report makes is that the Israeli presence in Judea and Samaria “is now unlawful under international law due to its permanence.” In other words, the report is saying that since 1967 the UN could not use that language, but now it feels at liberty to make that legal argument. What exactly changed?

It has already been noted that while the issue of the COI came up, so did the international response to the annexation of four regions in Ukraine by Russia this past October. However, there is no basis for comparing the two territorial disputes. It must always be recalled that Israel moved into Judea and Samaria in a war of self-defense back in June 1967.

Israel’s neighbors, including Jordan, had massed their armies along its borders during the month of May. True, Jordan had annexed Judea and Samaria back in 1950, but no one recognized that action at the time with the exception of Britain and Pakistan. Russia’s current operations in Ukraine were not in self-defense but rather looked like a war of aggression.

Indeed, the great British authority on international law, Elihu Lauterpacht, has drawn the distinction between unlawful territorial change by an aggressor, and lawful territorial change in response to an aggressor. In short, comparisons between Israel back then and Russia today are simply baseless.

The only explanation for what the UN is doing with the COI is the singling out of Israel. It is a kind of diplomatic invective. It is a nasty misuse of international law and practice by taking its struggle with the Jewish state to a new level.

What can Israel do, given the predicament at the UN? There is no question that the singling out of Israel yet again at the UN requires a response.
Doublespeak at Its Worst
And yet, despite the truth of these facts, the narrative one reads and hears in the mainstream media and from pro-Palestinian propagandists never reveals these critical details. The delegitimization of Israel relies on the spurious mantra that Israel was never legitimate, and that the Jewish nation has no valid claim to a country in the land that was previously “Palestine.”

And, as if this is not enough, the anti-Israel narrative maintains that the Arabs of Palestine were illegally dispossessed and that they remain dispossessed — all of them victims of a colonial enterprise executed by non-indigenous outsiders who stole the land from the Arabs.

But nothing could be further from the truth. While it is true that Arabs settled and dominated Palestine — which in the modern period was an ill-defined province of the Ottoman Empire — it was the Jews who were dispossessed, some 2,000 years ago.

And it was the Jews who were a perpetually persecuted minority in the territory which was theirs for more than 14 centuries, beginning with the conquest of Joshua, and ending with the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 C.E., followed by the rout of Bar Kokhba and his rebels in 135 C.E.

And it was the Jews who were associated, throughout the period of their dispossession, with the province known as Palestine — even by Muslim scholars of the Koran, as pointed out by, among others, the widely respected British imam, Sheikh Dr. Muhammad Al-Husseini.

How is it possible that the truly dispossessed can be accused of dispossessing others when they reclaim territory that is rightfully theirs?

What this means is that anyone who proposes Israel’s illegitimacy is simply guilty of Orwellian doublethink — at its worst. As Winston Smith, the protagonist of George Orwell’s masterpiece “1984” puts it: doublethink is “to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies.”

The truth of the Land of Israel’s association with the Jewish nation cannot possibly be disputed — it is a fact no less true than that the sky is above, and that water is wet.
With far right ascendant in Israel, Blinken tells Abbas US committed to 2 states
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas spoke with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken Friday, demanding the Biden administration “compel” Israel to stop various attacks against Palestinians.

According to State Department spokesman Ned Price, Blinken and Abbas discussed “joint efforts to improve the quality of life for the Palestinian people and enhance their security and freedom.”

Price said Blinken “further reaffirmed our commitment to a two-state solution,” a noteworthy statement as Israel, following this past week’s election, looks set to usher in its most right-wing government ever, including far-right elements.

Blinken “underscored his deep concern over the situation in the West Bank, including heightened tensions, violence, and loss of both Palestinian and Israeli lives, and emphasized the need for all parties to de-escalate the situation urgently,” Price added.

According to the official Palestinian news agency Wafa, Abbas briefed Blinken on “Israeli attacks against the Palestinian people… including the blockades, extrajudicial killings, home demolitions and settlement construction, in addition to settlers’ violence and violations carried out against the ‘occupied’ city of Jerusalem and its Muslim and Christian holy sites.”

The report said Abbas “reiterated his demand for the US administration to compel the Israeli occupation authorities to stop these crimes committed against the Palestinian people, land and holy sites.”

Wednesday, November 02, 2022

From Ian:

The Stories She Never Told
My mother loved to talk politics, real estate, and cooking. She’d happily offer intelligent insights on nearly any subject except one: her own life. With stops in prewar Hungary, Auschwitz, the Sorbonne, Mexico, and finally Manhattan, my mother’s life was extraordinary, but she kept it to herself. I hated that, but I knew why. So tender-hearted that news of terrorist attacks or natural disasters brought her to tears, she needed to distance herself from the pain of her own past. Still, as her child, I needed to understand her and the world that created her.

As a teenager and young adult, I plied her with questions, but I was only partly successful. I uncovered the scaffolding of her past but not its interiority. My mother is gone now, but my curiosity remains. I still search for her by immersing myself in stories of prewar Hungarian Jewry. Surprisingly, a new book about a Sephardic Holocaust survivor has opened a window into my mother’s inner life.

One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World, a Natan Award winner, is a Tuesdays with Morrie-style recollection of journalist Michael Frank’s conversations with nonagenarian Stella Levi, who grew up on the island of Rhodes. My mother was born thousands of miles and a universe away in the Romanian city of Satu Mare, the small Romanian city better known by its Yiddish name Satmar—the birthplace of the Satmar Hasidic sect—yet their lives seem to mirror each other.

They were born within two years of each other in the mid-1920s; both grew up in religiously observant but non-Hasidic families (prewar Satmar was home to many non-Hasidic Jews), and both belonged to the last generation of Jews to feel deeply rooted in their European birthplaces. My mother’s forebears had lived in or around Satmar for more than two centuries. Levi’s family had been part of the Juderia, Rhodes’ Jewish district, since the Spanish Inquisition. Both grew up in the embrace of aunts, uncles, and cousins in a world that moved to the eternal rhythms of the Jewish calendar.

Living within a 5-mile radius in Manhattan, both Levi and my mother viewed themselves as consummately modern women, yet both were intensely nostalgic for their childhood homes. Levi spoke of “a place where old women sat outside and told stories … took dishes to be baked in the communal oven … and where a granddaughter learned to prepare her grandmother’s sweet and savory dishes.” Unable to access the right words, my mother expressed her longing to recreate the flavors of her childhood and by carrying a crumpled photograph of her doomed aunts and cousins inside of her wallet.
Daniel Greenfield: The Holocaust Is Not Your Metaphor
"A production of Romeo and Juliet for non-binary performers"

This is what happens when the Holocaust becomes universalized, a free-floating metaphor and finally woke kitsch.

Yes, that’s the problem there.

This production, which has now been canceled, comes on the heels of things like the various Anne Frank revisions, including the Latino/ICE one. The underlying problem though is the use of the Holocaust and Hitler as a metaphor for everything bad.

The Holocaust is not a lens. It’s certainly not a lens for whatever woke nonsense is trying to appropriate Jewish history to make claims about the “rise of fascism” today.

There, is to a much lesser degree, similar objections to Netfix’s Dahmer movie which distorted and rewrote the history of the murders to score political points.

Treating real events, especially the murder of people, as a metaphor reduces the dead to the means of a political end while robbing them of their voice, their history and their identity.

The Holocaust is not slavery, slavery is not the Holocaust, whatever some sexual minority is upset by is not either one, and real events are not interchangeable. Neither are real people.
The Balfour bogeyman
In the eyes of the Palestinian Authority, one historical act is attributed with all future Palestinian suffering. That act is the Balfour Declaration, issued today, Nov. 2, in 1917. The declaration was the first contemporary, internationally recognized expression of the right of the Jewish people to establish a national homeland in the geographical area known as “Palestine”.

“His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

As exposed by Palestinian Media Watch, the PA Ministry of Information called the Balfour declaration: “The greatest crime in the history of mankind,” and the official PA daily called it “The crime of the century.”

PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ Advisor on Religious Affairs and Islamic Relations, Mahmoud Al-Habbash, who also serves as the PA’s Supreme Shari’ah Judge recently claimed that the Balfour declaration violated international law:
“Israel’s very existence contradicts international law. On what right do you bring people who have no connection to this land and plant them here and tell them: This is your national home? Who gave Britain a right to give a national home? Was Palestine the land of [former British Foreign Secretary Arthur] Balfour’s father?”

[Facebook page of the Fatah Commission of Information and Culture, Oct. 10, 2022]


So how then, can one answer the PA’s claim?

While the Balfour Declaration was an important statement of policy on the part of the UK government, it certainly did not have the ability to bring about the creation of the Jewish state without wide international consensus.

Historically, the declaration was issued as part of a new regional order that was born out of World War I and the demise of the Ottoman Empire, which, inter alia, had controlled most of the Middle East for centuries. As part of the new order, new borders were drawn and countries were, for the first time, carved out.

In the Ottoman Empire, “Palestine” as the separate national country and identity, as the PA claims, never existed. Rather, the region was merely just another region of the empire with no specific definition.


Abbas’ advisor: Israel’s existence contradicts international law

Thursday, October 27, 2022



Tharwat el-Kherbawy is an Egyptian lawyer who used to lead the Muslim Brotherhood but left the group in 2002 and became a strident critic of the Brotherhood since then.

He gave a TV interview with his analysis of the Brotherhood which was reported in major Egyptian media. He described how dishonest the Muslim Brotherhood is, and emphasized it in a way that any Egyptian would immediately identify with:
He emphasized that the Brotherhood is like the Jews; They never recognize the truth, take advantage of the social media, spread false ideas, and spread rumors.
When reaching for an example of the paradigmatic liar, and knowing that he is speaking to a national Egyptian audience, Kherbawy says that they are as bad as the Jews.

Not Zionists - Jews. 

And not one Egyptian media outlet found this to be problematic. Of course, the Jews are known to be the biggest liars in the world! It is axiomatic. Why would anyone disagree?

A 2010 Pew poll found that 95% of Egyptians have an unfavorable attitude towards Jews. The ADL finds "only" 75% of Egyptians have antisemitic attitudes. 

And modern anti-Zionists keep insisting that these Arabs are not antisemitic, but only anti-Zionist, and that Jews lived in peace and harmony in Arab countries before 1948.

There are definitely liars in this world - but they aren't the Jews.




Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Monday, October 24, 2022




The IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism is not a definition. It is a very vague guideline whose main advantage is that it is better than nothing. When a new controversy erupts about some famous person like Donald Trump, Rashida Tlaib or Kanye West saying or doing something, the narrative about whether it is antisemitic or not almost never refers to the IHRA Working Definition - because that definition is nearly useless in making such determinations. 

I have created my own definition that does not have the shortcomings of the IHRA definition. I describe it in the paper below, slightly modified from a paper I submitted to the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, ISGAP, for publication. (I previously excerpted from this paper.)

The ADL's webpage on the IHRA definition says, "The IHRA Definition is one tool, albeit an important one, to use to identify and combat antisemitism.  However, it is not a substitute for more nuanced expertise on antisemitism, nor does its use preclude consulting other definitions."

In fact, if you look at what the ADL has said is antisemitic, it tracks far better to my definition than to IHRA. 

I am not saying to abandon the IHRA Working Definition. I am definitely not interested in tearing down the great work done by many people to get governments and institutions to adopt the IHRA definition.  I'm saying that people who are serious about antisemitism use my definition in conjunction with the IHRA definition as the best means we have to impartially determine whether specific incidents are, in fact, antisemitic. Ultimately, I would like to see the IHRA incorporate my definition into its own.

This is too important to worry about politics or the egos of the drafters of other definitions. If my definition is the best - and other experts in the field have told me that it is - then it is the one that should be used. And if mine can be improved, let's do it.

____________________________________________________________

The IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism has been a tremendous success, and it is heartening to see so many nations and institutions adopt it. It is the best official definition we have.

However, it is not above criticism. In fact, while it may be the best definition out there, it is not really a good definition.

As is well known, the core component of the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism says,

 “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

This definition is vague, a fact already noted by other experts.[i],[ii]

A certain perception” doesn’t tell us anything about the perception itself.

May be expressed” implies that not all hatred towards Jews is antisemitism — but does not help us understand what is.

Saying that the manifestations of antisemitism are directed towards Jewish or non-Jewish individuals does not limit the scope of the definition at all.

The core definition simply does little to help anyone understand what is, and what is not, antisemitism.

Perhaps because of this ambiguity, the IHRA definition goes on to give eleven potential examples of antisemitism. The examples are accurate – most would agree that they are indeed manifestations of antisemitism – but they cannot be easily extrapolated to include all examples of antisemitism. Anything that does not fit exactly within the examples may or may not be antisemitism itself – the working definition does very little to guide the reader to understand what antisemitism means beyond the examples. Even the examples themselves aren’t considered definitive:  the Working Definition introduces the examples with caveats saying the definition “could, taking into account the overall context, include” the given examples – meaning that in some contexts they might not be.

A definition of antisemitism that cannot flatly say, for example, that Holocaust denial is antisemitic is severely lacking.

What would an ideal definition of antisemitism look like?

Any good definition of antisemitism must be precise. It should not have words like “may” or “could” or “might.”

A good definition should be complete. It should not require any examples. It should not require any background information or pre-existing knowledge on the part of the individual who needs to use the definition.

A good definition should be useful, able to be applied to new situations.

An ideal definition should be, essentially, an algorithm. It should be possible to input any speech or any actions into this algorithm and determine, with as much certainty as possible, that those words or acts are, or are not, antisemitic.

Finally, a good definition should be short.  Ideally, it should fit in a tweet.

I created my own definition of antisemitism that, I believe, fits these criteria.

The EoZ Definition of Antisemitism

Antisemitism is
hostility toward, 
denigration of
malicious lies about or 
discrimination against

Jews

as individual Jews, 
as a people, 
as a religion, 
as an ethnic group or 
as a nation (i.e., Israel.)

 

The formatting is deliberate, although not strictly necessary. It emphasizes that there is a list of actions that are included in the definition of antisemitism, as well as a list of potential targets, but the central and immutable point is that Jews are the object of vitriol.

The centrality of Jews to the definition contrasts with the IHRA Working Definition. The core IHRA Working Definition says the targets of hatred may be Jews, non-Jews, Jewish institutions, property or religious facilities. This is not strictly true. The target of antisemites is always Jews, and the others are simply proxies for Jews. For example, synagogues that are converted to churches may still have Jewish symbols on their facades, but they are no longer the objects of attack because there are no Jews associated with them anymore.

The definition has four types of general actions that define antisemitism, and five terms for the object of these actions. The objects represent the different dimensions of what it means to be a Jew.

“Hostility toward Jews” is, I believe, a better formulation than “hate towards Jews.” Hate is internal while hostility is generally noticeable to others. It does little good to make antisemitism a thought crime – antisemites usually don’t admit that they hate Jews, but they often display hostility towards Jews. “Hostility towards Jews” includes violence.

“Denigration of Jews” is any act or speech that unfairly criticizes Jews. This is emphatically not “criticism of Jews” – one can have criticisms of Jews as a people or a nation or as individuals without being antisemitic. Denigration crosses the line from rational to irrational.

“Malicious lies about Jews” includes all conspiracy theories involving Jews, and there are hundreds of them. It also includes any stereotyping of Jews: it is difficult to imagine a more heterogeneous group than Jews are, and any assumption that Jews all are on the same page with any issue is invariably a malicious lie.

“Discrimination against Jews” is obviously antisemitic, just as any discrimination against any people is bigotry. Notably, the IHRA core definition does not mention discrimination.

Now let’s look at the objects, Jews as “X.”

“Jews as individual Jews” means that the words and actions are directed against Jews simply because they are Jews.

“Jews as a people” emphasizes the peoplehood of Jews whether they are religious or not. Jews have been referred to as a people (“am”) since Biblical times. Attacking Jews as a people is clearly antisemitic.

“Jews as a religion” includes attacking Judaism itself. Again, we are only speaking of unfair or malicious attacks. Judaism may be criticized as may any other religion without it being antisemitic.  (Admittedly, the language is a little stilted here.)

“Jews as an ethnic group” includes those who attack Jews for racial or xenophobic reasons. I didn’t want to say “Jews as a racial group” because Jews are emphatically not a racial group. Most Jews are, however, part of an ethnic group and have been discriminated against or attacked on that basis.

Finally, we reach “Jews as a nation (i.e., Israel.)”

The IHRA definition seems to bend over backwards to treat anti-Zionism as a special case of antisemitism. It isn’t. Any student of antisemitism knows how modern anti-Zionism is a new label on a very old bottle.  Just because there is not complete congruity between Zionism and Judaism is not a reason to treat anti-Zionism as anything other than antisemitism – there is not perfect correspondence between Jews as a people, as a religion or as an ethnic group/tribe, either. Converts to Judaism aren’t ethnic Jews and most Jews aren’t religious. That doesn’t make attacks against those groups any less antisemitic.

The same goes for the modern State of Israel. As the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks eloquently stated,

 Jews have lived in almost every country under the sun. In 4,000 years, only in Israel have they been able to live as a free, self-governing people. …Only in Israel can Jews today speak the Hebrew of the Bible as the language of everyday speech. Only there can they live Jewish time within a calendar structured according to the rhythms of the Jewish year. Only in Israel can Jews once again walk where the prophets walked, climb the mountains Abraham climbed and to which David lifted his eyes. Israel is the only place where Jews have been able to live Judaism in anything other than an edited edition, continuing the story their ancestors began.[iii] 

Judaism and Israel are bound together. Jews know this - and the antisemites know this, too. Identifying with the State of Israel is a core component of what it is to be a Jew, not an exception.

Classic antisemitism says Jews poisoned the wells. Modern antisemitism says Israelis poison the wells and water.

Classic antisemitism says Jews delight in killing children. Modern antisemitism says the same about Israelis.

Classic antisemitism says Jews control major world governments. Modern antisemitism says the same about Zionists.

Classic antisemitism excludes Jews from clubs and organizations. Modern antisemitism excludes Zionists from “progressive” spaces.

There is no need to apologize for saying that modern antisemitism, in the guise of anti-Zionism, is just another flavor of classic antisemitism. The similarities dwarf the differences.

The IHRA Working Definition seems defensive when mentioning Israel. It says, “Manifestations [of antisemitism] might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.”

How is that different than criticism of Judaism, or criticism of Jews as a people? Any honest criticism is fair game for all those categories of what it means to be a Jew, not just for Israel. The IHRA does no favors by differentiating Israel from Judaism in this context.

We can run this same exercise against all the speech and actions in the first half of my definition. Hostility towards Jews as individual Jews, as a people, as an ethnic group or as a religion is clearly antisemitism – and so is hostility towards Israel as a nation. Hostility goes way beyond sober criticism, and it betrays the irrationality of the hostile party. Why single out Israel in this regard?

Denigration of Israel is similar. What other nation gets regularly denigrated? Saying Israel has no right to exist is on the same moral plane as saying Jews have no right to exist as a people – or that Jews are not a people at all, which is a favored accusation among Arab antisemites specifically to argue that a Israel has no right to exist as a homeland for people who merely share a religion. Again, classic and modern antisemitism are entwined.

Malicious lies about Israel fit in the same category as malicious lies about any group. The malice betrays the hate, and the hate is what drives the malice. The apartheid lie, the ethnic cleansing lie, the racism lie – they are just as illegitimate and revolting as the Christ-killing lie, the Elders of Zion lie, the Untermensch lie.

The same logic goes with “discrimination against Jews as a nation.” When Israel is discriminated against, we all know it is because it is the only state that is filled with and controlled by Jews. Vehement denials of antisemitism are not arguments.

For the purposes of determining what antisemitism is, Israel is not a special case of the collective Jew.  It is a core example. Nowadays, it is perhaps the paradigm of being a Jewish object of hate.

In a way, my definition is an extension of Natan Sharansky’s excellent “3D test” of whether anti-Israel criticism becomes antisemitism. As he wrote,

We must be clear and outspoken in exposing the new anti-Semitism. I believe that we can apply a simple test - I call it the "3D" test - to help us distinguish legitimate criticism of Israel from anti-Semitism.

The first "D" is the test of demonization. When the Jewish state is being demonized; when Israel's actions are blown out of all sensible proportion; when comparisons are made between Israelis and Nazis and between Palestinian refugee camps and Auschwitz - this is anti- Semitism, not legitimate criticism of Israel.

The second "D" is the test of double standards. When criticism of Israel is applied selectively; when Israel is singled out by the United Nations for human rights abuses while the behavior of known and major abusers, such as China, Iran, Cuba, and Syria, is ignored; when Israel's Magen David Adom, alone among the world's ambulance services, is denied admission to the International Red Cross - this is anti-Semitism.

The third "D" is the test of delegitimization: when Israel's fundamental right to exist is denied - alone among all peoples in the world - this too is anti-Semitism.[iv]

This is not only true for criticism of Israel, but for criticism of Jews, of Judaism and of the Jewish people. Jews as a people, as a religion, as a culture and as individuals can be legitimately criticized, just as Israel can be. Only when the criticism extends into the territory of these 3 “D”s do they become antisemitic.

There is no difference between demonizing, delegitimizing, and applying double standards to Israel or to Jews in every other sense. Both are the same antisemitism.

Testing the definition with antisemitism defined under IHRA

To test whether my definition is accurate, I suggest that we use it as an algorithm against situations that are listed as examples in the IHRA Working Definition to see if this definition judges those situations as antisemitic.

Calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion.

This would be hostility towards Jews as individual Jews, as a people, and as a religion.

Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective — such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions.

This would be malicious lies against Jews as a people, and possibly as a religion or nation.

Accusing Jews as a people of being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group, or even for acts committed by non-Jews.

This is hostility towards, denigration of, and malicious lies about Jews as a people.

Denying the fact, scope, mechanisms (e.g. gas chambers) or intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of National Socialist Germany and its supporters and accomplices during World War II (the Holocaust).

Accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.

This is the prototypical example of malicious lies about Jews as individual Jews (i.e., witnesses to the Holocaust,) as a people and as a nation (Arabs regularly accuse Zionists of making up the Holocaust to justify taking their land.)

Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.

This is denigration of and malicious lies about Jews as individual Jews, as a people and as a nation.

Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.

This is hostility towards, denigration of, malicious lies about and discrimination against Jews as a people and as a nation.

Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.

This is discrimination against Jews as a nation.

Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.

This would be hostility towards and malicious lies about Jews as a people and as a nation.

Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

This would be malicious lies about and hostility towards Jews as a nation.

Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.

This would be hostility towards Jews as individual Jews and as a people.

Testing the definition with antisemitism not defined under IHRA

The IHRA Working Definition is ambiguous about some examples of antisemitism that are generally accepted as antisemitism.

One example is the Khazar theory – the idea that most or all Ashkenazic Jews are not ethnic Jews at all but descended from a Turkic people known as the Khazars who supposedly converted to Judaism. Like Holocaust denial, it is an antisemitic conspiracy theory that is often disguised as legitimate research.

The IHRA Working Definition gives very little guidance on whether this is antisemitic or not, yet virtually everyone agrees it is. Under my definition, however, there is no doubt: the Khazar theory is a malicious lie about Jews as an ethnic group and a people.

Similar malicious lies, popular for the past hundred years among Arabs, is that there is no Jewish connection to Jerusalem and that the Jewish Temples are fictional. While the IHRA working definition does not help at all on this, my definition addresses it similarly to the Khazar theory: they malicious lies about Jews as a people and as a nation.

Popular writer and poet Alice Walker wrote a poem about Jews where, under the guise of simply asking questions, she accused Jews of believing that non-Jews are subhumans who must be killed, and that the Talmud supports raping children.[v] While this may fit under the IHRA working definition, it might not if Walker claims “context:” that she is just asking questions, or is only discussing the Jews who study the Talmud. Under my definition, however, Walker is exhibiting hostility towards, denigration of and malicious lies about Jews as a people and as a religion (as well as a nation in other parts of the poem where she ties Jews with Israelis.)

Testing the definition with ambiguous cases

How does this definition do with more controversial or ambiguous cases of potential antisemitism?

George Soros is a Jewish billionaire who funds many left-wing causes. Sheldon Adelson was a Jewish billionaire who funded many right-wing causes. Both have been the object of conspiracy theories. Are those theories antisemitic?

Frank Gaffney said about Soros:

 Is George Soros the anti-Christ?  While former New York mayor Rudi Giuliani has put the question in play, theologians may be better equipped to debate it than politicians.

The decades-long record of this billionaire financier and philanthropist, however, is one of such malevolence and destruction that he must at a minimum be considered the anti-Christ’s right-hand man. [vi]

This was regarded by the ADL as being antisemitic[vii]. Is it?

I’m no expert on Christian eschatology, but I have seen that non-Jewish rich people like Bill Gates[viii] and Jeff Bezos[ix] have also been accused of being the Antichrist, so without any mentioning or hinting of Soros’ religion, it does not fit my definition of antisemitism – the attack on him is as an influential rich person, not as a Jew, at least on the face of it. (For those who say that the Antichrist must be Jewish, however, this may very well be considered antisemitic.)

In contrast, Pink Floyd singer Roger Waters had this to say about Sheldon Adelson[x]:

Sheldon Adelson believes that only Jews – only Jewish people – are completely human. That they are attached in some way…and that everybody else on Earth is there to serve them.

There is no record of Adelson ever saying anything remotely like this. Waters is – consciously or not – invoking antisemitic interpretations of the Talmud and ascribing that to Adelson.

Both Waters and Gaffney are accusing rich Jews of being puppet-masters, but only Waters is couching that accusation is clearly Jewish terms. Under my definition, he is showing hostility toward, denigration of and malicious lies about a Jew as an individual Jew. While Gaffney’s slur can be interpreted as being against any rich person, Rogers’ invective cannot be interpreted any other way except for being antisemitic.

To be sure, the puppet-master motif has been associated with Jews for more than a century. Yet it is not exclusively applied to Jews, so without additional evidence, we cannot say that the accusation itself is antisemitic when applied to an influential Jew.

This brings up another issue in determining whether something is antisemitic or not. The IHRA Working Definition takes pains to point out that much of the determination of whether something is antisemitic or not depends on context. I would be a little more specific and note that much of that determination depends on the mindset of the potential offender. Their intentions may have been wholly innocent, they may have been malicious, and they very possibly may have been clueless or careless as to the implications of their offensive actions or statements.

We cannot read minds, but we can take educated guesses based on other statements or actions by the person or group that is behind the offensive words or actions. In this example, if Gaffney has a history of antisemitism, or he has previously specifically referred to Soros’ being a Jew, or he has cited sources saying that the Antichrist must be a Jew, then we can reasonably assume that his statement was indeed antisemitic, because in that case it would also be hostility toward, denigration of and malicious lies about Soros as an individual Jew.

Knowing the motivation of the person making the offensive comment is key in any determination. I believe that we should err on the side of caution and not assume antisemitic motives unless there is a compelling reason to do so, typically a history of other obviously antisemitic comments or a consistent pattern of singling out Jews for opprobrium. Without a cautious approach, there is a danger that charges of antisemitism will be used capriciously and more as a means of attacking a political opponent than as a sober analysis of an event or a statement. Indeed, we see that happen all the time both on the political Right and Left: accusations of antisemitism that are not motivated by actual concern about Jew-hate but to score political points. 

Another interesting test case is Representative Ilhan Omar’s statement that the reason US politicians support Israel is “all about the Benjamins, baby.”[xi] She was saying that Zionist money is the main or only reason why any politician would support Israel. This is invoking a trope of Jews controlling a nation with money. This is a case of malicious lies about Jews as a people or as a nation, and as such, it is antisemitic.

But what about political attack ads against Jewish candidates, portraying them as greedy and holding wads of cash? The Washington Post reported on six such ads by Republicans in the 2018 midterm elections.[xii] This is a more difficult call. The trope of a money-grubbing politician transcends religion or peoplehood. Yet when the candidates have obviously Jewish names, it makes the possibility that this is an attack on Jews more likely.

In one case, the attack ad against Sara Johnson Rothman showing her holding a pile of $100 bills appears to cross the line into antisemitism, because the ad excised her maiden name that she consistently uses as her middle name and just called her ”Sara Rothman.” This formulation made her sound like she was Jewish herself rather than having married a Jew. In that case, it seems to be a case of denigrating (and possibly malicious lies) about an individual who is portrayed as an individual Jew.  

The other cases require some mind reading to be sure that they were antisemitic, but the sheer number of them makes it  difficult to dismiss as normal political attack ads. If there were no comparable ads against non-Jewish candidates from the same sources, that could indicate antisemitic intent. Conversely, if there were a dozen other political ads in 2018 showing non-Jewish candidates grabbing bags of cash, then this would be considered normal political mudslinging and not specifically antisemitic. It must be noted that even if the ads are not strictly antisemitic themselves, the attackers should be more conscientious about the appearance of using these sorts of antisemitic dog-whistles.

In fact, dog-whistles and potential dog whistles are among the most difficult cases to define as antisemitic, within this definition and without it. By their very nature, dog whistles are meant to hide malicious intent.

When Donald Trump tweeted a graphic showing Hillary Clinton in front of a background of piles of cash, and it included the text “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever!” inside a six-pointed star[xiii], and there was an immediate backlash that Trump was associating Hilary with Jewish cash. The original graphic came from a far-right forum that traffics in antisemitism so there is little doubt that the choice of that star was meant to be a dog whistle for that audience. Whether Trump intended to share the same dog whistle with his followers as the original artist did is unclear. The Trump campaign modified the graphic within two hours.

Is it antisemitic? It all depends on what was in Trump’s mind when he tweeted it, and we cannot know that. Yet the origin of the graphic, and the fact that there was a path from that ignoble source to Trump and he then tweeted it, indicates that more care should have been taken before spreading this graphic around. A good definition of antisemitism can help people be more sensitive to spreading antisemitic tropes.

In October 2020, a BDS Facebook page in South Africa published a cartoon about Clover Dairy, which had been purchased by a firm that was owned by an Israeli company.[xiv] It showed a gross, fat man shoveling money in his mouth with the caption, “Don’t feed Clover’s greedy bosses.” The South African Jewish Report said that the cartoon was antisemitic, but BDS complained about that characterization, saying the caricature was just that of a greedy capitalist, not necessarily a Jew. A reverse image lookup shows that the original cartoon had nothing to do with Israel or Jews. Yet the caricature was specifically against Clover because it was purchased by an Israeli company, and it is difficult to dismiss this use of the graphic as anything less than a dog whistle that evoked Nazi-era cartoons showing fat, rich Jews with piles of money – the only thing missing was the prominent nose. Given that BDS itself is an antisemitic movement – it discriminates against Jews as a nation – I don’t believe we should give BDS the benefit of the doubt here. There is room for argument in this case, though.

It is important that a good definition of antisemitism not only defines what it is, but also what it is not. Whoopi Goldberg’s claim that the Holocaust had nothing to do with race[xv] was a manifestly stupid and false statement, but it was not malicious. By my definition, it was not antisemitic.

Another point: It is possible for a statement to be hurtful but not antisemitic, but statements that are meant to be hurtful to any Jews who hear it are undoubtedly antisemitic.  

When the determination of antisemitism depends on what was going through the offender’s mind, it makes sense to err on the side of giving them the benefit of the doubt unless there is a history of other more blatant antisemitic provocations from the same source.

One thing is clear, though. This discussion, with this level of specificity, is impossible with the IHRA Working Definition, or the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, or any of the other well-known attempts at defining the term. My definition allows this discussion to take place, and any borderline cases for my definition are also arguable among experts in antisemitism. My definition more closely maps to the large number of cases that Jews “know” to be antisemitic than the other definitions do.

Conclusion

Existing definitions of antisemitism have been vague and have only provided very general guidance that is often not useful for specific cases. I presented here a definition that is useful, precise, and as accurate as can be reasonably expected, both to define what is and to exclude what isn’t antisemitism.

I don’t want to take away from the excellent work that has been done in promoting the IHRA Working Definition, but I hope that my definition can supplement it in ways that can make it more useful and actionable.



[i] Maya Hertig Randall and Catherine Imbeck, “The IHRA working definition of antisemitism: a legal analysis,” Legal opinion provided at the request of the Service for Combating Racism at the Federal Department of Home Affairs (Switzerland), November 6, 2020

[ii] Peter Ullrich, “Expert Opinion on IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism,” Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, October 2019

[iii] Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, “Israel: The Heart of Judaism,” HaMizrahi, April 2018

[iv] Natan Sharansky, “3D Test of Anti-Semitism:Demonization, Double Standards, Delegitimization,” Jewish Political Studies Review 16:3-4 (Fall 2004)

[v] Alice Walker, “It Is Our (Frightful) Duty To Study They [sic] Talmud”, Alice Walker: The Official Website, November 2, 2017

[vi] Frank Gaffney, “George Soros, The Anti-Christ, or Just His Right-hand Man?”, Center for Security Policy, October 11, 2018

[vii] “The Antisemitism Lurking Behind George Soros Conspiracy Theories,” ADL Blog, October 11, 2018

[viii] Christopher James Blythe, “Bill Gates’ Comments on Covid-19 Vaccine Enflame ‘Mark of the Beast’ Worries in Some Christian Circles,” Religion Dispatches, May 4, 2020

[ix] “Could Jeff Bezos possibly be the Antichrist?”, Reddit r/Christianity, March 13, 2022

[x] “Musician Roger Waters on Hamas-Affiliated News Agency: Crazy Puppet Master Adelson Has Donald Trump’s Tiny Little Pr*ck in His Pocket; Israelis Teach U.S. Police How to Murder Blacks,” MEMRIReports Twitter,  June 21, 2020

[xi] Zack Beauchamp “Ilhan Omar’s tweet revealed core truths about anti-Semitism in America,” Vox, February 12, 2019

[xii] Eli Rosenberg, “Republicans attack Jewish candidates across the U.S. with an age-old caricature: Fistfuls of cash,” Washington Post, November 6, 2018

[xiii] Louis Jacobson, “Donald Trump’s ‘Star of David’ tweet: a recap,” Politifact, July 5, 2016

[xiv] Jeremy Gordin, “The SAJR vs the Press Council: What's going on?” PoliticsWeb (South Africa), June 2, 2022

[xv] Kenan Malik, “Whoopi Goldberg’s Holocaust remarks drew on a misguided idea of racism,” The Guardian, February 2, 2022




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This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For over 19 years and 40,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.

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