Showing posts with label BLM. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BLM. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 20, 2022

12/20 Links Pt2: To tackle the oldest hatred, it’s not enough to just teach the Holocaust; Caroline Glick: Hanukkah and the new imperialist assault on Judaism; Airbnb launches positive series of articles about Israeli hosts

From Ian:

Stephen Pollard: To tackle the oldest hatred, it’s not enough to just teach the Holocaust
In much of the West there is an assumption among both Jews and those who sympathize with them that teaching people about the Holocaust somehow inoculates them against anti-Semitism. Stephen Pollard observes that education about the Shoah in Britain is very good, but evidence shows that hostility toward Jews is nonetheless on the rise:

Last year, I was told by the anti-extremism educator Charlotte Littlewood of her experience in one school. After giving training to a sixth form about 9/11, a teacher approached her about the session. Why, he asked, had she ignored the “evidence” that 9/11 was organized by the Jews?

Ms. Littlewood is the author of a study cited today by the government’s so-called “anti-Semitism tsar” Lord Mann in his ground-breaking report calling for all schools to have policies to recognize and combat anti-Semitism, which should also be part of teacher training. (One might also point out the inherent irony of the phrase “anti-Semitism tsar.”)

Her study found that recorded anti-Semitic incidents in schools in England have nearly trebled over the past five years. But a mere 47 schools have any kind of formal, written policy that “might make staff more aware of the vicious forms of anti-Semitic bullying”—such as making a hissing sound when Jewish pupils enter a classroom in a reference to the Nazi gas chambers.

[In fact], some of those who think of themselves as being profoundly anti-racist nonetheless harbor stereotypically anti-Semitic thoughts about Jews—that they are rich, they control the media, they stick together, and so on. They won’t even recognize that these are racist ideas, seeing them merely as statements of fact. This explains how you can teach the Holocaust and yet not make any impact on dealing with living, breathing anti-Semitism. Or, to put it another way, the bar for anti-Jewish racism is set at the level of killing Jews.
A Festival of Light for Dark Times
A Hanukkah message from Theodor Herzl, 125 years ago

As noted by the historian Daniel Polisar, Herzl was likely writing autobiographically. He had customarily purchased a Christmas tree for his family and was more well-versed in Latin, Greek, and German than he was in Hebrew. But he was developing the realization that candles of national pride and Jewish tradition, once lit, could attract companions. Writing a few months after the First Zionist Congress—whose 125th anniversary was marked in Basel in 2022—Herzl hoped for the progressing of his project of national reclamation. He anticipated the most desperate, the young and the poor, would be the first to see the light.

Then the others join in, all those who love justice, truth, liberty, progress, humanity, and beauty. When all the candles are ablaze everyone must stop in amazement and rejoice at what has been wrought. And no office is more blessed than that of a servant of this light.

Though Hanukkah is undoubtedly a uniquely Jewish holiday, commemorating the bloody battle for the preservation of its ancient practices and beliefs 2,000 years ago, all Americans may find inspiration in Herzl’s depiction. After all, imagining the reinvigoration of political unity and patriotic pride in the United States today seems no less far-fetched than Herzl’s dream for a renewed Israel seemed on the eve of 1898. Even if we willed it, we undoubtedly feel, it would probably remain just a dream.

Yet, during the American colonies’ earliest decades, and as the colonists subsequently developed hope for independence from Britain, they looked to the branches of a tree to reflect the potential of shared national purpose. Old elms were deemed “Liberty Trees,” a symbol of what one observer called “that Liberty which our Forefathers sought out, and found under Trees, and in the Wilderness.” The biblically tinged image, like the menorah, acknowledges separate branches, but emphasizes the shared root that feeds its growth. It reminds us that by drawing from our common core we might yet expand outward and upward.

In the dark desperation of our current societal disunity, consideration of what Herzl termed the “marvel of the Maccabees” may serve as a hopeful reminder, a means of reclaiming our own sense of national pride and purpose. If we remind ourselves and the next generation of the faith in which we were forged, and envision a brighter, more joyous tomorrow, we may yet find companions amid the slumbering darkness. We may yet find ourselves servants of the light.
Ruthie Blum: No, Gray Lady, the ‘bedrock’ of US-Israel relations isn’t a two-state solution
In a social media post on Sunday, Prime Minister-designate Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu blasted the Gray Lady for its gall.

“After burying the Holocaust for years on its back pages and demonizing Israel for decades on its front pages, The New York Times now shamefully calls for undermining Israel’s elected incoming government,” he tweeted, in response to a weekend editorial titled: “The Ideal of Democracy in a Jewish State Is in Jeopardy.”

He was right to fight back, as the piece not only asserted that his coalition-in-formation poses a “significant threat to Israel’s future—its direction, its security and even the idea of a Jewish homeland”; it also urged the administration in Washington and the American public to support the “moderating forces” in the country that are “already planning energetic resistance.”

Not that Bibi’s response will do any good, other than reminding those who long ago realized that the “newspaper of record”—a broken one where Israel is concerned—doesn’t deserve its self-anointed reputation as a reliable source on any issue.

Nor did its horror at the return to the helm of the longest-serving premier in Israel’s history come as a shock to anyone, least of all Netanyahu himself. On the contrary, had it expressed a more positive view of the cabinet now taking shape in Jerusalem, it would have lost the remainder of its shrinking readership to publications that refuse to compromise on their unabashed radicalism.

In fairness, albeit ill-deserved, the Times and other “anti-Israel-is-the-new-pro-Israel” periodicals abroad are taking their cue from the “anybody but Bibi” contingent at home. The latter’s way of bemoaning its uncontestable Nov. 1 ballot-box defeat has been to decry the imminent demise of democracy at the hands of extremists bent on transforming the Jewish state into an unrecognizable, racist, homophobic theocracy.

The irony is that the bulk of the wokeratti, who can take considerable credit for the electorate’s rightward pull, didn’t use to praise the country for its liberal values. The sudden nostalgia—while the current caretaker government of Yair Lapid hasn’t even left its perch—is not merely laughable, it explains the Times’s disingenuous reference to “Israel’s proud tradition as a boisterous and pluralistic democracy.”

Wednesday, November 30, 2022

Tadasa Tashume Ben Ma’ada: Killed Not for the Color of His Skin but for His Jewish Faith (Judean Rose)



Tadasa Tashume Ben Ma’ada died of his wounds three days after an Arab terrorist set off a bomb at the bus stop where Ben Ma’ada stood, awaiting his bus. Ben Ma’ada was murdered because he was a Jew, and he was buried as a Jew. But you might not have read about him in your newspaper. That’s because Ben Ma’ada doesn’t fit the CRT narrative of the Jew as white and privileged.  Privileged he was, as a Jew who “came home” to Israel from Ethiopia 21 years ago, but white he was, of a certainty, not. 

Not that it matters even one little bit. A Jew is a Jew is a Jew. It’s not that we “don’t see color.” It’s that we don’t care. Ben Ma’ada died al Kiddush Hashem, in sanctification of God’s name, because he was murdered precisely for belonging to the Jewish nation. That makes him holy. In Hebrew, in fact, martyrs are referred to as kedoshim, holy ones.

Ben Ma’ada wasn’t one of those “we are the real Jews” like Kyrie Irving, Ye West, or the Black Hebrew Israelites, but an actual real Jew who had zero interest in a trinity, or even Malcolm X.

Ben Ma’ada, after undergoing the Jewish purification ceremony, was buried in his tallit, his Jewish prayer shawl, like every other Israeli Jew. Those who paid their final respects, wore kippot, yarmulkes. 


The Black Hebrew Israelites, on the other hand, during their recent march on New York in support of Kyrie Irving distributed leaflets that left no doubt as to their religious affiliations, reading in part:

“The biblical Israelites are targeted and accused of hate day and night without rest. Our knowledge of our heritage and laws has been systematically removed from us through the monstrous holocaust known as the trans-Atlantic slave trade. They may lie to the world and deny us of our birthright, yet Jesus the Christ, our Black Messiah, confirms the truth of who we are. We are not antisemitic, we are Semitic.”

To the Black Hebrew Israelites, it is Black Christians who are the real Jews, a nonsensical idea. Because the Jewish belief in one God, a belief certainly shared by the Jewish martyr Ben Ma’ada, is the diametric opposite of a belief in a trinity. For a Jew, it’s simple: God cannot be both dead and alive, nor is he a son of himself, while somehow a father, all at one and the same time. These ideas are not consonant with Jewish thought and practice, and would not have resonated with Ben Ma’ada, because he was a Jew like any other Jew.

Ben Ma’ada’s belief system blows a gargantuan hole into the theory of African American/Arab intersectionality. From Eunice G. Pollack, a retired U. of North Texas professor of history and Jewish studies:

Decades before the current embrace of “intersectionality,” Black political and cultural militants promoted the narrative of the commonality of the oppression of African Americans and Arabs—both colonized by White/racist Jews. Convinced by the Arab League and the Organization of Arab Students, its army on the campus, that in contrast to Israel, which discriminated against people of color, the Arab states were racially egalitarian and that supporters of Israel were “accomplices of colonialism and imperialism,” they sought to forge an alliance with their brown brothers.

The Black Hebrew Israelites are not alone in speaking of Jews as “white” and “racist,” and Arabs as people of color. A foundational belief of the Nation of Islam, founded in the 1930s and associated today with Louis Farrakhan, is according to Pollack, “the delegitimization of Judaism—and the denigration of ‘white Jews.’” Meanwhile, the Black Lives Matter Movement speaks of the “racist” Jewish State, and the “struggle for freedom” of the “Palestinian” people of color.

Several Women’s March co-chairs were not only tied to Farrakhan but endorsed and amplified his antisemitic views. In 2016 and again in 2017, the co-chairs informed Jewish organizers that “You people hold all the wealth,” and that “Jewish people bore a special collective responsibility as exploiters of black and brown people” (McSweeney & Siegel, 2018; Pollack, 2019). It must be said that Tamika Mallory later clarified that they only meant “white Jews.”

Would Mallory have given Ben Ma’ada a pass as the “right kind” of Jew being that he was the “right kind” of color? Or would she have seen him as an accomplice “of colonialism and imperialism?” It certainly is confusing. You can see why it was just easier for the mainstream media not to say all that much about the murder of Tadasa Ben Ma’ada, who was not white, and could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be seen as oppressing people of color, being that he was, himself, a person of color AND a Jew. Not the fake kind of “Jew as Christian” Jew, but the real deal, born into the Mosaic faith.

But of course, these things are all in the eyes of the beholder. White supremacists hate Jews just as much, if not more than any BLM or NOI activist. Pamela Paresky notes this fact with some irony: “In the critical social justice paradigm, Jews, who have never been seen as white by those for whom being white is a moral good, are now seen as white by those for whom whiteness is an unmitigated evil.”

Paresky continues:

The subtlety is that, instead of targeting Jews directly, the target of critical social justice is “whiteness.” But this does nothing to protect Jews. In 2018, when Hasidic Jews were victims of a wave of violent attacks — a precursor to another cluster of bloody attacks to come a year later — Mark Winston Griffith, the executive director of the Black Movement Center in Crown Heights, told The Forward that some black Americans see Judaism as “a form of almost hyper-whiteness.”

You could have fooled the white nationalists who gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee from a city park. “Jews will not replace us,” they chanted, looking like nothing so much as gleeful, blood-lusting Nazis at a Hitler rally. Here the word “replace” refers to the Great Replacement, known also as the white replacement or white genocide theory. In this conspiracy theory, in which white supremacist ideology is rooted, Jews promote mass immigration, intermarriage, and other phenomena that could lead to the “extinction of whites.”

And of course, Caryn Elaine Johnson, who adopted the insulting stage name “Whoopi Goldberg” called Jews and Nazis, “two white groups of people.” “If you’re going to do this, then let’s be truthful about it . . . these [Jews and Nazis] are two white groups of people.”

Would Goldberg Johnson have referred to the bombing that took Tadasa Tashume Ben Ma’ada’s life as two brown groups of people fighting it out? Likely not. In fact, it is more than likely that Goldberg Johnson has never had the chance to meet a “real Jew” like Israeli Jew Tadasa Tashume Ben Ma’ada, may Hashem avenge his blood. Which may be the real lesson in all of this, which is that, as Paresky says, “Jews should never again accede to being defined and divided in racial terms.”

Nor should we ever again be driven off our land by people who pretend to inherit what God gave to the Jews—real Jews like Tadasa Tashume Ben Ma’ada, killed not for the color of his skin, but for his Jewish faith.

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!
 

 



Tuesday, November 01, 2022

Yes, extremist rhetoric can normalize violence - and that includes "anti-Zionist" rhetoric

Historian Matthew Dallek writes in a New York Times op-ed:

The assault on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, last week shocked even those who have become inured to rising violence in the United States. The erosion of norms restraining extreme behavior that began well before the election of Donald Trump in 2016 appears to have accelerated. Society looks as if it is coming apart at the seams.

...Under Mr. Trump’s leadership, groups on the right have felt increasingly comfortable incubating, encouraging and carrying out violence.

The consistency of the rhetoric (“enemy of the people”; “Our house is on fire”; “You’re not going to have a country anymore”; “the greatest theft in the history of America”; “Where’s Nancy?”) has ingrained dehumanization of Republican opponents in parts of the political culture; conservatives have often painted their critics as enemies who must be annihilated before they destroy you. As the Department of Homeland Security has reported, domestic violent extremism — such as the white supremacist Charlottesville riots and the Jan. 6 insurrection — is one of the most pressing internal threats facing the United States.
I don't disagree with any of this except for the term "conservatives" instead of "the far-right" in the paragraph above  - there is little conservative about those who support political violence.

Dallek makes a half-hearted attempt at even-handedness:
Some on the left, too, have increasingly abandoned norms of civility and respect for rules and institutions. The gunman who in 2017 targeted Republican members of Congress and shot five people playing baseball — the Republican House whip, Steve Scalise, was seriously wounded — drew inspiration from his hatred of Republicans and Donald Trump. In June, a California man was arrested outside Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home and charged with attempted murder after posting on the social platform Discord that he was going to “stop Roe v. Wade from being overturned.”
But then Dallek draws a distinction that isn't really there, as the rest of the article ignores far-Left incitement:
While Democratic leaders for the most part are quick to condemn violence, Republican leaders increasingly minimize its severity or turn a blind eye.   

But Democrats are no less guilty at minimizing the violence on their side. 

One obvious example: Hundreds of Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 were violent, but the political Left emphasized that 93% of the protests were peaceful - as if the hundreds of violent protests shouldn't be reported. 

Has anyone reported on the percentage of rallies on the Right that are violent compared to non-violent? I'm sure the percentage that are non-violent is far higher than 93%. 

Both sides are guilty of emphasizing the excesses of the other side and downplaying those on their own, not just the Right. And the Left's blind side is not only for anti-racist protests but also for anti-Israel rhetoric that can easily escalate into violence.

Most of the anti-Israel protests in the US are sponsored by far-Left groups like Samidoun and Within Our Lifetime. They feature chants that call for violence against Zionist Jews, sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly. After all, the chants of "Globalize the Intifada" are a call for violence against Jews worldwide. "From the river to the sea" is a call to ethnically cleanse Jews from the Middle East. "By any means necessary" is explicit support for terror attacks against Jews.  Yet this incitement is  minimized by the larger Left.

Some of these protests have indeed escalated into violence, as we saw last year in New York and Los Angeles. The vicious beating of a Jew in New York was blandly reported as "clashes between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel protesters." Only this past week, a yeshiva boy in New York was attacked by someone who demanded he say  "Free Palestine", mirroring a similar attack in May.  The line between Leftist rhetoric and violence against Jews has already been crossed multiple times - but it is downplayed, over and over. 

Overseas, the same socialist sponsors chant pro-violence messages that are even more explicit, and they can be seen as a preview of what we will be seeing soon in the US. This past weekend in Brussels, a rally organized by Samidoun included these chants:

Stand firm until it ends, by throwing a stone or shooting bullets. My people have a war and have no fear, either with a stone or with a Kalashnikov. And fire your rockets, O Motherland...O Motherland, we are coming to you. O my love, O Grand Rocket, hand over this land to me. In war and sword, we will return.

 The rally featured people dressed up as masked Palestinian terrorists and holding signs supporting specific terrorists.

 


This is not just inciting to violence - it is romanticizing it. And the ideological basis for murdering Jews comes from the socialist PFLP, whose philosophy of violence against Zionist Jews was written in the 1960s are remains unchanged today. The PFLP is a terror group that has been behind countless attacks on civilians worldwide. 

How many people on the political Left call out the PFLP and Samidoun and Within Our Lifetime when they call for violence? On the contrary, the Left supports the PFLP as a social justice political party that has founded human rights groups.

Incitement to violence is wrong no matter who does it. It will not stop until those on the same political side are brave enough to call it out, even if it means there will be dissent within the party. 



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!
 

 

Thursday, October 27, 2022

10/27 Links Pt2: Marking 4 years since Tree of Life massacre, Biden rues ‘ugly rise’ of antisemitism; Melanie Phillips: The unholy alliance between Republicans and Islamists; BigLaw’s Jewish Problem

From Ian:

Marking 4 years since Tree of Life massacre, Biden rues ‘ugly rise’ of antisemitism
US President Joe Biden led memorial messages and vows to combat antisemitism on Thursday, marking four years since a gunman shot dead eleven Jewish worshipers and injured seven others at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

“A quiet Shabbat morning was shattered by gunfire and hate, and a place of sanctuary became a place of carnage,” Biden said in a statement.

“As we grieve this deadliest act of antisemitism in American history, we stand with the community of Squirrel Hill — and Jewish communities across America and around the world — in resolving to combat antisemitism and hate in all of its forms,” he said.

“This is especially true as we witness an ugly increase in antisemitism in America.”

Listing action the administration has taken to confront antisemitism, Biden noted the appointment of Holocaust expert Deborah Lipstadt as Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, an ambassador-level role.

He also cited the largest-ever increase in funding for security for synagogues and other religious institutes, and other actions announced last month at the United We Stand Summit.

“The rabbis teach that ‘what comes from the heart, enters the heart,'” Biden said, citing the eleventh Century Rabbi Moses ibn Ezra.

“On this difficult day, our hearts are with the families of the victims, the survivors, and all those impacted by the Tree of Life shooting. May their memories be a blessing, and may we continue to bridge the gap between the world we see and the future we seek.”


US Antisemitism Envoy: France ‘Ground Zero’ for European Antisemitism
France has become the epicenter of 21st century antisemitism in Europe — a phenomena which is now beginning to replicate in other countries around the world, the US Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism has warned.

“I think that in many ways France has proven to be ‘Ground Zero’ for European antisemitism, in part because of the large Muslim population,” the envoy, Deborah Lipstadt, told a panel hosted by the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (CRIF) and the World Jewish Congress (WJC) in Paris on Monday. “If we’d been having this conversation 15 years ago, I would have said France is a unique situation – sadly, it’s not unique anymore.”

In her remarks, which follow a week-long trip to Belgium and France to meet with EU officials on combating antisemitism, Lipstadt cited some of the deadly antisemitic and terrorist attacks that have plagued France over the last twenty years, among them the 2006 kidnapping and murder of Ilan Halimi, a young cellphone salesman, by an antisemitic gang known as “The Barbarians”, as well as the 2012 and 2015 respective gun attacks on a Jewish school in Toulouse and a kosher supermarket in Paris.

Other incidents included the 2017 murder of Sarah Halimi, a Jewish woman who was beaten and thrown to her death from the third-floor window of her Paris apartment by her neighbor, Kobili Traore, during a frenzied antisemitic assault. French Jews were outraged in April 2021 when the country’s highest court upheld an earlier decision that Traore could not be held criminally responsible for Halimi’s death because his intake of marijuana on the night of the killing had rendered him temporarily insane.

Lipstadt warned the evolution of antisemitism which once limited to France had now spread to other countries, including the United States. “I think that in many respects, France emulates what we’ve seen in other places, because it’s not just Islamist extremist antisemitism, it’s also from the right and from the left,” she said.

Lipstadt also noted that the convergence of antisemitic criticism of Israel from the fringes of both right and left wing ideologies is occuring not only in France, but in the US and UK as well.

Black conservatives engaging in casual antisemitism while being clueless why Kanye is offensive

Jason Whitlock is a sports journalist with half a million Twitter followers who is politically conservative. He has been tweeting in defense of Kanye West and getting thousands of retweets:

He displays a similar casual antisemitism as Kanye himself, retweeting this:


Whitlock has an online show where he discusses Kanye's words and the reaction, and at one point (8:50) asks his panelists a basic question: 

This is where I need help, and somebody jump in here. there seems to be a group of people that they're calling black or Hebrew Israelites and this seems to be very offensive, these people what they believe is very offensive that they're arguing that black people are the original Jews or are the Jews ...again I'm not plain dumb I really don't understand uh why it's offensive, or I'm not even sure what's the logic behind the argument, does anybody know?


Two of the panelists say what they know about the Black Hebrew movement and admit they don't know why this is offensive. One, author Shemeka Michelle, reads a dictionary definition of "semite" and says, sure, it sounds like Black people are Semitic, why is this offensive to Jews?

Finally, former football player TJ Moe says, "My takeaway, again rudimentary understanding, and I don't know if Kanye did this,  but a lot of the [Black Hebrew] movement they are not just saying that hey, there's a lost tribe of black people who are Jews too. They're saying you guys are imposters
and that's where it becomes anti-semitic,  and that's where I could see them being offended ...He may have actually said it on Tucker, if I remember right, he said I think black people are the real Jews."

So there is a clear element of cluelessness going on here - not only how offensive the idea that Jews who have been persecuted for millennia for being Jewish are being called imposters is, but that if we are imposters than the centuries of expulsions and pogroms and the Holocaust becomes meaningless. Our dead aren't martyrs, they are just dead.

There is another point that is offensive - the idea of truth. There is no evidence that Black people are originally Jews, no matter how many rappers make that claim. To have a group of people come and hijack our history based on clearly false and constructed arguments is not only offensive to Jews but to history. 

The conversation notes that Black people have poetically identified with Jews since the days of slavery, which is certainly true. One interesting point again made by TJ Moe was summarized by Whitlock, that Kanye was saying "that Jewish equals oppression, black people have been oppressed for centuries, ergo black people are the real Jews." The poetry of Negro spirituals like "Go Down Moses" has morphed into many Black people literally believing that the Bible is about them.

But even though Whitlock heard these explanations, he himself enthusiastically seemed to reject them - and reject Jews as Jews - in the tweet at the top of this article, written after this video was made. 

Also, Whitlock seems to accept without question that Jews control the music industry and are therefore guilty of oppressing multimillionaire rappers.  It isn't true that Jews control the industry, and it isn't true that Black performers are treated differently than any other in their contracts.

Whitlock's cluelessness doesn't end there - he cannot understand why Jews are offended by analogies of Black people getting abortions with the Holocaust. He thinks that is valid. 

Without bothering to ask a Jew why we are offended by Kanye's clearly hateful statements, he is taking wild guesses based on pure ignorance - and drawing conclusions based on wrong information. 

Yes, it is antisemitic to compare the Black experience in America today with the Holocaust. It is antisemitic to blame Jews for unfair contracts in the music industry. It is antisemitic to say that Jewish history is a lie. It is antisemitic to say that Jews are imposters and that some other group is the real Jewish people, based on fake history and lies. it is antisemitic to to pretend that Kanye is being persecuted by a vast Jewish cabal and that he did nothing wrong. And it is offensive to assume that the Jewish outrage at Kanye's words are overblown and unfair without even understanding why they are offensive to begin with.

And it might not be antisemitic, but it is definitely offensive, that so many supporters of Kanye West don't even bother to ask the question of why his words are so hateful and offensive to begin with. 


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!
 

 

Sunday, October 23, 2022

A small example of how academic Jewish studies has been taken over by anti-Zionist politics

Recently, Joshua Karlip wrote in Commentary about how Jewish studies in American academia have been taken over by a wokeism that marginalizes and denigrates Jews:

In December 2020, I participated in a Zoom panel at the annual Association for Jewish Studies Conference that discussed the state of the field of Jewish historiography over the past two decades. One participant noted that the first two decades of the 21st century have witnessed a rise in studies of the history of anti-Jewish violence. In response, I offered what I considered an innocuous explanation. Over the past two decades, I suggested, Jews have experienced an alarming rise in violent attacks. Between 2000 and 2005, the second intifada targeted the Jewish civilian population of Israel, leaving nearly 1,000 dead. Here in America, we have witnessed synagogue shootings in Pittsburgh and Poway, as well as a steady stream of attacks, some deadly, on Jews who “look” like Jews—Orthodox men.

This explanation did not sit well with a senior scholar in the audience. “What you said was exceedingly Jewishly focused,” she lectured me. She then went on to “enlighten” me that those who attack Jews are not primarily targeting Jews. Rather, the true targets of their hatred are African Americans. These hatemongers simply are angry at American Jews for promoting African-American rights. She ended her disquisition with a challenge. If I were really serious about fighting anti-Semitism, she told me, I would openly ally myself with Black Lives Matter.
His article is specifically about his field, Jewish historiography, but we've seen similar absurdities in other Jewish studies fields, as in an article last year in Religion Dispatches that accused anyone who wants to see Judaism survive of being racist. 

Or when 200 Jewish Studies academics last year signed a petition condemning Israel for defending itself from Hamas rockets and saying that Israel was engaged in "Jewish supremacy."

Or even recently, when the Association for Jewish Studies decided to stop accepting ads from Tablet magazine, because some members objected to some of Tablet's articles. The critics aren't even slightly ashamed at preferring woke politics over free speech, noting that  "much of the magazine’s content is focused on decrying liberal ​'wokeness'" - clearly a major crime in today's Jewish Studies cliques.

I saw a small example last week, when I tweeted, "If Jews rejoicing during their holiday upsets you, you just may be an antisemite."
Zachary Braiterman, professor of Jewish Thought and Culture at Syracuse University, responded, "it's a show of force and deliberate provocation of Palestinians living in the Old City."

This struck me as bizarre, since the video showed no indication of any deliberate provocation. Arabs pass by the singing Jews without harm. The song being sung has nothing offensive. the dancing Jews looked exactly like dancing Jews going outside their shuls on Simchat Torah worldwide.

The conversation went like this:

EoZ: You are a professor of Jewish culture and you never heard of Jews dancing on Simchat Torah outside their synagogues???

ZB: i know what a rightwing show of force by radical rightwing religious nationalists in Israel looks like

EoZ: Funny, because it looks exactly like a Simchat Torah celebration in Teaneck or Boca to me.
Please, let us ordinary people know exactly what you see in this video that shows you are right. The song? The color of the Torahs? 
I await your expertise.

ZB: because the intention is a show of force over against Palestinian people under Israeli control

EoZ: No flags. No insults. No slogans. The Arabs can pass by without issue. No incitement. They are doing in the Old City exactly what Jews did everywhere else. If you think they do not have the right to do in Jerusalem what Jews do in America, that says something about you, not them.

ZB: you are omitting the entire political context of a military occupation and threats of dispossession in E. Jerusalem

EoZ: So according to you, Jews have the right to dance outside on Simchat Torah everywhere in the world - except for Jerusalem's Old City.  Even if they have NOTHING to do with Ben Gvir.
Do I have that right?

ZB: why not at the Kotel?

EoZ: Why not outside where they pray?
Braiterman insisted, three times, that the video showed Jews deliberately provoking Arabs, yet never offered any evidence outside the pompous "I know it when I see it."

In short, he sees religious Jews dancing and he assumes that they are bigots. He cannot even imagine that Jews dancing outside in Jerusalem are celebrating the holiday the way Jews do worldwide, and nothing more. 

He then attempted to claim that Jews who quietly visit the Temple Mount are also deliberately provoking Arabs: "the religious zionists regularly do not respect Arab residents of Jerusalem or the sanctity of Har Ha'Bayit." I responded that this was absurd, they show far more respect for the Temple Mount than Muslims do. But he has a consistent position - when Jews show a love of Jerusalem's holy places, he assumes that they are really trying to attack Muslims and Arabs. 

Braiterman throws all religious Zionist Jews into one bucket, pretending that they are all racists, all fans of Itamar Ben Gvir, all support attacking Arabs for no reason.  

Stereotyping isn't sober analysis. It is bigotry. 

I've prayed on the Temple Mount and would happily have joined the Simchat Torah dancing, and I am no fan of Itamar Ben Gvir. An Israeli friend told me "my guess would be that not only is it true that most religious Zionists oppose [Ben Gvir], but also most of his supporters are not religious Zionists." 

The professor is not an antisemite. No one who spends two years writing a post on the Sefat Emet would be. But throwing all religious Zionists in the same racist bucket is, in a small way, just as bigoted as throwing all Jews into the same bucket.

Jewish studies is in deep trouble. 


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Monday, July 25, 2022

This is what REALLY happens when Israelis train US cops



Haaretz reports:

Researchers, led by Prof. David Weisburd, a Hebrew University of Jerusalem criminologist, conducted an intensive course for police officers in three cities in the United States (Houston, Tucson, and Cambridge, Massachusetts) based on a model known as “procedural justice.” Addressing the encounter between police and the citizenry, this concept focuses on making the interaction between them fair and dignified: Has the citizen been given the opportunity to voice his or her side, do the police show respect and project neutrality?...

At the conclusion of the course, the officers were assigned to high-crime areas and their work was monitored for nine months. The results exceeded all expectations.

After documenting hundreds of hours in the field, the research team concluded that the officers showed a clear tendency to listen more attentively to the people they interacted with and to treat them respectfully. Weisburd, a recipient of the Israel Prize for his research in crime and policing (in particular, he is identified with the idea of having police focus their patrolling efforts on “hot spots,” often specific streets, where crime is especially rampant), is visibly moved by the results.

“We changed the officers’ behavior,” he says. “There are hardly any studies that look at the impact of police behavior on the street. Second, it also changed their behavior in terms of law enforcement. We saw a decrease of 60 percent in arrests. It’s great!”

In addition, not only did surveys conducted in the areas where the officers were stationed find that the public harbored a more positive attitude toward the police, there was also a 14-percent decline in crime incidents in these areas. Says Weisburd: “Sometimes you can eat the cake and leave it whole, too.”
This is of course the exact opposite of what the Israel-haters have been claiming - that Israelis have been teaching US cops how to beat Black people, or whatever they are claiming lately under the "Deadly Exchange" libel. 

Which means that the Israel haters who claim that they want US police to act with more empathy towards the people they serve should want all police to be trained by these Israelis.

And they never will - because, as with all confirmed Jew-haters, every other cause they claim to support is subordinate to their desire to demean and delegitimize Jews and the Jewish state. 
 


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!
 

 

Thursday, June 03, 2021

Leftist Jews say Palestinians aren't antisemitic - but Jews are racist



It is a predictable pattern: any time anything happens in the news, a group of anti-Israel Jews issue a "letter" from "Jewish leaders" that try to gaslight the world and pretend to represent Jews as a whole.
The Israel-hating Left is very frightened by the wave of antisemitic attacks that have gotten publicity worldwide - attacks that clearly aren't initiated by the far Right that they blame for all antisemitism. So, they wrote a letter to fool people into thinking that the attacks are an anomaly, and roundly condemned by pro-Palestinian activists.

As usual, they are lying.

This one has the absurd title "Jewish Leaders Say: We Won't Be Distracted, We Won't Be Divided." The gaslighting begins in the title: they represent only a tiny fringe of Jews (only some 3% of Jews are actively anti-Zionist.) The writers of this letter are the ones who are actively trying to divide the Jewish community, not the mainstream Zionists. 

We are Jewish leaders who have a range of opinions, perspectives, and approaches to Israel-Palestine.

Yes, some of them (IfNotNow, JVP) want the Jewish state destroyed today, and some (J-Street) are willing to wait until tomorrow.

We are deeply concerned by recent reports and outcries from certain corners of our community which suggest a direct confluence between the growing movement for Palestinian freedom and violent incidents against Jews in our cities.
Their "concern" is that the attacks delegitimize their movement as being based on liberal principles. The letter is an attempt to deflect from that.
 We unequivocally condemn attacks on members of our Jewish community. Jewish people deserve to walk safely in the streets of our cities without fear of attack or harassment — just like anyone else. Blaming all Jewish people for the actions of the Israeli government is antisemitic. We are shocked and disgusted by individuals who would use this moment of heightened support for Palestinian rights to advance antisemitic hatred and violence.
It does not take political courage to condemn random attacks on Jews. But after they do, then they go on to minimize and justify them.
We reject efforts to stoke fear and division. Supporters of the Israeli government — including some in the American Jewish establishment — are misrepresenting fringe and widely-condemned acts of individual antisemitism as characteristic of the broader Palestinian human rights movement. 
The only people stoking division are these fringe Jews. The entire purpose of this letter is to give the impression that a significant number of Jews consider Israel to be beneath contempt.

Palestinian liberation and dismantling antisemitism are intertwined. For decades, the organizations and activists leading the Palestinian freedom movement have been resoundingly clear that antisemitism has no place in the movement, which is guided by principles of human rights and antiracism. When fringe antisemitic events occur, they are swiftly and roundly condemned by movement leadership.
Ooooh, look at all those hyperlinks! Most of them point to tweets, in English, from people no one heard of, that deny Palestinian antisemitism.

But if you spend time looking at Palestinian Arabic media, the story is very different. 

MEMRI and Palestinian Media Watch expose blatant antisemitism in Arabic media all the time, as do I, but that's not the entire story. I have not once seen Palestinian backlash against explicit antisemitism in their media. If one is going to represent antisemitism as a fringe opinion in Palestinian circles, then one would expect that Palestinians would condemn other Palestinians who spout Jew-hatred - and that never happens. 

I have never seen a single Palestinian media outlet criticize their first political leader, the Mufti of Jerusalem who collaborated with the Nazis in the Final Solution, as antisemitic. I have never seen a Palestinian respond to the mainstream Palestinian belief, popularized by Yasir Arafat, that Jerusalem is not really holy to Jews and there was never a Temple there. The antisemitic theory that most Israeli Jews are really Khazars and not Jews at all is never even debated. When Hanan Ashrawi's Miftah organization published the blood libel in Arabic, after defending it, it issued an apology, but only in English. Mahmoud Abbas claimed that rabbis want to poison the water of Palestinians. He has blamed Jews for the Holocaust which he claims was vastly exaggerated. The official PLO position is that there is no such thing as a Jewish people. 

This is not "fringe antisemitism." This is as mainstream as it gets. 

I think that these examples outweigh a few tweets from nobodies. But that's how one does propaganda - highlight the few counterexamples and ignore the overwhelming evidence disproving the thesis. But the "leaders" deny the reality:
Linking the movement at large to antisemitism is baseless and harmful. Especially in this moment, we must condemn this thinly veiled attempt to delegitimize Palestinian leadership and distract from Palestinians experiencing state violence by Israel.

The Leftist Jews don't only deny the undeniable antisemitism that is at the very core of Palestinianism. They then say that it is the Jews who are really the racists!

We commit to standing up against anti-Palestinian racism, so often unreported and unacknowledged in our communities. 

First they bend over backwards to deny the existence of Palestinian antisemitism, no matter how explicit and blatant. But you know who the real bigots are? Jews!  

....We support our Palestinian siblings’ right to describe their lived experiences without being accused of antisemitism. {W]e refuse to be more outraged by the words Palestinians use than the actual violence they endure.

4300 rockets, decades of terror attacks, Palestinian leaders inciting violence against Jews - they all go unmentioned. No, these As-A-Jews pretend that the only problem with Palestinians is that they sometimes say some bad stuff - which are all completely justified, by the way, because of Israel - and Jews are racists for calling those out. And when Palestinians say that Jews are Nazis, well, that is their "lived experience" and cannot be considered antisemitic.

Similarly, we refuse to allow progressive leaders of color who speak out in support of Palestinian rights to be smeared for their principled stand.
Claiming that Jews are racist is antisemitic itself. Mainstream Jews refute  the antisemitism and terror-support from Roger Waters and Betty McCollum as energetically as they refute the lies from Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. To claim that somehow Marc Lamont Hill should not be called out for his antisemitic conspiracy theories because he is Black is the actual racism. 

Beyond that, was Kareem Abdul Jabbar being racist when he called out the antisemitism from among Black Lives Matter supporters last year? There is a serious problem with Black antisemitism, whether it is from celebrities or from people attacking random religious Jews in Brooklyn. These "Jewish leaders" deny it, meaning that they condone it.
We know safety comes through solidarity. Antisemitism — like anti-Asian, anti-Black, anti-Palestinian, and Islamophobic attacks and rhetoric — exists in every community, but it is fostered and exploited by rightwing movements in the US and around the world, which gain power by keeping us divided. 
Yes, a letter that is supposedly against antisemitism ends up blaming only the Right, and dismisses all other Jew-hatred as "fringe." Which means that this letter ends up tacitly defending all antisemitism that is not rightwing - antisemitism from Arabs, from the Left, from people of color, from Louis Farrakhan - as justified or anomalous, and not something that needs to be specifically called out or fought. 






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