Showing posts with label Berkeley Law. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Berkeley Law. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 17, 2023

01/17 Links Pt2: Even the PLO knows the Jews are indigenous to Israel; The NYTs and the PLO are made for each other; The real reasons Ken Roth was bounced by Harvard’s Kennedy School

From Ian:

A New Study Shows That the U.S. Has More Anti-Semites Than Jews
According to a recent survey conducted by the Antidefamation League (ADL), disturbingly large numbers of Americans answered “yes” when asked if they believe Jews “go out of their way to hire other Jews” or “are more loyal to Israel than to America,” and to other similar questions. Kevin Williamson reflects on these results, and what they say about the persistence of this “strange prejudice.”
About 3 percent of Americans agreed that all of the anti-Semitic tropes in the ADL survey are “mostly or somewhat true,” suggesting that there are millions more anti-Semites in the United States than there are Jews. This is not entirely surprising, given the small size of the Jewish population.

Anti-black racism has of course been the most consequential prejudice in American history, but anti-Semitism remains strangely vital. Like its cousin, anti-Catholicism, anti-Semitism is more than a prejudice and more than a visceral hatred—it is, in its most extreme form, a kind of “theory of everything” in politics. Anti-black racism may exist with or without an attendant conspiracy theory, but anti-Semitism is almost without exception rooted in a conspiratorial view of the world. The fact that anti-Semitic incidents are on the rise on college campuses is entirely predictable in that campus culture is as much conspiracy-driven as talk-radio culture or Fox News culture, with different villains and a slightly more refined rhetoric: not “Jews” pulling the strings from the shadows, but “Zionists.”

Williamson also notes the confusion, and the bad faith arguments, that have emerged from the term “anti-Semitism.”
The Semitic languages famously include both Hebrew and Arabic, but also Amharic, Tigrinya, Tigre, Aramaic, and Maltese. But when T. S. Eliot wrote, “But this or such was Bleistein’s way:/ A saggy bending of the knees/ And elbows, with the palms turned out,/ Chicago Semite Viennese,” he wasn’t talking about the Catholics down in sunny Malta.
The real reasons Ken Roth was bounced by Harvard’s Kennedy School
The claim that Jewish influence and money can force non-Jews to serve the selfish interests of the Jews is, of course, a classic antisemitic trope. In the modern context, this trope usually claims that these Jewish conspirators are doing their dirty work to benefit Israel.

Roth also claimed that Elmendorf’s decision was “a shocking violation of academic freedom.” Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), agreed, saying, “If Harvard’s decision was based on HRW’s advocacy under Ken’s leadership, this is profoundly troubling from both a human rights and an academic freedom standpoint.”

It appears that Roth and Romero do not understand the nature of academic freedom. An applicant for a fellowship or faculty position does not enjoy academic freedom at the institution—in this case, Harvard—where they wish to work. They have freedom of speech to express their ideology and beliefs like all other citizens, but Roth would not have enjoyed the protection of academic freedom, which would allow him to express his views, no matter how corrosive or biased, until he became part of the Harvard community. Obviously, this never took place.

Moreover, hiring committees normally vet applicants during the application process. It appears that in the initial stages of Roth’s application, the committee inadvertently, or perhaps purposely, ignored Roth’s hostility to Israel. So, it is very likely that when the choice of Roth was made public, Harvard stakeholders had the opportunity to inform the dean about the darker aspects of Roth’s career. Dean Elmendorf then did what the hiring committee at the Carr Center should have done in the first place: Examine HRW’s and Roth’s defective scholarship and singular focus on Israel, objectively.

One particularly grotesque example of Roth’s shoddy scholarship and tendency toward outright falsehoods was a 2021 HRW report titled, “A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution,” the title of which makes its content clear.

No apartheid exists in Israel, but that did not prevent HRW from presenting the 217-page report as fact, effectively redefining apartheid to make their case. The Israel-based watchdog organization NGO Monitor, however, produced a report of its own that eviscerated HRW’s libels. NGO Monitor concluded that “the HRW publication is fundamentally flawed, using lies, distortions, omissions and blatant double standards to construct a fraudulent and libelous narrative demonizing Israel.”

“A careful examination of the text shows that HRW conducted almost no primary research,” NGO Monitor noted. “Rather, the text is bloated with cut-and-paste phrases, and quotes and conclusions taken from third-party sources—notably, other political NGOs participating in the same ‘apartheid’ campaign against Israel.”

“The omissions are even more egregious than the errors and misrepresentations, rendering HRW’s report as nothing more than propaganda,” the watchdog group asserted.
Even the PLO knows the Jews are indigenous to Israel - opinion
To deal with the inconvenient historical fact that Jews are the indigenous population of Israel, the drafters of the PLO charter created an arbitrary dividing line to determine who would be considered a Palestinian. First, the PLO charter deems any Arab who had lived in the entirety of what is now modern Israel prior to the re-establishment of the Jewish homeland to automatically be Palestinian, without regard to whether they were residents in the land. Further, the PLO charter deemed any Arab (but not Jews) born after 1947 to a Palestinian father to be a Palestinian.

Jews, on the other hand, were excised from their own national identity under the PLO charter. Only Jews who had resided in what is now modern Israel prior to “the Zionist invasion” would be considered Palestinian. And what did the PLO even mean when they called it “the Zionist invasion,” 1948 or the 1800s? The latter, of course.

Jews were forcibly removed from Israel after the destruction of the Second Temple and dispersed across the globe, making Palestine, as conceived by the PLO charter, a nearly Jew-free land before the Zionist movement was ever founded.

Imagine if, at the time of the founding of modern Israel, Jews had made a similar declaration with regard to Arabs. To wit, Israel would only recognize those “Arab Palestinians” who resided in the land and identified as “Palestinian” prior to the time of Abraham. This would obviously be an impossibility since the term “Palestinian” was created by the Romans after the Bar Kokhba revolt in around 130 C.E., while Abraham arrived in the Land of Israel approximately 2,000 years before the first use of the term Palestine.

Recently, antisemitic activists have escalated their attacks on Jews, claiming we are “settler-colonists” of a land they call Palestine. In my latest new law review article, I examine the question of colonialism and Israel. Part of my research involved tracing the history of the Jewish presence in Israel and comparing it to the waves of actual settler-colonists, ending with Palestinian Arabs, who displaced the indigenous Jewish population.

The only way that anti-Israel activists can strip Jews of our status as the indigenous people of the land and eliminate Jewish self-determination is to do as the PLO charter did: ignore history and designate a time when Jews had been ethnically cleansed from our own homeland as the point in time when Jewish history in Israel starts.

There are settler-colonists in Israel, and they are Palestinian Arabs. Nonetheless, Israel welcomes these settler-colonists and provides them with rights that no other country would provide to invaders and occupiers. It’s time for Palestinian Arab activists and their supporters to accept history and thank Israel for the gracious hospitality extended to newcomers.


Thursday, December 22, 2022

12/22 Links Pt2: Challenging the false anti-Israel narrative with facts; Jordanian anti-Israel film no longer Oscar contender; In WW2, German Generals Knew about the Annihilation of Jews

From Ian:

‘A Brief And Visual History Of Antisemitism’ Is An Important Resource In Today’s Climate
Israel B. Bitton’s new book, “A Brief and Visual History of Antisemitism,” shouldn’t be needed — but sadly, it is.

A substantial work two years in the making, the visually rich effort features a foreword by Israeli President Isaac Herzog. It’s aimed at all people, but it is particularly designed for seniors in high school as some of the images and discussion could be too intense for younger readers.

Former longtime Democratic New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, founder of Americans Against Antisemitism, was intimately involved in the creation of the book. He told me, “Knowledge is power. We wanted the book to be easy to read and follow.” And it is — even coming with “augmented reality bonus content” aimed at a generation that might not be as familiar as they should be with the long and sordid history of hate and violence directed against the Jewish people.

Hikind went on to note that in November alone, there were 45 hate crimes committed against Jews in New York City — almost three times as many as those committed against all other groups combined. Hikind also cited FBI Director Christopher Wray’s Nov. 17 testimony before Congress that “Antisemitism and violence that comes out of it is a persistent and present fact,” with the Jewish community “getting hit from all sides.” Wray then said 63 percent of religious hate crimes were motivated by antisemitism — a remarkable fact when considering that only 2.4 percent of Americans are Jewish.

The book runs 549 pages before hitting its densely packed endnotes, serving both as a well-documented resource book and a useful tool for the classroom. It’s divided into nine discrete units: Defining Antisemitism; Beginnings of Antisemitism; Proliferation of Antisemitism; Secularization of Antisemitism; Apex of Antisemitism; Easternization of Antisemitism; Politicization of Antisemitism; The Current Landscape; and Combating Antisemitism.

I queried Hikind about how antisemitism might be different today than it was when the infamous “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” was published in Russia in 1903. “There is no difference,” Hikind said, “The same thing Jews were accused of in the past are the same things they are accused of today.”


David Collier: Challenging the false anti-Israel narrative with facts
“Not all opinions are equal. And some things happened just like they say they did. Slavery happened, the Black Death happened, the earth is round, the ice caps are melting, and Elvis is not alive” -Rachel Weisz (playing Deborah Lipstadt) from the movie ‘Denial’.

Jews are facing Orwellian inversions of history. We are witnessing an increase in Holocaust denialism, that can even perversely attempt to make Jews responsible for the events in Nazi Germany. And we are seeing a rewrite of the story of Zionism, which results in Jews being portrayed as powerful, sadistic monsters.

Thankfully, Holocaust denialism is mostly in the shadows. Every decent person will have nothing to do with it. Unfortunately, the rewrite of the Israel story has been far more successful. Media, politicians, and even many Jews on the left, have lost sight of what is true. It is this history – the real history – that I highlight here.

Anti-Israel activism is based on two key falsehoods.

The first is that the Arabs welcomed the Jews (and were then betrayed by them).
The second is that the Jews controlled the events, eventually going on a deliberate rampage, slaughtering or expelling innocent and passive Arabs.

I have no intention of making this a wordy piece, but rather to go on a brief journey through time. Using news reports to highlight the truth upon which the conflict is built.

Acceptance and populations
Let me begin with the idea that the Arabs accepted the Jews – or lived with them in peace before the Zionists came. Until the latter part of the 19th century, pogroms could occur in places such as Tzfat or Hebron (1834) and the world remained oblivious. If news did break out, it often came through published letters of notable travellers that witnessed events. This distressing eye-witness account of a brutal attack on Jews in Jerusalem, was written in July 1834 and published four months after the event occurred:

That attack was not conducted by the Egyptians or the Turks – but by local Arab Muslims. This was the life of Jews in Jerusalem under Ottoman Islamic rule: 3rd class citizens, vulnerable to the violent whims of the Islamic rulers and local Muslim populations. Below are three more extracts from newspapers in the 19th Century, One details the ‘indignity’ with which Jews of Jerusalem were treated. The two others refer to Ottoman laws restricting Jewish free movement (one even mentions the ‘enmity’ towards them):

All reports from the area of the time speak of squalor, empty lands, decay, and neglect. Laws were set in place restricting Jewish land purchase and movement. This blatantly anti-Jewish decree did not just affect Jews from Europe – but even Jews inside the Ottoman empire:
American Israelite, 25 July 1884

At differing levels anti-Jewish activity continued until the British arrived. Between 1914 and 1917, the Turks expelled all the Jews in Tel Aviv and Yaffo:
Daily Phoenix and Times-Democrat Oklahoma,19 Jan 1915

There was an unmentioned driver to the Turkish oppression of Jews in the late 19th Century. The Islamic rulers were worried about Jews entering a land with a low population. So *Muslim only* immigration was encouraged. This can be seen in reports from the time, such as this one that details the Bosnian Muslim immigration and the barriers placed on others:


Alan M. Dershowitz: Democracy in Israel
Israel's democratic system is based on a unicameral parliament, the Knesset, the members of which are chosen in an election based on nationwide proportional representation. Because no one single political party has ever in the country's history won a majority of 61 out of 120 Knesset seats, multiple parties -- including small ones -- need to group together in a coalition to form the government.

It is often necessary to make significant compromises among the parties in order to make up a governing coalition. That is what is happening now with Likud Party leader Benjamin Netanyahu, who .... promises to continue to oppose [bigotries] in the new government he is working to form under himself as Prime Minister.

Israel, however, presents a very different face through the persona of its President Isaac Herzog. In Israel, the presidency is a non-partisan ceremonial role, without executive powers. Herzog... in 2015 ran unsuccessfully for prime minister as leader of the left-wing Labor Party. Today, as president, he represents all the citizens of Israel. His face is that of a centrist patriot with a long history of supporting human rights for all....

Herzog can remind the world that no country in history has contributed more to the world -- medically, scientifically, technologically, agriculturally, culturally, in human rights and in other ways -- during its first 75 years of existence than Israel. This, despite having to devote so much of its resources to defending itself against genocidal threats from Iran and other nations and terror groups committed to its destruction. Israel has signed peace treaties with Egypt, Jordan and other Arab nations, and is seeking peace and normalization with still others.

Netanyahu, who was Israel's longest-serving prime minister, has played an extremely positive role in many of these developments, as well as in creating a peace that few thought possible with four Arab countries -- the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco -- after decades of hostility – all while countering deadly threats from Iran and leading Israel's economy away from socialism into the high-tech wonder that it is.

There is much for Israel to be proud of, even as it faces challenges both from without and within. No nation is subjected to more unfounded and disproportionate condemnation -- from the United Nations, from international tribunals, from NGOs, from campus radicals, from many in the media -- than the nation-state of the Jewish people.


DEBATE: Does the Supreme Court have too much power? | Caroline Glick Show #supremecourt #democracy
In the new “Caroline Glick Show,” Caroline Glick hosts a debate between jurists Alan Dershowitz and Avi Bell about why the Israeli Supreme Court needs reforms.

While the two law professors disagree about the scope of the reforms required, they both agree that the power of the Court should be limited.

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.”

Friday, December 16, 2022

12/16 Links P2: Liberals, Progressives, Wokeness and Israel; Smearing Israel from the Ivory Tower; US Congressman Slams FBI Hate Crimes Data As Bipartisan Criticism Grows

From Ian:

Liberals, Progressives, Wokeness and Israel
Putting all this together, what the JILV survey powerfully documents is a troubling phenomenon that has pervaded the larger American political system today: namely political sorting. In its most basic form, political sorting, which is often confused with polarization, is a fairly new phenomenon and is where ideological and attitudinal positions no longer vary but are expected to align to particular liberal or conservative attitudes. The result today is that Democrats are more uniformly left-leaning and Republicans are more uniformly right-leaning than they were decades ago. Both the left and the right promote packages of ideas and attitudes that must be adopted wholesale if one is not to fall into disfavor. Today, dissent and divergence become almost impossible if one is to avoid adverse social consequences and possibly real professional ramifications as well. And for macro-political development, as Democrats are more habitually liberal and Republicans become more conservative, compromise and bipartisanship becomes harder to achieve. This is exactly what is happening with respect to Israel and ideology and represents an existential threat to the Jewish community and American support for Israel as well.

The recent uproar at Berkeley Law School is a case in point. Nine student groups at the law school banded together to amend their bylaws so as to exclude any Zionist speaker from ever speaking at the law school. That Women of Berkeley Law, the Asian Pacific American Law Students Association and the Law Students of African Descent felt compelled to join forces with the Middle Eastern and North African Law Students Association in this endeavor, illustrates how powerful this ideological sorting can be. Under the guise of intersectional solidarity, groups that have nothing to do with the Middle East conflict institute a litmus test that permanently excludes the vast majority of Jews who believe Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish state. To be part of the community of the good is to expel people with improper beliefs.

More specifically, to understand sorting what is critical to understand is that the electorate has not changed significantly in the aggregate as generations have aged in and out, but voters have sorted. Consider that in the 1990s there were many pro-choice and pro-immigration Republicans and pro-gun Democrats. These variations have disappeared with issues all lining up on the left or right such that if you are a Democrat, you have to believe and promote a particular agenda wholesale and thus one can predict an individual’s political positions based on partisanship alone. Thus, the United States is experiencing increased partisan polarization now even though Independents have grown as a share of the electorate while the number of partisans has shrunk

Turning to the JILV survey itself, support for Israel has become part of the larger political sort of the American public. Today, vast majorities of Republicans support Israel, while Democratic backing is much lower. To be on the left these days means that one cannot support Israel and be ideologically pure; backing Israel is a conservative value and that line cannot be crossed in the ideologically sorted world of today. Thus, it is also the case that those who score lower on the woke scale are appreciably more aligned with Israel than those who are highly woke. Attitudes toward Israel are now part of the liberal or conservative packages that partisans must uniformly adopt, constituting a new norm in American politics evident in the data here. As Abrams and Wertheimer pointed out, sorting has become so deep that it has influenced views and sharply divided Americans on ideas as varied as the nuclear family, the structure-enabling philanthropy and, of course, the police and justice systems.

Moreover, views toward religion, tradition and history have become part of the story now. To be liberal today means real disdain for people of faith and their rights to religious liberty including support for Israel, while conservatives take the exact opposite approach. As Zaid Jilani has written with respect to race, the vision of the now sorted left is one where, “America isn’t a land of opportunity. It’s barely changed since the days of Jim Crow. Whites, universally privileged, maintain an iron grip on American society, while nonwhites are little more than virtuous victims cast adrift on a plank in an ocean of white supremacy.” The emergent narrative and anti-racist policy positions are now stories, “where whites are the villains and minorities are the victims” making “honest discussion of why homicide is the leading cause of death for young Black men … off limits” for instance. The JILV data show the exact same trend with respect to Israel; support for Israel, even with its faults and complex narratives, is simply on the wrong side of the story and cannot be supported if you are on the liberal side of things.

Given the growth of woke culture and the inexorable sorting process in American political life, friends of Israel must ask themselves some tough questions: Should they continue to focus attention on progressives with deeply held woke commitments who seem to be sorting themselves out of support for Israel, or seek to strengthen support among those who don’t share those ideological commitments and are more inclined to support Israel? To what extent should friends of Israel continue to focus efforts on making Israel’s case in the public realm, and to what extent should they join forces with others in opposing the ideology that gives rise to the growing antipathy toward the Jewish state?

Now is a good time to rethink the mainstream Jewish posture in American politics.
Ungrateful France’s ‘national narrative’ ignores the Jews
France has had Jews for over 2,000 years, and their contributions to the economy, politics, culture and science cannot be denied. But the journalist and blogger Veronique Chemla notes that Judaism and the Jews are virtually absent from the “national narrative” in school curricula and textbooks as well as in exhibitions in French museums. This post is an extract from a talk she gave about this blindspot to the Tsedek Lodge of B’nai B’rith France. She also discussed the issue in her interview with André Barmoha on Radio Chalom Nitsan on 13 December 2022.

Revolutionary, Republican, secular France fought the influence of Catholicism. The state remains embarrassed by the history of religions and by the Jews whom she nevertheless emancipated. France also feared fragmenting the nation by isolating the Jews, while not daring to seem to exclude them. The revolutionary Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre had affirmed: “We must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation, and grant everything to the Jews as individuals” – a phrase that still inspires French diplomacy. But even as individuals, the ungrateful homeland ignores them in its national narrative.

Other factors were a pro-European France which denied the “Jewish and Christian roots of Europe” (Jacques Chirac), choosing instead multiculturalism, cultural relativism, atonement. History was perceived through an anachronististic moral lens – the Rights of Man, “political correctness”, making France feel guilty for slavery or colonization. The Crémieux decree was hidden from view while Eurabia ( an European-Arab alliance – ed) was rejected. French Jews are caught between, on the one hand, “pedagogues’ who “deconstruct” history, and, on the other hand, “political correctness”, the disintegration of the nation, European political “elites”, the claims of the “racialized” – Eurabia in different guises.

Jewish historians – Jules Isaac, co-author of school textbooks during the first half of the 20th century, and Marc Bloch – may have felt awkward writing about their co-religionists.

Most important of all, generations of historians, whose studies have skirted around Jews and Judaism, have produced a vicious circle of ignorance, bias and misunderstandings of Jewishness, Judaism and Jews.
Smearing Israel from the Ivory Tower
Israel, a tiny country the size of New Jersey, is the only state in the Middle East that substantially recognizes individual rights, such as legal equality for men and women, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and the freedom to engage in same-sex relationships. Compared to its neighbors—Islamic dictatorships that trample rights and violently oppress their populations—Israel is an oasis of enlightenment and liberty. Yet many American and European professors increasingly show support for anti-Israel movements and tyrannical regimes that aim to erase Israel from the map.

Iran is among the most brutal. According to the U.S. State Department, “The Islamic regime in Iran is the world’s leading state sponsor of terror,” and the “regime elites squander the people’s resources and opportunities, while suppressing freedom and basic human rights.”1 As of this writing, for more than a month Iranian “security forces” have been violently cracking down on widespread protests, which sprang up after the regime’s so-called morality police reportedly killed a young woman for not wearing a hijab correctly.2

Iranian leaders call for “death to Israel,” “death to England,” and “death to America.”3 They fund terrorist groups that wreak havoc in countries neighboring Israel, forming a “ring of fire” around it with the goal of annihilating the tiny democratic republic.4

Yet according to the academic watchdog group Canary Mission, which documents people and groups promoting hatred of the United States and Israel, more than eight hundred professors on North American campuses participate, to varying degrees, in efforts to undermine Israel. So do many in Europe. Among the most vocal anti-Israel professors are David Miller, recently fired from the University of Bristol; Amin Husain at New York University (NYU); and Marc Lamont Hill at Temple University. They are working to erode Israel’s stability, credibility, and security. This despite—or perhaps because of—the fact that Israel is a vital partner and strategic ally of the West.

Miller, previously a tenured professor who served as chair of Bristol’s sociology department, has spent years maligning Israel by advancing conspiracy theories in the classroom and via articles, social media, a website, and a talk show. In his quest to delegitimize the country—which he calls “a violent, racist foreign regime engaged in ethnic cleansing”—he has claimed, for instance, that British Jewish students are “being used as political pawns.”5 Without evidence, he accuses these students of being “constitutionally bound to promoting Israel and campaigns to silence critics of Zionism or the State of Israel on British campuses.”6 To achieve his goal, Miller advocates prohibiting pro-Israel groups from exercising their right to assemble, saying, for example, that Israel “depends for its lifeblood on the transnational Zionist movement. To dismantle the regime, every single Zionist organisation, the world over, needs to be ended. Every. Single. One.”7 (Zionism is the belief in and support of a Jewish homeland.)8

Thursday, December 15, 2022

12/15 Links Pt2: Herzog: Comparing Israel to apartheid South Africa is a ‘blood libel’; Melanie Phillips: How the White House attempt to counter Jew-hatred undermines itself

From Ian:

Herzog: Comparing Israel to apartheid South Africa is a ‘blood libel’
Israeli President Isaac Herzog on Thursday slammed as a “blood libel” comparisons of the Jewish state’s policies towards the Palestinians to South African apartheid.

“The comparison between the State of Israel and the apartheid regime is not a legitimate criticism—it is a blood libel,” Herzog said in a video address to the World Zionist Organization’s annual conference in Tel Aviv.

“It is a dangerous and intensifying terrorism, since the legitimacy of the State of Israel and the justification of its existence is directly related to its ability to protect itself and hence they are trying to undermine this ability,” he added.

Herzog also described the BDS movement as a “brutal campaign” spearheaded by organizations “spreading lies and false facts and seeking to build a long-term policy that will undermine the existence of the state.”

He continued: “Let’s make no mistake, this is not a peace-seeking campaign, it is a campaign promoting hatred and incitement.”

For his part, WZO chairman Yaakov Hagoel warned of a resurgence in antisemitism, which he called a “malignant cancer” that required “major medical surgery to remove… at its roots.”
Melanie Phillips: How the White House attempt to counter Jew-hatred undermines itself
Then there’s Hady Amr, who was recently made deputy assistant secretary of state for “Israel-Palestine” in order to promote the Palestinian Arab cause. One year after the 9/11 attacks, Amr wrote about his work as the national coordinator of the anti-Israel Middle East Justice Network: “I was inspired by the Palestinian intifada,” the murderous terror campaign against Israelis from 1987 to 1993.

Or how about Maher Bitar, the senior director of intelligence at the National Security Council, who spent years promoting the boycott of Israel and was on the executive board of the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Students for Justice in Palestine, which hounds Jewish students on campus and disseminates antisemitic propaganda.

Then there’s Reema Odin, deputy director of the White House Office of Legislative Affairs, who justified Palestinian suicide bombings of Israelis in 2002—when hundreds of Israelis were being blown up in buses and pizza parlors during the second intifada—as “the last resort of a desperate people.”

And let’s not overlook Uzra Zeya, the under-secretary for civilian security, democracy and human rights. As Alana Goodman reported in the Washington Free Beacon last year, during Zeya’s time working for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs she compiled research for a book arguing that “the Israel lobby has subverted the American political process to take control of U.S. Middle East policy” by establishing a secret network of “dirty money” PACs that allegedly bribe and extort congressional candidates into taking pro-Israel positions.

In a section entitled “Jewish Power in the Formulation of U.S. Middle East Policy,” the book claimed that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee gave American Jews secret marching orders on how to vote and which candidates to support financially.

It further argued that “non-Jewish Americans increasingly perceive their Jewish fellow citizens as members of a single-issue voting bloc which, at best, divides its loyalties between an increasingly exploitative Israel and an increasingly exploited United States.”

“The more strident lobbyists for Israel must also accept a major share of the blame for whatever changes have taken place in American public perceptions of the loyalties of America’s Jews,” it continued. “The inevitable public perception is that such ardent supporters of Israel have no real interest in making the United States a better place for all of its citizens, but only in making Israel a more secure and prosperous place for Jews.”

In other words, the book blamed Jews for antisemitism.

The chances of the new White House group calling out the bigotry of all these officials are clearly zero.

The likelihood is that this new strategy will as ever pin antisemitism on the “far-right” while ignoring it where it is most ubiquitous and powerful: In black and Muslim communities, the Democratic party—and the Biden administration.

The White House statement said the new strategy will “raise understanding about antisemitism and the threat it poses to the Jewish community and all Americans.” It would seem that the White House itself needs someone to teach it just what antisemitism is.


Benjamin Netanyahu: The Biggest Lie in the Palestine vs. Israel Debate - Jordan B Peterson
Benjamin Netanyahu was recently reelected as Prime Minister of Israel, having previously served in the office from 1996–1999 and 2009­–2021. From 1967–1972 he served as a soldier and commander in Sayeret Matkal, an elite special forces unit of the Israeli Defense Forces. A graduate of MIT, he served as Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations from 1984–1988, before being elected to the Israeli parliament as a member of the Likud party in 1988. He has published five previous books on terrorism and Israel’s quest for peace and security. He lives in Jerusalem with his wife, Sara. In his newest book "Bibi: My Story" the newly reelected prime minister of Israel tells the story of his family, the story of his people, his path to leadership, and his unceasing commitment to defending his country and securing its future.

Friday, November 25, 2022

11/25 Links Pt2: Whoopi Goldberg, Here’s Why Hamas Is Recognized as a Terror Organization; Children chant massacre-Jews song at North London school

From Ian:

No Good Jew Goes Unpunished
REVIEW: ‘Bad Jews: A History of American Jewish Politics and Identities’

Tamkin’s personal leanings often make her an unreliable narrator. She tries to sanitize the Second Intifada as "a Palestinian uprising that came from the failure of the peace process in the first decade of the 2000s and the violence that ensued," a sentence worthy of Orwell’s "Politics and the English Language." She describes Jewish Currents, which she admires, as "the magazine founded for the Jewish Left back in 1946," leaving out that it was Stalinist. She congratulates Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) for apologizing for an anti-Semitic remark, without mentioning that Omar quickly walked back the apology and reiterated her conspiracy theory.

Notably bad is Tamkin’s discussion of the neoconservatives. Hostile framings and poor paraphrases of Irving Kristol arguments are one thing. Another is that she doesn’t seem to know what she’s talking about. The first words she uses to describe neocon intellectuals are "free-market capitalists"; in fact, they were notable within the conservative movement for accepting limits on the free market and making peace with the New Deal, while critiquing excesses of the Great Society on empirical grounds. Next, she writes, "Neoconservatives actually started out as leftist radicals. They were disciples of Leon Trotsky." For most neocons, this is false. Norman Podhoretz, for instance, was never a Trotskyist. Some, like Kristol, had been Trots in college, but their Marxist credentials were far inferior to, say, those of many founding editors and writers of the conservative (no "neo") National Review.

The problem can be traced to the book’s citations. Tamkin’s pattern is to rely on a single secondary source for information, citing it several times consecutively to cover a topic, before moving on to another single source, also cited several times in a row, for a new topic. In her neocons chapter, she cites Benjamin Balint’s book on Commentary 16 times in a row. I’ve read the book and it is serviceable, but it is only one view on a topic on which countless words have been written. Commentary’s archives are also available online. To rely so thoroughly on single sources is indicative of laziness, frankly, and lack of knowledge.

Tamkin claims to argue that there’s no such thing as a good Jew or bad Jew. But her heart isn’t in it. At every opportunity, she valorizes her bad Jews, the ones who vilify Israel and the American Jewish community. They’re the heroes. Eli Valley, the Jewish cartoonist known for drawing Israelis and pro-Israel Americans as Nazis, she fawns over. Her comment that "multiple people, on learning that I was writing this book, told me that I had to speak to Valley. His work meant so much to them, they told me. It had helped them figure out their own relationship to Jewishness" is perhaps more revealing than she intended.

The flip side is that Tamkin clearly thinks her good Jews are bad. The major Jewish organizations are portrayed throughout as morally indefensible; even Jewish leadership in the civil-rights movement is unconvincingly labeled a "myth." Anticommunists and Israel supporters are cast as fear- and guilt-ridden tyrants, synogogue-goers as conformist and xenophobic. In her most disgusting passage, Tamkin blames the deadly 2018 shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue on Donald Trump and then immediately uses the tragedy to dump on Orthodox Jews—themselves the victims of most anti-Semitic violence—for several paragraphs.

At the end, Tamkin has one last somersault to perform: excusing left-wing anti-Semitism. "When I hear that the fixation should be on antisemitism on the left," she writes, "I recall that there was a reason that American Jewish professionals in the 1960s decided not to focus on the antisemitism within the Nation of Islam," namely, that it could detract from the broader progressive struggle. She then has a quote that the response to left-wing anti-Semitism should be "to show up more" to left-wing causes. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), it is made clear, is the ideal type. At last, and in so many words, we have Tamkin’s elusive definition of a good Jew: a leftist.

Bad Jews: A History of American Jewish Politics and Identities by Emily Tamkin
Whoopi Goldberg, Here’s Why Hamas Is Recognized as a Terror Organization
Whoopi Goldberg, the famed American actress and co-host of the ABC daily talk show The View, has come under fire for seemingly questioning whether Hamas is a terror organization.

During a discussion on The View about Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s past statements on foreign affairs, co-host Sara Haines brought up Omar’s June 2021 comment that equated the United States and Israel with the Taliban and Hamas.

Remember when Whoopi Goldberg claimed the Holocaust wasn’t racism, it was white people fighting white people?

Well, she’s at it again… While Haines was expressing her indignation at Omar’s comment, she referred to Hamas and the Taliban as “organized terrorist communities,” to which Goldberg responded, “Depends on who you talk to.”

So, to help Whoopi Goldberg and her viewers understand who considers Hamas to be a terrorist organization and why they do so, the following is a brief guide to everything you need to know about the organization.

Hamas, also known as the Islamic Resistance Movement, is currently recognized as a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union, Canada, the Organization of American States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. In addition, New Zealand and Paraguay have designated the military wing of Hamas as a terror organization.

The reason that so many states and supranational bodies designate Hamas as a terror organization is that, since its founding in 1987, Hamas has been responsible for some of the most heinous attacks on civilians in Israeli history.


Children chant massacre-Jews song at North London school
An Iranian propaganda video in which dozens of children sing a song that references an apocalyptic myth about massacring Jews was filmed at a school just 15 minutes’ walk from the New London synagogue in St John’s Wood, a JC investigation has revealed.

In the video, shot earlier this year in the playground of the Islamic Republic of Iran School (IRIS) near Queen’s Park station, the children sing about joining 313 mythical warriors in a conflict against the infidels, when (according to the present Iranian regime) Israel will be obliterated and Jews killed.

Some scenes were also shot at the nearby Islamic Centre of England (ICE), which is controlled by the Iranian regime and linked to the school. ICE is currently the subject of a statutory inquiry by the Charity Commission, as the JC disclosed last week.

The song, entitled Hello Commander, has been praised by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who claims its popularity proves his people’s “loyalty to the system”, Iranian pro-regime media has reported.

Its recording in St John’s Wood, in easy reach of several synagogues and Jewish centres, has raised serious concerns among community security officials.

In the London video, rows of boys in white shirts and pressed black trousers and girls in blue flares, white blouses and matching hijabs can be seen saluting and singing their allegiance to their “commander”, Ayatollah Khamenei.

The children, aged between eight and 15, sing: “Without you, this life has no meaning. This life comes alive when you are here for me.”

They then sing about fighting in history’s final battle for the mythical leader known as the Mahdi, last seen supposedly almost 1,200 years ago.

Thursday, November 24, 2022

11/24 Links Pt2: Thanksgiving Reaffirms the 400-Year-Old US-Israel Nexus; Irving, Stewart and Chappelle and the Double Standard for Jew-Hatred

From Ian:

Thanksgiving Reaffirms the 400-Year-Old US-Israel Nexus
Thanksgiving was reportedly first celebrated in November 1621 by William Bradford, the leader of the “Mayflower” and the Governor of the Plymouth Colony.

He enhanced his appreciation of the Bible — and especially the Five Books of Moses — in Leiden, Holland, where he found refuge from religious persecution in England. While there, he heavily interacted with the Jewish community.

Bradford and the other Mayflower passengers perceived the 66-day-voyage as a reenactment of the Biblical exodus, and the departure from “the Modern Day Egypt,” to “the Modern Day Promised Land.”

As a governor in this new land, Bradford announced the celebration of Thanksgiving by citing Psalm 107, which constitutes the foundation of the Jewish concept of Thanksgiving, thanking God for ancient and modern time deliverance.

The epitaph on Bradford’s tombstone in the old cemetery in Plymouth, Massachusetts, begins with a Hebrew phrase — “God is the succor of my life” (יהוה עזר חיי) — as befits the person who brought Hebrew to America. He aimed to make Hebrew an official language, suggesting that reading the Bible in the original language yields more benefits.

The Hebrew word for Thanksgiving’s central dish, turkey, is “Tarnegol Hodoo” (תרנגול הודו), which means “a chicken from India,” but also “a chicken of gratitude/Thanksgiving.”
The Original Puritans
Progressive causes and Protestantism in the U.S. frequently went hand-in-hand, from Prohibition to expanded public education, as the 19th century became the 20th. Indeed, the Social Gospel movement, the inspiration for many of the reforms of the Progressive Era, was led in its early years by Congregationalist minister Washington Gladden. In his book, Rothman quotes George McKenna, author of The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism, on the art of the overlapping Gilded Age and early Progressive Era: “The Puritans’ ethic of self-discipline and austerity was reflected in the numerous paintings and sculptures of Puritans that appeared during this period.” If this seems somewhat paradoxical—the cultural exultation of sober self-reliance alongside the excesses of the robber barons—consider that the progenitor of the New Deal was the blue-blooded FDR, himself the son of a cradle Congregationalist.

Rothman has a theory behind what he sees as a shift, from the late-20th-century paradigm of conservative Republicans as the “Just Say No” party fearful that “someone, somewhere, may be happy,” to progressive “New Puritans,” who, he writes in his book, “are draining life of its spontaneity, authenticity and fun.” Contending in his book that while the Democratic Party had broadened its tent by the 1990s to include upholders of the ’60s’ revolutionary legacy, by contrast, in 2016, Republicans were nominating a three-time divorced Howard Stern Show regular. “Conservatives didn’t so much lose the culture wars as much as they simply fled the field,” he writes.

Of course, the actual spiritual descendants of the New England Puritans, who began as radicals in their native England, are Congregationalists like the United Church of Christ, who are themselves fairly progressive on social issues. And when the idealistic utopianism of the Transcendentalist movement arose in the 19th century, with a focus on the primacy of the self and individual personal experience, it did so in the old Puritan stronghold of New England. Among its most prominent spokesmen was Ralph Waldo Emerson, the son of a Unitarian (itself an outgrowth of Congregationalism) minister at the First Church of Boston, which had been founded by the Puritan John Winthrop of “City Upon a Hill“ fame. In his landmark address, Winthrop warned his fellow New England Puritans that the eyes of the world were upon them, and as such, righteous living was essential. The reward, he wrote, would be a New England that was “a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, ‘the Lord make it like that of New England.’”

“Today,” Rothman said in his message to Tablet, “as the left gravitates away from liberalism and toward progressivism, they are assuming many of progressivism’s conceits—chief among them, a messianic utopianism that views everything, even life’s most banal pleasures, through the prism of political activism.”

But contradiction is something the Puritans accepted as a fact of life. “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling,” wrote the Apostle Paul to the young church at Philippi, and the Puritans took this charge seriously. “The [P]uritan life,” Winship writes, was “much more likely to involve protracted struggle with fear and doubt than it would a steady sense of God’s love.” They were a people ill-at-ease: with themselves, with each other, and with the wider world. That we perennially recast each other and ourselves in the New England Puritans’ story may suggest that the real mark that they left on the American character is something altogether more ambiguous than the saccharine annual depictions at Thanksgiving suggest.
The Case for Israel Celebrating Thanksgiving
Mark Twain wrote in his book Innocents Abroad about how desolate Palestine was when he visited in 1867, before the indigenous Jewish pilgrims and pioneers returned and made the desert bloom.

The success of Israeli agricultural innovation in feeding the people here, as well as in the Third World, is certainly worth celebrating. Israel’s successful hi-tech economy can be revered, as well as its unprecedented success in water conservation that would have made the environmentally conscious Native Americans proud.

Zionist visionary Theodor Herzl wrote in his 1902 book Altneuland that the Jewish state could transport water great distances. His vision and the success of the pioneers who implemented it could be celebrated on Thanksgiving in Israel.

Former diplomat Yoram Ettinger pointed out this week that William Bradford, the leader of the Mayflower and the Governor of the Plymouth Colony, interacted with the Jewish community and enhanced his appreciation of the Five Books of Moses in Holland before initiating the voyage.

“Governor Bradford announced the celebration of Thanksgiving by citing Psalm 107, which constitutes the foundation of the Jewish concept of Thanksgiving, thanking God for ancient and modern time deliverance,” Ettinger wrote. “Bradford was also inspired by the Jewish holidays of Pentecost (Shavuot in Hebrew) and Tabernacles (Sukkot in Hebrew), which highlight the importance of gratitude, and commemorating Thanksgiving for the harvest.”

Proper gratitude for the Land of Israel can be shown by eating turkey, whose Hebrew name, as Ettinger wrote, means both “a chicken from India,” but also “a chicken of gratitude/Thanksgiving.”

Thanksgiving falls this year on Rosh Chodesh, the celebration of the new Jewish month, when Jews say the Hallel prayer and its signature line Hodu LaHashem Ki Tov, which can be translated as “Give thanks to the Lord for He is good,” or “have turkey for God because it’s good.”

The final reason for celebrating Thanksgiving in the Jewish State is to remind the world and the often hostile international media that we – the People of Israel – are here in the Land of Israel, we belong here and we will always be here, even if we get bad press.

Lincoln, the Pilgrims and most of the Wampanoag are long gone, mostly due to tragic events that became part of history.

We the People of Israel have overcome countless tragedies, and yet we endure, which is clearly an excellent reason for us to be thankful.

Am Israel Chai!

Monday, November 21, 2022

11/21 Links Pt2: Why is the religious left taking sides against Israel?; 1,000 Israeli Students Call on Harvard Crimson to Move Office from "Stolen Lands"

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 04, 2022

At Berkeley Law, everyone can choose their identity - except Jews. Everyone has free speech - except for nearly all Jews.



At Berkeley Law School, faculty and staff members are encouraged to include their preferred pronouns in email signatures. Students can indicate their preferred pronouns on their law school applications, as well as on their name tags during student orientation.

Clearly, the right to identify oneself as one wishes is important at the law school, and anyone who chooses to ignore those wishes and tell students and staff that they refuse to address them as they self-identify would be marginalized as a bigot, and probably censured.

There is one exception, though.

This fall there has been a controversy at Berkeley Law when nine student organizations will not host events or invite speakers who have expressed views in support of Zionism. Many Jews protested, saying that this effectively discriminated against them as Zionism and Judaism are tightly bound.

The lawyer defending the student organizations, Liz Jackson of Palestine Legal, who is herself an alumnus of the school, defended the discriminatory bylaws in a most curious way:

“Some students say that their Jewish identity is so deeply identified with Zionism that this effectively discriminates against them," Jackson said. "But that’s their subjective view and choice about how they understand their own Jewish identity.”

According to Palestine Legal's lawyer, Jews do not have the right to say that their Judaism includes love of Israel. Self-identification is not a right for Jews, rather, Jewishness is defined by others and Jews must adhere to the definition that anti-Zionists impose on them.

This doesn't sound very progressive. But this is the argument of the Berkeley Law student organizations to defend their blocking any speaker for whom Israel is a central part of their Judaism, which includes the vast majority of Jews.

Jackson herself says she is Jewish. According to her own standards, I can declare that this is only her subjective view and that she is in reality not Jewish. How do you think that argument would go over at Berkeley? Yet that is exactly what she is saying about 95% of all Jews. 

Jackson's hypocrisy doesn't end there. 

Not only does she deny the right of Jews to define Judaism, she denies the right of Zionists to define Zionism!
In an Oct. 3 statement released by ASUC Senator Shay Cohen addressed to LSJP and student groups that adopted the bylaw, student groups alleged that the bylaw was “a deliberate attempt to exclude Jewish students from the community,” and likened anti-Zionism to antisemitism.

“When we say ‘Zionism,’ we mean the Jewish right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland, which is Israel,” said Amir Grunhaus, campus senior and president of Tikvah, a Zionist student group that signed the statement. “This does not say anything about the self-determination of Palestinians.”

Jackson expressed disagreement with this definition of Zionism, alleging that it was “colonial ideology” and that it is “problematic” to believe that a religious group has a right to a state of their own as it “requires discrimination” against people outside of that group.
This is "1984"-level thought police stuff. This lawyer defines what her political opponents believe. 

Note also that Jackson here is defining Jews as a purely religious group, not as a people. According to her words, atheist Jews aren't Jews, either. 

Jewish and Zionist identity can only be defined by those who oppose Jewish and Zionist identity.

And this is still not the height of Liz Jackson's hypocrisy.

She wrote an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times against the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act where she falsely claimed that the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism, which is incorporated in the Act, makes criticism of Israel illegal on campus. She's lying - the IHRA definition explicitly says that criticism of Israel similar to criticism of any country is not antisemitic.

Jackson wrote:
The State Department standard is highly controversial because it conflates criticism of Israeli policies with anti-Jewish hatred, shutting down debate by suggesting that anyone who looks critically at Israeli policy is somehow beyond the pale. It has no place on college campuses in particular, where we need students to engage in a vigorous exchange of ideas.
Jackson claims she supports a vigorous exchange of ideas on campus. No Zionist I know of disagrees.  But at Berkeley, she has taken the exact opposite stand, and defends organizations making bylaws that ban not only speech that supports Zionism, but they ban Zionist speakers from speaking on any topic whatsoever!

To anti-Zionist hypocrites like Jackson and her organization Palestine Legal, these are the rules:

The right to self-identify is sacred - except for Jews. 
The right to define your own beliefs is sacred - except for Zionists.
The right to free speech is sacred - except for nearly all Jews. 
And calling out this obvious hypocrisy is anti-Palestinian racism. 

(h/t Andrew P)

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!
 

 

Wednesday, November 02, 2022

11/02 Links Pt2: The Holocaust Is Not Your Metaphor; The Balfour bogeyman; AOC’s ‘obsession’ with Israel is ‘shameful’; LA Council Passes IHRA Definition of Antisemitism

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

Saturday, October 15, 2022

10/15 Links: Top Law Firms Fund Anti-Semitic Campus Groups at Berkeley; White House ‘deeply disappointed’ after Abbas tells Putin he doesn’t trust US

From Ian:

Nation’s Top Law Firms Fund Anti-Semitic Campus Groups at Berkeley
A host of the nation’s premier law firms are financially supporting organizations at Berkeley Law School that are accused of fostering anti-Semitism and hatred of Israel, according to a campus watchdog group.

Student groups at the elite law school, led by Law Students for Justice in Palestine, adopted what they called a pro-Palestine bylaw earlier this month pledging to ban all speakers who support "Zionism" or "the apartheid state of Israel." The resolution primarily targets Jews who identify as pro-Israel and support the Jewish state, fueling accusations of anti-Semitism among Berkeley law students.

An analysis by StandWithUs, a nonpartisan pro-Israel organization that combats anti-Semitism on campus, indicates that half of the student groups that backed the resolution are funded in part by some of the country’s most elite law firms, including Latham & Watkins, Jenner & Block LLP, and Cooley LLP. StandWithUs is demanding these firms pull their support from the student groups, but, as of Friday, none have committed to do so. A Washington Free Beacon request for comment to 10 of the law firms named by StandWithUs was not returned by press time.

Roz Rothstein, StandWithUs’s CEO and cofounder, told the Free Beacon that she is hopeful once these law firms learn that they are financially backing anti-Semitism, they will pull their support.

"It is hard to fathom that such distinguished law firms would knowingly sponsor student groups that support anti-Semitism by punishing Jewish students for aspects of their identity," Rothstein said. "We are hopeful that as these firms learn about what their grantees have done, they will publicly and rapidly condemn the antisemitic action and cease further sponsorship of groups who are perpetrators of such hate."
Analysts offer pros and cons on Lebanon maritime deal but agree it will not make Israel safer
Opponents of the deal, among them opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu, also complained that the agreement was a capitulation to Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy and the most powerful force in Lebanon. In July, the terrorist group launched three unarmed drones at an Israeli gas rig, and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah warned that “no one” would drill gas as long as Lebanon’s “rights” to extract gas were not upheld.

Amidror said his central question was how Nasrallah would react. “What will be the assessment of Nasrallah? … If, sitting with his people, he says, ‘Guys, we won. Israel collapsed under the pressure. … The Israelis retreated because they don’t want another war with Hezbollah, and let’s think what will be the next space in which we can blackmail them.’… it might lead to escalation,” Amidror said.

David Schenker, assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs during the Trump administration, shared Amidror’s concern during the JINSA webinar. “The big question for me is whether this agreement makes Israel safer. And this is what we’re hearing from the Israeli government. This is what we heard from the IDF. I think it’s to be determined. It could go either way. And the problem of Hezbollah doesn’t go away because of this agreement. It could potentially exacerbate the problem,” he said.

Schenker also offered a positive note, saying the deal would essentially turn Hezbollah and its Lebanese Christian allies into Israel’s business partners. “The Israeli government got … [them] … to sign off on a document that essentially recognizes Israel. This has never been done. … This discredits Hezbollah at home [and] undermines a little bit the resistance narrative,” Schenker said.

Amidror said proponents of the agreement have argued that what matters is that Israel can start drilling immediately, something “more important than all the symbolic lines in the sea.” He agreed that with the threat from Hezbollah at least temporarily shelved, oil and gas companies will more readily agree to explore in the area.

The U.S. has agreed to mediate between French oil giant TotalEnergies and Israel. TotalEnergies will drill in Lebanese waters and as part of the deal, Israel is to receive a percentage of revenue from gas that extends over the Lebanese line into Israeli waters. The U.S. also said that it would guarantee Israel’s security and economic rights should Hezbollah challenge the agreement. The U.S. provided Israel with a letter to that effect, Israeli sources said.

“It’s a PR paper. Legally, no one is obliged to fulfill it,” Amidror said. Schenker agreed, saying, “This letter, if it exists, doesn’t have any legal weight.”

Both analysts expressed concern that some of the funds from an offshore gas windfall could end up in the hands of Hezbollah. “I think the Lebanese already fear that this money will disappear into the abyss of corruption,” Schenker said. “There’s no transparency. The state does not have a sovereign wealth fund. Already there are contracts … by Total and others to shell companies that are partially owned by some of the most corrupt political elites in Lebanon.”

“We can expect that not only will it help Hezbollah’s allies benefit, but that Hezbollah to some extent will benefit as well,” he said.
Majority of Israelis Support Maritime Deal, Poll Shows
The majority of Israelis support the maritime border deal with Lebanon, believing it was the appropriate measure notwithstanding the coincidence with the election, according to an opinion poll released on Friday.

For 47 percent of respondents to Channel 12‘s survey, the signing of the agreement some three weeks before a general election represents the right decision, while 36 percent oppose it and 17 percent have no opinion on the matter.

On a separate topic, 47 percent of respondent believe that Prime Minister Yair Lapid’s main motivations for concluding the agreement were of a “political” nature, while 41 percent say the leader was guided by considerations of what is best for the security and economy of Israel.

In addition, 57 percent of those polled believe that former premier Benjamin Netanyahu’s opposition to the agreement and his harsh criticism of Lapid are political, compared to 31 percent who believe that his positions are motivated by Israel’s security and economy.

Israel’s security cabinet voted on Wednesday afternoon in favor of the maritime border deal with Lebanon. The text is now subject to approval by the parliament.

Lapid hailed the Lebanon deal on Wednesday, saying it was “a great achievement for the state of Israel, for Israel’s security and for Israel’s economy.”

Netanyahu meanwhile accused the government of caving in to external pressures and putting Israel’s security at risk.

Friday, October 14, 2022

10/14 Links Pt2: Phillips: Hysteria greets British PM's embassy move proposal; Amnesty UK refuses to sack official who likened Israel’s Gaza policies to the Shoah

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Hysteria greets British PM's embassy move proposal
Few expect that the British embassy will actually be moved. Indeed, given the chaos that has engulfed Truss since she became prime minister, with the financial crisis and collapse in electoral support sparked by her scorched-earth economic policies currently threatening to bring her down before she has her feet properly under the Downing Street table, moving the embassy would hardly seem to be a priority.

If it were to happen, however, it would not only be an enormous boost to Israel. It would also represent a dramatic change in British policy.

Unlike the US, where despite various presidents' relative coolness towards Israel the Christian heartlands remain solidly supportive, Britain's attitude towards the Jewish state has always been at best ambiguous and at worst – as in Mandatory Palestine – actively hostile.

Moving the embassy would not only start to reset Britain's shameful attitude towards Israel. It would also advance the cause of peace.

The only reason this century-old conflict continues is that the Palestinian Arabs have repudiated the two-state solution. They have refused repeated offers of a state of their own, because their goal is not a Palestinian state but the eradication of the Israeli one.

Towards this infernal goal, their principal weapon has been the refusal by Britain and other western countries to recognize the Palestinians' real agenda, providing them instead with funding, training and diplomatic recognition.

In other words, Britain and the rest of the west have incentivized, rewarded and perpetuated the war against Israel by going along with the morally bankrupt proposition that the Palestinian Arabs are entitled to a state of their own, even though their actual purpose is to use that state as a means to destroy Israel.

By moving the embassy, Truss – who describes herself as a "huge Zionist" – would be signaling an end to the shameful British capitulation to the Palestinians' lies and blackmail.

That is precisely why there's been such a reaction. While the average British citizen doesn't have an opinion about Israel one way or the other, Britain's elites loathe Israel on a scale that just doesn't exist in America.

The proposal to move the British embassy has lifted a stone, and we can all see what has crawled out from underneath.
Amnesty UK refuses to sack official who likened Israel’s Gaza policies to the Shoah
Amnesty International UK is defying calls to sack a senior official who shared a post comparing Israel to Nazi Germany and likened the Jewish state’s treatment of Palestinians to the Holocaust.

Garry Ettle, who represents the human rights charity as “country coordinator for Israel and Occupied Palestinian territories”, retweeted a message asking how video footage showing Israeli youths shouting at a Palestinian woman was “any different from Nazi Germany”.

The activist called Israel’s policies towards Gaza a “slow holocaust” in a Facebook message posted on 27 January 2020.

He also condemned US band Black Eyed Peas for playing a gig in “apartheid Israel” in another social media post last year.

Mr Ettle’s hardline views, which were revealed by online investigations group GnasherJew, have led to calls for Amnesty International UK to sack him.

Tory peer Lord Leigh of Hurley, an executive board member of the Conservative Friends of Israel, told the JC he thought Mr Ettle should be dismissed, adding: “Amnesty International UK has a very worrying record and this is the moment for decisive action to be taken by them.”

And a spokesperson for advocacy group Campaign Against Antisemitism said: “Only at Amnesty and like-minded organisations could someone who allegedly compares Israel to Nazis describe himself as a ‘human-rights activist’.

“Such comparisons are a breach of the universally accepted International Definition of Antisemitism. We would call on Amnesty to investigate and dissociate itself from this individual, but the organisation’s record on antisemitism gives little reason to think that it holds the views of the Jewish community in anything but contempt.”
Both the left and the right have turned on the Jews
Conservatives claim to abhor anti-Semitism, and yet foolishly believe they can ride the coattails of non-conservative loose cannons like Kanye West and greedily feed off the cultural scraps that fall to the ground; all while trampling on the supposed principles that were their “hills to die on” in their battles with the opposing side.

Kanye West, who in a matter of days argued that Jared Kushner sought peace in the Middle East to make money, repeatedly promoted the radical Black Hebrew Israelite conspiracy theory that American blacks are the “real Jews,” implied that Jews created cancel culture and announced that he would be going “death con 3” on “Jewish people,” has shown no signs of apologizing.

And yet, days later, conservatives celebrated Kanye West—an open and unapologetic anti-Semite—on the red carpet, labeling his very presence iconic.

A line has been crossed.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke with Jeremy Corbyn and said veiled anti-Semitic things in the past, and conservative media—myself included—never let it go. And quite rightly so.

Kanye West, who has far more cultural influence than Ocasio-Cortez, pushed multiple explicit anti-Semitic tropes, and what was the result?

Many high-profile conservatives shrugged and moved on that same day. Some didn’t even shrug at all.

Now, many have responded to my vocal criticism of this appalling conduct with “whataboutism,” declaring that the leftist media ignores anti-Semitism all the time.

Yes, they do. So what?

I was under the impression that we were meant to be the principled ones. If that is true, where on earth are our principles?

I do understand the attitude of wanting to bring culturally-powerful people into our tent based on their supposedly aligned views on single-issue topics. (Let’s leave aside for now the fact that Kanye West’s “pro-life” views are based on an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.) However, if there are no entry requirements to the ideological tent, if admission numbers are the only metric of value, what does that tent even represent?

Until our movement is willing to look in the mirror and stick to their supposed principles, the Jewish people cast out from this tent will wonder whether any of this is worth fighting for.

Yet again, Jews are alone.
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