A new low for The Forward: "Historian" says Zionists have traditionally allied with antisemites

Suzanne Schneider, a historian, writes in the Forward that there is a history of Zionists cooperating with Nazis and that today's pro-Israel, pro-Trump people are in that same mold.

I've seen articles like this before, but usually in Arab media, modern antisemitic sites like Mondoweiss or in the doctoral thesis of Mahmoud Abbas. 

But when the Jewish Daily Forward publishes this, it takes on an entirely new dimension of disgust.

Though the scope of destruction was not yet known in the 1930’s and early 1940’s, many nevertheless find it astounding that there were attempts by right-wing Zionists during these years to establish ties with Nazi Germany. Numerous scholars have noted the fascist sympathies of certain members of the Revisionist Zionist camp, who bitterly feuded with mainstream Zionists and denounced them as Bolsheviks. The antipathy was apparently mutual, as David Ben-Gurion in 1933 published a work that described Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of the Revisionist movement, as treading in the footsteps of Hitler. The Zionist Right’s flirtation with fascism reached its tragic peak in 1941 when Lehi, Avraham Stern’s paramilitary splinter group, approached Otto Von Hentig, a German diplomat, to propose cooperation between the nationally rooted Hebraic movement in Palestine and the German state. Nazi Germany declined his generous offer, having stumbled across quite a different “solution” to the question of Jewish existence.

That first phrase is Schneider's "get out of jail free card" to avoid directly calling Zionists Nazi-sympathizers. Because that is the entire point: there was huge controversy among Zionists, both in the right and the left,  in the early days of Nazi Germany, when everyone knew that Hitler was an antisemite but few imagined that he was aiming at murdering millions of Jews. The goal of the Zionists from both the mainstream and the revisionist side was to save Jewish lives, period, and Schneider's ex post facto attempt to link Zionist and Nazi goals is beyond disgusting.

I wrote about this last year when I noted that anti-Israel writers were cherry-picking articles about Zionist-Nazi cooperation without noting that in some cases, the lives of tens of thousands of Jews were saved because of it.

For many centrists and liberals, the idea of Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon working together causes endless confusion: How could the descendent of Holocaust survivors find common cause with the ideological leader of the alt-right?

... It has been with this history in mind that I approach contemporary debates about Donald Trump’s presidency and the alliance it fosters between members of the white nationalist “alt-right” on one hand, and a certain segment of American Jews, on the other. The argument that the latter should work with the former because they all share a commitment to “Greater Israel” belies the fact that not all allies, or alliances, are created equal. When Richard Spencer voices his admiration of Zionism (because, in his understanding, the movement stands first and foremost for racial homogeneity), we should realize that this is not incidental to his suggestion that America might be better off with a peaceful ethnic cleansing of those population segments that are not of white, European descent. Do American Jews really believe that they will pass muster within such a state? And are the swastikas and other acts of intimidation that have been so abundant since Trump’s victory really just peaceful incentives to realize that our true home is in a land far, far away?

Bannon is certainly controversial, but I have searched through the Breitbart archives when he was editor and have not seen a single piece of evidence that he harbors any antisemitic feelings. Neither has Alan Dershowitz. His own Jewish coworkers have hotly disputed that idea as well. Bannon certainly has problems with liberal Jews who attack Israel from that perspective, as do I, but to conflate him with unapologetic antisemites like Richard Spencer as this article does is simply slander. No one in the Trump administration supports Richard Spencer and to pretend that they do is another manifestation of what Schneider does with history: libel by analogy rather than considered disagreement based on facts.

There is plenty of room to disagree with the Trump administration based on its actual words and actions. But people like Schneider, and by extension the Forward, prefer to attack  a segment of Jewry by creating smarmy associations between the people they have political disagreements with and Nazis.

I don't like throwing around the term antisemitism loosely, but is it any less antisemitic to falsely associate right-wing Zionist Jews with Nazis than it is for more modern antisemites associate Israeli policies with Nazi Germany? Both of them revel in the false irony of Jews supposedly acting like their persecutors.

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How the Ayatollah duped The Forward (and how the NYT plays along)

Here's the New York Times headline:

There you go! A reporter who was accompanied by Iranian agents everywhere he went found no evidence of extremism!

“Though I had to work with a government fixer and translator, I decided which people I wanted to interview and what I would ask them,” Mr.[Larry] Cohler-Esses wrote in the first of two articles from his July reporting trip.

The bigger news is that the Forward reporter was duped because he didn't do his homework. In this section that the NYT also highlighted, Cohler-Esses writes:

During the course of my conversations with several senior ayatollahs and prominent political and government officials, it became clear that there is high-placed dissent to the official line against Israel. No one had anything warm to say about the Jewish state. But pressed as to whether it was Israel’s policies or its very existence to which they objected, several were adamant: It’s Israel’s policies. Others, notwithstanding their ideological objection to a Jewish state, made it clear they would accept a two-state solution to Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians if the Palestinians were to negotiate one and approve it in a referendum.

Almost unbelievably, Kohler-Esses doesn't know what they meant by this "referendum."

It is the Ayatollah's way of fooling gullible Westerners.

This "referendum" that they are referring to would be open to all who identify themselves as Palestinian around the world, at last count some 12 million.  Jews could only vote if their ancestors had lived in Ottoman Palestine and they still live in Israel.  The "referendum" would then be to decide what to do with the Jews who moved to Israel since 1948. Those millions of Jews don't have a vote. The Ayatollah knows that the results of this "referendum" would be to expel all the Jews who have lived in Israel for less than a century.

"Referendum," when used by Iranians, is a codeword for the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Israel. And they admit this freely for people who bother to read their writings.

But there may be an infinitesimal theoretical chance that these "Palestinians" would vote to allow a Jewish state on land that they claim as being stolen from them.

 This is what these clerics and officials are saying, and dupes like Larry Cohler-Esses is too ignorant of the facts to understand that he has been made into a fool.

This is explicit in the Ayatollah Khamenei's writings. But the Forward journalist is too enamored of the idea of a moderate Iran that he doesn't even know the basics of how Khamenei wants to destroy Israel - something that his interviewees agree with but were not asked.

So we see clearly how the Forward is duped:

Hossein Kanani Moghaddam, a British-trained civil engineer, has been deeply involved in his government’s nuclear development program — as an environmental designer for civilian generators, he stressed. But his enduring claim to wide fame was that he was the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s top commander during the war against Iraq. A candidate in the 2012 presidential election won by Rouhani, Moghaddam was also, without a doubt, the most fervently anti-Zionist person I met during my seven-day stay in Iran — to the point of anti-Semitism. Moghaddam believes, for example, that “all the world capital, all the investment, the banks, the charities, the economics are under the control of Zionism… 1% of the world is Jewish, but they control all the economy in the world.”

He also believes Jews who have immigrated to Israel from elsewhere should go back to their native land.

Yet when I asked Moghaddam about a two-state solution for Israel and for Palestinians, he replied: “Yes. I’d accept a two-state solution if it were negotiated and put to a referendum, and people in this area chose two separate places. Okay, we will follow them” — so long, he added, as Jerusalem, which he held as holy under Islam, was reserved as a city to be shared by “all the monotheistic religions.”

Without knowing the basic facts of this "referendum," the Forward is claiming that this guy accepts a two-state solution. And one other interviewee sued that same magic word "referendum" as well.

Larry Kohler-Esses also didn't ask these same officials if they support Iran's arming terror groups in the territories. Which Khamenei does, and he has said so repeatedly.

If only Kohler-Esses had bothered reading the Ayatollah Khamenei's tweets, in English, while researching his trip that he had requested two years ago. He could have read this:

Now, was anything these clerics said inconsistent with the Ayatollah's plan to destroy Israel?

This is journalistic malpractice.

Oh, and one other thing: The Forward journalist was allowed to enter Iran literally the week after Quds Day, when thousands of Iranians shout "Death to Israel" in unison in the streets. For some strange reason, his request for a visa was not granted for that day. And he doesn't mention it.

And a quick Google search for "Death to Israel" - even in Hebrew - finds dozens of Iranian websites. Too bad Mr. Kohler-Esses didn't seek out the many people who express their anti-Israel opinions so freely online.

The Forward was duped, and the New York Times takes out even what little context the Forward article had.

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The Forward's moral equivalence between 3-month old terror victim and a stone thrower

The worst kind of moral equivalence can be seen in The Forward as they juxtapose the coldblooded  murder of a three month old baby and the killing of an Arab stone thrower.

The title? "A Tale of Two American Tragedies."

In October, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict claimed two American citizens over just three days. Three-month-old Chaya Zissel Braun and 14-year-old Orwa Hammad were born in Jerusalem and Ramallah, respectively, but both held citizenship in the United States.

Chaya’s parents were American Jews who immigrated to Israel. Orwa’s parents were Palestinian Muslims who immigrated to the United States and then returned to the Israeli-occupied West Bank to raise their children. Both families’ migrations reflected their desire to live lives steeped in their religious heritage. They then found themselves the inheritors of the conflict.

The Forward goes on to mention that Hammad was accused of preparing to throw a Molotov cocktail. It does note he was among a group of Arabs throwing stones at Israeli cars "at Highway 60, a West Bank thoroughfare used by settlers" - well, that's an extenuating circumstance, isn't it? It also mentions that Hammad had pro-terror photos on his Facebook page.

That same Highway 60 has been the scene of hundreds of terror attacks, including the shooting deaths of four Israelis - including a pregnant woman - in 2010.

But to The Forward, both deaths are "tragedies". One person was a victim and one was an attacker; one was an innocent and one was a youthful criminal. But, hey, they are both American citizens, and their families are both sad, so that makes the terrorist-in-training and the terror victim part of the same moral universe - when your point of view is as skewed as that of The Forward.

We've seen this kind of lazy journalism before, this past summer in The New York Times and in an infamous Newsweek cover story that spawned an attempt to make a film juxtaposing the grieving parents of both the terrorist and the victim. Last week CNN made a similar equivalence between Chaya Zissel Braun and a Palestinian child killed by accident by a Jewish driver.

There is such a desire on the part of the media to turn the conflict into a "cycle of violence" where both sides have equivalent grievances. Yet scratching the surface only a little bit shows that one society raises their children to hate and to praise the murderers while the other one tries mightily to just live in peace.

These reporters, however, don't want to show the reality. They want to create a shorthand for readers to agree with their own biases, and the "moral equivalence" meme is an easy, lazy way to get their point across without making readers think that maybe, just maybe, one side is right and the other side wrong.

(h/t EBoZ)

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Forward publishes article denigrating prayer for #EyalGiladNaftali

Leah Bieler, who we are told "has an M.A. in Talmud and Rabbinics from the Jewish Theological Seminary [and] teaches Talmud in Connecticut," writes in The Forward that praying to God for the safety of the three kidnapped teens is really a waste of time:

When my eldest daughter was three years old, she enjoyed a comfortable morning routine. After breakfast, if she dressed quickly, she was allowed to watch half an episode of “Sesame Street” before heading off to school. Like most three-year-olds, she enjoyed the predictability and sameness of quiet time with Elmo and Grover and Oscar the Grouch. Every morning, she was engrossed, dancing and singing along, blonde ringlets bouncing.

Then, one Monday morning, tragedy struck. Instead of “Sesame Street,” there was a new show on PBS. She was horrified. Tears streaming down her face, she looked up at me and with all earnestness asked, “Ima, why did HaShem have to change the TV schedule?”

The theology of a preschooler is very concrete. God made the world. Something in my world changed. Therefore the creator of the universe must have caused the switch. The end. If she had thought of it, she might even have concocted her own personal prayer.

“HaShem, please use your awesome power to put Sesame Street back on PBS from 8-9AM on weekdays. Blessed are you O Lord, part time network programmer.”

You got it: Beiler is comparing thousands of years of Jewish theology to the maturity level of a three year old.

Individual and communal prayer have in them the potential for tremendous power. Prayer can force us outside of ourselves, help create and maintain empathy, form community, heal wounded souls. It can redirect our thinking, bind us to the past, and allow us to make space for a connection with the divine.

All of these are holy purposes. But using prayer as a magic trick is a much dicier business. The moment I’m sure that my specific mode of praying will work miracles is bound to be short lived. I will, without fail, find myself disappointed in the end.

Wow! I guess all the theologians over the centuries of every religion must bow to the mighty logic of Bieler and stop wasting their time in prayer!

It is not the Jews who are praying for the safety of the boys who have the maturity level of a child. It is Bieler, who hasn't a clue despite her education of why Jews pray and what they expect to get out of it. Her conception of prayer is about as mature as the teenager who says "Look! God hasn't struck me with lightning when I ate a cheeseburger!"

Since she considers herself a religious person, I wonder if she actually looks at the contents of the daily prayers. Is asking God for sustenance and rain and to heal the sick just an excuse, a waste of time?

But Beiler's wisdom extends beyond this:

For now, as far as anyone can tell, the lion’s share of fault for the kidnapping falls on the kidnappers, the masterminds, and the nature of a society where these actions are seen as viable options.

Really? None of those people who are crying out to God in every Jewish community are aware of this piercing insight - they need an obnoxious know-it-all from JTA to tell them this!

The irony is that Beiler, who pretends to support prayer's supposed primary purpose of "forming community," has no problem writing an article that is meant to divide it, to belittle those who are crying out for the kids' safety.

Of course, The Forward is eager to publish such rubbish.

(h/t EBoZ)

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Forward article justifies smiley photos at Arafat's grave

Elisheva Goldberg at The Forward says "Harvard Group Was Right To Visit Arafat's Grave."

After dismissing critics of the trip, including me, as "far right blogs," she misses the point completely:

The point is that allowing students to engage in conversation on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with Palestinians themselves is still taboo among the American Jewish establishment. And it’s high time that changed.

First, let’s establish the obvious: These Harvard students were well within their rights — on purely touristic grounds — to visit even the tomb of a man as reprehensible as Arafat. Imagine going on an educational tour of Berlin and not stopping at Hitler’s bunker. Or trying to see the sites of a conflict like the American Civil War without taking a look at the Confederate Memorial Carving of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Hitler killed 6 million Jews and 5 million others, but no one would argue that your visit to his bunker was meant to “honor” him. Davis, Lee and Jackson were considered war criminals in the North in their time, but no one is going to argue that you’re embracing their side of the Civil War at their monument. These students were not “paying homage” to Arafat. They were visiting a crucial site in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Goldberg's analogies are obviously bogus. The analogy to Arafat's grave is not Hitler's bunker; it would be a shrine to Hitler maintained by neo-Nazis. Contrariwise, the analogy to Hitler's bunker would be the room in the Muqata where Arafat made his decisions, which would be a quite appropriate place to visit.

Beyond that, her dishonesty is transparent. The smiling photo at Arafat's grave can in no way be compared to visiting a historic site. There is nothing historic about that gravesite; it is propaganda to make Arafat look like a leader of a nation and not the murderer of thousands. Even worse, thousands of Israelis  today have lost friends and loved ones because of the policy of this monster, still barely cold in the grave. It is not merely tasteless to pose at his grave, it is offensive. (Oh, I forgot. Arabs and Muslims are allowed to be offended in today's world, Jews are supposed to be better than that.)

This photo (detail below) of students smiling, clearly without having been told ahead of time how heinous Arafat was, is the problem. If they would have known, and known how much it hurts Jews to honor such a monster, they would never, ever have smiled. The students clearly were not told ahead of time how posing in front of his grave is hugely inappropriate. The Israeli-born Zionist student leaders of the trip should have refused to enter the building, and explained exactly why they refused, while allowing the students to make their own decisions.

That would have been educational. A mindless selfie-type image is not. And from what I can tell, the leaders of the trip are smiling right along with the students, despite their later claims that they "discussed how difficult it was for them to stand by the grave of a man so evil in their eyes." Sorry, I'm not buying it.

I never said that the students shouldn't hear the Palestinian Arab side of the story. On the contrary, from the mainstream media that often is all they hear; a trip like this is meant to show the Zionist side of the story. Even so, for this audience it would be entirely appropriate to hear a lecture from a Fatah leader in Ramallah.

Goldberg's embrace of open dialogue also rings hollow. Would she encourage the same students to visit and listen to the right-wing Jews in Hebron? Is she that liberal? Or does her embrace of seeing all sides of the story have some limits, where Jews who want to live in their ancestral homes are shunned but Arabs who want to ethnically cleanse them are to be embraced?

Moreover, for her to be consistent, she shouldn't only say she wants to see the undergraduates visit Hebron, but to also visit the grave of Baruch Goldstein. No doubt she is  more offended at that idea than visiting the grave of a far worse mass murderer. I would say that such a visit is inappropriate, but Goldberg can't do so easily without exposing her hypocrisy.

Perhaps this "far right blog" is more accepting of people hearing all sides of the story than progressive, liberal Forward columnists are.

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To the Forward, Israel is inherently evil

The Forward has a truly disgusting article by Lisa Goldman, entitled "Feel-Good Stories Obscure Ugly Mideast Truths."

Excerpts:

The Israeli government invests considerable effort in promoting its image in the foreign media. It’s called “hasbara,” which comes from the Hebrew root “to explain.” Israelis tend to be patriotic, with many believing their country is unfairly vilified in the foreign media. And so they embrace hasbara as a legitimate corrective measure. But for critics of Israel, even those who do not speak Hebrew, hasbara means official lies and spin designed to divert attention away from the military occupation of the West Bank and the settlers.

The Government Press Office, which provides journalists with press cards and keeps them informed of media events, contributes to the hasbara effort by sending out emails with carefully crafted pitches about human interest stories. Usually, these stories are meant to be both heartwarming and counter-intuitive — the kind that people post on Facebook with a comment about restoring one’s faith in human nature....

When I read a recent New York Times article about wounded Syrian children receiving treatment in Israeli hospitals, I posted it to my Facebook with a cynical comment: “So the Government Press Office sends an email to journalists in Israel, telling them about this ‘quiet’ story of Israeli hospitals treating Syrian wounded. Shhh…. We want to be modest about this. So don’t make too much noise and please don’t reveal the identities of the people who benefit from our generosity, because their own people might shun or hurt them. Just for seeking help for their children. Can you imagine? And the media obediently report this story, because who can resist cute Jewish and Arab kids getting treated in the same hospital…. And then the foreign ministry sends links to the articles to all the journalists they have on their global email lists. And voila. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you do hasbara.”

My friend Gal Beckerman read the comment and decided to look into the matter, emailing Isabel Kershner, who wrote the article, and the New York Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief, Jodi Rudoren. And it turns out that I was wrong. They discovered the story on their own, and in fact the army tried to prevent them from covering it.

So does this reporter ask forgiveness for falsely accusing Israel of pushing this story when it didn't? No! The Forward looks for the higher truth:

Gal’s conclusion — and I agree with him — is that the Israeli government’s relentless focus on hasbara efforts has tainted the way we report and consume news from that country. For partisan observers, news reports are judged not for their veracity and newsworthiness, but for how they present Israel. Far too often this is parsed according to binary clichés: Israel is presented either as the evil occupier or a light unto the nations.

But I would take Gal’s observation one step further. By reporting the Israel-Palestine story with an emotional subtext rather than some intellectual detachment, we are perpetuating a discourse that is disconnected from reality. Hasbara diverts attention from the very painful and difficult issues that must be addressed. It is much easier to smile at Arab and Jewish children sharing a hospital ward than to address the tough issues, like a military occupation that does not seem likely to end in our lifetime.

You see, according to The "Jewish" Daily Forward, any story that humanizes Israel - even when it was found by reporters doing their jobs, and against Israeli wishes - doesn't reflect the "reality." Who decides what reality is? Why, it is Lisa Goldman and Gal Beckerman and The Forward, of course!

Goldman has no compunction about humanizing Palestinian Arabs, as her articles attest.

On Friday afternoons in Nabi Salih, it starts like this. A few Israeli and foreign activists arrive at the village around noon, gathering at the home of Bassam Tamimi. His door is open, so there is no need to knock. Inside, villagers and visitors socialize, use the washroom and help themselves from the huge spread of homemade food laid out on the kitchen table. Bassam’s children run between the guests’ legs; and Sameeh, a neighbour from Jaffa, picks one of them up and tickles him. The atmosphere is relaxed, jovial and friendly. Most of these people see one another every Friday, under the same circumstances.

Bassam’s mother (or perhaps mother-in-law) sits on one of the chairs, her legs pulled up in a near-squat, observing the visitors through half-blind eyes. She looks like a Palestinian grandmother out of central casting, with her long white veil, embroidered traditional dress, deeply wrinkled face and thin, arthritic hands. I greet her by clasping one of them and muttering something in mangled Arabic. She responds by telling me to eat – a word I understand because the Arabic and Hebrew roots are the same (AKL), and also because that’s what grandmothers tend to do, the world over – urge you to eat.

After we have eaten and drunk our tea, Bassam says, “So, shall we start?”

No "emotional subtext" here, about the wonderful Tamimi family that also happened to produce a woman who blew up a pizza shop.

Oh, I'm sorry. The rule at the Forward (and the pretty indistinguishable +972 that Goldman also writes for) is that humanizing Arabs is quality journalism. Humanizng Israelis is evil hasbara.

Even when it is perfectly true! Even when it was not a story that the Israelis wanted to publicize!

Goldman doesn't feel manipulated at all by eating lunch with the Tamimis. Her journalistic antennae are retracted because of the nice grandmother feeding her and the cute kids being tickled. How could a great journalist like Lisa feel manipulated when she is asked to visit a loving family home before the protest?

No, even though the Tamimi story is hand-fed to her, literally, by the protesters themselves, they are human. Zionist Israelis who seem human are the ones you have to check and double check to ensure that there is a dark side somewhere that you can report.

The conclusion is that The Forward believes that Israel is inherently evil. Those are the only facts that can fit its editorial policy. Anything that contradicts that narrative makes reporters not just feel conflicted, but angry. Because they already knew the truth before the story that makes Israelis look like decent people comes out. That is an unacceptable distraction from their own one-dimensional analysis of the situation.

Beyond that, we can see how bad a reporter Goldman is. In the earlier part of the article she describes how she feels "manipulated" when she covers a story that the Israeli government tips her (and other journalists) off about. So what is stopping her from digging deeper? Moreover, what is stopping her from looking to find out if there are similar "feel-good" human interest stories that are not pushed by the government?

That's crazy talk! To Goldman and The Forward, Israeli cruelty is the only story, and everything else is a distraction, to be ignored or downplayed or belittled or cynically dismissed.

The Forward's motto might as well be "Truth above all - unless we are uncomfortable with it."

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