Remembering what happens when Jews rely on others (Daled Amos)

By Daled Amos

If there was ever a time that Jews needed the help of the West, it was against Hitler.

And we all know how that turned out.

Put aside the refusal to bomb railroad tracks in order to slow down the transportation of Jews to their death in the concentration camps. And put aside how long it took countries to get together to make a united effort to save Jewish refugees who needed destinations in order to escape the Holocaust. 

What happened when countries did get together with the sole purpose to help Jewish refugees escape the danger and find a new home? The answer is Evian.

And the results were not pretty.

In his new book, And None Shall Make Them Afraid, Rick Richman describes "Eight Stories of the Modern State of Israel" -- the stories of 8 Jews whose lives and actions contributed to the success of Zionism and the establishment of the Modern State of Israel. The 1938 Evian Conference intersects with the life of Golda Meir, who attended the conference, and the life of playwright Ben Hecht, who dealt with the Jewish leadership that followed and relied too much on world leaders they thought actually wanted to help.

The problem with Evian became clear before it even convened, starting with the invitation itself, which defined the goal as to

consider what steps can be taken to facilitate the settlement in other countries of political refugees from Germany (including Austria).

Notice that there is no mention of the identity of the refugees that the conference was supposed to help--Jews. Merely political refugees.

This avoidance was pervasive.

Richman points out:

To read the speeches of the nine-day Evian Conference, which convened on July 6, 1938, in the Hotel Royal's Grand Ballroom with 140 representatives from thirty-two countries, is to see a cascade of euphemisms, all designed to avoid using the words "Jews" (who were the subject of the Conference) and "Hitler" (who had created the problem the Conference was called to address). (p. 141, emphasis added)

This included the lack of any condemnation of Hitler or even any "message" addressed to him (p. 144).

That use of euphemisms is reminiscent of the tendency of today's media which in their headlines reduce Palestinian terrorist attacks on Israelis into cars that on their own volition run down Israelis --

At the conclusion of the conference, only the Dominican Republic was willing to accept Jewish refugees.

A political cartoon that depicted the situation of the Jews before the Evian Conference served as an accurate description of its result:

But Nazi Germany knew that the purpose was to help the Jews and not just refugees in general. Hitler's Foreign Office publicly gloated in response to the refusal of the participants in the Conference to offer to help:

it appears astounding that [those] countries seem in no way anxious to make use of these elements [the Jews] themselves now that the opportunity offers. (p. 148)

Richman writes about the inaction of the Conference:

It sent a signal to Hitler that no nation in the world wanted the Jews, that Palestine had effectively been closed as a place of refuge, and that German could deal internally with the Jews as it wished, without fear of even a critical resolution from the West. (p.148-149)

He notes that some historians find a connection between the failure of the Evian Conference and the Kristallnacht pogrom that occurred 4 months later. (p.149)

World leaders today are not doing much better. A look at the UN gives a snapshot of where those countries stand today.

And what about Jewish leaders?

During Kristallnacht, more than a thousand synagogues were burned and more than 7,000 businesses were destroyed. Hundreds of Jews died and 30,000 were arrested and sent to concentration camps.

What was the response from Jewish organizations?

Three days after Kristallnacht, the major American Jewish organizations met and formally agreed that "there should be no parades, public demonstrations or protests by Jews." They adopted a strategy of silence, out of fear that Jewish protests might lead to accusations of special pleading. [p. 158, emphasis added]

When Roosevelt condemned the pogrom 5 days later, he made no reference to Jews. What he did make were some generalized platitudes, concluding that there would be no protests and no increase in immigration quotas. The Jewish leader Rabbi Stephen Wise wrote at the time, "At long last, America has spoken."

Someone less satisfied was the Jewish playwright Ben Hecht, who once wrote about himself, "Most of the Jews I know are, like myself, a little startled to find themselves Jews." Despite what was, up to then, a weak Jewish identification, seven months after Kristallnacht, Hecht wrote a collection of stories in a book called A Book of Miracles. It included The Little Candle, which vividly recounted an international pogrom in Germany in which half a million Jews were murdered. He became friends with Peter Bergson, a follower of Vladimir Jabotinsky, leading to Hecht becoming even more active.

He wrote about what was happening in Germany, getting the word out at a time when FDR was doing nothing and Jewish leadership was passive. In March 1943, he wrote a script for a pageant at Madison Square Garden entitled "We Will Never Die," highlighting the dangerous situation of Jews in Europe. It featured a number of famous Broadway stage personalities. In his autobiography, Hecht writes about a phone call he received from Rabbi Wise reaction:

I have read your pageant script and I disapprove of it. I must ask you to cancel this pageant and discontinue all your further activities on behalf of the Jews. If you wish hereafter to work for the Jewish Cause, you will please consult me and let me advise you. [p.170]

Hecht hung up on him. 

There were 2 sold-out performances the first night and 40,000 saw the pageant, with thousands more listening outside on loudspeakers. It went on to be performed in DC, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles.

In September, Hecht wrote a poem entitled Ballad of the Doomed Jews of Europe, which the Bergson Group had published in an ad in The New York Times.

And again, Jewish organizations were opposed:

Both the American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Congress opposed the ad's publication when Hecht had proposed it at the end of 1942, fearing it was too provocative. When it was ultimately published a year later, another 1 million Jews had been murdered.

During this period, the Roosevelt administration took no action whatsoever to save the European Jews. (p. 172)

Finally, in January 1944, Roosevelt took action on the advice of his Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau Jr, who informed him that the State Department was blocking aid to Jewish refugees. According to Morgenthau, if FDR did not act quickly, he would risk an election-year scandal. This is what led to the creation of the War Refugee Board.

The Board was successful in saving the lives of tens of thousands of Jews, but it came into existence far too late, after more than 5 million Jews had been murdered.

Jewish organizations failed.

Today, Jewish organizations again suffer from a lack of confidence.

Betrayal: The Failure of American Jewish Leadership, is a collection of 22 essays assembled by Charles Jacobs and Avi Goldwasser. As established in the book's Acknowledgments, there is a need to address

The failure of the American Jewish establishment to counter the growing hostility toward the Jewish community [which] is endangering Jews across the country. This failure is scandalous.

...we have weak, politicized bureaucrats too often more concerned with their social status, the perks of power, and their organizations’ financial success than with their responsibility to defend the community. As can be seen in their priorities, staffing, and programs, they seem more loyal to a progressive ideology than to the safety of Jews.

Jews and Israel can no more rely today on the nations of the world to help them than it could when those same Western countries were needed the most. By the same token, Jewish organizations cannot afford to be complacent, valuing the connections with world leaders above the best interests of the Jewish people. At a time when there is growing friction between Israel and American Jews, it is even more important for Jewish organizations to put Jews and Israel before politics and progressive ideology

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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!

 

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03/08 Links Pt2: Expedia, Tripadvisor urge tourists to visit biblical heartland in ‘Palestinian territory’

From Ian:

Remembering The Scorpion Pass Massacre of 1954

March 17 this year will mark 69 years since one of the worst terrorist attacks on Israelis since the establishment of the State in 1948. Although I was only nine years old, this episode, called the Scorpion Pass Massacre, has a prominent place in my memory, perhaps because of the intense discussions it aroused in the Jewish community of Montreal that I was a part of, or perhaps because I was the same age as the Israeli boy who was severely injured. Or, perhaps it was the exotic name of the site of the attack, Scorpion Pass (Maale Akrabim).

The name obviously comes from the common appearance of scorpions (akrabim in Hebrew), venomous animals with two pincer claws and an articulated tail and stinger. Scorpions resemble crustaceans such as lobsters or crayfish, but are in fact related to spiders, mites and ticks. With an evolutionary history going back hundreds of millions of years, they were certainly around in biblical times. Maale Akrabim appears three times in the Tanakh (Numbers 34:3, Joshua 15:3 and Judges 1:36), as an indicator of the southern boundary of the Land of Israel.

The attack took place in 1954, when the population of Israel was 1.6 million and the southern port of Eilat, Israel’s only connection to the Red Sea, was a small development town with 500 inhabitants. As is true today, travellers from Eilat to central Israel could either fly (Arkia began flying from Eilat to Lod Airport, now Ben Gurion Airport, in 1950), or drive the 150 miles to Beersheba. In 1954 the drive to Beersheba was a lonely one that included a long and narrow grade with 18 hairpin turns, known as Ma’ale Akrabim. The ascent, about 60 miles south of Beersheba, is a 1000 foot escarpment that connects the Arava Valley of the south-eastern Negev to the central Negev plateau.

The attack was carried out in the middle of the day on an Egged bus (Israel’s largest bus company) containing 14 passengers plus a driver. The attackers shot at the bus as it was travelling very slowly around one of the hairpin bends, killing the driver. They then boarded the bus and shot most of the passengers. Eleven riders (ten passengers and the driver) were killed and three passengers were injured. One of the injured a nine year-old boy, Chaim Fuerstenberg, survived in a semi-conscious and paralysed state for 32 years, dying in 1986.

Morningstar lowers investment ratings of 28 Israeli companies for operating in contested territory

(This article has been taken down by the Jerusalem Post, apparently for inaccuracies.)

The Jerusalem Post has learned that Morningstar, a financial services firm that rates companies’ investment potential, has reduced the ratings of 28 Israeli companies due to their operations in what the firm’s ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) rating subsidiary Sustainalytics considers to be Occupied Palestinian Territory.

Of the 28 companies, 15 have been given a human rights score of “category 3” (significant controversy) or higher. The list includes several leading companies such as Elbit Systems and Caterpillar, as well as Israel-operating banks and telecommunications companies including PayPal Holdings and Motorola Solutions, which have been given their high controversy ratings due to their operations within East Jerusalem, the West Bank and/or the Golan heights — which Sustainalytics considers to be a human rights abuse.

Considering Morningstar’s significance within the financial ratings market, its negative rating of these companies is cause for concern to those who consider such actions to be in-line with BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanctions) activity.

As well, over 30 American states have laws that prohibit investment or contracts with companies that cause economic harm to those based in Israel. As such, even if just one Israeli company is unfairly targeted on a Morningstar watchlist, it could potentially violate state laws.

Morningstar is now in the process of consulting with human rights experts in order to determine how to proceed with its assessment of these companies.

Dem Senators Blasted Ticketmaster Over Taylor Swift Debacle. They Have Nothing to Say About It Raking In Cash From Farrakhan Hate Rally.

Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.) and Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.) last fall trained their fire on Ticketmaster after bungled sales for Taylor Swift's concert tour led to price-gouging and automated scalping, calling on the Department of Justice to investigate the ticketing giant. But when the company doled out tickets to Louis Farrakhan's rally—in which the Nation of Islam leader defended Adolf Hitler and predicted another Holocaust against Jews—the Democratic duo had nothing to say.

Blumenthal went on a crusade against Ticketmaster in November, saying "consumers deserve better than this anti-hero behavior." Klobuchar said she had "serious concerns" about Ticketmaster's failure to get the so-called Swifties tickets efficiently and wrote to the company's chief executive officer demanding answers.

Neither Blumenthal, who has warned that the "horrors of the Holocaust" could happen again if Americans don't fight anti-Semitism, nor Klobuchar, who has pledged "to confront anti-Semitism," have criticized Ticketmaster for profiting off of the Farrakhan ticketing sales. The two senators, who sit on the Senate's Task Force for Combating Anti-Semitism, did not respond to requests for comment.

Farrakhan during his speech claimed that Jews control the levers of power in Washington, Hollywood, and global finance and are using these powers to corrupt the world. "Somebody has to take on the synagogue of Satan," he said. "We cannot let them take the country." Critics had urged Ticketmaster, which charges service fees on each ticket it sells, to drop the Farrakhan event from its sales platform, but the ticket giant did not budge.

Among House Democrats, there has also been silence from lawmakers who criticized Ticketmaster in the past. Last November, more than two dozen House Democrats sent a letter to Ticketmaster, saying it "strangled competition for ticketing in the live entertainment marketplace." The Washington Free Beacon reached out to 28 members who signed the letter and are still in Congress to get their thoughts on Ticketmaster’s decision to sell seats at the Farrakhan event. None of them responded.

Democrats who signed the letter included Rep. Barbara Lee (D., Calif.), Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.), and Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.).

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12/21 Links Pt2: Black America’s Anti-Semitism Problem; 2022 the Deadliest Year for Palestinians? What the Media Didn't Tell You; Chanukah bus incident victims to mark a year since attack

From Ian:

JPost Editorial: Contemporary antisemitism should be taught in schools

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Black America’s Anti-Semitism Problem

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

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

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

None of these explanations stood up to scrutiny.

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

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

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

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

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

Jonathan Tobin: Jews don’t need another left-wing advocacy group

The federations, whose purpose is to represent and raise funds from the entire Jewish community, were used to the JCPA acting like a Democratic Party auxiliary operation. But the latter’s behavior could be justified as the product of a consensus among the majority of Jews who are politically liberal and vote for the Democrats.

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

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

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

Rather than an invigorated Jewish leadership, the new JCPA is additional evidence of the catastrophic and disgraceful failure of the existing liberal establishment. It’s not only a waste of scarce Jewish resources; it also reveals the intellectual bankruptcy of liberals who claim to speak for Jews but are actually working against Jewish interests and security. Redundancy and waste are bad enough. But the current situation is a moral calamity.

Why the ADL abandoned Antisemitism and went woke

The ADL’s education curriculum had started out teaching tolerance, but now teaches intolerance, and advocates partisan politics. Despite the organization’s origins, its handbook is notable for mentioning Jewish people only three times, once in the ADL’s background and twice in its definition of antisemitism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are Jews equal under Islam?

Filmed by @el_soco pic.twitter.com/zLzOlbX0sC

— Israel Advocacy Movement (@israel_advocacy) December 20, 2022

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Middle East Jews in December 1947 in danger from Palestinian Arabs, Syrians, Egyptians - and British soldiers

Continuing my look at the news from 75 years ago for Jews in the Middle East, from the Palestine Post from December 14-18, 1947.

Here's a story from December 14 that was not at all unusual, of Jewish civilians being targeted and killed by Arabs.

Here is a massacre of Jews who were bringing food to a Jewish children's village from the December 15 edition. This slaughter is barely mentioned nowadays. 

A follow-up story notes that five of the dead were under 18 years old.

On December 16, we see that Arabs were happily embracing the "spirit of Hitler" in their genocidal aims:

Jews didn't only have to be concerned about attacks by Arabs. Here is a horrific story of a Jewish girl raped by British soldiers.

The only way to demand justice from a rape by British soldiers was to go to...British police.

Later in the month, an attempt to hear the case was stymied when the male witness could not be found. That is the last I could see about this story.

Meanwhile, on December 17, we see how Jews in Arab countries continued to be threatened and harassed:

There were daily stories of Jewish civilians being shot individually, so many that the stories about them were short and often lumped together (12/18):

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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!

 

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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

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12/15 Links Pt1: Europe is waking up and seeing NGO corruption; Francesca Albanese: Special Rapporteur to Demonize Israel; Irish UNIFIL peacekeeper killed by gunfire in Lebanon

From Ian:

Seth Frantzman: Why Qatar’s involvement in EU scandal may impact Middle East

This kind of bargaining, using money to get influence, appears to have now brought Qatar into scandal in Europe. But Doha has seen this happen before with controversy over the World Cup and also other controversies in the US, and it has generally sailed on without much effect on its overall relations.

The EU scandal seems to reveal that Qatar targeted members of the European Parliament from southern Europe and also people who are involved in human-rights and other left-leaning causes. This means that someone decided that the best people to target in influence peddling were left-leaning voices, those connected to socialist or other similar parties.

But why would these voices be open to dealing with Qatar, a state that openly suppresses gay rights and is authoritarian? This is one of the perplexing aspects of how Doha has portrayed itself over the last two decades, via media such as Al Jazeera, as being different than it is.

Even though Qatar is an authoritarian monarchy that not only backs far-right extremists in the Middle East, but also theocracy and suppresses workers’ rights, it is able to sell itself to left-leaning voices in the West through a complex blend of preying on Orientalist ideas and pretending that its suppression of rights is merely its “culture.”

Once Doha has pretended that its authoritarianism and support for extremists is “culture,” then it claims that any critique of its policies is “Islamophobia.” This tends to buy quiet from critics and also enables its influence to continue.

On the one hand, accusations that Qatar was involved in another corruption scandal are not unique. Many countries try to exploit Western democracy through media influence-peddling and corruption. For instance, for many years, countries sought to influence Washington’s foreign policy by plowing money into think tanks in and around DC. Then those countries would get the think tanks to hire former government officials and get the officials to help lobby for them. This would be passed off as merely “policy” discussions, but the discussions would always have an agenda.

For instance, when it came to Qatar, the goal would be to get think tanks to critique other Gulf states but never critique Qatar. This kind of lobbying isn’t always corruption, because sometimes it can be done openly. A country can plow money into a think tank, or it can have its supporters do this for it. It can also register its lobbyists.

NGO Monitor: Europe is waking up and seeing NGO corruption

What would've happened if they checked?

Had the EU officials checked (i.e., NGO due diligence), the officials and Brussels-based journalists, who also completely missed this story, would have found that the Sekunjalo Development Foundation (SDF) is based in South Africa, and has considerable baggage, including reports of Qatari funding. SDF is the “philanthropic division” of the powerful Sekunjalo Group’s investments and business deals, and related involvement should have raised numerous red flags in Brussels.

Among other entanglements, the group has worked with the Gupta family, which has been deeply implicated in the corruption cases against former South African president Jacob Zuma. And as the owner of Independent Newspapers & Media SA, Sekunjalo was accused of agreeing to Chinese censorship demands on reporting the mass internment of ethnic Uighurs. China is reportedly involved in numerous business arrangements with the South African firm.

ALL OF this information was readily available to the European officials involved with the NGO Fight Impunity, had they bothered to examine the details.

In contrast, as long as NGOs and their funder-enablers view “civil society” as a religion, complete with a halo effect protecting these groups and the funding process from critical analysis, the doors to corruption and abuse will continue to be wide open.

Perhaps this high-level scandal in the EU will finally result in a fundamental and overdue policy change, including regarding the wholesale funding of the small network of Palestinian and Israeli political NGOs, some of which are linked to terror groups. This change should begin with opening up the documents and meeting protocols in which NGO funding is decided, allowing for analysis of possible insider influence and corruption in the grant-making process involving tens of millions of euros.

In parallel, Europe needs to create mechanisms for NGO oversight, ending the free pass that allows these groups to exert political influence without accountability.

Like other major crises, the EU’s corruption scandal linking Qatar funding and the NGO facade is also an opportunity for repairing broken and dysfunctional mechanisms. The “weaponization of NGOs” is not limited to autocratic regimes far from Europe.

German ambassador to Israel praises anti-Israel NGO

In a series of tweets, Germany’s ambassador to Israel, Steffen Seibert, and its envoy to Ramallah, Oliver Owcza, lauded the anti-Israel NGO Ir Amim in comments regarding their tour with the group on Tuesday.

According to a 2021 report by the Jerusalem-based NGO Monitor, Ir Amim slammed Israel’s security barrier while “omit[ing] the context of Palestinian terror attacks and Israeli national security concerns.”

NGO Monitor noted that Ir Amim argues that the security barrier “extracts neighborhoods from the city [Jerusalem] with the goal of reducing the portion of Palestinians” and that the “barrier’s demographic rationale therefore outweighs its security rationale.”

“Ir Amim frequently accuses Israel of attempting to ‘Judaize’ Jerusalem and promotes the Palestinian narrative on the city, including claims that ‘government powers are being handed over to the settler organizations’ and archeological digs have become an important ‘tool in the fight for control’ over Jerusalem,” NGO Monitor said.

Berlin’s ambassador wrote on Twitter on Tuesday: “Accompanying @GerRepRamallah Oliver Owcza on an insightful tour with @IrArmin’s Judith Oppenheimer to focal points like [the eastern Jerusalem neighborhoods of] Silwan & Givat Hamatos.”

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12/12 Links Pt2: The Apartheid Libel to Destroy Israel; Teaching Terror to Tots - reevaluating the Oslo Accords; Collier: An open letter to Gary Lineker

From Ian:

PMW: Teaching Terror to Tots - reevaluating the Oslo Accords

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The following is an Executive Summary of "Teaching Terror to Tots":

Khaled Abu Toameh: The Apartheid Libel to Destroy Israel

Recently... however, with the UNHRC's persistent allegations that Israel is an apartheid state, that label is being pushed even further in an apparent effort to make it stick. The complicity of recent reports from NGOs such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch appear to be trying to ensure that their libel will be complete.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Collier: An open letter to Gary Lineker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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