04/27 Links Pt2: Israel Is Antiracist, Anti-Colonialist, Anti-Fascist (and Was from the Start); Why the world has turned against Israel; Caroline Glick: An afternoon among the angels

From Ian:

Jeffrey Herf: Israel Is Antiracist, Anti-Colonialist, Anti-Fascist (and Was from the Start)

Nor did support for Israel come only from the Soviet bloc. Liberals and leftists in London, Paris, New York, and Washington heard Jamal Husseini, the representative of the Arab Higher Committee to the United Nations, reject a Jewish state in Palestine, because, he said, it would undermine the “racial homogeneity” of the Arab world. Such remarks resonated in a profoundly negative fashion with Americans who had followed the appalling news out of Germany during and after the war. In the Senate, Robert Wagner, a major author of New Deal legislation, extolled the Jewish contribution to the Allied cause. He had already denounced appeasement of the Arabs during the war. With the Allied victory, continuing to appease Arab rejectionism surely made no sense. In the House, Democratic Congressman Emanuel Celler of Brooklyn led efforts to focus attention on Jamal Husseini’s cousin, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, who had entered into a written understanding with Germany and Italy to “solve the question of the Jewish elements, which exist in Palestine and in the other Arab countries . . . as the Jewish question was solved in Germany and Italy.”

The liberal media also took note. Husseini’s collaboration with the Nazis was thoroughly documented in the New York Post as well as in the left-wing publications PM and The Nation, by I.F. Stone, Freda Kirchwey, and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Edgar Mowrer, who urged Husseini’s indictment at Nuremberg. Nevertheless, despite extensive State Department files on Husseini’s collaboration with the Nazis, the American bureaucracy succeeded in resisting efforts to put him on trial and publish its evidence of his Nazi-era activities.

The brief confluence of Soviet and liberal Western sympathies for the nascent Jewish state was brilliantly exploited by Ben-Gurion. He understood better than anyone that it presented a unique moment to bring Israel into existence, with the assent of the world’s two great powers — and that it was an opportunity that would soon close, as indeed it did. During the “anti-cosmopolitan” purges of the early 1950s, Stalin reversed course, spread the lie that Israel was a product of American imperialism, repressed the memory of Soviet support for the Zionist project, and launched a four-decade campaign of vilification against Zionism and Israel. It was one of the most successful propaganda campaigns of the Cold War.

Stalin succeeded in rewriting American history, too. His insistence that it was the Americans and not the Soviets who had wholeheartedly supported the establishment of the State of Israel carried the day. And yet the records of the Departments of State and Defense and the CIA clearly document their emphatic and consequential opposition to the Zionist project.

The differences between the international political landscape of the late 1940s and the one that emerged first in Soviet and then world politics in the 1950s and 1960s need to be reflected in American-Jewish discussions about the establishment of Israel. Contrary to what we’ve heard at the United Nations for decades, in international BDS efforts, and in academic descriptions of Israel, the Zionist project was never a colonialist one.

Just the reverse. The generation that created the state, and its supporters abroad, viewed it as part of the era of liberal and leftist opposition to colonialism, racism, and, of course, antisemitism. The evidence is clear: Whatever faults Israel may have, its origins had nothing to do with American or British imperialism. The argument to the contrary is a conventional unwisdom that has found a home in too much scholarship and journalism of recent decades. Israel’s establishment was not a miracle that eludes historical explanation. It was an episode of enormous moral and military courage for which space was created by canny and hard-headed political leaders in the cause of historical justice — in particular David Ben-Gurion, who seized a fleeting moment, Israel’s moment, to create an enduring achievement.

Daniel Ben-Ami: Why the world has turned against Israel

From Israel's foundation in 1948 through the 1960s, the left generally celebrated Israel as an expression of Jews' right to national self-determination. By the 1990s, however, Western elites started to reject the idea of national self-determination. Yet the denigration of the right to national self-determination undermines the Palestinian cause, too.

Indeed, many of today's anti-Israel activists aren't really interested in Palestinian self-determination. They are mainly concerned with attacking Israel as a symbol of everything they dislike. This leads them to uncritically endorse Hamas, the leading Islamist representative of the Palestinians, and often Islamism more broadly.

Islamism's goal is not national self-determination, for the Palestinians or anyone else. Rather, it wants to create an international Islamic order. The destruction of Israel - and not the creation of a Palestinian state - is seen as central to achieving that objective. Islamists regard Jews as an expression of "cosmic Satanic evil," who should be physically exterminated if Islam is to flourish.

The Palestinian slogan, "from the river to the sea" (meaning from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean), is popular among both Islamists and Western leftists. Islamists often state openly that they want to murder most if not all of the Jews living there. So when they chant "Palestine should be free," they typically mean free of Jews.

Stephen Daisley: Why I love Israel

[T]here are plenty of reasons for Zionists to be gloomy on this, Israel’s 75th birthday, but there is one reason for optimism that outshines them all: Israel is 75. Israel was created; survived an immediate Arab effort to annihilate it; ingathered the survivors of the death camps; settled the land and built kibbutzim; struggled through the lean and lonely years; triumphed in the Six-Day War and reunited Jerusalem; pulled through the Yom Kippur War; endured two intifadas; rescued Beta Israel and welcomed the refuseniks; lost Yamit, lost Rabin, lost Gush Katif; made the desert bloom with fruits and microchips; and made peace with Arab nations. All of that in 75 years and, despite impossible odds, Israel lives yet.

Israel is a hard country and for many a hard country to love. It is flinty but whiny, eager for the world’s love but diplomatically tin-eared, unsentimental but gripped by existential angst. It is a country that adores its army and reveres military discipline but is so hectically informal that you wonder how it made it to 75 days, let alone 75 years. It also boasts the highest density of rude people in the known universe, although I find that strangely endearing. I have never loved Israel more than the time the manager of a Tel Aviv minimart yelled at me for a) not speaking Hebrew, b) being a foreign journalist, and c) coming in to shop when she was trying to watch TV. Only in Israel, the innovation nation, could they invent the inconvenience store.

If Zionism is the theory, Israel is the practice and like all practical translations of idealism it is compromised, haphazard, sometimes unsightly, and occasionally disheartening. But that tension between Zionism and Israel, between ahavat and ha’aretz, is where the great debates take place and where the course of Jewish history can be set or changed. Israeli independence, as it reaches 75 years, is still a miraculous application of a mundane idea: Jewish self-determination.

Israel Independence Day: Celebrating 75 Years with Natan Sharansky

Former Prisoner of Zion Natan Sharansky's personal journey reflects that of the Jewish people, and the centrality of Israel in his life and Jewish identity mirrors the experiences of so many Jews around the world.

Sharansky: "The existence of Israel and, in a way, the existence of the Jewish people is the best demonstration of the importance of these two basic desires of people - to be free and to belong."

"For a thousand years, what were we fighting for? For our right to live freely in accordance with our identity. And then Israel was established. It could not be created as a non-Jewish state and it would never have succeeded in gathering all the Jews if not for its freedom." "There is no other nation or any other state which embodies the strength of this connection. And if you look at history and compare us with Israel 50 years ago, we have much more freedom and much more identity. We have far more of a Jewish and democratic state, so that's the direction we're heading in....Our history and our triumphs are the best proof of how important it is for these two things to go together." "I grew up [in the Soviet Union] having zero connection with anything Jewish except through antisemitism....It was Israel that came in a very powerful way to the center of our life, from the Six-Day War, and it allowed us to discover our identity, that we have a history, we are a people and we have a state. That gave us the strength to fight for our Jewish rights and for a better world."

"When people simply want tikkun olam [repairing the world] without any identity...your life is very shallow. Look at how all these Birthright kids - whose bar mitzvah was the last time they've had a connection to being Jewish - suddenly discover that it's cool and even interesting to live inside history....Suddenly, they have energy, meaning and understanding....In this age, there is no better way to quickly give Jews a brief injection of the importance and meaning of discovering their Jewish identity than coming to Israel."

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04/03 Links Pt2: World Vision, Prominent U.S. Evangelical Charity, Caught Funding Jihadis; How J Street Turned Democrats Against Israel; Telling a Story Founded the Jewish Nation

From Ian:

World Vision, Prominent U.S. Evangelical Charity, Caught Funding Jihadis

When U.S. officials discovered that World Vision was funding a designated terror group, they ordered WV to stop paying ISRA, but WV maintained its relationship with the organization. In January 2015, WV said it had "discontinued any future collaboration." Yet almost a year later, WV posted a job position working with ISRA in December 2015, apparently indicating it had not ceased collaborating as it claimed.

Around the same time, World Vision partnered with yet another group that "has helped fund the Hamas military wing," the Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH).

In 2012, World Vision was exposed using Australian government dollars to fund a terrorist front group operating in the West Bank. World Vision was funding the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC), a front group for the U.S. terror designated Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

Australian Solicitor Andrew Hamilton, who worked with the Israel Law Center which exposed the funding, told the Jerusalem Post that, "The Union of Agricultural Work Committees is an integral part of the proscribed terror organization, the PFLP, that Australian citizens and corporations are prohibited from providing support to."

In an email to FWI, Hamilton called on the recently elected Australian Government "to initiate a detailed criminal investigation into the Halabi scandal."

"For more than a decade, World Vision Australia has avoided justice in Australia for its criminal activities in funding PFLP terrorism using Australian taxpayer money obtained by deception," Hamilton told FWI.

"It would be reasonable to assume that if a smaller organization, whose CEO [Tim Costello] was not the brother of a former federal Treasurer [Peter Costello], had similarly deceived the Australian Government to obtain taxpayer funds which were then sent to terrorists, then they would have been prosecuted to the full extent of the law." (FWI has attempted to obtain a response from the Costellos and from World Vision Australia, but has been unsuccessful.)

In 2010, World Vision partnered with a group headed by a PFLP operative, Khaled Yamani, who led the Palestinian Children and Youth Foundation in Lebanon. And a few years prior to that, WV signed joint memoranda with the U.S. designated terror group Interpal, a financial supporter of Hamas.

WV responded to FWI's inquiry regarding the claims made by Cliff Smith in an email declaring, "We remain adamant we are committed to a positive relationship with Israel in our humanitarian work and we do not now, and never have, supported terrorism."

World Vision portrays itself as a "global Christian humanitarian organization." McDonnell asks how WV's support of Islamist terrorists is really in line with the Gospel message it presents. "To see this activity from World Vision in Sudan and then continuing in Israel too—it just makes me wonder: 'What kind of Christians are supporting a group that is funding terrorists?'"

Yisrael Medad: Update on Cordoba: "cultural reductionism"

Spanish Church ‘accused of glossing over Muslim identity of Cordoba’s Great Mosque’

February 28 2023,
The Catholic Church has been accused of glossing over the Muslim identity of the Great Mosque of Cordoba with a visitor centre that emphasises its Christian origins.

The Church’s planned centre for the mosque, which has served as a cathedral since the Spanish city’s reconquest by Christian forces in 1236, aims to “correct” what it deems to be an overly Islamic vision of the city’s past.

“The need to redesign the entire space [of the mosque area] derives from the finding that Cordoba is marked with a very powerful cultural label: that of a Muslim city,” said a report by Demetrio Fernandez, the Bishop of Cordoba.

The mosque has served as a cathedral for hundreds of years and is used for traditional processions at Easter

“The cultural reductionism is so strong that it has the capacity to eclipse the brilliant Visigoth, Roman and Christian [periods]..."

So, Muslims are engaged in cultural reductionism of Jerusalem as the capital of Judea, where the Temple stood on Mount Moriah?

Telling a Story Founded the Jewish Nation

Many of the basic fundamentals of the seder—not only eating matzah and bitter herbs, but also relating the story of the liberation from Egyptian bondage to one’s children—can be found in Exodus 12, which is set in Egypt just before the tenth plague. By imagining what this archetypal seder might have been like, Cole Aronson explores the ritual’s meaning for Jewish history:

You don’t tell the children they were once slaves in Egypt, because that’s all they know. But it wasn’t always so, you tell them—long ago, their ancestors enjoyed over a century of freedom under God. God chose to raise the patriarchs up from the idolatry of their native culture and gave them a covenantal life. A famine some generations later compelled the chosen family to live in Egypt, first as guests and then—until now—as slaves. Tonight, God will keep His promise to the patriarchs and restore the Israelites to His service.

What the parents of the Exodus told their children was the very first maggid the first “telling” of Passover night. But the story as originally told didn’t commemorate the founding of the Jewish nation. Telling the story founded the Jewish nation.

Until the Exodus, the before-time of the patriarchs was a rumor whispered by strangers subjugated in a strange land. On the Exodus night, teaching the children about God’s choice of Abraham converted his descendants into his self-conscious heirs. A free nation was created by restoring a memory of itself. The pageantry of the seder is often and correctly said to recreate the Exodus night in order to tell a story. The reverse is also true. Jews recreate the Exodus night in part by telling a story that the Exodus parents must have told their own children 3,500 years ago, and with the same function—initiating youngsters into the chosen people of God.

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03/08 Links Pt1: Leave the IDF out of the protest; IDF kill Palestinian terrorist responsible for Huwara attack; Israel slams 'disgraceful' South Africa vote to downgrade diplomatic ties

From Ian:

Overhaul protesters gear up for ‘day of resistance’ throughout the country Thursday

The protest movement against the government’s judicial overhaul plans was set to conduct a second major campaign to disrupt daily life in Israel on Thursday, in what activists are calling a “day of resistance.”

The day notably includes plans to block roads around Ben Gurion Airport in an attempt to make it difficult for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to get there for his flight on an official visit to Italy. This in addition to marches, temporary workplace strikes, the blocking of main thoroughfares, disruption of train services and rallies outside the homes of top government officials.

The protest events were laid out in detail on a dedicated website and map (Hebrew), with organizers promising “many surprises,” indicating there were more planned actions that had not been announced publicly.

“It is a civic duty to resist the dictatorship and this is the only way to return Israel to the path of democracy. This is a great battle for the independence of Israeli citizens against the tyranny that will destroy what we have built here for over 70 years. We call on the entire public to participate in protests,” the organizers said in a statement.

Protest heads have specifically called for demonstrators to block roads around Ben Gurion Airport when Netanyahu and his wife are scheduled to depart on their flight to Italy. The trip previously faced setbacks when national carrier El Al was unable to find a crew to man the prime minister’s flight — an issue blamed on crew shortages but which may have also been affected by growing public anger at the government as it pushed forward with efforts to weaken the justice system.

Some media reports indicated Netanyahu was looking at possibly taking a helicopter to the airport to avoid the expected road disruptions.

A major rally in Tel Aviv was to set off from the city’s Habima Square. In addition, protests by workers from the tech sector were planned at 15 locations around the country.

Police said they too were preparing for the demonstrations, with 3,000 cops set to be deployed across the country.

Ruthie Blum: IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi should call his troops to order

Those who defended Bar’s remarks (delivered several weeks before the Knesset election) did so on the grounds that terrorists apprehended by the Shin Bet told their interrogators that internecine strife in the Jewish state was bolstering their confidence and resolve. In other words, since perception influences enemy actions, security bigwigs have a responsibility to monitor and caution about pitfalls in this realm.

It’s a logical position, particularly in view of the gleeful way in which the international Arab and Iranian media outlets are depicting the present crisis in the country. That they’re being given a serious boost by the Israeli press may be extremely disconcerting, but it’s the price—and privilege—of free speech.

Soldiers don’t enjoy this luxury, however. On the contrary, their individual ideologies are irrelevant to the assignments they are charged to execute. Halevi has the duty to remind them of this in no uncertain terms. His failure on this score only encourages the very foes that the IDF, thankfully, is still fighting on more than one front.

“When we are on the battlefield, we don’t look to the right and left to discern the political views of our brothers and sisters,” said Netanyahu on Monday, after attending a Purim megillah reading at a Border Police base in the Jewish community of Beit Horon. “We [do it] with the knowledge that together, shoulder-to-shoulder, we are storming our enemies, in order to safeguard our security and future.”

This, he stressed, “is the first and most important foundation of our existence in our land. It rests on the deep understanding that whatever the controversies among us, we are always united against those out to kill us. This is how it was during all of Israel’s wars.”

He went on: “Refusal to serve threatens this existential foundation, and thus has no place in our ranks. Israeli society always condemned the refusal to serve.… We never allowed it a foothold—neither in the regular army nor in the reserves; neither in the security forces nor anywhere else. It had no place in the War of Independence, the Oslo Accords or in the disengagement [from Gaza]. There is no room for it now, nor should there be in the future…. because the minute that we give this illness legitimacy, it will spread and become systemic…in controversies to come.”

Netanyahu concluded with a Purim analogy.

“When Haman sought to find the Jews’ weak spot, he said, ‘There is one people that is scattered and divided.’ But…we rose as one; we banded together and achieved victory for generations. We will do it again this time, as well.”

It’s a message that Halevi would do well to hear, heed and repeat.

Ben-Dror Yemini: Leave the IDF out of the protest

This is one of the most legitimate protests in Israel's history.

Some have tried to quash it by pointing out a handful of Palestinian flags flown at rallies, but for every such flag, a thousand Israeli flags were raised, so that fell flat.

Others claimed the protest wasn't about the judicial overhaul at all but rather an attempt to overrule the will of the voter, but that too missed the mark. This protest's success lies in its expansion to more and more audiences, it's not merely a left-wing protest. Prominent religious and right-wing figures have also joined in, and while most of them don't take the streets, they make their voices heard by appealing for dialogue and broad consensus.

Are they too anarchists? Who are you trying to fool?

As for those screeching voices on the margins flying the BDS flag, let them, they clearly do not represent anything.

But the protest also brings the pain. The fissure is here. And 37 out of 40 pilots of the Israeli Air Force's elite 69 Squadron declaring they won't report for training is the closest thing to mutiny.

We must not allow this terrible scourge to become the face of the protest for there is a fine line where a protest shifts from an opposition to the government to an opposition to the state. There are too many elements on the left that had done so, there's no need for the protest to tread the same line.

Crossing that red line would only harm the protest since it draws its success from the fact that it has become a consensus in and of itself, and public opinion polls show as much.

As soon as the protest crosses these red lines, it will become a sectoral protest of the extreme left. This was not the intention of the pilots who declared that they won't report for reserve duty, but this may be the result. So yes, we must apply pressure to prevent harm to democracy. But there is no need for the protest to exacerbate that harm.

The Caroline Glick Show: Politics is poisoning the IDF

Mob violence against Sara Netanyahu; 37 out of 40 elite Air Force reservist pilots refusing to show up to duty. These are, but two of the most recent examples of the protests against the judicial reform proposed by the Netanyahu government.

To discuss the shocking turn of events and the leading role that retired leftist generals are playing in the left’s efforts to coerce the government to shelve its efforts to restore Israeli democracy, the guest on this week’s show is Brig. Gen. (res.) Amir Avivi.

Avivi is the founder and CEO of the Israel Security and Defense Forum (Habithonistim), a social movement and think tank comprised of retired senior officers, soldiers and concerned citizens working to reinstate the Zionist ethos in the IDF. Glick and Avivi also discuss at length the issue of Iran, which the United States now acknowledges had become a threshold nuclear state..

In addition, Glick devotes her opening remarks to an analysis of the central (hostile) role the Biden administration is playing in the events on the ground in Israel.

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01/26 Links Pt1: Mark Levin, Eugene Kontorovich Explain Israel’s Judicial Reforms; 9 Palestinian gunmen killed as IDF foils terror cell in Jenin; The Saudis are growing sick of Palestine

From Ian:

HRC Op-Ed In The Hill Times History Doesn’t Support Giving Israel An ‘Occupier’ Label

HRC’s Op-Ed entitled: “History Doesn’t Support Giving Israel An ‘Occupier’ Label” was published in The Hill Times on Wednesday, January 25, 2023

Israel, the nation-state of the Jewish people, is not an “occupier” of its own land and of its own eternal and undivided capital, Jerusalem.

No UN resolution or political proclamation can distort these historical truths.

Furthermore, Jews have historical ties to Judea and Samaria which dates back thousands of years. Israel strenuously disputes claims that it’s an “occupier,” citing pre-existing legal, ancestral, and biblical claims to lands it acquired in a war of self-defence in 1967 against pan-Arab armies seeking its destruction and as there was no recognized sovereign of these areas at the time.

Jordan controlled the area now regarded as the “West Bank” from 1948-1967 following the War of Independence, which saw combined Arab armies try to wipe the nascent State of Israel off the map. Jordan didn’t have rightful title to the land according to international law. Same equally applies for Egypt, which controlled the Gaza Strip from 1948-1967, unlawfully, and which Israel acquired in 1967, but from which, in 2005, it unilaterally disengaged, removing 21 settlements, 8,000 settlers, and its combined armed forces in a unilateral concession for peace.

Importantly, the Palestinians have never had sovereignty and statehood, and according to Israel’s position and many leading international jurists, the laws of occupation aren’t applicable.

Melanie Phillips: Netanyahu at bay, but what about the facts?

So, how’s Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faring in his supposed program to smash democracy at the behest of the religious extremists in his government?

Well, as Israel’s newly-minted dictator, he’s not doing too well in that regard.

Consider: Netanyahu has demonstrated his supposed craven subjection to the ultra-nationalist Bezalel Smotrich, to whom he gave authority over civilian administration in the disputed territories, by brutally slapping Smotrich down when he attempted to overrule an IDF and Defense Ministry decision to tear down an illegal Israeli outpost.

Netanyahu has shown his allegedly despotic determination to ditch the rule of law by bowing to the Supreme Court’s ruling against his minister and long-time ally Aryeh Deri and firing him.

And Netanyahu showed himself captured, bound and gagged by the zealots in his government who want to turn Israel into a theocracy when he effectively overruled the Culture and Sports Minister Miki Zohar, who said he would stop funding cultural activities on Shabbat.

In other words, in every case, Netanyahu has chosen to uphold the existing order rather than overthrow it.

Undoubtedly, the fight between Smotrich and the defense establishment has further to go. Netanyahu has said he will somehow bring Deri back into his government. We have yet to see how these and other issues will turn out.

Maybe Netanyahu will yet morph into a cross between Viktor Orban, Herod and Mussolini. But so far, he has been behaving as a cautious, risk-averse prime minister determined to keep the liberal, constitutional show on the road.

Of course, this has received no acknowledgment from the “progressive” Jewish world, both in Israel and the Diaspora. To such people, Netanyahu is personally irredeemable, and because the government he has formed is committed to defending Jewish interests rather than left-wing principles, it is deemed incapable of doing anything sensible or good.

Gadi Taub: The Struggle for Israel’s Democracy

In his previous administrations Netanyahu was careful not to pick a fight with the country’s judicial oligarchy, preferring to spend his political capital on other subjects—primarily Iran and economics. He assumed, based on experience, that Israel’s judicial oligarchy would continue to abide by an unwritten rule: If a politician doesn’t try to reform the justice system, they will leave his person—though not necessarily his policies—alone. The flip side of this arrangement was, in any case, more obviously true: Try to advance a reform, and you almost always end up with a criminal investigation, often one that was fabricated, as in the cases of Yaacov Neeman and Reuven Rivlin, both of whom were among those barred from serving as justice ministers by contrived investigations that ended up with nothing. The judiciary had its own praetorian guard in the Office of the State Attorney, which cultivated a culture of promiscuous yet slow-moving investigations that made sure politicians didn’t step out of line.

After Netanyahu won his fourth term in 2015, the despair on the left reached a fever pitch, and the various centers of left-wing power began to clamor for Netanyahu’s head. The press led the way with investigative pieces accusing Netanyahu of corruption. Despite the speculative nature of these investigations, law enforcement pursued them with new vigor, leading, finally, to indictments.

The indictments had a paradoxical effect on the struggle for power between bureaucracy and democracy. First, they showed Netanyahu that the judicial oligarchy posed a direct threat to his political fortunes that could not be reasonably abated through the usual program of mutual noninterference. Second, the attacks by the judiciary on Likud’s undisputed leader had an energizing effect on his voters.

While removing a justice minister can be seen as a peripheral event, taking down a prime minster, and thus overturning the results of a national election, is a wholly different matter. It can fly, even with his supporters, when a prime minister is clearly proven to be corrupt, as was the case with Ehud Olmert, who ended up serving jail time. But when more than half the public feels its standard-bearer was framed and its ballots effectively shredded, it is unlikely to just accept that result. So both Netanyahu and his voters came to see, more clearly than before, the severity of the problem and the urgency in restoring the balance between the branches of government.

But the indictments and later trial also threatened to neutralize Netanyahu’s ability to act. It is difficult for a prime minster to reform the judicial system and put checks on politicized law enforcement when he himself is facing a trial. How would he escape the obvious suspicion that he is trying to save himself and is willing—as the left dramatically phrases this talking point—to “smash the justice system just to save his own skin”? True, judicial reform is unlikely to interfere with an ongoing trial, except maybe by making the judges more hostile. But perception is crucial here, and so Netanyahu seemed caught in a bind. The question came down to this: Will voters support a reform, or will enough of them see it as cynical, self-serving move on his part?

Last year’s election turned precisely on that question. And the voters gave a clear answer.

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01/18 Links Pt2: Moshe Dayan’s Tragic Blunder; Mahmoud Abbas’ Dissertation; Why Israel’s enemies will hate the Louvre; No room for anti-Israel bias at Kennedy School

From Ian:

Meir Y. Soloveichik: Moshe Dayan’s Tragic Blunder

There is an argument to be made for permitting wider access and the right to pray for Jews at the site of the biblical Temples. In part, this argument charges that defense minister Moshe Dayan, in electing not to fully realize Israel’s sovereignty over the Mount immediately after its breathtaking capture in the 1967 war, helped facilitate the resonant Palestinian lie that the Jews have no connection to our ancient homeland—for surely, if the Temple Mount was historically ours, religiously ours, we would not have handed it back to them.

Dayan self-evidently thought otherwise. Anxious to avoid a full-on confrontation with the entire Muslim world, and utilizing the halachic argument that Jews should not set foot on the Mount for fear of defiling the sacred ground where the Temple and its Holy of Holies once stood, he allowed Jordan’s Muslim Waqf to continue to administer the compound’s holy places.

Netanyahu, Horovitz continued, had “wisely” adopted Dayan’s approach previously, but now the prime minister had “sanctioned” an act of “potential pyromania.” Horovitz’s account leaves out the fact that the decision of the ardently secular Dayan was founded on total disregard for what the Temple Mount meant to religious Jews.

After his paratroopers broke through Jordanian lines in 1967 and reached the site, Mordechai Gur exultantly exclaimed that “the Temple Mount is in our hands.” Dayan, in contrast, infamously reflected, “What do I need this Vatican for?” As the Israeli journalist Nadav Sharagai has documented, Dayan’s actions were based in the presumption that the Temple Mount is not of any religious significance to Jews at all:
Dayan thought at the time, and years later committed his thoughts to writing, that since the Mount was a “Muslim prayer mosque,” while for Jews it was no more than “a historical site of commemoration of the past…one should not hinder the Arabs behaving there as they do now and one should recognize their right as Muslims to control the site.”

But of course the Temple Mount is more, for Jews, than a commemorative locale of the past: It is the holiest site in Judaism, the one toward which Jews pray all over the world, because they believe that God dwells there in a special way. Dayan’s decision did indeed facilitate Palestinian claims, rampant today, that no Temple ever stood in Jerusalem and that the entire Jewish connection to Jerusalem is a fabrication. This is why more and more religious Jews are realizing that visiting the site is essential. It is not only far-right figures who are visiting the Mount. Entering certain sections of the Mount in a manner sanctioned by Jewish law is becoming more and more mainstream among Orthodox Jews. And that is why opposition to Jewish access to the Mount is growing more and more frantic by the day.

All this points to a profound irony. The return of Netanyahu has been met with the journalistic gnashing of teeth and the rhetorical rending of garments by writers and public figures about the danger that the (democratically elected) government of Israel poses to democracy. And yet it is these very critics who are often so dismissive of the most elemental of democratic injustices: denying Jews in Israel the right to visit, and to pray at, Judaism’s holiest place. Perhaps, when it comes to the history of the democratic liberties of mankind in the eyes of those who piously intone on the subject, it is only the rights of religious Jews that do not matter.

Mahmoud Abbas’ Dissertation

On Feb. 1, 1972, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union issued a directive “On further measures to fight anti-Soviet and anti-communist activities of international Zionism.” The social sciences section of the Soviet Academy of Sciences soon established a permanent commission for the coordination of scientific criticism of Zionism, to be housed at the academy’s prestigious Institute of Oriental Studies. Over the next 15 years, the IOS would serve as an important partner in the state’s fight against the imaginary global Zionist conspiracy that Soviet security services believed was sabotaging the USSR in the international arena and at home. In 1982, the IOS would grant the doctoral status to one Mahmoud Abbas, upon the defense of his thesis The Relationship Between Zionists and Nazis, 1933-1945.

Abbas’ dissertation has been a subject of considerable interest over the years. The thesis isn’t publicly available: By all accounts, it is kept in an IOS special storage facility requiring special authorization to access. But if one visits the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem, one can easily get the Palestinian leader’s so-called avtoreferat—an extended dissertation abstract. Written to the standards of the Soviet State Commission for Academic Degrees and Titles and authored by the candidate, the 19-page document outlines the dissertation’s relevance, methodology, main arguments and unique contribution to the field. It also provides a literature review and lists the individuals and institutions that were involved in shepherding the work through to completion. It therefore offers a peek not only into Mahmoud Abbas’ academic accomplishment, but also into the system that produced it.

Using the social sciences to support political and ideological agendas set by the Communist Party was a matter of course in the USSR. Entire academic disciplines had been established to grant scholarly legitimacy to the state’s guiding ideology. “Scientific atheism,” for an example, was tasked with proving scientifically that God did not exist and that religion was the opiate of the masses. “Scientific communism” was supposed to supply scientific proof that communism was the superior stage of social and economic development and would supersede both Soviet socialism and global capitalism. When, instead, capitalism superseded Soviet socialism and the cushy budgets that sustained these disciplines vanished, they, too, quietly dissolved.

As a field, “scientific anti-Zionism” never took root in the Soviet academy as broadly as the other two subjects. Like them, it died as soon as its primary client—the Soviet state—disappeared. Soon a million Soviet Jews resettled in Israel and the newly independent former Soviet states restored diplomatic relations with the country.

I grew up in Akademgorodok—a suburb of the Siberian city of Novosibirsk that was home to the Siberian Division of the Academy of Sciences. Adults around me lived and breathed science—real science, like physics and biology. It was well-known that portions of the academy were corrupted by ideological agendas. The antisemitism in its math division and elsewhere was a fact of life. Humanities and social sciences in particular were ruled by ideological priorities. But seeing the intellectual corruption that is evident in the story of Abbas’ dissertation is disturbing nonetheless.

Why Israel’s enemies will hate the Louvre

The Palestinian Authority and its supporters have a new enemy: the Louvre.

The world’s most-visited museum, the famous French institution that holds some of the greatest works of art and antiquities, is likely to find itself on anti-Israel boycott lists around the world.

This is because among the Louvre’s storied collections is a slab of stone with an inscription that affirms the ancient connection of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel.

The stone, known as the Mesha Stele, was first discovered in 1868 near the Dead Sea, but its inscription, written in the language of the ancient Moabites, was only partially understandable due to centuries of wear and damage. The inscription recounts a war between King Mesha of Moab and the Jews—the same conflict described in the third chapter of the Book of Kings. In addition, the words “House of David” appeared to be included in the inscription, but damage to the artifact meant this could not be proved conclusively.

Linguists and historians associated with a University of Southern California research project recently analyzed the artifact with a new technology called Reflectance Transformation Imaging that “takes digital images of an artifact from different angles and then combined to create a precise, three-dimensional digital rendering of the piece,” according to an article by two of the researchers, André Lemaire and Jean-Philippe Delorme, in the latest issue of Biblical Archeology Review.

This allowed the damaged section of the stele to be read. As was long suspected, it indeed referred to the “House of David.” So, once again, archaeological discoveries have affirmed what was already written long ago in the Hebrew Bible.

Do you know what is not mentioned in the inscription? “Palestine” or “Palestinians.”

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01/16 Links Pt2: How identity politics fuels anti-Semitism; Ken Roth’s Main Contribution is to Antisemitism, not Human Rights; MSNBC Claims Ilhan Omar’s Antisemitism the Fault of ‘Right Wing Hatemongers’

From Ian:

How identity politics fuels anti-Semitism

For several decades, the NUS has been closely wedded to the cultural politics of identity. As an institution, it works as a kind of coalition of identity groups that are all governed by an ideology of victimhood. Within the ranks of the NUS, identities perceived as ‘victims’ enjoy formidable authority.

But the NUS has apparently made an exception in recent years when it comes to Jews. In this, the NUS follows the identitarian mindset now widespread in our culture, which positions each identity within a hierarchy of victimhood – and which inexplicably places Jews near or at the top of that hierarchy.

Among devotees of identity politics, the Jewish identity has lost much of its claim to moral authority. The status held by Jews since the Holocaust has been revised. Jews are once again being portrayed as powerful, privileged and as aggressors. They are equated with the state of Israel and presented as the oppressors of a highly acclaimed victim group – the Palestinians.

In a world in which victim status trumps all others, this shift has had significant consequences for Jews. It is not that identitarians set out to cultivate anti-Semitism. But identity politics has helped to create a cultural and political climate in which Jewishness is increasingly perceived with hostility, as a negative identity. The validation of some identities always implies a devaluation of others – it is a zero-sum game. Today, the Jewish identity is on the losing side of that game.

Jewish identity is gradually becoming what sociologist Erving Goffman, in his classic 1963 study Stigma, characterised as a ‘spoiled identity’. A spoiled identity is one that lacks any redeeming moral qualities. It is an identity that invites stigma and scorn. Today, this is demonstrated by campaigns against the age-old Jewish practice of male circumcision, implying that Jews are perpetuating a barbaric custom. In a similar vein, attempts to ban kosher meat in parts of Europe signal an air of condescension toward Jewish culture, which is viewed as inhumane.

Bigotry has returned through the seemingly innocuous medium of identity politics. Back in March 2021, Politics Live, the BBC’s flagship politics programme, featured a bizarre debate on whether or not Jews are an ethnic minority. Apparently, this was open to question because some Jews have now reached positions of power and influence in British society. For identitarians, Jews have joined the ranks of the oppressors. Jewish privilege is seen as another version of ‘white privilege’.

This identitarian mindset has fuelled the new anti-Semitism. It must be confronted – not just within the NUS, but across British society.

The Baffling Appeal of "Jews Don’t Count"

Though Jews Don’t Count may be a weak and frivolous exercise in moaning, it has nevertheless struck a chord with that section of UK Jewry who, by virtue of their acculturation and success, are best positioned to make their voice heard. Of course, no one is completely immune to the kind of narcissistic self-pity that Baddiel and his guests have to offer, but this popularity is still, at first sight, surprising. Surprising, that is, until we understand its subtext, which contains an attempt to answer the central question of what Shaul Maggid has called “post-Judaism”: what does it mean to be a post-ethnic and post-religious Jew?

In Jews Don’t Count, Baddiel interviews over a dozen Jews, but there are few Israelis, religiously observant Jews, or Zionists among them. He thus deemphasizes or excludes something like 80 percent of the Jewish people from his analysis. The only time we see a yarmulke is in the background when Baddiel visits a New York deli and observes that Jews like pickles. Jews Don’t Count is, in other words, very clear about what Judaism isn’t (religion, Israel, and, of course, being white), but it is silent on the question of what positive content being Jewish has. Baddiel has stated elsewhere that “I’m really interested in and connected to the culture, the comedy, and obviously the identity, which is core to my being.” (Baddiel is, of course, a vocal atheist, and someone who doesn’t even care enough about Israel to oppose it, though he makes no bones about not liking it very much.) But what does that identity, which is the core of his being, consist of? What exactly is Baddiel identifying with?

In lieu of any indication that there is something other than anti-Semitism that Baddiel finds interesting about Judaism, the alarming answer to that question appears to be that Baddiel’s Jewish identity consists precisely of being a member of a persecuted group. The otherwise baffling popularity of Jews Don’t Count indicates he is far from alone. While, historically, many Jews have abandoned their faith and people in order to shed the burdens of being a loathed minority, the post-Jew does the opposite: clinging desperately to that legacy of persecution as the essence of being as a Jew. For some Jews, a denial of God’s existence, the divine authorship of the Torah, or their eternal connection to the Land of Israel is more than just an argument they disagree with: it’s an attack on their fundamental being. For post-Jews, the same blow is received when someone tries to gently point out that they are not a victim of anything but their own inability to quit while they are ahead.

The undeniable link between Anti-Antisemitism and America’s decline - Opinion

The New Antisemitism
The modern rise of antisemitism also known as the New Antisemitism kicked off at the start of the 21st century with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) Movement. With the Islamo Leftist alliance behind it, BDS, with its agenda to demonize the Jewish people and destroy the State of Israel, quickly moved from the fringes of our society and into the mainstream. Civil society organizations, American universities, and far-left politicians would come to endorse the BDS ideology.

Behind BDS, there has always stood a burning hatred of America, its exceptional liberal democratic and capitalist character, and worldwide influence, which is why it has been embraced by the far left and radical Muslims.

With American Jews unable to mount an effective defense against BDS due to our small numbers, division, and aversion to conflict, a door was opened for BDS to get incorporated into the Left’s radical ideologies as they have gained popularity over the past twenty years, normalizing antisemitism as an integral part of anti-Americanism.

Antisemism is now part of the Left Radical Ideologies
BDS and CRT are now intimately intertwined through the left-wing theory of “intersectionality”, and are being aggressively implemented in the workplace and school through CRT-adjacent policies like DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) and Ethnic Studies Curriculums. Americans from an increasingly early age are being indoctrinated to view America as intrinsically evil that must be totally remade according to racialized and socialist ‘Woke’ standards.

Although Jews are a major target of these groups, the struggle is not really about us—the ultimate target has always been America.

American Jews need to create alliances with other Americans focused on helping the public to understand that anti-Semitism spreading BDS, CRT, Ethnic Studies and DEI are first and foremost a threat to our core American values. Nothing less than the future of America – and the Jewish American community – is at stake.

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01/13 Links Pt2: Amnesty International’s latest excuse to accuse Israel of ‘apartheid’; Harvard didn’t cancel Kenneth Roth; it decided not to honor an antisemite

From Ian:

Ruthie Blum: Amnesty International’s latest excuse to accuse Israel of ‘apartheid’

Protests against new government bolster Amnesty and its friends
Israeli demonstrations in which participants compare the new government to the rise of the Third Reich do Amnesty and ilk proud, particularly when Palestinian flags dot the scenery. Those in attendance may profess to be protesting Team Netanyahu’s judicial-reform plan and other policies, but what they’re actually doing is discrediting the essence of the country.

This was evident a few weeks ago at a conference in Damascus, organized by the Hamas-affiliated Al-Quds International Institute. According to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), the event brought together Syria-based Palestinian activists and Iranian dignitaries to discuss Israel’s demise.

One noteworthy speech reported on by MEMRI was that of Syrian researcher Shadi Diab. He presented “data” on the “demographic problem facing the [Israeli] entity, and its failure to achieve harmony among its [Jewish] residents, who immigrated [to it] from different parts of the world and have different identities, cultures and languages, different circumstances and widely differing goals.”

This “entity,” he argued, “never managed to achieve a consensus among these sectors, who came from all over the world, and this disparity is evident in the struggle and fierce competition that currently prevail in the political arena and in the government of this entity, between the various political, ethnic and religious sectors, such as the Ashkenazi, Sephardi and haredi [Jews], between Right and Left, between religious and secular people, between the civilian and military sectors, etc.”

It sounds as though his “research” consisted of reading the Israeli press. He couldn’t admit to this, though, since he proceeded to claim that the “Zionist media conceals these struggles and disagreements and prevents [the publication of] any information about them inside and outside the [Zionist] entity.”

This contention is even more hilarious than Amnesty’s definition of free speech. But neither is a laughing matter when seen in a broader context: the holistic effort to annihilate Israel through external means, such as weapons and delegitimization, and contribute to its self-implosion. Due to ongoing Palestinian terrorism against innocent Israelis, the “peace process” was barely mentioned, even by the Left, during the election campaign. The Right emerged victorious by emphasizing Zionism and Jewish sovereignty as values whose positive connotations need to be restored and nurtured.

It’s a shame that the disgruntled losers aren’t open to the possibility that this will be to their benefit, as well. It’s far worse that they’re offering both fodder and hope to those who don’t distinguish between Ben-Gvir and Ben-Gurion.

MEMRI: Empty Vessels Looking To Belong

Sometimes the search for identity can go from bad to worse, whether it be children lamenting having mutilated themselves in bouts of sexual experimentation, the bleak nihilism of American teenage mass shooters, or Westerners desperately shopping for new racial or religious identities. California teen detransitioner Chloe Cole, who had her breasts removed at the age of 15, compares the transition surgery of minors to Nazi medical experiments.[8] There are apparently at least 72 genders to choose from, as well as more than a few cases of white people in America seeking to reinvent themselves into higher-status Black or Indigenous personae.[9]

The challenges are not limited to the West. Urbanization and modernity have been major social challenges in the developing world for decades, and particularly destructive to traditional societies uprooted by rapid change. In Israel, the country's Bedouin population has experienced massive upheaval as they are settled in new towns built in the Negev. Faced with a disruption in their traditional lifestyle, poverty, and crime, many have embraced political Islam as a safe haven in times of uncertainty and upheaval. Proof of this is the large number of mosques that have been built during this accelerated process of urbanization. The Bedouin, who historically have not been characterized by devout Islamism, are mentally crushed by this process, during which they are losing their way of life and their identity. As a result, they cleave to Islam to hold them together from within.

Where it can maintain any sort of real vitality and solidity in the face of our liquid future, traditional religion (or new faiths) will remain somewhat of a refuge from such nihilistic darkness. Ours is a metaphysical dilemma and it requires metaphysical responses. It seems hard to be a centrist when the center does not hold, when the middle ground of supposed liberal reason is excavated out from under you. But one of the risks of opposing the zeitgeist by finding supposed refuges that seem the furthest removed or most intransigent from the spirit of the age is that of extremism.

The controversial, resolutely anti-modern former kickboxer turned misogynist influencer Andrew Tate, now under arrest for human trafficking in Romania, recently described Islam , to which he recently converted, as "the last religion, the last one, because no other religion has boundaries which they will enforce. If you will tolerate everything, then you stand for nothing."[10] Europe-based Islamic reformer Hamed Abdel-Samad, in contrast to Tate, sees contemporary conservative Islam as increasingly "dwindling."[11] Tate seems to have taken a faith journey, if you can call it that in such a singular personality, that went from nominal Christian to Romanian Orthodox to Islam.[12] Still, to be Amish or Benedictine or Chasidic is also to be in clear contradistinction to an unmoored world. But then so is being a white supremacist or a jihadist.[13]

In the United Kingdom, Gen X (she was born in 1968) Sally-Anne Jones went from nominal Christian to punk rock to witchcraft and alternative lifestyles to not just converting to Islam but to becoming a highly successful recruiter for the Islamic State.[14] Less than a decade ago, tens of thousands of other Westerners, both converts and cradle Muslims, were motivated to leave the West and seek to emigrate to ISIS territory, where their lives were in constant danger.

More recently, in 2018, 17-year-old Corey Johnson of Jupiter, Florida decided to become a Muslim by watching ISIS videos and reading the Quran, though he seems never to have actually interacted with a live Muslim. Johnson seems like a Generation Z poster boy for our time – no father, "above-average intelligence but delayed maturity, autism, and severe mental illness," depression, prescription medications, stalking on social media.[15] For the supposed sake of Islam, he stabbed a 13-year-old boy to death and attempted to kill two other people one night during a sleepover. Before Islam, he had been infatuated with Hitler and Stalin, with white supremacists. He supported the Oklahoma City bombing (which took place five years before he was born). He had a swastika on his Facebook profile. During his trial in November 2021 in Florida, his defense attorneys described him as an "empty vessel looking to belong."[16] Despite expressing remorse, he was sentenced to life in prison at the age of 21.

In this new age of fervid identity seeking, the state in the West and many legacy institutions, their own foundations shaken, are mostly either absent or, in many ways, seeking to be relevant by promoting the latest thing. Many will be swept along with the latest enthusiasm, the last mirage, which will constantly need to be reinvented and repackaged to give the impression of progress. The Cult of the New will be regularly appeased. Others will often feel that they are on their own, redundant or alienated, alone before the winds of rapidly accelerating change, alone before the darkness. In them will remain the spark of authentic rebellion. Instead of seeking utopia, the imperative will be a search for communities which seem to offer safe harbor – or the illusion of a safe harbor.

Jonathan Tobin: Harvard didn’t cancel Kenneth Roth; it decided not to honor an antisemite

Roth is a prodigious fundraiser. HRW was rewarded for his calumnies against Israel with a $100 million grant from left-wing billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Foundation. Though some on the left treat any criticism of Soros as evidence of Jew hatred, his support for anti-Israel and even antisemitic activism aimed at supporting the Jewish state’s destruction renders their claims risible.

But Roth is also a terrible hypocrite when it comes to raising money. He solicited a $470 million donation from a Saudi billionaire, and in return promised not to advocate for LGBTQ rights in Muslim countries. Many on the left consider those who cite the fact that Israel is the one country in the Middle East where gays have equal rights (Amir Ohana, the new speaker of Israel’s Knesset, is gay) to be “pinkwashing.” But Roth was prepared to sacrifice the rights of Muslim gays in order to get more cash with which to attack the Jewish state’s existence.

An honest assessment of Roth’s record must lead to the conclusion that he isn’t a “critic” of Israel’s, but rather someone who regards its existence as a crime that must be atoned for by its destruction. His lies about Israel and willingness to deny Jews rights he wouldn’t deny to anyone else isn’t merely a controversial opinion; it’s a virulent variant of antisemitism.

He wouldn’t be the only one with such vile opinions to be given a prestigious perch at an elite university. But it is to the credit of Harvard’s Kennedy School that it drew the line at giving him the kind of honor he clearly doesn’t deserve.

Contrary to the arguments of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a group that has stood up in the past for conservatives, the issue at Harvard isn’t the defense of academic freedom, but normalizing Jew-hatred.

In a saner environment than the one that currently exists in academia and the establishment media, it would be the University of Pennsylvania under fire from faculty, students, alumni and the public for honoring an antisemite like Roth. Instead, it is Harvard’s Elmendorf who is under intolerable pressure to reverse his stand and give Roth yet another platform to advance his campaign to treat Zionism, the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, as racism.

That the organized Jewish community has had little to say about Roth and the attacks on Harvard’s stand against antisemitism also provides more proof of the failure of American-Jewish leaders and their preference for liberal causes that do nothing to protect the rights or the security of the community they purport to represent.

Rather than meekly accept his claims of martyrdom, those who profess to care about fighting Jew-hatred need to put aside political differences and join in an effort to call him out for his lies. If Harvard is ultimately forced to surrender on this issue, it will be a triumph for Roth’s brand of left-wing antisemitism that is a growing threat to the ability of Jews to speak up for Israel and Zionism in the public square, and especially in academia.

Indeed, it isn’t Kenneth Roth who’s being canceled, but all those who are willing to tell the truth about the leftist war on Israel and the Jews.

Shot - Chaser @BostonGlobe @thecrimson @Harvard @Kennedy_School @CarrCenter pic.twitter.com/E7tiXqaAga

— Faith Quintero (@FaithQuintero7) January 12, 2023

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01/09 Links Pt2: ‘The great unpunishment’: How, why so many Holocaust perpetrators got away with it; The Need to Curb Black Anti-Semitism; UAE will teach Holocaust in national school curriculum

From Ian:

‘The great unpunishment’: How, why so many Holocaust perpetrators got away with it

After spending 18 years bringing “Getting Away With Murder(s)” to fruition, British filmmaker David Wilkinson faced wall-to-wall rejections when he shopped the documentary to global broadcasters and subscription services such as Netflix.

Clocking in at three hours, Wilkinson’s film is a detailed indictment of the so-called “great unpunishment” faced by nearly all of the Holocaust’s perpetrators. The film focuses on specific German war criminals — and non-German collaborators — to explain how so many mass murderers avoided accountability.

“The lack of justice for the victims of the Holocaust is the greatest miscarriage of justice in the history of mankind,” Wilkinson told The Times of Israel. “The world needs to know this,” he said.

“Getting Away With Murder(s)” will finally land on several US streaming platforms on January 27, which is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The film has been airing in 11 European countries since July, said Wilkinson.

“It has been a slog all the time with this documentary,” said Wilkinson, who has produced or distributed 125 films in a career spanning more than four decades.

“In some ways, ‘Jews Don’t Count’ should have been the name of this film,” said Wilkinson, who had to fund much of the documentary himself, along with his wife, costume designer Amy Roberts of Netflix’s “The Crown.”

Even Israeli broadcasters, said Wilkinson, were not keen on supporting the sprawling Holocaust documentary.

“I was told a few times that Israel has more Holocaust documentaries than any other country,” said Wilkinson, whose film was also rejected by the Berlin Film Festival.

However, after the slew of commercial rejections, “Getting Away With Murder(s)” became a favorite of British critics. Wilkinson has been compared favorably to Claude Lanzmann of “Shoah” fame, and the influential “Guardian” voted the film its top documentary of the year.

“It was the power of the free press. Without them championing the film, I really do think it would have been ignored,” said Wilkinson.

The Need to Curb Black Anti-Semitism

In fact, Irving has neither apologized for any unintended incitement nor even acknowledged the phenomenon of growing animosity and violence toward Jews—especially among American blacks. If he had actually wanted to defuse the hold of these ideologies on some of his fans, he might have tried saying something like this:
There is no truth in the claims in Hebrews to Negroes that there was no Holocaust or that today’s Jews usurped Judaism from blacks and should be punished for it. In fact, roughly 6 million Jews were murdered for being Jews during World War II; there is no historical support for a religious usurpation; and it is never okay to harass or attack Jews. If your religion tells you that they deserve it, then your religion is despicable.

And he might have added:
Jews make up about 2 percent of the U.S. population but routinely suffer 60 percent of religion-based hate crimes. Here in New York City, nearly half of all hate-crime victims are Jewish—in a city only around 7 percent Jewish—and in cases where the attacker’s race is known, 42 percent of attackers are black. Brooklyn has experienced 186 hate crimes so far this year, at least 74 of these against Jews. This is shameful, and anyone who commits crimes against Jews needs to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

If anything, Irving’s peace-and-love non-apologies served as a dog whistle to those whose ideologies he refrained from condemning. On his reinstatement day, scores of Black Hebrew Israelites, outfitted in the uniform of the group Israel United in Christ, amassed in military formation in Grand Army Plaza shouting: “Hey Jacob, it’s time to wake up. We have good news: we are the real Jews.” Still shouting, they army-marched to the nearby Barclay’s Center, where Irving was finally back on court, to distribute fliers promulgating the same brand of libel against Jews that Irving could have explicitly countered, but didn’t. Nothing that Irving has said or done since has stopped Hebrews to Negroes from becoming the best-selling book in multiple Amazon categories or delegitimized its hateful message.

Perhaps conscientious education can cure people of prejudice; certainly, dialogue is a critical and healthy part of civics. Anti-Semitism, however, is an age-old malignancy that leapfrogs bias to become something irrational, suffused with magical thinking and the potential for violence. Maybe to combat this growing surge, we need to focus less on explaining why anti-Semitism is not nice and more on discovering what forces of misplaced grievance and fear in the black community are inflaming it now.

UAE will teach Holocaust education in national school curriculum

The UAE will be adding Holocaust education to its school curriculums, the UAE Embassy in the US confirmed on Twitter last week.

"In the wake of the historic Abraham Accords, the UAE will now include the Holocaust in the curriculum for primary and secondary schools," was written in the tweet which added a quote by one of the Emirati brokers of the Accords Ali al-Nuaimi.

"Memorializing the victims of the Holocaust is crucial," he said. "Public figures failed to speak the truth because a political agenda hijacked their narrative, yet a tragedy on the scale of the Holocaust targets not only Jews but humanity as a whole."

The UAE is the first Arab state to officially include Holocaust education in its school curriculum.

"This means a lot," said US Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides in a comment to the UAE Embassy's tweet. "Great to see it coming to fruition."

'Holocaust education is imperative for humanity'
"Pleased to see this important step being taken by the United Arab Emirates," wrote the US Special Envoy to Monitor Antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt. "Holocaust education is an imperative for humanity and too many countries, for too long, continue to downplay the Shoah [Holocaust] for political reasons. I commend the UAE for this step and expect others to follow suit soon."

“The United Arab Emirates has been leading the way in peace and tolerance education in the region for some years,” said CEO of Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se) Marcus Sheff. "IMPACT-se is delighted that they have taken this important step in educating about the Shoah and humbled to have partnered with the Ministry of Education.”

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01/03 Links Pt1: Israel should put an end to Palestinian diplomatic terror; The UN for Empowering Terrorists; Ismail Haniyeh’s Son Draws Scorn for Life of Luxury

From Ian:

Israel should put an end to Palestinian diplomatic terror

Palestinian Authority leaders should start to feel overwhelming pressure at every turn. They have become used to a limp response by Israel to its attacks in the international arena and have become further emboldened.

There is no better time than a brand-new Israeli government to state unequivocally that the rules of the game have changed, and there will be a strong and paralyzing response by Israel to the continued Palestinian attacks.

Israeli leaders shouldn’t just send threats behind closed doors but announce very publicly a series of steps it will take in response to the passing of the United Nations General Assembly resolution, with a further set of steps should they continue.

These steps should be designed with one singular goal in mind, to break the will of the Palestinian Arabs to continue fighting this war.

This is not just good for Israel; it will also be good for the Palestinians.

If their leaders end their obsessive war against Israel on all its fronts, legal, economic, diplomatic and of course, through violence, it will free up energy and resources for building Palestinian Arab society in all arenas, social, education and infrastructure.

The Palestinian Arab war against Israel is also a war against a decent future for the Palestinian Arabs.

Nevertheless, a more peaceful, prosperous and secure future for both peoples can only be attained once the Palestinian leaders have given up.

This can only happen when Israel forces them to do so.

It will take a change of direction by our security and political establishment, but all other paths have failed.

It is time for more drastic action.

It is time for an Israel victory against Palestinian Arab rejectionism on the front, which is crucial to ending the conflict.

The United Nations for Empowering Terrorists

Hammouri's affiliation with the PFLP and his involvement in planning terror attacks against Israelis, does not, however, seem to concern the UN Human Rights Office. Instead of condemning the convicted terrorist, the UN Human Rights Office chose to condemn Israel for daring to take measures to protect its citizens against terrorism.

This is also the same UN whose representatives have failed to condemn Hamas for building tunnels beneath schools run by its United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) in the Gaza Strip.

Take note: here is a senior UN official sitting with representatives of a terror group whose charter calls for the elimination of Israel and who is expressing "concern" over the rise of right-wing parties in Israel.

The UN official appears unaware that many Israelis voted for right-wing parties because of the increased terror attacks by Hamas and other terrorist groups.

It is ironic that a UN official, whose title is "Special Coordinator of the Middle East Peace Process", sits with a Palestinian group that is entirely dedicated to sabotaging peace.

As Article 13 of the Hamas charter states: "There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors."

This is hardly how to "prevent and remove threats to peace," as the UN claims in its charter. In fact, the actions of the UN clearly demonstrate that the organization is actually cozying up to terrorists while denouncing those who combat terrorism.

In its defense of, and engagement with, terrorists, the UN is boosting the ability of Hamas and the PFLP to continue their slaughter and genocide.

Ismail Haniyeh’s Son Draws Scorn for Life of Luxury As Gazans Scrape By

One of the sons of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh is living in luxury in Turkey and even received a Turkish passport to continue his expensive lifestyle, according to an Arab media report.

Elaph, a Saudi website based in Britain reported from its sources that Maaz Haniyeh recently received a Turkish passport enabling to travel the world with his family while enjoying a rich life in Turkey.

A source in Gaza commenting on the Elaph report told the Tazpit Press Service, “The Hamas apparatus follows Gaza residents who go out for medical or commercial needs and collect sums of money from them and part of the profits, and on the other hand, Maaz was awarded a Turkish passport for free, due to his father’s status.”

The article, titled “Maaz Haniyeh: A Life of Extravagance, Alcohol and Women,” reports that Maaz is known in Gaza as Abu Al Aqarat, or “The Father of Real Estate” for his ownership of several apartments, villas and buildings in different areas of the Strip. Its sources said that outside of Gaza, Haniyeh’s sons drink alcohol — which is prohibited for Muslims — and hang out prestigious clubs accompanied by women.

A journalist who lives in Gaza told TPS, “Maaz Haniyeh was forced to leave the comfortable life in the Gaza Strip and embark on the difficult and arduous resistance missions in the streets of Turkey and in its hotels.”

Two years ago, Maaz was photographed next to his father, Ismail, when he was showing off a new luxury car on the streets of Gaza.

Maaz, one of Ismail Haniyeh’s 13 children, is not the only family member drawing scorn.

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01/01 Links: From Jew vilification to the delegitimization of Israel; Netanyahu slams ‘disgraceful’ UN request for ICJ opinion on Judea and Samaria; The NYTs Rush to Whitewash Palestinian Terror

From Ian:

From Jew vilification to the delegitimization of Israel - opinion

From the dawn of time, Jews have been maligned and slandered. Apion's vilification, the blood libels, the Dreyfus trial, and of course, the antisemitic propaganda of the 20th century are just a few examples. All of these manifestations of antisemitism got an "upgrade" to vilifying Israel, where the majority of world Jewry resides, by taking away the very legitimacy of Jewish presence in its ancestral homeland.

This effort began when the Roman emperor Hadrian renamed the land of Israel "Palestine" in order to detach the Jews from their homeland. In a nutshell, the vilification of the Jew has evolved into the delegitimization of the State of Israel. Words have power, and we still suffer the consequences of those words written and spoken over the last two millennia.

Today, the effort to delegitimize Israel has gone global and has permeated organizations like the United Nations and Amnesty International, which routinely try to undermine Israel's right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state within any borders. Furthermore, with the democratization of communication due to the emergence of social media, the average person has been handed the power and platform to throw misinformed accusations at Israel with the click of a button.

Making matters worse, influencers and celebrities can reach three, four, or even ten times the number of all Jews on the planet, spreading incorrect information. They share inaccurate content out of ignorance (like the star of Netflix's hit show Wednesday, Jenna Ortega) or out of pure malice (like antisemite Kanye West). Thus, the average person, who forms their opinions, including geo-political stances, based on memes, Instagram stories and TikTok videos, will easily be misinformed by these influencers. I experienced this firsthand when my friends around the world would easily share misinformation, while terrorist organizations were unleashing thousands of rockets upon Israeli civilians.

Seth Frantzman: The UN's vote against Israel and its historic contradictions

This is the essence of the contradictory policies behind “international law.” Western colonial powers were able to set up various administrations all around the world, sometimes only for a few decades. During that time they often carved up areas and created arbitrary lines on maps and then partitioned the areas they had taken over. But the Western powers were rarely accused under international law of “illegal occupation.” The concept of “international law” was primarily inaugurated after western colonial powers left most areas of the world.

The remaining vestiges of colonial-era rule, such as some islands here and there, are not considered “occupied.” In this narrative, Western countries never “occupied,” but when they decided to partition countries or draw arbitrary lines on maps, cutting peoples and tribal territories in half, it was always "legal." This was the case in the partition of India and the creation of the Kashmir dispute.

It was also the case with areas in the Middle East. The Golan Heights are part of Syria, not because of some ancient legal reason, but because the British and French colonial authorities demarcated the border this way. Neither side of that equation was ever “occupying.” Only when the European countries decided to give “independence” to various states or leave, did international law suddenly swoop in and say that the borders the former powers had drawn would be set in stone. Now any changes were against international law.

The strangest thing is that the partition plan the British and UN left behind in 1947 was unworkable. International status for Jerusalem and a patchwork of areas for two states, one Arab and one Jewish, in what had been British mandate Palestine. Yet the “law” today isn’t entirely based on the 1947 decision. Instead, there was a ceasefire in 1948 and then a war in 1967. International law has a way of swooping in only when changes are made in Israel’s favor.

For instance, there was no “occupation” of Jerusalem or “demographic change” issue between 1948 and 1967 when Jordan ran east Jerusalem. Even though Jews were ethnically cleansed from areas of the Old City, this was not a “demographic change.” When Israel took over Jordanian-occupied east Jerusalem, then international law says the situation in 1967 must be set in stone. Not the situation in 1947 or 1887. How does the law know when to draw the line?

Similarly, it’s not clear why international law often portrays Israel as an “occupier” of Gaza. The Gazans were not consulted on whether they wanted to be occupied by the British or the Egyptians. Yet the “law” seems to only relate to Israel’s temporary control of Gaza and in essence forces Israel to forever be the “occupying power.” This is the same international concept that underpins the Oslo Accords, in a sense abrogating those very accords and making it impossible for Israel to give up control. This is problematic because even if Israel wanted to withdraw from parts of the West Bank and enable a full-fledged Palestinian state, the “law” would always portray Israel as continuing to “occupy” something. This is the case in Lebanon, for instance, where even though Israel withdrew in 2000, Hezbollah continues to accuse Israel of occupying the Har Dov/Sheba’a farms area. It’s hard to imagine a way Israel can ever extricate itself from the endless UN focus, even if it wanted to. The focus on Israel is convenient since it means more contentious issues such as focusing on Turkey’s occupation of Syria, are not spotlighted. Many countries agree to shift the focus to Israel.

The related features of international law, that it is often rooted in arbitrary European colonial power decisions, and in arbitrary dates, create many contradictions. It’s hard not to see it as merely being made up as it goes along to single out Israel. Some of the countries that created the “law” and the chaos of 1948, then condemn Israel for controlling the very thing they created and also refuse to let Israel leave areas they demanded Israel leave. Increasingly this is a tool of countries in the global south and authoritarian regimes. Many western countries do not see the constant focus on Israel as helpful. Some countries have realized that letting Iran and Russia hijack international forums is also no longer helpful. It is unclear if there will be more pushback against these kinds of resolutions and decisions that focus on Israel.

What are possible legal ramifications of an ICJ advisory opinion on Israel?

International Legal Forum CEO and human rights attorney Arsen Ostrovsky, agreed that “Such opinions of the ICJ are non-binding on the parties involved. They are purely of an advisory nature,” but warned that “they do carry considerable moral weight and are regarded highly as a reference point by the legal community, as well as civil society and the United Nations.”

Daphné Richemond-Barak explained that the ICJ advisory opinion “doesn’t obligate a state as such” but the body could urge member states to take action. Member states could use the ruling as a basis to make political decisions. Whether the states’ local courts would use the advisory as legal precedent was not the main concern. The opinion was more relevant in international fora.

“It’s not so much what the opinion is going to say but how it's going to be used in the future,” she said.

Richemond-Barak gave the example of the 2004 ICJ advisory opinion on the security barrier, and how it became the keystone for many reports and resolutions by international bodies. The ICJ’s opinion of the legal consequences Israel’s practices and control of the territories would likely be held in high regard due to the court’s prestige and air of authority.

Shany said that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new government would have to decide how to approach the ICJ opinion.

“There is always a question about what Israel should do, participate in the process or boycott.” said Shany. “If you don't make your case you may politicize the process but may face a more hostile decision.” He said that in the case of the 2004 advisory opinion on the security barrier, that Israel made a compromise between the two

In response to the ICJ’s 2004 evaluation on the “Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” the government submitted a statement challenging the “jurisdiction of the Court and the propriety of any response by it on the substance of the request,” but refused to address the legality of the fence.

According to Shany the opinion could take between 1-2 years to formulate, and in that time, even if the new government doesn’t directly respond to the proceedings, statements made by ministers could influence the decisions. This legal specter could therefore impact the speech of Israeli ministers.

“Although the new process began prior to the new government, the statements made by the ministers will impact the deliberations,” said Shany. Talk of “exclusive rights of Jews over all the territory of Israel, while this may play very well to the home base, in the Hague proceedings could be damaging.”

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12/31 Links: Where is the Middle East heading now?; Israel calls UN 'morally bankrupt' as assembly refers 'occupation' to Hague court; Happy 50th anniversary of the Dry Bones cartoons

From Ian:

Dore Gold: Where is the Middle East heading now?

Dr. Ebtisam Al-Ketbi, who heads the leading research center in Abu Dhabi, the Emirates Policy Center, pointed out that the overlapping crises afflicting the Middle East have made strictly bilateral solutions completely ineffective, which drew the major players in the region to try the Baghdad II mechanism. Perhaps they were thinking about a Middle Eastern version of the Helsinki Process that drew in members of NATO and the Warsaw Pact in 1975 at the height of the Cold War.

But Iran was glued to a policy of exploiting its Islamic Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) units as its chosen instrument for spreading its regional influence – not multilateral mechanisms that the strongest party in the room was prepared to ignore. Over the last few years, Iran effectively employed its Houthi allies in Yemen to successfully strike the heart of Riyadh, shutting down for a period of time a significant percentage of Saudi Arabia’s oil production.

Indeed, a Houthi drone attack knocked out half of Saudi Arabia’s oil production in 2019. Iran did not pay a price for this bold action. Clearly, it had little incentive to restrict its behavior, given the tepid regional reaction. In fact, Jordan’s King Abdullah disclosed on CNN in July 2021 that Iranian drones had attacked Jordanian territory in increasing numbers.

For years, Tehran had built up a military presence in Lebanon and Syria. Now, Iran had been showing its interest in spreading its influence into Jordan as well. Jordan was known to be the locale of a number of Islamic holy sites that were significant to both Sunni and Shi’ite Islam. Iran sought to expand its tourism in Jordan to these areas. Some had been battlefields for early Islamic armies when they had their first military engagements with the Byzantine Empire. They were located near what is today the Saudi-Jordanian border.

Some Middle Eastern leaders hoped that today the Iranians could be placated. That might have been another reason to invite the Iranian president to the shores of the Dead Sea in Jordan. Israel will have to monitor very carefully what is happening with its eastern neighbors – both Iraq and Jordan. Israel has intercepted convoys of weaponry crossing from the Iranian border, by land, to Syria and Lebanon.

It is logical that Tehran redirects its efforts to create an alternative route via Jordan. If Middle Eastern states can block this axis as well, they can assure the security of the region. But it is not clear at this stage that they will be able to achieve this goal.

To combat antisemitism, collaboration is needed - opinion

With growing displays of hatred for Jews evident among extremists across the ideological spectrum, the space and passive support for antisemitism seem to be growing. Jews are feeling this on the streets of their communities around the world, with record-high levels of antisemitic incidents recorded in 2022.

What has the US done as a result?
In the US, this has prompted Jewish institutions to adopt a European model of stricter security, including armed guards, higher walls and increased surveillance.

These measures, while necessary from a safety perspective, serve as a demoralizing daily reminder to Jews about the concrete threats they face. To identify publicly as a Jew means putting themselves on the frontlines of a battle they did not seek.

Nevertheless, amid this darkening reality, there is also light. While hate against Jews increases, many allies are stepping up to the plate and being counted.

As CEO of the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM), a global coalition engaging more than 650 organizations and nearly two million people from different religious, political and cultural backgrounds in the common mission of fighting the world’s oldest hatred, I have witnessed the power of partnership over the past year.

Recently, in Athens, we had more than 60 mayors and other top municipal officials from all over the world convene with the singular purpose of sharing and learning best practices about how to fight antisemitism. One key speaker, New York City Mayor Eric Adams, lamented the fact that antisemitism had become “normalized” and “popular,” and he called out its perpetrators.

Also last month, at the height of the Kanye and Kyrie furor, CAM helped organize the second annual awards ceremony of the Omni-American Future Project, a collaborative partnership strengthening ties between the black and Jewish communities in the US. These are just two recent examples of how prejudice can be countered with the fostering of cross-communal understanding and harmony.

However, this may have been best exemplified by CAM’s final event of 2022, when on the first night of Hanukkah, in the heart of Manhattan, a non-Jewish street artist painted a massive mural of Tibor Baranski, a courageous Hungarian-American who brought light to the world at the darkest moment in human history by rescuing more than 3,000 Jews during the Holocaust.

Of course, the Jews are not facing a Holocaust today, but we are under attack from an expanding number of hostile sources. To beat this network of hate, we must build, joined by our friends and all good people of conscience, an unbreakable web of togetherness, fraternity and comradeship.

Our enemies are gaining in strength, but so are our allies, and we must remember this. To turn the tide of rising hatred, we must reach more people who will stand by our side and say, “Enough!”

This is how we combat antisemitism.

Happy 50th anniversary of the Dry Bones cartoons

Yaakov Kirschen drew his first Dry Bones cartoon for The Jerusalem Post’s January 1, 1973, edition, and he never stopped. For 50 years, Dry Bones cartoons have been a beloved part of the Anglo Jewish world. Many children of English-speaking olim (immigrants to Israel) grew up in homes with faded Dry Bones cartoons that their parents had taped to the wall. Dry Bones cartoons have been mailed, shared, quoted, and forwarded between English-speaking Israelis, Christian Zionists, and our far-flung and embattled Jewish communities in the Diaspora.

Kirschen has made the lives of Anglo olim easier and more meaningful, and to his fans all over the world he has spread a deeper and stronger feeling for Israel and Zionism.

The Dry Bones cartoonist, who has been called a “national treasure of the Jewish people,” has received many awards, such as the Nefesh B’Nefesh Bonei Zion Award and The Golden Pencil Award.

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12/29 Links Pt2: Understanding the upsurge in black attacks on Jews;

From Ian:

Understanding the upsurge in black attacks on Jews

The path of promoting Jew-hatred as a strategy for popularizing withdrawal into racial authenticity and ethnic isolationism is today still represented by Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam and their myriad followers, including in the political, entertainment and professional athletic realms. It is also represented by significant segments of the Black Lives Matter leadership, elements of the black Hebrew Israelite movement, black college and university groups that have advocated segregation on campuses and others.

Black Americans who seek common cause with others and have spoken out against black antisemitism include academics and intellectuals like the Hoover Institute’s Thomas Sowell and Brown University’s Glenn Loury, various political figures on both sides of the aisle and numerous religious leaders, as well as prominent cultural and sports personalities.

Gates’ insight has implications beyond the issue of recent black antisemitism. For centuries, Jew-hatred has been used as a tool in political struggles between competing elites, with one or both sides attacking the other for being associated with or too tolerant of Jews.

In today’s America, this phenomenon is not confined to the black community. White advocates of the balkanization of America along racial and ethnic lines—whether on the far-left or the far-right—target Jews as champions of an integrationist ideal and defame Jews in order to discredit non-Jews who embrace that ideal.

For example, Martin Luther King, Jr., who advocated color-blindness and integration, would be as unwelcome on many of today’s college campuses as would defenders of the Jewish community. But to attack King directly would still generally be frowned upon. The Jews are a much easier target, and maligning and attacking them is an indirect way for both white and black bigots to undermine King and his integrationist message, especially in light of King’s lifelong alliance with Jewish activists and leaders.

The American Jewish response to the rise in Jew-hatred has been piecemeal and weak. This is largely because the increased antisemitism—or at least that part of it that has made the greatest inroads in American society—is coming mainly from sources towards which many American Jews have long felt affinity and identification: Black Americans, too often conceived as a monolithic community; progressives; and educators, especially those staffing what has become the greatest institutional font of antisemitism in America, the campuses.

The increasingly heated division between Americans who advocate balkanization and those who champion integration will likely grow even more intense, and the ever-increasing use of Jew-hatred as a weapon of the former against the latter will grow more ingrained and uglier. Gates’ observations cast a light on this reality. If American Jews wish to stem the rising antisemitism, they must cast aside their preconceptions, take a clear-eyed look at their situation and join with others who embrace the integrationist ideal in pushing back against those who would tear the nation apart and weaponize Jew-hatred as a means to that end.

Will Biden follow through on his pledge to combat antisemitism?

President Biden could better the Trump record by entrenching the Executive Order in the Code of Federal Regulations, further fleshing it out. Biden might also use the occasion to solidify protections for other ethno-religious groups, such as Arab Muslims, Coptic Christians and Sikhs. This would be a welcome addition.

Each of the last three administrations have built upon work done by their predecessors. During the George W. Bush administration, the Office for Civil Rights recognized that Jewish students enjoy legal protection under Title VI. The Obama administration affirmed the Bush policy, embellishing it with clarifying guidance. The Trump administration affirmed the Bush-Obama rules and, in addition, provided that federal agencies will use the Working Definition when appropriate.

The importance of maintaining IHRA cannot be overstated. Without this definition, OCR was long rudderless in its efforts to address a form of hate which it simply did not understand. And absent such a formal definition, the agency was unable to handle systemic campus antisemitism cases for nearly a decade and a half following the initial 2004 guidance.

Under the current OCR guidance, which includes IHRA, Assistant Secretary Catharine Lhamon has commendably opened several important cases involving systemic antisemitism, including the Brandeis Center’s cases Brooklyn College, the University of Vermont and the University of Southern California.

Whatever Biden does, he should not diminish use of the Working Definition by pairing it with a lesser standard. The controversial Jerusalem Definition, which some left-wing activists advocate, has been criticized for defining anti-Semitism too narrowly, misunderstanding Jewish experience and inadvertently giving cover to antisemites. It is hardly a substitute for the internationally agreed-upon standard, and its usage would significantly undermine civil rights enforcement.

President Biden’s words are strong, but his administration’s actions do not always match. Earlier this month, the Biden administration botched its presentation of federal hate crimes data. Nationwide underreporting has plummeted so far this year, especially in areas with high Jewish populations, that the FBI data mischaracterizes last year’s record spike in anti-Semitism as if it didn’t occur—falsely suggesting a decrease. Mistakes can happen. But it is hard to excuse the administration’s failure to correct these errors, now or in the future.

The stakes are high. President Biden has correctly identified the seriousness of confronting anti-Semitism. Now his administration needs to deliver a strong regulation to ensure, in his words, that evil will not win and hate will not prevail.

It’s Time to Apply ‘Broken Windows’ Thinking to Antisemitism

In another incident, this one online, Jewish students at Texas A&M University contacted us in November 2022 about posts on a Snapchat story that included crass references to the Holocaust, and defense of the murderers who perpetrated the Holocaust. The post stated, “we should’ve let the ‘ant exterminator’ do his job back in WW2,” — a reference to Hitler and the Holocaust.

This Snapchat group can only be accessed with a Texas A&M student email address. Our organization, at the request of and together with students, wrote to the administration, noting the various university policies that were being violated by this egregious display of antisemitism. The university couldn’t be bothered to respond — something inconceivable if the hate was directed at almost any other identity group. So we are bringing the story to broader attention.

Some might ask why go to such efforts over one mezuzah or a Snapchat story?

One of the reasons hate crime laws exist is because when one sees a fellow member of one’s racial, ethnic or religious group targeted with a hate crime, it makes every member of that group also feel fearful and targeted. Part of the justification for hate crime laws is the impact of this specific type of crime on the broader community. When a Jewish person learns that their neighbor’s mezuzah has been vandalized, they are not just upset that this happened to another Jew, but may also worry about their own safety.

As the director of StandWithUs’ legal team, I believe we must act in the spirit of the “broken windows” theory. There are some situations where going after “the worst, first” is necessary and appropriate. But as a general rule, we should consistently and vigorously go after the “small” antisemitic crimes with as much force as the headline-grabbing crimes. If we do not show that we are actively concerned, monitoring, and responding with vigilance and strength to all types of anti-Jewish hate, we likely will see hate crimes increase, antisemites grow emboldened, anti-Jewish bigotry normalize, and the overall environment worsen. If we show antisemites that they won’t get away with vandalizing mezuzahs or Snapchat hate, it is far more likely that we will never have to confront a wave of far more severe antisemitism.

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