Friday, September 30, 2022
- Friday, September 30, 2022
- Elder of Ziyon
- 1941, antisemitism, blame Jews, conspiracy theories, Electronic Intifada, IfNotNow, Jews have always been Zionist, justifying antisemitism, Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle
Wednesday, July 13, 2022
- Wednesday, July 13, 2022
- Elder of Ziyon
- Jewish prayer, Jews, Jews have always been Zionist, Poster, This is Zionism, Zionism
Wednesday, June 29, 2022
Anna Rajagopal may be confused about when she converted
to Judaism (was she 10, 11, or 12?), but about one thing she is certain: Rajagopal hates
Israel. She also hates any Jew who believes in the right of the Jewish
people to self-determination in the Jewish homeland. Which is funny for someone
who converted through a Temple that has always been Zionist.
But let’s back up.
Of her conversion, Rajagopal wrote in a blog
entry:
I converted to Judaism as a child, when I was around ten years old, but my conversion journey began at age nine, when I felt an inexplicable tug at my very being that I attribute to my Neshama (soul) being present at Har Sinai (Mount Sinai) when G-d revealed Themself to the Jewish people. For me, conversion was G-d calling me home, after thousands of years in exile. Where's the shame in that? (Spoiler alert: There is none).
Converting as a child was by no means easy, so I understand how difficult, overwhelming, confusing and even upsetting this process, and subsequent life can be.
One month later, writing for Hey
Alma, Rajagopal had moved up the age of her conversion from “around ten
years old” to “around age 11.”
I converted to Judaism around age 11, coming from a multicultural household with both Christian and Hindu influences.
Not a huge difference, for certain. Except that neither
version of the Anna Rajagopal conversion story is true. From these two
accounts, dated one month apart, the reader might have inferred that Anna
converted alone, on her own, as a young child. According to a 2013 temple newsletter,
however, we learn that the entire Rajagopal
family converted when Anna was 12.
Anna Rajagopal did not convert as a lone brave child because
of something tugging on her soul, but alongside her parents and brother, a
decision made and taken as a single family unit. At the time, Rajagopal was not
around 10 or 11, but age 12, the age of Jewish womanhood, when a girl becomes
fully responsible for her choices and actions.
Is this stress on the small difference of a year or two or
three in a personal narrative important in the scheme of things? Yes. Because conversion
would have been something momentous, something Rajagopal would have remembered
with all the details, including her age, intact.
Of course, if Anna Rajagopal were otherwise a person of
integrity, we might have looked the other way. We might have shrugged and said,
“Big flip, so she got the age wrong by a year or two (or three).”
Rajagopal however, is not a person of integrity. How do we
know this? Because of her visceral dislike of certain Jews—really all Jews—expressed
as remarks about, for example, their physical appearance. In March 2022, for
example, Rajagopal tweeted:
"sometimes I sit here and just wonder why zionists are
so physically unattractive. it's very interesting to me how every zionist is
just extremely ugly. like actually very unpleasant looking. it’s like you have
to be horrifically grotesque to be part of the genocide club.”
This is not Rajagopal’s sole antisemitic tweet, but in a
nutshell, it is certainly one that should disgust all humanity, no matter what they
think about Jews and Israel. Let’s flip it for a moment and rephrase her tweet in
terms that might make this blatant example of bigotry easier for the world at large to comprehend and
digest:
"sometimes I sit here and just wonder why BIPOCs are so
physically unattractive. it's very interesting to me how every BIPOC is just
extremely ugly. like actually very unpleasant looking. it’s like you have to be
horrifically grotesque to be part of the genocide club.”
If reading the above shocked you, it should. Good people do
not generalize about the appearance of another people, no matter their identity. We
learn this at our parents’ knees. But then again, when someone raves like this,
it has nothing to do with looks, Zionist or otherwise. It’s just a bigot ranting
on Twitter. If Rajagopal had something substantive to say, she’d say it,
instead of resorting to baseless insults that generalize about the physical
characteristics of a people.
Instead she says Zionists are ugly. And she didn’t say it
only the one time. In an earlier tweet, for example, Rajagopal wrote, “Zionists are
genocidal freaks. If there’s ever a circus show for ugly, sunburnt, violent
outcasts, that’s where you’ll see them.”
Where does this hatred for Zionists, really Jews, come from? Not from the
temple that converted Anna Rajagopal, her father, mother, and brother. Billed
as the first Reform Jewish congregation in North Texas, and the largest
synagogue in the South, Temple Emanu-El of Dallas is a member of the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ). Under Israel Engagement, the
URJ website states that: “Reform Zionism accepts and supports the foundational
aim of Zionism: the establishment of a Jewish State in Israel, the homeland of
the Jewish people.”
Foremost among the goals of URJ’s Reform Zionism work is “To
increase each Reform Jew’s relationship with Israel and make Israel a core
component of every Reform Jew’s identity.” To that end, the URJ website links
to its affiliate branch, ARZA (Association for Reform
Zionists). The acronym “ARZA” is a Hebrew imperative: “To the Land.”
It is no coincidence that Temple Emanu-El
of Dallas, under whose auspices Anna and her family embraced Judaism, is
affiliated with URJ/ARZA. The temple is nothing if not Zionist. In fact, the
synagogue just completed not one but two group trips to Israel.
It’s not just the trips to Israel that mark Temple Emanu-El of Dallas as Zionist. The Reform congregation also provides adult education classes in Zionist philosophy. As recently as 2019, for example, Temple Emanu-El offered a course called The Zionist Ideas.
Here’s the course description:
"The Zionist Ideas: Visions for the Jewish Homeland—Then, Now, Tomorrow” will be the textbook for the class exploring the vision of Israel as a democratic Jewish state. Author Gil Troy profiles more than 170 Jewish visionaries from the 1800s to today in this book, which builds on Arthur Hertzberg’s “The Zionist Ideas."
Temple Emanu-El is Zionist both by nature
and by deed. How does Rajagopal feel about this? How did she feel during
services as a “child convert,” seeing the “horrifically grotesque” congregants
sitting all around her?
And why would Rajagopal convert if the people are so ugly, er
Zionist?
While attempting to join the Nation of Israel, did Rajagopal
somehow miss the fact that there’s an actual, physical location associated with that nation? And if she thinks the idea of Jews having land or wanting to live in it and
govern themselves is so bad, then why did she sign on?
Like all antisemites, Rajagopal has tried hard to cut
the indivisible ties that bind the Nation of Israel to Israel the nation. She
does this “as a Jew,” using the fact of her Reform conversion to lend
legitimacy to her rejectionist views on the Jewish State. She assumes her Jewish persona at
will when convenient to the ultimate purpose of eradicating Israel.
When Rajagopal talks about her Neshama being at Har Sinai and how for her, "conversion was G-d calling me home, after thousands of years in exile," we wonder: of what nation were we to imagine her becoming a part? To where was she being called home? Was her soul’s presence at Sinai, her being called home from exile, meant as some sort of metaphor for something else?
Perhaps so, since her actions since that time have been directed toward the purpose of ethnically cleansing the Land of Israel of its entire Jewish population, as per her tweet: “Free Palestine by any means necessary: Decolonization is not a metaphor but a call to immediate action in which any form of resistance or rebellion is deemed moral under any immoral circumstances.”
We need not wonder about the borders of Rajagopal’s would-be Jew-free
Palestine. The borders would be the borders of Israel. Zionists, according to this “child
convert” are not to be allowed to live in any
part of their ancient, biblical homeland, or in fact to live. Rajagopal’s
“call to immediate action” is a call to murder Jews.
What is it about Zionism that so disturbs Rajagopal? Is it
the aspiration to have a Jewish state, or is it the actual fact of Jews living in Israel? Is it Jewish self-determination on Jewish soil that bothers her? What is the real Zionism in her Rajagopal's eyes? Which aspect of Zionism is it that
makes us Jews so ugly to her?
Who knows? But the Avodah Institute for Social Change must agree with Rajagopal’s antisemitic* views because they hired her for their social media team. That can only mean that her prospective employers monitored her Twitter and liked what they saw. Else they would not have hired her to assist in the running of their own Twitter account.
The Avodah website describes itself as “[providing] Jewish
leaders the tools, experience, and networks they need to create change.” If
Avodah likes what Rajagopal is tweeting out, this mission statement must be some kind of code. Based
on the hiring of Rajagopal, “creating change” is likely code for getting Jewish
leaders to stop being Zionist, to stop standing up for Israel and the welfare
of the Jewish people
A truer Avodah mission statement, one not couched in code,
might have said, “We agitate for and support the murder of Israeli Jews by Arab
terrorists and the annihilation of the Jewish State by any means.”
Note that there is nothing about Israel in the Avodah values statement, because Israel is not a value for them. |
The kind of people who found groups like Avodah, and those who work for them, all use coded language. They can’t come right out and say they hate Israel and want to annihilate its Jewish presence. Not yet. Not as an organization.
Instead, they encourage people like
Rajagopal to say it for them until it becomes a natural part of the
conversation. Lucky for us, this time Avodah was stymied in its efforts to amplify views that would appear to mirror those of Rajagopal. The Avodah tweet announcing her hire is gone. So is the page devoted to Rajagopal on the Avodah website. This is because Rajagopal was caught out for her tweets and the buzz went out until Avodah likely had to fire her in order to save face for what will probably be its next salvo against the Jewish State
As a people, we need to learn how to see and interpret anti-Israel, antisemitic code. There’s the code of Avodah regarding Jewish leadership and the unsaid need to change the way the leadership feels about Israel. There is the code of Rajagopal excusing
murder, as long as the Jewish victims love and/or want to live in Israel. All of this is in code. The code is necessary because the aims are wrong and immoral, so they
dare not voice them aloud.
At least not yet.
It is inevitable that some readers of this column will assert that Rajagopal is not really Jewish. They will say that Reform conversion
is not the same as Halachic conversion performed according to
Jewish Law. I will go a step further.
Could Anna Rajagopal and perhaps even her family, have
duped the people of Temple Emanu-El regarding their sincerity in wanting to be Jews? Did she/they trick the rabbis who performed the Reform conversion into thinking that some or all the members the Rajagopal family shared the Jewish
dreams and aspirations of this so-Zionist congregation? As a “child convert” could 12-year-old Anna have already been poisoned about Israel and the Jewish people? Could she have absorbed this lesson at home?
We might also ask: what was the group conversion about? What is the real reason the Rajagopal
family sought conversion? Was the conversion genuine
for some, not so much for other members of this family? Could the conversion have represented a bid to be upwardly mobile, to angle for a portion of what they might have seen as outsized Jewish power? Or was there
some other dark, nefarious political purpose to the family conversion, an infiltration,
perhaps, of enemy lines?
At this point, we cannot know. There is no backstory to hint at the answers. There is only the backstory supplied us by Anna Rajagopal, in which her age at conversion changes on a
whim and the conversion of her family is entirely omitted. Rajagopal's Twitter rants
reveal more, showing signs of a highly disturbed personality filled with
antisemitic loathing.
Without a backstory all we have is what we know of Rajagopal,
and what we know of Rajagopal tells us all we need to know about Avodah, the organization that hired and subsequently fired her.
Despite the Jewish-sounding name of this organization, Avodah is clearly a hornet’s nest--one filled with hate-filled hornets like Rajagopal, brimming with hate for one specific people:
The Nation of Israel.
The Jews.
*From the IHRA
examples of antisemitism: “Denying the Jewish people their right to
self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel
is a racist endeavor.”
Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. Read all about it here! |
|
Sunday, May 29, 2022
- Sunday, May 29, 2022
- Elder of Ziyon
- Jewish education, Jewish prayer, Jews have always been Zionist, Poster, Proud to be Jewish, Proud to be Zionist, This is Zionism, Zionism
Thursday, December 19, 2019
- Thursday, December 19, 2019
- Elder of Ziyon
- indigenous, Jeffrey Goldberg, Jews have always been Zionist, Juan Cole, Mondoweiss, revisionist history, tsunami of lies
Phil Weiss at Mondoweiss, the most lucid and informed voice on the American Jewish left doing journalism critical of right wing Zionism, reports on remarks of The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg at a Jewish Community Center forum in Manhattan.It's worth reading the entire section that Weiss quoted from Goldberg, because it is quite accurate, which is why it bothers the serial liar Cole.
In Weiss’s telling, Goldberg argued to his audience that Israelis are like the Seminole indigenous people of Florida, and the Palestinians are “the cowboys.”
This framing of the issue is completely ahistorical and frankly ignorant, and is offensive on all sides.
Many Palestinian leaders understand the conflict not as the conflict between the cowboys– the Jews– and the Indians– the Palestinians.Cole can't handle the truth, so he sputters. The next sentence in his article is that "Goldberg apparently can’t bring himself to say the word 'Palestinian,' as though all Arabic-speakers are indistinguishable." As you can see above, Goldberg used the word Palestinian and didn't use the word Arab. Cole apparently knows that his brain-dead followers won't bother clicking on the link that proves he cannot help making things up.
But the Jews are the Indians, and the Arabs, the Palestinians, the cowboys, in the following sense. What happened in the Middle East– this is not a political commentary about what should actually be done leading to a fair and equitable solution to the challenge here– but what happened here is the equivalent of the Seminoles sitting in Oklahoma or wherever they are today, scattered around the United States– Seminoles coming together and deciding that they’re going back to Florida. And going back in such numbers and telling the whites and blacks and Hispanics of Florida, Oh by the way, we’re home and we’d like a state, and we’d like to take over Florida.
The people of Florida would probably say to them, you haven’t been here in 200 years. This isn’t your home. And the Seminoles would say, Actually, it is our home. This is where our people are buried. This is the center of our religion, this is where we were expelled from.
That [discussion] doesn’t happen; and people need to understand that – what’s happened is, it’s really interesting from an analytical perspective. As Israel has become more and more powerful as a country, and every year it becomes more powerful, it becomes bigger, it becomes more militarily powerful, economically powerful, it’s lost more and more control of its own narrative. The narrative is of an indigenous people coming home to its homeland and to some degree, to a large degree, to some degree, willing to share that homeland or at least parts of that homeland with the people who moved in after. Right? But they lost total control of that narrative, because the people who were opposed to Israel’s existence are very very powerful and clever narrators as well.
In order to understand what’s going on historically you need to understand history…
It is completely natural that the people of Florida would say to the Seminoles who are walking back 200 years after the Trail of Tears, coming back to Florida, What the hell– what do you mean? You don’t live here, your father wasn’t here, your grandfather, your great grandmother, nobody was here, you can’t claim this as your own, but that’s because we don’t really understand and privilege historical memory, among other things.
Cole then goes on an extended pseudo-history of Jews with cherry picked (and possibly made up) facts where he strenuously tries to say that Jews aren't from Palestine - he doesn't seem to subscribe to the Khazar myth but something close - and that Jews hardly ever controlled Palestine, and that Jews weren't interested in living there anyway.
As an example:
The Crusaders killed or expelled most remaining Jewish populations. From about 1100 until the early twentieth century there were virtually no Jews in Palestine. Oh, there were a handful here and there– a few Kabbalist mystics at Safad, retirees in Jerusalem. But I wrote a book about Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of the Middle East and the French report that they only found 3,000 Jews in geographic Palestine in 1799.That's an interesting and counterfactual view. Jews were the majority in Palestine until the Muslim invasion - yes, the Arabs were colonialists, even though Cole falsely claims that most Palestinians have been there for millennia. (Research shows that the only truly indigenous Palestinians are the Christian community, and most of them were originally Jews.)
Since the Muslim invasion, the Jews that lived there went through an astonishing number of massacres and expulsions from both Christians and Muslims. Yet through it all, they kept coming back. Dozens of major rabbis kept immigrating with their students, often to be slaughtered again (with a few major earthquakes that also killed hundreds.)
This Wikipedia article fills in the gaping historic holes that Cole doesn't want you to know. The overwhelming conclusion is that Jews were always spiritually tied to their land despite it having very few ways of supporting them. This is the exact opposite to what Cole wants you to believe.
What about the 3000 Jews that Cole says he found out about? Well, his book on Napoleon says it - without a citation.
Cole continues to lie:
The European Jews were brought to Palestine by British imperial policy during the early twentieth century heyday of colonialism, and by the rise of Fascism in Europe that drove out or killed millions of Jews. Because of the complications of the Holocaust, Jewish migration into Palestine is not exactly like the voluntary settler=colonialism of the Pieds Noire in Algeria,Cole, the self described expert, apparently has never heard of the Perushim, the First Aliyah, the Second Aliyah. He thinks that somehow the British brought the Jews to Palestine, even though practically none of those were from Britain. He pretends that most Jews came to Palestine post-Holocaust not because they wanted to but that they were forced to. As someone who has looked up the Holocaust archives for my parents and relatives, I can tell him that the refugees filled out forms where they were offered where they would like to emigrate to. My parents chose America, they weren't forced to go to Palestine; one of my uncles and his mother chose Palestine.
In other words, Cole is a liar. Nothing new about that.
And by denying Jewish history including how fundamental Israel has always been to Jews and Judaism, Cole is proving that he is dabbling in antisemitism as well.
(h/t Dan, who reads Cole so I don't have to)
Sunday, January 13, 2019
- Sunday, January 13, 2019
- Elder of Ziyon
- "pro-Palestinian", antisemitism, denying Jewish history, Jews have always been Zionist, Judaism, Know How to Answer, PalArab lies
Here is part 13, which is very short.
Wednesday, February 15, 2017
- Wednesday, February 15, 2017
- Elder of Ziyon
- blame Israel, Death to Israel, Jews have always been Zionist, Judea-Samaria, NYT, occupied Palestine, Thomas Friedman
[President Trump,] you may be the last man standing between Israel and a complete, self-inflicted disaster for the Jewish state and the Jewish people.First Friedman essentially calls Jews racist, even though President Obama's race had zero to do with the country club story. (He also completely misrepresents the "Regulation Law" pretending that Israel now allows "wildcat Jewish settlers" to just grab land without checking if it is privately owned.) And calling Jews racist seems to be the only reason for Friedman to tell over this story, because the only tie he brings between the country club story and his usual anti-settlement screed is this:
Let me explain it in terms you’ll appreciate: golf.
Did you happen to follow the story involving Barack Obama and Woodmont Country Club? Woodmont is the mostly Jewish golf club in Maryland, just outside D.C., where Obama played as a guest several times during his presidency. Near the end of his term it was rumored that Obama would seek membership there.
Then he clashed with Netanyahu over Obama’s refusal to veto a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israel’s relentless expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Shortly thereafter, The Washington Post reported that a Woodmont member, Faith Goldstein, had sent a private email to the club’s president declaring that Obama “is not welcome at Woodmont” because of his U.N. vote.
It was appalling to think that Jews, who for so many years were themselves excluded from joining certain country clubs, would consider excluding our first black president, especially for his acting on the basis of what half of Israel believes — that continued expansion of Jewish settlements into Palestinian-populated zones of the West Bank will eventually make the separation of Israelis and Palestinians in a two-state solution impossible, and thereby threaten Israel’s character as a Jewish and democratic state.
Fortunately, in the end, the decent members of Woodmont prevailed. As The Washington Post reported, the club’s president, Barry Forman, invited the Obamas to join, declaring that “it is all the more important that Woodmont be a place where people of varying views and beliefs can enjoy fellowship.”
Why am I telling you this story? Because Israel is getting closer every day to wiping out any possibility of a two-state solution. Just last week, Netanyahu’s government pushed through the Knesset a shameful new law declaring that wildcat Jewish settlers who had illegally set up caravans on private West Bank Palestinian land, and erected their own settlement there, will have their settlements legalized, although the Palestinian landowners have to be compensated.
I don’t expect Israel to just up and leave the West Bank without a Palestinian partner for a secure peace, which Israel doesn’t now have. But legalizing this land grab by settlers deep in Palestinian areas is not an act of security — it will actually create security problems. It is an act of moral turpitude that will make it even harder to ever find that Palestinian partner and will undermine the moral foundations of the state. This is about right versus wrong.It isn't Israel that is dividing world Jewry, it is the Thomas Friedmans of the world who claim that Israel has no rights in its homeland to begin with. That's why he equates his fake Jewish racists with Jews who believe that there are actual legal and moral reasons why Judea and Samaria should not be Judenfrei.
And if that is where the debate goes, what happened at Woodmont golf club will happen everywhere. That debate will tear apart virtually every synagogue, Jewish organization and Jewish group on every campus in America, and around the world. Israel will divide world Jewry.
Who is more divisive than a smug columnist who declares every Jew who disagrees with him to be the morally equivalent to racists? How much can Tom Friedman care about Jewish unity when he makes such a claim?
While Friedman pays lip service to the fact that Palestinians aren't a peace partner, he lays the blame on Israel by saying that only Israel is killing the two state solution - despite the fact that Israel has lready accepted and offered the Palestinians a state multiple times.
Let's put this in terms Friedman might be able to understand.
Here is the top of the PLO official webpage, today:
I'll increase the size of the logo in case your reading glasses aren't on:
Where, exactly, is Israel on this PLO map of their ersatz state?
If Friedman wants to unite Jews, he should write about how the "moderate" Palestinians have never budged from their position that the "peace process" is a Trojan horse to destroy Israel. That's something all Jews should be aware of, but they certainly wouldn't know it from reading Friedman's columns.