10/19 Links Pt2: Why I think the Golden Age for Jews in America is coming to its end; The UN needs to be reimagined and reformed; Peter Bergson – The Unintended Hero of the Holocaust Era

From Ian:

Why I think the Golden Age for Jews in America is coming to its end - opinion

The New Antisemitism is becoming violent
The decline in the favorability of mainstream American views toward Israel has coincided with a rise in antisemitic violence, particularly in large metropolises, promoted by Islamo-Leftist groups. In New York City, more than half of hate crimes in 2019 targeted Jews. During the last major conflict between Israel and the Palestinians in May 2021, terror groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad launched more than 4,000 rockets and mortars at Israeli civilians. At the same time, we witnessed stunning and unprecedented scenes in New York, Los Angeles, and other American cities of Jews being assaulted by mobs of anti-Israel activists. This surge of anti-Jewish hate also included harassment, vandalism and online abuse.

With many Jews in America now fearing walking the streets in their kippot or wearing other items that identify them as Jewish or Zionist, or even speaking Hebrew in public, we are sliding in the direction of our European Jewish brethren—in fear and under siege, requiring more and more layers of security.

Meanwhile, many American Jews serve willingly as useful idiots for groups that despise us, divided our community, and weaken our resolve, under the pretext of legitimate critique of the Israeli government policies.

The end of the story for American Jewry?
While we undoubtedly face grave challenges as American Jews, we must not give up. Until now, due to lack of information and fear of rejection and persecution, many American Jews have been complicit as anti-Zionism morphs into the new antisemitism. Now is the time to stand up, fight back with all our remaining might and hold antisemites accountable.

We must form alliances with groups that share the same Judeo-Christian values of freedom and democracy, inspire today’s Jewish youth to be proud of their people and the Jewish homeland, and bring Israel back to the center of our Jewish life in the diaspora.

We must embrace Zionism as an integral part of our Jewish identity. We must engage in renewed efforts to strengthen the homeland of the Jewish people, ask Israel to empower and defend Jewish communities worldwide, and take stock of the strength our community possesses.

We must collectively demand a rejection of all forms of antisemitism, including and especially anti-Zionism.

James Kirchick: Calling Out an Antisemite

When I learned that Alice Walker and I would both be speaking at the same literary festival, I seized the chance to expose her views.

Fully a third of the Freedom Riders who risked life and limb to desegregate interstate bus travel in the early 1960s were Jews. So were many of the young men and women who took part in the 1964 Freedom Summer campaign to register black voters in Mississippi. The town of Philadelphia will always be remembered as the place where Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, two such Jewish activists from New York, and James Chaney, their black colleague from nearby Meridian, were murdered by white supremacists. President Barack Obama posthumously awarded them the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014. An individual about whom I knew nothing until visiting the museum is Rabbi Perry Nussbaum, a civil-rights activist who earned the distinction of being the first white clergyman to have his home and congregation bombed by white supremacists in 1967.

The history and contemporary state of black-Jewish relations has been weighing on me since August, when I visited Jackson as a guest of the Mississippi Book Festival. I was there to present my book, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, as part of a panel entitled “(Re)shaping Public Discourse,” alongside professors Eddie Glaude and Imani Perry, both of Princeton University, and the authors of books about James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry, respectively. Also invited to address the festival, immediately after our panel, was Alice Walker, one of America’s leading African-American writers, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Color Purple—and a well-known antisemite.

Walker evinces her antisemitism primarily not through her own words, but in her enthusiastic promotion of David Icke, the ex-footballer and prominent proponent of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion who simultaneously denies the Holocaust while claiming that the Jews perpetrated it against themselves. In 2013, Walker told the BBC’s Desert Island Discs that if she could keep only one book it would be his Human Race Get Off Your Knees, which purports to reveal the “sinister network of families and non-human entities that covertly control us from cradle to grave.” Asked by the New York Times what books were on her nightstand in 2018, she included in her response Icke’s And the Truth Shall Set You Free. In an exhaustive inventory of Walker’s antisemitism published in Tablet magazine, Yair Rosenberg observed that this tract alone contains the word “Jewish” 241 times and “Rothschild” 374 times. “These references are not compliments,” Rosenberg wrote.

John Ware: Rewriting history: Corbyn’s Labour Party, antisemitism and ‘Panorama’

The UK is facing economic meltdown. The world may be heading for nuclear Armageddon. Supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, meanwhile, have been preoccupied with salvaging his reputation over the antisemitism crisis that dogged his leadership for more than four years.

Did Corbyn or his office interfere politically in antisemitism disciplinary cases when he was Labour leader — or did they not?

Disciplinary cases were meant to be determined by officials at Labour Party HQ independently of the Leader or his political advisers.

In April 2020 Corbyn supporters found vindication in a leaked internal report by Corbyn staffers which, perhaps unsurprisingly, concluded allegations of interference were “entirely untrue.”

Six months later, the statutory investigation into Labour by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) concluded there had been interference: “We found evidence of political interference in the handling of antisemitism complaints throughout the period of the investigation”, thereby unlawfully discriminating against Jewish members. The EHRC blamed a “lack of leadership” within Labour “which is hard to reconcile with its stated commitment to a zero-tolerance approach to antisemitism.”

Then, last summer, Corbyn’s supporters were buoyed up by a report by the barrister Martin Forde KC which accused the mainstream media of being “entirely misleading” in how we reported allegations of interference.

So where, in this attritional battle for the truth, does the truth actually lie?

I must declare an interest because I presented the programme most often mentioned in the Forde Report: BBC Panorama’s “Is Labour antisemitic? ”transmitted in July 2019

A fortnight ago, the “Investigation Unit” of the Qatari-based Al Jazeera TV network piled in. Its central allegation against the BBC came from Corbyn’s Director of Strategic Communications, James Schneider.

He claimed to have “exposed” how Panorama had misleadingly presented evidence to suggest there was “unwarranted meddling” by Corbyn or his office “in antisemitism cases.”

Days after killing soldier, fugitive gunman shot dead attempting another attack

A Palestinian gunman suspected of killing an Israeli soldier in East Jerusalem earlier this month was shot dead on Wednesday evening, after opening fire at security guards near the entrance to the settlement of Ma’ale Adumim.

Police officials confirmed that Udai Tamimi, who they say killed Sgt. Noa Lazar, 18, and seriously injured a civilian guard on October 8 at a checkpoint near the Shuafat refugee camp in East Jerusalem, was killed while carrying out another attack.

A security guard, 24, was taken by the Magen David Adom ambulance service to the Shaare Zedek hospital in Jerusalem, with an injury in his hand. He was listed in light condition, the hospital said.

Security camera footage of Wednesday’s attack showed a lengthy exchange of gunfire between Tamimi and the security guards.

Tamimi, 22, fled the scene of the attack earlier this month. He was thought by police to have been hiding in the Shuafat refugee camp since then.

Prime Minister Yair Lapid hailed the killing of Tamimi, and sent well wishes to the guard wounded in Wednesday’s attack, in a statement published by his office.

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10/13 Links Pt2: How Ken Burns Misuses the Holocaust; How Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Berkeley and Wellesley mainstream anti-Semitism; The Wedding Canopy in Abu Dhabi

From Ian:

Jonathan Tobin: How Ken Burns Misuses the Holocaust

Yet contrary to the film’s conclusion, the Holocaust tells us little or nothing about what to do about America’s contemporary immigration debates or the current American problem with Jew-hatred. Any attempt to frame the Holocaust as a representative moment in the history of human intolerance is a moral calamity. Burns demonstrated this in a CNN interview to promote the film. He spoke of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s decision to ship illegal immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard—whose affluent liberal residents advocate open borders but prefer to have border communities deal with the humanitarian crisis this has engendered—as if it deserved to be mentioned in the same conversation as the subject of his documentary.

That Burns, a longtime supporter of the Democrats and liberal causes, would be guilty of playing along with such an inappropriate Holocaust analogy demonstrates that the filmmaker’s efforts to frame the question of American guilt in this context should be viewed with suspicion. The same is true of his attempt to claim that current political opponents of open borders—such as Trump, DeSantis, and their supporters—are figures who conjure up the threats that America and the Jews faced in the past.

Anti-Semitism isn’t merely a collection of hateful sentiments; it’s a political organizing principle that has attached itself to a variety of different ideologies, from Nazism to Communism to Islamism. The answer to such threats isn’t open borders for America, amnesty for illegal immigrants, or even ensuring that more people read The Diary of Anne Frank. The only way to deter another genocide of the Jews is Jewish empowerment and our ability to defend ourselves, something we would gain only after the war with the creation of the State of Israel.

Some who attempt to use the Holocaust as an exhibit in contemporary immigration-law debates are actually indifferent to the security of Israel and, indeed, support appeasement of an Iran that seeks nuclear weapons to possibly perpetrate another Holocaust. This makes it hard to take them seriously when they lecture Americans about the murder of 6 million Jews in the past century.

The Holocaust was a chapter of history marked by American failure. But whatever one may think about Franklin Roosevelt and his indifference to Hitler’s victims, the responsibility for the murder of 6 million Jews still belongs to the Nazis and their collaborators. It was a crime the United States may not have had the power to deter, but one this nation could have done more to stop had its political leadership been willing to do so. This is a disturbing fact for many who lionize Roosevelt. But Burns and others who clearly wish to apply the lessons from this failure to complicated 21st-century political debates, while ignoring real-time genocides or potent threats to the security of millions of living Jews, shouldn’t pretend they have learned anything from the past or have anything to teach us about it.

Jonathan Tobin: How Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Berkeley and Wellesley mainstream anti-Semitism

At what point does a rise in anti-Semitism stop being viewed merely as a series of isolated, troubling occurrences and start being treated like an emergency? When mass- media programs mainstream hatemongers who target and seek to delegitimize Jews? When elite academic institutions behave as though it’s acceptable conduct? When Jews are attacked in the streets?

The ongoing epidemic of violence against Jews in New York City is mostly ignored, both by the media and much of the organized Jewish world. This is not only because the victims are Orthodox Jews who are easy to pick out. They’re also not the sort of people with whom opinion leaders, and even most American Jews, identify or associate.

But the mainstreaming of anti-Semitic attitudes on major campuses around the United States is harder to dismiss. Even more difficult to ignore are the widely disseminated programs that embrace open anti-Semites as legitimate voices worth considering.

Indeed, what is unfolding, inch by inch, is the normalization of anti-Semitism in the U.S. in a manner unprecedented in the post-Holocaust era. Nor is it confined to a specific segment of society or particular end of the political spectrum.

Indeed, as the events of the past week illustrate, Jew-hatred is thriving on both the left and the right. Individually, each of these instances—the legitimization of the BDS movement and targeting of Jewish institutions at Boston’s Wellesley College; the establishment of a Jew-free zone by student organizations at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law; the appearance of BDS advocate Roger Waters on the Joe Rogan podcast; and the featuring of the rapper formerly known as Kanye West on the Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight”—can be unpacked, denounced or rationalized and then forgotten, before the public’s attention is diverted to new controversies.

Taken together, they represent a trend that ought to set off alarms about the way insidious ideas that normalize hatred for Jews and Israel are gaining a foothold in mainstream forums. More than that, the growing tolerance for them and lack of consequences for those responsible bode ill not just for Jews, but for the future of civil society.

Roger Waters: Israeli policy is the mass murder of Palestinians

Roger Waters, British rock musician and founding member of band Pink Floyd has expressed his strong opinions about the relationship between Israel and Hamas in a recent appearance on commentator Joe Rogan's popular podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience.

"The Israelis seem now to have a policy of ... murdering so many of them that they are absolutely trying to create another intifada. So they can make it an armed conflict...so they can just kill them all," he said, adding that Israel is provoking the Palestinians into an armed conflict in order to manufacture an excuse to destroy them.

Waters started out his statements by reminding Rogan that Hamas is actually "the democratically elected government of Gaza." He quickly added that "there is an armed wing and whatever..." and then began speaking about occupation and the Geneva convention.

Rogan pressed him, asking whether or not the elections in Gaza were corrupt. Waters responded saying, "I have no idea, I wasn't there...Has there been an election since then? I don't know. ...I can't really answer that question because I'm not there and I don't know."

Touching on the subject of rockets fired into Israel, Waters asserted that rockets fired from Gaza "almost never do any damage because they're very ineffectual."

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A film-maker comments on Ken Burns' Holocaust documentary (Martin Ostrow)

By Martin Ostrow 

Ken Burns’s advance interviews for his new Holocaust film provided much material for public discussion. Now that PBS has broadcast the six-hour series, how does the film measure up?

The answer, unfortunately, is that it’s a disappointment. “The U.S. and the Holocaust” misrepresents some key historical issues and entirely omits crucial information. Ultimately, Ken and his producer partners, Sarah Botstein and Lynn Novick, have failed to deliver the kind of film that we would have expected, given their track record. 

I write not as a historian, but as the producer and director of a previous PBS film on America’s response to the Holocaust, “America and the Holocaust: Deceit and Indifference,” which first aired in 1994. 

Inevitably, both my film and Ken’s cover some of the same ground. We both describe the context in which America’s response to the Holocaust evolved, such as the racism, isolationism, and antisemitism in the United States in the 1930s. Ken handles those themes and the unfolding of the Nazi genocide quite well, worthy moments of Holocaust education.

It is one thing, however, to acknowledge the disturbing trends in public and congressional opinion in those days; it is another to make it seem as if President Franklin D. Roosevelt was captive to them, as Ken does. FDR, after all, was a masterful leader. When he cared about an issue, he knew how to fight for it. But he made no real effort concerning the plight of Jewish refugees, not even to let them stay temporarily in a U.S. territory such as the Virgin Islands.

One might argue that Ken’s series is so broad and complex that it’s easy to lose Roosevelt in its massive story. Perhaps that was his intention. Ken certainly has the skill to render his subjects with vivid three-dimensional effect. Yet in this vast work, FDR is at times ghost-like—a hapless, impotent figure. The film offers excuses for the president’s inaction and shifts almost all the blame to Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long. Viewers could easily forget who actually hired Long, and who could have fired him if he had wanted to. Long served at the pleasure of the president, not the other way around.

It's a shame the series brings nothing new to understanding Roosevelt’s troubling decisions and motivations. Ken had a major advantage in making this new film. He could have drawn on significant information scholars have uncovered in the past two decades about FDR and America’s response to the Holocaust. I’m puzzled and disappointed he did not.  For example:

— FDR’s Private Feelings About Jews. Historians have uncovered more than a dozen private statements made by Roosevelt in which he disparaged “Jewish blood,” advocated quotas on Jews in various professions (and college admissions), and even accused the publishers of the New York Times of using a “dirty Jewish trick” to gain a tax advantage. While President Roosevelt’s private feelings about Jews may or may not offer a clue to his policies concerning Jewish refugees, they at least need to be part of the conversation. Yet they are not mentioned in the film.

— The James McDonald Diaries. The discovery of the diaries of the late refugee advocate and diplomat James G. McDonald shed new light on his efforts to help the Jews—and the refusal of the Roosevelt administration to assist him. Remarkably, McDonald is not even mentioned in the film.

— The George McGovern Interview. In a revealing 2004 interview with filmmakers Chaim Hecht and Stuart Erdheim, George McGovern, the former senator and presidential nominee, recounted his experiences as a World War II pilot who bombed the oil factories in the slave labor section of Auschwitz. McGovern’s eyewitness recollections about the feasibility of bombing the railways leading to the camp tell us much more than Ken’s commentators, who offer confusing speculations about why neither the railways nor the gas chambers were ever bombed.

Admittedly, a disadvantage Ken suffered was that in the decades since my film, some of the remaining principal figures in the story passed away. For example, unlike Ken, I had the opportunity to personally interview John Pehle, the first director of the War Refugee Board. 

Recalling the British-American conference on refugees held in remote Bermuda in 1943, Pehle told me it was “a conference set up to not accomplish anything, and the people who represented the United States there were given those instructions.”  Yet the Bermuda meeting, a crucial event in the history of the U.S. response to the Holocaust, was not even mentioned by Ken. 

Regarding the failure to bomb Auschwitz, Pehle says in my film, “After we recommended to the War Department that the extermination facilities at Auschwitz be bombed, we were told [that] this would involve bombers being sent from England…and therefore, it was not possible to do this. Later, perhaps after the war, we discovered at the very time we were recommending this, bombing all around Auschwitz was going on from Italy, and we had been misled.” Pehle’s powerful words should have been in Ken’s film. They are not.

As with every Ken Burns film, "The U.S. and the Holocaust” includes affecting cinematography, touching moments, and memorable music--although the decision to appropriate the precise Bach violin concerto passage from the most poignant moment of my film, is certainly questionable. 

But the film's strengths do not make up for the fact that this Burns production stumbles when it comes to the most important parts of the historical record. Ken promised "The U.S. and the Holocaust" would answer many of the lingering questions about our nation’s response to the Nazi genocide. But after watching all six-plus hours of the film, I can only imagine that many people are still asking the same questions. They certainly should be.

[Martin Ostrow has been an award-winning documentary producer, writer and director for public, commercial and cable television for more than 30 years.]

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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False claims of Nazi spies masquerading as Jews provided excuse to limit Jewish immigration to America during the Holocaust

The Ken Burns documentary that started being broadcast last night, The US and the Holocaust, has prompted me to dig up little known stories about how the US severely limited Jewish immigration.

One reason that the US gave for limiting immigration was the fear that some of the immigrants were in fact Nazi spies.

The New York Daily News reported on November 26, 1940 - a year before the US entered the war - about a secret Gestapo school in Prague to train spies to act as Jews for espionage purposes.

The article makes it clear that this fear would end up dooming thousands of Jews.

I cannot find any independent report during or after the Holocaust about this supposed "Jewish institute."

There are cases of Nazis who masqueraded as Jewish refugees in Europe. One such ring was reported in Holland and the Dutch authorities easily discovered them, as JTA reported:

The disclosure that Nazi agents masquerading as refugees had helped the Nazi parachutists landing in the Netherlands recalled today that the Dutch authorities had several months ago discovered a group of such agents through the medium of botched circumcisions.

Last February the Paris newspaper L’Ouevre reported that 16 Nazi spies who entered the Netherlands in the guise of Jewish refugees — even taking the precaution of being circumcised — were unmasked when it was determined through a rabbi that they were not circumcised according to the Jewish ritual.

According to the report, the Gestapo had selected 16 men who looked as Jewish as possible, had them attend synagogue services for several weeks to acquaint ports stamped with “J” (Jew) and sent them into Holland.

The Netherlands anti-espionage service, suspecting that they were spies, arrested the men. After examining them, the authorities called a rabbi and, without informing him about the details of the case, asked him to ascertain whether they had been circumcised in the Jewish manner. He reported that they were not.

But (so far) I cannot find any such case in the US. The closest was the case of Herbert Karl Friedrich Bahr, a German-born American citizen who arrived in the US on the Swedish-American liner SS Drottningholm in 1942. The media originally said that he pretended to be a Jewish refugee but that wasn't true, as JTA reported at the time:

The Nazi spy, Herbert Karl Friedrich Bahr, who was arrested aboard the diplomatic exchange ship Drottningholm, will face a speedy trial, it was announced today. Full information of the arrest released here indicated that the 29-year-old spy was posing as a “friend of Jews in Germany,” and not as a Jewish refugee as was generally reported yesterday when the news of his arrest was made public by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Inquiry at the FBI office here elicited the information that Bahr was provided by the Nazi military espionage office with full information concerning a Jewish family in Germany in order to be able to explain to U.S. authorities how he happened to be in possession of $7,000 in American currency. He was instructed by the Nazi espionage headquarters to say that a Jewish friend of his in Germany, a member of the old Social-Democratic party, had been beheaded by the Nazis, that the man’s wife had sold a valuable stamp collection for $7,000 and given him the proceeds to take out of the country for her.

In 2015, the Smithsonian Magazine wrote an investigative report on Bahr and noted that in fact the rumors of Nazis posing as Jews to spy on the US were essentially baseless:

Government officials from the State Department to the FBI to President Franklin Roosevelt himself argued that refugees posed a serious threat to national security. Yet today, historians believe that Bahr's case was practically unique—and the concern about refugee spies was blown far out of proportion.

In the court of public opinion, the story of a spy disguised as a refugee was too scandalous to resist. 

Immigration restrictions actually tightened as the refugee crisis worsened. Wartime measures demanded special scrutiny of anyone with relatives in Nazi territories—even relatives in concentration camps. At a press conference, President Roosevelt repeated the unproven claims from his advisers that some Jewish refugees had been coerced to spy for the Nazis. “Not all of them are voluntary spies,” Roosevelt said. “It is rather a horrible story, but in some of the other countries that refugees out of Germany have gone to, especially Jewish refugees, they found a number of definitely proven spies.”

Here and there, skeptics objected. As the historian Deborah Lipstadt points out in her book Beyond Belief, The New Republic portrayed the government’s attitude as “persecuting the refugee.” The Nation didn’t believe that the State Department could “cite a single instance of forced espionage.” But these voices were drowned out in the name of national security.

Government agencies like the State Department used spy trials as fuel for the argument against accepting refugees. But late in the war, government whistleblowers began to question this approach. In 1944, the Treasury Department released a damning report initialed by lawyer Randolph Paul. It read:

“I am convinced on the basis of the information which is available to me that certain officials in our State Department, which is charged with carrying out this policy, have been guilty not only of gross procrastination and wilful failure to act, but even of wilful attempts to prevent action from being taken to rescue Jews from Hitler.”

The FBI, State Department and media couldn't resist pushing the narrative of Jewish spies, the result being that tens of thousands of Jews who could have been saved in the US were murdered instead.

One other point: It would have been easy for the FBI to hire religious Jews to vet the immigrants to ensure that at least the religious ones were who they said they were. But it seems that the antisemitism of the day precluded considering American religious Jews as truly American and trustworthy for such a task. 

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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09/13 Links Pt2: Anti-Zionists advocate a global apartheid; Ken Burns has a Palestine problem; Rare, stolen 2,000-year-old silver coin returned to Israeli authorities in US

From Ian:

Anti-Zionists advocate a global apartheid

As I have recently written, the claim that Israel is an apartheid state has, in fact, little to do with the actual charge of apartheid. It is, first, little more than a cheap attempt to demonize the Jewish state. But more ominously, it is also a call for Israel to be dismantled, just as South Africa’s apartheid regime was, quite rightly, dismantled.

To destroy the Jewish state would, of course, be an injustice to the Jews quite as horrific as the injustice apartheid did to black South Africans. But it is worth pondering the nature of this injustice and following the dark logic of the apartheid libel to its inevitable end.

Its logic culminates in something hinted at many decades ago by Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. The struggle for the Jewish state, Ben-Gurion said, is not a question of the Jews and the Arabs; it is a question of the Jews and the world.

This simple but remarkably profound statement points out that injustice need not take place only in a community or a nation. Injustice can be global. It can rise higher than mere questions of territory and individual rights. It can be expressed in the nature of the international system itself.

In the case of the Jews, this global injustice was obvious: By leaving the Jews without a nation of their own, and thus denying the Jewish people its right to self-determination and self-defense, the world constructed a discriminatory regime that kept the Jews separate and unequal—second-class citizens of the world. It was, in effect, a global apartheid.

Implied in Ben-Gurion’s insight is not only that this global apartheid must end, but that it can only be ended by the creation and perpetuation of a Jewish state. Thus, in Ben-Gurion’s view, Zionism is not simply a territorial or nationalist movement. It is a global movement that seeks to correct a global injustice. It is a struggle to do nothing more—but also nothing less—than to make the Jews equal citizens of the world.

This has profound implications—and not only for the Jews—because it implies not simply a moral imperative but an assertion of certain responsibilities. The world, Ben-Gurion was saying, must remember that it is overwhelmingly not Jewish. As such, it has responsibilities towards one of its smallest and most beleaguered minorities, just as an overwhelmingly white nation has towards its black minority or a Muslim nation towards its non-Muslim minority.

The world’s responsibility is or ought to be fairly clear: It is to ensure that the Jewish people is not a second-class people, and that it enjoys the same rights and privileges as any other people via a state of its own.

Emily Schrader: BDS opposition to Project Nimbus will harm Arab-Israelis, too - opinion

Once again, the ugly BDS movement has reared its head over the landmark $1.2 billion (NIS 408 b.) Project Nimbus contract between Israel and tech giants Amazon and Google. Under the guise of civic action by employees, fringe anti-Israel groups, such as Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and Linda Sarsour’s MPower group have led a campaign to demonize the two companies over their contribution to Israeli “apartheid.” In the process, they are politicizing an apolitical project that will benefit all of Israel’s citizens, including two million Arabs.

Project Nimbus, according to Google, focuses exclusively on upgrading cloud computing services at the government level for ministries, such as finance, healthcare, transportation, and education, in an effort that will create over 3,000 jobs for Israeli Arabs and Jews alike. The project has nothing to do with military or weapons technology. But that’s never stopped anti-Israel activists from, once again, hijacking the narrative to make every single issue somehow about Palestinians.

This past week, protests against Project Nimbus took place in four locations, intended to give the impression there is a tremendous pushback from within the companies involved. The reality, however, is quite different.

The protesters claimed that Project Nimbus could be misused to oppress and surveil Palestinians, despite the fact that Google and Amazon confirmed that’s not related to the project in any capacity. Google’s representative even stated, “Today’s protest group is misrepresenting the contract. Our work is not directed at highly sensitive or classified military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.”

University of Vermont Faces Federal Investigation for Fostering ‘Severe Anti-Semitic Harassment’ on Campus

The Department of Education has opened a formal investigation into the University of Vermont over allegations several Jewish students have been "subjected to severe and persistent anti-Semitic harassment and discrimination."

A group of Jewish students who are remaining anonymous due to concerns for their safety say they have been targeted in a range of school settings merely for openly identifying themselves as Jewish. This includes Jewish students being kicked out of a support group for sexual assault victims, "online harassment against Jewish students by a Teaching Assistant," and attacks on the university's Hillel building, which supports Jewish life on campus.

The Education Department, which only investigates matters with substantial amounts of evidence, will review these incidents to determine if the University of Vermont "allowed a hostile environment to proliferate on its campus" in violation of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which bans discrimination based on race and religion.

"Jewish students have expressed fear about identifying publicly as Jewish, report hiding their Jewish identity and have considered transferring out of UVM due to the hostile environment toward Jews," according to the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, a legal advocacy group that filed the complaint with the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights.

The University of Vermont investigation is one of several being handled by the Education Department as anti-Semitic incidents proliferate on America’s campuses, driven by an ever-growing cohort of anti-Israel student activists who target Jews. The University of Southern California is also being investigated over allegations it fomented "a hostile environment of anti-Semitism" on its campus that forced a Jewish student government official to resign from her position.

At Vermont, a number of Jewish students approached the Brandeis Center after they faced a series of anti-Semitic incidents. The complaint filed with the Education Department alleges that "an environment of harassment and intimidation has existed at UVM for years, but it intensified in 2021 when a UVM [teaching assistant] repeatedly instigated hate against Jewish students who express support for Zionism, even threatening to lower their grades." Separately, "two student groups deliberately excluded Jewish students who expressed support for Zionism from membership, and the [UVM] Hillel building was pelted for nearly 40 minutes and vandalized."

The complaint alleges that school administrators were aware of these incidents, but have "taken no steps to rectify the situation."

From NYU, USC, UWisconsin Madison to now U of Denver, administrations claim to condemn antisemitism yet do NOTHING about it.

Why do Jew haters like Hashemi keep getting a pass? Schools would NEVER allow such hatred towards other marginalized communities.

— StopAntisemitism (@StopAntisemites) September 12, 2022

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1938: Columnist is sympathetic towards Jews in Germany - but not THAT sympathetic

Later this month, Ken Burns is releasing a documentary, The US and the Holocaust, on how the United States did not help Jews escape their doom. 

Here is one example of how some Americans thought on the eve of the Holocaust. 

William Bruckart was a moderately successful and influential columnist in the 1930s, who published a regular syndicated column called Washington Digest.

In December 1938, only ten months before World War II would break out and when there were no longer any illusions about Hitler's attacks on Jews, he wrote about how terrible Hitler was - but sympathy for German Jews was not enough reason for the US to allow Jews to immigrate.

Danger of 'Jewish Problem' for United States in German 'Purge' 

Opening of Gates to Refugees Might Introduce Disturbing Influence. 

By WILLIAM BRUCKART WNU Service, National Press Bldg., Washington, D. C.

WASHINGTON. — Press service wires and cables and radio from abroad have been clogged for several weeks with hundreds of thousands of words about the plight of the Jews in Germany; about the abuses visited upon the Jewish race by the European madman, Hitler, and his camp followers; about the humanitarian pleas of our own President, Mr. Roosevelt, for appeasement of the conditions. There has been what I believe to be one of the greatest waves of emotion, waves of resentful national sentiment, that this country ever has known. I recall none like it, none as overwhelming, none as deep-seated as that through which we have been passing, and in my opinion our nation should have resented such outrages. 

While no one with a heart can fail to grieve to a greater or less extent about the indescribable harshness, the unforgivable meanness of Hitler, it occurs to me that we should begin to temper these waves of emotion somewhat. There are other factors to be considered, factors and consequences of the thing that is now called "the Jewish problem," that require calm reasoning. In other words, let us say that America is and must remain for Americans, and charity, while it is sweet, cannot be exploited, or carried to extremes simply because we feel a sadness for a group upon whom an injustice has been sent. Like millions of other Americans, I am hopeful that some way will be found to aid the Jews who are being driven out of Germany, but I am unwilling that we, as a nation, shall create additional and unwarranted difficulties for ourselves by extending a helping hand. Therefore, the United States must not be the goat. 

It is one thing to render aid. It is quite another thing to inject into our own bloodstream of national life additional elements without knowing what those elements are. After all, the damage is something that we did not cause; the injured are a people who have no knowledge of our way of doing things and may never cooperate with us, and we must prevent being dragged into the other fellow's fist fight. 

I suppose there are very few persons in the United States who do not believe that Hitler's "purge" of German Jews constitutes a blot upon modern civilization. I know that leading Germans in the United States wish there were ways and means to stop the action. There can be no defense of the outright seizure of $400,000,000 of money from the Jews of Germany under the guise of a "fine" although there is a lesson of warning in it. ...

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 The unwanted race is simply the victim and a knowledge of how its members have had the sufferings brought upon them adds little or nothing to the search for a method to protect their lives. Where are they to go? That is the real question. Hitler doesn't care where they go or what happens to them. Some one else has to lead the way. Our nation has joined in that leadership, and rightly so. But we have policies and principles and traditions which must be respected. If, in our eagerness to help the German Jews, we should transgress those established principles, then we, as well as the Jews, will have to pay a penalty.....

We ought not kid ourselves. There are many persons swearing allegiance to the United States who do not like Jews. Those persons may be otherwise good citizens, but they distrust a Jew because he is a Jew, making no distinction between individuals. It is stating nothing new to say that there has been almost a steady undercurrent of criticism of Mr. Roosevelt from certain quarters because Jews have been given prominent places in the New Deal. I think it is not stretching the imagination at all, therefore, to point to the Jewish problem as one that may become involved in politics at some future time, although I hope it never does. 

Mr. Roosevelt has proposed removal of some of the immigration restrictions as a means of bringing into this country more German Jews than our immigration laws now permit. In so doing, he verged on politics himself. Any one familiar with the debates on immigration policies in the early 1920s must recall the severity of that battle. The issue was whether we, as a nation, were going to be haven for all corners and just hope that they would do things the American way, or whether we should restrict the number coming here to live to a number which could be absorbed into our national life. Labor unions and most employers favored the restrictions, and when we think of the number of unemployed in the last five or six years—people fed and clothed by the federal government—it appears that we allowed too many to come in. It seems we could have excluded all of them to advantage. 

Behind the scenes of the immigration restriction also was a determination on the part of Senator David A. Reed of Pennsylvania, then a senate power, to prevent introduction into the United States of all kinds of "isms." The senator foresaw the spread of radicalism by means of entry of the European backwash and rubbish. There was not much discussion of this phase because our government did not want to offend any foreign nation. It was a basic reason, however, and it is too bad that it was not given more public consideration. 

Fortunately, there can be no change in the number of foreigners admitted from any nation without action by congress. The United States can take only so many—something like 30,000 a year—of those purged Jews, unless congress amends the law. And when I say it is fortunate that there must be action by congress before there can be a change in policy, I mean no inferences. 

In consideration of whether we ought to let a deluge of refugees enter, I cannot help thinking of a possible spread of trouble. For example, if our definite national position of protest against Hitler's policies should bring retaliation, every Jewish refugee allowed in this country would be clamoring for the United States to take revenge on Germany and Hitler. Their influence would be great because they could tell what happened to them and give an idea of what is happening. 

As far as relations between Germany and the United States are concerned at the moment, all that can be said is that the United States has let the world know of its disapproval. When Ambassador Wilson was recalled, it was just the same as saying to the world of nations that Uncle Sam hasn't any respect for Hitler.

Bruckart isn't an antisemite - no, he really cares about the Jews in Europe. He feels very bad about them. He hopes nothing bad will happen to them, even though it is already happening. 

But doing anything to save them? That's un-American.

His mention of Senator David Reed refers to one of the architects of the 1924 Immigration Act which was designed to limit immigration to the US, especially of Jews and Asians. There was an element of Nazi-style eugenics in that law: northern Europeans were considered more wanted and healthier than those from central and southern Europe, where most Jews were attempting to immigrate from. It reduced Jewish immigration by about 90%.

This article assumes that there were desirable immigrants and undesirable ones - and Jews were definitely on the undesirable side of the equation. Moreover, it implies that the many Jewish immigrants who had come to the US in the early part of the century were still not real Americans, and that they were radicals.

That next to last paragraph is something. Bruckart is saying that Jews who arrive in America would tell the truth about how the Nazis act, and it would be bad for "real" Americans to hear the truth because it might prompt them to do something to stop it. 

I was curious whether Bruckart would have continued his isolationist position after Pearl Harbor, but we'll never know - he died suddenly of a heart attack in 1940 at age 48.

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