Showing posts with label Kyrie Irving. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kyrie Irving. Show all posts

Monday, January 09, 2023

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.”

Monday, December 05, 2022

12/05 Links Pt2: A Blood Libel Against Israel on Netflix; The Navel-Gazing Inanities of MESA; The story of Jewish expulsion from Arab countries must be told

From Ian:

A Blood Libel Against Israel on Netflix
On Dec. 1, Netflix started streaming the Jordanian film "Farha," which depicts fictionalized, heartless Israeli soldiers viciously killing Palestinian men, women and children in cold blood. These events never actually happened and the film admits that it is "dramatized." But that does not mean it will not have an outsized impact on anti-Jewish hate and violence.

The movie offers a fanciful retelling of the 1948 war in which the would-be genocidal Arab armies failed to destroy a newborn Jewish state (and kill all its inhabitants in the process). Those who tried to help them do it are romantically recast as the helpless victims of a horrible catastrophe.

Yet primary sources - from the Arab side - attest to the fact that the vast majority of Arabs who left their homes did so voluntarily, or under orders from the invading Arab armies, not the Israeli armed forces.

This is not a matter of perspective or worldview. A movie that malevolently depicts Israeli forces murdering defenseless Arab children in order to feed the nakba mythology is nothing short of a modern blood libel.

In a world of rising antisemitism, it is dangerous and disgusting for Netflix to feed false and anti-Jewish information to the masses by giving a film like this a platform.


Anger over Netflix film ‘aiming to destroy Israel’
Netflix is under fire for screening a movie depicting Israeli soldiers executing a Palestinian family in cold blood, made by filmmakers who have a track record of inflammatory comments about the Jewish state.

The film, Farha, set in the 1948 Israeli War of Independence, is being launched on Netflix in most countries from 1 December, and is likely to be Jordan’s entry to next year’s Oscars.

Dan Diker, president of the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs, told the JC that the film was intended to “destroy [Israel] by all means possible”.

He said: “I find it deeply troubling that Netflix has apparently failed to do the most basic due diligence before supporting and promoting this project.”

In an investigation into the filmmakers, the JC and activist group GnasherJew discovered that producer Ayah Jardaneh tweeted last year that “Israel is the real terrorist” and posted a “map of Palestine” that erased all trace of Israel.

She also tweeted that Mike Pence was supporting “an apartheid state, an occupier and Zionism”.

Addressing Mr Pence, she wrote: “If you love them so much give them your land and leave your house live as a refugee and let them live there instead”.

In 2014, Ms Jardaneh retweeted a post that said “Hamas or his firecracker rockets is not a problem, but seven decades of Israeli brutality and oppression is”.

She has also used the hashtag #27027KM, described as “the area of all Palestine from the river to the sea”.

Ms Jardaneh, who works at the Amman-based company TaleBox, is not the only member of the team to have made such controversial statements online, the JC found.


Netflix blocks controversial Nakba film for Israeli subscribers
The Jordanian movie "Farha" – which shows Israeli soldiers executing a Palestinian family - became available on Netflix several days ago, but it seems not for all the subscribers of the popular streaming service.

Although many Israelis have expressed outrage and terminated their Netflix subscription after the streaming platform announced that it would upload the film, Israelis who chose to keep their subscription would not be able to view it after it was blocked for them.

Many Netflix subscribers in Israel said that when they tried to upload "Farha" in the Netflix search engine, and could not find it, while others received a message saying "this title cannot be viewed in your country." It should be noted that for some subscribers who had an English interface, the film remained available for them, but still many had an error message and couldn't watch it.

Last week, Far-right lawmaker and destined National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir slammed the new Jordanian film.

"The inciteful Jordanian film that will be broadcast on Netflix demonstrates how hypocritical the world could be," Ben-Gvir said.

"Israel has been attacked by murderous terror before it was even established, this consciousness engineering should be handled by the Foreign Ministry with advocacy that shows the real picture, and who the real bloodthirsty murderers are," he said.

Wednesday, November 30, 2022

Tadasa Tashume Ben Ma’ada: Killed Not for the Color of His Skin but for His Jewish Faith (Judean Rose)



Tadasa Tashume Ben Ma’ada died of his wounds three days after an Arab terrorist set off a bomb at the bus stop where Ben Ma’ada stood, awaiting his bus. Ben Ma’ada was murdered because he was a Jew, and he was buried as a Jew. But you might not have read about him in your newspaper. That’s because Ben Ma’ada doesn’t fit the CRT narrative of the Jew as white and privileged.  Privileged he was, as a Jew who “came home” to Israel from Ethiopia 21 years ago, but white he was, of a certainty, not. 

Not that it matters even one little bit. A Jew is a Jew is a Jew. It’s not that we “don’t see color.” It’s that we don’t care. Ben Ma’ada died al Kiddush Hashem, in sanctification of God’s name, because he was murdered precisely for belonging to the Jewish nation. That makes him holy. In Hebrew, in fact, martyrs are referred to as kedoshim, holy ones.

Ben Ma’ada wasn’t one of those “we are the real Jews” like Kyrie Irving, Ye West, or the Black Hebrew Israelites, but an actual real Jew who had zero interest in a trinity, or even Malcolm X.

Ben Ma’ada, after undergoing the Jewish purification ceremony, was buried in his tallit, his Jewish prayer shawl, like every other Israeli Jew. Those who paid their final respects, wore kippot, yarmulkes. 


The Black Hebrew Israelites, on the other hand, during their recent march on New York in support of Kyrie Irving distributed leaflets that left no doubt as to their religious affiliations, reading in part:

“The biblical Israelites are targeted and accused of hate day and night without rest. Our knowledge of our heritage and laws has been systematically removed from us through the monstrous holocaust known as the trans-Atlantic slave trade. They may lie to the world and deny us of our birthright, yet Jesus the Christ, our Black Messiah, confirms the truth of who we are. We are not antisemitic, we are Semitic.”

To the Black Hebrew Israelites, it is Black Christians who are the real Jews, a nonsensical idea. Because the Jewish belief in one God, a belief certainly shared by the Jewish martyr Ben Ma’ada, is the diametric opposite of a belief in a trinity. For a Jew, it’s simple: God cannot be both dead and alive, nor is he a son of himself, while somehow a father, all at one and the same time. These ideas are not consonant with Jewish thought and practice, and would not have resonated with Ben Ma’ada, because he was a Jew like any other Jew.

Ben Ma’ada’s belief system blows a gargantuan hole into the theory of African American/Arab intersectionality. From Eunice G. Pollack, a retired U. of North Texas professor of history and Jewish studies:

Decades before the current embrace of “intersectionality,” Black political and cultural militants promoted the narrative of the commonality of the oppression of African Americans and Arabs—both colonized by White/racist Jews. Convinced by the Arab League and the Organization of Arab Students, its army on the campus, that in contrast to Israel, which discriminated against people of color, the Arab states were racially egalitarian and that supporters of Israel were “accomplices of colonialism and imperialism,” they sought to forge an alliance with their brown brothers.

The Black Hebrew Israelites are not alone in speaking of Jews as “white” and “racist,” and Arabs as people of color. A foundational belief of the Nation of Islam, founded in the 1930s and associated today with Louis Farrakhan, is according to Pollack, “the delegitimization of Judaism—and the denigration of ‘white Jews.’” Meanwhile, the Black Lives Matter Movement speaks of the “racist” Jewish State, and the “struggle for freedom” of the “Palestinian” people of color.

Several Women’s March co-chairs were not only tied to Farrakhan but endorsed and amplified his antisemitic views. In 2016 and again in 2017, the co-chairs informed Jewish organizers that “You people hold all the wealth,” and that “Jewish people bore a special collective responsibility as exploiters of black and brown people” (McSweeney & Siegel, 2018; Pollack, 2019). It must be said that Tamika Mallory later clarified that they only meant “white Jews.”

Would Mallory have given Ben Ma’ada a pass as the “right kind” of Jew being that he was the “right kind” of color? Or would she have seen him as an accomplice “of colonialism and imperialism?” It certainly is confusing. You can see why it was just easier for the mainstream media not to say all that much about the murder of Tadasa Ben Ma’ada, who was not white, and could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be seen as oppressing people of color, being that he was, himself, a person of color AND a Jew. Not the fake kind of “Jew as Christian” Jew, but the real deal, born into the Mosaic faith.

But of course, these things are all in the eyes of the beholder. White supremacists hate Jews just as much, if not more than any BLM or NOI activist. Pamela Paresky notes this fact with some irony: “In the critical social justice paradigm, Jews, who have never been seen as white by those for whom being white is a moral good, are now seen as white by those for whom whiteness is an unmitigated evil.”

Paresky continues:

The subtlety is that, instead of targeting Jews directly, the target of critical social justice is “whiteness.” But this does nothing to protect Jews. In 2018, when Hasidic Jews were victims of a wave of violent attacks — a precursor to another cluster of bloody attacks to come a year later — Mark Winston Griffith, the executive director of the Black Movement Center in Crown Heights, told The Forward that some black Americans see Judaism as “a form of almost hyper-whiteness.”

You could have fooled the white nationalists who gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee from a city park. “Jews will not replace us,” they chanted, looking like nothing so much as gleeful, blood-lusting Nazis at a Hitler rally. Here the word “replace” refers to the Great Replacement, known also as the white replacement or white genocide theory. In this conspiracy theory, in which white supremacist ideology is rooted, Jews promote mass immigration, intermarriage, and other phenomena that could lead to the “extinction of whites.”

And of course, Caryn Elaine Johnson, who adopted the insulting stage name “Whoopi Goldberg” called Jews and Nazis, “two white groups of people.” “If you’re going to do this, then let’s be truthful about it . . . these [Jews and Nazis] are two white groups of people.”

Would Goldberg Johnson have referred to the bombing that took Tadasa Tashume Ben Ma’ada’s life as two brown groups of people fighting it out? Likely not. In fact, it is more than likely that Goldberg Johnson has never had the chance to meet a “real Jew” like Israeli Jew Tadasa Tashume Ben Ma’ada, may Hashem avenge his blood. Which may be the real lesson in all of this, which is that, as Paresky says, “Jews should never again accede to being defined and divided in racial terms.”

Nor should we ever again be driven off our land by people who pretend to inherit what God gave to the Jews—real Jews like Tadasa Tashume Ben Ma’ada, killed not for the color of his skin, but for his Jewish faith.

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!
 

 



Thursday, November 24, 2022

11/24 Links Pt2: Thanksgiving Reaffirms the 400-Year-Old US-Israel Nexus; Irving, Stewart and Chappelle and the Double Standard for Jew-Hatred

From Ian:

Thanksgiving Reaffirms the 400-Year-Old US-Israel Nexus
Thanksgiving was reportedly first celebrated in November 1621 by William Bradford, the leader of the “Mayflower” and the Governor of the Plymouth Colony.

He enhanced his appreciation of the Bible — and especially the Five Books of Moses — in Leiden, Holland, where he found refuge from religious persecution in England. While there, he heavily interacted with the Jewish community.

Bradford and the other Mayflower passengers perceived the 66-day-voyage as a reenactment of the Biblical exodus, and the departure from “the Modern Day Egypt,” to “the Modern Day Promised Land.”

As a governor in this new land, Bradford announced the celebration of Thanksgiving by citing Psalm 107, which constitutes the foundation of the Jewish concept of Thanksgiving, thanking God for ancient and modern time deliverance.

The epitaph on Bradford’s tombstone in the old cemetery in Plymouth, Massachusetts, begins with a Hebrew phrase — “God is the succor of my life” (יהוה עזר חיי) — as befits the person who brought Hebrew to America. He aimed to make Hebrew an official language, suggesting that reading the Bible in the original language yields more benefits.

The Hebrew word for Thanksgiving’s central dish, turkey, is “Tarnegol Hodoo” (תרנגול הודו), which means “a chicken from India,” but also “a chicken of gratitude/Thanksgiving.”
The Original Puritans
Progressive causes and Protestantism in the U.S. frequently went hand-in-hand, from Prohibition to expanded public education, as the 19th century became the 20th. Indeed, the Social Gospel movement, the inspiration for many of the reforms of the Progressive Era, was led in its early years by Congregationalist minister Washington Gladden. In his book, Rothman quotes George McKenna, author of The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism, on the art of the overlapping Gilded Age and early Progressive Era: “The Puritans’ ethic of self-discipline and austerity was reflected in the numerous paintings and sculptures of Puritans that appeared during this period.” If this seems somewhat paradoxical—the cultural exultation of sober self-reliance alongside the excesses of the robber barons—consider that the progenitor of the New Deal was the blue-blooded FDR, himself the son of a cradle Congregationalist.

Rothman has a theory behind what he sees as a shift, from the late-20th-century paradigm of conservative Republicans as the “Just Say No” party fearful that “someone, somewhere, may be happy,” to progressive “New Puritans,” who, he writes in his book, “are draining life of its spontaneity, authenticity and fun.” Contending in his book that while the Democratic Party had broadened its tent by the 1990s to include upholders of the ’60s’ revolutionary legacy, by contrast, in 2016, Republicans were nominating a three-time divorced Howard Stern Show regular. “Conservatives didn’t so much lose the culture wars as much as they simply fled the field,” he writes.

Of course, the actual spiritual descendants of the New England Puritans, who began as radicals in their native England, are Congregationalists like the United Church of Christ, who are themselves fairly progressive on social issues. And when the idealistic utopianism of the Transcendentalist movement arose in the 19th century, with a focus on the primacy of the self and individual personal experience, it did so in the old Puritan stronghold of New England. Among its most prominent spokesmen was Ralph Waldo Emerson, the son of a Unitarian (itself an outgrowth of Congregationalism) minister at the First Church of Boston, which had been founded by the Puritan John Winthrop of “City Upon a Hill“ fame. In his landmark address, Winthrop warned his fellow New England Puritans that the eyes of the world were upon them, and as such, righteous living was essential. The reward, he wrote, would be a New England that was “a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, ‘the Lord make it like that of New England.’”

“Today,” Rothman said in his message to Tablet, “as the left gravitates away from liberalism and toward progressivism, they are assuming many of progressivism’s conceits—chief among them, a messianic utopianism that views everything, even life’s most banal pleasures, through the prism of political activism.”

But contradiction is something the Puritans accepted as a fact of life. “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling,” wrote the Apostle Paul to the young church at Philippi, and the Puritans took this charge seriously. “The [P]uritan life,” Winship writes, was “much more likely to involve protracted struggle with fear and doubt than it would a steady sense of God’s love.” They were a people ill-at-ease: with themselves, with each other, and with the wider world. That we perennially recast each other and ourselves in the New England Puritans’ story may suggest that the real mark that they left on the American character is something altogether more ambiguous than the saccharine annual depictions at Thanksgiving suggest.
The Case for Israel Celebrating Thanksgiving
Mark Twain wrote in his book Innocents Abroad about how desolate Palestine was when he visited in 1867, before the indigenous Jewish pilgrims and pioneers returned and made the desert bloom.

The success of Israeli agricultural innovation in feeding the people here, as well as in the Third World, is certainly worth celebrating. Israel’s successful hi-tech economy can be revered, as well as its unprecedented success in water conservation that would have made the environmentally conscious Native Americans proud.

Zionist visionary Theodor Herzl wrote in his 1902 book Altneuland that the Jewish state could transport water great distances. His vision and the success of the pioneers who implemented it could be celebrated on Thanksgiving in Israel.

Former diplomat Yoram Ettinger pointed out this week that William Bradford, the leader of the Mayflower and the Governor of the Plymouth Colony, interacted with the Jewish community and enhanced his appreciation of the Five Books of Moses in Holland before initiating the voyage.

“Governor Bradford announced the celebration of Thanksgiving by citing Psalm 107, which constitutes the foundation of the Jewish concept of Thanksgiving, thanking God for ancient and modern time deliverance,” Ettinger wrote. “Bradford was also inspired by the Jewish holidays of Pentecost (Shavuot in Hebrew) and Tabernacles (Sukkot in Hebrew), which highlight the importance of gratitude, and commemorating Thanksgiving for the harvest.”

Proper gratitude for the Land of Israel can be shown by eating turkey, whose Hebrew name, as Ettinger wrote, means both “a chicken from India,” but also “a chicken of gratitude/Thanksgiving.”

Thanksgiving falls this year on Rosh Chodesh, the celebration of the new Jewish month, when Jews say the Hallel prayer and its signature line Hodu LaHashem Ki Tov, which can be translated as “Give thanks to the Lord for He is good,” or “have turkey for God because it’s good.”

The final reason for celebrating Thanksgiving in the Jewish State is to remind the world and the often hostile international media that we – the People of Israel – are here in the Land of Israel, we belong here and we will always be here, even if we get bad press.

Lincoln, the Pilgrims and most of the Wampanoag are long gone, mostly due to tragic events that became part of history.

We the People of Israel have overcome countless tragedies, and yet we endure, which is clearly an excellent reason for us to be thankful.

Am Israel Chai!

Wednesday, November 23, 2022

Our Jewish Response to Antisemitism Isn't Working (Judean Rose)



When Kanye (Ye) West finally managed to out himself as an antisemite, the response was predictable. Demand an apology. Demand that the offender’s lucrative business deals be canceled. This is the pattern we’ve seen over the past several years, as antisemitism grows, even in America, the Goldene Medina. But is it working?

It certainly didn’t work with West. The rapper only doubled down and refused to apologize, even after several very profitable business contracts were canceled, as a result. 

Kanye (Ye) West


The following exchange took place during an interview with Piers Morgan:

Piers Morgan: “Do you now regret saying ‘death con 3 on Jewish people’… Are you sorry you said that?”

Kanye: “No… Absolutely not.”  

In other words, despite the fact that Ye lost out on billions of dollars in potential earnings, he has shown little to no contrition for the hateful things he said about the Jewish people.

Yet Morgan persisted until he at last managed to eke out a semblance of an apology from West:
“I will say I’m sorry for the people that I hurt with the ‘Death Con’ — the confusion that I caused. I feel like I caused hurt and confusion. And I’m sorry for the families of the people that had nothing to do with the trauma that I have been through, and that I used my platform, where you say hurt people hurt people, and I was hurt.”

Some media outlets referred to Kanye’s non-apology as an apology.

(Yahoo)


(The Wrap)

Others were more honest.

(TMZ)


(Daily Beast)

Once allowed back on Twitter after a six-week ban, Ye collectively mocked the Jewish people by tweeting a single word, “Shalom.” As if to say, “You Jews exploited me and stole my money as you always do, but I refused to bow my head.”

 

Kyrie Irving


The same irritating pattern was repeated with athlete Kyrie Irving. There was a tweet with hateful content, this time in the form of a link to an antisemitic movie: "Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America." The ADL put pressure on a sports shoe company—Nike—with West it was Adidas—and an apology was demanded but not received. Irving was also suspended from his position as a guard for the Brooklyn Nets. 

But Irving was smarter than Ye, or at least saner. He figured out that he stood to lose a LOT of money if he didn’t apologize to those damned Jews. So after he tried to get away with not apologizing, followed by a non-apology that everyone knew was a non-apology, he finally made an actual apology—or at least said the words—whether he meant them is anyone’s guess (and I’m guessing not).

The non-apology:

   

The apology: 

“I don’t have hate in my heart for the Jewish people or anyone that identifies as a Jew . . . The difficult aspect is just processing all this, understanding the power of my voice, the influence I have. I am no one’s idol, but I am a human being that wants to make [an] impact and change.”

“I really want to focus on the hurt that I caused. I just want to apologize deeply for all my actions throughout the time that it’s been since the post was first put up. I’ve had a lot of time to think,” said Irving.

Having at last issued an apology—whether heartfelt or not—Kyrie was reinstated by the Nets.

Nick Cannon


The antisemitism of Kyrie and Ye are lately in the news. But we’ve seen this show before. There was Nick Cannon’s 2020 podcast with Richard “Professor Griff” Griffin. From the transcript:

Nick Cannon: Right. So let’s dive into it. Who are they? When we speak up, because this is where it truly is. And we talk about the six corporations, when we go as deep as the Rothschilds, centralized banking, the 13 families, the bloodlines that control everything even outside of America. When we talk about the people who, if we were truly the children of Israel, and we’re defining who the Jewish people are, because I feel like if we actually can understand that construct, then we can see that there is no hate involved. When we talk about the lies, the deceit, how the fake dollar controls all of this, then maybe we can get to the reason why they wanted to silence you, why they want to silence Minister Farrakhan, and they want to throw that we are having hate speech when it’s never hate speech, when it’s not. You can’t be anti-Semitic when we are the Semitic people, when we are the same people that who they want to be, that’s our birthright.

Richard “Professor Griff” Griffin: It’s our birthright.

Nick Cannon: So if that’s truly our birthright, there’s no hate involved.

Richard “Professor Griff” Griffin: It’s not.

Nick Cannon: How did this message gets so misconstrued?

Richard “Professor Griff” Griffin: When we came back to claim it. When we woke up and we came back to claim … If you steal my bicycle, when we were six years old, and you riding around the hood with my bike, now I’m 12, and I understand …

Nick Cannon: I want my bike back.

Richard “Professor Griff” Griffin: I want my bike back, man. Now you’re going to kick up dust.

Nick Cannon: Right, right. Right.

Richard “Professor Griff” Griffin: You understand what I’m saying?

Nick Cannon:  And I’m baller enough to get my bike back. . .  

Richard “Professor Griff” Griffin: You understand what I’m saying? That’s showing and proving that that’s my bike, and I’m here to claim it, man. You got, you have to give it back. So when you start hearing songs like Michael Jackson “hike me, kike me” and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, nah, you can’t say that.

Nick Cannon: You can’t say that. That’s hate speech.

Richard “Professor Griff” Griffin: When you see Puffy talking about “I’m getting paid like the Hebrew,” you know what I’m saying?

Nick Cannon: Right, right. They want to mute the Hebrew.

Richard “Professor Griff” Griffin: They want to mute that. You understand what I’m saying?

Nick Cannon: Even we the true Hebrews.

Richard “Professor Griff” Griffin: Exactly. So we can’t even tell the truth now.

Nick Cannon: Right.

Richard “Professor Griff” Griffin: Not on record, not on television shows, not on YouTube. . . .

Nick Cannon: Because we’re not saying anything hateful, and that’s the thing when they want to put that on the Minister Farrakhan, was saying, even the term “white devils” or just devils in general …

Richard “Professor Griff” Griffin: Right, right, right.

Nick Cannon: … when he was really speaking about the people who devalue our communities and themselves, and that’s really where the word “devil” comes from and how he’s speaking it. But they want to take the sound bites and say, “This is antisemitic.” And so how does that occur? And why does that occur? Is that great? Is that spiritual warfare or is that just truly just us just silencing each other?

Richard “Professor Griff” Griffin: That’s the psychological covert, meaning hidden, war on the higher, infinite power healing our people.

Further on in the podcast is this exchange:

Nick Cannon: So ultimately are we saying that there’s a certain group of people that maybe they’re scared of the truth?

Richard “Professor Griff” Griffin: I think there’s Jewish people, but I just think there’s a group of Jewish people inside of that. You could call them Zionists. You can call them whatever.

Nick Cannon: Let’s dig into that for a second because that’s where I, and even sometimes I find myself wanting to debate this idea, and it gets real wishy-washy and unclear for me when we give so much power to the “they,” and then the theys then turn into the Illuminati, the Zionists, the Rothschilds …

Richard “Professor Griff” Griffin: The Freemasons.

Nick Cannon: The Bilderberg group, the Freemason. And as a community I feel, and I’ve done this myself, I want to blame others for the position that I’m currently in. And that often becomes when you say the privileged white girlfriend comes into the room or the apologists or these people come in and say, “Why aren’t you guys over slavery already?” or “Why are you always complaining? And why don’t you do for yourself? Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. And my people were also oppressed.”

But as was the case for Kyrie Irving, money talks, nobody walks. After ViacomCBS dropped Cannon like a hot potato, he found himself (shocker!) ready to apologize.  

 

That’s the pattern: demand an apology—and it doesn’t seem to matter whether or not it is sincere—and hit the hater in the wallet. Perhaps it’s time to question the wisdom of this method. Do the antisemitic beliefs evaporate once the apology is issued? Do the apologies matter at all? And doesn’t placing financial pressure on antisemitic offenders only reinforce classic tropes about Jews, money, and power?

ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt


From the ADL’s blog, Unpacking Kanye West’s Antisemitic Remarks:

Claims About Jewish Money and Greed

Ye’s claim that Jared Kushner’s actions between Israel and Arab nations was driven by his desire for financial gain corroborates long-standing antisemitic tropes about alleged Jewish control of money and financial institutions. His vague suggestion that a prominent Jewish holiday is associated with “financial engineering” also reinforces this stereotype. Overall, Ye's suggestions about Jewish people, holidays and the monetary implications of the two lends credence to the baseless idea that Jews can leverage their power for insidious purposes because of the stronghold they have on financial institutions.

From the ADL’s resource, Ye (Kanye West): What You Need to Know:

Claims about Jewish Control of Media and Government

In many of his recent interviews, Ye repeatedly referenced purported Jewish control over various industries — he used the phrase “Jewish media” over twenty times on “Drink Champs” alone. Ye also spoke about “Jewish Zionists” and “Zionist media handlers.” He made multiple references to prominent Jewish individuals, including George Soros — the Hungarian Jewish billionaire, philanthropist and Holocaust survivor who is a frequent bogeyman for both avowed antisemites and the political right — and Jared Kushner, as supposed examples of Jewish power.

Ye’s insinuations about Jewish control perpetuate the longstanding antisemitic trope that Jews wield an inordinate amount of power and exert control over global systems as part of a quest for world domination. These views are regularly promoted by extremists and antisemites of a wide variety of ideologies, from white supremacists and extremist Black nationalist groups to conspiracy theorists and Holocaust deniers.

·         “Jared Kushner is an example of how the Jewish people have their hand on every single business that controls the world.” (Ye on “Drink Champs,” 10/16/22)

·         “We’re not going to be owned by the Jewish media anymore…Every celebrity has Jewish people in their contract…And these people, if you say anything out of the line with the agenda, then your career can be over.” (Ye on “Cuomo,” 10/17/22)

·         “Kim [Kardashian, Ye’s ex-wife] has Zionist media handlers surrounding her.” (Ye on “Piers Morgan Uncensored,” 10/19/22)

·         “I said the Jewish people because, by the way, it’s a barrage…George Soros knows, like, ‘wow, this guy is like a younger guy that’s looking at what I did and looking at how I control the world silently and he’s calling it out’…That’s what George Soros sees, right, when he’s dealing with me.” (Ye on the “Lex Fridman Podcast,” 10/24/22) 

Claims that Jews Exploit Black Artists for Financial Gain

Antisemitic tropes about alleged Jewish power and greed intersect in Ye’s comments about purported Jewish control of the music industry and exploitation of Black artists. This trope has been present in the discourse of other Black performers and activists in the past and is a common talking point within more extremist groups. Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, for example, frequently makes this accusation.

·         “Jewish people have owned the Black voice…The Jewish community, especially in the music industry, in the entertainment [industry] period, they’ll take one of us, the brightest of us, right, that can really feed a whole village, and they’ll take us and milk us till we die.” (Ye on “Drink Champs,” 10/16/22)

·         “There’s so many Black musicians signed to Jewish record labels and those Jewish records labels take ownership not only of the publishing…but also ownership of the culture itself…It’s like a modern-day slavery.” (Ye on “Cuomo,” 10/17/22)

·         “I’ve been wronged so many times by Jewish businessmen…They’re taking money out of my children’s mouths and putting it into their children’s mouths!” (Ye on “Piers Morgan Uncensored,” 10/19/22)

·         “90% of Black people in entertainment — from sports, to music, to acting — are in some way tied into Jewish businesspeople…Like if Rahm [Emanuel] is sitting next to [President] Obama or Jared [Kushner] sitting next to [President] Trump, there’s a Jewish person right there controlling the country, the Jewish people controlling who gets the best video or not, controlling what the media says about me.” (Ye on the “Lex Fridman Podcast,” 10/24/22) 

So let’s see, Jonathan Greenblatt, after pressuring Adidas (of the Nazi past) to break its very generous contract with Ye, educates us on classic Jewish tropes relating to money and power. Isn’t this a contradiction in terms? Of course it is. And a lot of Jews think the ADL has outlived its usefulness, and in fact, causes more harm than good.

The Dassler shoe factory--where Adidas and Puma were born--in Herzogenaurach, Germany circa 1930s. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Liel Liebovitz lays it out for us in No More ADL:

Pop quiz:

Which of these two individuals do you find more problematic?

Kyrie Irving, a kooky basketball player who believes that the Earth is flat, that JFK was shot by bankers, that the COVID vaccines were secretly a plot to connect all Black people to a supercomputer, and that Jews worship Satan and launched the slave trade?

Or Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, who accepted $500,000 from Irving last week without even meeting or even talking to the all-star—and who was then forced to give back the donation when Irving blatantly refused to apologize?

Let’s think about it for a minute. One of these guys is a weirdo with dumb opinions he may or may not actually believe. The other is running a soulless racket which just made it clear that you can say whatever you want about the Jews and buy your indulgences at a discount price.

Don’t get me wrong: I absolutely believe that Irving’s endorsement of a Black nationalist documentary based on an obscure Jew-hating book, to say nothing of Kanye West’s meltdown, will most likely contribute to a surge in antisemitism in America, particularly in the Black community. But we Jews don’t control Kyrie Irving; in theory, we do control the ADL, and we shouldn’t want our chief defense group to behave in a way that advances antisemitic conspiracy theories about shadowy Jews trafficking in money and influence for fun and profit.

As for the pro forma apologies, not everyone is so eager to accept them. Meghan McCain, for instance, who, remarking on Nick Cannon’s apology said that antisemitism remains “the last form of passable bigotry in America.”

Meghan McCain at the No Fear: A Rally in Solidarity with the Jewish People, July 11, 2021, (Ted Eytan, Wikipedia.)

“This isn’t just about Nick Cannon,” said McCain. “It’s why we, as Americans, seem to find more forgiveness in our heart for antisemitism than we do of racism of any other kind.”

“I think my concern is, for some reason, antisemitism is something we let people forgive a lot easier than any other forms of bigotry and racism.” McCain noted that “we’re having conversations about canceling Dr. Seuss,” but we say nothing about works by other authors which contain “deeply antisemitic characters.”

“I find that people who say antisemitic things are forgiven a lot easier than anything else,” said McCain, “And I think that’s something we really need to examine as a society.”

McCain is right. We are too forgiving, and the pattern of demanding apologies and forcing companies to cancel big name antisemites just isn’t working. If it were working, we’d see less antisemitism, rather than more, as in our current situation, with both Ye and Irving coming out of the (antisemitic) closet, so to speak.

Raoul Wallenberg

The problem perhaps, is that the demands and pressures are coming from the Jews, when it would be preferable to have non-Jews fight this battle for us. But we have learned an unfortunate lesson from our tragic Jewish history. People like McCain, and even more so, righteous gentiles like Raoul Wallenberg who saved thousands of Jews during the Holocaust, are rare birds. For the most part, no one sticks up for the Jews, except for the Jews themselves.  

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!
 

 



Tuesday, November 22, 2022

11/22 Links Pt2: Bari Weiss: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on Kanye, Kyrie, and Antisemitism; The Black Hebrew Israelites are a real problem for the left; Why Is Jon Stewart Ignoring and Excusing Antisemitism?

From Ian:

Bari Weiss: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on Kanye, Kyrie, and Antisemitism
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar retired from the NBA in 1989, but he remains one of the greatest basketball players of all time. Many argue he is simply the greatest.

He is still—even with Michael Jordan and Steph Curry and Lebron and Shaq and Kobe—the NBA’s all-time leading scorer (38,387 points) and the league’s only six-time MVP. In March, the basketball news site HoopsHype included Abdul-Jabbar in its list of the top ten most influential players of all time. ESPN called him the greatest center in NBA history.

As Jews say every Passover: It would have been enough.

But there’s so much more that makes the 7-foot-2-inch Abdul-Jabbar a true giant. His religious conviction, his integrity, his wide-ranging intellectual proclivities, his outstanding performance in the 1981 movie Airplane!—and the unusual fact that this black, Muslim basketball star has been a consistent and outspoken voice against antisemitism.

For all those reasons, I wanted to speak with Abdul-Jabbar about the various firestorms of late: Kanye and his antisemitic rants; Kyrie Irving’s promotion of an antisemitic movie that denies the Holocaust; and the alarming rash of anti-Jewish hate crimes seemingly inspired by their worldview. A few weeks ago, a banner declaring “Kanye was right” hung over the 405 in Los Angeles as people gave Nazi salutes. On Halloween, the side of a townhouse in an Atlanta neighborhood was sprayed with graffiti: “Jews kill Blacks.” On the stop sign around the corner: “Jews enslave Black lives.” Last week, headstones at a Jewish cemetery in Chicago were vandalized with swastikas and the phrase “Kanye was rite.” And in Brooklyn, physical attacks against Orthodox Jews have become routine.

I asked Abdul-Jabbar about all of that and more in the Q and A below. And if you’re looking for more from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, check out his Substack, where he writes and talks about everything from basketball to pop culture to politics. — BW

BW: I want to focus on Farrakhan’s influence. He believes that Jews are parasitic, that Jews are behind a plot to exploit black Americans, and that blacks are the real Jews from the Bible. We’re hearing these ideas come out of the mouths of musicians like Kanye West (“Jewish people have owned the black voice”) and athletes like Kyrie Irving (“I cannot be antisemitic if I know where I come from”). For many Jews, hearing this kind of rhetoric is shocking, but many black Americans have noted that these views are more commonplace than we’d like to admit. So what I think a lot of people are afraid to ask is: How mainstream are these beliefs among black Americans? Are Kanye and Kyrie unique? Or has the influence of people like Farrakhan made this strain of antisemitism somehow more normal than many want to believe?

KAJ: Certain black leaders do exactly what certain white leaders do who want to gather followers, money, and power: They find a scapegoat they can blame. They can’t blame others who are marginalized because of the color of their skin, like Latinx or Asian-Americans, so they go for the default villain of fascists and racists: Jews.

What astounds me is not just the irrationality of it, but how self-destructive it is. Black people have to know that when they mouth antisemitism, they are using the exact same kind of reasoning that white supremacists use against blacks. They are enabling racism. Now they’ve aligned themselves with the very people who would choke out black people, drag them behind a truck, keep them from voting, and maintain systemic racism for another hundred years. They are literally making not only their lives worse, but their children’s lives. The fact that they can’t see that means the racists have won.
British Comedian David Baddiel Takes His ‘Jews Don’t Count’ Argument to TV
David Baddiel, a comedian-turned-activist against antisemitism who calls himself “one of the U.K.’s very few famous Jews,” was holding court in the basement of one of Britain’s best-known TV studios.

As a reporter headed hurriedly for the exit, Baddiel slouched into his chair, seemingly exhausted by the interview he had just completed about the forthcoming documentary based on his 2021 bestseller, “Jews Don’t Count.”

“I am speaking to many people like the last journalist who had not thought about any of this in their life,” he said.

The “this” Baddiel was referring to was to the idea, outlined in his book, that progressive anti-racists are guilty of hypocrisy towards Jews by not viewing them as worthy of similar protection or championing as other minorities because they are seen as white, privileged and wealthy.

When the book came out last year, it received rave reviews, and Baddiel has since become seen by some as a “voice for Britain’s Jews.” He often litigates the finer points of contemporary antisemitism as a guest on radio and television, and he has been quick to square off with trolls and critics on Twitter.

Now, with the premiere of an hour-long documentary also called “Jews Don’t Count” on Britain’s public Channel 4 network, Baddiel gets a primetime slot to make his case to a bigger audience. Featuring Baddiel’s interviews with Jewish stars of pop culture in both Britain and the United States — ranging from comedian Sarah Silverman to novelist Jonathan Safran Foer to actor Stephen Fry — the film argues that “in a culture where all forms of racism are being monitored, called out and held accountable, one form is apparently invisible.”
Can we fight antisemitism without losing our sense of humor?
If a comic with a huge following like Dave Chappelle goes over the line, he will immediately be put under a societal microscope that will analyze and respond from every possible angle, as I’m doing now.

If you run an organization that fights antisemitism, or simply cares for the welfare of the Jewish community, it’s almost certain that you will feel obligated to respond. Many of those responses follow the usual dance of “expose, condemn and ask for an apology.”

Chappelle himself poked fun at that dance at the start of his monologue: “Before I start tonight, I just wanted to read a brief statement that I prepared. I denounce antisemitism in all its forms and I stand with my friends in the Jewish community. And that, Kanye, is how you buy yourself some time.”

Chappelle exposed the uneasy truth of celebrities getting caught saying something offensive and then releasing a statement that everyone knows was written by a PR handler. By revealing the goal of “buying yourself some time,” he captured the phoniness of the whole exercise.

That was cutting and funny. It’s when he played up antisemitic tropes around the “all powerful” Jew that he entered dicey territory.

“I’ve been to Hollywood,” he said. “And I don’t want y’all to get mad at me, I’m just telling you this is just what I saw. It’s a lot of Jews. Like a lot.”

Perhaps realizing he was on sensitive ground, he called the idea that Jews run show business a “delusion,” but then added: “It’s not a crazy thing to think. But it’s a crazy thing to say out loud in a climate like this.”

In other words, it’s not crazy to think that Jews run the show; just don’t say it out loud.

Whether he intended it or not, that “hush hush” vibe suggests mystery and conspiracy, precisely the ancient trope that fuels Jew-hatred and makes so many Jews nervous.

Which brings us back to the “Chappelle trap.” It’s one thing to fight antisemitism when it comes from places like a neo-Nazi march or a BDS group or even celebrity musicians or athletes. None of those people make a living by making us laugh.

Chappelle does.

Because Chappelle plays in the very Jewish playground of comedy, it makes it that much harder to calibrate our response. How do we fight a comic without losing our sense of humor, without losing what made America love us in the first place? At what point do we say, “We can’t take this joke because it goes too far?”

If the ritual of “expose, condemn and ask for an apology” is phony anyhow, is it worth losing our sense of humor? And does complaining so loudly, as much as it makes us feel good, make things better or worse?

In the classic Jewish tradition, I have more questions than answers.

Monday, November 21, 2022

11/21 Links Pt2: Why is the religious left taking sides against Israel?; 1,000 Israeli Students Call on Harvard Crimson to Move Office from "Stolen Lands"

From Ian:

Why is the religious left taking sides against Israel?
For the old religious and evangelical left, Israel often represents Western Civilization, colonialism, and imperialism. For aging denizens of Liberation Theology, the Palestinian cause offers the narrative of a Third World people oppressed by First World wealth, technology, and cultural superiority. Israel is an ally of the United States, and from the religious left’s perspective, is an unwelcome extension of American (and British) power into the Mideast. The Palestinians, from that view, are victims of the American imperium, meriting special advocacy by concerned justice-minded American Christians.

The religious left’s animus towards Israel leads to often absurd contradictions and double standards.

Evangelical leftists relate to this narrative, often informed by their own neo-Anabaptist perspective, which is pacifist and anti-empire. Israel of course has by necessity a significant military force, much of it made possible through American aid. This rankles neo-Anabaptists who think anti-violence is the gospel’s chief theme. There is another sometimes-underlying concern for neo-Anabaptists. They are discomfited by ancient biblical Israel, with its divinely ordained kings, warrior heroes, armies, and military victories, all of which defy the neo-Anabaptist stress on God as supremely peaceful. If only unconsciously, they are inclined towards a form of Marcionism, the early church heresy that minimized the canonical authority of the Old Testament. This discomfort with the Hebrew scriptures facilitates unease with modern Israel.

The religious left’s animus towards Israel leads to often absurd contradictions and double standards, especially for a denomination like the PCUSA. It and the other mainline Protestant bodies have countless statements condemning Israel for ostensibly oppressing the Palestinians among other depredations. But they are largely silent about human rights abuses so prevalent among Israel’s Arab neighbors, including the Palestinian Authority, not to mention countless repressive regimes around the world. They ignored Hamas’s July rocket attacks on Israel. A 2011 PCUSA report affirmed calls for democracy during the Arab Spring, but such calls are rare, and it naturally focused on criticizing U.S. Mideast policy.

The PCUSA General Assembly in July did condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But it devoted more verbiage to the United States and NATO having “flooded Ukraine with lethal weapons,” enriching “war profiteers—at the expense of the taxpayers, the poor and the planet,” guided by “powerful geopolitical and financial interests.” It also derided sanctions against Russia and lamented the cost to “planetary survival and social justice.”

The Religious Left descends from the Social Gospel, later radicalized by Liberation Theology. It disdains capitalism, bourgeois democracy, America, Western Civilization, and human rights regarding speech, religion, and property. But its hostility to Israel is especially pernicious, not just for its double standards, but also for its underlying disregard for a people who have been among the world’s most tormented.

Modern Israel arose from the ashes of the Holocaust. From the beginning, Israel has had to fight for its very existence. Christians should understand that opposition to Israel as a Jewish state is opposition to Israel as a nation.
John-Paul Pagano: First Principles
Antisemitism is different from most other forms of racism. In order to combat it, we need to understand what is a conspiracy theory.

It's customary to hear well-meaning people intone something along these lines: "Antisemitism and anti-black racism are part of the same fight.” In a basic sense, this is true: they are both odious forms of hatred that endanger people and corrode society. Diminishing them as much as possible is part of the same overarching defense of our civic health.

But it’s a platitude that papers over essential differences between two opposite forms of racism. Few human phenomena can be described with an algorithm. There are always ambiguities and exceptions. Nevertheless, it’s heuristically valid to arrange racism into two categories: a caste-oriented, “down-punching” form and a conspiracist, “up-punching” form.

By and large, anti-black racism constructs an underclass that the racist regards as inferior, to be segregated, plundered, and exploited. In the main, Antisemitism views the Jews as a preternaturally powerful, evil elite that plunders and exploits the Antisemite—and the broader society he seeks to awaken to the struggle. In the ugliest of ironies, however much he rails about Jewish degeneracy, the Antisemite invests the Jews with traits and abilities that make them seem diabolically superior.
Jonathan Tobin: The ADL is waging war on free speech, not on Trump or Twitter
Yet the ADL has shown a dangerous propensity for Internet censorship—an authoritarian impulse that it usually veils behind a desire to quell the rising tide of antisemitism. Its consultations with the PayPal online payment system, for instance, were geared toward demonetizing anyone, not just far-right extremists, whose opinions were out of favor with the left.

The attempt to sink Twitter by persuading advertisers and users to exit it goes beyond those efforts to harness Big Tech clout to enforce woke orthodoxy on the Web.

What the ADL is now demanding is to set a standard by which no social-media platform or Internet service can survive if it enables conservatives to participate on an equal footing with liberals.

Censored or uncensored, Twitter—or any similar company—will always be something of a sewer, as it prizes angry discourse and discourages thoughtful exchanges. But if the ADL and others succeed, a precedent will be set to ensure that no platform encouraging debate from both ends of the spectrum can survive.

The consequence of the above—such as the Biden administration’s use of social- media companies to squelch COVID-19 debate—will be an even more divided country and greater civil strife.

Just as important, it will create an atmosphere in which free speech is not merely under assault, as it is on college campuses and other places that have been completely captured by the left. It will mean we are moving closer to a society where the norm will be to silence dissent on all important topics.

It is already a disgrace that the ADL treats partisan advocacy as more important than its core mission of fighting antisemitism. But its effort to sink Twitter makes clear that its real goal is to shut up those who don’t toe its political line.

Think what you like about Trump or Musk. But this latest stand shows that there is no greater foe of democracy than the ADL under Greenblatt.

Wednesday, November 16, 2022

When is an Antisemite not an Antisemite? When it’s Dave Chappelle Defending His Antisemitic Friends (Judean Rose)

Dave Chappelle made it onto my Comprehensive List of Antisemitic Celebrities already a year ago. That’s approximately when his offensive Netflix comedy special, “The Closer” was first aired. The special included a joke about making a movie called “Space Jews.” It was masterful. No one could ever have imagined that so many antisemitic tropes could be packed into so few sentences: 

In my movie idea, we find out that these aliens are originally from earth. That they’re from an ancient civilization that achieved interstellar travel and left the earth thousands of years ago,” he said. “Some other planet they go to, and things go terrible for them on the other planet, so they come back to earth, [and] decide that they want to claim the earth for their very own. It’s a pretty good plot-line, huh? I call it ‘Space Jews.’

Let’s unpack that.

1.       Jews aren’t human. They’re “alien.”

2.       The Jews weren’t expelled from their homeland, but left for the Diaspora of their own volition, having “achieved interstellar travel.”

3.       Jews didn’t like the way they were treated in space/Europe, what with all the pogroms and the Holocaust and such, so they came back to earth/Israel to claim it for themselves. Of course, they don’t plan to stop there: the (Space) Jews are aiming for world domination.

The joke "works," so to speak. We know that Chappelle drove home his point, that the underlying meaning of Space Jews was received loud and clear. We know this from the reaction of at least one audience member who called out, “Free Palestine!”

The Jews Are White and Rich

But wait. There’s more. In case you did somehow manage to miss Chappelle’s meaning, or decided to give his short detour into Nazi ideology a pass, he revisits the joke some 30 minutes later.

There was a black man in South Carolina during slavery who somehow got granted his freedom by his so-called master. And when his master granted him the freedom he also gave him a plot of land. Now it turns out this brother was brilliant. He had a good eye, good knack for farming. And he farmed this plot of land very successfully and made a lot of money, and this is where the story gets crazy. When he got all that money this [guy] bought some slaves… Not only was he a slave owner, he became a slave breeder. And employed tactics that were so cruel even White slave owners were like, “Yo, my man.” He was a wild dude, but he did it just because that’s what successful people did at the time. He just wanted to be down, what a f**** tragedy. How can a person that went through slavery perpetuate the same evil on a person that looks just like him? It’s mind blowing. And shockingly, they’re making a movie about him. Ironically… It is called Space Jews.

So let's take a closer look. Unpacking Chappelle’s revisionist Jewish history of the South, we find that:

1.       At one time, Jews were oppressed and enslaved like blacks, but the whites let the Jews into their secret cabal of whiteness. The other whites then gave these Jewish “whites” land and their freedom.  

2.       The Jews were clever and sly, so the plantations they built did well and they got rich (like they always do).

3.       Once the Jews were rich, they forgot they themselves had been slaves in Egypt and enslaved the black man, treating him cruelly and subjecting him to all kinds of perversions. So shocking were these ugly Jewish deeds that even the (non-Jewish) white slave owners were appalled and took pains to protest.

4.       When confronted by the other whites, says Chappelle, the Jews made excuses for their horrid behavior to blacks. “It’s what successful people do," said the Jews, by Chappelle's account. "It’s what people did at that time to get ahead,” the Jews would say, according to Chappelle.

The Evil Jews Enslaved the Blacks

Chappelle, describing the Jews as evil, asks a question based on lies: How can a person that went through slavery perpetuate the same evil on a person that looks just like him? 

What is Chappelle REALLY asking? It's this:

  • How can the Jews, who were once slaves, enslave the black man? 
  • How can the Jews do the same things to the blacks, perpetrate the same evils, that the Egyptians once did to the Jews?

Arriving at the end of his "joke," Chappelle lands back where he started, at the movies: Not only is “the Jew” a cruel, rich, evil white oppressor of the black man, but he is celebrated for that fact in the movies and in Hollywood itself, which of course, is dominated by . . . “the Jew.”

Despite the overt antisemitism contained in Chappelle’s special, the Wikipedia entry on "The Closer" says not a peep on this subject. The entry does mention the Space Jews joke, but spells “Jews” with a lower case “j.” Under “critical reception” the entry quotes from Eric Deggan’s critical NPR review, decrying Chappelle for oversimplifying hate of various kinds.

"Untangling homophobia, transphobia, racism and white privilege requires a lot more effort and understanding than Chappelle makes here."

Wikipedia Buries the "A" Word

But the quote cited makes no mention of understanding or “untangling” antisemitism. That’s because Wikipedia wants you to believe that antisemitism doesn’t really signify in the official woke list of “hates.” Even Wikipedia, however, can’t quite avoid airing the truth. It would be too obvious an omission. Hence, we find the “A” word at last at the bottom of the page, in a footnote, in teeny letters, a further quote from Eric Deggan:

“[Chappelle knows] reviewers like me will quote the joke and criticize him for it, which I am. I don't really care what point he's trying to make; a joke that sounds like antisemitism gets a hard pass from me.”

Even a reviewer at the woke NPR knows that Chappelle is an antisemite. Wikipedia, however, saw it fit to bury that fact. Wikipedia was happy to note however, that "The Closer" “received various award nominations including for two Primetime Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Variety Special and Directing for a Variety Special.” 

Vindication! Not only did Chappelle get away with his antisemitic jokes, but he was nominated for awards in two separate categories! Jew-hate, for the win!

"Buying Time" Through False Contrition

Against this background, we arrive at today's big story: Dave Chappelle’s newest monologue, a defense of Kanye that further smears and maligns the Jewish people. It’s in his opening, where Chappelle suggests that if you want to be free to talk smack about kikes and still make money, you’ve got to dissemble and apologize to "the Jew”:

Before I start tonight, I just wanted to read a brief statement that I prepared. I denounce antisemitism in all its forms and I stand with my friends in the Jewish community. And that, Kanye, is how you buy yourself some time.

We'd already forgotten about Space Jews, but with Ye in the news, Chapelle decided to ride the tail of West's sudden notoriety, and make himself relevant, by reminding us that he too is an antisemite. How best might he illustrate this fact other than to use his platform to let us know that every time someone references “the Jews,” something bad happens to blacks.

I gotta tell you guys, I’ve probably been doing this for 35 years now and early my career, I learned that there are two words in the English language that you should never say together in sequence and those words are “The” and “Jews.” Never heard someone do good after they say that.

"Deathcon 3 on the Jews" a Nothing Burger

Chappelle wants us to know that the whole Kanye thing is a tempest in a teapot—that no one even remembers how the whole thing started. Chappelle depicts as a minor event Kanye’s threat to go “deathcon 3” on the Jews. Just innocent, meaningless, harmless words. An empty threat.

After all, what exactly can Kanye do to “the Jews?” Nothing. It was all just words.  

Can’t even remember how it started. I vaguely remember it started with a tweet — a strange tweet. It was like, “I’m feeling a little sleepy, I’m gonna get me some rest, but when I wake up, I’m gonna go DEFCON 3! On the Jews!’ And then he just went to bed. I was up all night worried. What is he going to do to the Jews?

Some of Chappelle’s Best Friends are Jewish

Naturally, some of Chappelle’s best friends are Jewish, which is why he can say these things.

I grew up around Jewish people. I have a lot of Jewish friends so I’m not freaked out by your culture. I know a little bit about it just from hanging around like, yeah let’s get out after school tomorrow and it’s like we can’t go out it’s sha na na tomorrow. Like, what? What is sha na na? I had so many questions, like why do some of your people dress like Run-DMC?

Chappelle next sets his sights on Adidas, not without cause. From Chappelle’s point of view, Adidas has a huge hutzpah ending Kanye’s contract, that is considering the sports shoe company's own notorious antisemitic past history of cozying up to the Third Reich. Chappelle says that Adidas cut ties with Kanye to erase the past and placate “the Jews.” About this, at least, Chappelle is not wrong:

We went on [the podcast] Drink Champs again and this time he was all mad about something. He said “I can say antisemitic things. And Adidas can’t drop me.” Adidas dropped that [expletive] immediately.  Ironically, Adidas was founded by Nazis and they were offended. The student has surpassed the teacher.
"The student has surpassed the master." The West family in better times, all smiles, all chummy with Louis Farrakhan, antisemite par excellence.

The Jews are a Hollywood Mob

But now as in the "The Closer," Chappelle must then go back to his favorite target, the Jews. This time he has the Jews dominating Hollywood. He likens them to a mob.

It was a big deal. [Ye] broke the show business rules. You know, because it’s a rule, the rule of perception. If they’re Black, then it’s a gang, if they’re Italians a mob, but if they’re Jewish, it’s a coincidence and you should never speak about it.

And of course, says Chappelle, the movie touted by Irving was only some minor weirdness, as was the Holocaust, and anyway, “the Jews” always blame their troubles on the blacks.

Kanye got in so much trouble, Kyrie got in trouble. Kyrie Irving posted a link to a movie that he had seen on Amazon, no caption on the post or nothing like that. But apparently this movie had some, I don’t know antisemitic tropes or something, and it was a weird title like “From He-Bro to Negro” or something … He was slow to apologize and then the list of demands to get back in their good graces got longer and longer and this, this is where, you know, I draw the line I know that Jewish people have been through terrible things all over the world but you can’t blame that on Black Americans, you just can’t…Because Kyrie Irving’s Black ass was nowhere near the Holocaust. In fact he’s not even certain it existed.

 

“In Hollywood—It’s a LOT of Jews”

As Chappelle describes it, it’s an all-out Jewish invasion. The Jews, he says, have taken over Hollywood but you’re not supposed to talk about it, or you’ll be called an antisemite:

In Hollywood — don’t want ya’ll to get mad at me. I’m just telling you this is just what I saw. It’s a lot of Jews. Like, a lot. But that doesn’t mean anything. There’s a lot of Black people in Ferguson, Missouri … I can see if you had some kind of issue, I mean, you might go out to Hollywood and you might start connecting some kind of lines and maybe adopt the delusion that the Jews run show business. It’s not a crazy thing to think. 

But it’s a crazy thing to say out loud.

Actually, no Dave Chappelle. It’s not crazy to say so at all. The Jews have been successful and predominant in many spheres (oops, I said "the Jews" and nothing bad happened). What IS crazy and hateful to say is that Jewish success is due to some kind of secret behind-the-scenes stuff. Some white conspiracy. 

Well, let me tell you something Dave Chappelle. Jews are not white. And it’s called “sweat equity.” We worked hard and sweated blood to get to where we are. Perhaps you did the same. 

The Jews Stifle Free (Hate) Speech

Dave Chappelle tricked Lorne Michaels, the creator of SNL, into clearing his monologue by switching out his monologue during the rehearsal. It makes sense Chappelle would do this, try to put one over on Michaels. Michaels is a Jew. And Chappelle says that “the Jews” use antisemitism to stifle free speech. If Chappelle hadn't tricked Michaels into thinking his monologue was going to be about something else entirely, Dave wouldn't have been allowed his (antisemitic) say:

It shouldn’t be this scary to talk about anything. It’s making my job incredibly difficult. And to be honest with you, I’m sick of talking to a crowd like this. I love you to death and I thank you for your support. And I hope they don’t take anything away from me… whoever they are.

He's wrong of course. The rantings of Ye, Irving, Chappelle, and James Baldwin before them, are not free speech to be tolerated, but hate speech that should be given no quarter and never condoned. It begins with speech and ends with people dying by violent means. And the people who do the dying are "the Jews," despite them conquering Hollywood and enslaving the world and all that.

Chappelle's latest monologue contains all the hallmarks of classic black antisemitism. "The Jews" are white. "The Jews" are rich. "The Jews" enslave the black man. "The Jews" are cruel. "The Jews" are a mob; they have taken over Hollywood; they stifle free speech and force the black man to bow his head and apologize for his hate, a hate that is only natural, in the light of the awful phenomenon that is "The Jew."  

Like regular, garden-variety antisemitism, black antisemitism is informed by hate and superstition, and not a little jealousy. And of course, hate and jealousy don’t do well in a vacuum—these emotions require a scapegoat, and somehow that scapegoat is always “the Jew.”

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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This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For 20 years and 40,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.

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