There are always discussions on how to teach the Holocaust in a way that young people can internalize the horror of what happened. These discussions become more prominent around Yom Hashoah.
At the same time, with the upcoming Yom Ha'atzmaut, Israel haters try to frame Israel as pure evil whose existence is itself a human rights crime and which reduces the security of Jews, not enhances.it.
Last week, pseudo rabbi Brant Rosen said this on Al Jazeera:
I responded with a tweet that received hundreds of Likes:
Here, "Rabbi" Brant Rosen argues on @AJEnglish to @marclamonthill that a military cannot protect Jews, and if Jews want to be safe they should just work in solidarity with other minorities to protect themselves in the Diaspora.
Six million Jews were unavailable for comment.
On Sunday night, I decided to combine these two themes.
I took actual photos of victims of the Holocaust, but I specifically chose photos that non-Jews could identify with. Except for the first, which as taken in the Birkenau camp before that family was murdered, I chose photos without the yellow star, without the emaciated victims. And I colorized them so they would look recent and not like they came from a long ago era.
I then wrote fairly angry posters noting that no one tried to save these Jews from being murdered - but if Israel existed, things might have been different.
I admit, this exercise really affected me as I was doing it. I was too emotionally drained after four posters to continue.
I don't know if others would be as impacted, but perhaps this is a direction that might be useful for teaching both about the Holocaust and the importance of Israel. It won't help for the many real Jew-haters out there (there are plenty of people on Twitter responding that Israel's crimes are worse than Nazi Germany's) but there will always be Jew-haters - the point is to reach normal people.
Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!
Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.
A pro-Palestinian activist who committed a series of attacks on Jews in New York City in 2021 and 2022 discussed bringing firebombs to a pro-Israel rally, bragged about antisemitic assaults and plotted how to evade law enforcement, according to federal prosecutors.
Saadah Masoud pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit hate crimes in federal court in November as part of a plea agreement. His sentencing for separate attacks on three Jews will be held on Friday in the Southern District Court of New York. He faces up to two years in prison.
In a sentencing submission last week, prosecutors laid out discussions Masoud held with his associates around the time of the crimes that indicated the attacks were planned and targeted people they believed to be Jewish or Israeli.
In May of 2021, around the time of a conflict between Israel and the Hamas terror group, Masoud discussed disrupting a pro-Israel rally in Manhattan in a group chat on the Signal messaging app.
The group discussed bringing weapons to the pro-Israel rally, including Molotov cocktails, prosecutors said.
One of the participants said, “Remember, don’t chant out Jews, it’s the Zionists,” apparently to evade allegations of antisemitism. Another participant in the group chat said, “Fuck all Jews.”
In a separate exchange, Masoud celebrated violence against Jews, saying, “I beat the shit out of three Zionists yesterday and didn’t even see a jail cell.”
“VIOLENT!! ONLY VIOLENCE… IN PALESTINE THEY WISHHH THEY COULD SMACK A ZIONIST AND NOT GET TORTURED TO DEATH. WE CAN THO!! And we’ll just get a [desk appearance ticket from the NYPD],” he said, according to prosecutors.
The day after Masoud and his associates held the group chat, they went to a pro-Israel protest and picked out a man wearing a Star of David while he was walking with his wife.
“Are you a fucking Jew?” Masoud asked the man, then punched him in the face. Afterward, he texted his associates, “no videos of me anywhere lmaooo. I’m Gucci. No face no case.”
... Masoud was arrested in June 2022. When he arrived at the courthouse, he asked a detective, “All this for one Jew?” Shortly after, an investigator overheard him saying he didn’t want any “Greenbergs” for lawyers, and when he received counsel, he demanded the attorney recite and spell his last name, apparently to check if he was Jewish.
... Masoud has ties to Within Our Lifetime Palestine, an activist group that regularly calls for an intifada and the destruction of Israel at rallies in New York, and urged the targeting of Jewish groups in the city, including by handing out maps of Jewish organization locations at a protest.
It’s what makes Jews one people even if they speak different languages, have different color skin, and observe Judaism with different practices. And so, the concepts and terminology that the anti-Israel left chooses to employ now actually pit anti-Israel zealotry against American anti-discrimination laws.
We counsel an updated application of Natan Sharansky’s famous Three D’s test. “Criticizing” Israeli Jews for being white colonizers does not merely aim to delegitimize Israel; it delegitimizes Jews by severing them from their constitutive national symbols, holy books, and beliefs. It demonizes Jews by casting them as “white occupiers” who exploit non-white people. And it engages in rank double standards against Jews by singling out for scrutiny, among all the nations of the world, their interrelated claims to their ancestral homeland and national unity.
Just imagine the uproar if whites on university campuses told Afro-Caribbean students that they were not really black and could not share the banner with black students from other parts of the world. The victims of such harassment would quickly and rightly have administrators in their corner. The school could lose its federal funding for allowing an out-group to tell an in-group who they are and who they are not, and which national bonds emerging from the mists of time are sufficient to confer unity. Yet that is what happens every time activists deploy the indigeneity canard to demonize Zionism as a colonialist project.
And this is how progressives tantalized by the success of the postcolonialist anti-racist movement in the United States have badly overplayed their hand. They have run headlong into the Civil Rights Act. Lawyers up to the task of defending Israel and American Jews can and should sue institutions that fail to protect Jews. The lawyers must identify and explain the horrific and patently anti-Semitic implications of calling Ashkenazi Jews “white”—not because there is anything wrong with being white, but because it is maliciously inaccurate—and calling Israel a colonialist state.
When campus activists call Israel “colonialist” or Israelis “white Europeans,” they trace Jewish history back only to Europe. But history is more than a millennium old, and Jews can trace their heritage back much further, all the way to Jerusalem and Beersheba and Yavneh, well before the Romans first renamed Judea “Palestine” to sever the Jewish connection to the land. Referring to Arabs as “indigenous” or “native” similarly rewrites history and the Jewish tradition by erasing the Jewish national and religious connection to the Land of Israel—possibly the most foundational element of Jewishness no matter how abstractly defined.
As elite institutions adopt the trendiest, crassest anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, the Jewish legal defense creates itself. Indigeneity may be a silly value to champion, but if that is the framework that progressives insist on, it will collapse under the weight of its own bankruptcy and hypocrisy. Postcolonial anti-Semitism will fall apart as soon as Israel’s defenders expose its delegitimization, double standards, and demonization for what they are: the oldest form of hatred, going by its latest name.
Jew-hatred is on the rise in the US. I’m not talking about antisemitism, I’m not calling it antisemitism. I’m talking about Jew-hatred. Antisemitism and Jew-hatred are not the same.
Jew-hatred is a visceral hate. It is emotional, it is not at all rational. Other than diving into the dark corners from which it emanates, there is almost no true response or method to combat Jew-hatred.
The only way to confront Jew-hatred is to make it unacceptable in public spheres. Like other behaviors that are unacceptable in public, Jew-hatred needs to be rejected. Racism is unacceptable, and so is Jew-hatred. Xenophobia is unacceptable, and so is Jew-hatred. Homophobia is unacceptable, and so is Jew-hatred.
Decent people need to step up and say a loud and clear “no” to those promoting and professing Jew-hatred. They need to say “stop” no matter how subtle the message. They need to send out their message on social media and in person.
There is no logic to Jew-hatred. And because it is illogical, there is no reasoning with Jew-haters. A Jew-hater cannot be convinced that he/she/they are wrong. There is only shaming. Shaming – public shaming and private shaming – is the only language they understand. It is the only message they will receive and internalize.
What is the difference between Jew-hatred and antisemitism?
Plain and simple, that is the difference between Jew-hatred and antisemitism. Antisemitism is a philosophy. Antisemitism is based on principles. It is wrong – but it is not visceral. It is based on a set of ideas.
Today’s Jew-hatred is filled more and more with anger and vitriol. Today’s Jew-hatred smacks of medieval-style Jew-hatred, which was deeply seeded in religious hate.
Social media allows for and even permits the free flow of this hatred. It goes unchecked. It flourishes.
In response to a series of anti-Semitic outbursts, several fashion companies severed their business dealings with the rapper Kanye West, as did the agency that represented him. Elliot Kaufman cautions against seeing this reaction as evidence of civic health:
The naïve view is that the refusal to defend West marks a sea shift in black attitudes toward Jews, transcending the impulse to defend the indefensible just because it was done by a fellow African American. The cynical view is that if West hadn’t first angered black people with his comment that slavery was “a choice,” and betrayed black leaders with his decision to put on the MAGA cap, the reaction would have been entirely different.
West now simply has reason to paint himself as a victim of Jewish power. Meanwhile, Kaufman writes, the forms of anti-Semitism that have particular purchase among African Americans are not going anywhere:
Any confrontation with black anti-Semitism incurs risk for Jews, but it is necessary. First, black anti-Semitism places traditional Jews in physical danger every day on the streets of Brooklyn and not only there. Many Jews have moved to neighborhoods where they can usually avoid being mugged by such a reality, but some won’t—or can’t afford to. They are owed practical, moral, and political support, including against progressives whose policies release criminal Jew-haters to the streets, where they can attack again.
Second, black anti-Semitism has a unique ability to strike at the heart of liberalism, the older kind that has often made exile in America seem for Jews like a vacation from history. Jewish success and prominence in America—taken by some as a standing insult—have hinged on liberal principles of merit, equality before the law, pluralism, free expression, and individual rights, as opposed to group privileges. Black anti-Semitism, in denying the legitimacy of Jewish success and prominence, is also an assault on those ruling principles. Its deeper meaning is to call the American system a fraud, a manipulation, and a conspiracy.
MEMRI: Nation of Islam Leader Louis Farrakhan on Kyrie Irving, Kanye West Antisemitism Scandals
In a speech livestreamed on The Collective 9 YouTube channel on November 10, 2022, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan spoke about the accusations of antisemitism that NBA star Kyrie Irving and rapper Kanye West have been facing recently. Farrakhan said that the Anti-Defamation League should look into the “horror” that their parents have done to blacks in America and throughout the world, and he said that Jews consider 1,000 black lives to be worth less than the fingernail of one Jew. He said that the Jews have not apologized to African Americans for the transatlantic slave trade or for the killing, raping, castration, and enslavement of blacks. He also claimed that the Jews are responsible for African Americans seeing themselves as “Tarzan”, as “blackies”, and as “little black sambo”. In addition, Farrakhan said that the Nation of Islam’s views on the Jews are based entirely on quotes from Jewish rabbis, scholars, and historians.
The MEMRI Lantos Project exposes anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial in the Middle East region and Middle Eastern communities in the West with the aim of supporting legislation and educating media and the general public.
What lessons can we learn from the rubbish-cluttered mind of Kanye West? We can start by drawing some important distinctions.
Mr. West’s is a particular kind of anti-Semitism. The left-wing activist Shaun King writes in Newsweek that “you don’t have to be white to be a white supremacist,” and that “Kanye West is now a full-blown white supremacist.” This is a category error.
The “white extinction” conspiracy theory promoted by white supremacists holds that Jews promote integration, miscegenation and civil rights as part of a plot to replace the white race. Mr. West appears to believe the opposite. “Jewish people have owned the black voice,” he said on a recent podcast, later speaking of black Americans “being signed to a [Jewish-owned] record label, or having a Jewish manager, or being signed to a Jewish basketball team, or doing a movie on a Jewish platform like Disney.”
That sort of talk sounds very much like the ravings of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, the world’s foremost black anti-Semite. “You can’t do nothing in Hollywood unless you go by them”—the Jews—Mr. Farrakhan said in a 2010 speech. “You a hip-hop artist? You can’t do nothing, you gotta go by them. You want to be a great sports figure? They own that plantation. Children of Israel, they got you jumping through hoops.”
Similarly, Mr. West’s claim that Planned Parenthood was founded by Jews to control the black population is the inverse of the white-supremacist notion that Jews have promoted abortion to eradicate whites. Again, Mr. West was merely echoing the Nation of Islam, which has long implicated Planned Parenthood in a supposed black “depopulation agenda.”
Trivia
Film was included on a recommended viewing list by the Congressional Black Caucus at the request of long time Democrat Party supporter Louis Farrakhan
Kanye West’s descent into anti-Semitic hysteria has been a clarifying moment for American Jews. We have found out who our friends are from their reaction or non-reaction to Kanye’s appalling statements. Unfortunately, not enough conservative and Republican leaders have spoken out. The Daily Wire’s Candace Owens’s incoherent defense of Kanye, who is a friend of hers, was disappointing. Hopefully she will reconsider and put some distance between herself and Kanye.
Much worse, however, is the case of Jason Whitlock. A black Christian conservative with 600,000 followers on Twitter, Whitlock works at Glenn Beck’s The Blaze and frequently appears on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show. He is not only defending Kanye’s anti-Semitic outbursts, but also engaging in anti-Semitism himself, attacking Jewish people with rhetoric one would expect to find only on a fringe neo-Nazi website.
In an article at The Blaze defending Kanye’s comments about Jews having too much power and controlling black lives, Whitlock wrote, “I’m not going to entertain the lie that progressive secular elites—black, Jewish, LGBTQ or feminists—wield no power in the United States. Miss me with that ‘trope.’ Denial of the mass power they’ve collected is just one of the many lies they use to avoid accountability.”
“On the surface, progressive secular black people, Jewish people, LGBTQ and feminists seem united in their hatred of white people,” he continued. “It’s not white people. It’s a hatred of Christianity that unites them. That hatred compels them to try to destroy anything that Christianity created, including the patriarchy, Western civilization and the United States of America.”
Blaming Jews for trying to destroy Christianity is one of anti-Semitism’s oldest libels, and it has led to centuries of Christian violence against Jews. Moreover, why single out Jews for promulgating left-wing policies that Whitlock believes are harming America? Are there no progressive Christians or Muslims in the U.S. who wield political power? Has Whitlock ever heard of former President Barack Obama? Current President Joe Biden? Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi? They all routinely cite Christian doctrine to promote left-wing values.
In 1892, Hermann Ahlwardt was elected to the German parliament on an explicitly anti-Semitic platform. Three years later he broke off from his party to found the “Anti-Semitic People’s Party.” Dovi Safier and Yehuda Geberer tell the story of his brief tour of United States in the same year, in which he was feted by the newly formed Anti-Semitic Society of America. At the time, Theodore Roosevelt was New York City’s police commissioner. Safier and Geberer cite the future president’s description of what followed: “While I was Police Commissioner of New York City, an anti-Semitic preacher from Berlin, Rector Ahlwardt, came to New York to preach a crusade against the Jews. Many Jews were much excited and asked me to prevent him from speaking and not to give him police protection. This, I told them, was impossible; and, if possible, would have been undesirable, because it would make him a martyr. The proper thing to do was to make him ridiculous. Accordingly, I sent a detail of police under a Jewish sergeant, and the Jew-baiter made his harangue under the active protection of some 40 police, every one of them a Jew.”
Safier and Geberer add: As a result, his U.S. tour wasn’t overly successful, and the American press was full of derision for his stated mission. When he arrived in Hoboken, New Jersey to deliver an address at the local anti-Semitic society, he was berated and beaten by the young Jewish crowd, causing him to draw his (illegally obtained) pistol and wave it at the crowd. This act landed him in prison for disorderly conduct and carrying a concealed weapon. Borrowing a page from Commissioner Roosevelt’s playbook, the authorities in Hoboken placed him in a cell together with his assailants—who surely didn’t file a complaint about overcrowding.
After Mahmoud Abbas yet again spouted antisemitic lies in Germany on Tuesday, Palestinian officials and pundits unanimously supported him.
Bassam al-Salihi, head of the People's Party and PLO Executive Committee member, wrote that Abbas' statement that Israel committed fifty "holocausts" against Palestinians was true. "President Abbas' statements express the position of all the Palestinians, and the unrelenting Israeli incitement against the Palestinian president is totally and completely rejected," he wrote on his Facebook page.
Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah movement also supported his statement. Fatah spokesman Munther al-Hayek said that Abbas' words were meant "to remind the world of the suffering of the Palestinian people and the massacres committed by Israel." If there is to be any apology, al-Hayek said, it should be to the Palestinian people "whose land was occupied and the most heinous crimes were committed in front of the eyes and ears of the world without the killer being held accountable."
Ma'an News Agency reported Abbas' statements as "bold" and dismissed criticism by Israel as "hysteria."
The editor of Amad strongly defended Abbas' antisemitism, saying that "the patriot must stand without hesitation, conditionality, or thinking in the battle to defend President Abbas’s words, and that they represent what every Palestinian inside and outside the homeland believes… It is a political moment that never accepts neutrality. Silence on the fascist entity's war against the content of President Abbas's words is a partnership in it..there is no consolation for the cowards and the trembling."
Wattan.net even went beyond Abbas' words, with a Jew-hating screed that said that Israel is guilty of far more than 50 "holocausts." By insisting that the Holocaust is a unique event, the editorial says, Jews believe that their lives are worth more than anyone else's. "The Zionist extremist voices that have become addicted to blackmailing the world are nothing but a follow-up to the idea of ethnic or religious discrimination linked to the illusion and myth of 'God’s Chosen People' attributed to a racist god, and a real estate and land dealer who is intolerant of a part of his creation, which does not fit the description of the Creator."
I could not find one condemnation of Abbas' words in Palestinian media.
For his part, Abbas' fake apology was an excuse to insult Israel again. He didn't apologize at all, but merely said that he "condemned the Holocaust in the strongest terms," which is as low a bar as one can imagine.
But Abbas then attacked Israel, and implied that what Israel does is worse than the Holocaust, saying, "the crimes and massacres committed against the Palestinian people since the Nakba at the hands of the Israeli forces... have not stopped to this day." Meaning, the Holocaust ended in the 1940s but Palestinian suffering has lasted for over seven decades. (This theme has been used often in Palestinian media.)
Among the anti-Israel activists I follow on social media, I could not find one condemning Abbas' words besides J-Street. This includes the self-described experts on antisemitism who follow he Middle East extensively like Linda Sarsour, Rashida Tlaib, Marc Lamont Hill, and Peter Beinart. Because to them, if antisemitism doesn't come from a white nationalist, it isn't antisemitism.
Their silence condones Abbas.
Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!
Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.
Hamas' Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar delivered an hour-long speech yesterday in which he threatened to attack thousands of synagogues worldwide.
Referring to a large photo of Israeli police responding to riots and attacks in Al Aqsa Mosque staged behind him, Sinwar said, “Whoever makes the decision to allow this photo to be repeated, the violation of Al-Aqsa — he has decided to allow the violation of thousands of synagogues all across the world.”
He warned that this could happen if Israelis set foot in the Temple Mount on Israel's Independence Day or Jerusalem Day.
This year, Yom Ha'Atzmaut is celebrated this coming Thursday, May 5. Jerusalem Day is May 29.
So far, no human rights group has shown the slightest concern over the threat. Neither have so-called "experts" on antisemitism Linda Sarsour or Rashida Tlaib or Marc Lamont Hill or Peter Beinart, all who have participated in panels on the topic of antisemitism.
Absurdly, Sinwar also claimed that Hamas is not interested in making this into a religious war. That's really amusing from an organization whose founding documents are steeped in calls for jihad, who praise "martyrdom operations" and whose many obituaries are laced with imagery of paradise awaiting their mujahadin ("holy warriors.")
Notably, Hamas seems slightly embarrassed by this blatant Jew-hatred. While that part of the speech was highlighted in the Hamas-oriented Felesteen newspaper and the Al Qassam website, the Hamas.ps website didn't transcribe that part of the speech - and the Hamas English site didn't even mention the speech at all as of this writing.
But Hezbollah's Al Manar English news site made that part of the speech its headline:
When those who claim to human rights activists and who pretend to be dead-set against antisemitism pointedly ignore a direct threat against Jews worldwide by genocidal jihadists, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that they share the same goal as the jihadists do.
Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!
Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.
In an exchange on Twitter, Marc Lamont Hill sadly admitted that rapper Ice Cube had posted some antisemitism, gently denouncing them as conspiracy theories that he, of course, never engages in:
Hill’s record indicates otherwise.
In 2018, Hill said that Israel “poisons the water” of Palestinians, echoing the antisemitic conspiracy theory of Jews poisoning water that has been hurled since the Black Death of 1348.
Last year he said that the entire State of Israel created a category of Mizrahi Jew out of thin air for as part of a “racial and political project that transformed Palestinian Jews (who lived peacefully with other Palestinians) into the 20th century identity category of ‘Mizrahi’ as a means of detaching them from Palestinian identity.”
While one can argue that Mizrahi Jews from Morocco, Jerusalem, Syria and Yemen have different customs, they have far more in common with each other, and accept the same interpretations of Jewish law as each other compared to Jews who lived in Europe. For all of Israel’s failures in integrating the Mizrahi Jews properly in the 1950s, putting them in the same category had zero to do with any “Palestinian identity” that they wanted to “detach” them from.
That is a conspiracy theory, and worse, it is an attempt to erase the identity of Jews who identify as Mizrahi.
Hill’s love of conspiracy theories about “Zionists” doesn’t end there.
Last year Hill participated in a conference with other prominent anti-Israel activists, whose criticisms of Israel are published as op-eds in the most influential media outlets, claiming that they are being “silenced” by Zionists. Being fired from CNN has not slowed down Hill’s anti-Israel activism – in fact, it probably accelerated it – and there is no “silencing” going on.
That is a conspiracy theory.
An example of how Hill has not been “silenced” is his bizarre comments at the Netroots Summit also last year, where he said that news outlets like CNN, ABC and NBC are “Zionist organizations.” He described a Zionist conspiracy behind the news that he then quickly denied was a conspiracy:
“They’re like, I want to work for Fox, or I want to work for ABC or NBC or whoever. I want to tell these stories. You have to make choices about where you want to work. And if you work for a Zionist organization, you’re going to get Zionist content. And no matter how vigorous you are in the newsroom, there are going to be two, three, four, 17, or maybe one powerful person — not going to suggest a conspiracy — all news outlets have a point of a view. And if your point of view competes with the point of view of the institution, you’re going to have challenges.”
When you say that Jews control the media, you are peddling an antisemitic conspiracy theory. But when you say Zionists control the media, you are celebrated as an anti-racist fighter.
At that same summit, fellow panelist Noura Erekat invented a new conspiracy theory about an “explicit project” led by Ashkenazi Jews in Israel to avoid “sully[ing] the blood line with becoming dark and oriental” by marrying Mizrahi Jews. Hill didn’t say a word against that. (Her theory is complete fiction – today, some 20% of children in Israel are born to parents of marriages between Ashkenaz and Mizrahi Jews.)
Finally, Marc Lamont Hill still proudly associates with Louis Farrakhan, and while he has expressed discomfort with Farrakhan’s anti-LGBTQ preachings, he has never said a word against his antisemitism – including his rabid antisemitic conspiracy theories such as that Jews were behind the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
There is no difference between saying Jews poison the wells or Israelis poison the wells, between saying Jews control the media or Zionists control the media, between claiming Jews have supernatural powers to silence critics or that Zionist have that power. The fact is that in order to believe in an Israel of unparalleled evil, one must believe in the same kinds of conspiracy theories that traditional antisemites have believed about Jews over the centuries. And Marc Lamont Hill is an enthusiastic purveyor of these conspiracy theories.
He justifies riots by calling them “rebellions” – with lots of video showing things burning. things like shops and other buildings owned by people who have nothing to do with any racism, or who are often people of color themselves. You know – what he would call “collective punishment.”
Then, however, he quotes Martin Luther King Jr. to justify rioting. He accurately quotes him as saying “the riot is the language of the unheard.” But King wasn’t justifying and praising rioting like Hill is. He said:
Now I wanted to say something about the fact that we have lived over these last two or three summers with agony and we have seen our cities going up in flames. And I would be the first to say that I am still committed to militant, powerful, massive, non-violence as the most potent weapon in grappling with the problem from a direct action point of view. I'm absolutely convinced that a riot merely intensifies the fears of the white community while relieving the guilt. And I feel that we must always work with an effective, powerful weapon and method that brings about tangible results. But it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the negro poor has worsened over the last twelve or fifteen years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.
King is very much against riots, although he is explaining why they occur – in the context of continuing inequality. Hill, however, is not advocating non-violence. He is not warning of the negative consequences of violence, or of the danger of them spiraling out of control. Hill explicitly says that “we” must get the message across by “damaging their property and making them feel as unsafe as we feel every single day.”
Of course, then he says the shouldn’t just burn stuff down. Right after saying they must damage “their” property. He then calls destroying and looting a Target “shutting down a Target” as if they simply picketed the store. He threatens that “we” will continue to burn down cities until white people give blacks respect.
This is as far from Martin Luther King as you can get. How dare Hill quote King.
Why should anyone be surprised that an apologist for Palestinian terror is also an apologist for antifa-style terror?
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
Temple University
professor Marc Lamont Hill recently made an astonishing claim when he
declared:
“I literally study Yemeni and Moroccan Jews for a living.”
Perhaps Professor Hill doesn’t earn his living at Temple
University, because the subjects
(media and education) he teaches there seem to have absolutely
nothing to do with the study of Yemeni and Moroccan Jews. I was also
unable to find any scholarly study of the history of Yemeni and
Moroccan Jews authored by Hill.
But while Hill’s
claim looks very much like a pathetic attempt to assert academic
expertise, it’s noteworthy that he was apparently trying to create
an aura of authority for a project he has been working on. As Hill
announced: “I finished a film that devotes 20% to Mizrahis [i.e.
Middle Eastern Jews]. And I talk about them regularly.”
The film Hill
referred to is apparently “Black in the Holy Land”, and you can
watch the trailer on YouTube
– but before you do so, you should read an EoZ post
from last February. Amazingly enough, the trailer for Hill’s
“documentary” starts off with convicted terrorist Ali Jiddah, who
“planted four hand grenades on Strauss Street in downtown Jerusalem
in 1968. The blasts injured nine Israelis.”
Jiddah served 17
years in prison and was released in a prisoner swap. Since then, he
has devoted himself to demonizing Israel, and as he told
the Times of Israel a few years ago: “I am satisfied, and I
am convinced that the work I am doing today is more effective than
the bomb I planted in 1968.”
While the film is
apparently not yet released, it’s clear what to expect: if your
trailer prominently features a convicted terrorist who hopes to
achieve with words what he previously tried to achieve with bombs,
you really give your game away.
So it was hardly
surprising that Marc Lamont Hill wasn’t pleased when well-known
Israeli activist and writer Hen Mazzig recently wrote an excellent
article
that was published in the Los Angeles Times under the title
“No, Israel isn’t a country of privileged and powerful white
Europeans.”
If you missed the
heated exchange that developed between Hen and Hill on social media,
you can catch up by reading a Jerusalem Postreport
about it. Hill’s criticism of Hen’s widely read article included
the preposterous claim that “the 20th century identity category of
‘Mizrahi’ [i.e. Middle Eastern Jews]” was created “as a means
of detaching them from Palestinian identity.” According to Marc
Lamont Hill, those who are now considered Mizrahi should apparently
be called “Palestinian Jews” and we should all remember that they
“lived peacefully with other Palestinians.”
Well, if Professor Hill studies “Yemeni and Moroccan Jews for a
living,” he presumably knows that they cannot really be described
as “Palestinian Jews.” Those Jews who lived among “other
Palestinians” – meaning presumably the non-Jews in the area that
the Romans designated as “Palestine” – had to endure the fate
of an oppressed minority ruled by their conquerors. And if we want to
consider the barely century-old history since the local Arabs
actually started to consider themselves as Palestinians, we find that
the Palestinian leader of the time was the man who started his career
by instigating murderous pogroms, and who later became notorious as
“Hitler’s mufti.” Incidentally, the mufti was an early
proponent of boycotts and would arguably deserve to be honored as the
father
of BDS. Under his leadership, “‘Filasteen Arduna wa’al
yahud Kilabuna’ (Palestine is our land and the Jews are our dogs)”
and “‘Itbach al Yahud’ (slaughter the Jews)” were the first
rallying cries of Palestinian
nationalism in 1920.
For the narrative
that undergirds Marc Lamont Hill’s vile
anti-Israel activism, this history has to be ignored. It’s no
less obscene than Rashida Tlaib’s recent attempt
to rewrite history by claiming that the Palestinians somehow provided
a “a safe haven” to Jews. But at least Tlaib doesn’t claim to
be “one of the leading intellectual voices” in the US, and
she doesn’t claim to “literally study Yemeni and Moroccan Jews
for a living.” As it happens, my dearest friends include both a
Yemeni and a Moroccan Jew, and if Marc Lamont Hill ‘studied’
them, he could learn a lot.
But as it is, we can
anticipate that Hill’s forthcoming “documentary” will document
first and foremost why Hill has fans both among supposedly
“progressive” anti-Israel activists and virulent Jew-haters like
Farrakhan’s Nation
of Islam and David
Duke.
________________________________
[EoZ]: This article inspired me to look at some previous posts of mine about the history of how Jews lived in Morocco and Yemen. I tweeted this today:
Absurdly, @MarcLamontHill says "I literally study Yemeni and Moroccan Jews for a living" and he says they lived peacefully among Muslims. Ali Bey al Abbasi was the pen name of a traveler who described the lives of Jews in Morocco in 1805 quite differently.
There are plenty of examples of contemporaneous studies of Jews in Morocco describing how they were humiliated, daily, by Muslims there.
And Morocco was one of the best places for Jews to live!
Here you can see several attacks against Jews in Yemen between 1908 and 1913.
Marc Lamont Hill is not a scholar. He wants to whitewash history, ,not describe it.
This shows that his antipathy isn't against Zionists - but Jews.
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How can you satirize the absurdity of a leader of the Women's March, a huge rock star, a documentary maker who used to be a commentator on CNN and a sportswriter for a national publication complaining that they are being "silenced" at a public event at a major university?
“Israel, Free Speech, and the Battle for Palestinian Human Rights” is the topic of an upcoming event at the University of Massachusetts Amherst that is already drawing its own controversy, including opposition from Anti-Defamation League, or ADL, whose mission is to fight anti-Semitism. The panel, titled “Not Backing Down,” is being put on by the Media Education Foundation and will feature prominent figures who have spoken out against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and blockade of Gaza. Some of the speakers have been labeled as “anti-Semites.”
Among the speakers: Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters, an outspoken advocate for Palestinian rights who supports a cultural boycott of Israel as part of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, or BDS; Palestinian-American political activist Linda Sarsour, the co-chair of the Women’s March who also supports BDS; Marc Lamont Hill, a professor and political commentator who CNN fired last year for remarks he gave at the United Nations in support of Palestinian rights and a boycott of Israel; and Dave Zirin, sports editor at The Nation magazine who has been a vocal critic of the Israeli government.
Sut Jhally, a UMass Amherst communications professor and executive director of the Media Education Foundation, is the organizer of the event. Jhally himself has faced backlash over his film “The Occupation of the American Mind,” which “explores how the Israeli government, the U.S. government, and the pro-Israel lobby have joined forces, often with very different motives, to shape American media coverage of the conflict in Israel’s favor,” according to the film’s website.
“We’re not really intimidated anymore by this selective outrage,” said Ananya Bhasin, who is part of the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. “This event really is about silencing, so, the more silencing we get, the more it solidifies why this event needs to take place.”
Zirin, who is Jewish, also takes issue with those who have said Sarsour and the other panelists traffic in anti-Semitism. That rhetoric, Zirin said, is an “old tactic that’s meant to silence debate and chill discussion.”
I'm sorry, but have any of these people been "silenced?" Have they been intimidated into not speaking their minds?
These "silenced" critics of Israel - who often traffic in antisemitism as well - somehow manage to get on the front pages of major media. Their tweets get retweeted thousands of times by their fans.
It is absurd.
If anything, when people point out any antisemitism they traffic in, like Marc Lamont Hill's accusation that Israeli Jews are poisoning Palestinians' water, that doesn't get mentioned in the major media in stories about Hill. He's regarded as being merely a "pro-Palestinian activist."
That is what silencing looks like.
I also tweeted about the hypocrisy going on here:
Upcoming UMass conference with @lsarsour, @marclamonthill and @rogerwaters:: "We hate when those racist, colonialist, baby-killing, water poisoning, America controlling 'Zionists' try to silence us by calling us antisemitic." pic.twitter.com/b7MCu6E957
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Marc Lamont Hill, who was recently fired from CNN for his rabid hate of Israel, is releasing a documentary about supposed Israeli racism.
The trailer starts off with an interview with a self-described "Afro-Palestinian" who says that Israeli Jews oppress his people not only for being Palestinian but for being black.
The narrator for that section of the video is a terrorist.
His name is Ali Jiddah and his father came from Chad. But he considers himself a "Palestinian."
Ali Jiddah planted four hand grenades on Strauss Street in downtown Jerusalem in 1968. The blasts injured nine Israelis and Jiddah spent 17 years in Israeli prison. His cousin Mahmoud also served 17 years for a similar attack; the two were released in 1985 in a prisoner swap. Fatima Barnawi, daughter of a Nigerian father and Palestinian mother, has the dubious distinction of being the first female Palestinian arrested on terrorism charges. As a member of Fatah, she planted a bomb in the Zion Theater in downtown Jerusalem in October 1967. Although it didn’t explode, she was sentenced to 30 years in prison, of which she served 10 before being exiled.
After his release from prison in 1985, Jiddah worked first as a journalist, then started giving alternative tours of Jerusalem’s Old City, showing the Palestinian perspective of life under Israeli rule.
Tailor made for Marc Lamont Hill.
JTA described the bombing attacks in Jerusalem in 1968 this way:
Sunday night’s grenade explosions were described by observers as the most serious terrorist acts on Israeli soil since the June, 1967 Six-Day War and were obviously the work of organized professionals. The grenades, each with a Chinese-made chemical timing device, were planted in central parts of West Jerusalem, concealed in trash bins and in wastepaper cans attached to lamp posts. Five of them exploded between 9 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. local time but nine of the 10 injured persons were struck by fragments from a single grenade that detonated in a trash bin on Strauss Street, near the Bikur Holim Hospital, about 100 yards from the city’s main business crossroads.
There was an entire documentary made about Jiddah last year, that you can see here.
Some of what he says is word for word identical with the excerpts in Hill's forthcoming documentary. And they are lies.
Jiddah claims that he was jailed as a "political prisoner" for "political activities."
To prove how racist Israel supposedly is, he mentions that Israel in the 1980s (actually, 1990s) would not accept blood from Ethiopian Jews because their blood was "dirty" and Shimon Peres defended that decision. (In reality, because the incidences of HIV among the immigrants at the time were considered unacceptably high at about 1%, and the Israeli officials accepted and quietly discarded the blood so as not to embarrass them. When the news came out the Ethiopians rioted. Peres opened up an inquiry into the circumstances of the decision. The US didn't accept blood donations from Haitians and sub-Saharan Africans - including Ethiopians - starting in 1990 for the same reasons.)
Jiddah doesn't mention that he was a member of the PFLP terror group. He might still be - in 2008, when asked if he was still active in the group, he answered, "Well if I admitted to it, it would mean I would have to go back to jail again... But I will tell you... I’m addicted to politics and especially to the policy of the PFLP." (He also said about President Obama: "for me, he is not black, he is a coconut, black on the outside, totally rotten, corrupted, white on the inside.")
Ali Jiddah and Yasir Arafat after he was released from prison in a swap
In the TOI interview, he admitted that he planted the bombs:
“Due to the responses from my clients I am satisfied, and I am convinced that the work I am doing today is more effective than the bomb I planted in 1968,” he said.
In other words, he decided that it is easier to destroy Israel by pushing lies to tourists and reporters who don't even bother to check out the truth - or, in Marc Lamont Hill's case, journalists who actively try to hide the truth.
(h/t Petra)
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SJPLeaks has audio of Marc Lamont Hill saying in September that the pro-Palestinian movement must not "fetishize non-violence", essentially saying that he supports violent "resistance" to Israel - which all Palestinians understand to mean attacking Jewish civilians (and only Jewish civilians.)
This is interesting but not new, since he made the same point in his UN speech.
What is new is that in this audio, Hill accuses Israel of poisoning the water of Palestinians.
The slander that Jews poison the water of non-Jews is a classic antisemitic blood libel that Jew-haters have been pushing since the Black Death of 1348.
Hill is not only accusing Jews of poisoning the water but also of deliberately murdering Palestinian children.
If a far-right personality would say these things, the Left would be merciless on how this is absolute proof of antisemitism. Guess what? This is bona fide proof of Marc Lamont Hill's antisemitism.
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Marc Lamont Hill has an impressive biography and record of achievements as an academic, activist and TV personality. On his own website, he describes himself as “one of the leading intellectual voices in the country.” His Facebook page has almost 72K followers, on Twitter he has 318K, and on Instagram almost 87K. So unfortunately, it matters that he seems to have a bit of a soft spot for Palestinian terrorism.
Earlier this month, Hill opined on Twitter that “Trump’s position on Israel/Palestine is repugnant. His call for Palestine to ‘reject hatred and terrorism’ is offensive & counterproductive.”
When the tweet came to the attention of Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg several days later and he professed to be a “bit flummoxed”, Hill responded somewhat defensively, suggesting that “the context is missing” and that “[p]eace will not come from demanding action from only one side.” He later stated in exchanges with other Twitter users that he found it “offensive to only call on Palestinians to ‘behave’, while normalizing/ ignoring the violence of the occupation;” he also rejected it as “offensive” to compare “Palestinian resistance to settler-colonialism to the actions of ISIS,” and he declared: “We all agree that hatred and terrorism are bad things. The issue is who gets to define each term, and under what conditions.”
Right… Obviously, it’s appallingly presumptuous of those Israelis to define it as “terrorism” when Palestinians murder and maim civilians who are having pizza for lunch, who celebrate Passover or attend services in a synagogue, who ride a bus, go out for dinner and entertainment, or just go to sleep in their bed at home. And it’s of course also terribly presumptuous of those Israelis to call it “hatred” when the murderous perpetrators of such attacks are celebrated by Palestinians as heroes, who get handsomely paid and have buildings or events named in their honor. And really – who on earth would think of “hatred and terrorism” when the Gaza-based Wa’ed Band for Islamic Art produces a cute cartoon clip “depicting Israelis trembling in fear and fleeing the country,” while the band’s great musicians sing “My rockets long for you, and they will rain down on you;” “I’m coming for you with a gun, or with an axe and a knife – or I could run over you with my car.”
Hatred and terrorism??? Nah – just funky “Islamic Art” illustrating what “Palestinian resistance to settler-colonialism” is all about, right, Prof. Hill?
After all, Marc Lamont Hill has stated very clearly that he is “not anti Israel;” and he emphasized: “I’ve fought, and continue to fight, anti-semitism my entire life. But i oppose occupation of Gaza.”
Well, actually, in August 2014, when Hill declared his opposition to the occupation of Gaza, it was just a few weeks to the ninth anniversary of Israel’s complete withdrawal from Gaza – which, Israelis hoped, would reduce hatred and terrorism and perhaps even be a major step towards a peace agreement. It didn’t work out as hoped: “Since Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005, terrorists have fired more than 11,000 rockets into Israel [until 2014].”
Of course, Hill might find it offensive to call the Palestinians who fire the rockets “terrorists;” instead, he might prefer to see them described as ordinary folks who engage in “Palestinian resistance to settler-colonialism” and thus inspire artists like the Wa’ed Band for Islamic Art.
A few months after Hill tweeted about not being anti-Israel and fighting antisemitism, while just opposing the non-existent occupation of Gaza, he joined a group of “Dream Defenders” – dreaming about “the destruction of the political and economic systems of Capitalism and Imperialism as well as Patriarchy” – on a visit to “Palestine” (he has denied ever having been to Israel). William Jacobson posted about this visit at Legal Insurrection under the fitting title: “Wow, Marc Lamont Hill drank the anti-Israel Kool-Aid.”
From a propaganda video produced by the group, Jacobson cut a must-see clip showing Hill during a “Solidarity Demonstration” in Nazareth – which is in Israel, as everyone who doesn’t oppose the existence of the world’s only Jewish state will know – with Hill speaking to the camera [my emphasis]:
“We came here to Palestine to stand in love and revolutionary struggle with our brothers and sisters;
We come to a land that has been stolen by greed and destroyed by hate;
We come here and we learn laws that have been co-signed in ink but written in the blood of the innocent and we stand next to people who continue to courageously struggle and resist the occupation;
People continue to dream and fight for freedom;
From Ferguson to Palestine the struggle for freedom continues.”
When someone who speaks these lines while standing in an Israeli city claims that he has always fought, and will always fight antisemitism, the most benevolent explanation is that this guy simply doesn’t know that for centuries, Jew-haters have invoked the greedy Jew who steals, the hateful Jew who destroys, and the Jew who is after “the blood of the innocent”. And for centuries, Jew-haters have always believed that they were just telling it as it was…
In fall 2015, Hill published an op-ed under the title “Why Every Black Activist Should Stand With Rasmea Odeh.” Again, one could note that people who fight antisemitism usually don’t advocate solidarity with a convicted terrorist murderer of two young Jews. But as far as Hill is concerned, Odeh is a “venerable woman” and “a Palestinian freedom fighter being railroaded for her commitment to justice,” whose story “must also be understood as a Black story. A story of global resistance to colonial power.” After all, as Hill emphasizes, Odeh was arrested “by the Israelis in Palestine,” and, after enduring “over 20 days of vicious rape, and other physical and psychological torture,” the completely innocent “Palestinian freedom fighter” was unfairly convicted “by the Israelis in Palestine.”
Those “Israelis in Palestine” are real evil, aren’t they.
Almost a year before Hill wrote his vile apologia for Odeh, William Jacobson had published a thorough documentation showing that “Rasmea Odeh [was] rightly convicted of Israeli supermarket bombing and U.S. immigration fraud.” Legal Insurrection published about two dozen additional posts on the Odeh case before Hill wrote his piece – that is to say, if he wanted to get information on Odeh to check the reliability of the material circulating in his activist echo chamber, he could have easily done so.
Needless to say, Hill is also an ardent BDS supporter, and the goal of BDS is of course to rid the world of its only Jewish state. As Hill’s good friend, BDS leader Omar Barghouti put it so hopefully all the way back in 2004, when he denounced the two-state solution as an immoral ploy to save Zionism and eagerly anticipated “the final chapter of the Zionist project:” “We are witnessing the rapid demise of Zionism, and nothing can be done to save it, for Zionism is intent on killing itself. I, for one, support euthanasia.”
But as far as Hill is concerned [archived], “Omar” is admirably devoted to “the work of creating peace and justice for the vulnerable.”
Perhaps we can all agree that Omar Barghouti is as devoted to “the work of creating peace and justice for the vulnerable” as Marc Lamont Hill is devoted to fighting antisemitism?
Let’s conclude with a post by Hill [archived] from last August about the man the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has described as “the leading anti-Semite in America,” while the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) calls him “an anti-Semite who routinely accuses Jews of manipulating the U.S. government and controlling the levers of world power,” heading an organization that has “earned … a prominent position in the ranks of organized hate.”
But Hill greatly enjoyed the company of Louis Farrakhan, the notorious leader of the Nation of Islam: “Been blessed to spend the last day with Minister Louis Farrakhan. An amazing time of learning, listening, laughing, and even head nodding to music. God is Great.”
However, just to be clear: among “progressives”, Hill is in good company with his admiration for Farrakhan. As I have recently documented, two leading organizers of the Women’s March are ardent fans of Farrakhan, and while their beloved “sister” Linda Sarsour hasn’t offered gushing praise for him, she has given a strident speech at one of his major events, and embraces the Nation of Islam as “an integral part” of “the history of Islam in America” and as “part of one ummah, one family. #Islam.”
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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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