Jewish immigrants weren't "white" in the US as recently as 1952

From JTA, 70 years ago: August 20, 1952:

The Visa Division of the State Department, which had refrained from listing Jews as such on visa applications, is adopting a new system by which all Jews must be so identified. This was confirmed today by State Department sources.

Visa officials explained that the new listing is required because of “ethnic” data demanded by the McCarran-Walter Omnibus Immigration Act. The act goes into effect on December 24.

Anticipating the application of the new act, visa chief Herve J. L’Heureux has issued preliminary orders to consular officers to elicit information on whether or not applicants are Jewish. The Visa Division has cited section 222-A of the McCarran-Walter Act as its authority. This section requires that each alien “shall state his race and ethnic classification.”

A Visa Division source said Jews would be identified as a “special group” but that he did not yet have access to the “new details which are being worked out.” 

Despite the fact that the new law is not yet in effect, Jewish visa applicants have already been asked if they were Jewish as a point of information. 

September 11:

Immigration attorneys here point out that aliens who fail to provide an “ethnic classification” which satisfies the consular authorities may be arbitrarily denied visas under the new act. The penalty for not telling the truth is to be denied a visa, yet no definition is furnished of what constitutes the various “ethnic classifications.”   

Finally, on September 18, after a month of criticism:

Eight national Jewish agencies issued a statement today announcing receipt of assurances from the State Department that “existing State Department policy does not require questioning of applicants for visas as to whether they are Jewish” and that “where consular officials inquire if applicants are Jewish, they do so without authority and in violation of State Department policy.”

But for a while in 1952, Jews who wanted to immigrate to the US were considered non-Caucasian and required to identify themselves as such. And they could potentially have been denied visas based on their Jewishness.

The co-author of the Act, Pat McCarran, definitely had limiting Jewish immigration in mind when he wrote it. "Senator Pat McCarran (D-Nevada), the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, proposed an immigration bill to maintain status quo in the United States and to safeguard the country from Communism, "Jewish interests", and undesirables that he deemed as external threats to national security."

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ElderToons: The State Department on Abu Akleh

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Ben and Jerry's sells to lots of countries that commit human rights abuses

Ben and Jerry's is suing its own parent company Unilever for selling rights to manufacture its products to an Israeli company.  

When the Unilever announced the deal, Ben and Jerry's said that "We continue to believe it is inconsistent with Ben & Jerry's values for our ice cream to be sold in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. "

Here is a list of countries that Ben and Jerry's happily sells its products to up until last year:

I did a quick survey of the human rights records of some of these countries, based on NGO reports and the US State Department. Here are some results, and the list of human rights abuses is far from complete.

Australia	Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people comprise 29 percent of Australia’s adult prison population, but just 3 percent of the national population.
Austria	Excessive use of force by police; asylum seekers deported
Bahamas	Death penalty, mistreatment of migrants, discrimination against LGBTQ+
Belgium	Racial profiling by the police, inhumane prisons
Brazil	In 2020, police killed 6,416 people. More than half of the victims were young Black men.
Czech Republic	Roma children experience discriminatory segregation in schools
Dominican Republic	Unlawful or arbitrary killings by government security forces; criminalization of abortion
Estonia	Highest gender pay gap in the EU
France	Violent police attacks on peaceful protesters. Anti-Muslim speech by officials.
Jamaica	Unlawful and arbitrary killings by government security forces;  life-threatening conditions in prisons; law against homosexuality
Mexico	Police, prosecutors and the military regularly commit human rights violations, including arbitrary detention, torture, extrajudicial killings.
New Zealand	Asylum seekers are placed in prison and mistreated by criminals while being processed.
Philippines	ICC investigating crimes against humanity in "war on drugs"
Poland	Laws banning abortions
Singapore	Death penalty, government goes after freedom of speech and assembly
Thailand	Torture, no freedom of assembly or speech
Trinidad &Tobago	Death penalty, unlawful or arbitrary killings by police

Even the countries universally considered the leaders in human rights - Finland, Sweden and Norway - have been accused of discriminating against the Sámi people in various ways, such as attacking their culture and limiting their land rights. 

Not to mention Ben and Jerry's home country of the United States, which according to Amnesty has the death penalty, excessive police brutality, armed forces throughout the world that often kills civilians, and limited access to abortions in some states.

Is Ben and Jerry's OK selling to countries where homosexuality is illegal? Where abortions are illegal? Where the government security forces torture detainees, and violently break up public peaceful demonstrations? Where minorities are not protected and actively discriminated against? Where incarceration of minorities is way out of proportion to their population?

It sure sounds like this is not a problem for them.

No, the only country that Ben and Jerry's publicly says is so reprehensible that it won't sell there without it changing its own laws is Israel, where the crime that is so reprehensible to justify this singular treatment is that Jews build houses in their ancestral homeland, nearly all of it on land that no human being ever lived before.

Anyone can dissect any country's human rights record, in order to find excuses to be prejudiced against that country - while pretending that it is really a righteous position. 

If people decided that they want to cancel, say, Trinidad and Tobago, they could find lots of human rights abuses to justify their decision. But the hate comes first, the justification comes later. 

Which is exactly the case with Israel. The hate, which is by definition modern antisemitism, comes first; the justification comes later. This is why Israel is accused of such a huge variety of human rights abuses in so many areas - not because Israel is guilty of them, but because there is such an intense desire to demonize Israel that literally thousands of people are paid full time to scrutinize Israel from every angle to justify animosity towards the Jewish state. And when they run out of things to accuse Israel of, there is an academic cottage industry to create new ones. 

The many real human rights abuses listed above do not get the publicity that the mostly imaginary abuses attributed to Israel get. 

When you look hard enough, you can find a reason to justify hating any country. And when the bulk of that effort goes towards the only country that has a Jewish majority, it is pretty obvious that human rights is not the real reason for the scrutiny. 

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US just trying to make Abu Akleh go away - and throwing Israel under a bus

How can these two facts be both true?

After an extremely detailed forensic analysis, independent, third-party examiners, as part of a process overseen by the U.S. Security Coordinator (USSC), could not reach a definitive conclusion regarding the origin of the bullet that killed Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. Ballistic experts determined the bullet was badly damaged, which prevented a clear conclusion.

In addition to the forensic and ballistic analysis, the USSC was granted full access to both Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Palestinian Authority (PA) investigations over the last several weeks. By summarizing both investigations, the USSC concluded that gunfire from IDF positions was likely responsible for the death of Shireen Abu Akleh.  The USSC found no reason to believe that this was intentional but rather the result of tragic circumstances during an IDF-led military operation against factions of Palestinian Islamic Jihad on May 11, 2022, in Jenin, which followed a series of terrorist attacks in Israel.

What actual evidence is this conclusion based on? Certainly the PA didn't provide any. In fact, so far, there has not been a single bit of evidence that the IDF was responsible, at least not publicly released, outside the admission that they shot in her general direction a handful of times. 

This appears to be less about finding out the truth and more about making the incident go away. Biden is coming to Israel and right now, both Israel and the US want to make sure that there aren't any ugly incidents. This way they don't rile up the Palestinians too much, and the White House can tell the 24 senators who demanded an investigation that it was done as best as possible, and the White House also takes some of the heat off Israel by saying it wasn't done intentionally.

The actual truth? The likelihood that Palestinian terrorists killed Shireen Abu Akleh? Those just get in the way of the upcoming trip. 

So the truth is buried.

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US State Department Religious Freedom Report seems to OPPOSE religious freedom for Jews on the Temple Mount

The US State Department's 2021 Report on International Religious Freedom was recently released. It has quite a large section on Israel, much of it about religious coercion by Orthodox in Israel towards other denominations. 

But one theme on that and the West Bank/Gaza page was seemingly against religious freedom. 

When it discusses Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount, the tone of the report is decidedly negative, which is quite strange for a report that is supposed to support freedom and rights for religion:

According to local media, some Jewish groups performed religious acts such as prayers and prostration on the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount despite the ban on non-Islamic prayer.  The Israeli government reiterated that overt non-Islamic prayer was not allowed on the grounds of the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount.  NGOs, media, and Jewish Temple Mount advocacy groups continued to report that in practice, police generally allowed discreet non-Muslim prayer on the site.  The news website Al-Monitor reported in October that although the country’s two chief rabbis repeatedly said Jews were not to set foot in the Temple Mount out of concern they could inadvertently step into an area which, in Jewish law, it was forbidden to enter unless one was ritually pure.  In recent years, some Jews had entered the mosque and tried to offer prayers. 

No Jews entered the mosque. The State Department is adopting the absurd recent Palestinian claim that the entire Temple Mount is a mosque. (If it was, then no Muslim would be allowed to wear shoes on the entire complex!)  

In August, the New York Times reported that Rabbi Yehuda Glick, whom the newspaper described as a “right-wing former lawmaker,” led “efforts to change the status quo for years” and said that Glick livestreamed his prayers from the site.  The report said that although the government officially allowed non-Muslims to visit the site each morning on the condition that they did not pray there, “In reality, dozens of Jews now openly pray every day [at the site]… and their Israeli police escorts no longer attempt stop them.”  The New York Times reported that Glick and activists ultimately sought to build a third Jewish Temple on the site of the Dome of the Rock, an idea that Azzam Khatib, the deputy chairman of the Waqf council, said “will lead to a civil war.” 

The same article said that Glick only wanted to build the Third Temple in dialogue with Muslims, not above their objections, and it would be open to all religions.  Both of those facts  should be relevant but the report seems to want to paint the Jews as extremists who want to forcibly take over the Mount. 

According to the Religion News Service, one group known as the Temple Institute hoped to build a third temple where one of the al-Aqsa complex’s three mosques now stands and to reinstate ritual animal sacrifices.  The group’s website reported that it was working with an architect on a design.  In September, al-Monitor reported, “In the past, doing so [praying out loud or making movements of genuflection], could lead to the person being detained and ejected from the site, as Jews are not allowed to pray there.  But more recently, a warning is reportedly more common.  Last July Israel’s Channel 12 filmed Jews praying silently at the site while police officers watched.”  Police continued to screen non-Muslims for religious articles.  Police allowed Jewish male visitors who were visibly wearing a kippah and tzitzit (fringes), and those who wished to enter the site barefoot (in accordance with interpretations of halacha, Jewish religious law) to enter with a police escort.

On October 5, the Jerusalem Magistrate Court ruled that “silent Jewish prayer” on the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount did not violate existing police rules on the site.  The ruling was in response to a case involving a 15-day administrative restraining order against a man whom police had removed from the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount on September 29 on grounds that he disturbed public order by engaging in Jewish prayer.  The judge ruled that silent prayer “does not in itself violate police instructions” that prohibit “external and overt” non-Muslim prayer on the site.  Al-Monitor said the Magistrate’s Court’s ruling was “unprecedented” and “seem[ed] to question the status quo that has prevailed over the site.”  The Jerusalem District Court overturned the lower court’s ruling on October 8, ruling that the INP had acted “within reason,” and “the fact that there was someone who observed [him] pray is evidence that his prayer was overt.”  Minister of Public Security Bar-Lev supported the appeal, saying “a change in the status quo will endanger public security and could cause a flare-up.”  The Waqf said the lower court’s ruling was “a flagrant violation” of the complex’s sanctity and a “clear provocation” for Muslims.

This report is framing the Jews who want true religious freedom as fanatics who are somehow limiting Muslim religious freedom. The supposed "status quo," which was by definition antisemitic in that it forbade Jews from prayer, is held up as an ideal.

(h/t Irene)

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

 

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