Linda Sarsour's "MPower Change" uses "Israeli" the way "Jew" used to be used

MPower Change, the Muslim advocacy group co-founded by Linda Sarsour, just sent out an action alert to its email list with the title "Take Action: No autonomous drones from Israel:"

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) just approved a request by Airobotics, an Israeli government-funded company,¹ to fly “autonomous” drones over U.S. neighborhoods.²

We don’t want unaccountable, autonomous “crime-fighting” drones snooping on us, filling our skies, and making life-or-death decisions.

Tell the FAA: We need safety where we live, not spy drones funded by apartheid Israel.

Airobotics is not funded by the Israeli government. It received a specific grant at the end of August of $540,000 from the Israel Innovation Authority, which is funded by but independent of the Israeli government. The grant has nothing to do with the drone that the FAA approved. The Muslim group is stretching to find any connection, no matter how tenuous, to associate Israel with a myth of drones meant to spy on Muslims and people of color in cities. 

But what does Airobotics' Israel connections have to do with what the drone does? The email pretends that it is trying to protect civil rights of people of color who they imagine will be surveilled disproportionately by these autonomous drones - but if that was really MPower Change's concern, what difference does it make whether they were manufactured or even funded by Israel?  It is up to the people who actually purchase and deploy the drones to determine how they will be used, whether for good or evil purposes. The source has nothing to do with it. 

This is hatemongering, not a concern for human rights. And the implication that a drone company is especially pernicious because it is Israeli is simple bigotry.  

Notably, while the email mentions Israel eight times to whip up their subscribers into a frenzy, their auto-email to the FAA doesn't mention Israel once. Telling the FAA not to approve a drone because it is Israeli would be obvious bigotry. The advocacy group only tells that to fellow Muslims. MPower Change knows that Israel has nothing to do with the issue, but they also know that their email list is filled with people who hate Israel and Jews - and they want to leverage that hate to get them to take action (and raise their own profile.)

This email shows that the word "Israel" is now a dog-whistle for modern antisemites. They use "Israel" the way "Jew" used to be used, as a means to make people angry. 

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J-Street complains about "right-wing Jewish-American billionaires"

This fundraising email from J-Street is kind of amazing on a number of levels.

Israel is in the midst of a major political struggle.

On one side, those fighting to protect Israel’s founding ideals of democracy, equality and justice. On the other, the new hardline Netanyahu government, bent on centralizing power, circumventing the courts and cementing permanent occupation in the West Bank.

...The government’s radical plan was drawn up by the Kohelet Forum, an increasingly powerful right-wing, pro-settlement think tank that’s funded largely by two right-wing American billionaires. 

They’ve been called “the brains of the Israeli right wing” and helped draft the problematic “Nation-State Law” -- which according to Netanyahu made Israel “the national state, not of all its citizens, but only of the Jewish people.” They were also behind Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo’s tenuous legal argument claiming that Israeli settlements in occupied territory do not violate international law.

The group is funded by two Republican Jewish-American billionaires from Pennsylvania who have also helped fund the campaigns of MAGA extremists like Lauren Boebert. They hope that GOP-style policies and values can come to dominate Israeli society....

We might not have right-wing billionaires backing our work, but we do have thousands of supporters like you. Can you chip in $18, $54, $90 -- or any other amount -- to help us fight back?

Their use of the word "Jewish" here is telling. It is meant to be a dog-whistle, just like "right-wing" and "billionaires" and "Republican." Not that J-Street is against Jews per se, but when you add Jewish to the other terms it makes them sound so much worse - as if Jewish conservatives are traitors to the liberal Jewish people. 

J-Street, of course, takes millions of dollars from wealthy left-wing people (like Bill Benter, who helped fund its start-up.) And of course, only last year George Soros gave J-Street's SuperPAC a million dollars, in addition to his other donations to the group over the years, a significant percentage of their annual budget.

Now, how would it sound if far-right people said that J-Street was heavily funded by a "Jewish left-wing billionaire"? It would sound like a dog-whistle. And that is exactly what J-Street is doing here - trying to raise money from leftist donors to counter the evil influence of "Republican, right-wing Jewish billionaires."

Beyond that, J-Street cannot counter the Kohelet Policy Forum.  What exactly would funds raised be used for? To create left-wing think tank to criticize Israel in Israel?

They are creating a bogeyman to inflame the feelings of people who hate the Right, people who hate Republicans, people who hate billionaires, and people who especially hate Jewish right-wing billionaires. They hand-wave as if giving J-Street money will do something against these nefarious forces, but the entire mailing is simply a lesson in propaganda: "Here are people you never heard of before that you should loathe so much that you will want to give us money to pretend to counter them." The fundraising wouldn't work without the appeal to emotion, and the word Jewish is used as part of that appeal. 

If it looks, sounds and smells like an antisemitic dog whistle....

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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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Rashida Tlaib's antisemitic dogwhistle (UPDATE)

Speaking at the Democratic Socialists of America national convention this week, Rashida Tlaib nodded and winked for an attack on Jews using the codewords that we hear so often.

We also need to recognize and - this is for me as a Palestinian-American - we also need to recognize... you know as I think about my family in Palestine that continue to live under military occupation and how that really interacts with this beautiful black city I grew up in, you know, I always tell people cutting people off from water is violence and they do it from Gaza to Detroit and it's a way to control people to oppress people. 

It's those structures that we continue to fight against. 

So I know you all understand the structure we've been living under right now is designed by those that exploit the rest of us for their own profit.

I always say to people, you know I don't care if it's the issue around global human rights and our fight to free Palestine or pushing back against those that don't believe in the minimum wage or those that believe that people have a right to health care and so much more, and I tell those same people, that if you open the curtain and look behind the curtain it's the same people that make money - and yes they do - off of racism, off of these broken policies,  there is someone there making money and you saw it it was so exposed during the pandemic, because all those structures everything that was set up they made record profit when we were all at having some of the most challenging most difficult times in our lifetime at that moment,  and and again they made record profit so if anything this pandemic just exposed what we all have been fighting against.

Tlaib makes a direct connection between the Jews in Israel and the money-grubbing capitalists in America. Both of them are "they." "They" are racists. "They" are greedy. "They" profit from their racism. . "They" are hiding behind the curtain, and she reveals to her audience who "they" are: rich, miserly, greedy Fagins. 

Even the leftist Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL called this antisemitic.

Tlaib knows what she is saying. She knows her audience. It's barely a dogwhistle - it's an air raid siren. 

UPDATE: "Behind the curtain"

This is what @RashidaTlaib means when she says "behind the curtain”.

This is a piece of Nazi propaganda that presents Jews as behind the curtain controlling the Nazi’s enemies. pic.twitter.com/EV4p8samHg

— Ben M. Freeman (@BenMFreeman) August 4, 2021

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