Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: settler-colonialist

Showing posts with label settler-colonialist. Show all posts

Friday, August 25, 2023

Nazis put an academic face on Jew-hatred. Now their heirs have "The Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism."

The Nazis famously subverted academia by creating an entire new field of “Jewish research” (Judenforschung) where respected academics from various fields produced a corpus of academic papers to justify the Nazi policy of genocide of Jews. One early example of this perversion of academia is described in Studying the Jew: Scholarly Antisemitism inNazi Germany by Alan E. Steinweis:

Early in the [Nazi] regime, when the universities’ embrace of antisemitic Jewish studies still seemed tentative, Nazi supporters decided to fill the gap by creating their own free-standing Jewish studies institute. The main force behind this initiative was the historian Walter Frank. In 1935, with support from high-ranking Nazis such as Alfred Rosenberg and Rudolf Hess, Frank founded the Institute for History of the New Germany (Institut für Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands), the purpose of which was to infuse a National Socialist perspective into German historical scholarship. A short time later, this so-called Reich Institute established its special Research Department for the Jewish Question, based in Munich, and placed it under the direction of the historian Wilhelm Grau. ..Operating under the administrative protection of the Reich Education Ministry, during the second half of the 1930s the Research Department occupied a central position in the emerging field of Nazi Jewish studies. It sponsored research projects at universities, convened conferences that drew participants from a variety of academic disciplines, and published the conference proceedings in a scholarly yearbook, Forschungen zur Judenfrage (Research on the Jewish Question).

What's old is new again.

Modern heirs of Nazi antisemitism have just created their own pseudo-academic institution, the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism.

Don't be fooled by the phrase "critical study." It is just as intellectually dishonest as the Nazi academic studies of Jews were.

The Mondoweiss article "Why we created the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism" proves that this institute is a masquerade for making antisemitism academically acceptable in its very first paragraph:

In recent years, the Israeli flag has increasingly appeared around the world alongside racial supremacist political messaging– for instance, at the January 6th riot in Washington D.C., Hindutva rallies in India, Nazi rallies in Europe, and, most potently, in anti-Palestinian pogroms in the West Bank. At this point, it could not be clearer that Zionism is a political ideology tightly enmeshed with racism, fascism, and colonial dispossession.

It doesn't take a graduate level logic course to understand that "racists embrace the Israeli flag" does not mean "Zionist are racist." That's like saying that KKK use of crosses prove all Christians are racists.

But the intent of this new "Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism" is not detached academic study of Zionism. It is purely political - and it is antisemitic.

The very first of the group's "Points of Unity" is an antisemitic lie: "Zionism is a settler colonial racial project. Like the US, Israel is a settler colonial state. The Institute opposes Zionism and colonialism."

Zionists don't define themselves this way. Only anti-Zionists do. "Critical studies" of a topic are impossible when you pre-determine the results of the studies. These are no "studies" at all - just compiling evidence, no matter how flimsy, on one side of the scale and ignoring any counter evidence.

Zionism is the self-determination movement of the Jewish people. It seeks the return of Jews to their ancestral lands. It is anti-colonialist. It is not racist. However, denying that Jews are a people with national rights - and labeling those Jews who assert those rights as being inherently racist - is indeed antisemitism.

Their political agenda and disinterest in objective studies is made clear in other "points of unity:" "Academic research is not politically or morally neutral....The Institute’s project is to support research from below, produced by a community led by people who are the targets of Zionist and state repression, with a research agenda determined in collaboration with communities resisting repression."

In other words, if you believe that Jews have rights - rights to a state, rights to self-defense, rights not to be murdered by Palestinian terrorists - you are not welcome in this space.

This is not "critical studies." It is anti-Zionist propaganda. And once you get past their name, they don't even pretend to hide it. To study Zionism, they demand that you reject Zionism and Jewish peoplehood as a prerequisite.

This section of the manifesto is most enlightening:

Studying Zionism through such a comprehensive [sic!] lens means, for instance, looking at the role of Zionist institutions in arenas beyond Palestine as well as the range of Jewish communities, organizations, and institutions where it is not as readily transparent.

These modern Jew-haters are embracing David Miller's paranoid concept of looking for, and magically finding, links between Jewish organizations and whatever they are hating today. It presupposes that Zionist Jews have a single, nefarious agenda, all controlled by a small group of Jews who secretly direct all these projects -and always with immoral aims.

The entire project is putting an academic face on pure hate. Its basic principles are based on bigotry and lies.

Antisemitism is becoming mainstream, and it is people like this who are in the forefront.

(h/t Andrew)

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!

A "Democratic Socialists of America" political slate centered on hating Israel

In 1889, a notable French artist named Adolphe Willette ran as an explicitly antisemitic candidate in the 9th arrondissement of Paris for legislative elections.

The campaign poster included "The Jews are only powerful because we are on our knees! 30 million French people are their trembling slaves. It is not a question of religion, the Jews are a different race, hostile to our own... Judaism, there is the enemy!"

Notice how these antisemites were careful not to appear to be bigoted - their problem, they claimed, was not with Judaism as a religion, but Jews as a race, dedicated to destroying France.

Of course, the broken "Talmud" tablets on the ground show that they hated Jews as a religion too, but even these avowed antisemites didn't want to appear to be bigoted. They came up with a convoluted distinction between "good Jews" and "bad Jews" and claimed they only hated the Jewish race.

It seems strange today to see a political poster that is so suffused with hate, and a candidate who fully expects that a campaign centered on antisemitism would attract voters. Certainly that belongs to a time long gone, right?

Nope.

Yesterday, a small group of people who are alarmed at the weakening of the Democratic Socialists of America started a new slate of candidates for the DSA National Political Committee - to save the DSA by appealing to antisemitism (which they pretend is anti-Zionism.)

They call themselves the Anti-Zionist Slate of the DSA.

One of the primary issues facing our organization right now is our flagging membership numbers. Our organization's membership numbers have seen a substantial decrease from a high of over 94,000 constitutional members in April 2021 to a little over 78,000 constitutional members today. In reality, the number of members who are currently members in good standing and have paid their dues has decreased to 57,000 members.

This trend is not one to be dismissed or ignored. Rather, it must be accepted as an ongoing problem that needs to be diagnosed and further addressed before DSA finds itself facing a full-blown membership crisis.

So how best to shore up an American socialist group than to appeal to their naked hate of Israel?

Anti-Zionism as an organizing principle

Fighting Alongside Liberation Struggles to Dismantle Zionism & Imperialism: Recognizing that the US is a linchpin of imperialism and racial capitalism globally, we as a slate prioritize solidarity with liberation struggles, including those of indigenous peoples from Turtle Island to Palestine, and strive for an organization that takes material action against imperialism....We must develop relationships of accountability with grassroots formations as the BDS Working Group has done with Palestinian grassroots formations in diaspora and in Palestine. To best do so, we support the proliferation of grassroots BDS campaigns, such as the BDS Working Group’s No Appetite for Apartheid campaign...

The focus on hating Israel as a unifying theme for an American political group reflects the exact same kind of single-minded hate that the antisemitic political parties in Europe tried to take advantage of from the late 1800s through World War II. Just as Jews were regarded as the source of all the people's problems then, the Jewish state is regarded the same way today. They prioritize hating Zionism over workers' rights, or racism, or fighting capitalism - and they are convinced that this is a winning strategy to attract socialists to their platform.

Another DSA group recently released a statement saying that they believe that Israeli Jewish civilians - including children - should be treated as military targets under international law. Essentially they called for an open season on murdering Israeli Jews.

So it appears that there is some support in the DSA for a platform that is based on hating Jews.

Just as with Willette, the "anti-Zionist" candidates would insist that they have no problem with Jews per se. And their justification for their focus on hating Jews living in the Jewish homeland is just as absurd and transparent as Willette's.

History may not always repeat, but it sure plagiarizes a lot.

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!

The irony in a "BDS victory"

According to the Felesteen news site and many other Palestinian sites:

Cyprus International University canceled a lecture that was supposed to be given by a lecturer from the Rubin (or Rabin?) Institute for Studies, in the Israeli occupation entity.

This came after pressure from students in solidarity with the Palestinian cause, who organized a demonstration on the university campus, in front of the hall in which he was to lecture on the topic of "Jewish Victims in the Arab-Israeli Conflict."

The sit-down demanded the university administration to cancel the lecture and expel the Israeli speaker, while the International Academic Campaign Against Occupation and Apartheid and the Campaign for Palestine sent hundreds of letters to the university asking it to cancel the lecture.

I couldn't confirm this story outside Palestinian media, which says the lecturer's name is Erez Shishani.

But there is a huge irony here.

Cyprus International University is in Turkish-occupied Northern Cyprus. While it has many international students, the Turkish students there are illegal settlers - forced to go there by the Turkish government, as the New York Times reported in 2014:

Students from Turkey are generally placed in Northern Cyprus by the Turkish higher education board, which has integrated the Northern Cypriot colleges into its own roster and assigns students on the basis of a points system that leaves them limited control over where they study.

This exactly fits the violation in the Geneva Conventions of transferring one's citizens to an occupied territory. The crime that everyone falsely accuses Israel of.

So now Palestinians are celebrating that a university that is part of an illegal occupation. You can't make this up.

One other irony: the university that caves to student pressure to censor lectures has the slogan, "Open for Open Minds."

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!

The Alqasem family: a perfect example of Arab colonialists who pretend to be anticolonialist

One of the people who tried to troll me recently is Karen Alqasem, an American whose daughter Lara who made headline a few years ago for being briefly blocked from studying at Hebrew University for her BDS activities. Her father is a raging antisemite, Karen supports murdering Jews and then tried to lecture me on morality.

For fun, I looked at Karen's recent tweets, and this one caught my eye:

Well, since she claims that the Al Qasem family has more history in the land than the Jews, I decided to look up their family tree.

Multiple accounts of their family history are most intriguing.

Of course, the Al Qasems don't originate in the Levant.

Everyone agrees that they began as a tribe in Arabia. They then spread all over, and today you can find them from Morocco to Lebanon to Syria and Bahrain.

But they didn't just spread - they conquered.

The Al Qasem tribe was instrumental in the Arab conquest of the Levant, Egypt and North Africa/Maghreb.

They were colonialists!

The Qasems helped lead the colonial Muslim Arab conquests of non-Arab territories and turned them into Arab regions.

But their family history articles claim, incredibly, that they fought against colonialism! "Individuals and groups associated with the Al-Qasim family participated in the struggle against colonialism and the conquest of Egypt, the Levant and Morocco," says their family biography.

Talk about projection! She is claiming that Jews are the colonialists, when the truth is that the Al Qasem family are the paradigms of colonialism!

And what about Karen herself, who married into the Alqasem family and now claims to have more history in Israel than someone whose family lived in Hebron for centuries?

Oh, she's Welsh.

Yes - she really is a white European who pretends to be indigenous to the Middle East while claiming Jews who have lived there and kept a connection to the Land for millennia are the white European colonizers.

You can't make this up.

(h/t kweansmom)

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!

Article on @MSN accuses Jews of a new "holocaust" against Palestinians

Cartoon with article in The New Arab

MSN, like most media outlets, enters into syndication deals so they can publish articles from other news sources legally.

Apparently, republishing and amplifying hate doesn't bother them.

Today, MSN published an article by Wael Kandil in The New Arab that calls all Jews in Israel thieves - and worse:

The fact that groups of Zionist settlers attacked the town of Hawara and other Palestinian villages south of the city of Nablus brings the conflict over Palestine back to its roots at the beginning of the last century: gangs of foreign looters coming from abroad attack lands and homes to forcibly seize them from their original inhabitants, expel them from them, and make them their home and residence.

Burning is a creed of the Zionist colonizers, burning people, trees and stones, as they did recently, on the evening of the Aqaba summit, by attacking the towns and villages of Hawara, Burin, Qaryut and Za’tara south of Nablus, under full guard and support from the occupation army.

Pictures of the most recent Holocaust send footage of old Zionist massacres and holocausts from its archives, to find a perfect match between the atrocities of the Stern Gang, the Haganah, and the Irgun against the Palestinian people ...

Every Israeli settlement is a confiscated Palestinian village, and every dwelling of an Israeli is a stolen Palestinian house, and every civilian is a more brutal and ferocious fighter against truth, against justice, and against logic, and then every meter of Palestinian land remains a house of war, imposed by the occupiers, and set its barbaric laws and conditions.

He doesn't say "Jews," but he doesn't have to. With a wink, he says all "Zionists" who returned to their ancestral home are arsonists, looters, and thieves who are inflicting a Holocaust on Palestinians.

Kandil has 1.7 million followers on Twitter.

Hate for Jews is mainstream in Arabic media, and now Microsoft is adding fuel to the fire.

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!

Health journal article: Antisemitism is a necessary therapy for Palestinians' mental health

The Health and Human Rights Journal has a special section this month: "Settler Colonialism, Structural Racism, and the Palestinian Right to Health." It was organized and curated by the Community and Public Health at Birzeit University and the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University.

Its seven articles are predicated on malicious, antisemitic lies about Israel. The lies - that Israel is a racist, apartheid, settler-colonialist state bent on eradicating Palestinian Arabs and their culture - are accepted as unvarnished truth, without any debate.

The introduction of an article purported to be about amputations begins with this antisemitic framework:

Since 1948 and with the establishment of the state of Israel, Israel has been deploying physical and structural violence against Palestinians in multiple well-documented ways, all aimed at the erasure, subjugation, and oppression of the Palestinians, in line with what Patrick Wolfe has called the “logic of elimination” in settler-colonial states.[1]

Israel’s colonial ideology is manifested in the “daily assault on Palestinian life as a result of settler-colonial ideology that renders them killable as a part of and a furthering of their removal from their land.”[2]

Another article's abstract begins with antisemitic lies as irrefutable facts:

In this paper, we examine the social construction of race as a determinant of health inequities in Palestine. Race myths about Palestinians conform to the “logic of elimination” integral to settler colonialism, predicated on the dispossession and removal of the Indigenous people from the land.

These are all absurd and hateful lies. Somehow, the Palestinian population nearly quadrupled under this genocidal regime since 1967.

Another article based wholly on a lie claims that systemic Israeli racism is behind Israel's "refusal" to provide Covid-19 vaccines into the Palestinian controlled areas. In fact it was the Palestinian Authority that refused to partner with Israel on obtaining vaccines. And if Israel is racist, then why did it provide vaccines for its Arab citizens - and for Palestinian students at Israeli universities?

Again, the article is predicated on lies, but those lies are not even up for debate. Naturally, their conclusions are based on these lies. The articles are anti-Israel propaganda, pretending to be science, with lots of footnotes as if linking to previously written antisemitic articles in the social sciences or by NGOs is the same as linking to a real scientific paper that has gone through rigorous proof.

One of the articles in the journal outshines the others, though.

Titled "A Call for Social Justice and for a Human Rights Approach with Regard to Mental Health in the Occupied Palestinian Territories," it says that the only effective method to treat Palestinians' mental health issues is to teach them to blame Israel (i.e., Jews) for their issues.

It seems necessary and urgent to look at the effects of political and systematic violence on Palestinian mental health in order to strengthen the resilience of communities, instead of individualizing their suffering. This can be achieved by moving away from a mental health framework that regards them as individual victims affected by political violence and toward a human rights framework that sees them as rights holders and survivors of a collective experience of violence within a social and political context...

[T]he solution to breaking the cycle of internalization is to be found in resistance and in directing feelings outward, to those who oppress, instead of inward.

Hating Jews - and "resistance," which is understood by Palestinians as physical attacks on Jews - becomes the preferred path to solving Palestinian mental health issues.

Come to think of it, there are numerous papers about the trauma of Palestinians suffering under Israeli oppression, but I don't recall a single [Palestinian] academic paper about mental illness that might prompt Palestinians to want to kill random Jews. Apparently, the mental health professionals in the territories don't regard terrorists as mentally ill to begin with, but rather as role models who are breaking the paradigm of victimhood, as suggested by these authors.

Beyond that, the authors urge mental health professionals in the territories to become anti-Israel activists themselves, and they rail against the "depoliticization" of their roles - the exact opposite of decades of psychological practice:

A stronger understanding of the political and social implications of trauma and a more active role in relation to social injustices and human rights violations are essential against the background of the ethical standards of our profession. As mental health professionals, our commitment to advancing human rights can be shown by highlighting the pathogenic context in which trauma develops and by demanding social justice on a political level.

All of the articles in this journal have the usual disclaimer that the authors have no competing interests. But one of the co-authors of this article has a supremely competing interest: Samah Jabr is the head of the Mental Health Unit within the Palestinian Ministry of Health. She has every incentive to demonize Israel and declare it the source of all Palestinian problems.

And, in fact, she does. On her Facebook page, she frames the Israeli celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Resolution as "celebrating the historical trauma of Palestinians." Her entire mindset is based on nearly all Jews as evil people whose entire goal is to cause pain to Arabs.

A competent mental health professional would note the amount of psychological projection that she shows in this paper. Because the only ones who have physically tried to rid the region of an entire people are her fellow Arabs, not the Jews.

(h/t MtTB)

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!

Journal of International and Intercultural Communication: Peer-reviewed incitement against Israel

The Journal of International and Intercultural Communication (JIIC) is published by the National Communication Association. JIIC says it "publishes original scholarship that expands understanding of international, intercultural, and cross-cultural communication" and that "articles in this journal have undergone rigorous peer review, including screening by the editor and review by at least two anonymous referees."

Its most recent issue featured the theme, "Writing occupied Palestine: Toward a field of Palestinian communication and culture studies." Of course, the articles in the issue have little to do with Palestinian culture and everything to do with demonizing Israel under the rubric of "communications studies."

Besides the introduction and forward, there are four articles in the issue on this theme.

"Boycott eurovision singing to the song of its own tune: Global boycotts as sites of hybridity" has a classic impenetrable abstract:

Following (Kraidy, M. M., & Murphy, P. D. (2003). Media ethnography: Local, global, or translocal? In P. D. Murphy & M. M. Kraidy (Eds.), Global media studies: Ethnographic perspectives (pp. 299–307). Routledge; Kraidy, M. M., & Murphy, P. D. (2008). Shifting Geertz: Toward a theory of translocalism in global communication studies. Communication Theory, 18(3), 335–355. 10.1111/j.1468-2885.2008.00325.x) call to look at global communication through lenses of translocalism and hybridity, I find that global boycotts are hybridized sites that facilitate translocal recognition. Using Boycott Eurovision as a case study, two locales are investigated: petitions and Globalvision. By uncovering the translocal recognition in each locale, global boycotts become crucial avenues of inquiry to understand how global social movements grapple with globalization. The essay describes the importance of understanding the vulnerabilities of international boycotts’ hybridized status, calling forward analysis of structure, specific initiatives, and the enactments of hegemonic ideologies found in locales.

The article itself should not have passed even a cursory editorial review, let alone a "rigorous peer review." It is a polemic, not analysis. It deliberately uncapitalizes "Eurovision," it refers to the IDF as the "Israeli Occupation Forces," it fully accepts as truth that Israel engages in "settler-colonialist, apartheid, and military violence against Palestinians."

The author, Sarah Cathryn Majed Dweik, writes, "I focus on introducing vocabulary innate to Boycott Eurovision, heeding Lechuga’s (2020) call to develop praxis-driven theory within rhetoric." In other words, she can write whatever she wants because she creates her own vocabulary.

An example is in how she calls Israel racist by defining it as "white:"

[T]he Israeli national identity replicates the historical whiteness and settler-colonialism crafted by early Zionists and the British empire. I define whiteness as a global system of domination that reflects the logics of colonialism, racism, anti-Blackness, patriarchy, classism, ableism, and heteronormativity to recenter the white subject as that which is normal and required to attain (see Al-Saif & Ghabra, 2016; Ahmed, 2009; Ghabra, 2020a; Nakayama, 2020). In the historical moves that Israel made to establish itself as a country, Israel crafted the Jewish national subject in relation to Europeanness, whiteness, and settler-colonialism through the juridical exclusion of the Palestinian and Arab Others (Erakat, 2015) and relying on the state to guide where whiteness presents itself within the Israeli national identity (Yadgar, 2011). By utilizing whiteness as a heuristic to obscure specific meanings of Jewish-ness and Israeli-ness, material spaces are necessary to participate in this work, such as a fun singing competition.

Why bother to mention that Israel has had Mizrahi, Arab and Black Ethiopian contestants for Eurovision? Facts get in the way of the all-important discourse. Dweik can simply define them all as "white" for her purposes, and the reviewers are none the wiser.

Another article, "Disability as metaphor or resilience: A Palestinian poetic inquiry," parrots as fact the absurd thesis by academic fraud Jasbir Puar that Israel has an intentional policy to maim Palestinians.

A third article is called "Structural violence and sources of resistance among Palestinian children living under military occupation and political oppression." Based on an interview with 22 Palestinian children, it makes it sound as if most of them experience direct violence from Israel for no reason. Yet the methodology of choosing the interview subjects was biased:

The participants were recruited between November and December 2020 from a pool of children who accessed a local center organizing psychosocial activities. Researchers targeted a purposive convenience sample of 22 participants across various settings (villages, cities, and refugee camps) in the West Bank....[B]oth caregivers and participants were carefully informed about the aim of the task, the purposive confidentiality procedures, and their right to refuse or discontinue their participation at any time. All participants and families provided informed consent.

And what were the aims of the task that the caregivers had to agree to? We don't know the exact words used, but it is very clear both from the very title of the paperand the contents that they were told that this was a study meant to demonize Israel:

Thus, the present study explored the diverse everyday experiences of structural colonial oppression in children living in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Our research aimed to investigate the main antecedents and determinants of risk and violence exposure in a setting characterized by settler-colonial violence and military occupation.

Only those who agreed to participate with that purpose in mind are included in the study! If there was ever a self-selecting group, this is it.

There are well over a million children in the West Bank. The vast majority live in Area A, under full Palestinian control where Israeli forces only rarely enter (as they did this year when the PA did not act to restrain the "Lion's Den" terrorists.) If they don't participate in demonstrations, they would only see Israeli soldiers at checkpoints, and the vast majority pass right through. Yet the study includes a very high number of kids who supposedly experienced Israeli forces invading their schools or homes, or even shooting them.

Statistically, this isn't close to a random sample. But the peer reviewers don't know that.

This issue, except for the last article on how Palestinian kids use Tiktok, shines no new light on Palestinians and communications. On the contrary, it is anti-Israel propaganda that hijacks an academic discipline for promoting hate - just as Palestinian academics do with other disciplines.

It is a shame that the social sciences are so susceptible to being manipulated and taking part in incitement disguised as academic studies.

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!