A cringy woke apology for complaining about Hezbollah T-shirt at a gay pride event

Two weeks ago, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said that anyone who engaged in a homosexual act should be killed.

A week later, at the Berlin Whole LGBTQ festival, a person was seen wearing a Hezbollah T-shirt on the stage, which upset a Lebanese citizen at the event, who complained about seeing someone wear a symbol of oppression to gays.

He then apologized for complaining!

This apology is truly remarkable.

The hezbollah t-shirt on beach stage

@Chris on #general -

@Chris on July 31, 2023: 

To the person who was wearing a Hezbollah t shirt on the beach stage, I'm sorry if my complaint caused you upset. I unfortunately felt triggered by the t-shirt because the party leader recently encouraged the killing of queer people. I understand that wearing the t-shirt was used as a trendy fuck you to the hypocrisy of what is called terrorist vs what is not, and I understand being told that it's not ok to wear it by a white man can be triggering - however, given that whole is about celebrating queerness, I feel that perhaps there are other symbols to wear that are less complicated politically and more inclusive to the different experiences of people. I'm sorry again that it happened this way, I hope you are ok now. To the security people who listened to me and talked to the person, thank you. I wish you let me speak to him directly, it would have been validating and perhaps he would have understood the nuances of my views given that I'm Lebanese myself, but I also understand you wanted to make sure we are both heard. 

Needless to say, we don't have any similar apology from the Hezbollah T-shirt person.

A week earlier, at a different Berlin gay festival, someone was seen wearing a gay version of a Lion's Den terrorist group T-shirt, with pink submachine guns.

At these same demonstrations, anti-Israel posters and rhetoric are commonplace.

There must be a name of the psychosis where one loudly supports those who would murder them and opposes those who fight for their rights.

We could apply that same terminology to the small set of "progressive" Jews as well who avidly support those who want to destroy Jews. 

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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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Black diversity director who was fired had created an incredible Jewish Heritage Month for her college

Tabia Lee was the Director for the Office of Equity, Social Justice, and Multicultural Education at De Anza Community College in Cupertino, CA, and was recently fired from that position because she didn't adhere to the standard DEI orthodoxy. She describes her experiences in Compact:

What made me persona non grata? On paper, I was a good fit for the job. I am a black woman with decades of experience teaching in public schools and leading workshops on diversity, equity, inclusion, and antiracism. At the Los Angeles Unified School District, I established a network to help minority teachers attain National Board Certification. I designed and facilitated numerous teacher trainings and developed a civic-education program that garnered accolades from the LAUSD Board of Education.

My crime at De Anza was running afoul of the tenets of critical social justice, a worldview that understands knowledge as relative and tied to unequal identity-based power dynamics that must be exposed and dismantled. This, I came to recognize, was the unofficial but strictly enforced ideological orthodoxy of De Anza—as it is at many other educational institutions.

One section of her essay is relevant for this site:

The conflicts were not limited to my tenure-review process. At every turn, I experienced strident opposition when I deviated from the accepted line. When I brought Jewish speakers to campus to address anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, some of my critics branded me a “dirty Zionist” and a “right-wing extremist.” When I formed the Heritage Month Workgroup, bringing together community members to create a multifaith holiday and heritage month calendar, the De Anza student government voted to support this effort. However, my officemates and dean explained to me that such a project was unacceptable, because it didn’t focus on “decentering whiteness.”

When I later sought the support of our academic senate for the Heritage Month project, one opponent asked me if it was “about all the Jewish-inclusion stuff you have been pushing here,” and argued that the senate shouldn’t support the Heritage Month Workgroup efforts, because I was attempting to “turn our school into a religious school.” The senate president deferred to this claim, and the workgroup was denied support.

I looked up what she did for Jewish Heritage Month, and from what I can see, it was incredible. 

The first event in 2022, I believe, was this one on defining antisemitism, with panelists Rabbi Dr. Mark Goldfeder, Esq. from the National Jewish Advocacy Center and  Alyza Lewin from the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law.  They both explain the logic behind the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism and explain why the "3D" test is an accurate description of when criticism of Israel crosses the line into antisemitism. Rabbi Goldfeder spoke specifically about why labeling Israel as an apartheid state, as the then-recent Amnesty report did, is in fact antisemitism.

Dr. Lee even went through a breakout room exercise where students could take real world examples of "anti-Israel" slanders and identify whether and why they were antisemitic.

No wonder the hard Left on campus was upset about this! 

This video is nearly two hours long, but it includes not only excellent presentations by Goldfeder and Lewin, but also a video by the later Rabbi Jonathan Sacks explaining why anti-Zionism is often antisemitism. 

I don't know how many people attended this, but it is astonishing that this was shown on any campus today.

 

There are many other videos of different events celebrating Jewishness, moderated by Dr. Lee,  that interview Jews who are unabashedly woke but also often unabashedly Zionist. One example: This one interviews Dr. Brandy Shufutinsky, a Black Jewish social worker who disagrees with critical social justice and intersectionality theory, and features rap videos by her quite proudly Jewish son "Westside Gravy."

I am fairly certain that De Anza will not have another Jewish Heritage Month. 

Tabia Lee appears to be a principled warrior against all kinds of racism and bigotry, and as such she couldn't survive on that campus. I hope that there might be a larger university that actually cares about real equality and anti-racism that hires her and gives her the resources she needs to lead the students, not be led by the extremists. 

Her dismissal is a huge loss for the De Anza community.  I hope some other campus can gain her expertise.

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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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The Left - and Palestinian racism - killed Rachel Corrie

Today is the 20th anniversary of Rachel Corrie's death, accidentally killed by an Israeli bulldozer as she acted as a human shield against a mine clearing operation.

Her death came directly because of the Leftist myth that Israelis are racist - and that Palestinians aren't.

Corrie was brainwashed by her "progressive" teachers at Evergreen College and her International Solidarity Movement colleagues. 

One of her instructors, Simona Sharoni,  not only encourages but requires students to engage in activism in her classes. Corrie received college credit for her trip to Gaza, working with her professors to call her activism an independent study program. 

A basic tenet of the far-Left, which has now become mainstream, is that Israel is an irredeemably racist entity engaged in "genocide" against non-white Palestinians. This myth is what fueled Corrie and ISM to place activists in harm's way, because of a naïve belief that they were invincible - protected by their "white privilege."

One of Corrie's fellow Evergreen students, Joe Smith, also received independent study credit for his time in Rafah while Corrie was there. "I saw ISM as a way that I could directly use my white, Western, American male privilege to directly serve underprivileged people of color," he said a week after her death.

Corrie's emails to her parents while in Gaza emphasized her unwavering beliefs that white privilege would protect her, and that her anti-Israel activism was penance for her being an American. She emailed that Israel wouldn't arrest her and hold her for a long time because "I am a white US citizen." She wrote about how ISM members could make "serious use of our international white person privilege," and said, "If the Israeli military should break with their racist tendency not to injure white people, please pin the reason squarely on the fact that I am in the midst of a genocide which I am also indirectly supporting, and for which my government is largely responsible."

Other ISM activists admitted after Corrie's death that they felt invincible. ISM believed that "the white foreigners were the magic bullet that could neutralize Israel's overwhelming military strength." Smith himself admitted how he and his fellow ISMers felt invincible by their whiteness: "It's definitely easy to get cocky in this war zone when a tank is shooting at people and you walk up to them and shout at them, 'Hey, I'm here!' and they pack up and leave. You get so used to this idea, 'Hey, they won't hurt us.' It has really made me realize how naïve and cocky I was."

Corrie and other ISMers took huge risks with their lives because of this child-like belief that their whiteness is a superpower. In fact, an Irish activist in Rafah at the time named Jenny was nearly run down herself by a D9 that she thought she could stop. “The bulldozer’s coming, the earth is burying my feet, my legs, I’ve got nowhere to run, and I thought, ‘This is out of control.' Another activist pulled me up and out of the way at the last minute.” 

Even the Palestinians that these activists befriended considered them crazy. But there were no adults around to counteract the almost religious belief they had that Israeli racism would protect them in a war zone.

Notably, ISM would specifically recruit white kids because of this very assumption. Activists were well aware (and struggled with the idea) that they were promoting the idea of being white saviors of darker Palestinians and complicit in the racism they claim to oppose. 

But there was another reason why Corrie took such a risk that day that she was killed. And that was Palestinian racism and misogyny.

Even though these woke, white ISM activists flocked to Rafah to supposedly help Palestinians, there was much mistrust among the oppressed people of color that they deigned to help. ISM members were very concerned over an anonymous letter they had received:

[Corrie] was propelled, in part, by frustration. During the past few days she and the nine other ISM activists had become preoccupied with an anonymous letter circulating through Rafah that cast suspicion on the human shields. “Who are they? Why are they here? Who asked them to come here?” it asked. The letter referred to Corrie and the other expatriate women in Rafah as “nasty foreign bitches” whom “our Palestinian young men are following around.” 

That morning [of Corrie's death], the ISM team tried to devise a strategy to counteract the letter’s effects. “We all had a feeling that our role was too passive. We talked about how to engage the Israeli military,” Richard “Fuzz” Purssell told me by phone from Great Britain. 

Corrie, while assuming that Israeli racism would protect her, felt that if she would only take more risks, then Palestinian racism and misogyny would magically disappear. 

And that is exactly what she did.

We know now that Palestinians have treated these white international women horribly. There are many reports of how they have been raped by the Palestinians they think they are helping - and the stories are hushed up by the very organizations like ISM they volunteer for. Corrie believed that Palestinians are inherently good and Israeli Jews inherently evil, and she only had to try a little harder to prove it. 

The narrative of Israeli racism and Palestinian victimhood is fundamental to the existence of these organizations like ISM. And that false narrative is not only what killed Rachel Corrie, but also promoted a culture of Palestinian sexual assaults on her fellow, invincible, white women. 

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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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AI chatbots are a potential danger for fact-based Israel advocacy

The New York Times reported:

Over the past three decades, a handful of products like Netscape’s web browser, Google’s search engine and Apple’s iPhone have truly upended the tech industry and made what came before them look like lumbering dinosaurs.

Three weeks ago, an experimental chat bot called ChatGPT made its case to be the industry’s next big disrupter. It can serve up information in clear, simple sentences, rather than just a list of internet links. It can explain concepts in ways people can easily understand. It can even generate ideas from scratch, including business strategies, Christmas gift suggestions, blog topics and vacation plans.

Although ChatGPT still has plenty of room for improvement, its release led Google’s management to declare a “code red.” For Google, this was akin to pulling the fire alarm. Some fear the company may be approaching a moment that the biggest Silicon Valley outfits dread — the arrival of an enormous technological change that could upend the business.

For more than 20 years, the Google search engine has served as the world’s primary gateway to the internet. But with a new kind of chat bot technology poised to reinvent or even replace traditional search engines, Google could face the first serious threat to its main search business. One Google executive described the efforts as make or break for Google’s future.

Imagine a future where you ask a question to a website and you get a well-formatted, professional looking answer - and it is all wrong.

ChatGPT is an amazing technology, but it bases its answers on, well, no one is really sure. I asked it to write a blog post about torture in Palestinian jails, and it mentioned a couple of specific examples of people tortured to death - and they were both completely wrong. But there was no link to where it got its information from, and it all sounded authoritative. 

This problem already exists to some extent even in popular search engines. Google and others will try to put a summary of the answer they think you want on top of the search page results, often but not always citing Wikipedia, which has its own issues with reliability.

But if AI replaces search, people will implicitly trust what they read as if it is engraved in stone. 

Give that AI typically takes its knowledge from the Internet, and that antisemites outnumber Jews by far online, the chances that an AI chatbot answering questions about Israel accurately are not too high. 

I asked, "After the UN partition vote in 1947, which side attacked the other first?"

ChatGPT gave a generic "both sides" answer: "After the United Nations voted in favor of the partition of Palestine in 1947, tensions between Jewish and Palestinian communities in the region escalated, eventually leading to the outbreak of violence and armed conflict. There were attacks by both sides, with Palestinian Arab militants and Jewish militant groups engaging in acts of violence and terrorism against one another. The conflict eventually escalated into full-scale war in 1948, with the newly formed state of Israel being invaded by several Arab countries. The war ended in 1949 with a series of armistice agreements, but the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians continued to flare up periodically in the ensuing decades."

It isn't exactly lying, but it didn't tell the truth either, that Arabs attacked Jews within hours of the vote.

When I asked, "Who are the most notorious terrorists in the Arab/Israeli conflict?", it answered:

Terrorism has been a significant factor in the Arab-Israeli conflict, with various groups and individuals on both sides of the conflict carrying out acts of terrorism against the other side. Some of the most well-known terrorists in the conflict include:

Yasser Arafat: Palestinian leader and founder of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which was involved in numerous acts of terrorism against Israel.

Menachem Begin: Israeli politician and former Prime Minister of Israel, who was a member of the Irgun, a Jewish militant group that carried out numerous acts of terrorism against the British and Arabs during the 1940s.

Ahmed Yassin: Palestinian cleric and co-founder of Hamas, a Palestinian Islamist organization that has carried out numerous suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks against Israel.

Shimon Peres: Israeli politician and former Prime Minister of Israel, who was involved in the Stern Gang, a Jewish militant group that carried out numerous acts of terrorism against the British during the 1940s.

Abu Nidal: Palestinian militant and founder of the Abu Nidal Organization, which carried out numerous terrorist attacks against Israel and other Western countries.

It is important to note that terrorism is a highly controversial and inflammatory term, and different people may have different definitions of what constitutes terrorism. It is also important to recognize that the actions of individual terrorists do not represent the views or beliefs of all members of the group or community to which they belong.

This is again an attempt to "both sides" the question. Even worse, Shimon Peres was never a member of the Stern Gang. Where did it get that from?  We have no idea. And the last paragraph seems meant to blunt the idea of Hamas and Fatah as still promoting terror, even though they do, today.

There is a mindset, so to speak, that makes the AIs so seemingly human-like - but as we see, it ultimately reflects the thinking of the programmers as well as the data set that is chosen to be authoritative. Real objectivity is impossible, so naturally we will be seeing opinions that align with the overwhelmingly progressive thinking of most employees working on AI. 

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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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12/16 Links P2: Liberals, Progressives, Wokeness and Israel; Smearing Israel from the Ivory Tower; US Congressman Slams FBI Hate Crimes Data As Bipartisan Criticism Grows

From Ian:

Liberals, Progressives, Wokeness and Israel

Putting all this together, what the JILV survey powerfully documents is a troubling phenomenon that has pervaded the larger American political system today: namely political sorting. In its most basic form, political sorting, which is often confused with polarization, is a fairly new phenomenon and is where ideological and attitudinal positions no longer vary but are expected to align to particular liberal or conservative attitudes. The result today is that Democrats are more uniformly left-leaning and Republicans are more uniformly right-leaning than they were decades ago. Both the left and the right promote packages of ideas and attitudes that must be adopted wholesale if one is not to fall into disfavor. Today, dissent and divergence become almost impossible if one is to avoid adverse social consequences and possibly real professional ramifications as well. And for macro-political development, as Democrats are more habitually liberal and Republicans become more conservative, compromise and bipartisanship becomes harder to achieve. This is exactly what is happening with respect to Israel and ideology and represents an existential threat to the Jewish community and American support for Israel as well.

The recent uproar at Berkeley Law School is a case in point. Nine student groups at the law school banded together to amend their bylaws so as to exclude any Zionist speaker from ever speaking at the law school. That Women of Berkeley Law, the Asian Pacific American Law Students Association and the Law Students of African Descent felt compelled to join forces with the Middle Eastern and North African Law Students Association in this endeavor, illustrates how powerful this ideological sorting can be. Under the guise of intersectional solidarity, groups that have nothing to do with the Middle East conflict institute a litmus test that permanently excludes the vast majority of Jews who believe Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish state. To be part of the community of the good is to expel people with improper beliefs.

More specifically, to understand sorting what is critical to understand is that the electorate has not changed significantly in the aggregate as generations have aged in and out, but voters have sorted. Consider that in the 1990s there were many pro-choice and pro-immigration Republicans and pro-gun Democrats. These variations have disappeared with issues all lining up on the left or right such that if you are a Democrat, you have to believe and promote a particular agenda wholesale and thus one can predict an individual’s political positions based on partisanship alone. Thus, the United States is experiencing increased partisan polarization now even though Independents have grown as a share of the electorate while the number of partisans has shrunk

Turning to the JILV survey itself, support for Israel has become part of the larger political sort of the American public. Today, vast majorities of Republicans support Israel, while Democratic backing is much lower. To be on the left these days means that one cannot support Israel and be ideologically pure; backing Israel is a conservative value and that line cannot be crossed in the ideologically sorted world of today. Thus, it is also the case that those who score lower on the woke scale are appreciably more aligned with Israel than those who are highly woke. Attitudes toward Israel are now part of the liberal or conservative packages that partisans must uniformly adopt, constituting a new norm in American politics evident in the data here. As Abrams and Wertheimer pointed out, sorting has become so deep that it has influenced views and sharply divided Americans on ideas as varied as the nuclear family, the structure-enabling philanthropy and, of course, the police and justice systems.

Moreover, views toward religion, tradition and history have become part of the story now. To be liberal today means real disdain for people of faith and their rights to religious liberty including support for Israel, while conservatives take the exact opposite approach. As Zaid Jilani has written with respect to race, the vision of the now sorted left is one where, “America isn’t a land of opportunity. It’s barely changed since the days of Jim Crow. Whites, universally privileged, maintain an iron grip on American society, while nonwhites are little more than virtuous victims cast adrift on a plank in an ocean of white supremacy.” The emergent narrative and anti-racist policy positions are now stories, “where whites are the villains and minorities are the victims” making “honest discussion of why homicide is the leading cause of death for young Black men … off limits” for instance. The JILV data show the exact same trend with respect to Israel; support for Israel, even with its faults and complex narratives, is simply on the wrong side of the story and cannot be supported if you are on the liberal side of things.

Given the growth of woke culture and the inexorable sorting process in American political life, friends of Israel must ask themselves some tough questions: Should they continue to focus attention on progressives with deeply held woke commitments who seem to be sorting themselves out of support for Israel, or seek to strengthen support among those who don’t share those ideological commitments and are more inclined to support Israel? To what extent should friends of Israel continue to focus efforts on making Israel’s case in the public realm, and to what extent should they join forces with others in opposing the ideology that gives rise to the growing antipathy toward the Jewish state?

Now is a good time to rethink the mainstream Jewish posture in American politics.

Ungrateful France’s ‘national narrative’ ignores the Jews

France has had Jews for over 2,000 years, and their contributions to the economy, politics, culture and science cannot be denied. But the journalist and blogger Veronique Chemla notes that Judaism and the Jews are virtually absent from the “national narrative” in school curricula and textbooks as well as in exhibitions in French museums. This post is an extract from a talk she gave about this blindspot to the Tsedek Lodge of B’nai B’rith France. She also discussed the issue in her interview with André Barmoha on Radio Chalom Nitsan on 13 December 2022.

Revolutionary, Republican, secular France fought the influence of Catholicism. The state remains embarrassed by the history of religions and by the Jews whom she nevertheless emancipated. France also feared fragmenting the nation by isolating the Jews, while not daring to seem to exclude them. The revolutionary Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre had affirmed: “We must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation, and grant everything to the Jews as individuals” – a phrase that still inspires French diplomacy. But even as individuals, the ungrateful homeland ignores them in its national narrative.

Other factors were a pro-European France which denied the “Jewish and Christian roots of Europe” (Jacques Chirac), choosing instead multiculturalism, cultural relativism, atonement. History was perceived through an anachronististic moral lens – the Rights of Man, “political correctness”, making France feel guilty for slavery or colonization. The Crémieux decree was hidden from view while Eurabia ( an European-Arab alliance – ed) was rejected. French Jews are caught between, on the one hand, “pedagogues’ who “deconstruct” history, and, on the other hand, “political correctness”, the disintegration of the nation, European political “elites”, the claims of the “racialized” – Eurabia in different guises.

Jewish historians – Jules Isaac, co-author of school textbooks during the first half of the 20th century, and Marc Bloch – may have felt awkward writing about their co-religionists.

Most important of all, generations of historians, whose studies have skirted around Jews and Judaism, have produced a vicious circle of ignorance, bias and misunderstandings of Jewishness, Judaism and Jews.

Smearing Israel from the Ivory Tower

Israel, a tiny country the size of New Jersey, is the only state in the Middle East that substantially recognizes individual rights, such as legal equality for men and women, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and the freedom to engage in same-sex relationships. Compared to its neighbors—Islamic dictatorships that trample rights and violently oppress their populations—Israel is an oasis of enlightenment and liberty. Yet many American and European professors increasingly show support for anti-Israel movements and tyrannical regimes that aim to erase Israel from the map.

Iran is among the most brutal. According to the U.S. State Department, “The Islamic regime in Iran is the world’s leading state sponsor of terror,” and the “regime elites squander the people’s resources and opportunities, while suppressing freedom and basic human rights.”1 As of this writing, for more than a month Iranian “security forces” have been violently cracking down on widespread protests, which sprang up after the regime’s so-called morality police reportedly killed a young woman for not wearing a hijab correctly.2

Iranian leaders call for “death to Israel,” “death to England,” and “death to America.”3 They fund terrorist groups that wreak havoc in countries neighboring Israel, forming a “ring of fire” around it with the goal of annihilating the tiny democratic republic.4

Yet according to the academic watchdog group Canary Mission, which documents people and groups promoting hatred of the United States and Israel, more than eight hundred professors on North American campuses participate, to varying degrees, in efforts to undermine Israel. So do many in Europe. Among the most vocal anti-Israel professors are David Miller, recently fired from the University of Bristol; Amin Husain at New York University (NYU); and Marc Lamont Hill at Temple University. They are working to erode Israel’s stability, credibility, and security. This despite—or perhaps because of—the fact that Israel is a vital partner and strategic ally of the West.

Miller, previously a tenured professor who served as chair of Bristol’s sociology department, has spent years maligning Israel by advancing conspiracy theories in the classroom and via articles, social media, a website, and a talk show. In his quest to delegitimize the country—which he calls “a violent, racist foreign regime engaged in ethnic cleansing”—he has claimed, for instance, that British Jewish students are “being used as political pawns.”5 Without evidence, he accuses these students of being “constitutionally bound to promoting Israel and campaigns to silence critics of Zionism or the State of Israel on British campuses.”6 To achieve his goal, Miller advocates prohibiting pro-Israel groups from exercising their right to assemble, saying, for example, that Israel “depends for its lifeblood on the transnational Zionist movement. To dismantle the regime, every single Zionist organisation, the world over, needs to be ended. Every. Single. One.”7 (Zionism is the belief in and support of a Jewish homeland.)8

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100 years ago: Mordecai Kaplan arguing for more traditional Judaism - in an interesting venue

I am not at all a fan of "Reconstructionist Judaism" and its founder Mordecai Kaplan.  But he was a foe of Reform Judaism as well, and a hundred years ago he railed against it in a lecture in Brooklyn which has a lot of truth in it.

From the Brooklyn Daily Times, November 28, 1922:

KAPLAN SEES JEWS SEEKING NEW GODS 

"Let Us Not Become Too Worldly for Our Faith," Professor Says. 

"You claim it is hard for you to be a Jew, because. you don't know what real true Judaism is. After the present reformers have gotten through, not even a Jew ran recognize, his own traditions, customs and religion. " 

This statement wars made by Prof. Modercai Kaplan, well-known lecturer on Jewish topics, speaking at the weekly open forum conducted by the Jewish Centre, 667 Eastern Parkway, last night. His topic was "Spiritual Self-Adjustment of the Jew." 

In a discourse that was enthusiastically received Prof. Kaplan outlined in an interesting manner the trials of Jewish educators in this country.

"In this land of promise," he said, "with every opportunity. and freedom, educators find it hard to attract Jewish youth to their religion because reformers and theorists have eliminated everything that would attract the young mind. Instead they have substituted modern versions of the Bible which acts upon the young mind not as an incentive to study religion but as a poison." 

"Judaism is not a religion," he continued. "It is the art of living according to the norms and ethical laws extolled by our fathers. Jews claim that It is hard for them to practice their religion due to their activities of anti-semitism, but I think they arc mistaken. The anti-Semites are not at fault. The Jews are at fault; they are trying to enter Gentile clubs, and they are trying to become members of the Y. M. C. A. That is the reason why so much propaganda is aimed at them, for poaching on other people's property and pleasures.

 "If they cannot participate in foreign  activities without losing their consciousness of being Jews, let them stop attending these clubs. 

"Jews are losing their individuality trying to modernize themselves to extreme degrees. They do not realize that their individuality and sectionalism is one of the factors that keeps the great multitude in the ranks, and when the modern theorists minimize this, the Jewish youth drifts away, to the new-fangled religions, searching for some thing that will interest them in life, instead of finding it in our own religion as our forefathers did. 

"Let us not become too worldly in our faith. It is only when we cheapen our religion, nationalism, and customs, that we lose faith in them and they are of no more value to us than something that will take up our time on the Sabbath and holidays." 

Ending his address, he urged that the new schools being built should not be devoted only to gymnasiums and clubrooms but also have them include a "syllabus for the instruction of our language, customs, and faith." 

He gave the lecture at the Brooklyn Jewish Center, which was at the time a brand new building, a major hub for Jews in Brooklyn, with a banquet hall, synagogue, gym and swimming pool.

The Brooklyn Jews of Crown Heights ended up doing exactly what Kaplan predicted - they became less interested in Judaism and moved out of the neighborhood.

In 1982, the board decided to sell the building, but it was important for them to keep it Jewish, so they sold it for far less than its value to Chabad.

Today, the building houses Chabad yeshiva Ohalei Torah, and it is only a block from Chabad's headquarters.

Kaplan's warnings about Jewish assimilation were quite valid. His own movement has been a dismal failure at fighting it. 

Chabad has taken Kaplan's warnings about revitalizing the religion far more seriously than his own failed Reconstructionist movement has. While disciples have replaced religion with wokeness, Chabad is doing what Kaplan urged Jews to do, albeit not in the way he envisioned.

It is ironic that in the very spot where Kaplan warned about the future of Jews as a religious group and as a nation, the revitalization he demanded is actually happening - and leaving his own followers way behind.

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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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The PLO is run by 16 white men. "Progressives" silent.

Diversity. Equity. Inclusion.

These are sacred concepts for progressives. 

They also happen to be concepts roundly ignored by the Palestinian leadership. 

And the aforementioned progressives don't really care.

Here is a photo from a PLO Executive Committee meeting presided over by Palestinian dictator Mahmoud Abbas on Tuesday evening.

Not one woman. Not one man whose skin tone would make them a victim of discrimination anywhere.

Once upon a time, Hanan Ashrawi was a member of the committee. She resigned in 2020 - and was replaced by yet another white man.

EC members are not elected. They are effectively handpicked by Mahmoud Abbas to support his decisions, as he controls every single branch of Palestinian government. 

None of this bothers the people who claim to care so much about diversity and inclusion. 

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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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