Wednesday, May 09, 2018
From Ian:
Jonathan Marks: Real anti-Semitism on Campus
Jonathan Marks: Real anti-Semitism on Campus
At Ithaca College, of six “bias-related incidents” reported in 2017-18, three were “cases of aggravated harassment involving swastikas.” One Jewish student there reported that a mezuzah “was knocked off of his door and damaged.” At Western Washington University’s library, seven Jewish Studies books were defaced with anti-Semitic slurs or destroyed, and someone drew a swastika on “a poster outside a faculty member’s office.” The University of Miami is investigating multiple anti-Semitic incidents, including one in which someone drew a “large swastika” on a whiteboard hanging on a Jewish student’s door. At Knox College, a professor of African Studies tweeted, among other things, that Jews are “pulling the strings for profit.” A faculty member involved in discussing the incident “found an anti-Semitic image had been slid under her office door.”Cary Nelson: The Presbyterian Church’s demonisation of Israel
That’s a sampling of news stories appearing in the month of April.” This month, we learned of an incident at Towson University in which members of a Jewish fraternity “were walking near the campus when . . . two assailants began shouting “F*** the Jews” and called them by an ethnic slur.” The “assailants then began punching one of the fraternity members in the face.” The victims believe their assailants were fellow students. Last week, at UC-Irvine, amid an anti-Israel protest, a protester called a pro-Israel advocate a “Christ killer.”
The Anti-Defamation League has reported that anti-Semitic incidents were up 89 percent in 2017. There is no reason to think that 2018 will be a better year.
As the AMCHA Initiative’s useful but depressing “swastika tracker” indicates, incidents of anti-Semitism on campus are quite often perpetrated by people who are or are pretending to be neo-Nazis or white nationalists. According to the construct invented by some on right to justify these acts of subterfuge, no treatment is too harsh for the globalists who are betraying our country. A mirror image of this paradigm prevails in certain circles on the left. For supporters of the Jewish state, Jews who refuse to denounce the Jewish state, or sometimes just for Jews who are not card-carrying members of the anti-Israel movement, no treatment can be too harsh. After all, they are responsible for all that is wrong with America.
Left-wing anti-Semitism and right-wing anti-Semitism, then, need to be addressed, and no one who claims to care about anti-Semitism can address just one or the other. It must be said, however, that when it comes to campus anti-Semitism, our failure occurs almost wholly with respect to the left. To be sure, institutions often do quite well when anti-Semitism is absolutely blatant. On the other hand, the most thinly veiled anti-Semitism —for example the blood libel perpetrated by Jasbir Puar of Rutgers University—is not only tolerated but celebrated and rewarded. Academics are much more comfortable denouncing right-wing anti-Semitism, which is almost entirely an off-campus phenomenon, than left-wing anti-Semitism, which has a real, albeit small, foothold at our colleges and universities.
The Presbyterian Church (USA) has published an ideological and political manual for anti-Israel organising ahead of its bi-annual gathering in June. Reviewing its content, Cary Nelson argues that the publisher’s claim to have produced ‘a study guide’ cannot be accepted. Rather, the language of ‘intersectionality’ is misused in a Church-sponsored demonisation of the Jewish state that is propelled by insinuation more than responsible argument. The controversial academic Steven Salaita argues that the phrase ‘Israeli hummus’ is not just an act of ‘cultural appropriation’ but ‘a promise of genocide’. Sarah Schulman slams Israel’s gay-friendly legal and cultural environment as ‘pink-washing’. Reconciliation and dialogue initiatives are trashed as ‘normalisation’. Israel is accused of ‘genocide’ and the conflict is said to have ‘parallels to the history of slavery in the United States’. The result is a glossy Church-sponsored prospectus for the abolition of the Jewish state that should deeply concern Presbyterians in America.David Collier: Banksy and the alien god killers that occupy Bethlehem
Toward the end of the Presbyterian anti-Zionist book, Why Palestine Matters: The Struggle to End Colonialism, a sequel to Zionism Unsettled issued in April 2018, just barely in time for PC(USA)’s bi-annual meeting in June, there is a decidedly improbable effort to extend the politics of intersectionality to include a link between Gaza and Puerto Rico. The second item in ‘Parallels with Puerto Rico’ is ‘Letter from Gaza: “We Are All Puerto Ricans,”’ which opens by declaring ‘I know what it’s like to struggle with shortages of vital supplies such as electricity, gas, cash, and safe water’ (82).
Why Palestine Matters is a 110-page oversized book consisting of 39 essays, over 30 breakout supplements, and a large number of illustrations with full paragraph captions. It includes three very useful colour maps, one each of Gaza, West Bank settlements, and West Bank Areas A, B, and C. The editors make an effort to describe it as the third ‘study guide’ issued by IPMN, the Israel/Palestine Mission Network of the Presbyterian Church (US), but it is so fiercely one-sided that it really serves exclusively as an ideological and political manual for anti-Israel organising. The volume breaks with IPMN’s history by explicitly aligning itself with the BDS movement and doing so at length. Many of the essays are new, but a few are excerpts from earlier publications. In the latter category are Steven Salaita’s unusually intense ‘Cultural Appropriation or Theft?’ which warns us that the phrase ‘Israeli hummus’ is a radical form of cultural appropriation, amounting to ‘a project of erasure, a portent of nonexistence, a promise of genocide’ (61) and Sarah Schulman’s ‘Rebranding with Sex and Sexuality,’ which reprises her 2011 brief against ‘pinkwashing,’ the purported effort to distract attention from the military occupation of the West Bank by highlighting Israel’s gay-friendly legal and cultural environment.
The Banksy Hotel and antisemitic imagery
Throughout the museum, there is use of Holocaust imagery, part of an ongoing strategy of equating the results of the 1947/48 civil conflict with the Holocaust. This one plays on both Holocaust and the idea that the value of life is not equal, with one Israeli tooth carrying more weight than over 2000 Arab lives.
This one suggests Israelis kill for money. That Arabs die just so Israelis can test weapons and the conflict is only there so that Jewish business can thrive.
Babies, clothing, shoes. Everywhere you look is the image of a brutal Holocaust committed by money grabbing Jews upon a defenceless and helpless population. Devil against the angels.
The next one is classic antisemitic imagery. Jews as god killers. An image of a Christ like figure with a red-dot sight on his forehead.
Endless hate in the Banksy hotel
There are many other similar images that will be uploaded by the groups who were there with me, and the IAM is also producing a video on the trip, but these few images provide a clear taste of the viscous propaganda on display. Our itinerary included various different faces of the conflict, but this was an important one. This is part of what we are up against, raw hatred dressed up as art. There is no middle ground to be found when facing such distortion and those who create it have no interest in building a dialogue. They want Jews to be seen as money grabbing god killers who invaded a foreign land and brutalised the inhabitants.
The Banksy hotel is a disgraceful blot on the landscape and full of antisemitic images. And the truth is that there is far more hate that went into building the exhibits within the hotel, than went into building the defensive wall the Hotel was designed to protest. One was designed to save lives, the other only sets out to demonise a people. Rather than join some of those we met who really want to make peace, Banksy chose to run with the hate.
