Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, December 13, 2019

12/13 Links Pt1: Ben Shapiro: The Left’s Grotesque Politicization Of Anti-Semitism; UK: Conservatives crush leftist Labour Party in massive election landslide; John Podhoretz: Thank You, British Voters

From Ian:

Ben Shapiro: The Left’s Grotesque Politicization Of Anti-Semitism

The Left, increasingly, does not care about anti-Semitism.

That’s been true for a while— just look at the British Labour Party’s embrace of anti-Semite Jeremy Corbyn (today, the UK Guardian openly editorialized, “The pain and hurt within the Jewish community, and the damage to Labour, are undeniable and shaming. Yet Labour remains indispensable to progressive politics.”), or the Democratic Party’s defense of Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. But the Left has been able to cover for its own anti-Semitism problem by focusing in on the rise of white supremacist violence, connecting that violence with President Trump.

Here’s a quick rule of thumb: If you only want to have a conversation about anti-Semitism when you can blame anti-Semitism on your political opponents, you don’t care about anti-Semitism.

And that’s precisely what we’ve seen over the past 24 hours.

On Tuesday, two shooters targeted a kosher supermarket in Jersey City; six people died, including the shooters, three civilians, and a police officer. The shooters were apparently affiliated with the Black Hebrew Israelites, a fringe black supremacist group claiming that Jews aren’t actually the true Jews — that the actual Jews are black Americans. Members of this group have been involved in violent incidents in the past, of course.

The identity of the shooters meant that the media Left was eager to ignore the case. And indeed, within 24 hours, it was no longer trending on Twitter. No broad discussions of left-wing tolerance for anti-Semitism, particularly in minority communities, ensued. New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio had the temerity to tweet, “This tragically confirms that a growing pattern of violent anti-Semitism has now turned into a crisis for our nation. And now this threat has reached the doorstep of New York City.” Now, broadly speaking, violence against Jews in New York City has been spiking in the past few years — none of that violence attributable to white supremacists. But we already know why De Blasio has been able to ignore that violence – The New York Times told us as much back in November 2018:

If anti-Semitism bypasses consideration as a serious problem in New York, it is to some extent because it refuses to conform to an easy narrative with a single ideological enemy. In fact, it is the varied backgrounds of people who commit hate crimes in the city that make combating and talking about anti-Semitism in New York much harder. … [B]ias stemming from longstanding ethnic tensions in the city presents complexities that many liberals have chosen simply to ignore. …

New Jersey AG: Shooting ‘fueled by anti-Semitism,’ being probed as terror attack

The two killers who stormed a kosher market in Jersey City were apparently acting alone and were “fueled both by anti-Semitism and anti-law enforcement beliefs,” New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal said Thursday.

Grewal said the attackers expressed interest in the Black Hebrew Israelites, a fringe group whose members have been known to rail against white people and Jews. He told a news conference that authorities are investigating the shooting as an act of domestic terrorism.

While there have been fears since the shooting Tuesday that a hatred of Jews was behind the attack, Grewal and some others had been cautious in describing the motive, noting it was still under investigation.

New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal on the Jersey City attack on a kosher market: The evidence now points to acts of hate, I can confirm that we are now investigating this as acts of domestic terrorism fueled by antisemitism and a hatred towards police. pic.twitter.com/NIqIt2wKeH
— Reagan Battalion (@ReaganBattalion) December 12, 2019

Surveillance video released Thursday that was apparently shot from a security camera above the store entrance showed the two assailants entering the supermarket, as well as a man who was inside the shop when they entered fleeing down the street.

Sorry to share this other video of the shooting but it shows something that the other CCTV video didn’t. You can see the shooters target the man trying to run away from the store. They targeted Jews 💔pic.twitter.com/21bQWT19JU
— ~Legacy~ נפתלי בן מתתיהו (@Immort4l_Legacy) December 12, 2019

The FBI on Wednesday searched the Harlem headquarters of the Israelite Church of God in Jesus Christ, which is the formal name of the Black Hebrew group, according to a law enforcement official briefed on the investigation, who was not authorized to discuss the case publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

“The evidence points toward acts of hate,” Grewal told reporters. “I can confirm that we’re investigating this matter as potential acts of domestic terrorism fueled both by anti-Semitism and anti-law enforcement beliefs.”

Black Hebrew Israelites - Jewish Enough To Be Killed By Palestinian Terrorists (Daled Amos)

By Daled Amos

Two Black Hebrew Israelites deliberately attacked a kosher grocery in Jersey City this past Tuesday.

We can leave it to the media to report who the Black Hebrew Israelites are.
There will be articles about just how Jewish they are, about their history and about their community in Israel.

But while they are not considered Jewish by the Israeli government, Black Hebrew Israelites are Jewish enough for Palestinian terrorists.

According to an article in the Chicago Tribune in 2002, Death bridges gap for Black Hebrews:

Under a cool, clear sky and with a large crowd of mourners on hand, 32-year-old Aharon Ben-Yisrael Elis was buried Sunday in a new section of this town's cemetery.

He was the first of the Black Hebrews--a small group of African-Americans, most of whom came to Israel from Chicago more than three decades ago--to be born in Israel. He also was the first of the group to die from the terrorism that has haunted the Jews of Israel for years.

Aharon Ben-Yisrael Elis. Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Because the group had their own religion, combining Judaism with other beliefs, the Black Hebrews were not fully accepted into Israeli society and were not granted citizenship.

But those differences were set aside in the face of the terrorist attack:

Yet Elis' passing at the hands of a terrorist provoked an outpouring of Israeli mourners, including Dimona's mayor, a member of the Knesset and the two top rabbis from this town in the northern tip of the Negev desert. Elis was killed Thursday, one of six people slain by a Palestinian gunman who had stormed a banquet hall in a northern town where a bat mitzvah, or a coming-of-age ceremony, for a 12-year-old Israeli girl was under way.

...Dimona officials talked about how the Black Hebrews had found a home in their community and were welcomed. Av Shalom Vilan, a member of the Knesset from the left-of-center Meretz Party, said he hoped that the death of a Black Hebrew as a result of Arab violence would open the hearts and doors of Israel's society for citizenship for the group, which the Black Hebrews have long sought.

Rabbi Shalom Dayan, the chief Sephardic rabbi of Dimona, summed up in a few words what the others said Elis' death meant for the Black Hebrews' long-term quest to win full acceptance into Israeli society.

"You have just sealed one of the most difficult pacts with our Israeli society," Dayan said.

More than that, the Israeli government took action too.

Israel destroyed the Palestinian broadcasting center and Israeli tanks came up to Yasser Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah. Israeli troops entered Tulkarem, where they searched houses, detained a number of Palestinian Arabs and put the city under curfew.

But that was then.

And it makes this week's tragedy even more bitter.

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On Sunday, I noted (on a tip by WC) that a director and Oscar nominee Elia Suleiman said he wished to "drown Israel" but since he couldn't, his films are meant to accomplish the same "resistance" in a different way.

Tomer Ilan noticed that the Israeli Education Ministry lists his films as "recommended" in the official high school curriculum for Cinema.

This seems to have gotten the attention of B'Tslamo, a pro-Israel NGO. Makor Rishon reports today that B'Tsalmo's Shai Glick appealed to the Minister of Education Rafi Peretz to remove any films by Suleiman from the curriculum, and he did.

As far as I know, EoZ was the first to publicize this - I couldn't find any articles in Hebrew media about Suleiman's hate.

This is the third time this week that EoZ has helped with "tikkun olam," so to speak, where my posts led to actions.

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Yet more proof that "pro-Palestinian" is a codeword for "inciting against Israel"

The "Adalah Justice Project," an influential American group that claims to be "pro-Palestinian," tweets:

The Executive Order was against antisemitism, which includes treating the Jewish state as a proxy for traditional antisemitism (by subjecting it to double standards, false accusations and analogies meant to hurt the feelings of Jews such as comparing it to Nazis).

In no way does it cover "advocacy for Palestinian rights."

But Adalah, as well as any so-called "pro-Palestinian" organization you can name, cannot even imagine advocating for Palestinian rights - which no one is against - and attacking the Jewish state. The two are one and the same.

Well-meaning people are saying that the IHRA definition of antisemitism may be used to chill free speech. There is no proof for this. There is also no proof that existing Title VI legislation, which could be used to attack free speech that could be descried as racist or xenophobic, is problematic. But for some reason the Adalah-style argument - that antisemitic speech must be protected on campus while anti-racist and anti-immigrant speech cannot be - has resonated with the liberal media and organizations.

This is quite worrying for those who actually care about antisemitism.

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12/12 Links Pt2: Trump's Redefinition of Jewish Identity That Wasn't; The Guardian Throws British Jews Under the Bus; Pro-Israel Event in Madrid Disrupted by Violent BDS Activists

From Ian:

Yair Rosenberg: Trump's Redefinition of Jewish Identity That Wasn't

Regular readers of this newsletter know that I have not been sparing in my criticism of President Donald Trump, or his conduct towards Jews. I’ve spent years writing about the anti-Semitism within his ideological circle and evident from his own rhetoric and conduct. These facts remain real concerns. But the danger of a powerful narrative is that it can lead us to shoehorn events into it that don’t actually belong.

That’s what happened yesterday when it was announced that Trump would be signing an executive order to combat anti-Semitism on university campuses. Critics immediately seized on a New York Times report that claimed that the order—whose text it did not cite—would “define Judaism as a nationality, not just a religion.” In short order, “Judaism” began trending on Twitter for all the wrong reasons. Countless celebrities and commentators claimed that this was an attempt to define Jews as un-American and suggested it was the first step towards deportation or even a Holocaust.

My goal here is not to shame people who were expressing their legitimate heartfelt concerns, which is why I’m not embedding any of those tweets. I just want to explain what really happened, what the executive order actually says, and how we can avoid being taken in by such panics in the future.

Because as it turns out, the executive order does not redefine Judaism as a nationality. The full text, which was released today, simply echoes Obama era doctrine for protecting Jews under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Because Title VI does not mention discrimination based on religion, it could be interpreted to exclude protection for religious groups like Sikhs, Muslims, Jews, and others. To close this loophole, the Obama administration’s assistant attorney general for civil rights Tom Perez—now the head of the Democratic National Committee—crafted a policy based on prior precedent that stated that these religious groups were nonetheless covered under Title VI’s provisions, despite the language of the act. Basically, the idea was that although these groups might not define themselves as a “nation” or “race,” because racists define them that way and attack them as such, they are protected. A loophole of sorts to get around a loophole. Slate legal writer Mark Joseph Stern has an excellent detailed breakdown of this policy and its history.

Explaining Trump’s Executive Order on Anti-Semitism

President Trump is expected to sign an executive order today aimed at cracking down on anti-Semitism on college campuses. The order will define Jewish people as a nation or race and thus allow the federal government to withhold money from universities that ignore Jew-hatred.

For those interested in a deeper understanding of the plan, the original idea behind it was laid out in the September 2010 issue of COMMENTARY by Kenneth L. Marcus, who now serves as the assistant secretary of civil rights in the Trump Education Department. Marcus’s essay, “A Blind Eye to Campus Anti-Semitism?” explains:

The lack of a coherent legal conception of Jewish identity has rendered the Office for Civil Rights (henceforth, OCR) unable to cope with a resurgence of anti–Semitic incidents on American college campuses, of which the Irvine situation is enragingly emblematic. The problem stems from the fact that federal agents have jurisdiction under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act over race and national-origin discrimination—but not over religion. And because they have been unable to determine whether Jewish Americans constitute a race or a national-origin group, they found themselves unable to address the anti-Semitism at UC-Irvine. This confusion has led to enforcement paralysis as well as explosive confrontations and recriminations within the agency.

Study: Israeli Elections Rampant Because Kids Play Election-Filled Video Games (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook page.

Tel Aviv, December 12 - Researchers seeking to explain the many more rounds of voting citizens of the Jewish State must endure than their predecessors did have seized on the realization that the current generation of voters grew up during and immediately following an explosion in the prevalence of virtual interactive entertainment, leading them to conclude that the increase in parliamentary balloting results from prolonged exposure to the influence of that entertainment.

Academics in the Political Science and Sociology departments at Tel Aviv University announced today the findings of a study they conducted beginning with the first instance of elections in 2019, this past April, but which took on heightened relevance as another round of voting took place in September - with yet another to come in March 2020. The study looked at the close correlation between the increase in election frequency and the rise of immersive video games, and concluded that a causative relationship exists between the latter and the former. The study appeared in this week's issue of the journal Specious.

"We observed a direct relationship between the prevalence of video games and the increase in size of the electoral cohort that grew up playing those games," the article stated. "Closer examination led us to the realization that given the axiom that exposure to violent video games produces a more violent society, an analogous dynamic must be in play in Israeli society: video games with gratuitous elections in them leading to unnecessary and harmful elections in the real world."

The researchers also pointed to the relative paucity in neighboring Palestinian society - and all the Arab or Muslim societies in the region - of both a robust cohort of gamers or former gamers, and therefore of elections. "By examining the negative hypothesis as well," the article continued, "we determined that the relationship carries significance. Palestinian elections have not taken place in more than a decade, and examination of the prevalence of video games in Palestinian society reveals insignificant levels of such activity. The causative link also exists in wider Arab society throughout the Middle East, where both video games and regular elections of any real democratic import remain vanishingly rare."

Researchers offered few specifics for practical measures the link suggests. "The phenomenon deserves further study," the article concludes. "We recommend related interdisciplinary explorations, such as any correlations between blindness to left-wing antisemitism in video games and the same feature of large swaths of Western society, or between the lack of female gamers playing driving-related games and the common understanding of women as inferior drivers."

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Rashida Tlaib is heartbroken over murdered Jews. Oh, they were killed by blacks? Never mind.

US Representative Rashida Tlaib tweeted this morning:

Within seconds, people started responding that she should apologize because the Jersey City murderers were black, not white supremacists.

About 20 minutes later, Tlaib deleted her tweet.

But she didn't apologize.

She didn't correct herself.

She didn't send another tweet explaining how she is heartbroken over the deaths that weren't done by white nationalists.

The reason is as disgusting as it is obvious and as obvious as it is politically incorrect: Rashida Tlaib identifies more with the Black Hebrew murderers than with the Jewish victims of antisemitic violence.

They identified as persons of color, as does Tlaib. They thought of themselves as being oppressed by white people, as does Tlaib. They hated cops, as does Tlaib. They were antisemitic, as is Tlaib.

The anti-Israel political forces in America align themselves with angry black people in the false pretense that they are fighting the same battles. They succeeded in convincing Black Lives Matter that Jews/Israelis were responsible for American police violence.

You just know that as soon as Tlaib realized her mistake, she started thinking - what were Jews doing in a black neighborhood? How have they upset the locals? What did they do to deserve to be murdered?

Because the only people who are lower in the intersectionality totem pole than Jews are Trump supporters and neo-Nazis. When someone with a lower score is involved in a conflict with someone with a higher score, the presumption of innocence goes to the higher score. By finding out that the victims has a lower intersectionality score (-6) than the murderers (8 and 14) suddenly Tlaib was no longer heartbroken...except, perhaps, for the poor black people who felt so marginalized by the rich powerful Jews moving into their neighborhood that they felt they had to defend their community.

This is the sick mentality of the "progressive" Left.

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12/12 Links Pt1: Jewish Blood on the Streets of Jersey City; The Silence Surrounding Violence Against Us Orthodox Jews Is Deafening; Could Jordan’s Economic Crisis Solve the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict?

From Ian:

Jewish Blood on the Streets of Jersey City

In the early afternoon, after the governor and mayor had come and gone, Rabbi David Niederman, the president of United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg and one of the public faces of the city’s Satmar communities, arrived on the scene. I followed him and various leaders of the Jersey City community up that side stairway and into the first floor of the school, where dozens of children had been hiding in fear just a day earlier, and where a massacre beyond all imagination might have been narrowly avoided. There was a board game half out of its box, and cards strewn across one of the hallways. A single page of cursive Yiddish handwritten on notebook paper sat at my feet.

Niederman, who was likely in the midst of one of the most intense and complicated days of his life, had appeared at a press conference with New York Mayor Bill de Blasio just a couple hours earlier. He ate an egg salad sandwich and then said birkat hamazon under his breath.

Niederman had tirelessly sounded the alarm about the frequent attacks and harassment of Jews in Williamsburg. It was important for him to come to Jersey City as soon as he could, he said, because “my brother and my sister were killed here.”

In his experience, the attack was not a single, shocking incident of violence but rather the latest episode in a year-and-a-half-long period in which a Haredi Jew was hit, beaten, or threatened on the streets of New York on what felt like a monthly and then a weekly basis. That the steady drumbeat of attacks on Jews had finally turned deadly left him with a feeling of inevitability, exhaustion, and waste. “It’s incremental,” Niederman said of the worsening attacks. “The target moves.”

Niederman had a message for the non-Haredi Jews who form the vast majority of New York’s incredibly diverse Jewish community. “Don’t think that because you don’t have a kippa and you don’t dress like the Hasidim that you are safe,” he said. “Speak out, and say anti-Semitism has to be stopped, no matter who the recipient of the anti-Semitic acts are. Say: Those are our brothers and sisters. It’s our brothers and sisters, and people should start understanding that they are also Jewish, and therefore they can be next on the line.”

Jersey City rampage victims remembered as generous Satmar community members

Two of the Jewish victims of the Jersey City shooting rampage were remembered on Wednesday as a dedicated mother of five “full of love,” and a charitable young member of the Satmar Hasidic community who was involved in the founding of the local yeshiva.

A police officer, three bystanders and the two suspects all died in the violence Tuesday afternoon in Jersey City, just across the Hudson River from New York City. Two of the bystanders have been identified by local community members as Leah Mindel Ferencz, 33, and Moshe Deutsch, 24, both members of the local ultra-Orthodox community.

The 40-year-old slain officer, Detective Joseph Seals, who led the department in the number of illegal guns removed from the streets in recent years, was cut down by gunfire that erupted near a cemetery. The gunmen then drove a stolen rental van to another part of the city and engaged police in a lengthy shootout from inside the kosher market, where the five other bodies were later found.

Ferencz, 33, was part-owner of JC Kosher Supermarket. Shortly before the gunmen stormed the store, her husband, Moishe, went to the synagogue next door to pray, according to Chabad Rabbi Moshe Schapiro.

Thousands mourn at funerals of 2 Jewish victims of Jersey City shooting

Thousands of mourners took to the streets of Brooklyn and Jersey City late Wednesday for the funerals of Mindel Ferencz, 31, and 24-year-old Moshe Deutsch, who were killed in the kosher store shooting.

In Brooklyn, thousands of mostly men followed Ferencz’s casket through the streets hugging and crying. Many prayed. She was later laid to rest in Jersey City, where she had made her home in recent years and ran the grocery with her husband.

Thousands also accompanied Deutsch, a rabbinical student from Brooklyn who was shopping at the grocery when the assailants entered. The funeral service was held at the Satmar Beit Midrash in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Eulogies, in Yiddish, were broadcast to the crowds who filled the roads and stairs of homes along the route, with many sobbing and wailing.

At the funeral of Moshe Dautsch, murdered yesterday in the kosher grocery yesterday in Jersey City. This should not be. pic.twitter.com/oDQnRDt8kN
— Motti Seligson (@mottiseligson) December 12, 2019

Police provided escorts to both funerals.

The prospect of attacks against Jews weighed heavily on the more than 300 people who attended a vigil Wednesday night at a synagogue about a mile from where the shootings took place.

“I think maybe we have two parts of our brain,” said Temple Beth-El president Tom Rosensweet. “One part is absolutely not expecting something like this to happen in Jersey City, but the other part knows we have to be careful.”

I reported yesterday about a survey of Arabs throughout the Middle East by Transparency International that showed that Palestinians see their government as very corrupt, among the worst in the region.

The Palestinian Authority set up an anti-corruption commission about 14 years ago to supposedly fight corruption. The building looks very impressive. But how did the commission respond to this survey?

With denial and whining, of course.

Instead of saying that they will study the matter, they said that the methodology of the report was bad (many Arab countries were not included so they say their rankings aren't really so bad.)

They blame the sextortion reports in the survey as being all in Gaza under Hamas, and nothing to do with their bosses in Ramallah.

It said, "The report does not reflect the reality, and came in light of the cut in salaries and the difficult conditions experienced by the Palestinian people."

In short, the commission whose entire job is to root out corruption washed its hands of having to investigate a major report of corruption.

For all of the hundreds of reporters and NGOs in Israel and in the Palestinian territories, no one seems much interested in reporting stories like this. Corruption in an entity that receives billions of dollars from the West is not considered as newsworthy as Jews building a house.

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Palestinian Americans and Leftist Jews push vision of a Jew-free (and improbably progressive) "Palestine" from the river to the sea

Israel-haters pretending to be Palestinian activists in the US have started a new initiative to create a vision for a Jew-free Middle East while pretending to be progressive.

The "Justice for All" campaign, on a new website called "FreedomFuture.org," was set up by the BDSers from the Adalah Justice Project and the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. Together with many partners like Jewish Voice for Peace, the American Friends Service Committee, the Democratic Socialists of America they have a list of "demands" that use all he correct "progressive" buzzwords while building a case to ethnically cleanse Jews from the river to the sea, meaning an entire Middle East that is Judenfrei.

Demands include Palestinian self-determination (including in Israel), the "right of return" (where there is full freedom for Palestinians to live wherever they want but Jews have no such right,) "freedom for all Palestinians" which is just a veiled accusation that Israel discriminates against all non-Jews, and the "the right to resist our oppression" in which they never say that "resistance" is only peaceful - meaning it includes terrorism.

All of these codewords have been used for years to fool liberals into thinking that destroying the Jewish state is a valorous cause.

One demand absurdly says they want "the freedom to build our own just and liberated society that is free of classism, patriarchy, homophobia, racism, ableism, and bigotry in all forms."

Surveys have shown that Palestinians are among the the least liberal people on the planet. An astonishing 89% of Palestinian Muslims say they want Sharia to be the law of the land - and most of them approve of stoning for adultery and chopping off hands for theft. 89% say homosexuality is morally unacceptable and 92% say drinking alcohol is immoral. 37% say "honor killings" are justified.

It is had to imagine a less tolerant state than the one that Palestinians in the PA and Hamas controlled areas themselves want - these numbers are in Taliban territory.

These so-called progressives do not lift a finger to help Palestinians change their xenophobic, antisemitic and intolerant attitudes. Instead, they are gaslighting uninformed liberals in the West into thinking a Palestinian state would be a beacon of light and equality.

The entire initiative is meant to ethnically cleanse Jews from the area. Indeed, nowhere in the entire website does it even pretend to say that Jews would live as equals in the Palestinian state they "demand." This is intolerance disguised as progressivism, and it is a shame that so few true liberals call them on it.

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It is way past time to talk about antisemitism in the black community

There is antisemitism on the Right.

There is antisemitism on the Left.

There is antisemitism in the Arab world.

And there is antisemitism among blacks and Hispanics.

They have some things in common, but there is no "one size fits all" for each of them.

The problem is that this last category of antisemitism is the one that no one wants to talk about. Blacks are framed as perpetual victims in the media - and in many ways they really are - but the narrative cannot accommodate the victims as being the bigots against Jews.

There was a shocking video that came out after the Jersey City shootings showing truly evil antisemitic attitudes by the black community against the Jews who live there. One hopes this is not representative - but it shouldn't be swept under the rug, either.

SHOCKING VIDEO: As Jewish bodies were still laying in cold blood after being murdered by terrorists in Jersey City, a rep of @AmericansAA captured spontaneous antisemitic tirades blaming Jews for their own murder & ppl cheering it on!

Antisemitism, a bigger problem than appears. pic.twitter.com/WHmLtxANAE
— Dov Hikind (@HikindDov) December 11, 2019

The good news is that black antisemitism has been steadily decreasing in recent decades. Some 37% of blacks had antisemitic attitudes in the early 1990s, but since 2007 it has been bouncing in the mid 20s:

This is still significantly higher than the antisemitic attitudes of the general population (which is still way too high at 14%.)

Hispanic Americans born in the US are somewhat less antisemitic; those born abroad much worse:

Black antisemitism has different factors. Historic views of Jews as greedy landlords and the influence of the Nation of Islam on the community are among them. Jamie Kirchick in Commentary last year identified two trends: "neighborhood" antisemitism from Jews often being the only white people inner city blacks would meet and becoming the lightning rod for all resentment, and "conspiratorial" antisemitism pushed by Louis Farrakhan and others that the Jews have control over the nation or even the weather. It is a very worthwhile article to read.

I also recommend a 1992 New York Times op-ed by Henry Louis Gates Jr. about the rise of black antisemitism at that time. He also divides up black antisemitism into two parts that roughly correspnd with Kirchick's:

We must begin by recognizing what is new about the new anti-Semitism. Make no mistake: this is anti-Semitism from the top down, engineered and promoted by leaders who affect to be speaking for a larger resentment. This top-down anti-Semitism, in large part the province of the better educated classes, can thus be contrasted with the anti-Semitism from below common among African American urban communities in the 1930's and 40's, which followed in many ways a familiar pattern of clientelistic hostility toward the neighborhood vendor or landlord.

Gates exposes how black pseudo-intellectuals were able to provide the "new anti-semitism" with a veneer of respectability, including the Nation of Islam's influential and utterly false book about the supposed Jewish slave trade.

He concludes eloquently:

Bigotry, as a tragic century has taught us, is an opportunistic infection, attacking most virulently when the body politic is in a weakened state. Yet neither should those who care about black America gloss over what cannot be condoned: that much respect we owe to ourselves. For surely it falls to all of us to recapture the basic insight that Dr. King so insistently expounded. "We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality," he told us. "Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly." How easy to forget this -- and how vital to remember.

Black antisemitism has different sources than other strains, and it requires different methods to fight it. It cannot be fought unless it can be admitted and discussed. And this is where the Left, who claim to care so much about antisemitism, has failed terribly.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Trump Gets it Right about Antisemitism (Vic Rosenthal)

Vic Rosenthal's Weekly Column

(Note: This was written before we all found out that there was nothing in the executive order that described Jews as a nationality. - EoZ)

President Trump is expected to issue an executive order that Jews should be treated as a “nationality*” as well as a religious group. This means that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans the use of federal funds for programs or activities that discriminate on the basis of “race, color, or national origin,” will now apply to antisemitism. And an administration official has said that the government would use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which the State Department adopted in 2016, as a working definition of antisemitism (a previous working definition in use from 2010 is similar in relevant respects).

This is a big deal, because the extreme anti-Zionism (misoziony) that characterizes the discourse on many Western colleges and universities clearly falls under the IHRA definition, which specifically mentions

Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.

Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.

Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.

Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis...

which are all the bread and butter of Students for Justice in Palestine, as well as countless other anti-Israel organizations. Of course, antisemitism in the form of assaults, discrimination, and other more subtle forms of harassment in the guise of “free expression” – incidentally, things that would never be tolerated if their object were other minorities – also will be able to trigger a shutoff of federal funds.

Naturally, the usual suspects are outraged. Some of the outrage comes from those who would be outraged if Trump were to issue an order recognizing motherhood and apple pie, because he is Trump. Halie Soifer of the Jewish Democratic Council of America accused Trump of “hypocrisy,” blamed him for “emboldening white nationalism, perpetuating anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and repeating stereotypes that have led to violence targeting Jews.” Even if these accusations were true (I am convinced that they are not), they are irrelevant to the reasonableness of this executive order.

But there are more substantive objections. They either deny that Jews are a nationality, or they object to the IHRA definition, usually saying it limits free speech by conflating “legitimate” anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Let’s take the issue of nationality first.

One group that objects to the idea that Jews are a people or a nationality, of course, is the PLO and the Palestinian Authority, who have always insisted that “Jewish” refers only to a religion, not a nation. They have therefore refused to accept the “two states for two peoples” formula or to recognize that Israel is the state of the Jewish people. This is one of the main reasons that the Palestinians have never accepted any of the generous offers of statehood proffered to them. Interestingly, there is also a strong current of “nationhood denial” among liberal American Jews. Some seem to think that attributing nationhood to the Jewish people would mean that they would somehow be “less American.” But of course nobody believes that granting this status to Italian-Americans would make them less American, or that Title VI doesn’t apply to discrimination against them.

This prejudice in the diaspora against the idea of Jewish nationhood goes back to the late 18^th and early 19^th century when Jews were first beginning to acquire rights in newly-enlightened Europe. The spectre of their “dual loyalty” to their country of residence and to the Jewish nation quickly arose. In 1789, the French Count of Clermont-Tonnerre, in a speech about the treatment of minorities in the new Republic, said “[w]e must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation, and accord everything to the Jews as individuals.” Let them have their religion and their quaint customs, but their national loyalty can only be to France.

Many Jews were happy to agree. In Germany, the newly-created Reform Movement adopted the idea of being “Germans of the Mosaic Persuasion,” nationally identical to their neighbors of the Lutheran persuasion. In America, the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform of the American Reform Movement included this unequivocal statement: “[w]e consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.” By 1999, their platform refers to the Jews as “a people.” But many liberal Jews, uncomfortable about the possibility (and often the actuality) of accusations of dual loyalty, take pains to insist that they do not see themselves as anything other than Americans (or Canadians, or Britons). Their Jewishness is only a matter of religion, ethnicity, or some cultural artifacts.

They have a right to say that if they wish, and to distance themselves from the Jewish nation, but they do not have the right to say that there is no Jewish nation. The Jewish people, in fact, are the paradigm case of a nation: if you want to know what the characteristics of a nation are, look at the Jews. The Jewish people have

1.      A common geographical origin and a connection to their aboriginal home.
2.      A shared genetic heritage.
3.      A unique ancestral language.
4.      A unique religion.
5.      A shared culture.
6.      A shared historical experience.
7.    Self-identification as a nation.

It’s ironic that the Palestinian Arabs, who have multiple origins, a relatively short period of shared history, no unique language or religion, a culture based entirely on opposition to the Jews, and who have only self-identified as a nation since the mid-1960s, have the chutzpah to deny nationhood to the Jewish people!

What about the argument that the IHRA definition conflates antisemitism with anti-Zionism and thus limits speech that is critical of Israel? Despite what some say, it is actually quite easy to distinguish between legitimate criticism of Israel and antisemitism. The criteria were provided by Natan Sharansky, who called it the “3D Test of Antisemitism.” I’ll quote him:

The first "D" is the test of demonization. When the Jewish state is being demonized; when Israel's actions are blown out of all sensible proportion; when comparisons are made between Israelis and Nazis and between Palestinian refugee camps and Auschwitz - this is anti- Semitism, not legitimate criticism of Israel.

The second "D" is the test of double standards. When criticism of Israel is applied selectively; when Israel is singled out by the United Nations for human rights abuses while the behavior of known and major abusers, such as China, Iran, Cuba, and Syria, is ignored; when Israel's Magen David Adom, alone among the world's ambulance services, is denied admission to the International Red Cross - this is anti-Semitism.

The third "D" is the test of delegitimization: when Israel's fundamental right to exist is denied - alone among all peoples in the world - this too is anti-Semitism.

I call irrational, extreme hatred of Israel misoziony. Misoziony is a form of antisemitism, the traditional Jew-hatred raised to a higher level of abstraction. And there is no better test for misoziony than Sharansky’s 3D criteria, which are implicit in the IHRA working definition of antisemitism. There is no reason to oppose the IHRA definition, except to enable antisemites to disguise their poison as legitimate political speech.

The growing phenomenon of antisemitism in Western universities – where it usually takes the form of misoziony – has given rise to a great deal of consternation and hand-wringing on the part of university administrators, who have in general done nothing practical to reduce it. Yet again, Donald Trump has come along and cut what appeared to be a Gordian Knot, just as he did when he finally fulfilled the promise of the US Congress to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish state.

And just as they did last May, Jewish progressives displayed their remarkable ability to cut off their own noses to spite their faces.
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* It should be understood that “nationality” is used in the older and broader sense of belonging to a people, or nation, and not in the narrow modern sense of citizenship in a country.

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