Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, July 08, 2020

07/08 Links Pt2: Don’t erase Jesus’s Jewish identity; The Evil of Louis Farrakhan vs. the Morality of Frederick Douglass; How much anti-Semitism does it take to cancel an NFL star?

From Ian:

Since we’re debating labels, stop calling it anti-Semitism. It’s Jew hatred.

Should we capitalize the “b” in Black? Hundreds of publications across the country, including bellwethers like The New York Times and Associated Press, have adjusted their style guides, arguing that capital-B Black reflects a common identity and heritage.

It’s time for a similarly introspective debate about the language we use to describe discrimination against Jews.

Most leading authorities and publications use “anti-Semitism.” I prefer “antisemitism,” the spelling used by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. But this debate obscures the core issue: Whether spelled anti-Semitism or antisemitism, we should retire the term entirely and begin calling it what it really is: Jew hatred.

Consider the history of the word. While the phenomenon of Jew hatred is inscribed in ancient texts, the term “anti-Semitism” is actually of relatively recent vintage, about as old as the telephone or the lightbulb. The German journalist Wilhelm Marr coined the term “anti-Semitism” in 1879 to give an air of modernity to long-embraced animosity toward the Jewish people.

Earlier Germans were blunter: They called it “Judenhaas,” literally Jew-hatred. Wilhelm, himself a deeply anti-Jewish political agitator, sought a pseudo-scientific and therefore more palatable word. He knew the term “Semitic” had historically referred to a family of languages that originated in the Middle East. So he refashioned the word to mean prejudice against Jews alone.

In his 1880 bestselling propagandist pamphlet, “The Way to Victory of the Germanic Spirit over the Jewish Spirit,” Wilhelm freely used the German term “antisemitismus.” And in the same year, Wilhelm founded the Antisemitenliga, the League of Antisemites, the first organization committed to combating the alleged Jewish takeover of Germany and German culture.

In other words, the term “anti-Semitism” was coined not to marginalize Jew hatred but to mainstream it.

Don’t erase Jesus’s Jewish identity

It was in this spirit, I think, that the Archbishop of York said, ‘Jesus was a black man, and he was born into a persecuted group in an occupied country.’ The trouble is, it isn’t true. Jesus wasn’t a black man. He wasn’t a northern European either. He was a Jew. A Jew from the Middle East. And that is a scandal. The ‘Scandal of Particularity’, as it is called.

It is a scandal that Jesus was born at a particular time in a particular place among a particular people as a particular sex. It is far easier to believe in a God who never gets tied down by human specifics. If God is nothing, God can be anything: God can be white, God can be black, God can be British (or German or French) and God can cheer us on against our enemies. God can be trans, or straight, or gay.

But when you rip divinity out of its comfortable atemporality and give it – give him – a name (something God stoically refused to tell Moses on Mount Sinai), a family, an education, a station in life, a group of friends, and, of course, a political world with which he interacted… suddenly he cannot be all things to all men.

At its best, art that puts Christ in a different context takes us out of our reality and put us into his scene; we become actors in his drama. At its worst, we end up ripping Christ from his reality and making him an actor in our drama – national, racial, or personal. The gap between good art and bad art is a chasm that is almost as deep as that between good theology and bad theology – and takes us to the same place.

The best art, like the best theology, takes the particular and makes it universal. We should be able to see ourselves (whoever we are) as Thomas putting his finger into the side of Christ, or as Matthew being called from his counting house, or as one of the soldiers pushing the crown of thorns onto Christ’s bleeding head.

The worst, however, cancels historical fact and replaces it with whichever passing particularity suits your narrative at the time. It leaves us without an historical Christ in whom we can (or can’t) believe on his own terms, and gives us an ever-flexible puppet of our own creation – in which it isn’t worth believing whatever the terms. Having removed the Jewish identity of their Saviour, it’s unsurprising that so many Christians are indifferent to that of their Jewish neighbours. Having abandoned the Middle East, you can see why the plight of their Christians can no longer interest us.

Now is not the time to erase the Middle Eastern Jew from the Christian story.

A Textbook Case of Discrimination as Palestinian Authority Schools Edit out Christians — and Jews

Seventy-six percent of Palestinian Christians gave the Palestinian Authority (PA) failing marks for how schools teach the history of Christians, according to a recent survey commissioned by The Philos Project.

“Palestine has a long, rich history of Palestinian Christians,” said Khalil Sayegh, a Christian from Gaza and Philos Advocacy Fellow. “The Palestinian textbooks and curriculum, however, just choose to deny all of that.”

Sayegh shared his insights during a June 17 online discussion with Robert Nicholson, executive director of The Philos Project, and Dr. Khalil Shikaki of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR), who conducted the survey.

Christians are a dwindling minority, accounting for a mere 1 percent of the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and the comprehensive survey examines challenges this religious minority faces, including Israeli settlements and the PA educational system. The survey has a sample size of 995 with a margin of error of +/- 3 percent.

“The history that we learn [in school] starts with the Islamic conquest of the land,” Sayegh said. “Anything before will focus on the pre-Israelite era. I understand that. It’s trying to deny the narrative of the Torah and biblical history because this, to a certain extent, is used to justify the existence of Israel. However, this leads to Palestinian Christians looking like foreigners.”

Crusader, infidel, and foreigner are all epithets Sayegh experienced in grade school. And the survey revealed he was not the only Christian in the Palestinian Territories who had the same experience. Twenty-seven percent said that they have been exposed to racist curses or epithets, and 43 percent said that they feel most Muslims do not want them in the land.

Taught by his secular-minded father that Christians have little that distinguishes them from Muslims, Sayegh learned in school that they do. One teacher warned him of hellfire if he did not convert to Islam. While only 23 percent of those surveyed admitted to being asked to convert to Islam, 70 percent said they had at one time heard a Muslim state that Christians will go to hellfire.

Bloggers, compared to journalists, can say more about antisemitism. That’s because the two disciplines—blogging and journalism—are different. In journalism, one has to adhere to journalistic standards and avoid bias. But the blogosphere offers possibilities beyond those standards.

In a blog I can say what I like—things you just can’t say in a straight news piece. As a blogger I write the things I think my readers should know—things that may not be politically correct. My responsibility as a blogger lies only in remaining faithful to my standards and sensibilities and those of my host. The reader’s responsibility, on the other hand, lies in accepting or rejecting my words, or skipping past them altogether.

This was the basis for The Comprehensive List of Antisemitic Celebrities. The freedom of being able to say what a journalist cannot. As a blogger, I don’t have to pussy-foot around a topic and stay within narrow journalistic confines. I can say more about a subject, more about antisemitism. I can say what I think. I can go out on a limb and say, “This too, is antisemitism.”

A List Was Born

I had wished for a reference like my list for a long time and when I mentioned it to others, they said that they too, would like to have such a list. The idea percolated for at least a couple of years. I was afraid that it would be a herculean task; that making such a list would be biting off more than I could chew.

But a couple of weeks ago, I decided to research the topic and see where it went. I started with the most recent news piece, the now-infamous Chelsea Handler Instagram post of Farrakhan speaking about racism that so many of her celebrity buddies liked. The Instagram post is gone, and Handler has apologized.

A journalist would have reported only the facts of the incident, without labeling the behavior of Handler and the others. But a blogger is allowed to express an opinion. And in my opinion, Handler, and all the meek little celebrities who liked her post, aligned themselves with a known antisemite. As supposedly “woke” people, I deemed it appropriate to include their names in my list.

Adhering To IHRA

This brings me to CAMERA-UK and Adam Levick’s Editors’ Note On Cancel Culture And Misuse Of The Term “Antisemitism.” The piece speaks of the importance of journalists adhering to journalistic standards, and in particular, adhering to the IHRA working definition of antisemitism when reporting on any possible expression of antisemitism. I agree.

Levick says we should be careful about what we label antisemitism. That we shouldn’t throw slings and arrows at people and media outlets, but at their behavior. Because we don’t want to mimic the current cancel culture zeitgeist in which a misbehaving celebrity loses his/her job and is shunned within both professional and personal spheres based on spurious charges and slander.

IHRA Is Subjective

It makes sense. But as a blogger, and possibly even as a journalist, it’s my right to say that the IHRA definition is subject to interpretation. This is perhaps why IHRA saw fit to follow the definition with a list of examples covered by the definition. The examples are prefaced by this introductory text (emphasis mine):

“Contemporary examples of antisemitism in public life, the media, schools, the workplace, and in the religious sphere could, taking into account the overall context, include, but are not limited to:”

In other words, the contemporary examples of antisemitism listed on IHRA’s own page are not comprehensive, not final. The page suggests that we may have to always be watching things to see if what we see is or isn’t antisemitism according to the IHRA definition. And that leaves the process in the public’s hands, to some degree. Which makes the process of determining what does and doesn’t fit IHRA, at least somewhat subjective.

Strictest Sense

Now, as a journalist, I would have to interpret behavior as antisemitic only according to the strictest, most narrow sense of the IHRA definition. I would have to give benefit of the doubt and try to think if there’s something in the behavior that I can use as an out, a way to say “This is not necessarily antisemitic,” before casting aspersions.

And as a media consumer, I wouldn’t want it any other way. Don’t interpret my news. Let me read the facts and decide on my own.

But as a blogger, I can go broader. I can go all Potter Stewart and say I know antisemitism when I see it. And my readers expect that of me, as long as I make my case. I can say “This is what happened. I think it fits the IHRA definition of antisemitism. Here’s why.”

As long as I’m using the IHRA definition as my guide, I’m within my rights to expand on the examples given on the IHRA page, to interpret behavior according to my understanding of the IHRA definition. Which is why, as a blogger, I can say more about antisemitism.

Labeling Behavior, Not People

In terms of pointing out antisemitic behavior, rather than naming and shaming, I see Levick’s point. It’s Parenting 101. You don’t label the kid. You say the behavior is bad. You don’t say, “Bad boy!” but “It is bad to throw your food on the floor.”

But I think this misses the point of my list. “The Comprehensive List of Antisemitic Celebrities” is not meant to name and shame celebrities, but to offer information to the reader. It’s my way of saying, “Here’s something you may want to know about. If this is interesting or useful, fine. If not, next week I’m writing about ~~squirrels~~ sovereignty.”

In cancel culture, a call to action goes out. Fire him/her. Boycott this/that. Protest. Loot a store. But there was no call to action in the “comprehensive list.” I didn’t tell the reader what to do with the information or whether to do anything at all. That is the reader’s own business. Which is very different than the #metoo hashtag campaigns or the aggressive tactics of, for instance, BDS or BLM.

The fact is, the “Comprehensive List” includes no instructions on how my readers should relate to the information it contains. I didn’t suggest a boycott of Handler, Aniston, Portman, or Silverman. I suggested no action at all. I didn’t even mention how I personally intend to use this information, if at all. It’s just something to know.

Follow Your Conscience

A person’s private behavior is their own matter. When I found out Alice Walker was an antisemite, for instance, I decided never to give her royalties, again. That I would not watch “The Color Purple” or read the book. But I never suggested to anyone that they should follow suit.

The same is true of how I see a certain unnamed media outlet. Once I decide a particular outlet is anti-Israel, I don’t write for them. I don’t read their articles, but always look for an alternative source for the information. But that doesn’t mean others must do the same. My advice? Follow your conscience.

Blogging is da bomb. I can say that because I have done lots of writing in my time. All kinds of writing. Straight news pieces, blogs, marketing content, op-eds, classroom resources, and more. But I am content in my spare time to blog. Because only in a blog can I share the truth that is in my heart.

It’s Something—Take Note!

It’s where I can go beyond the strictest, most narrow sense of a definition to say: “There’s something here, something a journalist might not want to touch. But it’s something, so take note!”

That is the freedom that comes with being a blogger. I can say what a journalist cannot. But what you do with the information is your own business.

Believe it. Don’t believe it. Agree or disagree.

It's completely up to you.

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Ma’an reports:

Israeli occupation forces cut the electricity to 13 villages, in addition to eight Palestinian communities in the Jenin Governorate for a period of three hours, threatening to escalate the cutting of electricity, if these municipalities do not deal with the [Israeli] "Civil Administration" directly.

The Chairman of the Electricity Authority Yabad, Engineer Muhammad Adnan Abu Bakr, said: "The Israeli occupation forces cut off the electricity for three hours today in a warning signal, knowing that the Yabad Electricity Authority, which was established in 2012, is supplying 13 villages in addition to eight Palestinian communities in Jenin Governorate. And its population is more than 55,000Palestinian citizens. "

Abu Bakr added, “We paid the last three months of bills, which amounted to more than 2,400,000 shekels, to the Palestinian Ministry of Finance duly, because they cut off security coordination with the occupation, it seems that the money did not transfer and the Israeli government did not make a monthly clearance and deducted the amounts from the authority.”

Abu Bakr added, "The officers of the Israeli Civil Administration tried to communicate with the councils and municipalities in Jenin, to deal directly with them, but everyone refused to communicate and informed the occupation officers that the only address is Palestinian legitimacy and the Palestinian National Authority.”

Who needs electricity when you have a bizarre sense of pride that prioritizes your principles of not dealing with Jews above everything else?

07/08 Links Pt1: Zionism Is Not a Colonial Movement; UN adopts PA lie that Arafat renounced violence; UN encourages PA unity with terrorists

From Ian:

Zionism Is Not a Colonial Movement

Bareli explains that the Jewish acceptance of the political partition of British Mandate Palestine demonstrates that they rejected both “exploitation” and “dispossession” of Palestinian Arabs. He notes: “Twice, in 1937 and in 1947, Jews agreed in principle to proposals of a political partition into two states; in 1946-47 they even made substantial diplomatic efforts on behalf of partition — that is, on behalf of living side by side, not one on top of the other (exploitation), and not one in place of the other (dispossession).”

However, because the Arabs rejected these offers and attempted to expel the Jews from the land, a war broke out. Bareli further explains what really happened in 1947 and 1948: “The war broke out because the Palestinian Arabs rejected the principle of living side by side, even though it had been endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly, and sought to expel the Jewish immigrants from the country. When the Arabs’ attempts to expel them were frustrated, at the end of the war the Jews were no longer willing to return to the demographic and geographic conditions that had exposed them to mortal peril in late 1947.”

Those anti-Israel activists associated with the Black Lives Matter movement and other far-left dogmatists fail to understand and explain the causes of the return of the Jewish people to their ancient land; the development by the Jewish people of a modern national movement; and the Jewish emigration, investment, and settlement in Israel. And the reason for this failure is, as Bareli notes, because the goal of the “Colonialist School” attempting to call Israel “a colonialist entity” is not an understanding of the historical processes, but a puritanical judgment that frustrates such understanding.

Referring to Zionism as a “colonialist” movement and Israel as a “settler-colonialist” entity by failing to understand the causes and roots of Zionism has become a misleading but quite popular trend in the West.

Zionists and Jewish citizens of Israel are not colonists, and this has nothing to do with their skin color. It has everything to do with the causes, roots, and historical processes of Zionism. However, those who hold the false view that Zionism is colonialist do not entertain even the slightest interest in understanding the basics of Zionism.

Join me next Thu. July 16 for a Zoom Webinar with professor @EVKontorovich about Israel’s potential extension of legal sovereignty to parts of Judea and Samaria.

Get the facts from an expert.

“Know how to refute the ignoramous” (Avot 2:14)

Register: https://t.co/FC4890kxRd pic.twitter.com/IEUGR50jLP
— Dov Hikind (@HikindDov) July 7, 2020

Ruthie Blum: Pandemic politics in America and Israel

Nothing better illustrates Thomas Mann's famous statement that "everything is politics" than the response of opposing ideological camps to the government's handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

This makes sense. The global COVID-19 crisis affects two fundamental aspects of the human condition. Yes, health and finances affect us all and are a source of obsession for many. It is no wonder then that the first fights surrounding the spread of the highly contagious disease – a novel strain of an existing virus – centered on its point of origin.

Indeed, no sooner had the world begun to grasp that the microbe – initially pooh-poohed by skeptics as merely another type of flu – was stumping doctors and epidemiologists alike, than the battle about blaming China entered the debate. The question of whether it came from bats sold in wet markets or was manufactured in the laboratories of Beijing seemed to override discussions of symptoms and cures.

Another related topic of heated conversation focused on the legitimacy of closing borders to prevent carriers from country-hopping.

Then came the disagreement over the efficacy of lockdowns where containing the virus was concerned, with some leaders opposing them not only for economic reasons, but out of a belief that closures would hinder the creation of herd immunity. When British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who had been one such head of state, not only contracted the virus but nearly died from it, he changed course and imposed stricter measures on the United Kingdom.

Sweden, which boasted a "keeping everything open" policy – and letting the elderly quarantine themselves if they wanted to – ended up with the highest death rate in Europe and little herd immunity to speak of.

Early on, Israel barred incoming tourism, forced most of the populace to barricade itself indoors, recommended avoiding physical contact between family members not sharing a residence, and even prohibited people from straying more than 100 meters (328 feet) from their homes. It wound up flattening the curve in May, when it reopened most of the economy. Today, with a surge in COVID-19-related morbidity, the powers-that-be in Jerusalem are backtracking by re-shuttering establishments that lend themselves to overcrowding.

None of the above has served to settle the dispute that continues to rage in parliaments, Cabinets and Congress, or among pundits on the op-ed pages of newspapers and experts presenting contradictory data over the airwaves. If anything, the cacophony proves that conclusions will not be reached until the plague passes or after a vaccine is approved, whichever comes first. Or both together, perhaps.

J-Street’s antisemitic dogwhistle

The Jewish Left has often accused members of the Right of engaging in antisemitic dogwhistles. A number of Trump campaign ads were specifically called out as highlighting Jews while saying codewords like “global special interests” and “large corporations.”

Perhaps the most famous recent example from the Left was the London mural of global financiers named Freedom for Humanity that Jeremy Corbyn praised before changing his mind:

I am more reluctant to call either of these antisemitic. Conspiracy theories, sure, but I think the bar needs to be higher for something to be considered unambiguously antisemitic; the mural included four non-Jewish men along with two Jews although it admittedly played on Masonic and Jewish caricature tropes.

Either way, though, if those two examples are considered to be antisemitic, then this graphic made by J-Street certainly is as well:

The President of the United States, appearing somewhat confused, looks up from a position of subservience for advice from not one but four Jews who can tell him what he should do.

It is hard to say that this isn’t evocative of an Elders of Zion-level conspiracy theory of Jews controlling America.

The graphic is designed in a way to hide what the photo was about – President Trump giving Netanyahu the pen with which he just signed the declaration of recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan.

President-Donald-Trump-left-turns-to-give-a-pen-to-Israeli-Prime-Minister-Benjamin-Netanyahu-center-after-signing-a-proclamation (1)

Guess who the Jewish “white supremacists” are according to the Left? Themselves!

I just saw a “d’var Torah” (using the phrase very loosely) by Rabbi Andy Kahn, an assistant rabbi at the venerable Reform Temple Emanu-El in New York, about supposed Jewish white supremacy.

In a recent article in Ha’Aretz, April Aviva Baskin, a Black Jewish communal leader, reflected on the way that contemporarily White Jews have internalized American systemic white supremacy.

According to Baskin, somewhere in the process of fleeing antisemitism in Eastern Europe and assimilating in the United States, the country’s history of white supremacy and racism “got woven into the fabric of the American Jewish community – not necessarily intentionally, but by joining that status quo and trying to protect themselves.”

The questions White Jews increasingly need to ask themselves, she says, are: “What was the price your family paid to get conditional access to Whiteness? Was it changing your name?...Was it moving the mezuzah inside the house door? Those are options. Black people don’t have those options.”

…

According to Mark Dollinger in Black Power, Jewish Politics, his history of the Black-Jewish alliance,“By the 1950s, American Jews enjoyed the privileges of inclusion in the White middle class. Even as they boasted a disproportionate presence in liberal reform, Jews had already separated themselves from blacks, both physically and sociologically. Restrictive housing covenants eased...Quota restrictions...all but ended.”

So, at the same time Black people were fighting for civil rights in the 60s, (with White Jews disproportionately present in support), White Jews had overwhelmingly assimilated into White America. This is where our moment of change comes in. The Israelites in our Torah believed the next step towards the promised land was too much for them, and they bemoaned their sense of powerlessness. It cost them their dream, and deferred it an entire generation.

We too have a challenge before us today, as our Black neighbors struggle once again for equality. We, who feel we only so recently gained access to this equality, fear that by standing up to systemic racism we may lose what we gained through assimilating. Our own assimilation is a tricky issue for us. We have sought to blend in with our neighbors just enough while still trying to maintain distinctive Jewishness. April Baskin’s questions show us, though, that this striving in and of itself was a way of entering into the institutions of our country that are steeped in systemic racism and white supremacy. Have we, in the pursuit of our own equality, internalized Whiteness as supreme? Each step along the way we adapted ourselves in order to fit into these systems, but, as April Baskin asks, at what cost?

Kahn is speaking to a Reform Jewish audience about how they, alas, are unwittingly white supremacists – because their parents and grandparents decided that they needed to survive in America by casting off the Jewish religion and trying to assimilate into the “white” American culture.

There are a number of problems with this. Defining America as white is a fundamentally racist premise. There is a big distinction between the American dream of working hard to succeed and being “white.” If Jews who are now accepted in American society as equals are “white”, then so are many Asian Americans, so is Barack Obama, so is Condoleeza Rice, so is Oprah Winfrey. If Jews succeeding in the business world is an expression of white supremacy, then It means that Jackie Robinson is not a hero but a traitor to the black race by trying to make it in a white man’s baseball world. If the premise that there is no difference between American society and white supremacy is true, then one must view America as a nation without jazz or the blues. The people of all colors who have succeeded in America are the ones that have changed America from a racist country into a true melting pot, they are not white supremacists.

Pointing out and fighting racism is a necessity, and the battle is far from over, but to say that succeeding in America is akin adopting white supremacy is a false and ultimately racist viewpoint. The concept of what it means to be an American has changed over the years precisely because of hardworking outsiders succeeding in America. That is the American dream, and to demean those people of all colors as somehow trying to be white is bigotry and slander.

Unfortunately, many American Jews chose to succeed by abandoning their Jewishness rather than having pride in it. These are the Jews – from within the Reform movement and who didn’t even identify with that – who decided that being Jewish has nothing to do with Jewish faith or practice; instead Judasim is “social justice.” As documented by Jonathan Neumann, since the 19th century the Reform movement has adopted social justice as its main tenet as it abandoned Jewish law and customs. In recent decades this became known as “tikkun olam.”

Tikkun olam has very little to do with Judaism. It is an attempt to put a Jewish label on a socialist political philosophy. In other words, it is how Jews are attempting to assimilate into the larger gentile society by showing that Jews are just like the socialist gentiles – people who are overwhelmingly white.

By Kahn’s definition, the Jews who are guiltiest of white supremacism are his kind of Jews.

Kahn himself wrote a bizarre article for the Reform movement’s scholarly journal entitled “The Present and Future of Reform Aesthetics and Identity: Performadoxy and Emergent Custom.” He argues that Reform Jews who do Jewish customs are hurting the movement:

Performadoxy is the mode of behavior by which individuals who opt in to Jewish practice without a sense of being bound by halachah pick those forms that visibly set them apart from, and above, their peers in a competition of piety. Most often through dress, kashrut, and Shabbat observance, individuals choose modes of practice that allow them to set the tone for a room or community based on their level of stricture. It is common practice to capitulate to the “frummest common denominator” in elite Jewish spaces, or to behaviorally genuflect to those who most rigidly and outwardly enact their Performadoxy. By and large, Performadoxy is practiced by those few highly active Reform Jews who tend to end up in the professional Jewish world, while those less affiliated Jews, the overabundant majority, tend to veer away from spaces in which Performadoxy holds sway. This trend is, then, leading to professional leadership with increasingly less in common with those who they seek to lead, alienating the base of individuals who could otherwise be engaged laypeople.

Yes, he is arguing that the Jews who want nothing to do with Judaism would be “engaged laypeople” in Reform Judaism if only the Reform leaders would stop doing anything identifiably Jewish.

He further insults Reform Jews who choose to adopt Jewish customs as aping the hated Orthodox:

As ethnic, religious, and national Judaism crumble under secularization and postmodernity, those seeking a new foundation for Jewish identity turn to Orthodoxy’s ready-made stable, simple, and clear narrative both to crib notes and as inspiration for novel aesthetic. Beginning with the defensive argument that “we, too, are authentically Jewish,” Reform leaders striving for a sense of decolonization are instead performing the colonization of Orthodoxy’s realm. This is a self-defeating path. The inherent elitism rooted in a reliance on expensive and time-consuming Jewish education, a problem oft discussed in Orthodox circles, and its proclamation of a divine or miraculous understanding (with or without a wink) of Jewish text and the State of Israel are unappealing to the majority of self-identified but unengaged Jews who tend towards skepticism of anything appearing as organized religion. Further, Performadoxy rooted in the “frummest common denominator” implicitly sets up a spectral dichotomy between Reform and Orthodoxy, granting rich authenticity to Orthodoxy and vapid hollowness to Reform. Rather than buttressing Reform Judaism, Performadoxy disconnects today’s Reform world from the lineage and richness of its foundations as it struggles to find footing in the difficult post- modern cultural climate.

In English, he’s saying that Reform Judaism has nothing Jewish about it, and those who try to remain attached to the religion by adopting customs that Jews have done for thousands of years are abandoning Reform’s rich history – of rejecting Jewish faith and practice and choosing to assimilate instead.

Not only that, but according to Kahn, Reform Judaism shouldn’t lead Jews – it should follow the ones who have the least interest in the religion and take its cues from them:

In BT B’rachot 45a, there is a disagreement as to the proper blessing to be said over water. As a way of settling the dispute, the resolving rabbi responded, “Go out and see what the people are doing.” The Reform Movement began in this way—looking to see what the masses of Jews were doing as a response to civic emancipation. Today in America we have become triply emancipated––that is, not only have we gained political and economic equality, we also have social equality. …Instead of longing for a time that has passed or pushing the masses to capitulate to Performadoxy, clergy and Jewish leaders must go out and see what the people are doing. We must identify their emergent customs and provide both new Jewish forms for old ceremonies and old Jewish forms for new ceremonies. Reforming must not be a top-down process. Jewish leaders must take the emergent customs of the unengaged and mold them into new practices, using our knowledge and authority as tools for co-creation rather than dictation.

Without quite realizing it, Kahn is advocating that Jews do exactly what he decries as “white supremacism” – to assimilate as fully as possible and keeping Judaism to a minimum that leaves people comfortable as Americans. If they want to celebrate Easter, Reform will ensure they paint Jewish stars on the eggs. And somehow, he thinks, these assimilated Jews will respect Reform leaders who will put a kosher stamp on whatever they are doing.

But here’s the real contradiction between Kahn’s two essays.

If the Left defines white supremacy as assimilation into American society, then the obvious solution is to distinguish yourself from other Americans and be proud of who you are. For Jews, this means embracing Judaism – not tikkun olam, but Judaism – returning to the faith and customs of our forefathers and not apologizing for it. It means showing full throated support for having a distinctly Jewish state and showing support for the Jews who proudly identify with it.

But that obvious solution to this supposed white supremacism of assimilated Jews is completely unacceptable to “rabbis” who worship Marx more than God.

The Jewish socialist Left is very happy to promote Black pride and gay pride and Latinx pride – but they are actively against Jewish pride. They are the ones embarrassed by their fellow Jews, ashamed to be associated with people who act too “Jewy,” uncomfortable with Jews who actually believe in God, and disgusted by Jews who want to support and strengthen Israel. If they hate traditional Judaism and proud Jews so much, they aren’t much different from antisemites.

Kahn’s premise that assimilation is white supremacism is not only wrong but racist. Yet he endorses assimilation himself and actively rejects anything that makes Jews Jewish. He is an object lesson in what is wrong with Jews who prioritize socialism and “social justice” over their own religion.

Remember the terrible things that followed Trump recognizing Israel’s annexation of the Golan? Me neither.

I just stumbled upon this article by Aaron David Miller, one of those experts we hear a lot about.

Miller’s foreseen problems are a little scattershot.

He confidently predicted that it would make Saudi Arabia unlikely to support the Trump peace plan. Yet Saudi Arabia attended the Bahrain economic summit which was the first part of Trump’s plan – only three months later.

Miller says that annexation of the Golan makes peace with Syria less likely. I’m not sure what is less likely than impossible, but sure.

And finally Miller says that the Golan recognition would make it less likely that the Deal of the Century would be accepted. I think we can confidently say that this was not at all a factor.

The most interesting thing about the Golan is that is was a real annexation that Israel did in 1981. The world didn’t end, no one is saying that the Golan Arabs are living in “apartheid,” and if anything the US recognition could make them comfortable enough to not be nervous that they would be bargained back to Syria where they could be imprisoned or executed as Israeli spies.

Aaron David Miller might be very knowledgeable, but knowledge does not translate to wisdom – or the ability to predict what would happen in the future.

Just as the entire world is predicting the terrible things that would happen if Israel extends its laws to parts of Judea and Samaria. All they have to do it look at the Golan, because that is the best analogy to what would happen in the territories.

07/07 Links Pt2: Caroline Glick: Edward Said, Prophet of Political Violence in America; Melanie Phillips: The war against the west, and its defender; Are Palestinians Philistines?

From Ian:

Caroline Glick: Edward Said, Prophet of Political Violence in America

Twenty years ago, on July 3, 2000, an incident occurred along the Lebanese border with Israel that, at the time, seemed both bizarre and, in the broad span of things, unimportant. But with the hindsight of 20 years, it was a seminal moment and a harbinger for the mob violence now taking place in many parts of America.

That day, Columbia University professor Edward Said was photographed on the Hezbollah-controlled Lebanese side of border with Israel throwing a rock at an Israel Defense Forces watchtower 30 feet away.

Said, who passed away in 2003, was no mere professor. He was the superstar of far-Left intellectuals. Even better, he was at once both a professor and a member of a terrorist organization. Said served not only as an academic, but as a member of the Palestine National Council, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) terror group's formal governing apparatus.

Still, his action was strange. The PLO had ostensibly forsworn terrorism seven years earlier, when it embarked on a peace process with Israel. True, since then, Palestinian terrorism had risen to unprecedented heights, with more Israelis killed by Palestinian terrorists between 1993 and 2000 than had been killed over the previous 15 years. But Said himself insisted that he was a man of peace. So why did he choose to get photographed throwing a rock at Israeli soldiers protecting their border?

To understand his action, it is necessary to understand Said's intellectual record.

Although his field of expertise was comparative literature, Said became a celebrity intellectual for a work that had nothing to do with comparative literature.

In 1978, Said published Orientalism, a polemical analysis of Western study of the Arab and Islamic worlds. Said's work, which became the canonical text of postcolonial studies in the American academy, was a repudiation of all Western scholarship on the Islamic world—and, more broadly, a repudiation of the capacity of Western academics to study other regions and peoples of the world.

In Orientalism, Said characterized all Western—and particularly American—scholarship on the Arab and Islamic worlds as one big conspiracy theory. As Middle East scholar Martin Kramer explained in his 2001 work, Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America, Said said that Western scholarship on the Arab and Islamic worlds amounted to an expression of white supremacy, "articulated in the West to justify its dominion over the East."

Melanie Phillips: The war against the west, and its defender

Trump wasn’t stoking a culture war or exploiting social divisions. He was instead responding to the culture war now being waged upon core American and western values of freedom of expression and the rule of law, and declaring that he would not allow it to succeed.

“One of their political weapons is cancel culture, driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees. This is the very definition of totalitarianism, and it is completely alien to our culture and to our values and it has absolutely no place in the United States of America.

“This attack on our liberty, our magnificent liberty must be stopped and it will be stopped very quickly. We will expose this dangerous movement, protect our nation’s children from this radical assault, and preserve our beloved American way of life. In our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance. If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished. It’s not going to happen to us.”

Right from the start of Trump’s presidency I have expressed concerns about aspects of his character: his narcissism and thin skin, his volatility, his short attention span, his transactionalism, his occasional lapses into believing in fantasies, his Twitterhoea. And his leadership during the coronavirus crisis – or rather, the lack of it – has been lamentable.

Yet despite all that, I still believe as I did in November 2016 that if he were to lose the presidential election to the Democratic party, America and the west would be lost. The slim chance of their surviving this great crisis for civilisation would be snuffed out altogether if the morally bankrupt and venomously west-bashing left were to come to power in America. I also thought the west was now in such disarray, and the political and cultural establishment was so uniformly bankrupt, that it was only an individual defying conventional rules of behaviour who – paradoxically – would stand any chance of restoring America’s centre of moral and political gravity. And I believe all that even more strongly now.

Melanie Phillips: Video interview with Gadi Taub

I did a video interview with Gadi Taub, a historian at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University and a columnist for the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz.

We talked about my novel, The Legacy, and its themes of antisemitism, fractured Jewish diaspora identity and the pull of history, as well as my political and personal memoir, Guardian Angel. Then we talked about the journey I describe in that memoir, “from leftism to sanity” as it’s put on the cover or, as I prefer to style it, from fantasy to realism. We also talked about the reality-denying transformation of Israel in the western mind from victim to victimiser, and the malign processes which had brought this about.

You can watch the interview here.

Melanie Phillips: The long march, and how to reverse it

I took part remotely in a discussion held in London by the New Culture Forum to discuss their new book, “The Long March: How the Left Won the Culture War and What To Do About It.” The first part of the title refers to the “long march through the institutions”, the strategy of achieving revolutionary change by infiltrating subversive ideas into all the cultural institutions of society and thus transforming it from within.

As chairman Peter Whittle observed, however, it’s the latter part of the title that’s the most important and difficult bit. The long march has succeeded in Britain to the letter. The great question is whether it can be reversed and if so, how.

Other participants in the discussion were the book’s author, Marc Sidwell, and historian Ralph Heydell-Mankoo. You can buy the book or download a pdf at the NCF website here.

Starting on page 307 of a State Department appropriations bill is a proposal for funding a “Middle East Partnership for Peace Act of 2020.”

(a) ESTABLISHMENT.—Beginning on the date that is one year after the date of enactment of this section, the Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development is authorized to establish a program to provide funding for projects to help build the foundation for peaceful co-existence between Israelis and Palestinians and for a sustainable two-state solution. The program established under this subsection shall be known as the ‘People-to-People Partnership for Peace Fund’ (referred to in this section as the ‘Fund’).

(b) ELIGIBILITY FOR SUPPORT.—In providing funding for projects through the Fund, the Administrator may provide support for qualified organizations, prioritizing 10 those organizations that seek to build better cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians, including Palestinian organizations, Israeli organizations, and international organizations that bring Israelis and Palestinians together.

This is all very nice. But it doesn’t account for the fact that “normalization” is a dirty word in the Palestinian territories. The PA is dead-set against any program that treats Israelis as human beings that can be cooperated with. People who try to do things like this are ostracized. PLO official Hanan Ashrawi’s Miftah organization is explicitly against any grassroots programs that cooperate with Israelis. Once Mahmoud Abbas threatened any Palestinian who dared to shop in an Israeli-owned supermarket, and the PA said they would photograph license plates of Arab customers. Even Haaretz writer Amira Hass, who drips hate for the Jewish state, was expelled from an anti-Israel conference in Bir Zeit University because (Jewish) Israelis aren’t allowed on campus.

Because that would be “normalization.”

Perhaps conceding that the bill would fund practically nothing, it adds another part:

(c) ADDITIONAL ELIGIBILITY FOR SUPPORT.—In providing funding for projects through the Fund, The Administrator may additionally provide support to qualified organizations that further shared community building, peaceful co-existence, dialogue, and reconciliation between Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel.

There are plenty of those.

The EU had gone through this as well, trying mightily to fund Israeli-Palestinian grassroots peace initiatives and ending up funding Israeli Arab-Jewish programs.

Because Israel is the only place that actually wants peace.

From The Documentation Project:

On Saturday, July 4, 2020 “Mississauga Protest for Palestine” was held at Celebration Square in Mississauga, Ontario.

The organizer “Sauga for Palestine” was recently created by “a group of students who are passionate about Palestine and want their voices heard” and to show their “support for Palestine & make a statement against Israel & it’s illegal practices.” CD4HR’s Firas Al-Najim participated in the protest. Protesters waved Palestinian and red Socialist Action flags, no Canadian flags were present.

The protesters chanted:

Praise Allah. Allah is the Greatest
Free free Palestine
Palestine will never die
Long live Palestine
Palestine will be free from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea
We will sacrifice [redeem] our soul and blood for Palestine [Originally in Arabic]
Martyrs by the millions march to [Al-Quds] Jerusalem [Originally in Arabic]
We may die but Palestine will live [Originally in Arabic]
Palestine is our country and the Jews are our dogs [Originally in Arabic]

The Arabic for that last line, which you can hear on the video and which is obviously well known to the protesters, is "FALASTEEN BLADNA W EL YAHOOD KLABNA."

Here's the video.

Will any leftist Jewish group object to being called their dogs?

Of course not. Dhimmis don't have the right to object to what their overlords say.

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.

07/07 Links Pt1: Mossad said to foil Iranian attacks on Israeli embassies in Europe; UN expert: US drone strike which killed Iran's Soleimani was 'unlawful'; Will Pres Trump bring King Abdullah to heel?

From Ian:

Meet the Law Professor Laying Out the Facts on Annexation

Kontorovich’s latest battle is destroying the myths surrounding the Israeli government’s plans to apply sovereignty over (aka annexation of) Judea and Samaria. The term annexation in international law refers to the forced appropriation of one state’s territory by another state, Kontorovich said, explaining that in this case, applying Israeli law to those areas — some 30% of the land as delineated in President Donald Trump’s administration’s peace proposal — is simply a realization of a long-held right.

Close to 500,000 Israeli Jews living in the settlements are governed by a mish-mash of military rule and archaic Ottoman laws that makes implementing any changes to the area — such as building roads, schools and basic infrastructure — a bureaucratic nightmare that takes at least twice as long as anywhere else in Israel, Kontorovich said.

The reason that it is still this way decades on, he explained, is because of Palestinian intransigence. He added that in 1967, when Israel captured the area from Jordan occupation in a war of self-defense, the belief was that a final status solution would be hashed out quickly with the Palestinians. “This was supposed to be temporary until the Palestinians quickly came to the table, which didn’t happen,” he said. “But in the Middle East, nothing is as permanent as the temporary.”

According to Kontorovich, several offers of Palestinian statehood have been proposed but not one has been accepted. For the past 53 years, he said, settlers “have been held hostage to Palestinian rejectionism,” and every peace agreement before Trump’s was based on the notion that there would be population transfers of Jews living in those areas.

“Israel is not going to play along with this game, and neither will America,” he said, “that the Palestinians should only get a state that was pre-cleansed of Jews.” That idea, he noted, is “morally repugnant.”

Applying Israeli law now “underscores that Israel is not going to accept a situation in which it has indefensible borders [as well as] the notion that Jewish presence there is illegal and is so reprehensible that it needs to be reversed. The communities there are a reality,” Kontorovich said, “and they’re not going anywhere.”

Mossad said to foil Iranian attacks on Israeli embassies in Europe, elsewhere

The Mossad spy agency recently foiled planned or attempted Iranian attacks on Israeli diplomatic missions in Europe and elsewhere, according to a report Monday.

The report by Channel 12 said the names of the countries where attacks were prevented remain under censorship, but cooperation with them helped to thwart the attacks.

“Frustration is growing fast in Iran,” the report said.

No other details were available, and no sources were named.

In 2012, Iran and its Lebanese proxy, the terror group Hezbollah, seemingly attempted to carry out a number of attacks against Israeli diplomatic missions in India, Georgia, Thailand, and elsewhere.

Monday’s Channel 12 report also said that an attack on the Natanz nuclear facility in Iran, credited to Israel, had managed to set back Tehran’s uranium enrichment program by two years, citing Western intelligence estimates.

A report by Channel 13 on Sunday claimed the attack only set back the work by a single year.

UN expert: US drone strike which killed Iran's Soleimani was 'unlawful'

The January US drone strike in Iraq that killed top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani and nine other people represented a violation of international law, a UN human rights investigator said on Monday.

The United States has failed to provide sufficient evidence of an ongoing or imminent attack against its interests to justify the strike on Soleimani's convoy as it left Baghdad airport, said Agnes Callamard, UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions.

The attack violated the UN Charter, Callamard wrote in a report calling for accountability for targeted killings by armed drones and for greater regulation of the weapons.

"The world is at a critical time, and possible tipping point, when it comes to the use of drones. ... The Security Council is missing in action; the international community, willingly or not, stands largely silent," Callamard, an independent investigator, told Reuters.

Callamard is due on Thursday to present her findings to the Human Rights Council, giving member states a chance to debate what action to pursue. The United States is not a member of the forum, having quit two years ago.

Soleimani, leader of the Revolutionary Guards' Quds Force, was a pivotal figure in orchestrating Iran's campaign to drive U.S. forces out of Iraq, and built up Iran's network of proxy armies across the Middle East. Washington had accused Soleimani of masterminding attacks by Iranian-aligned militias on US forces in the region.

Anti-Jewish crime in NYC dwarfs anti-Black crime

Here are the NYPD statistics on anti-Black, anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish hate crime complaints since 2017, the first year the NYPD started keeping these statistics.

And here are the statistics for arrests for hate crimes by motivation:

One has to be careful about drawing direct conclusions from these. It is possible that blacks do not report anti-black graffiti nearly as often as Jews might report antisemitic graffiti, for example. But one cannot escape the impression that antisemitic incidents are downplayed compared to their frequency.
Does this mean that there is systemic antisemitism in New York? I don’t think so, but the word “systemic” is being batted around a lot nowadays as if it is obvious, and these statistics indicate that antisemitism is more prevalent and widespread in New York than any other bias by any measure.
In fact, anti-Jewish crimes come from all corners – some years there are more white attackers, some years more black ones. Last year 13% of the antisemitic crimes were done by Asians, but zero from Hispanics (who one would think would have identical grievances as Blacks do against Jews.)
That is equal opportunity hate.
And here’s an amazing statistic: there more more arrests for anti-Muslim crimes than there were complaints over these three years: 42 complaints and 49 arrests. For Jews it was 579 complaints and 139 arrests. So it appears that the police take anti-Muslim crime very seriously, and anti-Jewish crime not nearly as much, the exact opposite of the impression one gets from the media.