Caroline Glick: Bret Stephens and Bari Weiss, Lara Alqasem's Enablers
Israel’s big mistake was letting Alqasem land at the airport. It tried to correct its mistake when authorities apprehended Alqasem at the border. But as events show, it was too late. As should have been predicted, as soon as she landed at the airport, Alqasem immediately began carrying out her propaganda stunt. In doing so, she demonstrated how important it is for Israeli authorities to properly enforce the entry ban on BDS operatives.Seth Mandel: The Shame of the Anti-Defamation League
But the incompetence of Israeli immigration officials aside, they aren’t they real culprits in the Alqasem affair.
The culprits in this sordid story are Alqasem and her comrades in her racist movement — as well as their self-serving enablers on the Israeli Left; the American Jewish Left; and, perhaps most critically, Stephens and Weiss.
All of them viewed joining the BDS pile-on over Alqasem as a way to buy credibility — at Israel’s expense.
Media pundits are always quick to proclaim that they are not responsible for anything that happens subsequent to their writing. “We aren’t the decision-makers,” they bleat, as if they are convinced that all of their harping is utterly inconsequential.
These protestations are absurd, however. Pundits chose their profession to influence policymakers and the public. If they didn’t recognize their importance, they would have chosen a different profession. The Stephens-Weiss column was decisive in this absurd anti-Israel propaganda play.
Now that Israel’s Supreme Court has permitted Alqasem to spend a year in Israel, given what we know about the BDS campaign, and what we have observed about her over the past two weeks, we can be certain she will use her time, and her newfound celebrity to harm Israel far more.
She and the bigoted BDS movement she serves have her many enablers — including, and perhaps especially, “unhinged Zionists” Stephens and Weiss — to thank for the opportunity.
The integration of the two into mainstream Democratic Party politics is not a theoretical matter—refer back to the aforementioned Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Democrats’ praise of Corbyn, etc. Or watch the fusion in action: The confirmation of the judge Greenblatt came out so hard against, Brett Kavanaugh, saw a protest in Washington at which Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand was introduced glowingly by Linda Sarsour. It’s a mutual-admiration society: Last year in Time magazine, the senator extolled the “courage” of “extraordinary women”—Sarsour, Mallory, and two of their colleagues.Louis Farrakhan Uses CNN's Marc Lamont Hill to Promote $260 Music Box Set
If this is Greenblatt’s idea of “branding,” it’s understandable that those who want to fight anti-Semitism but who have been abandoned by Greenblatt—college students, political conservatives, strident pro-Israel advocates—would look to fill the gap. And it’s certainly reasonable for the existing Jewish establishment to be alarmed at the wrecking-ball revolutionary who wants to replace it with one that finds the very idea of criticizing anti-Semitism outrageous.
Greenblatt appears to see himself as a “disruptor,” the Silicon Valley self-designation that supposed rebels wear with pride. At a speech on philanthropy in Israel in 2017, he boasted of his work at the Obama White House, where he led the Office of Social Innovation and instituted “outcome-based payments, civic hackathons, and hybrid value chains.” His efforts “catalyzed new public-private partnerships that facilitated the flow of large-scale capital on long-standing problems.”
When he segued into his new responsibilities as head of the Anti-Defamation League, he didn’t leave his inner Elon Musk behind: “The question that animates me every day is, How can I apply what I learned in business and government to the social sector, how can I infuse our work with innovation and impact?”
He warned: “We have crossed a threshold that is less about the micro-economics of individual labor markets and more about the meta-economics of our common humanity. Facing planetary challenges like accelerating climate change, shrinking water and food access, and widening income gaps, we urgently need new response strategies.”
You almost expect Greenblatt to announce how to prevent cemetery vandalism using blockchain. Good luck solving climate change by catalyzing partnerships of civic hackathons that address the meta-economics of our common humanity, I guess. But the Anti-Defamation League isn’t the vehicle for it.
And it is apparently the vehicle for the study of anti-Semitic outburst against journalists only when the journalists share Greenblatt’s ideological presumptions. During the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, a combination of alt-right agitators and Russian trolls began making life online hellish for conservative opponents of Trump. Writers and pundits would be tweeted pictures of their faces imposed on a Jew locked in a gas chamber with Donald Trump about to push the button, or some other explicit Nazi threat. Soon the harassment moved off Twitter. My family was doxxed by a neo-Nazi site. My wife, Bethany Mandel, started getting phone calls of recordings of Hitler speeches. This became a common occurrence, but groups like the ADL seemed to notice only when Trump won the nomination and the harassers turned their attention to liberal journalists like Julia Ioffe. Then, and only then, was the anti-Semitic social-media wave treated as a new and terrifying crisis.
The ADL, which boasts that it “has been a pioneer in confronting cyberhate” since 1985, was revealed to be living in a partisan bubble. It convened a study, released in October 2016, to get to the bottom of the anti-Semitic cyber targeting. It turned out that my wife was one of the 10 most-harassed Jewish journalists during the election. Significantly, the top target—by a mile—was the conservative pundit Ben Shapiro, who received nearly 40 percent of the hate tweets. Conservative Jewish journalists were the ones most in need of a group like the ADL—and they continue to be least served by it.
Louis Farrakhan is using a photo with CNN contributor Marc Lamont Hill to promote a $260 box set of music on his Nation of Islam website, TheWrap has learned.
Hill, a political commentator for CNN touted on the site as “one of the leading intellectual voices in the country,” told TheWrap that he was not aware his image was being used for commercial purposes and will ask for its removal.
“I don’t want to be used to promote anybody’s materials,” he said. “I am going to ask for it to be taken down as I don’t think it’s consistent with my values and my professional standards.”
Hill said the photo was taken sometime in the autumn of 2016 after the minister invited a number of people to a Wyoming farm to listen to the new album. “It wasn’t like one big event it was just people, cycling in and out,” he said. “It was good music actually.”