Next week, J-Street will hold an online event to counter the Bahrain economic conference for helping Palestinians, featuring Palestinian/American businessman Sam Bahour to describe why Kushner's vision for economic prosperity for Palestinians is wrong and his is correct:
This Tuesday, as the Kushner workshop gets underway in Bahrain, Palestinian-American businessman and economic advocate Sam Bahour will join J Street members for an online briefing, directly from the West Bank. He’ll speak about his analysis of the Bahrain workshop and Trump administration policy, the barriers to business thrown up by the occupation and how the US can more constructively engage with the Palestinian economy to help lay the groundwork for peace.
J-Street claims that it is "pro-Israel, pro-peace." It claims that it is against BDS.
But when it wants to create counterprogramming to an American initiative to discuss helping Palestinians economically, it turns to a BDS supporter.
Meaning that Bahour is not going to present any ideas where Israel and Palestinians cooperate on peace or economic prosperity. He can't - he wants Palestinians to boycott Israel. And like all BDS leaders, whether he says it out loud or not, his endgame is to destroy Israel.
This is who J-Street wants to cozy up to.
In any conceivable peace plan or two state plan, Palestinians will have to cooperate with Israel economically. J-Street is against that.
Clearly, J-Street is not as against BDS as they claim to be.
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One of the more obvious cases of psychological projection from the "pro-Palestinian" camp is the "X-washing" accusation, which is predicated on the idea that Israel is so obsessed with the "occupation" that essentially everything the nation or Israelis do is either in support of oppressing, or a ruse to distract the world from, the Palestinian Arabs.
In reality, Israelis live their lives without thinking much about their would-be genocidal neighbors unless there are rockets falling. Real life involves work, school, entertainment, culture and family where the Palestinian issue is simply not thought about very much, except for people who work in NGOs or are extreme leftists.
Contrast this with how Palestinians view themselves.
Palestine Expo is a unique experience, which proudly celebrates Palestinian art, history and culture whilst fostering discussion and activism in the UK. Palestine Expo combines the use of traditional forms of education with cutting edge technology to raise awareness about Palestine. Palestine Expo brings people together to celebrate Palestine like never before.
While the expo does spend some time on "Palestinian culture" with fake date-palm trees and a "Palestinian wedding" from 1900 (way before any Arabs identified themselves as Palestinian,) it spends more time not celebrating Palestine but bashing Israel:
Virtual Graffiti: Hold a virtual spray can and graffiti your message of freedom across the apartheid wall. Banned items: Look inside the back of a lorry to see what everyday items are banned from entering Gaza, due to the siege imposed by Israel.
BDS: Have a go at knocking down apartheid in a game of BDS bowling.
Education: what obstacles will you face on your journey to school? Walk towards the oversized book to find out.
Child prisoners: See what state a child’s bedroom is left in after Israeli troops arrest them during a night raid.
Water: Fill up the buckets and watch the scale tip when measuring water disparity between Israel & Palestine.
Checkpoints: Walk with the most vulnerable Palestinians who pass through checkpoints daily. Will you be able to answer their questions?
Apartheid wall: See how you interact with your family during a meal with the Apartheid wall cutting through the dinner table. A symbol of how families are separated by the wall.
Settlements: 3D settlements placed on the disappearing maps will show you the density and increase of Israeli settlements over time.
Sport in Palestine: Score some goals and have a kick about in the football area where you can learn how occupation restricts the beautiful game.
A&E in Gaza: Feeling unwell? Visit doctors in the Gaza hospital and see the difference in treatment Palestinians receive.
UN tent: Hear personal stories from three generations on the impact of the Nakba and importance of the Right to Return. Set in a 1948 UN tent.
The conference part of the "expo" has essentially nothing about Palestinian history, culture or celebration. It is completely an anti-Israel conference.
Here's detail from day 1, you can click on the other images to see the entire program.
Once you see this in context, you realize that even the exhibits that celebrate "Palestinian culture" are really meant to create the myth of Palestinian culture, as up until the 1960s there was no such thing outside of the larger Arab and Levantine culture. Even those exhibits are created with the idea of Israel in mind - Palestinians must make up a fake history in order to lay claim to the land that is stronger that the Jewish claim.
The most laughable example of that comes from this exhibit:
Tapestry: Over 70 metres of tapestry pieces stitched by Palestinian women. This collection illustrates Palestine from Neolithic to current day.
The Neolithic period was the final stage of the Stone Age - 12,000 years ago.
Palestine Expo isn't designed to celebrate Palestine but to incite hate against Israel. Which is pretty much what the entire Palestinian cause is really is about to begin with.
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Yet, despite all this, despite Birthright’s hall-of-fame high educational batting average, 13 frauds who essentially stole spots from others and came on trips last year to walk off their trips have received far more press coverage than last year’s 48,000 satisfied participants.
THE LATEST example of this media distortion is the New York Times article of June 11, 2019, describing how “some Jewish activists have protested Birthright.” Weasel wording alert: “Some,” not 13; and “activists,” to make them sound romantic. The organization that trained these infiltrators, IfNotNow [INN], is described as “a network of Jewish activists” – that word again! – “who want to end Jewish American support for the occupation.”
Shouldn’t America’s “newspaper of record” have noted that these marginal voices don’t endorse Israel’s existence? According to The Forward, INN “does not take an official stance on BDS or whether an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal should have one or two states.” Hmm, we know what that means. Days before the Times article, some INN members tried banning the Israeli flag or any pride flags with Magen Davids from Washington’s Dyke March.
These sleights of hands and oversights rest on a bigger distortion – the barrage of claims that young American Jews are abandoning Israel.
“The Birthright protests... highlight a generational divide,” the Times reports, noting: “Just 6% of American Jews over the age of 50 believe that the United States gives Israel too much support... while “that view is held by 25% of Jews aged 18 to 29, the cohort that goes on Birthright trips.”
What an odd way to report data. We’re supposed to despair that four times as many young Jews reject Israel; but if 100 minus 25 is 75, perhaps 75% of this supposedly alienated young generation love the Jewish state and its generous American friends?
Here’s the real story: Birthright Israel, the 21 century’s most successful Jewish educational intervention, has been bridging the gap between Israel and the Diaspora with a light touch, an open, ethical approach and dedicated staffers. It must be forever responsive – adjusting, fixing, reimagining – without being reactive. And its secret ingredient – beyond the amazing participants who open themselves up to start thinking about captaining their own Jewish journeys, with no strings attached – is that magic resource Edelstein identified, the Jewish story, especially when discovered in the Jewish homeland.
Over the past two years, UNESCO has been washing away evidence of Jewish history in Israel, according to Malcolm Hoenlein, CEO of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.
“Why would UNESCO devote their energy, time and resources to rewrite and distort the history of the Jewish people?” Hoenlein asked the crowd at the Global Coalition 4 Israel conference in Jerusalem on Thursday.
“Why would they engage in a counterproductive and deceptive process over two years to deny 3,800 years of Jewish history and 2,000 years of Christian history?” he continued, referring to the UNESCO resolution that only used the Arabic name Haram al-Sharif to refer to the Temple Mount.
First, Hoenlein said, “they hyphenated traditional names with Arabic words, then within two years the Jewish names were removed… Did they not have more important things to do?”
Hoenlein called this the ultimate act of antisemitism.
“Today, they understand that if you take away our past, you take away our future,” he continued. “If you cut us off from our roots, if we have no attachment to this sacred land, then what right do we or our children have to be here in the future?”
But he said the Jewish people should take solace in concrete archaeological evidence that is unquestionable.
“Every excavation, every archaeological site, yielded tens of thousands of artifacts and discoveries, every one consistent with Tanach, every one attesting to the thousands of years of undeniable, irrefutable evidence of our past,” Hoenlein said.
President Reuven Rivlin on Thursday slammed the “modern blood libels” of the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, warning against both left-wing Jew-hatred disguised as anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism from right-wing supporters of the Jewish state.
“BDS does not seek peace, or even to help our Palestinian neighbors. It seeks to delegitimize Israel’s very existence,” he said at a conference of international pro-Israel activists in Jerusalem.
He urged participants to “use all the tools at our disposal to defeat BDS” in all sectors of government, the media and civil society.
“We must expose the modern blood libels spread by BDS, and put a price on its hate and discrimination,” he said at the International BDS Conference, which was organized by the Strategic Affairs Ministry.
Headed by Gilad Erdan, the ministry is tasked with fighting BDS and other efforts to delegitimize Israel.
Jerusalem is willing to listen to “legitimate criticism” that stems from genuine concern for its security and welfare, especially when it is voiced by Diaspora Jews, the president went on. The Israeli government “must do a better job of listening to your concerns,” he told the participants, who hailed from 30 countries, to applause.
But delegitimizing the Jewish state was unacceptable, he insisted.
“Today especially, we must stand together against the growing threats of anti-Semitism, whether from the left or right, or radical Islam,” the president went on.
Israel's Pres.: Left Hides Anti-Semitism Behind Anti-Zionism
Israel's President Reuven Rivlin addressed the BDs movement and its intentions at a conference designed to concentrate efforts on combating BDS and groups like it around the world.
Philipp Bobkov, a former director of the KGB’s Fifth Directorate, has died at age 93.
In 1983 Bobkov was one of the founders of the Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public, which was partially set up to stop the emigration of Jews to Israel. Pravda announced the formation of the committee by publishing its manifesto.
It's justification for the creation of the committee - which, naturally, included some Jews - sounds a great deal like the "progressives" of today to justify their monomaniacal hatred of Israel:
By its nature, Zionism concentrates ultra-nationalism, chauvinism and racial intolerance, excuse for territorial occupation and annexation, military opportunism, cult of political promiscuousness and irresponsibility, demagogy and ideological diversion, dirty tactics and perfidy... Absurd are attempts of Zionist ideologists to present those who criticize them, or condemn the aggressive politics of Israel's ruling circles, as antisemitic... We call on all Soviet citizens: workers, peasants, representatives of intelligentsia: take active part in exposing Zionism, strongly rebuke its endeavors; social scientists: activate scientific research to criticize the reactionary core of that ideology and aggressive character of its political practice; writers, artists, journalists: to more fully expose the anti-populace and anti-humane diversionary character of the propaganda and politics of Zionism...
What are the anti-Israel writers of today but the "representatives of intelligentsia" that the Soviets called upon to denounce Zionism?
What are the anti-Israel academics in the social sciences today doing besides creating pseudo-scientific research to justify hate for Israel?
What are the majority of journalists in Israel today doing besides showing a one-sided view of the conflict, only criticizing Israel and ignoring Palestinian crimes and rejectionism?
Whether they realize it or not, they are all marching to the Communist drumbeat of the 1980s.
The irony is that even Pravda apologized for its role in the unquestioningly antisemitic nature of this propaganda in 1990:
Considerable damage was done by a group of authors who, while pretending to fight Zionism, began to resurrect many notions of the antisemitic propaganda of the Black Hundreds and of fascist origin. Hiding under Marxist phraseology, they came out with coarse attacks on Jewish culture, on Judaism and on Jews in general.
This apology was too little, too late, of course.
The Black Hundreds was an ultra-nationalist Russian group from the early 1900s that promulgated the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and other antisemitic theories. Here we have gone full circle - today's "progressives" who claim to hate nationalism have gotten their anti-Zionist ideas from a group of extreme nationalist antisemites.
The idea of a similar apology from today's "progressives" who are pretending to fight Zionism but whose words and actions betray their crazed hate for most Jews - who hide behind the language of social justice and intersectionality - is unfathomable.
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Tehran, June 20 - A Middle East country whose military and agents maintain a long-running policy of international terrorism, mining shipping in international waters, shooting down aircraft outside its airspace, and pursuing nuclear weapons technology it can mount on ballistic missiles, dismissed accusations today that it pursues anything but a future of warm, conflict-free coexistence in the region.
Officials in the Islamic Republic of Iran poo-pooed American and other Western accusations today that its attack on an American surveillance drone yesterday and on two oil tankers last week, in addition to its overall status as the leading state sponsor of terrorism in the world, indicates it does not desire peace. At a press conference in the capital, Minister of Foreign Affairs Javad Zarif called such charges baseless, and characterized them as but the latest in ongoing American aggression and colonialism.
"What we do with medium-range missiles armed with atomic warheads is our business, and no one else's," proclaimed Zarif. "It is not up to the imperialists and Zionists of Washington and Jeru- I mean, Tel Aviv to determine the status of our research and testing. We even accepted a treaty under Obama that curtails our nuclear development such that, if we were to abide by its terms, it would take us as much as a few more years than otherwise to acquire the capacity to wipe out every Jew in the Zionist Entity. And quite a few Arabs, but no one cares about them when it's not Israel hurting them."
The foreign minister of the country bankrolling and arming Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and numerous other Islamist militant groups in Lebanon, Syria, the Palestinian Territories, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, in addition to targeting Jewish and Israeli interests from Bulgaria to Argentina, declared its commitment to managing conflict without violence. "It is the Great Satan and Little Satan who seek war," insisted Zarif, referring to the US and Israel, respectively.
Facilitating Bashir Assad's ethnic cleansing and wholesale slaughter of his own people in Syria will promote peace, added Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qassem Solemaini. "Our organization's mission is a peaceful one," he intoned. "Prosecuting the wars in Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, and Palestine is a serious peaceful endeavor, and we do not appreciate, to put it mildly, when our peaceful intentions are called into question by parties that would rather not see us dominate the region and control multiple puppet regimes to serve our interests."
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Neither the US nor Iran wants war. President Trump was elected partly on a platform that sought to end long-running US involvement in conflict in the Middle East and South Asia. Even if he wanted it he knows better than to engage in a major war with Iran in the run-in towards the 2020 presidential election. Following the traumas of Iraq and Afghanistan he also knows he would be hard-pressed to find allies to fight alongside the US.
As for Iran, the ayatollahs know the immense damage that would be inflicted on their country by war with the US. That alone does not deter them — they would be willing to exchange the lives of thousands of their citizens for the chance to give the ‘Great Satan’ a bloody nose.
But they also know the regime would not survive and to them that is supremely important.
If they don’t want war why are they provoking the US by attacking shipping in the Gulf? Re-imposition of US sanctions following President Trump’s withdrawal from Obama’s nuclear deal has hurt them badly. Even to the extent that they now fear for the survival of the regime.
Their aggression is intended to show Trump that his actions come at a cost for the US and the world, with 30 per cent of global oil supplies passing through these waters. It is also designed to deter him from pushing for wider imposition of sanctions including by European countries.
An important side benefit is the expectation that US retaliation against Iran, short of war, would help rally the people to the regime and ease growing internal dissatisfaction.
The Shin Bet (Israeli security agency) arrested a Jordanian citizen, originally from Hebron, under the suspicion that he was acting as an Iranian spy.
The 32-year-old Thaar Shafout was arrested and, under interrogation, confessed that he was a Jordanian businessman carrying out missions to promote the establishment of infrastructure in Israel, as well as Judea and Samaria, which would serve clandestine Iranian activities.
Shafout originally met two representatives of Iranian intelligence in Jordan – who acted under the aliases Abu Tsadek and Abu Jaafar – and had several more meetings met with them throughout 2018 in Lebanon and Syria.
Tsadek and Jaafar instructed the Shafout to establish a business infrastructure in Israel as a cover for future Iranian activity, as well as to recruit more spies within the country to assist in gathering intelligence. He was then instructed to make business connections in Israel and in Judea and Samaria.
Shafout made several contacts “in the field” so that they could assist him in his mission. He initiated the creation of a plant in Jordan that would hire Shi’ite workers and serve as an anchor for future Iranian activity over the border in Israel. The Iranian contacts agreed to give an initial investment of $500,000 to create the plant, as well as more later to establish operations in the field. The contacts also gave him encrypted means of communication in order to contact them.
Iranian intelligence, according to Shafout, intended to use him to transfer funds to terrorist contacts throughout Israel. They wished for him – once he finished carrying out all of the tasks for them in Israel – to come to Iran and finish his training as a spy.
The International Atomic Energy Agency has denied reports it has signed an agreement recognizing "Palestine" as a country.
"The agreement, which was signed by the agency's director general Yukiya Amano and the Palestinian Ambassador in Vienna Salah Abdul Shafi, gives the IAEA inspectors the ability to check the safety of radioactive materials and fissile nuclear materials, such as uranium," according to a report in The Jerusalem Post, Wednesday.
In a statement, the IAEA said the agreement "does not apply any expression or opinion relating to the legal status of a certain authority or area or the definition of borders."
Although the PA does not possess any nuclear reactors, The Post noted that "it does have physics departments in hospitals and universities, which have medical equipment containing components of nuclear materials."
Although it isn't a member, the Palestinian Authority is allowed to attend meetings as an observer, according to an IAEA spokesperson.
Ma'an has published the first few pages of what appears to be a draft conference schedule for the Bahrain "economic workshop."
It looks fairly - boring. The panels and speeches look to be nothing innovative or groundbreaking.
Perhaps the main point of the conference is to change the conversation. Or to grease the wheels for the forthcoming "deal of the century" since there is nothing remotely offensive in any of these sessions.
Or perhaps the main purpose is what will go on behind the scenes.
I found the final page on Twitter from Ben Caspit - and that's the most interesting one. For only 15 minutes, Jared Kushner and Tony Blair will talk about "the best path forward."
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Hatred for Israel is indeed a form of antisemitism. Just because it is not exactly the same as previous incarnations of antisemitism doesn't mean it isn't fundamentally the same thing.
Here's what I mean:
Ancient Greek antisemitism (ridiculing the religion, upset at their separateness) was not the same as Hellenistic antisemitism.
Hellenistic antisemitism (the first Diaspora was a conspiracy-against humankind) was not the same as ancient Roman antisemitism.
Ancient Roman antisemitism (persecuting Jews for practicing Judaism and not assimilating) was not the same as early Christian antisemitism.
Early Christian antisemitism ("Christ-killers" and New Testament antisemitic passages) is not the same as Islamic antisemitism.
Islamic antisemitism (Jews as deceitful and murderers of prophets) is not the same as medieval European antisemitism.
Medieval European antisemitism (Crusades, Jews as scapegoats for epidemics, blood libel, Inquisition) is not the same as Lutheran/Reformation antisemitism.
Lutheran antisemitism (direct calls to pogroms, accusations of blasphemy) is not the same as philosophical antisemitism.
Philosophical antisemitism (Voltaire:"an ignorant and barbarous people," ) was not the same as socialist antisemitism.
Socialist antisemitism (Jews are the corrupting force behind capitalism) is not the same as racial antisemitism.
Racial antisemitism (Jews are an inferior race) is not the same as conspiracy theory antisemitism.
Conspiracy theory antisemitism (Jews are secretly controlling the world, media, banks) is not the same as modern antisemitism/anti-Zionism.
Modern antisemitism says Jews do not have the right to a state, and the Jewish state is uniquely evil.
The hate that animates this is the same as for all the other antisemitisms.
Just because it is called "anti-Zionism" doesn't mean it is not antisemitism. It is simply the newest flavor.
As in the previous antisemitisms, there are always "reasons" to hate Jews. The reasons are invariably garbage. But they are excuses to hang hatred of Jews on and not feel like a bigot.
Anti-Zionism is exactly the same.
The Enlightenment should have destroyed antisemtism, since it was supposedly objective. But philosophy and "science" were used as excuses and justifications for Jew-hatred.
Today, people who claim to be against bigotry are using the same kind of flawed logic to tell people to hate most Jews. They find that they must remove Jews from victimhood status to treat them as if they are the victimizers.
Antisemitism NEVER has a reason - but it always has an excuse.
Today's antisemitism is based on a series of excuses that blame Israel for the world's troubles just like the previous one blamed Jews as a whole for the world's troubles. During the Inquisition and other times under both Christian and Muslim rule, Jews would be told they must renounce Judaism to get rid of the stigma of being Jewish; today Jews are being told they must renounce Zionism to be accepted as full members of certain groups.
The bottom line is that all of these versions of antisemitism are based on the exact same hate of Jews, and justifications for that hatred are made up after the fact. The hate is the common denominator. There is nothing more justified about today's anti-Zionism than the antisemitism of old.
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On Tuesday, I wrote about a hit Egyptian war movie "Al Mamar" where the villain plays an IDF officer who is referred to in interviews as Jewish. He says how proud he is that his portrayal elicits hate against the Jewish character, and how even his wife stayed away from him when he was in character as a Jew.
Moreover, the Egyptian media reported that children as young as kindergarten age were being brought to see the very violent movie to increase patriotism and how they loved how the Egyptians were killing "the Jews."
That same day, one of the newspapers I quoted wrote an article - about my article!
Referring to me as my pen name Eldad Tzioni, the site algomhuriaalyoum.com, the hard to decipher article says the Israeli press is attacking the film and that newspaper and the political party that arranged a showing of the movie to give awards to the filmmakers.
The article complains, "What limits do they go to in order to intervene even in the upbringing of our Egyptian children?" It then goes on to mention the accidental Israeli bombing of a school in 1970 that Israel thought was a military site.
(h/t WC)
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I met Prof. Cary Nelson on Monday. Nelson, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Illinois, is former president of the American Association of University Professors, and the author of many books and articles on diverse subjects.
It’s an attempt to push back against the remarkably ubiquitous participation of Western humanities and social-sciences university faculty in the process of demonization of Israel. It’s axiomatic that today’s college students are tomorrow’s political and business leaders, and the fact that most Western universities are monolithic anti-Israel environments today is not encouraging for the future.
The most important part of the book is a detailed refutation of claims made by Judith Butler, Steven Salaita, Saree Makdisi, and Jasbir Puar, against Israel. With the exception of Salaita, whose work is so substandard and his public invective so vulgar that he has been unable to find and keep an academic position, they hold highly prestigious jobs and have no difficulty publishing whatever they write in the best venues. Butler and Puar, in fact, are professorial rock stars, with numerous awards and accolades to their credit.
Nelson, who is old enough to have grown up in an era in which standards of scholarship were adhered to – facts were checked before being cited, articles were carefully vetted before being published, candidates for academic positions were evaluated on scholarly rather than political criteria, and there was an implied commitment to seek objective truth – found himself shocked by the total collapse of academic standards in the humanities and social sciences. This was particularly evident in connection with the Israeli-Muslim conflict.*
Jasbir Puar, for example, has recently published a book called The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (2017), in which she accuses Israel of deliberately and sadistically starving, maiming, and stunting the Palestinian population in order to achieve its “biopolitical goal” of breaking the bodies and spirit of the Palestinians to end their “resistance.” One reviewer called the book a modern “blood libel,” similar to the medieval accusations that Jews murdered Christian children in order to use their blood to make matzot.
Puar gave a lecture at Vassar College in 2016 in which she claimed that Israel poisons Palestinians with lead, uranium and phosphorus, and that the IDF shoots Palestinians in order to harvest their organs – (something which, Nelson pointed out, is medically impossible). She threatened to sue anyone who released an audio recording of that speech.
Nelson explained that Puar’s factual assertions about stunting and starvation can be debunked quickly enough by a high school student armed only with access to Google. It’s possible to show that the nutrition of the Palestinian Arabs is among the best in the Arab world, and has greatly improved since 1967 (only to decrease somewhat in areas under Hamas control since 2007). Her claim that the IDF aims at the legs of rioters or terrorists is true – but only insofar as these are cases in which the alternative would be to shoot to kill. For most of her accusations, there is simply no evidence of any kind. Puar simply makes up the facts she needs, and then “explains” them with a vicious fantasy of Jews as Nazis.
Puar is published by the respected Duke University Press. Nelson wondered why their editors were unable to check any of her factual assertions. He wondered why her similarly defective papers passed the peer review required by scholarly journals, and why she has been granted honors, academic tenure, grants, fellowships, and other prestigious and remunerative perquisites despite her penchant for inventing facts and using them to support a superstructure of demonization of a nation and its people.
I do not wonder.
Some years ago, the late Barry Rubin told me about the collapse of any semblance of scholarly integrity in his field of Middle East Studies. He noted that when he was a student, he could expect his teachers, some of whom had political views diametrically opposed to his own, to evaluate his work on its merits. But then – due to endowments and donations from the Arab nations – the complexion of the departments changed, with candidates being selected primarily because of their political views. The brilliant Rubin, author of countless books and articles, had difficulty finding a university position.
This is now the case in many departments of humanities and social sciences, although not necessarily because of Arab money. It is particularly bad in departments of Women’s or Gender Studies (Jasbir Puar is a professor in such a department at Rutgers University), Ethnic Studies, and so on, but it is not limited to them. The explanation is threefold.
First, the postmodern understanding of the nature of reality that has become common outside of the hard sciences (where you might blow up the lab if you make up your own facts), allows the subordination of reality to narrative. Every identity group – especially oppressed minorities – sees the world differently, and no window on the world is more true than any other. One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, and one man’s truth is another’s lie. What is real is the narrative, and it is acceptable to create “facts” as long as they support it.
Second, the introduction of the (somewhat corrupted) concept of intersectionality, in which every member of an oppressed group must support the struggle of every other such group, seems to encourage every “victimized” person to speak out on behalf of other victims, regardless of their expertise. For example, Jasbir Puar, as a “queer” “woman of color,” apparently has the right to speak – even to write books – in support of the Palestinians, even if there is no reason to believe that she actually knows anything about them.
Third, and most important: while the postmodern destruction of the scholarly enterprise has affected other subjects of study, nothing else has been the focus of so much concentrated negative energy as the alleged ill-treatment of the Palestinians by Israel. No other stateless people has so many (or indeed, any) cheerleaders in Western academe as the Palestinian Arabs, and no state besides Israel – not even North Korea – has been so vilified by so many faculty members so much of the time. There is something very familiar about this. It’s always about the Jews, isn’t it?
For whatever reason, the viral memes of misoziony (extreme, irrational hatred of Israel, pronounced mis-OZ-yuh-nee) and bad old antisemitism have a solid foothold in Western universities, where ground zero is the identity studies departments.
Cary Nelson’s careful exposure of the lies upon which some of the more vicious attacks rest is a necessary corrective. But it’s only a starting point, and I’m not optimistic. One answer to Nelson’s question about why nobody at the Duke University Press fact-checked Jasbir Puar’s manuscript could be that where Israel and the Palestinians are concerned, the facts don’t matter. Why bother checking them when everyone knows that Israel is a sadistic oppressor of Palestinians, even if some of the details are wrong?
__________________________ * The usual expressions, “Arab-Israeli conflict” or “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” are too narrow and do not capture what I see as its true nature: the religion-based rejection of Jewish sovereignty anywhere in the Middle East by almost the entire Islamic world, including the Arabs but also the Islamist regimes in Turkey and Iran.
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Speaking at the inaugural Algemeiner West Coast gala last week, Professor Judea Pearl, father of slain journalist Daniel Pearl, said his late son had become an icon of “three cherished values — truth, humanity and Jewishness.”
“And these are precisely three values that have been unprecedentedly attacked in our millennium,” Judea Pearl noted, as he accepted the “Warrior for Truth” award on behalf of his son in front of a crowd of nearly 300 people at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles.
Those same values, Pearl pointed out, were “championed” by The Algemeiner.
“It is a paper that would not hesitate to expose fake news,” he said. “It is a paper that views the existence of Israel as a human rights issue, not as a capricious luxury of white aristocrats. And it is a paper that has given voice to Jewish students on BDS-occupied universities, and has echoed their demands for protection from Zionophobic thuggery.”
Pearl was introduced by actress Sharon Stone, who was honored with the “Warrior for Truth” award at The Algemeiner’s annual New York gala last September.
“While I haven’t had the tragedy in my life that the Pearl family has had, I do understand that without faith we do not know how to move through these dark times,” Stone said. “It is in these times that we have to rely on the integrity of what we really believe, and that we believe in the God that is within ourselves, the God that is love within, the greater love, the love that guides us.”
In April 1944, two Slovakian Jews named Alfred Weczler and Rudolf Vrba escaped from Auschwitz, and provided one of the first eyewitness accounts of the horrors of the European concentration camps. Both men had been rounded up with a group of their countrymen and sent to the Birkenau section of the camp in the spring of 1941, where they were immediately put to work as slave labor.
This was before the German regime had properly streamlined and industrialized efforts to destroy European Jewry. In the early days of the camp, any man incapable of labor was immediately executed. Those who survived were sent to do the grueling work of construction.
The men began their work at sunrise, and except for a half-hour break at noon, when the prisoners were fed cabbage and turnip soup, they worked until 6 p.m. For dinner, the men were given an ounce of moldy bread made from “ersatz flour and sawdust.” Lice and fleas tortured their emaciated bodies as they slept on wooden boards. “Rats were so bold they gnawed at the toes and fingers of sleepers and stole the crumbs they had left in their pockets,” wrote Robert Conot in his book “Justice at Nuremberg.”
A third of the prisoners died every week. If a worker was hurt, he was allotted three days of recovery time. If they failed to heal, the infirmary—where Dr. Mengele had already begun his nefarious work on women and children—would inject a fatal dose of phenol directly into their hearts.
Of the 2,722 Slovakian Jews who had been rounded up with Weczler and Vrba, only 159 survived to the summer of 1942. Those who died had been dumped, with another approximately 105,000 bodies, into shallow trenches around Birkenau. “As they decomposed” Conot noted, “the earth rose like a yeasty mixture of dough and bubbled up nauseating gases, which spread for miles.”
I think of that last sentence whenever some modern-day know-nothing begins comparing the United States to a proto-Nazi state. Maybe it’s because their analogies are embarrassingly ignorant and intellectually lazy, or maybe it’s because people like Ocasio-Cortez, perhaps unknowingly, diminish the suffering of millions of dead. Or maybe it’s because my own grandfather was taken as slave labor in Austria.
The official Twitter account for Auschwitz Museum advised MSNBC commentator Chris Hayes to follow it on the platform after Hayes tried to argue that concentration camps were historically different from death camps.
“[Chris Hayes,] Please consider following @AuschwitzMuseum where everyday we commemorate and educate about the tragic human history of [Auschwitz],” Auschwitz Museum tweeted on Tuesday.
The comment was seemingly in response to an exchange between Hayes and Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney that occurred earlier in the day. After Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claimed that the U.S. government is “running concentration camps on our southern border” to hold illegal immigrants, Cheney advised the freshman congresswoman to “spend just a few minutes learning some actual history.”
“[Six] million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust,” Cheney tweeted at Ocasio-Cortez. “You demean their memory and disgrace yourself with comments like this.”
“If you spend a few minutes learning some actual history, you will find out that concentration camps are different from death camps and have a history that both predates and extends far past the Nazis,” Hayes replied to Cheney.
Hayes, however, seemed to dismiss that Ocasio-Cortez was specifically referring to the concentrations camps under Nazi occupation. While on an instagram live stream, she specifically said that she wants “to talk to the people that are concerned enough with humanity to say that ‘Never Again’ means something.”
“Never Again” is the phrase that Jews all over the world use to make sure that the extermination between 1939 and 1945 never happens again.
The Holocaust Memorial Museum considers Auschwitz to be a concentration camp & says that of the 1.3 million people deported there ~1.1 million died, including one million Jews.
Waldorf
was something I’d never written about at Smarter Parenting, the website I run
as part of my day job. We had a couple of articles on the Montessori
system and I’d written a piece on the democratic
classroom. But I thought we needed something on the Waldorf education
system to round things off. And so I began to research the topic, putting out
feelers to speak with teachers and administrators in the Waldorf system.
I
reached out to a friend whose wife was a retired educator. She’d taught in a
Waldorf school the last five years of her teaching career. I also placed a
query at HARO (Help a Reporter
Out), where journalists can query other members and set up interviews or get
quotes from experts on any topic imaginable for articles they are writing.
Sometimes
I get deluged by HARO responses in response to a query, other times, I get nothing. So instead of
sitting back and waiting to pick someone else’s brains, I hedged my bets and
began to do some independent research on the net.
Now, I’d
always known there was something strange, even off about the Waldorf classroom. Some aura of cultishness, perhaps
even Nazism, clung to Waldorf like an unpleasant department store perfume
sample that won’t be washed away with soap and water. I knew that the system
was based on the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner, who seemed, to put it frankly, a
bit of a crackpot.
Rudolf Steiner
My
impression of the Waldorf was that the schools wanted to distance themselves
from Steiner, to make a distinction between Steiner’s beliefs and the schools
that were spawned from them. But the more I dug into the subject of Waldorf
schools, the weirder things got. It was worse than I’d thought. And no one from
a Waldorf school seemed to want to go on record. I had one publicist contact me
to say that she knew of a parent of a child in a Waldorf school and this parent
was willing to pass on my questions to the administrator of the school.
This
seemed a strange way to conduct business, like buying a watch from a guy in a trench
coat in a back alley. I asked, “Can’t you just put me in touch with the
administrator?”
The
publicist replied only that she was sorry it had to be this way, but that she
would eliminate the middle man by giving my questions directly to the administrator.
With
nothing to lose, I sent on my questions, but never heard back. Follow-up
messages to the publicist went unanswered.
I
had thought my questions fairly innocuous. They weren’t confrontational. Were
the Waldorf people just sniffing around to see whether I planned a hit piece? (And
is there any other school system out there that has need to worry about hit
pieces??)
What
was with these people? What was with Waldorf??
My
friend’s wife, the one who’d taught in the Waldorf system, also failed to
respond to my questions. I went back to her husband. He said, “Oh, she never
reads her email. I’ll tell her to take a look.”
But I
never did hear back from her.
Which
seems strange to me: why agree to be interviewed and then never check your
email?
Does
this say something about Waldorf or only about this woman’s email habits?
I don’t
know.
But as I
looked into Waldorf on my own, I found some really strange things about their
philosophy. There were parents who’d had really bad experiences with Waldorf.
And one name kept coming up: Dan Dugan.
Dan Dugan
Dugan is
a cofounder of PLANS (People for
Legal and Nonsectarian Schools), an organization that was formed to educate the
public about Waldorf education. PLANS has been doing just that since
1997, acting as a clearinghouse for information on the mysterious Waldorf school
system. I went to the contact page at PLANS, and sent off an email to Dan
Dugan, who, as it turns out, was happy to speak with me, and gracious enough to
respond in writing, at length, to the ten questions I sent him.
I needed
to give my readers a rounded picture of Waldorf. So my questions to Dan ran the
gamut. But what interested me most about Waldorf on a personal level, was the
Nazi question. I had read that while Hitler was bent on closing down all
Waldorf schools, and eventually succeeded, Rudolf Hess managed to stall him for
a long time. I wanted to know why Hitler was against Waldorf, while Hess was
all for Steiner’s educational philosophy, known as “Anthroposophy.”
Dan explained
that Hitler didn’t like Steiner because Steiner was a cult figure with a significant
following. That made Steiner the competition: Hitler didn’t want anyone to follow
anyone but Hitler.
But Waldorf
educators didn’t understand that Hitler saw Waldorf as a competitor. They hoped
to persuade the Reich that their
philosophy was in line with Nazi philosophy. So Waldorf fired all the Jewish
teachers and wrote
to the authorities that their program was now a perfect fit for the new
regime.
The day after Kristallnacht
While
this gambit didn’t succeed, it did put off the inevitable for about six years,
until Hess fled to England. That’s when Hitler cracked down on occultism,
outlawed Anthroposophy, and closed all the schools. For further information, Dan
referred me to “Education
for the National Community? Waldorf Schools in the Third Reich,” a fascinating
chapter from a book by Peter Staudenmaier that shows how Waldorf tried to adapt
to a changing political climate during WWII. The chapter begins:
On the 31st of January 1933, the day after Adolf Hitler was
appointed Chancellor of Germany, a Mrs. Oberstein removed her daughter from the
Breslau Waldorf school. Oberstein, a Nazi party member, was upset by the
presence of a temporary assistant teacher from a Jewish background, and
expressed her strong disagreement with the Waldorf faculty regarding “the race
question.” Her daughter’s regular teacher, Heinrich Wollborn, wrote a letter
the same day defending his Jewish colleague and explaining the Waldorf attitude
toward such matters:
“We teachers place our complete trust in the capacity of
every person for spiritual transformation, and we are firmly convinced that
anthroposophy provides the possibility for an individual to outgrow his racial
origin.”
So there
you have it: the philosophy behind Waldorf sees Jewishness as an inborn flaw.
It can be “outgrown” to be sure. But in the view of Steiner and Anthroposophy,
to be Jewish is to have a racial birth defect. Staudenmaier writes:
The visiting teacher whose presence had sparked the incident,
an anthroposophist named Ernst Lehrs, came from a family whose Jewish roots
were notably tenuous. Not only was Lehrs himself fervently committed to
Steiner’s esoteric version of Christianity, both his parents and his
grandparents belonged to the Protestant church. The family had not been Jewish
for generations, except in the ‘racial’ sense, and Lehrs exemplified the
anthroposophical ideal of spiritual transformation and transcending one’s
racial origins—the abandonment of Jewishness as the sine qua non for
individuals from Jewish backgrounds hoping to become full members of the German
Volk. In anthroposophist eyes, Lehrs
had successfully joined the national community, whereas in Nazi eyes he was
ineligible to do so.
The
response by the Nazi regime to Wollborn’s initial letter was lukewarm. That's because Hitler
didn’t see Judaism as a birth defect, or something that can be outgrown or overcome. Hitler saw Judaism as an infestation of vermin that must be eradicated and shown no mercy. And so it
was that Wollborn and the other faculty members thought better of that initial policy
position and began again:
Writing to local school authorities in October 1933, Wollborn
reversed his earlier standpoint, insisting that in his January 31 letter
“nothing was further from my mind than taking a principled position on the race
question. I therefore greatly regret formulating the letter in such an unclear
manner.” Noting that he wrote the earlier letter when the Nazi government was
still forming, Wollborn now declared: “I have placed my pedagogical work
entirely on the basis of the government, and have fully expressed this by
joining the National Socialist Teachers League in June of this year.”
The Breslau Waldorf school, meanwhile, explained that Jews no
longer worked there and that Lehrs had been only a temporary employee who left
the school before the new laws regarding Jewish employees were promulgated. The
school further noted that many Waldorf teachers had joined the Nazi teachers’
association and that all Waldorf schools in Germany had completed the process
of Gleichschaltung, the Nazi term for
bringing social institutions into line with the regime.
A local school inspector assigned to investigate the incident
completely absolved both Wollborn and the school. His final report confirmed
the Waldorf representatives’ claims and declared that the Breslau Waldorf
school was indeed free of “Jewish influence,”
observing moreover that a number of its core faculty were Nazi party members.
There is
much more to the story of Waldorf’s desperate and hopeless bid to be accepted
by the Nazi regime. The Staudenmaier coverage of this chapter in the history of
Waldorf, is impressive and deserves to be read in full. But the main takeaways
are 1) In Rudolf Steiner’s view, Judaism is a racial defect and 2) During WWII, Jewish
teachers were fired to make Waldorf acceptable to Hitler (though the
gambit failed).
Auschwitz
Knowing
the history, these facts, it is difficult to imagine that any Jewish parent
would consider enrolling a child in the Waldorf school system. One might argue
that the Waldorf of today is far from these early underpinnings—that the
administrators acted under duress. But having read the record, we now have a
keen awareness of the inherent antisemitism of Steiner, his theory of
Anthroposophy, and the Waldorf school system. Who then could embrace the system
that betrayed us—and sees our Jewish birthright as a defect?
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.
This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For 20 years and 40,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.
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Friday, June 21, 2019
Elder of Ziyon
