Thousands attend Shield of David’s ‘We Are Israel’ rally against antisemitism in El Cajon
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and California gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder were among the many high profile people who spoke at the Shield of David’s rally Sunday evening in El Cajon.The price of being a Zionist woman on Twitter
Plus, over 4,000 people attended the massive event, that was put on to fight and prevent antisemitism in the community.
The rally was organized after a 2021 survey of American Jewish people conducted by the Anti-Defamation League found that in the past five years, 63% had experienced or witnessed antisemitism, up from 54% in 2020 – and 25%, or one in four American Jews, said they had been targeted by antisemitic comments, slurs or threats. Most alarming, 9% said they had been physically attacked because they are Jewish.
With a rise of recent Jewish hate crimes, the Shield of David group “wants to empower all people to be proud of their heritage and fight for ideals of truth, justice and liberty.” Organizers said their goal was to unite people together for freedom and democracy.
There was a small confrontation when pro-Palestine protesters crashed the rally, but a few bad actors were unable to ruin the enormous event.
Monday evening, El Cajon Mayor Bill Wells joined us in-studio to discuss the historic turnout and successful event.
In the pro-Israel world, there are few vocal female voices. This, again, is not a coincidence. Personally attacking and threatening women is a method of silencing their voices, online and in real life, and deterring new ones from speaking up. “With women there are no boundaries … The most common comment I get is sharmuta (“whore” in Arabic),” said TikTok influencer Shai Emanuel Yamin. “I saw men also suffering from hate comments, but it’s never about how they look or what they wear.”David Singer: UN discrimination against Jews ensnares Unilever and J Street
Liora Rez, the founder and executive director of Stop Antisemitism, agreed that the online attacks against women are more personal: “From the most deranged rape threats to the doxxing (publicly revealing private personal information) of my parents’ information, antisemites have no boundaries when it comes to harassing female Jewish activists online.”
To be clear, it’s not just Jewish women being targeted. Yasmine Mohammed, an ex-Muslim and women’s rights activist with over 100,000 Twitter followers, has been the target of gender-based hate comments for years after speaking against antisemitism. In response to the Israeli-Gaza conflict, she tweeted, “I’m normally inundated with death threats, but these past couple of weeks, it’s been more vicious than ever.” In conversation, she told me, “The explosion in the intensity of hate that I receive when I speak up in support of Israel or against antisemitism … no one can ever get used to that.”
We cannot continue to shrug our shoulders and say “Just ignore it,” because the results, as we’ve already seen for Jews, can very rapidly escalate into real-world violence. Harassing women, launching public smear campaigns, levying threats of sexual violence – these are actions with real consequences that should have no place on social media, and every social media platform should have a zero-tolerance policy toward such virulent abuse.
Yet, despite the myriad risks, as Jewish and pro-Israel female voices, we must not back down in the face of cyberbullying. Instead, we must elevate female voices and encourage new voices to join the conversation and help fight back.
As Rez put it, “Antisemites just failed to realise that their hatred and obscenities do nothing but motivate me to continue and amplify what I’m doing.” It’s draining to be on the receiving end of such abuse, but it also reaffirms that what we are fighting for is worthwhile, and more important than ever before.
J Street gets it very wrong in relying on false and misleading decades-old UN propaganda when making the following claims:
- The battleground is not the “Israeli-Palestinian debate” – it is the “Jewish-Arab conflict” - begun 100 years ago with the 1920 San Remo Conference and Treaty of Sevres and still unresolved - when there were no “Israelis” or “Palestinians” – only “Arabs” and “Jews”.
The “Palestinian people” was not defined until 1964 – a racist and apartheid Arabs-only definition that excludes all non-Arabs and Jews who lived in Palestine after 1917.
- The “rights and freedom of the Palestinian People” specifically excluded any claim by its sole spokesman – the Palestine Liberation Organisation - to sovereignty in “the West Bank of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan” - or the right to establish a separate State there – in addition to Jordan – which occupies 78% of former Palestine.
- “Illegal settlements” are “legal” under article 6 of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine and article 80 of the UN Charter.
Words do count.
J Street’s readiness to defend Unilever’s decision is appalling. No self-respecting Jewish organisation espousing “our Jewish values” should ever defend decisions discriminating against Jews.
Israel’s Ambassador to the UN – Yehuda Blum –confronted the UN General Assembly and trashed its treatment of the Jewish-Arab conflict on 16 November 1978:
"The history of international conflicts, and particularly those with complex historical origins, can only be properly written by objective historians who enjoy complete academic freedom. The practice of writing and rewriting history according to the transient interests of a political body is of course characteristic of certain regimes. It is regrettable that the United Nations has now been drawn into that pattern.”
Ben and Jerry's and J Street have seemingly swallowed the UN’s pernicious rewriting of history to justify discrimination against Jews because of where they live.
JINSA Podcast: A Legal Analysis of the Ben & Jerry’s Debacle
International lawyer Eugene Kontorovich of George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School joins Erielle to discuss Ben & Jerry’s recent decision to stop selling ice cream products in the West Bank and parts of Jerusalem, as well as the possible opening of a U.S. consulate to the Palestinian Authority in Jerusalem.