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ANTI-SEMITISM

ANTI-SEMITISM, ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Fear and Brisket for Jews at the DNC Jewish delegates at the DNC have to meet in hiding. by Daniel Greenfield

By on August 23rd, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fear-and-brisket-for-jews-at-the-dnc/

“As the highest-ranking Jewish official in American history, I want my grandkids and all grandkids to never, never face discrimination because of who they are,” Senator Schumer concluded his speech. “But Donald Trump. This is a guy who peddles antisemitic stereotypes.”

Meanwhile Jewish Democrats were literally hiding out at the DNC.

Most Jewish events at the DNC were held at undisclosed locations with organizers having to approve attendees and only then provide them with the secret location shortly beforehand.

Agudath Israel, a traditional religious and not particularly Zionist group, whose members wear black suits and hats, held an open event to discuss the antisemitism faced by Orthodox Jews, only to have masked activists show up and scream that they were going to destroy Israel. No one at the DNC condemned those responsible or held them accountable for their actions. Imagine the reaction if black or Asian attendees were systemically harassed in this way.

“After 50 years fighting antisemitism in America, I could not have imagined a time -Jews would have to meet in secret locations in Chicago at DNC,” former ADL leader Abe Foxman tweeted.

Outside the DNC convention, men in Hamas bandanas flashed victory signs, waved Hamas flags, burned American and Israeli flags, and declared their support for the mass murder of Jews on Oct 7. Inside the DNC convention, President Joe Biden deviated from his prepared teleprompter remarks to declare that, “those protesters out in the street, they have a point.”

When the president says that those who want to kill and harass Jews have a point, is it any wonder that they operate with political impunity and support from the top echelons of the party.

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ANTI-SEMITISM, HISTORY Comments turned off

Pogrom at Kibbutz Be’eri: Jews Under Fire by Nils A. Haug

By on August 21st, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20885/pogrom-at-kibbutz-beeri

“As word came that murderous hordes were approaching, the Jews attempted to flee. Those who could not, barricaded themselves indoors and prayed for a miracle.”

This moving narrative describes not the shocking events of October 7, 2023, at Kibbutz Be’eri and other communities in Israel, but the massacre of eastern European Jews nearly 400 years earlier by Cossacks during the 1648 Khmelnitsky pogroms, in what is now Ukraine.

Although Jewish settlements in the greater Kievan Rus region, Ukraine and Crimea included, can be traced to the 8th -10th centuries, a record of pogroms took some time to emerge. Not limited to the Rus region, pogroms were widespread in middle ages Europe as a whole. In the Rhineland area, the First Crusade of 1096 led to mass slaughter of Jews who had settled there, and the same later in Palestine when the Crusaders arrived. In England, the York pogrom of 1190 resulted in the expulsion of Jews from the land for nearly 400 years.

The long and woeful history of eastern European pogroms: the massacre of innocent, peace-loving Jews in their small villages, their shtetls, commenced about a thousand years ago and continues today. Out of these pogroms came the words of Rabbeinu Gershom, who in the 10th century wrote in his work, Zechor Brit Avraham (Recall the Covenant of Abraham):

“Wounds, bruises, and fresh blows
are inflicted on the daughter of Israel
She is pained and embittered in a foreign land
hunted like a bird from Mt. Moriah.”

The year 1391 witnessed the infamous Spanish pogrom in which Sephardic Jewish communities were destroyed, and those who refused to convert to Catholicism were murdered. By 1492, the date of final expulsion, there were few, if any, openly practising Jews left in Spain.

Nearly 400 years later, in 1881, a continuous four-year pogrom occurred in southern Russia, when thousands of shtetls with their Jewish occupants were eliminated. With numerous pogroms in between, some 40 years thereafter, between the years of 1918 and 1920, major pogroms were instigated throughout Ukraine, in which more than 250,000 Jews were murdered. The mass migration of Ashkenazi Jews from Ukraine and Russia to America can be traced to those events.

Only one day after Israel’s declaration of Independence in 1948, “murderous hordes,” like the Cossacks of before, once again sought to purge Jews in the region through an existential attack by five Arab armies. This time was different, however: the Jews had weapons and successfully fought back against the intended massacre.

In 2021 at the city of Lod, Israel, an intended pogrom of “violence and terror” by contemporary “murderous hordes” was attempted, but fortunately with limited success. In a repeat of history, and despite relocation to their ancestral homeland of Israel, Jews were forced once again to “barricade themselves in their homes in fear of the rampaging mobs while others chose to flee the city until calm was restored.” Still, this was not yet the Be’eri pogrom of 2023.

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ANTI-SEMITISM, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Pro-Hamas protesters are heirs to decades’ worth of anti-West propaganda By Ruth Wisse

By on August 20th, 2024

https://nypost.com/2024/08/19/opinion/pro-hamas-protesters-are-heirs-to-decades-of-anti-west-bile/

Oct. 7 is widely recognized as “the deadliest day for the Jews since the Holocaust,” yet some Americans — notably the tens of thousands marching on the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week — are celebrating the cloning of Nazism.

Last century, the United States led the fight against those massacring the Jews. Yet today’s college students are cheering on Hitler’s successors.

Many American Jews were “shocked, but not surprised” when antisemitism shot up virulently here on Oct. 8.

Campuses that should have protested the mass murder, rape, infanticide, torture, beheading and kidnapping of peaceful civilians rallied instead against Israel, home to almost half of the Jews left in the world.

It was the same antisemitism we have seen for more than a century — so no surprise — but a shock to many when the rhetoric came from the political left.

In the early 20th century, fascists won American adherents by appealing to ultra-nationalism, the same impulse that brought Hitler to power and made him chancellor of Germany in 1933.

Antisemitism, an anti-liberal movement conceived in the 1870s, accused Jews of exploiting emancipation and citizenship to “conquer Germany from within.”

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ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Liel Leibovitz Send in the Clowns Columbia’s former president is out, and her successor seems not to have learned a thing from this year’s anti-Semitic demonstrations.

By on August 19th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/send-in-the-clowns

Earlier this week, Minouche Shafik, Columbia University’s president, unexpectedly resigned her post. You would think that the departure of an Ivy League leader less than three weeks before the start of the fall semester would be a cataclysmic event, an indication that the institution and its board are ready to account for the series of unfortunate events that led the august school to this low point, a string of catastrophes that began with a temperate embrace of the anti-Semitic marauders who occupied the campus and harassed their Jewish classmates and ended with the shameful resignation of three deans who were caught exchanging text messages disparaging Jewish students concerned about said harassment. You’d expect something close to soul-searching, something approximating an apology, something approaching a promise to do better when thugs brandish the Hamas flag and threaten Jewish students that they’re next on the terror group’s kill list.

Welcome to American academia: what we got instead this week were two statements, one from Shafik and one from her interim replacement, Katrina Armstrong, that are so dazzling in their moral, intellectual, and emotional vacuity that they deserve to be read closely and carefully. Call these twin missives the ur-texts of our academic Armageddon, proof that from the crooked timber of contemporary American higher education no straight thing may ever be built again.

First, Shafik’s resignation. Here is its first paragraph, in full:

I write with sadness to tell you that I am stepping down as president of Columbia University effective August 14, 2024. I have had the honor and privilege to lead this incredible institution, and I believe that—working together—we have made progress in a number of important areas. However, it has also been a period of turmoil where it has been difficult to overcome divergent views across our community. This period has taken a considerable toll on my family, as it has for others in our community. Over the summer, I have been able to reflect and have decided that my moving on at this point would best enable Columbia to traverse the challenges ahead. I am making this announcement now so that new leadership can be in place before the new term begins.

Sadness? Appropriate. Progress in a number of important areas? No evidence is provided, but let us, in the spirit of human kindness, nod right along. But then we get to the heart of the matter: “a period of turmoil where it has been difficult to overcome divergent views across our community.”

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ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

‘So Unimaginable and So Abhorrent’: Federal Judge Orders UCLA to Stop Aiding Activists Enforcing Jew-Free Zones on Campus By Zach Kessel

By on August 15th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/so-unimaginable-and-so-abhorrent-federal-judge-orders-ucla-to-stop-aiding-activists-enforcing-jew-free-zones-on-campus/

““Shame on UCLA for letting antisemitic thugs terrorize Jews on campus,” Rienzi said. “Today’s ruling says that UCLA’s policy of helping antisemitic activists target Jews is not just morally wrong but a gross constitutional violation. UCLA should stop fighting the Constitution and start protecting Jews on campus.”

A Los Angeles federal district court ordered the University of California, Los Angeles, to stop allowing and assisting in self-described pro-Palestinian activists’ creation of what amount to Jew-free zones on campus, holding that the university may not offer classes if Jewish students are prohibited from participating in the programming.

Those who occupied encampments on the university’s property disallowed Jews from passing through the quad unless they would disavow Israel and, by extension, their Jewish faith. UCLA’s position had been that the encampments preventing Jewish students from accessing certain areas of campus were not its responsibility.

Despite that contention, the university erected metal barriers around the encampment and directed Jewish students to leave, according to a lawsuit.

“In the year 2024, in the United States of America, in the State of California, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith,” Judge Mark C. Scarsi wrote on Tuesday. “This fact is so unimaginable and so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of freedom that it bears repeating, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith. UCLA does not dispute this. Instead, UCLA claims that it has no responsibility to protect the religious freedom of its Jewish students because the exclusion was engineered by third-party protesters. But under constitutional principles, UCLA may not allow services to some students when UCLA knows that other students are excluded on religious grounds, regardless of who engineered the exclusion.”

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ANTI-SEMITISM, MEDIA Comments turned off

The New Yorker’s Fact Crisis Is Masha Gessen’s performative anti-Zionism an exception to the magazine’s commitment to factual accuracy and independent style, or a reflection of broader decay David Mikics

By on August 7th, 2024

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/fact-crisis-at-the-new-yorker

It was a commonplace among right-minded people at the dawn of the 20th century that hatred and bigotry were the products of ignorance and would be eliminated through the sanitary means of education. Unfortunately, the horrors of the 20th century would prove this theory to have been radically false. Even the horrors of the Holocaust failed to immunize Western societies against the plague of antisemitism, which is clearly thriving in major Western culture centers to an extent that Victorian optimists and post-Holocaust pessimists alike would find incredible.

So how did so many intelligent people go wrong? In the case of plain old bigotry, they missed the fact that hatred and resentment are at least as foundational to the human psyche as love or the desire for social progress. It is also clear that antisemitism is distinguished from other tribal hatreds and bigotries by the fact that it is a conspiracy theory, and conspiratorialism in societies, institutions, and individuals has an inherent tendency to become more extreme and deranging over time rather than less so. That’s because, by substituting a cosmos of false causes for real ones, conspiracy-theorizing traps its victims in a mirror world in which they progressively lose hold of demonstrable relationships between causes and effects. The more deranged the sufferers become, the more dissonance they feel, and the angrier they get at those they hold responsible for their ills—and, in their minds, the world’s ills. Entire societies—the Spanish Empire, czarist Russia, 20th-century Germany—can descend into the pit of conspiratorial antisemitism and never be heard from again. Which is why normal people who don’t ordinarily give a hoot one way or another about Jews and Israel should greet the yearlong orgy of deranged Jews-are-Nazis pronouncements from the country’s leading universities and culture organs with alarm.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Democrats Have An Antisemitism Problem And Its Time To Call It Out Eric Levine

By on August 2nd, 2024

No URL

For all their handwringing and sanctimonious garbage about fighting hate, Progressive Democrats  (the ascendant and dominate wing of the Democrat Party) are fighting tooth and nail to prevent their anointed presumptive presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, from selecting Pennsylvania Governor,  Josh Shapiro as her running mate.  His shortcoming: he is a proud Jew. 

Their beef with him is not about his economic plans. They are comfortable with his social policies.  He is a proven vote getter:  He ran 14 points ahead of Joe Biden in 2020.  They are willing to accept that he is a privileged white male.  They have reconciled themselves to the fact that Harris is likely to select a heterosexual.  Their objection is that he is critical of and has condemned the explosion of antisemitism at the University of Pennsylvania and on college campuses and in cities across America.

Unfortunately for Shapiro, those protestors are not white supremacist, Trump voters.  They are reliable anti-American, pro-Hamas, Jew hating, Harris voters.  How dare he speak out against them and support Israel in its war of national survival against Iran and its terrorist proxies.  It is one thing to be sad when Jews die.  But it is an article of faith that Jews are not permitted to fight back.  That is the unforgivable sin.  That is the bridge too far. 

For that he must be punished.  For Progressives, when it comes to hate, there is always an exception for the Jews. 

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ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

US Jewish students transfer to friendlier schools post-Oct. 7 By David Isaac

By on August 2nd, 2024

https://www.jns.org/us-jewish-students-transfer-to-friendlier-schools-post-oct-7/

In the wake of the anti-Israel protests that swept across U.S. college campuses following the Hamas invasion on Oct. 7, anecdotal evidence suggests that Jewish students have started voting with their feet and decamping from the worst-offending schools. 

“We’ve seen an unprecedented number of students from top-tier institutions transfer to Yeshiva University, including from Columbia, Cornell and Barnard,” Yeshiva University President Rabbi Ari Berman told JNS.

On April 25, Yeshiva University announced that “in light of ongoing antisemitism and harassment on college campuses,” it would extend its deadline for transfer students until May 31.

Berman said this was the first time the school had received student transfers from Columbia in the middle of the year. There was “no question” in his mind that the students were searching for a safer environment.

Although he wouldn’t share the number of students, he said it was high enough that the school needed to expand its infrastructure to accommodate everyone. “We have more people in our system now than we’ve ever had before,” he said.

Eliana Samuels, 19, grew up in a religious home in New York, graduated high school in 2023 and took a gap year to study in Israel. She’d planned to attend Columbia in the fall. “I applied early decision, which is binding. I didn’t see a problem with that, because I couldn’t really picture myself anywhere else,” she told JNS, noting her mother went to Columbia.

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ANTI-SEMITISM, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism If you insist that the Jewish state is the only one that should not be allowed to defend itself against terrorist attacks, you are probably an antisemite. David Benatar

By on August 1st, 2024

An unqualified advocacy of two states, without adequate attention to Israel’s security, would very likely result in repeated threats of the kind Israel currently experiences from Hezbollah in Lebanon and from Hamas in Gaza. Advocating that inhabitants of the only Jewish state should expose themselves to such risks—especially if you would not expect that of any other country—is antisemitic in effect. Unless the political culture of the Middle East outside of Israel changes fundamentally, the likely effect of a binational, unitary, or even a federal state, would be to make things even worse for Israel’s Jews than they already are. As things stand, it is fantastical to suppose that a Palestinian state between “the river and the sea” would be any different from any of the states that currently surround Israel. If such a state were established, the results would be fatal to many Jews currently living in Israel. The events of 7 October 2023 provide ample evidence for this. Any Jews who survived the establishment of a Palestinian state would then be living in the kind of repressive regime that characterises the entire region, outside of Israel. In short, there is no plausible interpretation of “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free” that could imply anything other than disaster for Israel’s Jews. If this is your plan to bring liberal democracy to Palestine, you are naïve at best. You may not be motivated by antisemitic prejudice, but your plan is antisemitic in effect.

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ANTI-SEMITISM, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Antisemitism: The Sinister Pattern The enemies of the Jews are the enemies of Enlightenment. Brett Hall (November 2023)

By on August 1st, 2024

https://quillette.com/2023/11/01/antisemitism-the-sinister-pattern/

The enemies of Israel are the enemies of reason and civilisation, and of our traditions of criticism. Those of us who like to think of ourselves as defenders of reason have a responsibility to speak out on this here and now, at one of the darkest times in modern history.

There are 7.2 million Jews living in Israel—73 percent of the population. So, less than three-quarters of Israel’s population is comprised of Jews. But Israel is a Jewish state, a state that exists to protect Jews. This is required because there have been systematic attempts over thousands of years to exterminate Jews. And ever since there have been Jews, there have been Jews in Israel. The first Jews populated the land where Israel is today in around 2,000 BCE. In other words, they have continuously occupied the land for close to 4,000 years.

There are around 15 million Jews living on Earth and of those who live outside Israel, most are found in the US, which has a Jewish population of around 6 million. By comparison there are 2.38 billion Christians and around 2.1 billion Muslims worldwide. Jews comprise only 0.2 percent of the total global population. Christians make up approximately 31.6 percent, Muslims around 25 percent, and Hindus 15 percent—even Buddhists make up around 8 percent. There would be many more Jews but for the continued and sometimes almost successful attempts to exterminate them. There is an asymmetry here.

Mainstream Islam explicitly teaches its adherents that Jews deserve death simply for being Jews. We could illustrate this with many passages from Islamic scripture, but one typical example will suffice, from a Hadith by Ibn ’Umar, reported by Al-Bukhari:

I heard the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) saying: “You (i.e., Muslims) will fight against the Jews and you will gain victory over them. The stones will (betray them) saying: ‘O Abdullah! There is a Jew hiding behind me; so kill him.”

Mainstream Islamic scripture is riddled with Jew hatred. Muslim children are taught this scripture. Of course, not all Muslims are antisemitic, but, again, there is an asymmetry here. Jewish scripture does not teach Jews to hate Muslims—if only because, when the Torah was written, Muslims did not exist. The Hebrew Bible predates Islam by around 2,500 years.

Israel has a population of approximately 9.4 million. Compare this to Egypt’s more than 110 million, Iran’s more than 88 million, Syria’s 22 million and Jordan’s 11.5 million. While Jews comprise only 0.2 percent of the global population, they fill our news reports night after night, years after year, generation after generation. Because they are always under attack: for being Jews and for defending themselves.

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