RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/05/13/hey-google-antisemitism-is-a-feature-not-a-bug-of-the-left/

Google has come in for some well-deserved criticism after its “artificial intelligence” wouldn’t answer a simple question: How many Jews did the Nazis kill? That’s bad enough. But then a not-so-intelligent Google employee compounded the problem with a lie about why it happened.

The story goes that Michael Apfel asked a Google “virtual assistant” this question: “Hey Google, how many Jews were killed by the Nazis?”

Google’s answer: “Sorry, I don’t understand.”

Then he asked: “How many Jews were killed during World War II?”

Google: “I don’t understand.”

“How many Jews were killed in the concentration camps?”

“Sorry, I don’t understand.”

“What was the Holocaust?”

“I don’t understand.”

After that series of questions, Apfel asks, “Hey Google, what was the Nakba?”

Don’t be embarrassed if you don’t know the answer, because it’s an Arabic word meaning “catastrophe,” referring to the displacement of Palestinians by Israel in 1948.

While pleading ignorance about the Holocaust, Google’s bot gave a long and detailed answer about the Nakba.

https://thespectator.com/topic/gaza-not-uighurs-china-college/

The Babylon Bee, “the newspaper of record” for anyone with a sense of humor, posed a more interesting thought about the campus demonstrations than anything you can find in the New York Times or Washington Post. The Bee’s headline proclaimed, “Uighur Slaves Struggling to Keep Up with Demand for Palestinian Headscarves.”

Dark humor indeed. The headscarves, like the masks, serve one obvious function: they hide the faces of demonstrators. That’s why bank robbers wear masks, too. Students know they are breaking the rules and professional agitators know they are breaking the law, so it’s smart to hide their faces.

But the scarves have one additional advantage that bank robbers’ masks don’t: the keffiyeh is a visible symbol of Palestinian identity. “Pardon me,” they say, “my virtue is showing.”

The Babylon Bee also picked up another interesting point the legacy media missed. The keffiyehs worn on campus today come from China, like so much clothing. Ah, globalization. Palestinians used to produce the scarves themselves but cheaper Chinese production squeezed them out of the market. The protesters’ attire is a hidden mark of the international trade they loath.

Another symbol of that global commerce is the vast number of international students involved in the protests and often leading them. Have you seen objections to that aspect of globalization? No. But then no one ever accused the mob of intellectual coherence.

What is it about Gaza that excites such large, ferocious and often violent demonstrations? Why are there no massive demonstrations about other human-rights atrocities around the world? Why is the campus silent about Hong Kong and the prisons in Siberia? Why such intense focus on Israel, which often bleeds into open antisemitism?

A few reasons top the list. The first is the nature of the hard-left coalition on campus. It centers on two groups, both of which position themselves as righteous victims. The number one domestic victims are African Americans. The number one international victims are Palestinians, plus Muslims more generally. Other victims run the gamut, Native Americans, queers, transgenders and others. White students and increasingly Asian Americans are labeled as the oppressors or victimizers. Their only chance at salvation from their “sin” is to make common cause with the putatively oppressed and follow their lead. Hispanics are rarely part of this coalition, even though their professors are.

The word “sin” is important here. The ideology has the intensity of a religion and the hatred of apostates.

The coalition would crumble if it emphasized positive issues, such as “gay rights in Gaza.” So they focus on common hatreds. Those are what hold the coalition together.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/05/07/zadie-smith-has-failed-the-palestine-purity-test/

So the ‘pro-Palestine’ mob has now rounded on author Zadie Smith. ‘Shibboleth’, an essay on American students’ protests against the war in Gaza, has been loudly denounced as a genocidal tract.

Published in this Saturday’s New Yorker, Smith’s essay is, at first glance, an unlikely target for the keffiyeh-sporting crowd. She explicitly expresses support for a ceasefire in Gaza, calling it a ‘potential reality and an ethical necessity’. She also celebrates those sons and daughters of privilege currently draped in Palestine flags and encamped on lawns across America’s universities. These protesters are the heirs of the student radicals of the late 1960s and early 1970s, she (wrongly) claims. Apparently, for their willingness to put their own bodies and futures on the line in support of a just cause, ‘they deserve our support and praise’.

But Smith does something else in the essay, too. Something that far too many ‘pro-Palestine’ types refuse to do. She dares to acknowledge the fear felt by many Jewish students right now, faced by hostile mobs calling them ‘Zionists’ and telling them to keep their distance. She also dares to express ‘concern for the dreadful situation of the hostages’ who were taken from Israel seven months ago by Hamas. And she dares to challenge those who minimise the rape of Israeli women during Hamas’s pogrom on 7 October last year.

For this – for gently drawing attention to the anti-Semitic elements of the pro-Palestine campaign, and for expressing sympathy with Israelis as well as Palestinians – she has been monstered by academics, authors and leftists.

Book Workers for a Free Palestine, a group of activists working in publishing, decided on Sunday that Smith’s essay warranted a public denunciation: ‘We profoundly disagree with the positions that Zadie Smith has taken in the New Yorker.’ A books editor at New Left publishers Verso joined in, calling it a ‘really bad essay’, written in ‘bad faith’. Cambridge professor of postcolonial studies Priyamvada Gopal also slammed Smith, denouncing her ‘white elite politics’ and claiming her ‘precious pomposity’ and sense of ‘rightness and superiority’ were all too typical of the ‘gaslighting’ that goes on at Smith’s alma mater, the University of Cambridge. Kettle, meet Professor Gopal.

Some of the reaction has been positively sinister. Author Monisha Rajesh said that she sees Smith ‘every morning on the school run’, and will now wear a ‘keffiyeh and carry a picture of Refaat Al Areer [a Palestinian writer killed during the war] and tell her, “It’s complicated”’. Elsewhere, one widely retweeted comment claimed that the mixed-race Smith uses ‘black aesthetics’, from her ‘head wrap’ to her ‘kente cloth’ earrings, in order to ‘conceal her deeply pedestrian, white, middle-class politics’. Apparently, expressing reservations about aspects of the pro-Palestine protests means that Smith is betraying her ethnic identity.

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-799568

As Jews are fighting a war of self-defense against Hamas, the PLO, and other terrorist organizations, Israel is accused of genocide, war crimes, and perpetrating a Holocaust.

Eighty-five years ago, World War II began; the Holocaust had begun earlier, and the Nazi plan of the Final Solution was implemented in 1942.

Eighty-five years ago, the world turned its back on the Jewish people. Many countries in Europe welcomed the Nazis, and many locals supported the Nazis. Some countries declared “neutrality.”

The British implemented the White Paper of 1939, which prevented Jews who sought refuge in Palestine from immigrating. The US and Canada refused to allow most Jewish refugees to seek safety in their territory. The leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Amin al Husseini, moved to Berlin to support the Nazis.

Today, those who support the Iranian proxies such as Hamas, PIJ, and Hezbollah, and support anti-Israel demonstrations, are calling for another Holocaust, destroying the State of Israel, and the two-state solution (2SS) – a Palestinian state led by terrorist organizations. The international community, especially the UN and the EU, have joined these efforts. This is a world war against the Jewish people and Israel, supported by most Muslim countries and Muslim authorities. 

Something nightmarish: Israel accused of perpetrating a Holocaust

Something nightmarish is happening. As Jews are fighting a war of self-defense against Hamas, the PLO, and other terrorist organizations, Israel is accused of genocide, war crimes, and perpetrating a Holocaust against the Arabs in Gaza. Israel is accused of deliberately killing innocent civilians, and is compared to Nazis. The accusers are joined by non-Muslims in demonstrations against Israel, calling US President Joe Biden “Genocide Joe” for sending weapons to Israel. Many countries, organizations, and the media call for a “ceasefire” in the war against Hamas, and the 2SS which justifies their atrocities and will ensure their claims of victory.

Eighty-five years ago, World War II was launched against the Nazis; today, the world sees Israel as the enemy. 

Ironically, as the world briefly turns its attention to the greatest human tragedy in modern history on Holocaust Remembrance Day, there is growing Jew-hatred and condemnations of Israel around the globe. Why?

https://www.jns.org/american-jewrys-poor-prognosis/

The steep rise in antisemitism in the United States, which has soared to new heights since the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel, has reawakened the debate about whether the so-called “Golden Age” of American Jewry has run its historical course. It’s a reasonable question.

Rather than arouse horror over the sadistic crimes that Hamas committed against innocent men, women and children on that Black Sabbath, the mass murder galvanized Jew-haters across America. Almost spontaneously, protests against the Jewish state erupted before southern Israel was even cleared of the thousands of terrorists who’d infiltrated the Gaza border.

This wasn’t due to a lack of information about the worst atrocities against Jews since the Holocaust. On the contrary, the Hamas perpetrators not only filmed themselves raping, burning, beheading, mutilating and kidnapping men, women and children; they proudly posted their deeds all over social media.

The response on the part of Muslim extremists and their progressive fellow travelers has been to alternate between denial and justification. On the one hand, they reject Hamas’s brutality. On the other, they hail it as heroic.

Nor did they bother waiting for the Israel Defense Forces ground invasion nearly three weeks later to accuse the “apartheid state” of Palestinian genocide. No, they shouted their lies in megaphones about the “occupation” of Gaza just as promptly and forcefully as they tore down posters of hostages. Even the picture of 9-month-old Kfir Bibas and his 4-year-old brother, Ariel, in the arms of their terrified mother, Shiri, wasn’t spared being ripped and trampled on.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/04/30/the-breathtaking-denial-of-anti-semitism-at-columbia/

Just four months into 2024, the Guardian published a leading candidate for most preposterous column of the year. Veteran Democratic operative Robert Reich has well earned this nomination for his article claiming that the ongoing protests at Columbia University in New York are ‘not expressing anti-Semitism’, ‘not engaging in hate speech’ and ‘not endangering Jewish students’ (his emphasis).

Where to begin? Put aside for a moment that even President Joe Biden, an experienced ‘both sides now’ waffler when it comes to the Israel-Hamas conflict, has called some of what the Columbia protesters have done ‘blatant’ anti-Semitism. And forget that protesters punched an Israeli-Arab in the face when he tried to convince them that cheering on vicious terrorists might not be an avenue toward reconciliation.

You merely need to look at the things protesters have been chanting and screaming to see what’s really going on. These include ‘Go back to Poland’ (by which they presumably Auschwitz) and ‘Never forget 7 October… 7 October is about to be every fucking day for you. You ready?’ Then there was that charming young student who held a sign that read ‘Al-Qasam’s [sic] next targets’ with an arrow pointing at pro-Israel counter-protesters standing nearby waving Israeli and American flags. Al-Qassam, the military wing of Hamas, is responsible for the carnage on 7 October.

Before 7 October, the anti-Semites among the ‘pro-Palestine’ crowd displayed a modicum of discretion by employing deliberately ambiguous phrases like ‘From the River to the Sea’, which were veiled calls to eliminate the state of Israel. Now their protests leave little to the imagination. They call for the elimination of Jews and the Jewish State. Yet Robert Reich, who is Jewish, can’t see the obvious.

Like all good social-justice warriors of a certain age, Reich harkens back to the romantic 1960s, recalling the campus protests against segregationist governors George Wallace and Ross Barnett, and against the Vietnam War. Reich writes: ‘If Columbia or any other university now roiled by student protests were doing what it should be doing, it would be a hotbed of debate about the war. Disagreement would be welcome; demonstrations accepted; argument invited; differences examined.’ Ah, those halcyon days of campus kumbaya.

Maybe Reich hasn’t noticed, but today’s protesters have no desire to debate or examine differences. This is not about two-state solutions or how to arrive there. Read the placards or listen to the chants and you will see that this is all about a world without Israel and eradicating the Jews. As Brendan O’Neill pointed out recently on spiked: ‘Their longing for Israel’s erasure was made clear… “We don’t want no two states / We want ’48!” That is, 1948, a time when the modern state of Israel didn’t yet exist.’ I challenge Reich – or indeed anyone – to find one poster in all those photographs of the Columbia protests calling for peace, negotiations or an acknowledgment of Israel’s right to exist. Just one.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/israel/2024/04/the-new-anti-semitisms-debt-to-the-nazis/

Anti-Semitism keeps evolving. In its current iteration, unimaginatively known as the New Antisemitism, it retains many of the traditional tropes found in the previous five stages of Antisemitism dating back over 2000 years, and these shouldn’t need to be rehearsed here. What is innovative in its new form is the way in which these traditional libels have been welded to the dominant discourses of the far Left, so that ‘the Jew’ has been conflated with colonialism, imperialism, global capitalism, racism, apartheid, genocide and even, in the cruellest of historical inversions, with Nazism!

Having found a comfortable home on the progressivist left, the New Anti-Semitism tries to obscure its exterminationist position by speaking in code, as did the Nazis, where, e.g., ‘placing the Jews under active control’ meant transporting them to the death camps for extermination. Similarly, the New Anti-Semites insist they are not Anti-Semitic just anti-Zionist, seeking to obscure the fact that the now ubiquitous protest chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, is code for the destruction of Israel and the extermination of the Jewish people. While it is (barely) possible that this is not known or of much concern to all the Greens and ALP politicians, media commentators, academics, university administrators, the ACTU, school teachers, local councillors, Trotskyites, celebrity protesters, Islamist fellow-travellers, and other useful idiots who mouth this slogan, its meaning goes back at least as far the Third Reich’s racial policies, Hitler and the Nazis’ plans for the Final Solution, and the genocidal aspirations of their Arab disciples.

‘The Final Solution to the Jewish Question’ was, of course, official Nazi code for the genocide of the Jews, across Europe and beyond as far as Nazi power could reach. The plan was mapped out at the January 1942 Wannsee Conference of high level Nazi officials responsible for its implementation, but its roots lie deep in the history of Antisemitism and especially into Hitler’s own hyper-paranoid worldview. This found notorious expression in Mein Kampf , in which he fulminated about “the black-haired Jewish youth, with satanic joy in his face, lurks in wait for the unsuspecting [Aryan] maiden whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people. With every means he tries to destroy the racial foundations of the people he has set out to subjugate.” Joseph Goebbels similarly denounced ‘the Jew’ as “the enemy of the world, the destroyer of cultures, the parasite among the peoples, the Son of Chaos, the incarnation of evil, the ferment of decomposition [and] the decay of humanity.” Such  sentiments are echoed today regularly in mosques, on social media, and in protests (with apparent immunity from sanction by the police, the courts, or the AHRC), and one wonders to what extent the New Anti-Semites identify with these Nazi caricatures, or are aware where their ideological allegiances might carry them.