RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/anti-semitic-influencers-conspiracy-theories-kanye-west-candace-owens-andrew-tate

In 1991, a motorcade carrying a Jewish rabbi cruised through Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood. After getting separated from the group, one of the cars ran a red light and collided with another vehicle, which swerved onto the curb and hit two black children, leaving one injured and another dead. Within hours, the neighborhood had broken out in riots, with mobs of black residents targeting Jewish institutions. Early the next morning, a group of young black men stabbed and beat a Jewish graduate student to death.

As the tensions escalated, the race hustler Al Sharpton organized protests at the scene, portraying Jews as nefarious “diamond dealers” responsible for the global exploitation of blacks. Another round of looting, vandalism, and violence followed.

Flash forward to the present. Hamas launched the October 7, 2023, terror campaign against Israel and created fertile ground for another propaganda war. In the United States, left-wing academics seized the moment to rally support for the “decolonization” of Israel, and in the digital realm, a new anti-Semitism has reared its head. Several influential online commentators—most notably, Kanye West, Candace Owens, and Andrew Tate—have used the attention around October 7 to push conspiracy theories and, especially in West’s case, outright anti-Semitism, on podcasts and social media platforms, ostensibly from a “right-wing” perspective.

The two episodes provide a fascinating point of comparison. Anti-Semitism is an ancient affliction, but it takes a different shape throughout history, depending on the culture, language, and technology of the moment. In today’s case, we see a resurgent anti-Semitism that has scrambled politics and perpetuated itself in cyberspace. In short, the Crown Heights riots have been digitized.

The first thing to understand is that Sharpton’s activism was a form of flesh-and-blood ethnic politics adapted to the televisual era. His narrative in Crown Heights was built on a particular grievance, against particular people, in a particular neighborhood. It generated its power on a left-wing trope: that Jews were oppressing poor blacks, and that the government was favoring “white interloper[s]” over native minorities. Sharpton’s desired outcome was tangible: he sought the imprisonment of the driver and, more broadly, cash for his organization, which operated like a mafia protection racket.

The new anti-Semitism has taken a different turn. The leaders of this movement are not political activists but social media “influencers” who have constructed a narrative based not on a left-wing, oppressor/oppressed framework, but on a diffused, right-coded conspiracy theory. Jews, in these influencers’ telling, have taken control of American media, flooded society with pornography, and organized sex-related blackmail rings to secure support for Israel.

https://www.jns.org/betrayal-lipstadts-silence-about-campus-jew-hatred-under-the-biden-administration/?utm_campaign=Daily%20Syndicate%20Emails&utm_medium=email&_

It turns out that what the country needed most was an antisemitism envoy to the United States and not to the rest of the world. And when the plague of Jew-hatred surged in the streets of American cities and on college campuses, what was also needed was for that envoy not to stand by in silence while the administration she served chose to be neutral about the issue for partisan reasons.

Sadly, that failure will constitute a major part of the legacy of Deborah Lipstadt.

Lipstadt is an eminent Jewish historian whose groundbreaking work on Holocaust denial earned her acclaim in her field. It also led to an important court case in Great Britain where Holocaust denier David Irving unsuccessfully sued her for libel, an ordeal that not only inspired her own book on the subject but also the 2015 movie “Denial” (she was portrayed by Jewish actress Rachel Weisz).

She deserves to be remembered for her scholarship and for writing some excellent books like her 1985 Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933–1945 and the 1993 Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, as well as the 2005 History on Trial: My Day in Court With a Holocaust Denier.

Her recent acknowledgment of the failure of the Biden administration to adequately respond to the explosion of antisemitism under her watch, however, should not be overlooked.

Denouncing Columbia

It was just one sentence in an article she recently wrote in The Free Press that was devoted to explaining why she refused to consider an offer to teach at Columbia University. But in so doing, she buried what should have been the lead.

https://www.thefp.com/p/american-psychological-association-antisemitism-complaint

More than 3,500 mental health professionals have sent a letter to the leaders of the world’s largest psychological association, rebuking them for allowing “virulent antisemitism” to fester in their ranks.

The letter, sent last night, calls upon the president and the board of the American Psychological Association (APA) to “address the serious and systemic problem of antisemitism/anti-Jewish hate.” The APA, which was established in 1892, has 173,000 members.

The 3,556 signers, who submitted the letter to APA president Debra Kawahara and the 15 additional members of the board of directors, claim that “Jewish APA members have been harassed, marginalized, and silenced on APA community forums even for attempting to challenge antisemitic rhetoric or correct misinformation.”

The signers, who comprise thousands of APA members and other psychological professionals, write that they “have documented extensive evidence of antisemitic discourse and concerning behavior across APA divisions.”

Their examples include:

APA-hosted listservs that “contain antisemitic discourse, often masked as anti-Zionism, including statements like ‘Kudos to Hamas’ and calls for ‘Intifada, Intifada,’ which are synonymous with calls for violence and murder against Jewish and Israeli civilians.”

Numerous calls for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against Israel—“an initiative to demonize, delegitimize, and isolate the state of Israel including Israeli academics.”

APA conferences where speakers “notorious for antisemitic rhetoric” have been invited and made official statements that rationalize “violence against Jews and Israelis; antisemitic tropes; Holocaust distortion; minimization of Jewish victimization, fear, and grief; and pathologizing of Jewish people’s connection to their indigenous homeland.”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/anti-semitic-hate-riot-new-york-borough-park

Seared into the minds of Jewish Americans are the innocent faces and bright red hair of the youngest Hamas hostages, Ariel and Kfir Bibas. The brothers, four and nine-months old, respectively, were kidnapped along with their mother, Shiri, by masked gunmen on October 7, 2023. Their father, Yarden, was also taken hostage but was released last week. Imagining Yarden’s anguish as he awaited news of his family’s fate only deepened the anxiety of millions who, like me, prayed for their safe return.

This week, the Israeli government confirmed that the boys were murdered while in captivity. Meanwhile, on Wednesday, a group of “protesters,” their faces wrapped in keffiyeh scarves to mimic Hamas militants, descended on New York’s predominantly Jewish Borough Park neighborhood to scream at Jews. “How many kids did you kill today?,” they chanted—with no sense of irony.

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This outrage—culminating in a brawl that police had to break up—reflects the growing normalization of masked rioters invading predominantly Jewish spaces to intimidate residents. Like Biblical villains, these agitators thirst for power. Like Hamas, they don’t care if they hurt the innocent, so long as they hurt Jews. The pro-Hamas mob pushed past police barricades and officers and approached nearby Jews, where fighting ensued.

It’s time for American cities and institutions to stand up to this targeted misbehavior. Simply complaining about “hate” won’t solve the problem. New York and other cities need to show some spine.