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ANTI-SEMITISM

Muslim Mobs Get a Pass for Assaulting Jews in NYC and LA Attackers get off with no prison time and anti-bias training. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/muslim-mobs-get-a-pass-for-assaulting-jews-in-nyc-and-la/

In May 2021, Joseph Borgen was violently assaulted by a Muslim mob while walking down the street in midtown Manhattan in the vicinity of an anti-Israel rally. The Jewish man was kicked, punched, pepper sprayed, beaten with a metal object, and ended up in the hospital.

Borgen was taunted as a “dirty Jew” and the assault was caught on video. “They were kicking me in my ribs, my stomach,” he described.

Waseem Awawdeh, the best known of the attackers, was out two days later. Even after Awawdeh reportedly told prison guards, “If I could do it again, I would do it again”, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg offered him a plea deal of only six months in prison. After public outrage, including protests and condemnations by elected officials,  it was raised to eighteen months.

Faisal Elezzi, another of the attackers, got off with probation and an obligation to complete “anti-bias programming”.

That same month in Los Angeles, a pro-terrorist Muslim convoy was driving down the street near the Jewish neighborhood of Fairfax, and began harassing outdoor diners at a sushi place. Members of the Muslim mob waved a PLO terror flag, demanded to know who at the restaurant was Jewish, and witnesses said chanted, “death to the Jews” and “free Palestine”.

The Muslim attackers reportedly punched, kicked, threw bottles and pepper sprayed their targets who were members of the Persian Jewish community who had fled Islamic violence in Iran.

Samer Jayylusi and Xavier Pabon were arrested and immediately released on bail. They have since been sentenced to probation and ordered to visit a Holocaust museum.

The assaults in Manhattan and Los Angeles went viral. Videos of Muslim mobs attacking Jews made their way around the country and the world. They ended up appearing in national news stories. And yet most of those suspects got off with a slap on the wrist and diversity training.

The Biden Administration’s Anti-Semitism Blindspot Will the administration’s new strategy to counter anti-Semitism camouflage its own inaction?Ruth R. Wisse

https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/politics-current-affairs/2023/07/the-biden-administrations-historically-ignorant-strategy-to-counter-anti-semitism/?utm_

In response to the alarming rise of anti-Jewish activism and calls from concerned Jews to do something about it, the Biden administration recently announced a “first-ever” National Strategy to Counter Anti-Semitism (NSCA), outlining over a hundred new actions that executive-branch agencies have committed to take within a year. Most Jews and fellow Americans welcome this as an obviously encouraging response to an ever-more-pressing problem. But both the administration and the Jews who pushed it to action have much to learn from an historical precedent that likewise publicized its intention of countering anti-Semitism but instead did irreparable damage.

In 1938 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was under increasing political and moral pressure to address the crisis facing the Jews of Europe. Hitler had begun his program of eliminating the Jews from Germany and the countries that he intended to conquer. Ideological Jew-blame, fueled by fascist parties across the continent, encouraged other countries like Poland and Romania to target their Jewish populations.

Anti-Jewish politics promoted by German propagandists had also penetrated America. The KKK, Henry Ford, Father Coughlin, and Charles Lindbergh helped the Nazis carry the fascist message in the interwar years. Counteracting the demands to rescue the Jews from Europe were two compelling priorities: isolationism and fallout from the Great Depression. Those who called for opposing Hitler were accused of dragging America into an unwanted war.

Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938, threatening its 180,000 Jews, finally forced Roosevelt to take action. He convened an international conference in the French resort town of Evian-les-Bains to consider what could be done to resettle European refugees; Jews were not named. But the president preemptively excluded from consideration both North America and Palestine—the two most obvious destinations. Hitler had announced that he would help the Jews leave for any countries that agreed to take them, but the only country that did was the Dominican Republic, which accepted 800 of Europe’s 9 million. To Nazi propagandists, this was proof that the Jews were toxic, unwanted by everyone.

Fear of anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant sentiment kept Roosevelt from allowing Jewish refugees into his own country. But since 1918 Britain had been charged by the League of Nations with allowing for the establishment of a Jewish national home in Mandatory Palestine. Surely this was the natural destination for Jewish refugees. Here, however, Britain’s perfidy exceeded even Roosevelt’s political cowardice. Determined to prevent an influx of Jews, the British-appointed Muslim leader Amin al-Husseini incited violence that by the late 1930s cowed London into agreeing to his demand to stop Jewish immigration. Rather than challenging Britain’s criminal betrayal of responsibility, Evian reaffirmed its right to stop Jews from entering their land. Thus, the conference called to address the crisis instead camouflaged its own inaction. Worse, the mufti, like Hitler, whom he admired, took it as a green light to pursue the elimination of Jews from the Middle East. Even assuming the president’s intentions were good, he failed to take seriously enough those intent on destroying the Jews.

Student Jew-Hatred at the City College of New York Worms in the Big Apple. by Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/student-jew-hatred-at-the-city-college-of-new-york/

Of the number of Western anti-Semitic groups that pretend to be motivated not by the glorious vision of Jews in endless torment, but by a deep sensitivity to the supposedly unprecedented suffering of the Palestinians, there can seem to be no end. In many cases, their online self-descriptions are so deceptive as to rise nearly to the level of high art: Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, which equates Israelis to Nazis, calls itself “a broad-based, non-partisan, democratic, and charitable organization of grassroots activists and students committed to comprehensive public education on the rights of all Palestinian refugees.” Under the slogan “Justice, Equality, Dignity,” Jewish Voice for Peace, which loves Hamas, represents itself as “a national organization dedicated to a U.S. foreign policy based on peace, human rights, and respect for international law.”

And then there’s Students for Justice in Palestine, which in the constellation of Jew-hatred is a galaxy all its own. Established thirty years ago at the University of California at Berkeley, it was the brainchild of Hatem Bazian, who then, as now, was a lecturer in the Departments of Eastern and Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies at that storied institution. His website further identifies him as “a co-founder and Professor of Islamic Law and Theology at Zaytuna College, the 1st Accredited Muslim Liberal Arts College in the United States.” In addition to these activities, Bazian founded both the Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project and the Islamophobia Studies Journal. (Beginning to notice a pattern?) Some time back, the respected watchdog group Canary Mission bestowed upon Bazian a title that, while perhaps not highly coveted in some circles, is surely, these days, mightily competitive – namely that of “most dangerous professor in America.” Justifying this designation is a predictable list of offenses – a repeated failure to condemn even the most barbaric acts of terrorism, a readiness to gush with praise for the Intifada, and, needless to say, a long record of utterly virulent Jew-hatred.

From CUNY to the Pandemic, Systemic Anti-Semitism is the Real Problem And the Biden administration is complicit in it. by Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/from-cuny-to-the-pandemic-systemic-antisemitism-is-the-real-problem/

In May, the Biden administration released its National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism which promoted a definition of antisemitism written by an anti-Israel activist who had defended Islamic terrorism against Jews. The administration partnered with CAIR, refused to acknowledge Islamic antisemitism, or address the worst cases of campus antisemitism at the government’s public universities like the University of California and City University of New York.

Earlier that month, Fatima Mousa Mohammed, a Students for Justice in Palestine activist, took the podium as the commencement speaker at CUNY Law’s graduation ceremony. Mohammed had previously tweeted, “i pray upon the death of the USA on a public platform” and delivered speeches celebrating violence against Jews. The anti-Israel activist had advocated segregating Jewish professors and students, urging, “”Demand that Zionist professors are not welcomed on your campus! Demand that Zionist students are not in spaces where Palestinian students are.“

Had any such remarks been directed at black or Latino students, Mohammed would never have been allowed to serve as commencement speaker and likely would have been expelled.

At the commencement address, Mohammed celebrated the “rage that fills this auditorium” and expressed hope that it would “fuel for the fight against capitalism, racism, imperialism, and Zionism around the world” and hailed those “who brought the ferocity of the violence” who will “carry the revolution”.

She praised CUNY Law’s support for BDS and described the Hamas fundraisers of HLF as “political prisoners”. That would presumably include Abdulrahman Odeh who had celebrated a bus stop suicide bombing as a “beautiful operation”.

Asking the wrong question about Biden’s flawed antisemitism plan Jonathan Tobin

https://www.jns.org/jns/antisemitism/23/5/30/291450/?utm_source=brevo&utm_campaign=Daily%20Syndicate%20Tues%20May%2030%202023&utm_medium=em

Cheers from failing Jewish leaders enabled the administration to pose as a defender of the Jews even as its policies enable a toxic ideology that spreads Jew-hatred.

You’ve got to hand it to the current occupants of the West Wing. President Joe Biden’s administration has shown itself to be weak and confused about a lot of important issues. But when it comes to manipulating American Jews, they know exactly what they’re doing.

After teasing it for weeks, the White House’s unveiling of the “U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism,” last week was a public-relations triumph in more ways than one. It was released just hours before the Jewish holiday of Shavuot and the Memorial Day weekend. Much like the traditional DC Friday-afternoon news dump in which officials release something just as everyone stops paying attention to headlines, this helped the White House manage reactions. With the Jewish world about to be shut down for two days—and then everyone else for two days after that—administration shills succeeded in dominating the conversation about the document.

More than that, the unveiling was a textbook example of how exceeding low expectations can generate positive spin. It also led to a discussion that avoided the most important question that should have been raised. Instead, the Jews were debating how happy they should be about Biden’s gesture.

For weeks, Jewish groups had feared that the document would not be rooted in the working definition of antisemitism established by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). Among other points, this definition states that denying Jews the right to self-determination and claiming that Israel is a racist endeavor are antisemitic.

Biden’s Strategy to Fight Anti-Semitism Enables Hatred of Jews and Israel BDS, leftist and Muslim anti-Semitism can’t be talked about. by Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/bidens-strategy-to-fight-anti-semitism-enables-hatred-of-jews-and-israel/

In 2019, President Trump signed an executive order on combating antisemitism. The order used the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism which includes “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination”, “using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism to characterize Israel” and applying double standards to the Jewish State.

Biden’s hyped U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, released on the eve of the Shavuot holiday, backtracks from this gold standard by claiming that, “there are several definitions of antisemitism, which serve as valuable tools to raise awareness and increase understanding of antisemitism”, including the IHRA, but noting that the Biden administration “welcomes and appreciates the Nexus Document and notes other such efforts.”

The Nexus definition was authored by anti-Israel activists like Tema Smith, who had claimed that, “Hamas — and the Palestinians as a whole — have desperately real and legitimate grievances against Israel.”

“Jews *have* to be ok with Palestinians *explaining* why some turn to terrorism,” she argued.

The Nexus advisory committee included the likes of Hussein Ibish, who had described Hezbollah as a “disciplined and responsible liberation force” whose terrorists had “conducted themselves in an exemplary manner”, along with J Street leader Jeremy Ben Ami, Lila Corwin-Berman, who had defended BDS, and Chaim Seidler-Feller, whose hatred was so intense he had kicked and scratched a Jewish woman over her support for the Jewish State.

The Nexus definition of antisemitism was created to protect anti-Israel activists from charges of antisemitism. That definition, which the Biden administration chose to promote, claims that BDS, or “boycotting goods made in the West Bank and/or Israel is not antisemitic”, and argues that, “opposition to Zionism and/or Israel does not necessarily reflect specific anti-Jewish animus nor purposefully lead to antisemitic behaviors and conditions” and defends double standards by contending that “paying disproportionate attention to Israel and treating Israel differently than other countries is not prima facie proof of antisemitism.”

June 2023 Anti-Semitism Campus Diversity Is Campus Jew-Hatred Campus Diversity Is Campus Jew-Hatred How DEI is openly attempting to marginalize and silence Jewish students by Seth Mandel

https://www.commentary.org/articles/seth-mandel/campus-diversity-jew-hatred/

By every metric, American Jewish campus life is a shadow of what it once was. The City University of New York is losing the last two Jewish members of its 80-member senior leadership team—in the city with the largest Jewish population in the world. Jewish enrollment in elite universities, most notably the Ivy League, is in free fall. And a sense of security on campuses nationwide has evaporated, as anti-Semitic incidents have hit all-time highs and students report hiding their Star of David pendants and taking winding paths to their campus Hillel.

By contrast, one area of American higher education has seen explosive growth: the programs and officers charged with spreading the gospel of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

This is not a coincidence.

Much like “Hate has no home here” lawn signs and “Coexist” bumper stickers, DEI university activity has become a reliable indicator of overt hostility to Israel and, at the very least, suspicion of any visible expression of Jewishness.

On campus, DEI bureaucracies are straightforward ideological enforcers. Their ideology views Jews as emissaries of (white) power. That’s why DEI officials aren’t merely indifferent to campus Jew-baiting, but its ringleaders.

Take CUNY. The taxpayer-funded university system’s pervasive anti-Semitism—harassment of students, administrators overheard complaining that there are “too many Jews” on the faculty, and support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction campaign to isolate Israel—is the subject of state and city investigations. Amid such complaints, CUNY’s chancellor in 2021 hired a new chief diversity officer, Saly Abd Alla, and put her in charge of investigating anti-Semitism.

Abd Alla was a firm supporter of BDS while working as civil-rights director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a powerful anti-Zionist pressure group. The “anti-discrimination portal” she oversees now at CUNY links to the Jerusalem Declaration on Anti-Semitism, which absolves BDS of Jew-hatred and undermines the more accepted definition of anti-Semitism put forth by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.

Elon Musk Is Right About George Soros—and Not Anti-Semitic The Hungarian-born billionaire has done more than anyone to turn Americans against Israel. By Alan M. Dershowitz

https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-is-right-about-george-soros-and-not-anti-semitic-hrw-j-street-israel-b7db935b?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Elon Musk has been accused of anti-Semitism because of his criticism and mockery of George Soros. Mr. Soros is Jewish; Mr. Musk isn’t. But Mr. Musk stands falsely accused. Mr. Soros is an active participant in politics, and his Jewishness shouldn’t shield him from criticism.

Further, no single person has done more to damage Israel’s standing in the world, especially among so-called progressives, than George Soros. His financial support has multiplied the influence of the two major organizations that have done the most to shift the left-wing paradigm against Israel.

One of them is Human Rights Watch, which was founded by publisher and human-rights advocate Robert Bernstein (1923-2019). For years HRW critiqued the denial of human rights by all countries based on two criteria: the seriousness of the violations in any particular nation, and the inability of the nation’s citizens to protest and remedy such violations. But in 1993 Kenneth Roth became executive director and turned HRW into an organization that specialized in demonizing Israel.

By 2009 the Israel bashing had become so severe that Bernstein wrote: “As the founder of Human Rights Watch, its active chairman for 20 years and now founding chairman emeritus, I must do something that I never anticipated: I must publicly join the group’s critics. Human Rights Watch had as its original mission to pry open closed societies, advocate basic freedoms and support dissenters. But recently it has been issuing reports on the Israeli-Arab conflict that are helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.”

The Marvel, and the ‘Scandal,’ of Jerusalem Anti-Semitism is rooted in envy of the Jewish people’s eternal endurance. By Meir Soloveichik

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-marvel-and-the-scandal-of-jerusalem-day-anti-semitism-missiles-gaza-b01f4eda?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

Thousands of religious Israelis are celebrating Jerusalem Day, which began Thursday at sundown. On Friday morning at the Western Wall, they will recite psalms of thanksgiving commemorating the moment in the Six Day War of 1967 that Israeli soldiers conquered the ancient city of Jerusalem, making it the heart of Israel’s capital. Those assembled won’t merely mark a military achievement 56 years ago. Their minds will travel back to the earliest origins of the sacred city, to its conquest by King David and to the empires that have destroyed it, only to have it rise again from the ashes. They will ponder how Jewish Jerusalem reflects the miracle of Jewish existence: one that allows us to understand why, for better or worse, the world’s attention remains riveted on Israel.

No city in the world has a history like Jerusalem, and no other people has a relationship to a location like the Jews do to it. To study Jerusalem is to study the story of the world: from Egyptian pharaohs to Mesopotamian kings, from Greek and Roman emperors to kaisers and sultans. They, and others, sought to end Jewish presence in the ancient city permanently. Yet Jerusalem is a Jewish city restored, while other ancient cities of biblical past—Babel, Pi-Rameses, Nineveh—are in ruin.

As Norman Podhoretz once put it, Jerusalem reflects “the scandal of Jewish particularity”: The uniqueness of one city in world history testifies to the enduring nature of one people on this earth. Established as Israel’s capital when now-extinct empires bestrode the world, it was toward Jerusalem that the Jews prayed in exile, binding themselves to it as empire after empire became the Ozymandias of its age. Jews celebrate the anniversary of the Jewish return to ancient Jerusalem not only because it is central to their spiritual lives but also because it is a reminder of God’s providence in the history of their people and of the world.

Jewish Public Interest Law Firm Demands Transparency on Ethnic Studies Content from Hayward Unified School District We’ve asked the Superior Court in Alameda County to compel Hayward Unified School District to answer the Public Record requests we sent months ago—requests they’ve completely ignored. By Lori Lowenthal Marcus

https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/358713/jewish-public-interest-law-firm-demands-transparency-on-ethnic-studies-content-from-hayward-unified-school-district/

Why do so many California school districts ignore the explicit requirements of California law? That’s the question that our public interest law firm, The Deborah Project, is asking after filing requests for public documents from dozens of California school districts so we can learn what they teach their students about Ethnic Studies and in particular about Zionism, Israel and her neighbors. The California Public Records Act requires public agencies such as school districts to turn over responsive documents sought by the public.  But in too many cases, our requests have been either completely ignored or we’ve been told the district has no responsive documents when we know that’s not true.

We just put our question to someone very important: a California judge.  We’ve asked the Superior Court in Alameda County to compel Hayward Unified School District to answer the Public Record requests we sent months ago—requests they’ve completely ignored.

Hayward’s failure to answer us at all sure can’t be because they’re not teaching about this subject. We know they signed a “consulting” contract with an organization publicly committed to teaching wildly antisemitic and demonstrably false claims about Israel, her neighbors, and the ages-old Jewish commitment to the land of Israel. That content is not permitted in California public school curricula.