From the Roxbury mosque, to Northeastern University, to the Newton Public Schools, instead of confronting the new threats facing today’s Jewish world, the Boston Jewish establishment seeks to demonize anybody that will.
By Dovid Margolin
In an effort to stay relevant and powerful in an increasingly different world than the one they grew up in, Jewish establishment leaders in Boston have developed a distinct pattern of response. When anyone with a dissenting opinion raises the alarm on an issue that the establishment feels uncomfortable discussing – such as Left-wing anti-Semitism and Islamic extremism – they smear them. They try to shut down discussion by saying that opinions opposing their own are not valid and cannot be tolerated.
One notable leader of the opposition is Dr. Charles Jacobs. Instead of engaging with him, the Jewish establishment labels him and his supporters McCarthy-ites and Islamophobes.
And then, just when they figure out that Jacobs was right, the establishment embraces his battles, stepping onto the field at exactly the right moment before ultimately claiming victory for themselves. It’s a brilliant tactic, but one that will serve the establishment’s purposes only for so long.
A Pattern Revealed
When Charles Jacobs wrote an op-ed in the Boston Jewish Advocate in 2010 questioning the wisdom of Rabbi Eric Gurvis’ embrace of Bilal Kaleem of the Muslim American Society, seventy Massachusetts Reform rabbis signed a letter condemning him, and smearing him with the brush of Islamophobia. They called upon him to “discontinue his destructive campaign against Boston’s Muslim community, which is based on innuendo, half-truths and unproven conspiracy theories.”
Federal prosecutors had by then called Kaleem’s Muslim American Society an overt front for the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim American Society is also the parent organization of the Islamic Society of Boston mosque in Roxbury – where extremist speakers regularly appeared, and whose trustee for 8 years was Yusuf al Qaardawi, the spiritual head of the Muslim Brotherhood – as well as the Islamic Society of Cambridge mosque, a mosque regularly attended by the Boston Marathon bombers. So much for unproven conspiracy theories.
In 2012 Americans for Peace and Tolerance (APT), the organization that Jacobs heads, called attention through a series of videos to the viciously anti-Semitic and anti-Israel activities of a number of professors and student organizations at Northeastern University in Boston. Holocaust Awareness Week at Northeastern, created to ensure that future generations not forget about the Holocaust, had been hijacked and transformed into a week-long Israel bashing event where Israel was routinely compared to Nazi Germany and featured speakers such as the notorious Norman Finkelstein, author of The Holocaust Industry.
A second video documented the radical Muslim activity taking place at Northeastern University. On tape was the university’s Muslim chaplain, Imam Abdullah Faaruuq, also a Muslim American Society associate, calling upon congregants at a Brighton mosque to “take up the gun and the sword” in the service of Allah and to support convicted terrorist Aafia Siddiqui.
A third video showed Northeastern’s Professor Denis Sullivan lauding the Hamas terror organization’s kindergartens and healthcare, and Northeastern economics professor Shahid Alam telling students that they “should laugh away accusations of anti-Semitism” and wear them as a badge of pride. Students spoke on tape, some with their faces and voices altered to avoid retribution, about the atmosphere of fear that any pro-Israel student faced on campus and in classrooms.
And yet at the time, the leadership of the Boston Jewish community, organizations that had been founded to stop the defamation of Jews in the public sphere – such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) – did nothing, attempting only to pressure Jacobs and his allies to lay-off of Northeastern University. “Don’t make this a public fight,” they told him.
“We called up Northeastern administrators and asked them, ‘do you know about Imam Faaruuq?'” explains Jacobs in an interview with the Jewish Russian Telegraph. “The university lawyers called us back and asked us to see the raw footage, which we sent them.
“A day later Imam Faaruuq’s bio was erased from Northeastern’s website. He was dismissed from his post – the first time I can recall a university Imam being dismissed.”
As more and more damning information regarding Northeastern came out, the tide of public opinion turned, as did the approach of the Boston Jewish establishment. Gone were the furtive phone calls to Jacobs and his allies to stand down from their campaign against Northeastern, and in came the establishment to negotiate a victory instead. On November 11, 2013, the ADL and the Combined Jewish Philanthropies (CJP) issued a joint statement:
“Over the past several years, students and faculty at Northeastern University have raised concerns regarding what they have described as virulent and intimidating anti-Israelism, or even anti-Semitism, on campus. Over the past year we have worked closely with officials at Northeastern regarding those concerns.
. Anti-Semitism posing as anti-Israelism is indeed a significant problem on certain campuses. At the same time, academic freedom and the right of free expression are vital to any academic setting. We applaud Northeastern for its statement to faculty and for the work it is doing to promote an atmosphere premised on civility and respect.”
Notably missing was any mention of APT or the Zionist Organization of America, whose legal director Susan Tuchman created a shocking report based on interviews she had done with dozens of students about their experience with anti-Semitic and anti-Israel professors at Northeastern. To the uninitiated, the ones who deserved credit for any changes put in place at Northeastern were the ones who for so long had fought to silence any criticism of the school – the leaders of the Boston Jewish establishment.
http://pai.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451af0469e201a3fb8f3af5970b-pi
Newton Public Schools
White-washing Newton
The campaign to discover exactly what was being taught in Newton Public Schools and who had authorized it has recently run a similar course. Two years ago Newton parent Tony Pagliuso was asked by his daughter whether it was true that Arab women were being killed in Israeli jails by the hundreds, as she had read in The Arab World Studies Notebook. Horrified by the specter of his children being taught anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic lies in his city’s public school system, Pagliuso went to the school to find out what was going on. The school promptly dismissed his complaints.
As the story gained publicity, more parents and students began coming forward with disturbing allegations of anti-Israel propaganda being taught in Newton schools. At school committee meetings, the committee was confronted by parents and concerned Newton citizens with some of the materials being used in the curriculum. The board responded by stone walling and accusing the parents of “McCarthy-ite” tactics.
In fact, one of the materials used, The Arab World Studies Notebook, was described in a 2007 report by the American Jewish Committee as “a text that appears largely designed to advance the anti-Israel and propagandistic views of the Notebook’s sponsors, the Middle East Policy Council (MEPC) and Arab World and Islamic Resources (AWAIR), to an audience of teachers who may not have the resources and knowledge to assess this text critically.”
