RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/4671152-democrats-fight-against-hate-crimes-vanishes-in-the-face-of-antisemitism/
Julian Epstein is the former chief counsel to the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee and former staff director of the House Oversight Committee.

For the past few decades, Democrats have consistently demanded a strong response to the rising number of hate crimes motivated by race, ethnicity, ancestry or sexual orientation. Among other things, they have insisted on universal condemnation of the crimes and vigorous enforcement of federal laws that criminalize hate crimes. 

Spurred by the brutal hate murders of James Byrd Jr., and Matthew Shepard in the late 1990s, the Department of Justice has prosecuted hundreds of these cases in recent administrations, including 70 convictions by the Biden Department of Justice as last September. As chief counsel to the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee years ago, I was involved in the push for stronger enforcement. It was a central part of the Democrats’ civil rights agenda.  

But now the Democratic Party has an antisemitism problem on its left flank, and its tune has changed a bit. Leftist professional organizers have mobilized student groups and mobs elsewhere to attack, harass and obstruct the free movement of Jews — all of which are crimes.   

Many openly support Hamas and the October 7 civilian massacre, calling for the destruction of Israel and for the repatriation of Jews to places like Poland. One student leader at Columbia asserted that “Zionists don’t deserve to live” in a livestream video. (University officials took no disciplinary action until the video was widely publicized.)   

Of course, the spike of over 8,873 antisemitic incidents of assault, harassment and vandalism in 2023 — a 140 percent increase from the previous year — was somewhat predictable.  

Numerous progressive groups like the Democratic Socialists of America (which counts among its supporters Democrats in Congress) and local chapters of Black Lives Matter celebrated Hamas’s genocidal attack as an act of liberation. A progressive Columbia professor called the attack “awesome”; one at Cornell was “exhilarated”; a Stanford instructor segregated Jewish students in an apparent slander of Israelis for being imagined “colonizers.” Democrats have largely looked the other way and declined to namecheck any of these bigotries.  

What would Democrats say if paid organizers incited mobs to attack Black students, impede their movement and publicly demand their repatriation to Africa? What would they say if college professors and their curricula slurred the ancestral heritage of Hispanics? They would rightly be outraged and would insist on maximum legal consequences against the perpetrators. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-palestinian-visits-auschwitz/

The first Palestinian to have visited a Nazi concentration camp was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin el Husseini, the leader of the Palestinian Arabs from the 1920s to the 1940s, who spent the war years in Berlin. He had a nice chat with Hitler on November 28, 1941, captured in a famous photograph here. Al-Husseini expressed to Hitler his enthusiasm for the Final Solution. He was befriended by Heinrich Himmler, and there is some evidence, not conclusive, that the Mufti may have been taken to Auschwitz by Himmler, or possibly by another person he had befriended, Adolf Eichmann, to see how swimmingly things were proceeding there. It is certain that the Mufti visited the concentration camp at Tebbin, for there are numerous photographs of him at the site together with high Nazi officials, as can be seen here.

As his contribution to the Nazi war effort, Hajj Amin el Husseini is known to have raised several Waffen SS battalions consisting of Bosnian Muslims. He also broadcast pro-Nazi propaganda to the Arab world throughout the war.

In January 2020, in quite a different spirit to that exhibited by the Mufti, a group of 25 Muslim faith leaders visited Auschwitz, in what was at the time called a “groundbreaking” visit. “To be here… is both a sacred duty and a profound honor,” the Saudi head of the Muslim World League said during a tour of Nazi death camp with members of the American Jewish Committee.

Now another Palestinian has just been in the news for his visit to Auschwitz, not undertaken In the spirit of sympathy for the victims that the delegation of Muslim faith leaders exhibited but, rather, in a triumphant mode, demanding that Jews everywhere “return” to where they belong — that is, to the Nazi death camps. Robert Spencer wrote about this briefly here, and more on this latest example of a Palestinian expressing murderous antisemitism can be found here: “Palestinian man visits Auschwitz, publicly calls on Jews to return there ‘where they belong,’” 

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.