RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20571/canada-rise-of-antisemitism

On the face of it, who can object to diversity, equity and inclusion? It is like objecting to Santa Claus. Unfortunately, these [DEI] workshops too often have been hijacked by radical ideologues who pitted races against each other.

Who indeed is to blame for the wave of hatred toward Jews that is roiling Canadian workplaces, universities, unions, social media postings, even our streets and neighbourhoods? Who are the purveyors of antisemitism?

Over the last several years, Canadian employers have increasingly brought in “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) trainers to rid their workforces of conscious, and even subconscious, racism. On the face of it, who can object to diversity, equity and inclusion? It is like objecting to Santa Claus.

Unfortunately, these workshops too often have been hijacked by radical ideologues who pitted races against each other. The unhappy story of Richard Bilkszto, who committed suicide after alleging he was deemed a racist by one such trainer for observing that Canadians are not more racist than Americans, was simply the publicly exposed tip of that iceberg.

I have had many Jewish clients, even before Oct. 7, complain about how Jews have been treated in these DEI seminars. To what extent has this radical training played a role in the sudden outpouring of antisemitism here?

Who indeed is to blame for the wave of hatred toward Jews that is roiling Canadian workplaces, universities, unions, social media postings, even our streets and neighbourhoods?

Antisemitism has had a long sordid history in Canada and, for some (ironically many of those who have never knowingly even met a Jew), it has always been hidden just below the surface. There was a reprieve after the guilt induced by the atrocities of the Second World War. But it is ascendant again, and surprisingly, its adherents are proudly so.

Who are the purveyors of antisemitism?

Obviously, first are the radical Islamists importing their ancient historic Jew-hatred based on their particular interpretation of the Koran. Their hatred of Christians and other “infidels” is only slightly behind in the hierarchy.

There is the radical woke left, which has, since Israel’s underdog defeat of the combined armies of Jordan, Egypt and Syria in 1967, viewed Israel as an oppressor. I believe much of the antisemitism in the public sector union movement can be attributed to that strain.

There is the influence of DEI which has too often placed Jews at the top of a racial hierarchy, ignoring the fact that Jews have always been, and remain, dramatically more discriminated against than any other group, including those groups at the supposed bottom of the DEI hierarchy of intersectionality: Indigenous, Blacks, Muslims and the LGBTQIA+.

Allied with those forces are universities and colleges, which have been temples of wokeness for years, penalizing students who express views that dissent from their left-wing pronouncements. While campuses are hotbeds of support for Hamas, polls have shown young people who have not been in the clutches of our university and college professors support Israel, as do most other groups in Canada by large majorities.

Although I am distinguishing them, the left, the universities and DEI practitioners are somewhat interchangeable, and have many of the same members.

https://www.thefp.com/p/at-columbia-i-am-told-go-back-to?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Since the first protest on Columbia’s campus in support of a “Free Palestine” on October 12, I have committed, along with my twin brother and a number of our friends, to show up at these protests with our Israeli and American flags.

There are often hundreds of people chanting for “intifada” and a handful of us. Suffice it to say, I can think of more pleasant ways to spend a New York City night. We do it for a simple reason: we want to tell Jews at Columbia—and around the world—that we refuse to be bullied off of our own campus.

For nearly seven months, I have been asked the same question by many people in my life: “Do you feel safe on campus as a Jew?” I wear a kippah—I can’t pass. And I have always maintained the importance of standing our ground rather than letting fear drive us away.

Nothing will stanch that pride, but the situation at Columbia has escalated to a point where my physical safety is in danger.

That is not a metaphor, nor an expression of safetyism. On Saturday night, April 20, I was assaulted and harassed repeatedly inside the gates of Columbia University.

For five days now, protesters have been camped out on Columbia’s South Lawn demanding financial divestment from Israel, an academic boycott of Israel, a call for cease-fire, and an end to Columbia’s real estate purchases. Their newest demand is to defund Columbia’s public safety, the only people on campus supposedly tasked with keeping us safe.

On Saturday night, the situation on campus hit a new low. Amid multiple protests both inside and outside of Columbia’s gates, my friends and I decided to show our pride yet again, as we have on so many occasions since Hamas began its war.

For an hour, 20 of us stood on the sundial in the middle of Columbia’s campus with Israeli and American flags and sang peaceful songs such as Matisyahu’s “One Day” and “V’hi She’amda”—a much-needed ode to the hope and perseverance of the Jewish people in the face of enemies who seek our destruction.

https://www.thefp.com/p/at-columbia-i-am-told-go-back-to?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

For a second, imagine that black students at Columbia were taunted: Go back to Africa. Or imagine that a gay student was surrounded by homophobic protesters and hit with a stick at Yale University. Or imagine if a campus imam told Muslim students that they ought to head home for Ramadan because campus public safety could not guarantee their security.

There would be relentless fury from our media and condemnation from our politicians.

Just remember the righteous—and rightful—outrage over the white supremacist “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, where neo-Nazis chanted “The Jews will not replace us.” 

This weekend at Columbia and Yale, student demonstrators did all of the above—only it was directed at Jews. They told Columbia students to “go back to Poland.” A Jewish woman at Yale was assaulted with a Palestinian flag. And an Orthodox rabbi at Columbia told students to go home for their safety.

Demonstrators on these campuses shouted more chic versions of “Jews will not replace us.” At Columbia they screamed: “Say it loud and say it clear, we don’t want no Zionists here.” At Yale they blasted bad rap with the following lyrics: 

Fuck Israel, Israel a bitch / Bitch we out here mobbin’ on some Palestine shit / Free Palestine bitch, Israel gon’ die bitch / Nigga it’s they land why you out here tryna rob it / Bullshit prophets, y’all just want the profit

These campus activists are not simply “pro-Palestine” protesters. They are people who are openly celebrating Hamas and physically intimidating identifiably Jewish students who came near. We are publishing the accounts of two of those students—Sahar Tartak and Jonathan Lederer—today.

Students—all of us—have a right to protest. We have a right to protest for dumb causes and horrible causes. At The Free Press, we will always defend that right. (See here and here, for example.)

It is not, however, a First Amendment right to physically attack another person. It is not a First Amendment right to detain another person as part of your protest. And while Americans are constitutionally protected when they say vile things, like wishing upon Jews a thousand October 7s, we are certainly free to criticize them and to condemn institutions dedicated to the pursuit of truth who stand by and do nothing meaningful to stop it.

The students who support terror have given in to madness. Refusing to condemn them is madness.

There are courageous students who see that madness clearly. Please read these essays by Jonathan Lederer and Sahar Tartak.

We’ll continue to follow this unfolding story. If you believe in the kind of journalism we do, become a paid subscriber today. — BW

At Columbia I Am Told: ‘Go Back to Poland’By Jonathan Lederer

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20570/canada-jews-social-compact

Given their small numbers and the omnipresence of antisemitism, the Jewish community is reliant on protection from society: the courts, the legal system, the police and public sentiment itself. That is the social compact under which the community is able to thrive — and give back.

But the social compact is now broken…. First, after Oct. 7, even before Israel invaded Gaza to root out Hamas, there were hate rallies….

It quickly became obvious that their targets were not Israelis, but Jews everywhere: in workplaces, unions, universities and on the street….

What is their goal? To intimidate the Jewish community, in the hope that it will capitulate and that its members will forfeit their identities as Jewish Canadians and perhaps even feel forced to leave.

It is not just Jews who are under attack. Our entire civilization is threatened. The chants a short time ago to “shut down Christmas”…. are deliberately targeting the functioning of society.

[I]f there was a ceasefire now, Hamas would regroup and strengthen, as it has after every previous ceasefire, and would still run Gaza. The Israeli hostages would be stuck in Gaza indefinitely and Hamas would, as it keeps promising, repeat the Oct. 7 attacks a second, third and fourth time until Israel is eradicated…. If bad behaviour is permitted, it gets worse.

It is not as if Hamas will somehow reform its ways: its 1988 charter has two main objectives, killing all Jews and the eradication of Israel.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/tucker-carlsons-apologia-for-christian-antisemitism/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=fourth

“In Isaac, Carlson has found a political activist who might support his anti-Israel views, Jewish Insider reported. The president of the Congress of Christian Leaders, Reverend Johnnie Moore, told the outlet that “those of us who track these things know that Munther Isaac has long been the high priest of antisemitic Christianity; sadly, he spreads his hate from the city of Jesus’ birth.” Moore added that, post–October 7, “Isaac seems to have graduated from being an anti-Zionist Lutheran preacher to a terror sympathizer.” “There’s really just no other way to describe him.”

“How does the government of Israel treat Christians?” Tucker Carlson asked Munther Isaac, the pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem, last week. For months since the October 7 attacks, Carlson has been at the forefront of a loose campaign of social-media influencers trying to convince Christians to abandon their support for Israel. He took things to a new level this week by turning to Isaac for answers, and claiming, “If you wake up in the morning and decide that your Christian faith requires you to support a foreign government blowing up churches and killing Christians, I think you’ve lost the thread.”

Isaac, though a Christian, has a long history of anti-Israel rhetoric that excuses terrorism. In 2021, he published an “Open Letter to U.S. Christians from a Palestinian Pastor,” in which he wrote, “We Palestinians are experiencing an occupation: one nation controlling another; the laws, policies, practices, and military of one state oppressing the people of another, controlling nearly every aspect of our lives.” Palestinians in Jerusalem, he continued, experienced ethnic cleansing at Israel’s hands and are subject to Israeli apartheid. In that article, Isaac told Christians to team up with groups such as IfNotNow and Jewish Voices for Peace — two of the groups organizing mass anti-Israel, and in many cases pro-Hamas, protests across the United States. Christians should embrace movements such as these, Isaac said, to “challenge the occupation.”

The pastor also said that Hamas’s October 7 attack was “an embodiment of the injustice that has befallen us as Palestinians since the Nakba until now. . . . Frankly, anyone following the events was not surprised by what happened yesterday. . . . One of the scenes that left an impression on my mind yesterday, and there are many scenes, is the scene of the Israeli youth who were celebrating a concert in the open air [the Nova music festival] just outside the borders of Gaza, and how they escaped. What a great contradiction, between the besieged poor on the one hand, and the wealthy people celebrating as if there was nothing behind the wall. Gaza exposes the hypocrisy of the world.” 

Isaac is on the board of Kairos Palestine, whose founding document says that “Christian love invites us to resist,” Jewish Insider reported. Kairos and Isaac describe Israel’s campaign in Gaza as “genocide.”

http://The wicked walk on every side, when the vilest men are exalted. -Psalm 22

https://pjmedia.com/david-solway-2/2024/04/06/antisemitism-and-the-devil-n4927961

 What historian Robert Wistrich has called the world’s longest hatred is also the world’s oldest sickness. Jew hatred is best construed as a universal epidemic, the emotional and intellectual equivalent of a decimating plague. The difference is that those who have contracted this septicemia of the mind do not die, except inwardly. It strikes me that the catalogue of such reprobates would fill the devil’s Rolodex. Unfortunately, the Israeli pharmaceutical firm Teva, one of the world’s largest suppliers of antibiotic medicines, has no psychic or endocrinal equivalent to treat the malady.

In “Anti-Semite and Jew,” Jean-Paul Sartre argues that antisemitism is not an idea but “first of all a passion” that is akin to hysteria. This passion connects schematically with “the idea of the Jew” to which individual Jews are made to conform irrespective of their personal attributes. Sartre’s thesis is that the Jew is made responsible for the inescapable distress of being human — an excuse for failure, a means of false absolution, and a convenient repository of all the unpleasant things we are unwilling to acknowledge about ourselves. Sartre concludes that “if the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.” Unfortunately, the malediction of Isaiah has been forgotten or dismissed: “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness…” Israel and its people, whom Isaiah called “a light unto the nations,” are now threatened by an encroaching darkness.

The cadastral address of the Empire of Antisemitism is located in the recorded past and the indefinite future, but it squats in the here and now so that it remains substantial, fully formed, repressive, and immutable, and refuses to be abolished. It merely creates tenement states — anti-Zionism, scholarly distaste, personal animosity, feckless alliances — renting time until the day history is annulled and the devil’s pleasure palace is erected in perpetuam. It is an evil that migrates from the meandering insincerity of our lives to the radical decline of moral sensitivity into the ninth circle of Hell where the social order turns feral and what Wistrich calls the “Judeophobic virus” once again infects the human race. We see this happening now in the wake of the Gaza embroilment as majorities side with a monstrous Islamic entity while reviling and abusing the only democratic nation in the Middle East constantly fighting for its always-threatened survival. We see it in the increasingly frequent and toxic anti-Israel and anti-Jewish incitement playing out on the streets, ministries, websites, and university campuses of our liberal world.