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ANTI-SEMITISM

Biden can’t be trusted to take on anti-Semitism The same identitarian worldview that is driving campus anti-Semitism is rife within Joe Biden’s White House. Heather MacDonald

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/05/15/biden-cant-be-trusted-to-take-on-anti-semitism/

On 7 May, Joe Biden condemned the ‘anti-Semitic posters’, the ‘slogans calling for the annihilation of Israel’ and the ‘rationalising’ of 7 October on colleges across the US. Such practices ‘must stop’, he said in a speech marking the annual Days of Remembrance ceremony at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Yet where does the US president think that campus anti-Semitism comes from?

Pro-Hamas hysteria is the foreseeable outcome of a belief system dominant not only in academia, but also in Biden’s own administration – a belief system in which the West is damned as ‘systemically racist’, and the world divided between ‘marginalised groups’ and the white, male, heterosexual power structure that oppresses them. Campus anti-Semitism will not stop until the university is transformed and the Democratic Party rejects identity politics.

The stunningly incoherent alliances that have sprung up since the 7 October terror attacks on Israel can only be understood in the context of academic theory. Queers and radical feminists for Palestine would seem to be logical impossibilities but for the dominance of such concepts as anti-whiteness and intersectionality. A sampling of Columbia University’s anti-whiteness offerings includes an ‘uprooting whiteness’ group, ‘deconstructing whiteness’ workshops and an ‘unlearning whiteness’ research award from the dean. Other colleges no doubt provide a similar menu.

According to the university worldview, whites and the West (the two categories are interchangeable) are responsible for everything wrong with the world, from inequality to poverty. ‘Persons of colour’ are the antidote. Heterosexuality and maleness are subcategories of whiteness, against which the intersectional coalition of queers, radical feminists and members of the Global South must mobilise. Israel today is hated as the embodiment of Western civilisation. Its modernity and economic success in a region where both are largely absent mark it out as hegemonic and illegitimate.

Of course, the ‘enemy of my enemy’ logic only works in one direction. Queers may be for Palestine, but despite their common nemesis, it is unlikely that Palestine is for queers.

What is being called anti-Semitism on college campuses today has little to do with traditional anti-Semitism. Had the university not taken its anti-white, anti-Western turn in the 1980s, students who know nothing of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion would not be baying for ‘intifada’. The exception comes from Muslim and black students, whose anti-Semitism has longer and more conventional roots.

The Eurovision hurricane The tantrums over Eden Golan epitomised the childishness of performative protest Melanie Phillips

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/account

This is an expanded version of my column in The Times of London (£) today.

When the Irish Eurovision contestant, Bambie Thug, failed to bully Israel’s competitor out of the contest being staged in the Swedish town of Malmö, Thug did what today’s culture warriors feel is an appropriate reaction when they don’t get their way. The singer had a meltdown and burst into tears.

Thug, a “non-binary” individual who performed a pagan satanic routine as a kind of goblinesque Goth, had demanded that Israel’s entrant, Eden Golan, be barred from the contest because… well, because of course all Israelis everywhere should be shunned and hounded and cancelled by the entire human race because of the war in Gaza.

Asked how it had felt when Golan qualified for the contest’s final, the goblin replied, choking back the tears, “I cried with my team”.

Of course! Because the protest was all about them, to demonstrate their virtue as victims of… well, Israel’s existence, not to put too fine a point on it; and to demonstrate the frankly intolerable human cost to themselves of their principled stand of resistance. “The world has spoken!” cried Thug triumphantly, gulping back principled sobs.

Except the world hadn’t quite said what Thug —  speaking from within the alternative universe where Israel’s fight for its life against a genocidal enemy is itself denounced as an act of genocide — thought the world had said.

Because in the real world people had seen something rather different. They saw a vast mob on the streets of Malmö supporting the “Palestinian resistance” —  ie terrorism against Israeli Jews — and besieging a young Israeli singer to force her out of the contest.

A Palestinian Visits Auschwitz Tells Jews: you belong here. Hugh Fitzgerald

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,’” 

Hey Google, Antisemitism Is A Feature, Not A Bug, Of The Left

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.

Why Gaza and not the Uighurs? The long march through the institutions has reached a familiar target: the Jews Charles Lipson

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.

Zadie Smith has failed the Palestine purity test The novelist has been monstered by the anti-Israel mob for daring to recognise the humanity of Jews. Tim Black

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.

The DEI Jihad How campus Jew-hate and DEI evangelism are cut from the same cloth. by Larry Sand

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-dei-jihad/

It’s no secret that the nation’s college campuses are ground zero for the current outpouring of Jew hatred. At Columbia, a mob recently taunted Jewish students, telling them to “go back to Europe” and “you have no culture.” At Yale, a Jewish student was stabbed in the eye with a flagpole.

As Ben Shapiro explains, this enmity has been fostered by left-wing college administrations for two generations, which believein “the intersectional hierarchy of victimhood, in which Muslims outrank Jews.”

Shapiro is, of course, correct. U.S. universities are invariably run by leftists who unapologetically espouse beliefs that are radical and revolting – in several senses of the word.

An article from Inside Higher Ed in 2017 cited a study showing that just over 9% of faculty surveyed identified as “conservative.” A more recent piece from the American Institute for Economic Research points out that this trend has becomeeven more one-sided over the past few years, with the number of faculty who identify as “far left” more than doubling. Non-leftist voices have been “squeezed out of the academy due to a combination of retirements and an emerging bias in faculty hiring that appears to privilege progressive political beliefs.”

In addition to colleges, anti-Semitism is omnipresent at the K-12 level. In government-run schools, Jews are often portrayed as privileged whites and oppressors, with Israel branded as an example of “settler colonialism” and the oppression of “indigenous people.”

Syre Elementary School, a highly-ranked public school in Shoreline, WA, near Seattle, teaches children as young as sevenyears old to chant “Free Palestine” and “From the River to the Sea” and instructs them to hold mock anti-Israel protests.

In November, hundreds of students rampaged through the hallsof a New York City high school for nearly two hours after they discovered a teacher had attended a pro-Israel rally, forcing the terrified educator to hide in a locked office as the mob tried to push its way into her classroom.

The Oakland Unified School District faces a federal investigation after 30 Jewish families removed their kids from school due to rampant anti-Semitism.

Jew-hatred and anti-Israelism: Why it’s on the rise Moshe Dann

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-799568

As Jews are fighting a war of self-defense against Hamas, the PLO, and other terrorist organizations, Israel is accused of genocide, war crimes, and perpetrating a Holocaust.

Eighty-five years ago, World War II began; the Holocaust had begun earlier, and the Nazi plan of the Final Solution was implemented in 1942.

Eighty-five years ago, the world turned its back on the Jewish people. Many countries in Europe welcomed the Nazis, and many locals supported the Nazis. Some countries declared “neutrality.”

The British implemented the White Paper of 1939, which prevented Jews who sought refuge in Palestine from immigrating. The US and Canada refused to allow most Jewish refugees to seek safety in their territory. The leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Amin al Husseini, moved to Berlin to support the Nazis.

Today, those who support the Iranian proxies such as Hamas, PIJ, and Hezbollah, and support anti-Israel demonstrations, are calling for another Holocaust, destroying the State of Israel, and the two-state solution (2SS) – a Palestinian state led by terrorist organizations. The international community, especially the UN and the EU, have joined these efforts. This is a world war against the Jewish people and Israel, supported by most Muslim countries and Muslim authorities. 

Something nightmarish: Israel accused of perpetrating a Holocaust

Something nightmarish is happening. As Jews are fighting a war of self-defense against Hamas, the PLO, and other terrorist organizations, Israel is accused of genocide, war crimes, and perpetrating a Holocaust against the Arabs in Gaza. Israel is accused of deliberately killing innocent civilians, and is compared to Nazis. The accusers are joined by non-Muslims in demonstrations against Israel, calling US President Joe Biden “Genocide Joe” for sending weapons to Israel. Many countries, organizations, and the media call for a “ceasefire” in the war against Hamas, and the 2SS which justifies their atrocities and will ensure their claims of victory.

Eighty-five years ago, World War II was launched against the Nazis; today, the world sees Israel as the enemy. 

Ironically, as the world briefly turns its attention to the greatest human tragedy in modern history on Holocaust Remembrance Day, there is growing Jew-hatred and condemnations of Israel around the globe. Why?

American Jewry’s poor prognosis Regardless of one’s permanent residence, the very idea of an inhospitable “goldene medina” is unsettling, to put it mildly. Ruthie Blum

https://www.jns.org/american-jewrys-poor-prognosis/

The steep rise in antisemitism in the United States, which has soared to new heights since the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel, has reawakened the debate about whether the so-called “Golden Age” of American Jewry has run its historical course. It’s a reasonable question.

Rather than arouse horror over the sadistic crimes that Hamas committed against innocent men, women and children on that Black Sabbath, the mass murder galvanized Jew-haters across America. Almost spontaneously, protests against the Jewish state erupted before southern Israel was even cleared of the thousands of terrorists who’d infiltrated the Gaza border.

This wasn’t due to a lack of information about the worst atrocities against Jews since the Holocaust. On the contrary, the Hamas perpetrators not only filmed themselves raping, burning, beheading, mutilating and kidnapping men, women and children; they proudly posted their deeds all over social media.

The response on the part of Muslim extremists and their progressive fellow travelers has been to alternate between denial and justification. On the one hand, they reject Hamas’s brutality. On the other, they hail it as heroic.

Nor did they bother waiting for the Israel Defense Forces ground invasion nearly three weeks later to accuse the “apartheid state” of Palestinian genocide. No, they shouted their lies in megaphones about the “occupation” of Gaza just as promptly and forcefully as they tore down posters of hostages. Even the picture of 9-month-old Kfir Bibas and his 4-year-old brother, Ariel, in the arms of their terrified mother, Shiri, wasn’t spared being ripped and trampled on.

The ivory tower jihad In the appalling scenes on campus, chickens are now coming home to roost Melanie Phillips

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/

The shocking scenes on campus over the past few days are far more significant than mere student demonstrations getting out of hand.

With “Gaza solidarity encampments” having sprung up on more than 100 US campuses (and with British campuses now following suit) Islamists and the hard left have turned western universities into a theatre of war against Israel, the Jewish people and America.

At UCLA, a Jewish girl was knocked unconscious by the mob. On the Berkeley campus, the founder of Students Supporting Israel was repeatedly punched in the head, with one thug shouting “Go back to Europe, coloniser.”

At the Columbia University encampment, the mob called for “10,000 October 7ths” and screamed “Go back to Poland” and “Burn Tel Aviv to the ground”. One student who said “Zionists don’t deserve to live” was barred from campus but subsequently spotted in the mob that broke into and barricaded the university’s Hamilton Hall. 

Just as on October 7 Hamas stormtroopers burst through the defences of an Israel that was looking the other way, so their supporters have burst through inadequate western defences to turn the Palestinian cause into a beachhead in their war to bring down a west that refuses to acknowledge the threat it faces.

Apart from a few examples, such as when the New York police tore down a Palestinian flag to restore the Stars and Stripes above City College and disbanded an encampment at Fordham University, with the LA police belatedly doing the same at UCLA, America has been signalling surrender to the mob.

The police should have been called in immediately to evict these unlawful encampments. Students perpetrating intimidation, incitement or violence should have been immediately expelled.

Instead, both Brown and Northwestern universities sought to appease the mobs by agreeing to consider their demands for divestment from Israel.