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ANTI-SEMITISM

A New Blood Libel Endlessly Repeated Declan Mansfield

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/israel/2024/04/a-new-blood-libel-endlessly-repeated/

One of the defining features, possibly the crucial, most existential characteristic, of intelligence, is the ability to distinguish one thing from another. This is true in every aspect of our lives. A car is not a horse. The sky is not a mountain. Taylor Swift is not Led Zeppelin – and Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza. That this needs to be said is not an indictment of our education system, or society, or contemporary politics, or social media, or not being breast fed as a child. It’s simply a statement of fact, because people who score between 25 per cent and 75 per cent on the bell curve of intelligence, the average Joe or Josephine Soap in other words, do not generally have an inclination to understand and distinguish why W. H. Auden’s poetry is superior to the comic verse of Pam Ayres, or why the value of something, as Oscar Wilde said, is different to its price, or why perennial worth is better than this month’s hyped fashion, or why there is a difference between being ‘merely clever’, as Wittgenstein said, and being intelligent.

Moreover, and this is an age-old problem articulated by philosophers as diverse as Plato and Heidegger – average minds are easily swayed by the cultural zeitgeist, by arguments from authority (whether from priests, politicians, ‘experts’ or celebrities), and especially by public opinion. They fall, regularly, for every contemporary trend. Look, for example, at the uncritical attitude and acceptance, from the majority, to the Covid-19 measures.

People with average intelligence are decent, kind, trustworthy, extraordinarily capable in ways that leave more intelligent people scratching their heads in admiration, not the least bit lacking in street smarts, and know implicitly what is good for themselves and their families, (especially when government policy negatively affects their wallets). What they are not, though, is particularly interested in abstract thought.

The impact of intelligence on politics and culture has become clear in recent months. People who six months ago couldn’t spell anti-Semitism are now parroting the most harebrained anti-Semitic delusions, without knowing much about Jews, Israel, Arabs, Islam or the modern history of the Middle East. In the words of Heidegger, people ‘fall’ into the ‘they’.

Antisemitism, though, is a hydra-headed beast, which, like a chameleon, changes its colours in different environments.

Columbia University Closes Campus as Hundreds of Anti-Israel Student Protesters Occupy Quad By James Lynch

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/columbia-university-closes-campus-as-hundreds-of-anti-israel-student-protesters-occupy-quad/?utm_source=recirc-

New York — Columbia University closed its doors to the public on Wednesday as hundreds of campus activists protested Israel’s ongoing military campaign against Hamas. 

Campus police and NYPD officers prohibited those without a Columbia ID card from entering campus as students erected dozens of tents on the school’s main campus lawn and hurled anti-Israel slogans. The protest was held as Columbia president Minouche Shafik testified before Congress.

“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” protesters could be heard chanting. Two Jewish Columbia students spoke  about their experience during the protest and the larger issue of antisemitism on campus.

“They took over the lawn, set up tents so people don’t have access to it, and they continued their anti-semitic, hateful chants,” Jewish student Jonathan Lederet told National Review.

“Intifada, intifada” and “death to [the] Zionist state” were among the chants hurled by the protesters, he recalled.

“They all chant ‘shame, shame on you.’ I say ‘I want there to be more aid, Hamas steals the aid.’ I say ‘Let’s chant for peace, let’s talk about co-existence, have a dialogue.’ They chant about martyrdom and violence and killing. So yeah, they all hate me, but I’m not going anywhere,” Lederet added.

Lederet held up an Israeli flag and wore his yarmulke to the march. Footage shared by independent left-wing reporter Talia Jane showed protesters chanting “shame on you” to the pro-Israel students who came to the event.

Another Jewish student from Barnard College, Columbia’s sister college, said she was “disgusted” by the protest and it happens “all the time.” The student, whose first name is Katie, called on Shafik to take further action against antisemitism and live up to Columbia’s values.

“If somebody says calling for the genocide of Jews makes me unsafe, they say ‘f*ck you.’ And then there’s no consequence, people have been told ‘f*ck the Jews,’ they’ve been spit on, someone threw coffee on a Jew today,” she said.

“A lot of Jewish students have either switched rooms, moved off campus, transferred,” Katie added. She was one of the Jewish students who moved off campus because of the antisemitic climate.

The Social Compact with Canadian Jews Is Broken and Needs to be Restored by Howard Levitt

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.

Tucker Carlson’s Apologia for Christian Antisemitism By Haley Strack

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.”

Antisemitism and the Devil David Solway

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.

Rutgers Police Escort Jewish Students Out of Town Hall after Pro-Palestinian Protesters Call for ‘Intifada’ By Zach Kessel

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/rutgers-police-escort-jewish-students-out-of-town-hall-after-pro-palestinian-protesters-call-for-intifada/

Rutgers University president Jonathan Holloway held a town hall with students Thursday night aimed at offering the school community the opportunity to ask him questions. Before he was able to answer a single one, anti-Israel protesters unleashed chaos.

As Holloway attempted to address the crowd, “pro-Palestinian students interrupted the town hall and prevented the scheduled programming from happening. They shouted and tried to intimidate other students,” Rutgers student Sarah Shiner, who was in attendance Thursday night, told National Review.

The chants — as captured on video and shared on X — included slogans like “globalize the intifada,” “long live the intifada,” “from the river to the sea,” and “we don’t want no two-state; we want ’48.”

“What shocked me the most,” Shiner said, “was the fact that the Jews attending the town hall were escorted out by police, not the individuals protesting and breaking the rules.”

Holloway also had a police escort out of the building mere minutes into the event, leaving only half the security dispatched to the town hall there to protect the Jewish students who had come to ask their university’s president how he plans to handle antisemitism on their campus.

Shiner told NR that the environment on Rutgers’s campus is “extremely hostile” to Jewish students. The university’s student body recently voted in favor of two referenda calling on Rutgers to divest its endowment and academic affiliations from Israel. As the campaign in favor of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement vote went on, anti-Israel students posted flyers featuring a photo of a Jewish student next to the words “Free Palestine” across campus.

Neither Holloway nor any other Rutgers administrator has addressed the targeted harassment, though Holloway did issue a statement after the BDS referenda saying he believes “in engagement, not isolation,” and opposes any divestment plan.

Interfaith or Bad Faith? Dialogue with Jews Rachael Kohn

“..That would explain why there is currently no basis for Jewish–Muslim relations in Australia, for without acknowledging that Israel is legitimate, sovereign and Jewish, and that its right to exist will be defended against any threat to its existence and its people, then interfaith dialogue is nothing more than a pious lie.”

The resignation of the current and past presidents of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim Association (JCMA), both rabbis, and the suspension of participation by the Jewish Community Council of Victoria, speaks volumes about the nature of Muslim–Jewish relations in Australia. The stated reason given was Muslim leaders’ “failure to recognise the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas”.

Speaking at a pro-Palestinian rally in Broadmeadows, Victoria, the President of the Islamic Council of Victoria, Adel Salman, defended as “legitimate acts of resistance” the October 7 attacks in which 1200 Israeli men, women and children were tortured, slaughtered and raped and more than 253 civilians at a music festival were taken hostage. Clearly, nothing has changed in the six months since the Australian Muslim Times jubilantly reported news of the attack, which was followed soon after by footage of rallies in Lakemba where Muslim sheiks were in celebration mode. Sheik Dadoun (see the video below) punched the sky with his fists as he cheered, calling it “a day of courage, it’s a day of happiness, it’s a day of pride, it’s a day of victory. This is the day we’ve been waiting for.” The failure of the Muslim leadership to denounce and remove preachers who had a reputation for calling on Muslims to kill Jews, such as Wassam Hadad (also known as Abu Ousayd) of the Madina Dawah Centre in Blacktown, Western Sydney, has underlined how artificial the Jewish–Muslim interfaith relationship has been.

In striking contrast, leaders of the Christian community including Rev Sandy Grant from St Andrew’s Cathedral, Michelle Pearse, Director of the Australian Christian Lobby, and Anglican Senior Minister Mark Leach led a rally in Sydney’s Domain on Sunday, February 18, under the banner “Never Again Is Now” (NAIN), attracting an estimated 10,000 people over two and a half hours. They responded to the 738 per cent surge in anti-Semitic incidents since the Hamas attack on Israel, including the recent “doxing” of over 600 Jewish Australians—writers, professionals, business people and academics—by anti-Israel activists.

The speakers at NAIN started with the Christian former Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who addressed the crowd saying, “Instead of support, we have seen those living under the freedom of democracy in this country calling for the extinction of the State of Israel from the river to the sea.” He said, “people were ignorant of the real meaning of the words” and the “violent and anti-Semitic nature of those statements”. Former Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson also spoke at the event, along with senators Jacquie Lambie and Hollie Hughes, as well as indigenous affairs activist and devout Catholic Warren Mundine.

Anatomy of an antisemite By Ruthie Blum

https://www.jns.org/anatomy-of-an-antisemite/

Francesca Albanese is at it again, cloaking her Jew-hatred in legalese and justifying it through denial. Yes, if there’s one thing that offends the United Nations special rapporteur on the human rights situation in the so-called “occupied Palestinian territories,” it’s being exposed as an antisemite.

Not that it’s ever prevented the Italian international lawyer, who was appointed in 2022 to her three-year position, from going above and beyond the call of duty in bashing Israel at every opportunity. But her latest one-two-punch, in the form of a “report” on the war in Gaza, is a new low.

The document, titled “Anatomy of a Genocide,” is laden with footnotes to support its slanted hypotheses and wrong conclusions. It’s a practice that’s par for the course, so to speak, in the world of academia from which Albanese hails.

The problem isn’t with the headline of the 25-page screed. No, the name would be perfectly apt for a dissection of the religious-political ideology behind the Hamas-perpetrated massacre on the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, which coincided with Shabbat.

But in the Orwellian universe of the United Nations, where “Jewish lobby” conspiracy theorists like Albanese are embraced, right is wrong and good is evil. Hence, while the description of “genocide” in the report actually applies to the aims and behavior of Hamas, the “pay-for-slay” Palestinian Authority and all radical Islamists bent on the annihilation of the Jewish state, it is presented as proof of Israeli culpability—before and after Oct. 7.

Take, for instance, the passage stating that genocide is codified as “any of the [specified] acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”

The acts in question are specified as: “killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

Academia Versus Civilization The antisemitism of campus leftism may be incidental. The barbarism is the point. Tal Fortgang / Jonathan Deluty

https://quillette.com/2024/03/25/antisemitism-campus-harvard-leftism-tal-fortgang-jonathan-deluty/

Not one week after the October 7 massacres, as America’s most prestigious institutions revealed themselves to be thoroughly embedded with pro-Hamas revolutionaries, we wrote: “Campus administrators should consider making significant changes before the American people realize what they are condoning.” Unfortunately, those administrators didn’t get the message.

On December 5, in what must surely rank among the most shameful moments in the history of academia, the presidents of MIT, Harvard, and Penn testified before a Congressional committee at a hearing about the surge of antisemitism on their campuses and refused to say that calls for the genocide of Jews would violate institutional policies. They opted instead for consultant-style newspeak, a whiplash-inducing rediscovery of the value of free expression, and contemptuous smirks. Their tone and coordination indicated that they stood not just for themselves but for the academy—a rarefied, insular, self-important world of its own—and they jolted Americans from their state of benign neglect towards our universities. In doing so, they revealed the acute need for a wholesale renovation of American universities to restore them as institutions that serve a socially useful function. We have subsidized and excused universities’ descent into factories of anti-social people and ideas. A band-aid will not suffice.

Many have responded to this moral collapse by demanding scalps. As of this writing, two of the three presidents who testified have resigned. Firings and resignations of leaders (and expulsions of students who vandalize property or occupy buildings) are necessary proximate goals, but cannot be the ultimate goal of the backlash. Rather, we must address the deeper problem of institutional capture by an ideology hostile to its host nation. What do we do when our finest schools have been overrun by students eager to cheer genocidal antisemitism, faculty and administrators who broadly agree, and a culture that could produce credentialed people so smugly disdainful of the West? 

Precisely diagnosing the disease is the first step towards offering effective prescriptions. The renovation of the American academy must be tailored to its problems, both quantitatively and qualitatively. 

One threshold observation is that a focus on the American university is warranted, because what happens on campus shapes our nation’s character and ethical instincts in sustained ways.

Harvard’s Federal Funds at Risk over Anti-Semitism Investigation By Eric Lendrum

https://amgreatness.com/2024/03/26/harvards-federal-funds-at-risk-over-anti-semitism-investigation/

Harvard University could lose over $500 million in federal funding after it has been accused of obstructing a congressional probe into anti-Semitism on campus.

According to the Washington Free Beacon, the threat was made by Congresswoman Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), chairwoman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, which is leading the investigation into allegations of systemic anti-Semitism at Harvard and other elite universities in the United States. In the aftermath of the October 7th attacks on Israel, there have been numerous riots, protests, and other instances of anti-Semitic rhetoric, committed overwhelmingly by college-aged agitators and sometimes taking place on campus. Jewish students have been increasingly harassed by anti-Israel activists in the months since the war began.

Harvard received $625 million in federal funds alone in the year 2021, making up 67% of its total sponsored revenue. The Ivy League school could be at risk of losing all of this money after it has stonewalled the committee’s efforts to further investigate the nature of such anti-Semitism on campus, as well as possible lenience on the administration’s part towards the anti-Israel forces.

“The ultimate thing is obviously, trying to hold back some of their money if they’re just not going to make the students safe,” said Foxx in an interview. “That’s always an option for us.”

In February, the committee issued a subpoena for Harvard regarding documents that detailed the university’s handling of anti-Semitism. The university has been slow in handing over documents, including sending numerous documents that were heavily redacted.

“It’s hard to know whether it’s arrogance, ineptness, or indifference that is guiding Harvard,” Foxx continued. “They know the investigation is not going away.”