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ANTI-SEMITISM

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Michael Oren: A War Against the Jews Hatred of Israel cannot be distinguished from hatred of the Jewish people. Incontestably now, anti-Zionism is antisemitism. By Michael Oren

By on October 27th, 2023

https://www.thefp.com/p/this-isnt-a-war-against-israel?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews. When the Jew will hide behind stones and trees, the stones and trees will say, ‘O Muslims, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’ ” —The Hamas Charter

“The conventional war of conquest was to be waged parallel to, and was also to camouflage, the ideological war against the Jews.” —Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews 1933–1945

It wasn’t the rallies with “Keep the World Clean” posters and chants of “gas the Jews.” Nor was it the glorification of Hamas paragliders by the Chicago branch of Black Lives Matter or, in New York and London, the tearing down of posters with the faces of Israeli children held hostage by Hamas. Not even the off-the-charts uptick in antisemitic incidents in Germany (240 percent), the United States (nearly 400 percent), and London (1,353 percent) convinced me.

It was, rather, one of those realizations that so many generations of Jews before me have experienced. A realization that they, like me, surely tried to push out of their minds until the reality became unmistakeable. 

This war is not simply between Hamas terrorists and Israelis. It is a war against the Jews. 

The insight began with the international media’s coverage of the conflict. Again, it wasn’t the press’s insistence on calling mass murderers “militants” or citing Hamas and its “Health Ministry” as a reliable source. For close to fifty years—as a student activist, a diplomat, a soldier, a government and military spokesman, and above all, as a historian—I’ve grappled with the media’s bias against Israel. I’ve long known that the terrorists are “militants” solely because their victims are Jews, and only in a conflict with Israel are terrorists considered credible. 

Instead, it was the media’s predictable switch from an Israel-empathetic to an Israel-demonizing narrative as the image of Palestinian suffering supplanted that of Israelis beheaded, dismembered, and burnt. It was the gnawing awareness that dead Jews buy us only so much sympathy. 

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Blood Libel against Jews: Back with a Vengeance by Alan M. Dershowitz

By on October 25th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20096/blood-libel-israel-gaza-hospital

This conflict is not about occupation or settlements. The chants of anti-Israel protesters, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” means that the entire area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea — all of Israel — must be free of Jews.

The truth does not matter to bigots.

A document from the end of the 15th century features an illustration of a bearded Jew extracting the blood of a Christian child. The adjoining text explains that Jewish law requires that Passover matzoh be baked with the blood of Christian children.

Such documents were widely circulated through Europe during the Easter season and led to frequent pogroms — murder, rape, and destruction — against Jewish children, women and men in revenge for allegedly killing Christian children for their blood to make matzoh.

There was never any actual evidence of such cannibalism. In fact, Jewish law explicitly prohibits the consumption of any blood or its use in cooking.

The total lack of evidence, however, did not matter to those who were taught and believed what has come to be known as the “blood libel.” Despite all the evidence to the contrary, many believed that this falsehood was “true.”

This blood libel persisted throughout Europe into the early 20th century. Jews were put on trial and executed for supposedly killing Christian children for their blood.

Other libels against Jews formed the basis for classic antisemitism, culminating in the Nazi lies that dehumanized Jews to an extent that made the Holocaust possible. Following the murder of 6 million innocent Jews, including babies, the world said, “Never again” and antisemitism abated in many parts of the world.

Now it is back with a vengeance, accompanied by blood libels and other systematic lies about the Jewish people and their nation state, Israel.

It is against this sordid historical background that the current blood libel — that Israel targeted a Gaza hospital deliberately causing the death of 500 Muslim children, women and men — can best be understood and assessed.

There is absolutely no evidence that Israel struck the hospital, whether deliberately or accidentally. Evidence from videos, photographs and telephone intercepts have proved to intelligence agencies worldwide that a barrage of rockets was launched toward Israel from near the hospital, almost certainly by Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and that one of the rockets malfunctioned mid-flight, landing not directly on the hospital but in its outdoor parking lot, and that the explosion killed far fewer than 500 people.

The claim of 500 people killed came, within minutes of the PIJ rocket strike, from the “Gaza Ministry of Health” – in other words from Hamas. They lie. No facts or numbers are ever verifiable. Moreover, Hamas claims that no rocket parts survived – another self-serving lie. Yet, their blood libel is widely believed by Israel’s enemies – perhaps because they want to believe it. It is too good a story to be ruined by the facts. As the journalist Becket Adams wrote in National Review:

“The Media Will Never Forgive Israel for Not Bombing That Hospital…. Reporters and pundits mishandled the Gaza hospital story because they wanted so badly for it to be true.”

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote:

“As the Israeli columnist Nahum Barnea pointed out to me, Palestinian Islamic Jihad achieved more this week with an apparently misfired rocket ‘than it achieved in all of its successful missile launches.'”

The “Muslim street” has been indoctrinated by its leaders to believe anything negative about Jews or Israel. And the Arab media generally reports Hamas lies and exaggerations — such as the claim that 500 civilians were killed at the hospital — as unvarnished truth.

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The aftermath of Hamas’s attack on Israel has exposed the West’s moral collapse The protests we are seeing have nothing to do with Israel and everything to do with problems here at home Douglas Murray

By on October 25th, 2023

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/10/20/israel-palestine-hamas-london-protests-anti-semitism/

There is a good rule about anti-Semitism. One reason it isn’t better known is because its best expression comes at the mid-point of the 20th century’s towering work of historical fiction: Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman.

That novel, which takes the reader from the Battle of Stalingrad to the Nazi death camps, traverses the entire dark heart of the 20th century. Yet in the very middle of its 900 pages, the great Russian writer examines the question of anti-Semitism. He says almost everything.

Anti-Semitism is something which, as Grossman writes, can be met “in the marketplace and in the Academy, in the soul of an old man and in the games children play in the yard”. He describes it as always a means rather than an end, “a measure of the contradictions yet to be resolved”.

And here is the key point. “It is a mirror for the failings of individuals, social structures and state systems. Tell me what you accuse the Jews of, I’ll tell you what you are guilty of.”

I can’t tell you how many times in my life I have seen this. And never more than in the past fortnight.

Look at the protests against Israel that have erupted across Europe since the Hamas massacres two weeks ago today. There were no mass rallies in solidarity with the Jews who had been gunned down at a music festival, shot in the head at a bus stop, or decapitated in front of their parents.

Weirdly enough across Britain, Europe and the wider West, almost nobody had time for any such public expressions of sympathy. We did at the highest political levels. But on the streets? No.

The Jewish people of this country were effectively left alone, to try to mourn and suffer however they could. But wider sympathy of the kind we saw during the Black Lives Matter protests? Nope. Nowhere to be seen.

I happen to have been travelling across America and Europe this week, and everywhere I have been I have seen the same thing.

Mass pro-Palestinian protests in New York’s Times Square. Major protests in every European capital. In Lisbon, people waving Palestinian flags. In Norway, a protest of people showing their support for the Palestinians and their opposition to Israel.

In each place, I think the same thing. What are you doing? What has any of this got to do with you? Why are you silent about so much in the world and produce such noise on this?

There is an explanation for what, at the deepest level, is going on.

The Jews are – as Grossman says – attacked by anti-Semites whatever they do. If they are poor, they are criticised for being poor. If they are rich, they are suspected for being rich. If they are ultra-religious, they are accused of being outsiders. If they are secular, they are accused of being seditious.

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Threats to ‘Zionist Journalists’ and Their ‘Kids in School’ From UC Davis professor Jemma Decristo, still on the faculty.Lloyd Billingsley

By on October 25th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/threats-to-zionist-journalists-and-their-kids-in-school/

“One group of ppl we have easy access to in the US is all these zionist journalists who spread propaganda & misiniformation. They have houses w addresses, kids in school. They can fear their bosses, but they should fear us more.”

That was an October 10 post on X by Jemma Decristo, an assistant professor of “American studies” at the University of California at Davis. The “trans” professor added emojis of a knife, axe and drops of blood. The story went viral, drawing widespread condemnation, and UCD bosses played defense. They took down Decristo’s bio on the UCD faculty page and as the Davis Enterprise reported, emails to the professor’s UCD address bounced back.

A statement from UCD chancellor Gary S. May, obtained by Newsweek, called the post “revolting in every way” and “antithetical to the values of our university.” UC Davis, the chancellor claimed, “rejects all forms of violence and discrimination, as they are. We strive to foster a climate of equity and justice built on mutual understanding and respect for all members of the community.” As Newsweek noted, the chancellor did not name the faculty member who posted the threats to “Zionist journalists” and their families.

According to the Enterprise, UC Davis hired Decristo in 2017. A May 23, 2023 report in the Nation cites Decristo as an “organizer” in a protest over Banko Brown, a homeless person shot by a security guard, without noting the organizer’s UC Davis connection. Decristo complained that San Francisco mayor London Breed, “continues to give millions and millions more to the SFPD, and equally violent proto-police security forces.”

The call for violence against Jewish journalists and their families caught the attention of Ken Kurson of the California Globe. “I happen to be a Zionist journalist and I have an address and kids in school,” he wrote to chancellor May and USD provost Mary Croughan. “Should I be afraid?”

The current chair of the University of California Board of Regents, Kurson noted, is Rich Lieb, who would like to see more support at UC schools for Jewish students. “Presumably, threatening to kill the families of those who support the world’s only Jewish State is not what Leib had in mind.” Kurson also called out UCD donors to “demand accountability from a university that funds a professor who threatens murder and celebrates anti-American violence.”

That professor, a biological male, was “formerly known as Jeramy Decristo.”

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Time for Billionaire Donors to Face Reality By Robert Weissberg

By on October 25th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/10/time_for_billionaire_donors_to_face_reality.html

An important repercussion of the recent campus anti-Israel/pro-Hamas rallies is that major university donors, many of whom are Jewish, say that they are re-thinking their continued support of their alma mater.

The billionaire Ronald Lauder has threatened to end his donations to the University of Pennsylvania. Fellow Penn alum, Marc Rowan, who has donated some $50 million recently asked fellow mega donors “to close their checkbooks.”  TV producer Dick Wolf, another Penn alum, joined this chorus while the Huntsman family has already shut its checkbook. Four thousand donors just signed a letter denouncing Penn’s support of anti-Semitism. Nor are these Penn donors unusual as billionaires at other schools have finally awoken from their slumber.

Can these aroused financial titans root out anti-Semitism? No doubt, the closed checkbooks will alarm top administrators who will promise “steps will be taken,” but, sadly, matters will not change, rhetoric aside.

No university will de-fund anti-Israel organizations since this generosity for student groups is a long-standing policy and administrators cannot anticipate what campus groups will do next.

Among the 30 Harvard groups denouncing Israel (listed here) were the Harvard Divinity School Muslim Association, The Harvard Jews for Liberation and, oddly, the Design Students Society, among others that, technically, have nothing to do with anti-Semitism. Moreover, rabid anti-Semites can seize control over any campus groups just by showing up and then voting for a toxic statement in the group’s name regardless of the membership.

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The Left’s Anti-Semitism Crisis Is the Right’s Opportunity France’s Marine Le Pen and Germany’s AfD are embracing Israel while socialists equivocate.By Joseph C. Sternberg

By on October 20th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-european-lefts-anti-semitism-crisis-is-the-rights-opportunity-ee81b8b1?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

Wars have a way of scrambling politics near and far, and so it may become with the war Hamas has launched against Israel. One topsy-turvy outcome in Europe is that ostensibly anti-Semitic parties on the further reaches of the political right have embraced Israel—likely because they’ve realized that doing so emphasizes the left’s embarrassing anti-Semitic hypocrisies.

In France, representatives of the two main right-wing political movements—those led by Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour—participated in a pro-Israel rally days after the attack. Ms. Le Pen in the National Assembly last week expressed solidarity with Israel, describing Hamas’s attack as a “pogrom,” and reminding lawmakers of the need to “protect French Jews.”

That’s striking rhetoric from Ms. Le Pen’s party, now known as the National Rally, which has an awful record on anti-Semitism. The party’s founder and her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, is notorious for Holocaust denial, and Ms. Le Pen eventually expelled him from the party because of it. She herself has waded into debates about France’s culpability for the deportation of its Jews under Nazi occupation and whether kosher animal slaughter should be legal.

In Germany, a parliamentary resolution in support of Israel garnered support from the Alternative for Germany, or AfD. This movement of the populist right, which opinion polls suggest is now the second most popular party after the opposition conservative Christian Democrats, periodically stokes arguments over how Germany interprets the history of the Holocaust. But two AfD members of Parliament visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Israel in May.

This apparent unity in support of Israel on the further reaches of the right contrasts with the disarray on the left. While Ms. Le Pen was speaking up for Israel, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the French version of Bernie Sanders who founded the France Unbowed party, argued Israel and Hamas both were responsible for the violence and then picked a fight with a major Jewish organization.

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Your Tax Dollars At Work: Financing Virulent Antisemitism On Campus

By on October 17th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/10/17/your-tax-dollars-at-work-financing-virulent-antisemitism-on-campus/

Shortly after Hamas began its bloodthirsty campaign against Israel, student groups started issuing statements praising the terrorists and blaming Israel. If you were appalled, you’re not alone. But you’re also helping to pay for it.

At Harvard, 31 student groups made news when they announced that they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” That prompted hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman to call for getting those students’ names so that “none of us inadvertently hire(s) any of their members.” At least a dozen businessmen endorsed Ackman’s call, according to the New York Post.

This was hardly an isolated incident. A few examples of what’s transpired on campuses over the past week.

Yalies for Palestine issued a statement saying “we hold the Israeli Zionist regime responsible for the unfolding violence and denounce the Israeli occupation, apartheid system, and military rule.”
A student group at the University of Virginia said “we stand in solidarity with Palestinian resistance fighters.”
The president of the New York University Student Bar Association expressed her “unwavering and absolute solidarity with Palestinians in their resistance against oppression,” and said that “Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life.”
Rice University students honored the Hamas “martyrs.”
At the University of Wisconsin, pro-Palestinian students chanted “glory to the murders.” (School officials have been silent about the protest.)
Columbia University students issued a statement attacking “Israel’s apartheid and colonial system.” (An Israeli student was later attacked outside Columbia’s main library.)
At SUNY Binghamton, cars reportedly drove around campus with passengers chanting “death to Zionists.”
Other examples of attacks against Jews on college campuses can be found here.

Sen. Marco Rubio had it right when he said: “Across America, college students on federal taxpayer-subsidized student (loans) celebrated the murder of Jews.”

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Don’t Hire My Anti-Semitic Law Students Would your clients want an attorney who condones hatred and monstrous crimes? By Steven Davidoff Solomon

By on October 16th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/dont-hire-my-anti-semitic-law-students-protests-colleges-universities-jews-palestine-6ad86ad5?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

I teach corporate law at the University of California, Berkeley, and I’m an adviser to the Jewish law students association. My students are largely engaged and well-prepared, and I regularly recommend them to legal employers.

But if you don’t want to hire people who advocate hate and practice discrimination, don’t hire some of my students. Anti-Semitic conduct is nothing new on university campuses, including here at Berkeley.

Last year, Berkeley’s Law Students for Justice in Palestine asked other student groups to adopt a bylaw that banned supporters of Israel from speaking at events. It excluded any speaker who “expressed and continued to hold views or host/sponsor/promote events in support of Zionism, the apartheid state of Israel, and the occupation of Palestine.” Nine student groups adopted the bylaw. Signers included the Middle Eastern and North African Law Students Association, the Queer Caucus and the Women of Berkeley Law.

The bylaw caused an uproar. It was rightly criticized for creating “Jew-free” zones. Our dean—a diehard liberal—admirably condemned it but said free-speech principles tied his hands. The campus groups had the legal right to pick or exclude speakers based on their views. The bylaw remains, and 11 other groups subsequently adopted it.

You don’t need an advanced degree to see why this bylaw is wrong. For millennia, Jews have prayed, “next year in Jerusalem,” capturing how central the idea of a homeland is to Jewish identity. By excluding Jews from their homeland—after Jews have already endured thousands of years of persecution—these organizations are engaging in anti-Semitism and dehumanizing Jews. They didn’t include Jewish law students in the conversation when circulating the bylaw. They also singled out Jews for wanting what we all should have—a homeland and haven from persecution.

The student conduct at Berkeley is part of the broader attitude against Jews on university campuses that made last week’s massacre possible. It is shameful and has been tolerated for too long.

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Jews Fear Rising Threats: ‘We’ve Seen This Film’ President Biden has called the Hamas attack the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust

By on October 15th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/jews-fear-rising-threats-weve-seen-this-film-43670e20?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=1

The Hamas attack that killed at least 1,300 people in Israel has left Jewish communities around the world on edge, as Jews confront rising vitriol, threats and violence.

The U.K. has seen a rising tide of antisemitic threats since the attacks last Saturday, and children from several Jewish schools in London were told to stay home Friday. Australian officials apologized to the Jewish community after chants of “Gas the Jews” broke out at a pro-Palestinian protest there last weekend.

In China on Friday, a 50-year-old Israeli man who works at Israel’s embassy was stabbed in broad daylight on the streets of Beijing. Chinese police said they were investigating the attack, and it wasn’t clear if it was related to events in the Middle East.

In the U.S., some parents fretted about sending their children to school Friday as police stepped up their presence. A bomb threat over social media prompted a congregation to evacuate a Chicago-area synagogue.

“Every Jewish institution is on high alert,” said Rabbi David Ingber, the founding rabbi of Romemu, a synagogue in Brooklyn and Manhattan’s Upper West Side, in New York City. Both locations were still open Friday but with heightened security. “Our number one responsibility is to protect our people at this moment,” Ingber said. 
President Biden has called the Hamas attack the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. Israel’s military has responded with a military campaign aimed at dismantling Hamas, a group the U.S., Israel and others have designated a terrorist organization.

“When antisemitism runs rampant in Israel, ultimately, it affects Jews all over the world. And even in America, there’s no exception,” said Rabbi Shaanan Gelman, of a synagogue in Skokie, Ill.

Synagogue leaders decided to evacuate the facility this week after a bomb threat circulated among high-school students on Snapchat, Gelman said. Nothing came of it.

“When former officials from Hamas publicly declare a day of rage and antisemitism and attacking Jews, of course we’re going to be frightened because we’ve seen this film play out many times in history before,” said Gelman, who has family members living in Israel. “But our response is absolutely not to cower.…We’re not going to be afraid to worship in our own way.”

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The Marxian Roots of Campus Anti-Semitism The left can’t behold Israel’s prosperity without concluding that the Jews have stolen their wealth from their neighbors. By Barton Swaim

By on October 15th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-marxian-roots-of-campus-anti-semitism-eeae25d0?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=1

If you thought claims of anti-Semitism on university campuses were exaggerated, you can’t think it after the past week. The spectacle was appalling: university presidents responding to the murder of hundreds of Jews by pretending that the fault lies partially with Israel and that reasonable people can differ over whether Hamas’s atrocities are justified; student groups issuing letters proclaiming solidarity with Hamas; campus protesters brandishing signs bearing such slogans as “resistance is justified” and “from the river to the sea”—the latter signifying the goal of extirpating all Jews from Israel.

How is it possible hundreds of Jewish civilians—including children and the elderly—were gunned down, bombed in their homes, raped, abducted and beheaded, and some of America’s elite students, academics and college administrators commiserated with the perpetrators? Again and again you hear otherwise intelligent people expressing vacuous phrases—“state-sanctioned violence,” “Zionist apartheid”—solely to excuse the butchery of Jews.

They will hotly deny that they hate Jews, but their denials don’t bear scrutiny. Even if all they say about Israel were true—in fact, it’s filled with distortions and lies—you’d still be left wondering why they’re unbothered by brutality when carried out by Hamas or anyone else other than Israel.

Where are the campus protests against Chinese concentration camps in Xinjiang? Governments brutalize citizens in Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Syria and many other places, but this week’s campus demonstrators bring their placards to the quadrangle only against the Jewish state.

That anti-Israel protests erupted on elite campuses this week—not after the accidental killing of a Palestinian demonstrator but after the systematic murder of at least 1,300 people in Israel—signifies an egregious failure at the heart of American higher education.

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