RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.jns.org/antisemitism/european-antisemitism/23/8/16/311333/?_se=Y

America isn’t Europe. That’s the key thing to bear in mind when reading the Anti-Defamation League’s sobering report on “Antisemitism and Radical Anti-Israel Bias on the Political Left in Europe,” published last week.

Some parallels can be drawn between the way a bizarre and troubling red-green alliance between leftist elites and Muslim immigrants has mainstreamed antisemitism in Europe and the growing influence of the intersectional left in the United States with the same aims. Americans should be paying close attention to the rising tide of Jew-hatred on the other side of the Atlantic and seeking to learn from it. But it’s important to remember the big differences between the two situations. More than that, the ADL’s policy recommendations stemming from its research don’t adequately alert Americans to the forces that are working toward the same dismal surge in antisemitism.

The first thing to recognize about this subject is that antisemitism is not an integral part of the history or the official policies of the United States, unlike the nations of the Old World. Equally true, the majority of Americans are likelier to be philo-semitic and pro-Israel in numbers that are not to be found in Europe. Still, important lessons may be learned from the subject of the ADL report.

While nothing in the study is particularly new, it confirms the way political parties and activists have embraced anti-Zionism, and the way that has inevitably sparked a new wave of hatred for Jews on the continent. Focusing on the state of affairs in four countries—the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Spain—it provides a generally accurate and worrying evaluation of the predicament for Jews that resulted from the left’s adoption of the Palestinian cause that has enabled the legitimization of attitudes and action that undermines the Jewish community and spreads intolerance.

Anti-Zionism is antisemitism

While all of these countries are different, the parties of the left in each have shown themselves vulnerable to co-optation by anti-Israel ideologues. They dominate public discourse about Israel and help create an atmosphere in which Jewish activism is treated as inherently racist.

I WILL BE ON VACATION

https://www.frontpagemag.com/muslim-mobs-get-a-pass-for-assaulting-jews-in-nyc-and-la/

In May 2021, Joseph Borgen was violently assaulted by a Muslim mob while walking down the street in midtown Manhattan in the vicinity of an anti-Israel rally. The Jewish man was kicked, punched, pepper sprayed, beaten with a metal object, and ended up in the hospital.

Borgen was taunted as a “dirty Jew” and the assault was caught on video. “They were kicking me in my ribs, my stomach,” he described.

Waseem Awawdeh, the best known of the attackers, was out two days later. Even after Awawdeh reportedly told prison guards, “If I could do it again, I would do it again”, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg offered him a plea deal of only six months in prison. After public outrage, including protests and condemnations by elected officials,  it was raised to eighteen months.

Faisal Elezzi, another of the attackers, got off with probation and an obligation to complete “anti-bias programming”.

That same month in Los Angeles, a pro-terrorist Muslim convoy was driving down the street near the Jewish neighborhood of Fairfax, and began harassing outdoor diners at a sushi place. Members of the Muslim mob waved a PLO terror flag, demanded to know who at the restaurant was Jewish, and witnesses said chanted, “death to the Jews” and “free Palestine”.

The Muslim attackers reportedly punched, kicked, threw bottles and pepper sprayed their targets who were members of the Persian Jewish community who had fled Islamic violence in Iran.

Samer Jayylusi and Xavier Pabon were arrested and immediately released on bail. They have since been sentenced to probation and ordered to visit a Holocaust museum.

The assaults in Manhattan and Los Angeles went viral. Videos of Muslim mobs attacking Jews made their way around the country and the world. They ended up appearing in national news stories. And yet most of those suspects got off with a slap on the wrist and diversity training.

https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/politics-current-affairs/2023/07/the-biden-administrations-historically-ignorant-strategy-to-counter-anti-semitism/?utm_

In response to the alarming rise of anti-Jewish activism and calls from concerned Jews to do something about it, the Biden administration recently announced a “first-ever” National Strategy to Counter Anti-Semitism (NSCA), outlining over a hundred new actions that executive-branch agencies have committed to take within a year. Most Jews and fellow Americans welcome this as an obviously encouraging response to an ever-more-pressing problem. But both the administration and the Jews who pushed it to action have much to learn from an historical precedent that likewise publicized its intention of countering anti-Semitism but instead did irreparable damage.

In 1938 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was under increasing political and moral pressure to address the crisis facing the Jews of Europe. Hitler had begun his program of eliminating the Jews from Germany and the countries that he intended to conquer. Ideological Jew-blame, fueled by fascist parties across the continent, encouraged other countries like Poland and Romania to target their Jewish populations.

Anti-Jewish politics promoted by German propagandists had also penetrated America. The KKK, Henry Ford, Father Coughlin, and Charles Lindbergh helped the Nazis carry the fascist message in the interwar years. Counteracting the demands to rescue the Jews from Europe were two compelling priorities: isolationism and fallout from the Great Depression. Those who called for opposing Hitler were accused of dragging America into an unwanted war.

Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938, threatening its 180,000 Jews, finally forced Roosevelt to take action. He convened an international conference in the French resort town of Evian-les-Bains to consider what could be done to resettle European refugees; Jews were not named. But the president preemptively excluded from consideration both North America and Palestine—the two most obvious destinations. Hitler had announced that he would help the Jews leave for any countries that agreed to take them, but the only country that did was the Dominican Republic, which accepted 800 of Europe’s 9 million. To Nazi propagandists, this was proof that the Jews were toxic, unwanted by everyone.

Fear of anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant sentiment kept Roosevelt from allowing Jewish refugees into his own country. But since 1918 Britain had been charged by the League of Nations with allowing for the establishment of a Jewish national home in Mandatory Palestine. Surely this was the natural destination for Jewish refugees. Here, however, Britain’s perfidy exceeded even Roosevelt’s political cowardice. Determined to prevent an influx of Jews, the British-appointed Muslim leader Amin al-Husseini incited violence that by the late 1930s cowed London into agreeing to his demand to stop Jewish immigration. Rather than challenging Britain’s criminal betrayal of responsibility, Evian reaffirmed its right to stop Jews from entering their land. Thus, the conference called to address the crisis instead camouflaged its own inaction. Worse, the mufti, like Hitler, whom he admired, took it as a green light to pursue the elimination of Jews from the Middle East. Even assuming the president’s intentions were good, he failed to take seriously enough those intent on destroying the Jews.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/student-jew-hatred-at-the-city-college-of-new-york/

Of the number of Western anti-Semitic groups that pretend to be motivated not by the glorious vision of Jews in endless torment, but by a deep sensitivity to the supposedly unprecedented suffering of the Palestinians, there can seem to be no end. In many cases, their online self-descriptions are so deceptive as to rise nearly to the level of high art: Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, which equates Israelis to Nazis, calls itself “a broad-based, non-partisan, democratic, and charitable organization of grassroots activists and students committed to comprehensive public education on the rights of all Palestinian refugees.” Under the slogan “Justice, Equality, Dignity,” Jewish Voice for Peace, which loves Hamas, represents itself as “a national organization dedicated to a U.S. foreign policy based on peace, human rights, and respect for international law.”

And then there’s Students for Justice in Palestine, which in the constellation of Jew-hatred is a galaxy all its own. Established thirty years ago at the University of California at Berkeley, it was the brainchild of Hatem Bazian, who then, as now, was a lecturer in the Departments of Eastern and Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies at that storied institution. His website further identifies him as “a co-founder and Professor of Islamic Law and Theology at Zaytuna College, the 1st Accredited Muslim Liberal Arts College in the United States.” In addition to these activities, Bazian founded both the Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project and the Islamophobia Studies Journal. (Beginning to notice a pattern?) Some time back, the respected watchdog group Canary Mission bestowed upon Bazian a title that, while perhaps not highly coveted in some circles, is surely, these days, mightily competitive – namely that of “most dangerous professor in America.” Justifying this designation is a predictable list of offenses – a repeated failure to condemn even the most barbaric acts of terrorism, a readiness to gush with praise for the Intifada, and, needless to say, a long record of utterly virulent Jew-hatred.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/from-cuny-to-the-pandemic-systemic-antisemitism-is-the-real-problem/

In May, the Biden administration released its National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism which promoted a definition of antisemitism written by an anti-Israel activist who had defended Islamic terrorism against Jews. The administration partnered with CAIR, refused to acknowledge Islamic antisemitism, or address the worst cases of campus antisemitism at the government’s public universities like the University of California and City University of New York.

Earlier that month, Fatima Mousa Mohammed, a Students for Justice in Palestine activist, took the podium as the commencement speaker at CUNY Law’s graduation ceremony. Mohammed had previously tweeted, “i pray upon the death of the USA on a public platform” and delivered speeches celebrating violence against Jews. The anti-Israel activist had advocated segregating Jewish professors and students, urging, “”Demand that Zionist professors are not welcomed on your campus! Demand that Zionist students are not in spaces where Palestinian students are.“

Had any such remarks been directed at black or Latino students, Mohammed would never have been allowed to serve as commencement speaker and likely would have been expelled.

At the commencement address, Mohammed celebrated the “rage that fills this auditorium” and expressed hope that it would “fuel for the fight against capitalism, racism, imperialism, and Zionism around the world” and hailed those “who brought the ferocity of the violence” who will “carry the revolution”.

She praised CUNY Law’s support for BDS and described the Hamas fundraisers of HLF as “political prisoners”. That would presumably include Abdulrahman Odeh who had celebrated a bus stop suicide bombing as a “beautiful operation”.

https://www.jns.org/jns/antisemitism/23/5/30/291450/?utm_source=brevo&utm_campaign=Daily%20Syndicate%20Tues%20May%2030%202023&utm_medium=em

Cheers from failing Jewish leaders enabled the administration to pose as a defender of the Jews even as its policies enable a toxic ideology that spreads Jew-hatred.

You’ve got to hand it to the current occupants of the West Wing. President Joe Biden’s administration has shown itself to be weak and confused about a lot of important issues. But when it comes to manipulating American Jews, they know exactly what they’re doing.

After teasing it for weeks, the White House’s unveiling of the “U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism,” last week was a public-relations triumph in more ways than one. It was released just hours before the Jewish holiday of Shavuot and the Memorial Day weekend. Much like the traditional DC Friday-afternoon news dump in which officials release something just as everyone stops paying attention to headlines, this helped the White House manage reactions. With the Jewish world about to be shut down for two days—and then everyone else for two days after that—administration shills succeeded in dominating the conversation about the document.

More than that, the unveiling was a textbook example of how exceeding low expectations can generate positive spin. It also led to a discussion that avoided the most important question that should have been raised. Instead, the Jews were debating how happy they should be about Biden’s gesture.

For weeks, Jewish groups had feared that the document would not be rooted in the working definition of antisemitism established by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). Among other points, this definition states that denying Jews the right to self-determination and claiming that Israel is a racist endeavor are antisemitic.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/bidens-strategy-to-fight-anti-semitism-enables-hatred-of-jews-and-israel/

In 2019, President Trump signed an executive order on combating antisemitism. The order used the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism which includes “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination”, “using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism to characterize Israel” and applying double standards to the Jewish State.

Biden’s hyped U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, released on the eve of the Shavuot holiday, backtracks from this gold standard by claiming that, “there are several definitions of antisemitism, which serve as valuable tools to raise awareness and increase understanding of antisemitism”, including the IHRA, but noting that the Biden administration “welcomes and appreciates the Nexus Document and notes other such efforts.”

The Nexus definition was authored by anti-Israel activists like Tema Smith, who had claimed that, “Hamas — and the Palestinians as a whole — have desperately real and legitimate grievances against Israel.”

“Jews *have* to be ok with Palestinians *explaining* why some turn to terrorism,” she argued.

The Nexus advisory committee included the likes of Hussein Ibish, who had described Hezbollah as a “disciplined and responsible liberation force” whose terrorists had “conducted themselves in an exemplary manner”, along with J Street leader Jeremy Ben Ami, Lila Corwin-Berman, who had defended BDS, and Chaim Seidler-Feller, whose hatred was so intense he had kicked and scratched a Jewish woman over her support for the Jewish State.

The Nexus definition of antisemitism was created to protect anti-Israel activists from charges of antisemitism. That definition, which the Biden administration chose to promote, claims that BDS, or “boycotting goods made in the West Bank and/or Israel is not antisemitic”, and argues that, “opposition to Zionism and/or Israel does not necessarily reflect specific anti-Jewish animus nor purposefully lead to antisemitic behaviors and conditions” and defends double standards by contending that “paying disproportionate attention to Israel and treating Israel differently than other countries is not prima facie proof of antisemitism.”