RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearreligion.org/articles/2022/03/24/when_will_antisemitism_be_taken_seriously_823368.html

Antisemitic hate crimes in New York City have recently increased by 409%, representing more than half of all hate crimes citywide. Many of these incidents targeted Orthodox people dressed in distinctive clothing, like the Jewish man who was punched in Bed-Stuy on Feb. 7 while walking on Shabbat, for which a 15-year-old was charged with assault and committing a hate crime. Yet it has not led civil rights organizations to act, unless they can connect these attacks to rightwing extremists or white supremacists, even when the evidence does not support such a link.

These organizations focus on instances of rightwing antisemitic propaganda rather than on those who are committing actual antisemitic hate crimes. For example, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) recently issued a report, “White Supremacist Propaganda Continues to Remain at Historic Levels in 2021.” It highlighted flyers posted by three obscure white supremacist groups in New England, none of which were responsible for any other antisemitic acts.

A similar instance occurred when New York antisemitic assaults jumped two years earlier. Then-New York mayor Bill de Blasio repeatedly insisted that the attacks were driven by a white-supremacist movement connected to Donald Trump, and a report by the ADL on the spike in antisemitic assaults in New York followed De Blasio’s lead. The report noted, “In 2018, ADL documented 67 white supremacist propaganda distribution incidents in New York State, 10 of which were antisemitic in nature,” although all the assaults were more specifically in New York City.

As reporter Armin Rosen pointed out, these spurious suggestions were made “despite clear evidence that … many of the attacks are being carried out by people of color with no ties to the politics of white supremacy.” Indeed, FBI statistics demonstrate that black Americans are disproportionately perpetrators of hate crime attacks on other groups, including Asian Americans.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/rashida-tlaib-and-making-her-second-blood-libel-ari-lieberman/

“Tlaib’s reckless and malevolent tweets, where she instinctively blames Jews for murder and other capital crimes belies a sinister intent. Even more troubling is that Tlaib is not just some foul-mouthed B-list actor or washed-out guitar player, she is a member of the U.S. legislative branch, and her words carry weight. Yet she continues to spew blood libels with near impunity and the deafening silence from her own party should sound alarm bells.”

In January 2020, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-Mi) retweeted an unverified tweet by professional agitator and former Palestinian Authority diplomat Hanan Ashrawi, in which she claimed that Jews had kidnapped and killed a Palestinian boy by throwing him into a pond where he drowned. As it turns out, the boy’s death was accidental and Israeli rescue teams resorted to superhuman efforts to retrieve the boy from the pond’s cold, murky waters and revive him.

Ashrawi deleted her tweet and surprisingly apologized for citing unverified sources. Tlaib on the other hand deleted the tweet but without apology. She was quick to accuse the Jews of committing barbaric acts but offered no contrition when those accusations proved unfounded. Even the ADL’s left-leaning head, Jonathan Greenblatt, pointed out that her lie was an “example of how a blood libel works in 2020; retweets [sic] a vicious lie steeped in centuries-old accusations used to demonize Jews, then says nothing when it’s disproven. An apology is overdue.” Of course, none was forthcoming.

It appears that Tlaib did not learn her lesson concerning her propensity to engage in hasty conclusions and antisemitic blood libels. On May 11, Israeli forces carrying out a counterterror operation in the Jenin vicinity encountered violent resistance from Palestinian gunman belonging to various terror entities. They came under heavy M-16 automatic fire. This is the weapon of choice for these gunmen, though some also carry AK-47 assault rifles and Carlo-type submachine guns.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/my-synagogues-anti-semitism-tax-hate-crime-shooter-shooting-attack-bigotry-judaism-security-11652992632?mod=trending_now_opn_2

“Yet when I reviewed the budgets of mainline Protestant churches in my own community, I found no security line items remotely on par with those in my synagogue. Maybe we are more fearful because of our history, but the Jewish community has been the greatest target of religious-based hate crimes in the U.S. since official reporting started more than a quarter-century ago. The numbers have risen in recent years.”

For the most part, serving on my synagogue’s board of trustees hasn’t involved dramatic decisions. Usually we discuss routine matters such as how to pay for repairs on the house we provide our rabbi. During the pandemic, we debated whether to open the preschool or refund parents’ payments. But over the past several years a more worrisome matter has appeared on our agenda. I call it the anti-Semitism tax.

More than 5% of our budget is now devoted to security to protect the congregation. That’s more than $150,000 a year to prevent tragedies like the deadly attack on Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 or the hostage-taking at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, in January. We had long used funds to hire off-duty cops for the High Holidays to direct traffic, but this is much more serious.

Every Jewish congregation is, as they say in accounting, a tub on its own bottom. There’s no diocese or sanhedrin to provide financial support. Membership dues keep the lights on. Security spending comes at the expense of other budget items: building repairs, new books for the library, or lower tuition for preschool parents, a key source of the new members we need to thrive as a community of believers. Ours is a reasonably well-off congregation, but those that aren’t face hard choices.

“Congregations have had to invest both in physical infrastructure and ongoing security personnel and processes,” observes Rabbi Jacob Blumenthal, who heads the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism. “Synagogues would obviously rather spend on our core functions of study, worship, volunteerism and community building.”

https://whiterosemagazine.com/how-did-we-get-here/

Lots of Jews seem to be paying attention to Jewish life in America in a new way now. Rashida Tlaib, “Apartheid Week” on college campuses, social media influencers, Colleyville, and much more have come together in critical mass and shoved these “twice-a-year Jews” into the figurative Jewish communal room, many for the first time. They are stumbling around, wondering how we got here and what to do next. “I can’t believe this is happening here, in the United States,” they say in disbelief. 

But, actually, it isn’t at all hard to believe. After all, “this” has been happening here for a while. “This” has also happened in almost every Diaspora Jewish community throughout history. If by “this” they mean the scapegoating of Jews during turbulent times, and the subsequent increase in anti-Semitic activity, then “this” is neither new nor surprising. In fact, it is perfectly predictable.  

What most American Jews are really shocked by, but couldn’t see until it became inescapably obvious, is the fast-growing, unabashed anti-Semitism of the American political left, where they themselves reside. BDS, the Squad, attacks on Hassidic Jews in the streets, BLM’s charter, Pinkwashing, Deadly Exchange, leadership at the Women’s March, biased mainstream media coverage of Israel, anti-Semitic professors at elite private high schools, Islamist apologists: it has all felt like a sudden landslide. But, in fact, it has been more like a slow, creeping mudslide that they seem to have entirely missed, until it appeared as a daily feature on their social media feeds. Why do American Jews seem so caught off guard?

What most American Jews are really shocked by, but couldn’t see until it became inescapably obvious, is the fast-growing, unabashed anti-Semitism of the American political left, where they themselves reside.

One explanation is historical ignorance. It’s usually a bad blind spot. If you didn’t study Soviet Jewry, perhaps it is difficult to understand that political collectivism is bad for the Jews. If you didn’t learn about the implications of group “identity politics” in 19th and 20th century Europe, you might not appreciate that the contemporary American manifestation of it is a threat to the Jewish community and Israel. If you don’t know that the image of the money-hungry, usurious Jew is an anti-Semitic slur hundreds of years old, then when Ilhan Omar says, “it’s all about the Benjamins” you might think the comment was an offensive, one-off remark you can overlook. These trends have been building for some time, but if you didn’t have historical sensitivity to them, you wouldn’t guess that the politics you support are also hurting Jews. Then, when your favorite ice cream brand suddenly decides to boycott Israel, it comes as a shock.

https://whiterosemagazine.com/the-jewish-community-cannot-survive-perfidy-by-its-leadership/

This is not the country we grew up in. The Jewish community is under siege. According to the FBI, Jews are the primary targets of hate crimes in America. An analysis of their reports reveals that a Jew is twice as likely to be a victim of a hate crime as a black person or a Muslim, ten times more likely than an Asian or a Latino, and twenty times more likely than a non-Hispanic white.

Jews are being beaten in the streets of New York City, murdered in Pittsburgh, San Diego, and Jersey City, stabbed in Boston, taken hostage in Texas, and harassed and bullied on college campuses across the country. In more than a few places, Jews live with rising anxiety. Most Jewish community buildings require security. Israel, the Jewish state, is defamed and demonized by the mainstream media, and maligned in both the U.S. Congress and the United Nations, as anti-Zionism becomes the new anti-Semitism. 

Hostility toward American Jews continues to grow. In February 2022, police in New York reported that anti-Semitic hate crimes in the city were up 409 percent. A recent American Jewish Committee (AJC) poll found that four in ten Jews avoid making themselves identifiable as Jews, avoid going to Jewish events, or refrain from posting Jewish-related content online. Ninety percent of Jews think anti-Semitism is a problem in America.  

In what seems like a perfect storm, Jews face assaults simultaneously from four major ideological camps. Lethal white nationalists attack them in the name of white supremacy, blaming them for supporting multiculturalism and rising Third World immigration. Radical black nationalists—including Farrakhan-following celebrities, academics, and politicians—attack Jews in the name of black liberation and “equity.” Radical progressives and segments of the Democratic Party promote the genocidal BDS movement and anti-Jewish critical race theory, inciting an ideological assault on Israel and Jews in the name of “social justice” and Palestinian nationalism. This new assault is a kind of “virtuous Jew-hatred,” socially acceptable and even fashionable, not easily countered by facts, logic, or reason.

In what seems like a perfect storm, Jews face assaults simultaneously from four major ideological camps.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/untrained-passenger-lands-airplane-11652285057?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

Whenever disaster strikes and life’s great challenges arise, we all hope to be ready to rise to the occasion. But it seems unreasonable even to hope for the achievement of a rookie aviator on Tuesday.

WPBF, an ABC television affiliate in Florida, is covering perhaps the most inspiring story of the year. The station’s Ari Hait reports from West Palm Beach:

A passenger with no flight experience safely landed a private plane at Palm Beach International Airport Tuesday afternoon after the pilot suffered a medical emergency.
“I’ve got a serious situation here,” the passenger can be heard telling Air Traffic Control in Fort Pierce. “My pilot has gone incoherent. I have no idea how to fly the airplane.”
“Roger. What’s your position?” Air Traffic Control responded.
“I have no idea,” the passenger said. “I can see the coast of Florida in front of me. And I have no idea.”
“Maintain wings level and just try to follow the coast, either north or southbound,” Air Traffic Control told him. “We’re trying to locate you.”