Displaying posts categorized under

ANTI-SEMITISM

Harvard University Had Most Campus Antisemitic Incidents Last Year: by Dion J. Pierre

https://www.algemeiner.com/2022/11/16/harvard-university-had-the-most-campus-antisemitic-incidents-last-year-report/

Harvard University had the most antisemitic incidents on college campuses during the 2021-2022 academic year, according to a new report investigating previously unexamined ways that anti-Israel activists attack and undermine Jewish identity.

Released on Wednesday by higher education antisemitism monitor AMCHA Initiative, the report, titled “Campus Antisemitism & the Assault on Jewish Identity,” claims that while previous studies have explored whether Jewish students are “safe” on campus, focus must be expanded to look at the ways in which Zionists are becoming increasingly excluded from campus life through classical “tropes of Jewish evil.”

“No other campus identity group is routinely subject to the kinds of well-orchestrated campaigns of identity assault that Zionist and pro-Israel students have had to endure for the last several years across the country,” the report said.  “The threats to Jewish student identity come from their peers, professors, and even school administrators, and reach every corner of campus life — the quad, classrooms, dorm rooms, student newspapers, social media platforms, student government, and more.”

The report cited dozens of antisemitic incidents falling under its categories, including the expulsion of two Jewish women from a support group for sexual assault survivors at SUNY New Paltz, Harvard University’s campus newspaper endorsing the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement and its claim that “Zionism is Racism,” and a campaign against so-called “S***** Zionist Classes” organized by the University of Chicago’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter.

Often prompted by ideas spread by college faculty, antisemitic incidents were likeliest to occur at colleges with large Jewish student populations and increased 100% to 200% percent after Israel’s 2021 conflict with Hamas. Harvard University had the most, 25, scoring the worst in each category of antisemitism examined by the report.

Academic Anti-Semites Who Don’t Like Being Called Out for What They Are Criticizing Israel can be anti-Semitic. by Richard L. Cravatts

https://www.frontpagemag.com/academic-anti-semites-who-dont-like-being-called-out-for-what-they-are/

In yet another tendentious display of virtue-signaling from a group of self-professed “scholars specializing in Antisemitism, Holocaust Studies, Modern Jewish History and related fields,” 128 academics cautioned the UN against adopting a tool for addressing anti-Semitism.

In a letter published in EUobserver on November 3rd entitled, “Don’t trap the United Nations in a vague and weaponised [sic] definition of antisemitism,” these woke scholars claimed to have “witness[ed] with growing concern politically motivated efforts to instrumentalize the fight against antisemitism at and against the United Nations. How, according to this group, was that occurring? In their delusional view, “Israeli UN Ambassador Gilad Erdan has spearheaded . . . efforts . . . to undercut the Palestinians and” of paramount importance to these scholars, “to shield the Israeli government from international criticism,”

Ambassador Erdan had pointed out that the UN itself has been a perennial hotbed of fanatical anti-Israelism, something which apparently offended this group who claimed that Erdan “has gone so far as to denounce the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) as ‘anti-Semitic’.” But the group’s primary concern was that “Mr. Erdan now seeks to fundamentally change the rules of the game by pressing the UN to adopt the “Working Definition of Antisemitism” of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA WDA).”

As the 2016 Internal Holocaust Remembrance Association’s (IHRA) working definition of anti-Semitism continues to be adopted by organizations and universities who find it useful as a way of identifying instances of anti-Semitism—and especially the “new anti-Semitism” which couches itself as criticism of Israel—predictably, though unsurprisingly, groups that wish to continue to slander and libel the Jewish state, such as this group, have come out in opposition to it. What bothers these indignant individuals? Possibly the section of the IHRA definition that suggests that “Applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation” is anti-Semitic.

UC Berkeley Calls Cops on Protest Against “Jewish Free Zones” At Berkeley, banning Jews is free speech, protesting anti-Semitism isn’t. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/uc-berkeley-calls-cops-on-protest-against-jewish-free-zones/

During the Black Lives Matter riots, UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ endorsed police defunding. “Elements of our country’s law enforcement culture dehumanize some of the very people whose safety and wellness police officers are sworn to protect,” she falsely claimed.

Two weeks ago, UC Berkeley called the police on a conservative truck protesting campus antisemitism and the “Jewish Free Zones” erected by elements of its law school.

Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky had claimed that the university couldn’t take any action against the “Jewish Free Zones” enacted by student organizations even as he admitted that they would bar 90% of Jewish speakers. “That is their First Amendment right. I find their statement offensive, but they have the right to say it. To punish these student groups, or students, for their speech would clearly violate the Constitution,” he argued.

That was in early October.

In late October, Chemerinsky responded to a truck rented by a conservative group protesting the “Jewish Free Zone” by threatening that, “we’re exploring whether there’s any action that can be taken against the Accuracy in Media for the truck.”

According to Chemerinsky and Berkeley, banning Jews is free speech, protesting the ban isn’t.

Chemerinsky described the ban of 90% of Jewish speakers as merely “offensive”, but condemned a protest against it as “despicable” and “outrageous behavior.”

Adam Guillette, the president of Accuracy in Media, had decided to challenge the culture of campus antisemitism by renting a truck to name and shame the students responsible for the  “Jewish Free Zones”.

It’s a tactic that has been successfully used by groups fighting antisemitism like Canary Mission.

Recalling his own student days, Adam told me that, “When I attended the University of Florida we dealt with the same sort of nonsense and our campus Jewish groups wouldn’t do a thing about it.

Can American Jewry Catch a Break?By Bobby Miller

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/can-american-jewry-catch-a-break/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=fourth

The FBI has found the person responsible for the “broad threat” to New Jersey synagogues that the Bureau’s Newark office warned about via tweet. Thank God. After Kanye West’s psychosis-induced philippics against members of the tribe, this threat, albeit different in kind from Kanye’s ravings, was the last thing Jews in America needed.

Unfortunately, the broader problem of antisemitism isn’t going anywhere. Kyrie Irving of the Brooklyn Nets continues to show insufficient remorse for the antisemitic bile he propagated when he posted Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America, an antisemitic Black Hebrew Israelite documentary, on his Twitter and Instagram accounts. The Southern Poverty Law Center, though compromised in other ways, was not wrong to deem 144 Black Hebrew Israelite organizations black-separatist hate groups “because of their antisemitic and anti-white beliefs.” Black Hebrew Israelite sympathizers were responsible for the 2019 Jersey City shooting at a kosher grocery store. White-supremacist leader Tom Metzger once said, “They’re the black counterparts of us,” when referencing the group.

Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America itself promotes the conspiracy theory that African Americans are the true descendants of the biblical Israelites and that the Jews of today are impostors who culturally appropriated the religious heritage of black people to dominate and oppress people of color. In doing so, the film engages in Holocaust denialism, includes falsely attributed Hitler quotes, and declares that Jews were responsible for slavery in America. When asked this week for a yes-or-no answer to whether he held antisemitic beliefs, Irving responded, “I cannot be antisemitic if I know where I come from,” an evasive answer (is he referring to lessons from his own life story and ancestry, or does he believe he is one of the “real Jews”?). His apology on Instagram only came after being suspended from the Nets without pay late Thursday night.

Indoctrinating School Children to Hate Israel and Jews Getting them while they’re young. by Richard L. Cravatts

https://www.frontpagemag.com/indoctrinating-school-children-to-hate-israel-and-jews/

The cognitive war against Israel, a campaign on college campuses for well over a decade, has helped in positioning the Jewish state as an alleged racist, colonial oppressor of an innocent indigenous people, an illegal regime that exists on land wrongly confiscated from Palestinians.

Zionism, it is alleged, is a corrosive political ideology that inspires both the creation of an apartheid nation and the undiminished lust for more Palestinian land for a Greater Israel.

In this narrative, the Palestinians are cast as perennial victims whose human and civil rights are deprived for them due to white supremacy, racism, and the predations of an Israeli military that brutally enforces this unjust, illegal state of affairs.

Activists, both on and off campus, have been successful in promoting this flawed and factually inaccurate narrative, but the perceived injustices being done to the ever-aggrieved Palestinians resonates with young liberal minds who have an understandable affinity for the underdog and victim—especially if that bias and hatred are characterized by racism and oppression—exactly how Israel is now mistakenly perceived by many of its ideological foes.

Now, the same slanders, lies, and contortions of history and facts about the Israeli/Palestinian debate are being introduced to younger audiences with impressionable minds: school children.

A recent example of this troubling trend was revealed when critics became aware that the Newark, New Jersey school board had included an anti-Israel book on its mandatory reading list. The book, A Little Piece of Ground by Elizabeth Laird, found its way into the sixth-grade English curriculum for the 2022-23 school year, and, according to the description on Amazon, “explores the human cost of the occupation of Palestinian lands through the eyes of a young boy.”

Of course, the same premise that campus activists chant about when they scream, “Free, free Palestine,” the factually false assertion that the land allegedly occupied by Israel is or ever was Palestinian land, is taken as truth, so Israel is already guilty in this narrative of having stolen others’ land.

Kanye West, Anti-Semitism, and Candace Owens “When a friend makes a mistake, he remains a friend, but the mistake remains a mistake.” By Dennis Prager *********

https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/01/kanye-west-anti-semitism-and-candace-owens/

Let’s begin with an indisputable fact. What Kanye West, a.k.a. Ye, is saying about Jews is anti-Semitic. Why? Because “the Jews run everything” is pure libel. That’s why Jews are not paranoid about being deeply troubled by such sentiments. If widely believed, they will almost inevitably lead to the persecution of Jews.

Now, let’s turn to the matter of Candace Owens. For the few who do not know who she is, Candace is a brilliant and charismatic black woman with a very large following. The Left hates her because she is a black conservative and, even worse, a supporter of former President Donald Trump. In the eyes of the Left, Trump supporters (often referred to as “MAGA people”) are either out-and-out fascists or, as Joe Biden put it, “semi-fascists.” 

Owens started BLEXIT, “a movement to encourage black people to leave far-left, progressive policies behind.” She believes the Democratic Party has used blacks to gain and retain power, not to help them. 

By virtually every metric, Trump did more to help black America than the entire Democratic Party in living memory, not to mention nonliving memory. The Democrats began as the pro-slavery party and morphed after the Civil War into the pro-Jim Crow party and the home of white racists. Later, with its social policies, the Democratic Party was instrumental in breaking down the black family, which, before Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society,” consisted overwhelmingly of a mother, father, and children living in the same home. To be precise, in 1960, 78 percent of black children lived in intact homes. Today, nearly three-quarters of black children do not.

In her attempt to lead blacks away from the Democrats, Owens befriended Kanye West, the best-known black rapper in the country. And indeed, Ye, as he is now known, became a Trump supporter.

Needless to say, the Democrats and the rest of the Left hate Candace. Democrats loathe every black individual who isn’t a Democrat, but blacks who convince other blacks to leave the Democratic Party are held in special contempt. And as with all those whom leftists hate, they do not debate, they smear. 

In addition to “racist,” “homophobe,” “Islamophobe,” “xenophobe,” “transphobe,” “fascist,” and “sexist,” “anti-Semite” is often used to smear opponents of the Left.

Taxpayer and Donor-Funded Systemic Anti-Semitism at Berkeley Jewish donors gave UC Berkeley over $450M in one year. by Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/taxpayer-and-donor-funded-systemic-anti-semitism-at-berkeley/

Berkeley’s $3 billion budget comes from taxpayers through tuition paid for by government scholarships, state, local and federal grants, state funding and tax deductible contributions. While the University of California school insists that “the state provides just 14 percent of the university’s revenue”, taxpayers actually fund or underwrite much of its operation.

And that operation is systemically antisemitic.

When nine campus groups at the UC Berkeley School of Law announced that they wouldn’t host the vast majority of Jewish speakers (as Dean Erwin Chemerinksy admitted that it “would exclude about, I don’t know, 90 percent or more of our Jewish students”), it made headlines around the world. It was also in violation of federal and state not-discrimination laws.

The University of California is a 501(c)(3) and the UC Berkeley Foundation is the college’s own nonprofit. And UC Berkeley Law is eager to accept everything from gifts of stocks to cryptocurrency. Taxpayers subsidize this system even though the UC Berkeley Foundation which has assets approaching $3 billion. That money helps fund its systemic antisemitism.

Systemic antisemitism at the UC Berkeley School of Law is not just a private policy. The creation of “Jewish-Free Zones” at the law school are being subsidized by taxpayers.

And by Jewish donors.

In ’21, Scott Shenker, a computer scientist, wrote UC Berkeley a $25 million check. That same year the Wertheim Family Foundation pledged $100 million to UC Berkeley Optometry. A year earlier, Bob Haas injected yet another $24 million into UC Berkeley. And they are not alone.

Karen Lehrman Bloch -Wellesley College News Demands Ethnic Cleansing of Jews and Destruction of Israel.

https://whiterosemagazine.com/

What surreal anti-Semitic act occurred on campus this week? It’s hard to keep up. Amidst the brouhaha over several UC Berkeley student groups’ ban on “Zionist speakers,” a former CAIR staffer being asked to investigate anti-Semitism at CUNY and Brooklyn College scheduling “implicit bias training” on Yom Kippur, many may have missed that on Sept. 28, the editorial board of the Wellesley College newspaper The Wellesley News called for the “liberation of Palestine.”

In other words, Wellesley College, a supposed beacon of liberalism, called for Israel’s destruction. The editorial, of course, doesn’t actually use the word “destruction,” but anyone even vaguely familiar with Palestinian propaganda knows “liberation” means the ethnic cleansing of Israel’s Jews.

With this editorial, Wellesley finally beat out Harvard in the anti-Semitic Olympics. The Harvard Crimson, after all, at least confined itself to “only” endorsing BDS in an April 29 editorial.

What was Wellesley’s response to its campus paper’s call for ethnic cleansing? An official statement said, “The Wellesley News is a student newspaper—an organization that is editorially independent from Wellesley College. Its editorials reflect the views of the newspaper’s editorial board; they do not reflect the views of Wellesley College.” Considering how ferociously American universities usually react to hate speech, this is a decidedly underwhelming rejoinder.

The New Progressivism Makes No Room for Jews David L. Bernstein

https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/politics-current-affairs/2022/10/the-new-progressivism-makes-no-room-for-jews/?utm

In 2016, as “intersectionality” escaped from academia to become a progressive buzzword—and came to to signify a doctrine that all just causes are linked and complementary—David L. Bernstein began to suspect that it was apt to be used against the Jews. As he pointed out in an article published that year, activists argued under the banner of intersectionality that anyone opposed to racism in the U.S. should also oppose the existence of Israel. He thought, however, that there was hope:

While I didn’t say so explicitly, I’d come to believe that the mainstream Jewish community needed to find a way to include the Jewish narrative in the intersectional matrix—to complicate it—so that Jews and Israel were not viewed as the perennial oppressors and Palestinians the perennial victims. Concerned about the growing backlash to my article, I used the opportunity [to participate in a panel discussion with some of my critics] to soften my stance on the topic, stating “I still have much to learn,” and that “intersectionality is a complex, interesting, and nuanced phenomenon that we need to understand, not just from the perspective of the pro-Israel community, but from its own perspective as well.”

Bernstein, at the time still president of the left-leaning Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA), soon learned that there was little room for such a compromise position:

[In 2020], the JCPA pulled together a Zoom meeting for a coalition called Jews for Criminal Justice Reform, which included top Jewish criminal-justice activists from around the country. After an inspiring talk by Paul Fishman—a former federal attorney from New Jersey—on the need to end mass incarceration, we broke up into smaller groups to discuss next steps. A lawyer named Jared, the group facilitator for my breakout session, asked, “What do you all think our criminal-justice reform priorities ought to be?” Ariella, a young professional staffer from a Jewish civil-rights organization, interjected, “Before we talk about strategy, there’s a lot of internal work we have to do in the Jewish community. We need to recognize our complicity in white supremacy and ensure we have black Jews at the forefront of these efforts.”

It’s Not Just Kanye: Antisemitism and the Black Community By Laureen Lipsky

https://www.israpundit.org/its-not-just-kanye-antisemitism-and-the-black-community/

Not much unifies Jews these days, sadly, but the tweet from  Kanye West on Saturday, October 8 did just that.  A world-famous celebrity with 31.5 million followers on Twitter threatened the Jewish people in a response to a fellow black celebrity, Sean Combs, and accused him of being controlled by Jews.

While the spotlight of calling out antisemitism is currently focused on Mr. West, and rightfully so, antisemitism has been prevalent in the Black community for decades.  Kanye and those like him, especially in the entertainment space, who have the loudspeaker, repeat ingrained tropes, stemming from numerous Black churches; from certain Black hate groups; and of course from the most famous of Jew-haters, who retains massive power today: minister Louis Farrakhan.

Was it always this way?  Luckily, the answer is no.

During Reconstruction after the U.S. Civil War, there was a strong relationship between Jews and Black people.  Several prominent Jews helped build schools in the South for Black children, and that led to firm ties between the two communities.

In 1960, the SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) was founded.  It was targeted toward younger Black people to stand up for equal rights.  In its earlier years, its members had great relationships with Jews, and it spearheaded a greater coordination to incorporate Jews into the Civil Rights struggle.  Yet when the 1967 Six-Day War against Israel broke out and Israel won, the leaders of the SNCC were already more radicalized thanks to Ethel Minor, the communications director of the group, who had formed ties with the Nation of Islam and turned on Israel.

Ethel Minor set the tone of the SNCC, and that included an antisemitic voice against Israel, which meant Jews.  This is when the lies began about “Palestinians” being a distinct ethnicity.  Playing into the Soviet propaganda, the lies about Jews being “occupiers” started to seep into the Black community.