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The new antisemitism? Or extreme political correctness?

November 17, 2017

The new antisemitism? Or extreme political correctness? | Anne’s Opinions, 16th November 2017

Linda Sarsour is an extreme leftist, “progressive” American activist with a nasty history of supporting terror and antisemitism cloaked as anti-Zionism. The latest saga in which she has become involved is her invitation by New York’s New School to speak at a panel on …. you guessed it… antisemitism – along with that other admirer of Israel, Jewish Voice for Peace (which is hardly Jewish, nor promotes peace).

The New School, a Manhattan- based university, is sponsoring the event in cooperation with the Jewish Voice for Peace and Jacobin Magazine, both of which promote causes of the radical Left.

Sarsour is Muslim activist and unrelenting critic of Israel who supports a boycott against the Jewish state. Among numerous other controversial statements, she tweeted in 2012, “Nothing is creepier than Zionism.”

Rebecca Vilkomerson, executive director of JVP, is also scheduled to speak at the event, which will be moderated by Amy Goodman, host of the radio program Democracy Now.

The mind boggles. Jason Greenblatt, the head of the ADL, tweeted:

Israellycool explained the Tweet for non-Yanks:

It’s just a shame he used a US-specific reference and spelled ‘Oscar Mayer’ (the American meat and cold cut production company, owned by Kraft Heinz) as ‘Oscar Meyer’

Israellycool describes these anti-Israel “activists” thus:

Because the speakers include Linda Sarsour, who denies beingantisemitic, but boy does she hatethose who support a Jewish homeland.

And Rebecca Vilkomerson, executive director of Jewish Voice For Peace (JVP), who sure love their murderers of Jews.

 

Linda Sarsour is also not the great feminist that she promotes herself as being, as the Tower notes:

In a critique of Linda Sarsour, Julie Lenarz, a senior fellow at The Israel Project, observed this past June in The Tower, “Linda Sarsour is not a feminist. She supports a culture that is forcing millions of women into religious slavery. She is a false apostle selling her regressive views to a blinded liberal audience.”

As for Rebecca Vilkomerson, you can read some of her anti-Israel activity and comments here, and below is a clip of her speaking at J Street, promoting BDS:

The New School did not seem to see the enormity of the problem, and assured the Jerusalem Post wide-eyed and disingenuously of their good intentions:

The New School responded in writing to The Jerusalem Post, saying the institution “is founded on principles of tolerance, social justice, and free intellectual exchange. These values remain central to our mission today, and we believe that engaging in debate on a range of issues and ideas is critical to our role as an academic institution”.

A representative who spoke on behalf of the school added: “We understand that there are different views on this issue.

For that reason, the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism Program has invited representatives of the magazine Tablet to organize an event to present some of these different views on this important topic; the program has also invited to participate Jonathan Greenblatt, national director and CEO of the Anti-Defamation League”.

The ADL declined the invitation.

Liel Leibowitz in The Tablet magazine launched a blistering attack on the New School for twisted thinking that led to their invitations:

Founded in 1919 by progressive New York intellectuals, The New School rose to prominence two decades later, when it took in a small band of Jewish intellectuals fleeing the Nazis. Eminences like Hannah Arednt, Leo Strauss, and Erich Fromm all benefited from the institution’s commitment to taking in the victims of the world’s most ancient and persistent hatred and giving them a place to pursue their ideas in peace.

How things change: Later this month, the university will co-sponsor a panel on anti-Semitism that will feature, among others, Linda Sarsour, who opined that “nothing is creepier than Zionism,” praised Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, and believes one cannot support the right of Jews to a homeland of their own and still be a feminist. Alongside Sarsour will be Rebecca Vilkomerson, who heads the odious Jewish Voice for Peace. The group, as an ADL report aptly put it, “uses its Jewish identity to shield the anti-Israel movement from allegations of anti-Semitism and to provide the movement with a veneer of legitimacy.” Among JVP’s recent achievements are the enthusiastic support of Rasmea Odeh, a Palestinian terrorist convicted of a bombing attack on a Jerusalem supermarket that left two young students dead and who was recently deported from the United States after lying about the incident on her immigration forms. The group is also a frequent supporter, despite its allegations to the contrary, of Alison Weir, an activist robustly promoting modern-day blood libels against Jews.

It goes without saying, sadly, that the event—which is co-sponsored by prominent progressive institutions like the radical magazine Jacobin—features not a single actual scholar of anti-Semitism, nor one voice that doesn’t belong comfortably in the deep left.

The New School, scrambling to respond to the widely broadcast negative reactions it received, offered to organize a second panel “to discuss these issues”:

We understand that there are differing views on the issue of anti-Semitism. For that reason, the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism Program has invited representatives of the magazine Tablet to organize an event to present some of these differing views on this important topic; the program has also invited to participate Jonathan Greenblatt, National Director and CEO of the Anti-Defamation League.

to which Liel Leibowitz at The Tablet angrily responded:

The aforementioned invitation arrived several moments later, to myself and other editors at Tablet, strongly suggesting that it had more to do with stanching the bleeding of a public relations problem that seriously resolving a brutal moral error. Even more insulting and infuriating is the fact that the invitation suggests that the New School sees this as a matter of balancing out two equally legitimate sides, each with its own point of view.

There ought never to be a debate between those who fan the flames of hatred and those who suffer its consequences. The New School of all institutions ought to know this, and it’s a shame that this once revered institution now peddles in the bluntest form of moral relativism rather than speak out against bigotry of all stripes.

My question remains: can the organizers at the New School really be so ignorant and obtuse as to think there is no problem with the panel of speakers at the antisemitism debate? Do they honestly think having another panel to discuss these “controversial issues” will balance out the problem?

Either they are so open-minded their brains fell out. Or they are outright antisemites. I still have not made up my mind.

Categories: Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism and the left, Antisemitism in academia, Jewish left
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To bigotry no sanction

June 13, 2017

To bigotry no sanction, Israel National News, Larry Domnitch, June 13, 2017

Linda Sarsour’s agenda is the abolition of the rights of others. She opposes the very existence of Israel. Among her statements and tweets, she has praised a terrorist who was involved in the murder of two college students, made the baseless claim that Muslim kids are being executed in the United States. Her statement that Zionists can’t be feminists obviously reflects the height of arrogance as she is a latecomer in a movement which had the participation of many Zionists for decades.

It would be a pleasant surprise if those Jewish leaders who defended Sarsour would feel so compelled to defend Israel when its reputation is so often defamed. Also, to all the Jews who rushed to her defense, a word to the wise: People like Sarsour may smile and express appreciation for your gestures, but are simply showing that they know how to play you. 

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The words of George Washington in a letter to the Jewish community of Newport, Rhode Island, resonate today as much as they did in August 1790. A small congregation of refugees and the sons of refugees who had escaped inquisitional rule in lands under Spanish and Portuguese rule, Washington assured them in these immortal words that the United States will assure freedom for all as it: “Gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.Just months later, the Bill of Rights, whose first amendment granted freedom of speech, was ratified .

Just months later, the Bill of Rights, whose first amendment granted freedom of speech, was ratified .

They are, however, very different statements.

Not giving sanction to bigotry means that while bigots have the right to openly spew their views as protected by the first amendment, they should never be given prominence or legitimacy. It is a moral imperative to refrain from giving bigots a podium, since doing so validates their hateful message.

For example, after a long legal battle, the American Nazi Party was permitted to march in Chicago in 1978 under the (questionable) pretext of free speech, but the city should never allow them to lead a memorial day Parade. Doing so would be akin to sanctioning their hateful ideology.

Sadly in American history, there were eras when the hate of the Ku Klux Klan was given significance in disregard of the admonitions of the first president. The damage they inflicted upon rights of others, the terror they sent into the hearts of fellow Americans is infamous in the annals of American history.

Linda Sarsour’s agenda is the abolition of the rights of others. She opposes the very existence of Israel. Among her statements and tweets, she has praised a terrorist who was involved in the murder of two college students, made the baseless claim that Muslim kids are being executed in the United States. Her statement that Zionists can’t be feminists obviously reflects the height of arrogance as she is a latecomer in a movement which had the participation of many Zionists for decades.

The real question: How can any adherent to Sharia law, which demands the submissiveness of women, be a feminist?

And there should never have been a forum for her as the keynote speaker at any graduation ceremony.

What is abhorrent, however, is not just the perception that she is merely exercising her rights of free speech, but the acceptance – and even support – by so many, of her invective.

CUNY President James B Milliken stated that he stood by the school’s decision to have Sarsour as the keynote speaker at the graduation for the Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy. He offered the familiar argument that it’s a matter of free speech!

Several professors at CUNY who penned a letter defending Sansour wrote that she represented “new activism of young people, women, immigrants, and others speaking out against discrimination and intolerance.”

They are clearly expressing support for the keynote speaker. A letter from Jewish leaders representing leftwing congregations and organizations in defense of Sarsour, stated that they “do not offer our stamp of approval to every tweet or message she has ever posted.” Indeed, they might not completely approve of her views but they are sufficiently acceptable to come to her defense.

It would be a pleasant surprise if those Jewish leaders who defended Sarsour would feel so compelled to defend Israel when its reputation is so often defamed. Also, to all the Jews who rushed to her defense, a word to the wise: People like Sarsour may smile and express appreciation for your gestures, but are simply showing that they know how to play you.

Then there is the silence: The Jewish organizations that have not spoken out against Sarsour, will only encourage more bigotry.

The local politicians of New York with a few exceptions have also failed to address the matter. But it is more than silence, there are politicians in New York who have supported Sarsour.

The events in New York City this spring should put up a warning flag to those who prize the values of freedom and mutual respect. Freedom is not a given. It must be safeguarded by people of good will who can discern between right and wrong without the numbing influence of political correctness.

If manipulation and enmity is given a pass by the silence of the majority, then the freedoms which the American forefathers endeavored to safeguard might someday be in jeopardy.

Categories: Anti-Zionism in America, Antisemitism in America, Jewish left, Linda Sarsour
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None is too many

February 1, 2017

None is too many, Israel National News, Jack Engelhard, February 1, 2017

(Please see also, The Lessons of Roosevelt’s Failures. — DM)

Sarah doesn’t remember the exact moment when Father and Mother decided it was time to leave as the Gestapo were tightening around Toulouse.

For me, now, I can’t imagine a more horrifying decision. How do you decide that it’s time to leave everything behind and, literally, run for the hills?

You’re leaving your country, your home, everything you know because one particular day you find that life is unbearable and you’ve run out of choices.

You are being hunted.

I can only try to imagine the tears and vexations of my mother when, despite her protests, it was time to go.

Largely through the efforts of the Catholic priest who studied Talmud with my father, and who had contacts with the French Underground, arrangements were made. They packed up. One suitcase. Plus a backpack. The backpack would be used by my father to carry me across the Pyrenees.

I cover much of that in “Escape from Mount Moriah,” a memoir about arriving in Montreal. That’s my story about being a refugee.

So today there are new stories about newer refugees; Trump’s restrictions to modify the influx from certain Muslim lands, and the protests here and abroad to stop Trump. They carry signs saying, “We are all immigrants,” and I say yes, but not all immigrants are alike.

We did not have 57 Jewish countries to save us as there are 57 Muslim countries to save these migrants coming to America.

We had no Israel. We had nothing. We had nobody.

I’m speaking here for ourselves, a family of four, and the millions of other families who were trapped, caught and slaughtered.

Roosevelt had clamped the doors to America except for a quota here and there and it was the same for Canada under Mackenzie King.

Chuck Schumer wasn’t around to weep for us as he weeps for the Muslims and in fact the policy for us was entirely different.

The man who ran the immigration office for Canada spoke for both his country and for America when he flatly declared, “None is too many.”

He was speaking about the few of us – the few Jews that had somehow survived Hitler’s systematic genocide.

I say systematic because there has never been anything like that, when a nation, Germany, takes it into its head to obliterate an entire population.

So there is absolutely no comparing Muslim immigrants to Jewish immigrants – for them it’s civil war, Arab against Arab – and they have choices.

For us it was a methodical and diabolical plan to obliterate us from the face of the earth…in which nearly everybody had a hand, including Islam.

We had no choices.

Today we call it the Holocaust. Back then it had no name. The victims, the prey, the hunted; they only knew it as a world war against them and them alone.

For what reason? What had they done? Had they committed acts of terrorism? There’s nothing like that on record.

Were we coming with books and motives that glorify murder? No, that is not our God. That is their god.

But it is for them and for their god that the world weeps today.

For us the Christian world was silent, in fact complicit, and some Jews living in freedom spoke up, but not nearly enough.

Today they speak up for Muslim immigrants.

These include American and Canadian Jews who had no tears for Jewish immigrants – immigrants who came not seeking a better life.

We were seeking life, period.

So please spare me your broken hearts. The refugees of yesteryear could have used your righteousness.

You are too late and you were nowhere to be found when your true brothers and sisters reached out for your hand but instead found a cold shoulder.

Categories: Holocaust refugees, Jewish left, President Trump, Trump agenda, Trump and refugees
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How Anti-Semitism Became Respectable Again

June 11, 2016

How Anti-Semitism Became Respectable Again, PJ Media, David P. Goldman, June 10, 2016

On most university campuses the majority of young brainwash victims take it for granted that Israeli nastiness is the source of the endemic Jew-hatred in the Muslim world. That mindset prevails from Berkeley to the Vatican Secretariat. A billion and half people cry from the bottom of their hearts: For us to live, they must die, or at least be driven from their homeland. The wretchedness and despair of this great mass of humanity, a tiny fraction of which has turned up on Europe’s doorstep, is too great to ignore. Surely the Jews must in some way be responsible. It is enough to turn some liberal Jews into functional anti-Semites.

The difference between today and the 1930s, to be sure, is that Jews are armed rather than defenseless. I am weary of excusing myself for breathing. Let them hate us as long as they fear us.

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The world was anti-Semitic in 1944, when Ben Hecht wrote A Guide for the Bedevilled. The majority of educated, civilized, and rational people believed that the Jews in some fashion had brought their own problems upon themselves. Hecht began fighting anti-Semitism after an unsettling exchange with a New York hostess, who explained to him that Jews had to acknowledge their own responsibility in the matter of their persecution. This polite Gentile lady explained:

The Jews complain. They suffer dreadfully, and they accuse. But they never stop to explain or to reason or to figure the thing out and tell the world what they, and only they, know…They are–how shall I put it–collaborative victims, a thing they refuse to see…The Germans are not a race of killers, fiends, of a special and different sort of sub-humans.

Not that she approved of Nazi genocide, to be sure; she may not have known the extent of the butchery, but she  knew that dreadful things were happening to Europe’s Jews. But she thought that the Germans must have had some kind of provocation to hate the Jews so deeply. Why else would the Germans hate Jews so much?

When did the old anti-Semitism return? For half a century the horror of a million Jewish children murdered by the Nazis stopped the mouths of the anti-Semites, but that memory has worn off. What Hecht’s interlocutor believed in 1944, most liberals believe today, not to mention the vast majority of Europeans. Yes, the Arabs hate Jews, and express this hatred in a barbaric way, they will allow, but that is because Israel has provoked the hatred.

Tripwires that once seemed taboo are being crossed every day. One was triggered in the new action film “Triple 9,” which portrays a gang of ruthless Russian mafia killers operating under the cover of a kosher meat business. There are some violent Jewish criminals, but I have not been able to find a single example of an observant Jew among them. The filmmakers have invented a stereotype that has no instantiation in the real world.

As Debbie Schlussel writes:

The movie, “Triple 9,” in theaters today, is one of the most blatantly anti-Semitic, anti-Israel movies I’ve seen in a very long time. And it’s also anti-police and anti-U.S. military. Plus it’s an incredibly violent, bloody movie whose message is that American military men and police officers are just as bad as ISIS. And so are Jews and Israelis. On top of that, the movie employs anti-Semitic terms, approvingly.[Corrupt cops] murder, torture, and kill for an Orthodox Jewish Israeli Russian mafia family headed by Kate Winslet…There isn’t a single Russian mafia figure who is an Orthodox Jew, but why be concerned with facts when you’re director John Hillcoat or writer Matt Cook who made this Protocols-of-the-Elders-of-Zion cinematic “masterpiece.”…Orthodox Jews don’t behead and kill people and don’t preside over tortured, bloodied bodies in real life. That’s the domain of Muslims. Except in this movie.

Anti-Semitic caricatures used to be off limits. When Dickens created the far less offensive character of Fagin in Oliver Twist, he atoned by inventing the saintly Jewish figure of Rina in Our Mutual Friend. One finds unflattering portrayal of Jews here and there in English fiction (including some despicable poems by T.S. Eliot) but nothing like this filth. It’s become acceptable to hate Jews.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu touched another tripwire this week by nominating mass-murderer Marwan Barghouti for the Nobel Peace Prize, an act hailed by the Arab press. “Barghouti is currently serving five life sentences in an Israeli prison for his role in leading terrorist activities during the first and second intifadas that included dozens of suicide bombings against Israeli civilians. He is a former leader of the Tanzim, a militant faction of the Fatah party currently headed by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, that took credit for many of the murders during the bloody Second Initfada in the early 2000’s. In 2014, he called for the launch of a third intifada,” the Jewish Press reported.

It is one thing to excuse Arab terrorism against Israeli civilians–the Left has done that throughout–and it is quite another to propose to reward murderers with the world’s most respected humanitarian honor. The world of enlightened opinion has no tears for the half million dead Syrian civilians, the tens of thousands of Kurds murdered by Turkish security services, or the countless dead in the Iraqi civil war now unfolding between ISIS and Iranian-backed Shi’ite militias. But it cries a river for suicide bombers who murder Israelis, because the Israelis in some way were asking for it.

On most university campuses the majority of young brainwash victims take it for granted that Israeli nastiness is the source of the endemic Jew-hatred in the Muslim world. That mindset prevails from Berkeley to the Vatican Secretariat. A billion and half people cry from the bottom of their hearts: For us to live, they must die, or at least be driven from their homeland. The wretchedness and despair of this great mass of humanity, a tiny fraction of which has turned up on Europe’s doorstep, is too great to ignore. Surely the Jews must in some way be responsible. It is enough to turn some liberal Jews into functional anti-Semites.

This is not a new thought. Before and during the Second World War it was the conventional wisdom. Authors whom I abhor like Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot said it openly. An author whom I love, J.R.R. Tolkien, said it allegorically: in The Hobbit, the Dwarves (whom he explicitly identified with the Jews) bring the calamity of Smaug upon themselves through their own obsession with gold in their miner’s kingdom at the Lonely Mountain. Tolkien was not an anti-Semite, not at least in the canonical definition (someone who hates Jews more than is absolutely necessary). On the contrary, he was something of a philo-Semite (he famously rebuked a German publisher who asked him to prove his Aryan heritage with the thought that he was sorry that he had no descent from “that talented people,” the Jews). But he wrote in a period when everyone knew that the Jews were in some measure responsible for their own troubles.

Tolkien, to be sure, compensated for his earlier ambivalent portrayal of the Dwarves/Jews in The Hobbit by portraying an Elven-Dwarvish friendship in The Fellowship of the Ring, deservedly the most beloved English-language novel of the 20th century. He was a man of his times who at length rose above his times. Those who did not rise above their times included G.K. Chesterton, who conjectured that there must be some truth to the medieval allegation that the Jews made Passover matzoh from the blood of Christians, and Hilaire Belloc, who wrote a book entitled “The Jews” calling for the “elimination” or “segregation” of “the alien.”

Islam, as Bernard Lewis wrote in his seminal essay “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” “has given dignity to drab and impoverished lives.” What is that dignity? It is the consoling belief that despite the humiliation of the Muslims during the past two centuries, the Umma still possesses God’s revelation and divine favor. The Christian West, from the White House to the Vatican to the Elysee Palace to the Kanzleramt, sustains this conviction by its courtship of Muslim good will. There is one great cognitive dissonance in the mix, and that is the transformation of the Jews from a despised, dependent and vulnerable minority to a Middle Eastern superpower. The return of the Jews to Zion threatens the belief that Islam is the seal of prophecy: how could God favor the Jews, who perverted the original revelation that Mohammed restored? That is why the Temple Mount remains a radioactive issue on the Muslim street. Merely by being there, Israel offers an existential challenge to Muslim identity. Conservative Muslim regimes, to be sure, may make a temporary accommodation with Israel when it is in their interest to do so; apocalyptic regimes like Iran’s never will.

Muslim civilization is crumbling, as I warned in my 2011 book “How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying, Too).” The human cost of this crumbling will be horrific, ranking among the worst humanitarian disasters in human history, and a disaster that we will watch in real time in high-definition video. The West is sickened by the spectacle and indifferent to its causes; if the Jews madden the Muslims, enlightened opinion thinks, let them go away.

Ich, ich dulde dass du rasest, Du, Du duldest dass ich atme, wrote Heinrich Heine of the relationship between Gentiles and Jews in 19th century Europe: I tolerate your rage, and you tolerate my breathing. Things have changed. The crime of the Jews today is to breathe, and especially to breathe the air of their own country. As the body count rises, enlightened opinion once again will blame the Jews for breathing. Muslims will continue to engineer humanitarian disasters (as in the last Gaza War) to solicit Western sympathy, and European governments will attempt to placate their growing Muslim populations by blaming Israel.

The difference between today and the 1930s, to be sure, is that Jews are armed rather than defenseless. I am weary of excusing myself for breathing. Let them hate us as long as they fear us.

Categories: Antisemitism, Israel, Israeli security, Jewish left
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