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Judge Reinstates Hamas/AMP Lawsuit

January 8, 2018

Judge Reinstates Hamas/AMP Lawsuit, Investigative Project on Terrorism, Abha Shankar, January 8, 2018

At a conference last week hosted by the Muslim American Society (MAS) and the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), Abuirshaid tried to erase Jews’ historical claim to Israel. He claimed the “Zionist Project” is a “form of apartheid” that seeks to “Judaize” Palestine. “In creating false Zionist historical and religious narratives, it’s a deliberate attempt to deny the indigenous people of Palestine, us, from their rights and their own land. And Jerusalem is the bedrock to forge and falsify the history of Palestine and Judaizing it,” he said.

That’s the kind of message that would have fit right in with any of the Palestine Committee groups. When the suit was originally filed last May, the Boims’ attorneys issued a statement explaining that Abuirshaid and the other defendants “directed and controlled the organizations in 1996 … that are legally obliged to pay the judgment won by the Boims.

“These defendants cannot escape their legal liability and accountability for murder by merely changing the names of their organization.

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A Chicago federal judge on Thursday reinstated a lawsuit alleging that a virulently anti-Israel group and several of its activists are “alter egos and/or successors” of a defunct U.S. based Hamas-support network previously found liable for the murder of an American teen in a 1996 terror attack.

American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) routinely sponsors conferences that serve as a platform for Israel bashers, and openly approves “resistance” against the “Zionist state.” One AMP official acknowledged the goal is to “to challenge the legitimacy of the State of Israel.”

AMP is also one of the principal advocates of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against the Jewish state. Its BDS campaigns include: Ramadan Date Boycott, SodaStream, Stop the JNF, Stolen Homes/Airbnb, and Stop G4S. Because they include groups dedicated to Israel’s elimination and single out Israel for criticism while they ignore other nations with severe human rights abuses, BDS campaigns are considered inherently anti-Semitic.

U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman not only vacated her earlier dismissal of the case, she also authorized limited discovery in the case. “[T]his Court placed too much weight to defendants’ declarations without providing plaintiffs with the opportunity to conduct limited jurisdictional discovery on the existence of an alter ego relationship. Accordingly, this Court will vacate its previous order dismissing the case … and permit plaintiffs to conduct discovery solely to address jurisdiction.”

This is a major victory for the family of 17-year-old David Boim. He was shot dead in Israel in May 1996 by Hamas terrorists. In a historic judgment, Boim’s parents Stanley and Joyce Boim won $156 million in damages against the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP) and other members of the U.S. Hamas support network called the “Palestine Committee.” The Committee was created by the Muslim Brotherhood to advance Hamas’ agenda politically and financially in the United States.

The IAP was the first to publish the genocidal, anti-Semitic Hamas charter in English. Its fundraisers benefited the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), which – along with five former officials – was convicted in 2008 of illegally routing millions of dollars to Hamas. IAP fundraisers featured overt praise for Hamas, and skits in which Palestinians murdered Israelis.

A 1996 Dallas Morning News story captured the scene at one IAP rally:

Inside a Kansas City auditorium in 1989, a masked man stepped to a lectern and described in Arabic the “oceans of blood” spilled in Hamas’ armed attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians.

He thanked two nonprofit organizations for being early allies: the Islamic Association for Palestine, sponsor of the conference, and the Occupied Land Fund [an early name for HLF].

An internal 1992 IAP document, “Islamic Action Plan for Palestine,” makes at least four specific references to Hamas, including its leadership role in the Palestinian intifada through “a lot of sacrifices from martyrs, detainees, wounded, injured, fugitives and deportees…”

IAP was among the first organizations the Muslim Brotherhood created in North America to specifically focus on the Palestinian cause, even preceding the Palestine Committee, the document said. Among the Palestine Committee’s tasks, “Asking the countries to increase the financial and the moral support for Hamas.”

At the time of the Boim judgment in 2004, IAP and other defendants claimed they were no longer in business and had no money to pay the damages. But that was a ruse, the Boims’ attorneys say, alleging that the defendants formed new organizations like the American Muslims for Palestine to escape their legal responsibility to pay damages. Successor groups, or alter egos, of organizations previously found liable for providing material support to Hamas need to pay the remaining judgment, the new litigation argues.

In 2015, the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) first identified at least five AMP officials and speakers who worked in the Hamas-supporting “Palestine Committee.”

An April 2014 AMP-sponsored conference in Chicago, for example, featured former IAP Chairman Sabri Samirah.

“We are ready to sacrifice all we have for Palestine. Long Live Palestine,” Samirah said. “We have a mission here [in the U.S.] also to support the struggle of our people back there in order to achieve a free land in the Muslim world, without dictators and without corruption.”

The Boims’ attorneys say that AMP’s current leadership and donors are “significantly identical” to their Palestine Committee branches, including the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), and the American Muslim Society (AMS) which served as another name for the IAP.

Rafeeq Jaber, a defendant in the new lawsuit, is a former IAP president and is now AMP’s registered agent in Chicago. AMP President Abdelbasset Hamayel was IAP’s secretary general. AMP’s conferences and other events are identical in their pro-Hamas message to conferences held earlier by IAP, including overlapping speakers’ lists.

AMP board member Osama Abuirshaid, a target of the current lawsuit, has close affiliations to both the IAP and the Northern Virginia think tank called the United Association for Studies and Research (UASR), a Palestine Committee branch that was headed by senior Hamas member Mousa Abu Marzook.

Abuirshaid served as editor of IAP’s Arabic periodical, Al-Zaytounah, a mouthpiece for pro-Hamas propaganda. The magazine also published advertisements by terrorist-tied charities, including HLF, the Global Relief Foundation (GRF), and the Benevolence International Foundation (BIF).

UASR published an academic journal that prosecutors in the HLF case say was “involved in passing Hamas communiques to the United States-based Muslim Brotherhood community and relaying messages from that community back to Hamas.”

Abuirshaid has openly expressed support for Hamas. He criticized Egyptian leader Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in a 2015 tweet for designating Hamas as a terrorist organization. Calling Egypt’s capital “Cairo Aviv,” Abuirshaid dismissed the move: “Look who’s talking!? A terrorist murder regime.”

In a 2014 article written in Arabic, he praised the “Palestinian resistance” against the “Zionist aggression” in Hamas-controlled Gaza: “The facts of the current Zionist aggression have clearly shown that the Palestinian resistance is no longer in the position of receiving slaps without the response of some of them, and even many of them responding. It also showed the creativity of the resisting Palestinian mind, consistent with the severity of its being unyielding with long-range rockets, high-explosive missiles and bombs, and unmanned aerial vehicles, most of which are domestically manufactured, being designed to attack the enemy at the doorstep of its military bases by sea, landing behind its lines through tunnels, etc. It is a slap that Israel receives from the Resistance every day, and it finds no response except through the cowardly weapon of targeting civilians with artillery, air and sea missiles to raise the human and economic costs of the Palestinians.”

Abuirshaid has also praised Hamas war tactics: “There is a difference between Hamas, whose youth renewed their adherence to their starting point determined on liberalization, and Fatah, which has grown old after deviating from the creed of liberation and resistance upon which it was established.”

“There is a difference between those who resist and those who compromise; between those who constitute an army for liberation, and those who ready battalions of lackeys; a difference between those who rise up for the blood of martyrs, and those who spill it in the wine glasses of Israel,” he added.

At a conference last week hosted by the Muslim American Society (MAS) and theIslamic Circle of North America (ICNA), Abuirshaid tried to erase Jews’ historical claim to Israel. He claimed the “Zionist Project” is a “form of apartheid” that seeks to “Judaize” Palestine. “In creating false Zionist historical and religious narratives, it’s a deliberate attempt to deny the indigenous people of Palestine, us, from their rights and their own land. And Jerusalem is the bedrock to forge and falsify the history of Palestine and Judaizing it,” he said.

That’s the kind of message that would have fit right in with any of the Palestine Committee groups. When the suit was originally filed last May, the Boims’ attorneys issued a statement explaining that Abuirshaid and the other defendants “directed and controlled the organizations in 1996 … that are legally obliged to pay the judgment won by the Boims.

“These defendants cannot escape their legal liability and accountability for murder by merely changing the names of their organizations,” they said.

Categories: American Muslims for Palestine, Anti-Israel, Anti-Zionism in America, Antisemitism in America, Hamas, U.S. courts
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Trump’s Jewish nominee for Civil Rights Office smeared by Arab groups

November 10, 2017

Trump’s Jewish nominee for Civil Rights Office smeared by Arab groups, Israel National News, Dr. Richard L. Cravatts, November 9, 2017

(Please see also, Trump’s Latest Education Nominee Steps into the Maelstrom. – DM)

No sooner had President Trump nominated Kenneth Marcus, president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under the Law, to be Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education, then extremist anti-Israel groups began to mount an aggressive campaign to derail the appointment.

This is a remarkable affront to a civil rights lawyer who has spent his career fighting for the rights of women, the disabled, and members of many minority groups: African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians, as well as Sikhs, Arabs, and Muslim Americans. Marcus’s prior tenure at the federal Office for Civil Rights was widely lauded for effective leadership and support for the rights of all students. For this reason, most civil rights groups have thus far refrained from subjecting Marcus to the vituperation that other recent Trump nominees have faced. 

Some extremist anti-Israel groups have broken ranks, however, attacking the administration’s Jewish civil rights nominee with reckless and malicious falsehoods.

One of these groups, Palestine Legal, whose mission is to bolster the anti-Israel movement by challenging efforts to protect Jewish students from anti-Semitism, immediately issued a letter smearing Mr. Marcus as an “Anti-Palestinian Crusader” and opposing his nomination in terms of the so-called Livingstone Formulation. Under that formulation, as identified by British sociologist David Hirsch, anti-Semites accuse Jews of fabricating anti-Semitism claims in order to silence decent people who are concerned about Israel’s supposed human rights violations.

In this way, Palestine Legal’s director, Dima Khalidi, levels the spurious charge that “Marcus is the architect of a strategy to abuse civil rights law to suppress campus criticism of Israel.” In other words, she contends that Marcus’ campaign to ameliorate campus anti-Semitism is not based on a virtuous desire to end bigotry but is a disingenuous attempt at “shielding Israel from scrutiny,” consistent with the “Livingstone Formulation.”

Part of that notion is “the counteraccusation that the raisers of the issue of anti-Semitism do so with dishonest intent, in order to de-legitimize criticism of Israel. The allegation is that the accuser chooses to ‘play the anti-Semitism card’ rather than to relate seriously to, or to refute, the criticisms of Israel.”

Of course, those who refuse to acknowledge that their speech or behavior may, in fact, be anti-Semitic normally resist such designations, but the allegation of Palestine Legal against Mr. Marcus is particularly odious because it seeks to impugn his integrity as someone fighting anti-Semitism, suggesting instead that his true motive, carefully hidden from view and masked as benign activism, is actually to serve the interests of Israel by trying to delegitimize and libel its campus critics.

Moreover, Palestine Legal claims, in order to shield Israel from scrutiny, to insulate its policies and state behavior from critique, Mr. Marcus, they say, pretends to be interested in anti-Semitism but is actually creating a smokescreen to shield Israel “at the expense of civil and constitutional rights.”

In addition to the Livingstone Formulation, these groups are also going after Marcus with the classic charge that Jews are attempting to use gain control of government power for nefarious purposes. “Marcus has no business enforcing civil rights laws when he has explicitly used such laws to chill the speech activities and violate the civil rights of Arab, Muslim, Jewish, and other students who advocate for Palestinian rights,” Khalidi charged.

It is not coincidental, of course, that a group dedicated to undermining efforts to fight anti-Semitism would have been aware of the efforts of Mr. Marcus and his colleagues as they attempted to identify the causes and corrosive impact of campus anti-Semitic speech and behavior.

For at least the last decade the primary source of anti-Zionist, anti-Israel, and anti-Semitic activism on campuses has been anti-Israel individuals and groups, including the Muslim Student Association and the radical Students for Justice in Palestine, among others. So, even as Ms. Khalidi would have one believe that Mr. Marcus launched a campaign to silence pro-Palestinian activists merely as a tactical ploy to insulate Israel from critique and condemnation, the anti-Israel activism which she so ardently defends has regularly spawned instances in which agitation against Israel has included speech and behavior which has been considered, and in fact often was, anti-Semitic.

Of great concern to those who have observed the invidious byproduct of this radicalism is the frequent appearance of anti-Israel sentiment that often rises to the level of anti-Semitism, when virulent criticism of Israel bleeds into a darker, more sinister level of hatred—enough to make Jewish students, whether or not they support or care about Israel at all, uncomfortable, unsafe, or hated on their own campuses.

That is precisely the type of “hostile environment,” created by generating hostility toward Jewish students over their perceived or actual support of Israel, that may violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, one of the legal tools Mr. Marcus has used and may well continue to use in his new role to help insure that universities take steps to ameliorate situations in which such prejudice-laced campus climates are allowed to develop.

Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), another anti-Israel group that also, not insignificantly, supports the BDS movement, published an open letter denouncing the choice of Mr. Marcus for the OCR appointment, as well, repeating the spurious charge that the use of Title VI statutes, and such guidelines as the U.S. State Department Working Definition of Anti-Semitism, would have the perverse side effect of suppressing the free speech of “pro-Palestinian” activists.

And despite Palestine Legal’s fear that the conflation of “criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism    . . .  has really serious consequences for those who advocate for Palestinian human rights and are being condemned and censored and punished as a result of the enormous pressure being placed on universities by the likes of Marcus and dozens of other Israel advocacy groups,” the truth is that not human rights advocates behave in civil ways, and the fact that “pro-Palestinian” activists support a minority group does not justify their misbehavior and extremism, even for what they clearly believe to be a noble cause.

But pro-Palestinian advocacy on campus—the very activism Palestine Legal is so intent on preserving—has been shown to correlate directly to an uptick in anti-Semitic speech and behavior. For example, in two studies it conducted of anti-Semitism on U.S. campuses, the AMCHA Initiative, an organization that investigates and documents anti-Semitism at U.S. universities, found that “Schools with instances of student-produced anti-Zionist expression, including BDS promotion, are 7 times more likely to have incidents that targeted Jewish students for harm than schools with no evidence of students’ anti-Zionist expression and the more such anti-Zionist expression, the higher the likelihood of incidents involving anti-Jewish hostility.” This “anti-Zionist expression” and “BDS promotion are,” of course, the central aspects of Palestinian activism.

That is the issue here, and why it is necessary and important that, in the effort to promote the Palestinian cause, another group—Jewish students on American campuses—do not become victims themselves in a struggle for another group’s self-determination.

Richard L. Cravatts, PhD, President Emeritus of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, and the author of Dispatches From the Campus War Against Israel and Jews, is also a member of the board of directors of the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under the Law and the AMCHA Initiative.

Categories: Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism, Antisemitism and the left, Antisemitism in academia, Antisemitism in America, Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, Department of Education, Jewish Voice for Peace, Kenneth Marcus, Muslim Students Association, Palestine Legal, Students for Justice in Palestine
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The Anti-Semitic Jewish Media

August 16, 2017

The Anti-Semitic Jewish Media, Gatestone Institute, Bruce Bawer, August 16, 2017

Almost everyone in a position to do something is a coward. Politicians continue to recite the mantra that “Muslims are today’s Jews,” even though in Europe today Muslims are far more often the tormentors than the tormented, and Jews lead the list of victims of public abuse.

Needless to say, the immigrants Trump wants to keep out of the U.S. are precisely the type who, in Europe, are currently Jew-bashing people like Stephen Miller — and Rob Eshman. But Eshman doesn’t want to think about this ticklish fact, which challenges his own simplistic, self-righteous pontifications.

Linda Sarsour is the very personification of stealth Islamization and an obvious anti-Semite. But as Davidson himself noted, she’s acquired plenty of Jewish allies and defenders, “including Jeremy Ben-Ami, Mark Hetfield, Rabbi Jill Jacobs and Brad Lander.”

For years now, Jews across western Europe have been the targets of harassment by Muslims. Police officers stand guard outside of synagogues. Recently, when I stayed in the Jewish Quarter in Rome, I couldn’t help notice the presence of multiple police kiosks, each manned by an armed cop. Many Jews in European cities have long since ceased wearing yarmulkes or Stars of David. Jewish kids are instructed by their parents to avoid identifying themselves as Jews at school lest they be beaten up by their little Muslim friends.

Meanwhile, almost everyone in a position to do something is a coward. Politicians continue to recite the mantra that “Muslims are today’s Jews,” even though in Europe today Muslims are far more often the tormentors than the tormented, and Jews lead the list of victims of public abuse. Police prefer not to prosecute Muslim perpetrators for fear of being called “Islamophobes.” Teachers don’t want to deal with Muslim bullies in their classes for the same reason.

Yet you would hardly know this to read much of America’s Jewish media. On August 2, the Jewish Journal ran a piece slamming Trump adviser Stephen Miller for dismissing (quite properly) the suggestion by CNN’s Jim Acosta that the new immigration bill favoring English-speakers violated the “spirit” of Emma Lazarus’s Statue of Liberty poem, “The New Colossus,” and emphasizing, as if it had anything to do with the issue, that Miller himself is the great-grandson of Jewish immigrants. This was not the first time the Jewish Journal had gone after Miller for being a Jew who supports immigration reform. In March, another piece in that publication, headlined (I kid you not) “From Hebrew School to Halls of Power,” noted that Miller was “a principal author of Trump’s draconian immigration measures, including the executive order the president signed in late January targeting immigrants from Muslim-majority countries,” even though “[t]hese politics are generally reviled in the liberal circles of his Jewish upbringing.”

The big hit-job, however, came a year ago, when the editor-in-chief of the Jewish Journal, Rob Eshman, sneered at Miller for the way in which he “froth[ed] the mob” at Trump rallies over immigration. Eshman professed shock at the news that Miller is Jewish. How, he asked, could “this young anti-immigrant leader” be “the descendent of immigrants”? Eshman looked into Miller’s family tree, and discovered that his maternal great-grandfather, seeking to escape persecution by Cossacks, fled Antopol (in present-day Belarus) and settled in Pennsylvania, where he founded a thriving business. And yet, thundered Eshman, Miller dares to serve as “Trump’s anti-immigrant avatar.” Imagine: “The great-grandson of a desperate refugee can grow up to shill for the demagogue bent on keeping desperate refugees like his great-grandfather out.”

Stephen Miller, Senior Advisor to the President for Policy, talks to reporters about President Donald Trump’s support for creating a “merit-based immigration system”, August 2, 2017. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Needless to say, the immigrants Trump wants to keep out of the U.S. are precisely the type who, in Europe, are currently Jew-bashing people like Stephen Miller — and Rob Eshman. But Eshman doesn’t want to think about this ticklish fact, which challenges his own simplistic, self-righteous pontifications. No, better to demonize Miller as “an American Jew [who has] turn[ed] on immigrants,” who has “tak[en] the side of people who… would have met your own great-grandparents at the docks with stones and spitballs,” and who is “stoking anti-immigrant fear and hate, by calling for a ban on an entire religion.”

As it happens, Trump has never sought to enact a ban on an entire religion, although the present situation in Europe certainly makes a good argument for such a ban (with ample room for sensible exceptions, of course).

On August 3, over at the Forward, formerly the Jewish Daily Forward, one Steven Davidson actually served up one of the most idiotic articles of the year, entitled “19 People Jews Should Worry About More Than Linda Sarsour.” Sarsour, of course, is the devout, hijab-wearing, sharia-loving, Israel-boycotting Muslim who, since her high-profile appearance at the Women’s March on the day after Trump’s inauguration, has become a hero of feminism and of the left generally. Linda Sarsour is the very personification of stealth Islamization and an obvious anti-Semite. But as Davidson himself noted, she’s acquired plenty of Jewish allies and defenders, “including Jeremy Ben-Ami, Mark Hetfield, Rabbi Jill Jacobs and Brad Lander.”

As for Davidson, while finding some of her language “coarse and insensitive,” he insists that criticism of her has “no basis in reality.” In his piece, he encouraged readers to move from Sarsour and focus their concerns instead on 19 other people, including Louis Farrakhan, David Duke, the Ayatollah Khamenei, and the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah. Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m capable of hating all these other people while still having enough hate left for Linda Sarsour. (I’m also capable of noticing that nobody in the American mainstream is celebrating most of these other creeps, while Sarsour, under a Hillary Clinton administration, would probably have been in line for a Presidential Medal of Freedom.)

Also on the list, however, are White House counter-terrorism adviser Sebastian Gorka, whom Davidson smears as “a member of a far-right group founded by Nazis”; Trump strategist Steve Bannon, formerly of Breitbart, which “spew[s] xenophobic hate”; Milo Yiannopoulos, who although half-Jewish “disseminat[es] Jewish conspiratorial tropes”; and President Trump himself, whose crimes against the Jewish people, according to Davidson, include “[r]efus[al] to mention Jews on Holocaust Remembrance Day.” Never mind that he has a Jewish daughter and grandchildren; we are supposed to believe that it is Trump, not Sarsour, who threatens Jews. Perhaps Davidson should have a little chat with some of the growing number of European Jews who are heading straight to Trump’s America to escape Sarsour’s coreligionists who, in countries run by politicians of whom Davidson doubtless approves, are being allowed to turn Europe once again into a place from which Jews feel compelled to flee.

Categories: Antisemitic Jewish media, Antisemitism and the left, Antisemitism in America, Antisemitism in Europe, Trump and antisemitism
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Anti-Israel Curricula Used in World History Courses Across the Country

August 12, 2017

Anti-Israel Curricula Used in World History Courses Across the Country, Washington Free Beacon, , August 12, 2017

Getty Images

A monograph published late last month of anti-Israel curriculum used in Newton, Mass., public high schools has led to revelations of similar materials in circulation at other school districts in the country, the report’s researcher told the Washington Free Beacon on Thursday.

Steven Stotsky of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) said that since the release of his findings in “Indoctrinating Our Youth: How a U.S. Public School Curriculum Skews the Arab-Israeli Conflict and Islam,” he has received phone calls alerting him to disquieting curricula being used in Michigan and California.

“We turned over a rock and discovered a significant problem,” said Stotsky, about his deep dive into textbooks, articles, timelines, and maps used from at least 2011 to 2015—some possibly still in use—for World History course sections on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Islam in Newton’s two public high schools, which are among the most prestigious in the country.

The materials included the Arab World Studies Notebook, a textbook the American Jewish Committee has previously condemned as filled with “factually inaccuracies,” “overt bias,” and “unabashed propagandizing”; a timeline of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that almost entirely omitted instances of Palestinian terrorism; and a misrepresentative translation of the Hamas charter.

Stotsky said procedures must be established for vetting all materials brought into the classroom.

“Teachers are pulling things off the Internet, and a lot of it is fine, but a lot of it not. They can’t just be giving this stuff to students,” said Stotsky.

He questioned the decision to teach the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a history class at all.

“History is complicated enough when you are studying issues that are 100, 200 years old,” he said. “You further complicate things when you add current events, and the Israeli-Palestinian issue is still politically and ideologically active.”

Stotsky’s report was the first comprehensive study of these materials, which were only obtained after a years-long battle with Newton administrators by an ad-hoc group of parents and concerned citizens.

Questions about the Newton curriculum were first raised in 2011, but the school district delayed turning over the documents until the summer of 2016. They only complied with those demands after Judicial Watch submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in October 2014, and even then dragged their feet for another two-and-a-half years.

“The obstruction, the failure to respond to citizens’ concerned, the lack of transparency was shocking,” said Stotsky. “The fact that it had to go all the way to a FOIA request is outrageous.”

An easy fix to the transparency issue, said Stotsky, would be simply throwing all curricula up on the Internet as a matter of policy.

Inaccurate, misleading, and radical Israel education is an ongoing problem at area schools, Stotsky said, pointing to a May 2017 “Middle East History Day” program at Newton North High School, at which he described a speaker as giving an “anti-Israel rant” to 150 students.

According to Stotsky, all the members of the Newton School Committee were sent copies of the CAMERA monograph weeks ago, and were asked to respond. Stotsky has been met with silence.

Ruth Goldman, the chair of the Newton School Committee—one of whose roles she said is “transparent communication with parents”—said all of the committee members received the CAMERA monograph and that a few had skimmed through it.

“You have to understand, we receive a lot of materials, and we can’t look through everything. We proactively seek out things that are agenda items for the committee. We don’t take up every thing that comes across our email,” said Goldman.

Goldman also said she couldn’t speak to the details of the case because “all that happened before my time on the committee.” She has served as the committee chair since 2013, a year before the FOIA was first submitted.

“It really had all been taken care of by the time I got here. It’s an old subject at this point,” Goldman said. “We communicate regularly with parents. We have a transparent process at the school committee.”

She wouldn’t speak to specific school curriculum, but said the district adheres to state guidelines and that “history is a tricky subject” taught in a “narrative and critical framework.”

Other school committee members told the Washington Free Beacon that they had not received the monograph and were not familiar with the case.

The mayor of Newton, who also sits on the school committee, was “too busy” to comment.

The superintendent did not respond to the Free Beacon‘s inquiry.

Categories: Academia and Israel, Academia and Palestinians, Anti-Zionism in America, Antisemitism in America, U.S. public schools
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California Imams Caught on Video Preaching Jew-Hatred, Violence

July 26, 2017

California Imams Caught on Video Preaching Jew-Hatred, Violence, Front Page Magazine, Ari Lieberman, July 26, 2017

Aside from the videos, there’s another more troubling aspect to this story, one centering on the gross disparate treatment the mainstream media provides to certain bias crimes. It appears that some hate crimes take precedence over others, depending on which ethnic group is attacked.

[A]nti-Semitic views have seeped into the left. Rancid individuals like Linda Sarsour are portrayed by media outlets like the New York Times as moderate civil rights activists when in fact, they are anything but. Sarsour, Shahin, Harmoush and many others within the Muslim community harbor deep-seated, xenophobic attitudes with particular vitriol reserved toward Jews. The fact that the mainstream media chooses to ignore this unwavering fact should be of concern to all Americans. 

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Two disturbing videos have surfaced involving California-based Muslim preachers in which both are heard spewing anti-Semitic vitriol as well as issuing implicit calls for violence against Jews. The videos, which are not dissimilar in content and shrill to those which have emerged from Gaza, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere in the Arab Mideast, reveal the extent to which anti-Semitism is deeply embedded in large segments of the American Muslim community.

The first video features Egyptian-born preacher Ammar Shahin, who is the imam of the Islamic Center of Davis, northern California. The sermon was delivered on July 21. Shahin, who delivered the sermon in both English and Arabic, is heard invoking an anti-Semitic hadith in which Muslims will do battle with the Jews and the Jews will be forced to take shelter behind rocks and trees. Shahin then says that the trees and rocks will call out to the Muslims and say, “Oh Muslim…come, there is someone behind me – except for the Gharqad tree, which is the tree of the Jews.”

Shahin refers to Jews as “filth” and calls on Allah to, “annihilate them down to the very last one; do not spare any of them.” Not content with merely the annihilation of Jewry, Shahin chillingly beseeches Allah to, “make this happen by our hands.” Apparently, a depraved Shahin wants to feel the knife plunging into his victim and derives perverse satisfaction from that feeling.

When confronted with the video, Shahin, who likened Jews to “filth” and called for their “annihilation,” among other sordid gems, alleged that his words were “taken out of context.” It’s funny how Jew-haters always claim to be “taken out of context” once they’re caught. Louis Farrakhan, Linda Sarsour and Keith Ellison, have all resorted to this same tired excuse, once exposed.

The second video, which was also delivered on July 21, features Sheikh Mahmoud Harmoush. The Friday sermon was delivered to congregants at the Islamic Center of Riverside, California.

Harmoush is heard telling his congregants that the immigrant Jews took advantage of Muslim hospitality and conspired to steal the “beautiful land…with killing, crime and massacres.” More ominously, Harmoush invokes “Jihad” and urges his flock to “wake up; it is time to be a Muslim. Prayer is not the only thing.” He further urges them to “resist and fight back” claiming that in addition to “Palestine” the Jews are seeking to seize “most of the Middle East…even Mecca and Medina.” Harmoush completes his screed with the obligatory, “destroy the [Jews] and render them sunder.”

According to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), Harmoush “holds educational and leadership positions at several institutions in Southern California, teaches Arabic at UCLA San Bernardino, and is a member of the leadership council of the Syrian American Council.”

In 2010, Harmoush was embroiled in legal battle involving the expansion of his mosque in Temecula, California. Residents opposed to the expansion cited traffic concerns but others pointed to fears of radicalism and terror. At the time, Harmoush was quoted by the New York Times stating that accusations of radicalism “really are not worth responding to.”

Clearly, those who opposed the 2010 mosque expansion project had their fears validated by MEMRI’s recent exposé. When interviewed by the New York Times, Harmoush placed his best, moderate foot forward but a radically different and more disquieting picture of Harmoush emerges when he issued an Islamic sermon to a Muslim audience behind closed doors. There, in the safety of secrecy, away from prying eyes and ears, his true feelings poured forth to an approving audience.

Aside from the videos, there’s another more troubling aspect to this story, one centering on the gross disparate treatment the mainstream media provides to certain bias crimes. It appears that some hate crimes take precedence over others, depending on which ethnic group is attacked.

In January and June of 2017 the Islamic Center of Davis was the target of bias crimes. In the first instance, a vandal broke some of the mosque’s windows and placed bacon strips on the mosque’s door handle. In the second instance, an individual dumped cut up pages of the Quran outside the center. Both of these outrages garnered national mainstream media attention and rightfully so. By contrast, the instant shocking revelations involving the anti-Semitic Islamic sermons have garnered scant mainstream media coverage. Thus far, only Jewish and conservative media outlets have given this important matter the coverage it rightly deserves.

The reasons for this are two-fold. First and foremost, both imams originate from Muslim countries – Egypt and Syria – and this type of negative exposure runs counter to the narrative the mainstream media wishes to present. But the sad fact remains that the Muslim community is rife with rabid anti-Semitism. This is hardly surprising given that there is a near 100 percent prevalence of anti-Semitic attitudes in the Arab world.

Second, and perhaps more ominously, anti-Semitic views have seeped into the left. Rancid individuals like Linda Sarsour are portrayed by media outlets like the New York Times as moderate civil rights activists when in fact, they are anything but. Sarsour, Shahin, Harmoush and many others within the Muslim community harbor deep-seated, xenophobic attitudes with particular vitriol reserved toward Jews. The fact that the mainstream media chooses to ignore this unwavering fact should be of concern to all Americans.

Categories: Anti-Zionism in America, Antisemitism in academia, Antisemitism in America, Islam and Jews, Media and Islam
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Hatem Bazian: Terrorist Professor Hamas Promoter

July 13, 2017

Hatem Bazian: Terrorist Professor Hamas Promoter, Front Page Magazine, July 13, 2017

Is Hatem Bazian the most dangerous professor in the USA? Nablus-born Bazian, is notorious for calling for intifada [violent uprising] in the United States.

He is the founder of the radical organizations Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and American Muslims for Palestine (AMP). He is a serial pusher of conspiracies, and has a “project” to re-write history. More worryingly, he is largely responsible for the wave of anti-Semitic incitement across North American campuses.

For more info about Bazian, go to this link at the indispensable Canary Mission website. The Canary Mission database was created to document people and groups that are promoting hatred of the U.S., Israel and the Jewish people, particularly on college campuses in North America. You can also learn more about Bazian, SJP and AMP at their comprehensive profile pages at the Freedom Center’s Discover the Networks resource site.

 

 

Categories: Academia and freedom of speech, Academia and Islamists, Academia and Israel, Academia and the left, Antisemitism in academia, Antisemitism in America
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The 45th President’s Anti Semitism Problem

June 30, 2017

The 45th President’s Anti Semitism Problem, The Jewish Press, Rabbi YY Rubinstein, June 30, 2017

Given the Left’s growing animosity toward Israel, it is hardly a surprise that Jared Kushner, the president’s Jewish son-in-law, is someone the Left has firmly in its sights.

Claims of sinister Jewish control of governments used to come from the extreme Right and the extreme Left. Now they seem to be coming from the mainstream Left as well.

And that leads me to conclude that the 45th president of the United States – half German, half Scottish, and so hated by the media and the Left – far from exhibiting any symptoms of anti-Semitism is, in fact, the victim of that oldest of all hatreds.

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Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan earlier this year urged President Trump to “extricate” himself from what he claimed was Jewish influence in the White House, starting with Jared Kushner.

“Ask any Jew, even your son-in-law, America is never first, Israel is always first,” said Farrakhan. “Mr. Trump, you have to extricate yourself from being controlled by any one of these.”

Art Jones, a neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier, agrees with Farrakhan and in April spoke at a rally in Kentucky accusing Trump of having betrayed him.

“The white majority are fed up of this Two Party… Jew Party… Queer Party system. Now President Trump; he has surrounded himself with hordes of Jews, including a Jew in his own family…”

But if you thought it was just the crazies who see Trump as having been caught in the nefarious web of “International Jewry,” you would be wrong.

Politico – considered a mainstream news outlet with a strong establishment bias – ran a piece in April suggesting the true source of Russia’s alleged infiltration of the Trump campaign.

I would suggest you read the piece for yourself in full, but save it for a dull rainy day, when you need cheering up (assuming your I.Q. is slightly above that of a mushroom), as it is guaranteed to give you a good laugh.

The piece is titled: “The Happy-Go-Lucky Jewish Group That Connects Trump and Putin: Where Trump’s Real Estate World Meets a Top Religious Ally of the Kremlin, since there are many types of real estate in the US and Canada; from selling houses to burnaby condos for sale and many other kind of property.

The writer, demonstrating that he may have experimented with certain kinds of mushrooms himself, alleges the whole thing is the fault of…Lubavitch!

Well! I knew that…and also the Hobbits…and Elvis.

And just let me repeat that Politico is a serious media outlet whose journalists are invited to comment on programs like WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show (well, maybe it’s not so serious after all.)

But that led me to thinking: Could the all-out war against Trump by the Left and its media enablers – like The New York Times and the remnant of a once great newspaper called The Washington Post – possibly have anything to do with Trump’s having sent out pro-Jewish and pro-Israel vibes?

And that reference to all-out war is more than mere hyperbole.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal on May 26, Holman W Jenkins Jr. observed:

The Trump-Russia business is finally coming into clearer, more rational focus. Former Obama CIA chief John Brennan, in testimony this week, offered no evidence of Trump campaign cooperation with Russian intelligence.

In fact, despite the desperate efforts of several agencies to find proof, it seems not to be there.

But as Newt Gingrich says, the “Deep State” seems to be determined to bring Trump down at all costs and Russia is the way it thinks it can succeed.

Given the Left’s growing animosity toward Israel, it is hardly a surprise that Jared Kushner, the president’s Jewish son-in-law, is someone the Left has firmly in its sights.

Kushner is as different from his father-in-law as two men can be. One is bawdy, loud, and brash. The other is quiet, intellectual, and refined. One simply cannot stop tweeting and the other has had a Twitter account since 2009 but not used it to issue even one teeny tweet.

Forbes magazine informs us that Donald Trump’s New York office is covered in wall-to-wall memorabilia and tributes to…Donald Trump!

Jared Kushner’s office is three blocks south of Trump Tower. A leather-bound copy of Pirkei Avot sits on a wooden pedestal in the reception room, and identical silver mezuzahs adorn the side of each office door. The only decoration in his large, terraced boardroom is an oil painting of his grandparents, Holocaust survivors who immigrated to the U.S. after World War II.

Forbes also informs us that Kushner is widely credited for creating the winning formula that got Trump the White House.

No less a Trump foe than the BBC reported early in the Trump presidency that a pattern had been detected in that Trump’s most glaring gaffes occurred over the weekend. That, the BBC explained, is when his son-in-law and daughter were away from the White House because of Shabbat. Other voices, notably that of Trump administration chief strategist Steve Bannon, had the president’s ear then and the tweets betrayed the lack of Jared’s steady and calming influence.

Little wonder that Trump’s many enemies would view it as a smart move to target the person who brings out the best in the president.

So The New York Times, BBC, and the remnant of a once great newspaper called The Washington Post eagerly reported that Jared Kushner was being investigated for possible “collusion” with Russia.

Holman Jenkins commented on this in a June 6 Wall Street Journal piece:

If the Trump campaign directed or cooperated in illegal acts by Russia, that would be collusion in the sense of contributing to a crime.

If Mr. Flynn promised privately what Trump was saying publicly, that he would seek better relations with Russia, as a deliberate inducement to encourage Russian meddling in the race, most of us would consider that an impeachable offense.

But unable to substantiate any such allegation, the media reach for an error so bad it has a name – the equivocation fallacy.

Thus Jared Kushner is accused of, after the election, trying to, “collude” with Russia in settling the Syrian war – the ad absurdum case of trying to make those seven letters c-o-l-l-u-d-e substitute for proof of something nefarious.

Kushner is, in other words, accused of performing the very natural functions of someone on the president’s team, exploring the possibilities of finding common ground with an adversary to defeat a common threat.

I suppose George Washington had people reach out to the British to see if they would concede the war and end the bloodshed. If today’s liberal media had been around back then, that would, in their eyes, have made Washington a British spy.

And since Abraham Lincoln explored ending the Civil War in a letter to Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Lincoln must have been a slaver.

Surely too, today’s New York Times would have branded Woodrow Wilson pro-German for discussing with British Prime Minister David Lloyd George how they could bring the First World War to an end.

At the start of Trump’s presidency, the Left (which naturally means the Jewish Left too, including the Forward and, increasingly, the Anti-Defamation League) allied themselves with the absurd claims that Trump and his adviser Bannon were anti-Semitic.

When the Bannon canard collapsed in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the Forward published a piece that exploded the lie. The Forward’s editors, however, did not see fit to apologize for publishing the lie in the first place.

Claims of sinister Jewish control of governments used to come from the extreme Right and the extreme Left. Now they seem to be coming from the mainstream Left as well.

And that leads me to conclude that the 45th president of the United States – half German, half Scottish, and so hated by the media and the Left – far from exhibiting any symptoms of anti-Semitism is, in fact, the victim of that oldest of all hatreds.

Categories: Anti-Zionism in America, Antisemitism, Antisemitism in America, Trump and antisemitism
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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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Outrage After Dartmouth Appoints Israel Boycotter as Head of Faculty

May 8, 2017

Outrage After Dartmouth Appoints Israel Boycotter as Head of Faculty, Washington Free Beacon, , May 8, 2017

Dartmouth Hall / Wikimedia Commons

The pro-Israel community at Dartmouth College is reeling following a decision by school leadership to appoint as their new head of faculty a leading supporter of the movement to boycott Israel and Jewish academics.

Dartmouth President Phil Hanlon is facing criticism following his recent decision to appoint Native American studies Professor Bruce Duthu—a leading supporter of the anti-Israel Boycott, Sanctions, and Divestment movement, or BDS—as Dartmouth’s dean of faculty.

Dartmouth, which declined Washington Free Beacon requests to comment on the matter, has come under criticism from the pro-Israel community, including within the school’s own staff, for elevating Duthu to a post of prominence. Duthu’s vocal support for boycotts of Israeli academics and efforts to lead the charge in the BDS movement is dangerous, these individuals argue, and anathema to academic freedom.

The appointment also has renewed fear within the campus pro-Israel community given Dartmouth’s anti-Semitic past, which included the active “Christianization of its students”

While pro-Israel faculty members spent weeks petitioning Dartmouth’s leadership about Duthu’s support for the BDS movement—which included co-authoring a leading BDS document backing the boycott of Israeli academic institutions—President Hanlon moved forward with the decision, prompting some to go public with their concerns.

Dartmouth economics professor Alan Gustman sent a faculty-wide email last week expressing his concern over Duthu’s anti-Israel activism and the college leadership’s apathetic response to these fears.

Dartmouth’s top faculty member should not be an individual who is opposed to working with Israeli academics based on their national origin, Gustman argues.

“In view of Dartmouth’s anti-Semitic history and Professor Duthu’s endorsement of the anti-Semitic BDS document, Dartmouth must not simply appoint Duthu to the position of Dean of the Faculty and ignore the implications of that appointment,” Gustman wrote. “Professor Duthu should either publicly disavow the full ramifications of the BDS positions he has publicly endorsed, or resign his position as Dean and return to his faculty position where expression of these views is sanctioned as academic freedom, but is not representative of Dartmouth College or its faculty.”

Duthu “cannot, without contradiction, 1) assure council signers of the NAISA document and holders of their position of his support for action to boycott Israeli academic institutions, and at the same time 2) administer his job as Dean of the Faculty, while assuring Dartmouth that he will not take such action,” Gustman wrote. “Given its history, Dartmouth cannot turn a blind eye to this contradiction. These issues must be directly and publicly addressed by the Dean, the President, and by the Board. Papering over hypocrisy and prejudice is no way to run an Ivy League College administration.”

When asked to comment on the issue, a Dartmouth spokesman told the Free Beacon, “Thank you for the opportunity, but we are going to decline.”

Dartmouth’s silence on the BDS controversy has raised charges of hypocrisy, given the college’s opposition to President Donald Trump’s immigration policies.

Dartmouth President Hanlon and other top officials issued a public statement condemning Trump’s immigration policies, but continue to remain silent in the face of charges the school is promoting boycotts of Israel.

“Dartmouth’s commitment to the free and open exchange of ideas, global research, and education manifests itself in dozens of partnerships and in international study and exchange programs,” the anti-Trump statement read. “Our engagement with the full human diversity of backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences is critical—to both the strength of the Dartmouth community and the effectiveness of Dartmouth’s learning and leadership. We recognize, value, and celebrate the essential contributions of our international students and scholars.”

The controversy also has begun to resonate in Washington, D.C.

“Dartmouth has long been a hotbed of thinly-veiled anti-Semitic activism, which was excused by the faculty and the institution as criticism of Israel,” said one senior official at a national pro-Israel organization who requested anonymity when discussing strategy. “This disgrace is the logical result. A bureaucrat who is supposed to manage an institution dedicated to the open exchange of ideas but who says that those exchanges shouldn’t include Israeli Jews. Parents will ask themselves if those are the sorts of values they want their kids to learn.”

Josh Block, president and CEO of the Israel Project, told the Free Beacon that Dartmouth must show its commitment to academic freedom.

“This is about dialogue and academic freedom, and simply put, anyone who rules out engaging an entire country, let alone the world’s only Jewish state, is simply unfit to run an institution dedicated to liberal education and higher learning,” Block said.” And that is before we examine the despicable, anti-Semitic double standard being applied, in which the flaws of Israel’s democracy are held up for sanction while the professor and his fellow travelers embrace or ignore numerous regimes committing actual atrocities on historic scale.”

“It’s not just Dartmouth’s reputation that is being damaged, it is the university’s very credibility as an institution capable of discerning right from wrong,” Block added. “Post-modernism married with Moral Relativism is the disease of our time, and a toxic cocktail on display so far here.”

Stephen Smith, an executive director USC Shoah Foundation, which fights anti-Semitism, publicly condemned Dartmouth for elevating Duthu in a recent op-ed.

“Those who call for singling out Israel for the Divestment, Boycott, and Sanction will deny they are anti-Semitic, but the result is clear: when you exclude a colleague by association to their affiliation with an Israeli institution of higher education, you are not targeting the state, you are targeting the individual,” Smith wrote.

Categories: Academia and Israel, Academia and Palestinians, Academia and the left, Anti-Zionism in America, Antisemitism in academia, BDS, Dartmouth College
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Panelists Prove Jewish Voice for Peace is Neither

April 2, 2017

Panelists Prove Jewish Voice for Peace is Neither, Investigative Project on Terrorism, John Rossomando, April 1, 2017

There’s a simple way to end global oppression, racism and immediately create a world overflowing with “equality, dignity and human rights,” panelists agreed Saturday morning during a Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) Conference in Chicago.

Simply eliminate Zionism from the planet.

“Arguing for a softer, less harsh, nicer version of capitalism, colonialism and racism won’t do it,” said Black Lives Matter leader Rachel Gilmer. “Many liberal Zionists believe that the problem with Israeli apartheid is simply a few bad policies, or Netanyahu, or the wall, but the problem is with the ideological foundation of the state itself: Zionism. Zionism at its core is white supremacy.”

While JVP claims its mission is to “end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem; security and self-determination for Israelis and Palestinians,” the conference so far has failed to mention any plan that keeps Israel intact. That’s not a surprise. JVP prides itself for playing a key role in the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement that pressures corporations, churches, and colleges and to drop investments in Israel.

“A world without Zionism is a world without oppression” and create “equality, dignity and human rights,” said panelist Lubnah Shomali of the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency & Refugee Rights. It also would mean Shomali’s claim ignores human rights violations by Palestinian leaders against inside the West Bank and Gaza. Hamas and the Palestinian Authority use intimidation to silence journalists who dare to engage in peaceful criticism, Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported in 2016. Journalists face arrest and detention for exposing corruption. The Palestinian Authority and Hamas flout international law by issuing death penalties, using torture and extrajudicial killings.

While speakers during Saturday’s “Let’s Talk About Zionism” panel tossed around “apartheid” accusations, they ignored the rights enjoyed by Israeli Arabs, including representation in Knesset and prominently in Israel’s judiciary.

No one on the JVP panel mentioned this. Neither did anyone advocate a peaceful resolution to the conflict that leaves Israel intact.

Jewish Voice for Peace, therefore, let an entire panel push the message that Zionism, the belief in a national homeland and refuge for Jews, should not exist.

Ethiopian Jewish activist Efrat Yerday, an Israeli citizen, also claimed that Israel engaged in racism by forcing Ethiopian Jews to convert to rabbinical Judaism.

Ethiopian Judaism contains numerous elements that predate modern rabbinical Judaism and has similarities with Ethiopian Christianity. This caused Israel’s rabbinate to mandate that the Ethiopians convert first.

“Zionism does not only dispossess Palestinians, but it also dispossesses in a very sophisticated way, non-white Jews. Being Jewish is highly identified with being white because of Zionism,” Yerday said. “This early fantasy that was shaped by the visionaries was to be a small Europe in the heart of the barbarian Middle East.”

Ironically, Yerday noted that Ethiopian Jews were able to peacefully demonstrate and protest against what they perceive as injustices against them. Such a display would not be allowed in neighboring Arab countries or in areas ruled by Palestinians.

And she didn’t try to reconcile the “Israel is racist” line with the history of how thousands of black Ethiopians became citizens. In 1984, Israel rescued 16,000 Ethiopian Jews in a secret airlift. That was followed by “Operation Solomon” in 1991, in which 14,000 Ethiopians were flown out in just 36 hours. And the country named an Ethiopian immigrant, Yityish “Titi” Aynaw, as Miss Israel in 2013. Like any other country, there is racism in Israel, she said. But “it’s something that Israel is trying to fix and it’s actually improving,” she said.

Israel’s enemies have tried connecting Zionism with racism for decades in an effort to delegitimize Israel.

During her remarks, Shomali lamented the fact that a 1975 United Nations resolution condemning Zionism as a form of racism was repealed in 1991. Her case for labeling Zionism as a form of racism relies on a cherry picked one-sided history dating back to Israel’s 1948 independence. Zionism developed as a purely secular movement that hijacked Judaism, she said. The two were not intertwined.

“There had to be a link made between secular colonialism, secular Zionism and religious Judaism,” Shomali said. “Members of the Zionist movement went to religious Jews around the world and told them that … God is telling you to come to Palestine. You are the chosen people. This is the promised land. A land without people for a people without a land, knowing full well that Palestine was not a land without people.”

Zionists used the forcible transfer of populations to cleanse Palestine of Arab natives, she said.

The role Arab governments and militias played in creating the so-called Palestinian Nakba, or catastrophe, appears nowhere in her analysis. She never mentioned the rejected 1947 U.N. resolution offering the Arabs a state. Nor does she mention that Arabs started the 1947-1948 war in Palestine.

Not only that, the Zionists called on Arab inhabitants of the then proposed state of Israel to remain and work for “peace and progress as sovereign equals” in October 1947. The day after the U.N. partition vote, the Jewish agency called for “fruitful cooperation” with the Arabs. In August 1948, John Bagot Glubb, commander of Jordan’s Arab Legion, told the London Daily Mail, “Villages were frequently abandoned even before they were threatened by the progress of war.”

JVP’s rabid hatred of Israel comes into even clearer focus Sunday, when it gives the stage to Rasmieh Odeh, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist group convicted for leading two 1969 bombing attacks in Jerusalem. One of those bombings targeted a grocery store and killed two college students.

This conference and the choice of speakers is just another reminder that Jewish Voice for Peace opposes the Jewish State and its prescriptions will lead to anything but peace.

Categories: Anti-Zionism in America, Antisemitism in America, Jewish left in America, Jewish occupation of Israel, Jewish Voice for Peace
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