Stop Antisemitism

Last week, it was disgraced former professor Steven Salaita earning a reported $12,000 to speak at Virginia Tech, the same university who refused to hire him after he was fired from a job at University of Illinois for his slew of antisemitic and inflammatory comments during Operation Protective Edge in 2014. During the speech he blamed Jews for the demise of his career and said ā€œZionism is inhuman.ā€

This week, Mohammed El-Kurd, a radical Palestinian activist and author, will be paid $5,000 by Duke Universityā€™s student senate to spread antisemitic blood libels. El-Kurd will be joined by journalist Ahmed El-Din, who is also earning a per diem, at an event titled, ā€œNarrating Resistance and Agency: Shifting the Discourse on Palestine.ā€ The request for funding this event came from Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a group known for demonizing Jewish college students who express support for the Jewish nation.

These speaker fees have become a big incentive to spread Jew-hatred and the question remains, why are universities complying? Itā€™s unimaginable to think they would do the same when presented with the opportunity to pay a speaker who spews hate against other minority groups.

When an antisemite speaks on a college campus, the implied endorsement foments a fear-filled environment for Jewish students. Many Jewish students feel compelled to hide their Judaism and their support of the State of Israel. Instead of protecting their Jewish students, these student governments and universities are aiding and abetting the hatred.

A recent StopAntisemitism report details how BDS, the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, is represented on campus by SJP and has led to an increase in antisemitic incidents. These SJP groups ask schools or student governments to fund speakers and activities aimed at vilifying and isolating Jews. None of the speakers they propose look to strike a balance or discuss peaceful coexistence.



(full article online)

 
The referendum called for, among other items, a boycott of companies associated with Israelā€™s alleged ā€œsettler-colonial apartheid,ā€ and a pro-Palestinian public statement to be made by the SSMU every semester, coinciding with ā€œNakba Day,ā€ the Arabic term for ā€œcatastropheā€, referring to Israelā€™s establishment in 1948.

Calling the March 21 vote a ā€œhistoric win,ā€ the editorial took issue with the subsequent backlash from McGill Universityā€™s administration, which condemned the vote and called for ā€œremedial actionā€ to be taken by the student union.

Importantly, the Tribuneā€™s editorial was rife with half-truths and outright falsehoods.

First, despite breathlessly referring to the vote as a ā€œhistoric winā€ with more than 71 percent of the vote, the referendum was voted in favour of by fewer than 2,300 students ā€“ representing a tiny percentage of the nearly 24,000 eligible electors at McGill University. More fundamentally, the editorial condemned the university administrationā€™s public statement, and claimed it ā€œeffectively exacerbates existing on-campus tension.ā€ This statement is simply beyond parody. To the degree that there are tensions on campus related to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, it is in no small part as a result of anti-Israel misinformation.

The editorial accused the university of characterizing ā€œanti-Zionism as antisemitism,ā€ and defended the right of the student union to be anti-Zionist. It may come as a surprise to the editors of The McGill Tribune, but Zionism is nothing more than the quest for self-determination among the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland. Therefore, referring to Israelā€™s independence as a ā€œcatastrophe,ā€ as the SSMU referendum did, is not merely a critique of Israeli government policy, but a complete denial of the Jewish peopleā€™s right to live in self-determination in their own homeland.



In fact, had the SSMU, or The McGill Tribune, consulted with mainstream Jewish voices, they would have learned that antisemitism is more than simply anti-Jewish statements or sentiment, but according to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), of which Canada is a signatory, denial of the Jewish peopleā€™s right to self-determination is absolutely antisemitic.

(full article online)

 
Romaniaā€™s Chairman of the Committee on Culture and Media Lucian Romascanu called for an investigation into a newspaper containing nationalist and antisemitic articles on Tuesday.


The national theater in Bucharest, the Romanian capital, hosted a show on Sunday which was led by Dan Puric, a pro-Russian director and actor.


ā€œAn antisemitic newspaper was put in the hands of the audience right in front of the interim general director of the TNB,ā€ actor Mihai Calin wrote on his Facebook page.

Prior, the interim director of the National Theater, Mircea Rusu, had stated he will not help organize any events in support of Ukraine or that denounced Russia's invasion of Ukraine, stating that the Theater ā€œdoes not do politics."


The newspaper contained antisemitic and anti-Romanian articles as well as a few conspiracy theories about Romaniaā€™s secret services. Puric, which led that nightā€™s show, has not responded about the incident.

(full article online)

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

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

But the narrative of white supremacy is impervious to the facts. Author Cathy Park Hong admits in the Atlantic that it's "tricky" to talk about "the optics of a black or brown person assaulting or attacking the Asian elderly." She feared that "with older Asian immigrants, these crimes may reaffirm their anti-blackness and drive them toward the right." She even laments that "Whenever I say on social media, ā€˜These attacks are symptomatic of white supremacy,' white people say, ā€˜How is it white supremacy when it's not white people committing the crimes?'" She went on to note her fear that "white people will not hold themselves accountable."

(full article online)

 
The Survey of Antisemitism in New Zealand 2021, released on Wednesday, involved 1017 people. Of those people, the survey found that 63 per cent of them held at least one antisemitic view.


New Zealand Jewish Council spokesperson Juliet Moses said that this shows that some New Zealanders still believe in stubborn and dangerous myths or tropes about Jewish people.

(full article online)

 
This is a bombshell report from TheJC (which does perhaps the best reporting of any Jewish newspaper):



YouTube routinely ignored warnings from its own moderators to take down antisemitic videos, including some that inspired the Texas synagogue gunman, a whistleblower has told the JC.
The refusal to delete the incendiary footage, which glorifies terrorism and brands Jews ā€œagents of Satanā€, makes a mockery of the web giantā€™s supposed commitment to safeguarding users, the whistleblower said.
Former moderator Khaled Hassan, 31, who was employed to identify extremism in Arabic language videos until two months ago, accuses YouTube of ā€œshirking its legal and moral responsibilitiesā€.
In shocking testimony, the whistleblower reveals:
- YouTube ignored warnings that specific videos would incite violence against Jews, just weeks before British terrorist Malik Faisal Akram watched the same clips and took four hostages at Beth Israel synagogue in Texas.
- YouTube ignored requests to remove videos by Wagdy Ghoneim, a leading Egyptian jihadist who is banned in the UK, on the grounds that he was not on an internal watchlist of just 29 names.
- Mr Hassan was told that when he wished to ā€œflagā€ any video about the Middle East conflict, he should seek approval from a Palestinian colleague.
- The whistleblower was moved to a more menial job because, he claimed, he highlighted videos that YouTube did not want to remove.
- The social media giant refused to delete clips celebrating the November murder of Jerusalem tour guide Eli Kay because they did not display the logo of a terrorist organisation.




...Mr Hassan, 31, a counter-terrorism expert who spent years fighting extremism in Egypt before achieving a masterā€™s degree in security policy at Leicester University, told the JC: ā€œYouTubeā€™s policy is a sham. They claim they will remove content that glorifies terrorism and contains racist hate speech, but what they do behind the veil of company secrecy is very different.
ā€œThey are shirking their legal and moral responsibilities. They tell users that their platform is safe. In fact, they are allowing people to be radicalised and reinforcing claims that Jews are evil and rule the world.ā€


This is more than just being irresponsible. YouTube, and Google, are arguably accessories to terrorism.

The part where Google told Hassan that Palestinians must approve removing any jihadist video about Israel is especially insane. Terrorism enjoys wide popular support among Palestinians.

In other words, they allow people who overwhelmingly hate Jews to decide what is antisemitic incitement.

This means that the Palestinian propaganda that "Zionists" are silencing them has real-world consequences. It causes Google and other social media to err on the side of the terrorists and wannabe jihadists when dealing with antisemitic propaganda, rather than prioritize the lives of Jews.

 
The Nasserist Egyptian site Al Majd has a great example of psychological projection from Firas Hajj Muhammad, in an article named "Only Israel is responsible for the violence in Palestine."



The ugliness of the Zionist occupation lies in the systematic hatred of the Arab and the Palestinians. The occupation policy and thinking is based on disrespect for everything that is non-Zionist and non-Jewish, Arab and non-Arab. A thought is based on human hatred and only recognizes them alone, and everyone is harnessed to serve them. It is a ā€œneo-Nazi.ā€
Whoever contemplates the two, ā€œJewish Zionismā€ and Nazism, will find that they are very close in view of the other, so they are inhumane experiences, and as history cursed the Nazi experiment, it will curse the Zionist-Jewish experience, as it is a curse on the world and an uncontrollable evil. The real solution lies in removing this illegal and inhuman entity that is based only on enslaving and controlling the world.
The problem with this occupation is that its leaders are devoid of all human responsibility and do not share with others and do not intersect with human beings in any of the general values, so they created for themselves values and standards that differ from the rest of the world. So, they are on one side and the world on the other, so they do not recognize truth, goodness and beauty as general human values, but rather they have their right, goodness and beauty, those values that mean nothing but evil in the consequences of the living reality. They practiced this with everyone, with us Palestinians, with Arab princes and poor politicians, with Iranians, and with other leaders in the world, so what evil is this upon which the Zionist movement is based while it is destroying the world politically and morally, to sit on the throne of the leadership of evil. This is neither a construction nor an exaggeration, it is the reality of the Zionist criminality that polluted Judaism with it, to rise on its shoulders.
The whole world should warn against this evil and resist it with all it can. Eliminating evil is a human value necessity and an end in itself, and this is not the task of the Palestinians alone, but the task of the whole world. So let us take the initiative to end and eliminate this evil. Is the worldā€™s affliction not enough as a result of its care for this evil thought for a century and more? Let the world return to its senses, to international politics its wisdom, and to the people's respect for their values!


The site that cares so much about morality supports Russia against Ukraine.




 
( The obsession with Jewish Israelis and Americans. No Jews live anywhere else in the world )

In a letter to Jewish House Democrats, Amnesty International USA Executive Director Paul Oā€™Brien apologized for ā€œrepresenting the views of the Jewish people,ā€ responding to the membersā€™ unanimous condemnation of his recent remarks that his ā€œgutā€ tells him American Jews want ā€œa safe Jewish spaceā€ rather than a Jewish state.

All 25 Jewish House Democrats came together earlier this month in a rare joint statement condemning Oā€™Brienā€™s comments at a Womanā€™s National Democratic Club event as ā€œpatronizing,ā€ ā€œalarming,ā€ ā€œdeeply offensiveā€ and ā€œantisemitic.ā€

In his response letter, dated March 25 and obtained by Jewish Insider on Thursday, Oā€™Brien wrote, ā€œI regret representing the views of the Jewish people. What I should have said is that my understanding from having visited Israel often and listened to many Jewish American and Israeli human rights activists is that I share a commitment to human rights and social justice for all with Jewish Americans and Israelis.ā€

In the letter, Oā€™Brien says he wants to ā€œprovide contextā€ to comments to a JI reporter after the event. In those comments, Oā€™Brien said Israel ā€œshouldnā€™t exist as a Jewish state.ā€ He claims his comments were in reference to Amnestyā€™s concerns about Israelā€™s 2018 Nation State Law. Oā€™Brien made no reference to the Nation State Law in the conversation with the reporter, but had mentioned it in an earlier part of the event.

(full article online)

 
Barghouti, who has also previously written for and contributed to outlets including The New York Times, The Guardian, and Newsweek, came to HonestReportingā€™s attention last year after we uncovered a series of now-deleted tweets, such as one in which she asserted that ā€œIsrael has been beating Hitler at his own game since 1948,ā€ and another that referred to former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu as being ā€œnothing more than a war criminal and a Nazi.ā€

There are a number of points that deserve to be noted in response to such allegations.

For starters, the accusation of apartheid, which has been primarily promulgated by three organizations ā€” Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch (HRW), and Bā€™Tselem ā€” has previously been thoroughly debunked by HonestReporting.

In addition, two of the organizations, Amnesty and HRW, that have spread this libel have been accused of having a fixation on alleged misdeeds by Israel. For example, when Amnesty released its widely-publicized report last month, an analysis of its Twitter account over the next six days revealed it had posted no fewer than 132 tweets accusing the Jewish state of perpetrating various crimes, compared to just 13 about every other human rights issue in the world.

Human Rights Watch released a 5,000-word report about Israel in December last year, in which it claimed Israeli law enforcement responded to outbreaks of violence in May in an ā€œapparently discriminatory manner.ā€ Yet the same document completely ignored what had been described as ā€œpogromsā€ by Arab-Israelis against Jews and their property during the same period.

In April, HRW penned a 213-page report that peddled the ā€œapartheidā€ canard and a third 6,500-word report was released in May that accused Israel of ā€œwar crimesā€ for its response to the barrage of indiscriminate rocket fire by Hamas during last yearā€™s conflict.

The NGOs that Barghouti claims Israel has unfairly targeted have proven links to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a designated terror group by most of the western world.

Finally, there is an irony in Barghouti accusing Jerusalem of weaponizing antisemitism, when she has manifestly spread anti-Jewish hatred online.

Just this week ā€” mere hours before a Palestinian gunman murdered five people in the central city of Bnei Brak and amid a wave of terrorism ā€” Barghouti tweeted that every year around the time of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, Israel becomes ā€œcharged with intensified aggressionā€ to create circumstances whereby Palestinians face violence or ā€œthe fear and crippling anxiety of anticipated attacks.ā€

(full article online)

 
( Exactly when are the Barghoutis going to return to their ancient homeland.....anywhere on the Arabian Peninsula will be a peaceful move. Stop Antisemitism/ Jew hatred )

 
The French film director Claude Lanzmann, celebrated for his documentary ā€œShoahā€, once remarked that in order to encourage Arab schoolchildren to sympathize with Jews, he would highlight how during the Holocaust the Imam of the Grand Mosque of Paris helped save Jews from Nazi deportations. This modus operandi is quite ubiquitous and is also reflected in Jewish efforts to showcase Muslim righteousness during the Holocaust in predominantly Islamic Albania, Bosnia and Tunisia. Analogous efforts have also sought to highlight how Jewish life in Muslim lands was historically better than Jewish life in Christian lands.

In my opinion, these efforts are necessary in order to dispel the prejudice popular among quite a few Jews that Arabs and Muslims are irremediably vicious anti-Semites. Such efforts, directed toward Muslims do not serve the cause of Jewish-Muslim reconciliation, but actually add to the amount of resentment and hostility in the Muslim camp.

These efforts are often orchestrated by Ashkenazi Jews who conflate Christian antisemitism with Islamic antisemitism. Christian European antisemitism is nevertheless fundamentally different from Arab Islamic antisemitism. Christian antisemitism is ontological: The Jew by virtue of rejecting Christ as his savior is implicitly complicit in the death of Godā€™s son. Islamic antisemitism is hierarchical: As long as the Jew is subordinate and docile toward Islam, the Jew is actually an asset to the prestige and truth of the Prophetā€™s message.

That is the reason antisemitism in Islamic lands reached historically Christian proportions only once Zionism proved to the world that Jews were better than Muslims at fighting and ruling. Since Islamic pride hinges on Muslim political and military power, defeat at the hands of Jews, the model dhimmis during over one thousand years, provoked an existential crisis in the Ummah: The Jew, in order to defeat Muslims on the battlefield, must have conjured diabolical forces. Hence, the contemporary myth popular in the Islamic world, that Jews are an all-powerful cabal bent on destroying Islam.

For this reason, when Muslims are reminded about the Golden Age of Judeo-Islamic harmony in Andalusia, the hospitality extended by Ottoman rulers to Jews fleeing from the Spanish Inquisition and more recently, Muslim rescue efforts during the Holocaust, they easily read history as follows: ā€œLook at the Jews, after all the kindness we extended to them throughout the centuries, they repaid us Muslims with the Nakba and the occupation of Jerusalem. What a thankless lot!ā€

To avert this reaction, any Jewish-Muslim attitude must mention the dark sides of Jewish life under Islam: Starting with the massacre of Khaybar and culminating in the Farhud of 1941 which heralded the end of thousands of years of peaceful Jewish life in Iraq. It is only once these tragic chapters are read that Muslims can understand that Zionism was not just legitimized by European Christian antisemitism, but also by the injustices and abuses that the Ummah heaped on its Jewish subjects, including the complicity of Palestineā€™s supreme leader, Haj Amin al-Husseini, with Hitlerā€™s plans to destroy the Jewish people.



 

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