A group of dermatologists recently sought to end their profession’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs en masse, exposing the degree to which the wider reactionary backlash against anti-racist efforts has found converts within the medical specialty. The anti-DEI proposition was heard at a dermatology conference held in San Diego this month: the annual gathering of the American Academy…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Hebrew University in Jerusalem has suspended an internationally renowned Palestinian professor for saying that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian is a feminist scholar whose work focuses on the impacts of militarization, surveillance and violence on the lives of Palestinian women and children. She made the remarks in an interview on Israel’s Channel 12 on…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Hebrew University in Jerusalem has suspended an internationally renowned Palestinian professor for saying that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian is a feminist scholar whose work focuses on the impacts of militarization, surveillance and violence on the lives of Palestinian women and children. She made the remarks in an interview on Israel’s Channel 12 on Monday, where she also said it was time to “abolish Zionism.” Shalhoub-Kevorkian has been under pressure to resign from her position at Hebrew University’s Faculty of Law Institute of Criminology and at the School of Social Work and Public Welfare since October, when she signed a petition of over 1,000 academics calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. This comes as no universities have been left standing in the Gaza Strip, and nearly 5,000 university students and staff have been killed during Israel’s assault. “I am calling for abolishing Zionism because I see it as very violent towards the people and as causing criminality,” says Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who discusses the atmosphere of silencing and reprisals against those who criticize Israel’s policies toward Palestinians. “Anti-Zionism is to refuse to accept continued dispossession, is to refuse to accept this ideology of supremacy, is to refuse to accept the securitized ideas of one group against the other.”
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
An interview with Collectif Golem, a left-wing Jewish group in France fighting antisemitism and the far right.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
Super Bowl LVII in 2023 was the most-watched U.S. telecast in history, and with well over 100 million people expected to tune in on Feb. 11, Super Bowl Sunday will provide one of the biggest platforms on Earth for pro-Israel groups to attempt to justify Israel’s ongoing genocidal war on Gaza. The Foundation to Combat Anti-Semitism, which is owned by Robert Kraft, the billionaire owner of the NFL’s…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
On January 31, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed House Bill 30, codifying the definition of antisemitism, as formulated by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), into state law. According to the legislation, law enforcement agencies in the state must consider the definition in the course of their enforcement. As the definition explicitly references criticism of Israel…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Today, I submitted my resignation as director of the Center for Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) at Florida Atlantic University (FAU). Although it might at first appear that this choice was driven by the ever-intensifying political attacks against gender studies in Florida, these attacks are precisely why I would have wanted to remain as director. As a genderqueer scholar…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Right-wing lawmakers in Georgia are advancing two bills that would erode free speech and protest rights in the state. HB 30 would categorize criticism of Israel as antisemitic hate speech and SB 359 would significantly expand the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) law, enhancing sentencing based on “political beliefs.” “Don’t sleep on this red clay fascism y’all,”…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The new documentary Israelism examines the growing generational divide among Jewish Americans on the question of Palestine, with many younger Jews increasingly critical of Israel and less supportive of Zionism. Simone Zimmerman, one of the protagonists of the film and a co-founder of the group IfNotNow, says she grew up being told that supporting Israel was central to her Jewish identity…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
New reporting reveals that workers for Jewish advocacy group Anti-Defamation League, or ADL, have been internally wrestling with the group’s vehemently pro-Israel views, as public stances from the group are threatening to undermine the ADL’s own work on extremism and antisemitism, some staff are saying. As Israeli forces have waged a relentless bombing campaign against Gaza in recent months…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
In 1962, James Baldwin wrote “A Letter to My Nephew.” The letter communicates Baldwin’s anger, his frustration, his commitment to radical change, and his indefatigable love for his nephew. His critique of white people, who he refers to as his “countrymen,” is piercing and demanding. Indeed, at one point he writes, “To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The United States Congress received international attention in December for their heated cross-examinations of university presidents on the topic of campus antisemitism. The spectacle fueled the weaponization of antisemitism by conservatives, breathing new life into a consolidated right wing, robust enough to take on liberal higher education. Nivedita Majumdar is a professor of English at John Jay…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
On 20 December 2023 Jakob Guhl posted in Index on Censorship a piece stating that German authorities are increasingly silencing pro-Palestine activism in an effort to stamp out anything they fear could be seen as antisemitic. He makes some excellent points (which apply also outside Germany):
..The seemingly isolated incidents highlighted in this article are piling up and the curtailing of civic space is starting to be noticed internationally: Civicus, which ranks countries by freedom of expression rights, recently downgraded Germany in a review from “open” to “restricted” due to repression of pro-Palestinian voices, as well as of climate activists…
There are long-standing disagreements around where to draw the line between legitimate criticism of Israel and attacks on Israel that single it out because it is a Jewish state, are expressed in antisemitic ways or are motivated by antisemitic views. For example, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism acknowledges that “criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic” but identifies seven examples of when attacks on Israel may be antisemitic (taking into account the overall context). For example, it could be antisemitic to reference classic antisemitic tropes such as the blood libel conspiracy myth to describe Israel, deny the Jewish people’s right to self-determination or blame Jews collectively for the actions of Israel, according to IHRA.
While Germany has adopted IHRA, much looser standards seem to be applied by authorities and commentators committed to tackling Israel-related antisemitism. Calls for a binational state, advocacy for the Palestinian refugees’ right of return, support for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) or accusations that Israel is committing Apartheid are regularly identified as antisemitic. There is a strong sense that given its historical responsibility, it is not Germany’s place to judge, or let anyone else judge, Israel even as its offensive in Gaza has resulted in one of the highest rates of death in armed conflict since the beginning of the 21st century, and disproportionately affects civilians. [see also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2021/01/18/israel-and-apartheid-israeli-human-rights-group-stirs-debate/]..
The debates since 7 October have created an atmosphere in which pro-Palestinian voices are more and more stigmatised. Pro-Palestinian protests have repeatedly been banned by local authorities. Their dystopian rationale for these bans revolves around the idea that, based on assessments of previous marches, crimes are likely to be committed by protesters. The practice is not new: in the past, German police have even banned protests commemorating the ”Nakba” (Arabic for “catastrophe”), the collective mass expulsion and displacement of around 700,000 Palestinians from their homes during the 1947-49 wars following the adoption of the Partition Plan for Palestine by the United Nations. In reaction to pro-Palestine protests since 7 October, the antisemitism commissioner of North Rhine Westphalia and former federal justice minister even suggested the police should pay closer attention to the nationality of pro-Palestine protest organisers as protests organised by non-Germans could be banned more easily.
Furthermore, pro-Palestinian political symbols are being falsely associated with Hamas or other pro-terrorist organisations. In early November, the Federal Interior Ministry banned the chant “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free” as a symbol of both Hamas and Samidoun, a support network for the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine which has been designated as a terrorist organisation by the European Union.
While one plausible interpretation of the “From the River to the Sea” slogan is that it is a call for the destruction of Israel, it is equally plausible to understand it as a call for a binational state with full equality of all citizens. Without context, the slogan cannot automatically be identified as antisemitic, though it is of course entirely legitimate to criticise this ambivalence. As has been extensively documented, the slogan does not originate with nor is exclusively used by Hamas.
Apart from being based on misinformation, banning “From the River to the Sea” has also created the ludicrous situation that the German police force is asked to make assessments on whether holding a “From the River we do see nothing like equality” placard is an expression of support for terrorism. A former advisor to Angela Merkel even called for the German citizenship of a previously stateless Palestinian woman to be revoked who posted a similar slogan (“From the River to the Sea #FreePalestine”) on her Instagram.
In some cases, these dynamics venture into the absurd. On 14 October, the activist Iris Hefets was temporarily detained in Berlin for holding a placard that read: “As a Jew & an Israeli Stop the Genocide in Gaza.”
These illiberal and ill-conceived measures are not limited to protests. In response to the 7 October attacks, authorities in Berlin allowed schools to ban students from wearing keffiyeh scarves to not “endanger school peace”.
Curtailing civic spaces
While these trends have been accelerated since 7 October, they predate it. In 2019, the German Bundestag passed a resolution that condemned the BDS movement as antisemitic. It referenced the aforementioned IHRA definition of antisemitism (which does not comment on boycotts), compared the BDS campaign to the Nazi boycotts of Jewish business and called on authorities to no longer fund groups or individuals that support BDS.
BDS calls for the boycott of Israeli goods, divestment from companies involved in the occupation of Arab territories and sanctions to force the Israeli government to comply with international law and respect the rights of Palestinians, including the right of return for Palestinian refugees. Inspired by the boycott campaign against Apartheid South Africa, BDS has attracted many supporters, but critics have claimed that BDS singles out Israel and delegitimises its existence. Accusations of antisemitism within the movement should of course be taken seriously: BDS supporters have previously been accused of employing antisemitic rhetoric about malign Jewish influence and intimidating Jewish students on campus. However, many of BDS’ core demands are clearly not antisemitic. Since the BDS lacks a central leadership that would issue official stances, it is difficult to make blanket statements about the movement in its entirety.
The 2019 resolution is now being cited to shut down cultural events. A planned exhibition in Essen on Afrofuturism was cancelled over social media posts that, according to the museum, “do not acknowledge the terroristic attack of the Hamas and consider the Israeli military operation in Gaza a genocide” and expressed support for BDS. The Frankfurt book fair “indefinitely postponed” a literary prize for the Palestinian author Adania Shibli, after one member of the jury resigned due to supposed anti-Israel and antisemitic themes in her book. Shibli has since been accused by the left-wing Taz newspaper of being an “engaged BDS supporter” for having signed one BDS letter in 2007 and a 2019 letter that criticised the city of Dortmund for revoking another literary price for an author that supports BDS. A presentation by the award-winning Forensic Architecture research group at Goldsmiths (University of London), which has analysed human rights abuses in Syria, Venezuela and Palestine as well as Neo-Nazi murders in Germany, was likewise cancelled by the University of Aachen which cited the group’s founder Eyal Weizman’s support for BDS.
The curtailing of civic space increasingly affects voices that have stood up for human rights at great personal risk. The Syrian opposition activist Wafa Ali Mustafa was detained by Berlin police near a pro-Palestine protest, reportedly for wearing a keffiyeh scarf. Similarly, the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, which is associated with the centre-left Green Party, pulled out of the Hannah Arendt prize ceremony, which was due to be awarded to the renowned Russian dissident, philosopher and human rights advocate Masha Gessen. Despite acknowledging differences between the two, Gessen had compared Gaza to the Jewish ghettoes in Nazi-occupied Europe in an article about the politics of memory in Germany, the Soviet Union, Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Hungary and Israel.
Conversation stoppers
Alarm bells should ring as one of Europe’s major liberal democracies has taken an authoritarian turn in the aftermath of 7 October. Germany’s noble commitment to its historical responsibility in the face of rising antisemitism is morphing into a suppression of voices advocating for Palestinian political self-determination and human rights.
In this distorted reality, civic spaces are eroded, cultural symbols banned, political symbols falsely conflated with support for terrorism and events are shut down. So far, there has been little pushback or critical debate about these worrying developments. To the contrary: politicians, foundations, cultural institutions and media outlets seem to be closing ranks under the shadow of the 2019 BDS resolution and a skewed interpretation of the IHRA definition.
Following the appalling violence committed by Hamas on 7 October, and the scale of civilian suffering in Gaza due to the subsequent Israeli military offensive, polarisation and tension between communities have been on the rise. In this context, it is crucial to be able to have passionate, empathetic, controversial and nuanced discussions about the conflict, its history, the present impasse, potential ways forward and its impact on Jewish, Muslim and Arab communities abroad. With the voices of activists, authors and even internationally renowned human rights advocates being increasingly isolated, these vital exchanges are prevented from taking place.
This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.
20 December 2023. Less than a week to go till Christmas.
Just under a week since the Jewish festival of Chanukkah ended.
And over two months since the October 7 massacre by Hamas in Israel, setting off an intense war between Israel and Gaza.
It’s all a bit depressing, bittersweet and well… unsettling, isn’t it?
It’s a special, reflective and sacred time of year for many, yet it’s all come together in a horrible blur of hate…
Speaking to a Jewish friend yesterday, I discovered how in a predominantly Jewish area of London, annual Chanukkah celebrations have been somewhat “dimmed” this year.
Muswell Hill in North London… The Chanukkiah (9-candle menorah for Chanukkah)was lit, prayers were said and greetings of solidarity shared.
And then… it was taken away. Leaving just a solitary Christmas tree.
The reason? I can only imagine fear or vandalism since the offset of the recent round of conflict in the Middle East.
Right now, the Jewish community are scared. And quite understandably.
Antisemitism is increasingly on the rise, nationally and globally.
Here in the UK, the Community Security Trust (CST) recorded 600 anti-Jewish hate incidents in the UK between 7 and 24 October (2023). This is the highest ever total reported to CST across a 17-day period.
Along with recent spikes in hate crime, when Chanukkah arrived (the often misunderstood and appropriated Jewish festival unrelated to Christmas), we then saw the desecration of chanukkiyot.
In North London for example, a publicly-erected chanukkiah was vandalised. This was merely days after it has been plastered with a “Free Palestine” sticker and one its bulbs smashed.
Given the climate of antisemitism, it’s more than understandable if Jewish leaders decided to remove the chanukkiah after the gathering to prevent abuse.
Yet, I couldn’t help feel that if the chanukkiah had been removed for such reasons, that this wasn’t the way forward. Or at least, it’s not a long-term solution to antisemitism.
Whilst distressing as it is to see desecrated holy sites and symbols, greater protection is needed in the short term, along with education and ardent strides to strengthen community cohesion in the long-term.
To my mind, this decision gave in to hate – showing that Jews can and will be invisible. When instead, we must foster an environment where the Jewish community feel confident, safe and proud in their identity. Like everyone should.
Speaking to my Jewish friend who’d attended, the feeling was mutual:
“I felt such dismay and sadness… It’s a crying shame that the Jewish community has to resort to hiding the Menorah for fear of antisemitic vandalism.
It is symbolic of the feeling that we have to be invisible in order to survive. That violence and the mob can call the shots in this way, is not just bad for Jews it’s clearly bad for our society as a whole.”
Compare this to other cities, and the message really hit home.
Earlier in December, I travelled to Berlin for a workshop on antisemitism. It was my second visit in recent months related to antisemitism, a period which has led to a lot of learning, revelations and reflection.
In Berlin, my seasonal experience was somewhat different to my friend’s in Muswell Hill.
In the German capital, I visited the chanukkiah located at the Brandenburg Gate.
In this historic square, the chanukkiah stood bright and proud, quite tragically yet beautifully next to the gate (and a nearby Christmas tree).
And this is no ordinary piece of historic architecture, it was once a symbol of the era of Nazi Germany (albeit built much earlier).
I didn’t have the words to express the bittersweet juxtaposition of the two images.
Jewish pride in a nation that saw the death of six million Jews (amongst others) not even a century ago… A tragic past, yet a future of efforts to embrace the Jewish world and stand against hate.
Things were and are moving forward (although antisemitism is a problem in Germany, just as in the UK and globally).
Back in the UK, communities are coming together. Yet, the chanukkiah in Muswell Hill was out of sight, whilst the Christmas tree remained. Life seemingly carried on.
But it hasn’t… Over in Trafalgar Square, the annual erection of the chanukkiah had taken place, but celebrations were markedly quieter (I discussed this with the same Jewish friend).
This also followed on the U-turn of the decision by Havering Council this year to not display Chanukkah candles outside its town hall in an attempt to avoid “inflaming community tensions”.
With this decision reversed following a united outburst of criticism from Jews, Muslims and likeminded citizens, there was and is hope.
Yet, back in Muswell Hill, a single Christmas tree remained, without the chanukkiah (a visible Jewish symbol).
I couldn’t help but feel sad. Not just for this, but for the wider image: the overwhelming sense of injustice and historical persecution of the Jewish community.
All the more poignant it is as, regardless of its origins, the festive tree is a symbol of Christmas globally (although not present in all Christian traditions).
This is a faith which marks a day to celebrate the birth of Jesus – a Jewish man from Judea.
A symbol of the Christian world. A world that long persecuted the Jewish community on religious grounds in the form of anti-Judaism – medieval theologically-driven antisemitism in the Christian-Western world.
It’s worth noting that the contemporary term “antisemitism” incorporates the now wide spectrum of prejudice, including also in the Muslim world (such as Christian anti-Judaism, Islamist antisemitism, Far-Left political and neo-Nazi Far-Right ideology).
This term was born later – deriving from 19th century references to “racial inferiority” of the Jewish people, prevalent with Nazis and neo-Nazis alike.
So, with the founding figure of Christianity (and a Prophet in Islam) a Jew himself, we’ve long seen two sides of the same coin.
One the one hand, there’s a shared history – an opportunity to embrace solidarity as members of the Abrahamic family in a multicultural, multifaith society.
Yet on the other, we’re reminded of a deep history of persecution – of lies and tropes used to “otherise” both Jews and people of other faiths (including Muslims alike).
It hurts to continuously see my Jewish friends and colleagues facing abuse, simply for being Jewish.
And at this time of year, it’s all the more tragic.
Why? Because Jesus’ message (whether his existence is historically proven or not) is one of love, unity and anti-corruption. It’s NOT one of division, appropriation, replacement and conflict.
Quite honestly, what would he think if he were to look at the state of the Earth now?
A Holy Land at war. The symbols of his traditional faith removed from the public sphere. Yet (quite rightly) the symbol of Western Christianity (the tree) stands firm on our soul.
A symbol of an institution that in fact persecuted Jews for centuries exactly because they weren’t Christian.
Historically, Jews were painted as devilish and corrupt for “rejecting Christ”.
This led to the vicious blood libel myth which portrayed Jews as “bloodthirsty” heretics who sought to “replicate the holy rites of Easter at Passover with the blood of Christian children”.
Obviously complete nonsense. Yet it’s stuck – replicating itself across the political spectrum.
Otherised and rejected, the Jewish community in Europe were also denied to the right to work as they wished and to own land, turning to money-lending to earn a living.
With usury seen as a sin by the Christian Church, Jews were therefore further demonised as “greedy, powerful and dominant”.
And so grew the myths around power and money, bearing fruit to the antisemitic conspiracy theories of today (depicting Jews as communists, capitalists, leaders of the “New World Order” and everything in between).
Having recently completed several trainings in antisemitism (blogs to follow), including in the medieval Christian world, I concluded and finally understood just how embedded antisemitism is in our society.
After all, we’re a society built on Christian history – whether many recognise this fact or not. (This acknowledgment of “Cultural Christianity” is forming part of my re-embracing of my Christian heritage/identity as British-Islam convert to Islam).
Yet history is often used, forgotten and abused in the name of hate, otherisation and exclusion.
The term “Judeo-Christian” for example is often used to imply a united world in a disingenuous move against people of other faiths. It’s a buzz-word for xenophobes preaching anti-refugee and anti-Muslim hate.
It attempts to paint a picture of a historically Jewish-friendly Europe that is markedly different to the “alien” and “Eastern” faith of Islam (the last Abrahamic faith).
Well… ask a British Jew and they’ll tell you a different story. One of historical persecution within Medieval Europe, of expulsion and rejection.
And this “othering” continues today in the form of rampant antisemitism.
Of course, all three faiths originate from the Middle East. And they all share a number of key figures such as Moses, Abraham and Jesus (in various forms).
Time and time again, history is used, abused and misrepresented for one’s own gain. To build narratives, to “disprove” lived experiences and to conveniently paint “black and white” binaries of “good vs. bad”, “right and wrong” and “us vs. them”.
Well, that’s not how the world works.
We’re a diverse planet. Reality is nuanced. And experiences are unique, varied, personal and collective.
As we witness the coming of Christmas as a global community, we’re seeing a clear reminder to look forward – acknowledging the past, living with the present and working towards a better future.
Through Jesus. And I say this as a Muslim (former Christian) ally to the Jewish community.
The name in itself carries so much variance yet commonality.
Jesus, Issa, Christ, Joshua, Yeshua, Jesús…
The name comes with many translations and variations, each with their own religious and cultural connotations.
And an opportunity for unity or division…
Divine Son of God (Christian teachings), a (historically unverified) Jewish man (Judaism), a Prophet of God (Islam).
Traceable in all three Abrahamic faiths in very different ways, his teachings are presented as a narrative of love, peace and spirituality.
This was at the time starkly opposed to religious dogma – whether one believes in his teachings or even existence from both a spiritual and historical perspective.
Yet here we are… At the end of 2023 and amid a war in the Holy Land.
And again, we’re hearing that time old seasonal line “remember that Jesus was Palestinian” and “Jesus was Muslim” from the Pro-Palestinian (often portrayed as Muslim) crowd.
Well, no… Jesus wasn’t Palestinian in so many words.
Jesus was Jewish. Born in Galilee, he preached in Judea and was later crucified in Jerusalem.
This area was a Roman province (colony) under Roman rule.
Jesus of Nazareth identified as a Jewish man.
“Palestinian” simply wasn’t a word that he would have identified with or that represents his authentic person.
And similarly, neither was “Christian”.
The term “Palestinian” derives from the land of the “Philistines” – a Greek word adopted by the occupying Romans in the 2nd century through the term “Syria Palaestina”.
Jesus’ followers were Jewish, with the term and official formation of a “Christian Church” not taking place till much later during the Roman leadership in the 3rd century.
Crucially, whilst may sound like semantical games it’s important. Mis-appropriation of history and one’s identity isn’t the way forward to peace, unity and cohesion.
Likewise, if we look at the term “Muslim” that gets flung around Twitter…
That’s a bit more complicated.
In simple terms, a “muslim” refers to a person who “submits to the one Single God”. That’s it.
And so, if we break it down, anyone can be a “muslim”.
Yep, no Arabic, no Qur’an, nothing except a connection with God and good deeds.
A message that is repeated in the Qur’an to remind us of our moral duty.
This is crucially one of the reasons why it’s incredibly unhelpful and disingenuous to refer to Islamists as “non-Muslims”.
In the minds of extremists, they’re following scripture (not what’s often simply passed off as “cultural practice). This is regardless of whether we think their beliefs and teachings are legitimate or not.
In the “Muslim world”, Orthodox prevailing traditions however are rather prescriptive.
In this tradition, a “Muslim” is portrayed as a person who follows the religion of “Islam”, who makes the “declaration of faith” and believes in the Qur’an and so on.
In such traditional teachings, there “one Truth” and one God, with the Prophets Moses (Musa), Abraham (Ibrahim) and Jesus (Issa) as “Muslim”.
However, as we all know, the religion of 1.9 billion followers known as “Muslims”, was not formed till centuries later. A religious intuition that certainly Jesus wouldn’t have known.
So of course, shouting “Jesus was Muslim” across Twitter, is the most unnuanced act of religious and cultural appropriation – especially in the current climate of conflict and rising hate.
Yes, he was a monotheist (a “muslim”) but Islam as a faith institution wasn’t born yet.
And “reshaping” Jesus (a Jewish teacher) amid the current climate of conflict and hate, this is not a sensitive, kind or even wise move.
We all share so much in common – and we must reflect and build on that. Whilst of course respecting the differences, variances and beliefs of others.
For whether we believe Jesus is a peaceful Jewish man from Judea, the Divine Son of God or part of wider Islamic tradition, what we should all be agreeing on is this:
The Jewish community deserve respect, representation and security.
Religious communities should stand together in solidarity
The world deserves peace (including both Israelis and Palestinians – whether Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Samaritan, Druze etc.)
So, as one of the biggest days in the Christian calendar approaches (days altering between different strands of Christianity of course – diversity again”), we therefore need to stand together against hate, in pride of diversity.
We need to acknowledge and respect the contribution of the Jewish world, educate ourselves about their collective trauma (both pre- and post-Holocaust in European and global contexts) and commit to respecting the Jewish community’s right to freedom of belief, safety and to quite simply flourish!
Likewise, the same rights that must be afforded to all people: Palestinians, Europeans, Americans, all over!
Because no matter we’re all spending (or not spending!) Christmas, we’re all human.
And humanity was exactly Jesus’ message.
So, whether you’re celebrating the Son of God, enjoying a cultural festival, making the most of a day off work or having a Chinese takeaway as you Netflix and chill (a very American-Jewish tradition at Christmas!), keep safe, keep sane and consider this as a New Year’s Resolution:
We must all commit to standing up against hate. To calling out antisemitism, anti-Muslim hate and all other forms of discrimination.
We can all reach out to neighbours, colleagues and acquaintances to check on their wellbeing, to build friendships and form alliances.
And we should all agree: we are stronger together.
Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and a Wonderful New Year to all!
Peace, salam, shalom!
This post was originally published on Voice of Salam.
This episode focuses on the Israeli and Palestinian conflict and its ripples throughout the world. First, Reveal host Al Letson has a conversation with members of the Parents Circle, Israeli and Palestinian parents who have lost children to the long-standing conflict and continue to work together for peace. We look at the human toll of the decades-old struggle and what it means to work for peace in a time of war.
Next, reporter Shaina Shealy looks at U.S. weapons transfers to Israel. Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack prompted a rush to send arms to the Israeli military, but some experts say that important safeguards meant to prevent weapons from being used on civilians are being ignored. We examine a policy introduced by the Biden administration earlier this year, which some argue is being bypassed, and a recently proposed weapons package that waives standard oversight provisions.
We end with a story from Reveal’s Najib Aminy about student protests at Columbia University in New York and the heated debate over free speech on college campuses. Soon after the Oct. 7 attack, university officials and student groups issued a series of statements about the Hamas attack and Israel’s response. This led to an escalation of tensions between student protesters and the school’s administration. Columbia and other universities have come under increasing pressure from students, politicians and donors about how they’ve responded to student demonstrations.
Support Reveal’s journalism at Revealnews.org/donatenow
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This post was originally published on Reveal.
Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen has built an impressive career in US journalism by being a constant thorn in the side of the Russian state. That journalistic campaign entered a new chapter in November when the Russian government issued a warrant for their arrest (Washington Post, 11/27/23; AP, 12/8/23; RFE/RL, 12/8/23; Newmark School of Journalism, 12/11/23).
Gessen, a staff writer at the New Yorker, gave an interview in which they spoke about well-documented Russian war crimes in the Ukrainian city of Bucha (OHCHR, 12/7/22). The Russian government, forever clamping down on negative press of its military invasion of Ukraine, symbolically declared them an outlaw. (Gessen lives in the United States.)
Masha Gessen (Photo: Clarissa Villondo)
Gessen has been an annoyance for the Russian government for some time; their book, The Man Without a Face, portrays Russian President Vladimir Putin not as a cunning political genius, but as a simpleton whose ego ruined the country (Washington Post, 4/7/12; Foreign Affairs, 5/1/12). Gessen, who is nonbinary, left Russia a decade ago after covering the country’s hostility toward LGBTQ people led them to fear for their own safety (Business Insider, 8/23/13).
In the post-2016 shock of Donald Trump’s presidential election, a great deal of US media fell into a trance of believing that Trump’s success could only be explained by Russian electoral sabotage. Gessen, refreshingly, took a different approach. Rather than blame one regime for the electoral outcome, they rightfully put Trump in the context of a global movement of authoritarian backlash toward liberalism. Their pieces linking Trump’s success to the rise of authoritarianism in Russia and Hungary remain essential reading (New York Review of Books, 11/10/16; New Yorker, 3/2/21).
Critical reporting on Putin and Trump is highly valued, and not controversial, in US media. Putin is an authoritarian, yes, but one not backed by the United States, and is viewed as an enemy. Trump, for most liberal publications, is an abhorrent aberration in an otherwise flawed but democratic political system.
Masha Gessen (New Yorker, 12/9/23): “From the earliest days of Israel’s founding, the comparison of displaced Palestinians to displaced Jews has presented itself, only to be swatted away.”
But when Gessen turned their lens to Israel, they fell victim to pro-Israel censorship. Their recent essay (New Yorker, 12/9/23) on Holocaust remembrance culture in Germany was a self-fulfilling prophecy: As a result of Gessen’s observation that the language that most accurately describes what is happening in Gaza—”the ghetto is being liquidated”—comes from the Jewish experience during World War II, the Green Party–affiliated Heinrich Böll Foundation (HBS), which was planning to award Gessen its Hannah Arendt Prize, canceled the event.
The Guardian (12/14/23) explained:
The HBS said it objected to and rejected a comparison made by Gessen in a 9 December essay in the New Yorker between Gaza and the Jewish ghettos in Europe.
In the essay, Gessen, who uses they, criticized Germany’s unequivocal support of Israel, drawing attention to the Bundestag’s 2019 resolution condemning the Israel boycott movement BDS as antisemitic and quoting a Jewish critic of Germany’s politics of Holocaust remembrance as saying memory culture had “gone haywire.”
In the paragraph the HBS draws attention to, Gessen wrote that “ghetto” would be “the more appropriate term” to describe Gaza, but the word “would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews. It also would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is being liquidated.”
The foundation said Gessen was implying that Israel aimed to “liquidate Gaza like a Nazi ghetto,” adding that “this statement is unacceptable to us and we reject it.”
Hannah Arendt (New Yorker, 12/9/23) called Israel’s Herut party—a forerunner of Likud—”a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy, and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.” Such opinions would likely disqualify her for the Hannah Arendt Prize.
Germany’s political culture of strong support for Israel, deeply tied to its guilt over the Nazi genocide of Jews, has led to a deeply chilling and severely anti-Palestinian censorship regime. As I have previously reported for FAIR (11/5/21), this culture has even taken a grip in US media.
There is a special irony in a prize in the name of German Jewish philosopher and journalist Hannah Arendt, whose work on the rise of German fascism is essential, being withheld from another Jewish journalist for writing about the rise of authoritarianism.
Arendt herself, as Gessen’s essay noted, wasn’t afraid to link Zionist extremism with the “N word,” joining other Jewish intellectuals in 1948 (including Albert Einstein) who protested the visit of Israeli politician Menachem Begin to the United States, denouncing Begin’s Herut (Freedom) party as “a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties” (Haaretz, 12/4/14). It seems likely that Hannah Arendt would also be deemed unworthy to receive the Hannah Arendt Prize.
The Daily Beast (12/13/23), New York Post (12/14/23), Washington Post (12/14/23) and Literary Hub (12/13/23) covered the issue. But the absurdity of the situation should be shouted from the rooftops of every respectable newspaper.
Gessen, of course, isn’t the only media victim of anti-Palestinian censorship since the outbreak of violence began in October. Reuters (10/21/23) reported that
Pulitzer Prize–winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen said…a Jewish organization in New York City canceled a reading he was due to give on Friday without explanation, a day after he said he signed an open letter condemning Israel’s “indiscriminate violence” against Palestinians in Gaza.
Two writers were forced out of the New York Times Magazine because of their protests against Israel’s military action in Gaza, as the magazine’s editor “Jake Silverstein said the letter violated the outlet’s policy on public protest” (Democracy Now!, 11/14/23).
After Artforum editor David Velasco was fired for posting an open letter expressing solidarity with Palestinians, he told the New York Times (10/26/23), “I have no regrets.” He added that he was “disappointed that a magazine that has always stood for freedom of speech and the voices of artists has bent to outside pressure.”
Jackson Frank, a sports writer for PhillyVoice.com, was fired for tweeting “solidarity with Palestine always” (Guardian, 10/10/23). Michael Eisen lost his job as editor-in-chief of the academic journal eLife after commenting favorably on an Onion (10/13/23) article with the headline “Dying Gazans Criticized for Not Using Last Words to Condemn Hamas” (Science, 10/23/23).
The absurdity of Gessen, a queer Jew, being punished in the name of Hannah Arendt, also a Jew, by a branch of the German political machine for being too open about the nature of global authoritarianism should be a wake up call for how degraded our discourse on Israel/Palestine has become. But it likely won’t change minds in most media. At least not yet.
The post Gessen’s Cancellation Can’t Go Unchallenged appeared first on FAIR.
This post was originally published on FAIR.
“Is Anti-Zionism Always Antisemitic?” a New York Times article (12/10/23) by Jonathan Weisman asked. Trying to pinpoint the moment when “anti-Zionism crosses from political belief to bigotry,” Weisman suggested there were different kinds of anti-Zionism based on different visions of what Zionism means. But his effort to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable critics of Israel painted principled supporters of equal rights as antisemitic bigots.
Weisman offered one definition of Zionism—the way it was “once clearly understood”—as “the belief that Jews, who have endured persecution for millenniums, needed refuge and self-determination in the land of their ancestors.” To oppose this kind of Zionism “suggests the elimination of Israel as the sovereign homeland of the Jews”—which he said to many Jews “is indistinguishable from hatred of Jews generally, or antisemitism.” Their argument is:
Around half the world’s Jews live in Israel, and destroying it, or ending its status as a refuge where they are assured of governing themselves, would imperil a people who have faced annihilation time and again.
On the other hand, wrote Weisman, “some critics of Israel say they equate Zionism with a continuing project of expanding the Jewish state.” This kind of anti-Zionism merely opposes “an Israeli government bent on settling ever more parts of the West Bank,” land that could serve as “a separate state for the Palestinian people.”
These two views of Zionism seemed to represent the poles of acceptable and unacceptable anti-Zionism. The piece quoted Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) explaining that “some anti-Zionism” isn’t “used to cloak hatred of Jews”; Nadler stressed, though, that “MOST anti-Zionism—the type that calls for Israel’s destruction, denying its right to exist—is antisemitic.”
The Nexus Task Force, a group associated with the Bard Center for the Study of Hate, has a definition of antisemitism that is more tolerant of criticism of Israel than that of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, also cited by the Times. But it still insists, Weisman wrote, “that it is antisemitic to reject the right of Jews alone to define themselves as a people and exercise self-determination.”
Jonathan Weisman (New York Times, 12/10/23): “Virulent anti-Zionism and virulent antisemitism ultimately intersect, at a very bad address for the Jews.”
The phrase “self-determination” is doing a lot of work here. In international relations, it is generally used to mean that the residents of a geographical area inhabited by a distinct group have a right to decide whether or not they want that area to remain part of a larger entity. It’s a right that seems to come and go depending on political allegiances: When Albanians in Kosovo wanted to secede from Serbia, their right to do so was enforced with NATO bombs. If ethnic Russians who wanted to split off from Ukraine got help from Moscow, though, that wasn’t self-determination but a violation of Ukrainian sovereignty.
To call Zionism a belief in Jewish “self-determination,” however, perverts the concept to include moving to a geographic region and forcibly expelling many of the people who already live there, in order to create a situation where members of your group can have a “sovereign homeland” where they “are assured of governing themselves.”
Ensuring the dominance of a particular ethnic group through forced migration is not usually called “self-determination,” but rather “ethnic cleansing.” This is the older version of Zionism that Weisman seems to suggest can only be opposed by antisemites.
It’s true that there is another vision of Zionism, unsatisfied with expelling the indigenous residents to the fringes of Israel/Palestine, that insists on incorporating those fringes. Ever since the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel has occupied the remaining parts of what was the League of Nations’ Palestine Mandate, where many refugees from the establishment of Israel were forced to live.
But because Zionism requires a Jewish state, the people who lived in those occupied territories could not be treated as citizens. Maintaining Israel’s veneer of democracy requires the political fiction that these undesirables are not part of the country that rules them, but instead belong to non-sovereign entities—like the Palestinian National Authority and the Gaza Strip—whose raison d’etre is to provide a rationale for why the bulk of the Palestinian population isn’t allowed to vote in Israeli elections.
As it happens, this is precisely the strategy that white-ruled South Africa employed to pretend that white supremacy was compatible with democracy; it called the fictitious countries that the nation’s Black majority supposedly belonged to “bantustans.” This and other resemblances to white South Africa are why leading human rights groups like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Israel’s B’Tselem call Israel an apartheid state.
But both versions of Zionism involve the dismissal of one group’s rights in order to create a polity dominated by another group—a project that can certainly be opposed in either iteration without signifying animosity or prejudice toward anyone. (To be sure, there are antisemites who use “Zionists” as a transparent codeword for Jews. These are generally pretty easy to spot.)
Weisman relied on this New York Times article (12/4/23), which gives no indication of talking to any protesters, to smear protesters as antisemitic.
There is much to take issue with in Weisman’s article, but there is one point he makes that really warrants a correction. As an example of straightforward “Jew hatred,” he cites “holding Jews around the world responsible for Israeli government actions”—and offers as an example that this is what “pro-Palestinian protesters did last week outside an Israeli restaurant in Philadelphia.”
But the protesters at Goldie, a vegan falafel restaurant, weren’t blaming “Jews around the world” for Israel’s assault on Gaza; they were holding Goldie’s owner, Israeli-born Michael Solomonov, responsible, because his restaurants had raised $100,000 for United Hatzalah, a medical organization that supports the Israeli Defense Forces.
According to the Guardian (12/8/23), which interviewed “protesters and current and former employees at Solomonov’s restaurants,” critics both inside and outside the staff were concerned that Solomonov hosted a fundraiser for prominent pro-Israel politicians, and had “booked and paid for multiple, lavish private dinners…for IDF members preparing to deploy to fight for Israel.” (The New York Times article—12/4/23—that Weisman linked to did not appear to be based on interviews with any protesters, but instead quoted numerous politicians condemning their demonstration.)
Obviously Solomonov and his critics have different views of his actions. But there is no evidence that protesters were targeting his restaurant simply because he was Jewish, and it’s an irresponsible smear for Weisman to assert that they were.
ACTION: Please tell the New York Times to correct its false claim that people protesting at a Philadelphia restaurant owned by a prominent supporter of the Israeli Defense Forces were “holding Jews around the world responsible for Israeli government actions.”
CONTACT: You can send a message about factual errors to the New York Times at nytnews@nytimes.com.
Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.
The post ACTION ALERT: NYT Misrepresents Zionism’s Opponents as Anti-Jewish Bigots appeared first on FAIR.
This post was originally published on FAIR.
CounterSpin interview with Sonya Meyerson-Knox on Jewish Voice for Peace
Janine Jackson interviewed Jewish Voice for Peace’s Sonya Meyerson-Knox for the December 8, 2023, episode of CounterSpin, about Jewish opposition to Israel’s siege of Gaza. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Despite the official contention that civilian deaths in the Gaza strip are in keeping with those of other military campaigns, a recent New York Times report acknowledged that, actually, “Israel’s assault is different.”
New York Times (11/25/23)
“Even a conservative estimate” of the reported Gaza casualty figures, the Times said, shows that the rate of death during Israel’s assault has “few precedents in this century.”
Listeners know that the response to the current violence on Gaza—the massive killings and displacement—what response you believe in has to do with your understanding of what’s happening and why. And that depends on who you’re hearing from, who you’re told to believe.
Who gets to speak is always a key question about US news media coverage of what we call foreign policy, but that doesn’t just mean which officially credentialed policy experts, but which human beings, which communities, get to, not just be quoted, but shape the conversation.
And now, as always, US corporate media’s insistence that power speaks—and those affected get to comment, maybe—is trying to win the day. But if that insistence is failing, it’s to do with the work of our guest and, I’m sure she would say, many others.
Sonya Meyerson-Knox is communications director of Jewish Voice for Peace. She joins us now by phone from Philadelphia. Welcome to CounterSpin, Sonya Meyerson-Knox.
Sonya Meyerson-Knox: Thank you so much. It’s so great to be here.
JJ: I don’t think New York Times columnist Bret Stephens is himself especially worthy of respectful consideration here. Ten years ago, he was saying, “The Palestinian saga has gotten awfully boring, hasn’t it?” Everyone else in the region is changing; “only the Palestinians remain trapped in ideological amber. How long can the world be expected to keep staring at this 4-million-year-old mosquito?” OK.
New York Times (11/7/23)
But the Times op-ed page is still looked to as a measure of kind of the range of acceptable opinion. So it’s meaningful what Stephens does in this recent piece where he states, “On October 8, Jews woke up to discover who our friends are not.” He cites Jewish Voice for Peace as being used as “Jewish beards”—interesting language—“for aggressive antisemites.” And he essentially suggests that we can maybe dismiss the views of Black Lives Matter, because one of them didn’t immediately denounce Hamas, and we should side-eye academic and corporate diversity efforts, because they’re also sites of antisemitism.
We’ve seen it elsewhere, this notion that, well, Jewish people put out lawn signs after George Floyd’s murder, so it’s unfair and it’s revealingly biased that all Black people don’t support Israel’s assault on Gaza, and indeed the occupation itself.
It reflects a sad and cynical view of coalitional social movements as transactional, as favor-trading. Your work represents a different vision and understanding. Can you talk about that and how you engage, or if you engage, that transactional view of justice movements?
SM: The thing about Bret Stephens and so much, unfortunately, of the New York Times opinion pages, is that, in fact, they are the ones who I would argue are historical anomalies stuck in amber. What we are seeing yet again, as we have seen so many times in recent history, is that people who are believing in progressive causes, who want the world to be a better place, are already understanding and committed to a vision of the world that is intersectional, where our struggles are absolutely connected.
The belief that none of us are free unless all of us are free, it’s not just a slogan. It’s absolutely, I think, the only way that any of us are going to have the future that we’re trying to build.
And so to have the paper of record continually disparage some movements, and I would put Jewish Voice for Peace’s work as anti-Zionist Jews, along with the much, much larger and rapidly growing Palestine solidarity movement globally—to put all of that somehow always on the exception, and to castigate anybody who chooses to stand with an incredibly moral and just cause, simply because one prefers to defend the actions of the State of Israel and a government which is advocating for genocide, is just utterly appalling.
Reuters (11/15/23)
I am astounded every time the New York Times and most of corporate media does this, the way that some causes are allowed to be lifted up and progressive, and other causes are not, not because they’re not presented as cleanly or as well-behaved, but literally because they are pointing out the inconsistencies of US foreign policy, and the extent to which the US government and our elected officials are out of step with what the US population wants.
Look at all the polls, including the ones that are coming out right now. A majority of US voters, and the vast majority of Democratic voters, are all demanding a lasting ceasefire, and most of them want to see US military aid to the Israeli government conditioned, if not stopped entirely.
And yet none of that actually appears on the pages of the New York Times. It treats the Palestine movement, and those of us who stand for Palestinian freedom and liberation, as though we are somehow an anomaly, when in fact we are the vastly growing majority.
JJ: And another thing, I think it also suggests that Jewish Americans have been corrupted, essentially, by “wokeness” or by critical race theory or something. And as I’ve seen you point out elsewhere, that’s a misunderstanding of history. That’s a misunderstanding of the role that Jewish Americans have played in progressive movements, to say that, all of a sudden, folks are critical of the State of Israel.
SM: Oh, absolutely. As long as there’s been the concept of a State of Israel, there have been Jews that have been leading opposition to it. The American Jewish population, let alone the global Jewish population, is not a monolith, and it never was and it never will be.
FAIR.org (10/17/23)
And that’s one of the things I think that makes the Jewish community so strong, is our long cultural and historical understanding of ourselves as a place that values debate and introspection and proving your sources, and then doubting them and challenging them and researching them, and coming back to the discussion and teasing things out, over and over again, along with, and this is especially important to the younger generation, I would argue, that are coming up now as young adults, the idea of social justice, of tikkun olam, repairing the world.
When I was growing up, as a kid, I thought being Jewish meant that my grandparents were union supporters and Communist activists, and I thought that’s what being Jewish was. And not everyone has that particular background, but so many of us have absolutely been raised to the idea that part of what it means to be a Jew and to practice Judaism, not just once a week or twice a week, but every day, constantly, is this commitment to trying to make the world a better place. And increasingly, like we’re seeing right now, that has to include Palestine, that has to include what’s happening to Palestinians.
But that, to some extent, has always been the case. Jewish Voice for Peace’s membership ranges from people who are in their first year of college to people who are in their eighties and nineties, and who have been lifelong committed anti-Zionists. And if you look back over the history of progressive movements in the United States, there have always been people as part of them who are also Jewish.
And so this insistence that all Jews support the actions of the State of Israel, right or wrong, I don’t think it ever existed. That was never the fact. And it’s increasingly not. But it’s only now that we’re even allowed to exist as a group, according to the New York Times. Like, the New York Times spent decades not mentioning our organization’s name, using our quotes, but not attributing us as Jewish Voice for Peace members.
Mainstream media treats anti-Zionists, and especially Jewish anti-Zionists, as though we’re some tiny little percentage of the population. But at the same time, even as far back as polls from 2012, 25% of US Jews thought that Israel was operating as an apartheid state. That was 2012.
Again, there’s a need of corporate media to simplify stories down, but then there’s also the intentional silencing of voices. And certainly Palestinians have been continually, appallingly silenced in corporate media. And the next up, I would argue, are the anti-Zionist Jews, who have also been so extensively silenced.
New York Times (10/27/23)
JJ: And just to add to it, I thought it was interesting that Stephens cites Jewish Voice for Peace as having organized, or having helped organize, a “much photographed protest” at Grand Central Terminal. That’s a funny way of dismissing, as merely performative, what is in fact a monumental, incredible, powerful action.
And I think it reads a little bit as desperate, that intention to dismiss, because things have changed, things are changing, in terms of the relationship of Jewish Americans and Israel. That Grand Central Terminal action was incredibly powerful and moving, and I find it interesting that folks would try to dismiss it by saying people took pictures of it.
SM: Especially given that that’s one of over 80 actions that JVP has organized or co-sponsored in the past seven weeks. That was certainly one of the most iconic, and was very, of course, intentionally organized in homage to one of ACT UP’s most famous AIDS awareness protests. And, you know, thousands and thousands of people, and then thousands and thousands of people who couldn’t even make it inside, were protesting outside in solidarity.
Chicago had a thousand Jews protesting in their train station. Every city across the US has seen protests led by Jews calling for ceasefire. They’ve also seen dozens more protests by Palestinians, often together with Jews, calling for ceasefire. But the numbers are not going down. They’re only getting bigger.
And whether it’s been inside of the halls of Congress, or taking over train stations or taking over bridges, or just outside of the district offices of our members of Congress every other day, week in and week out, demanding that our elected officials actually represent what their voters want.
We have been on the streets, and we have been organizing. And it’s seven, eight weeks now, and we are not flagging. People call us all the time, saying: “I live in this city. When’s the next action?” Our members are coming to us—because JVP is a grassroots organization that is very much member-led—coming to us, saying: “What about this location? Can we do something for this? How about that?”
The energy, it’s not flagging, even though seven weeks is a long time in the news cycle. If anything, people are more committed to it.
Sonya Meyerson-Knox: “As US Jews, we know what it means when a government uses genocidal rhetoric and then attacks civilians. We know where that leads.” (image: Zero Hour)
Of course, the fact of the matter is that the Israeli government is still bombing civilians that are captive in Gaza, and, if anything, that is going to get worse in the coming days. So we are very much aware of the scale of what is at stake, and I think that also drives us, but the numbers are not flagging. The numbers are only growing.
We know, I think especially as US Jews, we know what it means when a government uses genocidal rhetoric and then attacks civilians. We know where that leads. And that’s, of course, why we are committed to saying, “Never again means never again for anyone,” and that includes Palestinians.
JJ: And it sounds like a deflection, but it’s not, because one of the worries, of course, of conflating—vigorously conflating, life-alteringly conflating—anti-Zionism with antisemitism, it obscures the real antisemitism that exists, and makes it harder to fight that.
SM: Oh, absolutely. It’s devastating right now, watching as real antisemitism is absolutely on the rise, because white supremacy is absolutely on the rise, and the number of attacks that we have seen on Muslims and on Palestinians in this country is unequivocally on the rise. The attack on the three Palestinian students in Vermont is atrocious.
But instead of leading Jewish organizations that claim to work on civil rights actually addressing that, they’re focusing all of their attention on defending the government of the State of Israel, so that it can’t be held accountable for the war crimes it’s committing. It’s incredibly worrisome.
And as part of the larger movement committed to being anti-racist and defending all of our communities and being in deep relationship with them, we have been saying for a while now that the rise of white nationalism is really, really worrisome, and that the US government has, under certain presidents, certainly embraced it, and under the current president is not doing enough to fight it, just like we’d argue college campuses have platformed white supremacists numerous times, and create incredibly unsafe spaces.
And one of the results of that is absolutely the rise of this incredibly terrifying, horrific white nationalist movement that certainly uses antisemitism as one of its tools in its toolbox. We can and we will dismantle that, and we do that in solidarity with everybody from the other communities we work with, with our Muslim allies and our Palestinian allies and our Black allies and everybody else that is committed to being in solidarity against white supremacy.
But we can’t do that nearly as effectively if at the same time we’re being continually accused ourselves of something that we’re not doing. If these organizations that claim to worry about antisemitism really did, then they would stop defending the Israeli government, and protecting it from being held accountable for bombing hospitals, and instead allow us all to focus on what we need to do to dismantle white supremacy, and the antisemitism that white supremacy uses.
CounterSpin (1/6/17)
JJ: I would love you to talk about what you’d like to see more or less of from reporting, but I want to just reference, as I do that, an interview that I often refer to with Ellen Schrecker, who is an expert in McCarthyism, who says, there’s an idea that we went through this period and it was difficult, but we all lived through it. We made it through, we made it out the other side.
And what she says is, you know what? We didn’t all make it through. We didn’t all survive. It’s not only that people lost their jobs and their livelihoods and their friends, but certain coalitions didn’t survive. Certain ideas that were being put into action didn’t survive, and we were set back by that McCarthyism in unknowable ways.
And I think it’s relevant here. There are costs being made here, not just that people are being fired for having the wrong opinion or for putting something on Facebook, but people are being cowed. People who would’ve marched are not marching, because they see the harms. What would you say to folks who are maybe a little bit scared about the costs of speaking out at this time?
SM: That’s an incredibly potent point.
JJ: Right? I come back to it all the time, because—we didn’t all make it. It didn’t all work out fine. And I think it’s a point that’s often lost.
SM: And of course, I think the only way that we can make sure that all of us make it, right, that all of us come together and all of us are protected, is if we are truly all in this together. The doxxing of students—particularly Palestinian and Muslim students, but also Jewish anti-Zionist students—the doxxing of students is unacceptable, and we have to come together and call that out.
The response from certain Jewish institutions, legacy institutions in particular, which have silenced and/or fired staff for raising issues about ceasefire, not even necessarily getting into anti-Zionism, all of that has to be called out. And we do it together, and we come out loudly together.
And one of the things that Jewish Voice for Peace has always been committed to is building the Jewish community and Judaism beyond Zionism. So with our rabbis, and with our Havurah Network, and with all of our chapters, we bring in Jewish ritual, we embrace the teachings of our movement elders, in order to offer alternative Jewish communal spaces, so that if speaking up for Palestine, if demanding a lasting ceasefire, if even articulating that Palestinians deserve just as many as human rights as anyone else, if that is too much for the community that you’re currently in—for your family or for your Jewish community or whatever—there are other communities that are waiting and welcoming and would love to have you with us. And we are growing, and we have the full range of Judaism at our fingertips, and we are building a Judaism that is not dependent or in any way, in fact, related to the actions of the State of Israel.
And I always think back to something that Mohammed el-Kurd said a few years ago, which was, do you think it’s hard having these conversations at the dinner table? Imagine actually what it’s like living a day in the life of a Palestinian. And I think that’s something that we all have to hold onto as well, that it doesn’t feel great, initially, to initiate these really hard conversations, and we’re here to help, and it’s what we’re being asked to do. And it’s absolutely, I think, the moment to be doing it.
So Jewish Voice for Peace and other organizations that are part of the Palestine solidarity movement, including IfNotNow and others, are offering how to have our conversations, we’re offering the tools, so that when you have these conversations with your friends, and the kid you went to summer camp with, or your kind of grumpy older uncle, you’re not alone in it, and you also know how to do it in a way that we believe leads to everybody actually becoming more informed, more aware and hearing each other.
Al Jazeera (11/30/23)
Obviously, we want to see Palestinian narratives centered more. The fact that there was no Palestinian voice on the op-ed pages of any national US paper in the weeks following October 7 was appalling. I’m very concerned about the fact that so much of mainstream TV seems to find it okay to fire their Muslim and Arab anchors and hosts. We just saw that with Mehdi Hasan most recently.
There’s all sorts of context that’s continually being ignored. Why is the fact that the majority of the population of Palestinians in Gaza are all already refugees—how did that happen? Oh, we don’t need to talk about that; the clock just started on October 7. And of course the clock didn’t start on October 7. It started 75 years earlier, with the Nakba in 1948, at the least.
But also, and this is something that I fundamentally can’t believe is still happening in mainstream press: Corporate media need to stop repeating the Israeli military’s propaganda and talking points, and treating it as though it were fact. It is not fact.
The Israeli military, for example, didn’t tell Palestinians in Gaza to flee from North Gaza to South Gaza “because it was worried about their own safety.” It was not worried about Palestinian safety. The Israeli military is bombing civilians daily.
There’s so many accusations that are made by Israeli officials, who are then invited onto talkshows and quoted in newspaper articles as though they are speaking facts, when in fact they are saying incredibly horrible, racist, genocidal things, and none of that is called out.
There’s a level of accuracy and accountability that corporate media seem to not apply to the Israeli military and to the Israeli government, and it is shocking, and high time, we are well overdue for that to no longer be the case.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Sonya Meyerson-Knox of Jewish Voice for Peace, online at JewishVoiceForPeace.org. Sonya Meyerson-Knox, thank you so much for joining us today on CounterSpin.
SM: Thank you. It was such a pleasure to be here.
The post ‘”None of Us Are Free Unless All of Us Are Free” Is Not Just a Slogan’ appeared first on FAIR.
This post was originally published on FAIR.
A new bipartisan bill introduced Dec. 4 aims to target critics of Israel. Civil rights groups and organizers worry that House Resolution 6578, also known as Commission to Study Acts of Antisemitism in the United States Act, would usher in a new era of McCarthyism during a pivotal time of resistance and legitimate criticism of the apartheid state of Israel and its violent occupation of Palestinian…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
University of Pennsylvania President Elizabeth Magill voluntarily resigned her position Saturday after a House Education Committee hearing last Tuesday on how colleges have handled antisemitism. Magill has faced demands to resign since September, when she refused to bow to pressure to cancel the Palestine Writes Literature Festival on campus. More universities face accusations that they have…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
(CC image: Jewish Voice for Peace)
This week on CounterSpin: As we record on December 7, the news from Gaza continues horrific: The Washington Post is reporting, citing Gaza Health Ministry reports, that Israel’s continued assault throughout the region has killed at least 350 people in the past 24 hours, which brings the death toll of the Israeli military campaign, launched after the October 7 attack by Hamas that killed a reported 1,200 people, to more than 17,000.
In this country, Columbia University has suspended two student groups protesting in support of Palestinian human rights and human beings, though the official message couldn’t specify which policies, exactly, had been violated.
There are many important and terrible things happening in the world right now—from fossil fuel companies working to undo any democratic restraints on their ability to profit from planetary destruction; to drugmakers who’ve devastated the lives of millions using the legal system to say money, actually, can substitute for accountability; to an upcoming election that is almost too much to think about, and the Beltway press corps acting like it’s just another day.
But the devastation of Gaza and the vehement efforts to silence anyone who wants to challenge it—and the failure of those efforts, as people nevertheless keep speaking up, keep protesting—is the story for today.
Sonya Meyerson-Knox is communications director of Jewish Voice for Peace. We talk with her this week on CounterSpin.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of climate change.
The post Sonya Meyerson-Knox on Jewish Voice for Peace appeared first on FAIR.
This post was originally published on FAIR.
Over the past several years, we’ve witnessed growing calls to label anti-Zionism as antisemitism. Since Hamas’s October 7 attack and Israel’s subsequent military assault on Gaza, however, Israel advocates have doubled down yet further politically on this cynical accusation. On November 28, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution asserting that “denying Israel’s right to exist is a…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Hisham Awartani, one of three Palestinian college students who were shot by a white man in Burlington, Vermont, over the weekend, issued a text message statement to his peers at Brown University on Monday night, which was read aloud during a vigil on campus. In his missive, Awartani, who grew up in the occupied West Bank in Palestine, said the attack against him and his friends — Kinnan Abdalhamid…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Canadian House Speaker Anthony Rota (Politico, 9/24/23) said of the SS veteran, “He’s a Ukrainian hero, a Canadian hero, and we thank him for all his service.”
Media coverage of the Canadian Parliament’s standing ovation in September for Yaroslav Hunka, a 98-year-old Ukrainian Canadian who fought for the Nazis in World War II, has included egregious Holocaust revisionism.
On September 22, following Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s address to the Canadian parliament, Canada’s then–Speaker of the House Anthony Rota introduced Hunka:
We have here in the chamber today a Ukrainian-Canadian veteran from the Second World War who fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians and continues to support the troops today.
Rota went on to call Hunka “a Ukrainian hero, a Canadian hero, and we thank him for all his service” (Politico, 9/24/23). Parliamentarians of all political parties gave Hunka two standing ovations, and Zelenskyy raised his fist to salute the man (Sky News, 9/26/23).
Then the New York–based Forward (9/24/23) pointed out that Hunka had fought for the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division, also known as the Galicia Division, of the SS. (The SS, short for Schutzstaffel, “Protection Squadron,” was the military wing of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party.)
“You have to tread softly on these issues,” said the main expert used by the CBC (9/28/23) to discuss the topic of Ukraine and Nazism.
Covering the subsequent controversy, the CBC (9/28/23) ran the headline, “Speaker’s Honoring of Former Nazi Soldier Reveals a Complicated Past, Say Historians.” In the context of the Holocaust, “complicated” functions as a hand-waving euphemism that gets in the way of holding perpetrators accountable: If a decision is “complicated,” it’s understandable, even if it’s wrong.
Digital reporter/editor Jonathan Migneault, who wrote the piece, soft-pedaled the Galicia Division in other ways too. He said that some of the Ukrainians who joined it did so “for ideological reasons, in opposition to the Soviet Union, in hopes of creating an independent Ukrainian state.”
That’s quite a whitewashing of the ideological package that goes with signing up for the SS, leaving out that this vision for an “independent Ukrainian state” included the extermination of Jewish, LGBTQ, Roma and Polish minorities. As far as the “hopes of creating an independent Ukrainian state” alibi, the Per Anders Rudling (Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 2012) documents that “there is no overt indication that the unit [of Ukrainian Waffen-SS recruits] in any way was dedicated to Ukrainian statehood, let alone independence.”
Toronto Star columnist Heather Mallick (9/26/23) mocked Poland for wanting to extradite Hunka, whose unit massacred Poles during World War II, because “Poland has a notorious history of antisemitism.”
Toronto Star columnist Heather Mallick (9/26/23) also used the word “complicated” to diminish Nazi atrocities, and mock the Polish government’s interest in having Hunka extradited for war crimes:
Funny, they’ve had 73 years to ask Canada for him. It’s almost as if Poland has a notorious history of antisemitism but that’s crazy talk….
Rota should have understood how complicated history is, how, post-Holodomor, a Ukrainian caught between Hitler and Stalin made a fatal choice.
We can hate Hunka for that now. I do.
But would every Canadian MP have made immaculate choices inside Stalin’s “Bloodlands” in 1943? Of course you and I would have been heroic, joined the White Rose movement, been executed for our troubles. But everyone?
Mallick refers to Ukraine as “Stalin’s ‘Bloodlands,’” citing the Holodomor, the 1930s famine in the Soviet Union that killed an estimated 3.5 million Ukrainians, as well as millions in other parts of the USSR. Yet her link takes readers to a review of the book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, which—its own flaws notwithstanding (Jacobin, 9/9/14)—discusses the killings in Ukraine and elsewhere by Stalin and, on a significantly more egregious scale, Hitler. Acknowledging that the phrase she’s borrowing refers to both Soviet crimes and the Nazis’ genocides would have made the choice of joining the Nazis seem rather less sympathetic.
Meanwhile, Mallick’s baffling comments about Poland erase the Nazis’ systematic killing of Polish people. Polish history has indeed been marred by horrific antisemitism, with many Polish people complicit in the Holocaust, as she glibly references; this does not erase the fact that the Nazis also murdered 1.8 million non-Jewish Poles, or negate Poland’s desire to see their killers brought to justice. As Lev Golinkin (Forward, 9/24/23) pointed out, the Galicia Division that Hunka belonged to
was visited by SS head Heinrich Himmler, who spoke of the soldiers’ “willingness to slaughter Poles.” Three months earlier, SS Galichina subunits perpetrated what is known as the Huta Pieniacka massacre, burning 500 to 1,000 Polish villagers alive.
Keir Giles (Politico, 10/2/23) advances the argument that joining the SS and swearing “absolute obedience to the commander in chief of the German Armed Forces Adolf Hitler” doesn’t make you a Nazi.
An old cliché uses the analogy of gradually boiling a frog to explain how fascism takes hold in societies, but readers of Keir Giles’ intervention (Politico, 10/2/23) will feel like they are eyes-deep in a bubbling cauldron.
Giles, who said the relevant history is “complicated” four times and “complex” twice, wrote an article entitled “Fighting Against the USSR Didn’t Necessarily Make You a Nazi.” That’s a dubious claim in a piece focused on World War II, when the Soviet Union was the main force fighting Nazi Germany, and thus fighting the Soviets made you at least an ally of Nazis.
More to the point, the unit Hunka belonged to was a formal division of the SS, trained and armed by Nazi Germany (Forward, 9/27/23), which “fought exclusively to serve Nazi aims” (National Post, 9/25/23).
Giles, however, opened by writing:
Everybody knows that a lie can make it halfway around the world before the truth has even got its boots on.
And the ongoing turmoil over Canada’s parliament recognizing former SS trooper Yaroslav Hunka highlights one of the most important reasons why.
Something that’s untrue but simple is far more persuasive than a complicated, nuanced truth….
In the case of Hunka, the mass outrage stems from his enlistment with one of the foreign legions of the Waffen-SS, fighting Soviet forces on Germany’s eastern front.
Setting aside that Giles omits “and butchering innocent people” when he describes Waffen-SS activities as “fighting Soviet forces,” his suggestion that calling Hunka a Nazi is a “lie” does not withstand even minimal scrutiny. For instance, Rudling (Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 2012) documents that, from August 29, 1943, onward, Ukrainian Waffen-SS recruits were sworn in with the following oath:
I swear before God this holy oath, that in the battle against Bolshevism, I will give absolute obedience to the commander in chief of the German Armed Forces Adolf Hitler, and as a brave soldier I will always be prepared to lay down my life for this oath.
Vowing “absolute obedience” to Hitler, and swearing that you’re willing to die for him, makes you as root and branch a Nazi as Rudolf Hess or Hermann Göring.
SS commander Heinrich Himmler inspecting troops from the Galicia Division.
After drawing these bogus distinctions between the Nazis and their units, Giles moved on to genocide denial:
The idea that foreign volunteers and conscripts were being allocated to the Waffen-SS rather than the Wehrmacht on administrative rather than ideological grounds is a hard sell for audiences conditioned to believe the SS’s primary task was genocide….
Repeated exhaustive investigations—including by not only the Nuremberg trials but also the British, Canadian and even Soviet authorities—led to the conclusion that no war crimes or atrocities had been committed by this particular unit.
Giles doesn’t name any investigations by British or Soviet officials, so it’s unclear what he’s talking about on those points, but he’s lying about Nuremberg. The Nuremberg Tribunals did not specifically address the Galicia Division (Guardian, 9/25/23), but found that the combat branch of which they were a part, the Waffen-SS, “was a criminal organization”:
In dealing with the SS, the Tribunal includes all persons who had been officially accepted as members of the SS, including the members of the Allgemeine SS, members of the Waffen-SS, members of the SS Totenkopfverbaende, and the members of any of the different police forces who were members of the SS.
Giles asserted that “simple narratives like ‘everybody in the SS was guilty of war crimes’ are more pervasive because they’re much simpler to grasp”—but everybody in the SS was, quite literally, guilty of war crimes.
The Ottawa Citizen (9/27/23), citing B’nai Brith, reported that “the Canadian government’s approach to Nazi war criminals had been marked with ‘intentional harboring of known Nazi war criminals.’”
The Canadian investigation Giles refers to is a 1986 Canadian government report that claims that membership in the Galicia Division did not in and of itself constitute a war crime. This conclusion is highly suspect when read against the Nuremberg tribunal’s judgment, and the report also has to be understood in the broader context of Canadian state investigations into Nazis in the country. As the Ottawa Citizen’s David Pugliese (9/27/23) explained:
The federal government has withheld a second part of a 1986 government commission report about Nazis who settled in Canada. In addition, it has heavily censored another 1986 report examining how Nazis were able to get into Canada. More than 600 pages of that document, obtained by this newspaper and other organizations through the Access to Information law, have been censored.
Neither Giles nor any other member of the public knows what the Canadian government is hiding about its investigation, or why it’s concealing this information, so it’s disingenuous for him to present the fraction of the government’s conclusions to which he has access as if it is the final word on the Galicia Division or anything else.
As to Giles’ jaw-dropping complaint that people are “conditioned to believe the SS’s primary task was genocide,” the Nuremberg Trial concluded that the SS carried out
persecution and extermination of the Jews, brutalities and killings in concentration camps, excesses in the administration of occupied territories, the administration of the slave labor program, and the mistreatment and murder of prisoners.
Perhaps the public is “conditioned to believe the SS’s primary task was genocide” because the SS carried out genocide.
As disconcerting as it is that authors like Giles are writing fascist propaganda—and that Mallick veers perilously close to the same—it’s even more alarming that editors at outlets like the Star, CBC and Politico deem such intellectually and morally bankrupt material worthy of publication.
The post Media Holocaust Revisionism After Canada’s Standing Ovation for an SS Vet appeared first on FAIR.
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We cannot pick and choose how and to whom human rights are applied. Disrespect and racism has no place in our society
We are all “born free and equal in dignity and rights”.
This first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights sets out this simple aspiration for how we should interact and engage with each other as human beings.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
A new report details how the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, has failed to address bigoted posts toward a number of groups — including posts targeting Palestinians, Jews and Muslims — since the start of October. The report, compiled by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) and published on Tuesday, examined 200 hateful posts on the site that promoted antisemitic…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
An incisive new report released by researchers affiliated with Rutgers University lays out in detail the many ways in which the U.S. political establishment has instrumentalized anti-Muslim bigotry and disingenuously redefined the idea of “antisemitism” in order to defuse criticisms of the Israeli government and justify dehumanizing policies toward Palestinians. Titled “Presumptively Antisemitic…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
This Pew report (5/21/21) should not come as a surprise to US journalists.
As protests erupt worldwide against Israel’s ferocious bombardment and ground invasion of Gaza, which has claimed the lives of more than 10,000 Palestinians (Reuters, 11/6/23), US media ponder how all of this impacts Jewish people. Sadly, the way this is often framed completely mischaracterizes Jewish opinion and the pro-Israel movement, falsely acting as if Jewish opinion is unquestionably unified in support of Israeli military attacks and in opposition to Palestinian rights.
One might think corporate media might have learned better by now. The New York Times (10/27/23) reported on a massive “never again for anyone” protest at Grand Central Terminal headed by Jewish Voice for Peace. Descendants of Holocaust survivors were arrested for protesting military aid to Israel at Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s house (Business Insider, 10/14/23). More than 300 activists were arrested in Washington, DC, while calling for a ceasefire in a Capitol Hill protest organized by JVP and IfNotNow, another Jewish peace group (USA Today, 10/19/23).
CNN (10/23/23) reported, “Thousands more Jewish Americans continue to gather in protests across the United States, calling on President Joe Biden and other elected officials to rein in Israel.” Among those Jewish-led protests was one outside the Los Angeles home of Vice President Kamala Harris (LA Times, 10/19/23).
None of this should be surprising, as a Pew Research (5/21/21) survey “found that Jewish Americans—much like the US public overall—also hold widely differing views on Israel and its political leadership.” Younger Jews in particular are often sharply critical of Israel; a poll by the Jewish Electorate Institute (7/13/21) found that 38% of US Jews under 40 agreed that “Israel is an apartheid state,” and 33% believed it was committing genocide against Palestinians.
“Jewish writers reacted with horror to the guild’s refusal to condemn the attacks on Israel,” the New York Times reported (10/29/23)—although there were also Jewish writers on the board that made that decision.
Yet binary media framing persists. In the early days of the current Israel/Palestine violence, FAIR (10/17/23) criticized a New York Times (10/13/23) that depicted Jewish New Yorkers as united in putting aside their political differences with the Israeli government in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attack in southern Israel—ignoring the Jewish groups that were mobilizing against a military assault on Gaza.
More recently, the New York Times (10/29/23) reported on an internal spat within the Writers Guild of America over its initial reluctance to issue a statement about the Hamas attack. The paper characterized the affair as “Jewish writers” rebelling against the union’s leadership, even though some of its board members, like Raphael Bob-Waksberg (Hey Alma, 3/16/20), Justin Halpern (Reddit, 2/25/20; Tablet, 5/28/13) and Molly Nussbaum (Substack, 5/27/23), also identify as Jewish.
The Times got sillier when it ran a story (11/3/23) by Jeremy Peters headlined “Jewish Viewers Find a Refuge in Fox News,” in which the paper explained that “Fox News has wrapped itself in the Israeli flag in the weeks since the Hamas attack.” Admitting that “there are no specific metrics available on the religious affiliation of Fox’s audience since” the Hamas attacks, the paper said that “ratings data from major metropolitan areas with large Jewish populations, including New York, Miami and Los Angeles, show a spike in viewership that outpaces its rivals.”
The paper also noted that Jewish patrons of Manhattan’s Second Avenue Deli warmly embraced a visit by the crew of the Fox News show Fox & Friends. With all due respect to the wonderful menu at the storied institution, its clientele is hardly the beginning and end of Jewish opinion.
And at the very end of the story, Peters acknowledges that Fox coverage of the recent violence in Israel is similar to the hardline support for the Bush administration the network exhibited after 9/11. So the takeaway isn’t that Fox is popular to Jews specifically, but popular among those who support US policy in the Middle East. But the Times chose to frame it around Jewish opinion, specifically.
An AP story (10/15/23) on recent college campus protests said, “Many Jewish students and their allies, some with family and friends in Israel, have demanded bold reckonings and strong condemnation” after the Hamas attacks. Meanwhile, “some Muslim students have joined with allies to call for a recognition of decades of suffering by Palestinians in Gaza, plus condemnation of the response by Israel.”
This paints a false dichotomy. The fact is, people of all faiths, and those without religion or any ancestral connection to the region, exist in all corners of the great Middle Eastern debate.
“Jewish students hear ‘the river to the sea’ as an open call for the eradication of Israel,” the Washington Post (10/31/23) reported—not mentioning that Jewish anti-war protesters use this slogan as well (Common Dreams, 10/27/23).
A Washington Post report (10/31/23) on the Jewish response to pro-Palestinian protests on campuses stated, as a factual observation, that “Jewish students hear ‘the river to the sea’ as an open call for the eradication of Israel, a haunting proposition given the legacy of the Holocaust that led to Israel’s creation.”
There are a few problems here. One, it is hardly established that the American Jewish student body is monolithic on this issue. College groups that support Palestinian rights often include Jews; in fact, FAIR (5/22/23) reported how a Jewish staffer at the AP was forced out of her job because of her past pro-Palestinian advocacy in college. Two, the phrase “the river to the sea” is often mischaracterized, as it refers to a one-state solution, not anyone’s deportation.
However, to back up this assertion, the Post quotes Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League, saying that while “there’s nothing wrong with advocating for a Palestinian state,” there is also “nothing wrong with advocating for a two-state solution.” However, he says, “there’s something profoundly wrong with advocating for a final solution.”
The “final solution” is a reference to the Jewish Holocaust, or Shoah. But many Jews and non-Jews alike advocate for a one-state solution where all people have rights, regardless of their religion or ethnicity. It is intellectually dishonest for the Post to quote a pro-Israel partisan to assert that the choice for Jews is between a two-state solution and Auschwitz.
For example, in the post-Brexit economy, the idea of Irish reunification is becoming more and more real (Guardian, 10/6/22). Yet no one would seriously characterize the Republic of Ireland absorbing the North as a Protestant genocide. Nor were white residents of South Africa exterminated or forced to emigrate when their country turned to a democratic one-person-one-vote system.
Rep. Ritchie Torres framed the Israel/Palestine story as a conflict between “humanity” and “inhumanity” (Daily News, 10/9/23).
Media’s love affair with Democratic New York Rep. Ritchie Torres and his outspoken pro-Israel position is also telling. New York’s tabloids have given Torres’ attacks on critics of Israeli policy top coverage (Daily News, 10/9/23; New York Post, 10/11/23, 10/14/23, 10/15/23). But a recent interview with Torres in Politico (10/27/23), painting the non-Jewish Democrat as one of Israel’s biggest cheerleaders in Congress, truly exposes some key misunderstandings about Jewish politics and Israel.
For example, the first question in the back-and-forth with writer Jeff Coltin acknowledged that Torres has Jews in his district. But that’s also true of the Democratic Socialists of America–backed Jamaal Bowman, who represents the neighboring district; he also boasts support from the Jewish community (Forward, 10/19/23), though he is a constant target of pro-Israel PACs (Jewish Insider, 8/9/23).
Then Coltin asks Torres, “Have you considered converting to Judaism,” to which Torres answers no. But what kind of question is that? Zionism is just not synonymous with Judaism or Jewishness. In fact, Israel has increasingly looked for support from evangelical Christians for support (Brookings Institution, 5/26/21; Jerusalem Post, 9/3/23; New York Times, 10/15/23).
Coltin also takes Torres at face value when the Bronx lawmaker said that his “belief in Israel as a Jewish state is based not on religion, but history,” because “there’s a long and ugly history of antisemitism.” He never ponders if Torres’ fervor is at all related to his history of fundraising with AIPAC and other Israel supporters; the Open Secrets website lists “pro-Israel” as the third-largest source of funds for Torres’ 2022 campaign, behind only Securities & Investment and Real Estate.
FAIR (11/5/21) has previously reported that when Politico was acquired by the German media group Axel Springer, the new owner included support for Israel’s “right to exist” as one of the ideological principles employees must endorse.
Media organizations are well within their rights to portray debates about Israel’s assault on Gaza and the Hamas attack on southern Israel as having high emotional intensity, where passion often overtakes cold analysis. But they shouldn’t give us a muddled vision of Jewish politics—or anyone’s politics, for that matter.
Featured image: New York Times photo (10/27/23) of a Jewish Voice for Peace protest at New York City’s Grand Central Terminal (photo: Bing Guan).
The post Conflating Jewish and Pro-Israel Is Wrong and Misleading appeared first on FAIR.
This post was originally published on FAIR.
Dagestan riot and changing policy at Kremlin stir traumatic memories and prompt deep unease
For Vladimir Putin’s more than two-decade rule, he has promoted himself as a friend and protector of the Jewish community, and he launched an invasion last year with the ostensible goal to “denazify” Ukraine.
But the scenes of violence in Makhachkala, Dagestan, this week, as well as images of local people searching out Israeli passport holders in a hotel in the city of Khasavyurt, recalled darker moments in Russian history, when Cossacks rampaged through Jewish communities as local authorities looked on.