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Category: antisemitism

  • Jesus, are you there? We’re in a bit of a pickle…

    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.

    The chanukkiah by Brandenburg Gate in Berlin (December 2023).

    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).

    Antisemitism: from the church to wider society

    Painting in Sandomierz Cathedral (Poland) depicting Jews murdering Christian children for their blood, (~ 1750).

    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.

    Jesus: a symbol of unity and division rolled into one

    Jesus’ message is known as one of love!

    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.

  • Gaza: A War of Weapons and Words

    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

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • Gessen’s Cancellation Can’t Go Unchallenged

    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

    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.

    ‘The ghetto is being liquidated’

    New Yorker: In the Shadow of the Holocaust

    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.”

    Chilling censorship regime

    Hannah Arendt

    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.

    Job-costing solidarity

    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.

  • ACTION ALERT: NYT Misrepresents Zionism’s Opponents as Anti-Jewish Bigots

     

    “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.”

    Not ‘self-determination’

    NYT: Is Anti-Zionism Always Antisemitic? A Fraught Question for the Moment.

    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.)

    A smear that needs correction

    NYT: White House Condemns Protest at Israeli Restaurant in Philadelphia

    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.

  • ‘”None of Us Are Free Unless All of Us Are Free” Is Not Just a Slogan’

     

    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.

          CounterSpin231208Meyerson-Knox.mp3

     

    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.”

    NYT: Gaza Civilians, Under Israeli Barrage, Are Being Killed at Historic Pace

    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.

    NYT: For America’s Jews, Every Day Must Be Oct. 8

    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: US public support for Israel drops; majority backs a ceasefire, Reuters/Ipsos shows

    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: NYT Ignores Dissent to Convey Image of Jewish Unanimity

    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.

    NY Times: ‘Let Gaza Live’: Calls for Cease-Fire Fill Grand Central Terminal

    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 of Jewish Voice for Peace

    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.

    FAIR: ‘We’re Seeing the Result of a 40-Year Assault on the Liberal Mainstream’

    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: Palestine advocates decry MSNBC’s cancellation of Mehdi Hasan news show

    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.

  • Bill Targeting Anti-Zionism Will Usher in New Era of McCarthyism, Critics Warn

    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…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • UPenn President Resigns as Right Sets Terms for Repressing Palestine Solidarity

    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…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Sonya Meyerson-Knox on Jewish Voice for Peace

          CounterSpin231208.mp3

     

    Jewish Voice for Peace protest in Seattle against the Gaza siege, December 2, 2023

    (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.

          CounterSpin231208Meyerson-Knox.mp3

     

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of climate change.

          CounterSpin231208Banter.mp3

     

    The post Sonya Meyerson-Knox on Jewish Voice for Peace appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Amid Israel’s Brutality in Gaza, It’s Time to Commit to Anti-Zionism

    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…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Palestinian Shooting Victim Says Violence He Faced Is “Part of a Larger Story”

    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…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Elon Musk’s Backing of Antisemitic Content May Cost “X” Up to $75M in Ad Revenue

    Elon Musk, the owner of X (formerly known as Twitter) may have cost the company tens of millions of dollars in lost advertising revenue due to his recent comments endorsing an antisemitic and racist conspiracy theory, internal documents show. According to The New York Times, these documents find that the social media platform could lose as much as $75 million from advertising by the end of this…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Media Holocaust Revisionism After Canada’s Standing Ovation for an SS Vet

     

    Politico: Nazi-linked veteran received ovation during Zelenskyy’s Canada visit

    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.)

    ‘A complicated past’

    CBC: Speaker's honouring of former Nazi soldier reveals a complicated past, say historians

    “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.”

    ‘Caught between Hitler and Stalin’

    Toronto Star: House Speaker pays price for ignorance — meanwhile Ukraine still needs weapons

    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.

    The non-Nazi SS

    Politico: Fighting against the USSR didn’t necessarily make you a Nazi

    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.

    ‘Simple narratives’

    Himmler inspecting Galicia Division troops

    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.

    Heavily censored report

    Ottawa Citizen: Liberal government called on to release still-secret documents on Nazi war criminals living in Canada

    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.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • As the Israel-Palestine crisis continues, Australians must not allow anguish or fury to overwhelm us | Rosalind Croucher

    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.

  • Report Finds X Failed to Remove 98 Percent of Posts Flagged Hateful

    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…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • US Foreign Policy Establishment Is Instrumentalizing Islamophobia, Report Shows

    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…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Conflating Jewish and Pro-Israel Is Wrong and Misleading

     

    Pew: U.S. Jews have widely differing views on Israel

    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.

    Binary framing

    NYT: Reaction to Hamas Attack Leaves Some Jews in Hollywood Feeling Unmoored

    “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.

    ‘Open call for eradication’

    WaPo: Colleges braced for antisemitism and violence. It’s happening.

    “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.

    ‘Have you considered converting?’

    Daily News: Rep. Ritchie Torres slams and doubles down on Israel critics as fighting rages

    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.

  • Russian Jews fear Israel-Hamas war awakening sleeping antisemitism

    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.

    Continue reading…

  • The West’s double standards are once again on display in Israel and Palestine

    ANALYSIS: By M. Muhannad Ayyash, Mount Royal University

    American President Joe Biden is among the latest Western politicians to land in Tel Aviv in a show of support to Israel.

    As Israel’s primary backer, the United States has sent two aircraft carriers to the region and indicated it could deploy 2000 American troops to Israel.

    Biden was also set to meet Palestinian and Arab leaders in the Jordanian capital Amman. But Jordan cancelled the meeting after a reported airstrike on October 17 killed about 500 people at a Gaza hospital.

    In the days after Hamas launched Operation Al-Aqsa Flood against Israel, European and North American governments (with few exceptions) were quick to provide a unified and consistent message of support for Israel.

    That message contains at least four interconnected elements:

    • Israel is the victim of an unprovoked terrorist attack;
    • Israel has the right to defend itself;
    • The West fully stands with Israel against the barbaric and wanton violence of the Palestinians; and
    • Hamas is to blame (either partially or fully) for all civilian deaths on both sides since they began these hostilities and forced Israel’s hand while hiding behind civilians.

    Palestinians erased
    There are a few important features of this message, but I want to focus on two that highlight the West’s double standards.

    First, is the advancement of anti-Palestinian racism in the West. It is critical to underscore a salient feature of anti-Palestinian racism: the silencing of the Palestinian critiques of Zionism and Israel.

    This is a dynamic which has its roots in the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”) and erases Palestinian voices, history, presence, aspirations and identity from public discourse.

    Political, media and educational institutions in the West regularly sideline and silence Palestinians and their supporters. This is not just an issue among the right-wing or even centrists, but occurs across the political spectrum.

    Left-wing politics, including progressive spaces, that purport to be anti-racist often remain hostile to Palestinian voices

    Here in Canada, a statement by progressive Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow painted a rally in support of Palestinians as allegedly supporting violence and as a threat to the safety and security of Canadian Jews. That statement is still up on her X account.

    This is precisely the anti-Palestinian narrative that has permeated in the West for years: that all support for Palestine is inherently violent and driven by antisemitic hatred of all Jews. Thus, in the name of anti-racism, Palestinians and their supporters are denounced and even criminalised.

    Differing reactions to civilian death
    Second, the double standard is on display in the reactions we have seen to the killing of Israeli civilians and the reactions — or lack thereof — to the killing of Palestinian civilians. Many are rightly highlighting Western hypocrisy by drawing comparisons to how the West responded to Russia’s war on Ukraine.

    We need to look at how Western governments have responded to the killing of Israeli civilians versus the killing of Palestinian civilians. For the Israeli state and Israeli victims, political, military, economic, cultural and social institutions have fully mobilised to provide support.

    The same is entirely absent for the Palestinians. For the Palestinians, there are no evacuations. Aircraft carriers are not sent to provide military support. Mainstream political and cultural discourse does not humanise Palestinian life and mourn Palestinian death.

    Aid relief is withheld and used as a bargaining counter. Economic support is not forthcoming. Institutions do not send Palestinians messages of support.

    In some ways, this silence is not surprising. No one expressing support for Israel risks losing their livelihood. Many who have voiced solidarity with Palestinians have lost their jobs, been rebuked, suspended and faced doxing.

    Western self-interest
    States are not moral entities, but act purely in self-interest. Palestinian freedom and liberation does not align with the interests of the US-led West.

    Therefore, Western institutions repeat the increasingly weak talking point that “terrorism” is the cause of all the violence. This talking point is used to provide Israel with the green light to unleash uninhibited violence against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, West Bank and Jerusalem.

    The idea that Western governments and institutions are horrified by violence against civilians rings hollow because of their silence when it comes to violence against Palestinian civilians and other groups around the world.

    For decades, Palestinians have been expelled from their land, killed and maimed in great numbers, including in mass atrocities and many well-documented cases of sexual violence and torture in Israeli prisons.

    This only scratches the surface of the violence that Palestinians continuously experience, and have experienced, since well before Hamas was formed.

    Palestinians continue to suffer what Palestinian scholars Nahla Abdo and Nur Masalha have called an ongoing Nakba and genocide of the Palestinian people. Yet, when Palestinians suffer, as they are now in Gaza, what Israeli historian and expert on genocide Raz Segal has called “a textbook case of genocide,” Western governments remain silent.

    There was no Western outrage when Israel ordered more than a million Palestinians to leave their homes in 24 hours. In February, Israeli settlers went on an hours-long rampage in the Palestinian town of Huwara after two settlers were shot by a Palestinian.

    Western condemnations of the rampage were muted or non-existent.

    Hundreds of scholars and practitioners of international law, conflict studies and genocide studies are now sounding the alarm about the possibility of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

    The stories of Palestinian lives that end with the sudden drop of a bomb are not told. Palestinian voices that explain the settler colonialism they suffer remain sidelined. And Palestinian aspirations for decolonised liberation are denied.

    The West’s institutional reaction is not just hypocritical, it is an expression of where Western governments stand on the question of Palestine. The West is an active participant in the erasure of Palestine, and when moments of intensified violence like this happen, the West’s true position becomes clear for all to see.

    However, people power across the world, including in the US, provide reason for hope. Increasingly, many in the West are disgusted and ashamed by the erasure of Palestine and the killing of Palestinian civilians.

    More people are joining the protests and calling for the siege on Gaza to be lifted once and for all. More people power is needed to demand that governments do everything they can to resolve this issue, which can only begin to move towards peace and justice when the Palestinian people are free.The Conversation

    M. Muhannad Ayyash is professor of sociology, Mount Royal University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Summer Lee Condemns Jim Jordan for History of Peddling Antisemitic Hate

    As the House goes into the third week of not having an elected leader due to GOP chaos, progressive Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pennsylvania) is condemning Republican members for continually nominating speaker candidates like Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) with an extensive background of peddling antisemitism and white supremacy. In a scathing press statement released Tuesday, Lee’s office referred to Jordan as…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Roald Dahl Museum acknowledges author’s ‘undeniable’ racism’

    The Roald Dahl Museum has said that it is working “towards combatting hate and prejudice.” It acknowledged that the renowned children’s writer’s racism was “undeniable and indelible”.

    The admission by the museum, located in Buckinghamshire in southeast England, follows an apology in 2020 by the Dahl family and Roald Dahl Story Company for his well-documented anti-Semitic comments.

    The museum has placed a panel at the entrance of its exhibition acknowledging the racism in Dahl’s work. It has also put up a similar message on its website.

    Anti-semitism, colonialism and misogyny

    Dahl, the creator of books such as ‘Matilda’, ‘The BFG’ and ‘Charlie And The Chocolate Factory’  made offensive remarks about Jewish people in a 1983 interview with the New Statesman magazine.

    Readers have also accused Dahl of misogyny and racism. For example, he depicts the Oompa-Loompas as workers that Willy Wonka has kidnapped “for their own good”. He goes on to say that these characters in ‘Charlie And The Chocolate Factory’ came from the:

    deepest and darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had ever been before.

    Puffin, Dahl’s publisher, hired ‘sensitivity readers’ this year to edit and sometimes rewrite offensive sections of Dahl’s work.

    Museum ‘condemns all racism’

    The Dahl museum, which is a charity, said it fully supported the 2020 apology. The museum said on its website that it:

    condemns all racism, including antisemitism, directed at any group or individual.

    Despite Dahl’s racism, the museum says it still sees his creative work as a potential force for good. They continued:

    Roald Dahl’s racism is undeniable and indelible but what we hope can also endure is the potential of Dahl’s creative legacy to do some good.

    The museum said it was:

    committed to being more welcoming, inclusive, diverse, and equitable in all aspects of our work.

    The museum said it had taken steps towards that, including:

    reflecting the visible diversity of our audiences in our marketing, by running accessible and inclusive recruitment campaigns for staff or trustee positions.

    It said it was working closely with several organisations within the Jewish community, including the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council.

    The museum noted that it chooses not to repeat Dahl’s anti-Semitic statements publicly, but keeps a record of what he wrote in its collection, “so it is not forgotten”.

    Dahl’s comments have long cast a shadow over his personal legacy, which has remained prominent as a number of his children’s classics have made it onto the screen and stage since his death aged 74.

    Cultural problem

    Reflecting on his life, the Dahl Museum said he was “a contradictory person” who could be kind. But:

    there are also recorded incidents of him being very unkind and worse, including writing and saying antisemitic things about Jewish people

    The fact that the museum has taken until now to acknowledge Roald Dahl’s racism is an example of how slow institutions often are to respond to obvious bigotry by celebrated cultural figures. The Royal Mint even considered Dahl as a prospective subject for a commemorative coin five years ago. Although, happily. he was eventually rejected.

    Dahl is by no means the only commemorated UK cultural personality to be an out-and-out racist. Just take fellow children’s authors Enid Blyton and Rudyard Kipling for instance. The excruciating inertia in recognising the oppressiveness in these writer’s work is a testament to the deep-seated racism and colonialism embedded in UK society and culture.

    Featured image via Solarisgirl/Wikimedia Commons, via CC 2.0, resized to 1910×1000 

    Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse 

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Stop burning holy texts in the name of free speech. Religious belief deserves protection too.

    On 14 July, Swedish police said they had granted permission for a protest which would include burning holy texts outside the Israeli embassy in Stockholm. The controversial protest, which has raised concerns around respect for religious beliefs, is scheduled for Saturday 15 July. It comes just weeks after a man set fire to pages of the Quran outside Stockholm’s main mosque.

    So far, there seems to be little information on who has organised Saturday’s protest. According to Agence France-Presse (AFP):

    The demonstration would include a burning of the Torah and the Bible… in response to the Koran burning protest and would be an expression in support of freedom of speech, according to the application to police.

    But I don’t need to know who’s organising this ‘protest’, or why, in order to know that it is not only misguided but utterly deplorable.

    Religious belief: the freedom to be

    Being a religious minority living in the West is a grinding experience. This is particularly the case for Muslims. The constant superiority of Western mores and laws wears you down to the point where faith itself becomes an act of defiance. Few issues reflect a supposed ‘clash of civilisations’ between the West and Islam more so than the conflict between religious belief and freedom of expression.

    The trope that Muslims’ desire for respect towards their religion violates Western ‘freedom of expression’ constantly remains under the surface. It also rears its ugly head periodically. We saw it with the Rushdie Affair, with the Danish cartoons of Prophet Muhammad, with the Charlie Hebdo debacle. And now we see it with the burning of the Quran in Sweden.

    Proponents of free speech will say that freedom of speech includes ‘freedom to offend’. What they don’t realise, however, is that for people of faith, degradation of their religion and its associated symbols goes far beyond mere ‘offence’.

    For those who adhere to a religion, it forms a part of their identity. It’s not simply something they believe – rather it constitutes an integral part of who they are. Freedom of religion, therefore, isn’t just the freedom to be religious. It is the freedom to be. The freedom to affirm what you believe to be true, and to live your life accordingly.

    I don’t expect non-religious people to understand the pain felt by a person of faith when seeing their faith being humiliated. However, the issue here is not respect for beliefs, but respect for human beings. What we are asking for is not reverence towards the Quran, the Torah, or the Bible. It is basic human empathy.

    Hierarchy of freedoms

    Stockholm police stressed that in line with Swedish legislation, they granted permits for people to hold public gatherings and not the activities conducted during them. Carina Skagerlind, press officer for Stockholm police, said:

    The police does not issue permits to burn various religious texts – the police issues permits to hold a public gathering and express an opinion.

    What an absurd rationalisation. Following the Quran-burning, Swedish authorities said they had opened an investigation against the perpetrator over “agitation against an ethnic group”. Which begs the question: if they know the desecration of religious texts constitutes “agitation against an ethnic group”, and they know the protest they approved involves this action, why are they approving it?

    The behaviour of authorities in these situations demonstrates a truth I’ve come to know all too well: freedom of expression is only protected for those agitating against marginalised and oppressed groups of people.

    Meanwhile, people from marginalised groups must stick together. It is for this reason, and also due to being a person of faith, that I will always condemn the desecration of sacred texts. If you can’t make your point in a way that shows empathy, especially for marginalised groups, then I have no interest in what you have to say.

    Featured image via YouTube/Al Jazeera

    Additional reporting via Agence France-Presse

    By Afroze Fatima Zaidi

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • The White House’s Strategic Plan on Antisemitism Is Fatally Flawed

    A recently released White House strategic plan on combatting antisemitism, while including numerous mentions of “cross community solidarity” and the importance of combatting all forms of hate, fails to promote a framework that makes that kind of solidarity possible. The plan, in actuality, singles out antisemitism and, by extension, Jews, as requiring a special strategy — one that does not embrace…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The tough questions most Muslims ignore

    By Fiyaz Mughal

    Islam’s history contains some glorious periods, spanning Andalusia, Baghdad and the seats of learning and art that they created. I am proud to be attached by birth to this part of our cultural heritage.

    However, over my life I have come to understand that Islam initially grew from a zealous desire to spread the faith out of Arabia and across parts of Africa and the Middle East. Like any religion, it has its bloody history.

    Muslims have never seriously debated the really hard questions, such as whether Islam’s supremacy over other beliefs is simply based on man-made legitimacy and power, rather than being divinely ordained. This also goes for other faiths, primarily Christianity, which, like Islam, has its own violent past.

    Over time, I have come to realise that much of the life of Prophet Muhammad was never documented. It was orally transmitted, potentially subjected to embellishment; it was around 80 to 100 years before anything was actually chronicled.

    Much of the Sunnah (the traditions and practices of Muhammad) may well have changed over time as they were recorded. In fact, how much of the Islam that people practise today resembles the Islam of Prophet Muhammad is a question that needs to be asked. Few Muslims dare to do so.

    There needs to come a time when Muslims who want to see a progressive interpretation of their faith hold to account the failings within Islam.

    There are many difficult issues to reflect upon. Islam’s early history with Jewish communities in Arabia was at different points positive and friendly — and bloodthirsty. Sunni Islam’s history with the Shia sect is also deeply disturbing, with the schism leading to what can only be called a genocidal attempt to wipe out the Shia community, including the targeting of women and children.

    Islam is becoming increasingly irrelevant to many people in the modern world. What must also not be dismissed is how Islamist antisemitism and ignorance of the Holocaust has become endemic in parts of Muslim communities across the globe.

    Conspiracy theories about Jewish power travel from Cairo to Islamabad and then back into the UK, while casual comments about the murder of Jews in alleyways of such cities go unchecked. It is as though, while some Muslims talk about Islam being a “religion of peace”, they are often willing to overlook fantasies of brutalising Jews.

    This split within their own minds shows that there is a multi-generational challenge in countering antisemitism within Muslim communities.

    Given that there are nearly 1.8 billion Muslims across the globe, that is a lot of minds to change if, for example, even just 20 per cent of them think this way.

    Take for example, Dr Rizwan Mustafa, whom the Jewish Chronicle has highlighted recently. He is the founding chair of the West Midlands branch of the National Association of Muslim Police (NAMP), and was discussed in the recent Prevent review by William Shawcross.

    The JC revealed how a probe has been launched into Dr Mustafa, given that he is in charge of recruiting new recruits into the force. He is alleged to have shared content describing Jews as “filth”.

    How has it come to be that Islam, which is fundamentally based on Judaism, has seen so many of its followers relish and wallow in Jew hatred? How has it become the “new norm” that antisemitism is virulently alive and spreading in so many Muslim majority countries

    When I ask fellow Muslims why this is the case, denial is the usual response.

    While modern-day developments such as the Abraham Accords open up new opportunities between Arab Muslim majority countries and Israel, I hope there comes a time when Muslims in those countries ask the questions that I have dared to ask.

    The conclusion that I have come to is that Muhammad was a man of courage, vision, drive, leadership and determinism. He was indeed remarkable and Islamic history has brought much to civilisation and enhanced many parts of our collective lives.

    Yet, he was also pragmatic, willing to go to war, to pressurise and defeat people with the sword. He also enjoyed the company of women, much like men of his time. In today’s moral framework, some elements are troubling, but looking at history through a modern lens is unfair.

    Unless many Muslims stop acting as if their history smells of roses, we will never see the reality of what Muhammad’s life and teachings really were. Tough, kind, brutal and, sometimes, at stark odds with what we think and choose to believe.

    Credits:

    Fiyaz Mughal is the founder of Muslims Against Antisemitism.

    This blog was first published by The Jewish Chronicle, 9 March 2023.

    This post was originally published on Voice of Salam.

  • The 7 Poisonous Fabrications of Antisemitism

    A recent book detailing the seven most poisonous fabrications that make antisemitism possible starts by asking: “Why have the Jews been so despised and so brutalized throughout history?” Another book with potential answers is Why the Germans? Why the Jews?, which follows up on reasons such as envy, race hatred, and the prehistory of the More

    The post The 7 Poisonous Fabrications of Antisemitism appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Thomas Klikauer – Danny Antonelli.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Ultra Violence

    Rachel Maddow’s podcast tells the story of American Nazis in the 1940s. But the era’s real and lasting authoritarian danger came from the spectacular growth of a national security state.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • Trump Indicted on Criminal Charges in NY as 3 Other Investigations Continue

    In an unprecedented move, a Manhattan grand jury voted Thursday to indict former President Donald Trump for hush-money payments made to adult film star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential campaign to hide an alleged affair, making Trump the first former U.S. president to face criminal charges. While the precise details of the charges are not yet known, the development culminates years of…

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  • Starmer’s latest comments over Corbyn are even more proof Labour is finished

    Keir Starmer has torched the Labour Party in one fell swoop – telling socialists to eff-off while barring former leader Jeremy Corbyn from standing as a candidate at the next general election. Of course, this shouldn’t come as any surprise. However, is it now time to just shut up about Labour and move on?

    Starmer: blah blah blah

    Starmer was speaking after the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) lifted the Labour Party out of the special measures it had placed on it regarding antisemitism. As Sky News reported, the EHRC:

    had been scrutinising the party since ruling it was responsible for unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination more than two years ago.

    But the watchdog has said that, under Sir Keir’s leadership, the party has improved its complaints and training procedures to protect current and future party members.

    The Labour leader, writing in the right-wing Times, said:

    under my leadership there will be zero tolerance of antisemitism, racism, or discrimination of any kind.

    An interesting statement, given that Starmer’s team has expelled or investigated dozens of Jewish members – most recently forcing an 85-year-old holocaust survivor to quit the party:

    Starmer’s comments are also interesting given his stance on some issues. For example, he has shown racism over refugees and foreign-born workers – saying about the latter and immigration that:

    our common goal must be to help the British economy off its immigration dependency. To start investing more in training up workers who are already here.

    Meanwhile, his policies have been echoing the Tories – like his support for the electronic tagging of more refugees. Plus, Starmer has repeatedly chosen to ignore Islamophobia:

    One example of this was his lack of support for Labour MP Zarah Sultana when people were sending her Islamophobic abuse.

    Clearly, though, those issues aren’t a priority with the EHRC.

    Socialists out, racists in

    Starmer gave a clear indication that socialists are no longer welcome in Labour – saying that the “door was open” for them to leave:

    One socialist in particular will not be returning:

    Starmer’s refusal to allow Corbyn to stand is predictable – but also downright hypocritical and dishonest:

    As the Canary‘s Joe Glenton previously wrote:

    The reason Keir Starmer… [is] so desperate to slander Corbyn is because they fear and hate the ordinary working people who identify with the reformist program he put forward during his time as leader. Sadly, these capitalist goons are what the public is left with in the Labour Party, now – and Corbyn is well out of this toxic mess.

    What’s Corbyn to do, then? As of 12pm on Wednesday 15 February he hadn’t commented on Starmer’s actions. However, people were calling for him to form a new party:

    So, where is Labour heading now?

    Shut up about Labour?

    Starmer wrote in the Times that:

    The Labour Party I lead is patriotic. It is a party of public service, not protest. It is a party of equality, justice and fairness; one that proudly puts the needs of working people above any fringe interest.

    This rhetoric is predictable – given Starmer has thrown protesters to the wolves, refused to sanction transphobic MPs and ignored the Forde Report’s recommendations over racism in his party. Of course, this was all apparent back in 2021. As the Canary wrote at the time, in Labour:

    The left wing is being systematically and permanently destroyed. Starmer and Co have plotted a course back towards the corporate, capitalist status quo. So is now, finally, the time for anyone with socialist tendencies to leave the party and put their efforts into a more worthwhile project? The answer may well be a resounding ‘yes’.

    Now, Starmer has given his clearest indication yet that Labour is no longer anything remotely left wing – in fact, it is little more than a racist, discriminatory Tory-esque husk. The time of supporting these right-wing charlatans is well and truly over. It’s probably time to stop talking about them as well. However, the public is now faced with no choice from its two main political parties. So, we need to look to trade unions, grassroots community groups and each other to affect change. Whether Corbyn will feature in this on a national level remains to be seen.

    Featured image via Sky News – YouTube

    By Steve Topple

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • We Can’t Let Antisemitism Be Weaponized to Criminalize Solidarity With Palestine

    As Jewish students and anti-Zionist organizers, we know that it is in no way antisemitic to support the fight for Palestinian liberation. False accusations of such should not be used to silence Palestinian solidarity activists. That’s why we were glad to see the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights ditch a misleading and discredited definition of antisemitism in its recent fact sheet…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Republicans Vote to Remove Ilhan Omar From Committee

    The House voted along party lines to remove Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) from her assignment on the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Thursday in the party’s latest escalation of tactics to stifle Democrats and silence dissent. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-California) has seemingly made removing Omar a top priority in recent days after reports emerged over the past weekend that a few…

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  • GOP Readies ‘Shameful’ Vote to Oust Omar From House Committee



    Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and her progressive allies are denouncing the Republican effort to oust her from a key House panel as early as Thursday.

    House Republicans on Wednesday advanced a resolution to remove Omar from the House Foreign Affairs Committee (HFAC). In a party-line 218-209 vote, GOP lawmakers approved a rule that sets the parameters for debate on the chamber floor prior to a final vote.

    “It remains unclear when House Republicans will bring the Omar resolution to the floor for debate and a final vote,” The Hill reported. “Democrats still need to formally submit a separate resolution with their roster for the Foreign Affairs Committee.” That is expected to happen by Thursday.

    The GOP has sought for years to remove Omar, a principled critic of Israeli apartheid and Washington’s role in perpetuating it, from the HFAC. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has unilateral authority to boot any lawmaker from a select committee, but because the HFAC is a standing committee, removing a member from it requires a full House vote.

    On Tuesday night, after Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio) introduced the measure to remove Omar from the HFAC over supposedly “antisemitic” remarks, the progressive lawmaker tweeted that “there is nothing objectively true in this resolution.”

    In response to Miller’s argument that “Omar clearly cannot be an objective decision-maker on the Foreign Affairs Committee given her biases against Israel and against the Jewish people”—a contention that wrongfully equates criticism of Israel’s colonization of Palestine with criticism of Jewish people—the Minnesota Democrat said that “if not being objective is a reason to not serve on committees, no one would be on committees.”

    In a Wednesday statement, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) called the House GOP’s pending vote against Omar “the latest racist attack by the far-right to silence progressives in Congress who speak up for a human rights-centered foreign policy, including Palestinian human rights.”

    “The GOP is riddled with white nationalists and antisemites. It is infuriating and absurd that they are trying to distract from the bigoted hatred in their own party by attacking a progressive woman of color.”

    “Anti-Palestinian politicians and organizations” have long tried “to censor the Congresswoman’s consistent calls for accountability for the Israeli government’s apartheid and human rights violations against Palestinians,” said JVP. “Sadly, these Republican attempts to attack Congresswoman Omar have been buoyed in the past by attacks on Palestinian rights advocates within the Democratic party.”

    According to Beth Miller, political director of JVP Action: “These attacks are happening because Congresswoman Omar is effective. Because she is a progressive. Because she is a Black Muslim woman. Because her values are universal and include fighting for Palestinians.”

    “The GOP is riddled with white nationalists and antisemites,” said Miller. “It is infuriating and absurd that they are trying to distract from the bigoted hatred in their own party by attacking a progressive woman of color. Congresswoman Omar consistently calls for the Israeli government to be held accountable for its crimes—crimes the GOP would rather cover up.”

    Meanwhile, Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) said Monday that the CPC “stands fully behind our deputy chair.”

    “Omar is a valued member of the Democratic caucus and of this Congress,” said Jayapal. “Throughout her service in Congress and on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, she has brought her essential and unique voice and lived experience to bear: as a refugee, war survivor, and soon, as the first African-born ranking member on the Africa Subcommittee.”

    “You cannot remove a member of Congress from a committee simply because you do not agree with their views,” Jayapal continued. “This is both ludicrous and dangerous. In the last Congress, Republican members were moved from committees with a bipartisan vote for endangering the safety of their colleagues. Speaker McCarthy is attempting to take revenge and draw false comparisons.”

    Jayapal praised the few Republicans “who have already rejected this idea” and expressed hope that “more will join them to state their opposition so it is not brought to the floor, or vote against it should it be brought to the floor.”

    As The Washington Post reported Wednesday:

    Republican leaders have worked for weeks to ensure that there were enough votes to pass a resolution removing Omar from the committee through their razor-thin majority margin, which stands at three as Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) remains away from Washington recuperating from a traumatic fall. Opposition to the effort emerged last month as four lawmakers signaled that they wouldn’t support the measure, citing concerns that it would continue a precedent set by former speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

    But the inclusion of a provision in the four-page resolution, that Republicans argue provides due process to Omar, seems to have appeased at least one crucial voter, as Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.) announced Tuesday that she would now support the measure. Reps. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) and Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) have publicly suggested that they would vote against it before the resolution’s text was released Tuesday, while Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) has said he remained undecided. Republican leadership aides, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to outline private whip counts, said they have the votes to pass the measure whenever Democrats formally appoint Omar to her committee.

    Jayapal affirmed earlier this week that Democrats “will stand strongly with Rep. Omar: an esteemed and invaluable legislator, a respectful and kind colleague, and a courageous progressive leader.”

    On Sunday, Omar argued that House Republicans are trying to oust her from the HFAC because they disapprove of having a Muslim refugee from Somalia on the panel, as Common Dreams reported.

    Omar has been the frequent target of Islamophobic bigotry, including from Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which paid Facebook to host attack ads that endangered the lawmaker’s life. Due to credible death threats, the Minnesota Democrat is often assigned security by the U.S. Capitol Police.

    In her Sunday conversation with CNN‘s Dana Bash, Omar acknowledged that she apologized for the wording of her February 2019 tweets tying U.S. lawmakers’ support for Israel to money from lobbyists—at the time, she specifically called out AIPAC, which has given millions of dollars to members of Congress.

    The GOP’s campaign to expel her from the HFAC “is politically motivated,” Omar said. “In some cases, it’s motivated by the fact that many of these members don’t believe a Muslim, a refugee, an African should even be in Congress, let alone have the opportunity to serve on the Foreign Affairs Committee.”

    On Monday, Omar asserted that her work on the HFAC has contributed positively to “advancing human rights, holding government officials accountable for past harms, and advancing a more just and peaceful foreign policy.”

    Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) concurred, tweeting Monday that Omar’s work on the panel “matters deeply and Republicans’ cowardly efforts to remove and silence her are a disgrace.”

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) echoed Pressley, writing on social media: “It’s shameful that Republicans are trying to remove her [from the HFAC] after smearing her for years. We need her voice, values, and expertise on the committee.”

    Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), meanwhile, noted that “Omar is once again facing ugly personal and political attacks with incredible courage and dignity.”

    “It is outrageous that the House leadership wants to boot her off the Foreign Affairs Committee,” Sanders tweeted. “Fair-minded Republicans must join Democrats in preventing that from happening.”

    This article has been updated to include a statement from Jewish Voice for Peace.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.