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Antisemitism Tag

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 18, 2016 1 Comment
On December 4, 2016, I was a speaker at a national conference sponsored by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), held at Harvard Law School. The conference was co-hosted by HLS Alliance for Israel, and was titled "War By Other Means - BDS, Israel and the Campus." My presentation was on the history of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. While I have written hundreds of posts about the BDS movement, including its history, this presentation gave me an opportunity to pull it all together in one place, and to do more research to obtain documentation. BDS is a direct and provable continuation of the Arab anti-Jewish boycotts in the 1920s and 1930s and subsequent Arab League Boycott, restructured through non-governmental entities to evade U.S. anti-boycott legislation and repackaged in the language of "social justice" to appeal to Western liberals.

Posted by Miriam Elman on December 17, 2016 5 Comments
What’s happening to Jewish and pro-Israel students on many American universities and colleges from coast to coast is horribly ugly. On “hotspot campuses” the problem is only getting worse. “Hate Spaces: The Politics of Intolerance on Campus”, a new 70 minute documentary recently released by the organization Americans for Peace and Tolerance, chronicles the rampant anti-Israel and anti-Jewish activism prevalent on many of America’s institutions of higher learning. We featured the film’s trailer in a recent post and the movie premiered in NYC on November 30. Last week, I had the opportunity to watch the film in its entirely. In this follow-up post, I review the documentary’s central themes and take-home messages.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 05, 2016 12 Comments
It has not been a good couple of weeks for Democratic Congressman Keith Ellison in his quest for Chair of the Democratic National Committee. Ellison was fast out of the gate, with major endorsements from Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid, Elizabeth Warren, Nancy Pelosi and many others. But then some inconvenient facts came out about Ellison: His past support for Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam during college and after; once proposing a separate country for blacks; his flirting with tutherism by claiming 9/11 was Bush's Reichstag Fire; his cozy relationship with some of the worst anti-Israel groups at the Democratic National Convention last summer and generally being the go-to congressman for that segment of the Democratic Party; and most recently, release of a partial audio clip of 2010 comments at a Muslim community fundraiser in which he questioned why the U.S. has such a special relationship with Israel considering it's only 7 million people and the Arab world is 350 million. All of this was documented by many people, including by us in the following posts:

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on December 05, 2016 2 Comments
YouTube banned Prager University's latest video entitled, "Born to Hate Jews." The video feature Kasim Hafeez, a British Muslim who tells the story of how he overcame anti-Semitic indoctrination. Hafeez is now a pro-Israel activist. Hafeez almost enlisted in a terrorist training camp before realizing the error of his ways. He explained how hatred drives many young Muslims into terrorism. Naturally YouTube labelled the video "hate speech". The version beneath is embedded from Facebook:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 04, 2016 2 Comments
We have documented for years how anti-Israel protests at campuses frequently cross over into antisemitism, both directly and by creating a toxic environment for Jews. Ryerson University in Toronto is a case in point. A resolution to boycott Israel passed in 2014
Another Ontario university student union has voted in support of the anti-Israel Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) campaign. In a tense Annual General Meeting this week, several hundred Ryerson University students voted “overwhelmingly in favour” of supporting BDS.
Given the toxic environment, some Jewish students felt it important for the student government to support a Holocaust education week, and openly planned to present a motion at a recent student government semi-annual general meeting.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 02, 2016 12 Comments
Legal Insurrection readers have known for weeks about the controversial past of Keith Ellison, including support for Louis Farrakhan, being the go-to Congressman for anti-Israel groups, and statements suggesting it made no sense to base Mideast policy around Israel: So long as the controversy was talked about only among pro-Israel websites, Ellison and his supporters probably figured they could ride it out. But now it's gone deep into the mainstream media.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 26, 2016 6 Comments
Americans for Peace and Tolerance is releasing a 70-minute documentary on the rise of antisemitism and anti-Israel activity on campuses and the role played by the BDS movement and Students for Justice in Palestine. The movie is titled Hate Spaces: The Politics of Intolerance on Campus. I was interviewed for the documentary, along with others such as Alan Dershowitz of Harvard, Richard Landes of Boston University, Bret Stephens of The Wall Street Journal and Caroline Glick of The Jerusalem Post. Here is one early review of the film:
I’ve written about the phenomenon more than once, so I didn’t expect to be surprised by anything in the film. But despite knowing about the various incidents described, the sheer volume and intensity of them taken together left me shaken. Yes, shaken, and I’m not easy to shake....

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 16, 2016 30 Comments
You may remember Joy Karega, the Oberlin College "Social Justice Writing" Professor who put numerous anti-Semitic posts and graphics on Facebook. Karega was a supporter of the anti-Israel boycott movement, and hosted an event promoting BDS right around the time the controversy over her Facebook posts erupted. But she wasn't questioned and didn't get in trouble for her anti-Israel views. Those views, unfortunately, are all the rage at Oberlin and other liberal campuses. Rather, her Facebook posting clearly veered into rank antisemitism. Like this one alleging a conspiracy by the Rothschilds to rule the world:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 15, 2016 7 Comments
I guess this is now a continuing series. Turkey's Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is gutting any remnants of opposition by attacking numerous aspects of civil society, including particularly academia. Yet *shockingly* none of the progressive professors who demand a boycott of Israeli universities and academia are organizing a boycott of Turkish Universities. We have covered this hypocrisy many times: According to Turkish journalist Mahir Zeynalov, the crackdown on academics continues:

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on November 01, 2016 13 Comments
A guest house in Germany’s Black Forest region caused an uproar on social media after it turned down Israeli guests saying, “Our apartments are not for them.” Communicating through an online booking service, guest house instructed Israelis to “cancel the booking.” Four Israeli families were hoping to book apartments at the guest house while planning a trip to Germany next summer. City officials and regional press are trying to downplay the incident as a misunderstanding, but the incident comes in the backdrop of rising antisemitism and antisemitic hate crimes in Germany. Earlier this year, Kempinski-Hotel in Berlin removed Israel from its phonebook. A hotel employee had explained the decision saying, "Majority of over clients are Arabs and they told us to remove Israel."

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 31, 2016 9 Comments
We recently wrote about Miko Peled after Jewish Voice for Peace accused him of posting an antisemitic tweet, Jewish Voice for Peace disavows BDS activist Miko Peled: “No place 4 antisemitism in our movement”: https://twitter.com/mikopeled/status/776147480299835392 Peled denied that the tweet was antisemitic, as detailed in the prior post. But the fact that an anti-Israel group like JVP would make this accusation against Peled and would support the cancellation of his speech at Princeton was pretty remarkable.

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on October 18, 2016 6 Comments
“Anti-Semitic, homophobic and sympathising with Jihad.” This is how a leading Austrian newspaper summed up the latest study looking into the attitudes of young Muslims living in the city of Vienna. The study commissioned by the city reveals that nearly one-third of the Muslim youth living in the Austrian capital hold radical Islamic views and support armed Jihad against the West. The leftist coalition running the city attacked the findings of the study that yet again reveal the clutching hold of Islamism over Europe’s migrant Muslim population. The study also exposes the failure of Multiculturalism, a policy pursued for decades by Social Democrats and ecological Green Party, who run the Austrian capital.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 01, 2016 32 Comments
You may remember Joy Karega, the Oberlin College Social Justice Writing professor (yes, there is such a position) who, when not helping organize anti-Israel BDS events with Students for a Free Palestine, posted bizarre Jewish conspiracy theories on Facebook. Like this image of how the Rothschild family controls the world: Karega Rotshchild Image Karega also pushed other conspiracy theories, such as that the attacks on a Paris theater and Charlie Hebdo were Israeli false flag operations to distract attention from the Palestinian demands, and that Israel was behind ISIS:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on September 28, 2016 3 Comments
I reported the other day how Israeli anti-Israel activist and BDS supporter Miko Peled was disinvited by a pro-Palestinian group at Princeton and denounced by Jewish Voice for Peace after a tweet characterizing Jews as having a "reputation 4being sleazy thieves," Jewish Voice for Peace disavows BDS activist Miko Peled: “No place 4 antisemitism in our movement”. https://twitter.com/mikopeled/status/776147480299835392

Posted by William A. Jacobson on September 24, 2016 6 Comments
We have written dozens of times about Jewish Voice for Peace, which is a leader of the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. As Prof. Miriam Elman has thoroughly documented, JVP uses the "Jewish" in its name (even thought it's not a Jewish group) to lend cover to all manner of anti-Israel groups, Jewish Voice for Peace – “Jew Washing” the anti-Israel movement. Local branches of JVP, such as the NYC branch that disrupted a City Council commemoration of the Liberation of Auschwitz and the Ithaca (NY) branch that conducted an anti-Israel event for public school third graders, often are even more radical than the national JVP. Because BDS is a Settler Colonial Ideology which seeks alliances and to co-opt other movements through the concept of intersectionality, BDS of necessity singles out the Jewish Israeli as uniquely evil and the source of problems in the world. The distinction between Israelis and Jews quickly evaporates, as we witness in Europe where anti-Israel protests frequently use blatantly anti-Semitic rhetoric and where Jews are attacked on the street in the name of anti-Zionism. So, it is no surprise that while groups like JVP disavow anti-Semitism, BDS attracts both open Jew haters and those who traffic in negative Jewish stereotypes in the anti-Zionist cause.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on September 20, 2016 10 Comments
We have followed the problems at Oberlin College for years. Rather than revisiting everything, please scroll through our Oberlin Tag. The most recent incident involved Professor Joy Karega, who posted blatantly anti-Semitic conspiracy theories on Facebook, including linking the Rothschild family to a global conspiracy. Karega Rotshchild Image Karega also accused Israel of attacking Charlie Hebdo as part of a false flag operation and being the equivalent of ISIS.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on September 14, 2016 3 Comments
Recently I have started making the point that BDS is a Settler Colonial Ideology that invades, conquers and subjugates other causes. Addressing the destruction of the American Indian Studies Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign after its leadership aligned itself with BDS and intersectionality theory, I recently wrote:
But as with the Black Lives Matters, LGBT, environmental and other movements, BDS proved damaging. BDS was capable of taking over the intellectual territory of other peoples, but it was not for the benefit of any movement other than BDS. It’s time for a reboot of terminology. Israel is not a settler colonial nation, but BDS is a settler colonial ideology.
[caption id="attachment_182766" align="alignnone" width="600"]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ff3d0E_PG-Y [Co-founder of BDS, Omar Barghouti, objecting to 'normalization' between Arabs and Jews][click image for video][/caption]While a new way of looking at the BDS movement, and turning around its false accusation that Israel is a Settler Colonial nation, the facts of BDS taking over other movements is something I have been documenting for years.
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