Image 01 Image 03

Antisemitism Tag

Over the past few months, Jewish Community Centers across the country have received bomb threats that, thankfully, have turned out to be nothing more than threats. Just yesterday the Jewish Children's Museum in Brooklyn was evacuated after a bomb threat was received via email. The New York Police now believe the calls are all coming from the same individual who's using a voice changer and number spoofer.

On Saturday, February 25, 2017, Democrat National Committee delegates will vote in a new Chair. The two top contenders are Keith Ellison, congressman from Minnesota, and Tom Perez, former Obama Labor Secretary. Regardless of who is chosen, there is no centrist choice. Because the is no center of the Democratic Party. Perez is a fairly standard leftist. We haven't spend a lot of time covering his background because there's really nothing particularly interesting as regards the future of the Democratic Party. He's reportedly the Obama-Biden choice.

A Jewish cemetery near St. Louis saw over 100 gravestones overturned. The criticism of this act is deserved, regardless of whether it was the result of non-anti-Semitic hooliganism or an act of intended anti-Semitism. Either way, it is an act of religious intimidation. What is not deserved is the attempt to blame it on Trump, which is the suggestion of much media and social media attention, and Democratic Party spin.

You may recall the incident in the summer of 2015 involving Jewish American musician Matisyahu. His appearance at the Spanish Rototom Reggae festival was cancelled after threats from local Spanish activists from the Boycott, Divestment and Movement (BDS) movement. Spain has a particularly malicious BDS movement, which until recently, has had success convincing municipalities to boycott Israel, creating so-called Zionist-free zones. Those municipal boycotts have been declared to be illegal discrimination by Spanish courts. Matisyahu made a name for himself as a religious Jewish Reggae singer with hits advocating peace, such as One Day.

Anti-Israel and antisemitic propaganda are common on America’s college and university campuses. But as we’ve highlighted in a number of recent posts, this discriminatory and biased messaging and materials appears to be filtering down into the public education system. In a post last April we noted how anti-Israel materials have been systematically introduced into the curriculum of a Newton, MA high school. Then at an Ithaca, NY third grade classroom we recently documented efforts to indoctrinate kids into becoming “freedom fighters for Palestine”:

Despite its name, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) isn’t Jewish or for peace. It’s a radical group that provides cover to the anti-Israel movement, particularly on campuses, by legitimizing and mainstreaming its assault on Jewish identity. As we’ve noted in prior posts, JVP usurps various Jewish celebrations, religious holidays, and commemorative life-cycle events by incorporating within them virulently anti-Israel themes and reinforcing that this Israel-bashing is consistent with Jewish values. Last year, as we highlighted in our posts, this identity theft of Jewish heritage was particularly visible during Passover and the High Holidays. Now, JVP is hijacking Chanukah (also spelled "Hanukkah") too.

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.

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.

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:

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:

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.

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.

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....

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:

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:

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."