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Antisemitism Tag

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."

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.

“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.

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:

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

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.

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.

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.

A few days ago, we covered how in early August 2016 the Student Council at Leipzig University in Germany passed a resolution taking a strong stand against calls to boycott Israel, declaring them to be anti-Semitic, READ: German university student council resolution declaring BDS anti-Semitic:
The Student Council condemns anti-Semitic boycott campaigns such as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions [BDS] and stands against the execution, participation in, and promotion of such campaigns and events at the University of Leipzig. Therefore, the Student Council will not support BDS Campaign or settings (events, exhibitions, demonstrations etc.) in which BDS Movement is involved. We consider international cooperation vital for the Academics. As a Student Council we stand against anti-Semitic measures such as disinviting of Israeli academicians from conferences in the context of the boycott campaign, and [council will] publicise whenever it happens — thereby contributing to the clarification of the matter and preventing such an occurrence.
The student council has produced a chronicle of its rejection of BDS (pdf.) which includes a citation to my translation of the resolution:

Hebron is a hot spot in many ways. Hebron and its immediately surrounding Arab areas are the single largest source of terror attacks during the so-called Knife or Stabbing Intifada. It's also a place where anti-Zionist and left-wing "liberal Zionist" American Jews love to gather to protest the Jewish "settlers" who live in a tiny section of the city. That section is under Israeli military control by agreement with the Palestinian Authority, with good reason. Hebron has a long history of violence directed at Jews. Hebron also is the place of the Cave of the Patriarchs, which I visited in 2015. [caption id="attachment_129734" align="alignnone" width="600"][Cave of Patriarchs - Abraham] [Cave of Patriarchs - Abraham][/caption]Hebron had one of if not the oldest continuous Jewish communities in the world, dating back several hundred years at least. Until 1929. On August 23, 1929, the Arabs attacked the Jews of Hebron along with numerous other Jewish communities.

Students at Germany’s leading academic institution, the University of Leipzig, have passed a resolution rejecting the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and calling it anti-Semitic. According to a copy of the resolution obtained by the Legal Insurrection from the Facebook pages of student groups, Leipzig University’s Student Council declared the BDS movement as being blatantly anti-Semitic, saying “even the basic aim of the BDS movement, the complete boycott of the State of Israel, fits seamlessly with the anti-Semitic campaigns of past centuries, and explicitly with that of the National Socialism; Nazi slogan “Don’t Buy From the Jews” is once again being expressed here.” [lines 109-112] The resolution passed by the Leipzig University’s Student Council earlier this month declares [author's translation]: