#national antisemitism strategy

[eretzyisrael]

by Armin Rosen

To put it nicely, CAIR’s record on Jewish matters has been a source of controversy and tension. Zahra Billoo remained head of CAIR’s Bay Area chapter after a widely condemned speech last year in which she described Zionist Jewish groups as an “enemy” and urged suspicion and hostility not just toward out-and-out fascists, but “polite Zionists” as well. More recently, CAIR has come to the defense of a City University of New York Law School graduate who used her commencement speech as a chance to rip the university for its entirely imaginary training of Israeli soldiers and to connect her legal education to “the fight against capitalism, racism, imperialism and Zionism around the world.” CAIR’s top leadership, including co-founder and longtime Executive Director Nihad Awad, have a decadeslong history of statements in support of Hamas and religious warfare against Israel. The group opposed the U.S.’s deportation of Rasmea Odeh, who omitted her past conviction for a deadly terrorist attack in Israel from her U.S. immigration application. The Anti-Defamation League has maintained a constantly updated web page about CAIR’s various antisemitism-related uproars since 2015.

In a message circulated to Jewish groups in the week after the plan’s release, the White House stressed that “It’s factually incorrect to suggest [CAIR] are part of the strategy. They are not part of the strategy—there are zero mentions.” The group was merely “listed in a supplemental document as one of the many independent organizations making commitments to help counter antisemitism.”

When reached for comment, State Department Antisemitism Envoy Deborah Lipstadt repeatedly stressed that “CAIR had nothing to do with the preparation of the plan.” I suggested that even the ancillary mention of a group with CAIR’s history threatened to detract from the strategy’s potential strengths. “If you’re asking if it’s detracting, this conversation should be about the plan and the things it’s going to try to do,” she replied.

#cair #antisemitism #national antisemitism strategy #biden administration #deborah liipstadt

[mental-mona]

#joe biden #jumblr #combating antisemitism #us national strategy to combat antisemitism #this is definitely a win #big ideas #far reaching plans

[notaplaceofhonour]

When Hamas themselves compares the student protests to the October 7th massacre by calling it the “Student Flood” (referencing their name for the massacre, “Al-Aqsa Flood”), and sees in them the destruction of Israel and its people, you don’t get to tell Jews we are imagining it when we see that they are violently antisemitic in nature.

We fully understand that the majority of students are not personally assaulting anyone, so you can stop waving that piece of rhetoric around like it means anything. Every single student at every single protest could be perfectly “peaceful” in the sense that they personally never lay a finger on another person, and the rhetoric & narratives being spun out of them would still be steeped in deeply antisemitic rhetoric & tropes that provide & launder justification for violence that make it considerably more likely that someone else will.

We understand this when the right wing does it. Most QAnon posters & members of right wing activist groups like Moms For Liberty or Gays Against Groomers aren’t actively assaulting Jews & queer people, or even directly saying they think all Jews & queer people are inherently evil (it’s just “the Cabal” & “groomers”). Hell, even most January 6th protesters weren’t actively committing felonies.

That doesn’t change the fact that their conspiratorial thinking is steeped in anti-queer, antisemitic, and anti-democratic narratives which provide motive for violence. When right wing “lone wolf” shooters shoot up schools & synagogues & mosques, we understand how the extreme rhetoric of their political spaces have led them to seeing their violence as completely justified & necessary. That is what stochastic terrorism is.

When calls for Global Intifada, more October 7ths, and Palestine “from the River to the Sea” are so ubiquitous that hardly a single protest can go by without them; when imagery of fighters with AK-47s keeps getting plastered around college campuses; when so many of the groups organizing these protests are spreading Khazar Theory, Blood Libel, and the like (and even those who don’t are linked arm-in-arm with those who do); when the core narratives at the root of the infographics shared in the movement erase Jewish history, monolithize Israelis, & misrepresent Zionism as something from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion; when their rhetoric provides justification for discrimination on the basis of religion, ethnicity, or nationality against Jews or Israelis; when Hamas sees these protests as not only advantageous to their regime, but a key part of its strategy, giving it the same branding as their massacre—you do not get to tell us they are not making us unsafe.

#antisemitism #antisemitic flood #i/p #edited: #couple very obvious typos in the original including swapped letters & double instances of words

[mariacallous]

If there was a pro-Palestinian movement that wanted to capitalise on the disgust at the destruction of Gaza, it would be moving now to demand a compromise peace.

Western and Arab governments should use every sanction to enforce the removal of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, it would say. They are designed to so change the demography of the West Bank that a Palestinian state becomes an impossibility.

 Since Netanyahu came back to power in a coalition with the far right,  mobs have wrecked Huwara and other Palestinian villages.  It is not too fanciful to imagine a future when ethnic cleansers will run riot.

Western governments have already made tentative and, from the point of view of any robust and principled supporter of Palestine, wholly inadequate gestures. They have issued sanctions on groups that fund extremism, and left it there.

But instead of the global left demanding that the world begins to lay the groundwork for compromise, it insists on war, and a war to the death at that.

I could moralise about left ignorance. I could say its position that Israel is a settler colonial state is at best a half-truth which fails to acknowledge that its population is made up of the descendants of refugees from Arab nationalism and European fascism.

Let me for once avoid preachiness, however, and say that from the practical point of view, the global left has adopted a disastrous position.

It’s worse than a crime, it’s a blunder.

In any war to the death, Israel will win. It has nuclear weapons and a population under arms

Those who urge the abolition of Israel by chanting “from the river to the sea/ Palestine will be free” or by demanding that the descendants of Palestinians refugees have a right to return to swamp the Jewish state may think they are being principled. But they are playing into the hands of the Israeli right.

Netanyahu tells the West that he has no partners for peace. By supporting the programme of Hamas and Iran, the global left is proving him right.

When Iran attacks, the Israeli right can say completely accurately that its enemies want to wipe Israel from the map. And look what happens then. Not just Western countries but Arab states like Jordan defend Israel.

Two can play at the game of demanding total victory, and one side has all the advantages.

As the charter of the hard-line rightist Likud party put it, in  language which sounds familiar: “Between the Sea and the River Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”

If I were Palestinian, I could imagine myself wanting Israel gone. But the hope of total victory has been a disaster. In 1948, 1967 and 1973 the Arab states tried to wipe Israel off the map and succeeded only in strengthening it.

There is still a great deal of argument about what Hamas thought would happen when its terrorists attacked Israel in October. One theory holds that Hamas was possessed with the same delusion that misled the Bolsheviks in 1917, and hoped to ignite a general uprising.

The Arab masses failed to rise up on Hamas’s behalf and Iran made it clear it was not prepared to engage in more than token warfare with Israel.

Once again, an attempt to wipe out Israel has brought harm to Palestinian civilians.

If you doubt me on the dangers of going for a purist, maximal strategy and demanding total victory, listen to a true leftist, Norman Finkelstein.

There was a time when I admired his attacks on the “Holocaust Industry” and Jews who exploited Nazism to help Israel.

But after my own experiences of left antisemitism, I became suspicious of an argument which, when taken to extreme, was used to maintain the pretence that anti-Jewish racism did not exist, or barely existed, and that accusations of antisemitism were log rolling by cunning Jews seeking to exploit the compassion of naïve gentiles.

The parallels with anti-black racists who claim their opponents are merely “playing the race card” were too obvious to labour.

No such qualms held Finkelstein back. He helped build the anti-Israel movement in the US, and you might have thought his comrades would have listened to him.

He gave a speech at the student sit-in at Columbia university saying they should not chant for the abolition of Israel and for a Palestine “from the river to the sea”.

If you leave “wriggle room for misinterpretation,” he said, your enemies will exploit it.

The speech was a faintly embarrassing performance. Finkelstein is an old man now, and he rambled down many rhetorical cul-de-sac​s. At the end the students just laughed at him and began chanting “from the river to the sea/ Palestine will be free”.

A part of the explanation for their disastrous flight to the extremes lies in the appeal of ​Manichaeism.

People want to feel wholly virtuous and by necessity want to believe their enemies are wholly evil. In these circumstances, only the co​mplete destruction of evil from the river to the sea will suffice. It’s simply not enough to say that Israel must merely withdraw from the occupied territories. Satan and all his works must be renounced.

You might object that some protestors say they want to replace Israel with a sweet, multicultural liberal democracy. But this is progressive thinking at its woozy wishful-thinking worst: an argument made in clear bad faith.

If they were serious, they would damn Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and Iran who want to create an Islamic state. But it is not just that they do not criticise radical Islam, they barely acknowledge its existence. If you listen to the speeches at the rallies and sit-ins, Hamas and its ultra-reactionary blood-stained ideology are simply not mentioned.

The effort is self-defeating. By going to the extremes, a protest movement has a Manichean appeal but it plays into the hands of its enemies.

The “evaporation theory of protest” explains the phenomenon. When the Gaza war ends, and let us hope that it ends soon, most of the protestors will drift away and get on with their lives.

As they evaporate, all that is left will be a residue composed of the most committed and the most extreme.

They will carry on campaigning when the cause is all but forgotten. When Palestine and Israel are no longer in the news, they will still be there.

And when the next war begins in Israel/Palestine – and I am afraid that there will be a next one – they will organise the protests, write the extreme slogans and set the maximalist demands.

This is why the far left dictates the terms of left-wing protests, and why those protests fail.

Or to put it another way, this is why Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour party and then lost every election he fought

I could be wrong. Perhaps the global wave of protest will bring change for the better. I hope it does. But I fear that, as so often, Palestinian people will be worse off than they were before.​

[sophie-frm-mars]

Hi Sophie! In light of the genocide in Palestine and the conspiracies around it, do you have any thoughts on how to avoid conspiracy thought?

You pointed out in Conspiracy on the Left that conspiracists will often switch from using language that recognizes incentives and structures, to language that indicates direct malice and intent. I've seen this in real time with Zionism where people will stop using it as a term to describe the ideology and actions of Israel and America (economic and military interests, the historical inertia of the british empire, the interest of capital and western nations using Israel as a base in the Middle East), to using it as a placeholder for jews (people accusing individual people (usually american) of attempting to silence voices with media platforms)

I was gonna say I find this one really straightforward, but at the same time I myself have actually rushed into condemnations of Israel that gave too much leniency to antisemitic ideas, so there probably is a bit more to it. I'll get to it

Firstly, the straightforward part of it is that there are jews all around the world who absolutely fucking despise israel and its genocidal project, so even saying "Israel doesn't represent jews" is too mild. Israel actively denies citizenship to ethiopian jews for instance. I think the main thing is to recognise it for what it is - an outpost of imperialist white supremacy in the Middle East - and to recognise Zionism as a primarily American and imperial core phenomenon rather than a jewish one.

Once you have those ideas down it's pretty easy to separate it out because assuming that any jewish person or org supports Israel just because they're jewish is clearly antisemitic. But here's the rub, Israel uses jewish identity as a shield to justify its actions. At the same time that there are illegal settlers literally giving interviews saying "I describe myself as a fascist" the Israeli state claims that Hamas reads Mein Kampf and that Palestinians are literal Nazis. Not only that but Israeli statesmen use references to things like Amalek to signal their genocidal intentions, basically using the cultural references of Judaism to simultaneously hide behind and also attack.

Where I fell into something antisemitic was when I found out about the IDF cumjacker squad, the guys who go out to get the semen of Israel's fallen dead. the Jizzrael Defence Force if you will. Someone who was talking about it said that the justification had some kind of origin in the hebrew bible and I parroted this without thinking until a jewish friend pulled me up on it. There was no source and there was frankly no reason to repeat it even if it had been true, right? but I got carried away. The reality is that the cumjacker battalion exists for the same reason as sterilisation & organ harvesting programs, because Israel is a Starship-Troopers-Ass fascist nightmare state that sees the bodies of the pure and good as essential to the domination of the future and the bodies of the impure and wrong as wretched at worse and resources at best.

How I think we can avoid the trap of sharing these rhetorical points is by remembering what Israel's relationship to judaism is, which is primarily as a shield. "Shoot and Cry" is the phrase to remember. Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said "We can forgive them for killing our children but we can never forgive them for making us kill theirs". This bogus remorse over their genocide of palestinians (because they understand genocide because of the holocaust, see?) and constant preemptive counterattack (Amalek attacked Israel first, see) is the place where Israel touches base with jewish identity, but if you can't see any benefit to Israel's strategy in association with jewish identity, it's likely someone is just trying to say The Jews instead of Israel or repeating the talking point of someone who is.

[beardedmrbean]

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Hundreds of pro-Palestinian protestors made their way through the streets of Philadelphia Sunday night as they demanded a permanent cease-fire in Gaza. What they did outside of a Jewish restaurant drew harsh criticism from local and federal leaders.

The White House on Monday joined Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro in calling what happened in Center City "antisemitic" and "completely unjustifiable." Shapiro on Sunday night called it a "blatant act of antisemitism."

The pro-Palestinian protestors gathered in Rittenhouse Square and marched through the area and University City, including the University of Pennsylvania campus.

In a Facebook post, the Philadelphia Free Palestine Coalition had urged supporters to "flood the streets" Sunday night.

Video posted on social media showed demonstrators also made their way to Samson Street, where they gathered outside the Jewish restaurant Goldie, one of several restaurants in the city owned by Philadelphia-based Israeli chef Michael Solomonov.

The group of protestors is accused of shouting antisemitic remarks, and stickers with pro-Palestinian slogans were reportedly left on the doors, though when CBS Philadelphia checked back early Monday morning they had been removed.

Video of the crowd outside Goldie was posted on social media around 5:30 p.m. Sunday. Later that night, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro released a statement on X (formerly Twitter) in response to the clip, writing, "Tonight in Philly, we saw a blatant act of antisemitism — not a peaceful protest. A restaurant was targeted and mobbed because its owner is Jewish and Israeli. This hate and bigotry is reminiscent of a dark time in history."

Shapiro said in another post that he reached out to Solomonov and the team at Goldie to share his support.

White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said in a statement it's "completely unjustifiable to target restaurants that serve Israeli food over disagreements with Israeli policy."

Bates continued, "This behavior reveals the kind of cruel and senseless double standard that is a calling card of antisemitism. President Biden has fought against the evil of antisemitism his entire life, including by launching the first national strategy to counter this hate in American history. He will always stand up firmly against these kinds of undignified actions."

Congressmember Brendan Boyle also weighed in Sunday night, writing, "I can't believe I even have to say this, but targeting businesses simply because they're Jewish owned is despicable. Philadelphia stands against this story of harassment and hate."

Solomonov owns multiple restaurants in the city under the banner CookNSolo, including Zahav, Laser Wolf and K'Far Cafe. Following the start of the Israel-Hamas war in October, Solomonov announced he would donate 100% of all sales to Friends of United Hatzalah, a nonprofit emergency medical service.

CBS Philadelphia has reached out to the group that organized Sunday night's rally but has yet to hear back.

#nunyas news #attempt at kristallnacht 2.0 is on the way it would seem #arm yourselves #make a new purim if they try it

[probablyasocialecologist]

At a rally near the White House, 40 white nationalist National Justice Party, or NJP, members demanded a ceasefire in Gaza on Oct. 28. “[In] a country as broke as ours … why the hell are they dragging us into another Zionist war?” yelled one member of the group, standing next to alt-right podcaster Mike “Enoch” Peinovich. After the speaker made an antisemitic reference to the U.S. as “Zionist occupied territory,” one of the attendees demanded “no more Jewish wars” to a passing cameraman.

[...]

White nationalist Richard Spencer was notable for professing his support of the Zionist project and arguing that Jews and Israelis should support the alt-right because they “want the same things,” which in his formulation is authoritarian ethnic nationalism. Yet his commitment to Israel was opportunistic and has been a frequent topic of discussion on his various livestreams and private Zoom calls for Substack subscribers.  For white nationalists, the show of support for Palestinians is entirely a disingenuous attempt to hijack the conflict to add political weight to their antisemitism. “[For] neo-Nazis and many other white nationalists, anti-Zionism is based on hatred of Jews, not solidarity with Palestinians,” writes researcher of the far right, Matthew N. Lyons, in his 2018 book “Insurgent Supremacists.”  This appropriation of Palestinian struggles has been a long-term strategy in some sectors of the far right, which points to Israeli settler colonialism as an extension of the supposedly malevolent Jewish mind. “They have been doing this for years,” says antifascist researcher Daryle Lamont Jenkins. “It has been ‘an enemy of my enemy is my friend’ kind of thing. But in this case it is hollow, because the enemy of your enemy is also your enemy, but one you are trying to exploit.”

#antisemitism #israel #gaza #zionism #fascism

[rebel-girl-queen-of-my-world]

Repost from @jewishvoiceforpeace (with a side of @ jenanmatari and @EoghanGilmartin on twitter)

Neo-Nazis and Zionists collaborate to attack student protests against the genocide in Gaza.

It might come as a surprise that Neo-Nazis and the far right, who have a long record of stoking antisemitism, are joining anti-Palestinian demonstrations, but for those familiar with the long-standing alliance between Zionists and antisemites, this is disturbingly predictable.

Zionism is the ideology that the Israeli government rests upon. It claims Jewish safety requires a Jewish-only nation-state. Zionists use the strategy of violent ethnic cleansing to ensure their goal of “maximum land, minimum Palestinians.”

Antisemitic Zionists, or people who both hate Jews and love Israel, are common in right-wing movements, and are the sources of the most tangible threats to Jewish people. Depending on their ideology, white nationalists may admire Israel as a model ethnic supremacist state, share its Islamophobic and anti-Arab views, and/or want Jews to be corralled in their own state far away from the US. This worldview is gravely dangerous to Palestinians, Jews, Muslims, and people of color.

Neo-Nazi groups such as the Proud Boys and individuals carrying hate symbols like the Confederate and Gadsden flags have been spotted repeatedly at the violent pro-genocide protests harassing peaceful student protestors.

The agenda of white nationalists, war profiteers, and anti-Palestinian individuals and organizations has nothing to do with protecting Jewish people, and all to do with harming our intersectional movements for justice.

White supremacy anywhere is a threat to us all. That’s why we stand in solidarity with Palestinians and all people struggling for liberation.

#human rights #palestine #free palestine #gaza #israel #free gaza #white supremacists #fascism #racism #right wing extremism #right wing #Nazis #Zionism #student activism #student protests #gaza genocide #gaza solidarity encampment

[eretzyisrael]

By Nachum Kaplan

Hamas correctly identified that antisemitism was only dormant in the West, and that they just needed to wake the sleeping monster. They knew this because there were clear tells, such as the international media’s fixation on Israel, the over-reporting of the country, and that the Pavlovian way the conflict becomes newsworthy only when Israel responds to an attack.Hamas stuck to what has worked throughout history. The blood libel trope was modernized into accusations of genocide and deliberate starvation, while the trope of Jews being responsible for their persecution was updated with the notion that Israel had turned Gaza into an open-air prison.They leveraged their numerical advantage.With more than a billion Muslims globally, Hamas knew it had a huge virtual army it could activate on social media to reach a global audience.Hamas flooded social media with lies to exploit the Repetition Bias, a heuristic (mental shortcut) in which repeated information feels more true than new or unrepeated information. Social media repeated these lies exponentially, aided by extensive use of AI-generated “photographs.”The Palestinians also exploited another numerical advantage, the number of Muslim states, which is 48. This has given them weight in forums such as the United Nations and its various committees and bodies, creating a suited army of bureaucrats with credible titles to tell lies to the international press.Almost comically, Iran has just assumed the presidency of the UN Conference on Disarmament. That is the same Islamic Republic that funds, arms, and trains Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen — and ships arms to Russia to use in its invasion of Ukraine.They controlled the information flow.Hamas and the Palestinian Authority have used traditional authoritarian tactics to control the information flow from areas they govern. Reporters cannot report freely or unfavorably from Palestinian-controlled territories if they want to retain access. Threats of violence keep the few unsympathetic local reporters in check.Exploiting the inability of most media to report from Gaza directly, Hamas has used local Gazan “journalists” to feed lies, distorting images, and fabricated data to the credulous international media. Time and again, the foreign press has swallowed them, including claimed civilian death toll numbers that are demonstrably untrue (and presume every person killed was a civilian).Hamas has only needed the media to report its numbers, knowing that if repeated enough, they be treated as true and that no one will pay attention to the fine print stating they are unverified. Hamas at one point even had the media complaining that Israel was simultaneously not allowing reporters access to Gaza and targeting journalists there.They mastered the 24-hour news cycle.The internet has blurred the traditional lines between print and television news, turning all news media into digital services beholden to the 24-hour news cycle.Hamas has understood that as long as it keeps manufacturing outrages, the news cycle will move on quickly, and they will never be held to account. The Qatar-funded Al Jazeera, which has the veneer of a real news organization, has played a key role in this.They have exploited a ‘post-truth’ world.Hamas recognized that the post-Modernist rot has resonated in much of the West, including across its media and universities. The belief that people cannot only have their own opinions, but their own facts, sounds laughable, but it has become worryingly normal.Political tribes express opinions mainly as identity signals, and tribal loyalty is more important to these people than truth, or even reality. Hamas has understood that this liberates it from any need to have a fact-based narrative.They use simple slogans.“

#hamas #gaza #hamas propaganda #hamas media machine #Palestinians

[dostoyevsky-official]

Why the Kremlin will fear Dagestan’s anti-Semitic mob

Local officials have been trying to walk a delicate line between alienating local Muslim sentiment in the turbulent North Caucasus and doing anything to stir up further inter-ethnic violence. [...] But this incident may force them – and Moscow – to take a stronger line. [...] The other is the degree to which this issue is being weaponised. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky quickly turned it into a propaganda point, blaming the incident on what he called Russia’s ‘widespread culture of hatred toward other nations.’ Conversely Sergei Melikov, head of the Dagestan Republic, has suggested that the violence was instigated by Ukraine.  [...] Of course, it suits Moscow to paint the protests as the result of sinister Ukrainian machinations just as much as it suits Kyiv to use them to demonise Russia as a land of prejudice and hate. Nonetheless, the Kremlin clearly fears that rising Muslim violence will not only further complicate its relationship with Israel but also risks destabilising the North Caucasus. It also fears that Ukrainian allies and intelligence agencies, which have already demonstrated their willingness to commit acts of sabotage and subversion within Russia’s borders, have little reason not to exacerbate this problem. This makes the crisis a serious security issue.

The Storming of Uytash

The attempted pogrom is not just rooted in antisemitic messaging, but in systemic dynamics in the region. General socioeconomic conditions in the republic continue to deteriorate. Basic necessities to live such as electricity, water, and gas are irregularly supplied, which led to sustained small protests only a few months ago. Additionally, Russia’s war in Ukraine has impacted Dagestan heavily, with significant casualties. Public appeals and small actions do not regularly succeed, with the authorities sweeping them aside. In some cases, residents have appealed directly to President Putin because of Governor Melikov’s unresponsiveness. [...] Melikov has all but eliminated channels for moderate public expression. This leads to tactical outbidding that favors dramatic, extreme actions. An inability to protest built up pressure until a mob emerged. Expressions of solidarity with Palestinians are effectively banned, despite both Russia’s growing ties with Hamas and that the attempted protests are not anti-state. Nightly prayers are essentially the sole form of collective support for Palestine permitted by the state. Analysis of the event’s causes should be wary of overemphasizing individual actors’ roles in organizing it. The popular «Utro Dagestan» Telegram channel has received considerable attention for amplifying antisemitic narratives and purportedly instigating the attempted pogrom. Previously, it played a major role coordinating the anti-mobilization protests. However, its repeated calls for greater and continued resistance in September 2022 were not acted upon after a couple of days. [...] The influence of Utro Dagestan deserves focus, but assigning it causality would be misconstrued. The security services’ strategy came across as, at best, poorly executed containment, at worst, active passivity. They largely refused to intervene, other than attempting to keep the mob out of the airport and off of the tarmac.  There are three apparent explanations for the non-engagement strategy. First, instructions came from the top, with the authorities deciding they could maintain sufficient control over the situation, while allowing the mob to release its built-up emotions. [...] Second, non-engagement could suggest that the security services supported the mob’s actions. As such, they decided to not stop the attempted pogrom. Finally, the authorities could have decided non-engagement was the best strategy to avoid escalation, considering the threat of an armed mob.  [...] The arrival of a military convoy in Makhachkala indicates the government’s preparation for continued troubles. As seen in the anti-mobilization protests, Dagestan’s young men are typically prepared to clash with police, so violence at the airport was not entirely surprising. However, the tarmac breachers went further than the usual brawling, with them firing shots into the air. This fact will not be overlooked. The authorities have been closely watching dynamics related to youth radicalization, calls for partisan action, and militant activity. Dagestan, and likely the rest of the North Caucasus, is now facing heightened repression as a result of the storming of Makhachkala’s airport. This repression will not address actual problems or mobilizing factors, but add pressure within a strained system. The increase in antisemitic incidents reveal the potential for an explosion, as they represent uncontrolled violence beyond the state’s control—but, for now, it is not targeting the authorities.

#dagestan #caucasus

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Dion J. Pierre

Columbia University professor Shai Davidai, a Jewish Israeli, defended his right to condemn Hamas’ atrocities on Thursday after learning that an anonymous group of graduate students has accused him of anti-Palestinian racism and demanded a professional association of which he is a member publicly censure him.

Anti-Zionist TikTok influencer Jessica Burbank first reported the accusations the graduate students lodged in a letter to the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP), an organization founded in 1974 to promote the social psychology field and its usefulness to society. Comprising over 7,500 student and faculty members, it provides invaluable funding and networking opportunities.

Accusing Davidai of “targeting individuals — especially Palestinians and students of color,” the students’ letter describes his efforts to hold pro-Hamas student groups accountable for harassing Jewish students and defending terror as “decolonization” as “blatant dereliction of duty with respect to his responsibilities and ethical standards as a professor and faculty member of SPSP.” The students additionally accused him of promoting “doxxing” and “misrepresenting” the views of pro-Hamas groups, all of whom have defended Hamas’ atrocities on Oct. 7 while calling for a ceasefire, a strategy they have employed to portray themselves as a pro-peace movement.

On Thursday, Professor Davidai told The Algemeiner that the man depicted in the letter is not someone his community, students, and peers would recognize, and he accepts that enduring assaults on his character is a consequence of defending the Jewish people wherever they are, be it Israel or New York City.

“Look, I’m speaking up against evil, and against the support of evil,” he said. “I’m willing to take the reputational hits because people that won’t like me for saying what I’m saying — I don’t need them to like me. This isn’t about the performative virtue signaling that is en vogue right now. This is about having a moral compass and standing up for what’s right.”

Davidai went on to express concern that his colleagues in the field have not defended him, a silence which suggests that incriminating pro-Israel activists with baseless accusations will not be denounced or resisted even by moderates holding nuanced views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Israel’s war against Hamas.

“If I have to pay the price, I’ll pay the price. Thousands and thousands of Jews and non-Jews contact me to say that calling out pro-Hamas support on US college campuses is the right thing to do,” he continued. “And the irony is that I won’t be silenced. They might take away my reputation. They might take away my job and my career. But I’m not the kind of person who will be quiet now that there’s a personal cost for telling the truth. They’re just proving my point.”

Davidai first achieved national notoriety after delivering a thunderous speech before a crowd of students and others gathered on campus in which he called the school’s president a “coward” for refusing to condemn Hamas apologists and anti-Zionist demonstrations on campus.

“I’m talking to you as a dad, and I want you to know we cannot protect your children from pro-terror student organizations, because the president of Columbia University will not speak out,” Davidai said to the students, whom he asked to film and send the remarks to their parents. “Citizens of the US are right now kidnapped in Gaza, and yet the president of the university is allowing — is giving — her support to pro-terror student organizations.”

In many ways, becoming a public figure has been a detriment, Davidai said. His email is flooded daily with notes from antisemites accusing him of being an “Elder of Zion” and a “genocidal baby killer.”

His colleagues, furious that his exposing antisemitism and left-wing radicalism at Columbia University has caused important donors to pull their support from the school, have never commented on the hate mail even though they are always copied as recipients of it, he alleged.

#shai davidai #columbia university #antisemitism #evil

[plethoraworldatlas]

Progressive lawmakers and rights advocates on Wednesday implored U.S. President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party to listen to young voters who oppose the government's funding of Israel's bombardment of Gaza, as the party's student organization announced its support for campus anti-war protests that have spread across the country over the past two weeks.

The College Democrats of America refuted Biden's suggestion last week that the protests are inherently antisemitic and urged the president to listen to the widespread calls for him to demand a permanent cease-fire in Gaza and end funding for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), which is set to receive an additional $17 billion following Biden's signing of a foreign aid bill last week.

By failing to listen to those demands—backed by 77% and 56% of Democratic voters, respectively, according to recent polling—Biden risks losing crucial support from the voting bloc that the College Democrats has been tasked with engaging for decades.

"As College Democrats, we are committed to the re-election of President Biden and Democrats across down-ballot races in every corner of our nation," the organization said. "However, as representatives of youth across the country, we reserve the right to criticize our own party when it fails to represent youth voices... As young voters, we are well aware that come November, our votes will determine who wins the White House. The White House has taken the mistaken route of a bear-hug strategy for [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu and a cold-shoulder strategy for its own base and all Americans who want to see an end to this war."

#us politics #biden administration #vote uncommitted #joe biden #palestine #israel #college protests #university protests #student protest #Literally sending the police to beat up his main voter base

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Matt Shuham at HuffPost:

The national group representing college Democrats released a statement Tuesday standing with pro-Palestinian campus protesters and criticizing President Joe Biden for his “bear hug” of what the group called “the genocidal acts of the far-right radical extremist Israeli government.”

The statement, released by the College Democrats of America, illustrated a break with the Democratic Party — of which it is an official arm. It was approved by an 8-2 vote of the group’s executive board, which is made up of national leadership that has been elected by representatives of campus and state college Democrats chapters across the country. “Since the beginning of this conflict, College Democrats and students from every walk of life have had the moral clarity to see this war for what it is: destructive, genocidal, and unjust,” the CDA statement read. It commended the “bravery” of students facing arrest and disciplinary action for their protests, and condemned college administrators for those responses. Across the country, student protesters have called for an Israeli cease-fire in Gaza, and institutional transparency and divestment with regard to investments in Israeli firms, or those linked to American military aid to Israel.

The statement also called for the “release of all hostages” and condemned the rise in domestic antisemitism and Islamophobia in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s subsequent invasion and air barrage of Gaza, saying Jewish and Muslim students had no control over the conflict. Still, it said, “it should be abundantly clear that calling for the freedom of Palestinians is not Antisemetic [sic], and neither is opposing the genocidal acts of the far-right radical extremist Israeli government.” The statement’s harshest criticism was directed at the president and his reelection campaign. The White House, according to the CDA, has pursued a “cold shoulder strategy for its own base and all Americans who want to see an end to this war.” “Each day that Democrats fail to stand united for a permanent ceasefire, two-state solution, and recognition of a Palestinian state, more and more youth find themselves disillusioned with the party,” the statement read. It earned praise from progressives across the country including Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and the former Ohio state legislator and prominent Bernie Sanders supporter Nina Turner.

[...] The national College Democrats group began working on the statement after Columbia University’s president, Minouche Shafik, called in police to clear a pro-Palestinian encampment on campus two weeks ago; overnight Tuesday, Shafik called in police again, this time to clear a building where protesters had set up camp after Shafik began suspending students for their protest. Both instances resulted in several dozen arrests. Pyarali cited other campus protests as inspiration as well, including at Indiana University, where police snipers were stationed above protesters. “It’s insane, it’s not a war zone, it’s a college campus,” he said.

The statement doesn’t necessarily represent the thousands of Democratic college students whose campus chapters fall under the larger College Democrats umbrella. Rather, the only binding vote on its release was held by the CDA executive board. Two members of that body opposed it. One of them, Joshua Martin, the former student body president at the University of Houston, commented on social media: “The only way to bring peace is to destroy Hamas, who through years of terror have subjugated Palestinians to decades of violence.” Allyson Bell, a Meredith College graduate student and chair of the College Democrats Jewish Caucus — and who collaborated with Pyarali in a December call for cease-fire — told HuffPost in an email that earlier statements focused on condemning instances of campus antisemitism had been “voted down by the executive board and replaced with what was released.” She called the final statement “one sided.”

The College Democrats of America's response to the nationwide protests against Israel's genocide campaign on Gaza that criticized President Joe Biden for being too close to Israel Apartheid State government is spot-on.

#College Democrats of America #Joe Biden #Democratic Party #Israel/Palestine Conflict #Israel/Hamas War #Gaza Genocide #2024 Presidential Election #2024 Elections #Israel/Hamas War Protests

[good-old-gossip]

Germany's journey from Nazi Germany to Zionazi Germany

“Germany is promoting only those Jews who are willing to produce anti-Muslim discourse. Jews who do not perceive Muslims as such are being marked as a threat not just to the German nation but to Jews themselves.” Udi Raz, 34, is sitting in a cafe in Berlin, where he lives, reflecting on a turbulent six months.

Since Israel’s war on Gaza began following the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October, Raz, an Israeli Jew raised in Haifa, has been fired from his job and had the activist group he’s part of labelled antisemitic by Germany’s official antisemitism commissioner.

Last Friday, German authorities arrested Raz, a board member of Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East, after they cancelled and then banned the group’s three-day conference on Palestine.

The conference, which was set to feature notable speakers including former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis and leading British-Palestinian surgeon Ghassan Abu-Sittah, was cancelled by Berlin police within its first two hours on Friday.

“They came in and blocked the screening of a recorded video message, then they broke into the control room and switched off the electricity for the whole building with hundreds of people inside,” Raz told Middle East Eye.

The recorded video message was from Abu-Sittah, who had been detained after landing in Germany. The doctor told MEE that, in a basement room in Berlin’s airport, he was questioned for three and a half hours. At the end of the interrogation, Abu-Sittah, who spent 43 days during the war treating patients in Gaza’s al-Ahli and al-Shifa hospitals, was told by German authorities that he was not allowed on German soil, that this ban would last for the whole of April and that if he tried to dial into the conference remotely – or send a video message to be played at it – that would constitute a breach in German law that could see him face up to a year in prison. Nadija Samour, a lawyer involved with the conference, said organisers had not been “given anything in writing about why the event was being cancelled.

We had been cooperating with the police through everything, nothing said or done at the venue was illegal. From the very beginning, it was clear that there would be attempts by the police to shut the conference down." “A speaker was projected who was subject to a ban on political activity,” Berlin police said on social media after closing the conference down.

In the last six months, German authorities have continued to crack down on the Palestine solidarity movement in Germany, including silencing several high-profile Jewish intellectuals, academics and artists. The country’s responsibility for the Holocaust, in which six million Jews were murdered by Germany’s Nazi government, and its post-war “staatsrason”, or reason of state, a principle that places support for Israel at the core of Germany's national identity, have contributed to an atmosphere in which even Jews are now regularly branded antisemitic for criticising Israel. Raz, who is a leading Jewish peace activist in Berlin, has been twice detained, labelled an antisemite, lost his job, and his organisation has had its bank account frozen, as well as being branded antisemitic by Germany’s antisemitism commissioner.

The Israeli says there were clear signs that authorities in Berlin would try and shut down the event. “The Berlin Senate had been trying for the past few weeks to stop the Palestine Congress from going forward - one of the strategies they used was to freeze our bank account. For weeks, we had been collecting donations and tickets receipts for the Palestine Congress.

We still dont have access to those funds.” Raz says that Jewish Voice for a Just Peace is constantly reminding Germans of the structural inequalities and the genocide being carried out in Palestine. “We want everyone to be treated equally, we want human rights and international law to be respected. That makes the German state very uncomfortable; they are OK with the apartheid regime and its genocidal crimes,” he says. Jewish Voice for a Just Peace has been campaigning for an immediate end to hostilities in Gaza and demanding that the German government suspend diplomatic, economic support and weapons sales to Israel. Raz told MEE that he feels there exists a clear disparity in the treatment of pro-Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews in Germany.

“Whenever I had the opportunity to speak from my own perspective, I was allowed to speak only to the extent that I had something bad to say about Palestinians, about Arabs, about Muslims. Whenever that was not the case, and I brought up the Palestinian narrative, insititutions were pointing at me and accusing me of antisemitism.”

Previously a tour guide at the Jewish Museum in Berlin, Raz was fired for referring to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank as “apartheid” on tours. Since 7 October, several Jewish groups, academics, artists and human rights activists – including Israelis like Berlinale-winning journalist Yuval Abraham, who was branded an antisemite in Germany - have called out Germany for suppressing any criticism of Israel's war in Gaza and the Palestine solidarity movement in the country.

Last week, a leading Jewish American philosopher, Nancy Fraser, was disinvited from taking up a professorship at the University of Cologne after signing a letter expressing solidarity with Palestinians and condemning the killings in Gaza carried out by Israeli forces. In December, Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen was at the centre of a similar controversy after official German sponsors removed their support for the Hannah Arendt Prize – which was being awarded to Gessen – because of a New Yorker article in which which the Jewish writer drew a comparison between conditions in Gaza today and the Warsaw Ghetto. Raz told MEE that while growing up in Haifa, he was aware of two distinct realities that existed in that region between the Jewish and Palestinian population.

“I did not feel comfortable there. For me, the act of emigrating from Israel and landing in Germany was an act of finding my own home, where everyone was equal and human rights were respected.” Soon after moving to Berlin in 2010, Raz says, he felt that he was being celebrated by cultural institutions and politicians because of his Jewish heritage.

“However, I did soon realise that, while in Germany my Jewishness was being celebrated, I felt like a second-class citizen, so I found more in common with other minority religious groups.” He adds that while he did feel excluded, he was constantly reminded that being an Israeli Jew he had easier access to higher social standing in German society because he embodied a “superior” white western European heritage.

“Today, Jews in Germany are being divided along political lines: if you are a conscientious Jew, not willing to support a genocide in your name and wanting to speak out against it, you will be persecuted in this country, and if you are happy with the hate and the genocide being carried out then you can live in peace and enjoy your privilege,” he says.

When asked about the future, Raz draws on his family’s history and suggests quietly that his days in Germany might be numbered, while firing off a warning to Jews wanting to settle here.

“My grandparents lived in Lithuania before the Second World War. I often ask myself that, as the Nazis marched into Lithuania, at what point did my grandparents decide that it’s time to leave, and then eventually at what point in time did they realised that it's perhaps too late to leave?” His head hanging down, Raz says, with a defeated look, that space for Jews in Germany to express their political opinions safely and openly is shrinking.

“All this is happening under a Social Democrat government; you can only imagine what will happen when the far-right AfD comes to power. “My request to all my Jewish brothers and sisters is that, if you are considering moving to Germany, think twice.”

✍️ by : Sal Ahmed

#zionazi germany #nazi germany #zionism is nazism #zionism is terrorism #free Palestine #free gaza #I stand with Palestine #Gaza #Palestine #Gazaunderattack #Palestinian Genocide #Gaza Genocide #end the occupation #Israel is an illegal occupier #Israel is committing genocide #Israel is committing war crimes #Israel is a terrorist state #Israel is a war criminal #Israel is an apartheid state #Israel is evil #Israeli war crimes #Israeli terrorism #IOF Terrorism #Israel kills babies #Israel kills children #Israel kills innocents #Israel is a murder state #Israeli Terrorists #Israeli war criminals #Boycott Israel

[schraubd]

Getting Out in Front on Antisemitism

A few weeks ago, when the New York City Council was debating a resolution combating antisemitism, we had a bit of awkwardness when various lefty groups (and a few lefty councilmembers) expressed concern about aligning themselves with the undeniably right-wing actors who were the primary movers behind the underlying campaign. Six councilmembers ultimately declined to vote for the resolution, resulting in some absolutely expected negative headlines and bad press as the right seized the opportunity that fell into their laps.

In response to that own-goal, I wrote the following:

Look: Brooke Goldstein is an undeniably toxic actor. I totally get why a progressive wouldn't want to touch anything she's within ten feet of. But here's the thing: you don't *have* to wait for her to draft an anti-antisemitism resolution. You can draft your own!

NYC progressives have nobody to blame but themselves that they let Goldstein get out in front of them. If you don't want to vote for "her" res, write and submit your own first. Who knows, maybe [Republican city councilwoman Inna] Vernikov will pale at associating with you and you can turn the screws on her a bit!

But if you aren't writing these resolutions and you aren't frontloading the fight against antisemitism, you can't get too chippy that other people fill in the gap you've left. It's a problem entirely of your own making. 

As the day of the Biden administration's big antisemitism action plan rollout comes to a close, doesn't it feel nice to be on the right side of that lesson?

The Biden administration didn't wait on antisemitism. It didn't hold back, it didn't stay quiet and do nothing until some Matt Gaetz style yahoo created a "plan to fight antisemitism" that they had to reject while awkwardly insisting that of course they oppose antisemitism but they just can't oppose it this way.

The Biden administration wrote their own plan, on their own initiative, in their own words. And what was the result?

An array of Jewish organizations from the left to the center-right echoed those sentiments in welcoming the plan with enthusiasm, marking a change from recent weeks in which they had been split over how the plan should define antisemitism. Still, a handful of right-wing groups blasted the strategy, saying that its chosen definition of antisemitism diluted the term.

The Jewish left seems happy. I've seen naught but praise from groups like the JDCA, J Street, JFREJ, and so on. The Jewish center seems happy. The ADL and AJC clearly are taking this as a win. The Conference is happy. Groups like JIMENA are thrilled that the document expressly acknowledges and represents Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews. A rapid consensus has already emerged across a broad swath of the American Jewish community that this document is an example of true allyship from the White House.

And the right? Well now it's their turn to feel uncomfortable. They're still trying to stomp their feet about Nexus getting 15 words of modest praise. They're awkwardly trying to figure out how handle MAGA darling Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) calling the proposed campaign against antisemitism a means of "go[ing] after conservatives" and comparing it to Soviet repression. They're on their heels, reeling from the fact that the biggest national program to fight antisemitism is being conducted and they're struggling to even board the train.

Right now, the fight against antisemitism is a coalition of left and center, with the right bickering on the sidelines. It's not just a win for the Jews (though it is), it's a great political coup as well. And it's all because the Biden administration took the very simple step of getting out in front.

Learn that lesson, and learn it well.

via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/FnJLdI4

#anti-semitism #Biden administration #Jews

[readingsquotes]

"The problem is — and I will keep banging this drum as long as I have to — Biden’s incoherence on Israel and Palestine is both morally unforgivable and bad political strategy. He is bleeding support not only from young people, Arab-Americans, and others incensed with his continued support for a genocidal war machine, but also from pro-Israel moderates and Never Trump conservatives who are enraged at his furtive and contradictory efforts to ever-so-slightly rein that war machine in. I’ll give more details about that incoherence below. For now, I’ll just say that by trying to make everyone a little happy, he is making no one happy, as the pile of Palestinian corpses grows at his feet.

But that’s the narrow part of the question in the context of American politics. The bigger issue for me is why Biden’s management of the human catastrophe in Gaza is so salient. My answer is that it points to the larger and even more consequential failures of liberal politics over the last four to eight years.

....the heart of Biden’s failure to both recognize and confront the actual danger facing democracy. In a recent In These Times essay titled “Antifacism after Gaza,” the Italian philosopher Alberto Toscano subtly tweaked leftist Democratic politicians for whom “the threat of Trumpian despotism blunted opposition” to Biden’s Israel policy: “There is a bitter irony in granting primacy to the national fight against fascism over the campaign to stop a U.S.-funded genocide when the current Israeli government — in its exterminationist rhetoric, patronage of racist militias, colonizing drive and ultranationalism — fits textbook definitions of fascism far more neatly than any other contemporary regime.”

The campus protests would have been another opportunity for Biden to show his commitment to democratic and pro-social ideals. I’m not saying he had to support the protesters or their aims — they are, after all, in large part protesting him. But no one made Biden take the further step of employing reactionary talking points about the protests being fonts of antisemitism and supposedly genocidal rhetoric, or repeating memeified claims about “Jewish students” being “blocked, harrassed, attacked, while walking to class” — questionable claims that have been weaponized to justify state and vigilante violence against demonstrators exercising their First Amendment rights.2 Biden repeated those claims on May 7, Israeli Holocaust Remembrance Day. Yet he said nothing about the weeks of wanton anti-demonstrator violence by both police and unhinged pro-Israel counterprotesters. In fact, instead of condemning the episodic police state, he is pushing a new plan to funnel $37 billion more to police departments and hire 100,000 more cops.

The political problem here should be obvious. How do you explain to a student who just watched, say, the NYPD throw their friends down a flight of stairs for participating in a nonviolent protest — acts committed without so a peep of condemnation from the president — that a vote for him is a vote against fascism?

Nor is Gaza the only place Biden and the Democrats keep undermining their claim to being the antifascist party. The president has repeatedly pleaded with Trump to work with him in passing a MAGA-like immigration bill: one that prioritized enforcement, detention, and “shutdown” measures over, for instance, pathways to citizenship for undocumented migrants or those who came as children. When Trump didn’t take Biden’s obvious political bait, the president tried running even further to his right. Biden can insist, as he did at the State of the Union, that he “will not demonize immigrants” or endorse Trump’s Hitlerian cant about “poisoning the blood of our country.” But by adopting reactionary fearmongering about the need to “secure the border” above all else, all that remains of a message to voters is that even squishy libs think the fascists have a point about immigration — it’s just that they aren’t willing to do more to stop it.

The connection between state violence at home and genocide abroad isn’t lost on the students. Popular chants connect the dispossession and killing in Palestine to U.S. policy in the Philippines, Vietnam, and Latin America, as well as immigration policy here: “From Palestine to Mexico / border walls have got to go.” As Toscano notes, protesters at the University of Texas chanted at the Austin police: “APD! KKK! / IDF! They’re all the same!” — connecting domestic policing and racism to the Israeli military. And indeed, that connection isn’t purely theoretical: thousands of U.S. police officers have received direct training from the Israeli military on crowd control, use of force, and surveillance in recent decades, including the NYPD, and yes, the Austin police as well.

#us politics #us fascism #us imperialism #us immigration #solidarity #collective liberation #state repression #state violence #surveillance state #white supremecy #palestine #free palestine #settler police #settler colonialism #settler violence #student protests #student activism