RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.ajc.org/AntisemitismReport2022

American Jewish Committee’s annual State of Antisemitism in America report assesses and compares Jewish and general population perceptions of and experiences with antisemitism in the United States. Based on one of the largest-ever combined national surveys of American Jews and the U.S. general public, the report demonstrates the deeply disturbing impact that rising hatred of Jews has on America’s Jewish community.

The release of the data, from surveys done in Fall of 2022, comes two months after the White House announced the creation of a new federal interagency group that will develop a national strategy to combat antisemitism.

Use the links below to view the report results of each survey, a comparison between the two surveys, AJC’s analysis, and AJC resources to combat antisemitism.

For too many American Jews, being Jewish no longer feels as safe as it once did. And the younger those American Jews are, the more they experience that threat firsthand.

An American Jewish Committee (AJC) study released this week sheds light on that heartbreaking reality and more. How affected are American Jews by rising antisemitism? Does the general public understand the weight they carry?

Based on parallel surveys of American Jews and the U.S. general public on their perceptions and experiences of antisemitism in the U.S, AJC’s State of Antisemitism in America Report 2022 is the most comprehensive of its kind. 

Here are five key takeaways from the report.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/01/30/a-tale-of-two-massacres/

“So committed are some in the West to the narrative of Israeli evil and Palestinian good that they hold up Palestinians as the pitiable victims of massacres in the very week when it was Israelis, Jews in fact, who were the victims of a massacre. Their devotion to the ideology of Israel-hate clearly takes precedence over everything, even truth. That there has not been more moral and historical angst in the West over the massacre of praying Jews on Holocaust Memorial Day is abominable. It is a blot on the Western moral conscience. It tells us more about us than we would care to know.”

Truth is the first casualty of war, they say. It’s the first casualty of virtue-signalling, too. Over the past week we have seen just how estranged from truth the West’s fashionable anti-Israel set has become. Something extraordinary happened: woke commentators and activists expressed more fury over a massacre that didn’t happen than they did over one that did happen. They made more noise over a massacre that exists mostly in their imaginations than they did over a massacre that existed in the real world, that shattered people’s lives in the most violent, horrifying and bigoted fashion imaginable. This tale of two massacres, of the real and unreal, sheds a harsh and unforgiving light on anti-Israel sentiment today.

It starts with events in Jenin in the West Bank last Thursday. Following numerous clashes over the past month between Israeli security forces and Palestinian residents of the West Bank, the Israelis launched a raid in Jenin in which nine people were killed. It was a massacre, people say. Israeli security forces slaughtered Palestinians, we were told. Democratic US congresswoman and Squad member Rashida Tlaib led the charge: Israel is an ‘apartheid regime that is killing Palestinian children [and] families’, she said the day after the Jenin incident. We must ‘honour the victims of the Jenin massacre’, she said, ‘by telling the truth about the apartheid government’. The word ‘massacre’ was widely used in the left media. Electronic Intifada called it an ‘Israeli bloodbath’. ‘Jenin’ and ‘massacre’ trended online. British people were encouraged to write to their MPs to register their disgust with Israel’s ‘brutal’ behaviour.

What really happened in Jenin? For all the talk of hateful, racist Israel gunning down Palestinian families, in truth it was a fairly straightforward military clash between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian militants. Israel was pursuing militants that it believes are plotting attacks. Seven of the people killed were gunmen who had opened fire in response to Israel’s raid. You don’t have to take Israel’s word for it – Palestinian militants themselves have said it was mostly their people who died. Islamic Jihad said two of its members were killed while ‘battling’ the Israelis. Four of the slain gunmen were claimed by Hamas. And one was claimed by an armed wing of Fatah, the faction of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas. Does this sound like a massacre, or like a bloody clash between opposing groups in a war-like situation?

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/the-entrenchment-of-western-jew-hatred?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

In Britain’s House of Commons this week, MP Kim Johnson launched an attack on the “fascist Israeli government” and its “apartheid” policies.

Johnson is a Labour Party MP. You know — the same Labour Party whose current moderate leader, Sir Keir Starmer, has reputedly cleansed it of the Jew-hatred that exploded under its previous hard-left leader, Jeremy Corbyn.

Following Johnson’s remarks, the Labour leadership leapt into immediate action. Within hours, Johnson was ordered to make a grovelling apology.

This is supposed to reassure us. True, Starmer now takes action against any expression of Jew-hatred. This includes the pathological demonisation of Israel that singles it out for lies designed to delegitimise and destroy it — an agenda applied to no other people or state in the world.

Any such eruption threatens Starmer’s strategy of suppressing the bigotry that previously threatened to destroy the party as the self-professed standard-bearer of conscience, enlightenment and all good things. So, he stamps down on it hard whenever it appears.

But Starmer is playing a game of whack-a-mole. Anti-Jewish bigotry still courses through the party. Anyone who thinks Labour’s antisemitism has gone away or is restricted to a tiny unrepresentative fringe is a fool.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/molotov-cocktail-hurled-at-new-jersey-synagogue/

In the early morning of January 29th, a man wearing a ski mask ignited a Molotov cocktail and hurled it at the front door of Temple Ner Tamid, a synagogue located in the town of Bloomfield New Jersey. The attacker was dressed in black with a shirt that appeared to have a skull and crossbones design on it as recorded on the synagogue’s surveillance video, according to a report in The Jewish Voice. Fortunately, nobody was hurt, and the Molotov cocktail failed to penetrate the shatter-proof barriers the synagogue had installed over the glass of its doors and windows. 

Nicholas Malindretos, a 26-year-old man from a nearby town, was subsequently arrested and federally charged for allegedly committing the attempted arson. Little is known about the suspect except that he is reported to have made a very small contribution to Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential primary campaign.
 
This incident is yet another in a long line of anti-Semitic attacks against Jews and Jewish places of worship, which have been rising alarmingly in the United States as well as in other parts of the world. According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), “Antisemitic incidents reached an all-time high in the United States in 2021, with a total of 2,717 incidents of assault, harassment and vandalism reported to ADL.” The ADL added that this was “the highest number of incidents on record since ADL began tracking antisemitic incidents in 1979 – an average of more than seven incidents per day and a 34 percent increase year over year.” 
 
Rabbi Marc Katz, the current rabbi of Temple Ner Tamid, responded to the attack on his synagogue by noting that people “are feeling rightfully worried about the state of anti-Semitism because of how prevalent it has been lately.” 
 
However, regardless of being fully aware of the prevalence of anti-Semitism today, it is no less shocking when an anti-Semitic hate crime hits so close to home, as Rabbi Katz observed. “I don’t think anybody ever expects their congregation is going to be attacked,” Rabbi Katz said. 

https://thefederalist.com/2023/01/31/local-congresswoman-accidentally-spends-a-decade-being-an-antisemite/

Poor Ilhan Omar.

“I certainly did not or was not aware that the word ‘hypnotized’ was a trope,” the congresswoman told CNN’s Dana Bash this week. “I wasn’t aware of the fact that there are tropes about Jews and money. That has been a very enlightening part of this journey.”

And what a journey it’s been. It’s merely happenstance, Omar would have you believe, that she—along with her bestie, Rashida Tlaib, a woman who gets a “calming feeling” when thinking about the Holocaust’s aftermath and believes pro-Zionist Jews exploit “regular Americans” for “their profit,” etc.—keeps tripping into old-school Jew-baiting. What are the odds?

Omar’s been living in the United States since her early teens. She graduated from high school in a major American city. She earned a BA from North Dakota State University in political science and international studies. One assumes she’s consumed plenty of American culture over the years. You’re telling me that in all this time, in all her many interactions as an academic “fellow” and a government employee, she never once heard a stereotype about Jews hypnotizing nations or being motivated by money? That’s quite an accomplishment.

Of course, Omar shouldn’t lose her seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee because she believes rootless cosmopolitans are brainwashing the world for the “Benjamins.” She should lose it because she downplays 9/11 and equates the United States with theocratic terrorist organizations like Hamas and the Taliban. She is neither ideologically nor morally prepared for the job. She should be denied a seat because Nancy Pelosi created a new precedent by not only denying Kevin McCarthy his choices for the Jan. 6 committee, effectively creating a show trial, but also stripping Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor-Green of their committee appointments over ugly things they said. Republicans should unseat Omar using her standards.

When Democrats introduced a resolution to strip Lauren Boebert of all House committee assignments over a stupid bigoted joke about Omar, the congresswoman told CNN’s Jake Tapper that “we should punish and sanction Boebert by stripping her of her committees, by rebuking her language, by doing everything that we can to send a clear and decisive message to the American public that, if the Republicans are not going to be adults and condone — condemn this, that we are going to do that.”