RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2023/01/19/the_whitewashing_of_antisemitism_a_hatred_of_many_colors_876229.html

It was a common occurrence on the streets of one of New York City’s Jewish neighborhoods: A man dressed in the long black coat and broad hat worn by Hasidic Jews was walking in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, his two young children in hand, when suddenly a black man ran up behind him and hit him hard on the back of the head. 

Incidents like that one last May unfold repeatedly in New York, several of them in December alone – an outdoor menorah in Coney Island vandalized; a father and son wearing yarmulkas shot with a BB gun on Staten Island; a group of visibly Jewish boys chased by a gang firing a taser and shouting “Jews run! Get out of here”; a Hasidic man beaten outside a bus stop in Crown Heights.   

Rationalizations for black antisemitism can be strained, as when the spewings of billionaire rapper Ye, the former Kanye West …
Invision

Such attacks are part of a larger groundswell of antisemitism that has received wide notice across the country in recent years. But what has not gotten much attention is the reticence to even mention the ethnicity of antisemitic perpetrators unless they are white. It appears that discussion of this ancient hatred is being constrained by contemporary politics.  

In covering and condemning these acts, most major news outlets and politicians from President Biden on down have described antisemitism as almost entirely a sub-species of white supremacy or white nationalism, invoking the mob in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 shouting “Jews will not replace us,” or the murder of 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 by a white nationalist fanatic.  

This narrative obscures the complexity and diversity of the sources fueling the spike in antisemitism, some experts say. Right-wing hate groups are playing their usual part, but so too are blacks and members of other minority groups. The non-white antagonists are erased from the public discourse even though it’s generally understood that it’s hard to address a societal problem when society is unwilling to discuss it openly and honestly.  

https://www.frontpagemag.com/universities-decide-jewish-students-dont-need-protection/

In their zeal to construct an academic setting that reflects the true diversity of the nation—and simultaneously attempts to redress past discrimination and exclusion— universities have created campuses that have evolved in an opposite direction. Rather than helping students adapt to the real diversity of society outside the campus walls, the diversity ‘movement’ in the hands of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) diversocrats has served to create balkanized campuses where victims of the moment segregate themselves into distinct and inward-looking racial and cultural groups—exactly the opposite intention of the diversity credo.

Students from “underrepresented,” “marginalized,” and “protected” minority groups, who may well initially arrive at campuses thinking of themselves as part of mainstream society, are taught, in the name of diversity, to think of themselves differently: as part of a racial, cultural, sexual, or political subset of American life and victims of what is purported to be systemic bigotry.

In his engaging book, A Nation of Victims: The Decay of the American Character, Charles J. Sykes traced the growth of this culture of victimization and suggested that it has increasingly opened wide divisions between races, economic and social classes, and the advantaged and the disadvantaged — particularly when self-defined victims make unreason­able or exaggerated demands on the larger society by which they feel victimized.

“In the society of victims,” Sykes wrote, “individuals compete not only for rights or economic advantage but also for points on the ‘sensitivity’ index, where ‘feelings’ rather than reason are what count. Once feelings are established as the barometer of acceptable behavior, speech (and, by extension, thought) becomes only as free as the most sensitive group will permit [italics added].”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19298/jew-hate-universities

[The Amcha] report paints a stark picture of an increasing, intensifying and carefully coordinated campaign of attacks on Jewish identity at over 60% of the colleges and universities that are popular with Jews, including 2,000 incidents intended to harm Jewish students since 2015.

[T]hese activists demand an end to Zionism, which… means just one thing: an end to the democratic State of Israel. This itself is antisemitism in any book and is spelt out as such in the US State Department definition of antisemitism.

Despite expending so much energy against their fellow students, German Gentiles had plenty left for their Jewish professors. Unsatisfied with Nazi race regulations restricting Jewish faculty, students boycotted the classes of those who were exempt under the race laws and pressured university authorities to dismiss them. The result was that every Jewish professor who was still legally allowed to teach had resigned by 1935.

The Amcha report characterises the situation on US campuses today as a crisis for American Jews. It is much more than that. It is a crisis for us all that one section of our student body is bullied, abused, intimidated and cast down by their fellow students and often abandoned by their professors and faculty authorities.

It is high time for the federal government, under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, to withdraw its funding from all universities that participate in bigotry such as that.

As Jews were hounded out of German universities in the 1930s, where would you have stood? Many of us would like to think we would have found the moral and if necessary physical courage to stand up for our fellow students rather than see them persecuted, bullied, abused and thrown out. Well, now we can actually put our courage to the test as before our eyes we see a re-run of an almost identical pattern of antisemitism — this time at American colleges, with a similar picture at universities in Britain and elsewhere in the West.

A new study by the antisemitism watchdog Amcha Initiative documents a pervasive, relentless assault on Jewish identity at US universities.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-administration-define-anti-semitism-attack-violence-synagogues-jewish-identity-11673208133?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

The Biden administration announced in mid-December the creation of an interagency working group to develop “a national strategy to combat antisemitism.” This effort, which will span both domestic and foreign policy, is overdue. Anti-Semitism has been on the rise globally since the turn of the century, and the U.S. isn’t immune to the harm it causes. To succeed, however, the working group must first answer a basic question: What is anti-Semitism?

One answer is affirmed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, a group of 35 countries (including the U.S.). The IHRA defines the term as “rhetorical and physical manifestations” of hatred toward Jews. Defacing synagogues and cemeteries, harassing people wearing Jewish religious symbols and, at the extreme, assaulting or murdering people because they are Jewish are examples. These kinds of incidents have been rising in the U.S. and elsewhere.

But another expression of anti-Semitism has recently grown more common, especially in higher education and parts of popular culture. It takes forms such as Holocaust denial or minimization, comparing Israeli policies to those of the Nazis, and denying the Jewish people “their right to self-determination” by claiming that Israel is a “racist endeavor.” According to the Amcha Initiative, a nonprofit focusing on campus hostilities, these kinds of attacks on “Jewish identity” occurred during the 2021-22 academic year at 60% of schools with large populations of Jewish students.

The IHRA’s definition, which includes both types of anti-Semitism. is widely endorsed by governments and numerous private organizations. But it isn’t legally binding. Even so, in 2019 the Trump administration issued an executive order aimed at extending the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to cover discrimination “rooted in anti-Semitism.” It called on federal agencies to “consider” using IHRA’s definition while keeping in mind the First Amendment’s protection of speech. The State Department has also been using the IHRA’s definition in reporting on anti-Semitic activities throughout the world.

https://dianebederman.com/time-to-stop-fearing-the-jew-hating-bullies-and-fight-back-pikuach-nefesh/

I apologize for the length of this article. It is much longer than most of my blogs. I tried to reduce the words by editing the number of Jew hating incidents reported in 2021-the most recent year of hate statistics…

Time for the Jewish people to worry less about others, Tikkun Olam, and more about Pikuach nefesh: the preservation of human life that overrides virtually any other religious rule of Judaism. We have the moral and ethical right to protect ourselves including carrying weapons to prevent attacks on our people; especially in synagogue. Protecting life is above all other religious considerations.

Rabbi Hillel asked: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And being for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?” The time has come, dear Jews to be for ourselves.

We are living in a time where demonizing the Jews has become culturally acceptable. Jewish students are being bullied for being Jewish and for Israel being a white colonial oppressor against the oppressed Palestinians. Critical Race Theory is targeting Jews.  The time has come for the Jews to stand up to this endless industrialized bullying, this “coercive” aggression that is purpose-driven, not fear- or anger – driven. It’s the type of bullying that demonstrates an absence of ethics and compassion. It is bullying that has a tangible goal, carried out under intellectual control and will involve sufficient violence to achieve its goal, influencing social outcomes. This is the bullying of Jews taking place taking place in the 21st century and it’s time to fight back. Literally.

Although Jewish people constitute less than one-half of one percent of the world’s population, no other people have been as harassed, attacked, impugned more than the Jews from time immemorial. When it comes to the Jews and Israel, facts don’t matter. We live in a world where facts and critical thinking have been overtaken by feelings and wishful thinking.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/28/the-new-new-antisemitism/

The old antisemitism was more a right-wing than a left-wing phenomenon—perhaps best personified by the now-withered Ku Klux Klan.

A new antisemitism followed from the campus leftism of the 1960s. It arose from and was masked by a general hatred of Israel, following the Jewish state’s incredible victory in the 1967 Six-Day War. 

That lopsided triumph globally transformed Israel in the leftist mind from a David fighting the Arab Goliath into a veritable Western imperialist, neocolonialist overdog. 

On campuses, Middle-East activism, course instruction, and faculty profiles are now virulently anti-Israel—and indistinguishable from anti-Jewishness. 

When columnist Ben Shapiro spoke at Stanford University in 2019, left-wing posters were plastered around campus depicting Shapiro as an insect menace. A “BenBGon” bug spray bottle in Nazi fashion unsubtly suggested that a chemical agent is the best remedy to make sure Jews “be gone” from the premises. 

The avowed socialist Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) retweeted the old propaganda boast, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” 

Tlaib knew well “to the sea” could mean only the extinction of Israel itself and its 9 million Jews. She deleted her tweet—but only after an outcry of protest. 

Anti-Zionists and leftist Palestinian activists Linda Sarsour and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.)—“it’s all about the Benjamins”—often made no effort to hide their antisemitism. 

Yet now a dangerous new, new antisemitism is trending, predominantly among African-Americans—especially prominent politicians, celebrities, and billionaires. 

The old trope that blacks inordinately were prejudiced against Jews due to past inner-city stereotypes of exploiting Jewish landlords has been recalibrated. It is now repackaged by black elites claiming that their careers are overly profitable to and orchestrated by “the Jews.”

It has been difficult to find any major black leader who has not trafficked in antisemitism, whether Jesse Jackson (“Hymietown”), Al Sharpton (“tell them to pin their yarmulkes back”), Louis Farrakhan (“gutter religion”), or Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright (“Them Jews”). 

Yet what is different about the new, new antisemitism is the open defiance, often even or especially when exposed. 

Kayne West was met with pushback after warning, “I’m going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.” Yet he trumped that by soon praising Adolf Hitler. 

The Black Hebrew movement absurdly claims blacks are the real Biblical Jews, Jews the imposters. Black Lives Matter clumsily disguised its antisemitism when claiming Israelis were committing mass genocide in the Middle East.

When novelist Alice Walker was chastised for praising virulent antisemite David Icke (he claimed that Jews formed a cabal of “lizard people”), she too was unremorseful. Walker retorted that Icke was “brave” for publishing his nutty rants. 

Rappers from Public Enemy and Ice Cube to Jay-Z and Kanye West all spouted anti-Jewish venom. And billionaires, from the late Michael Jackson to LeBron James, dabbled in antisemitic talk, the first in lines from lyrics, the second in retweets. 

In the hate-crime statistics, blacks as perpetrators are overrepresented, and, as victims, Jews and Asians are overrepresented. “Knock out the Jew” occasionally resurfaces as a common sport among New York city black youth.

In our “woke” age, race is seen as an indemnity policy for any self-described victim. Thus even elite blacks, as the still oppressed, cannot be seen as oppressors against “white” Jews. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-new-report-exposes-endemic-campus-jew-hatred/

The campus war against Israel, now some decades old, has been unrelenting in its vicious assault against the Jewish state, led by such radical pro-Palestinian student groups as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) with some 200 chapters nationwide.

The real intention of this pro-Palestinian activism, now encompassing a large swathe of academia, is, clearly, to exclude Israel from the community of nations and to prevent supporters of the Jewish state from even defending it or offering counterarguments to the falsehoods and lies that comprise so much of anti-Israel rhetoric and expression—the Palestinian “narrative” with little connection to history and fact. The desire to affect the complete and comprehensive purging of pro-Israel students, faculty, and organizations is not, as it is often disingenuously positioned, mere “criticism of Israel.” It is much more repellent and insidious than that, and new evidence reveals this activism is a targeted attack, not only on Israel but on Zionism, Judaism, and Jewness itself.

In fact, an important new report from the AMCHA Initiative, a campus antisemitism watchdog group, has exposed how the cognitive war against Israel has expanded its reach and virulence and now seeks to malign, not only Israel itself, but any ideology or communal organizations connected to Israel, Zionism, and Jewish identity. The report, “Campus Antisemitism and the Assault on Jewish Identity,” exposes an “insidious phenomenon that has taken root on college campuses of late: a pervasive and relentless assault on Jewish identity that is likely to have dire consequences for the Jewish community in the years to come.”

As cataloged in the report, the AMCHA Initiative’s “online database of antisemitic activity includes nearly 2,000 incidents involving the targeting of Jewish students for harm since 2015. In addition, several of AMCHA’s annual reports have documented the alarming increase over time in the frequency and intensity of such incidents, particularly those motivated by animus towards Israel and its on-campus supporters . . . .”

While observers of the Israeli/Palestinian debate have long suspected that just under the surface of anti-Israel activism was a simmering and malignant anti-Semitism. It has been assumed that anti-Semites can disguise their hatred of Jews by claiming, usually disingenuously, that they were only criticizing Israel and its politics, not Judaism, Jewish communal organizations, Jewish self-determination, and other aspects of students’ Jewish identity that, as the AMCHA report uncovered, have become increasingly more visible and harmful to Jewish students.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/12/google_has_been_defining_the_word_jew_primarily_as_a_demeaning_pejorative.html

The word “Zeitgeist,” per the definition that Google automatically provides at the top of the page when you search for the word, means “the defining spirit or mood of a particular period of history as shown by the ideas and beliefs of the time.” If I had to define one aspect of the zeitgeist on the left, I would say, with great regret, that it’s antisemitism. Suddenly, that problem is everywhere, including Google definitions. Until about midday today, when one typed the word “Jew” into the Google search box, the definition that was automatically returned and that occupied pride of place at the top of the page was a vicious and ancient pejorative.

Fox News has the story:

A search for the word “Jew” on Google Wednesday temporarily had the engine telling users that the word is an offensive verb.

The top definition that appeared in search results — up until around 1 p.m. ET, described the word Jew as to “bargain with someone in a miserly or petty way,” with the origin being “in reference to old stereotypes associating Jewish people with trading and moneylending.”

Farther down was the noun definition for Jew, which Google describes as “a member of the people and cultural community whose traditional religion is Judaism and who trace their origins through the Hebrew people of Israel to Abraham.”