RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.”

https://americanmind.org/salvo/normalizing-jew-hatred/

The Left and Right must denounce the rising threat of antisemitism.

EXCERPTS:

Rather than be exiled to the lunatic fringe, antisemitism is becoming just another, normalized meme in our increasingly ugly politics. It even has taken on three distinct forms. The first, and most heavily covered by the media, comes from militant white racists, still largely unchallenged by Republican leaders.

The second, largely ignored, comes from the Left. The progressives and their media allies have had a field day with Trump’s nauseating repast but they are far less interested in combating anti-Semitism from progressives. This was evident in 2020, when the ADL and many mainstream Jewish groups openly embraced the anti-Israel Black Lives Matter, even while CEO Jonathan Greenblatt acknowledged the hateful views of many of BLMs supporters. Greenblatt, like most Democrats, has genuflected towards Al Sharpton, a past dealer in anti-Semitic calumnies.

The third and perhaps the most disturbing face of antisemitism is neither left or right, but essentially black. This reflects the recrudescence of a dormant but persistent hostility that has characterized a century of relations between two prominent minority groups. African American  communities, according to surveys, are the least admiring of Jews of all ethnic groups while many of their most prominent leaders—Louis Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson, and Al Sharpton—have all embraced, without much criticism, antisemitic tropes more recently adopted by such high-profile black celebrities as Kanye West and Kyrie Irving. West, styling himself now as “Ye,” has now gone beyond the standard viciousness of typical antisemitic rhetoric, openly enthusing over Hitler and the Nazis, insisting that the Holocaust didn’t happen, demanding that Jews labor for Christians, and announcing that he refuses to judge individual Jews on a neutral basis, separate from the devilry he ascribes to Jewry as a whole.

https://www.city-journal.org/the-case-for-safety-in-the-synagogue

American Jews are feeling vulnerable. The 2018 Tree of Life and 2019 Poway Chabad house synagogue shootings; the Colleyville, Texas hostage standoff in January of this year; and arrests of those threatening to harm Jews in synagogues in New York, New Jersey, and Michigan in recent months contribute to this unease. Coupled with largely unpunished street violence against Jews in Brooklyn and social-media threats worsened by Kanye West’s anti-Semitic ravings, Jews have had to bolster security measures at houses of worship. While President Biden recently announced an interagency taskforce to combat anti-Semitism, and while the governor and mayor of New York, along with Senator Chuck Schumer, recently met Jewish leaders at New York’s Lincoln Square Synagogue to announce a new Hate and Bias Prevention Unit, many Jews have recently decided that the only ones who can defend them are themselves. Increasing numbers of congregants are attending services while armed, often with the foreknowledge of the rabbi and the synagogue security committee.

Surprisingly, politicians in some heavily Jewish jurisdictions are trying to make these self-protection efforts illegal. A federal judge temporarily struck down a provision of New York’s gun law that makes it a felony for a person with a concealed-carry license to possess a firearm in places of worship, while Montgomery County, Maryland, recently passed a similar law. These laws not only limit an individual’s choice to bring a weapon to synagogue but also make it difficult for individuals bringing weapons to coordinate with the synagogue security committee. Board members of a synagogue allowing congregants to carry weapons in violation of the law could find themselves personally liable, and insurance policies might not cover anything that goes wrong in such circumstances.

These laws appear to be in line with the views of both the blue areas that pass them as well as most Jews: 77 percent of Jewish Americans want more restrictive gun laws. Yet these measures are in tension with the views of many other Jews about how best to protect synagogues from anti-Semitic assailants.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-german-it-is-sentences-suspended-for-tormenting-a-young-jewish-man/

EXCERPT

Just to make absolutely sure there would be no further executions of Nazi war criminals, in 1949, the West German government passed a law prohibiting capital punishment. It was, in effect, a way to prevent hundreds of thousands of people involved in mass murder of Jews, prisoners of war, and Resistance fighters all over Europe from ever receiving the punishment they deserved.

Such indulgence brings us to the recent story of three German men who, found guilty of having repeatedly whipped, beaten, and insulted a Jewish man, were nonetheless received suspended sentences. That story is here: “German Elite Fraternity Students Responsible for Antisemitic Assault Receive Suspended Sentences,” by Ben Cohen, Algemeiner, December 8, 2022:

Three German students from an elite fraternity who were charged with beating a Jewish student and subjecting him to antisemitic insults have been handed suspended sentences by a court in the city of Heidelberg.

The three convicted individuals — who all received suspended sentences of eight months and no financial penalties in Thursday’s court verdict — were members the right-wing nationalist Normannia student fraternity. A fourth member of the group accused of involvement in the assault was acquitted.

The incident occurred at a party at the Normannia fraternity’s mansion at the University of Heidelberg on Aug. 29, 2020. A 25-year-old student in attendance who spoke about his Jewish ancestry was berated with antisemitic abuse, whipped with belts and pelted with metal coins by the four assailants.

These students at what is described as “an elite German university fraternity” regularly greeted each other with the words “Heil Hitler” and used the word “Jew” as a pejorative, according to one of the fraternity’s former members, Karl Stockmann, in an article he published in the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel. That disenchanted former member of the fraternity described the antisemitism and glorification of Germany’s Nazi past that prevailed at the Normannia fraternity. He left the group, “repulsed” by the behavior of fellow members of the fraternity, citing as an example their habit of drinking heavily while listening to recordings of Hitler’s speeches.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/inconvenient-anti-semites-new-york-hate-crime-kanye-jewish-black-hasidic-brooklyn-11671200214?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

After a long month of attacks on Jews in New York City, the big guns held a symposium at a Manhattan synagogue Monday. One by one, Mayor Eric Adams, Gov. Kathy Hochul, Sen. Chuck Schumer and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas pledged to fight anti-Semitism. After blaming Donald Trump, Ms. Hochul announced a new hate-prevention initiative and vowed, “When you attack one of us, anyone, that is picking a fight with 20 million other New Yorkers, starting with your governor.”

Liberals love to fight hate, but I’d rather they punish crime. Americans Against Antisemitism has studied 194 anti-Jewish assaults and 135 property incidents in New York City since 2018 but can identify only two offenders who have been sentenced to prison. Others receive probation or counseling or their charges aren’t followed up. “There are practically no serious consequences to be had,” the group concludes in a July report.

Examples abound: In May 2021, a Brooklyn man with an attempted-murder charge pending yelled “F—ing Jews! I’m going to f— you up” and punched a 67-year-old man in the head. He was arrested but hate-crime charges were dropped and he pleaded down to a misdemeanor.

The New York Police Department reported 45 hate crimes against Jews in November, more than double the monthly figure from a year ago. It records 278 such crimes this year, up 53%, and 100 arrests, up 61%. Why don’t prosecutions and prison sentences follow? “I’ve asked the question for years with the DAs of the world, with legislators,” Rabbi David Niederman, a top Satmar Hasidic leader in Brooklyn, says in an interview. He gets no answer.