08/14 Links Pt2: Caroline Glick: Harris, Omar and the party's great march leftward; NY Democratic Socialists asks City Council candidates to pledge no Israel visits ~ EoZ

From Ian:

Caroline Glick: Harris, Omar and the party's great march leftward

Under the leadership of Obama White House alumni Jonathan Greenblatt, in recent years the ADL has tried to reinvent itself as a progressive group that focuses mainly on criticizing the other side of the political divide.

The ADL's fervent efforts to ingratiate itself among progressives places in stark relief the "Open Letter to the Progressive Community" signed by more than a hundred groups calling for ostracizing it. It shows that today's Democrat party is unwilling to accept Jews or politicians who are both progressive and pro-Jewish.

This brings us to Omar's primary victory. It wasn't particularly surprising that Omar won the poll. Her national profile has made her a lightning rod in national politics. While as a bigot she is justifiably hated by many, leftist donors and activists adore her and back her as an anti-Semite.

While predictable, three aspects of her win are particularly significant. First, the main difference between the Omar and the progressive black opponent she defeated is that unlike Omar, Antone Melton-Meaux isn't an anti-Semite. Rather than drawing praise from progressives for his lack of bigotry, Melton-Meaux was decried by progressive activists who accused him of being controlled by Jews.

The second significant aspect of Omar's win is that despite her open anti-Semitism, her reelection bid – and that of her anti-Semitic comrade Rashida Tlaib – was endorsed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Pelosi even donated $14,000 to Omar's campaign from her political PAC. Pelosi was long viewed as a friend to both American Jews and to Israel. The fact that she monetarily supported an out and out anti-Semite speaks volumes about the direction of the party.

The final significant aspect of Omar's win is that it was a testament to the rapidly growing power of the radical left in the Democrat party. Two years ago, four female radicals with harshly anti-Israel positions were elected as first-time lawmakers. The joined together, called themselves "The Squad" and proceeded to drain all the air out of the policy discourse in their party.

As the Squad members rose in power and prestige, moderate Democrats insisted their voice was out of synch with their actual power. To be sure, the moderates argued, the likes of Omar and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez have the loudest microphones, but they represent but a fraction of the party's Congressional delegation.

So far, Tlaib and Omar handily won their primaries and three new candidates with their same brand of radical, anti-Israel positions just won their primaries replacing moderate lawmakers who either retired or were defeated. These victories point to two things. First, the squad has already nearly doubled its numbers in one Congressional term, and two, they have become, without a doubt, the rising force – and with Pelosi's backing, the dominant force in the Democrat party.

In light of all of this, it is self-evident Omar's primary victory was far more significant than Biden's selection of Harris as his running mate. Biden and Harris, weather vanes both, will not lead their party. They will follow their party's grassroots and donors as they lead the Democrats every further along on their great march into the anti-Semitic leftist abyss.

NY Democratic Socialists asks City Council candidates to pledge no Israel visits

Lots of candidates for New York City Council are expected to seek an endorsement from the local Democratic Socialists of America chapter, a rising force in city politics, in next year’s elections.

To apply for the endorsement, the candidates will have to decide if they will pledge not to travel to Israel if elected.

According to a screenshot of a candidate questionnaire from the DSA posted to Twitter by local reporter Zack Fink, candidates are being asked to “pledge not to travel to Israel if elected to City Council in solidarity with Palestinians living under occupation.” (The party did not immediately confirm that it had distributed the survey.)

The group also asks candidates if they support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which is part of the New York City DSA chapter’s platform.

Some candidates declared their answers already on Twitter. “Easy: 1. No. 2. No,” Eric Dinowitz, a teacher (and son of a state Assemblyman) who is running for City Council in the Bronx, posted late Thursday.

The questionnaire comes after pro-BDS activists were vindicated this month when Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, who have voiced support for the BDS movement, both won their Democratic primaries. Both represent overwhelmingly Democratic districts where they are likely to be reelected to Congress. A third congressional candidate who has indicated support for the BDS movement, Cori Bush in Missouri, also defeated a longtime incumbent in her primary.

With 35 out of 51 city council seats up for election this year due to term limits as well as open elections for citywide offices like mayor and comptroller, citywide elections in New York City next year present a rare opportunity to reshape most of New York City’s government.

The DSA is considered to be a rising force in New York City after helping Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defeat incumbent Joe Crowley in 2018. In this year’s Democratic primary, DSA member Jamaal Bowman defeated Eliot Engel, a longtime incumbent and champion of Israel. Far from pledging to boycott Israel, Bowman has indicated his backing, last week telling City & State, “I am in full support of Israel.”

A few years ago, I had an amazing learning experience when I visited Israel and I encourage my colleagues to be open-minded and travel there to form their own opinions. I refuse to be a part of this litmus test/cancel culture movement. Let’s do more engaging not less. https://t.co/djZDrhTWg5
— Senator Brian Benjamin (@NYSenBenjamin) August 14, 2020

Jonathan S. Tobin: Can a Jewish leader coexist with an anti-Semitic extremist?

As it turns out, it isn't Rodney Muhammad who is on the spot in the controversy about the NAACP and anti-Semitism. The people who should really be worried about the controversy engendered by Muhammad are the Jewish members of the national board of the NAACP, like Rabbi Jonah Pesner, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, who are being discredited by the organization's failure to draw a line in the sand about Jew-hatred.

Muhammad is the Philadelphia chapter president of the venerable civil-rights group who sparked controversy last month with a blatantly anti-Semitic Facebook post. The post combined pictures of African-American celebrities who had recently made anti-Semitic statements, and included the image of a Nazi-style caricature of a hook-nosed Jew above a fake quote from Voltaire that said: "To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize." The obvious point was the false claim that powerful and sinister Jewish forces are working to suppress criticism of their fiendish hold on society by courageous but oppressed black people.

While Muhammad was bitterly criticized by various Jewish groups, as well as local politicians and public figures, he doesn't seem so concerned about his future as a public figure, even after such a gross display of prejudice. The national leadership of the NAACP was slow to issue a statement about the incident and when it did, its condemnation stopped well short of demanding Muhammad's resignation or his firing by the Philadelphia chapter.

As the African-American newspaper The Philadelphia Tribune reported, local black leaders such as Bishop J. Louis Felton, the first vice president of the Philadelphia chapter, said they had not received any instructions or guidance from the group's national office. Instead, the Tribune reported that NAACP president and CEO Derrick Johnson would be meeting with Muhammad, as well as local community and faith leaders, to "open a dialogue and continue the educational conversations." But the time for dialogue about this scandal is over. That statement could be reasonably interpreted as an indication that the national leadership has no interest in breaking with Muhammad, despite the fact that a state board could vote to The reluctance of the NAACP to take swift and decisive action is disappointing. Jews were active in the organization's founding. And there is a direct precedent in which the NAACP was faced with a similar situation in the not-too-distant past.

In August of 2000, Lee Alcorn, president of the group's Dallas chapter, sparked controversy by denouncing the selection of Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) as the Democratic candidate for vice president. Alcorn said he opposed Vice President Al Gore's running mate because "if we get a Jew person, then what I'm wondering is, I mean, what is this movement for, you know? … So I think we need to be very suspicious of any kind of partnerships between the Jews at that kind of level because we know that their interest primarily has to do with money and these kind of things."

NAACP president Kweisi Mfume responded immediately. He not only condemned Alcorn's remarks as "repulsive, anti-Semitic, anti-NAACP and anti-American," he also immediately suspended him from the organization.

The Democrat Party is Getting Rid of the Jews

The appropriation of the Jews transforms a people into a set of leftist slogans. And then Democrats from Barack Obama to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez are free to support policies that lead to the murder of actual Jews in the name of their leftist abstractions of Jewish values.

The American political system doesn’t recognize constituencies as abstractions, but as people. The Democrats are building a new one-party state in which elections are irrelevant and primaries exist to broker arrangements between intersectional non-profits funded by billionaires. Actual Jewish communities are an annoying inconvenience in this Marxist political system.

Democrats with Jewish last names will still exist, they just won’t represent anyone except the roster of non-profits like Bend the Arc, J Street, Jewish Voice for Peace, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice or If Not Now, that are not only actively working to get Jews killed, but that don’t represent anyone except George Soros or Buffett’s son. And attacking Soros for his radical extremism is the only thing that Democrats will even recognize as antisemitism anymore.

The pattern ought to be a familiar one from how leftist regimes dealt with Jewish populations.

There’s not much of a future for Jewish communities in this model. The cities and suburbs where Jews live are under siege in the name of social justice. Jewish communities are simultaneously losing their representation within the Democrats in the name of social justice.

Jewish Democrats who imagine that Israel is the problem are about to learn they’re the problem.

The problem, as in the USSR, is that many Jewish communities are bourgeois enclaves filled with middle class professionals, two-parent families who raise their children to succeed, go to a good college, get an even better job, get married, and raise their own children in a suburb with safe streets, challenging schools, and the rest of what used to be the American Dream.

Like most suburbanites, they aren’t actually radical. They just stupidly enable the radicals. And the radicals, once they take power, are not going to tolerate them. They’re going to get rid of them. It’s already happening. And, unlike the 70s, there won’t be any suburbs to run away to.

A decade ago there were six Jewish House Democrats out of New York. Now there are two.

What happened in the short span of a decade is that the radical future of the Democrats arrived. And there’s no room in that radical new world that the Democrats are building for the Jews.

Harris chief of staff praised Democratic candidates for skipping AIPAC conference

The chief of staff for Democratic vice-presidential pick Kamala Harris applauded the 2020 presidential candidates who chose to skip the 2019 AIPAC Policy Conference.

Karine Jean-Pierre, then national spokesperson and senior adviser for the left-wing group MoveOn, wrote in Newsweek that the Democratic candidates, particularly those who called themselves progressives, “made the right call,” and that AIPAC’s policies and values “are not progressive.”

“You cannot call yourself a progressive while continuing to associate yourself with an organization like AIPAC that has often been the antithesis of what it means to be progressive,” she wrote.

Harris did not attend the 2019 conference, though she has been to them in years past.

Jean-Pierre slammed AIPAC for opposing the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which the United States withdrew from in May 2018, reimposing sanctions lifted under it, along with enacting new ones. She further criticized having Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speak, considering his indictment for alleged fraud and bribery, and that “under his leadership of Israel, according to the United Nations, Israel may have committed war crimes in its attacks on Gazan protesters.”

Without calling out Democrats by name, Jean-Pierre slammed those on the left side of the aisle who attended the conference for rebuking Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.). Since entering Congress, Omar and Tlaib have been accused of an anti-Semitic and anti-Israel agenda with the former accusing AIPAC, the largest pro-Israel lobbying organization, in February 2019 of paying members of Congress to back Israel, saying it was “all about the Benjamins.”

Maine Democrat Sara Gideon Killed Bills Outlawing Female Genital Mutilation

Democratic Senate candidate Sara Gideon repeatedly killed bills to outlaw female genital mutilation during her tenure as the speaker of the Maine House of Representatives.

Gideon leveraged her leadership position in the Democrat-controlled legislature to kill two separate bills that would have criminalized the practice of severing the clitoris of infant girls and sewing their vaginas shut. Instead, the Democrat supported a different law that would have funnelled $150,000 to her political allies to educate Mainers about the practice instead of criminalizing it, according to a former state legislator who spearheaded the push to stop the mutilation.

Under Gideon's leadership, Maine Democrats argued that the bill was racist toward the state's large immigrant community from Somalia, a country where the practice is "nearly universal" according to the United Nations. The Democrats also argued that the practice rarely takes place in Maine and is already outlawed by existing federal and local laws.

Gideon's efforts have helped make Maine one of only 12 states that have not banned female genital mutilation. Such a legacy threatens to complicate her cultivated image as a champion of women's rights, one built on her consistent support for abortion access and the #MeToo movement. The image strategy has paid off, translating into hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations and outside money support from national pro-abortion groups. Gideon did not respond to a request for comment.

F. A. Cole, a survivor of female genital mutilation who testified before the Maine legislature, expressed deep frustration for the bill's failure. "The Democrats, especially the Speaker of the House Sara Gideon, did everything she could in her power to just kill this bill," she told the Washington Free Beacon. "I could not understand why."

Government reevaluating ban on BDS activists entering Israel

An interministerial committee is reevaluating the effectiveness of a law that bans BDS activists from entering the country, Strategic Affairs Minister Orit Farkash-Hacohen (Blue and White) said Thursday.

The committee, which includes representatives from the Strategic Affairs, Justice, Foreign and Interior ministries, is reviewing the criteria by which Israel denies entry to Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement activists. It was told to have a report ready within 45 days of its formation last week.

Farkash-Hacohen said she was taking a neutral position and wants to make sure the policy is working three years after its implementation.
“It is important to reexamine… a tool that hurts freedom of movement,” Farkash-Hacohen said.

“We need to not only be right, but also to be smart and save the tool only for the last resort,” she said.

“BDS is part of a larger campaign, and we are focused on the big goal of ending antisemitic, violent delegitimization of Israel,” Farkash-Hacohen said. “That is why I instructed my team to examine the criteria for barring the entry of BDS activists.”

IDF Clearing Golan Heights Minefields, Returning Territory to Local Communities

The Israeli military announced on Thursday that it is clearing some minefields in the Golan Heights in order to promote agriculture and tourism.

In a tweet, the IDF said that 50 dunams (12.35 acres) of land near the kibbutzim of Afik and Kfar Haruv had been made safe and handed over to the local regional council.

“The IDF sees great importance in strengthening and developing the settlements in the north through agriculture, tourism and economics,” the military stated.

It added that it would “continue to work to clear the mines from areas of the Golan Heights and return them to the residents.”

Israel took control of the Golan Heights from Syria during the 1967 Six-Day War, and the area again saw fierce fighting six years later during the Yom Kippur War. The strategic plateau was annexed by Israel in 1981.

Erdogan's Turkish regime is granting passports to 12 senior operatives of Hamas terrorist cell, giving them greater freedom to plot attacks against citizens around the world.

Lucky for the terrorists, UNRWA will still count these new Turks as 'refugees'.https://t.co/sVvQivxXuC
— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) August 14, 2020

PMW: Leading Arab newspaper credits PMW for fighting PA terror for "more than 30 years"

Saudi owned Asharq Al-Awsat:
- “The campaign was launched by a right-wing Israeli organization "Palestinian Media Watch”…[which] has been working for more than 30 years against the PLO and the Palestinian Authority, claiming that they are running anti-Jewish policies, approaches and practices that support terrorism.”
- “PMW played a central role in the campaign against paying salaries to Palestinian detainees serving sentences in Israeli prisons, as well as to the families of the deceased.”

Asharq Al-Awsat, a Saudi owned news outlet that is known for being a leading Arab daily newspaper, published an article describing the work of Palestinian Media Watch. In the article, special attention was given to PMW’s central role in the new initiative to have the Palestinian Authority funded Commission for Prisoners’ Affairs designated by the US administration as a “sponsor of terror,” and designated by the Israeli government as a “terror organization”.

The article cites PMW’s report which was adopted by Congressman Doug Lamborn in his letter to President Trump, recommending that the PA Head of the Prisoners’ Commission Qadri Abu Bakr and the Commission itself be designated as “sponsor of terror” in accordance with Executive Order 13224.

Following Lamborn’s letter, a number of MK’s similarly wrote to Israeli Defense Minister, Benjamin Gantz, calling on him to declare the Commission a terror organization.

Partnering PMW in the new campaign is the Middle East Forum.

As Turkey Pivots Toward Russia, Congress Quietly Halts Arms Sales

The chairmen and ranking members of both the House Foreign Affairs and Senate Foreign Relations Committees have been quietly exercising veto powers to block arms sales to Turkey for more than a year, Defense News reported Wednesday.

The vetoes come in response to Turkey's acquisition of S-400 missile defense systems from Russia—a move that signifies Ankara's growing relationship with Moscow. Following Turkey's missile defense purchase last year, Washington iced Turkey's involvement in a U.S. fighter jet program.

Some experts say that Moscow is using the S-400 system as a "diplomatic tool."

"With arms sales, a lot of people focus on the initial exchange of money, but that's really not the main value here," Foundation for Defense of Democracies senior director Bradley Bowman told the Washington Free Beacon. "[What] a lot of people don't really track is that when another country buys a major weapons system, they are going to use it for 20-30 years. … There are huge diplomatic and national security benefits from that. When Russia gets those benefits, it's not just a one-year thing but a decades-long thing."

The Kremlin is also extending its S-400 diplomacy to India, which is reportedly flirting with fast-tracking the purchase of its own missile defense systems.

Republican lawmakers are now encouraging the White House to take a tougher stand on Turkey's growing friendship with Moscow.

"Turkey's purchase of the Russian S-400 is unacceptable and undermines NATO's mission to deter Russian aggression," Rep. Michael McCaul (R., Texas), who has helped block arms sales to Turkey as the ranking member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement to the Free Beacon.

"The Administration must impose the sanctions required by law in response to this purchase. Turkey must reverse course on this destabilizing action to renew the United States' confidence in our defense relationship," he added.

World Must Not Play Politics With Lebanon’s Pain, Iran Says

The global community should help Lebanon rather than impose its will on the country, Iran’s foreign minister said while in Beirut on Friday, following the catastrophic blast at the city’s port that killed 172 people and pushed the government to resign.

Iran backs Lebanon‘s powerful armed movement Hezbollah, which along with its allies helped form the outgoing government. The United States classifies Hezbollah as a terrorist group.

Mohammed Javad Zarif was speaking after meeting President Michel Aoun, who had earlier met with US and French officials in a flurry of Western diplomacy that has focused on urging Lebanon to fight corruption and enact long-delayed reforms to unlock foreign financial aid to tackle an economic crisis.

“There should be international efforts to help Lebanon, not to impose anything on it,” Zarif said in televised comments.

He earlier remarked that the Lebanese people and their representatives should decide on the future of Lebanon. “It is not humane to exploit the pain and suffering of the people for political goals,” he said.

Lebanese had been staging angry protests against a political elite blamed for the country’s many woes even before the Aug 4. blast, which injured 6,000, damaged swathes of the Mediterranean city and left 300,000 homeless. Some 30 people remain missing.

Honest Reporting: Beirut Blast: Just the Beginning?

GOP Lawmakers Demand ‘Snapback’ of All Sanctions on Iran

Republican congressional leaders are pressuring the Trump administration to abandon its efforts to extend a United Nations arms embargo on Iran, and instead push the international body to reimpose all economic sanctions on Tehran that were lifted as part of the landmark nuclear accord.

The U.N. Security Council is expected to vote Friday on a U.S.-sponsored measure to indefinitely extend an arms embargo on Iran that is set to expire in mid-October. The Trump administration has expended great capital in recent months pushing its allies to back the measure. The administration earlier this week unveiled a revamped version of the measure meant to entice support from European allies such as France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. But Russia and China—which both have veto power on the Security Council—are standing in the way. The two countries want to see the arms ban expire so they can increase their sale of advanced weaponry and other military equipment to Iran.

Republican hawks in Congress are frustrated with the diplomatic battle, and are now calling on the Trump administration to invoke "snapback," a mechanism written into the original nuclear deal that allows member nations to unilaterally reapply all international sanctions on Iran that were lifted as part of the agreement. The Trump administration maintains that it can legally invoke snapback, but has been unclear about whether it will exercise the right. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other senior U.S. officials said their focus is on the arms embargo resolution.

Rep. Joe Wilson (R., S.C.), chairman of the Republican Study Committee’s Foreign Affairs and National Security Task Force, told the Washington Free Beacon that his coalition of conservative lawmakers wants the administration to invoke snapback immediately. With Russia and China standing in the way of the arms embargo extension, snapback is the only way to stop Iran from engaging in a weapons buying spree.

As UN votes, Pompeo says it’s ‘nuts’ to let Iran arms embargo expire

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday called for the world to unite around a long-shot American bid to indefinitely extend a United Nations arms embargo on Iran.

As members of the UN Security Council voted remotely on a US resolution to prolong the embargo that is widely expected to fail, Pompeo said it was “nuts” to allow Iran to buy and sell weapons at will. Pompeo spoke well before an announcement of the results of the vote, which many diplomats believe will end in an embarrassing defeat for the Trump administration.

“We ask nations to urge the UN Security Council to renew the arms embargo on Iran,” Pompeo said in Vienna, where he met with the UN nuclear watchdog’s head, Rafael Grossi, and with senior Austrian officials. “We can’t allow the world’s biggest state sponsor of terrorism to buy and sell weapons. I mean, that’s just nuts.”

The anticipated defeat of the resolution in New York likely would set the stage for a showdown between world powers over whether all international sanctions lifted under the 2015 Iran nuclear deal can or should be reimposed.

“We’re urging the whole world to join us. This isn’t about the JCPOA,” Pompeo said, using the acronym for the nuclear deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

Whatever the result of the vote, the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency that Grossi heads will continue to play a major role in the future of the nuclear deal, and Pompeo called for all nations to show “support for IAEA Director General Grossi’s critical mission to ensure that all countries comply with their international nuclear safeguard requirements.”

“That mission is all the more important given the Islamic Republic of Iran’s failure to address the IAEA’s questions about its nuclear activities,” Pompeo said. “The international community must speak with a single voice: Iran must provide full, transparent and immediate cooperation with the IAEA.”

Iran Seizes Oil Tanker in Strait of Hormuz

Iran briefly seized an oil tanker flying a Liberian flag in the Strait of Hormuz, an official in the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) told the Associated Press Thursday.

CENTCOM released a black-and-white video showing what were supposedly Iranian special forces rappelling from a helicopter onto the deck of the tanker. Iranian naval forces held the vessel for five hours before releasing it, a U.S. military official told AP.

Maritime intelligence group Dryad Global told AP it is also probable that two additional ships were stopped by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard in the Persian Gulf over the last week.

The International Maritime Security Construct, a United States-led consortium of countries tasked with maintaining security in the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, denounced Iran's boarding of the oil tanker.

"Iran's use of its military forces to conduct an armed boarding of a commercial vessel in international waters constitutes a blatant violation of international law that undermines freedom of navigation and the free flow of commerce," a statement from the consortium reads. "This type of reckless, aggressive behavior by Iran destabilizes the region and threatens the rules based international order."

Tehran has repeatedly flexed its naval muscles in recent weeks. In late July, CENTCOM reported an Iranian exercise in which the Revolutionary Guard Corps launched a missile at what appeared to be a mock American aircraft carrier.

American Islamic Preacher Fadel Soliman: Islam Is Under Constant Attack because It Is the Religion of Resistance; Muslims Must Be Proud of Belonging to a Religion That Irritates Corrupt and Unjust People pic.twitter.com/YX8tg6BK02
— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) August 14, 2020

California Governor Urged to Veto Bill That Would Mandate ‘Anti-Zionist’ Ethnic Studies Courses at CSU Schools

California Governor Gavin Newsom has been called on by a broad coalition of education, civil rights and religious groups to veto a bill that would make ethnic studies courses a California State University (CSU) graduation requirement.

Referring to the field of “Critical Ethnic Studies” referenced in the AB 1460 legislation that is awaiting Newsom’s signature, the groups — in a letter to the governor organized by the AMCHA Initiative — wrote, “We are deeply concerned that without adequate safeguards, these courses could become vehicles for one-sided political advocacy and activism that will both subvert the academic mission of the university, and incite bigotry and harm against some CSU students. ”

“In particular,” the letter continued, “we fear that the anti-Zionist orientation of Critical Ethnic Studies — the version of ethnic studies likely to be taught in response to AB 1460 — coupled with the willingness of many ethnic studies faculty to bring anti-Zionist advocacy and activism into their professional spaces, will foster a toxic climate for Jewish and pro-Israel students and foment harm against them.”

“While faculty have every right to engage in political advocacy and activism outside the university, recent studies suggest that many Critical Ethnic Studies faculty are bringing their extramural support for BDS and their anti-Zionist politics into their conference halls and classrooms,” the letter further noted.

AMCHA Initiative Director Tammi Rossman-Benjamin commented, “This type of anti-Zionist political activism directly corresponds to a rise in anti-Semitic incidents on campus.”

The power of Jewish orgs. working together when fighting antisemitism

An amazing thing happened this week, when 128 Jewish and pro-Israel organizations worked in unison to address the issue of antisemitism on Facebook. All 128 signed an open letter calling on Facebook to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s “Working Definition on Antisemitism.”

Why did so many organizations work together to sign the letter?

Facebook tries hard to remove hate speech on its platform. The Civil Rights Audit reported that in March, Facebook succeeded in removing 89% of hate speech before anyone could see the posts and report it. The European Union has data that shows 96% of the time, Facebook responded to reports of online hate within 24 hours and removed 87.6% of the posts that were reported.

The problem is Facebook’s policies, which state: “We only remove content that directly attacks people based on certain protected characteristics. Direct attacks include things like: Violent or dehumanizing speech – for example, comparing all people of a certain race to insects or animals; statements of inferiority, disgust or contempt – for example, suggesting that all people of a certain gender are disgusting; calls for exclusion or segregation – for example, saying that people of a certain religion shouldn’t be allowed to vote.”

Some antisemitic posts easily fall into these categories and are removed, but the lack of a clear definition of antisemitism allows too many antisemitic posts to remain on the platform, from where it can be shared worldwide.

For example, content that promotes the idea that Jews control the banks and the media, and are a threat to society – aka the antisemitic tropes based on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion – do not directly attack anyone, and thus do not fall into Facebook’s “hate speech” category. This has allowed posts to spread that incite antisemitism among the masses.

Three BBC articles about ammonium nitrate ignore Hizballah’s record

Under the heading “Is it used in bombs?” readers are told that “It has also been used in several terrorist acts, including the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.”

August 11th: Beirut explosion: Where else is ammonium nitrate being stored? by Christopher Giles, Shruti Menon and Zulfiqar Ali, BBC Reality Check.

“Following the destruction caused by ammonium nitrate exploding at Beirut’s port, there are concerns globally about its storage.
The chemical is widely used around the world, as a fertiliser or for explosives in mining.
But there are strict regulations about where it can be kept and for how long.
And its location is often kept secret because of its potential for making bombs.”

The article presents examples from India, Yemen, Iraq, Australia and “UK ports”.

August 12th: Beirut blast: The other countries with dangerous dumps of explosives by Frank Gardner.

“The devastating explosion in Beirut is a grim reminder of a deeply troubling fact: the thousands of tonnes of ammonium nitrate unsafely stored in that city’s port is not the only site at risk of spontaneous detonation.”

The article presents examples from the Philippines, Guinea-Bissau, Libya, Ukraine and Abkhazia.

“Munitions experts are now hoping that if anything positive can possibly come out of the tragedy in Beirut, it will be a renewed global urgency to make these stockpiles safe, before it is too late.”

Remarkably, none of those reports makes any mention of cases in which Hizballah was found to have stored ammonium nitrate in countries including Thailand (which the BBC did report), Cyprus, the United Kingdom and most recently Germany (which the BBC did not report).

BBC ME editor offers an evasive ‘guide through the maze’

In the wake of last week’s disaster in Beirut, on August 10th the BBC’s Middle East editor offered his 187.6 thousand Twitter followers a “guide” to the Middle East in the form of an episode from his 2017 BBC Radio 4 series ‘Our Man in the Middle East’ which was relaunched by the BBC earlier this year and some episodes of which have been discussed here in the past.

So what sort of answers to their “questions about the Middle East” do listeners get from that promoted episode? One example comes at 02:13 when Bowen tells listeners:
“In 2008 I saw how fighting could sweep through the mountains above Beirut like a forest fire, driven on by the hot wind of sectarian hate. Lebanon’s power sharing system had broken down and different sects were reaching for their guns. Lebanon’s leaders were mostly warlords turned politicians. They knew how hard it is to stop a civil war once it’s started. That time they contained the making of a new one within a week.”

The events described so opaquely by Bowen began in early May 2008 after the Lebanese government of the day discovered that Hizballah had a secret fibre-optic communications network allegedly financed by the ‘Iranian Fund for the Reconstruction of Lebanon’.

Antisemitic and Hateful Content Flourishing on TikTok, New ADL Report Warns

The video-sharing app TikTok has become a magnet for extremists who spread antisemitic and racist content to recruit new followers, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) warned in a new report this week.

“Despite TikTok’s efforts to moderate and/or remove extremist content via community guidelines that cover a wide range of problematic content, from hate speech to discussions of self-harm, a cursory review of the platform by ADL’s Center on Extremism found that white supremacists and antisemites are using a range of methods on the platform to recruit new adherents and share hateful content,” the ADL said.

Employing a wide range of hashtags, adding captions to existing videos and overdubbing material posted by other users are among the techniques utilized, the ADL noted.

Crudely antisemitic messages have been inserted into some of the most popular content on the platform, the report observed.

The report noted, “One TikToker took a video of Swedish YouTuber PewDiePie and added a voiceover to make him appear to say, ‘Hey guys PewDiePie here. Death to all Jews. I want you to say after me, death to all Jews. And you know, Hitler was right. I’ve really opened my eyes to white power and I think it’s time we did something about it.'”

It continued: “Another user created a voiceover for a clip from the animated movie The Incredibles, which portrayed Mr. Incredible as a ‘Goyim’ (a disparaging Yiddish and Hebrew word for non-Jews) and his supervisor as a hateful and manipulative Jew bent on enacting globalist policies. Yet another video creates an antisemitic skit using a video clip from Regular Show, an animated sitcom. In the TikTok skit the character Mitch ‘Muscle Man’ Sorenstein gives his girlfriend, Starla, a rose. She responds by saying, ‘A Jew would never do this for me.’ Mitch responds, ‘Actually, Starla I have a confession to make, I’m Orthodox.’ Starla laughs maniacally and says, “You’ve been kicked out of 109 different countries!'”

The ADL also found dozens of TikTok profiles that use combinations of white supremacist symbols, terms and slogans as screen names or handles.

Common white supremacist numeric symbols in use on the platform include “14” to represent a popular white supremacist slogan, “2316” the numeric symbol for “white power,” “88” to represent “Heil Hitler” and “13/52” which is shorthand reference to a racist claim about Black Americans, the report pointed out.

Editor of The Canary compares Israel to the Nazis, in breach of International Definition of Antisemitism

The editor of The Canary, a controversial hard-left blog, has compared Israel to the Nazis in a tweet.

Kerry-Ann Mendoza, whose website is under investigation by the Government’s Independent Advisor on Antisemitism, wrote: “Jewish families were once dragged from their homes so Nazi families could move in. It wasn’t wrong because of the ethnicity of the victims. It was wrong because it was wrong. Apartheid Israel does it daily. ‘Never again’ must be universal.”

According to the International Definition of Antisemitism, “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” is antisemitic.

Ms Mendoza recently attacked Campaign Against Antisemitism using violent language, saying “The antisemitism witch hunt is seriously about to face off with #BlackLivesMatter I’m telling you now, those anti-Black, anti-Palestinian racists are gonna get their asses dragged all over town. And they have no clue. Because…entitlement.”

CAA hails “positive start” as Ivors Academy resolves to establish Ethics Committee to review past awards following our call for Wiley’s 2019 Ivors Inspiration Award to be rescinded

Campaign Against Antisemitism has welcomed as a “positive start” the Ivors Academy’s announcement that it shall be establishing an Ethics Committee to review past awards, after we called on the professional association for music creators to rescind Wiley’s 2019 Ivors Inspiration Award following the grime artist’s antisemitic rampage on social media.

Joe Glasman, an award-winning composer, Ivors member and former Ivors award panellist, as well as a senior volunteer at Campaign Against Antisemitism, initiated contact with Ivors last week, noting that Wiley had “spent the last several days on an antisemitic tirade” and wrote that it would be “untenable for an individual who holds such horrific antisemitic views to continue to be held up as worthy of such an award by the Academy, an honour bestowed specifically upon those whom the Academy considers to be inspirational role models for composers and young artists.”

Mr Glasman went on to note that the Academy is “rightly dedicated to diversity, equality and inclusivity” but that this means that the Academy “must be a safe space for all minorities, and that includes Jews.”

Following correspondence with Campaign Against Antisemitism over the past week and after its AGM today, Ivors has now released a statement announcing that “any statements of discrimination and intolerance made by Academy members or award winners affects us all, not just those who are targeted for prejudice or abuse. We adopt a generous and supportive outlook, fostering collaboration and growth, not division and hate. These are values our members must sign up to on joining our membership; they are also expectations we should have of our award winners in future. […]

“When we recognise individuals in our awards, we are giving them a high honour that comes with responsibilities for the recipient and for the Academy. We wish to codify these obligations going forward and are today announcing the establishment of an Ethics Committee which will review our award decisions in future, and carefully revisit how others have been treated in the past. Part of their work will be to review our current members’ codes of conduct and put in place an ethics framework to govern the giving and rescinding of honours and awards. We can only achieve consistency if we first establish solid guidelines that ensure an objective and robust approach. We intend to have the Ethics Committee formed and giving us guidance by November this year when the entries for next year’s awards begin to be received.

‘Family Guy’ creator adapting Herman Wouk novels for miniseries

“Family Guy” creator Seth MacFarlane is adapting Herman Wouk’s epic World War II novels “The Winds of War” and its sequel, “War and Remembrance,” into a limited TV series for NBCUniversal.

Wouk, who died last year at 103, wrote numerous popular works of fiction — “Majorie Morningstar” (about a young Jewish woman who wants to become an actress), “Youngblood Hawke” (about a young writer supposedly modeled on the novelist Thomas Wolfe) and “The Caine Mutiny,” for which he won the Pulitzer Prize.

The author, an observant Jew, also wrote “This Is My God,” a book summarizing the tenets of Judaism intended for both Jews and non-Jews.

“The Winds of War” and “War and Remembrance” established the author’s reputation as a master of historical fiction — works featuring stories of personal conflict set against significant events. In this case, the books follow the experiences of Navy officer Victor Henry and his family from the German invasion of Poland through the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.
Seth MacFarlane is inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame on Jan. 28, 2020 at the Television Academy’s Saban Media Center in North Hollywood, Calif. (Dan Steinberg/Invision for the Television Academy/AP Images)

The two books had already been turned into a seven-part ABC miniseries in 1983 starring Robert Mitchum, Ali MacGraw and Jan-Michael Vincent. The miniseries, which remains among the most popular in television history, won five Emmy Awards and was nominated for 11.

Israeli Startup Launches At-Home Ultrasound Device

Israeli startup PulseNmore has signed a multi-year agreement with Israel’s largest healthcare provider, Clalit Health Services, to provide tens of thousands of its pregnant members the handheld tele-ultrasound device developed by the startup.

The device enables pregnant women to perform at-home ultrasound scans, and get feedback from a physician or sonographer, limiting the need for hospital and doctor visits during COVID-19 and beyond.

Clalit Health Services, with 4.6 million insured members, is the first healthcare provider to purchase the device, PulseNmore said in a statement.

“At home tele-ultrasound scanning is a major leap forward in digital medicine and prenatal health,” said Dr. Elazar Sonnenschein, founder and CEO of PulseNmore. “We have successfully miniaturized the traditional ultrasound system to create a solution that is both affordable and accessible for expectant families.”

According to Clalit, pregnant women often make unnecessary visits to the emergency room with concerns about their baby’s well-being.

The handheld ultrasound device will provide “vital information” to healthcare providers to determine if a baby is healthy, helping expectant mothers to “have peace of mind at home and avoid unnecessary visits to the ER,” said Sonnenschein.

'Revenge of the Elders of Zion': Fighting antisemitism meets dark humor

Revenge of the Elders of Zion By Dan Sofer 311 pages; $14.99

Dan Sofer is a literary phenomenon. It took him something like 27 years from the time he decided to become a writer to having his first novel published, and when he did so he had already decided that An Unexpected Life was to be the first of a trilogy which he called The Dry Bones Society. That first novel, and the two books that followed, proved enormously successful. Now comes his next novel, Revenge of the Elders of Zion.
It is not surprising that Sofer’s novels have a Jewish dimension. He left his native South Africa for Israel finally in 2001, but he had already spent four years in Yeshivat Har Etzion in the late 1990s, and also somewhere along the way, in his own words, “drove a tank in the Jordan Valley.”

He clearly knows something of life in the United States as well, for Revenge of the Elders of Zion takes place mostly in modern New York – but with a highly imaginative, and hugely entertaining, episode set in a long-lost island somewhere in the Atlantic inhabited by survivors of imperial Russia.

Indeed, imaginative and entertaining is an apt description of the novel as a whole. It does not fit neatly into any standard genre. It is essentially a fast-moving thriller, with a twist-and-turn of a plot that keeps the reader glued to the book, unable to resist turning the next page. Yet at the same time the book is replete with dark humor that can occasionally induce outright laughter.

David Zelig, the last surviving heir to a film production company that has fallen on hard times, is appalled by the antisemitic acts of terror that keep occurring in the States. To justify their activities, the anti-Jewish groups quote the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which claims that a secret society of Jews is out to control the world. David decides to create a society based on the myth. Perhaps his new clandestine operation will be able to prevent the next synagogue shooting.

David pulls in two old friends, and together they create The Trio. Almost immediately they are caught up in a terrifying new world of ruthless secret societies intent on achieving their objectives by any means. By extension they also find themselves bound into the anti-terrorist activities of the FBI and the CIA. The plot thickens to include the most extreme anti-Jewish attack ever planned in the USA, the theft of a priceless collection of Fabergé eggs, and an ancient, and highly embarrassing, Christian relic worth as many millions as the eggs themselves – but not to all parties.

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