Yakabuski | L’ombre de Gaza

2024/05/30 Leave a comment

More on the politics – Liberals as road kill (middle of the road trying to satisfy two different constituencies):

…Chez les électeurs musulmans, les libéraux sont à la traîne de dix points derrière le Nouveau Parti démocratique, toujours selon Angus Reid, avec l’appui de 31 % des électeurs de cette communauté, contre 41 % pour le NPD. Parmi tous les groupes religieux sondés par Angus Reid, il s’agit du plus fort appui pour le parti de Jagmeet Singh. C’est deux fois plus que les intentions de vote qu’il récolte à l’échelle nationale. Les néodémocrates étaient à l’origine d’une motion débattue à la Chambre des communes en mars qui demandait au gouvernement fédéral de reconnaître immédiatement l’État de Palestine. Les libéraux avaient réussi à faire amender la motion en appelant plutôt à la poursuite des travaux « en vue de l’établissement de l’État de Palestine dans le cadre d’une solution négociée à deux États ». M. Singh a sommé le gouvernement Trudeau d’appuyer M. Khan et sa demande de mandat d’arrêt contre M. Nétanyahou.

Le Canada comptait plus de 1,8 million de musulmans, contre 335 000 juifs, lors du dernier recensement en 2021. Selon une analyse de l’ancien haut fonctionnaire fédéral Andrew Griffith, 109 circonscriptions canadiennes comptent entre 5 % et 20 % de résidents musulmans ; et il y en a six où les musulmans comptent entre 20 % et 50 % de la population. Le poids politique des électeurs musulmans dépasse maintenant celui des électeurs juifs. Preuve du pétrin politique dans lequel ils se trouvent plongés depuis le 7 octobre, les libéraux de Justin Trudeau n’ont plus la cote ni chez les premiers ni chez les seconds.

Source: Chronique | L’ombre de Gaza

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Paul: What Does Hollywood Owe Its Jewish Founders?

2024/05/24 Leave a comment

Of note:

The Jews who founded Hollywood — and make no mistake, the big studio heads were overwhelmingly Jewish — shared several things: ambition, creative vision and killer business instincts.

But more than anything else, the men who were the driving forces behind Paramount, 20th Century Fox, Warner Brothers, Universal, Columbia and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer shared a very 20th-century sense of being Jewish in America. They were assimilationists who considered themselves American above all else and who molded Hollywood to reflect and shape their American ideals.

“Above all things, they wanted to be regarded as Americans, not Jews,” Neal Gabler wrote in his definitive 1988 history, “An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood.” Louis B. Mayer, a co-founder of MGM, went so far as to claim that his birth papers had been lost during immigration and to declare his birthday henceforth as the Fourth of July.

It was troubling, then, that when the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opened in 2021, it neglected to integrate Jews into its portrayal of Hollywood’s early days and later successes despite obvious attentiveness to other ethnic and racial groups. Beyond a few brief mentions, including Billy Wilder fleeing Nazi Germany, a photo of the MGM mogul and academy founder Louis B. Mayer looming over Judy Garland, and a few scoundrels in an exhibit on #MeToo, Jews were absent. Jewish studio heads, business leaders and actors were almost entirely shut out, an oversight that led to much outcry.

“It’s sort of like building a museum dedicated to Renaissance painting and ignoring the Italians,” the Hollywood historian and Brandeis University professor Thomas Doherty told Rolling Stoneat the time.

When I asked the museum’s former director and president Bill Kramer, now the C.E.O. of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, what he made of the omission, he did not acknowledge the error but said museum officials took the criticism seriously. “It was clear that this was something that certain stakeholders were expecting,” he said. “That in some visitors’ minds this was an omission that needed to be corrected.” Did he think the criticism was valid? “It was how people felt. And those feelings were real and feelings are valid.”

The museum has compensated for its neglect by creating what it calls its first permanent exhibit, “Hollywoodland: Jewish Founders and the Making of a Movie Capital,” which opened on Sunday.

The exhibit has three components. The first provides a panoramic view of how the city of Los Angeles evolved to accommodate an influx of immigrants, including Jews, the development of the film industry and the needs of its diverse population, from the Oglala Lakota people to Chinese immigrants, reflected in archival footage and an interactive table map. The second part tracks the history of the city’s studios, and the third screens an original documentary, “From the Shtetl to the Studio: The Jewish Story of Hollywood.” The space is intimate but expansive in its vision and is well executed.

So how were Jews left out in the first place? Some sources told Rolling Stone after the opening that those who might have applied more pressure earlier, chose to lay low during the museum’s development. Some of this reticence surely emerged from the tenor of the moment, with its focus on racial representation and what Kramer referred to as “pro-social” causes — gay rights, women’s equality, the labor movement — which the museum details in a dedicated section and weaves in throughout.

It may also be attributable to an uneasy tension among Jews around their place in America — eager to be integrated, included and successful, while at the same time wary of possible exclusion or alternately, too much notice, inciting a backlash and reanimating underlying antisemitism. The recent outburst of antisemitism that we’ve witnessed on college campuses and in protests against Israel had long been stewing within academia and across culturalinstitutions.

Throughout the Academy Museum’s development, much of which occurred after the rise of campaigns like #OscarsSoWhite, officials made clear that it would emphasize diversity and inclusivity. The museum highlights nonwhite and other marginalized contributors to the industry to help remedy the industry’s long record of exclusion.

“I don’t think you open a cultural institution at this historical moment and not be reflective of a diversity of histories and perspectives,” Jacqueline Stewart, the museum’s current director and president, told me when I asked about the museum’s focus on representation. She pushed back on the criticism. “There werereferences to Jewish filmmakers from the very beginning,” she said, mentioning a clip of a Steven Spielberg Oscar acceptance speech. “That seems to get lost.”

But in bending over backward to highlight various identity groups at every point, the museum unintentionally leaves out part of what makes the movies such a unifying and essentially popular medium: the ability to transcend those differences. In a pluralistic, immigrant nation, Hollywood helped create a uniquely American culture that speaks to a broad audience. That’s part of what we call the magic of movies.

If nothing else, Hollywood is relentlessly evolving, perhaps now more than ever under the threat of A.I., increased economic pressures and consolidation. The Academy Museum, too, continues to change. Much of what I saw in the museum — which must be said is a marvel and a must-see for any film lover — had been switched out for new material since I first visited in June 2022. Elements in the core exhibit are in constant rotation, in part due to fragility of its artifacts, like costumes; in part to reflect the immensity of its collection; and in other cases, in a then overt effort to hit all the bases among competing interests.

If this flux is indicative of the Academy Museum’s stated intent to represent the changing priorities of American audiences, then it also holds the potential to move beyond this current moment, with its intentional and unintended divisiveness.

Source: What Does Hollywood Owe Its Jewish Founders?

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Richler: Is the Jewish moment in North America over?

2024/05/20 Leave a comment

Interesting long read:

….But later tides have washed the North American beach clean for other groups to land and make their mark. Jews, by virtue of their success, are seen as a part of the establishment now. Not allies, as Jews were to African Americans during the civil-rights era, but “white-adjacent” and fair targets for shunning. We are living, now, in a time in which our “common humanity” matters less than the particular, than the difference in our identities so often brandished to set a community apart. It may only be passing, but at least for today whatever qualities we may share falter before the imperative of fair representation so that where, earlier, Jewish authors dominated bookstore shelves, the cinema, Broadway and television, now a story by a Jew is unlikely to be chosen by, say, the CBC, over a Black, Indigenous, Asian, South Asian or Muslim one.

Which is a positive and as it should be. Jewish novels are not so novel, their stories, their idiom are familiar, and any reader, any patron of any art, craves the new and what it teaches for good reason. Through art we learn about each other and how to share the spaces, real and abstract, that we live in. Other communities’ stories are invigorating the arts and it is their turn for good reason.

But for Jews there is a negative in this receding from public view and therefore interest that is, when it comes to immigration and settlement, the ordinary historical order of things. For the integration of Jews into North American life – what the writer and critic Dara Horn, author of People Love Dead Jews, has called the diaspora’s “fantasy” of acceptance – was, in North America, realized. And this acceptance was doubly important to Jews because it constituted, in the second half of the 20th century, a mirroring of the establishment of the nation of Israel, a state for a stateless people, and the hopes it represented. The stark truth is that a loss of security in either country brings its own existential peril: No place in America or no place in Israel, each dour prospect augurs in a new iteration of the precarity Jews knew in the Middle East and Europe for two millennia.

How did this come to be? Well, through simple demographics for a start, the 20th-century waves of Jewish immigration vastly superseded by the arrival into this continent of peoples whose own traumatic histories either do not intersect with the Jewish ones or contradict them. This demographic shift is one that politicians, many caught off guard, have been compelled to recognize – we are democracies, after all – and especially after its furious acceleration by the entry into social and political arenas of younger generations for whom terms such as “the Holocaust” and “genocide” have markedly different meanings.

No longer is the Holocaust a literal burning – instead, a confluence of horrid circumstances that may even be inadvertent is enough. No longer is genocide the realization of the meticulously planned and organized murderous intent of a specific, targeted people. It can be cultural, or, as we are seeing today in Gaza, a crushing, deleteriously ham-fisted and ultimately self-defeating military campaign that is the result of a profound and inalienable existential fear in a grievously injured population whose motives there is no will to understand, let alone permit. In this age in which “lived experience” is ultimately what validates a truth, the manner in which Jews remember both the Holocaust and the Nazi attempt at genocide is not shared. Jewish references are historical and effectively redundant. They are not this generation’s, and useful only as weapons to be turned back against Israel and the Jewish “Zionist” by activists and also governments benefiting from the distraction – Colombia, Nicaragua, Russia, South Africa, Turkey. (I used to think that, yes, to be anti-Zionist or anti-Israel did not necessarily mean a person was antisemitic but now, what with Jews basically regarded as colonists “from the river to the sea” – well, I’m not so sure.)…

Source: Is the Jewish moment in North America over?

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Rioux | La nazification d’Israël

2024/05/11 Leave a comment

Useful reminder of past and present naïveté:

L’humour peut-il être ignoble et drôle tout à la fois ? Je l’avoue, il est arrivé que des humoristes qui flirtaient avec l’abject me fassent rire. Comme il m’est arrivé de m’ennuyer avec d’autres trop bien intentionnés. C’est tout le mystère de l’humour. Et c’est toute l’ambiguïté de cette blague qui, cette semaine, a coûté son poste au comique de France Inter Guillaume Meurice, qui avait qualifié le premier ministre israélien, Benjamin Nétanyahou, d’une « sorte de nazi mais sans prépuce ».

Peut-on en rire sans pour autant adhérer à cette infamie sans nom qui consiste à nazifier le peuple de la Shoah ? L’idée n’est pas nouvelle. Quelle jouissance de démasquer le loup déguisé en mère-grand et de dire à la victime qu’elle est devenue semblable à son bourreau. Comme le disait le philosophe Michel Eltchaninoff, rien de tel que de peindre les Israéliens en nazis pour « se libérer de la culpabilité d’une des plus grandes tragédies de l’histoire récente : le génocide des Juifs d’Europe » qui, à de très rares exceptions, n’a jamais été reconnu dans le monde arabo-musulman.

Ce n’est évidemment pas parce qu’on appartient à une droite dure, comme Nétanyahou, et qu’on s’est allié par pur opportunisme politique à des partis extrémistes qui sont la honte d’Israël qu’on est un nazi et qu’on prépare un génocide. Génocide dont on attend encore la preuve sonnante et trébuchante. Les deux millions de citoyens d’origine arabe qui vivent librement en Israël étant la preuve éclatante du contraire.

Les slogans entendus ces jours-ci sur les campus américains, français et canadiens n’en finissent pourtant pas de nazifier Israël, quand ils n’expriment pas parfois un antisémitisme flagrant. Ainsi en est-il du mantra « from the river to the sea » (« du fleuve à la mer »), dont l’origine n’évoque rien de moins qu’une Palestine où Israël aurait été rayé de la carte. Faudrait-il, pour soutenir le peuple palestinien — qui mérite toute notre compassion, répétons-le —, aller jusqu’à qualifier le pogrom du 7 octobre d’acte de résistance ? Ou en taire l’horreur absolue, ce qui revient au même ?

On peut certes comprendre le désir d’une génération élevée en banlieue, dans un moralisme souvent étouffant, de se rejouer la grande épopée de l’opposition à la guerre du Vietnam. « En 67 tout était beau, c’était l’année de l’amour », disait la chanson.

Un demi-siècle plus tard, la mythologie a pourtant pris quelques rides. Si la libération du Vietnam méritait le soutien de tous, il n’en allait pas de même des Viêt-Cong et de leurs alliés communistes, dont le véritable visage nous a été révélé quelques années plus tard par les multiples vagues de boat people et le génocide des Khmers rouges au Cambodge. Un vrai, celui-là, puisqu’il fit 1,7 million de morts.

Un demi-siècle plus tard, malgré l’émotion légitime, c’est pourtant la même naïveté béate qui s’exprime à l’égard du Hamas, dont l’objectif avoué n’est pas de créer un État palestinien, mais de rétablir le califat en Palestine. Et pour cela, d’en finir avec l’État d’Israël.

Serait-ce trahir « la cause » ou « faire le jeu de l’ennemi » que de rappeler à ces militants LGBTQ+ et autres « Queers for Palestine » le destin que leur réserverait la charia advenant une victoire du Hamas ? Quant à celles qui hurlent leur colère souvent légitime contre Israël, savent-elles le sort qu’on réserve aux femmes dans ces théocraties ?

C’est Raymond Aron qui disait que « les hommes font l’histoire, mais ils ne savent pas l’histoire qu’ils font ». Cette naïveté criminelle fait étrangement penser à celle de cette gauche française qui, derrière Jean-Paul Sartre et Michel Foucault, n’avait dans les années 1970 que des mots doux à l’égard de l’ayatollah Khomeini, réfugié dans le petit village de Neauphle-le-Château. Parlez-en à cette jeunesse d’extrême gauche très active à l’époque dans les universités iraniennes, et qui sera littéralement exterminée après la révolution de 1979.

Si on a raison de dénoncer le cul-de-sac politique que représente Nétanyahou, l’émotion légitime que suscitent les souffrances des Palestiniens ne saurait justifier la moindre concession à une organisation qui, en islamisant la cause des Palestiniens au profit d’un pur délire religieux, signe pour ces derniers la plus terrible des défaites. « Ce que cherchait le Hamas, écrit l’ancien ambassadeur de France à Tel-Aviv Gérard Araud, c’est de commettre des atrocités qui rendent tout compromis inacceptable. Je crains qu’il n’ait réussi… »

Source: Chronique | La nazification d’Israël

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Nicolas | Racisme anti-palestinien

2024/05/11 Leave a comment

As mentioned earlier, I think the existing forms of racism, anti-Arab for both Muslim and Christian Palestinians, and anti-Muslim for Muslim Palestinians, cover the essential. The substantive examples raised by Nicolas can be addressed under both:

On apprenait mercredi dans le Toronto Star que la nouvelle version de la Stratégie canadienne de lutte contre le racisme, qui devrait être rendue publique sous peu, n’inclura pas de définition du racisme anti-palestinien.

Cette stratégie, publiée pour la première fois en 2019, « est conçue pour jeter les bases de la lutte contre le racisme systémique par des actions immédiates à l’échelle du gouvernement du Canada ». Plusieurs groupes ont fait pression sur la ministre de la Diversité, de l’Inclusion et des Personnes en situation de handicap, Kamal Khera, pour que le racisme anti-palestinien soit désormais défini et donc reconnu par le gouvernemental fédéral, au même titre que l’islamophobie et l’antisémitisme, le racisme anti-noir ou le racisme anti-asiatique, par exemple. Ça aura été en vain.

Pour l’instant, on continue donc officiellement à dénoncer l’islamophobie, du moins sur papier, laissant de son côté le racisme anti-palestinien se déployer au Canada. Ce n’est pas suffisant. Voici pourquoi.

D’abord, tous les Palestiniens ne sont pas musulmans. De larges pans du mouvement nationaliste palestinien ont toujours cherché à se rassembler autour d’une identité culturelle et d’une situation politique — et non d’une religion. Le keffieh, par exemple, est un symbole à la fois culturel et politique, selon le contexte, mais pas un symbole religieux. Le foulard blanc et noir a pris la signification qu’il a aujourd’hui après avoir été porté durant des décennies par le leader palestinien Yasser Arafat.

Lorsque le parlement provincial ontarien prend la décision de bannir le keffieh de sa chambre législative, comme il l’a fait le mois passé, on empêche l’expression culturelle et politique du peuple palestinien dans son enceinte. Parler vaguement d’« islamophobie », ce serait ici très mal nommer les choses.

En fait, pour bien comprendre le racisme anti-palestinien, il faut savoir qu’il se déploie notamment comme une forme de racisme anti-autochtone. Et ici, je fais très attention à mes mots et aux explications que j’en donne.

Être autochtone est une catégorie politique, et non pas seulement ethnique. Ce n’est pas simplement un terme qui réfère à « qui était là avant ». Il est important de le comprendre si on veut éviter de remonter aux temps bibliques. Le mot « autochtone », dans nos instances internationales, réfère notamment à une catégorie de personnes qui se retrouvent sans État qui parle en leur nom dans le système des Nations unies, parce qu’un État s’est construit « par-dessus » leur territoire ancestral, en quelque sorte. Si le mot référait seulement à de vieilles racines dans une terre, tous les Français chez qui on décèle une forme d’ADN gaulois pourraient participer au Forum des peuples autochtones des Nations unies, pour donner un exemple grossier. Le terme « autochtone » prend une grande partie de son sens à l’intersection de l’« ancienneté » et de la dépossession. C’est en ce sens que je m’exprime.

Lorsqu’un État assied sa souveraineté sur un territoire en dépossédant un autre peuple de ce même territoire, il doit déployer un récit national et un appareil idéologique qui normalise cette dépossession. L’âge d’or du colonialisme correspond avec l’invention de l’idée de terra nullius, par exemple, qui veut que lorsqu’un territoire n’est pas occupé — et par occupé, on veut dire occupé à l’européenne, sujet à des activités économiques « productives » dans une perspective européenne —, il est considéré comme vacant et donc disponible pour la prise de possession coloniale.

C’est aussi en pleine expansion coloniale que Friedrich Hegel et plusieurs autres penseurs européens ont développé leurs idées sur la téléologie de l’Histoire. D’abord, on a tracé une ligne arbitraire entre la « préhistoire » et l’« Histoire », puis on a posé l’État-nation comme l’aboutissement de l’« Histoire » et ainsi hiérarchisé les peuples selon leur « stade de développement ». On a, en quelque sorte, inventé la catégorie de « primitif » — une autre manière de naturaliser qui a le droit d’exercer sa souveraineté sur des terres, et qui peut en être légitimement dépossédé.

Ces idées continuent d’être mobilisées jusqu’à aujourd’hui un peu partout en Occident. Elles permettent notamment à certaines voix pro-israéliennes plus radicales de nier jusqu’à l’existence même de la Palestine, puisque le peuple palestinien ne disposait pas d’un État-nation indépendant avant la fondation d’Israël.

Ces notions nous permettent aussi de mieux comprendre, par exemple, les commentaires de Selina Robinson, qui était ministre de l’Éducation postsecondaire en Colombie-Britannique, lorsqu’elle a affirmé, en janvier, que la Palestine était un « morceau de terre merdique » (crappy piece of land) sur lequel « il n’y avait rien » avant la fondation d’Israël. Ses propos n’étaient pas « islamophobes ». Ils étaient un parfait exemple du racisme anti-palestinien ordinaire, appuyés sur une forme d’actualisation de la doctrine de la terra nullius. Finalement, Selina Robinson s’est excusée, a perdu son poste de ministre, puis a quitté le caucus du Nouveau Parti démocratique provincial.

Le maire de Hampstead, Jeremy Levi, nous a offert un autre exemple de dérapage anti-palestinien. La semaine dernière, il a encore déclaré sur X que le gouvernement canadien devrait « reconsidérer son plan d’immigration pour les Gazaouis », puisque « leurs valeurs semblent incompatibles avec les nôtres ». Il faut savoir que l’idée des « valeurs incompatibles » a été mobilisée durant l’histoire coloniale pour justifier le statut subalterne, « non intégrable » de certaines populations. Le discours est encore souvent employé à l’égard des Palestiniens, notamment dans les espaces médiatiques israélien et américain, pour justifier certaines inégalités ou violences structurelles.

La liste d’exemples pourrait être encore longue. Pour repérer le racisme anti-palestinien dans l’espace public, encore faut-il le comprendre. Pour le comprendre, il faut d’abord le nommer clairement.

Source: Chronique | Racisme anti-palestinien

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Klein Halevi: The war against the Jewish story  

2024/05/06 Leave a comment

Necessary read and questioning of the approach and effectiveness previous and current Holocaust education:

How has it come to this? How is it possible that Israel, rather than radical Islamism, would become the villain on liberal campuses? That thousands of students would be chanting “from the river to the sea” even as the Hamas massacre revealed that slogan’s genocidal implications? That the most passionate outbreak of student activism since the 1960s would be devoted to delegitimizing the Jewish people’s story of triumph over annihilation? 

This moment didn’t happen in a vacuum. The anti-Zionist forces in academia have been preparing the ground for decades, systematically dismantling the moral basis of each stage of Zionist and Israeli history. 

The attack began on the very origins of Zionism, which was transformed from a story of a dispossessed people re-indigenizing in its ancient homeland into one more sordid expression of European colonialism. (Europe’s post-Holocaust gift to the Jews: leaving us with the bill for its sins.) 

Next, the birth of Israel in 1948 was reduced to the Nakba, or catastrophe, a Palestinian narrative of total innocence that ignores the ethnic cleansing of Jews from every place where Arab armies were victorious and the subsequent uprooting of the entire Jewish population of the Muslim world. Post-1967 Israel was cast as an apartheid state – turning Zionism, a multi-faceted movement representing Jews across the political and religious spectrum into a racist ideology and reducing an agonizingly complex national conflict into a medieval passion play about Jewish perfidy. 

And now, with the Gaza War, we have come to the genocide canard, the endpoint in the process of delegitimization.

To turn Israel into the world’s arch-criminal requires three forms of erasure. The first is of the connection between the land of Israel and the people of Israel. In the anti-Zionist telling of the conflict, a 4,000-year connection that has been the heart of Jewish identity and faith is irrelevant, if not contrived outright by Zionists.

The second is the erasure of the relentless war against Israel, placing its actions under a microscope while downplaying or entirely ignoring the aggression of its enemies. There is never any context to Israel’s actions. Only by erasing Hamas’s atrocities can Israel be turned into the villain of this war. 

In focusing on Israel’s actions and dismissing those of Hamas, campus protesters are providing cover for October 7 denialism. This is a new version of the Holocaust denialism prevalent in parts of the Muslim world: The atrocities didn’t happen, you deserved them and we’re going to do it again (and again). 

On a recent trip to New York, walking along Broadway on the Upper West Side, I saw dozens of defaced posters of kidnapped Israelis. Rather than tear down the posters, the vandals had blacked out the Israeli faces – a literal defacement. And a useful metaphor for the anti-Zionist assault on our being.

The third form of erasure is dismissing the history of peace offers presented or accepted by Israel and uniformly rejected by the Palestinian side. No offer – an independent Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza, the re-division of Jerusalem, the uprooting of dozens of settlements – was ever sufficient. It is hard to think of another national movement representing a stateless people that rejected more offers of self-determination than the Palestinian leadership.

The ease with which anti-Zionists have managed to portray the Jewish state as genocidal, a successor to Nazi Germany, marks a historic failure of Holocaust education in the West.

This moment requires a fundamental rethinking of the goals and methodology of Holocaust education. By over-emphasizing the necessary universal lessons of the Holocaust, many educators too easily equated antisemitism with generic racism. The intention was noble: to render the Holocaust relevant to a new generation. But in the process, the essential lesson of the Holocaust – the uniqueness not only of the event itself but of the hatred that made it possible – was often lost. 

Antisemitism is not merely the hatred of Jews as other but the symbolization of The Jew – that is, turning the Jews into the symbol for whatever a given civilization defines as its most loathsome qualities. For Christianity until the Holocaust, The Jew was Christ-killer; for Marxism, the ultimate capitalist; for Nazism, the defiler of race. And now, in the era of anti-racism, the Jewish state is the embodiment of racism. 

Holocaust education was intended, in large part, to protect the Jewish people from a recurrence of the antisemitism that reduces Jews to symbols. Yet the movement to turn Israel into the world’s criminal nation emerges from a generation that was raised with Holocaust consciousness, both in formal education and the arts. And this latest expression of the antisemitism of symbols is justified by some anti-Zionists as honoring “the lessons of the Holocaust.” 

Unlike the Iranian regime, which clumsily tries to deny the historicity of the Holocaust, anti-Zionists in the West intuitively understand that coopting and inverting the Holocaust is a far more effective way of neutralizing its impact.

Many, perhaps most, of the campus protesters are likely not antisemitic. They may have Jewish friends or be Jewish themselves. But that is irrelevant: They are enabling an antisemitic moment.

What is under assault is the integrity of the mid-20th century Jewish story, of a people rejecting the self-pity of victimhood and fulfilling its most improbable dream: renewing itself, in its broken old age, in the land of its youth. The shift from the lowest point Jews have known to the reclamation of power and self-confidence is one of the most astonishing feats of survival not only in Jewish but world history. It is that story that is being distorted and trivialized and demonized on liberal campuses. 

I recently completed a lecture tour of some of the most Jewishly problematic campuses, from Columbia to Berkeley. In meetings with Jewish students, I was repeatedly told about a pervasive atmosphere of hostility toward Israel, even among many otherwise apolitical students. While the protests are an immediate threat to Jewish well-being on campus, the far deeper problem is the impact of the anti-Zionist campaign, linking the name “Israel” with racism and genocide. The vulgar protesters are a small minority, but they are shaping the attitudes of a whole generation. 

By focusing only on the immediate threat of the protests, we risk repeating the mistake we’ve made over the last decades of failing to adequately confront the systematic assault on our story.

We are losing a generation, but we haven’t yet lost. Like other radical movements, anti-Zionism could go too far in its righteous rage, potentially alienating the majority. Perhaps that process has already begun. 

The challenge of our generation is to defend the story we inherited from the survivor generation. We need to tell that story with moral credibility, in all its complexity, frankly owning our flaws even as we celebrate our successes, acknowledging the Palestinian narrative even as we insist on the integrity of our own. 

We desperately need new strategies to counter the anti-Zionist assault. A good beginning would be the creation of a brain trust, composed of community activists, rabbis, journalists, historians, public relations experts, that would devise both immediate responses to the current crisis and a long-term strategy, emulating the decades-long patient work of the anti-Zionists. 

The Jews are a story we tell ourselves about who we think we are; without our story, there is no Judaism. It is long past time to mount a credible defense of our mid-20th century story, which continues to sustain us as a people. 

Source: Klein Halevi: The war against the Jewish story  

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Why Are the Anti-Israel Chants So Tedious? » Mosaic

2024/05/03 Leave a comment

Of interest:

The anti-Israel demonstrations on American campuses have been compared to the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations of the 1960s and early 1970s. In their intensity, they may be similar. In their stupidity, they are not. Nowhere is the difference between the two protest movements more immediately apparent than in the quality and nature of the slogans used by their participants.When one considers the slogans of the anti-Vietnam War movement, one is struck by the wit and humor of many of them. Many still have the power to make one smile or laugh, such as the “Make Love, Not War” motto that probably outdid any other in its popularity. What made it so potent, yet so funny? Partly, its clever yoking together of two opposed English idioms that shared only the verb “make”; partly, its puckish suggestion that everyone, from the foot soldier in Vietnam to the president of the United States, would be better off in bed with someone else than on a battlefield or in a war-cabinet session; partly its invoking of the sexual revolution of the sixties as both the antithesis of, and the alternative to, a supposed culture of aggressive militarism; and most sweepingly, its implication that life-giving Eros and death-dealing Thanatos are different expressions of the same human libido, and that the first is preferable to the second. That’s a lot to pack into four words, but “Make Love, Not War” managed to do it.

Other anti-Vietnam War slogans were almost as memorable. Some, like “Hell, no, we won’t go [to fight in Vietnam]” were chanted at demonstrations. Two favorites that I remember were displayed on signs. One bore the iconic flower of hippiedom and the words, in a take-off of the warning recently introduced in those days on packs of cigarettes, “War Is not healthy for children and other living things.” The other, a parody of the famous World War I recruiting billboard, had a drawing of a grim-faced Uncle Sam exhorting, “Join the U.S. Army! Travel to exotic lands, meet exciting people, and kill them.” There was the stern “If you support this war, send your own children,” and the poignant “Not our sons, not your sons, not their sons.” A sign carried only by black demonstrators said, “No Vietnamese ever called me n—r.”

There were, of course, angrier and more violent anti-Vietnam War slogans, too, such as the chant “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” But these, though they spread as the war dragged on and public frustration with it mounted, were never the rule. The dominant tone was irony and sarcasm, the underlying message: “You who are prosecuting this war may be more powerful than we are, but we are smarter than you, more creative than you, and more caring for human life and human beings, and because of this, we will prevail.”

Compare this with:

  • “Red, black, green, and white, we support Hamas’s fight!.”
  • “Hitler, Hitler, go back home! Palestine is ours alone!”
  • “Globalize the intifada!”
  • “One, two, three, four, Israel will be no more! Five, six, seven, eight, Israel we’ll eliminate!”
  • “There is only one solution! Intifada revolution!”
  • “Say it loud, say it clear: we do not want Zionists here!”
  • “Oh, al-Qassam, you make us proud!  Kill another soldier now!”
  • “Resistance by any means necessary!”
  • “Palestine is our demand! No peace on stolen land!”
  • “We say justice. You say how? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground!”
  • “We don’t want no two states. We want all of ’48!”

The sheer idiocy of such slogans is as staggering as is their hatefulness. Those who compose them seem to be under the impression that whatever rhymes is intelligent, and their ability to put two rhyming words together in what resembles a cheer for a high-school basketball team appears to be as far as their intelligence extends.

One mustn’t, of course, overgeneralize. Although many college students have joined the demonstrations, many times their number haven’t. Still, changed attitudes toward Israel aside, something has clearly happened to the minds of young American protesters between the 1960s and today. What?

Well, childhoods and adolescences dumbed down by smartphones, WhatApp, and Facebook, for one thing. And college educations given by teachers, products of the postmodernism and deconstructionism that gained ascendancy on university campuses in the last decades of the 20th century, who have taught that there is no such thing as verifiable truth or falsehood but only the competing narratives of oppressed and oppressor, and that it is incumbent to identify with the latter. And a national politics that has become one of non-debatable identities rather than of debatable issues. And the fear of saying or thinking anything that smacks of racism, sexism, genderism, religionism, elitism, nationalism, patriotism, colonialism, ethnocentrism, Orientalism, or whatever else might offend progressive values and the feelings of others, with the notable exception of those whose feelings it is permissible to offend.

None of this has been conducive to independence or subtlety of thought, let alone to irony or humor; combine it with a growing antagonism toward Israel and its Jewish supporters, now squarely placed by many young Americans in the camp of the oppressor, and you get the imbecility of “Go, Hamas, we love you! We support your rockets, too!” But whence all that rage, whence all that hate?

This is a question worth pondering. After all, the student demonstrators of the 1960s had much better reason to be consumed by such emotions (and some were) than those today. The government they were protesting against was sending them to fight, and possibly to die, in a war they considered immoral and unjust. What comparable threat does Israel, however immoral or unjust it may strike them as being, pose to students on American campuses now? What is all the screaming at it about?

The stock answer given by Israel’s supporters is: anti-Semitism. It’s hard to argue with that. When a Jewish state is vilified by mobs of students for supposed atrocities the likes of which leave them indifferent when committed by other nations, an antipathy toward Jews clearly has something to do with it.

But rampant anti-Semitism, as we know, does not spring from nowhere. It’s always an expression of some deep fear or resentment that the anti-Semite projects onto the Jew. What are today’s student demonstrators projecting that students in the 1960s were not?

Possibly, the loss of hope.

The demonstrators of the 60s were, like all rebellious young people since at least the time of the American and French Revolutions, a hopeful lot. They believed, however naively, in their power to make a better world than the one they were born into. They may have been the last generation in human history to do so. They were certainly the last in a chain going back two centuries or more, since what young person today honestly thinks life might get better in his lifetime? At most, it might be kept from not getting too much worse: too much hotter, too much more spun out of control by blind, unstoppable forces, too much more stripped of its human face by technology and artificial intelligence. The young generation’s task as the world passes into its hands will be to fight a holding action to stave off disaster, not to try creating something freer, more loving, and more joyous. If it doesn’t already know this, it surely feels it in its bones.

I would be full of anger, too, if such a world were passed on to me. Projecting such anger on a traditionally American-backed Israel that has almost nothing to do with the overall state of things is a tempting way to vent it. The more intelligent of today’s demonstrators will one day look back with embarrassment at the slogans they shouted. They will understand that they were shouting about something else.

Source: Why Are the Anti-Israel Chants So Tedious? » Mosaic

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Lewis: The Left Needs to Handle Its Antisemitism Problem—NOW

2024/04/25 Leave a comment

Yes:

In recent days, we have witnessed chaos on and around the Columbia University campus, as threats against Jewish students have created an intolerable and combustible atmosphere.

A woman attempting to hide her identity held up a sign with an arrow pointing toward pro-Israel students that read “Al-Qasam’s Next Target,” a reference to Hamas’ military wing. Other protesters told students, “Go back to Europe. Go back to Poland.”

Another protester shouted, “The 7th of October is going to be every day for you,” in reference to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel. Others sang a chant, which included the words, “We support Hamas’ fight!” and “Hamas we love you. We support your rockets too!” An Arab-Israeli journalist was allegedly assaulted by agitators. These are just a few of the alleged threats and assaults that have been documented on or near this campus.

While protests of all kinds are often marred by fringe actors—doing and saying terrible things that don’t represent the views of the larger group—it’s difficult to watch the videos and not conclude that there is blatant antisemitism at play among at least some of these pro-Palestinian protesters. Even if they’re a minority of the larger movement, what we’re seeing on and around the campus of one of the most hallowed institutions of higher education in America are not merely peaceful calls for a ceasefire or more humanitarian aid into Gaza.

There’s rank antisemitism, full stop, and it needs to be dealt with immediately.

One obvious step is for prominent Americans who have advocated for Palestinians in Gaza to forcefully condemn this behavior. Today.

If you are a prominent progressive influencer, pundit, or elected official (looking at you, Squad members), this is the time for you to go on the record and say that the antisemitic “fringe” of this movement—ostensibly in support of Palestinian rights and an end to the war in Gaza—does not speak for the larger group.

As it happens, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN)—an outspoken critic of Israel whose daughter was one of the students arrested last week at Columbia—doesn’t seem too interested in rooting out the bigots that share her passion for the cause. Frankly, she’s not even interested in admitting they exist.

Rep. Omar on Monday tweeted, “Throughout history, protests were co-opted and made to look bad so police and public leaders would shut them down. That’s what we are seeing now at Columbia University. The Columbia protesters have made clear their demands and want their school not to be complacent in the ongoing Genocide in Gaza. Public officials and media making this about anything else are inflaming the situation and need to bring calmness and sanity back.”

That’s a lot of words to perform a Jedi Mind Trick: “These aren’t the antisemites you’re looking for.” (By contrast, Columbia Law Students for Palestine, to their credit, condemned the antisemitic incidents.)

Trust me when I say this matters. When racists on the right voiced repugnant ideas, some of us on the center-right stood up and condemned it. We did so because it was morally correct and because we hoped to prevent evil actors from co-opting and discrediting the conservative cause. Sadly, it was too little, too late.

The good news for mainstream Democrats is that these radical attitudes have not yet seized control of your political party. President Joe Biden, for example, has condemned the protests. There is still time to do the right thing.

But take it from me, parties can be hijacked more quickly than you can imagine. In four short years, the GOP went from Mitt Romney as the standard bearer to Donald Trump. You’ve got to identify it and uproot the cancer before it metastasizes. Because once it spreads, it’s too late.

If you’re still not sure this is a hill to die on, just imagine what you would think if such vicious antisemitism was coming from the right instead of the left. (Remember Charlottesville?)

Yes, there are some people who are looking to grab a short, out-of-context viral clip to make your entire movement look bad. Yes, some of these videos show events that happened on Columbia’s campus, while some took place outside the campus on a public street, where non-students were among the protesters.

But there are more than a few “bad apples” to deduce that the far left has an antisemitism problem. And honest brokers among that political tribe ought to be principled and courageous enough to admit it. Even if it’s only two or three people out of a hundred, it’s time to forcefully condemn it. Just say, “You don’t speak for us!”

This is your problem. This is your mess. Clean up your movement, before it’s too late.

Source: The Left Needs to Handle Its Antisemitism Problem—NOW

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

McWhorter: I’m a Columbia Professor. The Protests on My Campus Are Not Justice.

2024/04/25 Leave a comment

Valid contrast if similar protests were against other groups or issues:

Last Thursday, in the music humanities class I teach at Columbia University, two students were giving an in-class presentation on the composer John Cage. His most famous piece is “4’33”,” which directs us to listen in silence to surrounding noise for exactly that period of time.

I had to tell the students we could not listen to that piece that afternoon, because the surrounding noise would have been not birds or people walking by in the hallway, but infuriated chanting from protesters outside the building. Lately that noise has been almost continuous during the day and into the evening, including lusty chanting of “From the river to the sea.” Two students in my class are Israeli; three others to my knowledge are American Jews. I couldn’t see making them sit and listen to this as if it were background music.

I thought about what would have happened if protesters were instead chanting anti-Black slogans, or even something like “D.E.I. has got to die,” to the same “Sound Off” tune that “From the river to the sea” has been adapted to. They would have lasted roughly five minutes before masses of students shouted them down and drove them off the campus. Chants like that would have been condemned as a grave rupture of civilized exchange, heralded as threatening resegregation and branded as a form of violence. I’d wager that most of the student protesters against the Gaza War would view them that way, in fact. Why do so many people think that weekslong campus protests against not just the war in Gaza but Israel’s very existence are nevertheless permissible?

Although I know many Jewish people will disagree with me, I don’t think that Jew-hatred is as much the reason for this sentiment as opposition to Zionism and the war on Gaza. I know some of the protesters, including a couple who were taken to jail last week, and I find it very hard to imagine that they are antisemitic. Yes, there can be a fine line between questioning Israel’s right to exist and questioning Jewish people’s right to exist. And yes, some of the rhetoric amid the protests crosses it.

Conversations I have had with people heatedly opposed to the war in Gaza, signage and writings on social media and elsewhere, and anti-Israel and generally hard-leftist comments that I have heard for decades on campuses place these confrontations within a larger battle against power structures — here in the form of what they call colonialism and genocide — and against whiteness. The idea is that Jewish students and faculty should be able to tolerate all of this because they are white.

I understand this to a point. Pro-Palestinian rallies and events, of which there have been many here over the years, are not in and of themselves hostile to Jewish students, faculty and staff members. Disagreement will not always be a juice and cookies affair. However, the relentless assault of this current protest — daily, loud, louder, into the night and using ever-angrier rhetoric — is beyond what anyone should be expected to bear up under regardless of their whiteness, privilege or power.

Social media discussion has been claiming that the protests are peaceful. They are, some of the time; it varies by location and day — generally what goes on within the campus gates is somewhat less strident than what happens just outside them. But relatively constant are the drumbeats — people will differ on how peaceful that sound can ever be, just as they will differ on the nature of antisemitism. What I do know is that even the most peaceful of protests would be treated as outrages if they were interpreted as, say, anti-Black — even if the message were coded, as in a bunch of people quietly holding up MAGA signs or wearing T-shirts saying “All Lives Matter.”

And besides, calling all this peaceful stretches the use of the word rather implausibly. It’s an odd kind of peace when a local rabbi urges Jewish students to go home as soon as possible, when an Arab-Israeli activist is roughed up on Broadway, when the angry chanting becomes so constant that you almost start not to hear it and it starts to feel normal to see posters and clothing portraying Hamas as heroes. The other night I watched a dad coming from the protest with his little girl, giving a good hard few final snaps on the drum he was carrying, nodding at her in crisp salute, percussing his perspective into her little mind. This is not peaceful.

I understand that the protesters and their fellow travelers feel that all of this is the proper response, social justice on the march. They have been told that righteousness means placing the battle against whiteness and its power front and center, contesting the abuse of power by any means necessary. And I myself think the war on Gaza is no longer constructive or even coherent.

However, the issues are complex, in ways that this uncompromising brand of power-battling is ill suited to address. Legitimate questions remain about the definition of genocide, about the extent of a nation’s right to defend itself and about the justice of partition (which has not historically been limited to Palestine). There is a reason many consider the Israel-Palestine conflict the most morally challenging in the modern world.

When I was at Rutgers in the mid-1980s, the protests were against investment in South Africa’s apartheid regime. There were similarities with the Columbia protests now: A large group of students established an encampment site right in front of the Rutgers student center on College Avenue, where dozens slept every night for several weeks. Among the largely white crowd, participation was a badge of civic commitment. There was chanting, along with the street theater inevitable, and perhaps even necessary, to effective protest — one guy even laid down in the middle of College Avenue to block traffic, taking a page from the Vietnam protests.

I don’t recall South Africans on campus feeling personally targeted, but the bigger difference was that though the protesters sought to make their point at high volume, over a long period and sometimes even rudely, they did not seek to all but shut down campus life.

On Monday night, Columbia announced that classes would be hybrid until the end of the semester, in the interest of student safety. I presume that the protesters will continue throughout the two main days of graduation, besmirching one of the most special days of thousands of graduates’ lives in the name of calling down the “imperialist” war abroad.

Today’s protesters don’t hate Israel’s government any more than yesterday’s hated South Africa’s. But they have pursued their goals with a markedly different tenor — in part because of the single-mindedness of antiracist academic culture and in part because of the influence of iPhones and social media, which inherently encourage a more heightened degree of performance. It is part of the warp and woof of today’s protests that they are being recorded from many angles for the world to see. One speaks up.

But these changes in moral history and technology can hardly be expected to comfort Jewish students in the here and now. What began as intelligent protest has become, in its uncompromising fury and its ceaselessness, a form of abuse.

Source: I’m a Columbia Professor. The Protests on My Campus Are Not Justice.

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OPINION: University of Ottawa equity, diversity, inclusivity discussion ‘an abject failure’

2024/04/22 Leave a comment

Does appear to be an unbalanced selection of panelists:

Let’s say you are the vice president of Equity, Diversity and Inclusive (Excellence?), VP EDI, at a Canadian university and you organize an event to have a “courageous conversation” about anti-Palestinian racism, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism that ends up being a uniform rant against Israel and Zionism with no equity, no diversity, or inclusion for Jews.

This is exactly what happened on March 27 during the two-hour Zoom panel convened by the Vice-Provost of Equity, Diversity and Inclusive Excellence at the University of Ottawa, professor Awad Ibrahim.

With the declared goal of addressing in a balanced and unbiased manner the problem of increasing discrimination against Muslims, Palestinians, and Jews in Canada, especially in light of the conflict between Israel and Hamas after the massacre perpetrated by Palestinian Islamists on Oct. 7, the convened panel theoretically sought a balance: two people would discuss issues linked to anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia, and two would talk about anti-Semitism.

In reality, the four speakers spoke with a unified biased voice minimizing the precipitous rise in anti-Semitism in Canada and around the world, because, according to them, many of the events that are reported as anti-Jewish are simply “legitimate” (sic) expressions against Zionism, Israeli colonialism, and the defense of the struggle of the Palestinians against the “Zionist occupation” and do not really target the Jewish community.

The activist Dalia El Farra (senior advisor, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion – Centre for Human Rights, York University) and professor Jasmin Zine (Wilfrid Laurier University) represented the pro-Palestinian and anti-Islamophobia views. Two members of the Jewish Faculty Network (an anti-Israel organization), professor Sheryl Nestel and professor Alejandro Paz (University of Toronto), both anti-Zionists Jews, were invited to talk about anti-Semitism.

The main function of both Jewish panelists was to assert that the increase in antisemitic incidents is inflated by the “Jewish lobby,” because they dare to count as anti-Jewish events those that are actually demonstrations against the “Western colonial enterprise” (sic) known as Zionism and against Israeli “genocide” (sic).

Although Vice-Provost Ibrahim was asked during the event’s Q&A why he had decided to invite only two anti-Zionist Jewish speakers to talk about anti-Semitism, the VP EDI made only brief mention of the question towards his closing remarks and did not answer the question…

…In French, one might have described the event by exclaiming, “Quel gâchis!” (What a flop!) to qualify this EDI event (by the way, if we are talking about inclusion, it should be noted that only English-speaking panelists were invited, thus failing the bilingual mandate of the University of Ottawa). It was certainly not a courageous conversation, nor was it diverse, not equitable, and lacked the inclusiveness of multiple viewpoints. It offered only a single, ahistorical, hateful chorus of anti-Israel propaganda.

Perhaps professor Ibrahim, the vice president of Equity, Diversity and Inclusive Excellence, thought he was promoting balanced perspectives because he had hosted an event as part of the same series on March 21 about Anti-Semitism in Healthcare, University and our Larger Society. Instead, the panel on Demystifying Islamophobia, anti-Palestinian racism and anti-Semitism of March 27 was a missed opportunity for the University of Ottawa’s EDI office to fulfill its mandate, failing to meet the most basic standards of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion

The false moral equivalence between these two events, the former being grounded in scholarly research and fact, the latter being grounded in one-sided bias attempting to delegitimize Judaism and Israel, undermines inclusive excellence in the academy and further contributes to Jew hatred on Canadian campuses.

This is an abject failure of leadership of the VP EDI at the University of Ottawa and a direct assault on the protection of all minorities on Canadian campuses. It is a betrayal of trust with the Jewish community, and it undermines the core mission of the University to reveal and disseminate truth.

— Isaac Nahon-Serfaty is an Associate Professor at the University of Ottawa and Deron Brown is an MD in Toronto

Source: OPINION: University of Ottawa equity, diversity, inclusivity discussion ‘an abject failure’

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