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Politics, Israel, Jews, antisemitism
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THREAD: The @JewishLabour submission to the @EHRC that the BBC & Times have got hold of is devastating. The full doc is here https://t.co/nnbrVkcf4e. This is what it tells us about antisemitism in the Labour Party:— Dave Rich (@daverich1) December 5, 2019
1. Antisemitism is *everywhere*. In party meetings, at annual conference, online, affecting ordinary members, MPs and councillors. pic.twitter.com/ZJGVeje2fN— Dave Rich (@daverich1) December 5, 2019
2. The party leadership & staff haven't allowed this to happen by mistake. This is not a crime of omission but of active complicity. The leadership has repeatedly denied the problem, supported those accused of antisemitism and encouraged the idea it is all a smear. pic.twitter.com/cyCDYpBfbw— Dave Rich (@daverich1) December 5, 2019
3. People who have themselves made antisemitic comments, or who believe allegations of antisemitism to be a smear, are promoted as candidates, staff or key committee members, while whistleblowers & complainants are attacked. pic.twitter.com/bbq43QObLq— Dave Rich (@daverich1) December 5, 2019
4. The party's own figures about antisemitism cases are worthless because the people producing these statistics actively work to block disciplinary cases, reduce sanctions and keep cases off the books. pic.twitter.com/S2i9zyY2V0— Dave Rich (@daverich1) December 5, 2019
5. At one point last year, cases were not even allowed to go on the system before they had been cleared by Corbyn loyalists. It was all personal emails and USB sticks to avoid any digital trace. pic.twitter.com/1EPd8hddd4— Dave Rich (@daverich1) December 5, 2019
6. Overall the submission paints a compelling picture of an institutionally racist party and an antisemitic political culture, one consequence of which is the exclusion of Jews. pic.twitter.com/nWDZBxctYl— Dave Rich (@daverich1) December 5, 2019
7. The last point is hopefully the most important: we only know all of this because of the courage and moral determination of dozens of whistleblowers. Some went public already on Panorama; all have stood up for Jews, for anti-racism and for traditional Labour values.— Dave Rich (@daverich1) December 5, 2019
It came when [Andrew] Neil put to Mr Corbyn that the Chief Rabbi had not been wrong to dispute Labour’s claims that antisemitism in the party had been dealt with. The example Neil gave was one reported here in the JC last year. The council candidate for a ward in Liverpool, Liam Moore, had tweeted “Rothschilds Zionists run Israel and world governments”....
Neil to Corbyn: Let me ask you this. Is it antisemitic to say Rothschild’s Zionists run Israel and world governments?
JC: In the Chakrabarti report we asked that people did not use comparisons about conspiracies, not use…
AN: Is that antisemitic?
JC: …because in the belief of Shami, and I support her on this in that report, that can be constructed as being an antisemitic statement and therefore – and therefore should not be -–
AN: Right, but let’s just get it clear. I asked you – I gave you a specific quote. Are the words ‘Rothschild’s Zionists run Israel and world government’. Is that antisemitic?
JC: It should not be used and it is.
AN: But you can’t say it’s antisemitic?
JC: Look, I just said that it should not be used.
Finally, painfully, he allowed that it was “an antisemitic trope”. Neil banked that and asked, so if the Chief Rabbi was wrong, why was Moore still in the party? After a short eternity of bluster (the transcript makes almost unbearable reading) Corbyn finally answered “Look, I don’t know the process that is involved with him.”....
The man, a Labour council candidate, tweets out neo-nazi conspiracy theories about Jews, is then endorsed as a candidate by his local party, his antisemitism is described as “inappropriate”, a year later is still in the party and the party leader and putative prime minister, under intense criticism for just this, says “Look, I don’t know the process that is involved with him.” And, of course, there are plenty of others.
Andrew Neil - Wouldn't you like to take this opportunity, tonight, to apologize to the British Jewish community for what's happened?
Jeremy Corbyn: What I'll is this - I am determined that our society will be safe for people of all faiths. I don't want anyone to be feeling insecure in our society and our government will protect every community.
Neil: So no apology?
Corbyn: Against the abuse they receive on the streets, on the trains...
Neil: So no apology?
Corbyn: or in any other form of life
Neil: Try one more time. No apology.
Corbyn: Andrew, Andrew, Can I explain what we're trying to do?
Neil: You have, and you've been given plenty of time to do it. I asked you if you wanted to apologize
Corbyn: We don't want anyone to go through what anyone has gone through
Neil: And you've said that several times. I understand that Mr. Corbyn. I was asking you about an apology.
Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis is certainly a small-‘c’ conservative on both political and theological matters. And he congratulated Boris Johnson on becoming Prime Minister (though it’s worth noting that religious leaders are expected to offer congratulations and promises of prayer to incoming prime ministers).
Whether or not Mirvis is a Tory is not the issue.
The most senior rabbi in British Orthodox Jewry has made an unprecedented intervention into party politics, warning that “the very soul of our nation is at stake” and that Jeremy Corbyn’s failure to tackle antisemitism within Labour means he is unfit to be prime minister. While Mirvis stopped short of endorsing any other party or using language as explicit as that used by Jonathan Romain, a senior Reform rabbi, who urged his congregants to vote tactically to defeat Labour, the message is clear: don’t vote Labour.
Rightly or wrongly, close to 85 per cent of British Jews (according to the polls) believe that Labour has become an antisemitic party under Corbyn and that he himself is an antisemite.
Corbyn’s supporters (including some Jews) point to his record as a “life-long” opponent of “all forms of racism”, but the fact remains that under his leadership the majority of British Jews have become alienated from Labour and the party is under investigation by the Equality and Human Rights Commission following claims of “institutional” antisemitism.He makes an interesting point, which I hadn't considered before, that what he calls the "absolute anti-Zionism" of the far left (organizations like the British Socialist Workers Party, the SWP) is a form of political antisemitism. It's not merely opposing the discriminatory policies of the state of Israel towards Arab citizens, general criticism of the government, or opposition to the Israeli occupation - it goes much further than that, to a belief that the state of Israel should never even have been established.
In sincere appreciation of his devotion and selfless effort which contributed greatly to the success of our 1948 campaign in behalf of the
In a year of destiny, his notable service helped American Jewry play an historic role in the establishment of the State of Israel, in the beginning of a new era of hope and reconstruction for the Jews of Europe and in strengthening the foundations of Jewish life at home.
Oct 10, 2019 7:39 PM
Sometimes it makes sense to go back and read Mein Kampf....
In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler makes it clear that his particular obsession with Jews was not based on their being one of the inferior races. There were plenty of those, and the Germanic and Aryan races would fight them for domination of scarce natural resources and living-space.
For Hitler, the Jews were a threat to the human race because they had brought to earth the notion that there was a way for humans to share the earth instead of killing each other for it. The Jews, according to Hitler, had imposed their values on the natural order and were a force working against humanity. "All world-historical events are nothing more than the expression of the self-preservation drive of the races," he wrote. "It is Jewry that always destroys this order," and "murders the future."....
Mein Kampf is clearly referenced in the video manifesto of the 27 year-old German man who tried to enter the Humboldt Street synagogue in Halle on Yom Kippur (Wednesday) and murder the Jews praying inside. Having failed to shoot open the armored door, he fled, killing two passersby.
"Feminism is the cause of declining birth rates in the West, which acts as a scapegoat for mass immigration, and the root of all these problems is the Jew," he declared, livestreaming himself before arriving at the synagogue.
The chain-reaction leading from feminism, to dropping birth-rates and mass immigration to Germany, all originates from the Jew. And since mass immigration in today’s Europe is a by-word for Muslims, then we are all in the firing-line together. The ideological manifesto of the Halle shooter is virtually identical to that of the mass-murderer of Christchurch who massacred 51 Muslims at prayer in New Zealand and of the shooter who murdered eleven Jews in a synagogue in Pittsburgh a year ago.
The updated version of Mein Kampf’s natural order of races fighting each other, to the death, is today’s "replacement theory," the conspiracy theory popular on the far-right with echoes on the less radical but more populist right-wing, which sees the hordes of Muslim immigrants invading western countries, depopulated by plummeting birth-rates, and replacing their white Christian majority. The liberal elites responsible for welcoming these immigrants have been contaminated by the Jews and their ideas.
Unsurprisingly, not one of the mainstream Israeli politicians releasing statements at the end of Yom Kippur about the Halle shooting could bring themselves to call the hatred by its name. How could they?
Their ideological allies, from Donald Trump in the U.S. to Viktor Orban in Hungary, regularly spout watered-down versions of the "replacement" theory. As do those very same Israeli politicians, when they talk of Israel’s own Muslim communities and the African asylum seekers who have found shelter here....
It’s not that the left is much better. Statements from left-wing politicians and commentators about how Jews and Muslims are now both targets of the far-right are just a bit too convenient. They obscure the fact that in the last eight years, all the Jews murdered in Europe for being Jews, were killed by Muslims. Because they represented something to them as well.
If the attacker on Yom Kippur had successfully broken down the door, then we would have more dead Jews in Halle to add to the twelve murdered over the past year by white supremacists in Pittsburgh and Poway. But the interesting thing with left-wing condemnations is that they tend to be much more eloquent when the perpetrator is white and comes from the far-right.
Because a dead Jew is never just a dead Jew, it depends who killed the Jew.
Anti-Semitism is binary, just not in the way that word is usually used in these situations. The left has long categorized Jews as being white and therefore privileged oppressors. We lose our privileged status only when the shooter is from the right, and proposes, as the Halle shooter did, to "kill as many anti-whites as possible, Jews preferred."
In the 20th century our parents and grandparents were killed for being both rapacious capitalists and godless communists. In this century we are killed for both encouraging Muslims to emigrate to the Christian West and for being the vanguard of the imperialist Christian West dispossessing Muslims in the Middle East. Either way we are the targets.
Facing the far-right, both Muslims and Jews are targets. And in the wave of Islamist attacks in recent years, Jews weren’t the only targets either. There were plenty of non-Jewish targets, including satirical cartoonists and pop concert-goers and people eating at restaurants and many bystanders.
But in the Venn diagram of these two waves of terror, Islamist and neo-Nazi, Jews are the only targets who overlap in the crosshairs of both sets of attackers.
The man and woman murdered on Wednesday have yet to be identified as of time of writing and when their names are released, will remain significant only to their families and friends. Not being Jewish, their deaths are not politicized.
For the 80 Jews in Halle, praying on Yom Kippur that the shooter would not break in, they had no idea if he was a neo-Nazi or a soldier of the Caliphate.
And if those had been their last moments alive, they would not have known how their deaths would be exploited by the politicians, framed by the media, and claimed by Israel - or by multi-cultural Europe.
One early obstacle for Plame Wilson, should she choose to run, is an anti-Semitism controversy: She was criticized in September 2017 for tweeting links to anti-Semitic articles, including a column titled “American Jews Are Driving America’s Wars” and another called “The Dancing Israelis” that insinuated the Mossad was involved in the 9/11 attacks. Plame at first defended her sharing of the “Jews drive wars” article, arguing, “many neocon hawks ARE Jewish.” [Links to both articles are below].Here are the two tweets that were discovered, one from 2015 and one from 2017:
(JTA) — Former CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson resigned from the board of the Ploughshares Fund days after she retweeted an article accusing American Jews of pushing the U.S. into a war with Iran.
Wilson, who[se] paternal grandfather was Jewish, made the announcement on Sunday in a series of tweets. “Actions have consequences, and while I have been honored to serve on the board of the Ploughshares Fund…to avoid detracting from their mission, I have resigned,” Wilson said in consecutive tweets. “I take full responsibility for my thoughtless and hurtful actions, and there are no excuses for what I did.”
She also tweeted that she was “horrified and ashamed” for retweeting articles from the Unz Review website “without closely examining content and authors.”
The article, titled “America's Jews Are Driving America’s Wars,” included several anti-Semitic tropes including that American Jews are guilty of dual loyalty to Israel, and that Jews control the media, the entertainment industry and politics.
Ploughshares Fund, where Wilson has served as a board member, issued a statement condemning Wilson’s original tweet of the article. Ploughshares works to reduce nuclear threats and to prevent a new arms race.Yair Rosenberg's comments are apposite here:
At the time, Plame defended her tweet, calling the article “provocative, but thoughtful.” She later apologized, claiming that she hadn’t read the piece whose contents she’d just been defending. Of course, given that the headline—which she tweeted—was “America’s Jews are Driving America’s Wars,” this was not a very convincing excuse. Moreover, as the indefatigable journalist Yashar Ali quickly uncovered, this was not the first time Plame had shared anti-Semitic material. In another instance, she had promoted the notorious conspiracy theory that a group of Israelis celebrated while 9/11 transpired (a canard that candidate Donald Trump later revived and applied to Muslims). [I added the link to the "America's Jews are Driving America's Wars" article].She linked to the first article named in Rosenberg's article on September 21, 2017 - that's the one that forced her to resign from the board of Ploughshares and delete her Twitter account. The second one, about 9/11, was from 2015.
The imposed holocaust narrative is full of holes and contradictions in terms of who was killed and how, but it is impossible for genuine academics to critique it if they want to stay employed. Books like Wiesel’s “Night” are largely works of fiction. The narrative exists to perpetuate the belief in Jewish suffering, which brings with it a number of practical advantages....
Third, holocaust guilt is used in the United States to counter any criticism of what Israel and Jewish groups are up to, as they use their wealth and access to power to corrupt America’s institutions and drive the country to needless wars. One might well ask, when confronted by the taxpayer funded holocaust museums that appear to spring up like mushrooms, why so much interest in a possible crime that has nothing to do with the United States?Why was Valerie Plame reading and posting articles by Philip Geraldi? His antisemitism is hardly hidden in these articles. I don't believe her apology that she hadn't "closely examined content and authors" - something obviously drew her to Geraldi's articles, and to the Unz Review itself. Why was someone who claims to be a progressive even reading the Unz Review? It's not a progressive publication. Plame may have a Jewish grandfather, but that doesn't seem to have sensitized her to the existence of antisemitism. If I lived in New Mexico, I wouldn't vote for her - and I'm certainly not giving her any money.
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Model of the Ghetto, showing the large and small ghettos in 1943 |
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Memorial for the fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto "The people of Israel - for its fighters and martyrs" (In Hebrew, Yiddish, and Polish) |
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The martyrs of the Ghetto, on their way to death (on the other side of the memorial) |
The strength of Mesopotamian religious tradition, which gave Nippur its longevity, can be illustrated best by evidence from the excavation of the temple of Inanna, goddess of love and war. Beginning at least as early as the Jemdet Nasr Period (c. 3200 B.C.), the temple continued to flourish as late as the Parthian Period (c. A.D. 100), long after Babylonia had ceased to exist as an independent state and had been incorporated into larger cultures with different religious systems (Persian, Seleucid, and Parthian empires). The choice of Nippur as the seat of one of the few early Christian bishops, lasting until the city's final abandonment around A.D. 800, was probably an echo of its place at the center of Mesopotamian religion. In the Sasanian Period, 4th to 7th Centuries, A.D., most of the major features of Mesopotamian cultural tradition ceased, but certain aspects of Mesopotamian architectural techniques, craft manufacture, iconography, astrology, traditional medicine, and even some oral tradition survived, and can be traced even today not just in modern Iraq but in a much wider area.Gibson writes about the excavations of Nippur:
Nippur has been the focus of major excavation since 1889 when the University of Pennsylvania opened the first American expedition in the Middle East. Finding the site a rich source for cuneiform tablets, that expedition continued to excavate at Nippur until 1900 [Hilprecht 1903; Peters 1897]. The main achievements of the expedition were to locate the ziggurat and temple of Enlil and to recover more than 30,000 cuneiform tablets of extraordinary literary, historical, grammatical, and economic importance. More than 80% of all known Sumerian literary compositions have been found at Nippur. Included were the earliest recognized versions of the Flood Story, parts of the Gilgamesh Epic, and dozens of other compositions. It was these Sumerian works, plus an invaluable group of lexical texts and bilingual (Sumerian/Akkadian) documents that allowed scholars to make real progress in deciphering and understanding Sumerian. As important in historical terms are royal inscriptions from all periods, especially those of the Kassite Dynasty which ruled Mesopotamia from about 1600 to 1225 B. C. More than 80% of our knowledge of this dynasty has come from Nippur texts. In a special category of Nippur texts are the business archives of the Murashu family, merchant bankers who controlled vast commercial and agricultural interests under the Achaemenid Persian kings (c. 500 B.C.) [Stolper 1985].Gibson's article doesn't mention the incantation bowls, except obliquely, because he focuses on the earlier periods. The bowls are dated to the late Sasanian/early Islamic period (roughly the 5th-8th centuries CE), the last periods of habitation of Nippur.
Recent archaeological evidence has shed further light onto the Aramaic-speaking communities of Sasanid Mesopotamia. Recent excavations at Nippur of Area WG - adjoining the Jewish settlement dug a century earlier and from which Montgomery published his forty specimens - revealed in the seventh-century Level III five downturned incantation bowls. These were randomly buried in a courtyard which also featured an oven. Three of the specimens were written in Aramaic and two in Mandaic, the latter pair being for brothers.... The placement of the Aramaic and Mandaic incantation bowls strongly suggests that two families, one possibly Jewish and the other Mandaean, shared adjacent domestic quarters.The article is "Aramaic-Speaking Communities of Sasanid Mesopotamia," Aram 7 (1995): 319-335, and the quotation is from pp. 332-32, published on p. 129 of Rabbis, Sorcerers, Kings, and Priests: The Culture of the Talmud in Ancient Iran, by Jason Sion Mokhtarian (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015).
A copy of an inscription of Ur-Ninurta on a tablet excavated at Nippur deals with the setting up, in the courtyard of Ninlil's Gagiššua temple, of an image of the king holding an offering of a votive goat (máš-kadra).This is part of the inscription:
ii 6'-150 for the great mother of the Anuna gods, the lady of the Kiur [...], in order to choose the mes of the Ekur, the supreme shrine, [in order] to purify the cleansing rites of shrine Nippur, the bon[d of heaven and earth, in order] to make the neg[lected] rites appear magnificently, [in order] to restore Nippur, the lea[d] goat [of the nation],
ii 16-210 it was Ur-Ninurta, who devoted himself to the Ekur, upon whom the god Enlil, king of the foreign lands, look[ed] am[ong] the broad, numerous people and truly [chose].
vi r-30 (I, Ur-Ninurta)..., (for) the gods An, Enlil, (and) Ninlil removed evil from ...
vi 4-50 and set up for them a ... (in) the shining [E]kur, (in) the ... city
vi 6'-120 I fashioned (for Ninlil) a [copper] image, whose form was endowed with my face, clasping a votive kid, standing to make supplications for me, an ornament of the main courtyard of the Gagiššua (temple).
vi 13'-140 1 dedicated it to her for my own life.
vi 15-180 (As for) the man who gives orders to do evil against it, who [destroys m]y [handi]work
edge 1-6) ... the supreme ... of the god Enlil, may the ... which proclaims his name be revoked from the [Ek]ur. M [ay the god N]inurta, the mighty champion of the god Enlil, forever b[e] its (the curse's) evil spirit who cannot be countermanded.
"I will reveal to you, Gilgamesh, a hidden matterEa told Utnapishtim:
And a secret of the gods I will tell you:
Shuruppak - a city which you know,
And which is situated on the banks of the Euphrates -
That city was ancient, (as were) the gods within it,
When their hearts led the great gods to produce the flood."
"Their words he repeats to the reed-hut:Source: Tablet XI of Gilgamesh, published in Pritchard, ANET, p. 93.
'Reed-hut, reed-hut! Wall, wall!
Reed-hut, hearken! Wall, reflect!
Man of Shuruppak, son of Ubar-Tutu,
Tear down (this) house, build a ship!
Give up possessions, seek life!
Forswear (worldly) goods and keep the soul alive!
Aboard the ship take the seed of all living things.'"
Wooden synagogues were common in the 16th and 17th century because of the accessibility and low cost of the raw material.
They were built by local craftsmen, not necessarily Jews, inspired by manors and rich bourgeois mansions. High-pitched synagogue roofs dominated the surroundings. Underneath there was the praying hall, corridor and increasingly large women’s section. The synagogue in Gwoździec, humble on the outside, hid extraordinary riches inside.
The wooden building, erected most probably in 1640, was 15 meters high. During its existence it underwent numerous modifications. For example, the southwest brick wing was added later to be used as a children’s study room (kheder) and a heated praying place during winter. The main hall reserved for men was an octagonal copula decorated with fabulous biblical paintings. The women’s section was located in the north and south part of the synagogue and on the gallery above the entrance hall. The synagogue was famous for its polychromes covering the ceiling and the walls, interlaced with biblical verses, proverbs and anagrams. One of the synagogue creators was Mordekhai Lissnitzki of Jaryzow. The paintings were restored by Izhak ben Yehuda of Jaryzow in 1729.
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The bimah. |
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One of the painted sides of the bimah. |
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Looking through the top of the bimah towards the paintings on the ceiling. |
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Faun and flora painted on the vault - notice the turkey! |
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Psalm-prayer medallion on the ceiling, above a fish surrounding a town. |
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On the other side of the vault. |
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Excerpt from the Torah that is chanted before the Torah reading, above a painting of an elephant carrying a house! |
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The ceiling area that would have been above the Ark, with the two tablets of the Ten Commandments. |
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The double-headed eagle of the Russian Empire (I think). |
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This section of the wall goes between two post-war buildings. |
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This is one of of the original bricks - you can see how uneven and pockmarked it is. |