Today's Antisemitism Report: George Soros as the "anti-Christ"

First, a case of vandalism.

The Jewish Community Center of Northern Virginia was marked with large swastikas this morning. Senator Tim Kaine reports on Twitter:

Removal of the hateful graffiti:

Second, Rudy Giuliani, President Trump's lawyer, reposted an antisemitic remark that blamed George Soros for the demonstrations this week in Washington, DC, against the Brett Kavanaugh nomination to the Supreme Court. Soros, of course, is the whipping boy of both the left and the right, despite his work for democracy in Eastern Europe, his founding (and funding) of Central European University in Budapest, the work of the Open Society Foundations for democracy around the world, etc.

Soros is Jewish, originally from Hungary, where he narrowly escaped being murdered by the Nazis when he was a teenage boy. Calling him the "anti-Christ" is blatantly antisemitic - akin to blaming Jews for the death of Jesus.

Giuliani was just following his master, Trump. Yesterday, Trump blamed Soros for funding the anti-Kavanaugh protestors:

George Soros did not pay for people to protest Kavanaugh. And by the way, at almost every demonstration organized by an existing group there are identical signs. There are identical signs at campaign events for Republican and Democratic candidates. The NRA buys identical signs, as does NARAL. It's not something sinister to have printed signs.

From Buzzfeed:

Soros, a hedge fund manager and longtime donor to the Democrats and other liberal causes, is often the target of a right-wing conspiracy theory that claims he controls global politics.

The use of the term “anti-Christ” is specifically loaded as Soros, who is Jewish, is often the target of anti-Semitic attacks. In some Christian teachings, the Antichrist is the enemy of Christ and the church, who appears before the end of the world.

Soros has been a frequent target of Republicans during the Kavanaugh debate. Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley, asked by Fox Business on Friday if Soros was funding the protests, said, “I tend to believe it.”

The person who wrote the “anti-Christ” tweet had not been replying to Giuliani, but instead to Tom Fitton, the head of a conservative organization called Judicial Watch, who posted a video titled “Leftist Efforts to Destroy Kavanaugh.”

On Saturday Trump continued claiming that people protesting Kavanaugh are “paid professional protesters who are handed expensive signs.”

And guess who else blames Soros for funding the anti-Kavanaugh protests? RT, the Russian propaganda network - see a report of theirs on Youtube: Anti-Kavanaugh protesters linked to billionaire George Soros.

NB: Soros was not a collaborator with the Nazis in Budapest when they occupied the city in 1944. He was a victim, who narrowly escaped with his life.

From the Snopes article on the libel that he was a collaborator:

As a prominent political activist and supporter of left-wing causes, Hungarian-born billionaire financier George Soros has frequently been the target of smear campaigns, and none more odious than the persistent — and false — claim that Soros, a Jew, was a Nazi sympathizer, collaborator, and/or paramilitary officer during World War II.

That Soros was only nine years old (born in 1930) when the war broke out and all of 14 when Nazi Germany surrendered in May 1945 hasn’t dampened his detractors’ enthusiasm for spreading these rumors, including the absurd claim, which first surfaced in November 2016, that Soros literally served as an officer of the paramilitary Schutzstaffel (SS) in Germany.

This allegation continues to make the social media rounds in the form of a black-and-white photograph of a young man — supposedly Soros — wearing an SS uniform (...), accompanied by some version of this caption:

... I give you George Soros. A SS in the National Socialist German workers party. Nazi party. He served under Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler. He said it was the best time of his life. The destruction and agony around him was euphoric to him. This man was making policy with Hillary Clinton. And some of you think Trump is dangerous. Wow!

Wow, indeed. But given his age, Soros couldn’t have joined the SS (whose minimum age requirement was 17) even if he had wanted to. Moreover, as a Hungarian Jew he couldn’t have met the SS requirement for pure “Aryan” heritage. Quite to the contrary, Soros and his entire family were obliged to hide their identities and pose as Christians to avoid being forcibly housed in ghettos, interned in concentration camps, deported, or killed during the 10-month Nazi occupation of Hungary beginning in 1944.

Was Soros a Nazi Collaborator?

It is also claimed that Soros survived the German occupation of Budapest by becoming a Nazi “collaborator.” Fox News pundit Glenn Beck alleged in November 2010, for example, that the 14-year-old Soros “help[ed] the government confiscate the lands of his fellow Jewish friends and neighbors,” and, worse (in Beck’s view), was unrepentant about it:

So when George Soros was 14, his father basically bribed a government official to take his son in and let him pretend to be a Christian. His father was just trying to keep him alive. He even had to go around confiscating property of Jewish people. Now, imagine you are Jewish and you have to go and confiscate the property of your fellow Jews. And you are pretending to not be a Jew and if anybody finds out, you’re dead. He actually had to endure watching people sent off to their eventual murders, watching people gathering their stuff, sending them off knowing that they were going to go to their death.

“I don’t want to question the 14-year-old,” Beck disingenuously stated during a series of broadcasts devoted to painting Soros as an evil “puppet-master” of the left. “I would have, however, liked to question the 80-year-old man who has never once said he regretted it,” he added.

Central to Beck’s case were quotes and clips from a 1998 60 Minutes interview (which can be viewed in its entirety here), an excerpt from which was also used as the centerpiece in a commentary on the conspiracist web site InfoWars.com in which host Alex Jones claimed that the teenaged Soros “helped round up thousands of people” and “stole hundreds of millions of dollars” from Hungarian Jews on behalf of the Nazi occupiers.

Conservative author Dinesh D’Souza (who has gone so far as to compare the 14-year-old George Soros to Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele) revived the “Nazi collaborator” claim in his 2017 book The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left, doubling down on it in a social media campaign to promote book sales:

Dinesh D'Souza

✔@DineshDSouza

.@georgesoros, now a principle financial backer of violent #Antifa thugs, admits his collaboration with Hitler and says he has no regrets: pic.twitter.com/P1Xl1vo87T

8:30 PM - Sep 1, 2017

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Other conservative and alt-right media figures followed suit:

Soros was Nazi collaborator. He laughed about it. https://t.co/N41dkcDG6y

— Mike Cernovich ?? (@Cernovich) September 13, 2017

Ann Coulter

✔@AnnCoulter

Media Matters sugar daddy is George Soros, WHO IDENTIFIED JEWS TO THE NAZIS, as he admitted on 60 Minutes -- http://bit.ly/1IM0bYc 

10:51 PM - Jun 11, 2015

Ann Coulter Credits White Nationalist As "Intellectual Influence" On Her Anti-Immigrant Book

Ann Coulter Credits White Nationalist As "Intellectual Influence" On Her Anti-Immigrant Book

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Yet the simple truth is that George Soros neither said nor did anything resembling what he has been accused of. In no sense was Soros, who turned 14 years old not long after the Germans occupied Hungary in 1944, a “Nazi collaborator.” At no time did he confiscate (or help confiscate) the property of Jews, “identify Jews to the Nazis,” or help “round up” people targeted for deportation or extermination by the Germans (to answer just a few of the accusations leveled against him). And although Soros did attest during the infamous 60 Minutes interview that he regrets nothing about the time of German occupation, he also said it is precisely because he didn’t do any of the things attributed to him that his conscience is clear....

Did Soros Serve Jews with Death or Deportation Notices?

Another “Nazi collaborator” trope holds that young George Soros helped send fellow Jews to their deaths by delivering deportation notices on behalf of Budapest’s Jewish Council (Judenrat in German), an organization tasked by the Nazis with helping enforce Nazi policies on the Hungarian Jewish population:

People Soros deported to Auschwitz

Soros served Jews with “death notices” to go to Auschwitz
https://t.co/mWVzcN2SlJ:

— KellyLeeMedia (@jasian12345) August 23, 2017

YOUNG SOROS delivered notices for Nazis informing Jews of deportation
Later promoted to listing their confiscated property
‘Happiest youth’

— armageddon #bluehand (@davis_blackwood) November 15, 2016

However, as in the case of the “confiscation” rumors already discussed, here we find innocuous facts about George Soros’s adolescence twisted and exaggerated into a grotesque lie. According to Soros’s father, school-age Jewish children were required to run errands for the council. Among those errands (he came to find out) was delivering deportation notices to prominent Jews. But although George did, in fact, spend all of two days as a Jewish Council errand boy, he didn’t perform his assigned tasks exactly as ordered, taking it upon himself to warn the recipients of the notices that they ought not to comply [From George’s father, Tivadar Soros, in his 1965 autobiography, Masquerade: Dancing Around Death in Nazi Occupied Hungary].

As Jews couldn’t go to school any more and their teachers couldn’t teach, they were ordered to report to council headquarters. The children were enlisted as couriers under the command of their teachers. My younger son, George, also became a courier. On the second day he returned home at seven in the evening. 

‘What did you do all day?’ 

‘Mostly nothing. But this afternoon I was given some notices to deliver to various addresses.’ 

‘Did you read what they said?’
‘I even brought one home.’ 

He handed me a small slip of paper, with a typewritten message: 

SUMMONS
You are requested to report tomorrow morning at 9 o’clock at the Rabbinical Seminary in Rokk Szildrd Street. Please bring with you a blanket, and food for two days. 

THE JEWISH COUNCIL 

‘Do you know what this means?’ I asked him. 

‘I can guess,’ he replied with great seriousness. ‘They’ll be interned.’ 

Children are often good guessers. I wondered whether he knew what being interned meant. Did this child of mine realize that these people would be deported to Germany and very possibly murdered? I felt too ashamed of the world I had brought him into to enlighten him. 

‘The Jewish Council has no right to give people orders like that,’ I told him. ‘You are not to work there any more.’

‘I tried to tell the people I called on not to obey,’ he said, clearly disappointed that I wouldn’t let him work any more. He was beginning to enjoy his career as a courier: it was all a big adventure.

How the Boycott of Israel Can Harm Students

IS WRITING A LETTER OF RECOMMENDATION A PROFESSIONAL RESPONSIBILITY OR A POLITICAL CHOICE?

By Susana Cavallo, David Greenberg, Rebecca Lesses, Jeffry Mallow, Sharon Musher, Cary Nelson
(Chair), and Kenneth Stern, the executive committee of the Alliance for Academic Freedom.

[This statement expands upon and updates an op-ed first published in the Chronicle of Higher
Education, “How the Israel Boycott Can Compromise Faculty and Harm Students.“]

In July 2014, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel published guidelines, including one instructing professors to refuse to write recommendations for students applying to study in Israel. The guidelines were immediately adopted by the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. Ever since, BDS members have said that this would affect institutions, not individuals. However, the case this month of a professor refusing to write a letter of recommendation for a student wishing to study in Israel exemplifies the personal consequences of such actions.

John Cheney-Lippold, an associate professor in the department of American culture at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, emailed an undergraduate student to say he had just realized she was applying to study abroad at Tel Aviv University, and therefore, in compliance with the boycott movement, he was withdrawing his offer to write a recommendation on her behalf to that university. He added that he was happy to write other recommendations for her, thus confirming that he had no doubts about her academic record, which would be a valid justification for refusing to write a recommendation.

Faculty members are free to decline requests to write recommendation letters for many reasons. They may feel they don’t know the student well enough, or they may not consider a student strong enough to earn a letter that is both honest and favorable. A faculty member is also entitled to share with a student ethical or political objections to study in a given country. Although institutions have a responsibility to warn students traveling to foreign countries about risks and to determine which institutions they will and will not establish formal relations with, individual faculty members don’t bear such responsibility. In any case, it is students who must ultimately decide what’s in their best interest.

For a faculty member to impose a political litmus test on recommendations and refuse to write to a program because it is based in a particular country violates a student’s right to apply for admission to his or her program of choice. That is what happened here.

Eleven faculty members who are leaders in or supporters of the BDS movement have posted a statement endorsing Cheney-Lippold’s decision, and BDS-affiliated faculty have also organized an online petition supporting him and a pledge for faculty, administrators, students, and staff to refuse to participate in study-abroad programs in Israel. Although the pledge does not say explicitly that they should refuse to write letters of recommendation, by urging signers to endorse the boycott and discouraging participation in study-abroad programs, it implicitly does so. For boycott endorsers, opposition to Israel has a moral status that outweighs academic freedom and even a student’s right to learn.

The statement by 11 faculty members elevates political conviction to the level of religious belief: “Professors, like any other individual, are entitled to hold political positions and act in a manner that conforms to their stated positions. … Cheney-Lippold endorses the academic boycott of Israel and, in declining to write a letter of recommendation for a study abroad program in Israel, he is aligning his actions with his stated views.”

This alarming claim would create a new faculty “right” in which individual political belief can override university policies and professional standards. If this principle were actually applied, great harm would result. Imagine Democratic law professors refusing to write recommendations for a worthy student eager for an internship with a conservative Republican judge.

Further, the online statement gives another reason to support Cheney-Lippold: “Some students, specifically students of Palestinian, Middle Eastern, and Muslim background, who attempt to travel to Israel and the Palestinian territories may be denied visas to Israel or would be denied entry into the country.” No evidence of such travel restrictions is presented, but the politicization of professional responsibilities raises real concerns in any case. Would professors then be within their rights to refuse a Muslim student wanting to study in Qatar or Saudi Arabia because it would be difficult for Jewish students to travel there? Could they refuse a recommendation for any student wanting to study in the United States, because of President Trump’s anti-Muslim travel ban?

BDS-affiliated faculty have also organized an online petition supporting Cheney-Lippold, offering pledge for faculty, administrators, students, and staff to refuse to participate in study abroad programs in Israel. Although this pledge does not state explicitly that faculty should refuse to write letters of recommendation, by urging signers to endorse USACBI’s boycott call and discouraging any form of participation in a study abroad program, it implicitly does so. For boycott endorsers, opposition to Israel has a moral status that outweighs academic freedom and even a student’s right to learn.
Cheney-Lippold’s action acquired an additional complication after he told the Detroit News he had in fact previously written letters for two students applying to study in Israel. “I wrote for them because I did not have tenure,” said Cheney-Lippold. “I know how people are treated without tenure.” Although this may put the unqualified character of his political commitment in question, its more serious implication is that tenure in effect may protect a faculty member’s ability to substitute political for professional criteria in fulfilling academic responsibilities.

Professional ethics and AAUP policy specifically oppose politically based actions. The AAUP’s “Joint Statement on Rights and Freedoms of Students” states: “The professor in the classroom and in conference should encourage free discussion, inquiry, and expression. Student performance should be evaluated solely on an academic basis, not on opinions or conduct in matters unrelated to academic standards.” While not specifically referring to letter-of-recommendation policies, the AAUP clearly objects to the curtailment of student free expression, political opinion, and academic choice, which would include efforts to block study in Israel.

In addition, most students who apply to study in Israel are Jewish, and Israel is a Jewish state. Thus, there is arguably an element of discrimination based on religion and national status in this refusing to support specifically those students who seek to study in Israel.

We condemn those who have responded to Cheney-Lippold’s words with harassment (including, reportedly, death threats), responses that are increasingly a part of American political life and dangerously enhanced by social media. Such vitriol can have a chilling effect on the free speech that is crucial to academic freedom. We also vehemently disagree with a petition calling for his firing. Refusing a professional obligation is not grounds for dismissal and, needless to say, nothing justifies threats against a person’s life.

But some official response to Cheney-Lippold’s breach of professional ethics is necessary; we urge the University of Michigan administration to respond more forcefully than it has. It should indicate that faculty who discriminate against students based on their political positions, religious backgrounds, or ethnic identification will face consequences.

It is important that the University of Michigan faculty senate has unanimously stated that student qualifications, not faculty political views, should determine whether one agrees to write a letter of recommendation. That effectively isolates those who politicize their professional responsibilities in this way. It will discourage some faculty from following Cheney-Lippold’s lead who might otherwise be inclined to do so. But it is unlikely to have much impact on the most strongly committed boycott activists. So we regret that the Michigan Senate did not support some form of sanction. Not writing a letter of recommendation for political reasons is not a firing offense, but it might, for example, delay or eliminate a scheduled salary increase.

Because professors at other institutions might similarly discriminate against students, particularly in light of the recent pledge, it is vital that colleges and professional associations reiterate their commitment to study-abroad programs in Israel, and clarify and then publicize policies articulating faculty members’ professional responsibilities and the consequences of their failure to perform those duties.

Faculty should understand what will happen if they deprive deserving students of recommendations based on politics. Cheney-Lippold’s action may be the first explicit case of its kind, but it almost certainly won’t be the last.

Anti-Arab Violence in Jerusalem

I've been so obsessed with US news that I haven't noticed some things happening in Jerusalem. I received this email from the New Israel Fund tonight about Jews attacking Arabs in Jerusalem, and the response of some Israelis to this violence.

The past week has seen a series of attacks targeting Arabs in the Jerusalem area.

On Sunday - on the eve of the holiday of Simchat Torah - several dozen Jewish rioters, coming out of prayers at the Kotel, threw chairs, tables, and rocks at Palestinian stores and restaurants near the Old City's Damascus Gate. Five Palestinians were injured. A few days before, four Palestinian students were accosted at a park right next to Jerusalem’s popular German Colony neighborhood. One of them was allegedly tased and beaten until he lost consciousness. That same day, a Palestinian bus driver was assaulted in his bus in the settlement of Beitar Illit.

These new attacks are part of a disturbing pattern. And they cannot be divorced from the choices that Israel's leaders have made to pursue policies that stoke divisions, that empower racists, and that suggest that Arabs have no place in Israel. I’m appalled that no minister in Israel's cabinet condemned these acts of violence to date.

While those in power choose to remain silent, NIF organizations are taking action. On Tuesday, a delegation of Jewish Israelis, organized by the Tag Meir coalition, came to the home of the Zarib family in the Galilee. Two members of the family had been attacked by right-wing demonstrators last month.

The visitors brought with them an olive tree and living proof that a better future -- where every person in Israel can live and care for their family in safety and peace -- is possible. Outreach to the victims of the more recent attacks, and to leaders in their community, is underway. One visit is already confirmed for next week.

The person-to-person outreach that Tag Meir is doing here is just one part of the work we support that can create a better future for Israel -- one where everybody has equal rights and where every person has the opportunity to thrive.

Article in Ha'aretz with more details about the attacks:

Several Palestinians were lightly injured Sunday when they were attacked by a large group of Orthodox Jews near Damascus Gate in Jerusalem, Palestinians said – one of a spate of such assaults on Arabs by Jews in the city in recent days.

Some of the events were captured by closed-circuit cameras; the police said one man was injured. 

Last Wednesday, four Palestinian students were assaulted in Gonenim Park in the Katamon neighborhood by Jewish youths, who allegedly used a Taser on some of their victims. Also last week, a Palestinian bus driver was assaulted in the Orthodox settlement of Betar Ilit on the outskirts of Jerusalem. 

“They think they’re strong because there are a lot of them, so they started throwing chairs and tables, and anybody who tried to protect their property got hit,” said Iyyad Kastro, a business owner at the scene. In the Damascus Gate incident, according to eyewitnesses and footage from closed-circuit cameras, several dozen Orthodox men were coming out of the Old City after prayers at the Western Wall. They then threw chairs and tables from nearby restaurants and stones at Arab passersby and business owners, before they were dispersed by the police. No arrests were made. 

“Every year on this night there are problems. We’re the victims of your holiday,” he added, referring to Simhat Torah. “On our Feast of the Sacrifice there are goats, and on your holiday the victims are the Palestinians.” 

A wounded Palestinian man near Damascus Gate in Jerusalem's Old City, September 30, 2018.

Palestinian sources said five young men were injured in the assault, while cars and other property were damaged. The police said the attack took place outside the Damascus Gate by “extremist ultra-Orthodox men ... coming from prayers at the Western Wall when a clash erupted with a number of locals. A police detachment on the scene stopped the clash."

The police said one man was injured and a number of vehicles were damaged, as well as tables and chairs belonging to businesses in the area. The police said they were investigating.

Last Wednesday the incident was more serious. Four Palestinian students, from Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem and from Beit Safafa in West Jerusalem were sitting in Gonenim Park near the Railway Park, when they were set upon by several Jewish youths, most of them Orthodox, and severely beaten, the police said.

Stones were also thrown at them and one of them was attacked with a Taser, the police said, adding that at least one suspect had been arrested.

“We were sitting there for maybe five minutes when we saw a group of about 30 men, age 20 to 35 – one looked like their rabbi, around 55,” said Islam Agwa, a law student. “They were looking for Arabs and the second they saw we were Arabs their rabbi said a word and they jumped us.”

As Agwa put it, “I tried to run but they caught me and beat me, kicked me, slapped me and hit me with a Taser in the shoulder and the leg. They kept on hitting me for about 10 minutes until I lost consciousness.”

Agwa said that when the police came, the assailants ran off, stealing four of the Arabs’ motorbike helmets. As the assailants fled, one of them dropped his cellphone, which the police are using in their investigation.

The police took the victims for medical treatment. Agwa suffered a broken nose and deep cuts and bruises to his face, head and neck. One of his friends was injured in the shoulders by a block thrown at him.

“This wasn’t an assault, it was attempted murder,” Agwa said, adding that the police invited him and his friends to a lineup of suspects.

A few hours after the assault, the police arrested Avihu Haim David Cohen, 21, from Jerusalem. At a hearing Sunday, his detention was extended until Wednesday. Judge Sharon Lari-Bavli, after viewing a video of the incident, said the suspicions against Cohen were strong.

She also said that Cohen tried to interfere in the investigation and that he was a danger to the public. 

In another case, a bus driver, Armenius Rafat, was assaulted by passengers in the settlement of Betar Ilit. 

“Dozens of Arab drivers are attacked each year in violent racist assaults. Only a tiny number of these assaults are investigated by the police, and in most cases the assailants run free,” said Gadi Gvaryahu, the chairman of the anti-racism group Tag Meir.
“Unfortunately the bus companies also prefer to keep this quiet, even though the number of Arab drivers attacked is much greater than their percentage in the company. They should be recognized as terror victims, and the police must get to every assailant and prosecute them.” 

Regarding the assault outside Damascus Gate, the left-wing group Ir Amim said: “This is an area in the heart of East Jerusalem life; the Israeli authorities must ensure the well-being and property of the Palestinian residents year-round, with special attention to sensitive days such as the holidays.”

Anger in my heart.

Anger. That's what's in my heart.

Dr. Ford's story of Brett Kavanaugh (ימח שמו) trying to rape her when he was 17 and she was 15.

The many stories of women who are speaking up now about how they were brutally raped, sexually assaulted, sexually harassed, catcalled, groped at parties or in school hallways, were forced to listen to sexual jokes at work, in class, were laughed at by boys or men who mocked them, who called them sexual slurs.

And now, the old white men of the Senate who just have to have one of their own in the Supreme Court.

I believe that every man who still supports Kavanaugh for Supreme Court has something wrong with him.

Maybe he behaved the same way when he was in high school and he's trying to repress the memory and justify his actions to himself.

Maybe he finally sees the chance to bring back the full patriarchy in the US.

So that women can't have abortions when they're raped or when having a child will kill them.

So that birth control is no longer considered a right, so that any act of sexual intercourse could lead a child being born.

Wanting women to go back home, back to the kitchen, back to the back-alley abortionist.

To get back to the time when men were completely in control.

They're still so angry that Hillary Clinton had the chutzpah to run for president, much less get so close.

That's why I'm so angry.

Where is the Street Theater of the Resistance?

My friend Shira Houghton gives her thoughts on what the resistance to Trump really needs:

During the campaign I wanted to dress protesters up in shackles and Trump colored orange shirts that said, "Did he grab me?" "Did he rape me" "Did he ruin me?" The crimes of Donald Trump are myriad, but somehow were ignored by a ridiculously large percentage of our population. We need more theater! I thought. However, I got no traction from my friends and fellow soccer Moms for this and stupidly assumed that other, better politically connected people, would pick up the ball.

Hillary adapted "Fight Song," which is cute and catchy, for her campaign. And she also had... what? People of good cheer trying to do the right thing? A few flash mobs showing how diverse and lovely her base is? I weep remembering our naïveté in thinking that a few chicks in pantsuits dancing with some of the wheelchair bound was going to be enough to Bring Down the Patriarchy .

It's become a cliché to say that we are in a national crisis; the list of what we are losing every single day seems endless and soul destroying. However, most of the personal atrocities we know about, the ones people connect to viscerally, happen without a camera's eye upon them. We occasionally hear the sounds of children in cages, but most of the visuals we see are of the bittersweet reunifications. We know sexual assault happen, but unless it's a gang rape there are rarely eyewitnesses other than the assailant and survivor.

There are notable exceptions. Therese Patricia Okoumou scampered up the Statue of Liberty to protest the separation of migrant families. Black people are training cameras on both horrific murders and life denying stories of barbequing-while-black. The sounds of children who had been ripped from their parents were smuggled out and disseminated to a horrified public. The Trump Baby Balloon and Rubber Chicken are cartoon gimmicks that help bring eyes, ears and humor to the Resistance.

I beg, nay implore, that we need more Handmaids. We need installations with barbed wire and teddy bears and babies bawling in their “iceboxes.” We need whirling dervish dances about assault and fear. We need Punch and Judy puppet shows where 45 smashes small businesses and is flushed down a sinkhole. We need subversive videos that cartoonishly lampoon these straight, white guys and their mushroom dicks. We need to illuminate in song and dance just how these rich guys want to make our country their personal piggy bank.

Vote? Of course Vote! Drag and drive friends and strangers to the booth! But we vote rarely. We must protest loudly, messily, beautifully and frequently. The news about KavaNos was filled with the visuals of Handmaids and the screams of Rage. We need more of that. They are stealing the American Dream from us one silenced woman and one traumatized person of color at a time. We are the Majority! We need to ridicule their evil, illustrate their vices, echo their obfuscations so loudly they must cover their ears from the roar. Theater is not easy, but neither is Democracy. W e stand to gain so much more than we lose by making our art and our hearts dramatically heard.

The academic boycott of Israel affects American students

John Cheney-Lippold, an associate professor Department of American Culture of the University of Michigan, refused to write a letter of recommendation for a student to study abroad in Israel. He initially had said he would write it for her, but when he realized she wanted to go to Israel he withdrew his offer. The BDS movement is opposed to study abroad programs in Israel. These are the guidelines from the PACBI website:

Study abroad schemes in Israel for international students.  These programs are usually housed at Israeli universities and are part of the Israeli propaganda effort, designed to give international students a “positive experience” of Israel, whitewashing its occupation and denial of Palestinian rights.  Publicity and recruitment for these schemes through students’ affairs offices or academic departments (such as Middle East and international studies centers) at universities abroad should come to an end.

Guideline 10 requires faculty supporting the academic boycott not to write recommendations for students who want to study in Israel:

Furthermore, international faculty should not accept to write recommendations for students hoping to pursue studies in Israel, as this facilitates the violation of guideline 11 below. 

This is guideline 11:

International students enrolling in or international faculty teaching or conducting research at degree or non-degree programs at an Israeli institution. If conducting research at Israeli facilities such as archives does not entail official affiliation with those facilities (e.g. in the form of a visiting position), then the activity is not subject to boycott. 

I've had a visiting research position at Hebrew University (in 2012), so I guess I've violated the academic boycott - proudly, I must say.

The University of Michigan Board of Trustees has rejected the academic boycott of Israel:

Six of the eight members of the board signed the letter, and criticized BDS as an assault on the institution’s values. 

“Our university has long been a community that seeks to study and improve the human condition through our research and scholarship,” the statement said. “We work together to better understand the most complex challenges we face on campus and beyond. We do this work through active engagement in the world around us. To boycott, divest or sanction Israel offends these bedrock values of our great university.”

The day after the student received the note from Cheney-Lippold, she wrote to the president of the University of Michigan:

“I firmly believe that any student’s abroad experience should not be impacted or dictated by any professor’s personal political beliefs,” they wrote. “I feel that his response is very disturbing, as he is allowing his personal beliefs (and apparently those of ‘many university departments’) to interfere with my dreams of studying abroad.” 

“All I asked for was an academic recommendation regarding my work habits, diligence, and aptitude as a student,” they continued.

They called this stance “unconscionable and hypocritical, as presumably he would have no problem in issuing a letter of recommendation” to students who seek to study abroad in “totalitarian” countries and territories as part of a formal U-M program, namely “China, Cuba, Russia, Jordan and the Palestinian Territories.” 

The student pointed out that Cheney-Lippold’s rejection did not appear to stem from any objection to their work ethic or other characteristics, but rather “his own political views.” 

The student further suggested that Cheney-Lippold’s conduct appears to be in violation of a 2017 statement by U-M’s Board of Regents rejecting the BDS campaign, as well as Public Acts 526 and 527, which were signed into law in Michigan in 2016. The bipartisan bills, similar to others that have been passed in nearly two dozen states, bar state agencies from contracting with an individual who is engaged in “the boycott of a person based in or doing business with a strategic partner,” namely Israel.

Will the university do anything to assist this student, perhaps by making sure that another professor write her a recommendation to study in Israel?

This is the university's official response thus far:

Rick Fitzgerald, a spokesperson for the University of Michigan, told The Algemeiner on Monday that the school “has consistently opposed any boycott of Israeli institutions of higher education.” 

“No academic department or any other unit at the University of Michigan has taken a position that departs from this long-held university position,” he confirmed. 

“The academic goals of our students are of paramount importance. It is the university’s position to take all steps necessary to make sure our students are supported,” Fitzgerald continued. “It is disappointing that a faculty member would allow their personal political beliefs to limit the support they are willing to otherwise provide for our students.” 

He said the school will engage its faculty colleagues “in deep discussions to clarify how the expression of our shared values plays out in support of all students.”

The Department of American Culture at the university says about itself that it is "the top American studies department in the world." What was the department's stance toward the ASA (American Studies Association) endorsement of the academic boycott in 2013? Do they support it? Have other professors in the department also refused to write recommendations for students who wish to study in Israel?

This is the continuation of the web statement: "Our students and faculty are uniquely committed to social justice and the highest standards of scholarship. We are proud, too, to be home to ethnic studies programs at Michigan: Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies, Arab and Muslim American Studies, Latina|o Studies, and Native American Studies." Jewish American Studies is nowhere to be seen in this list of programs, which is common - Jewish Studies is commonly excluded from participating in ethnic studies and/or multicultural studies.

One wonders if this "commitment" and being "home to ethnic studies" has led to the department's alignment with the BDS movement.

Thus, contrary to the claim of the BDS movement and its advocates, the academic boycott *does* have an effect upon individuals, not just institutions, including this undergraduate whose professor should have put his political commitments aside and just written her the recommendation.

Sunset tonight in Ithaca, New York

More Antisemitism in the Republican party

People obsess about whether Trump or his family members are anti-Jewish. I think it's more important to pay attention to the many other people in the Republican Party who are displaying their open antisemitism, about whom there's no question.

Jim Hagedorn, a Republican running for Congress in Minnesota, "once wrote that former Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman supported the Iraq War because Lieberman is Jewish." (He's also a bigot against many other groups of people, including Native Americans, LGBT people, African Americans, and Irish Americans).

Two Republican members of Congress, Dana Rohrabacher of California (R-Kremlin) and Matt Gaetz of Florida, have once again shown up at a public event with a Holocaust denier, Charles C. Johnson,
"who wrote on Reddit last year that he did not believe that the Auschwitz gas chambers were real or that six million Jews died." Gaetz gave Johnson a ticket to the State of the Union address this year.

This is what Johnson said on Reddit:

During an “Ask Me Anything” session on Reddit’s alt-right section, Johnson had been queried, “what are your thoughts on the Holocaust, WW2, and the JQ in general?” (“JQ” is neo-Nazi shorthand for the Jewish Question.) Johnson replied, “I do not and never have believed the six million figure. I think the Red Cross numbers of 250,000 dead in the camps from typhus are more realistic. I think the Allied bombing of Germany was a ware [sic] crime. I agree…about Auschwitz and the gas chambers not being real.”

So why is it that antisemites and people who hang around with Holocaust deniers are so easy to find among Republican candidates or office-holders? While I think it's a good idea to keep an eye on the far left for antisemitism in the guise of anti-Zionism (as I often do on this blog), we have to be equally attentive to how certain people are trying to mainstream antisemitism in the Republican party (which is not to say that the party itself is antisemitic or that more Republicans than Democrats hold antisemitic views).

The Names, in remembrance of September 11, 2001

Today is September 11, 2018, seventeen years after the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. It was the second day of Rosh Hashanah, and our Rabbi, Rabbi Glass, interspersed remembrances of 9/11 with the normal prayers. One was a first-hand account by a flight attendant on Delta 15, one of the 53 airplanes that was diverted from flying into US to land in Gandar, Newfoundland. Another was a poem written by Billy Collins, called "The Names." It was published in the New York Times on September 6, 2002, and I must have read it then, but I don't remember it. He read it just before the recitation of the Kaddish at the end of the Musaf service.

Yesterday, I lay awake in the palm of the night.

A fine rain stole in, unhelped by any breeze,

And when I saw the silver glaze on the windows,

I started with A, with Ackerman, as it happened,

Then Baxter and Calabro,

Davis and Eberling, names falling into place

As droplets fell through the dark.

Names printed on the ceiling of the night.

Names slipping around a watery bend.

Twenty-six willows on the banks of a stream.

In the morning, I walked out barefoot

Among thousands of flowers

Heavy with dew like the eyes of tears,

And each had a name --

Fiori inscribed on a yellow petal

Then Gonzalez and Han, Ishikawa and Jenkins.


Names written in the air

And stitched into the cloth of the day.

A name under a photograph taped to a mailbox.

Monogram on a torn shirt,

I see you spelled out on storefront windows

And on the bright unfurled awnings of this city.

I say the syllables as I turn a corner --

Kelly and Lee,

Medina, Nardella, and O'Connor.

When I peer into the woods,

I see a thick tangle where letters are hidden

As in a puzzle concocted for children.

Parker and Quigley in the twigs of an ash,


Rizzo, Schubert, Torres, and Upton,

Secrets in the boughs of an ancient maple.

Names written in the pale sky.

Names rising in the updraft amid buildings.

Names silent in stone

Or cried out behind a door.

Names blown over the earth and out to sea.

In the evening -- weakening light, the last swallows.

A boy on a lake lifts his oars.

A woman by a window puts a match to a candle,

And the names are outlined on the rose clouds --

Vanacore and Wallace,

(let X stand, if it can, for the ones unfound)

Then Young and Ziminsky, the final jolt of Z.

Names etched on the head of a pin.

One name spanning a bridge, another undergoing a tunnel.

A blue name needled into the skin.

Names of citizens, workers, mothers and fathers,

The bright-eyed daughter, the quick son.

Alphabet of names in green rows in a field.

Names in the small tracks of birds.

Names lifted from a hat

Or balanced on the tip of the tongue.

Names wheeled into the dim warehouse of memory.

So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.

White nationalists, racists, and antisemites in the Trump Administration

The staffer, who went to IMMIGRATION POLICY MEETINGS AT THE WHITE HOUSE expressed his enthusiasm for a "Judenfrei" (cleansed for Jews) dinner party.

I think it's safe to say that a person who enthustiatically attends a dinner party advertised as "judenfrei" is a Nazi. https://t.co/5MQjZNIfJ7

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) August 31, 2018

Or, long story short, a Nazi was working at DHS and attending White House immigration policy meetings.

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) August 31, 2018

Discussion on "All in with Chris Hayes" on August 31, 2018, with Rosie Gray (Atlantic) and Michelle Goldberg (New York Times).

Chris Hayes: There have been a lot of stories about white supremacists and racists in this administration and I suspect it’s not a coincidence. The latest, Ian Smith, that's his real name, a former Homeland Security official whom the Atlantic reports was in e-mail contact with white nationalists. In one conversation about an upcoming dinner, one man wrote, quote, “so it’s settled, we know, my home shall remain Judenfrei.” Judenfrei is a German word meaning free of Jews, which the Nazis used to describe areas from which Jews had been expelled or killed. Smith responded to the group, “they don’t call it Freitag for nothing,” using the German word for Friday and added, “I was planning to hit the bar during the dinner hour and talk to people like Matt Parrot” (CH – “The prominent Neo-Nazi”). “I should have time to pop by though.”

This comes weeks after a White House speech writer was fired after revelations he spoke at a conference attended by white nationalists. Here to talk about what’s going on, Michelle Goldberg at the New York Times, and Rosie Gray who reported on those e-mails. There’s the spectrum of people, lots of people who have lost their job in this administration for things they have written or said, Facebook posts about the president or Michelle Obama or birth certificate.

I am still kind of catching my breath from the nature of these e-mails. Who was this guy hanging out with?

Rosie Gray: Well, what I reported is that, you know, basically Ian Smith was in e-mail contact and appears been involved in the planning of social events with a circle of younger white nationalists in Washington. people with ties to institutions like the National Policy Institute or American Renaissance and he appears to have known these people.

CH: Yeah, but I want to, like – I just feel like that language is maybe a little excessively polite. If someone is writing you an e-mail saying the party is going to be Judenfrei, that's a Nazi, even if it's tongue in cheek. 

Michelle Goldberg: It's a kind of ironic joke about their own antisemitism, right? And much the same way that some of the same people who are in this e-mail chain were videotaped doing the Hitler salute with Hail Trump after the election. So it's ironic but not ironic. The antisemitism is 100% sincere.

CH: What was Ian Smith doing in the Department of Homeland Security, and what was the chain of events that led to him being fired?

RG: He was a policy analyst at DHS working on immigration. The Washington Post had a story yesterday that explained more about what he was up to within DHS. As far as him leaving the department, you know, I reached out to DHS earlier this week and they – and the next day basically I learned that he had left and they sent me a statement condemning racism and condemning his radical ideology.

CH: Just to be clear, he's working there for a while, you reach out saying I have information about who he's hanging out with, who he's in correspondence with, they then fire him?

RG: What I learn is that he had tendered his resignation. it seems pretty obvious that it was connected to my reporting. 

CH: He is not the only one, of course, there's a guy named Carl Higbie who said all sorts of vile and racist things. He was fired and then sent to the Trump-aligned superPAC where he did a bunch of events with Mike Pence. [See note 1 below on Higbie].

MG: And this is the third uproar about administration connections to white nationalists this month. There was also the White House speech writer [Darren Beattie] who left after it was revealed he had spoken at a conference alongside white nationalist Peter Brimelow, who is one of the white nationalist speakers at that conference, was invited to a party at Larry Kudlow’s, the White House economic adviser's home. Larry Kudlow then said oh, I didn't know what his views were, everyone knows what his views were, everyone knows what this man's views are. [See note 2 below on Beattie, and note 3  below on Brimelow].

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And I think that one conclusion we might want to draw from this is that this is a white nationalist administration. 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And I think that one conclusion we might want to draw from this is that this is a white nationalist administration. Not everyone in the administration is white nationalist, but it's certainly an administration that has white nationalist policies, white nationalist sympathies, the president regularly employs white nationalists and outright white supremacist rhetoric like when he tweeted the lie about a genocide of white farmers in South Africa and actually directed the state department to then investigate this white nationalist conspiracy theory. There are, I would wager, more outright white nationalists in this administration than there are black people.

CH: Ian Smith was a political appointee. This was not someone in the civil service, obviously?

RG: That's my understanding, yes.

CH: And so you've got a – you've got people - people think about who is in the white house but there are all kinds of people in the agencies and sort of at the top of the agencies that are the political folks. It's easy for them not – like if the Times hadn't broken this, who knows how long he would have been there, I guess is my question.

RG: Well, right. I mean, obviously he was not somebody who is particularly well known. I imagine that if I hadn't written the story he could have just continued to labor in obscurity.

CH: And again, labor in obscurity on immigration policy attending meetings that Stephen Miller was apparently running as an interagency process to craft the vision of how the united states will enforce its immigration laws as regards refugees, non-white people.

RG: Right. Well, that's why this is such a significant story because it appears that Ian Smith played a not-inconsequential role in shaping U.S. immigration policy.

CH: Stephen Miller is someone who is the one running those meetings, of course, knew Richard Spencer at Duke, though he says they had nothing to do with each other even though they ran in somewhat similar circles.

MG: And the speech writer who left wrote speeches for Richard Spencer. And the immigration policy that we have, the policy that we have towards refugees and increasingly towards American citizens at the border is exactly what you would expect if a bunch of white nationalists were running that part of the U.S. government.

CH: You've also got a president -­ remember, the President of the United States said that Africa – said Haiti and other African nations were s-hole countries.

MG: it's in front of our face and it's such a living nightmare we've become accustomed to and something happens that reminds us how horrific this is.

CH: Do you know anything more about who these folks were that he was e-mailing with, Rosie? The people setting up Judenfrei dinner parties?

RG: I do, yes. some of the people he was in contact with include activists such as Devin Saucier who has edited for American Renaissance under a pseudonym and others. I can give you the full list if you want. [See note 5 on Saucier].

CH: the names of obscure -­ hopefully- racists and white supremacists in Washington, D.C. It's interesting to me - to sum up, yes. It's interesting this kind of underground exists and is bumping up against the Trump white house which, as you say Michelle, is not that surprising. Michelle Goldberg and Rosie Gray, thanks for joining me.

Note 1: Carl Higbie. CNN reported in January, 2018, that Higbie was fired from his job as chief of external affairs for the federal Corporation for National and Community Service (which runs volunteer programs like Americorps), because of a multitude of racist, sexist, homophobic, and anti-Muslim comments that he had made over several years on his radio show. He also "derided members of the military suffering from severe PTSD as having 'a weak mind' and said 75% of those afflicted were either lying or milking it for federal money."

Note 2: Darren Beattie spoke at a conference in 2016 of the H. L. Mencken Club, as reported by CNN. This is who else spoke - luminaries of the racist right. If you'd like to read their speeches, they're available at http://hlmenckenclub.org/2016-texts/.

The Mencken Club, which is named for the early 20th century journalist and satirist whose posthumously published diaries revealed racist views, is a small annual conference started in 2008 and regularly attended by well-known white nationalists such as Richard Spencer. The schedule for the 2016 conference listed panels and speeches by white nationalist Peter Brimelow and two writers, John Derbyshire and Robert Weissberg, who were both fired in 2012 from the conservative magazine National Review for espousing racist views. 

Other speakers from the 2016 conference are regular contributors to the white nationalist website VDare. Jared Taylor, another leading white nationalist, can be heard at the conference in 2016 on Derbyshire's radio show along with Brimelow.

Note 3: Peter Brimelow. According to the Washington Post article, "Brimelow, 70, was once a well-connected figure in mainstream conservative circles, writing for Dow Jones and National Review. But over the past two decades, he has become a zealous promoter of white-identity politics on Vdare.com, the anti-immigration website that he founded in 1999."

Brimelow’s website is named in honor of Virginia Dare, the first English child born in what is now the United States. Dare has become a symbol for white nationalists who are alarmed by immigration. 

The British-born Brimelow has written that Dare, who was white, is a reminder of the “very specific cultural origins of America at a time when mass nontraditional immigration is threatening to swamp it.”

Note 4: More on Ian Smith's views from the Atlantic article.

According to sources with knowledge of Smith’s role at DHS, he was a policy analyst working on immigration. He used to work for the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), an anti-immigration legal organization associated with the right-wing Federation for American Immigration Reform (fair). From 2014 to 2017 he wrote a number of columns on immigration for National Review. (The NationalReview.com editor Charles Cooke didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment).

Smith’s public writings showcased a right-wing perspective on immigration, such as opposing the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which ended race-based restrictions on immigration, particularly from countries in Asia and Africa, and which Smith argued was responsible for the “barely governable system we have today,” opposing sanctuary cities, and applauding the controversial S.B. 1070 anti–illegal immigration law in Arizona.

Note 5: Devin Saucier "helps edit the online white nationalist magazine American Renaissance under the pseudonym Henry Wolff, and [...] wrote a story in June 2017 called “Why I Am (Among Other Things) a White Nationalist.” American Renaissance is right-wing racist organization and magazine run by Jared Taylor.

Commentary on Israel's New "Nation-State" Law

Full text of the law in English translation, published by the Jerusalem Post.

1.  The State of Israel
a) Israel is the historical homeland of the Jewish people in which the state of Israel was established.
b) The state of Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people, in which it actualizes its natural, religious, and historical right for self-determination.
c) The actualization of the right of national self-determination in the state of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.

Comment by Amir Fuchs:

The stated purpose of the bill, at least according to some of its supporters, is to override the “constitutional revolution” of 1992 and erode the legal interpretation of the Supreme Court that the right to equality applies to non-Jews as well. A law of this sort, which is not balanced by an acknowledgment of absolute equal rights for minorities (in contrast with the balance expressed in the Declaration of Independence), is a law that seeks to alter the status quo rather than safeguard it. The bill clearly has the potential to turn into a “deal-breaker,” jeopardizing the balance between Israel’s identity as the Jewish national home and its identity as a democracy. No other nation-state defines itself in such a way, with no mention of democracy or minority rights. 

Clearly, the bill’s real goal is to sabotage the existing ruling of the Supreme Court, according to which Israel’s status as a nation-state does not imply that Jewish citizens have privileges which other citizens do not. There is no better proof for this than the explicit opposition to including the right to equality in the bill.

RL: Notice that the law excludes the possibility that the "right of national self-determination" might exist also for Arabs in the state of Israel. While the law doesn't mention Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, it implies, in my opinion, that only Jewish national self-determination has any legitimacy between the (Jordan) River and the (Mediterranean) Sea. As such, it is the mirror opposite of the BDS cry: "Between the River and the Sea, Palestine will be free," which completely negates any legitimacy to Jewish national self-determination.

Comments by Zachary Braiterman:

It undermines democracy in Israel, subordinates democracy to Jewishness, violates the spirit of the Declaration of Independence and its statement regarding “complete equality of social & political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or gender.” Against the vision of Israel’s founding fathers, including deep democratic impulses in classical rightwing Revisionist Zionism, there is no mention of rule of law, equality, equal citizenship, human dignity.

Regarding religion and state, it is unclear what constitutes a “religious right to self-determination” and how this might be constituted. But there it is, the invention of a new right for religion, in this case Jewish religion only, slipped surreptitiously into the law. It should be noted how religious discrimination against Muslims and Christians is rooted in another exclusive relation between Jews and the State.

2.  National symbols of the State of Israel
a) The name of the state is Israel.
b) The flag of the state is white, two blue stripes near the edges, and a blue Star of David in the center.
c) The symbol of the state is the Menorah with seven branches, olive leaves on each side, and the word Israel at the bottom.
d) The national anthem of the state is "Hatikvah"
e) [Further] details concerning the issue of state symbols will be determined by law.

RL: All of these details were already part of Israeli law and practice.

3. [The] unified and complete [city of] Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.

RL: This is also not new - Jerusalem officially became the capital of Israel in about 1950, and the language of "unified Jerusalem" has its origin in the period right after the Six Day War, when East Jerusalem and the West Bank were captured from Jordan.

4. The Language of the State of Israel
a) Hebrew is the language of the state.
b) The Arabic language has a special status in the state; the regulation of the Arab language in state institutions or when facing them will be regulated by law.
c) This clause does not change the status given to the Arabic language before the basic law was created.

RL: Hebrew is the language of the state, despite the fact that the native language of 20% of the country is Arabic, not Hebrew. This provision of the law formally gives a second-class status to Arabic.

Zachary Braiterman:

Arabic language is demoted from being an official language of the state to being to a special one. It’s unclear how clause C follows clause B. The status of Arabic language in Israel, such as it is and such as it could become, is definitely damaged.

5. The state will be open to Jewish immigration and to the gathering of the exiled.

RL: Also not new, and already stated in Israel's Declaration of Independence.

6. The Diaspora
a) The state will labor to ensure the safety of sons of the Jewish people and its citizens who are in trouble and captivity due to their Jewishness or their citizenship.
 b) The state will act to preserve the cultural, historical and religious legacy of the Jewish people among the Jewish diaspora.

Comment by Shuki Friedman (director of the Israel Democracy Institute’s Center for Religion, Nation and State, and lecturer in law at the Peres Academic Center):

Previously the bill said that state will act to preserve the link everywhere – in Israel and in the Diaspora as well. This legalistic turn of phrase has great practical significance, as it essentially allows the government of Israel to carry out any action in Israel that may harm Jews in the Diaspora or Israel’s relationship with them. This small yet far-reaching change was made against the background of the tensions with non-Orthodox streams of Judaism and the struggle to define prayer norms at the Western Wall, and paves the way for the state to exclude international Jewish sectors from the process. The supporters of the bill claimed that one of its pillars was providing a legal-constitutional status to the connection of the State of Israel with Jews in the Diaspora, yet what has emerged is precisely the opposite. Instead of strengthening the bridge with the Diaspora, the State of Israel is placing more explosives beneath it, which are one day certain to destroy it.  

Comment by Gil Hoffman:

The old version of the bill said that: “The state will take action to maintain the connection between the state and the Jewish people wherever they are.” 

The new version released Monday replaced “wherever they are” with “in the Diaspora.” 

UTJ MK Uri Maklev told The Jerusalem Post that he requested the change, because he did not want the state to help Diaspora Jews advance religious pluralism in Israel in general and at the Western Wall in particular.

7. The state views Jewish settlement as a national value and will labor to encourage and promote its establishment and development.

Editorial by the Jerusalem Post:

In reality, the state combines aspects of all of the streams of Zionism which built it. It enshrines privileges to Orthodox Judaism. It has hundreds of communities that openly discriminate based on religious and national factors. The education system offers several streams to citizens but in essence segregates them into separate Arab and Jewish systems, and within the Jewish system into different religious streams. It is a compromise state in this respect. No one would mistake the State of Israel for anything but the nation state of the Jewish people. 

But right-wing religious parties fear that these aspects of the state could be eroded in the future and want them anchored in law. “Those who do not know how to defend Israel as a Jewish state in a practical way should return their keys and go home,” MK Bayit Yehudi MK Bezalel Smotrich said on Sunday, criticizing Netanyahu’s attempt at compromise. Aymen Odeh, chairman of the Joint List, argued Saturday that it was important to raise a hand against creeping “fascism” in the country.

Since a Supreme Court case in 2000 brought by Adel and Iman Kaadan, discrimination against Arabs seeking to move to or join Jewish cooperative settlements has ostensibly been against the law. But the ruling didn’t bring the equality that rights activists thought it would. The NGO Adalah was still fighting cases in 2016 against the Israel Lands Authority regarding a company’s refusal to sell homes to Arab Israelis. Most recently, protests were held in Kfar Vradim and Afula after plots there were sold to Arabs. 

This points to widespread de facto discrimination and segregation between communities. Some of this segregation is put down to the fact that different communities self-segregate. But rights activists have asked why, for instance, Negev Beduin were not permitted by the state to build communal settlements on state land the way kibbutzim or moshavim were over the last 70 years. Opposition to the nation-state bill and compromises therefore only address part of the elephant in the room. Arab and Jewish citizens should not have to go to court to move to a community. In a community near Sderot discrimination against Mizrahi residents forced them to seek legal redress to move in. Ethiopian Jews have faced hurdles in access to housing. 

Struggling against segregation is not just about one law. It is about the larger struggle for coexistence and having more contact between Israel’s numerous diverse communities. The discussion of the nation-state bill should give impetus to a discussion about how we can bridge gaps in society and coexist. The state is a Jewish state, but in its soul it is also a state where coexistence should be a powerful value underpinning its strength in a region where intolerance too often dominates. 

8. The Hebrew calendar is the official calendar of the state and alongside it the secular calendar will serve as an official calendar. The usage of the Hebrew calendar and of the secular calendar will be determined by law.

9. National Holidays
a) Independence Day is the official holiday of the state.
b) The Memorial Day for those who fell in the wars of Israel and the Memorial Day for the Holocaust and heroism are official memorial days of the state.  

10. Saturday and the Jewish Holidays are the official days of rest in the state. Those who are not Jewish have the right to honor their days of rest and their holidays. Details concerning these matters will be determined by law.

RL: sections 8-10 have already been in practice for many years.

11. This Basic Law may not be altered except by a Basic Law that gained the approval of the majority of the Knesset members.

Zachary Braiterman's conclusion:

What the Jewish Ethno-State Law is supposed to fend off is that final reckoning when Jews become a minority in the entire territories under sovereign Israeli political and military control. This is an opening gambit to annexing the West Bank, or large parts of the West Bank, and keeping West Bank Palestinians disenfranchised non-citizens in an apartheid-like polity. One day, Israel will have to make a choice between Jewishness and democracy, absent a Jewish majority. This law stacks the deck in advance. In the Jewish majority running roughshod over the Palestinian minority who are citizens of Israel, the way is opened for Israel to continue controlling and even annexing the West Bank while safeguarding what will one day be Jewish minority rule in the total area comprising Israel and the West Bank.

Where are the children?

Where are the children, and why haven't they been reunited with their parents yet?

The Trump administration said in a court filing late Thursday that it has reunified 364 of more than 2,500 migrant children separated from their parents at the U.S. southern border, just one week out from a court-ordered deadline. 

Of 1,607 parents eligible to be reunited with their children, the filing said, 719 have final orders of deportation, meaning they could be removed from the country as soon as they are reunited. Those parents may have to choose between bringing their child back to a violent country or leaving them behind in the care of the government, nonprofits, foster families or relatives in order to seek asylum in the United States. 

“That’s a pretty horrifying statistic,” said Lindsay Toczylowski, Executive Director of Immigrant Defenders Law Center, of the 719 figure. “We have had such limited communication with parents it was difficult to know where they were in their case.”  

Toczylowski said the number was “way higher than I thought,” and said attorneys would need to immediately make contact with reunited families to advise them on potential legal avenues to stay in the United States.

Holocaust deniers try to disrupt conference on Mennonites and the Holocaust

In March 17 and 18, I went to a conference on Mennonites and the Holocaust that was held at Bethel College in North Newton, Kansas. It was very interesting, and I've been meaning to write up my impressions, but haven't gotten to it it.

The conference was disrupted a couple of times by a Mennonite denier of the Holocaust named Bruce Leichty, who was finally kicked off campus by the local police. He attempted to speak a couple of times during the question and answer period after the academic presentations, but was told to leave by the conference organizers.

Update: Lisa Schirch, in a contribution to the blog Anabaptist Historians, describes one of the incidents when Leichty attempted to disrupt the conference:

A Mennonite holocaust denier, Bruce Leichty, attended parts of the conference. Leichty is a California-based lawyer known for representing the Holocaust deniers Ernst Zundel and his Mennonite wife Ingrid Rimland Zundel. Leichty has passed out anti-semitic literature at the past several MCUSA gatherings. At the introduction of the conference, the organizers told the audience there was someone attending the conference who they were watching. But many were not in the room or did not understand what was being said. When Leichty began to ask an offensive question during the conference, the organizers removed him by calling campus security, but did not inform the audience of who the man was or why he was being removed. The lack of communication confused many in the audience.

Two of his compatriots in Holocaust denial, who are affiliated with the antisemitic group Deir Yassin Remembered (DYR), also went to North Newton - Daniel A. McGowan, emeritus professor of economics at Hobart and William Smith College in Geneva, New York, and Henry Herskovitz, who leads a weekly vigil outside a synagogue in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I saw and heard Leichty, but didn't see McGowan or Herskovitz, but apparently Herskowitz was hanging around the auditorium where the conference was held and he was also told to leave campus by the police. Herskovitz wrote up his reaction on his blog, hosted on the DYR website, where he wrote that Leichty was arrested and held by the local police for a number of hours. His arrest is recounted in an article posted on a Holocaust denial website, which I will not link to.

Herskovitz says that he and McGowan intended to give a kind of counter-talk outside the conference at a at a local meeting hall, called "Two Revisionist Jews Consider the Holocaust," and Leichty tried to hand out flyers about this meeting to the people at the conference. In all the reading I've done by and about McGowan, I've never seen the claim that he himself is Jewish, so I'm not sure where the title comes from. [I just looked again at Herskovitz's post, and he provides a link to a farcical document where he and Paul Eisen declare McGowan to be a Jew; Eisen is a co-founder of DYR].

The conference itself was very moving to me as an outsider, because so many of the Mennonite speakers and attendees were obviously troubled by the fraught history of Mennonites during the Holocaust. Mennonites were not persecuted by the Nazi regime, and in some places (Germany, Poland, and Ukraine) some collaborated with the Nazis, even to the extent of being part of one of the Einsatzgruppen (in Ukraine) - the Nazi killing squads that targeted Jews. Some Mennonites did try to protect and hide Jews, but most did not (as most European Christians did not). One of the talks was about Mennonites in the Netherlands who did work to rescue Jews.

Given the pained sincerity of most of the participants in the conference, it was really a violation to have Leichty appear and attempt to disrupt these difficult conversations with his crude and obtuse attacks upon historical truth. It is a pity that he and the other two deniers decided to push their agenda at such an important conference.

Update: Leichty apparently has a long history of pushing his antisemitic and Holocaust denial views among Mennonites. Vic Rosenthal, writing in Fresno Zionist in 2007, describes a talk organized by Leichty in a local Mennonite church. The speaker was Ingrid Rimland Zündel, wife of Ernst Zündel, who was imprisoned in Germany for Holocaust denial. The pastor of the church himself did not want Rimland Zündel to speak, and passed out flyers to try to dissuade people from going in and listening to her.

More on Leichty from the ADL: Anti-Semite Christopher Bollyn Scheduled to Attend 9-11 Events in California. 

Leichty is a problematic figure who has defended a number of Holocaust deniers, including Ernst Zundel, who is imprisoned in Germany for denying the Holocaust. Leichty also represented 9-11 widow Ellen Mariani in lawsuits against various entities she held accountable for her husband’s death. In motion papers, Leichty apparently used research from Bollyn to make spurious accusations against a Jewish judge on the case. In May 2012, the United States Court of Appeals sanctioned Leichty and Mariani for making frivolous arguments before the court and also highlighted the anti-Semitism reflected in the papers filed by Leichty.

Leichty is also a believer in other conspiracy theories, including those about the 9/11 attacks. He belongs to a group called "Lawyers for 9/11 Truth."

Leichty's antisemitism also showed up in a lawsuit he brought on behalf of a widow of a man who died in the 9/11 attacks: 9-11 Widow and Lawyer Sanctioned for Raw and Ugly Antisemitism. For a more objective report, see the New York Times article: Court Penalizes a Lawyer Over Slurs in a 9/11 Filing