Tag: anti-semitism

Beware of the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act

The House of Representatives passed the “Anti-Semitism Awareness Act” on May 2, by a vote of 320-91 in reaction to demonstrations on numerous university campuses and elsewhere against the brutal and genocidal policy of Israel in Gaza. The Act has now been sent to the Senate, where it seems certain to pass. This is an extremely dangerous bill that could criminalize the Bible, many Christian Churches, as well as any negative remarks about Israel and Jews. In brief, it threatens us with totalitarian thought control. We must do everything we can to oppose it.

First, let’s take an overview of the Act. It adopts the very broad definition of anti-Semitism of the “International Holocaust Remembrance Association.”  The Act calls this definition “a vital tool which helps individuals understand and identify the various manifestations of antisemitism.”

What does this definition say? “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed in hatred of Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” How you can be anti-Semitic toward someone who isn’t Jewish isn’t immediately apparent.

The authors of the definition give someone examples of what they consider anti-Semitic. These include saying that the Jews control the media and Congress, saying that Israel is a racist state, propagating the “blood libel” that the Jews killed Jesus, minimizing or denying the Holocaust, and claiming that Jews in America have “dual loyalty.”

As a number of writers including Tucker Carlson and John Zmirak have pointed out, the definition allows large parts of the Bible to be banned. The most famous such passage is Matthew 27: 25. “His blood be upon us and our children.” This is the “blood libel” that the Act wouldn’t let us teach!

You might object that the Act would never be enforced in this way. The American people would never stand for it! But it would always be there, like a sword of Damocles, hanging over our heads. And don’t be so sure it wouldn’t be enforced! The Scottish Hate Speech Act was passed in 2021, and people predicted it would never be enforced. Beginning in April 2024, though, it has been enforced, and many people have been fined and imprisoned for violating it.

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BLM activist Quintez Brown who was arrested for trying to kill a Jewish mayoral candidate showed ‘allegiance to anti-Semitic causes including Lion of Judah Armed Forces’ on his social media accounts

A Black Lives Matter activist who was charged with attempted murder last week following an alleged assassination attempt on a Jewish mayoral candidate exhibited anti-Semitic views on social media.

Quintez Brown, 21, was arrested and charged with attempted murder shortly after Monday’s shooting in Louisville, Kentucky, in which Democratic candidate Craig Greenberg narrowly avoided the bullet.

But he was released from prison and placed under house arrest just two days after the shooting when a BLM chapter, the Louisville Community Bail Fund, posted his $100,000 bond. 

In the months leading up to the shooting, Brown’s social media posts showed an increasing interest in Black nationalist and pan-Africanist leaders, and last week he appeared to encourage his followers to join the Lion of Judah Armed Forces. 

The group shares similar ideas to the Black Hebrew Israelite movement, which claims that Black Americans are the true descendants of the Biblical Hebrews and has been associated with several murders of Jews in the US.

Brown was one of 22 people chosen to meet the former President of the United States in 2019 as part of Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, which is aimed at closing achievement gaps facing young boys and men of color.

He also made regular appearances on the BBC to discuss race matters in the US, and was running as an independent candidate for Louisville’s metro council. 

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Response to the “Antisemitism Awareness Act of 2023”

What is happening on college campuses and what is being pushed through the Congress

The passage of the “Antisemitism Awareness Act” on May 1, the traditional day for celebrating the contributions of labor, by the House of Representatives, represents a dangerous effort to weaponize the laws and regulations established over the last 150 years to protect citizens against racial discrimination and to use them now to justify the absolute power of a corrupt government, doing the bidding of multinational banks and corporations, to punish anyone speaking out against the horrific actions taking place in Gaza. But the bill is not ultimately about Gaza, or about Israel. It is about giving the government the authority absent from the Constitution to punish citizens for speaking the truth about the illegal and unconstitutional actions of the government, or other governments around the world’.

The current dry run on the campuses of American universities of protests against the Gaza killings was intentionally watered down. It featured students wearing masks, backing corrupt Democratic Party “progressives,” who did not go far in their criticism of the state. It also had the university and the police who had been given instructions not to attack with the brutality that they are capable of in other actions.

The very fact that the campus protests were widely discussed on NPR, a controlled mouthpiece of the multinational banks which entirely ignores all spontaneous actions by citizens, tells us that these student protests were used as cover for passing this bill.

Once the “Antisemitism Awareness Law” is in place and can used to justify massive shifts in the Department of Education, and by extension American elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, colleges and graduate programs, we can be certain that the true steel fist in the velvet glove will get to work shutting down all questions about the special relationship of the United States with Israel not only in terms of protests, but in terms of the content of courses, the text books assigned, and, by extension, in the media as a whole.

And it will not stop there. Once the precedent is in place, all criticism of just about anything can be outlawed, or subject to onerous punishments.

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US House Passes Controversial Bill That Expands Definition of Anti-Semitism

The United States House of Representatives has overwhelmingly passed a bill that would expand the federal definition of anti-Semitism, despite opposition from civil liberties groups.

The bill passed the House on Wednesday by a margin of 320 to 91, and it is largely seen as a reaction to the ongoing antiwar protests unfolding on US university campuses. It now goes to the Senate for consideration.

If the bill were to become law, it would codify a definition of anti-Semitism created by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

That is a federal anti-discrimination law that bars discrimination based on shared ancestry, ethnic characteristics or national origin. Adding IHRA’s definition to the law would allow the federal Department of Education to restrict funding and other resources to campuses perceived as tolerating anti-Semitism.

But critics warn IHRA’s definition could be used to stifle campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza, which has claimed the lives of 34,568 Palestinians so far.

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Not in Our Name

Free speech is not a divisible concept. Either everyone is free to say what they want, no matter how noxious others find it, in order to create and sustain the free market of ideas—or else speech isn’t free.

Institutions that curtail speech—that make people’s social media postings grounds for expulsion, that ban or suppress speakers they disagree with, that penalize dissenting opinions in classrooms and workplaces with bad grades and HR reports—should not be allowed to then turn around and invoke the principles of free speech to defend problematic speech with which they happen to agree, let alone disruptive or illegal behavior.

And yet, recent years have seen the emergence of two different speech regimes, one for alleged oppressors and one for the allegedly oppressed. Huge swaths of often innocent speech by the former is deemed out of bounds, even criminal, whereas any speech coming out of the mouth of someone with a claim to victim status—including speech that actively incites violence—is considered sacrosanct.

As a result, there is now a great deal of confusion about freedom of speech, which is a very basic—and very central—principle of American history and society. For those interested in being de-confused, which we humbly submit should be all thinking American citizens, herewith: a primer.

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Bipartisan bill would create “antisemitism monitors” at colleges

A pro-Israel House Democrat and Republican plan to introduce legislation creating federally sanctioned “antisemitism monitors” for select college campuses.

Why it matters: It’s the first bill introduced in Congress as a direct response to the pro-Palestinian protests that have rocked Columbia University and other colleges in recent days.

Driving the news: Reps. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) and Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) are introducing the College Oversight and Legal Updates Mandating Bias Investigations and Accountability Act – or COLUMBIA Act.

  • The bill would allow the Department of Education to send a “third-party antisemitism monitor” to any college that receives federal funding — and to revoke that funding for colleges that don’t comply.
  • The monitor, paid for by the school, would be charged with releasing a public, quarterly report evaluating “the progress that a college or university has made toward combating antisemitism.”
  • The bill was first reported by Jewish Insider.

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Law College ‘Anti-Racism’ Fellow Caught on Camera Piling Vicious Hatred on ‘Ugly…Little Jewish People’

At some point in the last five years, we stopped merely studying history’s darkest moments and began experiencing them.

For instance, in an 11-second viral clip posted Wednesday to the social media platform X, a woman identified as Loyola Marymount University graduate student Grace Obi-Azuike effectively re-enacted a scene from Nazi Germany when she spewed venomous anti-Jewish hatred and, significantly, incurred no apparent rebuke from the younger people around her who attended an event featuring Israel Defense Forces members.

“Get the f*** out of here, all you ugly-a** little Jewish people in this b****,” the California law student appeared to say in a clip shared by the StopAntisemitism X account.

Obi-Azuike made the comment while seated and signaling in the direction of people who did not appear on camera.

Her insidious remark drew a look of astonishment but also an open-mouthed smile from an androgynous-looking person seated to her left. The male-looking person to her right wore the cloth mask of the COVID cult. His reaction, therefore — perhaps thankfully — remains a mystery.

But some attendees clapped or otherwise voiced approval.

“Oooooh, hooooo, yeah,” an unidentified female voice said.

At that point, an older, suit-wearing man walked over to Obi-Azuike and stood to her left. The camera did not capture what happened next, but he did not appear pleased as he rubbed his chin.

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Make Speech Free Again

Winston Churchill said, “Everyone is in favor of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people’s idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage.”

What has made America great are our basic tenets of individual rights which cannot be taken away by the state, and foremost among these is freedom of speech. Authoritarian regimes always try to control speech. This was true in the Soviet Union, and it is true today in Russia, China and Venezuela.

Mr. Scott Kalb, an elected Democrat on the BET, the town’s finance board, has been circulating a letter in support of the newly proposed Greenwich Speech Police, known by the rather malaprop name of The Greenwich Antisemitism and Anti-Hate Task Force (GAATF?). Presumably they mean the Greenwich Task Force to Combat Hate and Antisemitism. Of course, to deal with actual hate crime we already have the Greenwich Police Department, the State Police and the FBI, so the GAATF is not about crime, it’s about speech, and in this case, it’s about speech Mr. Kalb, Mr. Camillo and members of GAATF don’t like, sometimes found in these pages.

Speech suppression involves deciding what is hateful, and then banning it either directly or surreptitiously with indirect political pressure, “shadow bans” and online “blocking,” as we see in the case before the Supreme Court.

Mr. Kalb in his letter misleadingly cites the rise in antisemitic acts since the October 7th massacre of Israelis as a reason for instituting what amounts to a Speech Tribunal whose role must be to decide what is hate speech and what is antisemitism. Mr. Kalb and the DTC have been at it before, trying to stifle dissent by claiming that identifying Mr. Kalb as a “globalist” was antisemitic, though even the ADL acknowledges that “In some cases, its use [“globalist”] is more or less mainstream.”

Such accusations are invariably attempts to silence opposition.

GAATF is a continuation of Mr. Kalb and the DTC’s ongoing attempts to cover and deflect the actual hate and antisemitism coming from of the left, the evidence of which is incontrovertible and has led to the resignation of college presidents. But the hate from the left is also palpable, and unlike the occasional, laughable Nazi march, the hate from the left is massive and spreading.

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ADL pushed BMG to drop Roger Waters by threatening to weaponize company’s Nazi past

The Grayzone has obtained a private letter authored by ADL director Jonathan Greenblatt threatening to weaponize the Nazi past of the BMG music company unless executives terminated a major deal with Roger Waters. BMG has publicly denied Israel lobby influence on its decision to nix Waters’ contract.

When the Berlin-based BMG music company terminated its business relationship with Roger Waters, the Pink Floyd co-founder claimed the decision was spurred by a concerted Israel lobby-directed campaign to financially retaliate against his outspoken support for Palestine. The Grayzone has obtained a threatening private letter sent by Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt to BMG executives which confirms the musician’s accusation.

“Given the fact that your parent company, Bertelsmann Group, has made laudable and necessary efforts to repair its Nazi past,” the ADL director warned in his June 16, 2023 letter, “it would be deeply unfortunate to have those efforts continue to be tarnished by such hurtful and injurious conduct.”

In an interview with The Grayzone, Waters described the ADL’s menacing missive as the culmination of a months-long intimidation campaign which began well before the October 7 attacks in Israel. The ADL’s push resulted not only in the termination of the company’s deal to release the new 50th anniversary recording of “The Dark Side of the Moon,” he said, but in the departure of BMG’s CEO as well.

“As far as attacks on me by the ADL and and all the rest of the lobby are concerned, the jury has been out for a long time, but it’s not out anymore,” Waters commented to The Grayzone. “The contention that I’m an antisemite because I’ve stood up against the attempted genocide of the indigenous people of Palestine is dead in the water. The people of the world have seen through the wall of hatred and tissue of lies.”

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For the Safety of Jews and Palestinians, Stop Weaponizing Antisemitism

For eighteen years I had the great privilege of working as Executive Director of Harvard Hillel.

As a leader of Jewish communities on campus, in New England, and around the nation, I have helped cultivate a new generation of Jewish leaders and citizens. I navigated moments of tension and war: the tumultuous 1990s, as the Oslo Accords began to crumble; the Second Intifada; 9/11 and its fallout; the Iraq War; Israel’s Second Lebanon War and its war on Gaza in late 2008.

During my long career as a Jewish educator and leader — including thirteen years living in Jerusalem — I have seen and lived through my community’s struggles. Now, as an elder leader, with the benefit of hindsight, I feel compelled to speak to what I see as a disturbing trend gripping our campus, and many others: The cynical weaponization of antisemitism by powerful forces who seek to intimidate and ultimately silence legitimate criticism of Israel and of American policy on Israel.

In most cases, it takes the form of bullying pro-Palestine organizers. In others, these campaigns persecute anyone who simply doesn’t show due deference to the bullies.

The recent effort to smear our new University President, Claudine Gay, is a case in point. I applaud the decision by the Harvard Corporation to stand by Dr. Gay amid the ludicrous charges that she somehow supports genocide against Jews, and I hope Harvard will continue to take a clear and strong stance against any further efforts by these powerful parties to meddle in university affairs, especially over personnel decisions.

The toppling of the president of the University of Pennsylvania is a sobering example of what can happen when we empower these unscrupulous forces to dictate our path as university leaders. The stakes are as high as they’ve ever been. Our vigilance must be up to the task.

As a leader in the Jewish community, I am particularly alarmed by today’s McCarthyist tactic of manufacturing an antisemitism scare, which, in effect, turns the very real issue of Jewish safety into a pawn in a cynical political game to cover for Israel’s deeply unpopular policies with regard to Palestine. (A recent poll found that 66 percent of all U.S. voters and 80 percent of Democratic voters desire an end to Israel’s current war, for instance.)

What makes this trend particularly disturbing is the power differential: Billionaire donors and the politically-connected, non-Jews and Jews alike on one side, targeting disproportionately people of vulnerable populations on the other, including students, untenured faculty, persons of color, Muslims, and, especially, Palestinian activists.

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