American neo-Nazis protested in favor of Dr. Michael Link, who used to teach in Arkansas Tech University for 50 years and told students that the Holocaust “didn’t happen.”
How an anti-Semitic cartoon ended up in the New York Times | CNN
Reporters in the New York Times (NYT) newsroom could hear the protesters outside on Monday. “Shame on you!” they shouted. Some held signs that accused the newspaper of being anti-Semitic. Others waved American and Israeli flags.
the demonstrators packed Eighth Avenue in New York City in response to a recent cartoon that was baldly anti-Semitic. The image appeared in international editions of The Times last Thursday. It called to mind “a very dark time in Jewish history,” lawyer Alan Dershowitz said at the protest. “I ask myself, how could it happen?”
That’s what staffers at the Times wanted to know too.
Gov’t report: Bot network operating Eurovision boycott campaign | Jerusalem Post
The Eurovision Song Contest Finals are set to begin on May 14. In NZ, it isn’t a big thing but it does garner a several hundred million TV audience. This year it is being held in Tel Aviv, Israel. Consequently, the BDS Movement has made great effort to have it boycotted. Manipulation of social media seems to be the tactique du jour and the BDS Movement have taken to it with alacrity.
“The anti-semitic BDS Activists are trying every deceptive way to attack Israel, even when dealing with Eurovision which aims to unite people and cultures,” Strategic Affairs Minister Gilad Erdan said Thursday. “We have now proven that the boycott organizations are not only antisemitic and support terror, but lie and fabricate support for their agenda.”
The ministry said it began investigating the issue in November 2018. Last month, it sent information on the 232 accounts in question to both Twitter and the European Broadcasting Union. As of Thursday, the Ministry said, 33 of the accounts had been closed.
NZ MP promoting BDS | J-Wire
A New Zealand Labour MP is actively promoting the discriminatory BDS campaign against Israel. Dr Duncan Webb has recently tweeted that “[BDS]… is a concrete way to express a political view…”
A Terrorist Tried to Kill Me Because I Am a Jew. I Will Never Back Down | NY Times
Inspiring…
Today should have been my funeral.
I was preparing to give my sermon Shabbat morning, Saturday, which was also the last day of Passover, the festival of our freedom, when I heard a loud bang in the lobby of my synagogue.
I thought a table had fallen down or maybe even that, God forbid, my dear friend Lori Gilbert Kaye had tripped and fallen. Only a few moments earlier I had greeted Lori there; she had come to services to say Yizkor, the mourning prayer, for her late mother.
I went to the lobby to check on her. What I saw in those seconds will haunt me for the rest of my days.
An Expert on Anti-Semitism Fears for the Future in Britain | Tablet Mag
As a young boy growing up in the affluent North London suburb of Highgate, the writer and academic David Hirsh was always dimly aware that something was different. An uneasy family history lay behind his pleasant existence. Behind the joy there was trauma. He could sense it. Now, over forty years later, he worries that for young Jewish children, the type of idyllic childhood he enjoyed may one day be impossible.
Hirsh is one of the UK’s leading Jewish intellectuals and he is speaking out on the growing problem of anti-Semitism in this country. Above all, he fighting a strain of Western history’s oldest hatred coming from the unlikeliest of sources. Britain’s Labour Party, once the political home of much of the country’s Jewish population, is now led by the far-left, anti-Semite Jeremy Corbyn, and an inner circle dominated by extremists.
And, Hirsh, a true and lifelong a man of the left, is very, very worried.
Children beat effigy of Judas in Poland, amid persistence of ‘medieval anti-Semitism’ | Washington Post
BERLIN — It’s difficult to see what’s not anti-Semitic about the tradition that was filmed in the Polish town of Pruchnik over Easter.
On the ground, residents had placed a straw-filled effigy, complete with some of the most prevalent stereotypes about Jews, including Orthodox Jewish sidelocks and a large nose.
Then, children and adults began to beat the effigy with sticks, before burning their “Judas.”
With anti-Semitic attacks on the rise across Europe, there was widespread condemnation this week over the “revival” of a tradition to which Jewish organizations reacted with “disgust and outrage.” The Polish Catholic Church soon joined the chorus of critics, alongside the Polish interior minister, who called the incident “idiotic.”
The Frenchman who used games to save Jewish children | NZ Herald
Heartwarming….
It had all started as a game. During World War II, when hundreds of Jewish children were hidden at chateaus in the French countryside, kept out of sight from the nation’s Nazi occupiers and Vichy collaborators, Georges Loinger entertained them with calisthenics, football matches and ball games.
Tall and athletic, Loinger was a Jewish engineer turned physical-education teacher, whose blond hair and blue eyes helped him “pass” as a non-Jew while he travelled across France, secretly visiting the chateaus and other makeshift refugee centres to keep his young wards healthy with exercise.
But as anti-Semitic legislation gave way to mass deportations and murder, his exercise routines turned into a morbid form of training, preparation for the day in which Loinger would, if everything went smoothly, smuggle the children across the border into neutral Switzerland.
As a grim backup, it was also preparation in case the children were discovered and sent to a concentration camp.
Ilhan Omar, Harbinger of Democratic Decline? | NY Times
With political power comes rhetorical responsibility.
Spot the problem with the quoted remarks:
(1) The Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 was “something some people did.”
(2) Last month’s attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, was “something someone did.”
(3) The 2015 massacre at a black church in Charleston, S.C., was “something someone did.”
Now imagine that a public figure with a history of making racially inflammatory remarks — someone like Representative Steve King of Iowa or, better yet, President Trump — had said any of this. (Neither of them did.) Would you not be appalled?
Of course you would. You’d be insulted by the evasiveness of the something and someone. You’d be revolted that a right-wing politician would fail to speak forcefully against the bigotries too often found among his followers and fellow travelers. You’d be disgusted by the deliberate attempt to conceal the scale of the horror, the identity of the perpetrators, and the racist ideology that motivated them.
And you’d make no allowances for the possibility that the politician in question might have merely misspoken, especially if he failed to apologize, clarify or correct himself. With political power comes rhetorical responsibility.
The bulk of Omar’s speech was devoted to preaching political empowerment for American Muslims and denouncing Islamophobia. That’s fine as far as it goes.
But contrary to claims by some of her apologists, the remark is not taken out of context, it is not contradicted by anything else she says in the speech, and it is not marred merely because it is factually mistaken. (CAIR was founded seven years before 9/11.) Nor is the problem a matter of inapt phrasing: Omar is a confident public speaker with a precise command of language and a knack for turning a phrase.
The problem is that the remark is foul, in exactly the same way that the hypothetical remarks listed above are foul. I live in lower Manhattan, near the 9/11 memorial and museum. No decent person can look at the portraits of the 2,983 victims of Islamist terrorists and say, by-the-by, that this was “something” that “some people did.”
The problem is also that the remarks didn’t come from just anyone. Just as Trump has repeatedly made his ethnic prejudices plain, so has Omar. She has demonized Israel, and American supporters of Israel, in terms that are unmistakably anti-Semitic. She has been reproached by fellow Democrats, claimed ignorance by way of apology, and then slurred Jews again — without apology. And despite claiming to be a champion of human rights, she has been oddly selective about the human-rights issues that elicit her outrage.
Now Omar’s defenders are keen to paint her as a victim of Islamophobia, which no doubt she is. In this case, however, a victim of bigotry is also a major and unflinching bigot in her own right. That the president has chosen to target Omar may smack of rank hypocrisy, but it would be political malpractice for him not to pick the fight. Her views as a public figure, and what they signify for the party she represents, are fair game.
All the more so as progressives rush to her defense. Omar is not a significant figure in her own right. And the House of Representatives has never lacked for cranks, knaves, fools and bigots.
What is significant is that Omar’s defenders don’t consider her prejudices about Jews as particularly disqualifying, morally or politically, at least not when weighed against the things they like about her (and hate about her enemies). As for her views about Israel, she’s practically mainstream for her segment of the Democratic Party — a harbinger of what’s to come as the old guard of pro-Israel liberals like Majority Leader Steny Hoyer gives way to the anti-Israel wokesters typified by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
What is all this reminiscent of?
Oh, right: the early days of Trump, when millions of Republican primary voters heard the candidate denounce Mexicans as drug dealers, criminals and rapists, and said to themselves, “We like that.” The central lesson of the moral collapse that followed for the G.O.P. isn’t that conservatives are a uniquely perfidious bunch. It’s that partisans of any stripe are always susceptible to demagoguery, particularly when the demagogue refuses to back down in the face of outrage. Shamelessness has a way of inspiring a following, and Omar is in the process of cornering the market on the left.
Still, let’s not be entirely negative about the congresswoman. Toward the end of her speech, she said it was vital “to make sure that we are not only holding people that we don’t like accountable: We must also hold those that we love, have shared values with, accountable.”
Those words, at least, are wise. The best thing Democrats could do now is apply them to Omar herself.
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Max Christoffersen’s widow shocked to find Stuff columnist’s words twisted into Nazi rant | Stuff
The grieving widow of a Stuff columnist whose work was stolen by a blogger and twisted into a Nazi-themed rant under his name is shocked its web host fobbed off her requests to remove it in the aftermath of the Christchurch mosque shootings.
The mens rights blogger had copied an entire column Max Christoffersen wrote in December on male violence against women, but replaced the words ‘men’ with ‘jew’ and ‘woman’ with ‘aryan’.
The column was one of dozens of legitimate news stories and opinion pieces from reputable sources altered in an apparently twisted attempt at irony by switching out the portrayal of gender issues with Nazi-themed anti-semitic language. Stuff has chosen not to name the blog.
