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This is a courtesy notification to let you know that the petition regarding the property at the terminus of Green Island Road will not be heard at the June 4th MPC hearing. The item has been continued. The next regularly scheduled meeting of the MPC is June 25th. The South Harbor Homeowners Association and the Landings Association have been made aware of this action.
This email will certainly not reach everyone who is interested in the outcome of the project so please share it with others.
Marcus Lotson
Director, Development Services
CHATHAM COUNTY - SAVANNAH
METROPOLITAN PLANNING COMMISSION
110 E. State Street Savannah Georgia 31412
912 651 1497 (office)
912 651 1480 (fax)
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Not all young people wore beads in the '60s and '70s. Some wore dog tags.
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Even liberal law professor Dershowitz no longer can bring himself to defend Mueller's actions.Not all young people wore beads in the '60s and '70s. Some wore dog tags.
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Mueller seems to have an animus towards President Trump. However, when he did not find collusion he also failed to carry out the normal goal of a prosecutor which is to find guilt and where not refrain from make gratuitous comments.
Mueller left a cloud over Trump's presidency and basically challenged Congress to impeach based on obstruction or, at the very least, cause damage to Trump in order to make him less re-electable
How can Mueller conclude Trump, an uncharged person, obstruct where there was no collusion either by him or anyone connected with his administration. What was there to obstruct? (See 1 below.)
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The message above from our Muslim friend confirms what I have been writing you for years and certainly post Obama's election. The backdoor to America's destruction is in the classroom and on the campuses of colleges and universities and in the offices of radical socialist professors and teachers. Radical education and their proponents are the Trojan Horse through which they travel.
You do not grow up hating you are taught to hate. I am reminded of the beautiful song from "South Pacific."
Rest assured the history of hatred has no single chapter
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For the balance of this memo I am posting a lot of op eds pertaining to anti-Semitism which I believe is growing and casts an ominous shadow.
Historically, active anti-Semitism often surfaces and generally portends an ominous cathartic event, which may not yet be evident, is on the horizon.
Note the genesis of current anti-Semitism is college/university campus oriented and click on the above video. (See 2 to 2g below.)
Note the above chart regarding Arab Israelis regarding life expectancy and there is another voice coming from a Jordanian-Palestinian that speaks legions and confronts Europeans with historical truths hard to refute:
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Dick
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1)Dershowitz: I Was Wrong About Mueller, Who Just Shamefully Proved His Partisan Agenda
By GuyBenson
Liberal law professor Alan Dershowitz was not impressed by Wednesday's public statement from Robert Mueller, calling it a revealing indication of the former Special Counsel's partisan rooting interests. Dershowitz, who has been a frequent critic of many fellow liberals' legal and investigatory tactics against President Trump, penned on op/ed for The Hill entitled, "Shame on Robert Mueller for Exceeding His Role." He writes that Mueller overstepped his bounds as a prosecutor, lambasting Mueller for having erred even more seriously than fellow ex-FBI Director James Comey -- adding that he can no longer defend Mueller as a nonpartisan actor:
Comey was universally criticized for going beyond his responsibility to state whether there was sufficient evidence to indict Clinton. Mueller, however, did even more. He went beyond the conclusion of his report and gave a political gift to Democrats in Congress who are seeking to institute impeachment proceedings against President Trump. By implying that President Trump might have committed obstruction of justice, Mueller effectively invited Democrats to institute impeachment proceedings. Obstruction of justice is a “high crime and misdemeanor” which, under the Constitution, authorizes impeachment and removal of the president...Until today, I have defended Mueller against the accusations that he is a partisan. I did not believe that he personally favored either the Democrats or the Republicans, or had a point of view on whether President Trump should be impeached. But I have now changed my mind. By putting his thumb, indeed his elbow, on the scale of justice in favor of impeachment based on obstruction of justice, Mueller has revealed his partisan bias. He also has distorted the critical role of a prosecutor in our justice system.
He concludes, "No prosecutor should ever say or do anything for the purpose of helping one party or the other. I cannot imagine a plausible reason why Mueller went beyond his report and gratuitously suggested that President Trump might be guilty, except to help Democrats in Congress and to encourage impeachment talk and action. Shame on Mueller for abusing his position of trust and for allowing himself to be used for such partisan advantage." One of the most common and pointed critiques of Mueller's unexpected performance is that he inverted the role of a prosecutor on the question of guilt vs. "exoneration." Here's a quote from Mueller's question-free press conference: “If we had had confidence that the president had clearly not committed a crime we would have said so.” Charles Cooke of National Review responds:
That’s not how it works in America. Investigators are supposed to look for evidence that a crime was committed, and, if they don’t find enough to contend that a crime was a committed, they are supposed to say “We didn’t find enough to contend that a crime was committed.” They are not supposed to look for evidence that a crime was not committed and then say, “We couldn’t find evidence of innocence." I understand that Mueller was in an odd position. I understand, too, that this wasn’t a criminal trial. But I don’t think those norms are rendered any less important by those facts...If a person doesn’t have enough evidence that someone committed a crime to contend that a crime was committed, he is obliged to presume his innocence. “Not exonerated” is not a standard in our system, and it shouldn’t be one in our culture, either.
DOJ guidelines expressly prohibit the actions of both Comey and Mueller in naming and shaming individuals who were never formally charged with any wrongdoing. “As a series of cases makes clear, there is ordinarily ‘no legitimate governmental interest served’ by the government’s public allegation of wrongdoing by an uncharged party, and this is true ‘regardless of what criminal charges may . . . b[e] contemplated by the Assistant United States Attorney against the [third-party] for the future,'” states DOJ’s formal policy manual on the duties of federal prosecutors and principles of federal prosecutions. Nationwide bar rules governing all practicing attorneys in the United States also explicitly prohibit Mueller’s display during Wednesday’s press conference. “The prosecutor in a criminal case shall … refrain from making extrajudicial comments that have a substantial likelihood of heightening public condemnation of the accused,” states Rule 3.8(f) of the American Bar Association’s rules of professional conduct. Multiple federal agents and prosecutors reached out to The Federalist after Mueller’s press conference to express dismay at the former FBI director’s behavior.
"I’d have been crucified under this rule for a ‘not innocent’ comment about an uncharged party," one former federal prosecutor told Davis in the piece. "I literally cannot fathom holding a press conference to say that an uncharged person was not innocent," the source said. To be sure, neither the Hillary emails probe nor the Trump-Russia investigation qualifies as "ordinary." And doesn't the government implicate people and entities in wrongdoing without filing charges by naming "unindicted co-conspirators" on a regular basis? I'm actually pretty open to arguments that treating the findings of the Mueller probe like any run-of-the-mill federal investigation would have been unrealistic, and probably misguided.
But Mueller did seem to reveal an agenda by highlighting certain portions of his report, while choosing not to mention others. He also declared that the written product should 'speak for itself,' then declined to let it do so by speaking for it in a manner that many observers from across the partisan spectrum viewed as an effective impeachment referral, having failed to identify chargeable offenses. Mueller should answer questions about his decisions on this front, as well as the glaring discrepancy he identified between his version of events and the sworn testimony of the Attorney General on a critical issue regarding the lack of recommended obstruction charges. As for the official opposition party, this by and large captures my sentiments:
But Mueller did seem to reveal an agenda by highlighting certain portions of his report, while choosing not to mention others. He also declared that the written product should 'speak for itself,' then declined to let it do so by speaking for it in a manner that many observers from across the partisan spectrum viewed as an effective impeachment referral, having failed to identify chargeable offenses. Mueller should answer questions about his decisions on this front, as well as the glaring discrepancy he identified between his version of events and the sworn testimony of the Attorney General on a critical issue regarding the lack of recommended obstruction charges. As for the official opposition party, this by and large captures my sentiments:
Guy Benson's Latest Book, End of Discussion: How the Left's Outrage Industry Shuts Down Debate, Manipulates Voters, and Makes America Less Free (and Fun). is available on Amazon
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2, 2a and 2b) VIDEO: UNHINGED COMMENCEMENT SPEAKER’S ANTI- SEMITIC RANT! PAM GELLER
I had the misfortune to witness the undergrad NYU ceremony yesterday at Radio City Music HalL.. This was not my first time at the rodeo so I knew what to expect. But this was a whole other level. There was no ‘education’ component to it. It was all propaganda for the most subversive, radical movements in American society. It was, from the first, an orgy of hard left poison. Colonialism! LGBT! Welfare! Socialism! Climate! Refugees! Climate! Islamic! Native American! Manhattan is actually Native American land – don’t ya know? The valedictorian from the graduation and post-grad ceremonies both were students at the NYU Dept.of Social and Cultural Analysis the notorious school that recently ended its official relation with the Tel Aviv campus.
SHOCKING VIDEO: NYU’s Unhinged Commencement Speaker Goes Off on Jew-Hating Rant
2c) Jews warned against wearing kippa skullcaps as anti-Semitism rises in Germany
by ALAN DERSHOWITZ
An April 2019 report by the Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry showed that the number of major violent attacks on Jews and Jewish targets around the world jumped 13% last year, from 342 to 387. Those violent attacks were centered in the United States, which was home to more than 100 cases.
2f) Progressive Anti-Semitism Surges: Why Now? | National Review
Jew-hatred has a natural home on the multicultural Left, and ‘woke’ culture demands that leftists hate anything Trump supports — especially Israel.
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2, 2a and 2b) VIDEO: UNHINGED COMMENCEMENT SPEAKER’S ANTI- SEMITIC RANT! PAM GELLER
Posted By Ruth King
I had the misfortune to witness the undergrad NYU ceremony yesterday at Radio City Music HalL.. This was not my first time at the rodeo so I knew what to expect. But this was a whole other level. There was no ‘education’ component to it. It was all propaganda for the most subversive, radical movements in American society. It was, from the first, an orgy of hard left poison. Colonialism! LGBT! Welfare! Socialism! Climate! Refugees! Climate! Islamic! Native American! Manhattan is actually Native American land – don’t ya know? The valedictorian from the graduation and post-grad ceremonies both were students at the NYU Dept.of Social and Cultural Analysis the notorious school that recently ended its official relation with the Tel Aviv campus.
This is the best, the most brilliant of NYU? It is a stunning indictment of the left-wing take-ever of the education system in this country. And our taxpayer dollars is funding this civilizational suicide.
SHOCKING VIDEO: NYU’s Unhinged Commencement Speaker Goes Off on Jew-Hating Rant
NYU Graduation Speaker Smears Trump, Israel
BY: Mikhael Smits
A graduation speaker at New York University called President Donald Trump a "fascist," described Israel as an "apartheid" state, endorsed the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and praised Occupy Wall Street in a two-minute excerpt from his Monday speech.
Speaking at the convocation ceremony for NYU's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Steven William Thrasher praised his fellow doctoral graduates for their fight against the various perceived evils.
"Many of us have been together at Occupy Wall Street, and at Black Lives Matter protests, and against that fascist in the White House," Thrasher said to cheers.
When the applause quieted, Thrasher took aim at Israel, which hosts the largest pro-gay "Pride Parade" in the Middle East.
"I am so proud, so proud, of NYU's chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voices for Peace," he said, "for supporting the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against the apartheid state government in Israel."
The BDS movement targets Israeli organizations and companies doing business in Israel in an effort to weaken Israel economically and politically, forcing the Israeli government to change its policies. Israel is not an apartheid state.
In 2018, Northwestern University named Thrasher its inaugural Daniel H. Renberg Chair.
According to an announcement from Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications, Thrasher will "will focus on social justice in reporting, with an emphasis on issues relevant to the LGBTQ community."
A campus newspaper story following the announcement stated Thrasher hopes to "establish programs and classes that examine media coverage of sexual and gender minorities."
The Washington Free Beacon contacted Northwestern'
During the Monday convocation ceremony, Thrasher placed his political causes at the center of the university's mission.
"This is what we are called to do," he said. "This is our NYU legacy, that we are connected in radical love."
NYU awarded the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) a Presidential Service Award earlier this year. SJP members around the country have engaged in physical violence, apologized for anti-semitic activity, and praised terrorists. Its funding comes heavily from organizations like American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), which has ties to Palestinian terror.
Thrasher previously received his bachelor's degree in dramatic writing and film/TV production from NYU. In the interim, he worked as a journalist and at NBC's Saturday Night Live.
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2c) Jews warned against wearing kippa skullcaps as anti-Semitism rises in Germany
A German government watchdog has issued a warning to Jews not to wear skullcaps for their own safety, amid growing concern over a rise in anti-Semitic attacks.
Felix Klein, the German government’s official anti-Semitism commissioner, warned at the weekend that it is not safe to wear traditional yarmulke or kippah skullcaps in public.
“I cannot recommend Jews to wear the kippah at any time, anywhere in Germany,” Mr Klein said in an interview with several local newspapers. “Sadly I have to say this. My evaluation of the situation has changed.”
Mr Klein’s warning comes a year after similar advice from Germany’s largest Jewish organisation, and follows a disturbing increase in anti-Semitic attacks.
According to official figures, 1,799 hate crimes were committed against Jewish people in Germany last year, an increase of more than 10 per cent compared to 2017. They included 62 cases of violence against Jews, up from 37 in 2017.
There has been concern in recent years that Muslim immigration could be fuelling the rise in violence against Jews, but an official report published earlier this month found that 90 per cent of 2017’s anti-Semitic attacks came from the far-Right scene.
Mr Klein blamed “increasing social disinhibition and brutalization” for the rise. “The Internet and social media have contributed greatly to this, as well as the continued attacks on our culture of remembrance,” he said, referring to German attitudes to the Holocaust.
Björn Höcke, a senior politician from the Alternative for Germany party (AfD), called in 2017 for a “180-degree turn” in the German culture of atonement for the crimes of the Second World War and described the national Holocaust memorial as a “shameful monument”.
The head of Germany’s largest Jewish organisation backed Mr Klein’s warning. “It has long been the case that Jews are at risk in some major cities if they are recognizable as Jews,” Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews, told Welt am Sonntag newspaper.
“It is therefore to be welcomed if this situation gets more attention at the highest political level.”
2d) Why such a surge of worldwide antisemitism
Why are so many of the grandchildren of Nazis and Nazi collaborators who brought us the Holocaust once again declaring war on the Jews?
Why have we seen such an increase in antisemitism and irrationally virulent anti-Zionism in Western Europe?
To answer these questions, a myth must first be exposed. That myth is the one perpetrated by the French, the Dutch, the Norwegians, the Swiss, the Belgians, the Austrians, and many other western Europeans: namely that the Holocaust was solely the work of German Nazis aided perhaps by some Polish, Ukrainian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian collaborators.
False.
The Holocaust was perpetrated by Europeans: by Nazi sympathizers and collaborators among the French, Dutch, Norwegians, Swiss, Belgians, Austrians and other Europeans, both Western and Eastern.
If the French government had not deported to the death camps more Jews than their German occupiers asked for; if so many Dutch and Belgian citizens and government officials had not cooperated in the roundup of Jews; if so many Norwegians had not supported Quisling; if Swiss government officials and bankers had not exploited Jews; if Austria had not been more Nazi than the Nazis, the Holocaust would not have had so many Jewish victims.
In light of the widespread European complicity in the destruction of European Jewry, the pervasive anti-Semitism and irrationally hateful anti-Zionism that has recently surfaced throughout Western Europe toward Israel should surprise no one.
“Oh no,” we hear from European apologists. “This is different. We don’t hate the Jews. We only hate their nation-state. Moreover, the Nazis were right-wing. We are left-wing, so we can’t be anti-Semites.”
Nonsense.
The hard left has a history of anti-Semitism as deep and enduring as the hard right. The line from Voltaire to Karl Marx, to Levrenti Beria, to Robert Faurisson, to today’s hard-left Israel bashers is as straight as the line from Wilhelm Mars to the persecutors of Alfred Dreyfus to Hitler.
The Jews of Europe have always been crushed between the Black and the Red – victims of extremism whether it be the ultra-nationalism of Khmelnitsky to the ultra-anti-Semitism of Stalin.
“But some of the most strident anti-Zionists are Jews, such as Norman Finkelstein and even Israelis such as Gilad Atzmon. Surely they can’t be anti-Semites?”
Why not? Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas collaborated with the Gestapo. Atzmon, a hard leftist, describes himself as a proud self-hating Jew and admits that his ideas derive from a notorious anti-Semite.
He denies that the Holocaust is historically proved but he believes that Jews may well have killed Christian children to use their blood to bake Passover matzah. And he thinks it’s “rational” to burn down synagogues.
Finkelstein believes in an international Jewish conspiracy that includes Steven Spielberg, Leon Uris, Eli Wiesel, and Andrew Lloyd Webber!
“But Israel is doing bad things to the Palestinians,” the European apologists insist, “and we are sensitive to the plight of the underdog.”
No, you’re not! Where are your demonstrations on behalf of the oppressed Tibetans, Georgians, Syrians, Armenians, Kurds, or even Ukrainians? Where are your BDS movements against the Chinese, the Russians, the Cubans, the Turks, or the Assad regime?
Only the Palestinians, only Israel? Why? Not because the Palestinians are more oppressed than these and other groups.
Only because their alleged oppressors are Jews and the nation-state of the Jews. Would there be demonstrations and BDS campaigns on behalf of the Palestinians if they were oppressed by Jordan or Egypt?
Oh, wait! The Palestinians were oppressed by Egypt and Jordan… Gaza was an open-air prison between 1948 and 1967, when Egypt was the occupying power. And remember Black September, when Jordan killed more Palestinians than Israel did in a century? I don’t remember any demonstration or BDS campaigns — because there weren’t any.
When Arabs occupy or kill Arabs, Europeans go ho-hum. But when Israel opens a soda factory in Maale Adumim, which even the Palestinian leadership acknowledges will remain part of Israel in any peace deal, Oxfam parts ways with Scarlett Johansson for advertising a soda company that employs hundreds of Palestinians
When Arabs occupy or kill Arabs, Europeans go ho-hum. But when Israel opens a soda factory in Maale Adumim, which even the Palestinian leadership acknowledges will remain part of Israel in any peace deal, Oxfam parts ways with Scarlett Johansson for advertising a soda company that employs hundreds of Palestinians
Keep in mind that Oxfam has provided “aid and material support” to two anti-Israel terrorist groups, according to the Tel Aviv-based Israeli Law Group.
The hypocrisy of so many hard-left western Europeans would be staggering if it were not so predictable based on the sordid history of Western Europe’s treatment of the Jews.
Even England, which was on the right side of the war against Nazism, has a long history of anti-Semitism, beginning with the expulsion of the Jews in 1290 to the notorious White Paper of 1939, which prevented the Jews of Europe from seeking asylum from the Nazis in British-mandated Palestine… And Ireland, which vacillated in the war against Hitler, boasts some of the most virulent anti-Israel rhetoric.
The simple reality is that one cannot understand the current western European left-wing war against the nation-state of the Jewish people without first acknowledging the long-term European war against the Jewish people themselves.
Theodore Herzl understood the pervasiveness and irrationality of European anti-Semitism, which led him to the conclusion that the only solution to Europe’s Jewish problem was for European Jews to leave that bastion of Jew hatred and return to their original homeland, which is now the State of Israel.
None of this is to deny Israel’s imperfections or the criticism it justly deserves for some of its policies. But these imperfections and deserved criticism cannot even begin to explain, much less justify, the disproportionate hatred directed against the only nation-state of the Jewish people and the disproportionate silence regarding the far greater imperfections and deserved criticism of other nations and groups including the Palestinians.
Nor is this to deny that many western European individuals and some western European countries have refused to succumb to the hatred against the Jews or their state. The Czech Republic comes to mind. But far too many western Europeans are as irrational in their hatred toward Israel as their for-bearers were in their hatred toward their Jewish neighbors.
As author Amos Oz once aptly observed: the walls of his grandparents’ Europe were covered with graffiti saying, “Jews, go to Palestine.” Now they say, “Jews, get out of Palestine,” by which is meant Israel.
Who do these western European bigots think they’re fooling? Only fools who want to be fooled in the interest of denying that they are manifesting new variations on their grandparents’ old biases.
Any objective person with an open mind, open eyes, and an open heart must see the double standard being applied to the nation-state of the Jewish people. Many doing so are the grandchildren of those who lethally applied a double standard to the Jews of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s.
For shame!
2e) Caroline Glick talks about growing antisemitism in the realm of fake news
By JERUSALEM POST STAFF
Caroline Glick, author and former Jerusalem Post columnist, is known for her fiery rhetoric about Israeli politics and security. But antisemitism?
Glick sat down with Avi Abelow, CEO and co-founder of the Israel Video Network, to discuss what she described as a growing concern that antisemitic views are being pushed onto the global public through the realm of fake news.
"You use fake facts in order to rationalize violent facts against Jews," Glick explained.
She said antisemitism throughout the ages has manifested itself as fake news or fake facts, such as the idea that Jews make Passover matzah with the blood of Christian children
"That is a fake fact," she said. "So then, antisemites will say, 'It is not that we hate Jews. We are concerned and we need to deal with the fact that these Jews are eating our children.'"
As a result, when people become brutal or genocidal against the Jews, they can justify their behavior, Glick said, as "just taking the normal action that anyone would take if someone were eating their children."
This was the case in Nazi Germany, where the lie was spread that Jews were destroying German society by being communists.
"Obviously, if the Jews are destroying Germany because of communism you have to commit genocide," Glick said. "It is not that you are antisemitic. You are not anti-Jewish. You are responding to some terrible act that the Jews are committing and therefore it makes sense to kill them all."
Glick sat down with Avi Abelow, CEO and co-founder of the Israel Video Network, to discuss what she described as a growing concern that antisemitic views are being pushed onto the global public through the realm of fake news.
"You use fake facts in order to rationalize violent facts against Jews," Glick explained.
She said antisemitism throughout the ages has manifested itself as fake news or fake facts, such as the idea that Jews make Passover matzah with the blood of Christian children
"That is a fake fact," she said. "So then, antisemites will say, 'It is not that we hate Jews. We are concerned and we need to deal with the fact that these Jews are eating our children.'"
As a result, when people become brutal or genocidal against the Jews, they can justify their behavior, Glick said, as "just taking the normal action that anyone would take if someone were eating their children."
This was the case in Nazi Germany, where the lie was spread that Jews were destroying German society by being communists.
"Obviously, if the Jews are destroying Germany because of communism you have to commit genocide," Glick said. "It is not that you are antisemitic. You are not anti-Jewish. You are responding to some terrible act that the Jews are committing and therefore it makes sense to kill them all."
Glick's comments come on the heels of recent studies about the rise in antisemitism.
An April 2019 report by the Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry showed that the number of major violent attacks on Jews and Jewish targets around the world jumped 13% last year, from 342 to 387. Those violent attacks were centered in the United States, which was home to more than 100 cases.
2f) Progressive Anti-Semitism Surges: Why Now? | National Review
Jew-hatred has a natural home on the multicultural Left, and ‘woke’ culture demands that leftists hate anything Trump supports — especially Israel.
The New York Times International Edition recently published an anti-Semitic cartoon of a dachshund with the face of Benjamin Netanyahu. The composite animal was leading a hunched Donald Trump who had on dark sunglasses, as if blind, and a yarmulke.
Almost immediately, everyone pointed out that the theme of doglike Jews pulling along their clueless befuddled blinded “Aryan” masters was a favorite in Hitler’s Germany. The theme, style, and imagery of the cartoon might have trumped what was often published in Der Stürmer, the Nazi megaphone of propagandist Julius Streicher. The latter was hanged after the Nuremberg Trials for two decades of fomenting the Jew hatred that helped lead to the Holocaust.
Stranger still, at first the New York Times merely explained how the sick cartoon got published in its international edition, but without an apology for its publication. Its subsequent second-try mea culpa was rendered a pathetic joke when, a few days later, the paper published yet another incoherent anti-Semitic cartoon of a Benjamin Netanyahu, this time as some sort of blind Moses with selfie stick in one hand and a stone tablet with the Star of David in the other, as he descends from Mount Sinai.
It has been noted that the Times has had a long history of anti-Semitism, dating to before World War II, and, after that, of serial anti-Israel venom. Certainly, if the cartoon had similarly portrayed any other ethnic or religious group (except heterosexual white Christians), the Times would immediately have fired anyone remotely involved in running such trash. Was it any surprise that the Times recently referenced Jesus as a Palestinian rather than Jewish?
The Times in general sees bias such as anti-Semitism and racism in terms of political warfare: The hatred is always a cry of the heart of marginalized people, and always directed at the supposedly deserving. Note that not long ago the Times vigorously defended its hiring of Sarah Jeong, the racist blogger who had a long history of anti-male and anti-white hate speech that included such social-media posts as “Oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men” and “Dumbass f****** white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants” and “White people have stopped breeding. You’ll all go extinct soon. That was my plan all along.” In other words, the Times seems to have no innate problem with its progressive employees expressing racist and anti-Semitic tropes, as long as their targets are deemed politically incorrect.
Recently at UC Berkeley, in a now familiar routine, during a student-government meeting, protesters slurred Jewish students with conspiratorial charges that the Israeli military has trained American police how better to kill blacks. Campuses now routinely ignore student anti-Semitic smears; indeed, universities and colleges are becoming the incubators of progressive hatred of Jews.
The strange thing about the now predictable anti-Jewish and anti-Israel social-media outbursts of Representative Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) was not that Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) and Representative Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.) defended Omar’s slurs. (Tlaib herself recently demanded cutting off aid to Israel, claiming it did not reflect American values.) Rather, what’s striking is that the Democratic party in general could not even muster a vote condemning the anti-Semitic and anti-Israel statements of one of their own House members.
The examples of progressive hatred of Jews could be multiplied endlessly, but the key question is: Why in this generation and why on the Democratic left?
There, are of course, always white nationalists who voice reactionary anti-Semitism, but most are pathetic fringe groups easily identified and ostracized. For all the invective lodged against Donald Trump, no president has proved more sensitive to Jewish issues and more committed to the survival of Israel. The anti-Semitic extreme alt-right has received no sanction from the Republican party, and it remains a tiny, mostly irrelevant group of losers. In contrast, progressive Jew-hatred is expressed at the nation’s premier institutions, such as UC Berkeley, the New York Times, and the U.S. Congress. Again, why?
The far Left is intertwined with Islamist activists. Both share a hatred of the U.S. and see the Middle East as a postcolonial victim of Western imperialism. Students and urban youth bond with radical Islamists in their shared dislike of the Western countries (such as Israel) in general and the United States in particular.
Radical Muslims and the Left disguise their hatred of Jews by claiming that they are only championing downtrodden Palestinians. Few bother to ask them why a tiny democracy in a sea of autocracy is always singled out any time global attention turns to the question of refugees, disputed territories, or treatment of supposed religious minorities. In other words, the hater of Jews always says, “I have no problem with the Jewish people, but I do not like the imperialist and colonial policies of the Jewish state of Israel.”
But if so, why not extend such universal empathy for refugees to the last of the East Prussian Germans, or those who are left of the Volga Russians, or the octogenarians still alive from the nearly 1 million Jews who were ethnically cleansed from their ancestral homes in Jordan, Syria, Egypt, and throughout the Islamic world? Why pick only on tiny Israel?
If the rub is disputed land, why not agitate for the northern Cypriot Greeks who suffered (and do suffer) terribly from the occupation of Turkish overseers, or the Tibetans, whose lands were simply expropriated by Chinese Communists?
If the youth of today are anxious about the treatment of religious minorities, why not at least confess that 1 million Arab speakers in Israel cherish freedoms found nowhere else in the Middle East? They also are certainly freer and more secure than Muslim minorities in either India or China. So there is no reason to fixate on a tiny constitutional society — except that it is a Jewish state.
Anti-Semitism, to be frank, is deeply embedded also among the elite black progressive community. Numerous contemporary African-American national leaders — Jesse Jackson (“Hymietown”), Al Sharpton (“If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house”), the Reverend Jeremiah Wright (“Them Jews aren’t going to let him [Obama] talk to me.”) — have at some point trafficked in anti-Semitism.
The Jew-hating Louis Farrakhan is no outlier. He has been prominent in the progressive Women’s March, has had his picture taken with a then-smiling Senator Barack Obama (the photo was repressed until after Obama left the presidency), and he was once close to former Democratic National Party vice chairman Keith Ellison. Representative Hank Johnson (D., Ga.), like Farrakhan, has compared West Bank Jews to “termites” — another sick metaphor and, like those used in cartoons appearing in the New York Times, one with a disgusting pedigree from the Third Reich.
In such old-new binaries, Jews and Israelis are now recast as “privileged whites.” So their frequent attackers expect immunity from condemnation; they seek refuge as marginalized people for whom charges of bias or privilege do not so readily apply.
There is also the insidious suggestion by those on the left who traffic in anti-Semitic language and symbolism that most American Jews are assumed to be loyal Democrats. In passive-aggressive style, the new anti-Semites enjoy poking fellow party members on the left, in the expectation that they can do so without warranting the odium that like-minded Nazis and Klansmen would earn.
Like teenagers who rant against their parents on the expectation that, as members of the same family, they are exempt from rebuke, the progressive anti-Semites expect fellow Democrats to contextualize their animus, tolerate it, and even excuse it for the greater good of party and ideological unity.
Add in that a new generation of younger Jewish Americans is not inclined to push back against left-wing anti-Semitism. These fourth- and fifth-generation American citizens are often increasingly secular; they don’t have much knowledge about or interest in the history and nature of Israel, and they’re keen to avoid conflict with fellow hipster students and urban progressives. Like the former and now largely inert Greek-American “lobby,” the next generation of Jewish Americans is less interested in traditional Jewish concerns and likely to defer to fellow progressives in matters of “woke” issues such as the alleged “colonialism” of Israel.
Anti-Semitism is only going to intensify. Both in America and Europe, it is naturally at home among the multicultural Left. The media, popular culture, universities, and left-wing political parties either cannot or will not stop it.
Trump’s unwavering support for Israel and keen support of Jews also encourages leftists, in Pavlovian fashion, to attack anything that Trump favors. Prominent progressive Jews lack either the ability or the inclination to call out members of their own political persuasion — a fact that only encourages even more overt anti-Semitism.
So here is the near future: Every time the New York Times runs another anti-Semitic cartoon (and it will), each time a left-wing member of Congress questions the patriotism or morality of American Jews (and one will), and on every occasion Jewish students are harassed on campus (and they will be), we go another mile down the road to the well-known historical disaster that is looming ahead.
2g) Going Wherever The Evidence Leads
By Melanie Phillips
What has caused the deeply alarming upsurge in antisemitism across the West? As many have observed, there are three principal sources: the political left, Islamic culture and neo-fascist or white-supremacist cults.
One further factor, though, is crucial. Never disappearing altogether, antisemitism can be kept to a low level by condign social disapproval that deems antisemites to be totally beyond the pale.
If, however, that social stigma is lifted and society tolerates, excuses or sanitizes antisemitism, then it roars out of control.
That’s precisely what is now happening. In America, astoundingly, it is being facilitated and mainstreamed by Democratic Party grandees.
Look at what happened over remarks made by Michigan’s Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib. The congresswoman, whose Arab parents were born in Ramallah, said thinking of the Holocaust gave her a “calming feeling.”
This, she said, was because her Palestinian ancestors “lost their land and some lost their lives, their livelihood, their human dignity, their existence in many ways” in order to “create a safe haven for Jews, post-the Holocaust, post-the tragedy and the horrific persecution of Jews across the world at that time. And I love the fact that it was my ancestors that provided that, right, in many ways.
But they did it in a way that took their human dignity away and it was forced on them.”
This was a vicious travesty of history. Wickedly, she presented Palestinian Arabs as victims of the Holocaust’s victims. The reality was that those Arabs were actually hopeful ancillaries to the Nazi genocide of the Jews.
Far from giving their lives to provide safe haven for the Jews, as she claimed, the Arabs of Palestine did everything they could to stop them from coming in and slaughtered as many as possible — all to prevent the Jews from obtaining the homeland that could have saved thousands from the Nazi genocide.
Much worse still, they intended to perpetrate a Final Solution for the Jews in Palestine and beyond. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al Husseini, formed a pact with Hitler that if he won the war, the Mufti would ensure that every Jew in the Middle East was exterminated.
As the Nazis stepped up their persecution of the Jews in Europe, Arab storm-troopers marched in Palestine shouting “Heil Hitler” and branding the Jews “the human sexual disease” and “a menace to all mankind.”
The Palestinian Arabs have never stopped waging that war of extermination. They write the Jews out of their own history in the land to which the Arabs lay false and a historic claim.
They vandalize priceless archeological sites to destroy the physical evidence that Israel was the Jews’ national kingdom centuries before the Arabs invaded. They teach their children to kill Israelis, steal their land and hate Jews.
Indeed, they have never stopped bombing, shooting, knifing and decapitating Jews in Israel. Mahmoud Abbas, who worships al Husseini, recently admitted the Palestinian Authority’s central role in promoting attacks on Israelis when he justified paying the families of terrorists.
His spokesman, Nabil Abu Rudeina, said: “It is impossible to send a soldier to war and then not take care of his family. We are talking about someone who acts on our behalf and receives orders from us.”
The ancestors of today’s Palestinian Arabs were Hitler’s army in the Middle East; and their descendants can justly be regarded as the last undefeated front in the Nazi war against the Jews.
For making such remarks, Tlaib should be thrown out of Congress. As U.S. President Donald Trump rightly said about “her horrible and highly insensitive statement” on the Holocaust: “She obviously has tremendous hatred of Israel and the Jewish people.”
But instead of treating her as a pariah to be shunned, the Democrats have circled the wagons around her. The Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, said that “desperate attempts to smear” Tlaib and misrepresent her comments were “outrageous.”
Tlaib was neither smeared nor misrepresented. It was Pelosi’s defense of her remarks that was outrageous. Worse, this is now part of a pattern by Pelosi of sanitizing and normalizing Islamic antisemitism.
Although Minnesota Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar accused Israel of “hypnotizing the world” and prayed that “Allah awaken the people and help them see [Israel’s] evil doings,” Pelosi appointed her to the House Foreign Affairs Committee. And after Omar claimed that Jews use their money to suborn American politicians in the interests of Israel, Pelosi played down the remark.
She also invited a radical Islamist imam, Omar Suleiman, to deliver the noon prayer in Congress.
Suleiman has not just compared Israel to Nazis and incited violence against Israelis. As detailed by Islam researcher Andrew Bostom, he has a long history of virulent antisemitic comments, in line with Islamic religious texts, depicting the Jews as cosmically evil, incurring God’s wrath so they were transformed into apes and pigs and so forth.
Yet this is the man that the Democrats not only honored in Congress, but whose behavior they defend by smearing as “Islamophobes” those who dare call out his bigotry.
In Britain, the struggle against Labour antisemitism is getting nowhere at all, despite repeated outrage and even resignations by a number of decent Labour MPs.
A major part of the problem is that this derangement is by no means confined to the supporters of Labour’s far-left leader Jeremy Corbyn. This was shown by last weekend’s revolting anti-Israel hate-fest in London. Chanting demonstrators brandished posters declaring that Jews control the media, Jews are the new Nazis, Jews have no right to a state, Jews bring antisemitism upon themselves and so on.
Yet faced with this chilling display, the media could barely bring itself to shrug. This is largely because progressive people refuse to acknowledge that their signature Palestinian cause — so revealingly exposed by the mind-bending distortions of Rashida Tlaib — is the new antisemitism.
And that’s because they refuse to acknowledge that Palestinianism itself is fundamentally anti-Jew.
This denial of a most inconvenient truth—that the Arabs’ hatred of Israel derives from their murderous hatred of the Jews—was illustrated by one aspect of a BBC documentary last week about the border riots in Gaza.
In it, a Gazan boy says “the revolutionary songs excite you, they encourage you … to rip a Jew’s head off.” But, instead of accurately translating the Arabic word Yahud that he and others used for Jew, the BBC mistranslated it as “Israeli.”
The BBC insists that this was “both accurate and true to the speakers’ intentions.” This is simply untrue. In Arabic, yahud means “Jew.” When Arabic media refer to Israel, they use that word in Arabic letters.
A chant frequently heard among Islamic religious extremists is Khaibar, Khaibar, ya Yahud, Jaish Mohammed, sa yahud, which means “Jews, remember Khaibar, the army of Mohammed is returning.”
Anyone who reads Islamic religious texts can see that hatred of the Jews is embedded in Islamic religion and culture. Yet in America and Britain, this is all but unsayable.
Anyone who points out that Islamic society is fueled by hysterical and obsessional antisemitism is deemed to be Islamophobic — not least by prominent British Jews.
Astoundingly, they equate Islamophobia — the term designed to silence criticism of the Islamic world — with antisemitism. So they remain silent about this major threat to themselves from the Muslim community, the group of which the left will permit no criticism, while inflating the threat from “the right,” the group the left blames for all the ills of the world—and in which it preposterously lumps together white supremacists, anyone who criticizes mass immigration and all those who voted for Brexit.
Denial of Palestinian and Muslim antisemitism is legitimizing, mainstreaming and fueling antisemitism in the West.
When confronted with their own bigotry, people like Tlaib and Suleiman claim that the real problem of antisemitism comes from “the right.”
And which groups in both America and Britain hand them this particular “get out of jail free” card so they can continue to escalate the climate of Jew-hatred? Why, the left, of course — and the Jews.
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