NORTH DAKOTA FARM KID
Seven minutes of hate courtesy of SJP and UMASS Boston
By Carol Green Ungar
Last Thursday, June 24, 2021, I was publicly humiliated and scapegoated at a rally organized by the UMASS Boston Chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, (SJP). More to the point, I was shoved, spit at, called a bitch, a Nazi, a pig, and doused with water at a rally organized by a student organization supported with funds collected and distributed by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. SJP has been organizing rallies like this on college campuses throughout the U.S. for years, but now, SJP is moving off campus, with the powers that be taking little notice.
The ordeal was the longest seven minutes of my life, but I have nothing to complain about. Jews throughout the world have been subject to much worse abuse at the hands of their fellow citizens in episodes that lasted a lot longer than what I endured.
And even during the most frightening moments of my ordeal, I was comforted by two people who stood up for me out of principle, telling the mob assailing me I had done nothing wrong and that I should be left alone. Very rarely have Jews enjoyed such solidarity from their fellow citizens, even in the most enlightened polities.
Throughout history, people have been voyeuristic bystanders to anti-Jewish violence. These days, people who engage in antisemitic attacks are egged on, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, by people who declare they are on the side of peace and justice.
I am not a Jew, but what happened to me last week on the streets of Boston, my home for the past 20-plus years, is part of an ongoing campaign designed to drive Jews out of civic life in the U.S. This is not about Israel, but Jews. And it’s not just about Jews, but about undermining the rule of law and poisoning inter-group relations throughout the country — using public funds. It’s a recipe for disaster and the people who run the city are asleep at the switch.
On June 17, the UMASS Boston chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine started promoting a rally that begins on the steps of the Massachusetts State House in Boston and then proceeds to the separate offices of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) of Boston.
According to SJP’s narrative, the ADL brings American police officers to Israel, where they are trained to oppress and murder people of color in America, and the JCRC brings Massachusetts lawmakers to Israel to brainwash them into supporting Zionism, which is a form of white supremacy. They call this “investing in the infrastructure of white supremacism.” It’s an age-old tactic — blame the Jews for the great evil of the day.
With these accusations, which are the poisonous fruit of critical race theory, the rally organizers cast the ADL and the JCRC as the public face of what Bernard Harrison describes in his book Blaming the Jews: Politics and Delusion (Indiana University Press, 2020) as an “evil, conspiratorial organization of an essentially impenetrable kind [with] vast power to harm any non-Jewish society that harbors Jews.”
The SJP narrative, which clearly falls into what Harrison describes as “political antisemitism” had been showcased at a “Day of Rage” that took place on July 1, 2020.
At this rally, Nino Brown, a Boston school teacher associated with the Jericho Project, an organization that promotes a black radical separatist agenda in the U.S., demonized the United States and Israel, shouting, “F—k your police state, America was never great,” and referring to Israel as a “parasitic entity” during his speech.
I wrote a number of articles about Brown’s rhetoric in the weeks after last year’s rally and it was clear that these articles were on the top of his mind during his talk at last Thursday’s demonstration on the steps of the State House.
In addition to declaring that Israel was a “cancer to the Middle East” and that July 4 (which he referred to as the “Fourth of You Lie,”) is the “Nakba” for African Americans, he warned of enemies afoot at the rally. These enemies are present, he said, “to report and spread their baseless propaganda.”
That was a clear reference to me and two of my colleagues from the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) who were at the rally to see what Brown and others had to say. Given that I had written numerous articles about him, I concluded I had an obligation to give Brown an opportunity to complain to me directly — man-to-man — about what I had written, so I introduced myself to him as the rally, which numbered maybe around 100 people, made its way to the ADL offices.
It’s a habit left over from my days as a newspaper reporter at Suburban World Newspapers in Needham, Mass. If you’re going to write about people, you need to be able to stand in their presence as they respond, even with anger.
As the crowd made its way down Beacon Street, Brown and I shook hands, he gave me a flyer and I told him my name. He had declared me an “enemy” just a few moments before, but it was my hope that this human connection would ease the tension between us and that if he had any legitimate complaints about being misquoted, he’d point them out in detail to me either privately or publicly.
My hope was in vain.
When the crowd had made its way to the ADL office, the first speaker, a young woman associated with the SJP chapter of UMASS Boston, leveled a litany of accusations against the ADL. A few minutes into her talk, she paused to listen to one of her fellow activists who spoke to her privately. Then she yelled, “Is Dexter Van Zile in the crowd?”
“Yeah, I’m right here,” I said. “Hi, how are you?”
She asked me how I was — (“Fine,” I said). “It’s nice that you’re with us today. Thank you. It’s an open rally.” The crowd cheered at her magnanimity.
The young woman then went back to her accusations against the ADL, declaring that the organization brings legislators on “brain-washing trips” to Israel. As she continued speaking, a tall young man with long brown hair, wearing black pants, a black shirt, and a COVID-mask that obscured his lower face stood in front of me. Wearing a high-visibility yellow vest indicating he was a rally marshal, he stood to block my view of the rally and told me, “We know who you are.”
“I know,” I said. “Lot’s of people do.”
At one point, I had asked him his name.
“Steve,” he said, before adding that he could tell me whatever name he wanted and it could be fake. He reveled in his anonymity and the license that came with it.
“Why are you here?” he asked.
“To take notes.”
“Who do you write for?”
“I write for a lot of people.”
“Where’s this article gonna go?”
“I dunno.”
Then he pointed to the chicken scratch I was putting on the notepad. “That’s wrong, that’s wrong, that’s wrong, that’s b—-t,” he said as he moved his finger across the page.
During it all, he made fun of my handwriting, which is pretty bad, even under normal conditions, and of my shaking hands. At some point during our confrontation, he tried to steal my pen from my hand.
Then there was a commotion in the main crowd as Nino Brown got ahold of the megaphone.
“Dexter Van Zile’s here in the crowd,” Brown said. “He’s a rabid Zionist with this group called CAMERA.” Boos and shouts of “Shame!” resonated in response. Brown went on to declare that while the crowd was out exercising its right to free speech, others were there posing “as friends under the guise of journalism only to smear and muckrake on our righteous movement.”
He then started a chant of “Zionist Go Home!” to get me to flee the scene. In response, I chanted “Am Yisrael Chai” a few times just to let them know that there was another side of the story.
It wasn’t something they wanted to hear. Later one of my colleagues asked me, “What prompted you to do that?” It seemed obligatory.
The declaration that the people of Israel live elicited a rage from the crowd. A young woman emptied a bottle of water on me, another spit on me. Others called me a Nazi, a bitch, a f—–g pig. An African American man in a yellow vest told me I had “f—–d up” for not leaving when told to and at one point, I was told I had offended people in the crowd by uttering the word “Israel.”
Two people, bless their souls, tried to calm the maelstrom. “He’s done nothing wrong,” a Latino man about my height declared emphatically to the crowd. Another attendee, a woman whom I did not get a good look at, declared the same thing, in an attempt to calm the crowd, but to no avail. To be fair, maybe it was their admonitions that prevented disaster.
Eventually, one of the rally organizers, a young black man wearing a green yellow vest told me that the rally was going to move down the street and that I needed to yield way.
was at this point the rally organizer shoved me. I took up my position with my back to the wall and took off my hat in a mock expression of aw-shucks comity.
This seemed like a reasonable request, so I turned my back to him and started walking to the side and it
As this was happening, one of the rally leaders, a man with a kippah whom I had recognized from the “Day of Rage” rally in 2020, started yelling for the crowd to leave me alone — not out of a principled commitment to non-violence or free speech — but out of a cynical acknowledgement that things were getting out of hand and that anything physical harm done to me would harm their cause.
“Don’t give them the ammunition. They will use this against us,” he said, adding at one point, “One Zionist is not worth it. They will use this against us.”
As the crowd moved on, the young African American man offered me one last warning.
“You f—–d up, man,” he said. “You know that.”
After I filed a report with the Boston Police Department (which, six days on, has yet to contact me for details about what happened), CAMERA made the decision to post and publicize video of the events described above and broadcast them on Twitter.
In response, the JCRC, the ADL and the local office of the American Jewish Committee (AJC) have expressed shock and dismay over what happened, affirming both the group’s right to protest and my right to cover the protests as a researcher. But the powers that be in the city of Boston have yet to speak a word of about the events, prompting strong feelings of isolation on the part of Jews. Jeremy Burton, executive director of the JCRC, one of the institutions targeted by the rally, tweeted, “Where are the good people of Boston?” (There were two at the rally, but that’s about it, Jeremy.)
The melee I endured and the official silence I’ve witnessed in the days since demonstrates that American civil society is in bad shape and that the people responsible for ordering public life in the Boston area are indifferent to their obligations as leaders.
The upshot is this: The anti-Jewish hate we’ve seen for years on college campus is now in the streets of our cities, courtesy of groups like the state funded SJP at UMASS Boston.
It’s a maelstrom — a state funded maelstrom — and it’s just beginning.
And:
Are We Nazi Germany?
By Ronald E. Yates
I've noticed that whenever the subject of Nazi Germany is raised, someone always says something like this: "It's unbelievable that Adolf Hitler was able to manipulate and control the entire German population. It just seems impossible."
Yet that's exactly what he did. Yes, there were some dissenters and political foes, but they were subdued and quashed as the boundless power of the Nazi regime shut down all dissent with the use of the brown-shirted Sturmabteilung or SA, the Schutzstaffel or SS, and the dreaded Gestapo or Geheime Staatspolizei.
Perhaps a bit of context is in order here. I spent three years in Germany with the Army Security Agency involved in SIGINT (intelligence derived from electronic signals and systems used by foreign targets). I am fluent in German, my wife is German, I have studied German history, and I keep up with current events in the country.
Like a lot of Americans, I always assumed that America was safe from the kind of tyranny the German people experienced under the heavy hand of the Third Reich. There is no way our federal, state, and local governments could restrain and control the American people the way Hitler and his Nazis dominated the German population, I thought.
Yet, for the past eighteen months, that's exactly what has happened in America.
A nation that always prided itself on its independence and individuality was suddenly locked down. Travel was restricted, schools and businesses were shuttered, we were commanded to wear face masks, voting laws were altered, isolation and quarantines were mandated, and speech was censored by social and mainstream media if Big Tech oligarchs judged what was said or written as "misinformation."
It didn't stop there. A public health emergency was declared, borders were closed, and large gatherings were forbidden — including church attendance, funerals, and weddings.
In short, civil liberties that Americans had always taken for granted were suspended by those in power, just as the Nazis rescinded the rights of the German people, including a free press guaranteed by Germany's Weimar Republic (1918 to 1933). The German press quickly complied with its new masters.
Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Germany's Minister of Propaganda, had no use for a free press and once said, "Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play."
Alter that quote a little, and you have a passage more relevant to American social media today: "Think of social and mainstream media as a great keyboard on which Big Tech oligarchs can play."
Big Tech in the United States is following another Goebbels maxim: "Not every item of news should be published. Rather, those who control news policies should endeavor to make every item of news serve a certain purpose."
We know what that "certain purpose" is.
During Biden's socialist regime, the legacy media's goal is to promote socialist policies and protect our feckless president from all criticism — the same objective that Goebbels was tasked with during Adolf Hitler's reign.
No doubt Goebbels would be proud of America's Big Tech oligarchs. They are performing the same tasks in 2021 America that Goebbels performed during the 12 years of the Third Reich.
Instead of opposing restrictions on our First Amendment rights, which guarantees five basic freedoms (religion, speech, the press, the right to assemble, and the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances), millions of panicked Americans were quick to acknowledge and tolerate these new restrictions of their civil rights. The media declined to investigate the pandemic, its source, its causes, and its severe impact — especially on young children and the elderly. Instead, our media spent most of the pandemic refusing to look at China as the cause and source of the COVID-19 virus, choosing to pillory President Trump for daring even to suggest that China might be culpable. Today, we are learning (much to the chagrin of the media) that Trump was probably right. The virus came from a Wuhan, China lab and not from a flying rodent.
As was the case in Nazi Germany, American K–12 schoolchildren and students in universities are being indoctrinated with political dogma from socialist organizations like Black Lives Matter. Curricula are filled with the bogus and deceptive Critical Race Theory and the debunked and fallacious 1619 Project. Those who don't adhere to the dogma are ostracized, canceled, and even fired from teaching positions.
In 1930s socialist Germany (Yes, folks, the Nazis were socialists. Nazi stands for "Nationalsozialist" or National Socialism), the Nazis went even farther. They sent educators, religious leaders, and political opponents to concentration camps like Dachau. They encouraged supporters to take to the streets to harass and assault Nazi opposition. It was a winning tactic because few Germans dared oppose armed mobs of brownshirts who were never arrested or prosecuted for their assaults on people or property.
Sound familiar? Remember Black Lives Matter and Antifa in places like Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland, Chicago, and New York City? They are still burning and looting.
"Whoever can conquer the street will one day conquer the state, for every form of power politics and any dictatorship-run state has its roots in the street," Goebbels once said. "Total dominance is the goal."
In Germany, it was one-party dominance that put the state at the summit of the political and social lives of the German people. History was rewritten, free speech was suppressed, books were banned, people's lives were monitored, and religion was ridiculed and stifled in favor of the secular nation.
Today, Democrats in Congress talk about banning or outlawing the Republican Party — or at least those Republicans and independents who supported and voted for Donald Trump or who refused to follow government decrees and diktats during the pandemic.
Others are quick to support the lockdowns and suspension of civil rights.
"This pandemic is a 'black swan event,' one without modern precedent," opined Harvard Law professor Charles Fried. "Most people are worried about restrictions on meetings — that's freedom of association. And about being made to stay in one place, which I suppose is a restriction on liberty. But none of these liberties is absolute; they can all be abrogated for compelling grounds. And in this case, the compelling ground is the public health emergency."
I'm not buying it.
What we have experienced in the United States since January 2020 has been a gross overreach of state and national power — the domination of individual freedoms never before seen in this country.
Where were the resisters, the "anti-Nazis"?
In Nazi Germany, Jews were portrayed as a public health menace, vermin to be exterminated. The monthly magazine Neues Volk, published by Germany's "Office of Racial Policy," argued that all Jews suffered from "hereditary illness" and that each Jew cost German taxpayers and the community 60,000 Reich Marks over the course of a single lifetime. Lists of Jews were compiled in every German town and city, and today we know that millions were rounded up and murdered.
There are troubling parallels to that kind of thinking in America today as examples of anti-Semitism escalate day after day, mostly from a left that supports Palestinian causes and terrorist tactics but maintains a visceral hatred toward Israel.
Democrat members of Congress have taken that kind of political and social "cleansing" even farther, insisting that Republicans, conservatives, and anybody who supported or supports Donald Trump should be sent to "re-education camps" and "deprogrammed."
Democrat Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other leftist Democrats insist that "lists" should be made of all Trump supporters so they can be "ostracized and otherwise punished." Keeping "enemies" lists was a favorite tactic of the Gestapo. Thank you, AOC, for reintroducing this insidious tool to Congress.
But Democrats didn't stop there. Michael Beller, principal counsel for the tax-supported Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), said in a video that the children of supporters of President Donald Trump should be seized and placed in "re-education camps."
"We should go for all the Republican voters, and Homeland Security will take their children away, and we'll put [Trump-supporters' children] into re-education camps," Beller said in the video.
Beller must have been listening to Adolf Hitler, who, in 1933 said this about children: "If the older generation cannot get accustomed to us, we shall take their children away from them and rear them as needful to the Fatherland."
Is this the state of our nation today?
We are a country divided politically and socially into warring tribes: Democrats vs. Republicans, liberals vs. conservatives, minorities (brown, black, and yellow people) vs. whites, victims vs. oppressors, communities "of color" vs. police, the "haves" vs. the "have nots," socialists vs. capitalists.
All that's left is for Americans on opposing sides to arm themselves and commence slaughtering one another because of conflicting political and social opinions or skin color. Wouldn't China, Russia, and America's other enemies just love that?
In 1920s Germany, it was Hitler's brownshirts attacking the feeble Weimar Republic — Germany's first experiment with democracy. It was a growing Communist Party vs. a nascent Nazi Party. But after 1932, when Hitler and the Nazis gained power, Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, and political opponents were rounded up and sent to concentration camps.
Is this the "Endlösung" (final solution) that some socialists, radical leftists, and Democrats are proposing for America's Republican Party, conservatives, and Trump supporters?
Are we headed for a one-party socialist political system in which we allow our rights to be suspended indefinitely, the way we did for the past 18 months?
After millions of courageous Americans went to war in World War II and more than 500,000 made the ultimate sacrifice fighting fascism, are we going to roll over and accept domination by a few elite socialists and leftist Democrats who are convinced they should remain in power ad infinitum? Are the American people going to submit to the Big Tech oligarchs, the corrupt and compliant media, and the socialist elites in Washington and allow their rights to be trampled and obliterated?
Are we becoming Nazi Germany?
Ronald E. Yates is a U.S. Army veteran, author, former Chicago Tribune foreign correspondent, and professor and dean emeritus of journalism at the University of Illinois. His website: http://www.ronaldyatesbooks.com.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Adam Solender, Director of the Savannah JEA, reviews T.K Thorne''s Behind The Magic Curtain:
T. K. Thorne’s book, “Behind the Magic Curtain: Secrets, Spies, and Unsung White Allies of Birmingham’s Civil Rights Days,” challenges the accepted view that all Southern Jews stayed aloof from the 1960’s Civil Rights Movement.
In her introduction, Thorne quotes Larry Brooks, editor and publisher of Southern Jewish Life magazine, who observed in 2015 that, despite “shorthand notions that ‘Jews marched with Blacks in the South’ on one hand, or ‘Jews in the South didn’t do anything to help’ on the other, the reality is much more of a gray area.”
Thorne, 69, who is Jewish and a retired Birmingham police captain, focuses on that gray area. Coming when it does in the Black Lives Matter era, it is a timely reminder of the long history of Jews and Blacks struggling together for racial justice.
T.K. Thorne by the Forward
Mark Pinsky: As the civil rights movement erupted, the trope of conservative white Southerners was that everything was fine between the races until the established order was upset by the arrival of “outside agitators.” Many of these were Jews who came down from the North. But your book suggests that many Southern Jews were in fact “inside agitators” for racial equality. Is that a stretch?
T. K. Thorne: Not a stretch. That’s exactly what I found.
Rabbi Milton Grafman, of Temple Emanu-El, was upfront and constant in his talk about civil rights. In one case, he initiated an effort to lobby the city to withdraw the Ku Klux Klan’s permit for a booth at the state fair. Karl Friedman, a prominent attorney, raised money for the NAACP and helped on some of their legal briefs. Friedman was involved in creating an integrated bank, to reduce the power of white banks to retaliate and pressure Black supporters of civil rights and to give access to Blacks to loans and banking services. As a result, a bullet was fired through his living room window and a racist message was burned onto his front yard.
Another attorney, Abe Berkowitz, lobbied the state legislature to revoke the Klan’s state charter. He had Black clients, and was also intensely involved in the effort t to get rid of the racist police commissioner “Bull” Connor.
What about Birmingham’s Jewish women?
Dorah Heyman Stern led an effort to investigate and push for reform in the prisons (where mostly blacks were incarcerated) and to establish a hospital that treated patients regardless of their race or ability to pay; Anny Kraus persuaded professors at University in Birmingham (now UAB) to donate science lab equipment to local a Black college; Betty Loeb made the Klan’s Rogue Gallery for her activism, and Gertrude Goldstein, traveled with the Siegels, Krauses and Baers and others whites to Selma in 1965 before Bloody Sunday, marching past angry Klansmen armed with bats to make a public statement on the county courthouse steps in support of the Black activists fighting for the right to register and vote.
In one chapter of the book, which you title “The Invasion of the Rabbis,” you recount a rainy, early morning airport confrontation between Abe Berkowitz and 19 New York rabbis, led by Richard Rubenstein. They had come down from the North with other Jewish clergy and activists to support the civil rights demonstrators.
Yes, local Jews were at that moment involved in delicate negotiations between the local business community and city government to find a peaceful resolution to the racial issues. Abe Berkowitz tried to get Rubenstein to get back on the plane, or to give the local Jewish community a hearing, so as not to derail the settlement talks. Rabbi Grafman observed to the group that a local conservative synagogue had been advertising for a rabbi. “If you are so interested in changing things in Birmingham, why don’t you become a rabbi here?” Rubenstein and his group refused to leave, and joined Martin Luther King, Jr., and other of the civil rights marchers, although some of the group did meet with local Jews.
However, in 1973, Rubenstein returned to Birmingham to speak to the Jewish community. According to Karl Friedman, who was in attendance, Rubenstein said, “I’ve come here to apologize. I was young, and I was reckless, and I thought it was something that would be a credit to me.”
You say that you essentially backed into police work, first as a grant writer, before attending the police academy and becoming a sworn officer, working your way up from a patrol officer to precinct captain. Even though the events you describe in the book predate your time with the department, was it difficult for you to write about officers who were Klan members or sympathizers?
Yes, it was troubling; it was troubling to learn about. I tried to stay as honest to the truths I found as I could. There were abuses. There’s no way to make that pretty; it’s just wrong.
What was it like for you personally, growing up Jewish in Montgomery during the Civil Rights movement in the early 1960s?
Our family belonged to Temple Beth-Or, which, like many Reform congregations in the South, was mainly composed of German Jewish immigrants who came in the 19th century. This was during the “Old Reform” period, so it was mainly Sunday school – no bat mitzvah, no Hebrew.
What about racial attitudes in the early 1960s, when the Civil Rights Movement started to gain traction?
My parents, Jane and Warren Katz, were both progressives in Montgomery, who were very strong believers in civil rights and equity. They provided social support to activists. My mother’s family were Alabama natives. My maternal grandmother, Dorothy Merz Lobman, attended Wellesley College with the outspoken Alabama liberal Virginia Durr, a close friend of Rosa Parks and Eleanor Roosevelt and Justice Hugo Black’s sister-in-law. Years later, Dorothy and her husband Bernard had a cross burned in their yard for helping black women access their workplaces during the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott. My father was a transplant from Brooklyn.
I attended an all-white public school, and once, while I was in third grade, I used the N-word at home – which was common usage among my classmates. My mother turned pale and said, “We don’t say that word.”
You’ve observed that there was a contrast between how the Jewish communities of Montgomery and Birmingham reacted to the Civil Rights Movement.
Yes, the Jewish community of Montgomery was smaller than Birmingham’s, and also more conservative. The smaller the Jewish community, I believe, the more insecure they are.
I’ve not been able to find a single other Jewish person in Montgomery – other than my family and the rabbis who spoke out who did anything during the Civil Rights era. I hope to be surprised one day, but so far, it has been very disappointing, although it is easy to judge now. I know there was plenty of fear in the Jewish communities at that time. Birmingham was a different kettle of fish, although plenty of folks “laid low,” in the words of one Jewish activist.
Meanwhil
+++e:
https://anash.org/boston-shliach-stabbed-outside-chabad-house/
Boston Shliach Stabbed Outside Chabad House
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
HOOVER Reports:
|
+++++
|
No comments:
Post a Comment