To view the latest data regarding Israel's coordination of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, click HERE. ++++ 2,500 Rabbis call for dismissal of Columbia President Shafik
Baltimore, MD, July 11, 2024—Coalition for Jewish Values (CJV), representing over 2,500 traditional, Orthodox rabbis in American public policy, today called for Columbia President Minouche Shafik to resign or be fired by the Board of Trustees. This comes after Shafik announced that three of the four faculty who spent a session about anti-Jewish hate exchanging text messages ridiculing the speakers and sharing anti_Semitic tropes were removed from their positions—but retained on Columbia’s payroll—while the fourth, Josef Sorett, is slated to remain as Dean.
This situation is especially disturbing for CJV Vice President Rabbi Dov Fischer and CJV Israel Regional Vice President Rabbi Steven Pruzansky, as both are Columbia alumni and remember when the school was both tolerant and welcoming for Jewish students and faculty. Rabbi Pruzansky made the following statement:
The bigotry and double standards are blatant, and entirely at odds with the experiences that I and others had at Columbia in the past. Imagine if something like this had happened during a session when Black, Latino, Pacific Islander, or LGBTQ faculty and students were speaking about hostility they faced on campus. Any faculty dismissing their concerns, much less ridiculing them or sharing hateful sentiments, would find themselves unemployed without delay.
But regarding anti-Semitism, President Shafik demonstrates the very ‘lack of seriousness’ she claims to decry. It is clear that all four who exchanged anti-Semitic messages, plus Shafik herself, must be removed from the faculty and replaced by others committed to opposing and preventing hate against Jews and all other campus minorities. This is the only way that Columbia can hope to return to being a serious academic institution where all students feel safe and valued.
Coalition for Jewish Values (CJV) represents over 2,500 traditional, Orthodox rabbis as the largest rabbinic public policy organization in America. A 501(c)3 non-profit, CJV promotes religious liberty, human rights, and classical Jewish ideas in American public policy. ++++ Candace Owens has sunk to a new low as she goes of the deep denial end. +++
Candace Owens is a cautionary tale about platforming ignorance The extremist talker went off the deep end by engaging in Holocaust denial. Conspiracy theories are the last refuge of anti-Semitic media con artists.
Rapper Kanye West and Conservative political commentator Candace Owens attend the "The Greatest Lie Ever Sold" Premiere Screening in Nashville, Tenn., on Oct. 12, 2022.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS There is a good argument to be made that the best way to deal with anti-Semites, and especially Holocaust deniers, is to ignore them. Since they seek publicity, denying them the attention they crave can be like depriving a fire of oxygen. But in the Internet age where the gatekeepers of public discourse no longer exist, the virtual public square is open to all, including the very lowest and worst actors. Try as we might, there is no ignoring someone who broadcasts open hate on platforms where they have several million followers. And even if such persons are kept off broadcast and cable outlets, anyone with a YouTube channel with millions of subscribers can never be effectively denied attention.
Still, editors of responsible publications and broadcast outlets are faced with a dilemma anytime someone who is a public figure with a large audience, even if they are entirely disreputable, says something outrageous and deeply offensive that is then spread to a mass audience. Should we note that dangerous and completely false statements are being spread to many millions of people? Or would it be better to simply refuse to dignify their vile screeds by taking the trouble to report and condemn them.
That, in a nutshell, is the problem of Candace Owens.
A journey toward anti-Semitism
Owens’s latest bid for publicity involves her embrace of Holocaust denial in which she uses her popular videos and X posts to speak as if the horrors of Auschwitz, including the bestial medical experiments of Dr. Josef Mengele, is mere “propaganda.” On top of that, she has the chutzpah to speak of the Germans as if they were the true victims of World War II and that the Allies who defeated Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime were the true axis of evil.
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We can hope that this latest entry in an increasingly long list of anti-Semitic rants is the one that finally leads to a situation where she will, like some other hatemongers before her, sink into well-deserved obscurity where her mad utterances will draw no further notice from the general public.
Still, I think it’s important to note her journey from populist conservative talker to conspiracy theorist to full-blown lunatic Jew-hater. This story deserves to be understood not just because what she says is terrible—though it certainly is—but because Owens is a cautionary tale of how articulate, yet also utterly ignorant and completely unprincipled people can be platformed by serious outlets without them having a full understanding of the sort of person they’re employing. It’s also a commentary on how once you start buying into conspiracy theories, the rabbit hole of anti-Semitism can become an irresistible temptation.
In examining her career, there is no foolproof way to ensure that credible people, especially journalists, public intellectuals and responsible activist groups, don’t wind up enabling the rise of such bad actors. And it is also true that the descent into extremism can happen just as easily on the left as on the right. We should also acknowledge that left-wing extremists currently have more influence on U.S. politics via their grip on the activist wing of the Democratic Party than antisemites like Owens have on the Republicans. Nevertheless, some things can be learned from her story that involve the need to be cautious about platforming new voices, as well as acting quickly to shut them down once it becomes clear that they are not who everyone thought they were.
Playing against type
Owens became famous because she was fairly unique. In a political culture in which most African-Americans are very much on the left, she leaped to notoriety and then a large audience because she went against type as a powerful voice of black female conservatism. During the years of the Trump administration, she more or less came out of nowhere as a producer of conservative political videos before being hired by the conservative activist group Turning Point USA. From there, it was a quick ascent up the ladder of exposure as she was acclaimed at the age of 29 by The Washington Post as the new face of black conservatism.
From 2019 to 2021, she hosted a show on the PragerU website and YouTube channel that gave her access to a broad audience, which rightly looks to it for educational content and smart commentary. She then joined The Daily Wire, a highly successful conservative outlet founded by Jewish pundit Ben Shapiro, where she hosted another talk show from 2021 until she was finally (and belatedly) dismissed in March of this year for her anti-Semitic invective. Since then, she has gone out on her own, blasting out her opinions to 5 million followers on X and 2 million subscribers to her personal YouTube channel.
It’s hard to blame those who enabled her ascent since there was nothing anti-Semitic about her discourse in the first years of her public career. The fact that she had been a political liberal up until 2017 wasn’t disqualifying since many people have gone on political journeys from the left to the right with President Ronald Reagan being just the most prominent example. And there was no denying that she was a talented speaker who seemed to have the right combination of poise and combative spirit that endeared her to those who hired her and their audiences.
But it’s also true that Owens’s meteoric rise to popularity was something that would have been far more unlikely in the pre-Internet era of journalism. Nowadays anyone, including college students who know less about the world than those who might read or listen to their supposed insights, can parachute into journalism as pundits via blogs, websites and podcasts without first having to learn their trade from the ground up as cub reporters or lower-level editors.
Parachuting into journalism
Perhaps it dates this writer by noting that one used to have to earn coveted slots as an opinion writer by laboring in the vineyards of journalism. We’re never going back to a world where a few elite gatekeepers in the field could decide who could be allowed to spout their opinions to mass audiences—and never should even if it were possible. The Internet has democratized journalism in ways that are destructive as well as ways that help nurture the sort of lively debate about the news and issues that might otherwise be dismissed by the powers that be.
However, the ease and speed by which Owens parlayed her ability to glibly speak about the issues by telling conservative readers, listeners and viewers what they wanted to hear without gaining experience in the field or serious study that could lend real weight and value to her opinions is troubling. It should offer some food for thought to anyone who controls platforms that can enable the unknown to become stars.
The urge to censor dissident opinions remains a great temptation for establishment thinkers. Writer Ben Weingarten correctly termed the way in which the Biden administration colluded with Silicon Valley, mainstream corporate media and even liberal Jewish groups like the Anti-Defamation League to silent dissent from conservatives or those who questioned COVID-19 policies on lockdowns, masks or vaccine mandates as the creation of a “censorship industrial complex.” As the evidence from those efforts showed, efforts to ban extremists, even the most hateful ones that all decent people deplore, from social media and other Internet outlets are bound to create a slippery slope by which partisans will seek to suppress their opponents.
But as Owens has again taught us, not everyone who decries the dead hand of liberal groupthink is a principled dissenter or honest observer. Antisemitic conspiracy theories are always the last refuge of media con artists.
Hucksters work the system
The manner by which she slipped effortlessly from normal political discourse to defending rabid anti-Semites like Kanye West to attacks on Israel and mimicking Hamas propaganda to her current bout of Holocaust denial also illustrates the way hucksters like her can exploit partisan divisions to gain clicks and then a foothold for hate. Having first established herself as a supporter of former President Donald Trump, and with the imprimatur of PragerU and Daily Wire behind her, it was all too easy for decent people to give her a pass when she first started demonstrating signs of extremism. In a media culture where “owning” one’s foes has become a paramount objective, anyone who can infuriate the other side is always initially assumed to be either trolling them for effect when they say outrageous things or are victims of groupthink and censorship when they get negative blowback. With Owens, there was also a tendency to see any criticism of her as evidence of the unfair way in which liberals always seek to smear blacks who choose to dissent from the leftist orthodoxy.
That’s how she got away with her defense of West, though her poor excuses for arguments demonstrated that she was woefully ignorant about the subject.
More to the point, having gifted her with a large audience, those who ran the Daily Wire seemed to be stuck with her, even as her opinions diverged more and more from the conservative beliefs they espoused and her weakness for Jew-hatred became more noticeable. They should have booted her off their platform nearly two years ago, as some of us said at the time. Whether it was because they feared losing her followers or because it had already become a complicated business transaction, there she stayed until her post-Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and Jews forced their hand.
It’s hardly surprising that Owens has now gone completely off the deep end now that she’s no longer held accountable, even in theory, to other more responsible people. The same was true for Tucker Carlson, who kept his animus for Israel mostly under wraps while he was hosting the most popular show on cable news but unleashed it once he was fired by Fox News Channel last year and was relegated to a smaller but still significant viewership via his X account.
We needn’t waste time refuting the lies Owens tells about the past or her falsehoods about being a victim of a corrupt establishment. Her decision to become a Holocaust denier puts her beyond the pale and should render her too toxic for anyone with a shred of credibility to bother defending. Much like crackpots like Nick Fuentes, who are called “groypers,” and Michelle Malkin, another former mainstream conservative pundit turned anti-Semitic fever swamp dweller, Owens is now likely to fade from view. We can only hope that from now on, only fellow extremists and anti-Semites like Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, will have anything to do with her.
Yet before she is rightly relegated to the dustbin of history where such hatemongers usually wind up, we do well to ponder just how easy it was for her to gain access to so many readers, listeners and viewers. Owens’s journey towards Jew-hatred isn’t unique to the right or to African-Americans. In the future, we should be wary of people with no track record of fully thought-out beliefs and whose only qualifications are their ability to talk fast, along with a particular ethnic or racial identity that makes them stand out. Those who initially applauded her stands should establish a policy of zero tolerance for hate that we would expect to be observed by those on the other end of the political spectrum. Failing to do that is a formula for disaster that will only produce more Holocaust deniers with a mass audience.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS ++++ | 
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