Antisemitism: The Big Lie Smearing Campus Protesters

Students are being slandered by politicians, the media, and campus administrators.

By Richard Eskow

May 3, 2024

Source: Progressive Hub

Police presence against Gaza encampement at UCLA. Photo credit @lacontroller Kenneth Mejia

Mainstream journalists and politicians have engaged in a campaign of mass slander against US college students protesting the Gaza genocide. Their “antisemitism’ Big Lie echoes the racist hate campaigns of the past, inciting hostility toward young people whose only crime is their dedication to justice.

At around 11 p.m. on Tuesday night, this was the extent of damaged property that I witnessed outside the college campus. At the same time, New York Police Department officers in riot regalia had amassed in their hundreds, including members of the Strategic Response Group — a unit dedicated to public unrest and “counterterrorism.”

More police had stormed through the school’s neo-Gothic gates less than an hour before, at the behest of the college’s president, to arrest protesting students en masse.

Twenty blocks south, police had locked down and barricaded all streets in a two-block radius of Columbia University, brutally arresting students inside the inaccessible campus.

A newly published survey provides some important context for these protests and undermines the smear campaign against the protesters.

Students Are Not Antisemitic

The Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST), a project of the University of Chicago, recently published “Understanding Campus Fears After October 7 and How to Reduce Them,” subtitled “a non-partisan analysis of Antisemitism and Islamophobia among College Students and American Adults.” Robert A. Pape, political scientist and CPOST’s director, writes that its findings “are an opportunity to re-center the national discussion around students and away from politics.” Let’s hope so.

Understandably, Pape and his colleagues focus on the steps that should be taken to make all students feel safe on campus, regardless of religion, ethnicity, or politics. In doing so, their report includes important findings that deserve wider attention.

Is there a “climate of antisemitism” on campus? CPOST’s study found that college students are less Islamophobic than the general population, but they are not more antisemitic. The level of student bias against Jews is the same as their bias against Muslims, but no greater.

Why, then, is there a national debate about campus antisemitism and none about the comparable scourge of Islamophobia? What message does that send to the Muslim students whose fears are being ignored?

The Protests Aren’t Antisemitic, Either

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries wants a vote on the “Countering Antisemitism Act,” but neither he nor the president have proposed similar safeguards against Islamophobia. House Speaker Mike Johnson, who said that Columbia protesters have begun “to threaten lives and intimidate and harass people,” has an even more draconian antisemitism bill – also without plans to address Islamophobia.

President Biden, like the others, has condemned what he calls “antisemitic protests.” That slur is challenged by the Chicago study. The authors found that “while college students are not more antisemitic than the general population,” they are “more antizionist.” They also found that “prejudicial antisemitism and antizionism are largely separate phenomena,” with an “overwhelming” absence of any overlap between antisemitism and a negative view of Israel.

We’ve know for decades that the lie which equates antizionism with antisemitism serves a political goal by suppressing speech. We now have evidence to back it up.

“From the River to the Sea”

One protest slogan has been cited over and over as “antisemitic,” with accusers claiming it calls for genocide against Jews: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

Most students do not use it in anything approaching a genocidal way. The CPOST study found that only 14 percent of Muslim students, or roughly one in seven, interpret that slogan “to mean the expulsion or genocide of Israeli Jews.” That figure is too high, as is the 13 percent of students who believe that violence against Muslims is sometimes justified. But it also tells us that most people who use the slogan are not calling for harm against anyone.

That makes sense, since the phrase can be interpreted nonviolently in at least two ways. One is that a two-state solution should include the territory ceded to Palestine in 1948, which touched both the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Another is that Israel and Palestine should become a single, democratic, non-racial and non-theocratic state, with rights and safety for all. Under that interpretation, “Palestine will be free” is no more a call to genocide than “South Africa will be free” was a call to kill whites during the anti-apartheid struggle.

The study does note that the slogan makes two-thirds of Jewish students feel unsafe. For that reason, Pape recommends avoiding it.

But we now have confirmation that campus officials, politicians, and the media are misleading the public about that phrase. They’re endangering the protesting students and worsening the fears of pro-Israeli students. They should stop.

Conclusion

The political scientist Bernard Cohen once wrote that, while the press isn’t always successful and telling people what to think, “it is stunningly successful in telling people what to think about.” The student protests are a textbook example. The debate around these protests is focused on the false charge of antisemitism, not on the moral challenge raised by the protesters.

Does antisemitism exist among them? Since it is pervasive in this society, the answer is yes. But amplifying a comment or two from a couple of isolated individuals is a totalitarian smear tactic. Republicans did it with the racist Willie Horton ads in 1988. Trump does it when he highlights crimes allegedly committed by immigrants. And politicians, journalists, and college administrators are doing it today with their charges of protester antisemitism.

CPOST’s moderate recommendations for easing campus fears include, “Clear and immediate communication by college leaders condemning violence and intimidation by students and against students on their campuses.” Instead, those leaders are ordering police violence against protesting students, as they and the political/media elite stoke more fear and hatred against them – even in the wake of the anti-protestor mob violence at UCLA. That isn’t just wrong; it’s a dereliction of duty.

As leaders, these prominent individuals have been entrusted with the care and protection of the nation’s young people. Instead, they’re slandering them and putting them at risk. Why? To distract us from a genocide.

The people who make, report, and teach history should take note: it has never been kind to those who spread Big Lies. It won’t be this time, either.

House Passes Bill That Defines Criticism of Israel as “Antisemitism”

Jewish-led groups slammed the legislation as a tool for silencing the movement for Palestinian rights.

By Brett Wilkins

May 3, 2024
Source: Truthout


House lawmakers voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to approve legislation directing the U.S. Department of Education to consider a dubious definition of antisemitism, despite warnings from Jewish-led groups that the measure speciously conflates legitimate criticism of the Israeli government with bigotry against Jewish people.

House members approved the Antisemitism Awareness Act — bipartisan legislation introduced last year by Reps. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), Max Miller (R-Ohio), and Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) in the lower chamber and Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) in the Senate — by a vote of 320-91.

Both progressive Democrats and far-right Republicans opposed language in the bill. The former objected to conflating criticism of Israel with hatred of Jews, while the latter bristled at labeling Christian scripture — which posits that Jews killed Jesus — as antisemitic.

“Antisemitism is the hatred of Jews. Unfortunately, one doesn’t need to look far to find it these days. But the supporters of this bill are looking in the wrong places,” Hadar Susskind, president and CEO of the Jewish-led group Americans for Peace Now, said following Wednesday’s vote.

“They aren’t interested in protecting Jews,” he added. “They are interested in supporting right-wing views and narratives on Israel and shutting down legitimate questions and criticisms by crying ‘antisemite’ at everyone, including Jews” who oppose Israel’s far-right government.

“With this disingenuous effort, House Republicans have failed to seriously address antisemitism,” Susskind added. “I hope the Senate does better.”

The legislation — officially H.R. 6090 — would require the Department of Education to consider the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism when determining whether alleged harassment is motivated by antisemitic animus and violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which “prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance,” including colleges and universities.

Lawler’s office called the proposal “a key step in calling out antisemitism where it is and ensuring antisemitic hate crimes on college campuses are properly investigated and prosecuted,” while Gottheimer emphasized that “the IHRA definition underscores that antisemitism includes denying Jewish self-determination to their ancestral homeland of Israel… and applying double standards to Israel.”

Critics say that’s the trouble with the IHRA working definition: It conflates legitimate criticism and condemnation of Israeli policies and practices with anti-Jewish bigotry, and forces people to accept the legitimacy of a settler-colonial apartheid state engaged in illegal occupation and a “plausibly” genocidal war on Gaza.




As the ACLU noted last week in a letter urging lawmakers to reject the legislation:

The IHRA working definition… is overbroad. It equates protected political speech with unprotected discrimination, and enshrining it into regulation would chill the exercise of First Amendment rights and risk undermining the Department of Education’s legitimate and important efforts to combat discrimination. Criticism of Israel and its policies is political speech, squarely protected by the First Amendment. But the IHRA working definition declares that “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavor,” “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis,” and “applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation” are all examples of antisemitism.

Jewish Voice for Peace Action slammed what it called IHRA’s “controversial and dangerous mis-definition that does not help fight real antisemitism and is only a tool for silencing the movement for Palestinian rights.”

“The Israeli government’s bombardment and siege of Gaza has killed over 34,000 people in six months,” the group said on social media. “Congress must stop attacking the students and faculty members who are trying to stop this genocide, and instead focus on ending U.S. complicity in Israel’s attacks.”

Israel’s Gaza onslaught has sparked a wave of nonviolent student-led protests across the United States and around the world. Some of these protests have been violently repressed by police, while anti-genocide activists including Jews have been branded “antisemitic” for condemning Israeli crimes or defending Palestinians’ legal right to resist them.

Americans for Peace Now said that while it is “deeply concerned about the escalating antisemitism in the United States and globally,” the legislation “poses a significant threat to free speech and open discourse.”

“Equating criticism of the Israeli government with antisemitism is a tactic used to stifle important discussions on Israeli policies and actions, thereby hindering the broader effort to combat true instances of hatred and discrimination against Jewish communities,” the group added.

Kenneth Stern, director of the Bard Centre for the Study of Hate and lead drafter of the IHRA working definition, warned years ago that “Jewish groups have used the definition as a weapon to say anti-Zionist expressions are inherently antisemitic and must be suppressed.”

“Imagine if Black Lives Matter said the most important thing the [Biden] administration could do to remedy systemic racism is adopt a definition of racism, and that definition included this example: opposition to affirmative action,” Stern wrote in 2020.

“Obviously, sometimes opposition to affirmative action is racist and sometimes it is not,” he added. “The debate about systemic racism would be changed to a free speech fight, and those with reasonable concerns about affirmative action correctly upset that the state was branding them racist.”

Seeking Justice in the Name of Hate: In Defense of BDS 

 

BY STANLEY L. COHEN     

DECEMBER 30, 2022Facebook

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Photograph Source: Takver – CC BY-SA 2.0

“As long as Germany declares the Jews to be an inferior race, poisoning and persecuting them, decent, self-respecting Jews cannot deal with Germany in any way, buy or sell or maintain any manner of commerce with Germany or travel on German Boats.”

With this clarion call born of principle and necessity, a respected Rabbi and leader of the American Jewish community of the early 1930’s called for an absolute boycott of German goods as the “duty of all self-respecting Jews.”

He urged the boycott not because German’s were white, or Christian, or blonde haired and blue eyed. And few if any in the United States accused him of any such mindless targeted hate. The boycott, which was fundamentally rooted in human rights, was necessary in an effort to try to stem the growing odium and bloodletting sure and soon to follow.

Today, a similar call to boycott a later day hate also built of religious and cultural supremacy and persecution in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory, is reduced by Zionists to the all too expedient talisman of anti-Semitism, no matter what’s its words, its speaker, or its purpose.

“Antizionism is antisemitism. Zionism is an integral component of the Jewish identity.”

Armed by these glaring self-serving words of ignorance and duplicity, a Tel Aviv based law firm announced with perverse pride and desperate Constitutional rewrite a complaint it filed under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act with the Department of Education against the University of California, Berkeley Law School over its “failure” to punish several student organizations for the temerity of adopting a pledge to engage in a non-violent boycott of Zionist or pro-Israel speakers.

It is not by accident that the plea of Rabbi Stephen S. Wise framed almost a century ago in response to the palpable taste of national socialist hate and the looming clouds of genocide, have long been seen as heroic, yet today there are many who applaud a nation state built of the same vile ambition; those who seek to silence principled voices unwilling to accept the deadly acridity of unchanged flavor.

On so many levels, this civil action against a famed law school like the hollow show-tune words that proclaimed its filing, speaks to a double standard of life and law that serves as the very foundation of a racist colonial project that all at once has kidnapped the millennium of Judaism and, with routine ease, once again seeks to strip the U.S. Constitution of the very vitality, the very mainstay of its historical speech paradigm.

Which is more glaring, is hard to say.

Is it the deadly whoopla of contemporary Zionists who, like their predator geo-political ancestors of but a 150 years ago, seek to reduce the Judaism of thousands of years, to mere flock of aimless geese awaiting salvation through the arrival of European tour guides to escort it across the sea en masse to steal Palestinian lands, Palestinian liberties, Palestinian lives?

Or it can it be that the long-settled unanimous law of NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co.announced by the Supreme Court with grand daring and constitutional pride, not popularity, more than 40 years ago that boycotts undertaken through the exercise of speech, assembly and petition are essentil to First Amendment rights protects all but those who dare to challenge Israel and the dutiful political theocracy of its Zombie-like Zionists?

Or is it the self-evident double standard of an Israeli law firm which deigns to walk through the constitutional doorways of another place and history to dictate the parameters and importance of its speech and assembly rights, while applauding with absolute obedient silence the lack of any such consequential freedom in the heartbeat of his own?

Let us begin with NAACP v. Claiborne. Though time and time again Zionists have tried to restitch a simple but broad and compelling narrative into a narrow as applied test of limited constitutional consequence, that handy partisan invention has been rejected repeatedly by courts throughout the United States.

Claiborne finds its genesis in a 1966, on-again-off-again boycott of white merchants in Claiborne County, Miss., initiated by the NAACP to secure compliance by both civic and business leaders with a lengthy list of demands for equality and racial justice. Although there were some periodic acts of violence the boycott was known largely for picketing, distributing leaflets, giving speeches and holding rallies. Causing serious economic hardship to many of the local merchants, years after the boycott began the Mississippi Supreme Court found all of the boycott as illegal holding the NAACP and 129 codefendants jointly and severally liable for $1,250,699 in damages and attorneys’ fees. On appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States the verdict was vacated, with the court holding that “boycotts and related activities to bring about political, social and economic change are political speech, occupying the highest rung of the hierarchy of First Amendment values.”

Well before NAACP v. Claiborne, boycotts have bequeathed an essential and lasting international footprint in the chase of justice and equality, a battle that knows not the limitation of any given time, place or party. As noted by T’ruah, in its amicus (friend of the court) brief on behalf of more than 2,000 Jewish clergy in opposition to the anti-BDS effort framed in Arkansas Times v. Waldrip, as long ago as 1770 a colonial boycott was called for by a legislative resolution of Virginia against British and European goods. Two years earlier Boston merchants had voted to block English trade, a boycott later joined by various businesses in New York and Philadelphia and by every-day colonists who undertook a protest against imported British products.  Framers, Alexander Hamilton who was one of the signatories of the United States Constitution and John Jay who was president of the Continental Congress, the first Chief Justice to the Supreme Court and later the Governor of New York both boycotted merchants who engaged in slave labor.

In 1791, English merchant James Wright stopped his sale of sugar from the West Indies because it was produced by three-quarters of a million slaves who had been kidnapped to Barbados and Jamaica to be used as the cornerstone of the sugar-exporting industry. Less than a century later the formal “boycott” was born when Irish workers used, essentially, as slave laborer’s, grooms, coachmen, and house-servants organized a protest against Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott who, after retiring from the army to become a land agent, sought to raise their rents; evicting those who could not afford to pay.  Faced with a growing protest driven by tenants who refused to work, local businesses that would not accept his money and with his mail delivery stopped, Boycott was forced to leave Ireland.

Fast forward to Germany 1933 where “In the wake of Adolph Hitler’s rise to power,” T’ruah, in its amicus, cites the effort by Rabbi Wise who played a prime role in organizing the boycott against German goods in an effort to expose and isolate the country for its attacks on Jews and others for nothing more than their faith, culture and history.  Though a failed effort, it is beyond challenge that this plea for a non-violent boycott against regimes built of racial or religious supremacy and tyranny was later echoed by most of the world, excluding Israel, against South Africa-an earlier but less deadly iteration of its own Zionist apartheid today.  And in Martin Luther King’s Constitution: A Legal History of the Montgomery Bus Boycott  famed law professor and author Randall Kennedy notes that the Montgomery Bus Boycott gave rise to Gayle v. Browder  which “effectively overruled” the separate but equal racial poison of Jim Crow, approved of in Plessy v. Ferguson.

Elsewhere non-violent boycotts, large and small, be they by movements or people have proven to be the launch paradigm upon which the drive for liberty and justice was ultimately built and obtained. In 1930 Mahatma Gandhi led a 240-mile march in India to the Arabian Sea as part of a boycott against Britain’s colonial salt laws. It proved to be not just essential to the end of the salt tax and the release of political prisoners, but was a prime stoke of the fires of independence which ultimately drove Britain from India.

International boycotts against predator corporate or state policies are not at all an anomaly. To be sure, there have been numerous successful boycotts against multi-national corporations involved in the manufacture of dangerous products or permitted the use of child workers, or provided inadequate safety and industrial hygiene measures, or had a lack of drinking water, or no minimum wage or caps on work weeks, or were in bed with support for military regimes or which exploited migrant workers or placed their corporate coffers ahead of blatant human rights abuses. For example, among such boycotts which ultimately proved successful were those begun against Nestle in 1977, Nike in 1990, Pepsi in 1997 and Gap and Taco Bell in the early 2000’s, with resulting changes in product and work safety and conditions and the end of relationships with totalitarian regimes. In 2003, Liberian women went on a sex strike to end the country’s civil war; it worked with its primary organizer and leader Leymah Gbowee awarded a Nobel Peace Price for her efforts. In PereiraColumbia female partners of gang members also went on a sex strike demanding the end of gang violence and fewer guns. Within a few years the murder rate in Pereira had dropped by some 26%.

Domestically, in the United States boycotts have a storied and successful history as well. For example, in 1965 on Mexican Independence Day, Cesar Chavez and other Latino farm workers launched the “Delano Grape Strike” in support of Filipino-American grape workers for better wages and working conditions. Ultimately prompting an international boycott, it proved successful and led to the nation’s first farm workers union: the United Farm Workers of America. In 1984, when Food Lion refused to sign a “fair share” agreement to improve employment and economic opportunities for black workers, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) organized a three-day protest and boycott of dozens of stores it operated in various Southern cities. The boycott ended after Food Lion signed an agreement which required increased minority opportunities including more management positions and signing on with more minority-owned vendors.

Boycotts come in many shades of challenge. Following an unsuccessful international boycott of J.P. Stevens products of some four years, along with traditional strikes and mass picketing, the Amalgamated Clothing & Textile Workers Union moved on to apply tertiary pressure upon the banks and corporate lenders, insurance companies and Wall Street investors which JP Stevens relied upon. Other strategies included hundreds of individuals and organizations such as unions, religious and political organizations purchasing a single share of its stock in order to crash the company’s annual meeting to directly confront management. Meanwhile, thousands of protestors  marched around Stevens Tower. Described at the time as the “biggest labor-management war of the last two decades” the battle– which was very much the real-life manuscript for famed movie Norm Rae– ultimately prevailed with the union’s multi-faceted tactics leading to the first collective bargaining agreements between J.P. Stevens and more than 3000 of its workers at its ten plants in the Carolinas and Alabama. Today the AFL-CIO maintains boycotts against 22 hotels in 5 states and the District of Columbia, 2 food and beverage businesses including products made in Mexico, an e- cigarette manufacturer and two law firms.

It is fitting indeed that the transcendent message of NAACP v. Claiborne was recently parroted by a district court in Washington, D.C. albeit in a context other than a boycott. In rejecting the application by the former president in Thompson v. Trump to dismiss a lawsuit, the court reminded those who seek to tamp down on non-violent dissent that “Expression on public issues has always rested on the highest rung of the hierarchy of First Amendment values … [that] speech concerning public affairs is more than self-expression; it is the essence of self-government [and] embodies our profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.”

Not long thereafter in United States v. Hilliard  a decision from the Eastern District of New York the court affirmed the constitutionality of boycotts chiding a party to the litigation for their failure to recognize that “Claiborne involved an economic boycott over racial discrimination by white merchants, which is the type of peaceful political expression on public issues that has always rested on the highest rung of the hierarchy of First Amendment values.”

While these cases do not specifically implicate efforts to silence BDS, nevertheless in their striking dispositive language and sweeping constitutional application they serve as an ever-present reminder that non-violent speech is not a verbal beauty contest but a guarantee of freedom from state efforts to silence unpopular words or assembly. Nowhere is that cue more telling or lasting than it was in R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul, where the Supreme Court agreed that a statute which provided: “”[w]hoever places on public or private property a symbol . . . but not limited to, a burning cross or Nazi swastika, which one knows or has reasonable grounds to know arouses anger, alarm or resentment in others on the basis of race, color, creed, religion or gender commits disorderly conduct and shall be guilty of a misdemeanor ” violated the First Amendment.

There is nothing sui generis about these cases which echo numerous decisions that have come before and will follow to be sure including many that have rejected legislative assaults on the non-violent BDS movement. And while the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals– which speaks directly to the diversity and speech concerns of the body politic of Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, and the Dakotas (don’t venture out alone at night venues)–recently upheld anti-BDS legislation on the grounds of the so-called commercial speech exception, its twisted dishonest mental gymnastics is directly at odds with Claiborne and all other decisions that have faithfully held that the First Amendment is not one to be decided based upon the faith, politics or pockets of its proponent.

Given the Eighth Circuit’s reversal rate of almost 80% these last 15 years, were todays Supreme Court a bench driven not by personal political posture but constitutional precedent, it might well look to the keen journey of various lower courts which have previously struck down legislative attempts to ignore Claiborne and to silence BDS in clear violation of the First Amendment.

For example, in Jordahl v. Brnovich,  the court sided with those challenging an anti-BDS statute in Arizona noting “The Act’s history instead suggests that [its] goal is to penalize the efforts of those engaged in political boycotts of Israel and those doing business in Israeli-occupied territories because such boycotts are not aligned with the State’s values.” Koontz v. Watson  drew a similar conclusion finding that the “goal of the Kansas law requiring that persons contracting with the state certify that they are not engaged in a boycott of Israel was either viewpoint discrimination against the opinion that Israel mistreats Palestinians or subject matter discrimination on the topic of Israel and that both are impermissible goals under the First Amendment.” In Amawi v. Pflugerville Indep. Sch. Dist.  the court rejected a Texas anti-BDS statute which prohibited boycotting of Israel as boycotts against Israel were inherently expressive conduct and thus protected speech. And in Martin v. Wrigley the District Court rejected a Georgia statute that for employment purposes required parties to certify they are not engaged “in a boycott of Israel is no different that requiring a person to espouse certain political beliefs or to engage in certain political associations. The Supreme Court has found similar requirements to be unconstitutional on their face.”

And what of the attack on Berkley Law school? Title VI of the Civil Rights Act decrees that: “No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance”

Assume for the sake of argument student groups at Berkley Law School which seek to participate in constitutionally protected BDS activity by boycotting Zionist or pro-Israeli speakers are recipients of “Federal financial assistance.” Nevertheless, while Jews have, by Israeli law, been awarded a supremacist seat in the hallways of Israeli government, politics and life, Zionism (with its Jews of Europe and North America, its Christians of the US South and its Muslims of the Gulf states) is not a race, a color, or unique national origin under the guideposts of settled US law.

To be sure, while other international states and entities lacking any constitutional foundation let alone protection for individual speech and association have, by wave of magic wand alone, conflated and converted a political movement born of a political purpose and agenda to that of a faith, no such paranormal conversion has found de jure acceptance in United States courts. Cast from a less nuanced speech portal, be it a megaphone handled by a student, a professor, an activist, a writer or a parent at home, they are fully protected in pronouncing Israel as little more than a racist settler colonial project.

Moreover, The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) which enforces Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is not a grand state censor empowered to dangle US dollars over the market-place of ideas in an effort to control its parameters or to force open its private doors to welcome the boycotted speech of others.  Markedly absent here, over the years OCR has moved to intervene when US dollars have been used directly or incidentally to deny access to equal education opportunity, limited equal rights to public education based upon immigration or citizenship status, funded discriminatory-based discipline, denied equal opportunities for English learners, furthered discriminatory assignments to education services, assisted bullying, harassment and retaliation based upon race or undercut racial diversity. None of these considerations is implicated, let alone threatened, by the free-speech choices of Berkley law students who say no to the imposed sale of a theocracy that engages in mass violations of human rights.

Title VI claims are not new. And while the Israeli firm seeks to rewrite their reach and burden, unlike much of Israeli law driven by chest pounds, and little else, here faith hurled screams of “we are chosen” will do little more than draw a yawn. Putting aside the failed threshold requirements of sufficient state funding and a specific breach of legislated law, this matter is what is known in the law as an action seeking third-party relief; that is to say it seeks to hold Berkley responsible, as a whole, not for its own policies or practices but those of another … here several student groups that in the exercise of their private First Amendment rights did nothing more than to refuse a speaker’s podium to outside Israeli cheerleaders.

Long ago the highly respected Second Circuit Court of Appeals held in Zeno v. Pine Plains Cent. Sch. Dist.  that under Supreme Court precedent to survive summary judgement in a claim of intentional discrimination it must be established that Berkley had (1) actual knowledge of the alleged violation; 2) that the conduct amounted to was severe and with a discriminatory purpose; and 3) that Berkley exercised “substantial control over both the harasser and the context in which the known harassment occurs.” That is to say the “school must have “control over the alleged harassment” and “authority to take remedial action.” Moreover, a Title VI claim is not an ambulance chase. As noted by the Third Circuit in Whitfield v. Notre Dame Middle School  the challenged conduct must not only be “severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive” but generally speaking deprive “the victim of equal access to the school’s educational opportunities and has a “systemic effect on educational programs or activities.”

Under these attendant circumstances, the attempt to sting the United States Department of Education or to bully a university legendary for an activist student body empowered by speech and protests into recognizing or redefining Zionism as an identified race, color, faith or identity of unique national origin will fail. A plain read of the Tel Aviv based Title VI challenge against Berkley says … dismissed.

On the other hand, let’s assume the Berkley claim has legs and in fact survives a motion to dismiss as unfounded. Will its Zionist handlers impose the same claim and screed against hundreds of U.S. rabbis for being anti-Semitic? Indeed, recently some three hundred U.S. rabbis and organizations and at least one university, the Los Angeles based American Jewish University, announced a boycott which will ban “far right” Israeli lawmakers affiliated with the Religious Zionist bloc in the Netanyahu government from speaking before their communities.

That this boycott includes community groups and a university which receives federal money for its various programs would seem to render it no less within the reach of Title VI than the action filed against Berkley Law School. Although the stated purpose of the rabbinical boycott is to take a political stand against Zionists and ultra-Orthodox Jews who seek to change the Israeli “Law of Return”; who wish to undercut LGBTQ rights; to permit the Knesset to veto rulings by the Israeli Supreme Court; to annex the West bank; and to expel “Arab” citizens who oppose Israel’s government, are these rabbis who dare to challenge not the faith but the politics of Israel any less anti-Semitic for the flavor of their boycott?

So, Tel Aviv counsel spare us your righteous indignation. Yours is a Bar built not of the pursuit and protection of equality and justice, but by an oath of institutional surrender which willingly accepts judicial cellblocks against equality, assembly and speech.  Indeed, the paradox is dramatic. It is vivid. It is chilling.

You deign to step into the United States protesting the loss of your clients’ “rights” to input the market place of ideas, but yet do nothing to challenge the theft of parallel opportunity and redress for millions of Palestinians and their supporters in Israel and the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza. A system of Israeli opportunity and justice owned not by principles of equality, diversity and aspiration but by a military crowned with the hateful tiara of the Knesset that proclaims and proudly so …. For Jews only.

At days-end, Zionists promote the tattered tease of a fanciful “democracy” all the time obscuring a faith-based privilege of an Israeli justice system empowered by a “Nation state” … one that exalts Judaism over the faith of all others. It is a legislative badland that has welcomed some 65 laws that favor Jews alone. A grand judicial censor that upheld the deportation of Human Rights Watch director Omar Shakir who was removed from Israel for nothing more than his call on firms to cease operations in settlements. Several weeks ago, that same judicial process cheered for the forced exile of Palestinian-French human rights lawyer Salah Hammouri, who had been detained without charges much of this year.

It is perverse to say the least that while its packages itself as a democracy Israel continues its decades old practice requiring all media outlets, authors and publishers to submit articles “relating” to security and foreign relations to military censors for pre-publication review.

Last year “the Israeli military censor barred the publication of 129 articles in the media, and interfered with the content of another 1,313.” At the same time the Israel Democracy Institute and the Israel Internet Association challenged a new regulation that empowered the state to obtain a court order permitting Israel to block any website posts including those on Google, Twitter and Facebook or any Israeli news sites or those outside of Israel for content removal from Israeli IP addresses on the grounds that a post could serve as an “incitement to violence or terror.”  Currently there are hundreds of books banned by Israel either because of content or place of publication. This includes Arabic translations of George Orwell, James Joyce and William Faulkner; of Sylvia Plath, Susan Sontag and Nelson Mandela; of Shakespeare, D.H. Lawrence, Orhan Pamuk, and Agatha Christie.

This year Israel announced a new “Procedure for Entry and Residency of Foreigners in Judea and Samaria Region,” which provides the Israeli military the unilateral power to select which international academics, researchers and students can teach, do research or study at Palestinian universities. Given however increasing military attacks over the last several years at various Palestinian universities such as An-Najah, Birzeit and Palestine Technical University — Kadoorie in which dozens of students have been shot or arrested as “inciters” it just might be fortuitous these days for foreign applicants to be denied admission to Palestine to teach, research or attend classes.  As part of its effort to control what Palestinian students can access in classrooms and out Israel has accelerated its effort to control the content and language of what is taught in Palestinian classrooms.

Elsewhere there are increasing on-line efforts to control what is taught and by whom outside Israel.  Recently Zoom, Facebook and Youtube blocked an online academic event “ Whose Narratives? What Free Speech for Palestine?” co-sponsored by the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas (AMED) Studies program at San Francisco State University, the Council of UC Faculty Associations (CUFCA), and the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI).”

Meanwhile dozens of Palestinian or pro-Palestinian organizations, faculty, researchers and teaching assistants are under siege at various American universities- with many shuttered, denied tenure or fired through lobbying efforts to bully and silence them. While attacks by Zionist entities on famed academics such as Steven Salaita and Norman Finkelstein are well known, Israel itself has never hesitated to try and muzzle what can and cannot be taught about its colonial project in US classrooms. The matter of the University of Carolina Ph.D. student Kylie Broderick speaks volumes about its calculated effort to control academic content:

“Israeli consular officials in the southeast U.S. arranged meetings with a dean at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to discuss a graduate student teaching a course on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. According to two UNC professors with knowledge of the meetings, who asked for anonymity for fear of retribution, the Israeli official accused the Ph.D. student of antisemitism and said she was unfit to teach the course.”

For years the Israeli government with its global lobbyists and Zionist supplicants have tried to recast any challenge to Israel’s blatant violation of fundamental human rights and international law as “anti-Semitism.”

Though activists worldwide including Jews have confronted not Judaism but supremacist policies born of terrorism, nurtured by land theft and violence and heralded by a consummate system of Israeli Apartheid, it has not slowed the orchestrated effort to refabricate BDS and other non-violent efforts as little more than hatred of Jews. It is a constant: be it the fitted shroud over the human rights graveyards of Israel, or the corrupted screams of its crusaders, Zionists seek to define an acceptable marketplace of ideas through the crafted and cheap talisman of antisemitism.

It is this vile revision of political aim and purpose empowered by the call of human rights and justice for millions of targeted and displaced Palestinians that has fueled insidious attacks on nothing more than pure speech and protest. Across the globe, principled voices have been slandered with countless singled out for prosecution and economic injury not for violence but righteous resistance against the heirs of a racist colonial project- one more hateful than ever with the tally of its most recent election.

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism has been auctioned off as the universal bellwether of hate. That this chant has been taken up by some, perhaps many, does not make the brand itself any less tailored, dishonest or insufferable.  At its core, this marketing ploy is entirely irrelevant to settled US law and little more than mere deflection. Indeed, it is an interesting paradox that so many who decried as clichéd the UN General Assembly resolution which “determined that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination,” half a century later, themselves, reduce all who oppose Zionism as inescapably anti-Semitic.

In the United States dozens of laws have been passed to sanction those who support BDS or oppose Israeli policies by way of other non-violent iterations. Against the backdrop of the convenient mantra “they hate us, because we are Jews” …  or “self-hating Jews” … students, faculty, journalists, political activists and businesses alike have been intimidated and silenced; have lost employment; or been forced to spend limited resources to defend themselves against a finely fueled and funded attack by Zionist hawkers ultimately underwritten by the political or financial coffers of Israel.

So let us walk forward not with empty words but open eyes. For more than a century boycotts worldwide have served as an peoples’ alarm against policies and practices that have not just mocked human rights, dignity and justice, but taken the liberty and lives of tens of millions for little more than their faith, skin tone or political beliefs. Be it the voice of Jews against the arrival of Hitler; Americans who toppled Jim Crow; a world that said no to the Boers of South Africa; or the principled refusal by many across the globe to accept a supremacist Zionist nation state today, boycotts have been the historical foundation of international resistance.

The universal right of self-determination is a fundamental cornerstone of international law and human rights. With this no principled person or schooled scholar can disagree. At its core stands a settled age-old collective norm that people and movements can confront, indeed must defy, political and economic power born of religious, cultural or historical supremacy. To do otherwise is to surrender to the deadly tyranny of majoritarian rule and eventual ethnic cleanse. Nowhere is that call more compelling today than it is as against Israel, a racist colonial project.

Legendary Anarchist Emma Goldman born of an Orthodox Jewish family in Lithuania was not opposed to Jewish migration to Palestine, but only as a welcome refuge from the growing clouds of European national socialism. She was however an ardent anti-Zionist seeing “Zionism as the dream of capitalist Jewry the world over for a Jewish state with all its trimmings, such as Government, laws, police militarism… in other words a Jewish state machinery to protect the privileges of the few against the many.”

Goldman, who was imprisoned in the United States on multiple occassions for inciting to riot, urging draft resistance and illegal distribution of information about birth control, and who was deported to Russia for sedition following the Palmer Raids, understood well that principled resistance exacts a heavy personal price, to be sure.  For those who fight Zionism all these years later, be it through BDS or other forms of struggle, Goldman left behind sage words of inspiration which echo from the historical pathways of resistance:

“The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause. If, then, from time immemorial, the New has met with opposition and condemnation, why should my beliefs be exempt from a crown of thorns?”

Stanley L. Cohen is lawyer and activist in New York City.

CANADA DEFINES ANTIZIONISM AS ANTISEMITISM

Canada to make special envoy on antisemitism a permanent post, Trudeau says

Wed., October 13, 2021, 



OTTAWA — Canada will develop a national plan to combat hate with the help of its special envoy for preserving Holocaust remembrance and fighting antisemitism.

The Liberal government will also make the special envoy role permanent, and bolster the position with more resources.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced plans to further the fight against antisemitism and all forms of hate in a virtual appearance at the Malmö International Forum on Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism.

"We need to attack directly the problem of antisemitism with increased urgency and focus all together, because antisemitism isn't a problem for the Jewish community to solve alone," Trudeau told the forum Wednesday.

"It's everyone's challenge to take on, especially governments."

COLTER DEFINES BDS AS ANTISEMITIC

Former justice minister Irwin Cotler was appointed envoy in November 2020 to advance Holocaust education and fight domestic and global antisemitism.

Cotler was part of the Canadian delegation at the forum, and said Canada's national plan is a necessary step in joining Jews in the fight against antisemitism.

"This is central to the building of a democratic culture as well as the promotion and protection of human rights and human dignity," he said in a statement.

The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs has been advocating for Cotler's role to be made permanent for several years. The group is the advocacy agent of the Jewish Federations of Canada.

"We are pleased to see that the government has heeded our advice, and we thank them for being our allies in the fight against the scourge of antisemitism," association president Shimon Koffler Fogel said in a statement Wednesday.

B'nai Brith Canada, a Jewish human rights organization, says it recorded 2,610 antisemitic incidents last year, the fifth consecutive record-setting year for reports of antisemitism in Canada.

Trudeau told the forum he was deeply concerned about a surge of antisemitism in Canada and abroad, and called it "the canary in the coal mine of evil."

"We've seen so many different radical, extremist groups of various types lashing out at so many different things," he said. "One of the few common things so many of them have is an acceptance of antisemitic stereotypes and tropes that slip into their discourse and that they build so much of their other hatred on."

In July, the federal government hosted a national antisemitism summit where Cotler proposed ideas to fight the phenomenon. The suggestions included more resources for Holocaust and antisemitism education as well as enhanced security and protection for Jewish institutions such as synagogues, schools, community centres and memorial sites.

On Wednesday, Trudeau promised to work with Jewish communities to develop a national plan.

B'nai Brith Canada said it looks forward to helping the government.

"We view this as a true affirmation that the government will not allow the haters to continue to spew their venom," said Marvin Rotrand, national director of B’nai Brith’s League for Human Rights.

Trudeau also urged other governments to adopt the definition of antisemitism put forward by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, as Canada did in 2019.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 13, 2021.

— With files from Maan Alhmidi

Laura Osman, The Canadian Press

Holocaust forum looks at social media's role in antisemitism


Wed., October 13, 2021, 12:43 p.m.·3 min read



COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — Participants at a Holocaust remembrance conference in Sweden blamed social media Wednesday for contributing to a global rise in antisemitism, while YouTube and Facebook officials pledged to be part of the solution.

Government and social media representatives attending the International Forum on Holocaust Remembrance in Malmo vowed to crack down on hate speech, disinformation and the denial of facts both online and off. Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said the company is “now removing 15 times more hate speech than we were just five years ago. And we are not going to stop.”

The head of the European Union's executive arm, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called Holocaust denial and antisemitism “a threat to Jewish people, but it is also a poison for our democracies, our values and our open societies.”

From Brussels, von der Leyen said the 27-nation EU plans to create “a network of young European ambassadors for Holocaust remembrance." She added: "Who is in a better position to teach the lessons of the Shoah to their peers than our young?”

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the United States was allocating $1 million to counter online antisemitic hate speech in the Mideast and North Africa. Washington also has started “an expanded series of international visitor leadership programs" to confront Holocaust distortion and antisemitism in North Africa, the Middle East, Europe and Latin America, he said.

“Our priorities include condemning and countering antisemitism, ensuring physical security for Jewish communities, supporting Holocaust education, especially for young people, protecting religious freedom and urging countries to commit more deeply to the fight against hate speech online,” Blinken said in a video message.

Pedro Pina, head of YouTube in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, said the video sharing platform owned by Google pledged more than 5 million euros ($5.8 million).

Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven, the event's host, said other pledges included new memorial sites, museums and educational programs dedicated to preserving the history of the Holocaust and the mass killings of Roma. And he said the one-day conference was “by no means the end of the road."

“On the contrary, this is a powerful relaunch of the work to combat antisemitism, anti Roma-ism and other forms of racism,” Lofven said." The real work starts now. It’s now that our pledges must be turned into concrete action.”

Presidents Isaac Herzog of Israel and Emmanuel Macron of France participated remotely, with the latter addressing the assembly in a prerecorded video message.

The first International Forum on Holocaust Remembrance was held in Stockholm in 2000. International leaders urged all countries at the time to open secret government files on Nazi Germany's extermination campaign, a genocide that killed 6 million European Jews.

Ronald Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress, said during a news conference Wednesday that Jewish organizations "want governments to start making laws against putting hate on the internet."

“We will fight and fight that struggle, and we’re not to be silenced," Lauder said. "Silence is what makes antisemitism grow.”

Jan M. Olsen, The Associated Press