Anti-semitism

Friday

Hilary Miller

The UN’s anti-racism mission excludes Jews

António Guterres, the UN's secretary-general, has described rising anti-Semitism as a ‘multi-headed monster' of intolerance that's creating a ‘tsunami of hatred’ across the world, and the UN proclaims ‘anti-racism’ as its defining ideology. But the UN is failing to confront discrimination and violence against Jews — and at times even nurturing it. The UN special rapporteur on racism, E. Tendayi Achiume, ought to be among the leading global voices speaking out against Jew hate. Last year, she called on Bulgaria to stop hate speech and discrimination against the Roma, she urged the Human Rights Council to address abuses against people of African descent and she appealed to world leaders to confront 'structural forms of racial and ethnic injustice’.

united nations

Thursday

Dominic Green

Seth Rogen’s Jewish problem

The discourse has reached a sufficient pitch of sophistication that in order to comprehend the state of Jewish life in the US — and that means the state of anti-Semitism in the US — we must consider the thoroughly modern morality tale that is the story of Seth Rogen, Eve Barlow and the ‘fart’ emoji. Those fortunate enough to be spared a daily bath in the sewers of Twitter may need to be filled in. Seth Rogen is to comedy as Chapo Trap House is to Henry Kissinger: a kind of stoned, dirtbag antidote to adulthood. He specializes in depicting that saddest of American male specimens, the pot-smoking, pot-bellied, moob-stricken man-child.

seth rogen
anti-semitism
Zaid Jilani

We need to talk about anti-Semitism among the West’s Muslims

I’ve spent a good part of my adult life writing about US policy towards Israel and the Palestinians. To put all my cards on the table, I’m firmly in the camp that the US should adopt a less one-sided policy that puts firm conditions on the military aid that we give to Israel in order to pressure the country to respect Palestinian human rights. But there is a certain trap that a lot of the left tends to fall into when they take sides in conflicts such as these — where you have a weaker party quarreling with a much stronger party.

Tuesday

Charles Lipson

Elite anti-Semitism at the Boston Globe

Some people think the vicious attacks on Jews happen only in Times Square or in Los Angeles restaurants. Not so. They think the apologists for these crimes are limited to the Squad and extreme leftists, some of whom actually tweeted it is wrong even to condemn anti-Semitism. That sewer of hatred would be dreadful enough, but the problem is bigger than that. The thugs on the street have some ideological backing from the mainstream media and, of course, universities. Take a truly noxious cartoon in the Boston Globe, one of America’s most prominent newspapers. It appeared in the May 22 print edition (page A9) and online on May 21. The drawing and text by Christopher Weyant efficiently consolidated elite hatred of Israel and Jews into a neat, toxic mix.

boston globe anti-semitism

Monday

Dominic Green

Van Morrison is a sane man in a mad world

The dopes with tropes are at it again. This time, their target is Van Morrison. But Sir Ivan is, as Billy Joel would say, an innocent man. Morrison has been called a crank and anti-Semite because of the lyrics to his new single, ‘They Own the Media’. The Guardian, which really does have a problem with Jews, has called him a tinfoil milliner. The Forward, which used to be a serious Jewish paper, claims that Van’s title ‘espouses a classic anti-Semitic trope’. No, it doesn’t. What the lyrics say is that our media are owned by a small number of people. That their outlets habitually lie to our faces. That they want us to believe that ‘ignorance is bliss’, so let’s leave the decisions to the experts. And that we’ll ‘never get wise’ until we look behind the curtain.

van morrison

Sunday

Amber Duke

The notorious MTG

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s May 2021 World edition.  As I walk toward Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s office, I notice a large flag and sign opposing one another across the hall. Greene’s neighbor, Democratic Rep. Marie Newman, has recently planted a transgender pride flag to protest Greene’s opinion that biological men should not be playing women’s sports. Greene responded by posting a sign that says, ‘There are TWO genders: MALE & FEMALE. “Trust The Science.”’ I’m expecting a rather tense atmosphere inside Greene’s office, given how often the congresswoman from Georgia finds herself at odds with her colleagues.

mtg marjorie taylor greene

Saturday

Peter Savodnik

How the West was lost

One feels for the olds who birthed this cancer. They just wanted to placate the youngs. They had no idea they were disemboweling the same institutions they were charged with safeguarding against the idiot-children. The olds, the so-called progressive elites (so-called because they lacked any sense of noblesse oblige), were scared of being ‘on the wrong side of history’. They wanted the youngs — the new radicals — to like them, to follow them on social media. They wanted to hold onto their power, and they were shallow, and they were vulnerable to their own spinelessness. Blinded by it.

hate

Sunday

Ian Thomson

A tinpot Caesar

In 1919, an obscure political agitator called Benito Mussolini assembled a ragbag of Blackshirt diehards in the Lombard capital of Milan and launched the movement that was to become, two years later, the National Fascist party. The party took its name from the classical Roman symbol of authority — an ax bound in rods, or fasces. Once in power, Mussolini introduced the stiff armed Roman salute after the handshake was deemed fey and unhygienic. At times he wore a richly tasseled fez and thrust out his chin pugnaciously for the cameras. For all his posturing and demagoguery, Mussolini was widely admired in pre-war Britain, where Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail routinely carried flattering portraits of him.

mussolini

Tuesday

Charles Lipson

When ‘j’accuse’ is just a smear

Last week, the Chicago Tribune’s most prominent writer, John Kass, wrote a column decrying the rise in urban violence. Its compelling title: ‘Something grows in the big cities run by Democrats: an overwhelming sense of lawlessness.’ In today’s woke world, it is risky to speak such hard truths about gang shootings, unprosecuted shoplifting, looting, carjackings and more. This rising lawlessness is often cloaked in the language of protest, racial justice and income equality. Speaking out against it runs real risks. You might be doxxed, your home tagged with graffiti, or your family threatened.

george soros john kass

Monday

Samuel Gregg

The woke war on religion

Though you wouldn’t know it from most American media outlets, the phenomenon of vandalizing and burning religious sites which is accelerating in Europe has, like a virus, jumped an ocean and is now among us. Over the past month, statues of Christ and the Virgin Mary have been damaged in states as far apart as Colorado, Missouri, New York, Tennessee, and Massachusetts. On July 11, a vehicle was driven into a Catholic church in Florida with the clear intent of burning the building to the ground while congregants were inside. But it’s not just Catholic symbols and edifices being targeted. America’s Jewish community has received similar treatment.

religion

Monday

Dominic Green

An American pogrom

An American pogrom is going on in the New York metropolitan area. I use the word deliberately. A pogrom — the word comes from Russian — is a murderous assault on Jews, either incited by or connived at by the authorities. The machete attack that wounded five people in a rabbi’s home in Monsey, New York on Saturday night follows eight reported attacks in the week of Chanukah, the massacre at a kosher store in Jersey City earlier this month, a stabbing in Monsey, and a rising tide of assaults over the last three years.There is more than enough Jew-hatred to go around in our sick times. I have no doubt that soon enough we will be back to parsing the digital stormtrooping of the white nationalists or the apocalyptic perversions of the Islamists.

pogrom

Friday

Slavoj Zizek

The thin line between Zionism and anti-Semitism

One of the main reasons Labour lost the election in the UK was a well-orchestrated campaign of character assassination against Jeremy Corbyn, who was rated Top Anti-Semite of 2019 by the Wiesenthal Center (ahead of actual terrorists!). There is nothing new in this. It is a small part of the worldwide offensive whose victims include many Jews critical of Israeli politics — such as the 'propagandist for Hamas' Gideon Levy, who wrote in Haaretz on December 8: 'Laws labeling anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism and the anti-occupation movement as anti-Semitic, are passed with overwhelming majorities.

zionism

Thursday

Karol Markowicz

American anti-Semitism is everyone’s problem

If there is one positive thing to come out of the attacks on Jews in Jersey City last weekend, it’s that the pretense that anti-Semitism has a home in one part of American society but not in others is over. That doesn’t, of course, mean that some won’t try to keep the delusion alive but four dead in a kosher market at the hands of Black Hebrew Israelites will have to complicate their argument. For a long time, the left was able to provide cover for the frequent attacks on Jews in America by saying it was only white supremacists engaging in these attacks.

anti-semitism

Thursday

Dominic Green

Trump’s ‘Jew shenanigans’

The worst brings out the best. Joe Seals, a police officer and father of five, was killed defending the law and his fellow Americans in the anti-Semitic assault on the kosher market in Jersey City. And the best brings out the worst. In footage from the aftermath of the killings, African American residents are pleased by a mass murder on their doorstep.‘If they got shot dead, that’s great,’ says one.‘Get the damn Jews the fuck out of here,’ says another.‘My children are stuck at school because of Jew shenanigans,’ a woman says. ‘I blame the Jews.’America was meant to be different for the Jews. In a sense, it is. In Europe, the majority of assaults upon Jewish people or schools or synagogues seem to be committed by Muslim immigrants.

jersey city jew

Sunday

Ben Sixsmith

Is it God’s will that President Trump will meet with Prime Minister Corbyn?

Perhaps it truly will take place. Maybe it will happen.Imagine the scene. President Trump sits with his nose upturned as if a member of his entourage is suffering the effects of an enormous curry. Prime Minister Corbyn sits with a look of vague discomfort, as if he is meeting a friend's drunkenly abrasive wife. Their handshake is tense and their words are limited. (They have some common ground. As someone else — not me — suggested they are both unfriendly if not hostile towards the idea of Nato.)Afterwards, Trump says ‘Grandpa Jez’ is a ‘crazy guy’. ‘But we have to work together,’ he shrugs diplomatically. Corbyn tells the British press that he grilled the president on his sexism, racism and Islamophobia.

jeremy corbyn

Wednesday

Daniella Greenbaum Davis

Do Jewish lives matter to Bill de Blasio?

Jews being hit with rocks. Jews being chased down and punched. Jews being beaten with belts. Jews being stabbed on the street. Jewish school buses being set on fire. Jewish women having their wigs ripped off. Swastikas being painted on sidewalks. Jews being forced to take off their kippot. These are scenes that could be straight out of 1940s Nazi Germany, or perhaps from France today, but they’re not. These recent assaults have all happened in Brooklyn, New York. The worst part is, no one seems to care. Every so often a video is shared on Twitter — like this recent one, showing four assailants chasing down and assaulting a Hasidic Jew. Jewish community leaders come together to condemn it, and increasingly, to ask why nothing is being done. https://twitter.

brooklyn

Wednesday

Dominic Green

The passion of Bari Weiss

A couple of years ago, I took a shuttle train at London’s Heathrow airport, heading to the medium- and long-haul gates. I was standing at the end of the carriage, and as the ends of the carriages were mostly made of smoked glass, I could see into the carriage behind. A group of Orthodox Jewish men stood on the other side of the glass in full sectarian fig — beards and sidelocks, long coats and vaguely Habsburg Homburgs, the Bronze Age waistcoat of the tallit katan and its knotted fringes. Through the glass, I could see the other passengers staring with curiosity; fair enough, given that almost everyone else in the carriage seemed to be wearing Lycra and sweat-wicking leisurewear.

bari weiss anti-semitism

Wednesday

Dominic Green

Did Trump really invite Ben Garrison to the White House?

Imagine that you’re Donald Trump for a day. You wake up, you ablute, you make the usual follicular adjustments, you shoot off a few tweets in the throne room, and then you mooch down to the West Wing. Here, you face a choice. Do you dive into the fate-of-nations stuff and open the files marked ‘Rocket Man’ and ‘Iranistan’, like John Bolton has asked? Or do you spend the day compiling a guest list for a White House event on anti-conservative bias in Big Tech, at which the talking points will be as tired and old as the curly cheese sandwiches? The answer depends on which Trump-for-a-day you prefer to be.

ben garrison

Monday

Daniella Greenbaum Davis

Where is the outrage from the right over Ben Garrison’s White House invite?

The New York Times published an anti-Semitic cartoon depicting a blind Donald Trump being led by a canine Benjamin Netanyahu in its international edition earlier this year. Following near-universal condemnation, Trump seemed more concerned for himself than for the Jews. His tweet on the matter was typically puerile: 'The New York Times has apologized for the terrible Anti-Semitic Cartoon, but they haven’t apologized to me for this or all of the Fake and Corrupt news they print on a daily basis.

ben garrison anti-semitism

Monday

Daniella Greenbaum Davis

AOC: ignorant or anti-Semitic?

When my grandmother Masha was liberated by the British Army from the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen, she was 19 years old and weighed 83 pounds. It was the last of more than half a dozen camps she would survive before finally being freed. The first camp that she, her mother, and her then-11-year-old sister arrived at was in Estonia. She saw an unfamiliar sight: Jewish women like herself with their heads shaven, wearing strange prison pajamas infested with lice. She once explained to an interviewer from the Jerusalem Post that at the Stutthof concentration camp she had to convince her mother, my namesake, to 'hide in the outhouse during a roll call: exposing the swollen leg to the camp’s savage SS women would have been her mother’s death knell’.

aoc