You can cut and paste as much screed as you want, that doesn't change what you are.
Now, I won't be engaging with you anymore on this thread.
Of course you will have no problems turning fair dinkum back to the aboriginal population, will you?
You don't want your homeland liberated from Euro-invaders???
Members of leading British Jewish body condemn Israel’s latest actions in Gaza
Signatories from Board of Deputies say in open letter that ‘Israel’s soul is being ripped out’ and they ‘cannot turn a blind eye’ to loss of life
Members of the Board of Deputies, the largest body representing British Jews, have said they can no longer “turn a blind eye or remain silent” over the war in Gaza.
In a significant break with the board’s customary support for the Israeli government, the 36 signatories to an open letter published in the FT say “Israel’s soul is being ripped out”.
Since the war began after the terrorist atrocities committed by Hamas against Israelis on 7 October 2023, statements by the Board of Deputies of British Jews have been broadly supportive of the Israeli government.
But the letter, signed by about one in eight of the board’s members, is highly critical of recent actions by the Israeli government.
It says: “The inclination to avert our eyes is strong, as what is happening is unbearable, but our Jewish values compel us to stand up and to speak out.”
Last month, after a pause in fighting during which dozens of Israelis held hostage in Gaza were released, the Israeli government “chose to break the ceasefire and return to war in Gaza … Since then, no hostages have returned. Hundreds and hundreds more Palestinians have been killed; food, fuel and medical supplies have once again been blocked from entering Gaza; and we are back in a brutal war where the killing of 15 paramedics and their burial in a mass grave is again possible and risks being normal.
“Such incidents are too painful and shocking to take in, but we know in our hearts we cannot turn a blind eye or remain silent at this renewed loss of life and livelihoods, with hopes dwindling for a peaceful reconciliation and the return of the hostages.
“This most extremist of Israeli governments is openly encouraging violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, strangling the Palestinian economy and building more new settlements than ever … Israel’s soul is being ripped out and we, members of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, fear for the future of the Israel we love and have such close ties to.”
The letter adds: “Silence is seen as support for policies and actions that run contrary to our Jewish values. Led by the families of the hostages, hundreds of thousands of Israelis are demonstrating on the streets against the return to war by an Israeli government that has not prioritised the return of the hostages. We stand with them. We stand against the war … It is our duty, as Jews, to speak out.”
One of the signatories, Philip Goldenberg, a lawyer, said the Israeli government had “absolutely adopted the Trump playbook”, including demonising those who disagreed with it. “That is not what Israel is about,” he told the BBC’s The World at One.
There was a “whole range of views” among British Jews, “and there are those who think we should not have done this”, he said. There were others who shared the views expressed in the letter but “don’t want to put their heads above the parapet”.
What was happening in Gaza was “a total breach of Jewish ethical values”, he added. “More damage is being done to the Zionist project by Netanyahu than Hamas could ever achieve.”
A spokesperson for the Board of Deputies said other members would “no doubt put more emphasis on the fundamental responsibility of Hamas for this ghastly situation and the need to ensure that they are prevented from ever repeating the heinous crimes of 7 October”.
Within the diversity of views among British Jews, “however, there is much unity”, the spokesperson added. The UK Jewish community wanted to see Hamas release the remaining hostages, aid flowing in to Gaza and “definitive progress towards lasting peace and security for Israelis, Palestinians and the wider Middle East”.
A coalition of Jewish groups warns that the Trump administration is making Jews less safe by targeting international students who protested Israel's war in Gaza and the universities where they study.
In a statement released Tuesday, the coalition of 10 groups brought together by the nonpartisan Jewish Council for Public Affairs states that antisemitism is on the rise in the "public discourse, politics, and institution," but that it opposes the Trump administration's push to strip pro-Palestinian student activists of their visas and deny them due process.
"Our safety as Jews has always been tied to the rule of law, to the safety of others, to the strength of civil society, and to the protection of rights and liberties for all," reads the statement. The coalition includes reform, conservative and reconstructionist organizations, as well as HIAS, as a non-profit immigrant aid group founded by Jewish Americans.
President Trump signed an executive order in January aimed at cracking down on "the explosion of antisemitism" in the U.S. It outlined steps the administration would take to cancel the visas of students who protested the war in Gaza.
Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, told Morning Edition that she and her group are concerned that fear of antisemitism is being exploited to "undermine our democracy."
She added: "What's clear as these actions continue and grow is that the overwhelming majority of American Jews are feeling many of those same concerns and speaking out."
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Michel Martin: So in issuing this statement, the coalition said it wanted to reject the "false choice between confronting antisemitism and upholding democracy." And the statement goes on to say that "We reject any policies or actions that foment or take advantage of antisemitism and pit communities against one another. And we unequivocally condemn the exploitation of our communities, real concerns about antisemitism to undermine democratic norms and rights, including the rule of law, the right of due process, and or the freedoms of speech, press and peaceful protest." Was there a red line that members of your coalition felt had been crossed?
Spitalnick: Multiple things are true at the same time, but this entire conversation over the last few months has been set up as this false choice, as we wrote in the statement. We know that antisemitism is real and it's rising. And our organizations in this coalition have been speaking out clearly against the alarming rise in antisemitism since Oct. 7, 2023 and frankly, long before that as well. And at the same time, we've seen this escalating use of our legitimate concerns about antisemitism to undermine democratic norms and rights, to attack academic institutions, and to otherwise go after the core values of our democracy that have been so inherent to Jewish safety and the rights and safety of all.
Martin: The Trump administration says these student activists are a threat to national security. You just don't think that's true?
Spitalnick: We can look at some of the specific cases and understand why that broad brush to paint these students with is frankly not exactly aligned with reality. Look at the Tufts University case, for example, where at this point, weeks since that student has been arrested, the only thing that the government has pointed to as to why she was arrested and detained is an op-ed in the student paper. And so we've seen hundreds of visa revocations and arrests over the last few months. They all involve different students in different scenarios, but it's very clear based on some of these higher profile cases, that fundamental rights of due process and civil liberties have not been applied. And when we start selectively applying rights based on someone's views or identity, that's a slippery slope that makes us all unsafe.
Note: Federal immigration officers arrested Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk in March. Ozturk was in the U.S. on a student visa and had co-authored an opinion article criticizing the university's response to the war in Gaza.
Martin: There are other Jewish groups like the Zionist Organization of America that are applauding this decision to deport these students. They say that this does enhance the safety of Jewish students and faculty and people at these institutions. Is it your view that these folks just have it wrong or that they just don't represent kind of the mainstream of thinking in the community?
In this photo, protesters attending a demonstration hold signs declaring support for Mahmoud Khalil.
Spitalnick: Our coalition represents the overwhelming majority of American Jews. It includes the conservative reform reconstructionist movements and a variety of other organizations that are representative of mainstream American Jewry.
I've been spending the last few months on the road with the Jews across the country, and the overwhelming majority have deep seated concerns about what's happening, both because we know antisemitism is real and it needs to be addressed constructively and productively.
Conservatives fighting ‘antisemitism’ are actively targeting US Jews. Why?
Joshua Schreier
The pro-Israel campaign to ‘protect’ Jews by punishing anti-Zionist speech often targets Jews. That is no surprise
The Trump administration claims that its moves to defund universities, arrest and deport students and force schools to demote or monitor professors are meant to combat antisemitism, protect Jewish students and remove “Hamas-supporting” foreign nationals from the country. American pro-Israel groups including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Hillel International, Aipac and the Heritage Foundation have united behind Republican measures to crack down on higher education and its putative antisemitism. Religiously identified groups such as the Orthodox Union and Christians United for Israel have joined the chorus, celebrating the punishment of supposedly antisemitic students and professors. Whatever their varied pasts, today’s pro-Israel groups are not about protecting American Jews. Instead, they are allies in Maga’s war on free speech, academic freedom and the US’s democratic society itself.
To be clear: the pro-Israel campaign to “protect” Jews by punishing anti-Zionist speech often targets Jews. After a student complaint about a tenured Jewish professor’s Twitter post, Muhlenberg College fired her. The ADL has rewarded Muhlenberg by grading it “better than most” colleges for fighting “antisemitism”. The ADL also accused Jewish Voice for Peace, a large, anti-Zionist Jewish group with chapters on many American campuses, of “promot[ing] messaging” that can include “support for terrorists”. Under pressure from the Trump administration, Columbia University expelled a Jewish graduate student and United Auto Workers local president who demonstrated against the war in Gaza.
Most chillingly, the Trump administration recently sent all staff at Barnard College a questionnaire inquiring if they were Jewish, ostensibly to gauge campus antisemitism. For many, the experience of being asked by the government to self-identify as a Jew was terrifying; as one historian put it: “We’ve seen this movie before, and it ends with yellow stars.”
Canary Mission, a pro-Israel website that publishes information on students and professors who supposedly “promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews”, has been targeting an Israeli American scholar of the Holocaust along with many other Jews (including the author of this piece). Project Esther, an initiative launched by the conservative Heritage Foundation – the thinktank behind Project 2025 – blames the “American Jewish community’s complacency” for the “pro-Palestinian movement’s” ability to continue working for “the destruction of capitalism and democracy”. Maga’s pro-Israel partners do not protect Jews; they help Trump in his war on our academic freedom and open society more generally.
Of course, unlike some pro-Israel groups, the Trump administration has a broader antipathy toward higher education. As JD Vance put it, “the professors are the enemy”. But the pro-Israel movement furnishes Maga with a crucial weapon in their war on this “enemy”: charges of antisemitism. The entire “US education system”, according to Project Esther, has been “infiltrated” by “Hamas-supporting organizations” that now “foster antisemitism under the guise of “‘pro-Palestinian,’ anti-Israel, anti-Zionist narratives … within the rubric of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and similar Marxist ideology”. Of course, by linking Palestinian solidarity with longstanding rightwing bogeymen like antiracism and communism, Project Esther gives away the game; their “antisemitic” charge is a tool to silence Maga’s left-leaning critics in higher education.
Meanwhile, many pro-Israel groups seem to tolerate Maga’s proximity to antisemitism. If they didn’t, we might expect to hear more about Vance’s meeting with Germany’s neo-Nazi-linked AfD, Steve Bannon’s singling out of “American Jews that do not support Israel and do not support Maga” as “the number one enemy to the people in Israel”, or Trump’s claim that the Democratic senator Chuck Schumer is “not Jewish” but “Palestinian”.
The ADL went so far as to defend Elon Musk’s apparent Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration. True, the ADL rightfully criticized some of these other incidents, as well as Trump’s antisemitic advertisements, and his meeting with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes. But these cases do not seem to merit breaking with Maga. Why? Because the pro-Israel movement advocates for Israel, not American Jews.
For this reason, the American pro-Israel movement has been collaborating in the Trump administration’s campaign to roll back everyone’s constitutional rights. By now, most of us have seen the footage of Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk, both students at American universities, being surrounded by groups of government agents and forced into the backs of unmarked vehicles. The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, promised that hundreds of other students have been stripped of their visas. Neither Khalil nor Öztürk have any demonstrated ties to Hamas. Khalil even spoke out against antisemitism, declaring that “antisemitism and any form of racism has no place on this campus and in this movement”. Furthermore, as a permanent resident and a student visa holder, both Khalil and Öztürk are guaranteed first amendment protections. Yet Hillel International failed to condemn the arrests, and the ADL outright celebrated Khalil’s.
Ultimately, Trump and many in the pro-Israel movement have allied against free speech in higher education because it is a pillar of an open society that threatens both of them. The right has long had it out for universities. The pro-Israel movement, meanwhile, saw the campus encampments with horror; a wide cross-section of students and professors from a variety of religious, racial and ethnic backgrounds came together to speak out against Israel’s killing of tens of thousands of people.
Even more galling for the pro-Israel movement, Jews actively participated in the protests – even conducting Passover seders, as well as Kabbalat Shabbat and Havdalah services amid them. These young Jews are not alone; less than half of Americans now sympathize with Israel, and one-third believe Israel is committing genocide. These facts do not threaten American Jews, but they do threaten Maga and the heavily evangelical pro-Israel movement. As long as increasing numbers of students, professors and many others speak out for Palestinians’ humanity, the pro-Israel movement, armed with disingenuous accusations of antisemitism, will aid Maga’s war on American higher education and democracy itself.
About a decade ago, conservatives would often denounce Muslim immigration on the grounds that it threatened Western progress on gay rights. This posture, sometimes called homonationalism, got its start in Europe, then made its way into American politics with Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign. In his acceptance speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention, Trump decried the murder of 49 people in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., by the Islamist Omar Mateen. “As your president, I will do everything in my power to protect our L.G.B.T. citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology,” he said. A month later he unveiled his proposal for the “extreme vetting” of Muslim immigrants, which would exclude anyone who failed to “embrace a tolerant American society.”
It should have been clear at the time that Trump’s putative concern for the safety of sexual minorities was simply a convenient wedge to try to divide the Democratic coalition. During his first term, he stacked the courts with judges who had opposed the rights of gay and transgender people and rolled back some of their workplace protections. Last year he used a growing backlash to trans rights to propel himself back to power, where his administration has been on a crusade to strip federal funding from almost anything with “L.G.B.T.” in it.
Trump’s treatment of L.G.B.T. people should have been a lesson to anyone tempted to take his campaign against antisemitism seriously, when it is screamingly obvious that it’s just a pretext to attack liberal institutions. Trump and his allies, after all, have mainstreamed antisemitism to an astonishing degree. Elon Musk, to whom Trump has outsourced the remaking of the federal government, is perhaps the world’s largest purveyor of antisemitic propaganda, thanks to his website X. (My “for you” feed recently served me a post of a winsome young woman speaking adoringly of “the H man,” or Hitler.) Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, once said the unvaccinated had it worse than Anne Frank. Just last month Leo Terrell, the head of Trump’s antisemitism task force, shared a social media post by a prominent neo-Nazi gloating that Trump had the power to take away Senator Chuck Schumer’s “Jew card.” Trump himself, of course, dined with the Hitler-loving rapper Kanye West and the white nationalist Nick Fuentes.
Yet I’ve been astonished to learn that some people believe that when the administration attacks academia for its purported antisemitism, it’s acting in good faith. Speaking on CNBC last week, Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, cheered Trump’s attempt to exercise political control over Harvard, saying, “It is a good thing that President Trump is leaning in.” In a shocking interview with The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner, the Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt, who served as a special envoy to combat antisemitism under Joe Biden, praised Trump’s assaults on academia and its attempts to deport some pro-Palestinian activists. While in some cases she thinks the administration has gone overboard, she suggested that those who don’t give the president credit for standing up for Jews suffer from “Trump derangement syndrome.”
It seems to me that there’s another sort of derangement at play here, rooted in the way Israel’s defenders conflate all but the mildest criticism of Israel with antisemitism. There have certainly been incidents of crude anti-Jewish bigotry in the protests that followed Hamas’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. But too many backers of Israel can’t seem to imagine a reason besides antisemitic animus for impassioned opposition to Israel’s merciless war on Gaza. This leads them to vastly overstate the scale of antisemitism on the left and, in turn, to rationalize away Trump’s authoritarianism as he attempts to crush progressive redoubts.
As I write this, Israel has been blocking food, medicine and fuel from entering Gaza for more than 50 days. The U.N. World Food Program has delivered its last stocks of food to Gaza’s soup kitchens, which will shortly run out of supplies. “As aid has dried up, the floodgates of horror have reopened,” Secretary General António Guterres said this month. “Gaza is a killing field — and civilians are in an endless death loop.”
There are a couple of ways to interpret his words. One is that they’re true. The other is that, as a spokesperson for Israel’s foreign minister said, Guterres is “spreading slander against Israel,” just like all the protesters, many of them Jewish, now being punished at the administration’s behest. In this view, escalating opposition to Israel can be understood only as the product of a kind of antisemitic conspiracy, one so vast and entrenched that extreme measures might be needed to thwart it. Many Jews, said Lipstadt, “disappointed by how universities have behaved since Oct. 7,” are relieved to see “a strong — to use Passover terminology — a strong hand being used.” In the Exodus narrative, the “strong hand” belongs to God. In Lipstadt’s analogy, then, Trump is an agent of the divine.
It seems clear to me that if your presuppositions about Israel lead you to sanctify Trump, they bear rethinking. But even Jews who continue to delight in Trump’s animosity toward the Palestinians should be aware of the bargain they’re making. In the right-wing nationalist movement that Trump leads, gutter antisemitism is often considered a cheeky transgression and a sign of in-group belonging. Holocaust denial has started cropping up on major podcasts like Tucker Carlson’s and Joe Rogan’s. A decade ago, it served Trump to align himself with gay rights; now his administration either bans or discourages the mere use of the word “gay” or the abbreviation “L.G.B.T.” I’m not sure why anyone, let alone a scholar of the Holocaust, thinks Jews will fare better.
Jewish faculty decry Republican panel members ahead of antisemitism hearing
Lawmakers on key committee have quoted Hitler and are associated with calls for Jews to convert to Christianity
A number of Republican legislators set to grill university presidents in a congressional hearing on antisemitism this week are associated with calls for Jews to convert to Christianity, have quoted Adolf Hitler, or have reportedly threatened to burn a synagogue to the ground.
A group of Haverford professors, most of them Jewish, has raised concerns about the legislators, pointing to statements they have made in the past and antisemitic incidents in their districts that the professors say they have not forcefully condemned.
On Wednesday, the US House committee on education and workforce will question the presidents of Haverford College, in Pennsylvania, DePaul University, in Chicago, and California Polytechnic State University, in San Luis Obispo, in a reprise of contentious showdowns between legislators and university administrators that last year played a part in the resignations of several university presidents.
In a memo shared exclusively with the Guardian, the faculty at Haverford have questioned the credibility of several members of the committee.
The faculty have requested anonymity to avoid retaliation. In the memo, they write that the committee’s chair, Republican representative Tim Walberg of Michigan, is associated with the Moody Bible Institute, which, according to the memo, “trains students to convert Jewish people to Christianity”. Representative Mark Harris of North Carolina, it notes, once said that until Jews and Muslims accept Jesus Christ “there’ll never be peace in their soul or peace in their city”.
The faculty also condemned committee member Mary Miller of Illinois, who in a speech outside the US Capitol the day before the January 6 attack, quoted Hitler and said he was “right on one thing” when he said that whoever “has the youth has the future”. (Miller later apologized.)
The memo notes that several members of the committee hail from districts with a history of neo-Nazi incidents. It points to Appalachian State University in North Carolina – in a district committee member Virginia Foxx has represented for two decades – where, in recent years, antisemitic groups have distributed promotional materials, scratched swastikas and racist slurs on to the car of a Jewish student, and spray-painted swastikas and covered campus spaces with antisemitic stickers. The university, the memo notes, is not among those facing congressional investigations, which are instead focused on pro-Palestinian speech.
The memo also criticises representative Mark Messmer of Indiana for making “no visible statements critical of Nazi and white supremacist antisemitism” in his district and state, and New York’s Elise Stefanik for backing a political candidate who praised Hitler as “the kind of leader we need today”. (The candidate, Carl Paladino, apologized but suggested that his comment was taken out of “context”.) And it calls out Representative Randy Fine of Florida, a Republican Jewish congressman who reportedly threatened to burn his own synagogue “to the ground” for hiring an LGBTQ+ staff member.
The Guardian has reached out to all of the committee members named in this story for comment.
It’s not the first time Jewish scholars have accused those leading the fight over antisemitism on campuses of being compromised on the issue. In March, Jewish Voice for Peace’s academic council published a report arguing that Project Esther – a rightwing blueprint for undermining pro-Palestine solidarity in the US – “repeats and fortifies antisemitic tropes” by promoting the antisemitic conspiracy theory that powerful Jews are controlling social justice movements.
At Haverford, Jewish students and faculty have signed separate statements accusing the committee of “weaponising our pain and anguish” and saying that their voices “have absolutely not been represented in the current public discussion of antisemitism”.
“We reject the premise of the hearings as being at all concerned with antisemitism,” said Lindsay Reckson, a literature professor and one of the authors of the faculty statement. “They are political theater aimed at intimidating college administrations into sacrificing their commitment to academic freedom, and an effort to silence and police pro-Palestinian voices on campus – including many Jewish voices.”
The memo comes as Jewish scholars and students have increasingly condemned the Trump administration’s actions in the name of fighting antisemitism.
In a letter to Haverford’s president, Wendy Raymond, ahead of her congressional testimony, the committee references “antisemitic incidents” on campus, including the disruption of an antisemitism workshop by the Anti-Defamation League last October, and a talk, the same month, which the committee says “whistleblowers” reported as promoting “a culture of antisemitic discrimination”.
What the letter doesn’t say is that the protest against the ADL was staged entirely by Jewish students and that the lecture was by Rebecca Alpert – a rabbi as well as a professor of religion.
“To them, Jewish students means Zionist Jewish students,” said Ellie Baron, a senior at Haverford.
Alpert, a self-described anti-Zionist, told the Guardian that she was “astonished” the committee described her talk – about the difference between Judaism and Zionism – as antisemitic. “In my mind, it’s antisemitic to call a scholarly presentation by a rabbi antisemitism,” she said.
The conflation of criticism of Israel with antisemitism championed in congressional investigations has also muddled discussion over real antisemitism, Jewish faculty warn.
“It’s not that antisemitism doesn’t exist. We know it does,” said Joshua Moses, an anthropology professor at Haverford, who said he experienced it personally but stressed that the suffering in Gaza and the arrests of foreign students for their pro-Palestinian advocacy are more pressing concerns at the moment.
“If there’s antisemitism, I want to hear about it, let’s figure out how to address it, but let’s also look at who’s most at risk and who’s most suffering at this point.”
He added: “I don’t feel unsafe. But if I did, this congressional committee is not the place I would go to.”
