Abuse of Power: Selective Enforcement
HOA overreach
Good morning Hope,?
Please share this with your communication group.? ?
As you know, I had been sent a violation for placing political signs for Angelo Garcia and Josh Dieguez on my property.? This violation was sent a week or so ago and then they came out to reinspect.? I happened to be outside and told the GRS employee that the signs were no longer on my property, but now on the swale.? This no longer violated the bylaws.?
So..... apparently, either GRS or the President of the Association, or another individual complained to the Town of Miami Lakes.?
This is the situation that we are in here in Royal Oaks.?
But, during the recent elections, there was no enforcement of signs by the association and no notification as seen below.
This is called selective enforcement.? An enforcement in my opinion, because the President of our Association does not like these candidates or......maybe something has been promised by the :"other" candidates if our association deals with this display of political signs for their opponents.??
Please remember this....??
Vote for Josh Dieguez for Mayor of Miami Lakes
Vote for Angelo Garcia for Councilmember?
Run for the board of directors in Royal Oaks and replace individuals that make politics disgusting.?
Abel Fernandez, Chief (Retired)
Why is it that some try to do good whereas others play politics, display controlling and tyrannical behavior, maligning the very essence of liberty and property rights?
When we receive a message like the one below we find public servants, when we read the message above, we find ABUSE OF POWER: Selective Enforcement of rules!
We must ask: Who oversees a community to ensure that the above STOPS on its tracks and that below continues as the focus of government?
The Free Press [editorial]: How Is CBS Marking October 7? By Admonishing Tony Dokoupil
When Bari Weiss resigned as a writer and opinion editor at the NYT she cited the growing Orwellian world at the Gray Lady in her letter of resignation.
I could go on but you get the idea.? Read Weiss' letter.
After leaving the NYT, Weiss founded The Free Press, "built on the ideals that once were the bedrock of great journalism: honesty, doggedness, and fierce independence."
Weiss and The Free Press IMO, is in the forefront of breaking stories and commentary about under-reported events that have impact on American history.? The story below is such a story.? It demonstrates creeping Orwellian practices in the MSM and is illustrative of why Weiss resigned from the NYT.? Here is the original story.
The Free Press found it necessary to have a follow-up piece today.
The Fallout at CBS Continues At the home of Walter Cronkite, journalists debate Israel’s existence.
Horn [Atlantic]: October 7 Created a Permission Structure for Anti-Semitism: Yesterday was October 7, the anniversary of, to borrow FDR's famous phrase, "a date which will live in infamy." Here is the Oct 7 cover of the NYPost.
How it was acknowledged here in America.?Look below to see today's cover of the NYPost.
Would you get the same reaction from the NYT or WaPo?? In the NYT - Gaza in Ruins After a Year of War; Beinart: Biden’s Moral Failure in Israel; Zonszein: I Live in Israel. I Never Hear About What My Country Is Doing to Gaza.? Nothing specifically on Oct 7 and its meaning to Israel and Jews.
Would you get the same reaction from the New York Times or The Washington Post??
In the NYT - Gaza in Ruins After a Year of War;
Beinart: Biden’s Moral Failure in Israel;
Zonszein: I Live in Israel. I Never Hear About What My Country Is Doing to Gaza.?
Nothing specifically on Oct 7 and its meaning to Israel and Jews.
However, there is Dana Horn in The Atlantic. [H/T: Elihu D]. Horn is an American novelist, essayist, and professor of literature. She has written five novels and in 2021, released a nonfiction essay collection titled People Love Dead Jews,
I've been thinking a lot over the past year about a story I published in these pages in the spring of 2023 on Holocaust education in America .
I’d noticed how Holocaust education, initially promoted in the United States by Jewish survivors hoping to inoculate the American public against anti-Semitism, had long since been recast to portray the murder of 6 million Jews as a universal story.
[Is this the fault of Jewish organizations which promoted Holocaust education??
Did they modify the theme to make the program more palliative to non-Jews?]
The Holocaust is taught to American students as a case study in morality; well-meaning educators frequently compare it to the Armenian genocide, the Rwandan genocide, the treatment of Black Americans and Native Americans, and other acts of persecution and intolerance. This approach has undeniable resonance and value.?
[In After the October 7 pogrom, Maxine Phillips hits this point harder, "people complain 'the Jews have sucked up all the victimhood in the world and left none for anyone else'". Phillips cites Brendan O’Neill, editor-in-chief of the website Spiked in his recent book, After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation, writing right from the start the legions of the left, with teachers and professors often at the forefront, celebrated the slaughter of the Israeli innocents and said in essence that Israel had got what it deserved. As a result, antisemitism skyrocketed. "We are living in an era of Holocaust envy.
... Challenging the distinctive nature of the Holocaust, even demoting the Holocaust further down the pecking order of human agony, is the grim inevitable consequence of a cult of competitive grievance in which accruing ever-more tales of pain is the way you move ahead."]
But few of these educators think to connect the Holocaust to other assaults against and persecutions of Jews: for example, the Russian Civil War massacres in Ukraine in 1918–21, during which more than 100,000 Jews were murdered. Or the massacres, property seizures, and ethnic cleansing that drove nearly 1 million Jews from almost the entire Arab world in the mid-20th century. Or the ongoing genocidal rhetoric and periodic butchery of Jewish civilians undertaken by a slew of Islamist fundamentalist groups in the past 40 years. No—the Holocaust is mainly of interest when it’s extracted from Jewish history, used to teach a lesson about the humanity we all share. Instead of teaching students to understand anti-Semitism as a specific pattern in society, or to understand who Jews are, these curricula suggest that what happened to Europe’s Jews—who were just like everyone else —actually happened to all of us .
At the time my article was published, I thought little about the fact that few of the many Holocaust educators I’d encountered across the country were Jewish. But I have thought about it again and again in the past year, every time I encounter non-Jewish Holocaust educators bewildered by the explosion of anti-Semitism in their own schools and institutions. Hadn’t they taught the “universal” lessons of the Holocaust? Where had they gone wrong? One such educator attending one of my lectures told me ruefully, alongside her colleagues, about the surge in anti-Semitic sentiment that many of them had witnessed among their own students. Like every Holocaust educator I’ve met, she was sincere, well meaning, eager to improve. After my talk, she privately asked me if I thought that the October 7 attack had been plotted by the Israeli government. When I told her this was an anti-Semitic myth comparable to Holocaust denial, she seemed genuinely surprised.
What I observed in my deep dive into American Holocaust education, I now realize, was a massive appropriation of the Jewish experience that obscured, behind a screen of happy universalism, an intellectual tradition that has been used to justify the demonization of Jews for millennia. This appropriation was entirely consistent with what non-Jewish societies have routinely done with the Jewish experience: claim that that experience happened to “everyone,” and then use it to demonstrate how wrong Jews are for rejecting the “universalism” of their own experience—for refusing to be just like everyone else . As far back as the Seleucid and Roman Empires, which turned the site of the Jews’ ancient temple into a center for their own worship as part of their persecutions of Jews, non-Jewish societies have followed a similar pattern of appropriation and rejection.
In the years after World War II, when racial anti-Semitism lost its luster, the Soviet Union popularized a new form of universalism rooted in appropriation.Announcing on the official memorial for the 100,000 people, mostly Jews, massacred at Babyn Yar that Nazis had simply murdered “citizens of Kiev,” the Soviets declared themselves —not the Jews, who went unmentioned—to be Nazism’s chief victims. (Starting in the the 1960s, Jews attempted to gather at the site annually to commemorate the massacre; many were arrested.) The regime positioned the Jews, in fact, as perpetrators of evils like those of the Nazis. By the late 1960s, the KGB was pumping out enormous amounts of propaganda trumpeting a new value: anti-Zionism . Around the world, endless Soviet-sponsored publications and broadcasts proclaimed, without evidence, that Zionism is Nazism, Zionism is racism, Zionism is apartheid, Zionism is colonialism, and Zionism is genocide — all while the Soviet Union armed its Arab client states for their repeated invasions of Israel. And even as they endlessly repeated that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism , the Soviets continued to mercilessly persecute Soviet Jews.
This is the permission structure for anti-Semitism: claim whatever has happened to the Jews as one’s own experience, announce a “universal” ideal that all good people must accept, and then redefine Jewish collective identity as lying beyond it. Hating Jews thus becomes a demonstration of righteousness. The key is to define, and redefine, and redefine again, the shiny new moral reasoning for why the Jews have failed the universal test of humanity. [See O'Neill, cited by Phillips, above.]
The current calls for banishing “Zionists” from American public life follow the same ancient pattern.
Jared Silverman Email:?? [email protected]
October 7 Created a Permission Structure for Anti-Semitism
By Dara Horn October 7, 2024
For many American Jews , today is a stark reminder that they are still trapped, a year later, inside October 7, 2023. Here in the United States, that day—the largest massacre of Jews on a single day since the Holocaust—and the events that followed it have unearthed a terrifying potential in American life, a monstrous development that is both a pattern and a warning.
Physical assaults, harassment, and death threats; vandalism at homes and businesses; bomb threats at synagogues—all of these have become almost commonplace for American Jews in the past year. In addition to this intimidation and violence, Jews have also been loudly and proudly ostracized in spaces ranging from professional networking groups to the corner bookstore, in what can only be described as an ongoing campaign to push Jews out of American public life. Reasonable people have tried to rationalize this as simply passionate “free speech,” imagining that it’s an expression of concern for civilians in Gaza, whose suffering is undeniable—a wishful but implausible conclusion, because people who care about civilians do not generally express that compassion by harassing and intimidating other civilians. Clearly, something else is going on. How did we get here?
I ’ve been thinking a lot over the past year about a story I published in these pages in the spring of 2023 on Holocaust education in America . I’d noticed how Holocaust education, initially promoted in the United States by Jewish survivors hoping to inoculate the American public against anti-Semitism, had long since been recast to portray the murder of 6 million Jews as a universal story. The Holocaust is taught to American students as a case study in morality; well-meaning educators frequently compare it to the Armenian genocide, the Rwandan genocide, the treatment of Black Americans and Native Americans, and other acts of persecution and intolerance. This approach has undeniable resonance and value.
But few of these educators think to connect the Holocaust to other assaults against and persecutions of Jews: for example, the Russian Civil War massacres in Ukraine in 1918–21, during which more than 100,000 Jews were murdered. Or the massacres, property seizures, and ethnic cleansing that drove nearly 1 million Jews from almost the entire Arab world in the mid-20th century. Or the ongoing genocidal rhetoric and periodic butchery of Jewish civilians undertaken by a slew of Islamist fundamentalist groups in the past 40 years. No—the Holocaust is mainly of interest when it’s extracted from Jewish history, used to teach a lesson about the humanity we all share. Instead of teaching students to understand anti-Semitism as a specific pattern in society, or to understand who Jews are, these curricula suggest that what happened to Europe’s Jews—who were just like everyone else —actually happened to all of us .
At the time my article was published, I thought little about the fact that few of the many Holocaust educators I’d encountered across the country were Jewish. But I have thought about it again and again in the past year, every time I encounter non-Jewish Holocaust educators bewildered by the explosion of anti-Semitism in their own schools and institutions. Hadn’t they taught the “universal” lessons of the Holocaust? Where had they gone wrong? One such educator attending one of my lectures told me ruefully, alongside her colleagues, about the surge in anti-Semitic sentiment that many of them had witnessed among their own students. Like every Holocaust educator I’ve met, she was sincere, well meaning, eager to improve. After my talk, she privately asked me if I thought that the October 7 attack had been plotted by the Israeli government. When I told her this was an anti-Semitic myth comparable to Holocaust denial, she seemed genuinely surprised.
What I observed in my deep dive into American Holocaust education, I now realize, was a massive appropriation of the Jewish experience that obscured, behind a screen of happy universalism, an intellectual tradition that has been used to justify the demonization of Jews for millennia. This appropriation was entirely consistent with what non-Jewish societies have routinely done with the Jewish experience: claim that that experience happened to “everyone,” and then use it to demonstrate how wrong Jews are for rejecting the “universalism” of their own experience—for refusing to be just like everyone else . As far back as the Seleucid and Roman Empires, which turned the site of the Jews’ ancient temple into a center for their own worship as part of their persecutions of Jews, non-Jewish societies have followed a similar pattern of appropriation and rejection.
Christianity engaged in this appropriation for hundreds of years, claiming that Christians were the “new Israel” and then excoriating Jews who failed to accept the Church’s universal salvation. Islam did this too, insisting that the Quran was the true universal message, and that the Torah, which shares many of the Quran’s stories and precedes it by many centuries, was somehow “corrupted.” Of course, both Christianity and Islam developed their own rich traditions over time. Yet, for centuries, both Christian and Islamic societies also used the Jews’ failure to accept their “universal” values as permission to ostracize, discriminate against, and periodically slaughter them.
This pattern continued to evolve in the more secular modern era, as some societies graduated from appropriating Jewish holy sites and texts to appropriating Jewish experiences —including experiences of persecution. In the 1870s, German Jews were only a couple of generations out of the ghettos and had only recently been granted equal rights when their fellow Germans decided that they were the ones experiencing subjugation—by Jews. Sophisticated 19th-century Germans would never have dreamt of hating Jews for being Christ killers. But racial “science” had recently declared Jews a predatory, inferior race hell-bent on oppressing others. In 1879, the German author of a best-selling book explaining how Jews were discriminating against Germans introduced a handy new term for this fresh justification of Jew hatred: anti-Semitism . The supposed grounding in science gave enlightened Germans a new form of permission to persecute Jews based on “universal” values.
In the years after World War II, when racial anti-Semitism lost its luster, the Soviet Union popularized a new form of universalism rooted in appropriation. Announcing on the official memorial for the 100,000 people, mostly Jews, massacred at Babyn Yar that Nazis had simply murdered “citizens of Kiev,” the Soviets declared themselves —not the Jews, who went unmentioned—to be Nazism’s chief victims. (Starting in the the 1960s, Jews attempted to gather at the site annually to commemorate the massacre; many were arrested.) The regime positioned the Jews, in fact, as perpetrators of evils like those of the Nazis. By the late 1960s, the KGB was pumping out enormous amounts of propaganda trumpeting a new value: anti-Zionism . Around the world, endless Soviet-sponsored publications and broadcasts proclaimed, without evidence, that Zionism is Nazism, Zionism is racism, Zionism is apartheid, Zionism is colonialism, and Zionism is genocide — all while the Soviet Union armed its Arab client states for their repeated invasions of Israel. And even as they endlessly repeated that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism , the Soviets continued to mercilessly persecute Soviet Jews.
This is the permission structure for anti-Semitism: claim whatever has happened to the Jews as one’s own experience, announce a “universal” ideal that all good people must accept, and then redefine Jewish collective identity as lying beyond it. Hating Jews thus becomes a demonstration of righteousness. The key is to define, and redefine, and redefine again, the shiny new moral reasoning for why the Jews have failed the universal test of humanity.
The current call s for banishing “Zionists” from American public life follow the same ancient pattern.
Jews were murdered, gang-raped, mutilated, and abducted on October 7, 2023, by the proudly genocidal death cult Hamas. Its fellow Iranian proxies in Lebanon and Yemen continue firing rockets at Israeli civilians. Yet anti-Israel protesters now claim that Jews are “committing genocide.” (As apparently bears repeating, civilian deaths in war are devastating, but they are not genocide. And sadly, Gaza’s own leaders have been outspoken about their lack of care for civilians.) The recent pager attacks in Lebanon, targeting operatives of Hezbollah—a federally designated terrorist organization that has fired more than 8,000 rockets at Israeli targets since October 8 and turned tens of thousands of Israelis into internal refugees—have been decried by righteous Americans as “terrorism.” Zionists, anti-Israel activists announce over and over, are the new Nazis.
Zionists, to be clear, are simply people who do not want the state of Israel to be dismantled—a possibility vividly illustrated on October 7. To be a Zionist is not necessarily to support Israel’s current government or the current war, or to oppose Palestinian statehood. According to 2024 polling, 85 percent of American Jews ages 18 to 40 believe in Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state; pre–October 7 polling reflects similar attitudes among American Jews of all ages. Which means that this denunciation of “Zionists” has amounted to a denunciation of the overwhelming majority of American Jews themselves. Yet those who have objected to being stalked and harassed and assaulted this year—tactics designed to intimidate and silence them—have been told, repeatedly, that they are perniciously shutting down “free speech.” And because Jews have supposedly rejected these universal values of promoting free speech and opposing genocide and terrorism, they must be pushed out of society by any means necessary.
As I write this, I feel a bone-deep weariness at having to list examples from the endless effluvium of this campaign. Fact-resistant slogans that demonize Jews (“Genocide supporters!” “Zionism is white supremacy!”) have by now been repeated so often across America that these lies, recycled from medieval blood libels and KGB talking points, have become boring. Where to even begin?
If I must, I’ll start with my own field, literature. Last month, an annual literary festival in upstate New York canceled an event at which the novelist Elisa Albert was set to moderate a panel. According to an email that one of the festival organizers sent to Albert, the novelists Lisa Ko and Aisha Abdel Gawad didn’t want “to be on a panel with a ‘Zionist.’” Albert had written an article after the October 7 attack titled “ An Open Letter to Hamas’ Defenders .” Her books, however, are not about Israel, but about American Jews. (Gawad and Ko have denied accusations of anti-Semitism. Ko has said that she did not decline to be on the panel, but merely expressed concern about the decision to put Gawad, a Muslim author, on the same panel as Albert.)
This was but one of several instances this year of American literary institutions canceling book events to prevent the public appearance of “Zionists.” In April, writers forced the cancellation of the PEN Literary Awards ceremony—a major American literary event that provides rare opportunities for emerging writers—over the organization’s “consistent platforming of Zionists.” Readers have organized smear campaigns against “Zionist” (read: American Jewish) novelists; at least one person even burned a popular “Zionist” romance novelist’s books for the delight of online viewers. The author in question has never written about Israel at all.
Demands for denouncing “Zionism” have reportedly resounded among therapists, too. According to Jewish Insider , some clinicians have been open about their desire to deny referrals to therapists “with Zionist affiliations,” and an online networking group for therapists asks its members if they are “pro Palestine” before they are allowed to join. (The group’s moderator did not respond to Jewish Insider ’s request for comment.)
Jews working and training in the medical field have watched their colleagues and instructors justify the murders and rapes of October 7 and claim that “Zionism in US medicine should be examined as a structural impediment to health equity.” Like book burning, these smears in the medical field are time-honored; they echo those favored by medieval rabble-rousers who accused Jews of poisoning wells during the Black Plague and contemporary alt-right nuts who accused Jews of spreading COVID-19.
One American moment from the past year that has stayed with me involved a group of people gathered in a New York City subway car, some of them wearing face coverings. In the viral video of the incident, their leader instructs them, “Repeat after me,” after which his flock dutifully and childishly repeats, “Repeat after me.” Then the leader announces to the subway car’s passengers, “Raise your hand if you’re a Zionist.” His followers repeat the words: “Raise your hand if you’re a Zionist.” Then he continues, “This is your chance to get out.” His followers repeat: “This is your chance to get out.” (The man accused of leading the chant was charged with a misdemeanor; he has pleaded not guilty.)
The group’s loyal repetition of the leader’s words is chilling. It is an act of faith, a declaration of belonging, a placement of oneself inside the circle of good and right. It is the sound of a society capitulating.
In 1935, Varian Fry, an American journalist who would later rescue thousands of Jews and dissidents from Nazi-occupied Europe, described something similar he happened to observe while in Berlin. A mob had set up a gantlet on the busy thoroughfare of the Kurfürstendamm and were demanding that any Jews in cars that came by present their identification papers. “The crowd raised the shout ‘Jude!’ whenever any one sighted or thought he had sighted a Jew,” Fry told The New York Times . “At times a chant would be raised … ‘the best Jew is a dead Jew’—precisely like a Christian liturgy, with a leader speaking the lines first and the crowd chanting them over and over again, line for line, after he had finished.”
As we are repeatedly reminded, today’s chanting and targeting and harassing and ostracizing of American Jews is nothing at all like that, because we all agree that anti-Semitism is bad. The mobs pushing Jews out of public spaces in 2024 are in no way similar to the mobs pushing Jews out of public spaces in 1935, or 1919, or 1492, or 1096, or 135. This time, you see, the Jews deserve it. Perhaps it’s their chance to get out.
T he consequences for Jews of this hatred are obvious. Indeed, many American Jews have changed their behavior, hiding outward signs of Jewish identity and thinking twice before sharing their identity with colleagues and acquaintances. But its consequences for non-Jews are incalculable—not because of the often inaccurate Holocaust-education claim that Jews are the canary-in-the-coal-mine whose persecution indicates that other groups will later be persecuted, but because this permission structure devours human potential.
Imagine how many intelligent people in the 19th and early 20th centuries devoted their talents to justifying “scientific” anti-Semitism instead of doing actual science, or how many years of oppression have been endured by populations duped into thinking that their enemy was “Zionism” instead of their Soviet-sponsored dictatorships or fundamentalist regimes. Human-rights activists have appropriately raised awareness of very real injustices committed by Israel. But the enormous investment in exposing primarily Jewish perfidy—the United Nations Human Rights Council has passed more resolutions condemning Israel than any other nation in the world—has left fewer resources to address rampant human-rights abuses elsewhere. Meanwhile, any Israeli government is less likely to consider legitimate criticism from outsiders, because the supply of such criticism has been so thoroughly poisoned by those who want Jews dead. Blood, treasure, and talent in the Muslim world have been horrifically wasted in war after war against Israel.
Palestinian Arabs have borne the brunt of their leaders’ and manipulators’ anti-Jewish obsession, winding up subjected to autocratic rule, used as human pawns, and deprived of multiple opportunities for statehood, collaboration, prosperity, and peace. Like Israeli Jews, they aren’t going anywhere; they, too, deserve freedom and dignity, and must build a future with their neighbors. For people in all of these societies, the costs of this fixation are high.
American institutions that cave to this hatred will also face these costs. Schools and universities lose their credibility and their ability to teach when educators let lies undermine learning. The same is true for other sectors of American life. A literary world where conformity is the price of entry is unworthy of the name. A prejudiced therapist is a contradiction in terms, rendering therapy itself impossible. Patients suffer when ideology derails doctors’ training. When swaths of colleagues are blacklisted and ostracized, untold possibilities for research and innovation are blithely destroyed.
The permission structure is here, alive and vivid. It always is. Thousands of years of Jewish experience suggest that we will continue on this course. But Jewish experience is not universal. One revolutionary idea in Jewish tradition, articulated everywhere from the Torah to the Israeli national anthem, is hope: Nothing is inevitable; people can change. Hope and a vision for the future of Israelis and Palestinians will have to come from Israelis and Palestinians themselves. But the future that we choose here in America is up to us.
American Holocaust educators often ask me what they should be teaching as the “lessons of the Holocaust.” The question itself is absurd. As one of my readers once put it, Auschwitz was not a university, and most Jews who arrived there were immediately gassed and incinerated, making it difficult for them to produce coursework in ethics for the rest of the world to enjoy.
But there is indeed something we can learn from the long history of anti-Semitism and the societies it has destroyed: We’ve fallen for this before. After this terrifying year, I hope we can find the courage to say, Never again .
Dara Horn is an American novelist, essayist, and professor of literature. She has written five novels and in 2021, released a nonfiction essay collection titled People Love Dead Jews,
FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA, a movie based on in-depth understanding of October 7th, 2023 Hamas Invasion of Israel: Please note the film has achieved 1,445,407 views and it went live on 10-07-2024... With English subtitles:
Message from Stanley Krieger:
You must share with your entire family and friends, particularly, none-Jews!?
It was an act of barbarism beyond comprehension - a year on, a powerful new book by BRENDAN O'NEILL argues... far too many in the West who see themselves as good people failed the moral test posed by October 7
Brendan O'neill
The Middle East stands on the brink of all-out war.
Following?Iran's barrage of 180 ballistic missiles at?Israel?on Tuesday night, the world is holding its breath. How will Israel respond?
Will the US and Britain be drawn into a confrontation with the mullahs of Tehran?
Then there is Lebanon. As a vast exodus of civilians from the south of the country continues, the aerial bombardment on both sides of the border with Israel intensifies.
The diplomatic world clamours for a ceasefire, but neither the Iran-backed Islamist terror group nor the Israel Defence Forces show any sign of backing down.
One year after?Hamas's October 7 attacks on Israel, things feel more volatile than ever.
Following Iran's barrage of 180 ballistic missiles at Israel on Tuesday night, the world is holding its breath
But it is not the only confrontation that is escalating. So is hostility towards Israel, which is increasingly viewed as a pariah state in fashionable progressive circles.
Thanks to the twisted mentality that now prevails in much of the public discourse in the West – as I reveal in my new book about the response to the Hamas atrocity of October 7, After The Pogrom – the overwhelming preponderance of moral opprobrium is reserved for Israel.
How dare they, rail the bien pensants, retaliate against the barrage of Hezbollah rockets that has rained down relentlessly on their territory for months?
The correct-think mob even accuses Israel of provoking Iran's missile attack this week – overlooking that Iran has been bombing and massacring Israelis for years through its proxy armies of Hezbollah and Hamas. Indeed, this week, Iran's 85-year-old supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, lauded the October 7 atrocity as a legitimate action by the Palestinian people.
The grotesque double standards – where violent, misogynistic racists bent on creating a barbarous theocracy are hailed as freedom fighters, while the only democratic country in the Middle East is denounced as an engine of lethal oppression – have existed for decades.
But they were thrown into sharp relief by Hamas's assault on Israel last year, the most deadly single strike against the Jewish people since the Holocaust.
The Hamas incursion not only triggered the chain of events that led to the present conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon, but also unleashed an extraordinary wave of anti-Israeli bigotry and venom across the West.
At times, it felt as if our civilisation had been gripped by insanity. Basic morality had been inverted.
Radical activists who had cried 'Believe all women' during the #MeToo tumult, overnight became sceptics about claims of Hamas terrorists raping Jewish women.
Strident diversity officials now began to bleat about 'the context' when asked why they were silent about anti-Jewish racist abuse.
Demonstrators wave flags and carry portraits of slain leaders during a rally in Tehran on October 2
Victim-blaming was in, justice was out. In the wake of October 7, Israel became the most hated nation on earth. The sheer loathing of it was out of all proportion to its size and influence.
It is almost exactly a year since the Hamas attack exposed the moral decadence in large parts of our society. October 8, 2023, ought to have been a day of shining ethical clarity for humankind, given the horror that had unfolded over the preceding 24 hours as Hamas embarked on its killing spree.
No one was spared, not children, not women, not the elderly. Rockets were fired at moving cars. Grenades were thrown into bomb shelters in which families had taken refuge. A music festival was turned into a site of rape and slaughter.
More than 1,100 people were killed in total, 796 of them civilians. Shocking though it was, even this death toll failed to capture the full depravity of the massacre. The assailants took glee in their sadism, filming their violence and sharing it online.
Not content with their bloodbath in Israel, they also took 250 hostages, whom they dragged back to Gaza and then paraded, bruised and bloodied, through the streets. This was more than terrorism or mass murder.
It was, in the words of German novelist Herta Muller, 'a total derailment from civilisation'. The Jewish nation found itself subjected to the very butchery it was built to withstand. The state to which Jews had fled to escape the pogroms had now experienced one of its own.
All this should have awoken the world's conscience. Yet Israel waited in vain for the young and educated of the West to rally to its side.
From the moment that news of the Hamas attack began to be broadcast, the voices of equivocation and excuse-making could be heard. Some said Israel had provoked the atrocities by their mistreatment of the Gazan population.
Just as they now say Israel provoked Iran by attacking Hezbollah – even though Hezbollah has fired rockets at Israel almost every day since October 7.
Others claimed Hamas's October 7 assault was a just response to Israel's colonial-style occupation of Palestinian land. Referring to the mass killings at the music festival, Ashok Kumar, a senior lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London, tweeted: 'Sometimes partying on stolen land next to a concentration camp has consequences.'
One disturbing opinion poll in the US found 60 percent of 18 to 24-year-old Americans felt Palestinian grievances justified Hamas's action.
'Zionists off our campus', a slogan that was part of an ugly atmosphere in Britain in the weeks after October 7 that saw anti-Semitic hate crimes rise by 1,350 per cent.
Jewish schools and shops were attacked. At the Wiener Historical Holocaust Library in central London, the oldest such institution in the world, graffiti in support of Gaza was daubed at the entrance.
The mix of crude anti-Semitism and glorification of terrorism was also on display in the pro-Palestinian demonstrations which have become such a feature of cities in Britain and elsewhere in the West since October 7.
The relentless nature of these anti-Israeli protests, along with moronic chants like 'From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free', again highlights how deranged and morally perverted this cause has become.
Together with the wave of hate crimes, the demonstrations served to promote the internationalisation of Hamas's reactionary ideology, where the Jewish state is singled out for special contempt as the source of the world's ills, with the Jewish people held to be guilty by association.
Indeed, no nation provokes the wrath of the West's activist class as much as Israel.
Thousands can perish in Syria's civil war, or in Saudi Arabia's Western-backed offensive in Yemen, or in Myanmar or the Ethiopian region of Tigray, and not one foot will touch a street in our cities in protest.
Yet the minute Israel takes action against the terrorists on its borders, the marchers will be out with their placards, screeching about genocide.
The very existence of Israel excites fury on a visceral level that transcends logic. It seems to me that Israel has become a kind of sin-bearer for the woke warriors of the West, a totem of everything they find objectionable in Western society, culture and history.
Even more grotesque is the parallel drawn by pro-Palestinian activists between Israel and the South Africa of the apartheid era. Yet there is no comparison. Israel is an advanced democracy whose Arab population has the right to vote and whose Supreme Court includes Arab justices.
The entire process of denigrating Israel is riddled with lies and contradictions. In their fulminations against the Jewish state, the progressive activists blather about 'social justice' for Gaza.
Yet homosexual relations are illegal in Gaza, with the result that gay people face persecution and torture there, a reality that makes the London-based pressure group 'Queers for Palestine' look like a bunch of deluded idiots.
Nor is there any justice for women under Hamas's brutal Islamist dogma, which imposes widespread discrimination against them. According to one recent study, women in Gaza have one of the world's lowest rates of participation in the labour market, at just 20 per cent. Outspoken Western feminists, who see dangerous misogyny in a touch on the knee or a risque joke, fall silent in the face of mass rapes by Hamas fighters, because – in the woke playbook – Jews are the oppressors and Palestinians the victims.
Apart from the charity called Jewish Women's Aid, not one group in England that focuses on sexual violence against women condemned the sex crimes of Hamas. In fact, the radical organisation Sisters Uncut actively challenged the reports of abuse, claiming that there was a risk of stirring up Islamophobia.
The theory that Israelis invented or exaggerated the incidence of sexual assaults for their own political ends fits the anti-Semitic stereotype that portrays Jews as cynical, cunning liars, continually manipulating events for their own political advantage. That belief in the Jews' inherent dishonesty also lies behind the lurid conspiracy theory that Israel fabricated much of the attack on October 7 in order to provide a pretext for pulverising Gaza.
Troops remove the bodies of victims, killed during an attack by Hamas terrorists in Kfar Aza
It is an approach that could be called 'Pogrom denial', a smaller version of the vile practice of 'Holocaust denial' which has been central to modern anti-Semitism. While few of the Western pro-Palestinian brigade go so far as to question the reality of the Holocaust, they undermine its central importance to the Jews and to humanity in other ways.
One is to scold Israel for using its traumatic legacy as a stick with which to beat Hezbollah and Hamas, even though both groups are built on the desire to wipe the Jewish state off the face of the earth.
Another is to challenge the Jewish people's moral ownership of the Holocaust by robbing the Nazis' genocide of its racial specificity, instead presenting Hitler's policy as a generalised act of extremist wickedness.
Dressed up as a step towards greater inclusion, it is a process that downgrades the unique suffering of the Jews.
Other hypocrisies are glaring, such as the habit of self-regarding activists to don the Keffiyeh, originally a scarf worn by Bedouin tribesmen but now an emblem of solidarity with Palestine. Yet these are often the same people who shriek about 'cultural appropriation' if a white person wears a sombrero or has their hair braided.
Moreover, in a rich irony, few of the Keffiyehs are made in Palestine but rather are manufactured in China using forced Uyghur labour.
These double standards are embodied in the figure of Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader and now independent MP for Islington. He likes to see himself as a feminist ally, supporter of gay rights, advocate of democracy, and champion of the oppressed.
Yet in his hatred of Israel, he has ended up colluding with violent misogyny, racism, homophobia and authoritarianism.
Tragically, there are too many in the West who have taken the same route as Corbyn. That helps to explain why we failed collectively the moral test of October 7.
Israel deserved better.
After The Pogrom: 7 October, Israel And The Crisis Of Civilisation by Brendan O'Neill (￡11.99, Spiked) is out now
POGROM: an organized massacre of a particular ethnic group, in particular that of Jewish people in Russia or eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The characteristics of a pogrom vary widely, depending on the specific incident, at times leading to, or culminating in, massacres. Significant pogroms in the Russian Empire included:
The Odessa pogroms,
Warsaw pogrom (1881),
Kishinev pogrom (1903),
Kiev pogrom (1905), and
Bia?ystok pogrom (1906).
On April 8, 2022, Dion Marsh was arrested in New Jersey on charges of attempted murder and bias intimidation after he stabbed an Orthodox Jewish man and struck down another pedestrian in a stolen car. Referring to Hasidic Jews as “the real devils,” Marsh had reportedly promised a “blood bath.”* The attack came amid reports of the increasing number of antisemitic attacks since the tragic 2018 attack on Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue and the emergence of what many are calling the new antisemitism. While modern communication technologies and globalization have created new outlets for antisemitism, the new antisemitism looks remarkably familiar. Classic anti-Semitic tropes and conspiracy theories are being repurposed and even finding their way into mainstream political discourse. Rather than being a new type of antisemitism, this is more of a resurgence of classic antisemitism in new clothing. This report explores the types of antisemitism embraced by the far right, the far left, radical Islam, politicians, and beyond. It will also examine the common core of antisemitism as practiced by these groups, despite their otherwise disparate ideologies.
In May 2023, the White House announced a first-of-its-kind U.S. National Strategy to Combat Antisemitism. The strategy was a response to the continually rising, record number of record numbers of antisemitic incidents in the United States. In 2022, FBI Director Christopher Wray noted that while American Jews comprised only 2.4 percent of the U.S. population, antisemitism drove 63 percent of reported religiously motivated hate crimes.* According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), antisemitic incidents reached a recorded high in 2022, rising 36 percent from 2021.*
A March 2023 FBI report showed hate crimes increased almost 12 percent to 9,065 in 2021 from 8,120 in 2020. Of those 9,065 reported hate crimes in 2021, 4.1 percent were because of the offenders’ religious bias.* Breaking the number down further, the ADL recorded 2,717 antisemitic incidents throughout the United States in 2021, representing a 34 percent increase from the 2,026 incidents recorded in 2020.* In the first half of 2021, antisemitic attacks rise in conjunction with protests against Israel. That May, Israel and Hamas fought an 11-day conflict during which Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) launched more than 4,000 rockets toward Israeli population centers, killing 12 people. Israel launched airstrikes at Hamas and PIJ targets across the Gaza Strip, killing at least 243 Palestinians, according to the Hamas-run health ministry. The Israeli government claims it killed at least 200 militants from Hamas and PIJ.* As the conflict wrought destruction across Gaza, anti-Israel rallies took place across the United States and the world—and Jews thousands of miles away from Israel found themselves under assault.
Between May 9 and May 24, 2021, Britain’s Jewish community recorded 116 antisemitic incidents, compared to 11 during the same period in 2020. On May 16, a convoy of at least 10 cars brandishing Palestinian flags drove approximately 200 miles across England to the predominantly Jewish London neighborhood of Golders Green. Police arrested at least four people after one participant shouted, “f— the Jews, rape their daughters.”* Also on May 16, two men yelled antisemitic slurs and attacked Rabbi Rafi Goodwin in Chigwell, England.* In the United States, the Anti-Defamation League reported it received almost 200 reports of antisemitic attacks after the conflict began. The group also noted more than 17,000 Twitter posts with variations of “Hitler was right.”* On May 18 in Los Angeles, a group of men waving Palestinian flags attacked Jewish diners at a sushi restaurant. According to witnesses, the attackers chanted “death to Jews” and “free Palestine.”* A January 2022 report by the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency concluded 2021 had the most antisemitic incidents on record for the past 10 years.* The increase in attacks on Jews has reportedly caused some to consider removing their yarmulkes—skullcaps—in public or hiding other visible signs of their Jewishness.*
Though they had no actual links to the events in Israel or Gaza, because of a shared heritage individual Jews in Europe and the United States automatically became representatives of the Jewish state and targets for unleashing anger over current events. The specious assumption that all Jews are part of a vast, powerful network has placed Jews at the center of conspiracies surrounding catastrophes from the plague to the Great Depression to COVID-19. The emergence of wealthy Jews in Europe—particularly the Rothschilds—gave rise to the notion that rich Jews manipulate global events, which was later codified in The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. More than a century since it first appeared in Russia, the Protocols remains a prominent source of antisemitic theories. The forgery has endured and has been repackaged and reinterpreted in a contemporary context. In 2002, for example, an Egyptian TV series drew international outrage for promoting the forgery. *
Central to these examples is the idea of the Jew as the powerful puppet master and manipulator, which is rooted in the oldest antisemitic conspiracies. Early Christians blamed Jews for killing Jesus. Medieval rulers blamed Jews for spreading the plague. Jews were blamed for Russia’s communist revolution. Throughout history, Jews were portrayed as shadowy villains. And then The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Ziongave life to new conspiracies about Jewish power and the desire to manipulate and control world affairs. The emergence of a physical Jewish nation-state in 1948 provided antisemites with a centralized representation of Jewish power on the world stage. And while Jewish communities vary in their opinions on and support of Israel, in 2021 Israel’s fight against Hamas further highlighted the violent repercussions of the accusations that all Jews—merely by association—are responsible for the actions of Jewish state.
Conspiracies involving Jewish political power and influence are deeply rooted and influential. As shown in a 2018 CNN poll, one-third of Europeans think Jews are too politically powerful.* Conspiracies about the Rothschilds still abound but new Jewish faces have taken center stage. One of the most prominent Jews at the center of these new conspiracies is George Soros, the Hungarian Holocaust survivor who created a financial empire and is a strong supporter of liberal causes as well as the Democratic Party.
Soros has become a favorite target for the right and far right. Among the crimes blamed on Soros are being a Nazi collaborator,* causing the 2008 financial crisis, and funding the migrant caravans that reached the U.S.-Mexican border in late 2018 and early 2019.*
These claims anoint Soros the puppet master of a grand far-left conspiracy. Conspiracies circulate about how Soros survived the Holocaust, painting him as a Nazi collaborator who as a child aided Nazis in looting valuables from the dead bodies of Jews. Other theories have him enlisting in the SS. A 2016 tweet by the user @toombstone, for example, spread an image of a young man, allegedly Soros, in an SS uniform. A Google image search of the photo reveals the individual to be Oskar Groening, a Nazi guard at Auschwitz known as “the book-keeper of Auschwitz.”*
Hundreds of years ago, European peasantry accused Jews of spreading the plague by poisoning the wells of Europe. As the world struggled to address the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Jews once again became a target of conspiracies. In the early days of the outbreak in the United States, an Orthodox Jewish attorney became Patient Zero in New York state, making the New York Jewish community among the first to contract and spread the virus.* Within the white supremacist sphere, accusations swirled that Jews were either directly responsible for the transmission of the virus or were holding back a cure to maximize profits.* In one case in New York City, a couple attacked a group of Hasidic men, tried to rip off their facemasks, and shouted, “You’re the reason why we’re getting sick!”* According to another conspiracy theory, a Soros-owned company created the coronavirus in a lab.* In January 2022, antisemitic flyers blaming Jews for the coronavirus were distributed to homes in California and Florida. The flyer—erroneously—identified top officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other high-profile medical professionals as Jews and labeled COVID-19 part of the “Jewish agenda.”* An antisemitic group called the Goyim Defense League (GDL) offered financial incentives to distribute similar propaganda. In December 2020, analogous flyers were left at homes in California, Texas, North Carolina, Idaho, Vermont, Alabama, Illinois, and Florida.* First emerging in 2018, the GDL was reportedly responsible for at least 74 antisemitic propaganda incidents in the United States in 2021.*
The accusations all come from the same place: the notion that Jews wield outsized political influence and the ability to manipulate government policies. Resentment toward the Jewish emancipation of the nineteenth century and their emerging prosperity, as well as the migration of Russians into Europe, fed the spread of the fictitious Protocols throughout Europe in the last century. And while the Protocols itself may be relegated to the corners of far-right websites, antisemites have adapted the essence of its message for the modern era.
This report explores how those perceptions have shaped modern antisemitism, infected every aspect of modern life, and resulted in the highest record of antisemitic violence against Jews in years.
领英推荐
To Be a Persian-American Jew - TikTok
I am not a fan of TikTok, but I will make an exception with this TikTok by a young Persian-American Jewish woman.
It was sent to me by my stepdaughter.
There was a major Jewish community in Persia (now Iran) since the Babylonian exile.? This community existed until the Ayatollah and his mullahs took over Iran and overthrew the Shah.? Most of the Jewish community left at that time.?
I found, and I think you will find too, the woman's narrative of what it means to be a Persian Jew in America after October 7 moving.
Jared Silverman Email:?? [email protected]
Very comprehensive documentary of these events from last year, 10-07-2023, as well as the historical review.
I feel the hysteria of people who arrived later but think they own it!
(This happens here. One of the mayoral candidates who remained for the second round is of Lebanese origin, Boulos, comes from a wealthy family and is the leader of a movement that invades lands and homes).
I always knew that their children learn to hate at a very young age.
The testimonies from both sides are also important.
How will it end?
In Brazil, we are a country with many people on the path to spiritualization, we believe that the change is very close.
It is a profound HOPE!
We are already living in the times predicted by Jesus.
And we pray to the Lord and our Lady every day and moment: give us Your peace.
Besos
Clinton, Walz and Harris and Free Speech
Yesterday, I wrote, Democrats and Thought Police, about how Democrats were ushering the US into a Orwellian world.? I highlighted these concepts:
There is more in the media today, particularly about Hillary Clinton and Tim Walz. Hillary has been particularly under the microscope when it comes to propounding censorship.
Hillary Clinton warns that allowing free speech on social media means ‘we lose control’ - NYPost, 10/6/24
Former Secretary of State?Hillary Clinton?said Saturday that social media companies must moderate content on their platforms or else “we lose total control.”? [Beware of who "we" is.? What is the "total control" that "we" is seeking? The Orwellian concepts above might give an indication. Also see James Freeman below.]
Clinton told CNN host Michael Smerconish that while there have been some steps taken at the state level to regulate social media, she wants to see more done by the?federal government?to moderate content.
“We can look at the state of California, the state of New York, I think some other states have also taken action,” Clinton said.
“But we need national action, and sadly, our Congress has been dysfunctional when it comes to addressing these threats to our children,” she added.
Clinton said she believes the issue should be “at the top of every legislative political agenda” and called for the repealing of Section 230 of the Communications Act, which protects online platforms from being held liable for third-party content, such as user content on social media. This immunity applies to the content itself and the removal of content in certain circumstances.
Hillary Clinton says 'the quiet part out loud' during CNN interview, sending news appearance into viral frenzy -? Daily Mail (US), 10/6/24
Hillary Clinton?called for a government crack down on social media, sparking users on X to accuse her of saying 'the quiet part out loud.'
The former Secretary of State told?CNN?host Michael Smerconish Saturday that leaders could 'lose control' if they don't take serious action to censor digital content - sparking outcry on the web.
'Democrats see the internet as a propaganda tool rather than a medium for the open exchange of information!!' Tom Callahan wrote on X.?
'They are afraid of exposure, indictment and imprisonment,'?Wendy Stone added. 'I hope we make their fears come true.'
Clinton called for the federal government to imitate states like?California and New York to place more controls on social media.
'We need national action and sadly our Congress has been dysfunctional when it comes to addressing these threats to our children,' Clinton said.
Clinton brought up the issue in the context of controlling more of what children were experiencing on social media and getting addicted to content on major platforms.
She called for the repeal of Section 230 of the Communications Act, the keeps online platforms from being held liable for content posted by users on their platforms.
That legal carve out, she argued, was an 'overly simple view' that did not take into account the dangers of social media.
'[I]f the platforms, whether it’s Facebook or Twitter/X or Instagram or TikTok, whatever they are, if they don’t moderate and monitor the content, we lose total control,' she said.
Hillary Clinton Is Worried - James Freeman, Best of the Web, WSJ, 10/7/24
This whole free-speech thing could get totally out of hand.
Two events on Saturday brought home the threat to free speech in the United States and the horrific cost to the entire world when free speech is suppressed in the United States. Of course as humans we enjoy a right to express ourselves that no government can take away. This fundamental right, codified in the First Amendment to our Constitution, is also essential to a thriving, prosperous society. Without the unfettered ability to identify problems and propose solutions, civilization cannot advance.
Look around the world at governments that have denied the right to free speech and review a catalog of human deprivation and misery. Now consider how our generally open marketplace of ideas has enabled the exposure and defeat of falsehood, prejudice, superstition and, to use the politically fashionable term, misinformation. Sunshine remains the best intellectual disinfectant.
So perhaps it’s no coincidence that today the politicians who are most zealous in demanding the power to silence misinformation promoted by others have been peddling a great deal of it themselves. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was the client for a project that created perhaps the most poisonous misinformation in the history of presidential politics, continues her campaign to empower the federal government to censor communications.
Recently a Journal editorial noted Mrs. Clinton’s suggestion that criminal charges might be in order against Americans exercising their First Amendment rights in political discussions.
On Saturday Mrs. Clinton appeared on CNN to present her censorship campaign as necessary to protect children from dangerous content online.Certainly there is a lot of such content online. But her radical remedy would suppress vast swaths of content whether or not children are involved.
A federal law known as Section 230 has enabled the rise of social media by letting tech platforms make good-faith efforts to remove objectionable content without becoming liable for everything that individual users post. Take away Section 230 and, for example, the business model of Elon Musk’s X is destroyed. Social media platforms would be sued into oblivion by trial lawyers. Here’s what Mrs. Clinton said, according to CNN’s Saturday transcript:
We should be, in my view, repealing something called Section 230, which gave, you know, platforms on the internet immunity because they were thought to be just pass-throughs. That they shouldn’t be judged for the content that is posted.
But we now know that that was an overly simple view… if they don’t moderate and monitor the content we lose total control…
We need to remove the immunity from liability and we need to have guardrails. We need regulation.
We need guardrails against political actors seeking more control over our speech, even—perhaps especially—in cases in which they claim to be acting on behalf of our kids. [“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'” Ronald Reagan]
Then there is the Democrat candidate for VP, Tim Walz, who also advocated truncating the First Amendment.? This is from Reason, a libertarian publication.
Tim Walz's Very Bad Answer on Social Media Censorship - Robby Soave, Reason, 10/3/24
The would-be vice president is wrong to say that misinformation lacks First Amendment protection.
Toward the end of Tuesday night's vice presidential debate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) argued with Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio) about former President Donald Trump's efforts to remain in power following his 2020 election loss. Trump's conduct was indefensible, and thus Vance did not do a very good job defending it. Rather, he attempted to turn the tables on Walz, accusing the Democratic ticket of disrespecting the most important democratic norm of all: free speech.
"You guys attack us for not believing in democracy," said Vance. "The most sacred right under United States democracy is the First Amendment."
Vance went on to accuse Walz of wanting to criminalize misinformation, referencing previous, inaccurate comments the governor made about exceptions to the First Amendment. At that point, Walz actually interrupted Vance, and claimed that the First Amendment does not protect misinformation or "threatening or hate speech."
In other words, misinformation, threats, and hate speech are all unprotected categories of speech, according to Walz.
But the governor is mostly, very wrong. He's correct to note that true threats of violence lack First Amendment protection if they are specific enough.Misinformation and hate speech are absolutely protected by the First Amendment, however. And while the former is a relatively new category of expression facing explicit calls for censorship, the latter category—hate speech—has been exhaustively litigated before the Supreme Court.
Walz defended his position by glibly asserting that it is constitutionally impermissible to yell "fire in a crowded theater." This is an oft-expressed sentiment—and one that's completely and utterly false. It comes from the Supreme Court's odious opinion in the 1919 case Schenk v. United States, in which the majority held that the government could stop people from distributing leaflets opposing World War I. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes likened such activism as akin to yelling fire in a crowded theater; in other words, he believed that raising doubts about the desirability of the U.S. participating in such a global catastrophe was dangerous, and could be prohibited.
Today we recognize that the right to criticize U.S. military policy and oppose foreign wars is an essential component of the First Amendment. And the Supreme Court agrees:?Schenk?was gradually overturned by subsequent decisions. The right to engage in speech that the government might deem reckless, dangerous, or hateful was explicitly affirmed in the 2017 case Matal v. Tam, in which Justice Samuel Alito observed "the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express 'the thought that we hate.'" It could not be more simple: Hate speech is protected by the First Amendment.
The WSJ's James Freeman ties a bow around both Harris and Walz.
Criticize Harris and Walz While You Still Can - James Freeman, Best of the Web, WSJ, 10/4/24
One thing they haven’t been able to hide is hostility to free speech.
It’s a curious thing that Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Gov. Tim Walz (D., Minn.) are enjoying generally friendly media coverage even as they set modern campaign records to avoid media scrutiny. Odder still is that while avoiding discussion of the policies they will employ to govern us, they’ve clearly expressed contempt for the bedrock liberty that allows all of us to criticize government policies.
Recently this column noted Ms. Harris’s history of hostility to free expression. Now we know that if voters give her the promotion she seeks, we can’t expect her vice president to serve as a moderating influence.
Writing for Reason, Robby Soave notes that at this week’s vice presidential debate, Gov. Tim Walz repeated his false claim that the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment does not protect misinformation or “hate speech.” [See above.]
Harris has been an outspoken champion of censorship in an administration that supports targeting disinformation, misinformation and “malinformation.” That last category was?defined by the Biden administration?as information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”? [Translation - anything of which the Ministry of Truth disapproves, in its sole discretion.]
Jared Silverman Email:?? [email protected]
Kampeas [JTA]: Jewish officials handling hurricane communications face antisemitic harassment [Systemic Antisemitism]
Progressives and liberals like to talk about "systemic racism", aka "institutional racism", and engineering society for its elimination.
Maybe we should start talking about "systemic antisemitism".? How deeply is antisemitism embedded in today's American society?? Consider this story from JTA.
Jewish government officials are being targeted with antisemitic attacks in a misinformation blitz hampering efforts to get critical information out to victims of Hurricane Helene in North Carolina.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Asheville Mayor Esther Manheimer and Jaclyn Rothenberg, the spokeswoman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, have been the subject of an onslaught of antisemitic abuse on the social media platform X.? [It is not that Mayorkas is undeserving of criticism.? As a Jew, I have criticized him for his handling of the non-existent southern border and the Secret Service. Now, FEMA's under-performance with its response to Helene is added to that record. The problem is that Mayorkas is Jewish and no matter, who you are, and whatever position you hold, that will be a criterion in grading performance.]
The antisemitism has appeared among a welter of misinformation that has complicated efforts to deliver aid and services to victims of the hurricane.FEMA three days ago created a rumor-refuting page website, and Rothenberg’s professional X feed now reads like a Whac-A-Mole game of knocking away misinformation. One thread last week refuted false rumors that FEMA stole donations delivered to nonprofits.
“There are many dangerous, misleading rumors spreading about #Heleneresponse, which can actively prevent survivors from getting help,” she said on Thursday. “Our top priority is ensuring that disaster assistance is reaching people in need.”
Her replies overflowed with antisemitic comments. “Hey look, a lying Jew,” said one typical commenter. “Oh look you’re Jewish,” said another.
The Biden White House called on politicians to condemn the smears and the falsehoods.
Here's an example of how "systemic antisemitism" is exhibited in the MSM.
CBS News staff in uproar after host challenges guest's anti-Israel views, network leadership responds - Fox News, 10/7/24
The CBS host said Coates' take on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict read like something you'd find in the 'backpack of an extremist'
CBS News is in turmoil after an internal staff meeting addressed the concerns surrounding an interview featuring Ta-Nehisi Coates on Israel's "right to exist."
Last week, "CBS Mornings" anchor Tony Dokoupil grilled Coates, an author and journalist, on an anti-Israel portion in his new book, "The Message," which describes his travels "to Palestine, where he sees with devastating clarity how easily we are misled by nationalist narratives, and the tragedy that lies in the clash between the stories we tell and the reality of life on the ground," the book summary reads.
Dokoupil brought up this section of the book, telling Coates bluntly that it read like something you would find in "the backpack of an extremist."
Then there is
October 7 Created a Permission Structure for Anti-Semitism - Dara Horn, The Atlantic, 10/7/24 [To be sent separately. H/T: Elihu D]
Jared Silverman Email:?? [email protected]
?
JTA: Jewish officials handling hurricane communications face antisemitic harassment
A misinformation blitz has afflicted efforts to get critical information out to victims of Hurricane Helene.
Ron Kampeas, October 7, 2024
WASHINGTON — Jewish government officials are being targeted with antisemitic attacks in a misinformation blitz hampering efforts to get critical information out to victims of Hurricane Helene in North Carolina.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Asheville Mayor Esther Manheimer and Jaclyn Rothenberg, the spokeswoman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, have been the subject of an onslaught of antisemitic abuse on the social media platform X.?
The antisemitism has appeared among a welter of misinformation that has complicated efforts to deliver aid and services to victims of the hurricane. FEMA three days ago created a rumor-refuting page website, and Rothenberg’s professional X feed now reads like a Whac-A-Mole game of knocking away misinformation. One thread last week refuted false rumors that FEMA stole donations delivered to nonprofits.
“There are many dangerous, misleading rumors spreading about #Helene response, which can actively prevent survivors from getting help,” she said on Thursday. “Our top priority is ensuring that disaster assistance is reaching people in need.”
Her replies overflowed with antisemitic comments. “Hey look, a lying Jew,” said one typical commenter. “Oh look you’re Jewish,” said another.
The Biden White House called on politicians to condemn the smears and the falsehoods.
“It is already heinous to attack a bipartisan disaster response with conspiracy theories that put vulnerable Americans — people who have lost loved ones and homes — in even more danger and cheat them out of the aid they deserve,” Andrew Bates, an administration spokesman, said in an email. “Now those lies are also infected with revolting antisemitic smears, targeting a mayor who’s doing everything in her power to help her community stand together, and federal responders working around the clock to save lives and deliver critical necessities like food, water, and medical supplies.”
Manheimer, the Asheville mayor, is the subject of one of the most viral posts on X. “The Mayor of Asheville, North Carolina is Esther E. Manheimer,” said a post on Friday that accumulated more than 13 million views by Monday. “If you’re wondering: yes, she is.” (The implication, in social media parlance common on the far right, is that yes, Manheimer is Jewish.)
Another post that has acquired close to a million views features photos of Manheimer, Rothenberg and Mayorkas and identifies each as “jew.” Manheimer and the Department of Homeland Security did not return requests for comment.
Rothenberg, a political communications veteran who worked for former New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio’s administration and then for the 2020 Biden campaign, said she has seen nothing like the current round of abuse and misinformation.
“My job is to put out information that helps people during a really difficult time,” she told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Sunday. “We’re here to help people on their worst day, and so it’s been really surprising to see the reaction from people on social media who have made it about antisemitism when we’re here to do a job, and that’s to help people recover from Hurricane Helene.”
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has peddled some of the false claims, including that money meant for hurricane relief is diverted to migrants — though he has not trafficked in any antisemitic rhetoric when discussing the hurricane.?
Lawmakers of both parties say that the misinformation is diverting energies needed to get relief to those who need it.
“Please don’t let these crazy stories consume you or have you continually contact your elected officials to see if they are true,” Kevin Corbin, a Republican state senator in North Carolina, pleaded with his constituents on Facebook. “I’ve been working on this 12 hours a day since it started and I’m growing a bit weary of intentional distractions from the main job.”
Corbin cited the conspiracy theory that officials or bad actors control the weather, an antisemitic trope peddled by Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has apologized for her past embrace of the theory that the Rothschild family used space lasers to cause wildfires. She echoed the trope again last week.
“Yes they can control the weather,” she said Thursday on X. “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”
Within two days, her tweet became a joke on Saturday Night Live. “I don’t know who ‘they’ is, but it has been a suspiciously nice Rosh Hashanah weekend,” said comedian Michael Che during the “Weekend Update” segment.
Government officials say X remains one of the most efficient means for the government to get out information to the public, but it has also become a nexus for falsehoods, antisemitism and other forms of bigotry — particularly since Elon Musk bought the platform formerly known as Twitter in 2022 and weakened or removed guardrails around hate speech and disinformation.?
Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, mentioned the attacks on Manheimer and others when he appeared on Sunday on CNN to discuss the spike in antisemitism in the year since the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas invasion of Israel.
“There has been an avalanche of antisemitic conspiracies directed at the mayor, directed at FEMA, as if somehow the Mossad is involved in distributing disaster relief,” he said.
Amy Spitalnick, the CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, a national public policy group, said antisemitism and efforts to undermine government went hand in hand. “Antisemitic conspiracy theories are intended to sow distrust in our government and our democracy — leading directly to harassment and threats against Jews and ultimately making all of us unsafe,” she said.
Rothenberg said the only role her Judaism played was in motivating her to public service.?
“Judaism teaches you the importance of helping others,” she said. “And I am determined to continue helping people and making sure they have access to support from our agency.”
Rufo & Buttons [City Journal]: A Troubled Place
Do you think that the reports about the impact of migrants, aka illegal aliens (the proper, and statutory name), on Springfield OH and Aurora CO are either false or misinformation (to use the fashionable buzz word)?
Did you ever hear of Charleroi, Pennsylvania?? Christopher F. Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of?City Journal, has and reports with Christine Buttons.
Charleroi, Pennsylvania, is a deeply troubled?place. The former steel town, built along a stretch of the Monongahela River, south of Pittsburgh, has experienced the typical Rust Belt rise and fall. The industrial economy, which had turned it into something resembling a company town, hollowed out after the Second World War. Some residents fled; others succumbed to vices. The steel mills disappeared. Two drug-abuse treatment centers have since opened their doors.
The town’s population had steadily declined since the middle of the twentieth century, with the most recent?Census?reporting slightly more than 4,000 residents. Then, suddenly, things changed. Local officials estimate that approximately 2,000 predominantly Haitian migrants have moved in. The town’s Belgium Club and Slovak Club are mostly quiet nowadays, while the Haitians and other recent immigrants have quickly established their presence, even dominance, in a dilapidated corridor downtown.
This change—the replacement of the old ethnics with the new ethnics—is an archetypal American story. And, as in the past, it has caused anxieties and, at times, conflict.
The municipal government has felt the strain. The town, already struggling with high rates of?poverty?and?unemployment, has been forced to assimilate thousands of new arrivals. The schools now crowd with new Haitian?pupils, and have had to hire translators and English teachers. Some of the old pipes downtown have started releasing the smell of?sewage. And, according to a town councilman, there is a growing?sense?of trepidation about the alarming number of?car?crashes, with some vehicles reportedly slamming into buildings.
Among the city’s old guard, frustrations are starting to boil over. Instead of being used to revitalize these communities, these residents argue, resources get redirected to the new arrivals, who undercut wages, drive rents up, and, so far, have failed to assimilate. Worst of all, these residents say, they had no choice—there was never a vote on the question of migration; it simply materialized.
Jared Silverman Email:?? [email protected]
City Journal:
A Troubled Place: In Charleroi, Pennsylvania, the local population grapples with a surge of Haitian migrants.
Christopher F. Rufo, Christina Buttons, Oct 07 2024
Charleroi, Pennsylvania, is a deeply troubled?place. The former steel town, built along a stretch of the Monongahela River, south of Pittsburgh, has experienced the typical Rust Belt rise and fall. The industrial economy, which had turned it into something resembling a company town, hollowed out after the Second World War. Some residents fled; others succumbed to vices. The steel mills disappeared. Two drug-abuse treatment centers have since opened their doors.
The town’s population had steadily declined since the middle of the twentieth century, with the most recent?Census?reporting slightly more than 4,000 residents. Then, suddenly, things changed. Local officials estimate that approximately 2,000 predominantly Haitian migrants have moved in. The town’s Belgium Club and Slovak Club are mostly quiet nowadays, while the Haitians and other recent immigrants have quickly established their presence, even dominance, in a dilapidated corridor downtown.
This change—the replacement of the old ethnics with the new ethnics—is an archetypal American story. And, as in the past, it has caused anxieties and, at times, conflict.
The municipal government has felt the strain. The town, already struggling with high rates of?poverty?and?unemployment, has been forced to assimilate thousands of new arrivals. The schools now crowd with new Haitian?pupils, and have had to hire translators and English teachers. Some of the old pipes downtown have started releasing the smell of?sewage. And, according to a town councilman, there is a growing?sense?of trepidation about the alarming number of?car?crashes, with some vehicles reportedly slamming into buildings.
Among the city’s old guard, frustrations are starting to boil over. Instead of being used to revitalize these communities, these residents argue, resources get redirected to the new arrivals, who undercut wages, drive rents up, and, so far, have failed to assimilate. Worst of all, these residents say, they had no choice—there was never a vote on the question of migration; it simply materialized.
Former president Donald Trump, echoing the sentiments of some of Charleroi’s native citizens, has cast the change in a sinister light. As he?told?the crowd at a recent rally in Indiana, Pennsylvania, “it takes centuries to build the unique character of each state. . . . But reckless migration policy can change it quickly and permanently.” Progressives, as expected, countered with the usual arguments, claiming that Trump was stoking fear, inciting nativist resentment, and even putting the Haitian migrants in danger.
Neither side, however, seems to have grappled with the mechanics of Charleroi’s abrupt transformation. How did thousands of Haitians end up in a tiny borough in Western Pennsylvania? What are they doing there? And?cui bono—who benefits?
The answers to these questions have ramifications not only for Charleroi, but for the general trajectory of mass migration under the Biden administration, which has allowed more than?7 million?migrants to enter the United States, either illegally, or, as with some?309,000?Haitians, under ad hoc asylum rules.
The basic pattern in Charleroi has been replicated in thousands of cities and towns across America: the federal government has opened the borders to all comers; a web of publicly funded NGOs has facilitated the flow of migrants within the country; local industries have welcomed the arrival of cheap, pliant labor. And, under these enormous pressures, places like Charleroi often revert to an older form: that of the company town, in which an open conspiracy of government, charity, and industry reshapes the society to its advantage—whether the citizens want it or not.
The best way to understand the migrant crisis is to follow the flow of people, money, and power—in other words, to trace the supply chain of human migration. In Charleroi, we have mapped the web of institutions that have facilitated the flow of migrants from Port-au-Prince. Some of these institutions are public and, as such, must make their records available; others, to avoid scrutiny, keep a low profile.
The initial, and most powerful, institution is the federal government. Over the?past?four years, Customs and Border Patrol has reported hundreds of thousands of encounters with Haitian nationals. In addition, the White House has admitted more than?210,000 Haitians?through?its controversial Humanitarian Parole Program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (CHNV), which it paused in early August and has since relaunched. The program is presented as a “lawful pathway,” but critics, such as vice presidential candidate J. D. Vance, have?called?it an “abuse of asylum laws” and warned of its destabilizing effects on communities across the country.
The next link in the web is the network of publicly funded NGOs that provide migrants with resources to assist in travel, housing, income, and work. These groups are called “national resettlement agencies,” and serve as the key middleman in the flow of migration. The scale of this effort is astounding. These?agencies?are affiliated with more than?340?local offices nationwide and have received some $5.5 billion in new awards since 2021. And, because they are technically non-governmental institutions, they are not required to disclose detailed information about their operations.
In Charleroi, one of the most active resettlement agencies is Jewish Family and Community Services Pittsburgh.?According?to a September?Pittsburgh Post-Gazette report, JFCS staff have been traveling to Charleroi weekly for the past year and a half to resettle many of the migrants. The organization has?offered?to help migrants sign up for welfare programs,?including?SNAP, Medicaid, and direct financial assistance. While JFCS Pittsburgh offers “employment services“ to migrants, it denies any involvement with the employer and staffing agencies that were the focus of our investigation.
And yet, business is brisk. In 2023, JFCS Pittsburgh?reported?$12.5 million in revenue, of which $6.15 million came directly?from?government grants. Much of the remaining funding came from other?nonprofits?that also get federal funds, such as a $2.8 million grant from its?parent?organization, HIAS. And JFCS’s executives enjoy generous?salaries: the CEO earned $215,590, the CFO $148,601, and the COO $125,218—all subsidized by the taxpayer.
What is next in the chain? Business. In Charleroi, the Haitians are, above all, a new supply of inexpensive labor. A network of staffing agencies and private companies has recruited the migrants to the city’s factories and assembly lines. While some recruitment happens through word-of-mouth, many staffing agencies partner with local nonprofits that specialize in refugee resettlement to find immigrants who need work.
At the center of this system in Charleroi is Fourth Street Foods, a frozen-food supplier with?approximately?1,000 employees, most of whom work on the assembly line. In an exclusive interview, Chris Scott, the?CEO and COO?of Fourth Street Barbeque (the legal name of the firm that?does business as?Fourth Street Foods) explained that his company, like many factory businesses, has long relied on immigrant labor, which, he estimates, makes up about 70 percent of its workforce. The firm employs many temporary workers, and, with the arrival of the Haitians, has found a new group of laborers willing to work long days in an industrial freezer, starting at about $12 an hour.
Many of these workers are not directly employed by Fourth Street Foods. Instead, according to Scott, they are hired through staffing agencies, which pay workers about $12 an hour for entry-level food-processing roles and bill Fourth Street Foods over $16 per hour to cover their costs, including transportation and overhead. (The?average?wage for an entry-level food processor in Washington County was $16.42 per hour in 2023.)
According to a Haitian migrant who worked at Fourth Street and a review of video footage, three staffing agencies—Wellington Staffing Agency,?Celebes Staffing Services, and?Advantage Staffing Agency—are key conduits for labor in the city. None have websites, advertise their services, or appear in job listings. According to Scott, Fourth Street Foods relies on agencies to staff its contract workforce, but he declined to specify which agencies, citing?nondisclosure agreements.
The final link is housing. And here, too, Fourth Street Foods has an organized interest. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Scott said, Fourth Street Foods was “scrambling” to find additional workers. The owner of the company, David Barbe, stepped in, acquiring and renovating a “significant number of homes” to provide housing for his workforce. A?property search?for David Barbe and his other business,?DB Rentals LLC, shows records of more than 50 properties, many of which are concentrated on the same streets.
After the initial purchases, Barbe required some of the existing residents to vacate to make room for newcomers. A single father, who spoke on condition of anonymity, was forced to leave his home after it was sold to DB Rentals LLC in 2021. “[W]e had to move out [on] very short notice after five years of living there and being great tenants,” he explained. Afterward, a neighbor informed him that a dozen people of Asian descent had been crammed into the two-bedroom home. They were “getting picked up and dropped off in vans.”
“My kids were super upset because that was the house they grew up in since they were little,” the man said. “It was just all a huge nightmare.”
In recent years,?a debate has raged about “replacement migration,” which some left-wing critics have dubbed a racist conspiracy theory. But in Charleroi, “replacement” is a plain reality. While the demographic statistics have shifted dramatically in recent years, replacement happens in more prosaic ways, too: a resident moves away. Another arrives. The keys to a rental apartment change hands.
In one sense, this is unremarkable. Since the beginning, America has been the land of migration, replacement, and change. The original Belgian settlers of Charleroi were replaced by the later-arriving?Slavic populations, who are now, in turn, being replaced by men and women from Port-au-Prince. The economy changed along the same lines. The steel plants shut down years ago. The glass factory, the last remaining symbol of the Belgian glass-makers, might suspend operations soon. The largest employer now produces frozen meals.?
In another sense, however, legitimate criticisms can be made of what is happening in Charleroi. First, the benefits of mass migration seem to accrue to the organized interests, while citizens and taxpayers absorb the costs. No doubt, the situation is advantageous to David Barbe of Fourth Street Foods, who can pay $16 an hour to the agencies that employ his contract labor force, then recapture some of those wages in rent—just like the company towns from a century ago.?
But for the old residents of Charleroi, who cherish their distinct heritage and fear that their quality of life is being compromised, it’s mostly downside. The evictions, the undercut wages, the car crashes, the cramped quarters, the unfamiliar culture: these are not trivialities, nor are they racist conspiracy theories. They are the signs of a disconcerting reality: Charleroi is a dying town that could not revitalize itself on its own, which made it the perfect target for “revitalization” by elite powers—the federal government, the NGOs, and their local satraps.
The key question in Charleroi is the fundamental question of politics: Who decides? The citizens of the United States, and of Charleroi, have been assured since birth that they are the ultimate sovereign. The government, they were told, must earn the consent of the governed. But the people of Charleroi were never asked if they wanted to submit their borough to an experiment in mass migration. Others chose for them—and slandered them when they objected.
The decisive factor, which many on the institutional Left would rather conceal, is one of power. Martha’s Vineyard, when faced with a single planeload of migrants, can evict them in a flash. But Charleroi—the broken man of the Rust Belt—cannot. This is the reality of replacement: the strong do what they can, and the weak do what they must.
Christopher F. Rufo?is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of?City Journal, and the author of?America’s Cultural Revolution.?Christina Buttons?is an investigative reporter at the Manhattan Institute.
A Message from Felicia Salazar, Chair of The Town of Miami Lakes Cultural Affairs Committee and Liaison for the Office of State of Florida Representative Tom Fabricio:
Celebration of Life for Art TeacherGinette Lillo
Please share with those who may have known her.
She was the Adult? Painting Class instructor for many years at the Mary Collins Community Center and was a recipient of CAC "Woman of Distinction Awards" in the Arts Category in 2018. If interested in reaching out to her family, please contact her friend Sally Smith at (305)401-6465