David Schlesinger @dsles44

Joseph Massad, who is an apologist for October 7th (calling it “astounding” and “incredible”), is going to teach a course on Zionism at Columbia University. What’s next at Columbia? David Duke teaching a course on antiracism. Why should US taxpayers subsidize ideological indoctrination that glorifies the mass murder, maiming, mutilation, rape, and abduction of Jews and Israelis?

Hundreds of Jewish students at @Columbia just published one of the most incredible student letters I have ever read. It's not only magnificently written, but it also clearly articulates their experiences on campus for the past six months. Their letter tells the story of what's it like being a Jewish student right now better than any professor like myself could ever do. Please take 4-5 minutes to read their letter. Give Jewish students a voice. docs.google.com/document/u/1/d…

This is a superb important piece about the distortion and denial of Jewish and Israeli history by Yossi Klein Halevi, author of the great Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor. After all history is everything in this conflict but it has to be the real history, not an invented one. The war against the Jewish story  "How has it come to this?" writes Yossi Klein Halevi. "How is it possible that Israel, rather than radical Islamism, would become the villain on liberal campuses? That thousands of students would be chanting “from the river to the sea” even as the Hamas massacre revealed that slogan’s genocidal implications? That the most passionate outbreak of student activism since the 1960s would be devoted to delegitimizing the Jewish people’s story of triumph over annihilation? This moment didn’t happen in a vacuum. The anti-Zionist forces in academia have been preparing the ground for decades, systematically dismantling the moral basis of each stage of Zionist and Israeli history. The attack began on the very origins of Zionism, which was transformed from a story of a dispossessed people re-indigenizing in its ancient homeland into one more sordid expression of European colonialism. (Europe’s post-Holocaust gift to the Jews: leaving us with the bill for its sins.) Next, the birth of Israel in 1948 was reduced to the Nakba, or catastrophe, a Palestinian narrative of total innocence that ignores the ethnic cleansing of Jews from every place where Arab armies were victorious and the subsequent uprooting of the entire Jewish population of the Muslim world. Post-1967 Israel was cast as an apartheid state – turning Zionism, a multi-faceted movement representing Jews across the political and religious spectrum into a racist ideology and reducing an agonizingly complex national conflict into a medieval passion play about Jewish perfidy. And now, with the Gaza War, we have come to the genocide canard, the endpoint in the process of delegitimization. To turn Israel into the world’s arch-criminal requires three forms of erasure. The first is of the connection between the land of Israel and the people of Israel. In the anti-Zionist telling of the conflict, a 4,000-year connection that has been the heart of Jewish identity and faith is irrelevant, if not contrived outright by Zionists. The second is the erasure of the relentless war against Israel, placing its actions under a microscope while downplaying or entirely ignoring the aggression of its enemies. There is never any context to Israel’s actions. Only by erasing Hamas’s atrocities can Israel be turned into the villain of this war. In focusing on Israel’s actions and dismissing those of Hamas, campus protesters are providing cover for October 7 denialism. This is a new version of the Holocaust denialism prevalent in parts of the Muslim world: The atrocities didn’t happen, you deserved them and we’re going to do it again (and again). On a recent trip to New York, walking along Broadway on the Upper West Side, I saw dozens of defaced posters of kidnapped Israelis. Rather than tear down the posters, the vandals had blacked out the Israeli faces – a literal defacement. And a useful metaphor for the anti-Zionist assault on our being. The third form of erasure is dismissing the history of peace offers presented or accepted by Israel and uniformly rejected by the Palestinian side. No offer – an independent Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza, the re-division of Jerusalem, the uprooting of dozens of settlements – was ever sufficient. It is hard to think of another national movement representing a stateless people that rejected more offers of self-determination than the Palestinian leadership. The ease with which anti-Zionists have managed to portray the Jewish state as genocidal, a successor to Nazi Germany, marks a historic failure of Holocaust education in the West. This moment requires a fundamental rethinking of the goals and methodology of Holocaust education. By over-emphasizing the necessary universal lessons of the Holocaust, many educators too easily equated antisemitism with generic racism. The intention was noble: to render the Holocaust relevant to a new generation. But in the process, the essential lesson of the Holocaust – the uniqueness not only of the event itself but of the hatred that made it possible – was often lost. Antisemitism is not merely the hatred of Jews as other but the symbolization of The Jew – that is, turning the Jews into the symbol for whatever a given civilization defines as its most loathsome qualities. For Christianity until the Holocaust, The Jew was Christ-killer; for Marxism, the ultimate capitalist; for Nazism, the defiler of race. And now, in the era of anti-racism, the Jewish state is the embodiment of racism. Holocaust education was intended, in large part, to protect the Jewish people from a recurrence of the antisemitism that reduces Jews to symbols. Yet the movement to turn Israel into the world’s criminal nation emerges from a generation that was raised with Holocaust consciousness, both in formal education and the arts. And this latest expression of the antisemitism of symbols is justified by some anti-Zionists as honoring “the lessons of the Holocaust.” Unlike the Iranian regime, which clumsily tries to deny the historicity of the Holocaust, anti-Zionists in the West intuitively understand that coopting and inverting the Holocaust is a far more effective way of neutralizing its impact. Many, perhaps most, of the campus protesters are likely not antisemitic. They may have Jewish friends or be Jewish themselves. But that is irrelevant: They are enabling an antisemitic moment. What is under assault is the integrity of the mid-20th century Jewish story, of a people rejecting the self-pity of victimhood and fulfilling its most improbable dream: renewing itself, in its broken old age, in the land of its youth. The shift from the lowest point Jews have known to the reclamation of power and self-confidence is one of the most astonishing feats of survival not only in Jewish but world history. It is that story that is being distorted and trivialized and demonized on liberal campuses. I recently completed a lecture tour of some of the most Jewishly problematic campuses, from Columbia to Berkeley. In meetings with Jewish students, I was repeatedly told about a pervasive atmosphere of hostility toward Israel, even among many otherwise apolitical students. While the protests are an immediate threat to Jewish well-being on campus, the far deeper problem is the impact of the anti-Zionist campaign, linking the name “Israel” with racism and genocide. The vulgar protesters are a small minority, but they are shaping the attitudes of a whole generation. By focusing only on the immediate threat of the protests, we risk repeating the mistake we’ve made over the last decades of failing to adequately confront the systematic assault on our story. We are losing a generation, but we haven’t yet lost. Like other radical movements, anti-Zionism could go too far in its righteous rage, potentially alienating the majority. Perhaps that process has already begun. The challenge of our generation is to defend the story we inherited from the survivor generation. We need to tell that story with moral credibility, in all its complexity, frankly owning our flaws even as we celebrate our successes, acknowledging the Palestinian narrative even as we insist on the integrity of our own. We desperately need new strategies to counter the anti-Zionist assault. A good beginning would be the creation of a brain trust, composed of community activists, rabbis, journalists, historians, public relations experts, that would devise both immediate responses to the current crisis and a long-term strategy, emulating the decades-long patient work of the anti-Zionists. The Jews are a story we tell ourselves about who we think we are; without our story, there is no Judaism. It is long past time to mount a credible defense of our mid-20th century story, which continues to sustain us as a people." blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-war-agains…

‼️BREAKING Jewish students at @Columbia file a class action lawsuit against the university for failing to provide a safe learning environment. This will likely be the first of many to come. #AntizionismIsAntisemitism

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🔷"I don't think at all that what's happening in Gaza is Genocide, I think it's an unbelievable smear against Israel" 🔷"Gaza also has a border with Egypt. Why do you not mention Egypt?" 🔷"I'm not misinforming your viewers. I'm informing them because you are not". @DouglasKMurray rips South African anchor @janedutton to shreds on her show Eyewitness News, after she makes several false and libelous claims about Israel. It's worth watching every minute of this video⤵️ Full interview: youtube.com/watch?v=Flggg8…

This young man’s name is David Teeger. He was just dismissed from his position as captain of the South African under-19 cricket team because he is Jewish. South Africa isn’t looking for justice, it’s looking for Jews.

THIS is the shocking reality of what it is like to be a Jewish student at @MIT. WATCH

@Penn

Canary Mission @canarymission

3 years ago

NEW Canary Mission profile. Tara Tarawneh, a student at @Penn & writer for Penn's student newspaper, glorified the massacre of Jews at a pro-Hamas rally: “I remember feeling so empowered and happy...I want all of you to hold that feeling in your hearts." canarymission.org/individual/Tar…

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Shame on @Harvard

Visegrád 24 @visegrad24

3 years ago

Harvard students protesting against Israel surround a Jewish student and stop him from being able to leave. 🇺🇸🇮🇱

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"Why only in America?" US Senator Ted Cruz walks away from @Stone_SkyNews after being asked if "this is the moment to reform gun laws" trib.al/nmOJAT8 #TedCruz #America #Texasshooting #gunlaws

“Why are you here?!" A furious Sen. Chris Murphy demands answers from senators following Texas school shooting. “Why do you spend all this time running for the United States Senate...if your answer, is as the slaughter increases, as our kids run for their lives—we do nothing?”

Steve Kerr on today's tragic shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

.@mtgreenee, is this you harassing @davidhogg111 weeks after the Parkland shooting, that my daughter was killed in & he was in? Calling him a coward for ignoring your insanity. I will answer all of your questions in person. Get ready to record again.

Allegheny County Executive gave us this answer when we asked for his reaction to Senator Cruz’s statement about the Paris Climate Accord not helping our area. @KDKA

Here’s my statement on today’s violence at the Capitol.

#TrumpResignNow is trending. It won’t happen; he has no conscience, no shame. #25thAmendment won’t happen; his Cabinet of toadies lacks the spine. If we want @realDonaldTrump gone, we must do it ourselves. Starting NOW. Organize, mobilize, contribute, and #VoteForYourLife.

This is just another example that @realDonaldTrump is the worst manager America has ever seen. Don, you got conned … by your IT guy.

Why can I defeat Matt Gaetz in November? I have 26 years of active duty Naval experience and I know the benefits of leadership in the midst of chaos. Matt's never served anyone but himself and Trump. #ForwardWithHonor

Commissioner @OmariJHardy wasn't trying to hear the nonsense from Mayor Pam Triolo & City Manager Bornstein after they shut off the lights of residents last week. I appreciate his passion & am glad he chose to let the Mayor know her actions were unacceptable. #CoronaCrisis