St. Louis County Conservative B’nai Ammona Congregation’s Chief Rabbi Jeffrey Abraham has been given enormous amounts of space in St. Louis media outlets to represent the Jewish community and give his views on the Middle East, local policies and whether or not other people are antisemites. Abraham is also a demonstrated bigot who uses language to refer to Palestinians similar to that used by genocidal regimes to dehumanize their victims.
Recently Abraham shared with his congregation, the St. Louis community, and the world his terrifying prejudice – claiming that there are “no ‘innocent civilians’ in Gaza”, “all the people in Gaza are Hamas”, and all Palestinians “need to be re-educated”. He also “completely agrees” with a statement that all the people of Gaza are “Animals. Period. Full stop.”
This is more important than the words of just one rabbi – it can be seen to represent a broader trend in the American Jewish community where rabbis and other leaders are given free reign by the community to call others antisemitic, but they are never held accountable for even the most vile anti-Palestinian racism.
You can see Rabbi Abraham’s exact words here:
These statements are hurtful and painful to Palestinians in St. Louis. They are damaging to the entire St. Louis community. I have a friend here in St. Louis from Gaza whose brother, grandmother, niece, nephew and many other family members were killed and injured by Israeli bombs and bullets (after having fled different locations multiple times) for the simple reason of being Palestinian and living in Gaza. My friend is as much part of the St. Louis community as Rabbi Abraham. She and her family are not animals. They do not need to be re-educated. They are innocent civilians.
It is this kind of dehumanizing rhetoric that the Nazis used to justify the mass murder of the Jews of Europe in the 1940s and Hutu militias used to justify the mass murder of Tutsis in Rwanda in the 1990s. And now here the language is being used in St. Louis to justify the mass murder of Palestinians.
The Rabbi’s statements are a big problem for the St. Louis Jewish Community. Despite being made aware of these statements by many people, B’nai Amoona has not disciplined its Chief Rabbi in any way. The Saint Louis Jewish Community Relations Council has said and done nothing. The Saint Louis Jewish Federation has done and said nothing. No St. Louis rabbi has made a single statement. Despite allowing Abraham to speak for them over and over for many months, the entirety of the establishment Jewish community leadership has been silent about his genocidal statements. None of them have even asked for an apology (which Abraham has not given, at least not publicly, as far as I can determine). One can only conclude that those who consider themselves the leaders of the establishment Jewish community support Abraham’s genocidal ideas, or at least consider them part of the acceptable range of official Jewish views (unlike the views of Jewish Voice for Peace, or Progressive Jews of St. Louis, or anyone else who believes in Palestinians deserve full human rights).
The rabbi’s statements are also a problem for St. Louis media outlets. Rabbi Jeffery Abraham has been a ubiquitous presence in St. Louis media in the last year and a half, talking about his heartfelt connection to Israel, perceived antisemitism, and his belief that those working for justice for Palestinians do so out of bigoted animosity towards Jews. News outlets have given an enormous amount of airtime on television and radio, and words in print outlets. All three local television news programs, the local NPR affiliate, St. Louis Magazine and the only daily paper, the Post-Dispatch, have all published his views – at least nineteen times in the last year and a half. He has never been shy in criticizing others, often calling people antisemitic or self-hating Jews. He has been cited as an arbiter of other people’s bigotry and he has been given an opportunity to accuse many people of anti-Jewish bigotry (including former Congresswoman Cori Bush and St. Louis President of the Board of Aldermen Megan Green). Most of these accusations are dubious at best and were made because the individual who Abraham accused opposes the crimes of the State of Israel. As he is someone who has been given so much space to call other people anti-Jewish bigots, St. Louisans should know of his open anti-Palestinian bigotry, yet none of the news outlets that have given him a voice have reported on that bigotry. (Update: Since the time of publishing, one article was published in the Post-Dispatch about the issue.)
When Abraham was on television correctly opposing white supremacists in suburban St. Louis, he told a news station “We’re going to stand against all forms of hate, whether that’s antisemitism, whether it’s racism, whether it’s LGBTQ, whatever it might be.” This is the tolerant inclusive image that those who claim to represent the American Jewish community want to project to the world. But, as Rabbi Abraham’s anti-Palestinian hatred shows us, these words ring hollow. You can’t dehumanize an entire people and support their genocide and then claim that you stand against racism and hatred. Both cannot be true at the same time.
The rabbi is the one filled with hate, and the Israelis are the actual terrorists.
“Prominent St. Louis rabbi Jeffrey Abraham recently wrote there are “no ‘innocent civilians’ in Gaza,” and endorsed the belief that Palestinians are “animals.” “
Back in the good old days you could just come right out and say that Black people were subhuman or Jews had hook noses and were greedy and shifty. But it’s the 21st century and you have to be a little more subtle these days! The proper, modern way to dehumanize a whole group is to say that they lack ‘peoplehood’. When a Jew is born he or she automatically comes equipped with all the accessories of history and culture, but Palestinians lack these fundamentally human attributes.
Israeli minister says ‘no such thing’ as Palestinian people…An Israeli minister with responsibility for administrating the occupied West Bank drew condemnation on Monday after he said there was no Palestinian history or culture and no such thing as a Palestinian people….”Is there a Palestinian history or culture? There is none,” he can be heard saying in footage of the speech he gave on Sunday at a conference in France shared widely on social media. “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people.”
( delete Reuters cookies for full access )
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-minister-says-no-such-thing-palestinian-people-2023-03-20/
Also, if you really want to dehumanze a group, you have to pretend that history doesn’t exist and we’re never seen anything like this before! During the Algerian war of independence there were plenty of atrocities committed by both sides and the French were putting out propaganda that looks like it was written by our colleagues at Hasbara U.
“Corruption of the FLN was a central theme in much of French Army propaganda. In Figure 1, a propaganda poster by the French Army, two FLN soldiers are depicted stealing money from an Algerian man and sending it to a table where a French man, French woman, and Algerian man sit toasting with glasses of champagne. The poster reads in both French and Arabic: “The fellagha assassin steals your savings. Abroad, the rebellion leaders have fun with your money.” Fellagha is an Arabic word meaning “bandit;” it was used to describe Arab guerillas of the FLN and to symbolize the enemy in French army propaganda”
https://works.swarthmore.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1091&context=suhj
Sound familiar?
B’nai Ammona Congregation’s Chief Rabbi Jeffrey Abraham–>> stoking his incubator of hate while hiding behind the tax code; he needs to be arrested for inciting violence and hate in his community and placed on the HATE map @- SPLC.
“…It’s not too late for life, for the living…” Yuval Abraham, No Other Land
I have turned ANTI ZIONIST and loathe israel for everything it has come to represent.
The author of this article never stops to ask himself what role the events of October 7, 2023, played in forming the rabbi’s perceptions. Elderly people and small children were in fact killed in cold blood. Many members of his congregation probably have family members living in Israel. The rabbi said that all Hamas members were animals, not all Gazans, a serious and dishonest distortion on the author’s part. At any rate, many Gazans did collaborate in the kidnappings, holding hostages in their homes, threatening, beating, humiliating and malnourishing them. This was cold-blooded, up close and personal cruelty. The author and the commenters to date mention none of this.
In addition, the author is guilty of what he accuses the entire Jewish population of St. Louis of: Indicting and entire population. By implication, this article gives moral license to those who want to stab Jews in the street, who want to detonate fuel trucks in front of synagogues, who want to taunt and beat up Jews who have the effrontery to wear yarmulkes or mezuzahs in public or display the latter on their doors. If any of those things happen in St. Louis, the blood of the victims will be on the hands of Michael Berg and of the editors of Mondoweiss who published this ugly article.