Pompeo’s lightning visit to Israel shows that Republicans have a lot to gain by making Israel a political football, possibly gaining Jewish votes in Florida.
Analysis of several recent incidents shows how factually questionable, or even provably false, reports are of a fictional campus antisemitism crisis.
The Trump peace plan was brought to you by the Jewish community. Over the last 20 years, vigorous opposition to the pro-Israel right inside the US Jewish community has been quashed, and liberal Zionists have enforced that line by refusing to organize as equals with the community Israel is oppressing: Palestinians.
Forward opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon’s claims of anti-Semitism at Bard college have been widely refuted. Yet she has doubled down on them – saying the response only confirms the truth of her allegation. This is dishonest, and also strategic, aimed at limiting criticism of Israel inside leftwing circles.
Batya Ungar-Sargon asked students not to protest Ruth Wisse at Bard because she’s a Holocaust survivor, giving her a pass for anti-Arab racism. The panel she did want the students to protest featured Ungar-Sargon and a black Jew, Shahanna McKinney-Baldon, who now seeks an apology for Ungar-Sargon’s error-laden account of the event.
Batya Ungar-Sargon, the opinion editor of the Forward, issues extraordinary claims: 97 percent of Jews are Zionists, anti-Zionists in the Jewish community are as anomalous as Trump supporters who are black; she is the “number one publisher of Palestinian voices in America”; and intellectuals who cheered demonstrators at a pro-Israel panel bear responsibility for the spike in anti-semitism and even synagogue murders.
Lately we’ve seen several institutional efforts to show that American Jews are all for Israel, except the lunatics. That’s because the appearance of wall-to-wall US Jewish support is a necessity for Israel lobby groups in convincing politicians to back Israel unconditionally. IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace are a threat to the Stalinist consensus.
Zionism is Judaism, and anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic, New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss argues in her new book on anti-Semitism. “Whereas Jews once had to convert to Christianity, now they have to convert to anti-Zionism.”
Trump’s claim that Jews who vote Democratic are “disloyal” is ugly and dangerous, but he is only echoing Zionist indoctrination: that American Jews must give unconditional support to Israel. New York Times columnist Bari Weiss praises the idea that “Jews should be loyal to Israel,” while Trump aide Elliott Abrams says Jews, except in Israel, “must stand apart from the nation in which they live.”
Batya Ungar-Sargon of the Forward is attacking our website on twitter, implying we’re anti-Semitic. But Batya once asked Phil Weiss to write for the Forward. He revisits the meeting she sought with him in 2017.