An anti-Zionist teacher was fired from the Westchester Reform Temple in Scarsdale, NewYork, and is now suing the institution. Religious organizations should support the Reform Temple in this lawsuit.
Jessie Sander wrote an article in May 2021 in which she “call[ed] for American Jewish institutions to revisit their educational philosophy and curriculum about Palestine and its history,” and that American Jews must stop their “racist practices and beliefs” and support of Israel (which she spelled each time with a lower case “i”) in its “settler-colonial violence” and “genocide in Palestine.” She added that “israel actively trains the actors of our military state to enact violence against our Black and Brown siblings,” portraying Israel as committing racist violence both in Israel and the United States.
A few weeks later she was hired as a Hebrew teacher at the Westchester Reform Temple before the school was aware of her writings. Once the administration found out about it, she was questioned and then dismissed. She is now suing the school for reinstatement plus compensatory damages.
February 6, 2022 New York Times article on a Jewish school firing an anti-Israel teacher
The New York Times covered the story in its typical anti-Israel jaundiced fashion. It noted that Sander is like many younger American Jews, who are not emotionally attached to Israel, as it cited a poll which found that 25 percent of Jews believed Israel to be an “apartheid state” and 22 percent said it was “committing genocide against the Palestinians.”
Those aren’t “beliefs” any more than Holocaust denial is a belief. They are simply wrong. When 25 percent of a class gets a question wrong on an exam, we don’t reorient the narrative to accommodate the incorrect.
Schools must be able to evaluate the teachers they hire and whether they pose a threat to the students and mission of the institution. This teacher was not simply stating that she was concerned about Palestinian self-determination but sought to change the “educational philosophy and curriculum” with her false impressions about the state of Palestinian “genocide.” Together with her deliberate refusal to capitalize the state of Israel, the institution was rightly concerned about what she was going to teach in her classes.
While liberal anti-Zionists like Peter Beinart may run to defend this teacher, it is important for other religious denominations – especially the Orthodox – to rally to the side of the Reform Temple.
Jewish institutions have long hired a variety of people from different backgrounds. Yeshiva University, the flagship Jewish university in the United States, hires many non-Jewish faculty. Jewish Day Schools hire people with a range of political views from conservative to progressive.
But they do not hire someone who seeks to instill a false narrative into the cirriculum.
Yeshiva University, the Orthodox Union, the Rabbinical Council of America and other Orthodox organizations do not always have an opportunity to bond with the Reform movement. These mission-driven groups – as well as non-Jewish ones – should rally to support the Westchester Reform Temple in the suit by an anti-Israel extremist, in an important defense of their religious rights.
Holocaust denial is so commonplace, that we don’t contemplate its uniqueness. There is no other broad-based denial of a particular event in history other than the genocide of European Jewry, even while Survivors are still alive.
Why is that?
Certainly there is bigotry and racism. But many people harbor biases against a group and still do not deny their history.
A person may dislike Black people but won’t deny that there was Black slavery. A person might be a misogynist, but will readily admit that women once did not have the right to vote.
Yet the deliberate effort to deny Jewish history happens so frequently, that even the United Nations General Assembly – no friend to the Jewish people – passed a resolution to combat this evil.
Why do people deny and falsify Jewish history?
A Religious Perspective: Change in Gospel and Fake History
Christianity views itself as an extension of Judaism. The Christian Messiah was a himself a Jew in Jerusalem, who took the religion in a new direction. The Christian bible is called the ‘New Testament,’ built upon the ‘Old Testament’ of the Jews.
For centuries, Christianity viewed Jews as those who rejected their Messiah. Until the Second Vatican Council in 1965, Catholic doctrine felt that Jews should be punished for killing Jesus and continuing to reject him.
Muslims’ approach to Judaism is quite different. Islamic tradition views the Hebrew Bible as a complete fabrication. They believe that Abraham’s covenant ran through his son Ishmael, the patriarch of the Arabs, not Isaac.
It is therefore not surprising that Muslims are twice as likely to harbor anti-Semitic attitudes as Christians according to an ADL poll. That the Islamic Republic of Iran mocks the Holocaust as a fabrication can perhaps be seen through the lens that it views itself as the vanguard of Islam, which rejects the entire story of the Jewish people from its foundation.
Christians falls into two camps: those who accept the Second Vatican Council and are not likely to deny the Holocaust, and the “ultra-traditionalists” – like some of the people from the Society of St. Pius X – who actively deny the Holocaust. This second group are angered that the Church altered its own foundational texts and the history of Jews and Jesus, so they actively deny the genocide of the Jews.
For Muslims and ultra-traditionalist Christians, Jewish history is either built on a fiction, or has become fictionalized, so think nothing of denying Jews of their history.
A Secular Perspective: Schemers and Scapegoats
The falsification of Jewish history occurs outside of religious denominations as well.
“The Protocols of The Elders of Zion,” was a notorious anti-Semitic forgery written in the Russian Empire in 1903. It attempted to portray Jews as schemers who were plotting to create havoc to control the world through the banks, media and provoking wars. It spread throughout the world by radical anti-Semites including Henry Ford and the Palestinian terrorist group, Hamas.
While some people might hate Hindus, no one took time to create a false document about Hindu community leaders to make them look evil.
So why the Jews?
Jews were often viewed with suspicion because of their position.
The Jewish diaspora spread a small people to the corners of the earth. While some assimilated and converted (forcibly and otherwise), many held on to their traditions. They did so in clustered communities – both voluntary and forced – to facilitate the production of kosher foods and participate in communal prayer.
That insularity bred suspicion. A small group that insisted on holding onto an unpopular belief system either lived on one extreme of abject poverty or became leaders in various professional fields. They were resented for both because they were considered as foreigners.
Anti-Semites were ready to embrace the Protocols forgery. They jumped at the opportunity to believe blood libels that Jews stole babies for baking matzah or were behind the Black Death. Jews were considered aliens in their midst, and easy scapegoats for the root of problems. Falsifying history helped foster that foreigner narrative, and an evil one at that.
The foreigner label attached to Jews everywhere, including in Ethiopia where Black Jews were called “falashas,” which means “foreigners” in Amharic.
In small, cloistered communities stretched around the world, Jews were vulnerable. Their non-Jewish neighbors were able to cast their opinions onto this minority, and craft stories to enlist others to embrace their hatred. Jews were left protesting the absurd charges to an audience that was both instigator, prosecutor and judge at once.
The secular falsification of Jewish history is anchored in xenophobia, and a desire to expel the foreign bodies, whether they be the “unclean,” poor Jew, or the “powerful,” puppet-masters “behind the curtain,” exploiting the noble masses for profit.
1,000 years of Jewish expulsions
The unique nature of denying and falsifying Jewish history is embedded in Muslim and ultra-traditionalist Christian religious bias as well as anti-Semitic xenophobia. Holocaust education will not cure those ills.
Whoopi Goldberg, a liberal Black popular personality on television described the Holocaust of European Jewry as matter of “White people doing it to White People,” and therefore not a matter of racism. From her vantage point, the Jews were not an “other,” a people apart, but merely a group of White people that other White people didn’t care for. For Whoopi – and many Black people and liberals – Jews are White, and possess power and therefore cannot claim racism.
To set the matter straight, the Nazis did view the Jews as an inferior race. Here is just one section of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, in his introduction to the Jew:
“One day when I was walking through the inner city, I suddenly came upon a being clad in a long caftan, with black curls. Is this also a Jew? was my first thought. At Linz they certainly did not look like that. Secretly and cautiously I watched the man, but the longer I stared at this strange face and scrutinized one feature after the other, the more my mind reshaped the first question into another form : Is this also a German?
“As was my custom in such cases, I tried to remove my doubts by reading. For the first time in my life I bought some anti-Semitic pamphlets for a few pennies. They all started with the supposition that the reader already knew the Jewish question in principle or understood it to a certain degree. Finally, the tone was such that I again had doubts because the assertions were supported by such extremely unscientific arguments. I then suffered relapses for weeks, and once even for months. The matter seemed so monstrous, the accusations so unbounded that the fear of committing an injustice tortured me and made me anxious and uncertain again. However, even I could no longer actually doubt that they were not Germans with a special religion, but an entirely different race; since I had begun to think about this question, since my attention was drawn to the Jews, I began to see Vienna in a different light from before. Wherever I went I saw Jews, and the more I saw of them, the sharper I began to distinguish them from other people. The inner city especially and the districts north of the Danube Canal swarmed with a people which through its appearance alone had no resemblance to the German people.“
The entirety of Hitler’s work is a screed against the Jews as an entirely alien being, vile in every form. His propaganda machine borrowed from the prior works of anti-Semites, and expounded upon them, riling up a continent to exterminate these foreign beings from their midst.
The matter of whether Jews are a different race is not the point. To debate that matter is to give air to noxious evil. The Whoopi comments which were broadcast to millions, must be considered for other insights:
Holocaust ignorance and denial on various platforms
Non-Anti-Semitic Black Perception of Jews
Holocaust Ignorance and Denial on Various Platforms
A few days ago was Holocaust Remembrance Day, and the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution against Holocaust denial. The resolution pointed out “the global and open nature of the Internet and the significant role of social media in spreading information,” but failed to discuss how the distortions about the Holocaust occur regularly in the mainstream media, both in the news and on popular shows like Whoopi Goldberg’s “The View.”
Various forms of anti-Semitism and Holocaust distortions are also becoming mainstreamed in American politics from the likes of Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). It is important to call it out everywhere and not pretend it is only promoted on social media.
Non-Anti-Semitic Black Perception of Jews
There are certainly a large number of Black anti-Semites like Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, who attracts loyalists like Keith Ellison and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA). Whoopi should not be dumped into this anti-Semitic camp.
Whoopi, as well as many Blacks and liberals, perceive of Jews as White, powerful “one-percenters.” They see American Jews and Israeli Jews as oppressors of Black and Brown people for profit, as stated by Tlaib to her loyalists in the Democratic Socialists of America. Marc Lamont Hill claims that only the powerful can be racists, both making it impossible for Black people to be racists, and that Jews cannot be the victims of racism since they’re White and powerful. This twisted logic has permeated the mindset of those who are not openly anti-Semitic and anti-Israel.
The reality is that an average Jew in the United States is over 40 times more likely to be attacked than an average White person. Proportionately, Jews suffer more hate crimes than Blacks as well. These are plain facts.
Jews are marked as “the other” by White Supremacists as well as Blacks. It binds KKK leader David Duke with Ilhan Omar in their open hatred, but also blinds others like Whoopi Goldberg.
Black people insist on holding the mantle of Victims of Preference, and cannot let such security blanket drop for a moment, even when discussing the Holocaust on broadcast television.
Whoopi apologized for her Holocaust remarks that offended people but missed the opportunity to teach people about the common evil of racism and anti-Semitism: don’t turn your neighbors into “others” to demonize and despise. Jews suffer from “othering” around the world, and this Black liberal should educate her listeners to stop doing it to Jews themselves.
To mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, The New York Times posted an editorial by Jan Grabowski about “The New Wave of Holocaust Revisionism.” The essay described how Poland was setting up monuments for Polish non-Jews who helped Jews during the Holocaust – directly in the location where hundreds of thousands of Jews were slaughtered, often with the help of other Poles.
Grabowski warns that this distortion of history is a new form of Holocaust denial – one that tries to whitewash Polish collaboration with the Nazis. It is taking flight since Poland passed a law in 2018 to penalize those people who attribute some of the blame of the Jewish Holocaust on Poland. The historian faces a number of lawsuits from the country for his detailed published research, including his book “Hunt for Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland” which won the Yad Vashem International Book Award in 2014.
Polish-Canadian historian Jan Grabowski predicts a bleak future for holocaust research.
It was appropriate for the Times to publish the lengthy essay shortly after the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution condemning Holocaust denial. Alas, the paper did not do the same when Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) distorted the role that Palestinian Arabs played in the murder of European Jewry.
In May 2019, Tlaib said that she got a “calming feeling” thinking about ancestors who helped “create a safe haven for Jews.” Jews and many Republicans denounced the Holocaust revisionism as pure anti-Semitism, while fellow Democrats and liberal outlets rushed to her defense. The plain facts are that Palestinian Arabs pushed the British to limit Jewish immigration to Palestine during Kristallnacht, and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem met with leading Nazi officials to support the annihilation of the Jews. When Jews arrived in Palestine after the war, Arab armies came to slaughter the Survivors.
Telegram from Nazi Heinrich Himmler to Palestinian Grand Mufti of Jerusalem about their “joint fight” against the Jews.
The Times similarly avoids writing that the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, wrote his doctoral thesis distorting the Holocaust.
It is wrong of Poland to reorient history from the complicity of Poles in the Holocaust and to come after those who discuss the actual history, much as it is shameful for Tlaib to twist history that Palestinians were saviors of European Jews and the Democratic party loyalists to rally to her defense and demand silence on Muslim anti-Semitism.
Holocaust revisionism is finding a home in the alt-right, the alt-left and among radical Islamists. If the mainstream media selectively highlights the poison only among the racist right, it is complicit in the same Holocaust denial.
Intersectionality considers that various forms of discrimination are both unique in themselves and can manifest in ways that are more particular due to overlapping prejudices. For example, a Black woman might experience a particular form of racism in being Black, a different form of prejudice in being a woman, and yet a distinct form of bias in being both. It is a broad movement designed to make people consider various forms of biases as well as to create bonds of support between various groups suffering discrimination.
It is therefore perplexing on its face, that antisemitism, the oldest and most pernicious form of hatred, is treated with such scorn among the proponents of intersectionality.
Consider the anti-Zionist fervor of the intersectionality preachers. The Democratic Socialists of America call Israel an “apartheid” state and its New York chapter demands that politicians refuse to visit the Jewish State.
Black Lives Matter condemns Israel’s “apartheid practices and settler colonial project” and both ignores Jewish history and human rights as it inverts attacker and victim in propaganda seemingly lifted from the terrorist group Hamas.
Even the founders of the Women’s March had strong ties to the infamous anti-Semite, Louis Farrakhan.
This alt-left noxious anti-Jewish and anti-Jewish State orientation has even permeated the mindset of progressive Jews.
At the University of Colorado Boulder, a South Asian Jew named Samira K. Mehta is launching a new program called “Jews of Color: Histories and Futures.” It seemingly binds together the most oppressed groups of all- Jews who are Black, Brown or Hispanic. According to the Brandeis Center, roughly 11% of American Jews are non-White, and a much higher 18% among Gen Z. It is therefore a very worthwhile effort.
Samira Mehta, CU Boulder Assistant Professor of Women & Gender Studies and Jewish Studies
However, in launching the initiative, Mehta said about White Jews “When you’ve been hurt by white supremacy, how do you grapple with the fact that you’ve also benefited from it? I want to get at that by talking about how Jews of Color experience predominantly white Jewish spaces.” Re-read the statement from a Jew of Color about White Jews – they benefit from ‘White Supremacy.’
In what twisted world can anyone postulate that Jews benefit from White Supremacy? They are the victims of White Supremacy twice over – by being viciously attacked by those hate-mongers and by being lumped together with them by idiots because they are White.
Do 1.8 billion Muslims benefit from the actions of Islamic extremists? No! They become lumped into a horrible stereotype that all Muslims are terrorists. No progressive would ever suggest such a theory, let alone in an interview about the launch of a new course on ‘Islamophobia.’
When you’ve [White Jews] been hurt by white supremacy, how do you grapple with the fact that you’ve also benefited from it?
Samira Mehta
Would a Black lesbian turn towards people in the intersectional community – say a Black heterosexual woman – and taunt her that she’s straight and benefits from people that attack the LGBT community? Who could even drum up such a scenario? Seemingly, a Jew of Color.
Anti-Semitism has become so systemic in parts of the progressive community, that even Jews are now repulsed by White Jews.
On January 20, 1942, Germans met in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to develop the “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem.” The persecution of Jews was already well underway, and on that day, the Nazi regime put into place a program to push the Jews to extinction. They succeeded in wiping out nearly all of the Jews in Europe, about one-third of global Jewry.
Since the end of World War II, the Arab and Muslim world picked up the fight to “the Jewish Problem.”
The Arabs in Palestine were successful in lobbying the British in impeding Jewish immigrants desperate to leave the Holocaust in Europe with the “White Papers”, likely causing well over 100,000 Jewish deaths. The remaining Holocaust survivors landing on the shores of Palestine after World War II were very vulnerable targets. The Palestinian Arabs enlisted the help of neighboring Muslim countries to complete the genocide of the Jews, killing nearly one per cent of the region’s Jews in the 1948-9 Arab-Israeli War. The Arabs then ethnically-cleansed all Jews from the lands they seized, and forbade Jews from visiting their holiest locations in the Old City of Jerusalem.
Angry at the survival of the Jewish nation, Muslim Arab countries purged their Jews. Roughly 99% of the region’s Jews were forced out, an estimated 850,000 Jews, a total which excludes the Jews who fled Afghanistan and Iran.
Algeria 140,000
Egypt 75,000
Iraq 135,000
Lebanon 5,000
Libya 38,000
Morocco 265,000
Syria 30,000
Tunisia 105,000
Yemen 55,000
Arab countries attempted to kill all of the Jews in Israel again in 1967, though they failed spectacularly. Stinging from the loss, the Arab League adopted the Khartoum Resolution which called for “no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel and no negotiations with Israel.” The Arabs soon launched another war against Israel – during Judaism’s holiest day, Yom Kippur – in 1973, while pushing the noxious idea that “Zionism is a form of racism” at the United Nations under the watch of former Nazi, Kurt Waldheim, who was serving as the UN Secretary General.
Meanwhile, Christianity rethought its complicity in the European Holocaust and declared in 1965 that Jews were no more responsible for the death of Jesus than anyone else, and declared clearly that Jews should not be persecuted. Less than 25 years later, the “Iron wall” in the Soviet Union crumbled and allowed thousands of Jewish “refuseniks” to leave the country to Israel and elsewhere.
But the bile in the Arab Muslim world did not let up during this time, even as Egypt made peace with Israel in 1979.
The Palestinians declared themselves to have an independent state in 1988 on all of the land of Israel including the “West Bank” and Gaza, a move which was rejected by much of the western world. At the same time, Hamas introduced its foundational charter calling for the death of Jews and complete destruction of the Jewish State. The group (and other Palestinian terrorist groups) became immensely popular and received funding from Iran and Syria.
Iran and its proxies like Hezbollah, together with Palestinian Arabs, targeted and killed thousands of Jews around the world in the following decades. Iranian leaders have continued to hold Holocaust denial conferences, call for the destruction of Israel and pursue nuclear weapons and long range ballistic missiles.
On the 80th anniversary of the Wannsee Conference, the United Nations approved a resolution condemning Holocaust denial, with only Iran standing in opposition. The story was covered by The New York Times and other media outlets which wrote about the resolution and described today’s prevalent “right-wing” anti-Semitism and completely ignored that the vast majority of anti-Semitism stems from the Islamic world.
Not only will Muslim anti-Semitism not go away by ignoring it, but it may enable the leading state sponsor of terrorism and Holocaust denial to obtain weapons of mass destruction to carry out another genocide of the Jews.
A British Muslim flew thousands of miles to take Jewish hostages in Texas in an attempt to secure the release of Aafia Siddiqui, a noted anti-Semite serving time for trying to kill American soldiers and plot a mass casualty attack in New York City. The hijacker, Malik Faisal Akram, yelled at the people praying on a Sabbath morning in synagogue, “Jews control the world, Jews control the media, Jews control the banks,” and said that the Jews “can call President Trump and he will do it [release Siddiqui] because Jews control everything.“
But The New York Times deliberately omitted that Akram and Siddiqui were Muslim or even the word “anti-Semitism” in its coverage. The Associated Press would similarly not describe the Jew hatred of Siddiqui in a long profile of her.
The New York Times article on January 17, 2022 about the hostage taking in a Texas synagogue. No Times article mentioned the word “anti-Semitism” regarding the hostage taker or the terrorist he tried to free.
The Times has an established track record of ignoring Black and Brown anti-Semitism for two principle reasons: the liberal paper does not want those communities to draw the attention of law enforcement which it thinks over-police those communities, and it seeks to label racism as a purely White and Republican phenomenon, in the hopes of securing more votes for liberals and minorities.
The left-wing media gives Muslim anti-Semites and anti-Zionists a platform, such as CAIR-San Francisco Bay Area Executive Director Zahra Billoo, who has been flagged by the Anti-Defamation League for comments like “pay attention to the ‘polite Zionists,’ … We need to pay attention to the Anti-Defamation League. We need to pay attention to the Jewish Federation. We need to pay attention to the Zionist synagogues. We need to pay attention to the Hillel chapters on our campuses. …know your enemies, and I’m not going to sugarcoat that they are your enemies.”
Discussion by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) on November 10, 2021 including popular anti-Zionist Linda Sarsour, seeking the release of Aafia Siddiqui. Sarsour is a favorite of the Times who affectionately calls her a “Brooklyn homegirl in a hijab.”
But in the end, liberals have placed Muslims alongside Black and Brown people in the category of Victims of Preference. They will not disturb their protective shield around these groups, even if they commit heinous crimes.
That is why left-wing politicians call out anti-Semitism and lump it together with racism and Islamophobia – not because they think that Jews suffer like their Victims of Preference, but as a means TO PROTECT the VOPs, even as the Jews uniquely suffer.
What makes the absence particularly appalling, is that the liberal press did not have to make the statement itself, but could just have simply quoted Democratic President Joe Biden who said of the attack “let me be clear to anyone who intends to spread hate — we will stand against anti-Semitism and against the rise of extremism in this country.” Instead, the paper just use a quote in an article on January 18 where he called it an “act of terror.“
The New York Times quoted President Biden on January 18 as saying it was an “act of terror,” and not using his statements about anti-Semitism.
The New York Times, the most popular digital news source in the world where over 90% of its viewership is Democratic, is educating its liberal readers that minorities cannot be racists or anti-Semites. It is part of its ‘2019 Project’ on White Supremacy, which is concluding that “American Jews are now part of the ownership class,” as Randi Weingarten, President of the powerful American Federation of Teachers union said. While Jews may be a numerical minority, they are in the one-per centers and in cahoots with the White ruling class, and are therefore an integral part of the problem. More succinctly, the alt-left is attempting to educate people that Jews are the only persecuted minority who actually deserve it.
Sabbath broke, so the phones turned on to check emails and the news of the prior 25 hours. The horrible reports coming out of Colleyville, Texas were not just disturbing but unsettling. Yet again, Jews were targeted by anti-Semites/ anti-Zionists to free other anti-Semites / anti-Zionists.
Between calls and community tehillim, I opted to find some strength in a historic hostage situation – when the Israeli army rescued passengers from an airplane hijacking at the Entebbe Airport in Uganda. I had seen movies relaying the exciting rescue attempts made in the 1970s, but had not seen the newer version produced in 2018 called ‘7 Days in Entebbe,’ so watched it while my thoughts were with the Jewish hostages in Texas.
It’s a very peculiar take on the story. Rather than highlight the daring rescue operation by the Israelis, the writer/ director team of Gregory Burke and Jose Padhila took a completely different approach. They told the story of two German “revolutionaries” who joined the Palestinian hijackers; explored the Israelis through the lens of a political battle between Defense Minister Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Itzhak Rabin; and littered the story with performances by the Bat Sheva Dance Company.
The Left Wing Embrace of Palestinian Terrorism (and in a good way)
The movie opens with a distorted pro-Palestinian view of history with statements to set the background and tone of the film:
The United Nations created Israel in 1947
The Palestinians then fought to get their land back
They were backed up by left-wing groups around the world
They called themselves ‘Freedom fighters’ while the Israelis called them ‘terrorists’
Opening lines of the 2018 movie “7 Days in Entebbe“
The distortion needs multiple levels of unpacking.
The UN voted to create BOTH a Jewish State and another Arab State. The Arab world refused to accept the vote as they stood firmly against any Jewish country and wanted the entire region to rule. Israel was created through its own declaration in 1948.
The Palestinians did not have a country where they had self-determination so there was no fight for “the return of their land.” Five Arab nations waged a war against Jews who had just survived the Holocaust, to expunge the survivors from their historic homeland.
The “left-wing” groups from the 1940s, 1970s and today have morphed in mission and focus. In the telling of this story, one senses that the writers believe that “social justice” requires actions like the taking of hostages – perhaps even today if nobody listens.
This view was cemented by the concluding lines of how the “left-wing” viewed themselves as “freedom fighters” while the Israelis called them “terrorists.”
The “left-wing” which rallied to the Palestinians’ side, dominate the story’s focus. The movie is a platform to state how these new Germans were “not Nazis” who hated Jews like the prior generation, but fought for “social justice.” They were “humanitarians” who saw how wrong it was for the Palestinians to suffer, and therefore sought and fought for a “life of meaning,” sacrificing on behalf of others.
I think Senator Bernie Sanders may have consulted on the film.
Israeli Politicians Care About Politics, Not People But Rabin Knew That Palestinians Deserve Negotiations
The film took a very cynical view of Israeli politicians who simply were dueling for power. While Peres may have stated that one never negotiates with terrorists, the script made clear that Peres was a political opportunist who wanted the Prime Minister to look bad so he could gain the upper hand. Even when the movie relayed how the Israeli and Jewish hostages were separated from the other passengers reminiscent of the concentration camps, there was less emotion in the scene than when a small child needed to use the restroom on the plane moments after the hijacking.
While the Israeli public was hysterical about the hostage situation, Rabin remained calm. Even after the successful rescue operation, he shared with Peres that at some point the Israelis need to talk to the Palestinians and not just fight them. The writer/director were clearly paying more attention to the future when Rabin pushed forward the Oslo Accords in the 1990s, for which he paid with his life. But it is completely ahistorical when the action happened in 1976.
The Arabs fought two wars to annihilate the Israeli Jews, in 1948-9 and in 1967. Having lost both wars of attempted genocide, they adopted the Khartoum Resolution which declared three no’s: “no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel and no negotiations with Israel.“
The refusal to talk and make peace was a uniform Arab policy from the 1920s through that hijacking in 1976. The movie completely inverted facts and made the Israelis the party that was holding back on negotiating peace, rather than acting in a defensive capacity against neighbors determined to kill them.
Secular Israelis Have Evolved, While Traditional Jews Have Become the New Nazis as told by the Bat Sheva Dance Company
The movie opened and closed with performances by the Israeli troupe, the Bat Sheva Dance Company. Aside from being a constant break in the flow of the movie, most movie viewers likely just found the snippets annoying and bizarre. Let me offer my take on why these scenes were in the film.
The first time we see the performance, we see a semi-circle of dancers dressed seemingly like Hasidic Jews, sitting on chairs performing before an empty auditorium. They dance to a song “Who knows one?” traditionally sung at the end of the Passover seder. Each dancer jumps in his chair except one, she falls to the ground, exposing shocking red hair. We assume at first it is a mistake, that the dancer was not supposed to fall. Or perhaps we think we understand the message since we are familiar with the Entebbe story – that one Israeli soldier dies in the rescue attempt.
I think that scene is a retelling of the Holocaust. The Jews jumping on the chairs one after the other were European Jews shot before a firing line. The one who fell to the ground was the old Jew in the ghetto, a community forever vanquished. The shock of red hair is meant as an anchor for the viewer, much like the girl in the red coat in the move “Schindler’s List.” It happens before open chairs, as to one did anything to stop the genocide of the Jews.
We see the dancers in a similar scene later in the movie. However, this time the dancers – except for the one falling with red hair – remove an article of clothing after each wave of shots. At the end, they are all standing in their underwear while the one sitting is still garbed in the Hasidic attire. This is a reflection of the new Jew which has shed religion and its past, except for a lone holdout. These are the new strong Jews who come in and shoot the hijackers. The packed auditorium loves the performance. But are these killing Jews, like a Palestinian hijacker states, the “new Nazis”?
At the very end of the film, the stage is set with only two dancers remaining. In the background is the re-haired dancer running continuously and going nowhere. In the front of the stage, the stripped down modern Jew goes from a creeper-crawler to dynamic dancer. This evolved Jew commands the stage – until abruptly exiting. We are then only left with the dull and distant Hasidic Jew, forever repeating the same actions and going nowhere.
The audience in the end is only us, the viewer, left to decide what to make of Jews: the evolving, modern, beautiful and appreciated Jew who dominates the scene and then disappears, and the traditional Jew, in the background who endures.
The failure of the movie (not just from critics and Rotten Tomatoes) is the notion of choice. The allegories of the dancers interspersed throughout the film attempt to parallel the tension and options of modern and traditional Jews with the Israeli-Arab conflict, and consequently, why secular leftists attach themselves to the Arab cause for a Palestinian state.
The orientation of the film is that Israelis and Jews have a choice as to whether to be modern or traditional, and whether to make peace with Arabs or to fight them. To set such worldview (which is perhaps a worthwhile discussion today, over a coffee) in a movie about hostages in 1976 is highly offensive and illusory. The Jewish hostages had no choice. Saving them is not an option (and certainly not simply a matter of politics). It is the Arabs who have always had the option of making peace with the Jews, and opted each time to fight.
There are two sides to a conflict, and one party may view themselves as “freedom fighters” while the other views them as “terrorists.” It is clear where you and society stood on an issue by how each party was portrayed.
The end of the Texas synagogue stand-off is a cause to celebrate. Not only were the Jewish hostages saved, but all Americans came together to clearly identify with the besieged Jews. Regrettably, that is not always the case.
The western world is fracturing when it comes to other dead and persecuted Jews, such as the recent movie retelling the story of the 1976 Israeli hostages in Entebbe from the hijackers perspective, and an opera showing the 1985 Achille Lauro cruise ship hijacking in a manner which highlighted the “humanity in the terrorists,” as general manager of the Met, Peter Gelb said about the performance “The Death of Klinghoffer“.
January 15, 2022 saw another reminder of the threats Jews face in the United States. A man walked into a synagogue during Sabbath services in Texas and held four people hostage. Eventually the congregants escaped unharmed.
Police deal with hostage situation at synagogue near Dallas, TX January 15, 2022
The Jewish community is by far the most likely minority group to suffer a hate crime in the US every year, and over the past few years, the attacks have included murder. In October 2018, Jews were shot in a synagogue in Pittsburgh, PA. In April 2019, Jews were killed in a synagogue in Poway CA. In December 2019 Jews were killed in a kosher supermarket in Jersey City, NJ.
These kinds of attacks are more common outside the United States where terrorists attack Jews in their schools, shuls, community centers and restaurants in France, Belgium, Turkey, Argentina, India and of course, in Israel. Knowing of the threat, countries deploy extra protection to guard against the anti-Semitic attacks. But there have been some who do not support providing Jews with protection in the United States for their own reasons.
Liberals Believe That Jews Hate Gays
A number of politicians have stated their opposition to providing Jewish schools with extra police protection and had the following to say when a bill came up before the New York City Council:
Rosie Mendez (D-Manhattan) “They charge tuition, they should pay for their own security. I was against having churches in schools. There should be separation of church and state. As a member of the LGBT community, I know that a lot of these schools discriminate against us and if the city is going to provide any kind of funding, the schools should not be discriminatory.“
Daniel Dromm (D- Queens) “Public schools have to come first. We are supposed to have separation of church and state. Where does this city funding for private schools end?” He added later “I know the same lobbyists for these private and parochial schools and yeshivas will be back again to rob the public-school budget of additional funding at some point in the future.“
State Senator Brad Hoylman “As a public official, we have to stay focused on taxpayer dollars funding public schools. There are shortages of security officers in the public schools.“
NY Civil Liberties Union “is strongly opposed to the use of government funding and services to support religion, including religious schools. This is an inappropriate use of city resources, and skirts dangerously close to government sponsorship of religion, forbidden by the First Amendment to the US Constitution.“
Allen Roskoff, Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club “Religious institutions pushing this bill have a long history and present-day reality of discriminating against the gay community. Why should they be able to discriminate on our dime? Where is the concern for the safety of LGBT students and staff in these anti-gay religious schools? These Council members say they care about anti-gay bullying. How is a child being told by religious leaders that he or she is immoral for being gay not bullying?“
Bill Dobbs, Civil Libertarian “Religious freedom does not mean socking overburdened taxpayers for special treatment worth hundreds of millions. Religious freedom means don’t disturb religion, it doesn’t mean you throw your wallet their way.“
Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters “I see no evidence that there is a threat to these students. Surely they can afford to pay for their own security.“
Harvey Robins, a former director of operations for the city, said “For what the Council wants to spend on this, they could open libraries seven days a week.“
Teamsters Local 237 said “Every New Yorker should be outraged at this proposal. This is a giveaway of taxpayers’ money.“
United United Federation of Teachers President, Michael Mulgrew said this was “Crossing the line between public and private is something our forefathers were smart enough not to do.“
Ernest Logan, President of the American Federation of School Administrators said “I want to know who in their right mind thought this was a good idea to take city money and put it into the private industry when you haven’t taken care of the money that you’re required to for the public.“
Progressive Smear That The Jewish State Targets Palestinians
In the fall of 2021, several members of Congress voted to oppose helping to replenish Israel’s defensive Iron Dome missiles which it used to shoot down incoming rockets from the terrorist enclave of Gaza run by Hamas.
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) tweeted “we continue to pay lip service to human rights, peace and a two state solution. Yet we also continue to provide Israel with funding without addressing the underlying issue of the occupation.“
Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) said “We shouldn’t be sending an additional $1B to an apartheid state’s military. Especially not when we are failing to adequately invest in the health care, housing, education, and other social services our communities need.“
Rep. Andre Carson (D-IN) said “Israeli military’s operations that resulted in heavy Palestinian civilian casualties must be scrutinized.“
Rep. Rashida Tlaib said “I will not support an effort to enable war crimes and human rights abuses and violence. We cannot be talking only about Israelis need for safety at a time when Palestinians are living under a violent apartheid system, and are dying from what Human Rights Watch has said are war crimes.“
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) voted present according to the New York Times because of “influential lobbyists and rabbis.“
Alt-Left View That “Black Lives Matter,” But Anti-Semitism Should Only Be Condemned Alongside Islamophobia
While denying Jews and the Jewish State monies for defending themselves from anti-Semitic attacks, many of these same politicians won’t clearly call out anti-Semitism when Jews are attacked, and instead issue broad sweeping comments, as they did in May 2021 when Jews were attacked throughout America during the barrage of missiles from Gaza against Israel.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (Idiot-VT) “We’ve recently seen disturbing antisemitic attacks and a troubling rise in Islamophobia.“
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) “Antisemitism has no place in our country or world. Neither does Islamophobia.“
Rep. Cori Bush “The work of dismantling antisemitism, anti-Blackness, Islamophobia, anti-Palestinian racism, and every other form of hate is OUR work.“
Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) “We’ve seen an increase in antisemitic and Islamophobic hate, in NYC and nationwide — hateful words, hate crimes, and other forms of violence.“
The broad brushstrokes of condemning all forms of hatred when Jews were being singled out was an echo of the orchestration of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) refusing to censure Ilhan Omar for repeated anti-Semitic remarks and instead put forward a resolution which condemned ALL forms of hatred including “Islamophobia, racism and other forms of bigotry.” Omar and fellow female Muslim Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) were thrilled by the wording and said “It’s the first time we have voted on a resolution condemning Anti-Muslim bigotry in our nation’s history.” Rather than being scolded and embarrassed, Omar emerged as a proud victor.
The shocking matter of these statements is that they all come from one party – Democrats – home to the majority of Jewish votes for over 100 years. At least for now. The Orthodox movement has already shifted to 75% voting Republican according to Pew Research, and with the current alt-left movement away from basic protections from Jew hatred, more Jews may leave the Democratic party.
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