Tag Archives: anti-Semitism

Trends in Anti-Muslim and Anti-Semitic Attacks Post-9/11

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As the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the United States approaches, various news outlets are discussing the animosity towards Muslims that became a reality in America after the terrorist attacks by nineteen Muslim men, directly killed nearly 3,000 people and many times that number indirectly in the years that followed. Other than giving a platform for American Muslims to talk about their experiences with prejudice, little analysis into the hate crime statistics has been shared.

So here it is.

Before the September 11th attacks, almost every religious-based hate crime reported by the FBI was against Jews. From 1998 to 2000, a total of 89 anti-Muslim hate crimes were reported, or about 30 per year. In comparison, over that time period, over 3,500 anti-Jewish attacks were reported by the FBI, or 39 times as many. That dynamic changed with the jihadist terrorism against the USA in 2001.

The spike was immediate and significant.

In 2001, a total of 546 anti-Muslim hate crimes were reported, a 16.5 times jump from the prior year. White people committed 200 of those offenses, a high number relative to the 29 attacks committed by Black people. The numbers declined rapidly in 2002, but the number of anti-Muslim attacks has remained significantly above the pre-9/11 days.

Anti-Muslim attacks increased again with the influx of Muslim refugees from Syria and elsewhere in 2015 and 2016, reaching a high of 381 in 2016. The number of incidents declined significantly since then, with 219 attacks reported in 2019, a 43 percent decline in three years.

In regards to the perpetrators of the offenses, from 2000 to 2009, Whites committed an average of 69.9 attacks per year, compared to 16.8 for Blacks. The numbers increased for both groups in the 2010-2019 decade, with Whites and Blacks committing an average of 97.3 and 25.2 attacks, respectively, representing a jump of 39% for Whites and 50% for Blacks.

By way of comparison, Jews suffer many more hate crimes than Muslims but the trend line is quite different.

Attacks against Jews was consistently above 1,100 attacks per year through the year 2001. It was only in 2002 that anti-Semitic attacks began to decline, reaching a low of 635 attacks in 2014. This was a period marked by the War on Terror around the world, and in Israel, it included the Second Intifada/Two Percent War (2000-2005), the election of a Holocaust denier to the Palestinian presidency and a jihadist terrorist group to a majority of the Palestinian parliament (2005 and 2006) and wars from Gaza after the Hamas takeover of the Strip (2008, 2012 and 2014). Perhaps Americans sympathized with Jews and the Jewish State in the global war on Islamic extremism, as attacks on Jews declined significantly over those thirteen years.

But the trend reversed as anti-Semitism began to spike at the same time as anti-Muslim attacks picked up in 2015. Most recently, crimes against Muslims have been declining while anti-Semitism has been rising.

A review of the offenders perhaps reveals some clues.

From 2000 to 2009, Whites committed an average of 181.0 attacks against Jews while Blacks committed an average of 17.8 attacks per year. But from 2010 to 2019, Whites committed an annual average of 137.3 attacks while Blacks committed 28.5. So while anti-Semitic attacks among Whites declined by 24% over the past decade, it increased 60% among Blacks.

The past decade witnessed a spike in religious-based hate crimes committed by Black people at a greater rate than White people, and against Jews in particular, as the average anti-Semitic hate crimes committed by Whites has declined by 24%. (source: FBI Hate Crime Statistics)

The sharp increase in Black anti-Semitism came most recently in 2018 and 2019, with all-time record levels of attacks by Blacks on Jews. This coincides with the election of the “Squad” to Congress – and two Muslim women, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, in particular – who pushed anti-Semitic tropes that Jews control the military, the press, the government and do it all as a means to profit from the poor. The ridiculous shouts of “from Ferguson to Palestine” shouted by the likes of CNN’s Marc Lamont Hill and “from Detroit to Gaza” shirts sold on Rashida Tlaib’s website, were malicious attempts to portray Jews as militant exploiters of Blacks and Muslims all around the world. Shockingly, Democratic leaders protected their anti-Semitic minority members and advanced anti-Islamophobia measures rather than protecting Jews.

Not surprisingly, attacks against Jews increased and those against Muslims decreased.

In 2019, an average American Jew was roughly three times more likely to suffer a hate crime than an average Muslim (1,032 Jewish victims in a population of 5.7 million versus 227 Muslim victims in a population of 3.3 million). Jews always suffered more than Muslims and the gap is growing.

In summary, there were almost no anti-Muslim attacks in the United States until the Islamic extremist attacks of September 11, 2001. The spike in anti-Muslim hate crimes went on for a year, and the situation then dramatically improved. That turnaround enabled American Muslims to assume positions of power in the United States, which they have used to further protect Muslims and fuel minority attacks against Jews.

Twenty years ago, foreign jihadists hijacked a small part of the U.S. transportation system to viciously attack America’s financial, military and political centers. Today’s jihadists are aggressively weaponizing the U.S. educational system, the government and the media, to attack Jews around the world.

Related First One Through articles:

David Duke, Ilhan Omar and the Three Lenses of Anti-Semitism

The Insidious Jihad in America

Criticizing Muslim Antisemitism is Not Islamophobia

Victims of Preference

Mum on Black, Brown and Leftist Anti-Semitism

The Global Intifada

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The Old City of Jerusalem’s “Settlers’ Quarter”

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Anti-Semitism wears many masks, the most prominent these days is anti-Zionism. The malicious malady has related hats, including denying Jewish history, distorting Judaism and opposing the rights of Jews to live in certain places.

The British Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC, has locked arms with alt-left Jews in some of these sinister proclamations, especially concerning Jews living over the 1949 Armistice Lines struck between Jordan and Israel. That “Green Line” was specifically defined as never to be regarded as a border, and the 1950 Jordanian annexation of the “West Bank” was deemed illegal by the international community, marking that invisible line as a footnote in history penned in disappearing ink. No matter, anti-Semites have a long history of dictating where Jews can and cannot live, whether the Pale of Settlement in Russia or ghettoes throughout Europe.

Consider the recent BBC coverage of the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem.

The BBC using a map produced by B’Tselem, a group which markets itself as an “information center for human rights in the occupied territories.”

The dotted lines (at least they are dotted!) represent the 1949 Armistice Lines between Israel and Jordan, which disappeared in 1967 when Jordan attacked Israel again and lost the entirety of eastern Jerusalem and the “West Bank.” Note that the map’s legend refers to the dotted line as “pre-1967 ceasefire line,” which implies that there was a ceasefire between Israel and Palestine, as Jordan is not mentioned (this is deliberately misleading). The map’s purple areas are marked as “Israeli settlements.” Are they?

In the lower portion of the map is the Old City of Jerusalem. Marked in purple is the Jewish Quarter, a place with over 750 years of continuous Jewish presence except for the window of Arab rule when the Jordanians ethnically-cleansed all of the Jews from 1949 to 1967. According to this map, any JEW – not Israeli – living east of the Green Line (EGL) is a “settler.”

There are thousands of Israeli Arabs living in EGL including the eastern part of Jerusalem. Israel gave all the Arabs in the city permanent resident status in 1967 and has afforded them the right to apply for Israeli citizenship. Thousands have already taken such citizenship and thousands more have applied. Yet the B’Tselem/ BBC map doesn’t mark the homes of Israeli Arabs in purple but only the locations where Israeli Jews live.

Jewish men, women and children living in the Jewish Quarter of their holiest city
are marked with the term “settler”

Adolf Hitler accused the Jews of being sly manipulators who steal, as he roused Germany to rout the Jews. He painted their stores with the word “Jude” and made them wear yellow Jewish stars with the word in the center, so they could be easily identifiable for insult and attack by passers-by, and interrogated and ultimately expelled for annihilation by government officials.

So it is today with the term “settler,” even in the Jewish people’s holiest city.

Related First One Through articles:

Time to Define Banning Jews From Living Somewhere as Antisemitic

Antisemitism Includes the Denial of Jewish History

Rashida Tlaib’s Modern ‘Mein Kampf’

The United Nations and Holy Sites in the Holy Land

The Green Line Through Jerusalem

The Long History of Dictating Where Jews Can Live Continues

Linda Sarsour as Pontius Pilate

“Settlers” Now Means Jews Stepping Over The Green Line

To Serve Jews, United Nations Style

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The Green Line (music by The Kinks)

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Elul and the UN’s Durban Conference

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The Hebrew month of Elul is the last month of the year and traditionally marks the beginning period of repentance in the Jewish calendar. It is on the first day of the month that the prophet Moses ascended Mount Sinai 3,300 years ago, and forty days later, on Yom Kippur, when he descended and broke the tablets when he saw the Children of Israel worshipping beside a statue of a golden calf.

To mark the period of repentance, rabbis instituted a tradition of reciting Psalm 27 at the end of morning and evening prayers. It is a call for God to protect Jews from their enemies.

As we approach the twentieth anniversary of UN Durban Conference and the attacks of 9/11 which both occurred during Elul, and how governments and people choose to commemorate those events, two sentences in the psalm deserve deeper exploration. Sentences 11 & 12:

ה֤וֹרֵ֥נִי יְהֹוָ֗ה דַּ֫רְכֶּ֥ךָ וּ֭נְחֵנִי בְּאֹ֣רַח מִישׁ֑וֹר לְ֝מַ֗עַן שֽׁוֹרְרָֽי׃ Show me Your way, O LORD, and lead me on a level path because of my watchful foes.

אַֽל־תִּ֭תְּנֵנִי בְּנֶ֣פֶשׁ צָרָ֑י כִּ֥י קָמוּ־בִ֥י עֵדֵי־שֶׁ֝֗קֶר וִיפֵ֥חַ חָמָֽס׃ Do not subject me to the will of my foes, for false witnesses and unjust accusers have appeared against me.

While the Psalm is set up to seek God’s protection from armies (verse 3), the lines above highlight that enemies include those who wish to undermine Jews with slander. The “watchful foes” scrutinize every action and then bear “false witness” with accusations that seek to seriously harm Jews as they enter the high holidays.

The United Nations, a body conceived of to promote peace and reduce bloodshed, has become a platform for “false witnesses and unjust accusers” which lambast Israel. UN Watch noted that in 2020, the UN General Assembly passed 17 resolutions condemning Israel, while passing a total of six against the rest of the world.

Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, said that the “farce at the General Assembly underscores a simple fact: the UN’s automatic majority has no interest in truly helping Palestinians, nor in protecting anyone’s human rights; the goal of these ritual, one-sided condemnations is to scapegoat Israel.“

United States Secretary of State Colin Powell said much the same as he withdrew from the World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa on September 3, 2001:

“Today I have instructed our representatives at the World Conference Against Racism to return home. I have taken this decision with regret, because of the importance of the international fight against racism and the contribution that the Conference could have made to it. But, following discussions today by our team in Durban and others who are working for a successful conference, I am convinced that will not be possible. I know that you do not combat racism by conferences that produce declarations containing hateful language, some of which is a throwback to the days of “Zionism equals racism;” or supports the idea that we have made too much of the Holocaust; or suggests that apartheid exists in Israel; or that singles out only one country in the world–Israel–for censure and abuse.“

Flyer at 2001 World Conference Against Racism with a picture of Adolf Hitler with caption “What if I had won?” and continued that there would be no Israel nor bloodshed of Palestinians (source UN Watch)

The United Nations has promoted and given legitimacy to the “watchful foes” of Jews – both around the world and in the United States, at governmental levels, among lay leaders and ordinary citizens – to promote vicious slander against Israel and the Jewish people. As those lies are becoming mainstreamed, it is time to stop reciting Psalm 27 quietly but “with shouts of joy, singing and chanting,” (verse 6), for God to cause these evil people and organizations to “stumble and fall” (verse 2).

Related First One Through articles:

Rep. Ilhan Omar and The 2001 Durban Racism Conference

The Anti-Zionist Lexicon – Vilifying Israel

B.D.S. Is Not A Social Mission Action

The Global Intifada

Hamas’s Willing Executioners

The Veil of Hatred

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Torching Each Corner to Get Rid of the Jews

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I had always been told that my paternal grandmother’s family came from Sighet, a decent sized town in Romania along the Ukrainian border. It was considered a small source of familial pride as it was the same home town for Eli Wiesel, the Nobel laureate who wrote about the Holocaust.

Some years ago, upon speaking to my grandmother’s brother about the place where the family grew up as my grandmother died before I was born, I learned that history takes a bit of time, both to happen and to explain.

My great uncle informed me that his family grew up in a small shtetl, a small Jewish village, some miles away from Sighet. One evening, when he was about eight years old, a fire broke out in a corner of the shtetl. All of the people in the town, including himself, rapidly lined up to pass buckets of water one to the other to help put out the flames. He recalled that while he was passing buckets he heard someone shouting that another fire had broken out on the other side of the village. The villagers started to shout how to break the line into two to deal with the second blaze, when they looked up to see a third blaze in another corner of the town. And then a fourth.

The local anti-Semites had come to incinerate their town.

He recalled how the following morning the family grabbed what belongings they could manage, and walked to Sighet as the smoke from his village filled the air. He told me the name of that former village, and as I quickly forgot the foreign sounding name, I internalized how history had forgotten it too.

So, yes, the family did live in Sighet, but it wasn’t really the town of his birth. Our family had already been routed by local anti-Semites a couple of decades before the Nazis came for the Jews of Sighet.

The alt-right relentlessly pursued the Jews of Europe and Russia for hundreds of years, sometimes as part of the ruling class and other times by the hands of a band of locals. In each circumstance, they knew how to rout the small collection of Jews.

The Four Corners of Anti-Semitism Today

In many parts of the world, the ruling class is being taken over by extremists. The alt-left made inroads in America’s Democratic Party with the Democratic Socialists of America getting seats in Congress with members including Bernie Sanders, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman. The DSA was following the playbook of the Labour Party of the United Kingdom, where Jeremy Corbyn pushed anti-Zionism, anti-Semitism and extremist ideas to take over the party.

The DSA invited disgraced anti-Semite and former leader of the British Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn to address their annual convention.

The alt-right still exists around the world and in America but shunned and sidelined by civilized society. Not so the alt-left, which has bonded with Islamic extremists to gain power, and with the alt-right in the cause of setting fire to Jewish homes.

American Jews are surrounded on all sides by anti-Semitic extremists, and there are neither sufficient volunteers to pass buckets to extinguish the flames of hatred nor to expel the sinister arsonists.

Related First One Through articles:

MSNBC Courts Anti-Semitic Leftists

Your Father’s Anti-Semitism

25,000 Jews Remaining

Bernie Sanders’ Antisemitic and Anti-Zionist Friends

David Duke, Ilhan Omar and the Three Lenses of Anti-Semitism

The Right Number of Anti-Semites in Congress

Mum on Black, Brown and Leftist Anti-Semitism

Where’s the March Against Anti-Semitism?

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Rashida Tlaib’s Modern ‘Mein Kampf’

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Successful race baiters become famous and powerful. They first attract attention which brings in followers, and then money and ultimately true power.

Adolf Hitler produced his manifesto called ‘Mein Kampf” meaning ‘My Struggle” which sought to air his grievances about the state of German society and the struggles of the common man. He used the Jew as his scapegoat, at times attacking the Hebrew Pinata for being poor, dirty and smelly, and at other times for being a rich banker who profited off the work of others. He portrayed the Jews as leeches which sucked the blood and labor of poor workers and profited in a sneaky plan for world domination.

Some selections on his second “powerful parasite theme”:

Jewish parasites: “In the business world things were even worse. Here the Jewish people had really become ‘indispensable.’ The spider began slowly to suck the people’s blood out of its pores. By way of the war societies one had found the instrument with which to put an end, bit by bit, to a national and free economy.“

Jews stealing in secret: “they try to cheat the whole world with their tricks; they are lazy, but with their pretended ‘silent’ work they create the appearance of an enormous and equally laborious activity; in short, they are cheats, characters of political profiteering, who hate the honest work of others. Just as such a folkish moth always appeals to the darkness of the silence, one can bet a thousand to one that under its cover he does not produce, but only steals from the fruits of the labor of others.“

Jewish profiteers and desire for world domination: “Jews are the regents of the stock exchange power of the American Union. Every year they manage to become increasingly the controlling masters of the labor power of a people of 120,000,000 souls; one great man, Ford, to their exasperation still holds out independently there even now.  With rapacious cleverness they knead public opinion and form from it the instrument of a struggle for their own future.  Already the greatest heads of Jewry envisage the approach of the fulfillment of the hereditary slogan of the great devouring of the nations.“

Hitler was appalled that people would come to the defense of the Jews, knowing that they profit off of the toil and suffering of others:

Don’t defend Jews who profit off your misery: “If the Hungarian government hangs ten Jewish stock exchange profiteers, whose money is sticky with the blood and the sweat of hundreds of thousands of honest people, we protest, we cry about pogroms and we demand the boycott of an entire State.”

Hitler wrote Mein Kampf in July 1925 as a poor man in prison. Within eight years he was the chancellor of Germany.

The Alt-Left’s Modern ‘Mein Kampf’

The National Socialist German Worker’s Party of the 1930’s and 1940’s was commonly called the Nazi Party. It is associated with the far right’s desire for racial purity, demonization of inferior races and elevation of proper Aryan Germans. It drew its inspiration from Hitler’s manifesto.

Today’s Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is a far-left group which shuns much of the ideology of the Nazi Party while embracing other key tenets.

It does not follow Hitler’s screed against the dirty, smelly Jew or other poor people as the party argues that it is fighting for the poor working class. Instead the alt-left goes all-in against the rich “ownership class” which robs from poor people of their work and dignity. Jews just happen to be the mascot of the evil profiteers, whether in Gaza or Detroit.

Randi Weingarten, longtime president of the American Federation of Teachers, a lobbying group with 1.7 million members which pumps millions of dollars into Democratic politicians’ pockets, declared that American Jews are “part of the ownership class…. now want to take that ladder of opportunity [education] away from those who do not have it.” (Weingarten is married to Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, who sits on the Rabbinical Committee of the left-wing group J Street, and was just appointed by President Biden to join the US religious freedom commission. An interesting spectacle of Jews eating their own).

Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), a proud member of the DSA made her own declaration about Jews:

“As I think about my family in Palestine, that continue to live under military occupation and how that really interacts with this beautiful Black city I grew up in … you know I always tell people that cutting people off from water is violence, and they do it from Gaza to Detroit, and it’s a way to control people, to oppress people. And it’s those structures that we continue to fight against. I know you all understand the structure we’ve been living under right now is designed by those who exploit the rest of us, for their own profit. I always say to people ‘I don’t care if it’s around the issue of global human rights, and our fight to free Palestine, or to pushing back against those who don’t believe in a minimum wage or those who believe we don’t have a right to healthcare and so much more.’ And I tell those same people, that if you open the curtain and look behind the curtain, it’s the same people who make money and—yes they do—off of racism, off of these broken policies. There is someone there making money and you saw it, it was so exposed during the pandemic…. They made record profit.”

It’s a wonderful summation of Hitler’s thesis, that Jews operate in the shadows to profit off the suffering of others.

Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) speaking at a DSA event under tagline “From the Ashes of the Old: Socialism for a new tomorrow”

The DSA is remarketing key talking points of the Nazi Party under the banner “From the ashes of the old: socialism for a new tomorrow.” Who would imagine that the heirs to Hitler’s ideology that Jews are puppet masters exploiting the labor and suffering of the masses, would be Jewish and Muslim women?

Related First One Through articles:

The Re-Introduction of the ‘Powerful’ Jew Smear

Christiane Amanpour is More Anti-Semitic Than Ilhan Omar

David Duke, Ilhan Omar and the Three Lenses of Anti-Semitism

Peter Beinart is an Apologist for Anti-Semites

I See Dead People

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The Anti-Zionist Lexicon – Vilifying Israel

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Haters of Israel have a growing list of terms which they throw about frequently in attempts to demonize the Jewish State. The ugly list bears no resemblance to the truth but this kind of hatred is morbidly stupid, not just blind and deaf.

Here’s a review of some of the choice expressions with some basic facts about the slander.

“Genocide”

This is a particularly disgusting one, as it goes to the core of anti-Semitic hatred against Israel. Jews just went through a genocide of one-third of its population in Nazi Germany less than 100 years ago in a crime in which Palestinians were complicit (meeting repeatedly with Hitler and other Nazi leaders as well as convincing the British to not comply with the mission of the Mandate to limit the entry of Jews fleeing the Holocaust). Stating that Israel is committing genocide is a vicious attempt to belittle the Holocaust and argue that Jews are worthy of the anti-Semitism hurled at them.

The application of the term itself is insane, as the Arab population growth in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank has surpassed the growth rates of Arabs in all the surrounding countries.

“Ethnic Cleansing”

Like “genocide,” this is an attempt to invert the charge from the Arab and Muslim nations that ethnically-cleansed around one million Jews from their lands since the founding of Israel. As noted above, the population in the area under the 1922 Palestine Mandate has skyrocketed. Even in Jerusalem, the population growth rate of Arabs surpasses that of Jews since Israel reunified the city.

“Apartheid”

Israel gave citizenship to every non-Jew when the state was founded. It has non-Jewish supreme court judges, members of parliament and generals in the army. It allows Muslims to pray at Judaism’s holiest site of the Jewish Temple Mount and to build mosques and minarets around the country, as well as to wear hijabs and eat halal meat. The term makes absolutely no sense in the most liberal country in the region for one thousand miles.

“Colonialist”

Jews lived in Israel for over 3,000 years. Judaism is the only religion that is tied to a specific land, the land of Israel. It is not possible to colonize a place which ancestors lived in for centuries and which is the center of daily religious focus.

Further, when international law split the Ottoman Empire into different French and British mandates including Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine, they did not send their own French and British citizens to live in the land. The Jews who moved to Palestine from the 1922 mandate until the founding of the country in 1948 came from dozens of countries, with the Jews of England and France making up a paltry sum. Today, the majority of the Jews in Israel came from the Muslim countries which expelled their Jews including Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Syria and Iraq, alongside a sizable group from Russia and Ukraine.

“Europeans”

This is a code to say that Jews are “White” and part of the oppressor class in today’s woke terminology. Most of the Jews in Israel are actually Black and Brown from Africa as listed above, including over 100,000 Ethiopian Jews.

“Occupied Palestinian Territory”

Many anti-Zionists consider the entirety of the State of Israel to be “Occupied Palestinian Territory.” The more moderate part of the Israel-haters consider the West Bank and Gaza to be “OPT.”

Perhaps there will one day be an independent State of Palestine like there is currently a Jewish State of Israel. But that day is not today, as the Palestinian Arabs have refused to agree to the various peace offers Israel put before them. Until that time, the only Palestinian territories are the ones that Israel handed to the Palestinian Authority in Gaza and Areas A and B in the West Bank which cover 86% of West Bank Arabs. By definition, those aren’t “occupied” and are run by Palestinians.

“Threaten Al Aqsa”

This is a term that extremists use to rile up riots against Jews around the world. Israel has not made any moves against the al Aqsa Mosque, and welcomes Muslims to pray peacefully in their holy site. Still, there are many Jews which are appalled by the anti-Semitic edict which prohibits Jews from also praying on the Temple Mount. Just as the Cave of the Jewish Patriarchs and Matriarchs in Hebron has space and time for people of both religions to pray, Jews seek a similar accommodation. In no manner shape of form do they want any harm to befall the Islamic holy site. Stating that Jews are threatening the site has generated multiple riots and killed hundreds over the years and is dangerous and inflammatory.

“Expulsions”

As reviewed in “ethnic cleansing,” Israelis have not and are not seeking to get rid of the Arab population. There have been “evictions” of people who live in a house illegally and “expulsions” of a select number of terrorists over the decades. But the general usage of the term has no bearing to reality.

“Crimes against Humanity”

The term “crimes against humanity” has a particular definition covering genocide, slavery, apartheid and torture. As reviewed above, these do not apply to Israel. The country does its utmost to have a peaceful society for all of its citizens with a wide range of freedoms not found elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa.

“War Crimes”

Israel is in an asymmetric war against a terrorist group that fights from schools and hospitals and has a network of tunnels beneath houses and mosques. It attempts to use a targeted approach to fight against Arab terrorists who deliberately attack Israeli civilians. It is an approach that will most likely be adopted by other parts of the world that seek to manage wars against terrorist groups embedded with civilians (who support them).

“Open air prison,” “Apartheid Wall” and “Collective Punishment”

When the Palestinian Arabs rejected Israel’s peace proposal in 2000 that gave them almost everything that they wanted, they launched the Two Percent War which is generously marketed as the “Second Intifada,” in which they went on a terrorism campaign against ice cream stores, buses, restaurants and any soft targets populated with Jews. To stop the barbaric wave of hundreds of murders, Israel constructed a security barrier roughly along the 1949 Armistice Lines which anti-Zionists call an “apartheid wall.” The barrier is 90% fence and only 10% wall and built specifically because of Palestinian terrorism.

When Israel abandoned the Gaza Strip in 2005 it did not place a blockade on the area. Only after Palestinians voted the political-terrorist group Hamas to 58% of parliament in 2006 with the most anti-Semitic charter ever written, followed by Hamas’s take-over of Gaza in June 2007, and the attempted import of missiles and attack against Israel in 2008, did Israel resort to a full blockade of the terrorist enclave. Even though anti-Zionists call Gaza the world’s largest “open air prison” and a form of “collective punishment,” the actions were deemed legal by the United Nations (no friend of Israel) which commissioned the Palmer Report. That report stated that it “concludes that Israel’s naval blockade was legal… Israel faces a real threat to its security from militant groups in Gaza.  The naval blockade was imposed as a legitimate security measure in order to prevent weapons from entering Gaza by sea and its implementation complied with the requirements of international law.”

Weapons on the Turkish vessel Mavi Marmara which sought to bust the Gaza blockade, used to attack Israeli soldiers

“Settler” and “Settlement”

The term “settler” has morphed into something anti-Semitic.

Once upon a time, an Israeli who developed a new outpost east of the Green Line (EGL) was called a “settler” because he and she established a new settlement. But people who wanted to see a new Arab state of Palestine without the presence of a single Jew changed and weaponized the meaning of “settler.” A Jew buying an apartment in an existing building in an existing town – even Jerusalem – somehow became a “settler.” The media has now gotten to the point where Jews who are just visiting EGL including the Western Wall, are called “settlers.” The president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas calls the entirety of Israel a “painful settlement.“

“Zionist” and “Zionism”

Zionism was and is a two-part movement: a deliberate action against the scourge of pervasive anti-Semitism through the encouragement and support of 1) Jews moving back to their ancestral land and 2) to reestablish sovereignty in the Jewish holy land.

In 1975, with dozens of Arab and Muslim lands holding oil barrels over the world economy, the United Nations passed the “Zionism is Racism” resolution. While cancelled in 1991 due to the efforts of the US, it was revived in the August 2001 Durban Conference Against Racism. It has since been picked up broadly by Israel haters ranging from the far right to the alt left.

The extremist media empires like The New York Times have adopted the smear, and state openly that “Zionism was never the gentlest of ideologies.” Zionism is rapidly becoming a curse word, where left-wing schools are preaching that in order to be an anti-Racist one needs to be an anti-Zionist. This gaslighting campaign has corralled Jews to join the anti-Israel crusade, forgetting that the entire purpose of Zionism was to fight anti-Semitism and to have the same self-governing status that they seek for the stateless Arabs of Palestine.

The anti-Zionist lexicon is changing the very meaning of words in an aggravated assault against the Jewish State and Jews around the world. Everyone should readily recognize the mendacious slander and call out the perpetrators for their libel.

Related First One Through articles:

Nicholas Kristof’s “Arab Land”

English Lesson: Eviction, Expulsion and Ethnic Cleansing

Palestinians Seek Mercy For Being a Menace

UN’s Confusion on the Legality of Israel’s Blockade of Gaza

Linda Sarsour as Pontius Pilate

Israel’s Peers and Neighbors

Bernie Sanders’ Antisemitic and Anti-Zionist Friends

To Answer the Question Tying Anti-Semitism, Understand The Two Types of Anti-Zionists

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MSNBC Courts Anti-Semitic Leftists

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How an organization markets itself says a lot about who they are targeting for customers. A business or organization which has a product for seniors will feature older people in their advertisements to attract them as buyers. One that wants to portray its products as flexible might cast athletic actors in various positions to showcase their wares.

The media industry is no different. A conservative media company might show an ad with a leading conservative politician, say Sen, Ted Cruz (R-TX) and a liberal one would showcase a liberal one, say Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). The product for them are the opinions which the viewer likes to hear.

So what does it tell you about a program that opts to feature a controversial politician who has repeatedly used anti-Semitic tropes?

MSNBC’s Morning Joe plugs its own show during commercials. While it did feature leading liberal politicians like Rep. Nancy Peolsi (D-CA) and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), it led the ad with Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN).

Omar is not simply a far-left extremist in the Democratic Party. She has repeatedly been rebuked by both Republicans and Democrats for attacking Jews and the Jewish State. Her appearances on the program were not forceful interviews of her positions but a series of softball questions for her to spout her extreme views to millions of people while putting her into the mainstream.

Liberal media has become an open mic for left-wing Jew-haters, and it is currently proud to advertise as much.

Related First One Through articles:

David Duke, Ilhan Omar and the Three Lenses of Anti-Semitism

As Ilhan Omar Clearly Demonstrates, Not Every “First” is Jackie Robinson

Ilhan Omar Isn’t Debating Israeli Policy, She is Attacking Americans

Is Ilhan Omar’s Mentor the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei?

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Hamas’s Willing Executioners

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There was a time when people understood what genocide meant.

They saw the brutality of Nazi Germany’s largely successful effort to exterminate the Jews in Europe. They read about China, the USSR and Turkey killing millions of their own citizens during the 20th century, and recall Rwanda’s civil war with 800,000 people wiped out in just 100 days. Genocide was the brutal slaughter of an entire unwanted ethnic group.

There was a time when people recognized the evil of unjustly accusing people of “genocide.”

In December 2013, United Nations’ Special Rapporteur Richard Falk called Israel “genocidal,” whereupon Canada immediately called for Falk to be fired. In 2017, when Falk tried to push through a report at the UN calling Israel an “apartheid” regime, US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley got the report withdrawn. Horrific lies and smears were met with outrage and action.

No longer. The steady drip of anti-Israel propaganda has taken root and decent people are now running for cover from the hate-filled tsunami.

Shrill voices on college campuses are claiming that Israel is committing a “genocide” against Palestinian Arabs, coming from the mouths of both professors and students at institutions like Rutgers and Yale. The charge is “ethnic cleansing” of Muslim Arabs at UCLA and CUNY.

Students of Yale accusing Israel of “genocide and ethnic cleansing”

The accusations are outrageous.

Lies. At the most basic level, the statements are outright lies, as the Arab population in Israel and Jerusalem have not only grown faster than Jews in the country and capital city, but have grown at a faster rate than Arabs in the neighboring countries as well.

Inversions of Perpetrator and Victim. Worse than the fabrication is the attempted inversion of the fanatic Muslim anti-Semitic attackers into victims. Palestinian leadership conspired with Nazi Germany to kill Jews and worked with the British to keep Jews fleeing for the lives from entering Palestine. After the brutal slaughter of 6 million Jews, the Muslim Arabs went to war to wipe out the paltry number of Jews who made it to safety in Palestine. Losing that 1948-9 Arab-Israeli war, the Muslim world expunged nearly a million local Jews in a massive ethnic cleansing. They attempted to annihilate the Jews gain in 1967, only to lose the war – and land – once again. Since 2000, localized terrorism has been the preferred vehicle to express their disgust with Jewish neighbors. When Jews defend themselves from attacks, anti-Semites attempt to portray them as offensive, such as labeling the security barrier Israel built in response to Palestinian Arab terrorism as an “apartheid wall.”

Anti-Semitic Propaganda. Even more dangerous than the lies and offensive inversion of victim and attacker is the motivation for the smears. Like the Nazis who put forth a propaganda machine to label the Jews as degenerates and conspirators to enlist the masses in the purge of the Jews, today’s calls against the Jewish State are designed to weaken and isolate it, while enemies in Muslim countries like Iran and Syria along with their terrorist clients including Hamas and Hezbillah prepare to attack again. The chants of “Free Palestine” and “From the River to the Sea” are the stated goals of destroying Israel accompanying the foundational slurs of Jewish “colonialists” committing “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide.” They are attempting to educate the world that Jews never had rights to land or sovereignty in the holy land, and are evil invaders unworthy of a state and support.

In 2001, just before nineteen Muslim hijackers took civilian airplanes to kill thousands of people on American soil, anti-Semites cloaked as “anti-racists” hijacked the 2001 Durban Conference. The United States withdrew from the horrific spectacle at that time, and now, twenty years later, continues to distances itself from the anniversary commemoration. Alas, the insidious “Zionism is Racism” Redux propaganda has already infected the West.

The noxious “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” smears against Israel which used to only emanate from the mouths of jihadists are now being echoed on college campuses, the liberal mainstream media and the halls of Congress. This vilification of Israel is designed to set the stage for the eradication of the reestablished Jewish State, much as Nazi propaganda facilitated the genocide of European Jewry. While the slanderers self-identify as “pro-Palestinian protestors,” history will refer to them as Hamas’ Willing Executioners.

First One Through articles:

Extreme and Mainstream. Germany 1933; West Bank & Gaza Today

Excerpt of Hamas Charter to Share with Your Elected Officials

25,000 Jews Remaining

English Lesson: Eviction, Expulsion and Ethnic Cleansing

The Insidious Jihad in America

The Banners of Jihad

Considering Nazis and Radical Islam on the 75th Anniversary of D-Day

To Serve Jews, United Nations Style

First One Through music videos:

The Perplexing Palestinian Population Explosion (music by Ozzy Osbourne)

10 Ignored Facts of Muslim and Jewish Population in Israel (music by Seal)

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Anti-Semitism Spikes Because Israel-Palestine is a Religious Battle

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The spike in anti-Semitism right after the latest skirmish between the Palestinian political-terrorist group Hamas and Israel seemingly caught many people off guard even though the same thing happened in 2014. The surprise is rooted in the delusion that the conflict is between two ethnic groups (Arabs and Jews), when in fact it is a religious war between Muslims and Jews, much like the crusader wars between Christians and Muslims centuries ago. The religious battles in the holy land quickly ignite anti-Semitism globally, especially when holy sites are involved.

Sovereignty: Islamic Ottomans versus Zionist Jews

Various peoples have ventured through the holy land over thousands of years, as the small strip of land is the only corridor connecting Africa on one hand, and Europe and Asia on the other. Different races, religions and ethnicities came and went with sovereignty falling under different regimes.

From 1517 to 1917, the Ottoman Turks ruled the region as part of its vast empire. The Ottomans were Islamic and gave preference to members of its faith. Early in its rule, Ottomans kicked Jews off of the Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest location, and relegated them to a small part of the western supporting wall of the Temple Mount. That area, the Kotel, has since become the stand-in for Jews for their sacred spot. Similarly, the Islamists forbade Jews from entering the Cave of the Jewish Patriarchs and Matriarchs in Hebron.

When the British and French defeated the Ottomans in World War I, they divided the empire into distinct mandates which would ultimately become various countries including Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Israel. Upon announcing that the Jews would get to reestablish their homeland in the Balfour Declaration which became codified in international law in the 1920 San Remo Agreement and 1922 Mandate of Palestine, the Muslim Arab world went berserk. It was one thing for the far-away, non-Arab Ottoman regime to rule Palestine, but at least they were Muslims. It was an insult to Islamic pride to have the land ruled by Jews.

Goodbye Jewish Neighbors

Once the notion of Jewish sovereignty was introduced, the basic presence of Jews became a problem.

Muslim Arabs slaughtered Hebron’s Jews in 1929, making the British feel that the removal of Jews from the city was the right course of action rather than punishing the murderers. The British would fold to Muslim Arab anti-Semitism again after their multi-year riots from 1936 to 1939, and instituted the White Paper which forbade the Jews fleeing Nazi Europe to enter Palestine, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews.

During World War II, the Mufti of Jerusalem met frequently with Hitler and other Nazi leaders to conspire against the Jews, making sure they were killed and could not flee to Palestine.

Telegram from Nazi Heinrich Himmler to Islamic Mufti of Jerusalem on the anniversary of
the Balfour Declaration talking about “the battle against world Jewry.”

After the war, in the shadow of the Holocaust, Muslim nations routed Jews from their lands, with roughly one million Jews fleeing Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, Libya, Yemen and elsewhere. These were not Zionists but Jewish neighbors who had lived for hundreds of years in Muslim lands. They were attacked simply for sharing the faith with Jews in Israel.

Whether in Europe, the Middle East or North Africa, Christians and Muslims trounced the local Jewish communities.

Toxic Islamic Anti-Semitism

While the Christian world rethought systemic anti-Semitism in the Second Vatican Council of 1965, the anti-Semitic toxicity level continued to spread among Muslims, especially after their defeat in 1967 when they went from smug warriors about to finish off the Jews a mere generation after the Holocaust, to embarrassed losers in just a week.

The 1988 Hamas Charter remains the most anti-Semitic foundational document of any political party ever written. It combines the vileness of Hitler’s Mein Kampf with the Russian forgery Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It blames Jews for starting all wars for profit, controlling the media and global resources as well as “uncleanliness, vileness and evils.” The document calls upon Muslims around the world to fight the Jews and kill them in a messianic jihad. “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it…. Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious…. the Palestinian problem is a religious problem, and should be dealt with on this basis…. Israel, Judaism and Jews challenge Islam and the Moslem people.” The conflict is anchored through the lens of a religious war against Jews and Judaism.

The charter makes clear that the issue is not 1967 borders or even 1948 borders, but that “struggle against the Zionist invaders… goes back to 1939,” the beginning of the Holocaust. For Hamas, the core of the issue is that Jews survived the Holocaust and came to Palestine. The root of the current hastags #Hitlerwasright has nothing to do with a property dispute in Sheikh Jarrah in eastern Jerusalem, but that the Jews continue to exist.

Regular Islamic Anti-Semitism

Not all Muslims believe that all Jews are sinister and must be punished for re-assuming sovereignty of the holy land as they had thousands of years ago. Many are garden-variety anti-Semites.

In 2005, the Palestinians voted a man who wrote his doctoral thesis on Holocaust denial, Mahmoud Abbas, as their new president. The following year they voted the political-terrorist group Hamas to 58% of the parliament. In 2014, the ADL conducted a poll which found that 93% of Palestinian Arabs – almost every single person polled – held anti-Semitic views.

Beyond the holy land, a 2015 ADL poll found that Muslims around the world were two to five times more likely to be anti-Semites than Christians in the same country.

When Palestinians poll themselves they continue to favor Hamas. A June 2021 poll found that 59% would vote for Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas for president. They are overwhelmingly in favor of attacking Jewish Israeli civilians inside Israel.

As further proof that the dispute is between religions and not ethnic groups, Hamas’s biggest sponsors are not Arab countries but non-Arab Islamic countries of Turkey and Iran (which has threatened to wipe Israel off the map). Religion, not ethnicity, drives the conflict.

The Sensitivity of Religious Sites

While Muslim Arabs object to Jews living anywhere in what they perceive as an Islamic waqf, the sensitivity is heightened around religious sites. The Muslim world calls for “days of rage” when anything happens around Jerusalem and especially the al Aqsa Mosque. Even during peaceful times, Muslim Mourabitoun harass Jewish visitors to the Jewish Temple Mount, while they simultaneously leave Christian visitors alone.

The Indignity of the “Jewish State”

Underscoring the religious dimension of the conflict is the refusal of Palestinian Authority President to accept Israel as the “Jewish State,” even though doing so costs nothing in terms of the main desires of Palestinian Arabs which seek sovereignty and to move into neighborhoods where ancestors once lived. Abbas would be willing to forgo an independent Muslim Arab state if he has to simultaneously acknowledge Jewish sovereignty in Israel.

The Broader World’s Embrace of Muslim Anti-Semitism

The non-Muslim world has accepted many of the Muslim charges, seemingly re-connecting with its own historic toxic anti-Semitism.

Only Jewish Israelis moving east of the 1949 Armistice Lines are labeled with the unique term “settlers,” while Muslim Israeli Arabs moving to eastern Jerusalem or other parts of the West Bank are simply called “Palestinians.” Airbnb has one policy for Jews renting homes in the West Bank and another for non-Jewish neighbors renting out their homes. Europe seeks to have distinct labels for products coming from Jewish businesses in the West Bank and a different one for Muslim businesses. The dividing line is not whether the owner is Israeli or Palestinian but whether the Israeli is Jewish or Muslim.

The examples go on.

The two-state solution has been long been marketed as creating sovereign entities for two ethnic groups – Jews and Arabs – but that has always been a myth. The Arabs already have dozens of countries and Palestinian Arabs were content being part of Muslim Arab Jordan from 1949 to 1967 and the Muslim non-Arab Ottoman Empire from 1517 to 1917. The conflict stems from the massive Muslim world’s distaste for the single small Jewish state. The Islamists proposed solution is ideally to wipe the Jewish State off the map. Failing that, making the country exceptionally small, without control of any religious sites, and converted into a bi-national (non-Jewish) state is the most they could accept.

The “Palestinian-Israeli” or “Arab-Israeli” Conflict is actually the “Muslim-Jewish Conflict over the Holy Land.” It is therefore no surprise that flare-ups in Israel rooted in noxious Palestinian Muslim anti-Semitism should ignite the same vile reactions against local Jews around the world, led by regional Muslim fanatics and abetted by other willing anti-Semites.

Related First One Through articles:

‘The Maiming of the Jew’

Examining Ilhan Omar’s Point About Muslim Antisemitism

Criticizing Muslim Antisemitism is Not Islamophobia

The Parameters of Palestinian Dignity

Paying to Murder Jews: From Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Iran to the Palestinian Authority

It is Time to Insert “Jewish” into the Names of the Holy Sites

The New York Times Whitewashes Motivation of Palestinian Assassin of Robert Kennedy

Eyal Gilad Naftali Klinghoffer. The new Blood Libel.

A Tale of Three Palestinian Refugees, With and Without UNRWA

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“Clarifications,” The Toxic Cleanse

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Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) decided to absolve Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) after Omar lumped the United States and Israel into the same basket as the terrorist groups of the Taliban and Hamas. Pelosi said “We did not rebuke her. We acknowledged that she made a clarification.”

“Clarifications” on anti-Israel and anti-Jewish comments have an interesting history.

Progressive professor and CNN commentator Marc Lamont Hill offered a clarification after he quoted the tagline of the Palestinian Liberation Organization terrorist group, “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which calls for the eradication of Israel. Hill “clarified” his comment that he was actually seeking a “radical change within Israel, not a desire for its destruction,” to convert the Jewish State into a bi-national state. He implied he wants a purely Arab state of Palestine and the end of Israel as a Jewish State. That was clarity enough for his to keep his job at Temple University.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) has a similar view about Israel and she tied it to the Holocaust. She told an outright lie that Israel was established in “trying to create a safe haven for Jews, post-the Holocaust” at the expense of her Palestinian Arab ancestors. People criticized her remarks in failing a basic truth that the land of Israel has been center of Judaism for nearly 4,000 years and modern Zionism predates the Holocaust by many decades. The whitewashing of the active role her ancestors played in blocking Jews from entering Palestine in fleeing Europe – killing over 100,000 Jews – was beyond insensitive. Tlaib remained defiant tweeting “I will never allow you to take my words out of context to push your racist and hateful agenda,” in an attempt to invert her vile anti-Semitism as a charge against others who note basic facts.

Nation of Islam leader, Louis Farrakhan was a little less elegant in asking people to stop saying he’s an anti-Semite, clarifying “I’m anti-Termite.” That seemed to be enough for him to remain in a vaunted position with numerous politicians and celebrities quoting him.

Notorious anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan standing at the funeral of Aretha Franklin alongside Rev. Al Sharpton, Rev. Jesse Jackson and former U.S. President Bill Clinton (photo: Mike Segar/Reuters)

The “clarifications” of anti-Zionists and anti-Semites like Omar, Tlaib, Hill and Farrakhan are additional opportunities for them to spew venom. Their desired absolution cannot be granted by leaders like Nancy Pelosi, and each and everyone of us must hold the bigots to account.

Related First One Through articles:

Pelosi’s Vastly Different Responses to Antisemitism and Racism

Ilhan Omar Isn’t Debating Israeli Policy, She is Attacking Americans

Is Ilhan Omar’s Mentor the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei?

Rep. Ilhan Omar and The 2001 Durban Racism Conference

The Calming Feeling of Palestinian Refugees: Rashida Tlaib in Her Own Words

Bitter Burnt Ends: Talking to a Farrakhan Fan

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