Tag: anti-Semitism

Worcester State: Cowardly admins give in on free speech, antisemitism

On March 22, Worcester State University President Barry Maloney sent a college-wide email seemingly cementing the university’s reputation as an institution run by cowards who have allowed the college to turn hostile to Jews.

The email, in which Maloney implicitly blamed an observant Jewish professor for the school’s failure to stop anti-Israel and pro-Hamas* students from creating riot-like conditions on campus, was sent exactly 18 minutes before Shabbat began. On Shabbat, observant Jews refrain from social media and all forms of work; in the moments leading up to the weekly holy day, they are usually trying to finish any of the week’s unfinished business. It’s likely the professor/scapegoat is only seeing the message now.

As the top administrator of a university with a diverse student body, Maloney, or at least someone in his office, should have known that the timing of the email was a slap in the face to the professor and to the school’s Jewish community at large. Still, the form was perfect for the email’s content.

Maloney’s message, under the subject line “Moving Forward From March 13 Speaker Event” was different things to different people. For those who support Hamas, it was a huge victory. For campus Jews who – like the vast majority of Jews across America – support Israel and its war against Hamas, as well as all who support freedom of speech, the email was yet another insult from the university.

What happened on March 13?

The “March 13 speaker event” isn’t described in Maloney’s email, probably because of the immense embarrassment it was for the school. What happened was simple, though: after several engagements in which anti-Israel speakers lectured students about nonsense such as “settler colonialism” and questioned whether the atrocities of Oct. 7 actually happened, a Jewish professor invited IDF reservist Shahar Peled to speak. Peled, who was called up to duty as the massacre was ongoing, was to give an alternate point of view from what the university had previously offered, as well as to take questions and answers. As he was about to speak, a group of students, largely from the Muslim Student Association, disrupted the event to the point that it was entirely derailed.

Unlike members of a local socialist group, who protested peacefully outside, the MSA members and others forcibly disrupted the event, routinely shouting down Peled and making it impossible for attendees to hear more than a few words of his presentation. For example, Peled tried to describe a situation in which his battalion encountered an Arab family in northern Gaza after evacuations had already taken place. The family, Peled said, told soldiers that Hamas had shot their neighbors for trying to flee. Peled was interrupted by students heckling and accusing him of genocide.

A video on Twitter/X shows the moment a fire alarm caused the evacuation of Peled’s speech.

Moments later, after a few of the most egregious disruptors were escorted out, a protester pulled a fire alarm somewhere in the building. Everyone was ushered outside, where they waited for about 20 minutes. When the all-clear was given, attendees filed back in, but by that time any chance at order had vanished. The fire alarm sounded at least twice more (though the police knew it wasn’t necessary to evacuate everyone) and there was a general air of chaos in the room.

Antisemitism

While opposing the war itself isn’t inherently antisemitic, the display staged by the students clearly was. “It felt like a hate crime,” said one Jewish student after the event. A member of the Jewish community said that she was “shaken by the hate” the students displayed.

At one point, Peled said that he felt “proud to be Jewish” after all that had happened since Oct. 7. He was met with jeers.

Chaos reigns: This is while Peled was still trying to speak.

One or two students and a professor tried to provide cover for the antisemitism by saying that they were Jews against Israel, but these people represent an extremist fringe, tokens unrepresentative of the Jewish community. Recent polling shows that about 90 percent of all American Jews think Israel has a good reason to fight the current war, and more than two-thirds have no qualms about Israel’s handling of it.

For comparison, currently 17 percent of Black voters say they would back former President Trump for re-election. More than 1 in 5 Muslims, 21 percent, think that Hamas’s systematic rape, torture, and murder of civilians on Oct. 7 was acceptable. A Black voter is more likely to support Trump and a Muslim is more likely to support the Oct. 7 atrocities, according to the polling, than a Jew is likely to believe that Israel shouldn’t be fighting Hamas.

At one point, a student shouted at Peled that the conflict didn’t start on Oct. 7, to which Peled, trying to make himself heard, cited the 1929 Hebron Massacre, in which Arabs in pre-state Israel massacred dozens of Jews. Dropping any pretense that the protesters’ problem was with “Israelis” or “Zionists,” one of the students yelled, “The Jews started that,” letting his mask slip and garnering applause from most of the protesters inside the room.

The university’s response

How did the university respond to this? Did they condemn those who caused a long-scheduled event to end in chaos? Did the university condemn antisemitism? Did they punish any of the students shown clearly on video acting more like rioters than lecture attendees?

No.

First, Provost Lois Wims sent a message on March 14 saying that “there was a speaker on campus that has left some in the Worcester State community angry and upset, and we want to address these concerns.”

Note the language: people in the community were angry and upset – because of the speaker! The problem wasn’t the unruly antisemitic mob; it was the speaker who barely spoke.

These students whom the provost seems to believe were traumatized were only subject to having this speaker on campus because the “University upholds the First Amendment right to express differing viewpoints and acknowledges that some members of the community may find these viewpoints controversial or offensive.” Because the few words the speaker was able to get out might have been so traumatic, “students in need of support may contact the WSU Counseling Center.”

Really. The university’s leadership offered support to students because they voluntarily heard a few words from an Israeli Jew about Israel’s war on Hamas and yet had nothing to say about antisemitic disruptions that “felt like a hate crime.”

Flagrant dishonesty

There was not a single word in Wims’ message denouncing or criticizing the disruptions. Instead, the provost’s email dishonestly implied that the event went on as scheduled, despite a few interruptions. “While a majority of the audience listened respectfully, a handful of individuals were asked to leave the event after repeated requests to limit disruptions,” she wrote.

The audacious lunacy of Wims’ statement is easily visible in the videos of the event that circulated around the world, picked up even by Anadolu, Turkey’s official state-run news agency, And this ridiculous message was the only statement the university made until Maloney’s shameful March 22 email.

Worst practices

“Worcester State University stands firm in its commitment to academic freedom and to fostering an environment in which diverse perspectives can be shared in a safe and respectful manner,” Maloney wrote. This line sounds nice, but combined with the rest of the email, it is clearly an exercise in Orwellian doublespeak.

The students’ behavior was appalling; a (non-Jewish) professor at the event said, “I’ve never felt more ashamed of Worcester State students.” But who does Maloney blame in his email? Not the students. He writes, “I’ll note that the event on March 13 failed to adhere to some of our best practices with respect to WSU event sponsorship.”

You read that right! It wasn’t the students who silenced a speaker who are to be condemned. Instead, it was the professor who dared to invite someone a few find disagreeable to campus because he “failed to adhere to some of our best practices.” What are these best practices? Who knows? Maloney doesn’t say. Perhaps “best practices” involve not inviting Israelis? Not inviting Jews?

“Best practices” apparently allow for inviting a speaker to campus to accuse Israel of “settler colonialism” under the auspices of a lecture series that was supposed to be about domestic violence, as was the case with the Nov. 16, 2023, Candace Allen Lecture. That one-sided anti-Israel lecture was actually sponsored by the university’s office of multicultural affairs. (Contact me if you’d like a transcript.)

Maloney ends his email saying, “We expect that when members of the Worcester State community interact with one another they will uphold the University’s core values of academic excellence, engaged citizenship, the open exchange of ideas, diversity and inclusion, and civility and integrity. On these values, we must all stand firm and not allow any topic, artifact or individual undermine them.”

This is ironic, given that Maloney and Wims seem to “stand firm” on nothing. If they really care about “the open exchange of ideas,” why did Wims send an email downplaying out-of-control students disrupting an event while writing that those traumatized by the speaker can find counseling? Why does Maloney offer new rules for those organizing events and nothing for those who seek to shut them down? Why were none of the disruptors punished? Why do neither even condemn in general open and brazen behavior celebrating the shutting down of “the open exchange of ideas”?

Maloney, Wims, and the full administration should know that no one will be happy with their cowardly response. Those who support free speech and abhor antisemitism will view the university’s capitulation for what it is, a betrayal. The students they’re appeasing will only sneer, knowing that they’ve won.

*At least one of the students posted a video defending Hamas – not Palestinians, but Hamas itself – on the WSU 2024 Snapchat forum.

Nguyen statement: pro-Hamas lies, incoherence, and immorality

On November 10, Thu Nguyen, a city council member in my hometown, released a statement condemning Israel action’s in the ongoing war started by Hamas. The statement is worth examining because it is emblematic of the moral confusion and intellectual rot that has crept into much of the American left.

For background, Nguyen, who uses they/them pronouns, barely won re-election to the city council Nov. 7. Every single person who had a funded campaign and lost in the at-large council race was an ally of Nguyen, so there was no real alternative. For the two years leading up to the next election, it will be necessary to keep reminding Worcester voters of the increasing depravity of Nguyen and the need to defeat them in 2025.

Before proceeding, a note: This is not Thu Nguyen’s most extremist statement; that was when they openly defended Hamas. Most Americans are not that extreme, so that statement, while it was worth highlighting for the people of Worcester, is not worth engaging.

Nguyen’s text, which is available here, has not been altered. I did not add “sic” after every error in grammar and spelling because there were simply too many instances. I cut-and-pasted all but the last line, which was only available in the Instagram photo. Below, the statement is interspersed with my responses. The divisions are entirely my own; Nguyen posted an undivided block of text.

Council Member Thu Nguyen on Israel/Palestine
Statement as it appeared on Instagram and Facebook

Let’s take a look:

Reflections on Proxy Wars and Ones That’ll Never Reach You

Free Palestine

This is the headline, apparently. It’s not clear what Nguyen means when writing “proxy wars,” but, based on the rest of the statement, it is safe to assume that they aren’t referring to Israel being a front line for the liberal democratic world order, along with Ukraine, and Hamas a proxy for the Tehran-Moscow-Beijing alliance. In fact, the word doesn’t show up anywhere else in the post. This seems to be nothing more than an attempt to sound sophisticated.

Also what “reaching you” means is certainly up for debate. Given that antisemitism has skyrocketed to “historic” levels as a direct result of the war and that there have been increased instances of aggression and even a recent incident of lethal violence in Los Angeles, it is safe to say that the war has reached people far outside of Gaza, a fact to which Nguyen is either oblivious or finds uninteresting.

I find it interesting the people who never experience war on their land in their lifetime getting so worked up and reinforcing the violence of war and bombings on other humans. As if you ever walked miles towards safety, as if you ever had to decide between taking cover in a building for shelter or whether it was safer to stay outside in case the building collapsed on you- all in a split second.

It’s worth noting that many Jews in Worcester and around the U.S. and around the world actually know people and have relatives in Israel, people who are now fighting for their state’s survival. Some are Holocaust survivors; others are the children of Holocaust survivors. I personally have friends who are on the front lines, or who are living under rocket fire daily. A good friend of mine found out recently that one of those murdered on Oct. 7 was a relative.

The idea that the war is just some far off thing in some distant land is simply wrong, and it’s an offense to Nguyen’s constituents to tell us such a reprehensible and obvious lie.

Worth noting is that Nguyen, just like most of the protesters across the country, goes to great lengths to describe how terrible everything is for Gazans, but doesn’t even bother to mention or consider the sheer brutality of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel.

The council member, like other “progressives,” doesn’t consider how Israelis might feel, given that 1,400 compatriots were slaughtered. And even “slaughtered” sanitizes what happened. Hamas’s useful idiots encouraged online a ridiculous and shameful debate about whether babies were beheaded or simply murdered another way, as if that were better (they were beheaded), but we know that Hamas’s savagery was at least as extreme as the Nazis’. They murdered grandmothers and used the women’s own cellphones to upload the video to Facebook, so that their family members could watch their elders being slaughtered. Hamas’s thugs raped young girls – so hard their pelvic bones were broken – and, while doing so, took the girls’ phones and called their parents so the mothers and fathers could hear their daughters screaming as they were violated. They beheaded migrant workers with farm instruments. They cooked babies in ovens. Virtually every evil imaginable, they carried out.

Perhaps the reader is wondering whether Nguyen addressed this barbarity before. The answer is a resounding “no.” Nguyen could not even bring themself to vote in support of a resolution in the Worcester city council calling for the speedy release of hostages, many of whom were and are American. Nguyen gives every indication that they simply do not care about what happened on October 7.

Also, note that, while Nguyen doesn’t realize it, their description of daily life in Gaza also describes life in Israel: whole communities have been evacuated; people are still running for cover due to the ongoing rocket barrages from Hamas, as well as Hezbollah and even the Houthis in Yemen. And while Nguyen, like other American leftists, was happy to spread false information about Israel bombing a hospital in Gaza, they’ve said nothing about the fact that Hamas has bombed Barzilai Medical Center, a hospital in Ashkelon, at least three times since the war started. Hamas hit same hospital before; even in 2008, administrators moved many departments underground. The outrage is highly selective.

Both Israelis and Palestinians are suffering as a result of Hamas’s actions. Nguyen expresses sympathy for only one group and exudes an open disdain for the other.

Also note: Nguyen has never, ever, made a public statement from elected office about any other war in the world. Azerbaijan invaded Nagorno-Karabakh recently and forcibly displaced every single Armenian there. The images are staggering and horrifying. Nguyen said nothing.

The councilor did nothing to publicize the fight of the women of Iran to free themselves from theocracy. Nguyen has said nothing about any international conflict at all – not Azerbaijan; not Syria, not anywhere. Again, this is selective outrage.

Its troubling cause this isn’t our reality yet we have the audacity to say anything but demand a ceasefire. Its not our city being destroyed, bodies under rubble, and what we wake up to and close our eyes praying and falling to our knees about.

Ceasefire. Sounds nice. A lot of people – including people who, unlike Nguyen, are honest – have heard this phrase and are now calling for it. And it really does sound nice. It sounds like ending violence. It sounds like peace.

But it’s not.

A ceasefire before the return of the hostages and the overthrow of Hamas would simply set the stage for another October 7. Hamas has vowed that it would carry out the same kind of massacre again and again. As many have already noted, there was a ceasefire on October 6.

A ceasefire would let Hamas remain in power. And that is a moral depravity.

What’s more, a ceasefire would put a price tag on the head of every single civilian in the world. If Israel is pushed by the world into a ceasefire because of reports of civilian casualties (and, really, we don’t even know how many civilian casualties there are, given that the numbers are coming only from Hamas), then every single terror organization and rogue state in the world would know that they can act with complete and total impunity, so long as they are able to barricade themselves behind a few thousand civilians.

Based on the logic Nguyen uses here, the U.S. never could have fought World War II or the Civil War, because both brutalized civilians. Would Nguyen feel satisfied if this “principled stance’ were taken, even though it would have left the Nazis in power or slavery still in place in America? Is Nguyen pro-slavery? Pro-Nazi? Or does Nguyen single out only Israel because of a special animosity toward that state? Or does Nguyen simply have no idea what they’re talking about?

Of course these questions apply to everyone calling for a ceasefire.

There’s too many better logic and arguments for me to come up with more. If a shooter was in a school, we wouldn’t bomb the school. If hostages were held in a hospital, we don’t bomb a hospital. 

It’s probably for the best that Nguyen doesn’t come up with any of the “many better logic and arguments” than they’ve already put forward, because doing so would make them look even more ridiculous.

No, we don’t bomb a school if there is a shooter inside. But – get this – that’s an entirely different situation. A school shooter is a threat to anyone in the school. Bombing the school kills the shooter and everyone the shooter is a threat to. But Hamas isn’t a school shooter, and Hamas isn’t a threat only to the people in Gaza. Hamas is an organization that maintains state power and has genocidal intent for the people outside the “school.” If we wanted to simplify the situation down, as Nguyen does, the “shooter” would also be carrying a bomb large enough to blow up the city, and be intent on using. Instead of blowing up the school, the authorities would be planting snipers around the building, hoping to take out the shooter with minimal loss to civilians – essentially exactly what Israel is doing, but on a tiny scale. 

We condemn gas chambers used in the holocaust and agent orange in the Southeast Asian War yet white phosphorous chemical warfare is okay.

This statement is grotesque. The most obvious reason is that there is no hard evidence that Israel used white phosphorus at all, and we know for certain that Israel did not use it as an indiscriminate weapon of chemical warfare. In fact, white phosphorus is used legally in war as a way to light up an area. There is no question: Israel did not attack civilians with white phosphorus. Israel is not engaged in chemical warfare. The point bears repeating: if Israel did not care about reducing civilian casualties, the war would have been over on October 9.

The second, and more odious, reason this statement is grotesque is that Nguyen is comparing Israeli actions to the Holocaust. Comparing Israeli actions to Germany’s slaughter of two-thirds of all European Jewry is called “Holocaust inversion” and is a particularly insidious form of antisemitism, specifically named as such by the IHRA definition of antisemitism.

A simple model was dropped by her agent for making such odious statements, and yet Nguyen since in Worcester’s city council. Again: voters take note. In 2025, we have a moral duty to oust Nguyen.

And I find arguments unnecessary, a distraction, I can’t find words to reach people who don’t see children with names written on their arms to note their deaths tragic and just a fate one must accept under the pretense of war. I don’t see how to reach one’s empathy if they don’t think losing 3 generations in one day with no lineage left to light incense or create an altar to mourn the lives lost, simply erased upon this blood soaked earth.

In other words, “I’ll continue to condemn Israel and defend terrorists, even though I can’t figure out a legitimate argument for doing so.”

Here Nguyen does what you’ll find anti-Israel, pro-Hamas people doing all over the country: refusing any form of discussion. “I find arguments unnecessary,” Nguyen says. In writing this, Nguyen – who, as we’ve seen, either knows nothing about the conflict or is a useful idiot purveying misinformation – has decided that they don’t need to actually discuss the issue with anyone. There’s no need to listen to any Jews aside from the token few who agree with them.

Engaging with, in Nguyen’s case, the very people they purport to represent would be “a distraction” from spreading the latest and best misinformation Hamas sends through al-Jazeera.

I don’t see how we can explain history in a society that thinks critical race theory is a theory and not the experience of the majority of people in the United States in systems that rejects the truth.

Now Nguyen is, in a post about Palestinians, discussing critical race theory. Here, they are linking American racial problems to Israel, a conflation that makes no sense and serves only to demonize the Jewish state. It is common for American leftists to portray Israel as “white” and the Palestinians as “people of color,” even though Palestine is one of the most racist societies in the world toward Black people, with 44 percent of the population saying they wouldn’t want a neighbor of another race. (Check out how the Palestinian press depicted Condoleeza Rice, whom they referred to as a “Black spinster.”) The American white/Black dichotomy simply makes no sense when superimposed onto the conflict.

Also, in case Nguyen is reading: Critical race theory is a theory. It’s the third word in the actual name of the school of thought. In that phrase, it’s actually the noun: “critical” and “race” modify “theory.” Whether a person disagrees or agrees with it, it is still a theory, just like evolution is a theory. Nguyen seems not to understand that a “theory” in science is a way of best understanding a pattern of facts. Here’s a definition from the American Museum of Natural History.

The whole discussion of “what is a theory?” might seem like an aside, but it’s not. The point is that this level of ridiculousness is exactly where the anti-Israel argument is. The people who are so fervent in their condemnation of Israel are the people who speak so forcefully on topics about which they are completely and totally misinformed. Nguyen, who holds a Bachelor’s degree from a prestigious university, repeating “just a theory” like some proponent of intelligent design, is a perfect example of the sad reality.

What we are up against is monstrous, toxic to the bones.

Indeed, what we are up against is monstrous. Unfortunately Nguyen, full of disinformation and lies in service of Hamas, is part of that monstrosity. Worcester voters must take note.

It thrives on us giving up on each other. It thrives on us choosing ourselves over our collective liberation. It thrives on us refusing to acknowledge each other’s humanity. So I get our innate need of survival, but I don’t believe in doing it at the sake of others. At the sake of genocide. Free Palestine.

Again, Nguyen, like anti-Israel people across the country, is speaking nonsense. The word “genocide” actually has a meaning; it’s not simply an invective to be thrown around. According to Oxford, “genocide’ means “the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.” Unintended civilian collateral damage, no matter how awful, is not genocide.

Israel is deliberately killing Hamas, and there is likely collateral damage. That’s not genocide. If that were genocide, then the Allies, who killed millions of Germans during World War II, would have been guilty of it against Germans. Of course we weren’t; only an idiot would think that.

The claim of “genocide” is particularly pernicious, because it paints Israel as a uniquely evil state, in line with Nazi Germany, aiming to wipe out an entire people. This is nothing more than a modern incarnation of Middle Ages blood libel.

If ya haven’t spoken up, its not too late.

While Nguyen didn’t mean it like this, this part is true. We missed our shot to get rid of Nguyen in the past election cycle – and really, looking at how far Nguyen dropped in votes, and taking note that there was no alternative who was not an ally of Nguyen, that was a huge missed opportunity to run someone good, or for someone of the challengers to have broken ranks, condemned Nguyen’s support for Hamas, and won. But there is another election in just a couple years, and the voters can get rid of Nguyen then.

For the reader not in Worcester, next year’s presidential and Congressional elections will present similar choices.

We need to escalate and stop the systems. We need to not live business as usual. We need to dig deep into our souls. This “Thanksgiving,” this Christmas, this New Year, this holiday season for everyone. We owe it to each other. Our humanity depends on it.

Here Nguyen wraps up with the nonsensical. “Thanksgiving” in quotation marks. Why? No one knows. Another thing no one, likely including Nguyen, knows is what exactly “stop the systems” means. Here, Nguyen, like some freshman in college just discovering socialism, throws in a word to sound clever, even though they won’t – likely can’t – articulate what it is they mean, what this “system” is.

And thus concludes Nguyen’s diatribe. Virtually every sentence is nonsense, and it is packed with all kids of misinformation, slander, antisemitism, and sophistry. Virtually every anti-Israel, pro-ceasefire argument that I’ve come across is nothing more than this. Granted, there are many actual well meaning people who get swept up in calls for ceasefire, but they’ve been swindled, taken in by arguments like those of Nguyen and other Hamas defenders.

Dear reader, these arguments are vacuous and dangerous. You know it. We all know it. Don’t let people like Nguyen and their allies dominate the discussions. Speak up. Respond to them. Call out their nonsense, and don’t be fooled by them throwing lots of words they themselves don’t understand into a statement or post on Facebook or Twitter.

Jenna Ortega: Antisemite or useful idiot?

On Instagram alone, Gen Z superstar Jenna Ortega has more than 40 million followers, roughly three times as many people as there are Jews in the world. Consequently, what she says about us matters. And what she’s been saying has been bad.

Very bad.

I wrote in these pages last year that Ortega seemed to be an intelligent person who had, in her naivete, made an innocent mistake in posting propaganda from a website that justifies violence and seeks Israel’s destruction. I also argued that she probably isn’t an antisemite.

I retract at least one of these judgments.

She’s either a smart antisemite or a decent person who happens to be, to put it plainly, stupid. As I demonstrated in previous posts, the website she linked to had deeply antisemitic content. It was created by people who champion terrorists who killed civilians and who think that a “free Palestine” would mean most Jews leaving Israel and the remainder being “re-educated.” After the article and ensuing blowback, the actress quietly removed the pinned post from her Twitter (now X) feed.

Everyone makes mistakes, but a smart person in her position would be extremely careful in what content she posts moving forward, at least if she cares an ounce about the Jewish people. Unfortunately, she hasn’t been.

On October 18, yesterday, Ortega used her platform to broadcast to the world a message calling to “stop the genocide against Palestinians.” The idea that the planet’s only Jewish state, uniquely evil, is somehow hellbent on killing innocent Palestinians harkens back to the Middle Ages. Then, Jews were routinely accused of plotting to kill children or other crimes. It was common to accuse us even of trying to wipe out much of Europe by poisoning drinking water. The only difference is that before Jews were thought to be working out of their shtetls; now we are assumed to be using the miraculous state we established to kill for fun. 

The notion that Israel is consciously trying to kill off the Palestinians is not just insane – it is, as President Herzog himself said in reference to the various conspiracy theories being pedaled, a modern form of blood libel.

And now Ortega’s broadcast it to 40 million people, most of them young and impressionable kids who listen more to celebrities than thought leaders.

It should come as no surprise to any thinking person that these kinds of accusations fuel hatred against Jews and can end up getting people hurt – or worse. In recent years, but especially since the Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel and Israel’s response, Jews around the world have been fearful of going to synagogues, wearing their Magen Davids in public, sending their kids to Jewish schools, and a host of other things that non-Jews do without a care in the world.

They’re not fearful for no reason: the FBI and police departments across the country and world have been forced to step up security around Jewish institutions. Antisemitic incidents in the U.S., which had already been on the rise, rose by a whopping 300 percent, dramatically increasing after the Israel-Hamas war began. A teacher was stabbed in France. A synagogue was firebombed in Germany. The list goes on. Even as I write this, the news is reporting that a New York woman was just punched in the face by an assailant who yelled, “You are Jewish.”

And Ortega decided to fan the flames to her 40 million followers around the world.

Here’s the tricky part, the part that makes it unclear whether Ortega was motivated by a belief that Jews are generally bad and wanted to hide that unfortunate believe or if she is just really, really gullible.

The post Ortega shared was from a group called “Jewish Voice for Peace.”

Perhaps Ortega thought that JVP must not be a problem, given the term Jewish in their moniker. But a person of goodwill who had already been condemned for posting a call to destroy a nation, if they were smart, would have done at least a little bit of research into the organization whose voice they’re amplifying to millions, especially when it’s making accusations of genocide.

If Ortega merely spent a moment on Google, she would have found that JVP, far from being a nice and fluffy peace group full of Jews, is actually a shadowy organization flagged by the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. The ADL’s report is literally the second thing that comes up in a Google search for “Jewish Voice for Peace.”

The ADL states the problem with JVP very clearly: “JVP does not represent the mainstream Jewish community, which it views as bigoted for its association with Israel.” Further, “The spread of JVP’s most inflammatory ideas can help give rise to antisemitism.” The idea that the Jewish state is engaged in genocide is certainly one of its most extreme ideas.

Click here to read the rest of this post at the Times of Israel.

Worcester city council must reject Thu Nguyen’s indulgence of antisemitism

There is something deeply unsettling in Worcester City Council member Thu Nguyen’s attitude toward Jews and the Jewish state.

Most recently, Nguyen, who uses they/them pronouns, took issue with a statement that City Council Member Moe Bergman put forward for the council’s consideration. The text, below, seems uncontroversial:

That the City Council of the City of Worcester does hereby condemn the recent barbaric and inhuman taking of hostages in Israel, including a number of American citizens, and prays for their immediate and safe release and return to their loved ones.

Who could take issue with a statement calling for the release of hostages, many of whom are children? Apparently Thu Nguyen. They posted to social media Bergman’s proposed resolution, complaining, “There is no acknowledgement of the death and suffering of the Palestinians and what has unfolded. I urge us to speak. If we are to go on record regarding Israel-Hamas, we must also be on the record calling for a ceasefire and an end to the killing of Palestinians, the collective punishment, and imminent genocide.”

Other city council member’s should ignore, or even condemn, Nguyen.

First, it’s worth pointing out that Bergman’s statement is directed only at those held captive by Hamas. There is also no acknowledgement of the death and suffering of the hundreds of Israelis who were slaughtered, unprovoked, by the thugs who streamed into Israel on October 7. Nguyen doesn’t seem to mind that they were not mentioned. Why would this be?

Unfounded accusations of Israeli of “genocide”

But notice something else in this statement. Nguyen not only minimizes the horrors perpetuated by Hamas; they also accuse Israel of “genocide.” This is an antisemitic trope with no basis in reality. The idea that evil Israel is plotting to wipe out an entire population of innocent victims is nothing more than a modern form of blood libel.

On October 7, Hamas perpetrated the worst terrorist attack in Israel’s history, perhaps the worst ever carried out in the developed world. Babies were burned and beheaded, girls were raped while their parents were forced to listen by cellphone, people were burnt alive in bomb shelters, Holocaust survivors and toddlers were taken captive and brought into Gaza. The list goes on.

What does Nguyen think the proper response should be to a state-like entity sending its “warriors” across the border to rape, murder, and kill? Israel decided it would topple the terrorist organization responsible. While President Biden agrees with this decision – he even said it was necessary to do so – Nguyen wrote in another rambling statement, “Demanding that people leave within 2/4 hours and then bombing the escape routes. We cannot with our conscious(sic) encourage this behavior. We must call for a ceasefire and negotiate towards peace.”

Nguyen’s statement on Facebook

A ceasefire! Negotiations toward “peace”! How nice that sounds. Israel should just lay down its weapons and have a nice conversation with those who came to rape and murder her citizens! That will solve everything! Obviously, this is a stupid idea. No “negotiations” are possible with a group that wants to murder you – and Hamas’s founding charter, which calls for the eradication of all Jews – makes that intent clear.

Propaganda directly from Hamas

Also notice the little detail about “Demanding that people leave…and then bombing the escape routes.” This is propaganda directly from Hamas. Hama’s supporters spread this narrative around the Internet for a bit, before video emerged debunking the claim: the “bombing” was an explosion of a vehicle, which couldn’t have been caused by Israel, as there were no troops in Gaza, nothing flying overhead, and no projectile incoming. Smarter antisemites stopped talking about this before Nguyen made their post.

But let’s look closer at Nguyen’s two statements. One accuses Israel of plotting “genocide.” The other condemns Israel for telling Gazan civilians to get out of areas where there is going to be intense bombing and fighting. If Israel is plotting to murder all Gazans, why is it telling them to go a dozen miles south temporarily so that they can avoid being endangered?

Special standards for Israel

Yes, it’s true that Gazan civilians are dying in Israel’s response to Hamas. That is sad, and every Jew I’ve spoken with or texted with, including friends who are now in the IDF, who are scared but desperate to fight Hamas, have expressed sorrow at the deaths of innocent Gazans. But has Nguyen no idea of what happens in war? Can Nguyen, or anyone, name a war in which civilians weren’t killed? Has Nguyen ever looked at the photos of Berlin or Rome or many other European cities, bombed out as a result of World War II? No one accuses the U.S. of genocide, even though our air force carried out a bombing raid on Tokyo that killed 100,000 civilians on a single night in 1945.

Would Nguyen argue that the U.S. should have just sat out the war and “negotiated” for “peace” with the Nazis?

War is horrible. You don’t judge a country’s entry into a war based on the ugliness of the conflict. You judge the war based on whether or not the intended outcome is just, and whether the country making war is doing its part to prevent civilian casualties.

Europe after World War II

Israel is obviously doing its part. It gave civilians notice, while Hamas gave none to the innocents before they raped and murdered and captured them. That’s why Israel even extended the deadline for people to leave northern Gaza. That’s why Israel turned on water to southern Gaza and why it’s made way for food shipments.

Given the above, that Israel’s aims are just and that its defense forces are doing their part to get civilians out of harm’s way, it is impossible to imagine that anyone could seriously believe that Israel is trying to wipe the Gazans from the face of the Earth, i.e., to commit genocide. Also interesting to note is that Nguyen hasn’t condemned any other country for “genocide” or war crimes. They didn’t even note that Azerbaijan expelled nearly every single ethnic Armenian from Nagorno-Karabach a few weeks ago. Worcester has one of the largest Armenian populations in America, so this is certainly as local an issue as Palestinian suffering.

Clearly, given that their only statements on foreign policy relate to Israel, and that they expend far more words condemning the Jewish state than Hamas, Nguyen is singling Israel out as an actor of unique evil, the Jew of nations.

Not only did this statement make nonsensical claims that promote antisemitism – endangering Jews everywhere – but Nguyen also includes another piece of dishonesty. They write, “I did not intend on writing a statement not because I don’t care but because I am still learning and working through my emotions.”

Nguyen doesn’t seem to have been “still learning and working through my emotions.” Before posting that statement, they had already spread lies. On October 12, the eve of the “day of rage” proclaimed by Hamas, when tens of thousands of Jews around the world, including here, were deciding whether to send their kids to school or to keep them home for fear of violence, when Worcester synagogues needed police protection to ensure Jews’ safety, Nguyen had already decided they “learned” and “worked through” their emotions enough to post a statement from Jewish Voice for Peace accusing Israel of plotting genocide.

Again: at the very moment Jews around the world and here in Worcester were taking shelter, Nguyen posted an inflammatory statement accusing the Jewish state of genocide.

And don’t be fooled by the word “Jewish” (or the word “peace”) in JVP’s name. As I pointed out to Nguyen, JVP is labeled by the Anti-Defamation League as an extremist organization that fans the flames of antisemitism. This is an organization that literally posted a picture of IDF soldiers drinking the blood of children.

“Jewish Voice for Peace” sounds nice, but it’s an extremist organization

Using a fake Jewish organization to spread lies about Israel is a grotesque form of tokenizing Jews. As a public servant, Nguyen should know that the vast majority of Jews in their community are still reeling from the violence of October 7 and, along with President Biden, Sen. Chuck Schumer, and a host of other American leaders, support Israel in defending herself.

Nguyen must at least intuit that they’re engaging in gross antisemitism; that’s why, throughout their statements they use this fake Jewish organization and refer to their Jewish friends as cover. It’s a form of tokenizing, as in the case of every white racist who assures the world that they have Black friends.

I responded to Nguyen on Instagram, noting that using JVP as a way to express the opinions of the Jewish community is similar to using Candace Owens as a messenger of the opinions of the Black community. Nguyen replied, oddly, only that they viewed JVP as Angela Davis. I wrote about this and, of course, Nguyen felt aggrieved, bringing us to another act of dishonesty on the council member’s part.

While most people would issue an apology if someone pointed out that they shared a post from an organization identified by the ADL as an extremist group, Nguyen let the propaganda stand. Then, when this Jew-endangering behavior was pointed out, they jumped to an old standby: “…believing in the dignity, the right to live and freedom of Palestinians is not anti-semitic. This notion of being anti-Jewish over the simple acknowledgement of a community is a reductive argument that detracts from the conversation of history and people’s humanity…” Obviously, I never called Nguyen an antisemite for “believing in the dignity,” etc. of Palestinians. I suggested that they were ignorant or antisemitic for dishonestly accusing the Jewish state of “genocide,” a form of blood libel, on the eve of a day when violence against Jews had been called for worldwide.

The Worcester city council should reject an amendments to the statement condemning kidnapping from the council member most guilty of spreading antisemitism.

And voters should reject Nguyen in November.

Condemning Israel like condemning Allied powers during WWII

Question: Was it wrong for America and her allies to fight World War II, given that our bombing caused an immense amount of suffering for the German, Italian, Japanese, and other people, including innocent women, children, and even babies?

Keep in mind that the U.S. and allied forces used atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We also literally lit the air of Dresden on fire, killing everyone around, combatant or not, in one of the most gruesome ways imaginable.

If your answer to the above question is “yes,” that fighting WWII was morally wrong, you’ve chosen the side of depravity. In the interest of “peace” and “humanitarian efforts,” you’ve agreed it would have been acceptable to allow the Nazi Reich to maintain power at the expense of the lives of millions of people, especially Jews and the Romani, but millions of others as well – across Europe and, eventually, the world.

If you answered “no,” congratulations. You’ve made the hard choice that the people we tasked with making these choices made, in the interests of justice. And if you answered this way, then you must logically support Israel’s actions in Gaza, especially given that Israel has not, and will never, commit anything remotely approaching the scale – or type – of Dresden or Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Israel will never target civilians.

Egregious lies

And yet there are people, even now, days after the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust, urging Israel to move toward de-escalation and restraint in its just and proper war against Hamas in Gaza. Israel should not accept their council. This same advice would have left the Nazis in power in Germany.

Even more egregious, some are publicly accusing Israel of war crimes, including even ethnic cleansing and genocide. The best of these people is that they are completely devoid of any realistic understanding of the situation. The worst of them are purposely repeating Hamas talking points, aimed at undermining Israel’s just response. During World War II, these same people would likely be repeating Nazi talking points about the poor suffering Aryans.

In my own city of Worcester, Massachusetts, there is a city council member, Thu Nguyen, who falls into this latter category, though I can’t make any claim to know if Nguyen, who uses they/them pronouns, is an ignoramus or a conscious defender of Hamas. They posted to Instagram a statement from Jewish Voice for Peace, an organization designated by the ADL as an extremist group dangerous to the Jewish community, accusing Israel of plotting “imminent genocide.”

With Nguyen, I have to assume that they are in the “defenders of Hamas category,” as I responded to them with a link from the ADL explaining who and what JVP is and pointing out that tokenizing a “Jewish” group to promote anti-Jewish ideas is akin to using a statement from Candace Owens as representative of the Black community. Nguyen ignored the ADL’s statement, responding only that they (Nguyen) considered JVP to be more like Angela Davis, whatever that means. Needless to say, Nguyen’s accusation of genocide has not been removed from their Instagram feed.

Unfortunately, there are people like Nguyen across the country, all across social media and cable news making these ridiculous claims. It’s as if some of these people don’t even understand the words they are using.

The falsity of the “genocide” claims

How can anyone accuse Israel of genocide? Israel’s military could easily kill every single man, woman, and child in Gaza right now. That is not what they are doing; the goal of the war has been announced: to destroy the military capabilities of Hamas. While Thu Nguyen and others might not make a distinction between Hamas and innocent civilians, Israel does.

Israel is conducting targeted air strikes to remove Hamas targets so that a ground invasion can begin. Before the airstrikes began, Israel sent video messages in Arabic to the people of Gaza telling them the general area where the bombs would fall and where to go for safety. As the ground invasion comes closer to commencing, Israel has given warning – something that the slaughtered in Israel didn’t receive from Hamas – telling everyone in northern Gaza to evacuate to south of Wadi, or about ten or 15 miles south of Gaza’s most extreme northern border.

Those who make genocide generally don’t give warnings to their intended victims telling them where to go for safety. Unfortunately, for bad actors like Nguyen and others, this has brought no good will for Israel. Instead, they suggest that the temporary evacuation is a form of ethnic cleansing!

By the standards of those who argue Israel is engaged in the practice, the U.S. ethnically cleanses Florida every so often, each time a hurricane approaches the region.

If we agree that World War II was a just war, we have to agree that Israel’s actions in Gaza are just, given that Israel is taking a dramatically more proactive effort to preserve the lives of civilians than we ever did. Who would you rather be, a Gazan driving or walking ten miles from home or a citizen of Dresden, where the air was turned into fire?

The real war criminals

As I wrote before, there will sadly be casualties in the Israel-Hamas war, both Gazans and Israeli soldiers. Despite this, Israel has to fight. The past couple decades of relative security have been due to the perception that Israel is a powerhouse. If Israel loses that edge, not only Hamas, but Hezbollah and their director financiers, Iran, will be emboldened. The horrors those groups could unleash are unimaginable.

Make no mistake: there is no justification for war crimes, and any soldier who loses their mind and commits a vile act should and would be prosecuted. Israel will not commit them. Hamas, on the other hand, is and has been.

Hamas is using civilians as shields.

Hamas raped young girls and forced their parents to listen.

Hamas killed children in front of their parents and parents in front of their children.

Hamas is refusing to let Gazan civilians evacuate.

Hamas burned babies alive.

Hamas has turned schools, hospitals, mosques, and other areas into military installations.

Hamas is targeting civilians.

Hamas is torturing people.

Hamas commits rape as an act of war.

All of these are war crimes, crimes against humanity and Hamas must be made to pay for them.

Choose the right side

Any blood spilled in this conflict is on the hands of Hamas’s leaders and members. Any decent person, should they learn of a civilian killed in Gaza, should mourn them, but they should assign blame appropriately. Allowing the terror group to stay in power, ruling over Gaza, would itself be a crime against humanity, a crime that Thu Nguyen and many other “peace” lovers seem fully content with.

There is no “context” to consider. There are no shades of gray. In this conflict, Israel is on the side of good. And if you’re opposed to the side of good, either through restraining it or spreading ridiculous lies and propaganda pieces from the other side, you’ve chosen the side of evil.

Featured image: Montecruz Foto // Creative Commons License

A Society of Baruch Goldsteins

On February 25, 1994, Baruch Goldstein, armed and wearing his reserve uniform, walked into Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs and found a room in which dozens of Muslims were praying. Provoked by nothing but his own madness, he lifted a Galil rifle and opened fire on the innocents, unloading 111 rounds and killing 29 people.

Israel was stunned.

Israel’s Response to a Jewish Terrorist

“I am shamed over the disgrace imposed upon us by a degenerate murderer,” Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin told parliament. “You are not part of the community of Israel,” Rabin added, addressing not only Goldstein, who had already been beaten to death by others at the cave, but of anyone who thought like him.

The prime minister emphasized the point, saying that people like Goldstein were “not partners in the Zionist enterprise” and “a foreign implant” and “an errant weed.”

“A single, straight line connects the lunatics and racists of the entire world,” Rabin said, condemning all forms of terror. He added that Goldstein was no better than a terrorist who kills Jews, saying,  “A single line of blood and terrorism runs from the Islamic Holy War member who shot Jewish worshipers who stood in prayer in the synagogues of Istanbul, Paris, Amsterdam and Rome, to the Jewish Hamas member who shot Ramadan worshipers.”

The condemnation crossed partisan lines. Benjamin Netanyahu, then leader of the opposition, deplored the violence as a “despicable crime” and expressed his “unequivocal condemnation.”

Rabbis in Israel, including the Chief Rabbis, and around the world, including the Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, then Britain’s chief rabbi, condemned Goldstein. Rabbi Sacks said that “Such an act is an obscenity and a travesty of Jewish values. That it should have been perpetrated against worshippers in a house of prayer at a holy time makes it a blasphemy as well.”

The state took action. Goldstein had been a member of the Kach movement, founded by Meir Kahane, who was assassinated several years before. Already banned in 1992 from running for elections in the Knesset, the movement was outlawed altogether after Goldstein’s massacre. A special body of inquiry, the Shagmar Comission, was even set up to probe the events.

Aside from a  vanishingly small number of people who actually believed that Goldstein had thwarted a terrorist plot – he hadn’t – Israeli society was united in its outrage. Even now, decades later, as Israel has moved further to the right politically, Goldstein is still reviled. There has been a great deal of scandal around Itamar ben Gvir joining Israel’s government, because he was at one time a supporter of Goldstein. But even he, perhaps Israel’s most extreme politician, had to announce that he was no longer a supporter to gain office. He might be honest, an Israeli version of Democratic U.S. Senator Robert Byrd, who went from recruiting friends to the Ku Klux Klan to endorsing Barack Obama for president. Or ben Gvir could be lying; either way, aside from a few political outcasts, Israeli society rejects Goldstein’s legacy and those who support him.

Compare the above to the morally abject displays across a wide swath of Palestinian society this past weekend.

Palestinian society’s response to a terrorist

On Jan. 27, 2023, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, seven Israeli Jews, including a 14-year-old boy, were murdered by a Palestinian gunman in cold blood while leaving their synagogue in a Jerusalem suburb. The next day, another Palestinian terrorist, this one 13 years old, tried to kill a father and son who, luckily, survived.

Palestinian society’s response to the massacre of innocents at their place of worship was dramatically different from Israel’s. Instead of widespread condemnation, streets in the West Bank and Gaza erupted in celebration. Palestinians chanted and cheered, distributed candies, shot their many guns into the air, and even lit fireworks. And this was not the response of a small group of extremists: the streets were literally filled.

Read the rest of this article at the Times of Israel (no paywall).

Jenna Ortega did the right thing. Will others?

In December, two articles appeared here asking which type of antisemitism was more dangerous for Jews: the kind promoted by Kanye West or Jenna Ortega. The comparison surprised many. The fallen-from-grace hip hop artist Kanye openly loves Hitler, while Ortega, star of Netflix’s Wednesday, seems a nice person who genuinely wants to help those in need. Judging by the controversy that ensued, the question was entirely warranted. The argument was never that Ortega’s an antisemite, but that antisemitism under the social justice guise of anti-Zionism is at least as dangerous as its other forms, because it is so easily accepted. The online outrage entirely validated the point.

The original article argued that Ortega was doing damage to Jews, especially young Jews on college campuses, by pinning a link to the “Decolonize Palestine” website to her Twitter profile. That site has the look and feel of a progressive social justice advocacy page, but the veneer masks a series of talking points completely aligned with Hamas’s.

As it turned out, Hamas agreed and began featuring Ortega’s words on its Quds News Network.

Importantly, the intent was never to demonize the actress. As both articles note, she seems to be a decent person who would honestly tell anyone who asked that she deplores Jew hatred; that’s what made “her hate” so terrifying. The hate was “hers” only because when you post something on social media, it’s yours. That Ortega is actually a good person fooled by slick propaganda made her post all the more frightening.

With the previous articles, the aim was that maybe only a few thousand people would read them and that someone on Ortega’s publicity team would take note. The hope of the second article was more specific, that someone from a Jewish organization would reach out and explain to Ortega, first, that Decolonize is a hate site and, second, the amount of harm this type of propaganda does, especially on college campuses, where anti-Zionists often protest any Jewish organizations, political or not.

For example, someone should have explained to the Scream star that, due to ideology like this, Dyke Marches, like the one in D.C. and the one in Chicago, barred Jewish pride flags, causing LGBTQ Jews to fear for their safety. Or that this ideology caused the Washington, D.C., Sunrise Movement, an environmental organization, to boycott a national demonstration for voting rights due to the participation of liberal Jewish groups, including the Religious Action Center. RAC is the Reform Jewish movement’s political action arm, which advocates for almost all the issues Ortega supports and routinely criticizes Israel. Or perhaps she could have been educated on how American Jewish youth often hide all signs of their Jewishness for fear of being harassed on college campuses.

Hollywood unfriendly to open friends of Israel

What happened behind the scenes is unknown, but, as it turns out, Ortega did the right thing. Or, at least, the closest to the right thing she could do that wouldn’t also be career suicide: she unpinned the tweet from the top of her Twitter feed, meaning that anyone who wanted to see it would have to scroll back to March. This effectively consigned the tweet to oblivion without causing anti-Zionist pages that embedded her tweet to become filled with “tweet deleted” messages, which would have led to outrage from a well-organized, powerful movement that would immediately turn on her. Despite the antisemitic trope, it is hard to support, or even openly not hate, Israel in Hollywood. Gal Gadot was nearly canceled simply for saying during a recent war initiated by Hamas that she wants Israel and its neighbors to find a way to live in peace.

Calls for peace are “propaganda” for “ethnic cleansing.” That’s how these people think. Clearly, the anti-Zionist left/Hamas extremist grouping is dangerous to an actor, especially a rising celebrity.

Confirming the above, just after Ortega did the right thing, Twitter user Amir Amini posted a screen grab of the “Ortega vs. Kanye” article, dishonestly suggesting that the Times of Israel (the article and its headline are solely my own) was attacking Ortega for saying “Palestinians deserve to live.” Obviously part of a media campaign, his tweet was viewed 11.3 million times and retweeted 49 thousand times, creating such a controversy that Newsweek and others covered it, associating Ortega with Kanye not for a few thousand people who read the articles, but for millions who didn’t. This is an injustice to the actress, who took a step to right her mistake.

The Co-Founders of “Decolonize” Let the Truth Slip

Read the rest of this article at the Times of Israel. (No paywall)

Jenna Ortega becomes Hamas poster child, Jewish organizations silent

In a further illustration of what happens when people with seemingly good intent spread propaganda about things they don’t understand, Jenna Ortega, the American actress who rose to fame as Wednesday Addams on the eponymous Netflix series, has become – literally – a poster child for Hamas via their Quds News Network.

Shamefully, American Jewish organizations have said nothing.

Ortega’s Tweets

As noted previously, the actress shared a link to the “Decolonize Palestine” website. At first glance, it seemed in keeping with previous social media posts – she’s championed the cause of Planned Parenthood, Ukrainians, the women of Iran, and children in Iraq and Yemen. However, while she supports women rising up against Islamic theocrats in Tehran, the “Decolonize” link was essentially a list of talking points in line with Hamas, an organization funded in large part by Iran and which imposes an Iranian-style theocracy on Gaza. Some of what appears on the site has been disavowed even by the PLO and the Palestinian Authority, which the site calls “subcontractors for Israeli control of Palestine” (as does Hamas).

Lest anyone think that Israel’s new right-wing government is the problem, the “Decolonize” link Ortega promoted goes out of its way in its “myths” section to argue that this is wrong. Instead, any Israeli government, even if it were composed entirely of left-wing pro-Palestinians, would be the same, since, we’re told, “a colonial society will also produce a colonial ‘left’, and even a colonial ‘peace’ movement. This was exemplified by Yitzhak Rabin.”

Needless to say, the site is full of anti-Semitic tropes, portraying Jews as shadowy operators, lurking behind the scenes to exert control. Take any 19th-century anti-Semitic work, replace “Jew” with “Zionist,” and you’ll have something that looks like “Decolonize Palestine.”

Ortega’s tweet has been shared nearly 10,000 times, and has received more than 32,000 likes. For context, the top 25 percent of Twitter users receive on average only 37 likes and a single retweet per month. Each retweet and each like exposes the link to an even greater audience, and, because she has the tweet “pinned” to the top of her profile, people continue to see it for the first time each day.

The Face of a U.S.-Designated Terrorist Organization

Read the rest of this post at the Times of Israel (no paywall).

Jenna Ortega vs. Kanye: Who’s more dangerous on antisemitism?

Who’s more dangerous to the safety of Jewish people, Kanye West or Jenna Ortega?

Easy, right? Kanye is an open Jew hater. He creates tweets that are both incomprehensible and threateningly anti-Semitic, spews Black Hebrew Israelite and Nation of Islam propaganda, and declares his love for Hitler and the Nazis. He even appeared to cause discomfort for even Alex Jones, the guy who attacked the survivors of the Sandy Hook shooting. Ortega, who plays Wednesday Addams in the current Netflix series, is, according to those who work with her, genuinely nice. While West uses his social media for self-aggrandizement, unhinged rants, declarations that he is a god, and, most troublingly, Jew hatred, Ortega uses hers to promote her work and humanitarian causes. She seems to genuinely want to help others.

And therein lies the problem.

The anti-Semitism of the well-intentioned but uninformed

West understands antisemitism perfectly well. He hates Jews. Whatever else is going on in his addled mind, that much is clear. Jenna Ortega presumably sincerely believes that antisemitism is evil, no less so than sexism, homophobia, hatred of Muslims, or other forms of racism and xenophobia. The idea that she promotes anti-Jewish causes would likely make her shudder. The problem is that, like millions of other well meaning Americans, she has no real understanding of antisemitism, and therefore is unlikely to recognize it in at least some of its forms. And, also like millions of other Americans, she likely doesn’t do much investigation into a cause before she posts it to social media. (The number of celebrities who at least in part handle their own social media is astounding.)

Earlier this year, someone forwarded a link to a group chat, horrified that “the girl from Scream” (the Netflix series hadn’t yet been released) would post something like it. (My friend, a Russian-speaking Israeli Jew, used far more vividly descriptive and colorful language which I avoid repeating here.) The link was to a Jenna Ortega Tweet that read simply “Decolonize Palestine,” with an embedded link to a website bearing the same moniker.

Decolonize? Was this a clumsy attempt at supporting a two-state solution? I clicked the link.

And I was horrified.

Check out the rest of this post at the Times of Israel (no paywall).

Netlfix’s Farha: irredeemable anti-Semitic propaganda

If you make it through the entirety of Farha, the controversial Jordanian film about a young Palestinian girl during the conflict of 1948, and then watch the credits, you’ll find something curious. The extras are listed as residents of the “Gaza Refugee Camp” in Jerash, Jordan. This movie, supposedly in solidarity with the plight of Palestinian Arabs, was made in and financed by a country that keeps hundreds of thousands of them locked in refugee camps. The filmmakers, along with the Jordanian and other governments, care less about Palestinians than about using them as a tool to demonize Israel and Jews.

Farha is nothing more than propaganda, and boring propaganda at that. The film is grotesquely one-sided, even slanderous, in its depiction of the military units that later became the Israel Defense Force. While the situation around the creation of the State of Israel and the conditions that led to the hundreds of thousands Palestinian Arabs displaced from their homes are varied and complex, Farha paints a Manichean picture, in which benevolent Arab villagers are mercilessly slaughtered by carnage-loving Jews.

The plot, centering on the eponymous teen girl, is simple. Farha wants to leave her village in Mandatory Palestine to go study in the unnamed “city,” presumably Jerusalem. Alas, it’s 1948, and the devious Jews attack her town. Though her father tries to send her away with her uncle and his family, she flees the escape car to stay with him. To keep her from danger, he locks her in a food storage cellar, promising to return. The rest of the movie tediously chronicles Farha’s days in the cellar. For most of the movie, the viewer desperately waits for anything to happen while watching a girl mill about in a basement. Farha cries, goes to sleep, wakes up, her lamp runs out of oil, she runs out of water, she collects rainwater, and on and on…and on.

While supposedly based on true events, there is very little actual historical detail presented. Early on, Farha and her cousin see a convoy of British soldiers as they are leaving the country, prompting her and other village kids to mock the soldiers and cheer their withdrawal. The average American, unfamiliar with the conflict, must surely wonder: why are these British soldiers there? Why are they leaving? Those who know a bit more might suspect that the villagers were cheering some kind of Arab victory in pushing the British out. That seems to be the notion the filmmakers want to present, but it’s a false one. Few Arabs actually sided with the British – indeed, Jerusalem’s Grand Mufti Mohammed Amin al-Husseini was an open supporter of Hitler and recruited Arabs to fight in the Third Reich’s army – but the Jewish military organizations the film slanders were the ones who actually expelled the British, as documented in Menachem Begin’s The Revolt.

The film’s fudging of the historical record is the least of its flaws, however. Much more important is the blood libel. In the film’s central scene, Farha, watching through an opening in the cellar door, sees Jewish soldiers capture an Arab couple from the village. The Jews – the filmmakers, who aim for historical accuracy nowhere else, do not neglect to ensure that the proto-IDF are speaking Hebrew – laugh and taunt the woman. Believing her to be pregnant, the fighters place a bet as to whether the baby is a boy or a girl, deciding to gut her to find out. However, a baby cries out from above; they realize the woman has actually just given birth and hidden the baby. The Jews then find the newborn and their two other children. After more taunting, the soldiers line everyone but the baby against the wall and shoot them.

As they prepare to depart, the commander tells his subordinate to kill the baby, but not “to waste a bullet.” The soldier places the baby on the ground, throws a towel over it, and leaves. Later, when Farha breaks out of the cellar, she finds the baby dead, covered in flies.

Farha is one-sided and engages in blatant antisemitism: but is its core story true? Probably not. According to the film’s opening, it was “inspired by true events.” But “inspired” is a weasel word; which part was true, and which was simply inspired? And of the events that the filmmaker actually believed to be true, was it really? Perhaps there was a girl who hid in a food cellar. There is no documentation of anything that happened, and new scholarship tells us that many well-known “truths” of Israeli brutality were nothing more substantial than rumors that swirled during wartime, later amplified by various interests. 

What’s more, filmmaker Darin Sallam said that there were “parallels” between her film’s story and the life of Anne Frank. This analogy is by definition antisemitic, as the logical conclusion is that, if this girl is Anne Frank, the Israelis are to be taken as the Nazis. According to the definition of antisemitism agreed upon by the United States and dozens of other countries, comparisons between Israelis and the State of Israel to Nazis is antisemitism.

Liberal democracies tend to produce better movies than authoritarian regimes. Compare, for example, this misfortune of a film with the Israeli series Fauda. The latter, about the current stage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is layered and rich, and every character on any side is a multi-faceted human being with complex motivations. Fauda is not without bias; it is as pro-Israel as Farha is pro-PLO. The difference is that in the world of Fauda, the Israelis are on the right side of the conflict, but they are imperfect, and the Palestinians are real human beings caught between sides in a situation they wouldn’t choose for themselves. In Farha, the Arabs are good and the Jews are monsters who like to kill.

Given that Farda’s “true” story is highly unlikely to be so, the closest we come to a crime against humanity is the producers and Netflix causing anyone to endure this film. Stripped of its anti-Israel and antisemitic sentiment, the film is just a bore, its brief 92-minute runtime seeming to stretch to hours.

The libel against Jews and Israel is clearly the only reason anyone has taken notice of this film. Admittedly, lead actress Karam Taher turns in an excellent performance, but even that cannot rescue what is ultimately a wretched propaganda film with no redeeming values.