Tag: Jewish

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 Time for War

Thousands of years ago, Israel’s King Solomon wrote that there is a time for peace and a time for war. The wise king understood that, while unpleasant, war is not always wrong. In fact, not making war at the right time is a grievous injustice. In the millennia since the Jewish monarch wrote, religious figures and philosophical traditions have grappled with the question of military conflict, and it is generally understood that there are just wars.

The events of October 7, 2023, make it perfectly clear: Now is the time for war.

Only a person completely devoid of morality – and sadly there are many, including many Western so-called “progressives” – could watch the events that transpired that morning in southern Israel and not realize that an unprecedented response was necessary, for both strategic and moral reasons.

Even now, the number of dead in Israel is still unknown; so far we are aware that about 1,200 innocents were murdered. We still don’t know how many people the savages of Hamas stole into captivity, except that the number is somewhere over 100 people. But numbers only tell part of the story.

The Barbarity

The pure savagery unleashed by Hamas after its fighters stormed into Israel by air, land, and sea continues to horrify all who are decent. Hundreds of young people were murdered simply because they happened to be at a desert music festival. The thugs raped many women and, while in the process, used the their victim’s cellphones to call their parents so that they could hear the sounds of their child being violated. They filmed themselves murdering an elderly woman and then used her phone to upload it to her own Facebook account so that her family could see.

Babies were dismembered. Initial reports were that 40 were found beheaded, but now the army can’t verify that this is the case. A friend in the Israel Defense Force (IDF) told me that the reason for the uncertainty is that the infants are literally in pieces; they’d been blown apart by machine guns, and it’s not possible to determine whether the heads came off first. Other babies were burned alive.

Under interrogation, a Hamas member was asked why women and children were captured. His answer, in Arabic: “To rape them.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu eloquently described the evil, saying, “We saw the beasts of prey. We saw the barbarians that we are facing. We saw a cruel enemy. An enemy worse than ISIS. We saw boys and girls, bound, shot in the head. Men and women burned alive. Young women raped and slaughtered. Fighters decapitated… In one place, they set fire to tires around them, and burned them alive.”

These evildoers were so unencumbered by feelings of guilt as they slaughtered hundreds of Jews – more than had been murdered in any single day since the Holocaust – that they gleefully filmed their acts and posted them to social media, providing the world evidence of their crimes against humanity.

Anyone who reads the news reads accounts of brutality on a daily basis. Someone, somewhere does something ghastly to their family or their friend or their neighbor all too often. But this was different. What happened on October 7 was not some individual losing their mind. Instead, it was a well planned out, orchestrated campaign of terror directed by the governing entity of Gaza, Hamas.

Despite what progressives and those who style themselves as urbane sophisticates might tell you, the context does not matter. Whatever you think of Israel’s “occupation” of Palestine, whatever you think of their building settlements (apartment blocks) far away from Gaza in Area C of the West Bank, whatever you think of any of that simply doesn’t matter. There is no excuse, no context, nothing at all that could justify what the terrorists did.

The only option

After this, Hamas can no longer be allowed to govern Gaza. For years, Israel thought that they could live with Hamas next door, periodically “mowing the lawn,” their term for using rockets to destroy Hamas’s rocket launchers when they came too close to threatening Israel. October 7 made it clear that Israel cannot live with Hamas. The civilized world cannot live with Hamas. Thousands already do not live because of Hamas.

The Israel Defense Force has started what is likely to be a long, brutal fight against Hamas in Gaza. Hundreds of thousands of reservists have been mobilized. The war against Hamas is going to be ugly. Horrible images will fill television screens and other news media. Israel will be accused of atrocities.

Netanyahu stated clearly the intent of his government, saying, “Every Hamas member is a dead man.” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said that Hamas “will be wiped from the face of the Earth. It will not continue to exist.” And Israel cannot simply kill Hamas; there needs to be some sort of government. It’s likely that Israel will need to retake control of the Gaza Strip, which they gave up nearly two decades ago in the interest of peace.

As always, the IDF will do its utmost to protect civilian lives. Well before fighting began, Netanyahu warned the civilians of Gaza to get out. But where should they go? The IDF has produced videos and maps warning people where bombs are likely to fall and where to go for safety. The IDF’s leaders know that Hamas will exploit this information and use it against Israeli soldiers, but protecting innocent life is part of the ethical DNA of Israel’s defense force.

Still, there will be “collateral damage,” a horrific term, because it sanitizes the information it conveys: civilians in Gaza will die. Hamas will continue to launch their rockets and fighting force not from legitimate military bases, but from schools and hospitals and apartment buildings and mosques. Israel will be obliged to destroy them. They will put children where the bombs will fall, aiming to score a pile of bodies that they can parade across television in order to accuse Israel of war crimes.

None of the above should be taken to mean that the lives of Gazans don’t matter. Gazan civilians – not members of Hamas and their supporters – are as human as any of the rest of us. A Gazan child or baby is as precious as any other. The point, though, is that Israel (and perhaps allies – there are American hostages in Gaza as well) has been forced to act. Any blood shed will be on the hands of Hamas.

Americans should resist the urge to call for “peace” or a “peace process.” As alluded to above, it was a move for peace, Israeli disengagement from Gaza, that brought Hamas to power.

No to negotiations

War is a horror show. And yet it is necessary. Not going to war after such evil as was perpetrated against the Israeli people on October 7 will leave the perpetrators unpunished. It will advertise to the world that Israel is open to having its children murdered and burnt, its women raped, its elderly killed on Facebook, its music festivals turned into killing fields. A price tag would be on the head of every Israeli.

The lack of a devastating response by Israel would have reverberations across the Middle East.

As ugly images fill television screens and atrocities attributed to Israel’s soldiers are shown, the liberal West will find a familiar temptation, the temptation to call for negotiations. But with Hamas, there can be no negotiation. Their charter calls for the elimination not only of Israel, but of the Jewish people as a whole. Negotiating with them would be useless, because there is nothing that Israel can offer, short of national suicide, that would appease the terror organization.

In historical context, we understand that war and its accompanying horrors are in certain situations not only morally acceptable, but morally necessary. The Civil War devastated civilians in the South. Some consider Sherman’s March to be the first iteration of what is now called “total war.” No one says the Civil War shouldn’t have been fought, that the Union should have negotiated with the Confederacy. World War II, which liberated Europe and ended the Holocaust, was marked by ghastly actions the Allied Forces deemed necessary, including the firebombing of Dresden and the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We don’t debate the morality of World War II.

Times have changed, and there are rules of war now. The IDF will follow those, as the U.S. did during the Gulf War. Even then, though, there was “collateral damage.”

Anyone who argues that now is not a time for war, that Israel should negotiate some kind of deal with Hamas instead of destroying them, has to either argue that Hamas is not as bad as the Nazis or the Confederacy or that America’s entrance into World War II and the Union’s entrance into the Civil War were grave injustices.

Does anyone want to make these arguments?

Our Duty

Our duty as Americans and others who support civilization over savagery is to push back against those who would call for the immorality of letting Hamas maintain its rule over Gaza. We cannot let the ugly pictures that will show up in the media in the coming days, weeks, and months cause us to demand Washington stay Israel’s hand as it roots out Hamas and its affiliates, like the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and, likely, retakes control of Gaza.

Already, people like Reps. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., and Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., are already calling for the U.S. to use our power to restrain Israel. Even senators who clearly don’t hate Jews, like Massachusetts’ Ed Markey, have started calling for the injustice of a fake “peace” already. Thankfully, President Biden has more moral clarity than they do, but his co-partisans are likely to exert pressure on him to change course. The more the horrors of war appear on television, the more strength they will have. It is unlikely that Israel will allow itself to be restrained, given what they’ve just been through. Still, a supportive United States allows Israel a free hand to conduct the war as they see fit, within the confines of the IDF code of ethics. The world did not attempt to tell the U.S. how to respond after 9/11, and we should not do that to Israel. Instead, we should work to ensure that America leads the world in support for Israel, encouraging fickle European allies not to waver.

We have to maintain moral clarity. While it is fashionable now to engage in moral equivalence and to deny the existence of good and evil, doing so is wrong. Hamas is evil. Israel’s response, as they go to war against evil, is just.

And there is no alternative.

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 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).

Endangering Arabs to spite Israel: the results of “progressive” demands

How are we to understand the recent efforts of the “Justice” Democrats to cut funding for military assistance to the State of Israel? To hear them tell it, their actions are humanitarian and would stop a powerful bully (Israel) from using American tax dollars to kill innocent Palestinian Arab civilians.

This is nonsense.

Based on their recent statements, it seems apparent that the Justice Democrats – the group energized by Bernie Sanders’ campaign – give very little worry to the lives of Israeli civilians. But what has become increasingly apparent is that they also don’t give much consideration to endangering the safety of Arabs in the area, either – so long as it means the weakening, and eventual destruction of, Israel as a Jewish state. (While the “Justice Democrats” website does not go into much detail on any policy issues, the politics of the Justice Democrats and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) overlap to such an extent that the leading members of the the former grouping are members of the latter, which has a page going into detail on their policy preferences for Israel and the disputed territories.)

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) introduced a provision into the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which funds America’s military goals yearly, to ban the transfer of $725 million worth of “JDAMs” to Israel. According to the representative, writing Sept. 17 on Twitter, the reason for the amendment was to punish the “Israeli gov over the bombing of Palestinian civilians, media centers”. Ocasio-Cortez knows well enough that the “media centers” (it  should be in the singular form, as there was only one building) was actually a base of Hamas operations, and she knows that the leadership of her own party have seen and accepted the proof of this. She also knows full well that Israel goes beyond any other country in warning civilians before bombs fall. Apparently, none of this matters. Instead of being upset at the death of civilians (which happened in Israel as well during the war brought about entirely by Hamas), this new strand in the progressive movement is upset at Israel having the ability to defend itself.

Why else would anyone oppose the sale of JDAMs, if not to undermine Israel’s defense mechanisms? JDAM is an acronym for “Joint Direct Attack Munitions.” It is possible that AOC is so uninformed that she doesn’t know what these are (“I’m not the expert in geopolitics on this issue,” she said during a Firing Line interview after being questioned as to why she used the term “occupation” to describe Israel’s presence in the West Bank), but let us assume that she has done the most basic of research on the policy she is trying to influence. If she has, she knows that JDAMs are not weapons themselves. Instead, they are kits that, when attached to regular bombs, turn them into GPS-enhanced precision-guided weapons. Rejecting the sale of JDAMs, therefore, means pushing Israel to use “dumb” bombs instead of precision weaponry.

Why would anyone want Israel using dumb bombs when its military is engaged in a campaign in Gaza? The Gaza Strip has a population density of 13,069.1 people per square mile, meaning the whole area is far more densely populated than Chicago, which has a density of 11,783 people per square mile. In the most recent conflict, 243 people, both terrorists and innocents, were killed in Gaza. Without detracting from the fact that the death of any innocent civilian is a tragedy beyond imagination, it is obvious that the only way that the number of casualties could be kept this low was due to the use of precision weaponry. Those 243 people died in the course of an  11-day-long protracted fight where thousands of bombs were exchanged between Israel and Hamas. As a thought experiment, imagine a military plane dropping a single dumb bomb on a block in Chicago. Is it even possible to imagine that less than 243 people would die? A single subway car holds about 250 people. If an El (Chicago’s light rail system) station was hit in a regular business district, thousands of people could have easily died due to one “dumb” bomb. Contemplating how many would die over the course of a whole military conflict in such a populated area is indeed a grim intellectual exercise.

In essence, the proposal would have kept Israeli bombs “dumb.” Leaving Israel with only dumb bombs the next time Hamas decides to launch a volley of rockets would mean one of two things: Israel would be forced to allow rockets to rain down on it (even the Iron Dome isn’t perfect; 12 Israelis died in the most recent conflict, including children) or Israel would be forced to go into Gaza using imprecise bombs, killings either thousands or tens of thousands of civilians. Neither of these situations is good for anyone – aside from Hamas or PIJ.

This past week, this band of “progressives” convinced House Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to remove a billion dollars’ worth of support for Israel’s Iron Dome from a government funding bill. In essence, they told Pelosi, “Remove this money for Israel, or we’ll vote against keeping the federal government open.” Shamefully, Pelosi acceded to this measure. A billion dollars is, in relation to the federal budget, actually a relatively small amount, and anyone looking for pork to cut would do far better looking elsewhere. The aim was decidedly not to save money, but to cripple the Iron Dome. (The discussion of why the U.S. sends aid to Israel is long and complex; suffice it to say that the relationship is mutually beneficial, and also to point out that the U.S. sends military and other aid to many countries.)

Aside from hatred for Israel – increasingly common on the left and the right, fueled by non-factual “news” pieces from outlets like al-Jazeera – it is hard to imagine why anyone would oppose the Iron Dome. Composed of a set of purely defensive missiles, the Dome’s sole mission is to shoot down rockets fired into Israel, most often by Hamas or the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). The Dome quite literally does nothing more than defend the lives of Israelis from foreign rockets.

Indirectly, the Iron Dome saves Arab lives in Gaza. Without the Iron Dome, every single missile that enters Israeli air space every single time Hamas or PIJ decides to launch them would

The Iron Dome in action. On the right are missiles launched from Gaza while, on the left, Iron Dome missiles intercept them over the State of Israel.
The Iron Dome in action. On the right are missiles launched from Gaza while, on the left, Iron Dome missiles intercept them over the State of Israel.

potentially scores of kill civilians, and Israel would have no choice but to respond. With the Iron Dome, Israeli military officials are able to monitor how many missiles are coming in at a given time, and decide whether it is necessary to respond at all. Further, without the Dome, it is highly likely that the IDF would need to enter into a costly, in terms of human lives, ground battle in Gaza either to seek out and destroy all of Hamas’s rocket-launching capabilities or to dislodge Hamas outright. Regardless of how carefully the IDF and Israeli Air Force engage in combat, this would probably kill thousands.

Eliminating the Iron Dome would mean death for countless Israelis and Palestinian Arabs. There is no question of this. The only possible explanations for these Congressional representatives – who have never expressed any desire for fiscal constraint – and their ideological allies (including a few Republicans) to oppose the Iron Dome’s funding is either stupidity or a callous disregard for the lives of Jews so intense that this group is willing to see Arabs severely endangered only to spite Israel. Note that here “hatred of Jews” is written purposely instead of “hatred of Israel,”  because eliminating the Iron Dome would not harm Israel’s self defense as a state; it has a strong military that would easily defeat Hamas. Eliminating the Iron Dome would leave the State of Israel fully intact even as it would cause the deaths of scores of Israelis and potentially thousands of Palestinian Arabs.

Thankfully, the efforts of the the Justice Democrats, in alliance with a few extremist America First Republicans, have so far ended in abject failure. Only yesterday, House Democrats introduced a resolution separate from the federal spending bill, House Resolution 5323, the Iron Dome Supplemental Appropriations Act, which passed 420-9, guaranteeing funding for the Iron Dome. Republican Rep. Thomas Massie (D-Ky.) who in 2019 was the only member of the House to vote against a bills supporting democracy in Hong Kong  and condemning the ongoing genocide of the Uyghurs in China, voted against the Iron Dome funding. On the Democratic side of the aisle, Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Cori Bush (D-Mo.), Andre Carson (D-In.), Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), Marie Newman (D-Ill.), and Jesus “Chuy” Garcia (D-Ill.)  – Justice Democrats and their allies – voted against it, as Ocasio-Cortez and Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) voted “present.” 

The vast majority of the Democratic and Republican Parties voted the right way, as did the overwhelming majorities of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and the Congressional Caucus for Women’s Issues. A number of Democrats made excellent speeches, including the new progressive Democrat Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.), the first gay Black member of Congress, who represents the district adjacent to AOC’s. Rep. Ted Deutch (D-Fla.) said what many were thinking when he responded to one of the Justice Democrats, Rep. Tlaib, and accused her of antisemitism for her more egregious statements. It is important to note, however, that Deutch’s statements can’t be interpreted as directed solely at one member of Congress, nor should this controversy be seen only as the work of a few members of the House. Instead, it is indicative of a rise in anti-Israel – connected very strongly to antisemitic – sentiment in America on both the far right and the far left. From Massie, it represents the resurgence of right-wing antisemitism under the guise of “human rights.” From the “progressives”, it represents the encroachment into the U.S. of Soviet-style antisemitism, displayed most vividly in recent times in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, through the recently radicalized Democratic Socialists of America, the Justice Democrats, and other such groups. The influence of this group is growing and, if it is left unchecked, it could metastasize throughout the Democratic Party, potentially Corbynizing the Democratic Party. While Rep. Pelosi should be applauded for introducing the Iron Dome funding in a standalone bill, her original cowardly decision to strip it from the NDAA – and not to fight the move – is not promising.

Democrats and Republicans must clean house and replace those who hate Israel and Jews so much that they would sacrifice anything, even Arab safety, to spite Israel with better representatives – and they must combat the lie that legitimate criticism of Israel includes the vicious slander that the new “progressives” lodge.

Self-pitying anti-Zionists: A Reply to Shaul Magid

Self-pity is an ugly thing, especially when it comes from the most well-off members of a community. It is even less pleasant when those wallowing in it are completely oblivious to the actual hardships of others. Such is the case with Shaul Magid’s Tablet article “The Enforcers,” in which the reader is expected to pity the poor anti-Zionists who – the horror – are sometimes accused of “not being Jewish enough,” while Jews around the world are daily being imperiled by a rise in violent anti-Semitism.

Currently, the debate around Zionism in the Jewish community is bigger than it has been in decades. This has been obvious to me through interactions with other Jews and viewing ongoing, seemingly never-ending social media debates. Only a few years ago, the question of how Israel could best achieve peace with the Palestinians was the only real subject of debate, while anti-Zionists were relegated to the fringes, where they belong, an area in the discourse they had inhabited since before the second world war. More and more, however, the question of whether Israel should exist has been entertained, increasingly openly. Just hours ago, the Jerusalem Post published an article with some frightening statistics from a recent poll: 28 percent of American Jews apparently believe Israel is an apartheid state (the number rises to 38 percent for those under 40), 23 percent think Israel is engaged in genocide (33 percent of those under 40), and 20 percent of American Jews under 40 actually believe that Israel doesn’t even have the right to exist at all.

Given this sad state of affairs, Magid’s article seems oddly timed. During a period when anti-Zionists are more vocal than at any point in decades, he frets that their voices are being pushed out by “enforcers,” supporters of Israel who, he argues, act as “gatekeepers of Zionist-Jewish identity [to] try to write out of Judaism anyone who doesn’t share their nationalist project.” While he argues that there are “thousands” of such mean-spirited articles, the reader is only shown a few minor examples. Regardless, Magid goes to great lengths to prove that Jewish anti-Zionists are real, actual Jews and that anti-Zionism has a long, Jewish history. In doing so, however, he states the obvious, overwhelmingly mischaracterizes Zionists’ views – and misses the most important point entirely.

Magid writes,

Those who demonize anti-Zionism today never quite define the term. Denial of a ‘Jewish’ state? Of Jewish chauvinism or Jewish supremacy? Of Israel itself? There is the theological anti-Zionism of ultra-Orthodoxy made explicit in the writings of the Satmar rebbe, Yoel Teitelbaum, the moral and anti-nationalist anti-Zionism of Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig, the secular anti-Zionism of the American Council for Judaism, the diasporist anti-Zionism of Judith Butler or Daniel Boyarin, and the anti-imperialist anti-Zionism of Noam Chomsky. Are they all the same? Of course not. All have different assumptions, different thought processes, and in some cases different goals.

He concludes this line of thought with, “But for the gatekeepers, nuance and distinctions don’t really matter.” Does anyone actually believe this? Are we actually expected to believe that the most vocal supporters of Israel actually make no distinction between the anti-Zionism of BDS leader Judith Butler and that of the Satmar rebbe? This is nonsense. Further, the same accusation could be made against the anti-Zionists. This group defines itself as opposed to Zionism, but do they engage with the “nuances and distinctions” Magid accuses Zionists of overlooking? Is the average anti-Zionist opposed to the Revisionist Zionism of Netanyahu’s Likud? The religious nationalist Zionism of Naftali Bennett’s Yamina party? Are they opposed to Rav Kook’s religious Zionism? Do they go so far as to oppose even the two-state, socialist Zionism of Israel’s Meretz Party? Do they make any distinction at all? There is no way to know.

Magid then turns to history. But for anyone who’s studied it – indeed, anyone who’s read Anne Frank’s diary – knows that there is a long history of religious and secular anti-Zionism. This is such common knowledge that it is hard to understand why Magid belabors the point in his article. What Magid does not ponder in his piece is the distinction between what anti-Zionism means now compared to what it meant then. Before Israel was re-founded, being an anti-Zionist didn’t mean advocating for the destruction of the state where nearly half the world’s Jewish population, millions of people who are periodically bombarded with rockets and who are surrounded on all sides by those who want to kill them, live. Instead, Magid  marvels at how wonderful the diaspora is, writing, “There is now a thriving Jewish diaspora in North America, South America, Europe, Australia and elsewhere, one that is not dependent on Israel for its creative sustenance. This should be celebrated.” While I’m sure that Magid feels safe, such is not the case for many diaspora communities around the world. Here in the United States, arguably the place where, at least during the post-war years, Jews have had had better lives than in any other country, anti-Semitic violence is on the rise at a rapid clip. In Boston, not far from where I’m writing this, a rabbi was stabbed multiple times in broad daylight in front of a Jewish day school. In recent months and years, Jews have also been attacked in L.A., Pittsburgh, New Jersey, New York, and elsewhere across the U.S.

Still, American Jews have it good, at least compared to other Jews throughout history and to Jews in other countries. But this is what is so infuriating about Magid’s pity for the anti-Zionists who, from the comforts of (still mostly) safe American suburbs, have had their feelings hurt by those who, he imagines, say anti-Zionists aren’t “real Jews.” How will this Western self-pity come across to Jews in Israel, many of whom are only alive because they were able to make it there? How is the Ethiopian Jew who escaped to Israel supposed to understand the sorrows of the Western anti-Zionist? Or, indeed, one of the several thousand members of Beta Israel still in Ethiopia, constantly imperiled, hoping to make their way to Zion someday? But then, most of even the Western world is not the U.S. Forty percent of British Jews were considering emigration pending recent election results, mostly to Israel. Jews are fleeing rising anti-Semitism in France by droves each year – 5,000 in 2015 alone – mostly to Israel. How are they to understand elite liberal anti-Zionism and the sorrows of the sheltered upper-middle-class American Jews who seem to feel that they should be able to say whatever they want without anyone actually responding?

It appears that Magid is oblivious to these Jews and to history itself. For example, in mocking pre-war Zionists, Magid writes, “Josef Stalin once said that the Jews are not a nation because they lack two essential national attributes: language and territory. Many Zionists agreed!” Obviously, this is a mistake. Zionists disagreed with Stalin; they thought the reason Jews deserved territory was exactly because they are a nation; the anti-Zionists who thought assimilation was best were the ones who agreed with the red dictator. This is a small point; the bigger historical error is in failing to note that it was exactly because Jews had no territory that Stalin was able to deport thousands to Birobidzhan, a wretched place a week’s train ride away from Moscow, from where nearly all Jews fled as soon as they could. And, of course, the mass deportations were just a small part of the Soviet Union’s repression of Jews.

Magid spends paragraphs showing that these early Zionists, including ben Gurion, were not religiously observant Jews, and then sets his sites on contemporary Zionists. In arguing against the idea that Zionism is correct simply because most Jews support Israel (does anyone make the Zionist case this way?), Magid argues that most American Jews are not very observant and break halakha. So? That is between them and their rabbis – and it also is demonstrative of the point opposite that which Magid is trying to make. While many Zionists (myself included) argue that support for Israel is an important facet of Judaism, different Jews place various levels of emphasis on this. The other driving force of the Zionist movement is the demonstrably true belief that Jews, like all other peoples, need a nation state where they can actually be safe, and that state needs to be in the place where the Jewish nation formed. There are many different interpretations of what it means to be a good Jew. Far less negotiable, however, is the need for safety.

Despite arguing that Zionism isn’t correct or incorrect based on how many Jews support it, Magid spends time discussing how many younger Jews have negative impressions of Israel. Pointing out the complexities of geopolitics and how it vexes Jewish youth, Magid writes, “Israel is a complicated place for younger generations of Jews, especially but not only in America. Jews under the age of 50 do not know Israel other than as an occupying power. “ As the Post article shows, this is an accurate assessment of many young Jews’ understanding of Israel. These facts represent a two-fold  problem, but not a failure of Zionism. Obviously, Jewish communal institutions need to do a better job educating young Jews. The number of young people (and not only the young) who think, for example, that Israel randomly decided to start ethnically cleansing Sheikh Jarrah, not realizing the complex history of court cases and titles and contested ownership, is astounding. Magid is correct in that the Zionist organizations have, by and large, not yet been able to properly educate other Jews about what Zionism means, but that is somewhat beside the point. The second part of the problem is the anti-Zionists themselves, many of them Jewish, who spread misinformation. One who knows nothing of Israel but what they read in the often anti-Semitic Jewish Currents will have a very skewed view indeed.

In truth, anti-Zionists aren’t being condemned as “not properly Jewish” or “not real Jews,” at least not often. Even the articles Magid linked to were for the most part not calling Jewish anti-Zionists “bad Jews” or “not real Jews.” It is telling that the article Magid quoted that most illustrates his complaints was written in large part by Natan Sharansky, the heroic Soviet Jew who spent nine years as a political prisoner in the USSR. On the other hand, this article only called anti-Zionists “indecent” and argued that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. Indeed, this is the biggest criticism of the anti-Zionists, whether they are Jews or not: anti-Semitism.

Perhaps it seems odd that here a group of Jews and a specifically Jewish publication are characterized as anti-Semitic. Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, at least in practice, even when the anti-Zionist has fond feelings for the Jewish people. As noted above, struggling for the abolition of the Jewish state either endangers (for Israelis) or removes the possibility of escape to (for Jews living precarious lives in oppressive states) safety for the majority of the world’s Jewish community. An ideology should be characterized by its results. In theory, Maoism sounds nice and egalitarian; in practice it is a death cult. Anti-Zionism has many iterations in theory, but in practice would lead to millions of dead or oppressed Jews living with dhimmi status. Magid writes in his essay, “I want to take the argument about anti-Zionism being antithetical to one’s Jewishness seriously.” He should take more seriously the argument that anti-Zionism is antithetical to millions of Jewish lives; he would then have a better understanding of why many Jews frown upon anti-Zionists.

Maybe this is what offends the Jewish anti-Zionist the most, the idea that they are themselves engaged in anti-Semitism, even if they are descended, as is Norman Finkelstein, from Holocaust survivors, even if they are themselves stellar Jews (however that is interpreted). This is not a concept  unique to the Jewish community. One of the most popular left-wing writers on racism, Ibram Kendi, for example, makes the argument that Black people can in fact be racist, and they do so each time they support a racist policy. You can agree or disagree with Kendi on systemic racism and which policies are racist, but here his argument is sound: if you support policies or ideologies that are racist, you’re being a racist. And, analgously, if you support anti-Semitic ideologies, you’re being an anti-Semite, regardless of how good of a Jew you are.

Maybe that is what is most troubling to left-wing anti-Zionists.