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Peter Beinart Thinks He Is a ‘Good Jew’ — The Truth Is Anything But

Peter Beinart. Photo: Joe Mabel via Wikimedia Commons.

In April 2024, Guardian columnist Naomi Klein said that Zionism is a “project that commits genocide in” the name of the world’s Jews. We argued at the time that this op-ed was one of the most despicable pieces published at the outlet in the 15 years we’ve been monitoring their content.

Last week, they published an essay by Peter Beinart (adapted from his new book) that arguably has the potential to incite even more hatred against Jews than Klein’s screed.

Beinart, a Guardian columnist, is a former “Liberal Zionist” turned anti-Zionist, and now fancies himself one of the few Jewish voices brave enough to speak out about what he claims is the moral corruption at the core of Zionism — which he’s characterized as “supremacism” — and the Jewish community more broadly.

He also largely blamed the Oct. 7th massacre on Israel’s long “denial of Palestinian freedom,” and began describing the IDF’s early response to Hamas’ pogrom, including even the relocation of Palestinian civilians to keep them out of harm’s way, as “monstrous crime” and another potential “Nakba,” before even the ground invasion began.

He focuses his Guardian essay on the “dark side” of Purim, which he likens with Jewish support for the “slaughter in Gaza.”

What’s the “dark side” of Purim to Beinart?

Writing as if he’s the only Jew who’s ever read the Megillah — and then serving the role of a Jewish informer, “revealing” to non-Jews the sinister truth about this seemingly joyous Jewish festival — Beinart chides the Jewish community for “forgetting” that the book of Esther doesn’t end with Haman’s execution after his plan to annihilate the Jews was thwarted.

Since the genocidal edict couldn’t be annulled, Beinart recounts, Jews were allowed to defend themselves by striking, “slaying and destroying” their “enemies with the sword.”

The Jews, he adds, “killed 75,000 people” and then declare the 14th “a day of feasting and merrymaking.”

He then writes that “with the blood of their foes barely dry, the Jews feast and make merry” — before warning, in a sentence that “Purim isn’t only about the danger Gentiles pose to us. It’s also about the danger we pose to them.”  [emphasis added]

The Book of Esther, however, couldn’t be clearer that the Jews’ enemies prepared a genocide, and Jews fought back and killed their enemiespreventing the genocide.

Though this is indeed cause for celebration, antisemites through the ages have distorted and weaponized the text, claiming it shows that Jews are vengeful, bloodthirsty, and even genocidal.

Beinart’s agenda here in using rhetoric redolent of the ancient blood libel, about the “blood-soaked massacre” celebrated during Purim, is clear, as he begins pivoting to Israeli sins, and, eventually, to the Gaza war, moralizing that “today, these blood-soaked verses should unsettle us.”

Why should we be “unsettled”?

Beinart answers that by chiding contemporary Jews for a “false innocence” when discussing Israel. He criticizes Israelis and Jews who (correctly!) point out that “the Palestinian refugee issue originated in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.” In Beinart’s telling, the attack by five Arab armies of the nascent Jewish State was justifiable — a war launched to protect the Palestinians from the Jews.

Turing to Gaza, he not only blames “establishment Jewish officials” for promoting what he suggests is a lie — or, at least, a huge exaggeration — that Hamas uses Palestinians civilians as human shields, which vastly increases the number of non-combatants killed, but seems to defend the terror group’s use of human shields, writing that this tactic is “typical of insurgent groups.”

Mocking those who would hold the terror group itself responsible for hiding fighters and weapons in homes, mosques, and hospitals, and using a tunnel system below civilian infrastructure, Beinart wonders what precisely Hamas should do, “put on brightly colored uniforms, walk into an open field, and take on a vastly more powerful conventional army?! ”

The answer is painfully obvious to all but the most extreme anti-Zionist ideologues: they shouldn’t have attacked Israel and slaughtered Jews in the first place.

To most Jews, Beinart continues in his complaint, the “human shield” argument is designed “to prove that Israel is always innocent“ — and that the state is never the author of Palestinian suffering. In this, we see the stunning moral obtuseness that informs his discourse on Judaism and Israel.

For anti-Zionist Jews like Beinart, it is Palestinians who are never assigned agency, but, instead, are infantilized, with their deep-seated antisemitic pathos framed as a legitimate grievance.

Whether we’re discussing the Palestinian leadership’s alliance with Hitler, their opposition to the 1947 UN Partition Plan, decades of terrorism, including the Second Intifada, which was launched during the peak of the peace process, or the rejection of several Israeli offers of Palestinian statehood, bad Palestinian decisions are inevitably framed in a way exculpating Palestinians, while imputing an Israeli root cause.

At his core, Beinart refuses to hold Palestinians morally culpable for participating in, supporting, or providing succor to, the death cult whose bloody pogromists murdered, raped, tortured and mutilated Jews with glee — and whose leaders knew full well that the response to their unprovoked attack would bring untold suffering to civilians.

Moreover, no lessons were learned by the pro-Palestinian movement on that dark Shabbat day. Instead of anything resembling self-reflection, most, as Beinart’s reaction in the days and months following the massacre showed, actually doubled down on their beliefs, intensifying their denunciations of Israel.

“Western activists for Palestinians,” Shany Mor wrote, “are dedicated to two nearly theological precepts: that Israel is evil, and that no Palestinian action is ever connected to any Palestinian outcome”. Hamas’s gruesome attack, he concluded, “poses a threat to this worldview, and the only way to resolve it is by heightening Israel’s imagined malevolence. The terrorist atrocities don’t trigger a recoiling from the cause in whose name they were carried out; they lead to an even greater revulsion at the victim.”

Finally, Peter Beinart is not a self-hating Jew.

Rather, he fancies himself a better Jew — in fact, one of the very few genuinely “good Jews.” In his book, Trials of the Diaspora, Anthony Julius calls Jews like Beinart “scourges” — a term which relates to their self-anointed role as prophets, whipping the wayward Jewish people into line. By indicting most Jews, and the Jewish State, he puts himself on the “right” side of the moral divide, proclaiming his own superiority to the ruck of his sinful fellow Jews.

What Beinart now peddles, Haviv Rettig Gur observed, “is an ideologically updated version of the same claim of deep-seated and defining criminality in the Jews” as Theobald of Cambridge, a Jewish convert to Christianity who leveled the first known accusation that Jews ritually murder Christian children. Beinart, a convert to anti-Zionism, confirms “to our tormentors that [Jews’] criminality is the distillation and apotheosis of the great evils of our age”.

The fact The Guardian employed Peter Beinart’s services as a Jewish informer, a modern-day Theobold, should surprise nobody.

Adam Levick serves as co-editor of CAMERA UK – an affiliate of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA), where a different version of this article appeared.

The post Peter Beinart Thinks He Is a ‘Good Jew’ — The Truth Is Anything But first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Trump Vows to Hold Iran Responsible for Houthi Attacks, Warns of ‘Dire Consequences’

A Houthi fighter mans a machine gun mounted on a truck during a parade for people who attended Houthi military training as part of a mobilization campaign, in Sanaa, Yemen, Dec. 18, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah

US President Donald Trump has declared that Iran will be held directly responsible for any future attacks by Yemen’s Houthi rebels, who have targeted US and Israeli ships in the Red Sea in retaliation for Jerusalem’s ongoing blockade of the Gaza Strip.

“Every shot fired by the Houthis will be looked upon, from this point forward, as being a shot fired from the weapons and leadership of IRAN, and IRAN will be held responsible, and suffer the consequences, and those consequences will be dire!” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social account on Monday.

Over the weekend, the US military launched strikes against the Houthis in Yemen after the Iran-backed terrorist group declared they had resumed attacks on ships “linked to Israel” in the Red Sea.

Since the Israel-Hamas war began in October 2023, the Houthis — whose slogan is “death to America, death to Israel, curse the Jews, and victory to Islam” — have targeted over 100 merchant vessels in the Red Sea with missiles and drones. They asserted that these attacks, which caused a massive disruption of global trade, were a show of support for Palestinians in Gaza following Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

The attacks have forced vessels to avoid the Red Sea and Suez Canal in favor of longer routes around Africa, driving up travel and insurance costs.

“The hundreds of attacks being made by Houthi, the sinister mobsters and thugs based in Yemen, who are hated by the Yemeni people, all emanate from, and are created by, IRAN,” Trump wrote in his post on Truth Social.

“Any further attack or retaliation by the ‘Houthis’ will be met with great force, and there is no guarantee that that force will stop there,” he continued.

According to US officials, several senior Houthi commanders have been killed during the attacks. Meanwhile, local media reports said the Houthis claimed at least 53 people have been killed and 98 wounded as a result of the strikes.

On Sunday, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that Washington would conduct “unrelenting” strikes against the Houthis until the terrorist group ceases their military actions targeting US assets and international shipping.

“Iran has played ‘the innocent victim’ of rogue terrorists from which they’ve lost control, but they haven’t lost control,” Trump wrote in his post on Truth Social. “They’re dictating every move, giving them the weapons, supplying them with money and highly sophisticated Military equipment, and even, so-called, ‘Intelligence.’”

Over the weekend, Houthi leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi called for mass protests, urging Yemenis to take to the streets in response to US airstrikes. Demonstrations were held in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, and other Houthi-controlled areas, with crowds chanting “Death to America! Death to Israel!” during a rally broadcast on the Houthis’ Al-Masirah television network.

The Yemeni terrorist group warned that its attacks on shipping in the Red Sea will continue until US military strikes on Yemen stop. The Houthis also claimed two attacks in the past 24 hours against the USS Harry S. Truman in the northern Red Sea.

In January, the group signaled it would limit its attacks in the Red Sea corridor to only Israeli-affiliated ships after a ceasefire began in the Gaza Strip but warned that broader assaults could resume if necessary. Reports have indicated that the Houthis used Iranian-supplied ballistic and cruise missiles to carry out its attacks.

Earlier this month, Washington imposed sanctions on seven senior members of the Houthis, shortly after the Trump administration officially redesignated the Iran-backed rebels in Yemen as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO).

Several countries — including Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Israel — currently designate the Houthis as terrorists.

Last month, the United Nations announced it suspended its humanitarian operations in areas controlled by Houthi rebels, after they detained dozens of UN staffers, who remain unreleased.

The Houthis have been waging an insurgency in Yemen for two decades in a bid to overthrow the Yemeni government. They have controlled a significant portion of the country’s land in the north and along the Red Sea since 2014, when they captured it in the midst of a civil war.

The post Trump Vows to Hold Iran Responsible for Houthi Attacks, Warns of ‘Dire Consequences’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Australian Jewish Leader Urges Continued Vigilance on Antisemitic Hate Crimes After Police Label Bomb Threat ‘Fake’

Car in New South Wales, Australia graffitied with antisemitic message. Photo: Screenshot

A top Australian Jewish leader has expressed disappointment with a recent announcement by police that an incident involving an abandoned caravan filled with explosives and antisemitic writings was “fake,” arguing law enforcement downplayed the severity of a recent spree of crimes targeting the Jewish community.

Alex Ryvchin — co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), an organization which advocates upholding the civil rights of the country’s some 120,000 Jewish citizens — on Monday urged Australian authorities to remain vigilant against antisemitism.

“We learned that in addition to everything we faced over the past 17 months, the doxxing, the vilification, the harassment, everything happening at schools and universities,” Ryvchin said during an appearance on Sky News. “On top of all that, you now have hardened criminals paying off lowly hoodlums to set fire to our buildings and cars and set our streets ablaze with reckless disregard for what happens.”

He continued, “But for some reason, the police in announcing this chose to completely downplay it, refer to it as a con job, and a fake.”

Ryvchin explained the framing had now “allowed negative actors who have tried to downplay it [the rise in antisemitism] this whole time to now galvanize and to try to dampen all the momentum and the enthusiasm for actually solving this problem. So, it’s really incredibly disappointing.”

Earlier this month, Australian police announced that an organized crime group had created a fake bomb threat intended to draw law enforcement resources, rather than a genuine targeting of Jews.

“It was about causing chaos within the community, causing threat, causing angst, diverting police resources away from their day jobs, to have them focus on matters that would allow them to get up to or engage in other criminal activity,” Dave Hudson, New South Wales (NSW) Deputy Police Commissioner, said in statement.

Krissy Barrett, the Australian Federal Police’s Deputy Commissioner for National Security, described the incident as “fake,” a “fabricated terrorism plot,” and a “criminal con job,” adding, “The plan was the following: organize for someone to buy a caravan, place it with explosives and written material of antisemitic nature, leave it in a specific location and then, once that happened, inform law enforcement about an impending terror attack against Jewish Australians. We believe the person pulling the strings wanted changes to their criminal status but maintained a distance from their scheme and hired alleged local criminals to carry out parts of their plan.”

Then last week, NSW Police and the Australian Federal Police (AFP) released a statement that they had arrested and charged 14 members of an organized crime group, allegedly involved in a series of antisemitic hate crimes.

“None of the individuals we have arrested … have displayed any form of antisemitic ideology,” Hudson said. “I think these organized crime figures have taken an opportunity to play off the vulnerability of the Jewish community.”

However, Ryvchin told ABC Radio that law enforcement should not be so quick to dismiss the role fo antisemitism, noting the historic surge in antisemitic attacks across Australia in recent months.

“I don’t feel we can definitively draw that conclusion,” he said. “Ultimately, the things that we’ve seen took place. They weren’t hoaxes. This is part of something transpiring in broader society. The fact that a criminal network with no apparent ideological links to antisemitism thought fit to latch on to what’s happening shows how deep-seated the problem already was.”

The Australian Jewish Association (AJA) has challenged the claim that the crimes were hoaxes, sharing a news article last week reporting that the man charged with allegedly orchestrating the series of crimes had posted antisemitic comments online.

Also last week, NSW Premier Chris Minns pushed back against calls for repeals of news laws passed in response to the recent wave of hate crimes. Among other measures, the laws imprison those who make terror threats or perform Nazi salutes.

“While these laws were drafted in response to horrifying antisemitism, we have always made clear they would apply to anyone, preying on any person, at any time. In response to calls for the laws to be scrapped, doing so would be a toxic message to our community that this kind of hate speech is acceptable when it’s not,” Minns said. “These laws are very important to maintaining social cohesion.”

On Monday, the Palestine Action Group reportedly filed suit in the NSW Supreme court, charging that the laws were unconstitutional, infringing on “constitutional freedom of communication on government or political matters.”

Southeastern Australia saw a string of hate crimes targeting Jews from November through January. These included cars set on fire and antisemitic graffiti targeting synagogues as well as other Jewish buildings.

That followed the ECAJ releasing a report last year showing that antisemitism in Australia quadrupled to record levels over the past year, with Australian Jews experiencing more than 2,000 antisemitic incidents between October 2023 and September 2024.

The post Australian Jewish Leader Urges Continued Vigilance on Antisemitic Hate Crimes After Police Label Bomb Threat ‘Fake’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Chuck Schumer Postpones Book Tour on Antisemitism Amid Planned Protests, Outrage Over Funding Bill

US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) holds a press conference in the US Capitol in Washington, DC, April 23, 2024. Photo: Annabelle Gordon / CNP/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect

US Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s upcoming tour to promote his new book on antisemitism has been postponed for “security reasons” amid outrage over his decision to prevent a government shutdown last week

“Due to security concerns, Senator Schumer’s book events are being rescheduled,” a spokesperson for the New York Democrat said in a statement.

Schumer, who is Jewish, was slated to hold multiple events this week promoting his book, Antisemitism in America: A Warning, which is set to be released on Tuesday.

One of the events was supposed to take place at Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center in New York City. Information regarding the event, which was set to be moderated by US Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY), was removed from the venue’s website.

Schumer’s other promotional events in Washington, DC and Baltimore were also shelved on short notice. The venues did not provide a reason for nixing the senator’s scheduled appearance. 

Jewish activists planned a protest of Schumer’s now-cancelled New York City book event, lambasting the Democratic leader for failing to advance the Antisemitism Awareness Act to the Senate floor for a vote. In addition, the left-wing anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace organized a protest of his Baltimore book event, accusing the senator of helping facilitate Israel’s so-called “genocide” in Gaza. 

The Democratic leader has also faced tremendous blowback over Senate Democrats’ decision to help pass a continuing resolution and thwart a government shutdown. The Senate voted 54 to 46 to pass the funding bill. Schumer argued that a government shutdown would provide US President Donald Trump and Tesla CEO Elon Musk a greater amount of unchecked power. 

“I know a lot of members didn’t like the CR [continuing resolution — the government shutdown would be far worse. A government shutdown gives Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and DOGE [the US Departmet of Government Efficiency] almost complete power … to close down because they can decide what is an essential service,” Schumer said in a statement.

In the 17 months following the Hamas terrorist group’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, Schumer has struggled to coalesce strident support for the Jewish state among Democratic senators. Although Democrats have repeatedly issued nominal support for Israel’s right to “self-defense,” liberal lawmakers have steadily adopted a more adversarial posture against the Jewish state. In November 2024, 17 Democratic senators voted to impose a partial arms embargo on Israel, citing frustration over mounting civilian casualties in Gaza. 

Furthermore, critics allege that Schumer has not done enough to fight antisemitism in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 atrocities. According to a report by the US Committee on the Workforce and Education, Schumer advised embattled administrators at Columbia University to “keep heads down” amid outrage over surging antisemitism within the student body. 

Nonetheless, Schumer has continued using his platform to voice support for Israel’s right to defend itself. In a recent interview with the New York Times, Chuck Schumer defended Israel from false accusations of “genocide” in Gaza and lambasted the United Nations as “antisemitically against Israel.” 

Genocide is described as a country or some group tries to wipe out a whole race of people, a whole nationality of people. So, if Israel was not provoked and just invaded Gaza and shot at random Palestinians, Gazans, that would be genocide. That’s not what happened,” Schumer told the Times. “In fact, the opposite happened. And Hamas is much closer to genocidal than Israel.”

Schumer lamented the rising tide of anti-Jewish hatred across the country, claiming that antisemites often use the word “Zionist” as a placeholder for “Jew.”

I’ve criticized the Israeli government, and I’ve criticized [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, as you know. Criticism of Israel and how it conducted the war is not antisemitic. But it begins to shade over, and it shades over in a bunch of different ways. When you use the word ‘Zionist’ for Jew — you Zionist pig — you mean you Jewish pig,” Schumer said. 

The post Chuck Schumer Postpones Book Tour on Antisemitism Amid Planned Protests, Outrage Over Funding Bill first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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