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Jews Did Not Finance the Slave Trade; Here Is the Proof
Recently, a prominent figure in the Rochester city community named Cynthia Elliott made a statement to a parent group about an important topic.
It was a passionate statement, which this person had clearly thought about, and sought to speak about from the heart. In this statement, Elliott included a reference to the “history of the Jewish nation … financing the slave ships to bring Africans into the Americas.”
The fact that this was mentioned as an aside, with no citation, leaves me to conclude that the author believes this assertion to be both true and well known.
I decided it was worth spending some time to address this disturbing but persistent falsehood.
“The Jewish nation” did not finance the slave trade. First of all, any time you begin a sentence with a phrase like, “the Jews” (or some iteration thereof), I urge any author to proceed with caution. Collective action by a racial or ethnic group, especially one without a centralized governing body, is rare. As such, these statements often devolve into stereotypes or worse.
I won’t assert that no Jewish person was ever involved in the transatlantic slave trade. I don’t know the identities of the many people around the world who colluded to perpetrate this industrial scale violation against Black Africans, and people of African descent.
The implication of the phrase is that Jews were main, motivating financiers (because of course Jews = money) behind this historical atrocity. This is simply not true.
Horrifyingly, as with many of the modern industrial scale crimes against humanity, the perpetrators kept records.
The Dutch West India company, for example, was one of the largest companies involved in the transatlantic slave trade. Their records indicate that 18 of the original stockholders were Jewish, and estimates put the cash value of their investment as high as 1.2% of total investment. The largest single company involved in the transatlantic slave trade, the Royal African Company, despite being headquartered in London where there was a thriving Jewish community, had no Jewish investors for more than 20 years, until finally in 1691, a single Jewish financier purchased some stock.
Furthermore, to the extent that Jewish people were involved in the transatlantic slave trade, it was not only in finance, and not even disproportionately in finance. The fact that only financing is mentioned plays into the stereotype that Jews are always behind the scenes, controlling the money. While the fact that any Jews were involved in the slave trade makes my blood run cold, it can hardly be said to constitute “the Jewish nation … financing the slave ships.”
Why do people think “the Jews” financed the slave trade? Some of the chief proponents of this idea have been Louis Farrakhan and Leonard Jefferies.
The Nation of Islam, under the leadership of Farrakhan, wrote a pseudo-scholarly book entitled, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, which is devoted to this topic. This book picks sources to show any Jews who were involved in the slave trade, and then carefully doesn’t mention the scale at which these people were involved — which was a tiny fraction of the whole.
The book leaves out mention of other groups involved in kidnapping, torturing, selling, and owning Black human beings, including indigenous groups in America, Black African leaders, and other ethnic and racial groups. I do not write this to excuse or minimize any involvement by anyone of any race in this horrific crime. My point is that this book takes one of the worst crimes in human history, and pins it on “the Jews” by virtue of the actions of a tiny minority of people involved.
This kind of collective scapegoating is never acceptable or moral. It is hardly surprising however, since Farrakhan is an outspoken antisemite. His list of public antisemitic remarks is too long to list here, but suffice it to say that “termites” is one of the nicer names he has for Jews.
Leonard Jefferies was a professor at the City College of New York, who in 1993 gave a now infamous lecture in which he asserted, among other things, “Everyone knows rich Jews helped finance the slave trade.” When Jefferies gave a version of this lecture at Harvard, and was questioned by a student regarding historical records that do not show Jewish ownership or control in the companies who engaged in enslaving Black people for profit, he replied that the investments were “secret.”
Because these allegations align with pre-existing antisemitic tropes about Jews (that Jews are secretly controlling everything), they reinforce what many people already believe. This makes them memorable, and credible to people who are exposed to them. It also means that people are inclined to accept them, regardless of the lack of evidence.
The myth of Jewish control of the slave trade is one of several that foment the divide between non-Jewish Black communities, and non-Black Jewish communities. These two communities have historically stood together in the fight for civil rights, but also experienced increasing tension as Jews became coded “white” in American society, and benefited from some programs and opportunities that excluded Black Americans (though many excluded Jews also).
Today, white supremacy is the language we use to describe unjust, unearned power. In this conception, Jews (being all powerful) must be the agents of white supremacy, even though antisemites don’t consider Jews “white.”
I’m not sure what to say to someone who wholeheartedly believes “the Jews” financed the slave trade. I don’t know if we have a shared frame of reference from which to understand each other. I do not believe this community leader wrote these words with hate. This is simply their understanding of the world. This person lives in a world where an assertion like this makes so much sense, that it doesn’t need to be proven or justified. And my main question is: how do we find healing and justice when these libels persist in our education?
Lauren Deutsch, Esq., is an attorney, activist, and Torah scholar, living in Rochester New York, with her husband and three children. Lauren worked in migrant women’s health services prior to law school, and began her legal career representing survivors of domestic violence at The Legal Aid Society of Rochester in 2010. She has worked in reproductive justice, labor justice, and currently works in disability justice as the Executive Director of a national legal services organization.
The post Jews Did Not Finance the Slave Trade; Here Is the Proof first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Israel Has Told ICC It Will Contest Arrest Warrants, Netanyahu Says
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant during a press conference in the Kirya military base in Tel Aviv, Israel, Oct. 28, 2023. Photo: ABIR SULTAN POOL/Pool via REUTERS
Israel has informed the International Criminal Court that it will contest arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister Yoav Gallant over their conduct of the Gaza war, Netanyahu’s office said on Wednesday.
The office also said that US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham had updated Netanyahu “on a series of measures he is promoting in the US Congress against the International Criminal Court and against countries that would cooperate with it.”
The ICC issued arrest warrants last Thursday for Netanyahu, Gallant, and Hamas leader Ibrahim Al-Masri, known as Mohammed Deif, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza conflict.
The move comes after the ICC prosecutor Karim Khan announced on May 20 that he was seeking arrest warrants for alleged crimes connected to the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas and the Israeli military response in Gaza.
Israel has rejected the jurisdiction of the Hague-based court and denies war crimes in Gaza.
“Israel today submitted a notice to the International Criminal Court of its intention to appeal to the court, along with a demand to delay the execution of the arrest warrants,” Netanyahu’s office said.
Court spokesperson Fadi El Abdallah told journalists that if requests for an appeal were submitted it would be up to the judges to decide
The court’s rules allow for the UN Security Council to adopt a resolution that would pause or defer an investigation or a prosecution for a year, with the possibility of renewing that annually.
After a warrant is issued the country involved or a person named in an arrest warrant can also issue a challenge to the jurisdiction of the court or the admissibility of the case.
The post Israel Has Told ICC It Will Contest Arrest Warrants, Netanyahu Says first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Jewish Girls Attacked in London With Glass Bottles in Antisemitic Outrage
Shomrim officers at the scene of a hate crime in London in which Jewish girls were struck with glass bottles. Photo: Shomrim Stamford Hill/Screenshot
A group of young Jewish girls were the victims of an “abhorrent hate crime” when a man hurled glass bottles at them from a balcony as they were walking through the Stamford Hill section of London on Monday evening.
One of the girls was struck in the head and rushed to the hospital with serious but non-life threatening injuries, according to local law enforcement.
A spokesperson for London’s Metropolitan Police said officers were called to the Woodberry Down Estate in the city’s borough of Hackney following reports of an assault on Monday evening at 7:44 pm local time.
“A group of schoolgirls had been walking through the estate when a bottle was thrown from the upper floor of a building,” the spokesperson said. “A 16-year-old girl was struck on the head and was taken to hospital. Her injuries have since been assessed as non-life changing.”
Police noted they were unable to locate the suspect and an investigation is ongoing before adding, “The incident is being treated as a potential antisemitic hate crime.”
Following the incident, Shomrim, a Jewish organization that monitors antisemitism and serves as a neighborhood watch group, reported that the girls were en route to a rehearsal for an upcoming event. The community, the group added, was “shocked” by the attack on “innocent young Jewish girls,” calling it an “abhorrent hate crime.”
14-year-old girl rushed to Hospital with head & facial injuries following an attack in #StamfordHill.
Young Jewish girls on their way to a rehearsal were pelted with glass bottles by a male on a balcony at Woodberry Down Estate N4.
This… pic.twitter.com/MzHPHusgyX
— Shomrim (London North & East) (@Shomrim) November 26, 2024
Since then, another Jewish girl, age 14, has reported being pelted with a hard object which caused her to be “knocked unconscious, and left feeling dizzy and with a bump on her head,” according to Shomrim.
Monday’s crime was one among many which have targeted London Jews in recent years, an issue The Algemeiner has reported on extensively.
Last December, an Orthodox Jewish man was assaulted by a man riding a bicycle on the sidewalk, two attackers brutally mauled a Jewish woman, and a group of Jewish children was berated by a woman who screamed “I’ll kill all of you Jews. You are murderers!” A similar incident occurred when a man confronted a Jewish shopper and shouted, “You f—king Jew, I will kill you!”
Months prior, a perpetrator stalked and assaulted an Orthodox Jewish woman. He followed her, shouting “dirty Jew” before snatching her shopping bag and “spilling her shopping onto the pavement whilst laughing.” That incident followed a woman wielding a wooden stick approaching a Jewish woman near the Seven Sisters area and declaring “I am doing it because you are Jew,” while striking her over the head and pouring liquid on her. The next day, the same woman — described by an eyewitness as a “serial racist” — chased a mother and her baby with a wooden stick after spraying liquid on the baby. That same week, three people accosted a Jewish teenager and knocked his hat off his head while yelling “f—king Jew.”
According to an Algemeiner review of Metropolitan Police Service data, 2,383 antisemitic hate crimes occurred in London between October 2023 and October 2024, eclipsing the full-year totals of 550 in 2022 and 845 in 2021. The problem is so serious that city officials created a new bus route to help Jewish residents “feel safe” when they travel.
“Jewish Londoners have felt scared to leave their homes,” London Mayor Sadiq Khan told The Jewish Chronicle in a statement about the policy decision earlier this year. “So, this direct bus link between these two significant communities [Stamford Hill in Hackney and Golders Green in Barnet, areas with two of the biggest Jewish communities in London] means you can travel on the 310, not need to change, and be safe and feel safer. I hope that will lead to more Londoners from these communities using public transport safely.”
Khan added that the route “connects communities, connects congregations” and would reassure Jewish Londoners they would be “safe when they travel between these two communities.”
However, it doesn’t solve the problem at hand — an explosion of antisemitism unlike anything seen in the Western world since World War II. Just this week, according to a story by GB News, an unknown group scattered leaflets across the streets of London which threatened that “every Zionist needs to leave Britain or be slaughtered.”
Responding to this latest incident, the director of the Jewish civil rights group StandWithUs UK Isaaz Zarfati told GB News that the comments should be taken “seriously.”
“We are witnessing a troubling trend of red lines being repeatedly crossed,” he said. “This is not just another wave that will pass if we remain passive. We must take those threats and statement seriously because they will one day turn into actions, and decisive steps are needed to combat this alarming phenomenon.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Jewish Girls Attacked in London With Glass Bottles in Antisemitic Outrage first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Biden Lauds ‘Permanent’ Ceasefire, but Northern Israelis Warn It Opens Door to Future Hezbollah Attacks
Israeli soldiers gesture from an Israeli military vehicle, after a ceasefire was agreed to by Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon, near Israel’s border with Lebanon in northern Israel, Nov. 27, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
While US President Joe Biden hailed the new ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hezbollah on Tuesday as a “courageous” step toward peace, security experts and residents of northern Israel voiced starkly contrasting sentiments, criticizing the agreement as falling far short of addressing the ongoing threats posed by the Iran-backed Lebanese terrorist group.
“I applaud the courageous decision made by the leaders of Lebanon and Israel to end the violence. It reminds us that peace is possible,” Biden said one day before the ceasefire took effect on Wednesday.
He added that it was “designed to be a permanent cessation of hostilities,” vowing that Hezbollah, which wields significant political and military influence across Lebanon, would “not be allowed to threaten the security of Israel again.”
But according to Lieutenant Colonel (Res.) Sarit Zehavi, a resident of northern Israel and the founder and director of Alma — a research center that focuses on security challenges relating to Israel’s northern border — the ceasefire deal, the details of which have not been made public, is nowhere close to establishing peace.
“Let’s not be mistaken. Ceasefire is not peace,” Zehavi told The Algemeiner. “There is a gap between the two and in order to bridge the gap, we need a thorough change in Lebanon and in the Iranian involvement in the region.”
According to Zehavi, the deal was problematic at the outset because it was based on UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the 2006 Second Lebanon War and has been criticized for its historical ineffectiveness. Zehavi highlighted the failures of the Lebanese army and UNIFIL [UN Interim Force in Lebanon] troops in enforcing the resolution in the past, warning that the same could happen again.
As part of the deal, Israel has insisted on retaining the ability to enforce the resolution independently, but this approach carries risks, Zehavi said. “If we enforce the resolution, it means that there won’t be a ceasefire. If there isn’t a ceasefire, it means that Hezbollah will retaliate, and we will continue the ongoing fighting.”
Hezbollah had already violated the terms of the deal within hours of its signing, with operatives disguised as civilians entering restricted zones in southern Lebanon, including the villages of Kila, Mais a-Jabal, and Markaba, despite warnings from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
Another sticking point is the lack of safeguards preventing Hezbollah from rearming, leaving Israel reliant on Lebanese assurances. “After what happened on [last] Oct. 7, Israelis are not willing to enable Hezbollah to recover,” Zehavi asserted. “We cannot rely on just promises; we need to make sure that Hezbollah is not capable of threatening us and our families over here in the north.”
The international community, Zehavi argued, has a crucial role to play in pressuring Lebanon to sever its ties with Hezbollah. So long as Lebanon does not designate Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, she said, the Shi’ite Muslim group will continue to exert influence over the country and therefore pose a threat to neighboring Israel. Members of the group hold influential positions in the Lebanese government, including ministers who control border crossings and airports, facilitating the smuggling of weapons into Lebanon.
Zehavi also pointed to Iran’s declaration that it will help rebuild both Lebanon and Hezbollah, even while continuing to funnel weapons and financial aid into the terrorist group through smuggling routes.
“As long as the ayatollahs of Iran continue to nourish proxy militias in the Middle East against Israel, we are not going to see peace,” she said.
Other northern residents similarly argued that halting the fight against Hezbollah now would give the terrorist group an opportunity to rebuild its arsenal, strengthen its forces, and potentially replicate the scale of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack in Israel’s northern region.
“We never learn. Just like in 2006, and many other times, we stop at the brink of total victory, handing our enemies the opportunity to rebuild and return years later, stronger and deadlier than before,” said Moti Vanunu, a resident who was evacuated from the northern town of Kiryat Shmona.
Gabi Naaman, mayor of the battered northern city of Shlomi, expressed skepticism that the ceasefire would bring lasting security to Israel’s northern residents.
“Everything we’ve seen indicates that the next round is inevitable, whether it’s in a month, two months, or ten years,” he said.
Despite her reservations, Zehavi explained that Israel had no real alternative but to accept the ceasefire, citing the need to provide northern residents with a return to normalcy and to provide the opportunity to the IDF to resupply ammunition and allow soldiers time to recover. “We had to choose between two bad options,” she said.
Some 70,000 Israelis living in the north were forced to evacuate their homes amid unrelenting rocket, missile, and drone attacks from Hezbollah, which began firing on Oct. 8 of last year, one day after Hamas’s invasion of and massacre southern Israel from Gaza. Israel had been exchanging fire with Hezbollah across the Lebanon border until it ramped up its military efforts over the last two months, moving ground forces into southern Lebanon and destroying much of Hezbollah’s leadership and weapons stockpiles through airstrikes.
While Zehavi viewed the timing of the campaign’s start in September — ahead of the challenges of fighting during the winter months — and not in May as a strategic error, she applauded the army’s achievements of the past two months.
In a poll conducted by Israel’s Channel 12 News on Tuesday night, half of those surveyed felt there was no clear winner in the war against Hezbollah. Twenty percent of respondents believed the IDF emerged victorious in the war, while 19 percent thought Hezbollah prevailed. A further 11 percent were unsure who had the upper hand.
The post Biden Lauds ‘Permanent’ Ceasefire, but Northern Israelis Warn It Opens Door to Future Hezbollah Attacks first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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