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Prominent Peruvian-Jewish journalist hit with antisemitic harassment after investigating protester deaths
LIMA, Peru (JTA) — Right-wing extremist protesters have targeted Gustavo Gorriti, a prominent Peruvian-Jewish journalist, harassing him with antisemitic chants and posters outside of his home over his website’s investigations into police violence stemming from the country’s ongoing unrest.
Jewish and non-Jewish organizations have defended Gorriti since around 30 people protested in front of his home in Lima last Tuesday, holding signs depicting him and one other non-Jewish journalist as rats holding bags of money. Videos posted to social media also show some of the protesters shouting antisemitic slogans, such as: “We will continue visiting this Jew, his days are numbered.” Others shouted “Gorriti isn’t Peruvian, he’s Jewish.”
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, the protesters were part of La Resistencia, “an extremist right-wing movement whose leaders had published Gorriti’s address on social media and encouraged followers to harass him.”
Peru has been embroiled in a political crisis since December, when the left-wing former president, Pedro Castillo, attempted to dissolve Congress and unconstitutionally rule by decree. He was promptly impeached, and his vice president, Dina Boluarte, was sworn in as his successor. Many Peruvians, especially low income citizens and those of Indigenous heritage, oppose the new government.
Widespread protests — ranging from rallies to attempts to take over airports — have continued unabated since December. While the majority of the protest activity has been peaceful, Peru’s military and police have also resorted to violence on multiple occasions. At least 49 protesters and one police officer have been killed as a direct result of the protests.
On Feb. 12, the news website IDL-Reporteros, where Gorriti works as editor in chief, published an investigation into some of the deaths in Ayacucho, a southern city that has been a protest hotspot. The investigation found that some of the protesters killed by police were innocent; one was killed while assisting someone who was injured, while another, a 15-year-old, was not part of the demonstration. The team of journalists said some of the police killings could be classified as “extrajudicial killings.”
Gorriti, who rose to fame in the 1980s through reporting on Peru’s government, founded IDL-Reporteros in 2009. He has been the target of antisemitic harassment before from a range of critics, including a former Peruvian president.
In a 2005 interview, Gorriti spoke about his Jewishness.
“I am agnostic and I don’t like religious rituals. However, I identify with the vision of Judaism, which is to feel a great history that beats within oneself,” he said.
Jeffrey Radzinsky, a Peruvian-Jewish lawyer and political analyst, said that although La Resistencia is a fringe group, antisemitism in Peru is “something shared in both ideological extremes,” not only the far right. He gave the example of Vladimir Cerrón, a former leftist governor who has tweeted about “Peruvian-Jewish powers.” Gorritti’s news organization has previously reported on Cerrón’s antisemitism.
On their website, IDL-Reporteros condemned the harassment as “anti-Semitic” and noted that this is the fourth episode of attacks against the news organization and against Gorriti in the past 36 days.
On Saturday, the Jewish Association of Peru communal group released a statement condemning the attacks on Gorriti.
“We emphatically reject the harassment and threats laden with anti-Semitic racism that a group of people recently carried out in front of the home of journalist Gustavo Gorriti,” the group wrote. “Freedom of expression is one of the essential values of our society. Our country has a climate of polarization, and Peruvians need to look for spaces of dialogue and understanding, for which it is essential to eliminate racism and physical and verbal violence.”
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The post Prominent Peruvian-Jewish journalist hit with antisemitic harassment after investigating protester deaths appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Trump to Meet Qatar’s Emir Al-Thani En Route to Malaysia
Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani speaks during a meeting with Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, in Doha, Qatar, December 8, 2021. Saudi Press Agency/Handout via REUTERS
i24 News – US President Donald Trump will meet with Qatar’s Emir and prime minister on Air Force One during a refuel stop in Qatar en route to Malaysia for a regional summit, a White House official said on Saturday.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio would join Trump in Qatar, the official added. The meeting is expected to be closed to press.
Qatar, a Major Non-NATO Ally and host of the largest American military base in the region, is also an ally and sponsor of Hamas, the jihadist Palestinian group sworn to Israel’s destruction that, on October 7, 2023, led the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
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Report: Hamas Terrorists Freed Under Ceasefire Deal Luxuriating in a 5-Star Cairo Resort
Hamas terrorists carry grenade launchers at the funeral of Marwan Issa, a senior Hamas deputy military commander who was killed in an Israeli airstrike during the conflict between Israel and Hamas, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, in the central Gaza Strip, Feb. 7, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ramadan Abed
i24 News – Upward of 150 convicted Hamas terrorists released by Israel in exchange for hostages under a US-brokered ceasefire deal are staying in a luxury hotel in Cairo alongside unsuspecting Western tourists, the Daily Mail reported Saturday.
The group was among some 250 prisoners serving life sentences for deadly attacks against Israelis. Israel agreed to the swap to secure the return of the last 20 living hostages. The move was met with some opposition in Israel, including from those whose loved one were murdered by the terrorists.
The Daily Mail reported that 154 of the released terrorists are staying at the five-star Renaissance Cairo Mirage City Hotel, whose guests are booking rooms without being forewarned that convicted terrorists are also staying on the premises.
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Leonard Bernstein wrote a love song to the White House; now it’s an elegy
In 2017, Cynthia Erivo, clad in white like a bride, took the stage at Washington, D.C.’s Kennedy Center to perform “Take Care of This House.” It was opening night of the National Symphony Orchestra’s season, and Erivo was singing First Lady Abigail Adams’ solo from the little-known Leonard Bernstein and Alan Jay Lerner musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
That show, an ode to the first century of the White House’s existence, premiered in 1976, and has a rocky history: It closed on Broadway after only 20 performances, including previews. But the musical, while imperfect, was daring — a recounting of American history that featured a series of presidents, their first ladies, and their Black servants. Erivo sang in the first year of President Donald Trump’s first term. Then, having a Black actor on the Capitol’s most prominent stage sing the part of a white first lady — in a song that promises a Black servant he has a part in the American dream — felt like resistance.
Yes, the political tide might have been turning away from the heartfelt messaging of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, which suggested women and people of color were as central to American history as any white, male president. But in the world of culture, Erivo’s performance proclaimed, that kind of equal respect was still the true American dream.
Is it still?
Where Jacqueline Kennedy’s Garden, also known as the First Lady’s Garden, once bloomed, there is an expanse of yellow-brown dirt. The First Lady’s Office, shaped by Eleanor Roosevelt and Rosalynn Carter, is a heap of twisted metal. Where the corridors of power once linked the presidential operations of the West Wing to the visitor’s office — the point of public access to the public’s house — there is an expanse of scarred, dusty red brick, the innards of the house exposed.
Amid Trump’s demolition of the White House’s East Wing, the rubble where part of the most familiar facade in the country used to stand feels like a rebuttal to the simple exhortation Adams’ character expresses in “Take Care of this House.” “Keep it so clean,” she sings, “The glow can be seen / All over the land.”
Bernstein held a troubled but profound attachment to the vision of a United States that lived up to its founding promise of liberty and justice for all. That oft-broken pledge was a theme of West Side Story: “America,” with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, is an unusually effective, and entertaining, argument both for and against maintaining hope in this country. Bernstein’s support for the civil rights movement was so well-known that it occasionally backfired, with Tom Wolfe famously asking if the composer’s activism was just a way of accenting his own glamour.
But the picture of a better country — a country that was true to its professed ideals — has rarely sounded as unglamorous, or as meaningful, as it does in “Take Care of This House.” Adams coaches her servant carefully: Make sure the doors are locked and the surfaces are shined, and be ever alert to anything even mildly amiss.
Whatever Bernstein’s failings as an activist, he understood something essential about what the White House means. It is an example of the best of the U.S. because it is humble: Not a palace, but a place that successive generations — especially First Ladies, and their unsung servants — have strived to make beautiful. Some people may visit the White House to gawk at the extravagance, or to feel the rumbles of the machinery of power. I suspect more do because they are drawn to their own sense of ownership of it — the idea that they, too, could have a small part in making it great.
Will Trump’s new ballroom make it greater than the First Lady’s Garden did? Greater than the quiet energy that came from standing between walls that had witnessed the making of history?
It’s true that luxury and ease are also manifestations of a kind of American dream — a different one than that which Bernstein and Lerner articulated. But today, watching Erivo sing Adams’ paean to the beauty of a carefully kept home, my heart aches. All that work, over all those decades, and the end is a landscape of desolate rubbish, with the suggestion of gaudiness to follow.
When I think back to my own visit to the East Wing of the White House in 2015, I think about the last lines of Bernstein and Lerner’s song: “Take care of this house / Be always on call/ For this house / Is the hope of us all.”
I felt a sort of soft awe back then. I wonder if that feeling is one I’ll ever have again.
The post Leonard Bernstein wrote a love song to the White House; now it’s an elegy appeared first on The Forward.