Three pro-Israel attendees of a public event titled “Strategic Lessons From the Palestinian Resistance” reported being attacked and forcibly dragged out by anti-Israel activists also in attendance at the West Asheville Library in North Carolina on Saturday.

The event, hosed by Another Carolina Anarchist Bookfair, was one of multiple anti-Israel sessions that took place during a three-day “anarchist” book fair.

The Algemeiner interviewed David Moritz, a 54-year-old son of Holocaust survivors, and Monica Buckley, who is 48 and identifies as queer. Both are Jewish and attended the event with 80-year-old Bob Campbell, who was also interviewed for this story.

Approximately 60-80 anti-Israel activists were in attendance at the event held in a public library. Almost all were masked, with the exception of one activist who is reported to regularly attend events in the area unmasked.

According to Moritz, Buckley, and Campbell, the event celebrated and glorified Hamas’ massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, when the Palestinian terrorist group killed 1,200 people and kidnapped about 250 others as hostages.

The three Jewish attendees were seated quietly along a far wall. Anti-Israel activists asked them to put on masks, which they did. Interestingly, no one asked a presenter to stop vaping as he spoke at the indoor, public library.

At one point, according to video circulated on social media, a presenter stopped the event, drawing everyone’s attention to the three pro-Israel attendees.

The others in attendance expressed concern that their public event was being live streamed by “Zionists.” The presenter immediately joked about the possibility of a “murder here.”

The attendees and anti-Israel activists were then asked by a presenter, “I’ll let you guys decide. What do you want to do?” The pro-Israel attendees were immediately told to leave with multiple people yelling out “bye.”

After further discussion, the presenter asked for a show of hands on how to proceed. An attendee said, “They are not f—king welcome here.” Someone else was heard saying, “I don’t trust them.”

At about two minutes and 20 seconds into the video, activists began encircling Moritz, Buckley, and Campbell.

While about 80 percent of the attendees were women, a group of large men stood over the pro-Israel attendees and loudly clapped their hands while yelling “Free Palestine.” The video then goes black while the audio continues with a clear struggle being heard.

According to video and interviews with those targeted at the event, an activist grabbed Buckley’s phone, instigating mob violence against the three pro-Israel attendees. She was reportedly punched, kicked, and stomped. Her phone was stolen and later found, having been thrown on nearby property.

All three pro-Israel attendees reported being dragged out of the library.

Campbell, an 80-year-old military veteran with cancer and a stent in his heart, was stomped, assaulted, and pushed to the ground, a footprint clearly visible on his shorts. His phone was also taken and later found in a trashcan. Local police encouraged Campbell to see a doctor.

“My arms are chewed up,” Campbell told The Algemeiner. For medical treatment he went to a US Veterans Affairs facility, which found he had “severe contusions.”

“What really upset me — I was laying on the floor and this big guy was on top of me,” Campbell said. “The librarian came to the door, looked me right in the eye, turned around and walked back and didn’t do a damn thing. Didn’t call the police.”

Moritz was badly beaten, a large welt clearly visible on his head. Once the activists got Moritz outside, one briefly put him in a headlock before he was able to break free. According to interviewees, police arrived and stated that while they received multiple calls, none were from library personnel.

According to Moritz, the man who put him in a headlock was allowed to leave even after the activist was pointed out to the police.

Buckley reported that when she was being dragged outside, the unmasked activist who seemingly recognized her from other local events repeatedly said, “Monica, just relax, don’t fight it.”

None of the activists in attendance came to the defense of the three pro-Israel attendees.

According to Buckley, one of the attendees was arrested. A police report confirms that one person was arrested at the library.

Moritz said that the police showed him video footage that caught some of the attack, but did not provide him a copy. It is unclear if the police have obtained additional video footage from an outside camera or any additional cameras of the incident.

On Monday, the Asheville Police Department issued a statement that they “are investigating an assault that occurred during an ACAB [Another Carolina Anarchist Bookfair] seminar held Saturday afternoon at the West Asheville Library.”

The statement noted that a 35-year-old was charged with two counts of “resisting, delay, and obstruct,” adding, “The investigation into the robbery and assault is ongoing.”

The Algemeiner has reached out to the police for additional information and comment.

Peter Reitzes writes about issues related to antisemitism and Israel.

The post Masked Activists Violently Attack Jews at North Carolina Public Library first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

The report that Wikipedia’s volunteer editors are labeling the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) as an unreliable source of information on certain topics — including antisemitism related to Israel and Zionism — is a much more serious problem than an attack on a particular institution. Instead, it speaks to how much the bias against Israel and the indifference to antisemitism has spread to other organizations and informational platforms in this country.

There are those in the Jewish community who go so far as to claim that any criticism of Israel is really a cover for antisemitism. This is absurd. Israel is a country like any other, and its policies are subject to criticism, and even condemnation, as we see taking place within the country itself. Serious people, including those at ADL, reject outright the idea that Israel is beyond criticism, and that when criticism of Israel appears, it is a manifestation of antisemitism.

On the other hand, equally absurd — but much more dangerous because it is accepted in certain mainstream institutions — is the notion that any form of criticism of Israel can never be classified as antisemitism. This is a dangerous and misinformed idea, which underlies the spread of hate that we have witnessed since October 7. The most extreme manifestation of this was the rationalization or outright denial of the barbaric Hamas massacre of October 7.  This attack — the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust — was supposedly framed in terms of legitimate resistance to Israeli policies. In other words, nothing Israel could do to defend itself is defensible.

While the distortion embodied in these justifications for the murder of 1,200 Israelis, the rape of scores of women, the taking of more than 200 hostages is so obvious, it wasn’t the most perilous form. Even a person with hostile views toward the Jewish State could see through the immorality of justifying one of the worst acts of terrorism since 9/11.

Far more dangerous, because of its respectability, is the concept that no criticism of Israel can ever be antisemitism. This is often expressed with phrases like, “we don’t hate Jews, we hate Zionism.” And those sources — such as the ADL — which identify areas where hostility toward Israel can be a form of antisemitism and a generator of antisemitic incidents, are treated as biased and unreliable by Wikipedia and other groups and publications.

In fact, the manifestations of anti-Israel activity and the explosion of anti-Jewish behavior in a multitude of areas of society cannot be separated from classical antisemitism.

Jews were demonized for centuries — from being accused as “Christ killers,” to charges of blood libels and murders of children for ritual purposes, to sinister conspiracy theories as embodied in the fraudulent Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion document, which accuses Jewish leaders of plotting to take over the world.

All of this deeply embedded hatred culminated in the Holocaust, the Nazis’ systematic murder of two-thirds of the Jews of Europe.

After the horrors of the Nazi extermination of the Jewish people, outright Jew-hatred was stigmatized — but millennia of prejudice against the Jewish people did not suddenly disappear. Over time, it transformed itself into something more legitimate: hatred of the only Jewish state in the world.

To those who cared, like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., it was obvious that delegitimizing the Jewish State was merely a post-Holocaust form of antisemitism.

While these ideas existed for decades, it was October 7 that gave them new life. Beyond the rationalization of the Hamas terrorism itself, the anti-Israel protests on campuses were characterized by classic demonization and delegitimization of the Jewish State and its Jewish supporters.

Denial of the fundamental right of the Jewish state to exist — as embodied in the popular protest phrase, “From the river to the sea” — is along the historic lines of delegitimizing Jews through conspiracy theories.

Demonization of the Jewish State through denying what Hamas did, or justifying or labeling Israel’s struggle to defend itself after the worst day since the Holocaust as genocide — or accusing Israel of deliberately targeting children, in the spirit of blood libel charges — are only some of the ways in which expressions have not been mere criticism of Israel.

And the effect of all this — the attacks on Jews on campuses and elsewhere — was highly predictable. Hate speech, whether from the right, the left, or Islamist, inevitably leads to hate incidents.

In deeming ADL reporting as “unreliable,” this subset of Wikipedia’s editors has ignored all these forms of antisemitism that have emerged over the last eight months. For us, we will continue to do our work, always recognizing the distinction between free speech and criticism of Israeli policies and the demonization and delegitimization of the Jewish state, which fits into the pattern of historic antisemitism.

It is important that leaders in society make clear that they know what’s going on here — that it’s exactly this kind of thinking that has produced the opportunity for antisemitism to openly raise its ugly head in a way that we haven’t seen for decades. If people don’t confront the reality, this hatred — legitimized by mainstream sources — will spread and create even greater dangers for American Jews and American society.

The first step in standing up against this spreading support for hate is to express support for the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s Working Definition of Antisemitism, which articulates when legitimate criticism of Israel becomes antisemitism.

Ken Jacobson is Associate National Director of ADL.

The post Wikipedia’s Serious Problem: Bias Against Israel first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Whoever thinks the current war is an isolated conflict in the Gaza Strip — think again. The war is being cheered by members of Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas’ political party, Fatah, as leading to a “return to Acre, Jaffa, and Haifa.”

In other words, “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

One Fatah member stated recently what Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) has documented for decades — that the conflict with Israel is not over land, but much more. It is “existential, not just a conflict over borders.”

Fatah Revolutionary Council member Muhammad Al-Lahham: “This is my opinion as [a member of] Fatah: That my conflict against this occupation [i.e., Israel] is an existential conflict, not just a conflict over borders. It’s either me or him on this land.”

[Al-Arabiya TV (Saudi Arabia), Facebook page, June 15, 2024]

Another top member and official of Fatah, Nablus Branch Secretary Muhammad Hamdan, said that Palestinians dying in the war in Gaza serve as “fuel” for the Palestinian “return,” and taking over of all of Israel. As he put it, Israel is “transient”:

Fatah Nablus Branch Secretary Muhammad Hamdan: “We say to the entire world that this blood that is being shed will be the fuel for our return to Acre, Jaffa, and Haifa, and certainly the Israeli occupation is transient and indeed the State of Palestine will be established, whether the occupation [i.e., Israel] and this world want it or not. All this national and mass activity emphasizes that we are returning, whether the occupation wants it or not.”

[Official PA TV, May 15, 2024]

The Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Education showed a map and worded it as explicitly as possible on its Facebook page: “Palestine — the entire land is ours, from the [Mediterranean] Sea to the [Jordan] River”

This echoes many similar statements before it by other top Fatah and PA officials, such as Fatah Revolutionary Council Secretary Majed Al-Fatiani, who said that all the “transients” who came to “Palestine” must return “to where they came from,” and that only the Palestinians will have “sovereignty” over the land:

Fatah Revolutionary Council Secretary Majed Al-Fatiani: “There will be no sovereignty over this land except for the Palestinians … even if there is a foreign and transient case as the transients who came in the history of Palestine and returned to where they came from… [The Israelis] must understand that Palestine between the [Mediterranean] Sea and the [Jordan] River – every Palestinian man and woman has a right to it, and we will pursue them to take this right … Every year a generation arises among us that says: My home is in Jaffa, my home is in Tantura, my home is in the Upper Galilee, in Al-Bassa, in Lod, my home is in Ramle, Umm Al-Rashrash [i.e., Eilat; all the places are in Israel], and everywhere.”

[Fatah-run Awdah TV, Special Coverage, May 29, 2022]

The idea of Israel as a colonial “implant” and “a temporary ruler” is expressed in the following video, which was broadcast by official PA TV hundreds of times for almost a decade. It shows the rise and defeat of different rulers in “Palestine” over time. It ends with Israel’s defeat and the arrival of a “new” Muslim conqueror, Saladin, who defeated the Crusaders, thus representing the coming Muslim savior who will “liberate Palestine” from Jewish-Israeli rule:

The author is a senior analyst at Palestinian Media Watch, where a version of this article was originally published.

The post Members of Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah Party Say Jews Cannot Live in Israel first appeared on Algemeiner.com.