RSS
There Are Not Two Sides to Antisemitism; These Are Signs of Jew-Hatred
Illustrative: Thousands of anti-Israel demonstrators from the Midwest gather in support of Palestinians and hold a rally and march through the Loop in Chicago on Oct. 21, 2023. Photo: Alexandra Buxbaum/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
The October 7 Hamas terror attack in Israel was the worst single day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. And yet, Hamas’ torture, indiscriminate murder, and kidnapping of innocent people has unleashed staggering antisemitism around the world.
More than 1,200 people were slaughtered in Israel, including women, children, infants, and the elderly, and approximately 240 hostages are still being held in Gaza. The attacks, and the Israeli government’s response to them, have sparked protests around the world.
Unfortunately, too many of the voices criticizing Israel’s actions to defend itself and rescue its hostages have descended into open antisemitism.
American Jews make up just more than 2% of the US population, yet they accounted for more than half of religiously-motivated hate crimes in 2022 according to the FBI — a 37% increase compared to 2021. And that was long before the Hamas attack and the subsequent aftermath on the Jewish community.
Contemporary antisemitism is often stoked by social media and online posts. Since October 7, messages that are not only anti-Israel, but anti-Jewish have been amplified by segments within pro-Palestinian protests.
Antisemitism is the world’s oldest prejudice because of its adaptability; today we see this hatred promoted under the guise of human rights. While it is not always clear when or whether some words and phrases are blatantly antisemitic–and context can be critical, if you witness these eight terms, tropes, and themes, you are seeing discrimination against Jews.
There are not two sides to antisemitism.
1. Dirty/Filthy Jews
Describing Jews as “dirty” or “filthy,” which was seen on a sign during a pro-Palestine protest, draws on anti-Jewish themes including “poisoning the well,” an accusation rooted in the 14th-century Bubonic Plague that blamed Jews for purposefully spreading disease. Following the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023, a Jewish person in London was called a “dirty Jew” and was also told, “no wonder you’re all getting raped.” That’s happened countless times before and after October 7.
2. Dual Loyalty
Dual loyalty is a bigoted trope used to cast Jews as the “other,” accusing them of being disloyal citizens whose true allegiance is to other Jews or to Israel. This creates distrust and spreads harmful ideas, such as the belief Jews are a traitorous “fifth column,” undermining their country from within. Some anti-Israel activists have asserted Jews should leave their countries and Israel to go “back to Poland” or other places where Jews have historically lived. Dual loyalty accusations also occur on US college campuses, when Jewish students are asked to denounce Israel in order to participate in progressive activities.
3. Justifying Hamas
Hamas is an internationally-recognized terrorist organization in Gaza, which is funded by Iran. Its founding charter, also known as the Covenant, calls for the destruction of Israel and the annihilation of the world’s Jews.
Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin said, “Killing Jews is an act of devotion.”
At several pro-Palestine rallies around the world, protestors chanted, spray painted, and held signs supporting Hamas and promoting violence, saying “resistance is justified when people are occupied.” Slaughtering innocent people, including children and babies; raping women; and kidnapping civilians is not resistance. Any justification for Hamas must be condemned for what it is: defending the indiscriminate murder of Jews.
4. “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free”
“From the River to the Sea,” is a rallying cry for terrorist groups and their sympathizers, from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) to Hamas, who are seeking Palestinian control over all of Israel’s borders from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
While there is nothing antisemitic about advocating for Palestinians to have their own state, this specific call implies the eradication of Israel and Jews from their historic homeland.
To most Jews, the chant is an existential threat to the one Jewish state where Jews can live freely and safely. Yet, pro-Palestine protesters, including members of Congress, have repeatedly used and defended the phrase, despite it being a call for violence against Jews and Israelis.
5. Deicide
The deicide charge, which blames Jews for Jesus’ crucifixion, is a trope echoing centuries-old methods of maligning Jews that have been refuted for decades by the Roman Catholic Church. But antisemites continue to use it to justify anti-Jewish hatred. Branding Jews as Christ-killers has been recycled in the Middle East, often by comparing Jesus with Palestinians who are “crucified” by the Israeli military or government.
In May 2021, for instance, a protester in Miami held a sign reading, “Jesus was Palestinian and you killed him too,” and in London, a protester shared an image of Christ carrying the cross with the words, “Do not let them do the same thing today again.”
6. Blood Libel
Since the Middle Ages, blood libel charges have falsely accused Jews of killing and using the blood of Christians for ritual purposes. For centuries, such claims to demonize Jews led to horrific violence, destruction, persecution, and massacres of Jewish people and communities.
Today, these antisemitic charges have evolved into blaming Jews for purposefully targeting and killing Palestinian children. The blood libel has been seen and heard from cartoons, such as in Al-Ghad, the Jordanian daily, which depicted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu drinking the blood of children in the Gaza Strip, to inappropriate signs and libelous headlines, including on October 17, 2023, when major newspapers including The New York Times falsely reported that Israel intentionally bombed the Al Ahli Baptist Hospital.
This misinformation perpetuated a common antisemitic trope that Israelis are bloodthirsty and intentionally killed Palestinian civilians, and led to attacks on Jewish communities and institutions. It took several days before news sources accurately reported that a Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) rocket misfired and hit the hospital, by which time the false narrative was already accepted as truth.
7. Holocaust Distortion and Denial
Distorting or trivializing the Holocaust, which was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators, is an attack on Jewish memory and identity.
We saw an alarming amount of Holocaust comparisons during the COVID-19 pandemic, which downplayed and distorted the Holocaust and lessened what Hitler did. On the other side, saying Zionism, which is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, equals Nazism — which led to the genocide of the Jewish people — also lessens what Hitler did. That statement is not a disagreement with Israeli policy; it is a distortion of the Holocaust.
The day after Hamas’ invasion, a pro-Palestinian protester displayed a Nazi swastika in Times Square. Graffiti of Nazi swastikas were tagged on Jewish institutions around the world. Saying Israel is perpetrating a “second Holocaust” by trying to annihilate Palestinians is both factually wrong and antisemitic.
8. Holding Jews Collectively Responsible
While criticizing the Israeli government is not antisemitic, associating all Jews with the policies of a sovereign nation absolutely is. This blame furthers long standing conspiracy theories of secret Jewish power and world domination, which originate from a discredited Tsarist Russian publication called Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Even though it is clearly a work of fiction, “many school textbooks throughout the Arab and Islamic world teach the Protocols as fact,” according to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Jews around the world have rightly feared that anti-Israel protests and pro-Hamas sentiment would lead to violence against Jews living in the Diaspora. Unfortunately, there are dozens of examples of how Jews continue to be targeted because of the war.
Many of these terms and dozens of others are found in the Translate Hate glossary from American Jewish Committee (AJC), which highlights how easy it is for antisemitism to hide in plain sight. The more you can recognize these terms, the easier it is to call them out for what they are and help combat anti-Jewish prejudice and hatred.
Holly Huffnagle is the U.S. Director for Combating Antisemitism at American Jewish Committee (AJC).
The post There Are Not Two Sides to Antisemitism; These Are Signs of Jew-Hatred first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Antisemitism Continues to Skyrocket in France, With Over 1,500 Incidents Recorded in 2024, New Report Finds
Sign reading “+1000% of Antisemitic Acts: These Are Not Just Numbers” during a march against antisemitism, in Lyon, France, June 25, 2024. Photo: Romain Costaseca / Hans Lucas via Reuters Connect
Antisemitism in France continued to surge to alarming levels across the country last year, with 1,570 incidents recorded, according to a new bombshell report.
The Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF), the main representative body of French Jews, on Wednesday released its annual report on antisemitism, which was compiled by the Jewish Community Protection Service using data jointly recorded with the Ministry of the Interior.
The total number of antisemitic outrages last year was a slight dip from 2023’s record total of 1,676, but it marked a striking increase from the 436 antisemitic acts recorded in 2022.
In late May and early June, antisemitic acts rose by more than 140 percent, far surpassing the weekly average of slightly more than 30 incidents.
The report also found that 65.2 percent of antisemitic acts last year targeted individuals, with more than 10 percent of these offenses involving physical violence.
One such incident occurred in late June, when an elderly Jewish woman was attacked in a Paris suburb by two assailants who punched her in the face, pushed her to the ground, and kicked her while hurling antisemitic slurs, including “dirty Jew, this is what you deserve.”
In another egregious attack that garnered international headlines, a 12-year-old Jewish girl was raped by three Muslim boys in a different Paris suburb on June 15. The child told investigators that the assailants called her a “dirty Jew” and hurled other antisemitic comments at her during the attack. In response to the incident, French President Emmanuel Macron denounced the “scourge of antisemitism” plaguing his country.
Comme chaque année, le Crif publie le rapport annuel sur les chiffres de l’antisémitisme en France établi par le Service de Protection de la Communauté Juive (@SPCJFRANCE) sur la base des chiffres recensés conjointement entre le SPCJ et le ministère de l’Intérieur.
Pour la… pic.twitter.com/VuPwVXvq0f
— CRIF (@Le_CRIF) January 22, 2025
Antisemitism skyrocketed in France following the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, amid the ensuing war in Gaza. According to CRIF’s report, the surge continued unabated last year, with over 30 percent of antisemitic incidents, or 43 out of an average of 130 per month, making direct reference to “Palestine.”
In November, for example, a monument honoring victims of the Nazis located in eastern France was vandalized with graffiti reading “Nique Israël,” or “F—k Israel” in English.
On the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities, three men brutally attacked a Jewish woman at the entrance to her home in Paris. The victim stated that the assailants threatened her with a box knife, made antisemitic threats, and mentioned the events of last Oct. 7.
In September, a kosher restaurant in Villeurbanne, near the eastern city of Lyon, was defaced with red paint and tagged with the message “Free Gaza.”
CRIF’s latest data also showed that 192 antisemitic acts were committed in schools, which accounted for 12.2 percent of all such incidents recorded last year.
Synagogues were targeted as well. In August, for example, French police arrested a 33-year-old Algerian man suspected of trying to set a synagogue ablaze in the southern French city of la Grande-Motte.
France is one of several countries that has experienced a surge in anti-Jewish hate crimes and demonstrations since Hamas’s invasion of Israel.
According to a report from the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency for Israel, there has been a staggering 340 percent increase in antisemitic acts worldwide in 2024 compared to 2022.
The report showed a sharp rise in antisemitic outrages in North America and Europe, with the US up 288 percent, Canada increasing by 562 percent, and Britain seeing a 450 percent spike, with nearly 2,000 incidents recorded in the first half of 2024 in the UK.
The post Antisemitism Continues to Skyrocket in France, With Over 1,500 Incidents Recorded in 2024, New Report Finds first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Cornell University Statue Vandalized by Anti-Zionist Activists
Cornell University workers begin the work of cleaning anti-Zionist graffiti off a statue of the school’s co-founder on January 21, 2025. Photo: Screenshot
Anti-Zionist agitators at Cornell University kicked off the spring semester with an act of vandalism which defamed Israel as an “occupier” and practitioner of “apartheid.”
“Divest from death,” the students, who have not yet been identified, graffitied on a statue of Cornell co-founder Andrew Dickson White that is located on the Arts Quad section of campus — as first reported by The Cornell Daily Sun on Tuesday. “Occupation=death.”
Speaking anonymously to The Sun, the university’s official campus newspaper, the students provided an account of their grievances, which addressed what in their view is the insufficiency of the recently negotiated ceasefire between Hamas, a Palestinian terrorist group, and Israel. In so doing, they put forth the view that all of Israel must be surrendered to the Palestinians, whose leaders have serially rejected viable two-state solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ever since the United Nations voted in 1947, via Resolution 181, to partition what was then known as British Mandatory Palestine into Arab and Jewish states.
“We demand that Cornell divests from the weapons manufacturers that make genocide possible,” they said. “A ceasefire will save lives, and we hope it will be permanent. But a ceasefire is not a free Palestine, and we will organize until we see a liberated Palestine free from genocide, occupation, and apartheid.”
Anonymous collectives of anti-Zionists have vandalized Cornell University property before, and the school as a whole has seen some of the most disturbing incidents of campus antisemitism since Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
In August, a group vandalized the Day Hall administrative building, graffitiing “Israel bombs, Cornell pays” and “Blood is on your hands” on it and shattering the glazings of its front doors. They justified their actions.
“We had to accept that the only way to make ourselves heard is by targeting the only thing the university administration really cares about: property,” the students told The Sun. “With the start of this new academic year, the Cornell administration is trying desperately to upkeep a facade of normalcy knowing that, since last semester, they have been working tirelessly to uphold Cornell’s function as a fascist, classist, imperial machine.”
Anti-Zionists convulsed Cornell University’s campus during the 2023-2024 academic year, engaging in activities that are without precedent in the school’s 159-year history. Three weeks after Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel, now-former student Patrick Dai threatened to perpetrate heinous crimes against members of the school’s Jewish community, including mass murder and rape. Cornell students also occupied an administrative building and held a “mock trial” in which they convicted school president Martha Pollack of complicity in “apartheid” and “genocide against Palestinian civilians.” Meanwhile, history professor Russell Rickford called Hamas’s barbarity on Oct. 7 “exhilarating” and “energizing” at a pro-Palestinian rally held on campus.
By the end of the year, Pollack announced her resignation as president of the university, which followed the installment of an illegal “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” on the campus in which pro-Hamas students had lived and protested the university’s investments in companies linked to Israel.
Cornell now has a new interim president, Michael Kotlikoff, and his administration has vowed to punish and deter criminal behavior undertaken in the name of anti-Zionist activism.
“Acts of violence, extended occupations of buildings, or destruction of property (including graffiti), will not be tolerated and will be subject to immediate public safety response,” he said in August. “We will enforce these policies consistently, for every group or activity, on any issue or subject …We urge all members of the community to express their views in a manner that respects the rights of others. One voice may never stifle another. There is a time, place, and manner for all to speak and all to be heard.”
So far, Kotlikoff’s administration has executed its zero-tolerance policy, pursuing criminal investigations against protesters who break the law, as happened on Sept. 24 when a mass of students disrupted a career fair because it was attended by Boeing and L3Harris, an American defense contractor. The incident resulted in three arrests, and, later, severe disciplinary sanctions, including classifying five students as “persona non grata,” which, Cornell says, bans from campus “a person who has exhibited behavior which has been deemed detrimental to the university community.” However, the university did downgrade sanctions levied against a doctoral student after his supporters decried that dis-enrolling him as a student would lead inexorably to his deportation from the US.
Regarding this latest incident, Cornell has vowed to bring the vandals to justice.
“Vandalism violates our code of conduct and the law,” the Cornell University Police Department (CUPD) told The Sun. “Graffiti is property damage, which is a crime. We are committed to identifying the perpetrators responsible.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Cornell University Statue Vandalized by Anti-Zionist Activists first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Trump Fires Head of Terrorist-Linked World Central Kitchen From President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, Nutrition
World Central Kitchen (WCK) barge loaded with food arrives off the Gaza coast, in this handout image released March 15, 2024. Photo: Israel Defense Forces/Handout via REUTERS
US President Donald Trump on Tuesday announced the firing of celebrity chef Jose Andres, founder of the controversial World Central Kitchen (WCK), from the president’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition, claiming that the restaurateur and humanitarian is “not aligned with” the current White House’s mission.
Trump shared the news of Andres’s departure in an “Official Notice of Dismissal” on social media. The statement explained that his administration is currently in the process of “identifying and removing over a thousand presidential appointees from the previous administration, who are not aligned with our vision to Make America Great Again.”
Over the past year, Andres has found himself embroiled in controversy regarding the alleged conduct of WCK employees in Gaza. WCK, a US-based NGO founded by Andres to help feed needy people caught in disasters or conflict zones, has been operating with roughly 500 employees in Gaza since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023. The charity has often engaged in heated public disputes with the Jewish state, accusing the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) of purposefully targeting its workers with airstrikes — allegations that Jerusalem has adamantly rejected.
In April 2024, the IDF came under fire after it conducted airstrikes on a WCK vehicle convoy, killing seven employees of the charity. Israel acknowledged responsibility for the incident and insisted that the airstrikes violated internal protocol, subsequently dismissing two senior officers over the botched military operation.
Israel has accused WCK of insufficiently vetting its workforce and employing terrorist members within its ranks.
Last month, WCK fired at least 62 of its staff members in Gaza after Israel said they had “affiliations and direct connections” with terrorist groups. Israel conducted an investigation into the backgrounds of the charity’s employees after the Jewish state discovered that a WCK employee named Ahed Azmi Qdeih took part in the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Qdeih was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza on Nov. 30. At the time, WCK said it had no knowledge of an employee involved in the Oct. 7 onslaught, in which Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists murdered 1,200 people and kidnapped over 250 hostages during their rampage in southern Israel.
Israel has long insisted that Hamas and similar terrorist groups have infiltrated humanitarian organizations in Gaza. In August 2024, the United Nations admitted that nine employees of UNRWA, the controversial United Nations agency responsible for Palestinian refugees and their descendants, were fired over their alleged involvement in the Hamas terrorist group’s Oct. 7 attacks on southern Israel.
Andres responded to Trump’s statement on X/Twitter, claiming that he had already resigned.
“I submitted my resignation last week … my 2 year term was already up,” Andres wrote.
“I was honored to serve as co-chair of the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition. My fellow council members — unpaid volunteers like me — were hardworking, talented people who inspired me every day. I’m proud of what we accomplished on behalf of the American people,” he added.
The post Trump Fires Head of Terrorist-Linked World Central Kitchen From President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, Nutrition first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
You must be logged in to post a comment Login