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Why Antisemitism, Anger and Intolerance Have Infected America’s Ivy League Colleges — Part Two

University of Pennsylvania. Photo: Billy Wilson/Flickr

We recently examined the alarming escalation in antisemitism seen on US college campuses — specifically at the Ivy League universities of Harvard, Yale, Cornell, and Columbia — since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war on October 7.

In this second part, we will look at the remaining four Ivy Leagues, charting how America’s most elite educational establishments have become havens of intolerance, and why so many of their students harbor such hatred toward both Jews and the State of Israel.

University of Pennsylvania

Two weeks before Hamas’ barbaric rampage through southern Israeli communities resulted in the biggest loss of Jewish life in a day since the Holocaust, the University of Pennsylvania was embroiled in an antisemitism scandal when notorious Jew-hating musician Roger Waters was invited to speak on campus during an anti-Israel festival.

Waters, who is best known as a founding member of the rock band Pink Floyd and for goose-stepping on-stage while dressed as a Nazi, was asked to address attendees at the “Palestine Writes Literature Festival” before he was banned from campus following a backlash by critics who had noted that the event was scheduled to coincide with the Jewish High Holiday period, thus reducing the likelihood of Jewish students protesting antisemitic speakers.

In the lead-up to the festival, which went ahead as scheduled with Waters speaking remotely, numerous incidents of antisemitism were recorded on campus, including a swastika that was drawn inside the school’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design, and the arrest of a man who entered the Penn Hillel and screamed statements such as, “F—k the Jews” and “They killed JC,” a reference to the myth that Jews are responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus.

In light of the Waters controversy, UPenn President Liz Magill belatedly announced her personal commitment to addressing antisemitism at the college, adding: “The University of Pennsylvania has a long and proud history of being a place for people of all backgrounds and faiths, and acts of antisemitism have no place at Penn.”

How utterly hollow those words were.

In the days and weeks after Hamas terrorists murdered and kidnapped more than 1,200 Israeli civilians, UPenn has again allowed antisemitism to rear its head on campus.

The university administration’s first statement to condemn the Hamas atrocity was more than a week after the massacre took place. On Sunday, October 15, Magill sent an email to the university community. “I want to leave no doubt about where I stand,” it said. “I, and this university, are horrified by and condemn Hamas’s terrorist assault on Israel and their violent atrocities against civilians. There is no justification — none — for these heinous attacks…”

However, the email apparently only came after Jon Huntsman Jr., the former governor of Utah and former US ambassador to China, Russia, and Singapore, told Magill that his charitable organization, the Huntsman Foundation, would be pulling donations from the university over the issue of antisemitism.

For some UPenn students, though, the email’s failure to mention Palestinians was akin to not recognizing their “existence,” and they organized a mass walkout of classes in response.

Videos and photos taken of the protest show students chanting slogans such as, “Intifada, Intifada,” “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and “Israel, Israel, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide.” A handful of students reportedly harassed a rabbi who was manning a tefillin stand on the route marchers took.

Other wealthy UPenn donors have since followed Huntsman’s lead and pulled funding from the college, including Marc Rowan, who contributed more than $50 million in 2018, and Steve Eisman, who demanded his name be removed from a university scholarship.

NEW Canary Mission profile. Tara Tarawneh, a student at @Penn & writer for Penn’s student newspaper, glorified the massacre of Jews at a pro-Hamas rally: “I remember feeling so empowered and happy…I want all of you to hold that feeling in your hearts.” https://t.co/38Lj7qBtQ5 pic.twitter.com/MxDrYMLGWx

— Canary Mission (@canarymission) November 5, 2023

Princeton University

In August of this year, Israeli Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli wrote a letter to Princeton University’s senior leadership about a book that was approved to go on the syllabus of the Near Eastern Studies Department’s “Decolonizing Trauma Studies from the Global South” course.

The book, “The Healing Humanities: The Right to Maim,” written by Jasbir Puar, falsely claims that Israel harvests the organs of Palestinians and that the country has a policy of trying to maim Palestinians.

Despite the text promoting a modern-day blood libel, Princeton’s President Christopher L. Eisgruber refused to remove the text from the syllabus on the grounds that it would be “censoring” the curriculum.

“Those who disagree with a book, or a syllabus, are free to criticize it but not to censor it,” he wrote. “Such arguments are the lifeblood of a great university, where controversies must be addressed through deliberation and debate, not administrative fiat.”

However, one must question the sincerity of Eisgruber’s view about fighting censorship, considering the fact that under his tenure, Princeton scrubbed the name of America’s 28th President, Woodrow Wilson, from its public policy school on the basis that Wilson’s “racist thinking and policies make him an inappropriate namesake for a school or college whose scholars, students and alumni must stand firmly against racism in all its forms.”

Incidentally, as Michael Goldstein pointed out in the Jewish Journal, the inclusion of Puar’s antisemitic tome in the curriculum actually marked the second time the “Israelis harvest Palestinian organs” blood libel had been legitimized on campus. Just months before the Puar controversy, professional Palestinian activist Mohammed El-Kurd, who has accused Israelis of eating Palestinian organs and lusting after their blood, was paid to give the Edward Said lecture at the university’s English Department.

Many in Princeton’s undergraduate student body have also been gunning to pass a resolution in support of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, which seeks to isolate and eventually dismantle the Jewish state.

What followed a March 2022 vote on BDS was reminiscent of something out of a banana republic. In total, 44 percent of students voted in favor, 40 percent voted against, and 16 percent abstained, which was supposed to mean the resolution immediately failed, because abstentions prevented a majority.

However, a dispute ensued about how abstentions would be counted, with Eric Periman, then-president of the Princeton Committee on Palestine (PCP), which sponsored the resolution, arguing the pro-BDS camp had won.

Around the same time that PCP was pushing for Princeton to support BDS, the group made crystal clear its real target when it held a protest outside the campus Center for Jewish Life (CJL), in which protestors held signs with phrases commonly used by Hamas such as, “from the river to the sea” and during which PCP President Periman suggested Princeton’s Jewish students were complicit in human rights violations.

Dartmouth College

Two pro-Palestinian students were arrested at Dartmouth last month after they allegedly trespassed on the grounds of the university’s Parkhurst Hall late at night and threatened to “escalate” and take “physical action” against college administrators in a document titled the “Dartmouth New Deal,” which demands the school divest from “Israeli apartheid.”

“You have until the first day of the winter term to publicly address our demands and outline a plan to meet them. If you fail to do so, we will escalate and take further action,” the document reportedly warned.

The arrests followed at least one pro-Palestinian rally in which attendees reportedly chanted, “Israel is a terror state.”

Breaking News:

Around 1AM today, Hanover Police arrested two pro-Palestinian protesters who were camped on Parkhurst Hall’s front lawn, charging them with a misdemeanor for criminal trespassing. The two students were released on bail later in the morning. pic.twitter.com/PSNBncJ0SC

— The Dartmouth Review (@DartmouthReview) October 28, 2023

However, while Dartmouth has grappled with more isolated incidents of anti-Jewish hatred on campus, including a swastika being carved on the college green and a public menorah being shot at with pellets, it should be noted that the general response by the university leadership to the Israel-Hamas war last month has been commendable.

Spearheaded by a group of Middle Eastern academics at the college, two public forums were set up on October 9 that featured professors from Israel, Lebanon, and Egypt discussing the conflict, which were attended by hundreds of students in-person and online.

Encouraging students to attend the forums, the university’s President Sian Leah said: “I watched with growing horror the Hamas attack on Israel this weekend, the escalating violence, and the devastating loss of life, especially among civilians… In every conflict, one of the most important roles a university can play is to help us understand it, and to make a space for dialogue and community.”

Leah’s dither-free response to the attacks, which was in stark contrast to the leaders of so many other colleges, was a welcome change from her predecessor Philip Hanlon, whose role in attempting to hire BDS-supporting Professor N. Bruce Duthu as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences had been criticized as another “chapter in the school’s history of anti-Semitism.”

Brown University

Brown’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), an organization that has a well-documented history of disseminating vicious anti-Israel propaganda and vilifying Jewish students, was already organizing pro-Palestinian campus protests as Hamas terrorists were still cutting their bloodsoaked path through southern Israel.

In addition to organizing several student walkouts, the group posted on October 12 a statement to its Instagram account in which it claimed Israel was responsible for the Hamas massacre, and stated that it stands in “solidarity with the Palestinian resistance against Israeli occupation.”

At one such campus rally, an SJP member was captured on film telling the crowd: “Palestinians will die for justice and will die to return to our land. Glory to our martyrs from the river to the sea … Palestine is the hope of the world.”

Apparently, explicitly supporting a proscribed terrorist organization that is sworn to the destruction of both Jews and Israel is not enough to get the group banned from Brown’s campus.

Although Brown University’s President Christina H. Paxson has opposed calls for the college to adopt a pro-BDS stance, the school’s response to antisemitism among the Brown community has been criticized, particularly after several high-profile incidents at the college over the past two years, including swastikas drawn around campus and antisemitic threats directed toward Brown Hillel.

 

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It is not so difficult to explain why so many students — many of whom would proudly describe themselves as “anti-fascist” — are so intolerant toward Jews and Israel.

Wall Street Journal columnist Barton Swaim described the scenes on American campuses as a product of the Marxist theories that have been taught for decades in higher education establishments:

That’s why they particularly hate Israel—a wealthy nation among neighbors whose poverty is relieved only by oil revenue. Israel is the one country in the Middle East where ordinary people stand a good chance of creating prosperity for themselves and their families. For modern progressive academics, weaned on the Marxian concept that wealth is the result of exploitation, that is precisely the reason for Israel’s guilt. They can’t behold its prosperity without concluding that the Jews have stolen their wealth from their neighbors.”

And that is the crux of it: for American students, Israel and Jews are privileged, and privilege is the new original sin.

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

The post Why Antisemitism, Anger and Intolerance Have Infected America’s Ivy League Colleges — Part Two first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Here’s a Partial List of Assaults on American Jews in June

Anti-Israel demonstrators outside the Adas Torah synagogue in the heavily-Jewish Pico-Robertson area of Los Angeles, June 23, 2024. Photo: Screenshot

Street protests targeting Jews and Jewish institutions, and institutions deemed supportive of Israel, escalated in June and were characterized by threats of violence and antisemitic rhetoric. Among the most notable incidents was a Los Angeles march by keffiyeh clad and masked protestors organized by the Palestinian Youth Movement and Code Pink, where Jews were physically assaulted outside of a synagogue.

The confrontations spilled over into the surrounding Jewish neighborhood, where a number of Jews were beaten and sprayed with mace. Reports indicate Los Angeles police, who had been warned about the event, were initially instructed to stand down and then protected protestors and prohibited Jews from entering the synagogue. Several injuries and one arrest were reported.

President Biden condemned the Los Angeles attack without naming the perpetrators as did Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass and other local politicians including Governor Gavin Newsom, all within a 30-minute period. The protests were defended by anti-Israel activists and the ACLU (for the non-violent part) on the grounds that the real estate fair was “political activity.”

In another egregious example, protestors from Within Our Lifetime (WOL) in New York City besieged an exhibition about the Nova music festival massacre of October 7. Police rushed the waiting viewers into the exhibition space while protestors lit flares and shouted “long live intifada” and “Israel go to hell.”

In another pro-Hamas and pro-Hezbollah protest, a two-mile long group organized by the People’s Forum, Palestinian Youth Movement, and the ANSWER Coalition encircled the White House. Protestors shouted “We don’t want no two states, we’re taking back 48” and “kill another Zionist now” while vandalizing local monuments with slogans including “Death to Amerikkka,” “Death to Israel,” “Death to Zionists,” and “Al-Qasam make us proud. Kill another soldier now.”

No arrests were made, and mainstream media reported only slogans such as “free Palestine.”

Other public events have been co-opted by anti-Israel protests, notably gay pride parades. In Philadelphia the pride parade was blocked by anti-Israel protestors who shouted “Now, Now, Now, Now, Burn Israel to the ground.” The Washington D.C., and Denver pride parades were similarly disrupted.

In one June incident, the homes of Brooklyn Museum trustees were vandalized by WOL activists with red paint, red triangles symbolizing Hamas targets, and the words “blood is on your hands.” The home of the head of the board, Anne Pasternak, was painted with the words “White Supremacist Zionist.”

The museum has been targeted repeatedly by pro-Hamas protestors, who have now attacked the institution for permitting arrests of protestors who took over part of the building.

Among the official responses to escalating pro-Hamas violence have been calls to reinstate mask bans which had been aimed at the Ku Klux Klan. New York Governor Kathy Hochul, New York City mayor Eric Adams, and Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass — all Democrats — spoke in favor, while the ACLU and “civil liberties”advocates expressed opposition.

A group took credit for three firebombings on the University of California at Berkeley campus in “in retaliation for UCPD’s violent assaults on vulnerable student demonstrators and to punish the university of kkkalifornia system for supporting the genocidal Zionist-Israel entity.” The Columbia University Jewish Voice for Peace chapter expressed support for the perpetrator.

Efforts were made to disrupt remaining campus activities. At Columbia University, an encampment was set up to harass attendees at alumni weekend.  Building takeovers also occurred at Cal State Los Angeles and Oregon State University. At Cal State, the takeover trapped a number of staff members inside the building, including the president, and vandalism was widespread. No arrests have been made.

University and local authorities continue to take little or no action against protestors. Notably, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg dropped most charges against students and others arrested for taking over a building at Columbia University.

Harassment of Jewish students and campus organizations remained steady in June. The University of Southern California Chabad house and the University of Minnesota Hillel building were vandalized. Student for Justice in Palestine (SJP) remains at the forefront of targeting Jews on campus. At the University of Pittsburgh, the SJP chapter demanded , among other things, that the Hillel chapter be banned from campus for its support of Zionism.

Direct SJP protests were also held at the Baruch College Hillel, which included banners stating “Hillel stands with genocide,” “It is right to rebel, Hillel go to hell,” and “Synagogue of Satan.” The masked protestors also wore Hamas and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) headbands.

Faculty support for anti-Israel students was highlighted by the events surrounding publication of a tendentious and absurd paper by the Columbia Law Review that alleged “nakba” should be a new category in international law. After secretly soliciting and then circumventing the normal review process the paper was accepted. The board of directors then asked the student editors to delay posting the piece online leading to accusations of censorship.

The student editors then published the piece and leaked the story to the media while the directors shut down the website. The piece was later published with a board disclaimer regarding the irregular process. The incident illustrated how student activists have helped subvert international law by controlling law reviews and surrounding discourse.

In the K-12 sphere, walkouts occurred across the country, and support of anti-Israel activities at the New York City Department of Education was also shown by the fact that it had hired prominent BDS activist Debbie Almontaser to conduct “workshops” on the Gaza war for teachers. Jewish teachers complained that the materials presented were deeply anti-Israel.

The predictable targeting of Jews by teachers and parents reached its peak in June at a fifth grade commencement ceremony in Brooklyn when a Jewish family was physically attacked by an Arabic-speaking family shouting “Free Palestine!” “Gaza is Ours!” and “Death to Israel.”

A presentation made by teachers to high school students in the Fort Lee, New Jersey, Public School District — which described Hamas as “armed resistance,” the “Nakba” as “the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and near destruction of Palestinian society,” and the Gaza war as “genocide” — is another event criticized after the fact. The tendentiousness of the presentation was explicitly recognized by the teachers who confiscated students’ cellphones and warned in advance that it was “biased.”

Most egregiously, efforts are being made by schools to institutionalize anti-Israel bias and Palestinian narratives in the guise of outlawing “anti-Palestinian racism.” At the Toronto District School Board, proposals were adopted in June to outlaw this supposed hatred. While the Toronto proposal was vague, other cases indicate that objecting to the Palestinian narrative of the nakba, Palestinian descriptions of Zionist as racism, and demands for Israel to be erased, are examples of “anti-Palestinian racism.”

The June political primaries showed the pivotal place of Israel and antisemitism at all levels of American politics. In the most closely observed race, Westchester County Executive George Latimer defeated Squad member Rep. Jamaal Bowman by a large margin in a New York Democratic primary. Bowman blamed the loss on Israel supporters, Jews, and AIPAC.

Another key test will come in August when Rep. Cori Bush faces a Democratic primary challenge in Missouri, and Rep. Debbie Wasserstein-Schultz (D-FL) is facing a challenge from a Jewish anti-Zionist.

In the international sphere, the Maldives announced that it was banning Israelis from entering. After an outcry and calls for a boycott of the country by the Jewish community, the Maldive government announced it was reconsidering. One consideration was apparently the fact that the edict as written banned Arab citizens of Israel in addition to Jews.

Anti-Israel bias continues to dominate and divide the various communities in the arts, with attacks from Palestinian supporters leading to sudden revocation of corporate support for festivals and other events. In Britain, Barclays has dropped support for music festivals after protests from artists regarding the firm’s alleged business relationship with Israel. Several festivals boycotted Barclays, which has been long targeted by the anti-Israel movement including recently vandalizing of branches around Britain.

Similarly, the investment firm Baillie Gifford ended its support for all book festivals in Britain after being attacked for its minor business links with Israel and alleged relationship with fossil fuel. Critics note that continued attacks on corporate sponsors will undermine arts funding in Britain and jeopardize the existence of book festivals. A similar process is emerging in the US where the South by Southwest festival announced it would no longer accept support from the US Army or weapons companies after boycott threats from various bands.

The politicization of Wikipedia, where a handful of anti-Israel editors have now elected to ban the ADL as a source, parallels that of the media, albeit behind the fig leaves of anonymity and decentralization. The use of Wikipedia as a source for generative artificial intelligence training promises to expand and cement anti-Israel bias and antisemitism.

The author is a contributor to SPME, where a significantly different version of this article was first published.

The post Here’s a Partial List of Assaults on American Jews in June first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Watchdog Group Calls on Talent Agency to Drop Former ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ Star for Promoting Antisemitic Blood Libels

Jesse Williams at the 2024 Tribeca Film Festival World Premiere for “FOLLOWING HARRY” held at the SVA Theater in New York, NY, USA. Photo: LJ Fotos/AdMedia/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect

The watchdog group StopAntisemitism is calling on a global talent agency to drop actor and former “Grey’s Anatomy” star Jesse Williams as its client for sharing antisemitic content, including blood libels and anti-Israel conspiracy theories, on social media.

The American actor recently uploaded a series of posts on his Instagram Stories that additionally support antisemitic tropes of Jewish power and misinformation about Israel’s military actions during its ongoing war against Hamas terrorists controlling the Gaza Strip. One post featured a world map that pinpointed Israel and claimed that “your freedom of speech is being controlled” by the Jewish state.

In another post on his Instagram Story, Williams falsely alleged that in Gaza, Israel “forced a Palestinian captive to have sex with a dog, is siccing attack dogs on elderly woman,” and shot a six-year-old child “355 times.”

One of his accusations appeared to stem from the Qatar-based news network Al Jazeera reporting on footage of what it claimed was an Israeli military dog mauling an elderly Palestinian woman in her home in the northern Gaza city of Jabaliya. However, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) revealed that the dog was actually abducted by the terrorist group Hamas, which used the canine to film an “attack” as anti-Israel propaganda before killing the animal and booby-trapping its body with explosives in the event that Israeli soldiers tried to retrieve their canine comrade.

Williams also reposted a message that falsely claimed Zionists “consider Palestinian deaths a good thing, creating favorable demographic shifts in the direction of a Jewish minority in Palestine.” The post further claimed that “mass Palestinian death is a major Zionist ‘war aim.’”

A fourth Instagram post uploaded by the actor featured a quote attributed to Cairo-based comedian Bassem Youssef, who said recently on the NewsNation show “Cuomo,” hosted by Chris Cuomo, that, “We will only be safe if Israel is safe, and Israel will be safe if all of us are dead.”

 

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Jewish groups and scholars of antisemitism have argued that attributing to Jews a desire to harm Palestinians is a modern iteration of the medieval antisemitic blood libel, which falsely claims that Jews use the blood of non-Jewish children in their religious rituals.

Williams is represented by Creative Artists Agency (CAA), which is the world’s leading entertainment, sports, and media agency, according to its website. CAA did not immediately respond to The Algemeiner‘s request for comment regarding Williams’ social media posts.

Liora Rez, executive director of StopAntisemitism, told The Algemeiner on Tuesday that her organization “calls on CAA to immediately break ties with antisemite Jesse Williams.”

“His propagating such horrifying antisemitic tropes are unforgivable,” Raz added.

The post Watchdog Group Calls on Talent Agency to Drop Former ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ Star for Promoting Antisemitic Blood Libels first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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No, Israel Is Not at All Comparable to the Nazis

Egyptian trucks carrying humanitarian aid make their way to the Gaza Strip, amid the ongoing conflict in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, at the Kerem Shalom crossing in southern Israel, May 30, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Amir Cohen

In a repulsive Guardian op-ed, the New York-based writer John Oakes not only falsely accused Israel of causing the mass starvation of Palestinians in Gaza, but likened the situation to the Nazis’ starvation of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto (“The starvation of Gaza is a perverse repudiation of Judaism’s values,” June 25).

Oakes’ antisemitic trope, comparing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to the Nazis’ treatment of Jews during the Holocaust, has sadly been employed or legitimised by Guardian contributors previously.

Oakes begins with a lie:

For many months now, it has been no secret that one of America’s closest allies has been using hunger as a weapon against a civilian population. That hunger is being used by Israel is supremely ironic, given the particular role that privation from food plays both in Jewish philosophy and in the grim history of the Jewish people. It is a charge that the Jewish state has repeatedly denied in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

This is the opposite of the truth.

The starvation narrative was given credibility in the mainstream media following a March report by Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) which alleged that famine was imminent and likely to occur by May in northern Gaza, and by July in other parts of the territory.

However, in early June, the IPC published a follow-up report titled, “Famine Review Committee: Review of the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) IPC-Compatible Analysis for the Northern Governorates of the Gaza Strip.

That report concluded that the analysis published in March was not plausible, pointed out the omission of certain categories of food deliveries, and noted that “the available evidence does not indicate that famine is currently occurring.” The analysis also acknowledged that the daily kilocalories requirements for Palestinians in Gaza were surpassed in April, and found that the food supply in Gaza is increasing each month.

Even prior to that conclusion by the Famine Review Committee, multiple reports and studiesciting fatal methodological and data collection flaws — contradicted the initial warnings of imminent starvation in Gaza by the IPC. One of the reports, by Columbia University professors Awi Federgruen and Ran Kivetz, analyzed available data and found that “sufficient amounts of food are being supplied into Gaza.” According to the paper, “the mean calories available per person per day in Gaza in January was 3,076 kcal, for February that figure dropped to 1,741 kcal, but then rose in March to 3,446 kcal and rose again in April to 4,580 kcal.”

After telling that lie, the Guardian contributor pivots to the Nazi analogy:

Even Germany, which for obvious historical reasons has long been one of Israel’s staunchest allies, finally has begun to warn against using starvation to win a war. The Germans would know about such a tactic. During the second world war, 380,000 people were crowded into the Warsaw ghetto, barricaded, and left to die by the Nazis.

Much of what we know about the effects of long-term starvation comes from a manuscript smuggled out of the ghetto in 1942 and translated into English in the 1970s as Hunger Disease. The remarkable document was compiled by a heroic team of 28 Jewish doctors working under unimaginable conditions.

The suffering and the defiance of the inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto have become touchstones for students of Jewish history, a story that every Jew knows well. As Holocaust museums struggle to address the Israel-Gaza war, the idea that we can somehow put what is happening in Gaza at a distant remove from the history of the Warsaw ghetto is grotesque. [emphasis added]

What’s truly grotesque is his comparison between the Warsaw Ghetto, implemented by a regime which murdered two out of every three Jews in Europe, and Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. The daily food rations in the Warsaw Ghetto, which housed as many as 460,000 Jews and was completely sealed off from the outside, were the equivalent of “one-tenth of the required minimum daily calorie intake” — causing an 80,000 to die of either starvation or disease. Most of those who survived were sent off to death camps.

By contrast, there have been no credible reports of Palestinians dying of starvation in Gaza, and aid continues to pour in to the Strip.

If there are any Nazi-analogies to be made in this war, it should be directed at Hamas, the genocidal antisemitic terror group whose sent death squads rampaging across southern Israel on Oct. 7th with the sole purpose of murdering, torturing, raping, mutilating, and taking hostage as many Jews as possible — a barbaric assault that represents the worst antisemitic massacre since the Holocaust.

Finally, Oakes’ vilification of the Jewish state reaches a crescendo further into the op-ed, when he reaches the culmination of his big lie, writing that, given the historical and religious history of Jews, “it is remarkable that of all nations, the Jewish state is using mass starvation as a method of warfare“ — a libel against the Jewish collective as morally obscene and toxic as the antisemitic medieval superstitions peddled for centuries against individual Jews.

Amidst an ongoing tsunami of antisemitism in the UK and elsewhere in the Jewish diaspora, the Guardian continues to incite the mob.

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 version of this article first appeared.

The post No, Israel Is Not at All Comparable to the Nazis first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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