It wasn’t a white supremacist defacing Brooklyn synagogue with “Die Jewish rats”

TABLET MAG
As Brooklyn Hate Crime Suspect is Arrested, Time for the Left to Rethink Its Attitude to Anti-Semitism
by Leil Leibovitz
November 3, 2018

Earlier today, the New York Police Department arrested the man suspected of vandalizing the Union Temple in Brooklyn by scrawling “Hitler” and “Die Jewish rats” on its wall. The man, James Polite, is also being investigated for allegedly attempting to set several Jewish institutions throughout the city on fire. Polite, 26, is not a white supremacist. He is African-American, was raised in part by Jewish foster parents, and was sent to Brandeis University with the help of a charity run by The New York Times. He was a Democratic party activist…READ MORE

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“Human Rights Watch takes a break from Israel-bashing to examine abuses by Fatah and Hamas”

WALL STREET JOURNAL
The Palestinians’ Worst Enemy Is Their Own Leaders
by Elliot Kaufman
Oct. 30, 2018

There’s a rule of thumb for journalists reporting on the Palestinians: If it can’t be blamed on Israel, it isn’t news. But some rules demand to be broken. After a two-year investigation and nearly 100 interviews with detainees, Human Rights Watch released a report last week documenting the Palestinian leadership’s gross violation of its people’s human rights. Both Hamas, which rules Gaza, and the Palestinian Authority, which governs in the West Bank, are implicated. The two groups conduct arbitrary arrests for offenses as ludicrous as critical Facebook posts and regularly torture detainees. READ MORE SUBSCRIPTION CONTENT

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Another (proposed) #Hamas ceasefire deal

YNET
Al Akhbar publishes draft of Israel-Hamas ceasefire deal
by Elior Levy
November 3, 2018

The Hamas-affiliated Lebanese newspaper Al Akhbar published Saturday an initial draft of the ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel, including ten provisions, with every provision constituting a condition for the next one…Among the initial provisions published by the Hamas-affiliated Lebanese newspaper, the terror organization commits to restrain violence demonstrated during weekly ‘March of Return’ riots, punishing those violating its orders; in exchange, Israel will grant 5,000 Palestinians work permits, and Egypt will work to lift 70% of the siege on the coastal enclave. READ MORE

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“The political goal of the “Christ at the Checkpoint Conference” in Oklahoma was to flip American Christian support for Israel to the Palestinians”

JNS
United Methodist Church under fire for anti-Semitism
November 1, 2018

In the wake of the synagogue shooting last week in Pittsburgh, activists from several mainline Protestant churches came under fire for promoting a culture of anti-Semitism in their churches, especially the United Methodist Church.  The worst offenders are usually activists affiliated with the Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA) and the United Church of Christ (UCC). But this year, the activists and officials from the United Methodist Church took on a leading role by hosting the controversial “Christ at the Checkpoint Conference” in Oklahoma. READ MORE

CAMERA BLOG CAMERA Asks UMC Bishop in Chicago to Address Church’s Role in ‘Othering’ Jews in U.S. and Israel The Oct. 27 murder of 11 Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh by a gunman who ranted on the internet about Jews “infesting” the Trump Administration has highlighted the manner in which American Jews have been “othered” and portrayed as fifth-column enemies of American democracy and American civil society…One community that has contributed to the hatred of Israel in the United States is the coalition of “peace and justice” activists in mainline Protestant churches who since at least the late 1990s have been promoting a narrative of Israeli and Jewish villainy and Palestinian innocence.

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“On the contrary, the runaway success of Anne Frank’s diary depended on playing down her Jewish identity”

MOSAIC
Anne Frank, the Beloved Victim of the Nazis Who Never Had the Chance to Write about the Holocaust
October 31, 2018

…This disturbing idea [that “people love dead Jews”] was suggested by an incident this past spring at the Anne Frank House…When a young employee at the Anne Frank House in 2017 tried to wear his yarmulke to work, his employers told him to hide it under a baseball cap. The museum’s managing director told newspapers that a live Jew in a yarmulke might “interfere” with the museum’s “independent position.” The museum finally relented after deliberating for six months, which seems like a rather long time for the Anne Frank House to ponder whether it was a good idea to force a Jew into hiding. READ MORE

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Abbas has never “seriously attempted to prepare Palestinians for peace. Were he to sign a peace treaty, it is doubtful Palestinians would accept it, or that he would be able to implement it”

WASHINGTON TIMES
Peace processing 2.0
by Clifford D. May
October 30, 2018

Tibetans would like a state of their own, as would Uyghurs. China’s rulers do not intend to let those peoples go. The Kurds would like a state of their own. The governments of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria remain determined to prevent them from establishing one. The Chechens would like a state of their own. Russian President Vladimir Putin will allow that when pigs fly. Most famously, of course, the Palestinians would like a state of their own. They could have one. They’ve been offered one — on several occasions. But, in exchange, they’d have to agree to end their conflict with Israel, negotiate borders and security issues, and embrace peaceful coexistence with their Jewish neighbors. READ MORE

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“Antisemitism is a politics of misdirected blame. Today its most frequent target is the state of Israel”

WALL STREET JOURNAL
The Many Faces of Jew-Hatred
by Ruth Wisse
Oct. 31, 2018

…The most discouraging feature of the anti-Israel brand of anti-Semitism is its penetration of Western societies, including the U.S. That a single shooter wants to kill the Jews is less dangerous to this country than Louis Farrakhan’s smiling designation of Jews as “termites,” broadcast to a vast audience, or the vicious movement to boycott Israel—an extension of the Arab boycott launched in 1945. The incursion of fanatical anti-Israel politics into the American campus and the Democratic Party is a threat not to the Jews alone but to what they represent in liberal democracy. READ MORE SUBSCRIPTION CONTENT

TIMES OF ISRAEL Benjamin Anthony: Pittsburgh, The outrage that didn’t shock me …No quarter must be given to those who question the Jewishness of the victims, nor to those who lay blame at the foot of the policies of the Israeli government. Jewish blood has been spilled in America. It has been spilled in quantities that were unimaginable less than a week ago…We should allow nobody to ply their petty, political agenda against a particular US administration, Republican or Democrat, present or past.

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“Like in the Middle East, U.S. political operatives and intelligence officials are increasingly using the cloak of journalism as a tool for their aims”

TABLET MAG
How Should We Read the American Press? In Arabic
by Lee Smith
October 31, 2018

In his last column for The Washington Post, Jamal Khashoggi explained how the lack of a free press has impoverished the Arabs. “A state-run narrative dominates the public psyche,” he wrote, “and while many do not believe it, a large majority of the population falls victim to this false narrative. Sadly, this situation is unlikely to change.” Khashoggi might have also been describing the current state of the U.S. media. Over the last several years, the press here has repeatedly joined with government officials, including intelligence officers, to wage operations influencing the American public to obtain political goals, just like Middle East media. READ MORE

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This week’s third rail, apportioning blame for Pittsburgh

JERUSALEM POST
American Jewry’s false prophets
by Caroline Glick
November 1, 2018

Just hours after the largest massacre of Jews in America in US history, the Atlantic Monthly posted a piece by Franklin Foer. In his “Prayer for Squirrel Hill, and for American Jewry,” Foer wrote, “Any strategy for enhancing the security of American Jewry should involve shunning [President Donald] Trump’s Jewish enablers. Their money should be refused, their presence in synagogues not welcome. They have placed our community in danger.” That is, in the shadow of the blood drenched synagogue, Foer declared war on his fellow Jews. READ MORE

NEW YORK TIMES Bret Stephens: Yes, the President Bears Blame for the Terror From the Right.For years, conservatives have rightly pointed out that Islamist terrorists don’t spring from an ideological or cultural vacuum. It usually takes a village, real, virtual or proverbial, to make an Islamist terrorist — one composed of hate-spewing imams, TV programs saturated with anti-Semitic and anti-Western conspiracy theories,  neighborhood vigilantes enforcing fundamentalist religious strictures, and political leaders excusing, reflecting or disseminating many of the same beliefs and attitudes  …What are the villages from which Sayoc and Bowers hailed?

NATIONAL REVIEW Jonathan Tobin: Politicizing Mass Murder at a Synagogue Misses the Point As scholar Ruth Wisse has noted, anti-Semitism was the most successful ideology of the 20th century, being a virus that morphed from fascism to Nazism to Communism and then Islamism. This trend has continued in the 21st century, with the persistence of traditional right-wing Jew hatred along with a rising tide of anti-Semitism that has swept across Europe and then to American college campuses, where it operates largely under the false flag of anti-Zionism and support for boycotts of Israel.

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“It’s worth noting that many commentators, such as Franklin Foer in The Atlantic, simply ignore past antisemitic violence, and act as if the Pittsburgh murders were some unique event in recent American Jewish history”

JNS
How much security will make us feel safe?
by Jonathan S. Tobin
October 30, 2018

…Stephen Colbert’s mocked Trump, saying, “Yes, it’s so simple. In fact, why didn’t the Jewish people have an armed guard for the last 5,000 years?” That line got the expected laughs from an audience that always applauds attacks on the president, but you don’t have to have to be a historian to understand that a lot of lives would have been saved over the centuries had vulnerable communities been able to defend themselves from anti-Semites intent on shedding Jewish blood. But while this issue, like just about everything else these days, seems to be all about Trump, it actually revolves around a dilemma that Jewish groups have been struggling with for decades. READ MORE

REASON
Has There Been a Surge of Anti-Semitism Under and Because of Trump?
by David Bernstein
October 28, 2018

First, Pittsburgh was hardly the first time an anti-Semitic gunman murdered people in a Jewish institution in the U.S. Between the Clinton and Bush II years, there was a shooting at a Jewish Community Center in L.A., a shooting at an El Al counter at LAX, a shooting at the Jewish Federation in Seattle, a shooting at a Jewish Community Center in Kansas City, and a shooting at the Holocaust Museum. Lower levels of vandalism and violence have been even more common. It’s true that the death toll in Pittsburgh was especially high, but that’s just happenstance; any of the other shoooters would have been happy to kill as many or more. READ MORE

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