Saturday, March 6, 2021

The New McCarthyism Comes to Harvard Law School - Alan M. Dershowitz

 

​ by Alan M. Dershowitz

Much of this effort to exclude Trump supporters from campuses comes from individuals and organizations that also demand more "diversity." But their definition of diversity is limited to race, gender, sexual orientation and ethnicity.

  • This self-serving defense of censorship is intended to convey a crass economic threat: if you want to get a good job after law school, make sure that Harvard bans teachers and speakers who are trying to "rehabilitate their reputations and obscure the stain of their complicity in the Trump administration...."

  • One would also think that signatories would be aware that if these vague criteria — anti-democratic, racists, xenophobic and immoral — were applied across the board, they would result in bans on anyone who was associated with the current regimes in China, Cuba, Turkey, Belarus, Russia, Venezuela, the Palestinian Authority and other repressive governments.

  • It would also apply to supporters of American anti-democratic and anti-free speech groups, such as Antifa, and the very organization — People's Parity Project — that is promoting this anti-free speech petition. Indeed, historically, repression and censorship have been directed primarily against the left.

  • The Harvard Law School petition is directed only at Trump supporters, not supporters of left wing anti-democratic repression, either here or abroad. It is based on the assumption that there is a special "Trump exception" to freedom of speech and due process. But exceptions to free speech and academic freedom for some risk becoming the rule for all.

  • Much of this effort to exclude Trump supporters from campuses comes from individuals and organizations that also demand more "diversity." But their definition of diversity is limited to race, gender, sexual orientation and ethnicity. It does not extend to the central mission of universities: to hear and learn from the widest array of views, perspectives, ideologies and political preferences.

A recent petition, signed by hundreds of Harvard Law School students and alumni, demands that Harvard not "hire or affiliate with" the "architects and backers of the Trump administration's worse abuses." There is no place for selective censorship based on political affiliations at Harvard Law School or any institution of higher education, whether it receives federal funding or not — but especially if it does. (Photo by Darren McCollester/Getty Images)

A recent petition, signed by hundreds of Harvard Law School students and alumni, raises the specter of the new McCarthyism coming to the law school at which I taught for half a century. The petition states that "Harvard Law School faces a choice of whether to welcome the architects and backers of the Trump administration's worse abuses back into polite society." It demands that Harvard not "hire or affiliate with" any of these sinners, and threatens that "if it does so the school will be complicit if future attacks on our democracy are even more violent – and more successful."

The petition sees this ban as part of the educational and employment mission of the school: "it would also teach ambitious students of all ages that attempting to subvert the democratic process" will deny them access to the "revolving door to success and prestige." This self-serving defense of censorship is intended to convey a crass economic threat: if you want to get a good job after law school, make sure that Harvard bans teachers and speakers who are trying to "rehabilitate their reputations and obscure the stain of their complicity in the Trump administration ...."

This is similar to the message that the original McCarthyites tried to have Harvard convey in the 1950s, when students were denied editorship of the Law Review, clerkship recommendations, and other opportunities that they had earned, solely because of their alleged affiliation with Communism and other left wing causes. One would have thought that current Harvard Law School students would be familiar with the sordid history of McCarthyism that infected many American universities, including Brooklyn College, which I attended as an undergraduate and where I fought against the denial of civil liberties to suspected communists.

One would also think that signatories would be aware that if these vague criteria — anti-democratic, racists, xenophobic and immoral — were applied across the board, they would result in bans on anyone who was associated with the current regimes in China, Cuba, Turkey, Belarus, Russia, Venezuela, the Palestinian Authority and other repressive governments. It would also apply to supporters of American anti-democratic and anti-free speech groups, such as Antifa, and the very organization — People's Parity Project — that is promoting this anti-free speech petition. Indeed, historically, repression and censorship have been directed primarily against the left. Even today, the French government is expressing concern about the impact of "Islamo-leftist" influences from Americans universities.

The Harvard Law School petition is directed only at Trump supporters, not supporters of left wing anti-democratic repression, either here or abroad. It is based on the assumption that there is a special "Trump exception" to freedom of speech and due process. But exceptions to free speech and academic freedom for some risk becoming the rule for all.

Free speech for me but for not for thee is not a defensible principle. Today it is the mantra of the new censors, who demand deplatforming and cancelling speakers, teachers and writers who disagree with their anti-Trump zealotry. The voracious appetite of the censor, however, is rarely sated. Some are now trying to silence defenders of the Constitution, such as me, who opposed most of Trump's policies but who also opposed what we believe were unconstitutional efforts to impeach him. When I was invited to speak by a Harvard Law School student group, the event had to be moved off campus as the result of threats to shout me down and silence me.

Much of this effort to exclude Trump supporters from campuses comes from individuals and organizations that also demand more "diversity." But their definition of diversity is limited to race, gender, sexual orientation and ethnicity. It does not extend to the central mission of universities: to hear and learn from the widest array of views, perspectives, ideologies and political preferences.

Today's students should welcome Trump supporters and challenge them — respectfully, civilly and with open minds. They should be willing to listen to views diametrically opposed to their own deeply felt morality and politics. Many of these cancelled speakers would express views that are accepted by tens of millions of American voters. Those of us who disagree with these views should feel confident that they will be soundly rejected in the open marketplace of ideas, as they were in the 2020 election. No university or law school should shut down this marketplace, as the old McCarthyism did and as this new McCarthyism is now trying to do. There is no place for selective censorship based on political affiliations at Harvard Law School or any institution of higher education, whether it receives federal funding or not — but especially if it does.

This anti-civil liberties petition should be rejected in the marketplace of ideas by all students, faculty and administrators who value diversity of opinions both inside and outside the classroom.

 

Alan M. Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Emeritus at Harvard Law School and author of the book, Guilt by Accusation: The Challenge of Proving Innocence in the Age of #MeToo, Skyhorse Publishing, 2019. His new podcast, "The Dershow," can be seen on Spotify, Apple and YouTube. He is the Jack Roth Charitable Foundation Fellow at Gatestone Institute. 

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17146/harvard-law-school-mccarthyism 

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Lunch Box Donald - Don Feder

 

​ by Don Feder

Why blue-collar workers are going red.

 


An NBC News poll released last week reflects one of the most significant political trends of the past 30 years – the realignment of blue-collar workers who’ve left the party of Planned Parenthood and Drag Queen Story Hour for the party of energy-independence, fair-trade deals and border security.

The poll shows that between 2010 and 2020, the Republican share of blue- collar votes rose from 45% to 57%. Within the same demographic, its Hispanic vote went from 23% to 36%, while its black working-class vote went from 5% to 12%.

In 1992, Bill Clinton carried 49% of counties where at least 25% of the workforce was employed in manufacturing. In 2016, Donald Trump took 95%. What used to be one of the left’s most reliable constituencies is now going the way of evangelicals in their flight from a party that’s lost both its mind and its soul.

Writing in The Detroit News on April 10, 2019, Terry Bowman (a 22- year UAW/Ford worker) charges: “While Democrats fight for policies that crush working-class communities, Republicans and our president are fighting for blue-collar jobs and traditional American values.”

The geezer in the White House is becoming a job-killing machine. On Day One, the Keystone XL-Pipeline was axed. And that’s just a down-payment on Biden’s debt to the Greenies. But, not to worry. As John Forbes Kerry assured us, unemployed pipeline workers can get good-paying jobs manufacturing solar panels – in China.

It’s infuriating the way Democrats can speak so nonchalantly about sacrificing the opportunities of others. Campaigning in 2016, the warm and lovable Hillary Clinton boasted, “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business!” This from someone who probably never lifted anything heavier than a nail file.

Under Biden’s welcome-mat policy, the Border Patrol has been ordered not to arrest illegals unless they commit multiple homicides within eyesight. He’s starting to admit the first of 25,000 “asylum” seekers, and blue-collar workers will get to pay for a process that will lead to the loss of more of their jobs.

But jobs isn’t the whole picture. 

Most of the white working-class is solidly middle-American: church-going, socially conservative (pro-life, pro-marriage and pro- traditional morality). Many are gun-owners, veterans and reservists, patriotic and not embarrassed to show it and mystified by those who are.  And, are you sitting down Nancy, they refuse to apologize for being white.

If a guy drives a pick-up truck with a gun-rack and a tool box in back, and an American flag decal, chances are he isn’t a community organizer who votes Democratic.

In short, workers are everything liberals have come to loathe – an animosity that’s reflected in Obama’s bitter-clingers comment, Hillary’s basket of deplorables and Biden’s dregs of society.

The Democrats have become the party of Alice-in-Wonderland social policy – the party that refuses to criticize Antifa and Black Lives Matter even as they turn our cities into barbecue pits, the party that turns a blind eye to urban riots but sees white supremacy everywhere, the party of defund the police and sanctuary cities, the party of climate-change cultists, the party of “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15,” the party that tried to take an innocuous reference God out of its 2012 platform, the party of abortion up to the moment of birth, the party of LGBTQ, and now, the party of transgenderism.

Bowman writes: “My father, a retired UAW/Ford worker, was a life-long Democrat” who voted for Trump in 2016 and now says “I don’t know the damn Democrat party anymore.” Ronald Reagan used to say he didn’t leave the Democrats; they left him.

Unlike their white-collar counterparts, blue-collar workers didn’t have an opportunity to be indoctrinated by their college professors – but Biden wants them to pay the debts of those who were. They are less likely to heed the so-called experts. They don’t get their news from The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN. They’re not afraid to voice views that get conservatives banned by Facebook and Twitter.

While the GOP is becoming the party of labor, the Democrats are firmly in the hands of coastal elitists.

Business Insider listed the billionaires who bankrolled Biden’s 2020 campaign. It reads like the Fortune 500 and includes the CEOs -- or their wives -- of Microsoft, Google, Lucasfilm, Estee Lauder, Dream Works, Hyatt, J.P. Morgan Chase, Linkedin and Comcast/Universal. Remember when the media used to whine about Republicans as the party of the super-rich?

You think they care about the guy who worries about making this month’s mortgage payment or if he’ll still have a pension when he retires? In a pig’s eye.

Since Jimmy Carter, blue-collar workers have been worked over by the Democrats. Now, they’re returning the favor. With the Republicans, they’ve found their real home.

 

Don Feder  

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/lunch-box-donald-why-blue-collar-workers-are-don-feder/ 

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As even his media apologists complain, Psaki promises Biden will do a presser — but needs a few more weeks - Thomas Lifson

 

​ by Thomas Lifson

Psaki was asked about the "invisible" (Brian Stelter's term) president, and she did a lot of tap-dancing to try to soften the embarrassment but allowed as how her boss would do a press conference...but not right away

The failure of a newly elected president to face questions from the media for six and a half weeks (and counting) is so weird that even CNN's Brian Stelter is noting it.

There are many ways to measure an American president's accessibility. One way is by counting press conferences. Right now, by that count, President Biden looks invisible.

CNN White House reporter Kevin Liptak shared this note with colleagues on Wednesday: "As we await word on when President Biden will hold his first solo press conference, an analysis of the past 100 years shows he is behind his 15 most recent predecessors, who all held a solo press conference within 33 days of taking office." Liptak pored through this university database to confirm the data.

Stelter is far from alone among Biden allies raising concerns.  Tom Darnell of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution joined many conservatives in citing the worrisome cutoff of Biden's video feedDarnell wrote:

On Wednesday, Biden appeared in a virtual event along with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the House Democratic Caucus. Biden was speaking to lawmakers on COVID relief and the ongoing vaccine rollout. He closed his remarks by saying he was happy to take questions from the lawmakers.

The White House feed was then cut, with no explanation.

You can watch it here.

The cutoff came so abruptly — and obviously unexpectedly – that the sign language translator was left standing there all by her lonesome self next to the White House icon on the video feed:


Rumble video screen grab.

Yesterday, press secretary Jen Psaki was asked about the "invisible" (Brian Stelter's term) president, and she did a lot of tap-dancing to soften the embarrassment, but allowed as how her boss would do a press conference...but not right away, by the end of the month (three and a half more weeks).  The U.K. Daily Mail reports:

'Well, first as all of you know the president takes questions several times a week,' Psaki answered. 'He took questions actually twice yesterday, which is an opportunity for the people covering the White House to ask him about whatever news is happening on any given day.' 

The Daily Mail fact-checked her:

During what's called a 'spray,' when reporters pop into a meeting with Biden for several minutes to take his photo and observe what he's doing, he's often answered a question or two, though often strains to hear what's being asked over the calls from his aides telling journalists to leave the room. 

More tap-dancing from Jen:

Psaki also pointed to the current crises the president is tackling — the coronavirus pandemic and the economic fallout. 

'So I think the American people would certainly understand if his focus, his energy and his attention has been on ensuring we secure enough vaccines to vaccinate all Americans, which we will do by the end of May and then pushing for a rescue plan that will provide direct checks to almost 160 million Americans,' the press secretary added. 

Excuses, excuses.  Maybe the dog ate his briefing book, too?

But Psaki conceded:

'We look forward to holding a full press conference in the coming weeks before the end of the month,' Psaki told reporters at the press briefing. 'And we're working on setting a final date for that and as soon as we do we will let you all know.' 

It's pretty obvious that Biden's deteriorating mental condition is the reason he is not facing the media anytime soon.  I don't know his real diagnosis, so I don't know what kind of time-consuming measures are necessary to implement before his handlers deem him ready.  As Kayleigh McEnany, Psaki's predecessor, says, it must be the handlers (the ones who cut off Biden's video feed), not Biden himself, who are behind the Stelter-noted invisibility:

"I think his staff does not have faith that he can stand at the podium and have a press conference the way President Trump did many times," she said. (snip)

"I don't think this is President Biden saying, 'I don't want to do this,'" she said. "I think it's those around him recognizing when he does speak, it doesn't always turn out so well, like calling Republicans 'Neanderthals,' as he did recently in the Oval Office."

One reason that weeks of planning and preparation may be necessary for Biden to face the media might be the desire to work with friendly media to program specific questions, so that Biden can rehearse and rehearse canned answers.  Or it may be that some sort of physical conditioning, or possibly medication, may take time to have a positive effect on his performance.

The other aspect of Biden's invisibility, his missing State of the Union speech, may be a matter of timing.  Dementia often takes its worst toll in the evening, the so-called Sundowner Syndrome or Sundowner Effect.

Bur former senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller suggests that eyesight may have something to do with it.  Speaking to Sean Hannity, he pointed out that at his few campaign events, Biden often used a jumbotron-sized screen as his teleprompter, and in a joint session of Congress, that may not be possible.

It really is sad watching not just Biden, but his enablers like Psaki scramble to cover up the dimensions of the trick they pulled on the public, with the complete cooperation of the major media, running a rapidly declining shadow of the man he formerly was, using a pandemic as an excuse for keeping him away from scrutiny.

We'll see if another excuse emerges why Biden can't actually do a press conference by the end of the month.  Or maybe he will, but it will turn out to be low-key and uninformative, with totally predictable questions yielding totally predictable scripted answers.

For the sake of the country, I'd like this prediction to turn out wrong.  I'd like us to have a man in charge of the nuclear codes who can think clearly and who doesn't need shadowy others making his decisions for him.

 

Thomas Lifson  

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/03/as_even_his_media_apologists_complain_psaki_promises_biden_will_do_a_presser__but_needs_a_few_more_weeks.html 

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Dumbest 'insurrection theatre' stunt of the week - Thomas Lifson

 

​ by Thomas Lifson

More evidence that Washington is going mad

The relentless campaign to demonize supporters of President Trump entered the realm of self-parody this past week, with warnings that the U.S. Capitol and democracy itself were in danger on March 4 because QAnon saw that date as the real inauguration day.  It was all balderdash, a PsyOp aimed at delegitimizing support for Trump or questioning the integrity of the presidential election.

Even the Washington Post admitted there was nothing to it, calling the reports a "mirage."

At the Capitol, a March 4 threat from militant Trump supporters proves a mirage https://t.co/pHUgunuHEN

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) March 4, 2021

This is too kind, for mirages are genuine phenomena, a product of the physics of light.  This bogus warning was entirely the product of human intentions, not the result of impersonal natural forces.  And it amounted to the worst sort of propaganda, intended to demonize a group based on lies, by fanning the flames of panic.

But Speaker Pelosi eagerly canceled voting Thursday because of the bogus threat.  This freed up Representative Al Green, a Democrat from the Houston area, to undertake a stunt of surpassing stupidity that was taken with deadpan seriousness by much of the media.  The D.C. insider publication, The Hill, bought into the stunt:

Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) is sending a message to QAnon and right-wing extremist threats by sitting on the Capitol steps on Thursday, the date authorities warned militia groups were potentially planning another breach of the building.

"I want to make a statement to let people know, those who would threaten those of us who cherish this freedom that we have here that we refuse to allow those threats to negate our freedom," he told The Hill.

Green himself touted his bravery:

I love my country and believe that freedom is not free. Others have made great sacrifices for the freedoms I enjoy. I refuse to surrender our nation’s Capitol to those who would abridge my freedom. Hence, as a matter of personal principle, I will be in the Capitol complex today.

— Congressman Al Green (@RepAlGreen) March 4, 2021

And a heroic-looking picture of him went out to social media:

Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) sat on the U.S. Capitol steps today to protest QAnon and right-wing extremists -The Hill pic.twitter.com/WJhMDuxFwq

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) March 5, 2021

The only problem is that Rep. Green was sitting behind a large protective cordon, including National Guard troops and fencing, facing no danger, even if the phony insurrection reports had been true.

pic.twitter.com/GuIIELXL1J

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) March 5, 2021

Ninety percent–plus of the population will never see the broader picture.  The propagandists control what most people see, and they are all too effective in their theatrics.

Tucker Carlson called them out in his introductory segment Friday.  It's worth watching here.

Photo credit: Twitter.

 

Thomas Lifson  

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/03/dumbest_insurrection_theatre_stunt_of_the_week.html 

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Children need Protection from Transgender Activists - Wen Wryte

 

​ by Wen Wryte

Some medical professionals have expressed concerns, but they are not being listened to because the ideology of transgenderism is now firmly embedded in the medical profession.

Transgender ideology is a threat to children, and also to their right to childhood.  Childhood should be a time of innocence and learning to grow into an emotionally well-adjusted, intellectually competent, morally capable adult.  Transgender activists seek to sexualize and politicize children long before puberty, telling them they have a right to transition even though their bodies and minds are not fully-formed, and against their parents‘ objections.

Transgender ideology treats children as if they have the same rights as adults and ignores the fact that they are vulnerable to all kinds of suggestion and manipulation.  This undermines the principle that we should value a child’s protection above all other considerations, protecting children from the negative effects of their own ignorance, impulsiveness, and enthusiasms, and from those adults who may seek to pursue their own interests at the expense of a child’s well-being and welfare.  It amounts to a war on childhood and on responsible parenting.

But trans activists have already labeled attempts by some state legislatures to head off the undermining of protection for children as a ‘war’ on trans people.

These state legislatures are actually seeking to protect children.  Children are being targeted for life-changing and irreversible medical procedures to prevent their natural development, the long-term implications of which they are not mature enough to understand. 

Some medical professionals have expressed concerns, but they are not being listened to because the ideology of transgenderism is now firmly embedded in the medical profession.

The slightest indication of confusion about sex and the expression of sexual identity can be seized upon as an indication of transgenderism and cultivated as such by activists.  This is a form of grooming.  Most children are not in a position to resist this unless they have very wise, committed, and resourceful parents to protect them.  

Transgender ideology presumes that children can have a clear and firm conviction as to their ‘gender identity’ and can decide on those grounds that they are in the wrong body and they are really of the opposite sex.  But the logic is faulty.

Gender is supposedly not biologically determined.  Medically qualified trans activists advocate puberty-blocking hormone treatments and gender-reassignment surgery to address an incompatibility between a subjective, non-biologically determined gender identity and the child’s biological sex.  But if gender identity has nothing to do with sex or biology this can only make things worse not better.  We know that adults identifying as trans already have a significantly higher incidence of mental illness. And this risk continues after transition.

Which is a clear indicator that transition did nothing to address the underlying psychological problems.  Perhaps this is why trans activists are so angry and resentful.

But the same approach is being advocated for vulnerable, impressionable, confused and anxious children who get caught up in the spider’s web of transgender ideology. 

How can any doctor know for sure that a child’s adoption of a transgender ‘identity’ is not a passing fad?  Certainty is impossible.  While a child is growing towards adulthood, different genes will express themselves and all manner of psycho-social influences will impact.  No one -- not even the parents, let alone the child -- can possibly know in advance exactly what this process will involve or what the eventual outcome will be.  Parents can only hope for the best whilst doing everything they can to bring this about. 

The child, meanwhile, is experimenting at being the kind of person he or she imagines best expresses his/her aspirations.  But those aspirations may change drastically over the course of growing up.  What children need is guidance, support, and protection.  This should come  primarily from their parents but also those in loco parentis.  Children are prey to all sorts of misguided ideas and need protection from themselves as well as from those adults who might do them harm, and this protection should remain in place until children have reached maturity and can take responsibility for themselves.

Doctors who offer transgender interventions to children argue that the developing body and mind of a child can offer unequivocal evidence of the desirability of transitioning before maturity is reached.  But transgenderism is not viewed as a pathology by transgender activists; not even the medically qualified ones.  This view is becoming increasingly prevalent.

But if transgenderism is not a pathology, what is it?  A lifestyle choice?  So why all the rush to intervene in the lives of children who are confused about their sexuality?  If these children are not ill or disordered, what is the medical justification for altering their minds and bodies (with hormones and surgery) even before they are fully formed?  Even if the child desires this outcome, is it wise to gratify this desire before mental and physical maturity is attained? 

And yet medically qualified transgender activists seek to do just this.

This is an example of what I term ‘pathological irrationality’ -- the kind of reasoning that undermines the very idea of reason itself.  The logic of transgender ideology is riddled with contradictions.

In what sense is it defensible to hold that children are competent to make life-changing decisions that are irreversible, the consequences of which will be with them for the rest of their lives, and which in any case might not be necessary at all and simply reflect a lifestyle choice, which in itself might be a passing fad?  The doctors ‘treating’ such children are literally ‘playing God’ because they are taking upon themselves the role of omniscient benefactor when in fact they are not omniscient.  They cannot possibly know for sure that what they are doing is for the long-term benefit of their patient.  But at present they can act with impunity whilst the child carries all the risk and suffers the adverse consequences for life.

Concerns about the well-being and welfare of children motivate the child protection laws, policies, and practices.  Why should such protections be sidelined in the case of medical interventions in the lives of children in the name of transgenderism?

If the child later has a change of heart, will that child be justified in judging that they have been mutilated by adults who took advantage of their vulnerability?  Even if what happened was with the child's consent, this consent will have been influenced by the medical transgender activists who have a vested interest in changing children from one sex to the other to suit their political agenda.  But if they turn out to have changed a child into the opposite sex who then decides that this was the wrong thing to do after all, then in reality what happened was the taking advantage of a vulnerable, suggestible child to gratify the adults involved.

This is a child protection issue, one that is created by transgender activists who refuse to acknowledge that children have a right to a childhood unmolested by adults with a political agenda.  What is really needed is much stronger protection, so that children are allowed to be children without being manipulated into making decisions that may irreversibly ruin their lives.

Image: Pixabay

Wen Wryte  

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/03/children_need_protection_from_transgender_activists.html 

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Hero of the Month: M. Zuhdi Jasser - Grégoire Canlorbe

 

​ by GrĂ©goire Canlorbe

"It is my hope and prayer that our work will contribute not to what the Islamists want—a revivalism of the old—but rather a genuine reform towards a Western model of Islam based in infinite diversity of thought and protection of individual inquiry and their universal human rights"

  • The Obama Administration handed hundreds of billions of dollars to the theocrats as well as an insurance of security, as well as a future with a nuclear bomb. These, along with thousands of troops and the empowerment of the terror group Hizballah, gave Iran's leaders a green light to spread terror into Syria.

  • Some may appropriately say that no real democracies evolved quickly [in the "Arab Spring"] after centuries of tyranny. In fact, there may be a need for multiple revolutions before democracy can take hold. Perhaps, though, there can be a more methodical transition towards modernity with steady benchmarks of reform and liberalization, as we have seen done so successfully with the 2020 Middle East agreements.

  • The challenge, as always, will be in keeping it from being too slow to the point of fiction—which has been "Plan A" for the tyrants across the Middle East since World War II. They lie to the West about reforms in order to placate each new administration with a five- or ten-year plan while transitions in power in the West along with our short-term, societal "attention deficit disorder" give them a pass.

  • Regardless of whether a state's approach is top-down or bottom-up, if its raison d'ĂȘtre is based in Islam and the primacy of Islamic law rather than on individual rights and the protection of minorities, as in secular liberal democracies, it will always be anti-freedom and illiberal.

  • We will have to watch very closely if there will be new interpretations from the pulpits of the grand mosque in Mecca, or mosques in Medina and across the country. The fact that we heard this coming from the pulpits in the Emirates and Bahrain is what made the Abraham Accords a reality to believe rather than doubt.

  • As for Biden's foreign policy, he is already signaling that the Pentagon will focus on diplomacy first and the military second. So, the Pentagon is a branch of the State Department? If that is not "leading from behind 3.0", I don't know what is. Sources say he wants to "de-emphasize the military" and lift up diplomacy. If that vision is by openly weakening our defense programming, that will signal a green light actually to usher in more war, not less. Peace through weakness doesn't work against thugs like Khamenei and Assad across the planet. We are thus likely to see a re-emergence of Islamist belligerence and a testing of the waters as they try to make gains against Biden's apparent appeasement strategy.

  • It is my hope and prayer that our work will contribute not to what the Islamists want—a revivalism of the old—but rather a genuine reform towards a Western model of Islam based in infinite diversity of thought and protection of individual inquiry and their universal human rights, rather than the oppressive collective and the proverbial Islamic state.

Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser. (Image source: Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons)

Canlorbe: Dear Dr. Jasser, thank you for joining me. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib are the first two Muslim women to serve in American Congress. Do you think they representative of the mentality of the majority of Muslims in America?

Jasser: Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) are simply byproducts of the Islamist teams that recruited them and trained them in the art of ideology and dissimulation. Those teams include the alphabet soup of Islamist organizations—"Muslim Brotherhood legacy groups"—that exist in the United States. These include, for instance, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Muslim American Society (MAS), and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC). Future politicians, media pundits, or the many demagogic imams, they all rise up from within the Islamist populist movement in the West by telling insular Islamist communities what they want to hear while claiming to speak for all Muslims.

Omar and Tlaib rose up in Democratic politics because they represent decades of cooperation between the Islamist movements here in the West, and the far left's progressivism. Since 2011, other Muslim reform leaders and I were asked by Congress to testify many times on the Hill on the compromising influence of Islamist organizations and ideologies, both global and domestic, to our national security.

The American Islamist groups worked in a coordinated fashion to attack me, the organization I represent, the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) and the other Muslims in our Muslim Reform Movement. Each time we testified to Congress, their attempts at takfirism (declaring us not to be "real" Muslims) were often less than subtle and typically defamatory. They repeatedly attempted to smear us on social media and never addressed the issues or ideas that we represented in our testimony. It is always revealing how fearful Islamists are of actually addressing the connection between their non-violent 'political Islam' (Islamism) and violent political Islam.

This is the classic method of many Islamists: they tag onto "identity movements" and transform the belief in the ideology of a faith, Islam, into an identity racial group—which it is not. This distortion stifles any real diversity of ideas and promotes a culture where the community is perceived to be a racial monolith. Thus, anyone who speaks out becomes an "Uncle Tom" and supposedly against the whole tribe.

In 2020, we saw Islamist identity politics fit right into the Black Lives Matter Movement and its racialization of every issue. It is quite a cooperation to behold, even though ultimately the Islamists actually agree with very little of the ideas of the far left—for example when it comes to implementing extremist Muslims' draconian interpretations of 'shariah law,' such as child marriage, slavery, unequal legal rights for men and women, death for homosexuals, female genital mutilation, or beating women, to name a few.

The bottom line is that there is one alliance, progressive, that exists between AOC and her progressive extremists, and another different, alliance, Islamic fundamentalist, that exists between, say, AOC and her following and the Islamist members of Congress and their following.

Those two members of Congress represent the current leading edge, in identity politics, of political Islam in the West and its emphasis on group rights rather than individual rights. Both women, however, represent the trend to stifle dissent and dissidents. They also both represent the effort to empower domestic and global Islamist supremacists and their Islamic nation-state ideologies over the exceptionalism of secular liberal American democracy. They would most likely deny this, and certainly there are some clear differences between Omar and Tlaib. For example, Omar's foreign policy has clearly proven that she formulates her positions by looking first for the interests of the global political Islamist populist movement, and then all else follows. She spins it to her benefit in a deceptively American context, yet you can see—in her unwavering support of Turkey's Erdogan, Qatar, various permutations of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and even Iran—that her affinity for Islamists is paramount. As a naval officer, there is nothing I found more offensive than her fabricated statements, right before she was elected, that somehow Americans killed thousands in Somalia, more than the terrorists we were fighting, and implying that those of us who served in "Operation Restore Hope" were terrorists.

Canlorbe: You make no mystery of your Syrian origins. How do you assess Bashar al-Assad's policy? Do you believe that former President Donald J. Trump had the right attitude towards Bashar when, in April 2017, he decided on a missile strike in response to the use of chemical attack?

Jasser: Bashar Assad's policies are in line with the Syrian Ba'ath party fascism of more than 50 years. The Syrian revolution, which began in 2011, needs to be understood in the context of the methods with which the ruling party wields its power. The Syrian Ba'ath Party is an Arab nationalist socialist party (akin to an Arab Nazism), which seized power by military coup in 1963. The Alawite—a Shi'ite offshoot—faction of Ba'ath Party loyalists then took power in another bloody coup in February 1966. After that Alawite coup, the fascist Ba'ath transformed its predominantly supremacist political platform to incorporate a preference for the Alawite Shi'ite sect. Members of Sunni Muslim leadership were purged from the military. The entire leadership became comprised of Alawite Ba'athist faithful. The influence of Sunnis, Christians, Druze and Ismailis was all but eliminated. Non-Alawite officers who were ousted reported that in the late 1960s and early '70s, Syria was on the verge of a civil war among all their sects. This condition was often difficult to ascertain for blind analysts since, like many Arab tyrants, Hafez Assad ruled in a predominantly secular fashion rather than theocratic. Now this began to shift as his son, Bashar, moved Syria into the orbit of Iran and essentially became a client-state of Iran as well as Russia.

In 1970, however, Hafez al-Assad took the reins from his fellow Alawites in still another coup. In line with the totalitarian doctrine of the Ba'athist Party, Assad, ruled Syria with an iron fist for 30 years. He ended the Ba'ath-Alawite in-fighting and his regime cleansed any non-Alawites in its midst, and obliterated any Sunni protestations. To quell the religious unrest of other sects, Assad placed a few party loyalists who were Sunni, Christian, and Druze in mid-level, and a few higher levels, of political leadership—but not military. Most people knew they were window dressing and sympathizers. The Syria of Hafez Assad was much like the Iraq of Ba'athist Saddam Hussein, described by one expatriate, who used a pseudonym, as "A Republic of Fear": "a regime of totalitarian rule, institutionalized violence, universal fear, and unchecked personal dictatorship." Many of our Syrian families, after suffering for years in and out of prison, and muzzled in every form of expression, left for American freedom after realizing that a revolution to topple one of the world's most ruthless military tyrannies would likely never materialize in their lifetimes.

The Assad regime, using incalculably cruel methods, paralyzed the humanity of 22 million Syrians for two generations. Brothers, sisters, families reported on one another to Syrian intelligence (Mukhabarat). Many vanished, never to be seen again, and anyone who dared to dissent from the ruling party was systematically tortured and made an example of by frequent collective punishment. By the twenty-first century, there were more Syrians living outside Syria than inside, and some analyses claim that one in nine expatriates living abroad provided steady information to the Assad regime on expatriate Syrian activities in order to spare the family. The Syrian Human Rights Committee has chronicled many of the atrocities committed in the past 45 years by the Assad regime: the Hama massacres of 1963, 1982, and again in 2011, Tadmur, and the countless prisoners of conscience were systematically snuffed out by the regime.

It is upon this background that the Syrian revolution commenced in March 2011 as part of the greater regional Arab awakening. The Assad regime calculated that it would be able to slow-walk a genocidal cleansing operation against the Syrian people who were part of the revolution. While the first year of the revolution showed significant diversity—with Sunnis, Alawites, Druze, Christians and others marching in the streets—Assad did as his party always did. He drove internal divisions among the sects to rip his country apart, while leaving his regime alone. He was sustained with heavy foreign help, from Russia and Iran, in military, financial, and human assets. The Sunni population was eventually radicalized, with ISIS arising in 2013 in Syria and Iraq. It was due to a perfect storm of Assad's radicalizing Sunnis—combined with their ideological influence from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey—at the same time as Iraq's descent into anarchy. The growth of ISIS provided the Assad regime a convenient cover for continued military genocidal operations and the use of chemical weapons against the majority of the population who were unarmed and who had naively thought that if the world saw it on YouTube, the public would put enough pressure on Assad to bring it to an end. Sadly, Russia and Iran were likely the primary reason Assad survived and the civil war did not evolve organically. Russia and Iran consolidated Assad's grip on Syria's humanity and systematically exterminated more than 600,000 people and displaced 10,000,000 people out of Syria's 22,000,000. The UN remained feckless.

This is not to say that the West or anyone should have intervened in any way close to what happened in Iraq. What use is the UN, however, if ruthless tyrants can use chemical weapons and eradicate swaths of their own population with no repercussions? A Bosnian type of response, akin to President William Jefferson Clinton's and the UN's response to Serbia's crimes in 1995 might have helped. President Barack Obama, however, did not just avoid military intervention; his administration actively supported the Assad regime at the altar of their "nuclear deal" with the Islamic Republic of Iran and the empowerment of The Iranian Republican Guard Corps and its Masters in Tehran. The Obama Administration handed hundreds of billions of dollars to the theocrats as well as an insurance of security, as well as a future with a nuclear bomb. These, along with thousands of troops and the empowerment of the terror group Hizballah, gave Iran's leaders a green light to spread terror into Syria.

President Donald Trump's Administration's response to the Assad's repeated use of chemical weapons in April 2018, while minimal in the scheme of what had happened in Syria to that point, did send a message that reverberated within the Assad regime, not to mention Russia and Iran, that red lines do mean something for that administration. It did have some deterrent effect, as limited as it was.

Canlorbe: At Trump's request, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Sudan and Bahrain signed the Abraham Accords, promising to make peace with Israel. They also promised to stop financing and hosting terrorist organizations. Do you believe those regimes can be trusted? How will they behave under a Biden presidency?

Jasser: In President Ronald Reagan's words, "trust but verify". But first, it is important to reflect on the failed "Arab Awakening". While it was not a Spring—except for Tunisia where a culture of democracy and some liberalism is actually beginning to take hold—a complete reset in the Arab world against tyranny was certainly very appealing to those of us from families that have been fighting against these dictators, autocratic monarchs, and otherwise Islamist theocrats for more than two generations. After a decade of failed revolutions—between the 20th century's tyrannies and the chaos after 2011—was there a better path forward?

Some may appropriately say that no real democracies evolved quickly in the "Arab Awakening," after centuries of tyranny. In fact, there may be a need for multiple revolutions before democracy can take hold. Perhaps, though, there can be a more methodical transition towards modernity with steady benchmarks of reform and liberalization, as we have seen done so successfully with the 2020 Middle East agreements?

The challenge, as always, will be in keeping it from being too slow to the point of fiction—which has been "Plan A" for the tyrants across the Middle East since World War II. They lie to the West about reforms in order to placate each new administration with a five- or ten-year plan while transitions in power in the West along with our short-term, societal "attention deficit disorder" give them a pass. Remember, the changes in 2011 created vacuums facilitating the re-emergence of tyranny and radical Islamists, but sometimes, like treating cancer, the patient has first to get more ill before returning to health.

Essentially, a model of reform that I see possible—perhaps remotely, but possible—for liberalism and freedom, may be an evolution towards constitutional monarchies (much as I disagree with "genetic supremacism"). Some of them have been building civil society institutions that begin to modernize Islamic thought, end the concept of an Islamic state and its jihad, and instead are looking at their state and citizens through the prism of universal human rights. What we have been seeing in the UAE gives hope, as do Bahrain, Sudan, with, one hopes, more to come. So far, I have less optimism for Saudi Arabia relinquishing the dominance of the ideas of salafi-jihadism and its draconian interpretation of Islam even as the Saudis openly condemn and declare war on 'political Islam'. Their track record is just so abysmal. But as we see them outlaw child marriage and make other changes, the principle of "trust but verify" may be appropriate to push them forward?

This is likely confusing to many non-Muslims, if we try to say, that the Saudis are now anti-Islamist despite decades of supporting Muslim Brotherhood groups across the planet? Please understand, though, that the concept of an Islamic Republic, with an Islamic flag and an Islamic jurisprudence (sharia) in which the Qur'an is the source, not just a source of law, is in fact certainly still a form of political Islam, just more of a top-down, corporate, theocracy no matter which way you cut it. However, even the Islamist populist movements, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, are not much better. They are simply bottom-up, grass roots theocracies founded in sharia ideologies. Regardless of whether a state's approach is top-down or bottom-up one, if its raison d'ĂȘtre is based in Islam and the primacy of Islamic law rather than on individual rights and the protection of minorities, as in secular liberal democracies, it will always be anti-freedom and illiberal.

We will have to watch very closely if there will be new interpretations from the pulpits of the grand mosque in Mecca, or mosques in Medina and across the country. The fact that we heard this coming from the pulpits in the Emirates and Bahrain is what made the Abraham Accords a reality to believe rather than doubt.

For the first time I do also see peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia as not only a short-term possibility but even a long-term one. The combination of the populist Islamist movement threat to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and its radical offshoots of ISIS and al Qaeda combined with the threat of Shia Islamism of Khomeinism has shaken the foundations of the Saudi state establishment and forced them to reckon with monsters they helped create—such as the Muslim Brotherhood and their mosques—while also pushing them to forge more meaningful acknowledgement of the state of Israel and the West. Let us not also underestimate the role of the Trump administration and the Pompeo State Department in making this happen. This early reform however will only be real when it is met with a genuine reinterpretation of the antisemitic translations and interpretations of the Qur'an and Hadith (the Prophet's deeds and sayings) that the government of Saudi Arabia pushes. Not until their imams begin to marginalize the anti-Semitic bigotry of so many of those interpretations and begin to present new interpretations will that change be in fact durable.

As for Qatar, we should begin closing our base there and finding other options for our regional security. Their state propaganda arm of Al Jazeera—in addition to their relationship with Iran, Turkey and global Islamist movements of the Muslim Brotherhood—has rendered them no longer an ally, let alone even a "frenemy". This should not surprise anyone. The Al-Thani family went all in the Muslim Brotherhood since 1961 when they gave safe haven to the spiritual guide of the Ikhwani movement—Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi. He has since been a close partner of the royal family aligned ideologically and strategically with a global reach of at least tens of millions of Islamists. We have long followed and dissected Qaradawi's English and Arabic work and there is little doubt that he and his followers are the central cancer of the Sunni Islamist global movement against the west and our way of life. The Qatari government's fealty for Islamists has brought them economically and ideologically closer to Iran's Khomeinists in addition to the Taliban. My position has always been that Qatar sees itself as the global center for Islamists, meaning "The Caliphate". Their extreme wealth makes for a toxic global brew for most of our Islamist enemies.

I see no inkling of reform or change on the programming of Al Jazeera or any of their imams or clerics. In fact, only months ago we saw systematic Holocaust denial on the programming of Al Jazeera as they attempted quickly to erase history of that. They are too deeply embedded at heart and economically with Iran, Turkey and other Islamist supremacists across the planet to have any hope at reform unless their regime falls. We can only pray.

There is little doubt that the Biden administration will simply be Obama 3.0. It may even be worse than the Obama administration because it is going to trip over itself in such an exaggerated fashion trying to undo the progress against the Islamists—domestically and abroad—that we have made since 2016, that the pendulum will swing back further than even the Obama administration in defense of Islamists.

We are already seeing this in the Islamist that was selected to be a senior White House staffer for legislative affairs—Reema Dodin. She is notably not only historically an operative with Muslim Brotherhood legacy groups such as CAIR in DC but she also stated as a student at UC-Berkley, "Palestinian suicide bombings are the last resort of a desperate people". With her likes running interference with the Hill for the White House, we may see an even more radicalized policy in favor of not only Iranian appeasement but overt support of Islamist interests domestically and abroad. What is certain—based on how Dodin while at Senator Durbin's office with her allies at Muslim Advocates beat the drum of Muslim American victimization against our testimony on the Hill—it will only get worse.

As for Biden's foreign policy, he is already signaling that the Pentagon will focus on diplomacy first and the military second. So, the Pentagon is a branch of the State Department? If that is not "leading from behind 3.0", I don't know what is. Sources say he wants to "de-emphasize the military" and lift up diplomacy. If that vision is by openly weakening our defense programming, that will signal a green light actually to usher in more war, not less. Peace through weakness doesn't work against thugs like Khamenei and Assad across the planet. We are thus likely to see a re-emergence of Islamist belligerence and a testing of the waters as they try to make gains against Biden's apparent appeasement strategy. Now more than ever, our private work needs to push for anti-Islamist reformers against the likely ascendant Islamist threats.

Canlorbe: Putin is an ally of the mullahs and sits at the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. In Russia, Muslims represent 10% of the total population, and Islam is the second most widely professed religion. Is the Russian regime a trustworthy ally in promoting enlightened Islam and fighting against terrorist, political Islam?

Jasser: Domestically, as Michael Weiss pointed out in 2017, the Russians have long played a double game with radical Islamist terror, in fact helping fuel ISIS with recruits from Chechnya to give Assad cover and allow Russia to ship out the jihadists it creates. Regionally, Putin's regime has empowered our greatest enemies—Iran's terror regime from its Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC) to Hizballah, and Assad. Its state propaganda—RT is finally listed under FARA and is an unwavering part of the Assad/Khameinist media arm state-sponsored media. They have worked with our nominal ally, Turkey (selling them missiles) and giving them the green light against our Kurdish allies in Syria. Part of their longtime interest in Syria is their only Mediterranean port and base at Tartus. Chechnya's tyrant, Ramzan Kadyrov, portrays himself as a devout Muslim but he is a two-bit radical tyrant and Putin tool who has systematically radicalized his population while violating the human rights of every minority group from the gay community to dissidents.

In my book, A Battle for the Soul of Islam: An American Patriots' fight to Save his Faith, I recount how my father told me that our family's deep seeded anti-communism and anti-Islamism is what drove them to become enamored of West and learn about the exceptionalism of secular democracy and especially about Americanism. Russia's Putin and its kleptocrats would never promote an enlightened anything, let alone defeat a theocracy. They still have a state-sponsored church; the other faiths, whether within Christianity or outside, have lesser to no rights. There is a reason their entire economy is oil, and produce no products of any kind competing in the free markets. The Putin regime is against individual creativity and battles of ideology. In order for reformists to emerge, we need a public platform of critical thinking and modern civil institutions that protect universal human rights.

Canlorbe: Both Maimonides and Averroes endeavored to conciliate religion and philosophy. How do you assess the legacy of Averroes in Islam and that of Maimonides in Judaism?

Jasser: As a physician dedicated to treating the ill, your question resonates with me more than you would ever know. My chosen profession is as a doctor and it was the inspiration of clear broad-minded thinkers and doctors like Maimonides and Averroes who influenced so much of my idealism about medicine and medical ethics. Their confidence in weighing in on philosophy, theology, legalisms, and politics are an example of what I have always aspired to be and do in my own life even if their ideas are from almost 1000 years ago. It was not necessarily the specifics of their ideas, but the courage of their inquiry. Scholars have often pointed out the strong resemblance between Maimonides' "understanding of God's manifestness in the order of nature" and Averroes' "conception of God and providence which focuses heavily on God's essential preservation of all species, and his role as the cause of being and unity in all hylomorphic substances." Averroes, for example, saw God in every element of nature's diversity. Averroes's gift or legacy to Islamic thought was much like that of Maimonides; he took human feelings and sensations, like 'heat', 'intellect', 'mind', 'wisdom', and 'creativity' and used them to broaden our human understanding of God. To most Salafists, even the suggestion of imparting human-like attributes to God is blasphemy whether or not it is intended just to understand and relate better to our understanding of God. Giving philosophical descriptions of God using human metaphors and nature provided Averroes, like Maimonides, a flexibility of thought about God which in the right era of boundless human creativity and inquiry can become the foundation of real enlightenment and liberalism.

Similar to Maimonides, Averroes sought to bring to Islamic thought a "blending of God as pure unity and God as intellect" a very Hellenic thought process seen throughout Arabic discourse, as seen in, for example, the Theology of Aristotle.

Contrary to essentially every extremist or literalist movement in Islam today, Averroes' legacy was about taking God's unity (tawhid) and giving Muslims a way of looking at that unity, consistency, and omnipresence in a way that does not conflict and actually explains the infinite diversity of the human condition, our nature, and our laws. This is actually also the essence of our Muslim Reform Movement—an attempt to bring back such a deep understanding of diversity of thought and interpretations of Islamic law (shariah) in a way that allows us to live in harmony with modernity and secular liberal democracy through a separation of "history and religion"—or more allegory and less literalism. Averroes may not have explicitly gone so far as real liberalism. But then again there were no liberal democracies upon which to reflect for these thinkers at the time. But the foundations of his thought, similar to what Maimonides was to Judaism, gave metaphysical nuggets of what God is and what God is not, along with the infinite possibilities for human nature brought about by God. Averroes, like Maimonides, looked at scripture, the Qur'an for Averroes, as allegory. This courage to go beyond literalism is part of his legacy and similarities to Maimonides.

Sadly, while both Maimonides and Averroes did their amazingly open-minded and deep work during the 12th century, both in Muslim majority nation states, Averroes' legacy has so far been very difficult to find in the "Islamic world" if not lost to hundreds and hundreds of years of intellectual and philosophical stagnation and reactionary movements that ultimately dominated and decimated most free Islamic academic and civil institutions since his life.

It is my hope and prayer that our work will contribute not to what the Islamists want—a revivalism of the old—but rather a genuine reform towards a Western model of Islam based in infinite diversity of thought and protection of individual inquiry and their universal human rights, rather than the oppressive collective and the proverbial Islamic state.

M. Zuhdi Jasser is the President of the American Islamic forum for Democracy. He is a former U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander. He is a former Vice-Chair and commissioner on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) appointed by Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) from 2012-2016. He is also a physician in private practice specializing in internal medicine, primary care, and medical ethics in Phoenix, Arizona. You can find him on Twitter @DrZuhdiJasser

 

GrĂ©goire Canlorbe  

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17128/m-zuhdi-jasser-interview 

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Miracle in Marseille - Ido Ben Porat

 

​ by Ido Ben Porat

Man armed with knife attempts to enter Jewish school, kosher supermarket, in Marseille, France.

A man armed with a knife attempted on Friday morning to enter a Jewish school and a kosher supermarket in Marseille, France.

Police officers gained control of the suspect and arrested him.

The attempted attack occurred around 8:15a.m., when the suspect, armed with a knife, arrived at the Yavneh school, and was distanced from there by security personnel.

Afterwards, the suspect entered a nearby kosher supermarket, but security guards succeeded in overpowering him before he could cause harm.

No one was injured.

During these events, students at the school were locked in their classrooms.

French police increased their presence near Jewish institutions in the city.

The suspect has been arrested and an investigation opened.

Jewish Agency Chairman Yitzhak Herzog responded: "The anti-Semitism and danger to Jews' lives did not end with the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, which paralyzed the world. Today's attempt to carry out a terror attack in the city of Marseille, France, is a warning light that anti-Semitism is occurring under the surface and just waiting to burst out with the end of the coronavirus pandemic and restrictions on travel in countries around the world."

Rabbi Reuven Ohana, Chief Rabbi of Marseille, said that the Jewish community is continuing life as usual. On the school campus opposite where the suspect was caught with the knife, prayer sessions will be held as usual, in accordance with the usual security and health regulations.

"The suspect with the knife arrived at a supermarket opposite a school, with a knife. School security guards caught him and called the police. The school was immediately closed and the students remained in their classrooms. The suspect did not call out specific words and it is not yet clear what the motivation was. It could also be that he was drunk. Everything is still be investigated and the police have not yet stated what the background is," he said.

"The local Jewish community is far from the city center. This is a large and supportive community, with three schools and extensive religious services.

"I thank the Creator of the World and His emissaries the security guards, whose alertness prevented a tragedy, G-d forbid, and I thank the security personnel who acted quickly. We hope that it will become clear that there was no act of terror here, G-d forbid."

 

Ido Ben Porat  

Source: https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/297961 

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Cornel West and Stealth Anti-Semitism at Harvard - Richard L. Cravatts

 

​ by Richard L. Cravatts

Welcome to the moral trap for Israel-haters.

 


As evidence of what the late Professor Edward Alexander has called “the explosive power of boredom” in rousing the liberal professoriate to its ideological feet, Harvard’s own Harvard Divinity School professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy, Cornel West, recently wondered out loud why the university might have denied him tenure. His explanation: that because he is a relentless critic of Israel, and because he thinks so highly of his academic accomplishments and record, it must be his pro-Palestinian leanings that spooked the Harvard committee making his tenure decision. "This is my hypothesis,” West said, “because given the possibilities of why they would not be even interested in initiating a tenure process, what else it could be?”

Ignoring the possibility, of course, that the reason he was not offered tenure has more to do with his uneven academic reputation and credibility than with his criticism of the Jewish state, West conjured up a familiar trope of Jew-haters: that if you condemn Israel and denounce its policies and behavior, you potentially have to pay a high reputational price. “The problem is that [critiquing Israel] is a taboo issue among certain circles in high places,” West said. “It is hard to have a robust, respectful conversation about the Israeli occupation because you are immediately viewed as an anti-Jewish hater or [having] anti-Jewish prejudices.

Criticism of Zionism and Israel is, of course, an issue about which Professor West and others have many notorious opinions, but which are being threatened, in his view, through the suppression of Palestinian solidarity and an unrelenting cataloging of the many predations of Israel. Professor West’s implication is that on this one issue—criticism of Israel—the sacrosanct notion of “academic freedom” is being threatened by those pro-Israel opponents who wish to stifle any and all speech critical of the Jewish state. West goes even further, suggesting that Jewish power “among certain circles in high places”—and those who are afraid of it on the Harvard campus—is so pervasive and influential that it shapes tenure decisions and plays a role on who advances academically and who does not.

West is caught in a moral trap in which many critics of Israel now find themselves, particularly as universities and other organizations adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of anti-Semitism. One of the sections of the definition says that those who “claim that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” are anti-Semitic, a point which, naturally, causes great discomfort for West and his fellow travelers on race-obsessed campuses who now frame the Israeli/Palestinian conflict as a contemporary example of racism—even manifested as alleged apartheid in Israel’s supposed racist treatment of “brown” Palestinian Arabs. If it is now deemed anti-Semitic to refer to Zionism as racism, then West, naturally, has to reject any definition of anti-Semitism that would accuse him of expressing it.

The IHRA definition does not criminalize speech; what it does do, however, is enable university leaders to reject false claims that virulent anti-Israel activism is simply “criticism of Israel,” and call it what it is and what its pernicious effects are: that if the behavior of individuals on campus involves “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis,” and “holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel”—opinions and accusations that West has himself expressed and which regularly animate the ideology of anti-Israel campus activists—then those expressions are not mere political commentary but are, in fact, anti-Semitic.

In 2014, for example, as Israel was conducting Operation Protective Edge against Hamas as a result of the terrorist group’s bothersome habit of showering Southern Israeli towns with rockets and mortars in an ongoing campaign to murder Jews, West astoundingly described the operation as “Israeli state terrorism in action and its Jewish racism in motion.”

At the same time, West was careful to sidestep any comments that might be perceived to be anti-Jewish even while he outrageously asserted that “[Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal not because he is Jewish but because he has chosen to promote occupation and annihilation." 

More recently, West was a featured speaker at a February 2020 event entitled “Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine,” an event which called on Harvard to “Disclose direct and indirect investments in companies complicit in human rights abuses towards Palestinians” and to “Divest all direct and indirect holdings in these companies,” claiming that “Palestinians live under apartheid” and that the “recent ‘peace’ plan proposed by the Trump administration legitimizes this occupation of Palestinian land and restricts 4 million Palestinians to mere slivers of land simply because they are not Jewish.”

West, of course, is conflicted because he must deal with competing victimhoods: one is his own as a black man and the other is that of Jews for their historical and chronic persecution and the continuing existence of anti-Semitism as manifested in enmity toward the Jew of nations, Israel. How, then, do you deprive Jewish Israelis of the insulation of victimhood? By accusing them of being racists. By claiming that they maintain and utilize a system of apartheid against the ever-aggrieved Palestinians. By accusing them of being guided by the racist ideology of Zionism and employing it as weapon through which an indigenous people are subjugated, ethnically cleansed, and exterminated as part of the pursuit of a Greater Israel free of any non-Jewish, brown people. By suggesting, grotesquely, that they are the modern incarnation of the Third Reich, Nazi-like in their behavior towards the Palestinians.

Others at Harvard participate in the campaign to delegitimize and slander Israel and, like West, they seek to malign the Jewish state and Zionism but also wish to not be characterized as anti-Semites when their ideas and behavior are judged by the IHRA definition. To game the system by which they will be exposed as bigots, anti-Israel activists resist any attempt to conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, and they wish to continue their incessant slandering of Israel without having to answer back to those pro-Israel individuals who call them on their attitudes. They wish to loathe and denounce the Jewish state and Jewish self-determination but not be called anti-Semites.

While West suggested that his criticism of Israel cost him his tenure bid when Jews had him punished him for his alleged bigotry, others at Harvard, such as members of the board of the Harvard Technology Review (HTR), of all things, wish to delineate very clearly what they believe to be the vast difference between Zionism-hatred and Jew-hatred, even though such subtleties are lost on the targets of that bigotry: Jews themselves.

This summer, in response to the racial hysteria that engulfed campuses in the wake of the George Floyd death in Minneapolis, the HTR board proposed establishing a fellowship, jointly with the Harvard Black Students Association (BSA) with the purpose of having the fellow “critically engage with the intersection of systemic anti-Blackness and technology” and “to use that as a segue to discuss broader issues of racial bias in technology. . . .”

A pro-Israel HTR board member pointed out that Stop LAPD Spying Coalition and the Allied Media Projects, two groups which were potential donors for the fellowship, both had records of maligning Israel and supporting the BDS campaign which seeks the elimination of Israel. Additionally, it was explained, a proposed speaker for an HTR event, Dr. Melina Abdullah, co-founder of the Los Angeles Black Lives Matter chapter, had “actively promoted anti-Semitic violence.”

In response to the board member’s observations about potential anti-Semitism seeping into HTR activities and the fellowship specifically, the board, along with some 30 other Harvard- and non-Harvard related organizations, in a veritable love-in of intersectionality, created a stern document, “HTR Summer Fellowship Must Take an Anti-Zionist Stance,” which not only rejected the pro-Israel board member’s suggestions, but committed the board and other groups to an even more energized and proactive anti-Israel campaign—as if that is the expected and appropriate role of a technology journal.

Central to the heated response was the notion that, as many Jew haters now contend, denouncing Zionism has nothing to do with Jew-hatred, nothing at all. “Zionism is not Judaism,” the document categorically announces, and “[o]pposing Zionism must be a central tenant [sic] in any anti-racism work,” presumably part of the mission of a tech journal. And in case anyone was unclear about the inherent and fundamental evils of Zionism, the document further explained that “Zionism is unquestionably a racist, sectarian, exclusionary, Jewish-supremacist political ideology that has dispossessed, displaced, and ethnically cleansed Indigenous Palestinians from their lands for over three generations.”

Anticipating the clause in the IHRA definition that that specifically links anti-Zionism to anti-Semitism, the HTR document conveniently rejects this notion completely, suggesting that “we cannot treat as respectable the false, ahistorical, intellectually dishonest, and dangerous assertion that criticism of Zionism is equatable [sic] to antisemitism.”

Repeating the lie as fact that Israel maintains a racist social structure and practices apartheid, the activists announce that “The fact that Israel is an apartheid state must not be up for debate, lest we descend into the perilous waters of moral relativism, disinformation, and mendacity.” It would be very convenient for these Israel-haters to not have to debate their position and to have the apartheid charge be accepted as fact whenever it is leveled against Israel, and so the suggestion here is that since they believe it to be true, and have stated it in no uncertain terms, there is no reason to evaluate the truthfulness of the charge or to permit opposing, pro-Israel views to be heard.

If Zionism is so fundamentally evil, and if tolerant and woke people like themselves feel compelled to “smash Zionism,” then boycotts to weaken and destroy Israel are not only not anti-Semitic, it is felt, but necessary, and no one should judge BDS efforts to be anti-Semitic, either in intent or effect, as former Harvard president Lawrence Summers once put it. “Again,” the document stresses, “the conflation of boycotting Zionism with antisemitism is both dangerous and disingenuous.”

It may give Professor West comfort thinking that his academic advancement at Harvard was compromised by powerful and influential Jews who wished to punish him for his criticism of Zionism, Israel, and the moral complicity of Jews who support the Jewish state. West’s accusation that Jewish interests blocked his tenure bid, not on its own merits, but in a furtive attempt to stifle criticism of Israel is also consistent with a pattern that David Hirsh of Engage in Britain has termed the “Livingstone Formulation,” part of which is “the counteraccusation that the raisers of the issue of antisemitism do so with dishonest intent, in order to de-legitimize criticism of Israel. The allegation is that the accuser chooses to ‘play the antisemitism card’ rather than to relate seriously to, or to refute, the criticisms of Israel.”

West and the HTR board members and their supporters may want to sever Judaism from Zionism and loathe and attack the latter while claiming to respect the former, but it is not up to anti-Semites to define their own bigotry. The IHRA definition helps in the effort to identify and denounce anti-Semitism where and when it shows itself, and while those who hate Jews, Zionism, and Israel will still be free to express their enmities, but others can, and should, be able to call them out for being the bigots that they are.

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Photo credit: Gage Skidmore

 

Richard L. Cravatts, Ph.D., a Freedom Center Journalism Fellow in Academic Free Speech and President Emeritus of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, is the author of Dispatches From the Campus War Against Israel and Jews. 

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/cornell-west-and-stealth-anti-semitism-harvard-richard-l-cravatts/ 

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