BERLIN, 2023: The words “Never Again Is Now” are projected onto the Brandenburg Gate on the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht. Paul Zinken—dpa/picture alliance/Getty Images

Due to space, knowing that people will not spend more than a few seconds, if that these days in paying attention to something, anything — except the banal, foolish, and selfish — there are only a few articles here pertaining to this worldwide rise in antisemitism. Jew hatred. Israel hatred.

I am not including all the statistics, but Jew-hatred, Israel hatred, attacks on Jews [which is many, many, MANY times greater than attacks on Muslims, or black people, brown people, or Asian people contrary to what the so-called journalists and news organizations in America report] has reached the highest levels in America ever recorded since the ADL, Anti-Defamation League began recording incidents in 1979.

I contend Jew hatred is greater now than it was in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. How can I make such a statement knowing the progression that hatred took? Simple. Look around. Listen. Pay attention. That level of Jew hatred is now worldwide. Not contained in one country or a couple of countries in Europe. It is worldwide. Exactly as God’s Word said it would be in the very last days.

In the first article found here, The New Antisemitism, written by Mr. Noah Feldman, he writes;

“The easiest way to explain why antisemitism is still with us is to blame religion. Scholars agree that what we call antisemitism today has its historical origins in a strain of anti-Jewish thought that grew out of early Christianity.”

Incredible statement. Israel, the Jewish people have been in slavery more times and longer than any other people in history, long before Jesus Christ came to this earth in the flesh. Israel and the Jews have been the most persecuted people on earth. For centuries before that birth in Bethlehem on that most historical night when the shepherds were tending their flocks and the angels appeared to them. Before about 33 years later in an illegal trial the Roman government acquiesced to the corrupt dead dry bones Jewish religious leaders who feared Jesus and they turned the people against Jesus so that He was beaten, scourged beyond human recognition, His back split open, and then nailed to that tree of shame to have His side pierced, to be spat on prior to that, to be stripped naked and mocked. Long before that day in which the sky became blacker than the darkest night and the earth trembled and shook, the veil of the temple was torn from top to bottom revealing the innermost holy of holies for all to see.

While it is true, historical fact, and tragic that Christians have directed hatred and much persecution towards Jews in the past, and some still do — the Church of Rome, that cult that does not preach the Holy Bible or the need to be born again, they have a history of gorging Jews with food, stripping them of their clothing, and then chasing them through villages, towns, and cities with sticks and clubs. How Christ-like, eh? Yes, what a history. If professing to be a Christian and you have never taken the time to learn real history, discover just what occurred while the Good Good, and Great God blesses you with breath and a beating heart maybe take some time to learn the facts. Know some important history. It is absolutely wrong of anyone professing to be a Christian to blame Jews for the crucifixion of the Lord Jesus Christ. Yes, the Jewish mob before Pontius Pilate kept shouting “Crucify him, crucify him, crucify him!” and they demanded a criminal, a terrorist in exchange for the Lamb of God, God Himself in the flesh on earth.

But to blame those Jews, the Jews is to be ignorant — utterly ignorant of God’s Word. How can anyone professing to be a Christian blame the Jews for the crucifixion of God on the tree of shame, when it is by His sacrifice and resurrection that ANYONE TODAY, ANYONE SINCE THE RESURRECTION THAT HAS COME TO BELIEVE AND OBEY THE WORD OF GOD, TO BE BORN ANEW IN FAITH, BY REPENTANCE RECEIVES FORGIVENESS AND SALVATION!? 

Were it not for God coming to earth, Jesus of Nazareth, as prophesized in the whole Word of God from Genesis onward, had He not come, lived as He did, be rejected at His first coming as He was by His people, the Jews — oh, that’s right Jew-hating Christian, replacement theology Christian, Jesus not only was a Jew…He still is a Jew.

Digest that truth if never having eaten of that before.

Were it not for Jesus, fully truly God, fully truly a man, dying on the tree of shame for the forgiveness of sin, the only acceptable Sacrifice, and His shedding His precious sinless blood, and rising from the dead on the Third Day?

Crucifixion is one of the most horrific, painful ways to die. And it is WE THE PEOPLE OF THE WORLD, WE THE SINFUL PEOPLE WHO REBELLED AGAINST GOD AND DESTROYED THE PARADISE HE CREATED FOR US THAT PUT JESUS ON THAT TREE OS SHAME.

And it had to be that way. According to God. And this was known by God, by Jesus, by the Holy Spirit in heaven always. Always. Eternally before the heavens and this earth were formed. Eternally before Genesis 1:1. It was known and understood in heaven what Jesus would have to do, because of what we would do when we were given this world in perfection but by our will determined to destroy it and cause Jesus to have to come and die and conquer death so that we believers might have eternal life and salvation. Forgiveness of our sin.

None of what is seen, heard, and known occurring in events, the news, politics — all of it — none of it can be isolated, separated from the whole Holy Bible and God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and every person on earth and how each person either accepts or rejects this fact, this truth.

There would be NO SALVATION. NO FORGIVENESS. NO ETERNAL LIFE FOR ANYONE FROM THE DAY HE DIED. 

Kapish?

Understand?

Think.

If doubting this? Maybe more time in the Holy Bible and less time in every other pursuit and place time is being spent. Along with more time in prayer with God.

It had to be as it was. According to God. It was prophesized all through the Older Covenant [Old Testament].

If an individual professes to be a Christian, truly, genuinely a Christ follower believing the whole Holy Bible and they do not love Israel? Understand the history and place of the Jews. Know at least basic Bible prophecy and what went before, what is, and what is to come. And what is in store for Israel and the Jews? What is in store for any who do not believe, do not understand, and perhaps have disdain, bitterness, or even downright hatred towards Jews? And they are convinced they are Yeshua’s going to heaven? And that the Church has replaced Israel even though they ought to know the covenants, the promises God made all along with HIs people — and GOD NEVER BREAKS OR GOES BACK ON A PROMISE — it might be time for a reexamination of the life, the beliefs held within, the condition of the spiritual heart, mind, spirit, and soul. And repent. And learn what it all means. Us Gentiles. The pagans. The Jews. The world vs. the Word. God’s people, Jew and Gentile alike who believe in and obey the Son, Jesus Christ.

Ever read the Holy Bible?

YES THE OLD TESTAMENT IS IN THE BIBLE FOR A REASON. It needs read, studied, meditated upon, and understood equally with the New Testament. There is no division between them other than the former prophesized of the coming of the Messiah, the latter details in great part His first advent and life on earth, and what the world became from that point on. What everyone has a decision to make regarding who is Jesus.

Blame the Jews?

Hate the Jews?

Hate Israel?

Well, Christian, you’re going to have some explaining to do when before the Lord Jesus Christ, a Jew, and getting around the New Jerusalem in God’s chosen land, Isreal.

What are you going to do when you need to go to the New Jerusalem, in Israel, when Jesus ascends to His throne on earth for 1,000 years?

And when Passover is observed in heaven? Eternally? As God said it shall be?

Antisemitism, Jew-hatred, and Israel hatred are increasing by the day worldwide.

It is not only tragic and dangerous. It is a sin for anyone professing to be a Christ follower to not love Jews, not love Israel, not understand just how important Jerusalem, Isreal, the Jews, and everything taking place are. And if a bit lost, confused, not in agreement, not understanding?

It can all be understood by spending more time in God’s Word and in prayer. In fervent, humble, deep Bible study and meditating upon what is read. Putting it into practice.

Now is the time to stand boldly, firmly for Israel. For all Jews. And to pray that the Lord comes soon for His Church, us Gentiles and Jewish believers in Jesus as Messiah, and then the 144,000 Jewish men, 12,000 from every tribe can be revealed as the Antichrist and his false prophet are revealed and the nation of Israel — which will come under the harshest and most difficult tribulation ever — many Jews at that time, many people worldwide, will have the scales removed from their eyes and come out from the dark and into the Light, the Truth, and the Way that Jesus of Nazareth, the Jesus of the Holy Bible is the Messiah, Yeshua HaMashiach, and be saved. Before those raptured believers, and every believer in heaven throughout the ages come with the Lord Jesus Christ in His Second and Final Coming…

If not right with Israel, with the Jews then a person is not right with God.

Not according to me, although that is my firm belief — but that is the truth according to the Word of God, dear Chrisitan.

Hate Jews?

Hate Israel?

Then how can one truly love the Lord Jesus Christ? Love God as Father? Obey the Holy Spirit? Know and understand the Holy Bible?

Otherwise, you are like the pagan, the heathen, all those self-consumed unbelieving, mocking, doing whatever was right in their own eyes, anything and everything goes in the days of Noah consumed in the flood and not one of the 8 souls saved and aboard the ark.

There are many more articles, many more reports, and incidents of Jew hatred, Israel hatred that have taken place in America, Europe, and around the world but time and space does not permit them all to be published here.

“…But as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.”

Joshua 24:15b

And me and my house will stand firm for Israel and for the Jewish people. Even though so many are stiff-necked and have scales over their eyes regarding the Messiah, Yeshua, Jesus Christ the Lord, Who came to this earth and sacrificed Himself on that tree of shame for me, for you, for them. Instead of division and hatred and bitterness and spreading ignorance let us pray for all lost people in this fallen and corrupted world. Pray for the Jewish people. Pray for Israel’s awakening, safety, and peace. Pray for Jerusalem. Pray that the Lord’s will be done on earth, as it is in heaven, His kingdom come…

Perhaps each person can begin to pay closer attention. Listen better. See better. Understand better. I think we all can, and let it begin with me. Lord let it begin with me…

Read on…

Ken Pullen, Thursday, June 27th, 2024

The New Antisemitism

February 27, 2024

by NOAH FELDMAN

Feldman, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard University, is the author of To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People

Reprinted from Time Magazine

Why won’t antisemitism die, or at least die down? In the months following Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, antisemitic incidents increased substantially. The Anti-Defamation League, which keeps track, says they tripled in the U.S. over the previous year, although its criteria also changed to include anti-Zionism. But from 2019 to 2022, the amount of people with highly antisemitic attitudes in the U.S. had nearly doubled, the ADL found. In Europe, Human Rights Watch warned in 2019 of an “alarming” rise in antisemitism, prompting the European Union to adopt a strategic plan for fighting it two years later.

No one can say definitively why the pre–Gaza War surge happened when it did. The salience of groups like the neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 probably played a role, as did the influence of figures like the troubled rapper turned designer Kanye West. Historically, antisemitism has been a side effect of populism, which traffics in us-vs.-them stereotypes. Social media allows antisemitic influencers to recruit and communicate directly to followers, getting around the filtering bottleneck of the legacy media. The murder of 11 worshipers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, by a shooter enraged at Jewish groups providing aid to immigrants, was the painful lowlight of this era.

It can be hard to think clearly and reason calmly about antisemitism. For 15 million Jews around the world, its resilience engenders fear, pain, sadness, frustration, and intergenerational trauma going back to the Holocaust and beyond. The superficial sense of security that many Jews feel on a daily basis in the contemporary world turns out to be paper-thin. Jews know enough of their own familial stories to realize that in historical terms, such moments of safety have often been fleeting, followed by renewed persecution. Sitting in my office in leafy Cambridge, Mass., a proud citizen of the freest country in the world, in which Jews have been safer than in any other country in history, I am not free of emotion on the topic. Nor could I be.

For many non-Jews, antisemitism matters deeply too. People everywhere who believe that all humans are created equal know that the presence of antisemitism in a society has often been the forerunner of other visceral, irrational hatreds, from racism to homophobia to Islamophobia. Worse, the persistence of antisemitism stands as a stubborn counterargument to Martin Luther King Jr.’s hopeful faith that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice.

In the past, antisemites, whether medieval Crusaders or 20th century Nazis, were often proud of their views. Today, thankfully, almost no one wants to be accused of antisemitism.

That’s a marker of human progress. It also means that the whole subject of antisemitism needs to be approached with charity and sensitivity. People who harbor no conscious negative ideas about Jews may unknowingly hold views that resonate with historical antisemitism.

Jews aren’t exempt from this, and so, neither am I. In a world roiled by polarizing debate, my aim is to encourage introspection—to get you to ask, as I ask myself, whether your feelings and beliefs would be the same if seen through the lens of the history and context of antisemitism. I come not to accuse anyone of antisemitism, but to explore the topic in a way that deepens our understanding of where it comes from, and where it’s going.

WARSAW, 2023: A far-right Polish lawmaker, left, after using a fire extinguisher on Hanukkah candles in parliament.Andrzej Iwanczuk—NurPhoto/Getty Images

The easiest way to explain why antisemitism is still with us is to blame religion. Scholars agree that what we call antisemitism today has its historical origins in a strain of anti-Jewish thought that grew out of early Christianity. The Gospels describe the Jews as complicit in the Roman crucifixion of Jesus. Paul’s theology was read to depict the Jews as having been replaced or superseded as God’s special favorites by the community of Christian believers. By failing to become Christians, Jews implicitly challenged the narrative of inevitable Christian triumph. For well over a thousand years, Jews in Christian Europe were subject to systemic, institutionalized oppression. Historical antisemitism took the form of discrimination, expulsion, and massacre.

The problem with blaming religion is that antisemitism today is no longer driven primarily by Christianity. Although antisemitism can still be found among Christians, in the U.S. and around the world, most contemporary believing Christians are not antisemites. The old theological condemnation of the Jews for killing Christ has been repudiated by nearly every Christian denomination.

Nor does antisemitism among Muslims primarily reflect the classical Islamic claims made against the Jews, such as the accusation that the Jews (and Christians) distorted Scripture, resulting in discrepancies between the Bible and the Koran. Jews in Muslim lands mostly fared better than in Christian Europe. Until the 20th century, those Jews occupied a complex, second-class status, protected alongside Christians as “people of the book” and also simultaneously subject to special taxes and social subordination. The tropes of modern Europe’s antisemitism—of Jews’ power and avarice—mostly came to the Middle East late, through Nazi influence. Even the prevalence of antisemitism among Islamist groups like Hamas isn’t primarily driven by religion. Rather, it is part of their politically motivated effort to turn a struggle between two national groups for the same piece of land into a holy war.

It emerges that far from being an unchanging set of ideas derived from ancient faiths, antisemitism is actually a shape-shifting, protean, creative force. Antisemitism has managed to reinvent itself multiple times throughout history, each time keeping some of the old tropes around, while simultaneously creating new ones adapted to present circumstances.

In each iteration, antisemitism reflects the ideological preoccupations of the moment. In antisemitic discourse, Jews are always made to exemplify what a given group of people considers to be the worst feature of the social order in which they live.

A crucial reason why is surely that Jews were the most salient minority group living among Christians for the bulk of European history—and Europe was the heartland of historical antisemitism. The practice of projecting immediate social fears and hatreds onto Jews grew from the human need to treat some nearby group of people as the Other. (Muslims and Asians eventually also became subject to projection and fantasy, a practice dubbed Orientalism by the literary scholar Edward Said.) Once Jews had become the go-to targets for exemplifying societal ills, the habit stuck.

In this way, crucially, antisemitism is not and has never been about actual Jews so much as antisemites’ imagination of them. Because antisemitic ideology isn’t accountable to real-life facts, its content can be altered and changed as a society’s worries and moral judgments shift. Antisemitism’s capacity to keep its familiar character while also channeling new fears is what confers its stunning capacity to reinvent itself.

PITTSBURGH, 2018: A memorial outside the Tree of Life synagogue.Cathal McNaughton—Reuters

The first major reinvention of antisemitism took place as the Enlightenment gradually reduced the role of religion as the main source of Europeans’ attitudes and beliefs. Nineteenth century antisemitism preserved the old belief that the Jews were unique, having once been God’s chosen people and then uniquely punished for rejecting Christ. But it transformed this uniqueness to match the concerns of contemporary society.

Preoccupied with economic and social upheaval, antisemites depicted Jews as both uniquely capitalist and uniquely communist. Concerned about an unstable global power balance, antisemites claimed that Jews secretly controlled the world. Entranced by the pseudoscience of race that flourished after Darwin, antisemites declared that Jews were racially inferior. The obvious contradictions—that far from running the world, most Jews were impoverished, or that capitalism and communism were warring ideologies—did not deter antisemites. They ignored the illogic, or fell back on conspiracy theory, like the myth that Jewish capitalists and Jewish communists were secretly in cahoots. Ultimately, in different ways, both Nazism and Marxism identified Jews as an enemy deserving liquidation. The virulent antisemitism that fueled the Holocaust was thus partly a descendant of Christian antisemitism and also the product of modern conditions.

Today, racial pseudoscience is an embarrassment and the struggle between capitalism and communism has become passé. Antielitist populism can still draw on old canards about Jewish power, and those still resonate with certain audiences, especially on the far right. But the most perniciously creative current in contemporary antisemitic thought is more likely to come from the left.

Instead of disappearing among people who would condemn neo-Nazis, antisemitism is morphing again, right now, before our very eyes.

The core of this new antisemitism lies in the idea that Jews are not a historically oppressed people seeking self-preservation but instead oppressors: imperialists, colonialists, and even white supremacists. This view preserves vestiges of the trope that Jews exercise vast power. It creatively updates that narrative to contemporary circumstances and current cultural preoccupations with the nature of power and injustice.

Concerns about power and justice are, in themselves, perfectly legitimate, much like past concerns about the effects of unfettered capitalism on working people—or for that matter, condemnations of elitism. So it is important to distinguish carefully between critiques of power that deserve serious consideration and the antisemitic ways in which those critiques may be deployed.

That caution is especially important because Israel, the first Jewish state to exist in two millennia, plays a central role in the narrative of the new antisemitism. Israel is not an imaginary conspiracy but a real country with real citizens, a real history, a real military, and real political and social problems that concern relations between Jews and Palestinians. It is not inherently antisemitic to criticize Israel. Its power, like any national power, may be subject to legitimate, fair criticism.

WASHINGTON, D.C., 2022: Workers clean swastikas off the exterior of Union Station. Tom Williams—CQ-Roll Call, Inc/Getty Images

It is also essential not to tar all critics of Israel with the brush of antisemitism, especially in wartime, when Israel, like any other war-waging power, is properly subject to the strictures of international humanitarian law. To deploy the charge of antisemitism for political reasons is morally wrong, undermining the horror of antisemitism itself. It is also likely to backfire, convincing critics of Israel that they are being unfairly silenced.

At the same time, Israel’s history and current situation confound categories that are so often used today to make moral judgments—categories like imperialism, colonialism, and white supremacy. And because people’s ideas about Israel typically draw on older, pre-Israel ideas about Jews, criticism of Israel can borrow, often unconsciously, from older antisemitic myths.

To understand the complicated, subtle character of the new antisemitism, notice that the concept of imperialism was developed to describe European powers that conquered, controlled, and exploited vast territories in the Global South and East. The theory of settler-colonial white supremacy was developed as a critical account of countries like Australia and the U.S., in which, according to the theory, the colonialists’ aim was to displace the local population, not to extract value from its labor. The application of these categories to Israel is a secondary development.

These borrowed categories do not fit Israel’s specificity very well. Israel is a regional Middle Eastern power with a tiny footprint, not a global or continental empire designed to extract resources and labor. It was brought into existence by a 1947 United Nations resolution that would have created two states side by side, one Jewish and one Palestinian. Its purpose, as conceived by the U.N.’s member countries, was to house displaced Jews after 6 million were killed in the Holocaust.

The Palestinian catastrophe, or nakba, of 1948 was that when the Arab invasion of Israel failed to destroy the nascent Jewish state, many Palestinians who had fled or been forced out of their homes by Israeli troops were unable to return. Those Palestinians became permanent refugees in neighboring countries. Instead of ending up in an independent Palestine as proposed by the U.N., those who had stayed in their homes found themselves living either in Israel or under Egyptian and Jordanian rule. Then, in the 1967 war, the West Bank and Gaza were conquered by Israel. Palestinians in those places came under what Israel itself defines as an occupation. They have lived in that precarious legal status ever since despite the 1993–2001 peace process.

Notwithstanding undeniable Jewish prejudice and discrimination against Arabs in Israel, the paradigm of white supremacy also does not correspond easily to the Jews. Around half of Israel’s Jewish citizens descend from European Jews, as do most American Jews. But those Jews were not considered racially white in Europe, which is one reason they had to emigrate or be killed. Roughly half of Israel’s Jews descend from Mizrahi, (literally, Eastern) origins. They are not ethnically European in any sense, much less racially “white.” A meaningful number of Israeli Jews are of Ethiopian origin, and the small community of Black Hebrew Israelites in Israel are ethnically African American.

WARSAW, 1943: SS troops bring a group of captured Jewish people, including women and young children, to a railway-station collection point for deportation to the Nazi death camps; in the background, police and soldiers can be seen watching the Warsaw Ghetto burn.National Archives

Whether early Zionist settlers should be conceived as colonialists is a hotly disputed question. Were they stateless, oppressed people seeking refuge in their ancient homeland, where some Jews had always lived? That is certainly how they saw themselves. Or were early Zionists agents of the very European states they were seeking to flee, aiming to buy as much territory in Palestine as they could to create their own state? That is the view of critics, who emphasize the 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which Britain, still very much an empire, announced that it looked “with favor” on the creation of a national Jewish home in Palestine.

The upshot is that while a well-meaning person, free of antisemitism, could describe Israel as colonialist, the narrative of Israel as a settler-colonial oppressor on par with or worse than the U.S., Canada, and Australia is fundamentally misleading. Those who advance it run the risk of perpetuating antisemitism by condemning the Jewish state despite its basic differences from these other global examples—most important, Israel’s status as the only homeland for a historically oppressed people who have nowhere else to call their own.

To emphasize the narrative of Jews as oppressors, the new antisemitism must also somehow sidestep not only two millennia of Jewish oppression, but also the Holocaust, the largest organized, institutionalized murder of any ethnic group in human history. On the right, antisemites either deny the Holocaust ever happened or claim its scope has been overstated. On the left, one line is that Jews are weaponizing the Holocaust to legitimize the oppression of Palestinians.

During the Gaza War, some have argued that Israel, having suffered the trauma of the Holocaust, is now itself perpetrating a genocide against the Palestinian people. Like other criticisms of Israel, the accusation of genocide isn’t inherently antisemitic. Yet the genocide charge is especially prone to veering into antisemitism because the Holocaust is the archetypal example of the crime of genocide. Genocide was recognized as a crime by the international community after the Holocaust. Accusing Israel of genocide can function, intentionally or otherwise, as a way of erasing the memory of the Holocaust and transforming Jews from victims into oppressors.

It is, of course, logically possible for an oppressed group to become oppressors over time. Allegations of genocide have been brought against Israel by South Africa in the International Court of Justice (ICJ), charges Israel has wisely chosen to contest rather than ignore. The charges are based on the numbers of civilians killed, the tactics that led to the deaths, and statements by Israeli officials. This evidence is supposed to prove Israel intends to destroy the Palestinian people, in whole or in part, which is the legal definition of genocide.

The number of Palestinian dead, over 29,000 as of this writing, is heartbreaking. The rhetoric of some individual Israeli government officials cited by South Africa is particularly appalling, both in its dehumanizing character and in referring to Palestinians as Amalekites, a group whom the God of the Bible called on the ancient Israelites to “erase.” Retired Israeli Chief Justice Aharon Barak, who serves on the ICJ panel considering the genocide charges, joined a part of the court’s provisional measures that directed Israel to “take all measures within its power to prevent … public incitement to commit genocide” in Gaza.

The U.S. government has itself condemned far-right members of Israel’s Cabinet who called for Gazans to be pushed into Egypt. The repugnant policy of ethnic cleansing urged by the extremists would violate international law, even if it would arguably not count as genocide under the legal meaning of the term.

LONDON, 2023: Protesters march through central London to Parliament Square at a demonstration against antisemitism, less than two months after the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7Krisztian Elek—SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images

Notwithstanding these serious concerns, Israel’s efforts to defend itself against Hamas, even if found to involve killing disproportionate number of civilians, do not turn Israel into a genocidal actor comparable to the Nazis or the Hutu regime in Rwanda. The genocide charge depends on intent. And Israel, as a state, is not fighting the Gaza War with the intent to destroy the Palestinian people.

Israel’s stated war aims are to hold Hamas accountable for the Oct. 7 attack on Israel and to get back its citizens who are still being held captive. These aims are lawful in themselves.

The means Israel has used are subject to legitimate criticism for killing too many civilians as collateral damage. But Israel’s military campaign has been conducted pursuant to Israel’s interpretation of the international laws of war. There is no single, definitive international-law answer to the question of how much collateral damage renders a strike disproportionate to its concrete military objective. Israel’s approach resembles campaigns fought by the U.S. and its coalition partners in Iraq in Afghanistan, and by the international coalition in the battle against ISIS for control of Mosul. Even if the numbers of civilian deaths from the air seem to be higher, it is important to recognize that Israel is also confronting miles of tunnels intentionally connected to civilian facilities by Hamas.

To be clear: as a matter of human worth, a child who dies at the hands of a genocidal murderer is no different from one who dies as collateral damage in a lawful attack. The child is equally innocent, and the parents’ sorrow equally profound. As a matter of international law, however, the difference is decisive. During the Hamas attack, terrorists intentionally murdered children and raped women. Its charter calls for the destruction of the Jewish state. Yet the accusation of genocide is being made against Israel.

These relevant facts matter for putting the genocide charge into the context of potential antisemitism. Neither South Africa nor other states have brought a genocide case against China for its conduct in Tibet or Xinjiang, or against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. There is something specifically noteworthy about leveling the charge at the Jewish state—something intertwined with the new narrative of the Jews as archetypal oppressors rather than archetypal victims. Call it the genocide sleight of hand: if the Jews are depicted as genocidal—if Israel becomes the very archetype of a genocidal state—then Jews are much less likely to be conceived as a historically oppressed people engaged in self-defense.

The new narrative of Jews as oppressors is, in the end, far too close for comfort to the antisemitic tradition of singling out Jews as uniquely deserving of condemnation and punishment, whether in its old religious form or its Nazi iteration. Like those earlier forms of antisemitism, the new kind is not ultimately about the Jews, but about the human impulse to point the finger at someone who can be made to carry the weight of our social ills. Oppression is real. Power can be exercised without justice. Israel should not be immune from criticism when it acts wrongfully. Yet the horrific history and undefeated resilience of antisemitism mean that modes of rhetorical attack on Israel and on Jews should be subject to careful scrutiny.

Just because antisemitism is a cyclical, recurring phenomenon does not mean that it is inevitable nor that it cannot be ameliorated. Like any form of irrational hate, antisemitism can in principle be overcome. The best way to start climbing out of the abyss of antisemitism is to self-examine our impulses, our stories about power and injustice, and our beliefs.

Paris Hotel Refuses to Serve Israeli Family as Antisemitism Continues to Spiral in France

Anti-Israel demonstration supporting the BDS movement, Paris France, June 8, 2024. Photo: Claire Serie / Hans Lucas via Reuters Connect

June 25, 2024

by Jacob Frankel

Reprinted from the algemeiner

An Israeli family visiting Paris was denied service at a hotel after an attendant noticed their Israeli passports, continuing a record spike in antisemitism across France that has increasingly led to violence against the Jewish community.

According to the French magazine Le Point, the Israeli family of three intended to spend three nights in Paris. Although they had booked their Novotel Paris Porte de Versailles hotel room online, an attendant informed the family, after seeing their Israeli passports, that the price of the room had increased.

“He completely changed face,” the father said in a complaint to French authorities, according to the publication.

Novotel’s Porte de Versailles hotel in Paris. An Israeli family was turned away from the hotel after an attendant noticed their Israeli passports. Photo: Accor Group

“When he saw that I had an Israeli passport, he told me that the room would cost 1,219 Euros in the end; he increased the price voluntarily,” the father continued.

The attendant also allegedly hurled antisemitic accusations at the family, including, “Israel, you think you are kings of the world; you will not have a room in this hotel!”

The family was turned away from the hotel at 1:30 am and forced to stay elsewhere. The attendant “treated us with contempt and racism,” the father said.

Accor, the group that manages Novotel, offered the family compensation after their poor treatment.

The incident came amid a spike in antisemitism to record levels across France.

In an especially egregious attack that has garnered international headlines, a 12-year-old Jewish girl was raped by three Muslim boys in a Paris suburb on June 15, according to the French authorities. The child told investigators that the assailants called her a “dirty Jew” and hurled other antisemitic comments at her during the attack.

The three alleged attackers were arrested by French police two days after the rape. Two of them were indicted for gang rape, death threats, antisemitic violence, attempted extortion, and invasion of privacy. The third boy was charged as a witness.

After the attack, French President Emmanuel Macron “denounced the scourge of antisemitism” overtaking French society and spoke of the need to combat hatred of Jews in schools.

French President Emmanuel Macron speaks during a press conference in Paris, France, June 12, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Stephane Mahe

The parents of the girl agreed to speak anonymously with the French newspaper Le Parisien in an interview that was published on Monday. They described the attack as a “mimicry” of Hamas’ sexual violence against Israeli girls and women during the Palestinian terrorist group’s onslaught across southern Israel on Oct. 7.

The rape in France reportedly occurred after the assailants discovered that the victim was Jewish. “Why did you lie? I know you are not Muslim. So what religion are you?” the boys yelled at her before the attack, according to her parents.

According to the girl’s mother, “before they let her leave, they made her swear by Allah not to tell her parents or police.”

The assault was antisemitic and motivated by the war in Gaza, her parents told Le Parisien. “This incident is a sign of a collective social failure in the fight against antisemitism and extreme violence,” they said.

Jewish children were also targeted in another Paris suburb this past weekend. On Saturday, six Jewish minors were assaulted at a movie theater in the suburb of Levallois-Perret. According to reports, three assailants yelled antisemitic slurs at the minors and “slapped one of them several times,” before the victims fled toward Jerusalem Square in the French capital’s 17th arrondissement, where they filed a police complaint. French police are investigating the incident.

“I condemn the physical attack of antisemitic nature in which several young minors were victims,” Geoffroy Boulard, mayor of the 17th arrondissement, wrote on X/Twitter in response to the assault.

The recent antisemitic attacks came amid a record surge of antisemitism in France in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel. Antisemitic incidents rose by over 1,000 percent in the final three months of 2023 compared with the previous year, with over 1,200 incidents reported — greater than the total number of incidents in France for the previous three years combined.

RELATED: Jewish women mocked by Virgin Atlantic at JFK, denied permission to fly | World Israel News

Pro-Hamas Group Behind Targeting of LA Synagogue Joins Columbia Students for Protest at Barnard College

Attack on Los Angeles synagogue.

June 26, 2024

by Dion J. Pierre

Reprinted from the algemeiner

Columbia University’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter, a group responsible for the demonstrations that roiled the campus in the final weeks of this past academic year, held on Wednesday a protest at Barnard College in New York City with a pro-Hamas group that helped organize a violent anti-Israel riot on the streets of Los Angeles this past weekend.

“We demand full amnesty for our Barnard comrades!” the group said in a social media post announcing the latest demonstration, which called on school officials to revoke expulsions meted out to students who illegally occupied or damaged school property and to halt any other disciplinary proceedings.

Only about 20 people showed up for Wednesday’s protest, according to footage of it — a far cry from the hundreds who SJP drew to the New York City area earlier in the year. Walking in circles, the group chanted, “Long live Hind’s Hall, every fascist state will fall,” a reference to the new anti-Zionist song by rap artist Macklemore, who in 2014 appeared on stage in a costume depicting an antisemitic caricature of a Jewish person wearing a beard and a large prosthetic nose. He later denied that he intended to cause harm, saying the outfit was a “random” choice. The title of his new song, “Hind’s Hall,” is a reference to Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall, the building that anti-Israel protesters broke into, occupied, and attempted to rename in April.

Earlier this week, Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus, an online group which tracks antisemitism in higher education, noted that SJP listed Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) as a “collaborator” of the event.

On Sunday, PYM’s Los Angeles chapter helped organize a demonstration which, it claimed, was an attempt to prevent a real estate auction event at the Adas Torah synagogue in the heavily-Jewish Pico-Robertson area of Los Angeles. The demonstration was based on the false premise that a local real estate agency was “marketing homes in ‘anglo neighborhoods’ in effort to further occupy Palestine.”

The demonstrators waved Palestine flags and donned keffiyehs while blocking entry into the building. Many of them also covered their faces in an apparent attempt to avoid identification, chanting “intifada revolution” and “free Palestine” in front of the synagogue while intimidating bystanders.

The scene quickly descended into complete chaos and violence. Anti-Israel activists were recorded shoving, punching, and screaming at pro-Israel counter-protesters attempting to defend the synagogue. In one instance, a Jewish woman was shoved to the ground and stomped on by pro-Palestinian activists. Another video showed two anti-Israel demonstrators cornering a woman carrying an Israeli flag, ignoring demands to “get off” her.

“Racist settler expansionists are not welcome in Los Angeles! This blatant example of land theft is operating in our own backyard,” PYM said in a social media post stating its intentions. “The Nakba is ongoing and must be confronted.”

Many Palestinians and anti-Israel activists use the term “Nakba,” or “catastrophe,” to refer to the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948.

PYM’s brazen targeting of Jews alarmed Jewish leaders and lawmakers, prompting responses from leading California politicians such as Gov. Gavin Newsom as well as US President Joe Biden.

Founded — according to Influencer Watch — as a project of Westchester People’s Action Coalition (WESPAC) sometime in 2011, PYM is a pro-Hamas group which has spread anti-Zionist agitprop, lobbied members of Congress to enact anti-Israel policies, and attempted to foster insurrection in the US by rallying support for terrorism and opposing development of infrastructure projects such as the Keystone XL Pipeline.

Columbia SJP’s partnership with the group, which is planning to “shut down” Washington, DC in July, has deployed increasingly extreme rhetoric and tactics since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in October. Last month, it endorsed Hamas, calling it “the only force materially fighting back against [Israel].” The group’s behavior, which is the subject of a lawsuit filed by the StandWithUs Center for Legal Justice (SCLJ), after Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel included beating up Jewish students, chanting antisemitic slogans, and stealing missing persons posters of Israelis who were abducted by Hamas.

The SCLJ complaint alleges that after bullying Jewish students and rubbing their noses in the carnage Hamas wrought on their people, the pro-Hamas students were still unsatisfied and resulted to violence. They assaulted five Jewish students in Columbia’s Butler Library and another attacked a Jewish students with a stick, lacerating his head and breaking his finger, after being asked to return missing persons posters she had stolen.

Following the incidents, pleas for help allegedly went unanswered and administrators told Jewish students they could not guarantee their safety while SJP held its demonstrations. The school’s apparent powerlessness to prevent anti-Jewish violence was cited as the reason why Students Supporting Israel (SSI), a recognized school club, was denied permission to hold an event on self-defense. Events with “buzzwords” such as “Israel” and “Palestine” were forbidden, administrators allegedly said, but SJP continued to host events while no one explained the inconsistency.

The explosion of end-of-year protests held by SJP forced Columbia officials to shutter the campus in April and institute virtual learning. Later, the group occupied Hamilton Hall, forcing President Minouche Shafik to call on the New York City Police Department (NYPD) for help, a decision she hesitated to make. According to The Columbia Spectator, over 108 arrests were made.

HATE: Virgin Atlantic Facing Accusations Of Shocking Antisemitism At JFK Airport

June 26, 2024

by Yeshiva World News

Virgin Atlantic is facing allegations of shockingly antisemitic behavior towards two passengers at John F. Kennedy International Airport. The incident occurred on June 17, as two female Jewish flyers were on their way from JFK to Tel Aviv, with a layover in London.

According to a formal complaint submitted to Virgin Atlantic’s executive office, the passengers arrived at the airport several hours before their flight, successfully checked in their luggage, and received their boarding passes without issue. However, at approximately 10:50 PM, while waiting at the gate for their 11:59 PM flight, they experienced what they describe as severe mistreatment by Virgin Atlantic staff.

The Jewish passengers reported that during the boarding process, they presented their passports to a duty manager, described as a man with dark skin and wearing a gold cross necklace. This manager then allegedly called them aside, informing them that they had been removed from the passenger list and that their luggage had been offloaded. When the passengers requested an explanation, the manager became hostile, threatening to call the police if they attempted to take photos or videos.

The Jewish women believe that the actions taken against them were motivated by discrimination. They further reported that other Virgin Atlantic staff members at the gate openly laughed and mocked them, making derogatory and antisemitic comments in what they say was a coordinated and deliberate act of bigotry and discrimination.

The incident was witnessed by staff from the El Al gate located nearby, who expressed shock and dismay at the behavior of the Virgin Atlantic staff and described the actions as both unprofessional and discriminatory.

As a result of being removed from their Virgin Atlantic flight, the two Jewish women were forced to purchase new tickets with El Al at an additional cost of $800 each.

Virgin Atlantic has acknowledged receipt of the complaint and stated that an investigation is currently underway, led by the head manager at JFK.

ADL blasts Lufthansa’s “non-apology” after Jewish passengers blocked from flight

May 13, 2024

by Kate Gibson

Reprinted from CBS News