If anti-Semitism was a tennis match between good and evil, this past week, it became advantage, evil.
Hear me out.
On Tuesday, the trial of Robert Bowers started. He’s the murderer in the Tree of Life Synagogue massacre. Eleven Jews were slaughtered during Shabbat morning services nearly five years ago in Pittsburgh. It was the deadliest attack ever on the Jewish community in the United States.
Celebrities, athletes, politicians joined in the grief. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette printed the Kaddish, the Jewish mourner’s prayer, on the front page of the paper.
Hell, even the Eiffel Tower in Paris dimmed its lights in memory of the victims.
Leaders of other faiths linked arms with the Jewish community. There were vigils. There were rallies. Condemnations were everywhere.
Many Jewish Americans took some solace in believing we lived in a nation, unlike some others, where anti-Semitism was taboo. The Tree of Life tragedy could have been the inflection point in fearlessly fighting Jew hatred.
I’m sad to say it was not.
Anti-Semitism is still mushrooming in the United States. But it’s not just the Robert Bowers strain of anti-Semitism that has American Jewry in peril. There’s another one that just got a wink and a nod from the Biden administration.
The strain of anti-Semitism I’m referring to was on full display a few weeks ago in New York City, the place with the largest Jewish population in the world.
It was revealed in a speech given by a despicable and dissembling law school student, spewing hatred of Jews in front of hundreds of people. She vomited out her evil words in a taxpayer funded law school, no less.
The keynote speech delivered by Fatima Mousa Mohammed at the City University of New York Law School, was replete with hatred and lies.
It was a clear call for the destruction of Israel and for the death of millions of Jews, whom she calls murderers, oppressors and colonialists.
Not one person got up and told her to shut up. People applauded, including the dean of the law school.
Not a peep from CUNY until two weeks later when the New York Post and others brought her speech to light. In fact, the school tried to bury the screed before being shamed into releasing it.
But wait, there’s more. Mousa Mohammed isn’t only hunting the Jews of Israel. She joined a rally in New York last year and proudly demanded that American professors and American students that support Israel, the “Zionists” as she called them, be banned from college campuses and not be allowed in the same “spaces” as Palestinians.
https://www.memri.org/tv/land-day-nyc-zionist-professors-students-ban-campus-palestine-will-be-free
Was she being anti-Semitic, or just anti-Israel? This is where the rubber meets the road.
The Biden administration just released a 60 page strategy for combatting anti-Semitism. It’s something no other administration has ever done. That should clear up once and for all, any ambiguity around what constitutes hatred of Jews. Right? Wrong.
The Biden strategy lists 100 items the government will throw against the haters. It puts money against education, research, monitoring of anti-Semitic incidents, yada, yada, yada. All good. But it caved in to progressive pressure on one essential and indisputably crucial issue.
It clearly punted on unequivocally adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism.
The IHRA says it’s anti-Semitism plain and simple, if you deny “the Jewish people their right to self-determination” by “claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavor.” It’s also anti-Semitic if Israel is held to a double standard, “requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.” In short, anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.
That definition was unanimously adopted by the mainstream Jewish groups and they wanted it as the bedrock of the Biden strategy. But under pressure from the leftists, the White House document also says it “welcomes and appreciates” another definition of anti-Semitism called the Nexus Document.
https://israelandantisemitism.com/the-nexus-document/
That official White House nod to the Nexus Document flings open the door to those who say they don’t hate Jews, they just hate Israel and want it to disappear. I guess, under the Nexus definition, the mullahs in Iran aren’t anti-Semites.
American Jews desperately needed moral clarity on anti-Semitism from the White House but instead they got moral capitulation.
I guess it’s easy to commiserate with the Jews when a fiend like Robert Bowers rampages through their synagogue. Yes, he clearly is a Jew hater, through and through. Let’s light some more candles in memory of his victims.
But what about Fatima Mousa Mohammed and her ilk? What happens when you waffle on her brand of anti-Semitism?
That, I’m sorry to say, is a reminder that while American Jews may have some purported pals in Washington, those friends still don’t get it when it comes to anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.
Chuck Schumer and the Jewish groups can spin it any way they want about their victory with the Biden anti-Semitism manifesto. They’re trying to put lipstick on a pig (sorry for the swine reference). But despite all their lobbying, cajoling and explaining, they know they lost. The Bidens succumbed once again to the left, this time at the expense of all American Jews.
Robert Bowers will no doubt be severely punished for his anti-Semitism, but Fatima Mousa Mohammed and her Jew-hating cohorts must be grinning and high-fiving. The US government says they’re kosher.
1 thought on “High-Fiving Haters”
Reason and logic should send those approving CUNY law students and administration to the unemployable line. Along with other recent law school outrages, they don’t appear to have learned very much except hate; justice is not part of their thinking. In a righteous world, Juris Doctor should not be after their names. Current campus political activity should be dismissed as “DEI,” that is, some of the most “despicable ever ideas.”