Shame on Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for giving succor, credibility and legitimacy to these dangerous groups plaguing Chicago and elsewhere.

Morton A. Klein

(JNS)

It’s very troubling that President Joe Biden said during his Democratic National Convention speech that “those [anti-Israel] protesters out in the street, they have a point.” Similarly, during her interview with The Nation in July, Vice President Kamala Harris stated that the anti-Israel “protesters” “are showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza. … I understand the emotion behind it.”

What exactly is the point of anti-Israel, anti-American terror-affiliated rioters? (“Protesters” is way too mild a term for them.)

Their motives are violence, hatred, sexism, and antisemitism, in addition to demands to destroy America and Israel, to support Hamas and to globalize the intifada—meaning murdering and committing violence against Jews everywhere.

According to reports in The Chicago Tribune, Associated Press and NBC, the rioters in Chicago screamed, “F*** this country, burn it down.” They also chanted rhetoric against the police and the Jewish state; called for “the apartheid” (their inappropriate name for Israel) “to go down”; marched straight into police lines protecting the Israeli consulate; refused orders to disperse; and attacked police outside the Israeli consulate in Chicago. A masked rioter set fire to a half-American, half-Israeli flag.

Chicago Police Superintendent Larry Snelling said rioters yelled “vicious, nasty sexually explicit things” at female police officers.

He added that the group outside of the Israeli consulate “showed up with the intent of committing violence and acts of vandalism,” and “physically confronted and attacked” the police officers, leading to a mass arrest of 60 of these rioters.

The Consulate General of Israel to the Midwest also said that it was “appalled to see violence during the protest in front of our offices. … This is anything but peaceful.”

The groups organizing this mayhem in Chicago were the radical, left-wing anti-Israel, anti-American hate groups Behind Enemy Lines; Chicago Coalition for Justice in Palestine (which appears to be a conglomeration of some of the worst anti-Israel, antisemitic hate groups including Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace); and Samidoun, a subsidiary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization that is responsible for numerous deadly terror attacks in Israel, including the assassination of an Israeli Minister. Samidoun demands the release of Palestinian Arab terrorists from prison and is itself also designated as a terrorist organization by Israel and Germany.

The mission statement of Behind Enemy Lines states that “the empire [the U.S.] is the enemy”; calls for “refus[ing] to accept the legitimacy, normalcy, and permanence of the empire”; calls for ending U.S. support to Israel; and disparages “routinized protests that threaten no one” and instead calls for “a militant anti-imperialist movement” and “mass resistance” (the common euphemism for terrorism and violence).

Shame on Biden and Harris for giving succor, credibility and legitimacy to these dangerous groups plaguing Chicago and elsewhere—all over the world.

Biden’s praising the hateful anti-American, anti-Israel rioters is in stark contrast to the portion of his DNC speech in which he again reiterated his divisive “fine people on both sides” Charlottesville hoax libeling former President Donald Trump.

Trump never supported neo-Nazis or white nationalists, as Biden falsely claimed. Instead, he made it clear that the “fine people on both sides” were those who had different views about the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue. Trump condemned the neo-Nazis in the same paragraph, saying: “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists because they should be condemned totally.”

Biden and Kamala should have borrowed that line from Trump and made it publicly clear that these anti-American, anti-Israel rioters “must be condemned totally.”

Image: A anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian rally in Dublin on Nov. 18, 2023. Credit: Sinn Féin via Wikimedia Commons.

Kamala Harris has fueled the current tsunami of anti-Jewish hatred by recycling the lies and blood libels against Israel spread by Hamas and its Western stooges since Oct. 7.

Melanie Phillips

(JNS)

Lauren Holtzblatt, a rabbi in Washington, D.C., caused outrage at her synagogue earlier this month when she declared that American Jews need to elect Kamala Harris as president of the United States to comply with “sacred texts.”

She told Harris supporters at a Jewish Democratic Council of America meeting held on Zoom: “I could tell you that we need to elect Vice President Kamala Harris because as Jews our sacred texts tell us we need to build a world where we feed the hungry, where we care for the sick, where we love the stranger, where we guard and nurture this planet. Those are her values. That is what her policies seek to achieve.”

Members of the influential Adas Israel congregation reacted furiously. Telling congregants to vote in a certain way was “frankly insulting,” said one. Tying this instruction to “sacred texts,” said others, was “at best simplistic” and “easily rebutted with myriad other examples from scripture.”

All true, and doubtless a dismal reflection on the standard of Holtzblatt’s religious credentials. But there are other issues.

Earlier this month, speaking to representatives of the “Uncommitted” movement—the most extreme anti-Israel and pro-Hamas faction of the Democratic Party—Harris reportedly said she was “open” to an arms embargo against Israel. All this while the Jewish state is fighting for its life on seven fronts against genocidal Iran and its proxies.

Harris has fueled the current tsunami of anti-Jewish hatred by recycling the lies and blood libels against Israel that have been spread by Hamas and its Western stooges for the past 10 months. Ignoring the reality of plentiful food supplies in Gaza and the thefts of aid by Hamas, she accused Israel of causing starvation there so that families were “eating leaves and animal feed” and children were “dying from malnutrition and dehydration.”

In an attempt to court votes among the Muslim voters of Dearborn, Michigan, she met the town’s radical mayor, Abdullah Hammoud, who the day after the Oct. 7 pogrom tweeted: “Israel’s decades of illegal military occupation and imprisonment of Gaza make peace impossible and tragic violence inevitable.”

Hamoud had also spoken of Democratic Party donors who “stuff your pockets with money,” apparently recycling the antisemitic trope about Jews paying for congressional support for Israel.

Even more disturbing is Harris’s apparent tolerance for the Iranian regime. In January 2020, she helped push through the House of Representatives the No War Against Iran Act to prevent any money from being used for unauthorized military action against Iran. She also has a close relationship with members of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), which reportedly collaborates with Tehran.

Worse, a congressional investigation has been opened into links between Harris’s National Security Advisor Philip Gordon and Ariane Tabatabai, a Pentagon staffer who is reportedly an Iranian agent of influence tied to a network of experts in the Beltway pushing the interests of the Iranian regime.

Tabatabai was first infiltrated into the Obama administration in 2021 by Robert Malley. He was the point man on Iran under both the Obama and Biden administrations until he was placed on leave last year following the (still unexplained) suspension of his security clearance.

Gordon was the co-author with Tabatabai of at least three opinion pieces that lawmakers said had been “blatantly promoting the Iranian regime’s perspective and interests” by claiming that sanctions against Iran would create “catastrophe” and cause Tehran to “lash out.”

Despite the antisemitism on display around this week’s Democratic convention, both from the pro-Hamas mobs in the streets and the pressure on Jewish groups that were forced to hold their meetings at secret locations in D.C., Harris hasn’t uttered a word of condemnation.

This is hardly surprising. Her response to the antisemitism that exploded across America after Oct. 7 was to announce: “As the result of the Hamas terrorist attack in Israel and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, we have seen an uptick in anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab and Islamophobic incidents across America.”

As pro-Hamas, virulently anti-Zionist students wrought havoc on campus, Harris commented: “They are showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza. I don’t mean to wholesale endorse their points. But we have to navigate it. I understand the emotion behind it.”

Now Harris has appointed her former adviser Nasrina Bargzie to “lead outreach to Muslim and Arab voters.” Bargzie is a longstanding anti-Israel activist from Students for Justice in Palestine. She helped stoke antisemitism on campus and even argued at the U.N. against the civil rights of Jewish students, accusing them of “organized legal bullying” for using the law to demand that universities protect Jewish students.

Harris’s pick as “liaison” to the Jewish community, Ilan Goldenberg, is no less vicious. Goldenberg has spearheaded the defamatory and unjust effort to hunt down and sanction Israelis who the Biden-Harris administration has decided are “right-wing crazies” and therefore must be treated as pariahs—a fate that the administration declines to impose on Palestinians who murder Israelis.

As a member of the Obama administration, Goldenberg was a vocal proponent of the 2015 Iran deal that would have legitimized Iranian nuclear weapons after a short delay. He opposed the Trump administration’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and the U.S. embassy’s move to Jerusalem; he opposed recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights; and he opposed the Taylor Force Act cutting off aid to the Palestinian Authority over “pay-for-slay.”

Contrary to Holzblatt’s strictures, American Jews can be forgiven for being skeptical of Harris’s views on Israel and the Jewish people.

Tragically, however, Holtzblatt was speaking for too many American Jews, who believe that the “social justice” agenda embodies the Jewish concept of tikkun olam, or “repair of the world.”

Holtzblatt wasn’t wrong that compassion and respect for the natural world are Jewish values. But these are also values prized by those of other faiths or none. When dislocated from Judaism, they are no more than Kumbaya values—and so the “intersectional” social-justice agenda, which actually repudiates Jewish principles, has turned into a weapon against Israel and the Jewish people.

Jewish values are fundamentally based on moral responsibility. The social-justice agenda, by contrast, dispenses with moral responsibility altogether for an entire “victim” class based on race and gender. Those people are deemed not to be responsible for their actions, whose bad effects are blamed instead on their supposed “oppressors”—notably, white people, men and Jews.

Since moral choice defines what is to be human, the social-justice agenda is thus the quintessence of racial and dehumanizing bigotry against that supposed “victim” class. It stands for a culture of resentment and grievance that traps the poor permanently in poverty and disadvantage, promotes division and hatred, and is a dagger in the heart of Jewish values and identity.

Harris is, therefore, the anti-Jewish candidate. To disguise this, she is cynically recruiting anti-Israel Jews like Goldenberg to her team. She is also deploying what she presumably regards as her biggest weapon of deception: her husband, Doug Emhoff.

In a cheesy address at the convention, Emhoff played his Jewish card. He said Harris had helped him connect more deeply to his Jewish faith; she accompanied him to synagogue during the high holidays; and she made “a mean brisket” for Passover that “brings me right back to my grandmother’s apartment in Brooklyn; you know, the one with the plastic-covered couches.”

This is aimed at persuading those who think that Jewish identity is about brisket, sepia-colored memories of booba in Brooklyn and twice-a-year synagogue visits that Harris has the interests of the Jewish people at heart.

In fact, Emhoff has a starring role in a circus of deceit being used to launder a viciously anti-Israel and anti-Jewish agenda. There are sacred texts explaining that, too.

Image: U.S. Vice President of the United States Kamala Harris speaks at an event at Desert Diamond Arena in Glendale, Ariz., on Aug. 9, 2024. Credit: Gage Skidmore/Creative Commons.

“It is absolutely chilling,” said Michael Levitt of Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center.

(JNS)

Canadian law-enforcement officials are investigating some 100 bomb threats on Wednesday at synagogues, and other Jewish community centers and organizations across the country.

Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center said it is “deeply concerned” about the threats, which Michael Levitt, its president and CEO, called “absolutely chilling.”

“For many, many months, Canada’s Jewish community has raised alarm bells about the escalation of rampant Jew-hatred, as incitement and hateful rhetoric have become normalized online, on our city streets and on our university and college campuses,” he stated.

“Repeated calls for violence against Jews and Jewish institutions are a stark reminder that extremism and radicalization are thriving in Canada, and must be confronted before it’s too late. The time for our leaders to step up is now,” he added.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the threats “blatant antisemitism” and wrote that he is “disgusted” about the news.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police “is in contact with local law enforcement to investigate, and we’re working with them to keep Jewish Canadians safe,” he added.

“Those who make threats to any religious institution in Canada, whether churches, synagogues, temples, mosques, gurdwaras, etc. should be charged and prosecuted to the full extent of the law,” said Anthony Housefather, a Jewish Canadian parliamentarian. “Nobody should be intimidated from entering community buildings.”

Melissa Lantsman, a Jewish Canadian parliamentarian, wrote that it was “another week, another openly brazen threat to the Jewish community. “

“How on earth is this tolerated in Canada? Antisemitic hatred is spreading like a plague across our country and Trudeau is silent. We must act now to protect our people,” she wrote. (Her tweet was sent some six hours before Trudeau posted his.)

“It should never become normal for any worship services to be disrupted and evacuated from threats,” she added. “Canada is not the free country we know and love if the right to worship freely and safely needs to be protected. Immediately. Now. Today.”

B’nai Brith Canada stated that it, too, received a bomb threat.

“This is not just an attack on our safety—it’s an attack on the fabric of Canadian society,” it stated. “Authorities are treating this as a hate crime and are taking immediate, decisive action to protect our people.”

The findings reflect the ongoing high volume of anti-Jewish hate since the Hamas terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7.

(JNS)

The number of antisemitic incidents in the United Kingdom from January to June of this year shattered previous records with nearly 2,000 incidents recorded, including more than 120 assaults, according to the CST, Community Security Trust.

The report recorded that while there were 964 incidents of antisemitism recorded in the first six months of 2023, this year that number has more than doubled to 1,978. The previous high number of antisemitic incidents over a six-month period was 1,371, recorded in 2021.

The findings reflect the ongoing high volume of anti-Jewish hate since the Hamas terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, said CST.

“As documented in CST’s Antisemitic Incidents Report 2023, there was an instant increase in antisemitic incident levels in the UK following Hamas’ attack on Israel, before Israel had coordinated any large-scale military response in Gaza,” the CST report stated. “The subsequent war, and the widespread public focus it has drawn, have continued to impact the scale and content of antisemitism so far this year.”

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer responded to the CST report on X, writing: “The rise of antisemitic incidents in the U.K. is deeply concerning. Jewish people, and all those from faith communities, deserve to feel safe on our streets. I’d like to thank the CST for their action. We will work together to eradicate discrimination of any kind.”

Joani Reid, a member of the House of Parliament and chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Antisemitism, tweeted: “If antisemitism is an indicator of the health of our democracy, this is a worrying sign indeed. These statistics underline not only the shocking and unacceptable level of anti-Jewish racism in the United Kingdom but the scale of the task ahead of us.

“We have a new government and a new parliament, we now need a renewed effort, from every party, to tackle this scourge,” she wrote.

According to the report, “anti-Jewish discourse” accounted for more than 1,000 of all incidents.

Assaults accounted for 121 of the incidents reported in the first half of 2024, a 41% increase from the same time last year. There were also 83 incidents of “damage and desecration” reported from January to June—the highest six-month total to date; it includes 26 incidents targeting homes or vehicles of Jewish individuals.

The report also noted a “significant” increase in hate on campus, with 96 incidents of antisemitism in the first half of 2024 where either the “victims or offenders were students or academics, or which involved student unions, societies or other representative bodies.” It is an increase of 465% over the same six-month period in 2023.

Of the nearly 100 incidents related to higher education institutions, the report states that 44 took place on campus or university property, and 45 occurred online.

According to CST, the report makes clear that events in the Middle East trigger a surge of antisemitism in the United Kingdom and even when the number of antisemitic incidents slows down after the “initial surge,” they remain at a “higher level than prior to the trigger event.”

Image: London. Credit: Alisonup Dyke/Pixabay.