Israelophobia and the Spike in Global Anti-Semitism

An Interview with Dan Diker of the JCPA

by Jerry Gordon and Rod Reuven Dovid Bryant (February 2020)

 

 

 NYC Solidarity March, January 5, 2020

 

More than fifty world leaders gathered in Jerusalem in the week prior to January 27th at the Yad Va Shem Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem. The occasion was the World Holocaust Forum to commemorate the 75th Anniversary of the liberation by Russian forces on January 27, 1945 of the notorious Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Southern Poland where 1.1 million were murdered, over 90 percent of them Jews. They were part of Hitler’s Final Solution that saw the murder of Six Million European Jewish men, women and children in unspeakable ways. In a resolution of 104 members, the UN designated the date as International Holocaust Remembrance Day on November 1, 2005.

 

reported in 2017, Anti-Defamation League executive director Jonathan Greenblatt noted that the incidents were at their highest level in two decades. The ADL found particularly troubling a 57 percent jump in reported Antisemitic incidents in 2017 over 2016.

 

Prominent among the “new normal” of Antisemitic violence were three lethal attacks. The first occurred on October 27, 2018 at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania were 11 members were killed during a shabbat service by 46-year-old Robert Gregory Bowers, who was charged with commission of multiple federal capital hate crimes. Then there was the attack by 19-year-old John Timothy Earnest on the final Day of Passover, April 27, 2019 at the Poway, California Chabad Center with a semi-automatic rifle killing 60-year-old Lori Gilbert-Kaye and injuring three others, including Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein. Both events were perpetrated by White Supremacists who were apprehended. In both instances the motivation was to kill Jews. More bad news was to come.

 

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pledged “zero tolerance for acts of hate of any kind” and expressed her support for the Jewish community. New York US Senator Chuck Schumer called the attack “an act of pure evil” and added in a tweet that the “cascade in anti-Semitic attacks is outrageous throughout metropolitan New York and America, and must not be tolerated”.

 

President Reuven Rivlin also expressed his “shock and outrage,” adding, “The rise of anti-Semitism is not just a Jewish problem, and certainly not just the State of Israel’s problem.”

 

The attack in Monsey capped a series of violent attacks against Chassidic Orthodox Jews in New York and suburban Orthodox Jewish communities. The Wall Street Journal reported:

 

Antisemitic hate crimes in New York City—home to the US’s largest Jewish population—were up 51% this year from the same period last year, according to New York Police Department data. That included a string of assaults against Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn, as well as a sharp rise in anti-Semitic subway graffiti.

 

On January 5, 2020, 25,000 marched in solidarity from Brooklyn to Manhattan demonstrating against the rising violent acts of Antisemitism in New York and New Jersey. The theme was “No Hate No Fear”. The march drew contingents beyond New York from across the US including Washington, DC and Cleveland Ohio. Among the marchers were New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Charles Schumer. Cuomo said before the march:

 

What has happened in Brooklyn, what has happened in Monsey, New York, was an attack on every New Yorker and every New Yorker has felt the pain. Racism and anti-Semitism is anti-American, and we must remember that. It is ignorant of our history because to know the history of the Jewish community is to love and appreciate the Jewish community because New York would not be New York without the Jewish community.

 

The conundrum of rising violent global Antisemitism was the subject of an Israel News Talk Radio—Beyond the Matrix interview with Dan Diker of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA) to address what is behind the disturbing rise of violent anti-Semitic attacks against Jews in the US and Europe. Diker is the Director of the Program to Counter Political Warfare at the JCPA. He is the editor and author of monographs and books concerning the radical origins of the international BDS campaign, anti-Israeli Students for Justice in Palestine connected to Hamas and normalization of relations between Arabs and Jews in Israel, Judea and Samaria.

 

Diker is a co-author of a soon to be published compendium, Israelophobia—The Hijacking of Civil Discourse and How to Rescue Free and Fair Debate on Israel in the Middle East. Diker identified the threads behind the spike in Global Antisemitism: Islamic Antisemitism, right-wing white supremacism evident in the Pittsburgh and Poway attacks, intersectionality of Nazism and Jew Hatred of the troubling Black Israelite Hebrew Movement evident in the Jersey City and Monsey attacks. Another emerging thread is political criticism of Israel, including “blood libel” in the death of a Palestinian child by “progressive” Democratic members of the US House of Representatives, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. Then there is Jeremy Corbyn, the UK Labor party leader in the Westminster Parliament delegitimizing the Jewish nation as an illegal racist endeavor.

 

These threads, Diker argues, fit the definition of anti-Semitism of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) and those of the US Department of State adopted in 2010. The IHRA definition of anti-Semitism was adopted by the recent Executive Order signed by President Trump on December 15, 2019 applying Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Law to Jewish Americans. These provisions assert Israel’s ethnic religious heritage as the basis for the Jewish nation of Israel. Diker believes that the Trump executive order provides some important remedies. J Street, he notes, opposes the Trump executive order because it has an alleged “chilling effect” on criticism of Israel, meaning delegitimizing and demonizing the Jewish nation, under the US First Amendment “free speech” doctrine.

 

Against this background, Rod Reuven Bryant and Jerry Gordon of Israel News Talk Radio—Beyond the Matrix interviewed Dan Diker of the JCPA.

 

 

It is really something that is at the core of why there has been a rise or a spike in anti-Semitism, not only in the US, but in Europe as well.

 

[email protected].

 

 

 

Jerry: Dan, four years ago I wrote an article on what I called the Red-Green-Black Intersectionality. Recently, particularly in New York’s Orthodox Hasidic communities there have been a whole welter of attacks—thirteen plus. The worst of those was the machete attack by an African-American in the community of Monsey twenty-five miles northwest of New York City in Rockland County. The discovery by the FBI of the Monsey perpetrator’s journals, his social media with depictions of Hitler, the final solution and depictions of Jews as being the enemies of blacks is essentially currency in the United States at the present time. The issue before us is what do we do about that?

 

Dan: We need to recognize that there is such a thing as what I call cross-category anti-Semitic rhetorical and physical attacks. I think what you point to is a very important example that anti-Semitism is no longer the exclusive property or the exclusive possession of right wing, white supremacists.

 

Jerry: Having said that, Governor Cuomo of New York came out forthrightly and he called this as domestic terrorism. Is that what is going on now?

 

 

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Dan: Rod, one of the most virulent forms of Jew hatred has been overlooked over the last ten years. It is called Israelophobia or Jewish State hatred. It has been open hunting season on the Jewish state. In Europe we see that—especially since 1979—there has been something called Quds Day which I mentioned earlier in the segment, Jerusalem Day. Thousands of people in cities across Europe, Britain, Germany, France, Belgium, wave Hezbollah flags. Hezbollah is an Iranian regime proxy calling for death to Israel. That means death to the Jewish state, and “Death to America.” Across American campuses over the last decade, there has been something called Israel Apartheid Awareness Week, which essentially says the Jewish state is illegitimate, illegal and criminal in its existence. We see that on hundreds of college campuses with hundreds and thousands of Jewish students. There you have witnessed this type of virulent hatred of the Jewish state behind physically and rhetorically violent actions against Jews. Witness Alain Finkielkraut, who is a French left-wing Jewish philosopher, was called a “Zionist shit” and told to “get the hell out of France.” This translates into acts of anti-Semitic violence. The source of this Jewish state hatred, in Europe, the United States and Israel, is driven by Islamic Hezbollah and Hamas agendas and NGOs. Here is the kicker: the European Union has refused to sanction the political wing of Hezbollah as an illegal entity in the European Union. The United Kingdom, the Dutch, the United States, the Australians? They all have done it. Most of Europe has yet to designate Hezbollah an outlawed organization as it is part of the Iranian regime. That is what drives this Jew hatred there and under US protected speech. I think this is a very important point that your listeners must focus on. Hatred of the Jewish State is directly connected to hatred of Jewish people.

 

 

Rod: Dan, why do some of the U.S. organizations like J Street take exception to some of the President’s Executive Order provisions about the assertion of Israeli Ethnic Religious Heritage. What is their beef?

 

 

Dan: To be a Jew in the world today is to be part of a triangular relationship between the people of Israel, the Torah of Israel and the land of Israel. These organizations that call Israel apartheid and genocidal, deny any Jewish rights to the ancient Jewish homeland. If you espouse that, then Israel has no more right than North Korea to exist. However, if you recognize you know the five-thousand-year-old connection between Jews and the land of Israel with Abraham and the national connection beginning about 3,800 years ago at Sinai, then you must take seriously Jewish rights. It seems like so many people in the progressive community assign Palestinians certain rights but completely deny Jewish rights.

 

Jerry: By the way, Dan, the first complaint underneath the Executive Order signed off by Trump was filed by alumni of my alma mater Columbia University.

 

Rod: We left off talking about the Columbia campus obsession with inviting some of the most virulent Jew haters, did you want to wrap that up with anything?

 

 

Rod: Dan your optimism is very palpable. Do you think that we are already, the critical point of failure that this is going to work? That the future of Israeli/Arab relationship in the country is going to be a positive one. It is going to have its rough starts, but do you feel optimistic so far?

 

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Jerry: Dan, we had a development in the last couple of weeks which is disturbing. The International Criminal Court at the Hague announcing a prosecutorial investigation into allegations of war crimes by the IDF committed during Operation Protection Edge in 2014. What has been the reaction in Israel on the part of the Prime Minister and others?

 

Rod: For the sake of our listeners that are outside of the great Holy Land of Israel, could we give them an update on the election that took place, Bibi Netanyahu and the right-wing bloc government?

 

Rod: Well, we are hoping that in March, Bibi Netanyahu can form the government. Maybe the third time is a charm, we will see. Dan Diker it has really been a great privilege having you on the show today. until next week currently, Jerry and I, as well as Dan Diker, says Shalom.

 

Listen to the Israel News Talk RadioBeyond the Matrix interview, with Dan Diker.

 

 

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Jerome B Gordon is a Senior Vice President of the New English Review, author of The West Speaks, NER Press 2012, and co-author of Genocide in Sudan: Caliphate Threatens Africa and the World, JAD Publishing, 2017. Mr. Gordon is a former US Army intelligence officer who served during the Viet Nam era. He is producer and co-host of Israel News Talk Radio – Beyond the Matrix. He was the co-host and co-producer of weekly The Lisa Benson Show for National Security that aired out of KKNT960 in Phoenix Arizona from 2013 to 2016 and co-host and co-producer of the Middle East Round Table periodic series on 1330amWEBY, Northwest Florida Talk Radio, Pensacola, Florida from 2007 to 2017.

 

Rod Reuven Dovid Bryant is creator and host of Israel News Talk Radio-Beyond the Matrix.

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