Category: anti-semitism

Helen Pluckrose on Elon Musk and the faux Hitler Salute

January 24, 2025 • 9:30 am

I was quite surprised three days ago when I argued that Elon Musk’s “Hitler salute”  at the post-Inaugural rally simply seemed to be a gesture of exuberance made by an overexcited and awkward man and was not a Hitler or Mussolini salute. He said, when he made the “Sieg Heil”, that “My heart goes out to you,” and, indeed, touched his heart three times while extending his arm twice. See the video below, noting also his awkward dance moves when he also pumps and extends his arms:

It amazed me that this caused a fracas not only in the media, but on my own website, with a lot of people asserting unequivocally that it was Musk’s tribute to Hitler/white supremacy or that he was trolling the Left by doing something that would anger them. Musk himself has denied the allegations. From the BBC:

Some on X, the social medial platform he owns, likened the gesture to a Nazi salute, though others disagreed.

In response, the SpaceX and Tesla chief posted on X: “Frankly, they need better dirty tricks. The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired.”

But of course to enraged “progressives” on the Left (and do I need to explain again that when I put that word in quotes, it’s perjorative?), Musk’s denial means absolutely nothing. He was lauding Nazis!

My interpretation of the “Hitler salute” explanation is that it is made by people who feel they must demonize their political opponents in the worst way possible, even though there’s a more charitable explanation. And we have to be more charitable in the future, including admitting when our opponents do things that are actually good.

Further, as the ADL (the Anti-Defamation League, an organization that combats anti-Semitism) explains, people are touchy after Trump’s inauguration, and this explains why some could mistakenly interpret an “awkward gesture” as a Hitler salute. One would think that the ADL’s take would give people pause, but not wokesters like AOC, who, in what some called “Jewsplaining”, tells the ADL that they were actually defending a Hitler salute:

This leads to the second issue with the Hitler take: it makes Leftists look loony, ready to demonize their opponents and lose their heads over something that at worst is dubious and at best (and most likely) is simply an “awkward gesture.”  Even the ADL realizes that the Hitler take is not going to reduce antisemitism and, in my view, it simply reduces the credibility of the Left in general.  Surely ludicrous interpretations of gestures as Hitleresque bespeaks a mindset that helped cost us the last election.  So, like Helen Pluckrose in her website post below, I agree that people have to stop this nonsense.  Even if you don’t like Musk, he was not giving fealty to Hitler.  If Democrats don’t regroup and get sensible, we’ll keep on losing elections.

So I’ll quote Pluckrose in extenso, and if you don’t like what she says, take it up with her.  I’m not arguing any more about this issue; I’ve pondered the Hitler argument, dismissed it as a misguided and kneejerk overreaction (Pluckrose calls it “deranged”) and I’ll move on.  But click below to read.

Pluckrose is no fan of Musk, but calls for a thoughtful rather than a reactive rebuttal of his views. Quotes from her piece are indented.

This makes it especially important that those who are concerned about his influence over the policies of the most powerful country in the world and the largest forum for public political discourse, and the impact the combination of these factors can have on the rest of the world conduct themselves as serious and responsible adults in their critiques of him.

Admirers and supporters of Mr. Musk who believe these concerns to be unfounded range from thoughtful, well-informed politically engaged people who support his general views and overall aims and believe that the benefits his expertise, his stances and his influence bring outweigh any personal foibles to utter lunatics, wedded to ideological narratives divorced from reality and engaging in tactics common to both the woke left and the woke right. It is important that his thoughtful and serious critics engage in good faith with his thoughtful and serious supporters and address the reality of his influence in ways that focus on what is true, what is significant and what has real impact on the world.

It is already the case that Musk’s least thoughtful and serious supporters on the woke right typically shut down any criticism of him by claiming it to be a symptom of “Musk Derangement Syndrome” (MDS). This accusation, when made spuriously, functions in a very similar way to the woke left’s use of the DiAngelo style concept of ‘whiteness’ (an unconscious drive to uphold the systems of white supremacy for one’s own political benefit). That is, it functions as a Kafka Trap in which any attempts to deny that one’s motivations in criticising Musk’s or DiAngelo’s ideas are caused by either of these pathologies are evidence of the pathologies. By formulating concepts of MDS or whiteness which contain within them the premise that any denial of them are evidence of the derangement or unconscious bias skewing the speaker’s judgement, it preemptively shuts down the possibility of any critique being legitimate. This kind of circular reasoning is not persuasive to reasonable, ethical people who care about what is true and share the stated aims of Musk to oppose censorship and dismantle governmental corruption or of DiAngelo to oppose racism and dismantle racial prejudice (my readers are likely to support both) but think that doing so in an evidence-based and consistently principled way is essential

Nevertheless, if one wishes to counter claims that any criticism of Musk is a manifestation of Musk Derangement Syndrome, it is important not to be deranged.

She gives a number of social-media examples of this “derangement”, and then analyzes interpretations of the gesture, all three of which followed my post:

. . . . even if there is a possibility that [Musk] was deliberately making a Nazi salute, mindreading him as doing so and responding in a hyperbolic and overwrought way is not remotely helpful whatever the motivations were. Consider the reasonable responses people are likely to make to such interpretations in any scenario.

  1. Musk was simply illustrating his heart going out to the people he was speaking to.

People will see the woke left doing its “Everybody who disagrees with me is a Nazi” thing again and the perception that it should not be taken seriously is strengthened.

  1. Musk was trolling with the gesture and trying to provoke this response in order to illustrate how deranged ‘the left’ is.

Well done. You played right into that and consequently reduced the credibility of left-wing critiques of Musk including from those of us who are not deranged.

  1. Musk really does have sympathies with Nazi ideology and intended to convey that he will influence the Trump administration in that direction.

This would be highly alarming and indicate a need to seriously and carefully scrutinise his policy recommendations and shore up your credibility so that you are taken seriously should you find indications of it. The worst thing to do is shriek “Nazi” spuriously and increase the tendency of reasonable people to assume that somebody being accused of being a Nazi has simply said something considered problematic using the tortuous reasoning of the Critical Social Justice Left and ignore it rather than have a look to see if they have, in fact, expressed views compatible with a genocidal antisemitic and/or ethnonational ideology.

Stop it.

There is never a good time for hyperbolic, overwrought and, yes, deranged accusations of Nazism, fascism or far-right beliefs and intentions based on little to no evidence, but of all the times when this is a terrible idea, this is probably the worst. The Trump administration is in power, Elon Musk has significant influence on it, the power and influence of X as a platform for news has never been higher and policies that impact not only Americans but the rest of the world are already underway. This is a time to be serious grown ups and carefully, thoughtfully and honestly scrutinise both policy decisions influenced by Elon Musk and the impact of his social media platform on the state of political discourse and what everyday people who vote and influence culture believe to be true and ethical. It is a time to be particularly conscientious when evaluating the views and actions of Musk, give him credit for anything positive and beneficial he achieves in an ethical way, and present any concerns that arise in a serious, well-evidenced and well-reasoned way.

If there is reason to be concerned about the power, influence and character of Elon Musk (and I suspect there is), the people who will need to be convinced of this will be serious, ethical, thoughtful, American conservatives who care about what is true and what is morally right, who are currently of the view that Musk is beneficial to their great nation (and hopefully the world) and are absolutely sick of the authoritarian irrationality and spurious name-calling of the Critical Social Justice left.

I beg you, please stop being deranged.

Helen Pluckrose knows whereof she speaks, as she’s been a critic of “Critical Social Justice” for a long time, including her book with Lindsay, Cynical Theories (yes, Lindsay has gone a bit off the rails after the publication).  Her take on this whole kerfuffle is sensible and, I think, correct.

The best criticism is often satire, and here’s some: first a take from the Babylon Bee, and then a Musk interpretation of the often-used “Hitler goes nuts” scene from the 2004 movie Downfall:

Harvard resolves claims of creating an anti-Semitic atmosphere, agrees to make changes

January 23, 2025 • 9:30 am

The Brandeis center has announced a settlement in its civil lawsuit against Harvard University for allowing the creation of an anti-Semitic atmosphere, and Harvard will make some changes. The deal is announced by the Center, and you can see the announcement by clicking below:

Harvard, of course, has admitted to neither wrongdoing nor liability; I suppose it’s just making these changes because it’s the right thing to do. LOL!

From CNN:

One day after the inauguration of President Donald Trump, who has said he would “remove the Jew haters” if reelected, Harvard University has settled two lawsuits accusing the Ivy League school of failing to protect Jewish students from antisemitic bullying and harassment on campus.

In the settlement with the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, Jewish Americans for Fairness in Education, and Students Against Antisemitism — a group of six Jewish students — Harvard agreed to make several changes to how it addresses antisemitism on campus.

Among them is adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism when reviewing complaints of antisemitic discrimination and harassment and posting a document online that clarifies people who identify as Jewish and Israeli are covered by the school’s non-discrimination and anti-bullying policies.

Additionally, the school agreed to draft an annual report for the next five years that details its response to discrimination and harassment; hire a point person to consult with on all complaints of antisemitism, and provide training on combating antisemitism for staff who review the complaints.

“Today’s settlement reflects Harvard’s enduring commitment to ensuring our Jewish students, faculty, and staff are embraced, respected, and supported,” a Harvard University spokesperson said in a statement. “We will continue to strengthen our policies, systems, and operations to combat anti-Semitism and all forms of hate and ensure all members of the Harvard community have the support they need to pursue their academic, research and professional work and feel they belong on our campus and in our classrooms.”

Harvard has come under fire in the past year for how it addresses antisemitic bullying on campus. Much of the criticism and complaints from students and faculty stemmed from the protests and vandalism on campus following the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel.

Last year, Harvard received a failing grade from the Jewish civil rights advocacy group Anti-Defamation League for its policies to protect Jewish students from antisemitism on campus.

It also has the lowest Free Speech rating from FIRE among all 251 schools.  The two others right above it also have ratings of “abysmal”: NYU and Columbia, and both are, as I recall, subject to similar Title VI lawsuits.

I have no idea whether this settlement has anything to do with Trump’s threats, nor do I much care; I suspect, though, that a settlement was in the works before Trump was inaugurated. Harvard has not looked good after Claudine Gay stepped down on January 2, 2024, plagued by accusations not just of personal plagiarism, but of Harvard hypocrisy in how it dealt with speech.

At any rate, the IHRA definition of antisemitism is so tame that I don’t know why it’s even controversial. Here it is from their page of explanation:

Note that the definition doesn’t include anti-Zionism, but does state this:

Manifestations might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.

To me, that means that if you deny the right of Israel to exist, that’s anti-Semitism, for it conceives of Israel, because it’s the one Jewish state, as the one state that has no right to exist. We all known that “Zionist” has long since become a euphemism for “Jews” by pro-Palestinian or anti-Israeli demonstrators, and this ruse no longer carries water. That’s the point made by Natasha Hausdorff in the Munk debate on whether anti-Zionism is the same as anti-Semitism, and Hausdorff and her partner, Douglas Murray, did change the mind of the audience about this. I’ve watched this video several times; Hausdorff’s final metaphor is brilliant.

As for the other agreeements, about annual reports, point persons, and the like, yes, they are necessary to combat the atmosphere of anti-Semitism that Harvard itself tacitly admitted by settling the lawsuit.

None of this, however, should be construed as prohibiting acts of speech that are anti-Semitic or anti-Israel.  A Harvard student still has the right to stand in Harvard Yard holding a placard reading “Gas the Jews.” (It won’t do his reputation much good, however.)  It’s only when a multiplicity of anti-Semitic acts, teaching, and speech add up to create an atmosphere that discriminates against Jews, or creates a climate that chills the speech of Jews, that lawsuits must be filed.

Next, Columbia and NYU. . .

Ta-Nehisi Coates and his ignorant demonization of Israel

December 15, 2024 • 9:30 am

A year before last September, I spent three weeks in Israel, visiting Tel Aviv for a week and Jerusalem for two weeks. I also got two one-day tours, one to Masada and the Dead Sea for sightseeing, and the other a “security tour” of the defensive environs of Jerusalem given by the head of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). While there, I deliberately looked for signs of apartheid within Israel: signs of Israeli Arabs being treated as inferiors by Israeli Jews. I didn’t see any: Arabs and Jews seemed to mix completely in restaurants, trains, and trams. But of course my visit was short, superficial, and there might have been discrimination that I simply didn’t see. In light of that, all I can say is that “I didn’t see any apartheid, but my visit to Israel was short and superficial.”

Unfortunately, writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose visit to Israel and Palestine was much shorter than mine (10 days total) does not refrain from making sweeping pronouncements. And that is because he clearly went to the area (sponsored and guided by anti-Israeli groups) with a preconception: he wanted to show that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is closely analogous to American’s treatment of blacks, even during slavery.  His visit was thus tendentious and what he wrote about it (the last of four essays in the book below) is incomplete, misguided, and, to be honest, shameful.

Below is Coates’s new the book of essays; click on it to go to the Amazon site.  I read only the last (but most talked-about) essay, “The Gigantic Dream,” 117 pages long.  If you know anything about the situation in Israel and Palestine, and the history thereof, you will spot immediately how tendentious, erroneous, and damaging to Israel Coates’s essay is. And some reviewers have called him out for it, though of course the Israel-haters defend him.

Using the four categories of lies that Francis Collins lays out in his own new book The Road to Wisdom, I would say that Coates’s dilations on Israel fall between “delusions” and “bullshit.” That is, he is not intentionally lying, but I think his view is warped by his immersion in American racism, and I believe he knows that there is far more to the story than he’s telling. In fact, he has been corrected by both interviewers and reviewers about his distortions, but he hasn’t changed his mind.

The theme of his book could be summarized by saying, à la Orwell, “Israel bad, Palestine good.”  To arrive at this theme, he has to completely neglect anything bad ever done by the Palestinians and anything good ever done by Israel. But I’m getting ahead of myself:

There are the usual accusations of genocide and apartheid on Israel’s part (the apartheid is supposed to occur within Israel, with Jews oppressing Israeli Arabs), but the most obvious omissions are those of Palestinian terrorism and of Israel’s repeated offers of a state to Palestine.

What, for example, do you make of Coates’s repeated beefing about having to wait for long periods at checkpoints, or about Israeli soldiers at those checkpoints glaring at him?  Could the plethora of checkpoints have something to do with Palestinian terrorism and an attempt to keep murderers out of Israel? You won’t hear that from Coates. Nor does he mention the First and Second Intifada.  Will you hear that Palestine won’t allow a single Jew to live in Gaza or the Palestinian-controlled parts of the West Bank (areas A and B)? Isn’t that apartheid? If not, why not? Remember that fully 20% of Israeli citizens are Arabs, like the one in the first video below.

If you didn’t know about the Palestinian terrorism that’s killed Israelis ever since the seventh century (with two big pogroms in 1929 and 1936), you wouldn’t realize the context of much of Coates’s complaints. But he has a point to make: the treatment of Israel towards Palestinians—or, indeed, of its own Arab citizens—is precisely analogous to Americans’ treatment of slaves and the subsequent Jim Crow laws.  But you’d have to squint pretty hard to see Israel doing anything in Israeli that resembles even slightly the purchase and use of slaves, or of forcing Israeli Arabs to bow and kowtow to Israeli Jews.

Coates mentions the two-state solution, floated by one person he met, but he doesn’t mention that such a solution has been offered to the Israelis four or five times, and every time it has been rejected—by the Palestinians.  If there is apartheid and genocide to be seen, simply look at the first charter of Hamas, as well as its behavior and the statements of Iran, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and many other Arab groups sworn to extirpate Israel. There is of course no mention of the events of October 7, 2023, but the book came out on October 1, 2024, and perhaps, given that there’s about a year’s lead time on publishing many books, Coates couldn’t fit that event in. But I don’t believe Coates would have mentioned it anyway (not even one inserted footnote?), for the butchery of that day spoils his narrative. Would Coates admit now the truth that Hamas, proud of that day, has sworn to repeat it over and over again? Remember, Coates says not one word about Palestinian terrorism.

Coates dwells heavily on the nakba, or “catastrophe,” originally seen as the humiliation suffered by five Arab armies (and volunteers from two other Arab states) who invaded Israel right after independence but was routed by a lowly army of Jews.  The nakba was subsequently reconceived by Arafat to mean the “ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Israel” after the invasion.  Coates implies repeatedly that, without provocation, the Jewish military simply slaughtered Arabs wholesale after their invasion.  This is not the case: many Arabs fled because they were frightened, many other because Arab countries ordered them to leave so the Jews could be destroyed before Arabs could return, and some fled because they started trying to kill Jews and were driven out militarily or destroyed.

The Arab invasion of Israel, beginning on its day of independence in 1948, was certainly not a genocide of Palestinians. Coates discusses the “massacre” by Israeli soldiers of the Arab village of Deir Yassin (an event badly distorted by Wikipedia, which repeatedly mentions rapes that never happened), but he doesn’t note that the attack was prompted by the infiltration of the village by Arabs who fired on Israelis. About hundred people died and, unfortunately, some non-combatants were bystanders in the line of fire.

To see another view of this battle (one that Coates, not interested in hearing all sides, neglects), read The Massacre That Never Was: The Myth of Deir Yassin and the Creation of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (and a review of that book in the Middle East Quarterly).

As for Coates’s writing, one petulant reviewer (the reviews are mixed) called Coates a “narcissist”. When I saw that after reading the essay myself, I said, “Precisely right.” Not only is there Coates’s hubris of assessing a messy, complex, and historically convoluted conflict after only a ten-day visit, but his writing is deeply self-absorbed. Coates is far more interested in his own reactions than in talking to people on both sides. A soldier glares at him, and he’s off to the races.

But Coates’s mission is not to talk to Israelis and Palestinians, but to show that Israel’s racism parallels that of America’s. It’s as if he needs to fill in a jigsaw puzzle, and is looking for just the right pieces to unite Israel and American segregationism.  I won’t dwell on the folly of such comparisons, except to say that Coates has a bill to sell. He seems to have been prompted in this solipsism by the success of his famous Atlantic article “The Case for Reparations”—a good piece of writing—an article that he brings up repeatedly.

And since Coates is tendentious, let me just give the other side, but in the words of other people.  First, how is Israel enacting apartheid against its own people? (I am construing this accusation as one of intra-Israel apartheid, not the endless conflict between Israel and Palestine.) I have tried to find laws in which Arab Israelis are discriminated against by Jewish Israelis. I could find only one discriminatory law, and it discriminates in favor of Arabs: they are not required to serve three years in the IDF unless they want to. There are also laws that discriminate among Jews themselves, with—until recently—Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews being exempt from military service as well, though that is supposed to end in a few years.  It is curious that those who level accusations of apartheid against Israel Israeli Arabs never come up with tangible examples.

If you want to dig deeper into the apartheid accusation, here are two videos, one long and one short. In the first short one (ten minutes), an Israeli Arab who served in the IDF fields a number of hard questions about whether he experienced discrimination. The answer was “no”:

. . . and here is the stupendous Natasha Hausdorff discussing the “apartheid” accusation with an American professor Professor Orde Kittrie from Arizona State. Kittrie is a specialist in international and criminal law, and, as I’m presenting this as a palliative to the ignorance of Coates. You will hear Kittrie’s opinion that the apartheid accusation is baseless. (At 31 minutes in, Natasha gives some viewers’ questions—and some of her own—that Kittrie answers.)

Here are the YouTube notes:

Chair: Natasha Hausdorff

A new UN Commission of Inquiry of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) is poised to accuse Israel of apartheid.

Professor Kittrie discusses this Inquiry and its mandate, and the potential relationship with prosecutions by the International Criminal Court (ICC). The mandate’s reference to apartheid was apparently inspired by a lengthy report, accusing Israel of committing the crime of apartheid, published by Human Rights Watch (HRW). However this report is based on a definition of “apartheid” which is not found in the ICC’s Statute or the International Convention on Apartheid. Professor Kittrie discusses the different definitions of apartheid, reasons why the apartheid charge is wrong even under HRW’s definition, and options for responding.

Finally, here’s an article from Fathom taking apart Amnesty International’s 2022 accusation that Israel was an “apartheid state.”   Click to read:

Read, watch, and judge for yourself. In my view, Coates, while his writings on American racism may be good (I’ve read only the Atlantic article), his piece on Israel and Palestine is reprehensible, misguided, full of distortions, and, in the end, is pretty much racist, if not antisemitic. If you read it, please do so with some knowledge of the politics and history of the region.

h/t: Malgorzata

Another pro-Israeli speaker at the Oxford Union, this time with the audience uncensored

December 9, 2024 • 12:53 pm

Eventually I will post all the talks, pro and con, at the Oxford Union’s debate on November 28, whose topic was this:

“This House Believes Israel Is an Apartheid State Responsible for Genocide.”

Speaking against the motion here is Jonathan Sacerdoti, identified by Wikipedia as

“a British broadcaster, journalist, and TV producer. He covers stories relating to the United Kingdom and Europe, as well as terrorism and extremism stories, race relations, Middle East analysis and the British royal family.  He is also a campaigner against antisemitism.”

His father was a survivor of the Holocaust.

I wanted to put this speech up now because it is uncensored, showing the abuse to which the pro-Israel speakers were subject, an abuse not evident in what was apparently a censored clip of Natasha Hausdorff’s speech the other day. I think it likely that this clip will be taken down, for it makes the Oxford Union look really really bad. 

This video, complete with unceasing shouts and attacks on the speaker, shows how shameful the audience really was, a shame that also devolves upon the Union’s moderators, who were clearly on the side of the proposition although they are supposed to be neutral. They do very little to quell the audience’s despicable treatment of the speakers.  Should not repeated abusers be ejected?

As you know, the proposition passed by a large proportion, with the audience packed with those who hate Israel, and with Jewish students apparently afraid to attend.

Sacerdoti’s arguments are good, and similar to Hausdorff’s, but of course he didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell with an audience like that.

Have a listen, even if you don’t care much about the arguments, for this is, after all, supposed to be one of the most well-run and respected groups at Oxford University.

msn quotes Hausdorff on the abuse dished out in Arabic:

She detailed how Arab speakers on her team were subjected to abuse in Arabic, which she only learned about after the event.

“They were called ‘traitors’ and ‘collaborators’,” she said. “One of the speakers confided in me that the nature of that abuse and the threats have him flashbacks to a time he was targeted for being a collaborator in the West Bank.”

“When the center is silent, who’s defining the Democratic Party?”: Ritchie Torres on the election

November 15, 2024 • 11:00 am

I have never singled out a single factor that I considcered crucial in Trump’s victory against Harris, because there were so many factors in play. These include immigration, the economy, wokeness among Dems (loudly decried by Trump’s ads), Harris’s failure to choose Josh Shapiro as a running mate, Biden’s failure to resign, the word-salady nature of Harris’s campaign and her refusal to answer questions like “How would your administration differ from Biden’s?”, and, of course, the blame people affix to Republicans, saying that they are simply misogynistic, stupid, and nationalistic yokels.  A change in any of these factors might have changed the election’s results, but, in truth, we don’t know. All we can offer is post facto analyses. That’s why I simply post a diversity of takes so readers can hear all viewpoints.

In response to one public post I recently put on Facebook about Laura Helmuth leaving Scientific American after going on an expletive-laden post-election rant that demonized Trump voters as “fucking fascists”, as well as “mean, dumb, and bigoted,” I got one comment that basically agreed with Helmuth:

I think the outcome of the election was abysmal, dreadful, and maybe the trans activists were a small part of the problem, but a much bigger problem is the poor state of American education and the country’s persistent religiosity. Again, not the fault of the left.

In other words, this commenter agreed with Helmuth, throwing into the mix the high religiosity of Americans.  I haven’t talked to enough people in my elite “bubble” to know how pervasive this feeling is.

In the 38-minute video below, a segment of Dan Senor’s “Call Me Back” show, New York freshman Democratic Congressman Ritchie Torres, only 36, says that the Democratic left basically scuppered the election by infusing the party with progressive ideology, refusing to address the two issues that really mattered to the middle- and lower-class voters: immigration and inflation. Torres represents the South Bronx, and his district is characterized by Wikipedia as “by one measure the poorest congressional district in the United States.”

A couple of quotes from Torres:

“My diagnosis is that we have to Stop pandering to a far left that is more representative of Twitter and Tik Tok than it is to the real world  and start listening to working-class people of color—working class people in general—who have historically been the heart and soul of the Democratic Party.”

“The movement of ‘defund the police’ has done almost irreparable damage to the brand of the Democratic Party. . . . if the objective is to win elections in the real world, then we have to marginalize the far left in favor of working class Americans.”

Torres is not hesitant to criticize Biden or Harris, calling Biden’s actions on immigration “political malpractice”, which aroused clear signs of popular discontent well before the election.

Senor, who comes from a Jewish background, then brings up an issue that most commenters have neglected: the Jewish vote. As he notes, Jewish voters went for the GOP in higher proportions than previously, so that in this election Jewish voters were largely “up for grabs”—unsure about how to vote. Slogans from the far left like “globalize the intifada,” or “from the river to the sea,” says Torres, alienated Jewish voters, most of whom support Israel.

Torres theorizes that the Jewish vote may have been decisive in states like  Michigan, Georgia, and Arizona, all of whom went for Trump. He adds that the says far left “chose to wage an antisemitic smear campaign in an attempt to sabotage Josh Shapiro, simply because he was a Jew who spoke out against the antisemitism after October 7. . . . The far left’s hatred for Donald Trump was exceeded only by its hatred for Israel and for any Jew who identifies unequivocally as pro Israel. And that to me was the ultimate example of how destructive the far left can be to our ability to win elections.”

Torres argues that Harris herself wasn’t anti-Israel, but a mainstream, pro-Israel centrist who was falsely painted as anti-Israel by the far left. Nevertheless, as you may know, Harris talked out of both sides of her mouth, always mentioning the suffering of Palestinian people when she defended Israel. As Senor says, Harris was, on the Gaza War, talking out of both sides of her mouth to appeal to both sides.  Senor argues that this kind of moral equivalency, or moral equivocation, cost Harris Jewish votes.

Torres chimes in eloquently, saying that in all politics, candidates must espouse “moral clarity”, and Jews didn’t feel Harris’s pious mouthings “in their kishkes“. (Torres gets extra points for the Yiddish.)

30 minutes in, Torres goes on an eloquent tear, including stuff like this:

“The fact that the far left would wage an antisemitic smear campaign against the most popular governor of the most pivotal swing state: that should have been a wake-up call that the far left is  willing to sacrifice what is best for the Democratic party on the altar of ideological purity and anti-Zionism.”

Senor adds that pro-Hamas and anti-Israel protests weren’t just a Jewish issue—that others look at people celebrating Hamas and Hezbollah and get turned off by the far left.  Torres thinks that the failure to deal with such protests undercut Americans’ sense of safety and convinced them that government cannot keep people safe. This, he sayus, was an indictment of the governments of both New York State and New York City.

In the end, since people of color, both middle-class and impecunious ones, are Torres’s constituents, he concludes that, at least in his district, the cost of living far, far outweighed their concern for a war 5,000 miles away.

I recommend this video not because it gives the reason why the Democrats were routed, but why they were routed in a poor, black district. And, to me at least, having sympathies for Israel, it makes Torres look like a guy with an exceedingly bright future in Democratic politics.

Watch it!

Teachers brainwashing students against Israel

November 11, 2024 • 10:45 am

Abigail Shrier is the author of two books that I’ve recommended, the first of which was predictably attacked by progressives:  Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. Her second book was Bad Therapy: Why the Kids aren’t Growing Up.  You may remember that ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio broadcast that he wanted to get the first book banned (yes, an ACLU lawyer), as he considered it “transphobic”.  And you can find my review of Bad Therapy here.

Now Shrier, who is basically an investigative reporter, has written a long piece for the Free Press about how secondary-school teachers throughout America are secretly propagandizing kids to favor Palestine and hate Israel (and Jews) in the Gaza War. You can read the piece by clicking on the screenshot below, or find it archived here.

The propagandizing is ubiquitous, from California to New Jersey, and is fostered by often-“progressive” teachers unions.  Because it’s illegal to do this (as Shrier notes, “public school teachers have no First Amendment right to express their political views in the classroom”), teachers often do it in secret, even taking kids on field trips to anti-Israel events without broadcasting it. An example:

In August, the second largest teachers union chapter in the country—there are more than 35,000 members of United Teachers Los Angeles—met at the Bonaventure Hotel in L.A. to discuss, among other things, how to turn their K-12 students against Israel. In front of a PowerPoint that read, “How to be a teacher & an organizer. . . and NOT get fired,” history teacher Ron Gochez elaborated on stealth methods for indoctrinating students.

But how to transport busloads of kids to an anti-Israel rally, during the school day, without arousing suspicion?

“A lot of us that have been to those [protest] actions have brought our students. Now I don’t take the students in my personal car,” Gochez told the crowd. Then, referring to the Los Angeles Unified School District, he explained: “I have members of our organization who are not LAUSD employees. They take those students and I just happen to be at the same place and the same time with them.”

Gochez was just getting warmed up. “It’s like tomorrow I go to church and some of my students are at the church. ‘Oh, wow! Hey, how you doing?’ We just happen to be at the same place at the same time, and look! We just happen to be at a pro-Palestine action, same place, same time.”

The crowd burst into approving laughter.

Isn’t that hilarious? But of course, this kind of stuff eventually produces anti-Semitism in school, leading to the taunting and bullying of Jewish students (Shrier gives examples).

Worse than these one-time incidents, however, it he constant infusion of antisemitism in to the school curricula. It particularly infects “ethnic studies” classes, required for students in states like California.There we saw a huge fracas about antisemitic materials in the ethnic studies curriculum, a fracas that’s still going on. Here’s a summary of what Shrier found in her swing across America:

Four years ago, I was among the first journalists to expose the widespread incursion of gender ideology into our schools. Once-fringe beliefs about gender swiftly took over large swaths of society partly thanks to their inclusion in school curricula and lessons.

Today, extensive interviews with parents, teachers, and non-profit organizations that monitor the radicalism and indoctrination in schools convinced me that demonization of Israel in American primary and secondary schools is no passing fad. Nor is it confined to elite private schools serving hyper-progressive families. As one Catholic parent who exposes radicalism in schools nationwide on the Substack Undercover Mother said to me: “They’ve moved on from BLM to gender unicorn to the new thing: anti-Israel activism. Anti-Israel activism is the new gender ideology in the schools.”

Parents who watched in alarm as gender theory swept through schools will recognize the sudden, almost religious conversion to this newest ideology. And very few educators are standing against it.

Much of the anti-Israel vituperation slides into classrooms through a subject called ethnic studies. In 2021, California became the first state to adopt it as a requirement for receiving a high school diploma. Legislatures of more than a dozen states have already followed suit, incorporating ethnic studies into K–12 curricula.

Here’s an image shown to students at Lowell High School as part of their Ethnic Studies class. (From The Free Press)

In principle, these laws require schools to teach the histories and cultures of African Americans, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, Latinos, and Native Americans. In practice, they grant teachers license to incorporate lessons that often divide civilization into “oppressed” and “oppressor.” A primary fixation of ethnic studies is demonizing Israel.

Activist-led organizations readily supply instructional materials. Arab Resource & Organizing Center (AROC), Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA; creators of the Teach Palestine Project), Teaching While Muslim, Jewish Voice for Peace, Unión del Barrio, and the Zinn Education Project regularly furnish distorted histories with eliminationist rhetoric against Israel.

Especially in the year since the Hamas massacre of Israelis on October 7, 2023, the anti-Israel materials have become pervasive. It’s not surprising that they are found in world history and current events lessons. But demonization of Israel is now taught in art, English, math, physics, and social-emotional learning classes.

At the teachers’ meeting described above, they pondered the question of how to teach this stuff “without getting fired”. They’re still doing it because although it’s forbidden to propagandize students in class, it’s up to the schools themselves to find out about it and control it, and they don’t seem much interested. Also, the parents have to KNOW that this stuff is going on and get involved, and parents are reluctant to do that. Further, schools, though required to release instructional material to parents, have fought such releases.  Finally, states can set school curricula, and if those curricula include anti-Israel tropes, as in California, then teachers are free to teach that material.

At any rate, here are a few anecdotes and some material that Shrier got with the help of the Free Press:

A Jewish ninth grader, “Sam,” attends a Bay Area high school where, after October 7 of last year, posters declaring, “Ceasefire Now!” and “Free Palestine” began appearing on the walls. Because Sam’s family considers itself very progressive, Sam was not bothered by the posters.

Then one of Sam’s friends sent him a long diatribe that read in part (spelling from the original), “I would just like to say that u are an ignorant ass white ass privileged boy u are so privileged to not b one of those children being killed rn in Gaza…solidarity and indigenous solidarity is something you could never understand as you have grown up your whole life with no culture and money and you been brainwashed by isreali and western media the world stands with Palestine and frankly it’s embarrassing to be anything different, when mostly all people of color stand with Palestine and you stand with ISREAL, that’s how yk ur in the wrong bud oppressed people stand with oppressed people in solidarity SOMETHING YOU COULDD NEVER UNDERSTAND.” The text concluded: “FREE PALESTINE TILL ITS BACKWARDS BITCH!!!!”

I spoke to Sam’s mother, and her perception was that the message didn’t sound like her son’s friend. The jargon and gist appeared to come from adults. Only the self-righteous fury and the message’s abusive conclusion belonged to the boy.

another:

I also spoke to the mother of “Dana,” a sixth-grade girl at a Bay Area elementary school. In a social studies unit on ancient civilizations last year, the teacher encouraged students to share their “feelings” about “Israel and Palestine.” Students shouted: “Fuck Israel!” and “Israel sucks!” Dana was the only Jewish child in the class.

Please, sir, can I have some more?:

One of Danny’s teachers posted a running tally, in the front of the classroom, of the number of Palestinians allegedly killed by the IDF. She says, “So every day, when my son came into class, it would say how many people Israel has killed today.” (The Free Press has confirmed this with photographic evidence.)

Danny, who is black, said to her, “If there was an image of a noose, we would not hear the end of it. There would be protests, people would be going crazy. But it’s always okay if it’s anything anti-Jewish.”

One more bowl of porridge:

At a Fort Lee, New Jersey, high school, world history teachers confiscated students’ cell phones before giving a lesson that presented Hamas as a “resistance movement” rather than an internationally designated terrorist organization. Teachers also showed a map of Israel that falsely presented Palestinians as the sole indigenous natives of Israel. (The Free Press has obtained a copy of the presentation. Click here to see it.)

Here are two slides from that lesson dealing with Hamas (“a resistance movement”) and October 7 of last year.

I’ll finish with an excerpt that has two more audiovisuals:

Kaplan says, “In math class, they can be studying charts and are told, ‘Look at this pie chart of the number of Palestinians murdered. This slice shows the number of Israelis that were killed.’ ”

That example was actually presented to elementary school students in New Haven Unified School District, California. The chart is labeled “People Killed Since September 29, 2000” divided into Palestinians and Israelis and asks: “What information is this pie graph showing us?” The obvious answer: Far more Palestinians have been killed than Israelis.

What “noticings do you have?” (Can’t these people even write?)

Image obtained by The Free Press.

Another mother sent me an example of an assignment used in a physics class at Cupertino High School, which asked students to consider the “Effect of Israel’s Bombing of Gaza” on climate change. (Arrow is mine)

Image obtained by The Free Press.
At schools where anti-Israel propaganda is promulgated, schoolchildren are turning against their Jewish classmates. Dozens of interviews with parents, teachers, and people at nonprofits revealed that discussions of Israel quickly become personal, and American Jews—even children—are the inevitable targets.

All of this guarantees that America will become yet more antisemitic in the future as these kids grow up and assume positions of power—or become teachers themselves.

I’d like to point out one more thing: I am not aware of teachers spreading anti-Palestinian propaganda like this, so it’s not as if Shrier is just singling out “her side” (she’s Jewish) for support. This kind of brainwashing, and nearly all the riots on college campuses the past academic year, are anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian. It’s not hard to understand why when you realize that Jews are now regarded as white “settler colonialists”, and Palestinians as “oppressed people of color without agency:—a trope that has been instilled in both college and secondary-school students for a long time. This trope is spread by DEI organizations.

A pogrom in, of all places, Amsterdam

November 8, 2024 • 9:30 am

Once again Amsterdam is proving itself Europe’s most antisemitic city. Last night a pogrom of Jews began in the city, involving a group of extremist Muslims roaming around a soccer field where an Israeli team was playing. Demanding that people identify themselves, the hooligans then proceeded to beat up anybody with an Israeli passport, or even those who were suspected to be Jews.

This is especially distressing because the Netherlands has a sad history of Jew hating—largely (but not exclusively) on the part of the Nazis. Everyone knows the story of Anne Frank and her family, who were probably betrayed by a Dutch person. They were sent to the dreaded camp of Westerbork, a transit stop from which, between 1942 and 1944, nearly 100,000 Jews, as well as Romani, were sent to death camps elsewhere. The Netherlands lost a huge number of Jews during WWII:  nearly three-quarters of all Dutch Jews perished in the Holocaust.

It’s ironic, then, that Dutch citizens enacted a pogrom on Jews in Amsterdam just last night. And El Al is evacuating Jews back to Israel! From the NYT report:

Israeli commercial planes on Friday were bringing home citizens injured in Amsterdam after bursts of violence tied to a soccer game between a Dutch and an Israeli team that Israeli and Dutch officials described as antisemitic attacks.

The police in Amsterdam said in a statement on Friday that they had begun an investigation into multiple outbreaks of violence, and that 62 people had been arrested. Most of those arrested were later released, the authorities said.

The Dutch police said that the clashes had taken place in several places where people had gathered, some in support of the Israeli team and others to protest its arrival.

A tense atmosphere and street disturbances had been building since Wednesday night and early Thursday, hours before the soccer match. The Amsterdam authorities said at a news conference that people had attacked Israeli fans and chanted anti-Israeli slogans, and that they were investigating whether the attacks were coordinated. They also said that some supporters of the Israeli team had taken a Palestinian flag down from a building. Videos posted to social media and verified by The New York Times show men taking down a Palestinian flag while others nearby hurled anti-Arab chants.

While the exact sequence of events remained unclear, the violence appeared to be the product of two combustible forces in Europe: the unrest that often accompanies gatherings of hard-core soccer fans and tensions over the yearlong Israeli military offensive in Gaza.

Five Israelis who had been hospitalized were later discharged, the Amsterdam authorities said. Some others sustained light injuries, they said.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said that he had spoken with Dick Schoof, his Dutch counterpart. Mr. Schoof said in a statement early Friday that there had been antisemitic attacks on Israelis in Amsterdam, calling them “completely unacceptable.”

He added that the situation had calmed and that he had told Mr. Netanyahu in their phone conversation that the perpetrators would be found and prosecuted.

Gideon Saar, Israel’s newly appointed foreign minister, said he would travel to the Netherlands on Friday to meet with his Dutch counterpart as well as with Israelis and members of the Jewish community.

A spokeswoman for the Israeli airline El Al said that it would “operate on short notice rescue flights” free of charge from Amsterdam to Tel Aviv starting Friday afternoon.

Apparently the IDF had started planning rescue flights of Dutch Jews, but abandoned that plan after El Al said it would rescue the Jews on commercial flights.

Some tweets from one person:

“I’m not Jewish, and he gets punched anyway. The Times of Israel reports that the Amsterdam police stood by and didn’t do anything. WHY?

Click to see the videos on this one, which I can’t embed:

 

As usual, the NYT deliberately misleads the readers (see below):

You may recall that when I visited the Netherlands last May, invited by students to be on a panel at the University of Amsterdam to discuss the incursion of ideology into science, the student group who invited the four of us canceled at the last minute. The reason:  two of us had proven too sympathetic to Israel! That was a shock to me, as I’d never been canceled before when I was talking about science (we weren’t going to mention the war!). But it was a sign of what’s going on in the city. And the students who canceled us weren’t Muslims. Philosopher Maarten Boudry and I, the two “cancelees,” wrote a Quillette piece about our experience. (Boudry had also been canceled the week before at the same university for a different talk, but for the same reason!) But of course our treatment inflicted a psychological blow, not a physical one.

What is to be done? A lot of the trouble in Europe like this comes from Muslim immigrants, but of course most Muslim immigrants don’t go around beating up Jews. Nevertheless, this kind of action is not only racist, but badly hurts the reputation of European countries where it occurs. I don’t know how Europe can vet the young men who cause antisemitic violence, but they should at least adjudicate their behavior quickly, and deport them when they’re guilty. I for one am not overly keen to go back to the Netherlands, though I have good and sympathetic friends there.

Kudos to the King and to the Dutch Prime Minister for decrying this violence and Jew hatred, but decrying is not enough. As the country’s Chief Rabbi said above, the situation has gone too far for words; there must be action taken to stop the brutality and the hatred that causes it (without, of course, abrogating free speech).

h/t: Jez