Category: bigotry

German high court affirms that Kuwait airlines can discriminate against Israeli passengers flying from Germany

October 1, 2018 • 12:15 pm

Here are two articles that both say the same thing (I’m putting up the Reuters piece because posting only The Tablet piece would lead some to say, “Well, that’s just a Jewish site kvetching about Jewish mistreatment.”

Reuters:

The Tablet:

The short story: an Israeli passenger tried to book a trip from Frankfurt to Bangkok in 2016 on Kuwait Airways. The airline refused to sell the passenger a ticket because Kuwait Airways—and I didn’t know this—won’t transport Israeli passengers. And that’s because Kuwait has a law prohibiting its companies from doing any business with Israeli citizens.

The passenger, who is unnamed, sued.  A Frankfurt court ruled for the airline last year, which outraged many Germans. Subsequently, the passenger, with support from Jewish and pro-Israel organizations, appealed.  A week ago the German High Court of Hesse affirmed the lower court decision, though it found Kuwaiti policy reprehensible. As The Tablet reports:

Critically, the [High Court] court was sympathetic to M’s plight. In a hearing on Sept. 6th, the court made clear that it shared the view of Nathan Gelbart, German counsel of The Lawfare Project acting for M, that this Kuwaiti law must not be applied in Germany as it contradicts important German values, including the value of friendship towards the State of Israel.

But the dispositive factor was a logistic one:

Factually, however, the court said, M would not be able to leave the first plane after it landed in Kuwait, because the transit area of the airport is under the territorial integrity of Kuwait. Put simply, the court seems to have dismissed the claim on the practical ground that it has no jurisdiction over  the anti-Semitic laws in Kuwait that would prevent an Israeli from disembarking a plane in the country, even if only to catch a connecting flight in the airport.

Well, fine. But I don’t agree with this decision, which amounts to Germany endorsing anti-Semitic policies of another country, and being complicit in them.

Soothing words of the High Court aren’t enough. Germany, especially with its sensitive history vis-à-vis the Jews, needs to take action to free it from complicity in bigotry. Germany should simply tell Kuwait Airlines that so long as they have that policy, they cannot land in Germany.

And I’d suggest the same thing if an airline refused to carry women, or passengers from any country. This may inconvenience some non-Israeli people in Germany, who have to find other ways to get to Kuwait, but that’s just too damn bad. An international carrier that discriminates against carrying passengers of any national origin, sex, or ethnicity, should not be able to operate from a democratic country.

h/t: Orli

Starbucks drops Anti-Defamation league from developing training against bias; Woman’s March head Tamika Mallory denounces the ADL as racist

May 6, 2018 • 10:00 am

Historically, America’s Anti-Defamation League is an organization devoted to fighting anti-Semitism, but it has also defended other groups.  Here’s the list on their web page of  “What we do”:

Wikipedia describes its mission:

The stated purpose of the ADL is to fight:

anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry (in the United States) and abroad, combat international terrorism, probe the roots of hatred, advocate before the United States Congress, come to the aid of victims of bigotry, develop educational programs, and serve as a public resource for government, media, law enforcement, and the public, all towards the goal of countering and reducing hatred.

Historically, the ADL has opposed groups and individuals it considered to be anti-Semitic and/or racist, including: Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, Henry Ford, Father Charles Coughlin (leader of the Christian Front), the Christian Identity movement, the German-American Bund, neo-Nazis, the American militia movement and white power skinheads (although the ADL acknowledges that there are also non-racist skinheads).[7][8] The ADL publishes reports on a variety of countries, regarding alleged incidents of anti-Jewish attacks and propaganda.

The ADL maintains that some forms of anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel cross the line into anti-Semitism. The Anti-Defamation League states:

Criticism of particular Israeli actions or policies in and of itself does not constitute anti-Semitism. Certainly the sovereign State of Israel can be legitimately criticized just like any other country in the world. However, it is undeniable that there are those whose criticism of Israel or of “Zionism” is used to mask anti-Semitism.[9]

It has not been free of criticism, as you can see here, and much of recent criticism, which I’m not sure is justified, centers on its pro-Israel activities, and its claim that at least some of anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, which I more or less agree with. (If you don’t believe that Jews should have the state given to them by the UN as a refuge from persecution, you’re pretty close to anti-Semitism).  But they do engage in the following mission, as described above under “Israel advocacy and education“:

Israel needs people to stand up now more than ever as it faces more threats—from enemy states like Iran, terrorists, and those seeking to delegitimze Israel like the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. ADL helps our supporters understand the complex issues and advocate for a secure and stable democratic Jewish state.

Learn about Israel and its challenges through our website, blogs and resources, which focus on current events relating to the Jewish State. Study ADL’s Israel: A Guide for Activists to find tools for advocating for Israel, information on Israeli history, responses to common inaccuracies about Israel and other information.

All this is by way of me trying to understand what’s reported in a new story on Politico (click on screenshot):

As you may recall, in April two black men were arrested at a Philadelphia branch of the Starbuck’s coffee chain for loitering. They said they were waiting for an associate, but were asked to leave and, when they didn’t, they were arrested. I suspect this was a truly racist incident, as I doubt that two white guys doing the same thing would have prompted a call to the cops.

In response, Starbucks will close 8,000 of its branches on May 29 for “sensitivity training,” which seems appropriate. You simply can’t treat people differently because of their color. The two black men, Donte Robinson and Rashon Nelson, settled with the city for a token payment of $2 each, but in return for that settlement the city of Philadelphia also created a $200,000 fund to train young entrepeneurs in the city, and the two men arrested will be on the committee that dispenses these grants. This all seems like a fair and decent outcome.

The bad part of the outcome is that the Anti-Defamation League was supposed to help Starbuck’s develop the anti-bias curriculum, but was apparently dropped after blacks objected.  Politico reports that the ADL is perceived by blacks as both anti-black (I guess that includes Palestinians) and pro-Israeli, which means the ADL is seen as impure.

As Politico reports:

Bowing to pressure from African-American activists, Starbucks excluded the Anti-Defamation League from an upcoming daylong anti-bias training session.

. . . “When Starbucks asked for assistance, we agreed to help,” ADL spokesman Todd Gutnick told POLITICO. “As to whether Starbucks may or may not now want to utilize our expertise, you should ask them.”

Liel Leibovitz, writing today in Tablet, a “a daily online magazine of Jewish news, ideas, and culture,” was less measured in his criticism. “Shame on Starbucks for giving in to bigotry,” he said.

But Starbucks’ Riley denied the company cut the organization loose because of political pressure, saying in an email, “We are architecting a multi-phase approach to addressing bias.”

Almost immediately after the April 17 announcement, activists attacked Starbucks over the ADL’s involvement, citing the ADL’s support for Israel and its arms-length relationship to the Black Lives Matter movement.

And guess who tweeted out denouncing the ADL as racist. Yes, it’s our old friend Tamika Mallory, co-head of the Women’s March, good pals with the National of Islam bigot Louis Farrkhan, and worshiper of sundry terrorists and murderers:

Sorry, but she’s dead wrong about the ADL constantly attacking black and brown people. What’s the evidence?  And speaking of bigotry, Mallory of course implicitly endorses the racist message of Farrakhan as well as the misogyny, homophobia, and anti-apostate bias of Palestine and Islam.  For that she suffers no opprobrium. It’s an embarassment to feminists to have this vitriolic and hateful woman as president of their March.

Politico continues:

 Cat Brooks, the co-founder of the Anti Police-Terror Project, told ABC News that she agreed with Mallory, saying, “You can’t be a piece of an anti-bias training when you openly support a racist, oppressive and brutal colonization of Palestine.”The Washington chapter of Black Lives Matter, meanwhile, tweeted that the ADL was “ultra pro-cop,” and cited a 2016 letter in which Greenblatt said “ADL has not endorsed the Black Lives Matter movement” because “a small minority of [its] leaders … supported anti-Israel — and at times anti-Semitic — positions.” Greenblatt’s letter didn’t identify the leaders in question.

Starbucks’ exclusion of the ADL from its May 29 training session became apparent on April 24 when a press release about the event failed to mention Greenblatt in connection to it. Instead, it said the company would “consult with” the ADL in connection with longer-term efforts.

Thus Starbucks, while attacking racism against blacks, gets away with booting the prime organization in the U.S. attacking anti-Semitism. Is there any other brand of bigotry besides anti-Semitism that’s politically acceptable on the Left? I can’t think of one.

h/t: BJ

The anti-Semitism of Britain’s Labour Party

April 8, 2018 • 12:30 pm

Although I’ve read some stuff about the British Labour Party’s growing anti-Semitism, I didn’t really know how pervasive it was until reader BJ sent me some links. The first is from the Spectator, simply listing 50 instances of Labour Party anti-Semitism. While some of the bigots have been expelled or punished for their sentiments (that’s up to the party, not me), others have gotten off scot-free for expressions that, were they applied to blacks or Muslims, would have been grounds for expulsion. Here are just a few examples from “Labour’s pockets of anti-Semitism: The evidence“. Remember that Jeremy Corbyn is an MP from Islington and leader of the Labour Party. I’m just repeating the Spectator’s assertions and haven’t verified them for myself:

7. Jeremy Corbyn had a ten-year association with a group which denied the Holocaust. Mr Corbyn was a ‘stalwart’ supporter of Deir Yassin Remembered, attending events in 2013, with the group’s founder, Paul Eisen, a self-professed Holocaust denier.

11. A Labour councillor in Birmingham, Zafar Iqbal, shared a David Duke video on Facebook entitled ‘CNN Goldman Sachs and the Zio Matrix’. The Labour party accepted Mr Iqbal’s apology and claim that he had have no recollection of sharing this video’ – no disciplinary proceedings were enacted.

16. Ken Livingstone reportedly said a Jewish journalist was ‘just like a concentration camp guard’, that Jews vote Tory because they are rich and that Hitler supported Zionism. Despite his attempt to draw a parallel between those who fought for Jewish freedom and those who perpetrated a Jewish genocide, Livingstone was only given a temporary suspension from a party disciplinary panel – a decision Corbyn supported, despite 100 Labour MPs calling for Livingstone’s expulsion.

19. Labour Party member and Momentum Teesside activist Bob Campbell has shared an image of a rat marked with a Star of David and claimed Israel controls ISIS. Campbell denied to the press that he had been suspended by the party.

21. Labour Councillor and former Labour Mayor of Blackburn, Salim Mulla, called Zionist Jews a ‘disgrace to humanity’, endorsed a video which blamed Israel for school shootings in the USA, and said ‘Zionism’ was orchestrating ISIS. After an initial suspension he was reinstated as a Labour member.

27. Naz Shah, MP for Bradford West, was suspended from the party for sharing a post suggesting Israel should be ‘relocated’ to the United States and for saying that ‘the Jews are rallying’ to a Daily Mirror poll. She later apologised and was re-instated.

30. Jeremy Corbyn called antisemitic terror groups Hamas and Hezbollah ‘our friends’ when inviting them to speak in Parliament. He claimed the invitation to Hezbollah was ‘absolutely the right function of using parliamentary facilities’ and that the group was committed to ‘social justice and political justice’. Corbyn later said this was ‘inclusive language I used, which with hindsight I would rather not have used’.

35. Miqdad Al-Nuaimi, a Labour Councillor in Newport, was suspended after tweeting that ‘#Israel regime and army are increasingly assuming the arrogance and genocidal character of the #Nazis’ and that ‘ISIS leader Al-Baghdadi dies in Israeli hospital…If confirmed, the #Israeli connection is very interesting’. He was initially suspended, but then cleared by the Labour party.

37. Afzal Khan, then a Labour MEP and now the MP for Manchester Gorton, compared Israel to Nazis. No disciplinary action was taken.

40. Luke Cresswell, a Labour Councillor in Suffolk, tweeted an image of a blood-soaked Israeli flag, accused Israel of genocide and captioned the image ‘Moses must be proud of you’. Though initially suspended, he was then re-admitted, and subsequently selected as a councillor.

42. Max Tasker, a Labour Councillor in North Wales, posted Youtube videos to his facebook page with entitled: ‘Is ISIS good for the Jews?’, ‘The whole story of Zionist conspiracy: the filthy history of pedophilia, murder and bigotry’, ‘Not for the immature! Zionist Antichrist will rule the [New World Order]’ and ‘Ukraine’s anti-Russian stance is a Zionist masterplan’.

48. Jeremy Corbyn defended in 2012 an anti-Semitic mural in East London that depicted Jewish bankers playing a monopoly-style game on the backs of the poor. He has since apologised.

This is a small sample, but I found it appalling, though just another instance of the Left being anti-Semitic. But I’m not sure why this is the case in the UK, though in the US it’s because Jews are seen as white oppressors of brown Muslims. Is this the same in the UK?  I’m not the only one to be appalled by this, of course: journalist Nick Cohen has repeatedly called out Labour for its anti-Semitism; the latest example is here. But the leader of the party? Oy!

At any rate, the Guardian has published a letter signed by “more than forty senior academics” that is pure “whataboutery” with regards to Labour’s anti-Semitism. For example, it calls attention to anti-Semitism in Europe and Poland, the link between Conservatives and right-wing European parties, and accuses “dominant sections of the media” of claiming both that anti-Semitism is largely a problem of Labour and also that Corbyn hasn’t dealt with it. In other words, it uses whataboutery (while claiming it isn’t doing that) to defend Labour against anti-Semitism. But the issue, of course, is whether the party of inclusion is also bigoted, regardless of whether other countries are equally bigoted.

Notice that the signatories of the letters are largely from Goldsmiths at the University of London, the London School of Economics, and other universities that have a strong Authoritarian Leftist strain. No wonder their “senior academics” are defending Labour against bigotry!

In two pieces in the Spectator, conservative writer Douglas Murray examines whether those “senior academics” really are respected senior academics. Well, he finds some weirdos among them, including people whose scholarship is in Zombie and Star Wars studies, and one woman who’s not an academic at all. But that’s not really the point, which is the accusation of anti-Semitism. The academic credentials of the signatories isn’t that important, though the Guardian’s possible misrepresentation of them is. Still, you may want to look at Murray’s pieces, “The truth about the ‘senior academics’ defending Corbyn” and “The Guardian letter defending Jeremy Corbyn is a sham“. They’re more snark than light, but still fun.

What makes me sad is that were I a Brit, I’d be a Labour voter, and yet the party appears ridden with anti-Semitism. That’s not true of the American Democratic Party. Some of the problem may be because the Labour bigots appear to be Muslims, or at least have Arabic names, and therefore are enemies of the Jews from the outset. I don’t know, and ask British readers to explain this to me.

Canada: Higher rate of hate crimes against Jews than against Muslims and blacks

December 11, 2017 • 9:00 am

Elder of Ziyon posted the recent data on hate crimes in Canada, with the data come from the Canadian government itself: Statistics Canada, Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, Incident-based Uniform Crime Reporting Survey.

First, the graph, which just gives raw numbers of hate crimes for various groups over the last three years (data below):

Except for 2016, the numbers are highest for blacks, but these figures haven’t been adjusted for population size. As Elders of Ziyon notes:

In 2016, there were more anti-Jewish hate crimes than even anti-Black hate crimes in Canada, which is almost certainly unprecedented.

Anti-Jewish crimes always are the most prominent compared to crimes against other religious groups (anti-Muslim crimes actually went down while anti-Jewish crimes went up.)

But to have antisemitic hate crimes outpace even racist crimes is extremely worrisome.

There are some 380,000 Jews in Canada and nearly twice that many Blacks. There are over a million Muslims, meaning that Jews are about six times as likely to be victims of hate crimes than Muslims.

Now Wikipedia gives a Canadian population of 1,198,540 blacks and, for 2013, 1,153,677 Muslims—surely higher now. The actual per capita rates of hate crime per year in 2016, using these population figures and the raw data below, are these:

Jews:         0.121%
Blacks:       0.018%
Muslims:     0.012%

These data suggest that the rate of hate crimes against Jews is 6.7 times higher than for blacks and more than ten times higher than for Muslims.

Even if you assume 500,00 Jews in Canada, the upper limit given by Wikipedia, the per capita rate for Jews is still 0.04%—more than twice the per capita rate for blacks and more than three times the per capita rate for Muslims.

Here are the raw data:

Now I don’t closely follow Canadian politics, but I bet a lot more press is given to hate crimes against Muslims than against either Jews or blacks—but I might be wrong. The higher per capita rate for Jews than Muslims also holds in the U.S., but you wouldn’t know that from most of the liberal media. And that reminds me of a joke:

A guy walks into a bar and notices a man talking to the bartender down at the other end. The guy does a double take because the man talking to the bartender really resembles Hitler.

So the guy goes up to the man and says “Excuse me, but did anybody ever tell you that you look like Hitler?”

The man replies, “Oh, but I am  Hitler. I have been reincarnated and I am back on Earth to kill 10 million Jews and 33 geese!”

“Oh, my God! That’s terrible! But why 33 geese?”

Hitler then turns to the bartender and says “See? I told you nobody cares about the Jews.”

 

h/t: Orli

The Southern Poverty Law Center loses the plot when an African-American threatens Jews

March 6, 2017 • 9:00 am

Twitchy is a Twitter aggregation site with a conservative bent, so it’s no surprise that it put up a couple of article about the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) recent bad behavior, since the SPLC is becoming increasingly allied with the Regressive Left.

You may remember that the SPLC put both Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Maajid Nawaz on its list of “Anti-Muslim extremists”. When called to account for this unconscionable slur on Muslim reformers (one of whom is still a Muslim), and on Nawaz in particular, Heidi Beirich, Head of Intelligence (?) at SPLC simply lied, claiming that Nawaz had called for increased surveillance of mosques (see Heather Hastie’s post on the SPLC and the links therein).  This was clearly an untruth that Beirich made up: as Nawaz noted, he’s called for decreased surveillance of mosques:

screen-shot-2017-03-06-at-7-55-13-am

I hope Nawaz forces them to retract their slur, or even sues them for slander, as this is surely a deliberate lie that damages his reputation.

What many people are coming to realize is that the SPLC, once a great organization for protecting civil rights and prosecuting racist offenders, is now transforming into an entitled McCarthyite organization, compiling “hate lists” and defending Islam, even at the cost of slandering reformers. These “hate lists” are not without controversy, and the Center itself has been the focus of credible reports of financial mismanagement (see here).

Like many Regressive Leftists, the Center has taken a position against Muslim reformers. Now, as reported by Twitchy (here, here, and here), the organization tried its best to dissimulate when Juan Thompson, a black man and former writer for The Intercept, was arrested for  making 8 threatening phone calls to Jewish community centers in Atlanta. There have been at least 100 such threats against Jewish organizations so far this year—I haven’t mentioned them lest I be accused of defending threatened Jews but not Muslims—and most of these weren’t made by Thompson. They’re probably part of a general xenophobia against immigrants, Jews, and Muslims that, previously under wraps, was unleashed by Trump’s election.

At any rate, Thompson’s threats were “excused” by the SPLC as “not anti-Semitism” since they may have been made as part of his harassment of a former girlfriend (see the New York Times piece and an article in Time Magazine), since they were made in the name of his girlfriend. The SPLCC swung into action, issuing this tweet which has been reproduced below since the SPLC later removed it:

screen-shot-2017-03-04-at-11-38-53-am

But given that there were a hundred threats, why was the SPLC so eager to exculpate Thompson for 8 of them, denying that he was anti-Semitic? They even issued another tweet (below), saying in effect, “It’s not anti-Semitic because it was a copycat crime. Besides, what about the unsolved threats?”:

More attempts to exculpate Thompson:

Twitchy suspects, and they might be right, that since the arrested suspect was an African-American, he didn’t fit the SPLC’s narrative of hatred emanating from white supremacy groups, and thus they tried to minimize Thompson’s involvement, as in the tweets below:

Thompson was fired from The Intercept for fabricating stories and quotes, and has shown signs of being unhinged since then. And he published some pretty strong anti-Israel tweets before all this went down—statements that should have been noticed by the SPLC’s investigation. Well, Thompson may not be anti-Semitic, but he’s shown clear signs of being anti-white, as the Anti-Defamation League revealed in their own tweets.  But of course to the SPLC, that’s not bigotry. I wonder if they’d have defended Thompson against charges of anti-Semitism if he was a white Republican male who was just trying to harass his girlfriend by making threats against Jewish community centers.

Bigotry walks among us

July 23, 2016 • 12:45 pm

Even if you think that some of the tactics of the Black Lives Matter movement aren’t optimal for their goals, remember that there is still a point to it all. Racism is alive and well in the U.S. While overt racism is no longer permissible in polite society, it still can go underground and be used to terrorize others.

Here’s a video filmed by Mia Frias-Russell in Campbellsburg, Indiana on Wednesday. She’s alone and scared, and who wouldn’t be to wake up and find this?

h/t: KP

Portland State students fall for a “give Hamas money so we can kill Israeli civilians” scam

May 25, 2016 • 1:30 pm

In this video Ami Horowitz, who does short scam videos along the lines of “Candid Camera”—but with a political theme—approaches students at Portland State University (PSU), asking them to give money to fund Hamas attacks against schools, hospitals and cafes in a campaign to destroy Israel. In other words, he’s asking students to support terrorism. Surprisingly, many students agreed to give money for the murder of civilians. Horowitz has made a number of these videos, including one in which Yale students signed a petition to scrap the First Amendment.

Of course these videos were surely selected from a larger number in which students sloughed him off, but I’m surprised that any student was amenable to Horowitz’s pitch. Peter Boghossian, who works at PSU, has a big job ahead of him!

Now were these students approving terrorism in general, or terrorism against Israeli civilians in particular? Almost certainly the latter. If Horowitz were to say that he was a Christian anti-abortionist and, failing legal success to stop abortion, he was asking for money to send suicide bombers against abortion clinics, he would certainly not have gotten this kind of reaction.

UPDATE: A bit of digging shows that donation wasn’t rare. As The Examiner reports:

Appearing as a guest on the Sean Hannity’s radio show, Horowitz noted that he managed to raise $300 within one hour. He also claimed that at least half of the students he spoke to offered to donate financially.

Yes, this video has been shown by Fox News and touted by The National Review. It’s a sad state of affairs, but telling, when the Right publicizes stuff like this, but the Left ignores it.

h/t: Orli