桜が満開

Once HRW is relying on ICERD to define what racial discrimination is, they must then include the very next paragraph in ICERD, which applies directly to Israel - and which they do not quote in their report.

This Convention shall not apply to distinctions, exclusions, restrictions or preferences made by a State Party to this Convention between citizens and non-citizens.

This one paragraph completely destroys HRW’s “apartheid” argument.

Israeli laws do not distinguish between Israeli Jewish citizens and Israeli Arab citizens. They distinguish between Israeli citizens and non-citizens - which every nation on Earth does.

HRW and others will base their “apartheid” arguments on claims like saying that Jewish “settlers” in the territories have different laws than their Arab neighbors. HRW says that Israeli “policies include limiting the population and political power of Palestinians, granting the right to vote only to Palestinians who live within the borders of Israel as they existed from 1948 to June 1967.” But that is  a lie -  there are thousands of Israeli Arab citizens who live across the Green Line in French Hill, Beit Hanina, Beit Safafa and other communities, who can vote in Israeli elections, just like Israeli Jewish “settlers”  can.

And if someone like, say, Peter Beinart decided to move to Ramallah to prove that Palestinians are wonderful people who wouldn’t murder him, he would not be allowed to vote in Israeli elections even though he is a Jew - because he is not an Israeli citizen.

Virtually every example of discrimination in the HRW report, as well as in other articles that make the claim of “apartheid,” is based not on whether someone is Arab or Jewish, but on whether they are citizens or non-citizens - the exact distinction that the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination made clear is not to be considered racial discrimination.

This one paragraph in the ICERD demolishes their entire 213 page report.

The authors of the Human Rights Watch report definitely knew this when they decided not to quote the other section of the ICERD that they base their entire argument on. 

The Holocaust That Never Happened

by Izabella Tabarovsky

[September 27, 2021] - In the run-up to the 80th anniversary of the Babi Yar massacre, we asked several young Russian-speaking North American Jews to interview Holocaust survivors from the Soviet Union.

The stories they brought back are unlike most of what American Jews’ collective memory of the Holocaust contains. Most take place in the summer and fall of 1941—the chaotic first months of the German-Soviet war and occupation, and the early stage of the Jewish genocide. The Holocaust at this point is far from the well-oiled machine we remember it as. At this point, the most high-tech solution to the “Jewish problem” is still Einsatzgruppen commander Friedrich Jeckeln’s “sardine method” of packing people as tightly as possible in the shooting pits before murdering them.

The absence of streamlined mass murder solutions, however, did not prevent the Germans, their allies, and local collaborators from murdering 2.7 million Jews in these territories. Fewer than 120,000 Jews are estimated to have survived the genocide here.

(…)

Some 250,000 Jews were murdered [in Transnistria, an administrative entity established by the Romanians in southeastern Ukraine] by starvation, brutal forced marches, disease, forced labor, and mass executions. And yet, this horrific place offered an ever-so-slightly higher chance of survival if one was, perhaps, a bit stronger and healthier, a bit more resourceful, and much, much luckier than most. By contrast, virtually no one survived mass shooting events such as Babi Yar in the German-occupied Soviet territories.

(…)

[Efraim Donitz] was only 3 when his family moved to a ghetto in Transnistria some 80 years ago. I doubted he would remember much. But I was wrong. “I remember everything,” he said. “That’s the problem.”

Despite his vivid memories, he spoke of the period like he was giving a history lecture, rather than relaying personal experience. But there were brief moments in which Efraim was overcome with emotion. They happened most frequently when he spoke about how the world remembers—or, rather, doesn’t remember—those events rather than the events themselves.

A few years ago, he and his wife embarked on a pilgrimage through the sites of the occupation. He wanted to show these places to his children and grandchildren because he had been there: “I lost my mother there, and I lost my sister. It’s a part of my life.”

When they were looking for Babi Yar in Kyiv, their tour guide took them to the wrong memorial. For a long time, they couldn’t find a driver who would be willing to take them to the actual site of the massacres. When they finally got there, they found it desecrated. Later, they were told that their tour guide and the drivers likely knew exactly where Babi Yar was, but refused to take them. It made them angry.

Back home in Los Angeles, Efraim tried to get others to hear about it. “I’ve tried everywhere, nobody wants to listen,” he said. He volunteered to teach at the Holocaust museum, and though the museum’s donors appeared very enthusiastic about the idea, he never got a call back.

“I’m just disappointed in the whole thing.” This time, the crack in his demeanor was almost a sob.

Most of the world didn’t have an obligation to remember Babi Yar, he said. But Jews do.

“That is why this is the Holocaust that never happened.”

(…)

The single funniest thing I’ve seen in 2019 (sound on)

COMPLEX_02

RIP James Gandolfini

Outer space, Planet Earth, and the International Space Station (ISS) photographed on 4 October 2018 “by Expedition 56 crew members from a Soyuz spacecraft after undocking” from the ISS. Photo credit: NASA and Roscosmos [6048 x 4032]

ANTISEMITIC BIAS 

Many antisemites don’t consciously dislike Jews. They might even think highly of Jews. For example, they might believe “positive” stereotypes of Jews, such as that Jews are good at business or good with money. They might have Jewish friends. They might like “some” Jews. But they still cause tremendous damage to the Jewish community. 

“Biases” can be defined as “an inclination or prejudice for or against one person or group.”

Unconscious biases are known as implicit biases. We all have implicit biases (whether negative or positive) in the way that we interpret the world around us. Conscious biases (such as, for example, the Nazis outwardly believing that Jews were “the inferior race”) are known as explicit biases.

Because antisemitism is everywhere in our world — in our cultures, our languages, our folklore, our literature, our entertainment, our media, and more — it’s impossible for us not to internalize at least some antisemitic biases. These biases, however, exist on a spectrum: from unconsciously assuming that most Jews are wealthy (implicit bias) to believing the white supremacist conspiracy theory that Jews are enacting a “white genocide” (explicit bias) to everything in between.

Because antisemitism is so old and so deeply embedded into our society and institutions (e.g. religion, language, literature, education, and more), that means that there is a lot of antisemitic bias in our world, most of which you might not even be able to see. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. 

ANTISEMITISM IS A CONSPIRACY ABOUT THE JEWS

Antisemitism can be tricky to spot because it works very differently than every other form of bigotry. While other bigotries see their victims as “inferior,” antisemitism sees Jews as both “inferior” but also “superior” or all-powerful, capable of causing every calamity from wars to natural disasters to diseases to controlling the weather. 

Societies project whatever they dislike most onto the Jews. In the Middle Ages, Jews were Christ-killers. In Nazi Germany and McCarthyist America, Jews were communists. In the Soviet Union, Jews were capitalists. In Nazi Germany and during the rise of the scientific racism period, Jews were the inferior race. To white supremacists, Jews are not white. To left-wing anti-Zionists, Jews are white. For centuries in Europe, Jews were untrustworthy foreigners from Palestine. But today among anti-Zionists, Jews are Europeans colonizing Palestine. We are whatever makes us the perfect scapegoat at any given time. 

It’s no coincidence, then, that antisemitism tends to surge most when societies are in upheaval. After all, the leaders need someone to blame. Examples of this include the Germans’ blaming Jews for Germany’s suffering post-World War I, as well as the rise of the “Deadly Exchange” conspiracy which blames Israel for police brutality in the United States, following George Floyd’s murder. 

Antisemitism moves through conspiracy theories. Most notably, since to the antisemite, Jews are all-powerful, the most prevalent and deeply ingrained antisemitic conspiracies have to do with Jews and wealth and power. In the Middle Ages, for example, Europeans believed that Jews aimed to subvert Christendom. Since the 1920s, antisemitic leaders in the Arab world have rallied their followers behind the conspiracy that Jews intend to destroy Al-Aqsa Mosque and usurp Islamic lands. White supremacists — and far left anti-Zionists — today believe the “Zionist Occupied Government” conspiracy, which accuses Jews of controlling and manipulating the American government for their benefit. 

Given the pervasiveness of conspiracies regarding Jews and power, antisemitism is nearly impossible to address without triggering more antisemitism. If an antisemite faces consequences for their actions, antisemites will use this as “proof” that it’s the all-powerful Jews that have imposed these consequences. This makes antisemitism a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

BIGOTRY WON'T ALWAYS BE OBVIOUS TO YOU

Most of us want to do the right thing. The problem is that bigotry — whether antisemitism or something else — doesn’t come with a flashing neon sign that says “this is bigoted! Call it out!” Instead, bigotry persists because entire societies convince themselves that their bigoted worldview is somehow justified. This is especially true of antisemitism. Antisemites throughout history have long persecuted Jews under the guise of seeking justice. 

For instance, since the Middle Ages, Jews have been periodically persecuted on the accusation that they killed a Christian or Muslim child for ritual purposes. In other words, antisemites were seeking “justice” for these children that the Jews allegedly killed. This antisemitic trope is called “blood libel” and has led to the deaths of millions of Jews. It’s safe to say that these murderous antisemites fully believed that they were doing the “right thing.” Some examples of historic blood libels that have resulted in violence against Jews include the William of Norwich blood libel (1144), the Damascus Affair (1840), and the Kielce Pogrom (1946). 

During the Bubonic Plague, Jews were persecuted under the false accusation that they were “poisoning the wells” and sickening the gentile population of Europe. Once again, the persecution of Jews was seen as just.

During the Nuremberg Trials, high-ranking Nazi officers testified that they believed that Jews were a danger to the safety of the German people and the German nation. In other words, they justified their mass extermination of Jew under the guise of “protecting” the people of Germany. 

The list goes on and on. Is it possible that today you too have been made to believe that violence against Jews — Zionists, Israelis — is a just cause? 

THE NAZI FALLACY

A few years ago, the notorious antisemite Shaun King argued with a Holocaust survivor on Twitter. When accused of antisemitism, he retorted, “I can’t be an antisemite. I fight Nazis every day!” But anyone even remotely familiar with antisemitism or Jewish history will know that Nazis were far from the Jews’ only historic oppressors. You don’t have to be a Nazi to be an antisemite. In fact, most antisemites are not Nazis.Not even close. 

Nazism is just one manifestation of antisemitism. It’s a deadly one, certainly, but it’s also far from the only deadly manifestation of antisemitism. Jews have been killed by the thousands — sometimes by the millions — by a multitude of other oppressors. Some, like the Nazis, the KKK, and other white supremacists, are far-right. Others, like the Soviet Union, are far-left. Others are somewhere in the middle, and others oppressed us so long ago that their ideologies long predate the left-right political spectrum as we know it today.

The horrific images of Nazism and the death camps are seared in the world’s collective memory. It’s easy to think that if it doesn’t look like Nazism, if it doesn’t look like Auschwitz, then it’s not actually antisemitism, or perhaps it could be antisemitism, but it’s not serious antisemitism. In reality, though, antisemitism doesn’t go from zero to Auschwitz. Instead, antisemitic tropes, conspiracies, and stereotypes fester and proliferate, operating under new euphemisms and adapting to whatever society they’re in. Many of the same antisemitic conspiracies that drove the Nazis nearly 100 years ago are the exact same conspiracies that are driving “protestors” to violently harass Jews in the streets of New York City today. 

For many years before the gas chambers, antisemitism in Germany, which once was home to the most assimilated, well-integrated Jewish community in the Diaspora, proliferated in university lecture halls, justified and explained away in academic language. It wasn’t deadly yet, but it soon would be. When you dismiss any sort of antisemitic rhetoric because it doesn’t mirror the deadliest days of the Nazi regime, what you are actually doing is that you are contributing to the sort of hostile, conspiratorial environment that eventually made the Holocaust possible in the first place. 

THE GASLIGHTING

Antisemitism and the gaslighting of Jews go hand in hand. If an antisemite faces consequences for their antisemitism, it simply reinforces their antisemitic beliefs. Because antisemitism always places Jews in the role of oppressor, it’s nearly impossible for Jews to seek accountability or justice without being accused of exaggerating, crying wolf, playing the victim, or otherwise having nefarious intentions. 

After the Holocaust, for example, the second in command at the Red Cross, Carl Jacob Burckhardt, decried the Nuremberg Trials, calling them “Jewish revenge.” Others, like the Palestinian newspaper Falastin, did so as well. 

Antisemitic bias oftentimes makes it impossible for some people to see Jews as victims. If an antisemite loses their job for espousing antisemitism, they will then blame the “powerful” Jews — or Zionists, or another euphemism — for taking their job. In that way, they turn the victim into the victimizer. This is a classic gaslighting tactic, which creates a catch-22 and is one of the reasons antisemitism can be so hard to combat. 

For example, in the lead up to the Holocaust, American isolationists of various political persuasions accused Jews sounding the alarm on the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany of trying to instigate a war with the Germans. 

Sometimes we are even accused of provoking or exaggerating antisemitism for our own benefit. There are a number of conspiracies, for example, that the Zionists worked with the Nazis to instigate the Holocaust to justify the creation of a Jewish state. 

An example of the accusation that Jews play the victim is when we are told that we talk about the Holocaust “too much” — contrary to the statistics that demonstrate people are woefully misinformed about the Holocaust — or that we should move on because we “got reparations” (not exactly true, but that’s a different topic). 

Then there are the accusations that we brought antisemitism or antisemitic violence onto ourselves — something that we’ve seen on a grand scale following the Hamas massacre on October 7. 

WHAT YOU CAN DO

(1) Listen to Jews. I don’t mean just listen to your Jewish friends, or to the Jews you personally agree with. I mean listen to the Jewish community as a whole. Jews don’t often agree on much, but at the end of the day, we are a community, and only the Jewish community can fully describe our own experience. 

Don’t listen just to the Jews who validate your views. Listen to the Jews that challenge you. Don’t shut yourself off from learning because it might contradict whatever ideology you follow. Learning is a lifelong process. I promise you you don’t know everything there is to know about antisemitism (I don’t either! I’m always learning). But it’s your responsibility to open yourself up to new information so that you can do better. 

(2) if Jews are telling you something is antisemitic, then your first instinct should never be to distrust us.Can Jews weaponize accusations of antisemitism? Sure. Anyone can weaponize anything. Is it likely that that’s what’s happening? No. Antisemitism worldwide has skyrocketed to the highest levels since the end of the Holocaust. It’s a very real threat taking lives. You should take accusations of antisemitism just as seriously as you take accusations of other bigotries…even if initially you don’t see it. 

(3) I can’t stress this enough: do your best to educate yourself about antisemitic conspiracies, stereotypes, and tropes throughout history. The euphemisms may change — sometimes we’re “globalists,” other times we’re “Zionists” — but the formula remains the same. To be able to spot antisemitism, you have to learn to spot it. I recommend reading my post “The World’s Oldest Hatred” for more. 

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The best part of this video begins at 11:00 when Dr. Phil interviews two Hamas supporters from the University of Michigan.