ADL Says Palestinian Scarf Equals SWASTIKA

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There is no way that anything in this world can be as bad as the Swastika. The Swastika is a very horrible symbol.

They lost credibility with me years ago when they ignored the actual antisemitism of "woke ideology" putting Jews in the automatic "white privileged" category or even worse the "white adjacent" category which is nonwhite people who are mooching off of white privilege. They did that because the more traditional right-wing antisemitism that was coming out of the MAGA movement was considered the greater evil and as liberals, there were some similarities in ideological outlook.

Equating someone to a Nazi because of their choice of scarf, that is as woke-like as you can get.

What? If there is such a thing as "woke ideology" (which technically there isn't because the word originally meant being woke as in awake, or aware of the structural injustices that exist in society, which is not an ideology) those who consider themselves "woke" are opposed to all injustice and prejudice, including antisemitism.

A Palestinian national symbol is like ...the flag of Germany. Symbol of a nation and not a creed. An emblem of HAMAS (if they have any) would be like "a swastika" because it would be the symbol of a particular pathological creed and faction of that country.

Same with a US flag and a KKK hood and burning cross.

Same with a flag of Israel, and...a "vote for Netanyahu" bumper sticker.

Netanyahu should share a space on the gallows with HAMAS for the privilege of hanging for war crimes.

Not only is he just as bad, BUT he has a long history of aiding and abetting HAMAS and of undermining of the the secular and less violent Palestinian Authority to deliberately undermine the peace process and to prevent any two state solution.

Add to this malfeasance and good helping of dumb incompantant misfeasance and nonfeasance (ignoring intelligence warning about the HAMAS attacks, and keeping troops on the west bank to defend illegal settlers and not redeploying some to defend Israeli citizens on the GAZA border). Or maybe those were deliberate too.
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But having said all of that...if Netanyahu himself were sitting here in the room with us he would probably protest that "the supposedly peace loving secular non fanatic Palestinian authority are actually just as much of a threat as the Fanatical Islamist HAMAS...they just wanna take their time to destroy Israel instead of doing it fast like HAMAS...ergo...thats why we Israelies have to destroy all of Palestine...all factions...ergo the only solution...and please dont call it 'the Final Solution'...is for us Israelis to do ethnic cleansing on Palestine! Drive all Arabs out of the land between the Jordan and the Med...let other countries in both the Arab world and in Europe take them in...and let the Jews have the Holy Land to ourselves cause thats the only realistic way to peace."

So...what about that?

Old Bebe would say "I dont wanna kill em off (genocide), I just wanna drive them all out (ethnic cleansing). Drive their whole population out of both the West Bank and Gaza, and...let other countries around the Mediterranean take them in as refugees.

So...just to be the Devil,and Bebe's, advocate...would that actually be a fair and viable solution?

Should...Palestinian Arabs, and Israeli Jews, in effect, just swap places on the world map? Should we send Palestinian Arabs north to...live in the Warsaw Ghetto? To live in the same neigbhorhoods that the grandparents of the Israeli Jews who fled to Israel...came from? And places like that in both Europe and in the Arab world were both European and Middle Eastern Jews fled from in the mid 20th century ...to populate Israel?

Britain signed the Balfour Resolution in circa 1919 because they agreed with the founders of Zionism that "the Jews will never get along with Gentiles in Europe so the Jews need a homeland". So why shouldnt Europeans just drop the other shoe...and take in the Palestinian Arabs displaced by the Jews fulfilling the Zionist dream?

The result would be...swapping antisemitism against Jews for antisemitism against Arabs. But at least it would sumpin a little different! LOL!

Old Bebe would say "I dont wanna kill em off (genocide), I just wanna drive them all out (ethnic cleansing)

There is no way that anything in this world can be as bad as the Swastika. The Swastika is a very horrible symbol.

I'm sorry but if you find yourself having to nit-pick over the technical definition of genocide, then I have to say that doesn't inspire very much confidence in your arguments. Zionism is, by definition, predicated on the displacement of indigenous Palestinian people (i.e., Palestinian Arabs). It's genocide. Everyone who studies this stuff for a living agrees that it's a genocide. And anti-Israeli violence is not colonialism, it is anti-colonialism. Calling Palestinians the colonizers is pure DARVO.

Well, apparently it's not that impossible, since Barchan just denied it. And I'm denying it. An Iraqi-American Arab and an American-American Jew just denied it so I'm not sure what your definition of "credible" is, here. (also Arabs and Jews are both Semites, helloooo? what the hell is going on in this thread?)

This war is basically Islamphobes vs Antisemites.

Despite so many attempts to deny or minimize this, despite all the attempts to weaponize the word "woke" by nefarious actors there is this way of thinking in the part of "the left". There is this concept of intersectionality which started as a way to describe the reality that if you belong to multiple minority groups your chance of being othered, discriminated against, etc is greater than if you belong to one minority. There was a connection between intersectionality and the original concept of "woke" of being hyperaware. The concept was advanced to putting different groups in the oppressed or oppressor categories. By itself, there is nothing wrong with that. In the "woke" way of thinking you are automatically the oppressed or the oppressor based upon what group you are born into. This connects with the word "privilege". For the most part, it meant gaining unfair advantages because you knew somebody or were born into wealth. In "woke ideology" you are automatically the oppressed or oppressor/privileged based upon the group you belong to. Automatically ascribing negative characteristics such as oppressor and privileged to people based on the groups they were born into is a core part of the definition of bigotry.

This is how the Jews relate to the above. In the 1930s and 1940s, both Jews and Gentiles thought of Jews as a race. Hitler was an extreme example but in America, it created problems also. Quotas against Jews in employment and school admissions, Christian Front gangs inspired by radio preacher Father Charles Coughlin beating up Jews and vandalizing their cemeteries, and celebrity antisemites such as Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford. By the 1960s and 1970s Jews were thought of as a white ethno-religious group. Despite exceptions like Sammy Davis most American Jews especially at that time were Ashkenazi Jews thus lighter skinned thus "white". That was what is now being described as the golden age of the Jewish diaspora. Not perfect There were one-off incidents and schoolyard bullying as I can attest to but Jews and Jewish culture were part of mainstream America. When the "wokeness" started racializing Jews history told me that it would not be a good thing. This has been proven true.

Another characteristic of "wokeness" is to take a non-nuanced view of people primarily judging people by their supposed racism. It often involves a "gotcha" mentality. An example is "offense archeologists" who find an offensive tweet somebody wrote as a teenager and attempt to try and get them fired for it. That is exactly what Jonathan Greenblatt did to the max when he conflated wearing a certain type of scarf with being a Nazi. I called it woke-like instead of woke because "wokeness" is associated with a part of the progressive left. It is despicable and bigoted because it associated Palestinians with Nazis. If you are Jewish you should be the last person making trivial Nazi comparisons.

Why did you post this paragraph when you know full well that it has nothing to do with your point?

Whoopie was rightly condemned by a wide range of folks for her gap in basic education.

The folks who condemned Whoopie ranged from Woke-hating GOPers to actual Woke espousers and every educated person in between in ideology because...what Whoopie said was simply historically inaccurate. Nazism was nothing if not a racist ideology. Their motivation to murder Jews was based upon their belief that Jews were untermenshen ...a subhuman "race" separate from the German Nordic "master race". And Nazism was part of the same movement and was heavily influenced by American racists and by American early 20th century notions of eugenics.

The fact that American racists of the same era had the luxury of hating folks who look different from themselves (ie Blacks) and the Nazis had trouble telling European Jews from European Gentiles without sticking stars of david on the later's clothes doesnt change the fact that the Nazis were motivated by racist beliefs.

I don't know where you acquired your definition of "woke ideology" but it is not correct. To begin with, as I said before, it's not an ideology, it's merely a heightened level of awareness of societal injustice. While there may be individuals who believe what you describe, that is in no way universal nor is it accepted among people who might describe themselves as woke. It's not true that one is either oppressed or oppressor. Everyone is oppressed in various ways except the people who hold real power, and those are very few. One can be a white, straight, cisgender, male, American-born and still be oppressed as a worker, for instance. Or that person can be disabled, poor, an addict, etc. No one escapes being oppressed by the system except for the very very few who have actual power and control in society.

It's also not true that people who describe themselves as woke see Jews as white and therefore privileged. You might recall an incident in which Whoppi Goldberg said on television that Jews were not a race and there was literal uproar from the public and she was, as a result, suspended from the show she co-hosts. That is how strongly that belief is condemned, even among the less woke and more mainstream parts of society, and even more strongly among those calling themselves woke.

It’s only recently that I came across the idea of “Schrödinger’s whites”. This is the notion that Jews are considered to be white or non-white depending on the political perspective of the viewer. To those on the murkier reaches of the far-Right, Jews are not white; indeed their non-whiteness is considered a threat to the purity of whiteness. But to those on the progressive Left, Jews are often considered archetypally white — powerful, privileged, wealthy. Whether you see a Jewish person as white or BAME has more to do with you than it does with them. It’s a matter of perspective.

Imagine you’ve just been accepted to college. You open your welcome packet. It contains the bestseller all first-year students are expected to read: Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility. You flip to a random page and read, “Only whites can be racist.” You flip to another page where you read that to deny being racist is itself evidence of “white fragility.” You wonder what you’re supposed to do in order to not have “white fragility.”

You dutifully read the book.

Your first day arrives. You decorate your room with pictures. Your favorite is the one of you and your extended family in Israel when you were little. Your cousins live in Tel Aviv and you love visiting them. You hang a hamsa above your desk. Your roommate seems nice.

The theme of orientation is “Campus Inclusion.” The first thing you learn about is “microaggressions.” The associate dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion explains that perpetrators of microaggressions are often unaware of the harm they’re causing. They can even have good intentions. But as the handout says, “almost all interracial encounters are prone to microaggressions.”

You were looking forward to meeting people from different backgrounds. You didn’t realize it would be so fraught — you don’t want to perpetrate anything. It never would have occurred to you that asking someone where he’s from could be a microaggression. Or that saying “I believe the most qualified person should get the job” is. Even saying “America is a melting pot” is on the list.

You cringe when you read that it’s a microaggression to say “there is only one race, the human race.” That’s something your grandmother always says. Her father, who survived several concentration camps, used to say that, too. They aren’t racist. But according to the list, it’s also a microaggression to deny being racist.

You wonder whether it’s a microaggression to deny being antisemitic. You look on the list for examples of microaggressions against Jews. There aren’t any.

In your second year, you attend a campus protest against systemic racism. You hear from the Asian American and Pacific Islander Student Union, the Latinx Student Union, the LGBTQIA+ Alliance, the Black Student Union, and the leaders of student government. All of them reiterate in various ways that any system with unequal outcomes is a “white supremacist” system. “We’re either racist or antiracist,” says Sandra, the president of the student government. She adds, quoting this year’s summer reading for all students, Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist: “The claim of ‘not racist’ neutrality is a mask for racism.”

You’re against racism. Now saying you’re “not racist” is not only a microaggression and evidence of white fragility, but is itself racist? It makes your head spin. In any case, you know how evil white supremacy is. Your great-grandparents were unambiguous victims of it. Your grandmother was born in a displaced-persons camp, and most of her extended family were murdered by the Nazis.

“Denial is the heartbeat of racism,” Sandra says before closing, again quoting Kendi. She adds something about being a true “ally” and antiracist, accepting her own racism, “doing the work,” and standing in solidarity with all movements for liberation and self-determination.

In your third year, you take a class called “Privilege, Domination, and Oppression” to fulfill the college’s new diversity requirement. You learn that being white, heterosexual, cisgender, middle class, and able-bodied are all associated with privilege, oppression, and domination. Belonging to an opposing category means you have a “marginalized identity” and that you are, definitionally, oppressed. You’re all supposed to define your own “intersectionality” and, if you have “multiple marginalized identities,” understand that you experience “multiple forms of oppression.”

The week before your Privilege, Domination, and Oppression final, you’re assigned two articles: one about how Jews “became white” and another about an Orthodox woman who wanted a divorce, but her abusive husband refused to provide the get (a Jewish divorce). Her rabbi didn’t help at all; instead, he told her that the wife’s responsibility was shalom bayit, making peace in the home.

During the discussion, a student named Feigah objects. She is the daughter of an Orthodox rabbi. Domestic abuse, she points out, happens across all cultures. Why has the topic been covered only with respect to Jews? Furthermore, while certainly there are exceptions, victims of domestic abuse can find help in Jewish communities. And men who try to withhold a get are not generally aided by rabbis. Plus, shalom bayit is not the sole responsibility of women. This lesson conveys all kinds of false concepts about Jews and Judaism.

For the entire semester, she adds, the class has discussed intersectionality, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, ableism, fat-shaming, and the marginalization and oppression of black people, indigenous people, and other people of color. Yet, in a class about oppression, antisemitism wasn’t even covered. Members of her community have been violently attacked on the streets for being Jews, and not by white supremacists. But none of this was included in the material.

In your final year, your first-year roommate invites you to an event co-hosted by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). As you arrive, the speakers are promoting the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions proposal that the student government is considering, and volunteers are handing out a petition to prevent the campus police from being trained in Israel.

Someone asks, “The campus police are being trained in Israel?” The head of JVP flips over a copy of the petition and holds it up. On the back is a cartoon of an Israeli soldier and an American police officer, each with an arm around the other’s shoulder. They are deploying the same knee-on-the-neck technique that was used on George Floyd — the Israeli soldier on a Palestinian, the American cop on a black man. “This petition is a precaution,” the JVP leader says. “We don’t want to wait until they’re already doing it.”

Someone asks, “What about Palestinian terrorism?”

The room goes quiet. The head of SJP addresses the crowd. Palestinians, he insists, unlike racist, “transnational” Zionists, do not have an army. Whatever Palestinians do in their struggle for their liberation and rights is necessary. Labeling their actions “terrorism,” he says, is the white, colonialist, imperialist propaganda of an illegitimate, apartheid country.

As people disperse, you express your angst to a Jewish friend about how Israel and Jews are sometimes depicted on campus. She stops and puts her hand on your arm. “You know how Robin DiAngelo says she wants to be ‘less white’ — meaning she wants to be ‘less oppressive’? We should be less white, too.”

I tell this story — a composite account based on real trainings, classes, resources, and the experiences of actual students — because some readers may not fully understand the extent to which our universities are promoting and exporting a certain kind of indoctrination, one that has especially profound consequences for Jews.

Why Jews in particular? Because current social justice ideology (“critical social justice”) is heavily influenced by critical theory of various kinds, including critical race theory (CRT). Despite its laudable goal of opposing racism and white supremacy, CRT relies on narratives of greed, appropriation, unmerited privilege, and hidden power — themes strikingly reminiscent of familiar anti-Jewish conspiracy theories.

To make matters worse, the expectation of solidarity between social justice allies allows anti-Zionists to use the latent antisemitic themes of CRT to propagate a false narrative about Israel without opposition from within the movement. This magnifies the existing anti-Jewish nature of the social justice project.

The subtlety is that, instead of targeting Jews directly, the target of critical social justice is “whiteness.” But this does nothing to protect Jews. In 2018, when Hasidic Jews were victims of a wave of violent attacks — a precursor to another cluster of bloody attacks to come a year later — Mark Winston Griffith, the executive director of the Black Movement Center in Crown Heights, told The Forward that some black Americans see Judaism as “a form of almost hyper-whiteness.”

Race is the locus of power in the critical social justice worldview, which holds that the dominant group — white people — will, when it serves their interests, conditionally invite minority groups into “whiteness.” When people (such as “light-skinned Jews”) can “gain the benefits of whiteness by dropping ethnic markers of difference,” as California’s Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum teaches, those people gain “conditional whiteness.”

The above is from the lesson, “Jewish Americans: Identity, Intersectionality, and Complicating Ideas of Race,” which instructs students that, “to the present day,” Jews continue to change their names (in other words, drop ethnic markers) and benefit from whiteness. At a time when the moral imperative is to “be less white,” there is no identity more pernicious than that of a once powerless minority group that, rather than joining the struggle to dismantle whiteness, opted into it.

In the critical social justice paradigm, that is how Jews are viewed. Jews, who have never been seen as white by those for whom being white is a moral good, are now seen as white by those for whom whiteness is an unmitigated evil. This reflects the nature of antisemitism: No matter the grievance or the identity of the aggrieved, Jews are held responsible. Critical race theory does not merely make it easy to demonize Jews using the language of social justice; it makes it difficult not to.

This is not merely theoretical. The CRT lens, and the theories with which it is suffused, are brought into corporations and nonprofits through diversity trainings and imposed on students across the country through campus activism, student-life programming, and even course curricula.

One “critically informed” social-work curriculum teaches that the notion of Jews “pulling themselves up by their bootstraps” is a “myth.” Instead, having “become white,” Jews benefited from federal programs that allowed “Jews and other European immigrants to be recognized or rewarded.” In other words, these social-work students are not taught that antisemitism is a conspiracy theory about Jews gaining unmerited success and power. They are taught that Jews, having been initiated into whiteness, have gained unmerited success and power.

Why does current social justice theory target Jews?

According to Kendi, the leading scholar of antiracism, “racial inequity is evidence of racist policy,” and “racial inequity over a certain threshold” should be “unconstitutional.” This obviously presents a particular problem for Jews, who represent roughly 2 percent of the U.S. population. A much higher proportion of Jews than non-Jews attend college. Jews represent an outsize share of winners of major awards, like Nobel prizes. As of 2020, seven of the 20 wealthiest Americans were Jewish. In virtually every major American industry and institution, Jews hold leadership roles disproportionate to their overall demographic numbers.

American Jews have generally looked upon Jewish success in the United States as evidence of the country’s fundamental (if far from fully realized) commitment to the principles of tolerance, fair play, and recognition of individual merit. But, according to critical social justice ideology, that explanation is not just false. It’s racist. Jewish success can be explained only by Jewish collusion with white supremacy.

Again, this is no accident. Critical social justice is not an extension of liberal or progressive politics, or even a critique of such politics. It is, as its more sophisticated proponents readily admit, a form of anti-liberalism. In Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic explain that “unlike traditional civil rights, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.” Concepts like the rule of law, merit, reason, knowledge, and even truth are seen as fictions constructed by the “white cisheteropatriarchy” that are used to perpetuate injustices against BIPOC groups (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color).

Simply put, the “critical social justice” movement, informed by critical theory, represents an assault not just on core concepts of liberal democracy, but also on the epistemology that undergirds it. That’s something that ought to concern anyone, Jewish or not, who cares deeply for freedom and reason. And it should also concern everyone who wants to see true social justice succeed.

The American linguist and political commentator John McWhorter coined the term “Woke Racism” to refer to the latest wave of elite, radical, “anti-racist” campaigners who posit that racism is so deeply embedded in the fabric of American life that it’s impervious to traditional civil rights and anti-racist legislation.

In order to level the playing field, liberal democratic systems of government – which aren’t up to the Utopian task of achieving perfect racial parity – must be radically re-constituted to allow for what Ibram X. Kendi, author of “How To Be An Anti-Racist,” refers to un-ironically as “anti-racist discrimination” against groups who are “disproportionately successful.”

The only thing that matters to such campaigners is the racial disparity in economic and social outcomes, which is viewed as sufficient evidence to demonstrate racism. Not only are all other possible factors for unequal results ignored, but it’s considered racist to even consider other explanations.

Thus, “privileged” whites and those labeled as “white adjacent” must accept a future where they will face “progressive bigotry” until there’s complete racial parity in all areas of life.

Though the proponents of this “Woke Racism” typically focus only on the Black-White paradigm, the question of where Jews (and other successful, yet historically disadvantaged minorities) stand within this racial binary is rarely prominent within the public discourse.

In a chapter in his masterful and urgent book, David L. Bernstein recounts a story about a Jewish friend who grew up poor, lost his father as a young child, was the target of antisemitic abuse in school and struggled with dyslexia. However, after working his way through college, he managed to earn his MBA and land a job a at a major consulting firm, where he worked diligently and received several promotions.

After the murder of George Floyd, his company decided, in order to advance the values of “equity and inclusion” (DEI), to make major staff changes. One of the changes involved the CEO’s decision to lay off over-represented, white staff and to hire more people from “marginalized communities.”

One of the employees fired as the result of this racial restructuring was David’s friend, who, despite his under-privileged background, had become – in the eyes of the dominant DEI orthodoxy – a privileged white man. As Bernstein observed, “taken to its logical conclusion, the woke ideologue’s approach to equity” will, in the workplace, university and elsewhere, inevitably have this kind of impact on Jews.

The problem with Woke orthodoxy, Bernstein explains, in his thorough analysis – which includes his first-hand experience as a Jewish communal leader dealing with its growing acceptance by Jewish day schools and organisations, and his work as director of the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values (JILV) – is a racial essentialism which reduces people to oppressed people of colour and privileged white oppressors.

Within this Manichean framing, Jews, despite being an historically oppressed minority and framed as non-white or even enemies of the “white race” by neo-Nazis and other far-right anti-Semites, are typically categorized as “white” or “white adjacent.”

The role to which the Woke left has assigned Jews is to acknowledge their privilege and their contribution to white supremacy, and become “white allies” for the truly oppressed racial minorities. As Bernstein writes: “If someone is kept down because of white supremacy, someone else must have been propped up by it.” It follows, he adds, that “Jews will be seen as profiting at the expense of Black people.” Merit, in the eyes of the Woke left, is an illusion designed to legitimize the racist system.

Whilst anti-Semitic incidents are highest among the religiously motivated in the US, an unprecedented rise in anti-Semitism is also being seen in the UK. A recent HJS report identified a 173 percent rise in anti-Semitic incidents over the last five years in schools across the country. But where are the throngs of protestors against the climbing intolerance? Why is it that, in the age of anti-racism, the longest-standing victim group in the world has the smallest support base?

The writer and comedian David Baddiel is right: the title of his book is “Jews Don’t Count”. Why not? Because they are not the right kind of victim: too white, and perceived to be too rich and too powerful. Contemporary anti-Semitism is drawing on centuries-old bigotry, its hardy spores impenetrable to “progressive” elements.

The present woke agenda dictates that “white people” are blessed with “white privilege” and therefore cannot suffer racism. The extreme Left dictates that not only do white people enjoy wealth and power, but they are also intent on dominating minorities of colour since they are embedded in institutions. By such a rationale, the Jewish community is the epitome of the stereotypical oppressor. Yet here is the Jewish community, branded by the far-Left as white oppressors, suffering the highest levels of discrimination of any religious minority group in the US.