Biden Capitulates to Left Again on Antisemitism
As published in Newsmax.
August 8, 2023.
Blowing a smokescreen to empower antisemites, the Biden Administration recently unveiled a plan to counter the surge in antisemitism in America.
Biden’s "National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism” (NSCA) includes recommendations for Holocaust education and partnerships with institutions to combat antisemitism. However, it condones contemporary antisemitism in the form of anti-Zionism directed at the Jewish collective, Israel, and promotes diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) training, which describes Jews as “white supremacists.” Additionally, the plan is often non-specific to antisemitism, directed at "all forms of hate."
Instead of specifying the uniqueness of antisemitism and promoting the nearly universally accepted International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism, Biden’s “strategy” deliberately includes the Nexus Document and the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, both promoted by the Left.
The unbiased, apolitical IHRA definition, adopted by more than half of U.S. states, federal agencies, 40 countries and over 1,000 international organizations, clearly states “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country is not antisemitic.” However, criticism becomes antisemitic when, for example, it denies the Jewish people their right to self-determination in their ancient homeland, demonizes and delegitimizes Israel as a racist endeavor, holds the Jewish state to a double standard applied to no other country or draws comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany.
The Nexus and Jerusalem Declaration definitions exclude behavior that the Left embraces to attack Israel and, ultimately, Jews. The Nexus definition states that “paying disproportionate attention to Israel and treating Israel differently than other countries is not prima facie proof of antisemitism.” The Jerusalem Declaration insists that the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement (BDS) is not antisemitic despite its advocating for the elimination of the Jewish state, denying its right to exist and uniquely singling out Israel as colonial and apartheid.
Noted scholar Harvard Professor Emeritus Ruth Wisse accuses the NSCA of not addressing the obvious domestic sources of today’s antisemitism —anti-Zionist attacks from the Left and the Muslim and black communities — while fixating on the fringe far right as the primary source of current Jew-hatred.
No one excuses far-right antisemites, but those disgusting haters are few in number, grounded in easily identified neo-Nazi viewpoints. They are powerless in our society and are summarily rejected. On the other hand, Jew-haters on the Left now control our schools, the media, the entertainment industry and other major institutions, determining what is expressed and institutionalized.
Wisse puts it succinctly: “There are no known neo-Nazis in the BDS movement, in campus Israel-apartheid campaigns, radical mosques and churches, or at the New York Times. Neo-Nazis do not run anti-Israel Middle East programs or excite anti-Jewish sectors of African American and Muslim communities. They do not promote anti-Israel resolutions in Congress.”
Influential Muslim and black opinion makers spread toxic, poisonous Jew-hatred — Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Alice Walker, Louis Farrakhan, Kanye West, the Democratic Black Caucus and Black Lives Matter, to name a few. Days ago, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the 103-member Congressional Progressive Caucus, libeled Israel as a “racist state.”
Yet Biden’s strategy includes Muslims and blacks as fellow victims of white supremacist bigotry, while ignoring their antisemitism.
College Jew-hatred is incited by campus Muslim groups. Fatima Mousa Mohammed, keynote student speaker at the City University of New York's law school graduation, called for a "fight against capitalism, racism, imperialism and Zionism" and a “revolution” against “indiscriminate murder” perpetrated by Israel. On social media, she wished "every Zionist burn in the hottest pit of hell." Campus anti-Zionism is de rigueur, falsely demonizing Israel as a surrogate for apartheid South Africa and as the quintessence of Western colonialism and imperialism.
As Rabbi Dov Fischer noted, “If the ‘N-word’ once was the noun of bigoted hate, today it is the ‘Z- word’: Zionism.”
When the White House went looking for help in formulating the definition of antisemitism and programs to combat it, it reached out to none other than CAIR — an organization that peddles antisemitic tropes and hatred of Israel and defended Fatima Mousa Mohammed’s tirade.
CAIR’s co-founder and executive director, Nihad Awad, has called Israel a "terrorist state."
He has a decades-long history of supporting Hamas and worked as public relations director for the Islamic Association of Palestine, which claimed "the only way to liberate Palestine, all of Palestine, is the path of Jihad."
Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) commented, “I’m disappointed and appalled that CAIR played any role in the U.S. national strategy to counter antisemitism….We must not open the door to severing the connection between Jew-hatred and Israel-hatred.”
The Biden antisemitism strategy promotes the DEI agenda of racial preferences and equal outcomes in every governmental agency, schools, corporations and cultural institutions.
DEI is an ideology based on critical race theory which stereotypes the Jews as “privileged white supremacists” who use their “powerful whiteness” to usurp control of our institutions to oppress black and brown people in America and the Middle East. In the DEI/intersectional worldview, Jews have stolen victimhood from more deserving groups. Zionism is defamed as a racist totem where white Jewish supremacists have seized the land from powerless Muslim Arabs, labeled “people of color.”
Never mind that the Jews are the indigenous people of the area, with more than half of Israelis being Middle Eastern and North African Jews, most darker-skinned than many Arabs.
Last December, the Heritage Foundation observed that “DEI staff have an obsessive and irrational animus toward the Jewish state,” repeatedly using “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” “apartheid” and “targeting children” in conjunction with Israel.
According to Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Clifford May, “In the 20th century, those who sought to eliminate Jews called themselves antisemites. In the 21st century, those who seek to eliminate the Jewish state call themselves ‘social justice warriors,’ scholars, and peacemakers.”
The "National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism” is a dangerous farce, catering to the very people who incite today’s antisemitism.
Ruth Wisse reminds us that the Biden plan “points us away from the greatest dangers to the Jews, and back to pursuing the villains America once defeated.”
President Biden, through this sleight-of-hand, has failed in his duty to ensure that Jew-hatred has no place in mainstream American culture.
