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Tuesday, November 27, 2018

First They Came for Confederate Generals, Then for Black Conservatives

By On November 27, 2018
The Benjamin Carson High School of Science and Medicine near the Detroit Medical Center has an ambitious program of preparing its mostly African-American students for careers in medicine.

Students from Ben Carson High recently toured a hospital and experienced what it’s like to be doctors.

The school’s name, in its own words, honors “Dr. Benjamin Carson whose journey from impoverished, inner-city Detroit youth to acclaimed neurosurgeon is remarkable and is a constant reminder to Benjamin Carson students that their career dreams are achievable.”

Or maybe not.

The Detroit school board voted to rename the school under guidelines that say a school can be renamed when it doesn’t reflect the student population or when “information newly discovered about the current name of the school is negative in nature.”

LaMar Lemmons, a Democrat, was the leading advocate for removing Ben Carson's name from the school. Lemmons, who along with his wife, Georgia Lemmons, sits on the school board, has used his position to blame Michigan’s emergency managers for all of Detroit’s self-created problems.

Lemmons, a “Bernie-crat”, also got his completely unprepared sister-in-law elected to the State Senate.

“Quite frankly, it is a political thing,” he admitted. “We named a school after an individual who is in the Trump administration.”

The Democrat insisted that having a medical sciences school named after a brilliant African-American surgeon from Detroit was “synonymous with having Trump’s name on our school in blackface.”

“When you align yourself with Trump, that is a direct affront to the city of Detroit and the students of Detroit,” he insisted.

If the name change goes forward, it may be the first instance of a school being renamed because it was named after a Republican.

Lemmons is okay with a school being named after a white slaveholder, but not a black conservative.

“Lewis Cass was a slaveholder,” Lemmons said. “But I would never recommend changing the name of Cass.”

Also on the nomenclature chopping block, for unclear reasons, is the Frederick Douglass Academy for Young Men.

Ben Carson isn’t the only African-American conservative being targeted by the renaming squad.

Last month, a petition to change the name of Savannah College of Art and Design's Clarence Thomas Center for Historic Preservation received favorable media coverage.

The petition was put forward by a former student named Sage Lucero. Clarence Thomas is the grandson of sharecroppers from rural Georgia. Lucero is a Brooklyn hipster and junior copywriter.

Lucero's illiterate petition demanded that the Center be renamed after Anita Hill, "A woman who stood up for herself despite being denied of true justice."

She ranted that Justice Thomas "wrongfully won against a woman’s word."

The building was named after Thomas because he had served there as an altar boy.

Instead of filing the petition in the internet’s underwear drawer, the media hurriedly amplified the white leftist’s grievance against the highest ranking African-American judge in the country. One media outlet breathlessly reported that the petition had over 500 signatures. And then actually interviewed Sage.

The president of the Savannah College of Art and Design (or, as Sage put it, “one of the president’s”) actually contacted her about her ridiculously ignorant petition.

“I don’t want any other female who has hopes and dreams to have to walk through the doors of that building," Lucero, who lives in New York, insisted.

She also claimed that “many of the students feel unsafe about the building” and that she wanted to start a conversation about “diversity” by taking a black man’s name off a building.

When Lamar Bowman wrote a counter-petition that received over 20,000 signatures, no one in the media interviewed him to learn why he thought that Thomas’ presence on campus spoke of its “dedication to the struggles and achievements of millions of African Americans.”

Or why he wrote that Thomas’ story “is one that I want my children to know and understand.”

Lamar’s story, like Thomas’ story and Carson’s story, is not the story that the media is interested in.

It took protests from Capitol Hill for Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture to include Clarence Thomas. But not before it had included Colin Kaepernick and Anita Hill.

When the renaming cultural revolution took off, it was under the guise of fighting racism. And now it’s come full circle to fighting against the legacy of conservative African-Americans.

The parade of renamings has drifted into the realm of the ridiculous. In Portland, Lynch Meadows, Lynch Wood and Lynch View elementary schools were renamed because they had the word, "Lynch" in them. The schools were named after Patrick Lynch, a berry farmer, who donated some land to build schools.

Renaming schools named after a berry farmer, who shares a last name with former Attorney General Loretta Lynch and numerous other African-Americans, has nothing to do with fighting racism.

It’s political correctness.

Political correctness doesn’t actually fight racism. It only pretends to do so, exploiting outrage over racism to justify its power grabs. The point of renaming a school named Lynch isn’t to fight racism, but to wield the power to rename schools. Renaming educational institutions and buildings named after African-American conservatives however is the core purpose for which that power is truly wielded.

The renaming revolution was not about fighting dead Confederate generals. It was a convenient pretext for legitimizing a politically correct purge. Outrage over racism and slavery was used to build a movement whose ultimate targets were not dead 19th century rebels, but living conservatives.

Including the greatest threat of them all, African-American conservatives.

Political correctness doesn’t fight discrimination. It implements it. And its machine for suppressing intellectual diversity inevitably reaches the same African-Americans, women, gay people and others whom it claims to be protecting from discrimination when they dissent from political correctness.

The Left begins by fighting racism and then implements it.

African-Americans are the group most frequently abused as a pretext for political correctness, and so African-American conservatives pose the greatest threat to the power of political correctness.

The existence of a Clarence Thomas or a Ben Carson undermines the ideological infrastructure that has been used to silence hundreds of millions of Americans in the name of millions of African-Americans who never sought such a silencing. The renamings don’t just attack Carson or Thomas as individuals, they erase their existence. This political genocide removes people whom the Left thinks shouldn’t exist.

Political correctness exploits the suffering, the history and the bodies of African-Americans to suppress other African-Americans. While it divides the country along racial lines, it also divides racial groups internally, putting its activists in charge of forcing African-Americans into conformity with the Left.

Black leftist activists are given power by white leftists in order to keep other African-Americans in line

Erasing Thomas and Carson also erases the identities of countless African-American conservatives, the history of African-American conservatism, and the values of African-American conservatism.

It tells the students at Benjamin Carson High School of Science and Medicine that they shouldn’t learn from his journey or adopt his values. They shouldn’t aspire to be successful surgeons, but aggrieved victims whose only purpose is to serve as foot soldiers in the culture wars of their leftist masters.

The Left is not really at war with the unalterable past. It is at war with the future.

The students at Benjamin Carson High and at the Savannah College of Art and Design are that future. By destroying the past and present of African-American conservatism, the Left hopes to destroy its future.




Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

Sunday, November 25, 2018

Fake Orthodox Jews Against Trump

By On November 25, 2018
You could find Rabbi Mike Moskowitz protesting for illegal aliens at “Moral Mincha” rallies organized by Torah Trumps Hate (TTH) and Hitoreri: An Orthodox Movement for Social Change.

Both lefty groups claim to be Orthodox Jewish organizations and with his black hat, dark suit and black beard, “Rabbi” Mike Moskowitz certainly looks the part of a real Orthodox Rabbi.

But he’s as real as Hitoreri and Torah Trumps Hate.

“Rabbi” Moskowitz is actually employed by Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, a gay non-Orthodox institution. Its clerical leader, “Rabbi” Sharon Kleinbaum, was ordained by the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, a movement that rejects the idea of both God and the Torah. While Beit Simchat Torah’s views aren’t unusual within its movement, its anti-Israel politics have made it controversial.

During a previous war with Hamas, an exodus of pro-Israel members occurred at Beit Simchat Torah after it was caught praying for Hamas terrorists and hosting BDS bigots.

“Recent events have demonstrated that CBST is far more committed to a progressive political agenda than to the Jewish people,” Bryan Bridges, a former board member, wrote. “I couldn’t imagine raising a child in this congregation, and have that child hear, just before we recite Kaddish, the names of people who are trying to kill her grandparents.”

Bridges has higher standards than “Rabbi” Mike Moskowitz who collaborates with the institution as its “scholar-in-residence for Trans and Queer Jewish Studies”. Pro-Israel gay leaders have condemned Beit Simchat Torah’s collusion with Islamic homophobia and anti-Semitism.

Joining CBST’s clergy isn’t just an endorsement of gay rights, but of radical leftist and anti-Israel politics.

Mike Moskowitz is often wrongly described as an Orthodox Rabbi, his own site states that, “Rabbi Moskowitz was assigned secular, then identified as ultra-orthodox for but twenty years, and now embraces a religiously non-conforming identity.”

A Jewish Week article photo shows him with a clean shave and no black hat. A note in the article mentions that, “his old black hat” makes its appearance “when necessary”.

That apparently includes Hitoreri and Torah Trumps Hate rallies where the costume gives people the impression that they brought an Orthodox Rabbi out to protest Trump and Republicans.

Like Moskowitz, Hitoreri and Torah Trumps Hate are inauthentic and collaborate with anti-Israel hate groups.

Torah Trumps Hate is described as “a community of orthodox and orthodox-friendly Jews” who are part of the “resistance” to the results of the 2016 election. “Orthodox-friendly” is not Orthodox.

Elad Nehorai, a leading Torah Trumps Hate figure, admitted that the group was run by “Victoria Cook, a woman who doesn’t consider herself Orthodox anymore.” Cook has said that she doesn’t believe in G-d and had co-produced Screwed, a documentary “about pornographer Al Goldstein”.

Cook, an entertainment lawyer, is still described as Torah Trumps Hate’s “founder and leader” on its site while “leading Torah Trumps Hate into a future of activism and public-facing political actions.”

An organization claiming to represent Orthodox Jews is being led by someone who isn’t Orthodox.

It’s calling itself Torah Trumps Hate even though its leader and founder doesn’t believe in Torah.

Nehorai, TTH’s other key figure, is a lefty hipster who drifted around Chabad for a few years before breaking with the movement and getting a “quick”, “simple” rabbinic ordination that “mostly happened over email”. Nehorai has admitted, "I wasn’t an expert in Shabbat or Kashrut (laws of kosher food) or Niddah (marriage laws)," but, "I was an authority of my own Torah."

At an event in support of the March for Racial Justice, Cook claimed, “We are diverse”. Including, "those who are observant in other ways, to those like me who are OTD [off the derech, or lapsed Jews]."

Torah Trumps Hate appeared at the pro-black nationalist event along with Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Israel and pro-terrorist BDS hate group that has flirted with outright anti-Semitism.

Also, there was Farrakhan supporter, Linda Sarsour, who had urged Muslims to dehumanize Jews. At the rally, Sarsour warned, "we will not be intimidated by right-wing Zionists, by white supremacists, by racists."

On Twitter, Elad Nehorai claimed that "Calling out Farrakhan after Pittsburgh” is “also a sickening attempt to create racial division.”

Hitoreri was co-founded by Rebecca Krevat, a lefty feminist activist who called Birthright Israel, "rape culture".

Krevat has repeatedly retweeted attacks on Israel by anti-Israel activists. She also retweeted Linda Sarsour. Like Moskowitz, she worked with Uri L’Tzedek, a pseudo-orthodox group that serves as an incubator of lefty activists. And she co-authored at least one piece with Moskowitz.

Despite occasionally claiming to be Orthodox, Krevat largely retweets non-Orthodox clergy. There is nothing “Orthodox” in the lifestyle that she displays on her social media accounts. Over the summer, she tweeted about “feeling so inspired” at visiting the hateful premises of Beit Simchat Torah.

“This gorgeous shul embodies hospitality&inclusivity,” she tweeted about a place that its pro-Israel members are fleeing because it embodies support for terrorism and the murder of Jews.

Torah Trumps Hate and Hitoreri, which often appear to be interchangeable, recently attacked the National Council of Young Israel for praising President Trump’s condemnation of anti-Semitism. Its Moral Mincha attacked the Orthodox Union for honoring Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Its activism borrows the style of anti-Israel hate groups such as If Not Now which targets legitimate Jewish organizations in support of radical lefty causes. The protests are invariably deserted. On one video, Mike Moskowitz can be seen lecturing about the suffering of illegal aliens to what appears to be an audience of two women. Torah Trumps Hate and Hitoreri’s petitions struggle to reach 200 signatures.

These “Orthodox” Jewish protests suffer from a distinct shortage of Orthodox Jews. Their key figures are processed through the same pipeline of professional social justice groups. Their rants about white people and recitation of party line causes are equally interchangeable. But they are meeting a demand.

The demand does not come within the largely conservative Orthodox Jewish community. Instead it comes from lefty groups which have seen the rising Orthodox demographics and seek to hijack its voice for their causes. They are backing and promoting fake Orthodox social justice movements that do not represent and do not speak to the conservative values of a religious and traditional Jewish community.

“While we need the outside world to see that observant Jews have not lost their moral compass, we also want the bullying voices within the Jewish community to no longer be so sure that they have a majority of support,” Victoria Cook declared.

Victoria Cook, by her own admission, is not an observant Jew and does not believe in God.

Her activists are the ones trying to bully Orthodox Jews into remaining silent. They are targeting Orthodox Jewish organizations that represent hundreds of thousands of religious Jews. And they are doing it while collaborating with lefty anti-Semites in a profoundly anti-Semitic movement.

Fake Orthodox Jews campaigning against Trump would not have a fraction of the attention without a fake news media that gives them millions of dollars worth of unearned publicity.

The truth was always easy to find.



Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

Friday, November 23, 2018

How Ohio Democrat Corruption Killed a Black Woman

By On November 23, 2018
On the way back from a funeral, Judge Lance Mason beat his wife so badly that he broke her orbital socket. A woman who called 911 had described a horrifying scene of “fists flying” inside the car.

Their two children, ages 4 and 6, were in the SUV when their father assaulted their mother, choked her and bit her on the ear and the cheek. According to Aisha, Judge Mason "struck me in the face, yanked my hair, slammed my head into the dashboard and armrest of the car."

She later called the police, telling them, "I'm afraid he's going to hurt my daughters.”

Aisha had to be hospitalized and required reconstructive surgery to repair the damage to her face.

When the cops came to arrest Judge Mason, they found semi-automatic rifles, 2,500 rounds of ammunition, a bulletproof vest and a sword.

Judge Mason wasn’t just anybody. He had deep roots in the local Democrat machine. He had been appointed to the bench by Governor Ted Strickland. Before that he had worked as a district director for Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, his mentor. Then he wrangled an appointment to the Ohio State House, and moved on to the State Senate, where he became notable for opposing a bill regulating strip clubs.

When Governor Strickland appointed Mason, the Democrat claimed that the future domestic abuser’s experience in politics “will make him an effective and respected judge." Mason claimed that he wanted to be a judge for the sake of his family. “I've got to get home and help out my wife with my baby.”

The huge pay bump to $121,350 probably didn’t play a role for this devoted family man.

Despite his horrific crime, Mason was still able to call on the support of numerous Ohio Democrats, including Rep. Marcia Fudge, who wrote a letter in his defense, claiming, “Lance Mason is a good man who made a very bad mistake. I can only hope you can see in Lance what I and others see.”

The Ohio Supreme Court had to assign a special judge to hear the case after Mason’s colleagues recused themselves. Judge Mason attempted to avoid jail time in a move that the assistant county prosecutor described as a statement conveying that, “I'm special; I'm not like the other people”.

Despite the prejudiced assumptions of white liberals, Mason came from a privileged background. His father had been a doctor and his cousin a lawyer. A profile written during his Capitol Hill days describes him as being “torn between a career in medicine or law”.

Judge Mason couldn’t escape jail. He was sentenced to two years. But when he got out, the Ohio Democratic party did not abandon its favorite son. Instead Ohio Dems, who condemned President Trump for not caring about “women’s rights”, gave him a plum position as the Minority Business Development Administrator for Cleveland despite beating his wife so badly she needed surgery.

Then she was murdered.

The body of Aisha Fraser, a beloved teacher at Woodbury Elementary, and the mother of a daughter with Down syndrome, was found, stabbed to death, in the driveway of her home.

Mason was reportedly caught trying to flee the scene. He struck a police officer with his car and rammed into the police car hard enough to disable both cars.

The officer suffered injuries to his legs and ribs.

And then Cleveland finally fired its monster.

Mayor Frank Jackson defended hiring Mason as part of Cleveland’s second-chance for felons program. “We hire many ex-felons and almost all of them turn out well because we have second chance as a part of what we do as a policy in the City of Cleveland,” the Democrat insisted.

In an interview, Mayor Jackson suggested that domestic violence cases were too complex to lay blame.

He claimed that murderers and drug dealers, "have come to work for the city of Cleveland and they have done quite well for us." Even people convicted of “public corruption” are being employed by Cleveland.

They include City Council member Sabra T. Pierce Scott who was sentenced to probation for soliciting a job for her son and taking a bribe from a contractor, before being hired as Cleveland's first director of quality control and performance management at a $95,000 salary. Scott is a Democrat.

Scott’s son was shot by a police officer after allegedly reaching for a gun.

Mayor Jackson personally swore in a politician who had been found guilty in the biggest corruption scandal in the region, aiding a $125 million project for corrupt reasons. Scott had escaped with a slap on the wrist, teaching ethics to high school students, before landing a top government job.

Mason had also gotten a virtual slap on the wrist.

He had been indicted on charges of kidnapping for driving away with the children after throwing his wife out of the car, and on charges of domestic violence, felonious assault, attempted felonious assault and child endangerment. But all he did was plead guilty to domestic violence and attempted felonious assault. And then in a short time, he was out and back working for his corrupt political organization.

Like Mason, Scott had benefited from the patronage of her party, with current and former Democrat council members showing up to support her at her sentencing hearing. Democrat politicians had used programs meant to help released convicts looking for a fresh start to employ their own criminals.

Mayor Jackson had personally hired Mason and admitted he knew him because of his relationship with fellow Democrat, Rep. Tubbs. It was rumored that Jackson had hired Mason as a favor to Rep. Marcia Fudge, a top Democrat currently running against Rep. Nancy Pelosi to serve as Speaker of the House.

Rep. Fudge had endorsed Mayor Jackson, but denies that she pulled any political strings for Mason. She claimed that by reporting on the story, the media is guilty of the “traumatization and victimization of Mr. Mason's family”. That family would not include Aisha Fraser, whom Mason allegedly murdered.

Her concern for the two surviving children is as transparently phony as Mayor Jackson’s condolences.

The simple and ugly truth of the Mason case is that he benefited from Democrat political privilege. But in Mason’s case, the Democrats were not satisfied with protecting crooks and instead decided to cover for a monster because, no matter what he did or whom he hurt, he was a Democrat monster.

"I learned that when I had been stripped of public acclaim, I had far more friends than I had imagined. I didn’t lose a friend," Mason wrote on his blog. "People who I didn’t think I was close to were kind, gave encouraging words (even several prosecutors)... Eleven attorneys donated time to work on my cases."

When you’re a Democrat, prosecutors offer you encouraging words instead of throwing the book at you.

The political party that claims to protect women got a woman killed. The faction that claims to love “women of color” helped put one in the ground.

Aisha Fraser might be alive today if Lance Mason had been held accountable. Instead he was coddled and protected because of his relationships within the Democrat establishment. If he had been put away for a substantial prison term, the way that any ordinary person would have, Aisha would still be alive. And her daughters would still have their mother and her students would have their teacher.

Instead Mason got a slap of the wrist, and after that slap, Cleveland officials, from Mayor Jackson on down, made it clear that he still had the backing and the protection of his fellow Democrats.

Is it any wonder that Lance Mason believed that he could get away with killing his wife?



Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

Wednesday, November 21, 2018

Black Supremacists Terrorize New York Jews

By On November 21, 2018
Last November, Jews For Racial & Economic Justice (JFREJ) released Understanding Antisemitism. The bizarre tract had as much in common with the reality of anti-Semitism as Marxism does with economics.

JFREJ, a radical leftist group, claimed that “white Christians” in Europe had “invented anti-Semitism”. That would have come as news to Pharaoh, Haman and Mohammed: in JFREJ’s parlance, “people of color” who had innovated and spread anti-Semitic ideas, while seeking to exterminate the Jews.

“Antisemitism was something European Christians created and brought to the Middle East within the last 150 years,” JFREJ insisted. There was no such thing as Muslim anti-Semitism, the leftist group, which collaborates with Linda Sarsour, a Farrakhan supporter who had urged dehumanizing Jews, insisted.

Black and Muslim anti-Semitism are occasionally justified as a response to white Jewish oppression. But mostly their existence is denied. Racial anti-Semitism, JFREJ insisted, only existed as white supremacy.

JFREJ’s tract whitewashing black and Muslim anti-Semitism was partly funded by Jenny Levison.

This November, Levison’s black leftist foster son, James Polite, was arrested for setting 7 fires in Hasidic Jewish schools and synagogues in Brooklyn. He also scribbled, “Kill All Jews” inside a lefty congregation.

Polite’s anti-Semitic vandalism broke up an appearance by Ilana Glazer, an obnoxiously unfunny leftist comedian, to rally turnout before the election. Polite scrawling, “Jew Better Be Ready” and “Insert Oven Here” got far more attention than the actual fires he set in more conservative religious institutions.

It was the fire he set in a Yeshiva school coat closet early in the morning that finally got him caught.

Glazer went on Democracy Now, notorious for defending the anti-Semitic Hamas terrorists who murder Jews, to whine that, “we lived through a safe, you know, physically benign version of a white supremacist act.”

Except the surveillance footage had made it clear that the vandal was a black man. But there was no room for acknowledging the reality of black anti-Semitism on the Left.

Last year, Juan Thompson, a former writer for the anti-Semitic and pro-terrorist site, The Intercept, was arrested for sending bomb threats to a number of Jewish targets, including the ADL. Like Polite, there were efforts to paint Juan as suffering from mental illness. JFREJ went even further, declaring, “We reject attempts to explain away anti-Semitism by laying the blame on Black men.”

Its guide to distorting anti-Semitism had insisted that, “singling out Black people and other People of Color as especially anti-Jewish is racist.”

If “white Christians” invented anti-Semitism, white American Christians appear to be terrible at it. The ADL’s own surveys show black anti-Semitism as being 2 to 3 times higher than average. A statistical analysis in the Washington Post suggested that the majority of Americans who hold deeply entrenched anti-Semitic views are minorities.

Higher rates of anti-Semitic attitudes are bound to lead to higher rates of anti-Semitic hate crimes within the black community. And in the aftermath of the Pittsburgh mass shooting, all the anti-Semitic incidents in New York City appeared to be perpetrated by black men.

Two days before James Polite disproved the myths about black anti-Semitism that his foster mother had helped spread, swastikas were spray painted on houses in Brooklyn Heights. Surveillance footage showed that two black men were responsible. The two, Jarrick Wiltshire and Daul Moultrie, turned themselves in.

Closing out the week, six black teens hurled a pipe through the window of the Volkan synagogue in Brooklyn during Sabbath prayers. Prior to that they had allegedly accosted a girl in the area.

In 1 week: 9 attacks on Jewish institutions, 7 fires, 1 broken window and 9 black male perpetrators.

And little interest by the national media which was too busy claiming that the essence of anti-Semitism was saying anything negative about a career collaborator with anti-Semites, George Soros.

These anti-Semitic attacks probably had nothing to do with Pittsburgh. They are instead typical of the everyday, ordinary anti-Semitism that Jews living in urban neighborhoods regularly experience.

This October, a Jewish man in Brooklyn was beaten so severely with a stick that it broke. In April, in that same neighborhood, a Jewish man suffered a cracked rib in an anti-Semitic assault by a black man screaming, “I hate Jews.” Both incidents were only notable because they were caught on camera.

Yeshiva Beth Hillel of Williamsburg, where Polite set his final fire, had previously come under attack from lefty activists with Yaffed whose smears of Jewish schools are unquestioningly recirculated by the media, (without ever reporting on who is behind the group) than it has reporting on the school arson.

The Volkan synagogue, which was attacked on the Sabbath, and Yeshiva Beth Hillel, are less than a mile apart. And yet these two attacks on Jewish institutions so close together in time and space were never assembled into a pattern by the mainstream media. Because it didn’t like what the pattern would show.

A week later, the mainstream media which broadcast Polite’s magic marker scrawls to the world, hasn’t even bothered to report the names of all the Jewish institutions where the black leftist started his fires.

A recent New York Times piece noted, “there have been four times as many crimes motivated by bias against Jews — 142 in all — as there have against blacks.” It also addressed the bias and disinterest in these crimes, much of which target the city’s working class religious Jewish population in urban areas.

“When a ḥasidic man or woman is attacked by anyone in New York City, mainstream progressive advocacy groups do not typically send out emails calling for concern and fellowship and candlelight vigils in Union Square, as they often do when individuals are harmed in New York because of their race or ethnicity or how they identify in terms of sex or sexual orientation,” it noted.

But it awkwardly elided the issue of who is behind the violence. The attackers have "varied backgrounds" and their identity "presents complexities" for liberals.

There’s only so much ideological heresy that can be tolerated in the pages of the New York Times.

The media assumes that swastikas and Holocaust imagery are the work of white supremacists. But, as James Polite, Jarrick Wiltshire and Daul Moultrie remind us, that isn’t at all the case.

Black nationalists often believe that there is much to admire about Hitler and the Nazis. They identify with Nazi racial supremacism and the calls for the mass murder of the Jews.

Louis Farrakhan had said, “The Jews don’t like Farrakhan, so they call me Hitler. Well, that’s a good name. Hitler was a very great man.”

The Nation of Islam had an extensive history of collaborating with the KKK and the American Nazi Party.

Stokely Carmichael had dubbed “the greatest white man”. And he had declared, "The only good Zionist is a dead Zionist we must take a lesson from Hitler”.

“What the Negro needs is a Hitler,” Marcus Garvey had said admiringly.

"I got the extermination blues, jewboys / I got the Hitler syndrome figured," Amiri Baraka, the black nationalist poet, had hatefully scribbled.

This black nationalist rhetoric easily translates into swastikas and Hitler sloganeering by street thugs.

During the pogrom in Crown Heights, black marchers shouted, “Heil Hitler”. At the funeral at which Al Sharpton delivered an anti-Semitic eulogy, a banner read, "Hitler did not do the job."

Last year, three black men scrawled a swastika on the door of the Sutton Place Synagogue in Manhattan. No media accounts mentioned the race of the suspects. While synagogue clergy later announced that two arrests were made, the media never bothered following up with a story on their identities.

Also last year there was outrage when an Arizona family’s menorah was twisted into a swastika. The police arrested Clive Jamar Wilson, a black man whose father, like James Polite, had attended Brandeis.

Conflating anti-Semitism with white supremacism, as the Left does, is misleading. And even when it comes to neo-Nazi signage and slogans, the perpetrators are just as likely to be black Nazis.

The Left claims that it wants to fight Nazis. But it quickly changes its mind when the Nazis are black.

Insisting on fighting Nazis only when they’re white isn’t opposition to either Nazism or anti-Semitism. It’s an endorsement of both as long as they are being practiced by the racial supremacists of the Left.





Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

Wednesday, November 14, 2018

Identity Politics and American Anti-Semitism

By On November 14, 2018
When Robert Bowers walked through the door of the Tree of Life synagogue with murder on his mind, he was propelled by identity politics. As a white supremacist, his brand of identity politics is more politically incorrect than the ones that led Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour of the Women’s March to support Louis Farrakhan, but it’s no more violent, racist or evil.

Before the massacre, the most recent high profile anti-Semitic attack had been carried out by a Muslim who was caught on video beating a Jewish man while shouting about, “Allah” and his hatred for Jews.

Another hate crime, also caught on video, was a violent assault with a baseball bat by a black man.

Such assaults are less devastating than the mass murder of eleven people, but also much more commonplace. They repeat from month to month and year to year. They make up much of the toll of anti-Semitic hate crimes so that they top the list of hate crime statistics every single year.

The Tree of Life massacre has been greeted with editorials mourning a “loss of innocence” by American Jews. Such editorials come from a bubble of privilege that is cut off from the way many Jews live.

In 1991, New York City’s first black mayor stood and watched while a violent mob whipped up, by among others, Al Sharpton, went on a violent anti-Semitic rampage in Crown Heights. The Crown Heights Pogrom, as it would become known, took three lives and terrorized a neighborhood.

Sharpton, the black supremacist linked to the anti-Semitic violence, went on to speak at the Democratic National Convention, host a show on MSNBC and become a regular visitor to the Obama White House.

The distance between Crown Heights and Squirrel Hill is more than mere geography, it’s social and cultural. Anti-Semitic violence by black supremacists and Muslim terrorists tends to happen in poorer, urban neighborhoods and is directed against a poorer and more religious class of Jews. White supremacist attacks tend to target more suburban, prosperous and less diverse Jewish areas.

Those are home to the same Jewish populations who are much more likely to write editorials about a loss of innocence. But innocence is a privilege that Jews in poorer urban neighborhoods never had.

There are Jews who live in proximity to neo-Nazis and those who live closer to admirers of Farrakhan and Hamas. (Though Farrakhan and Hamas both admire Hitler for killing millions of Jews.) The Jewish communities that endured a generation of race riots, and another generation of muggings, knockout games, rapes and murders, before often having to pack up and move out, from their American Anatevkas in major cities, have never had any innocence of anti-Semitism, only bitter experience.

It is no coincidence that the privileged are also more likely to be progressive. The hysteria over Trump is not born of experience of anti-Semitism, but inexperience. To believe that President Trump is anti-Semitic is a confession of privilege. It’s an admission that your experience of anti-Semitism is an abstraction, a series of theories and history lessons, rather than the awareness of an everyday reality.

It takes a great deal of inexperience of anti-Semitism to believe that it exists only on the side of the political spectrum furthest from you. Anti-Semitism is tribal. Those who hate Jews tend to be losers who are convinced of their own natural superiority and blame the Jews for their failure to achieve it.

You can find such people on the right side of the spectrum, but it is the left side of the spectrum that has been built for them. Hitler’s genius lay in taking the fundamental appeal of socialism, its state controls, welfare state security blankets, suspicion of meritocracy and appeal to mediocrity, and reframe them in racial and nationalistic terms. But he only emphasized the anti-Semitism in socialism, he didn’t invent it.

Identity politics does the same thing as National Socialism, combining the welfare state and anti-capitalist rhetoric with naked racial appeals, tapping into the supremacist convictions of failed groups, offering them special racial privileges, while blaming their failures on meritocracy and capitalism.

The biggest beneficiaries of the social mobility provided by both have often been the Jews.

There is very little difference between white supremacism and black nationalism. Indeed there was so little difference that Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam collaborated with the KKK and the American Nazi Party. There’s a much closer route between Obama and Hitler, than there is between Trump and Hitler. Just follow Obama’s photo with Farrakhan, the affinity of his mentor, Jeremiah Wright, for Farrakhan, Farrakhan’s admiration for Hitler, and Hitler’s admiration for Islamic anti-Semitism and his role in inspiring the Muslim Brotherhood. But that’s a route that the progressives choose not to follow.

While progressive Jews may deny that black nationalism and white supremacism are the same thing, the mutual admiration society between them makes a mockery of their denials. Anti-Semitism is a tribal problem. Multiculturalism evolved into intersectionality, spawning more tribalism, more resentment, and an alliance of the resentful in which Jews are not full participants, but growing targets.

As a society becomes more racially and ethnically tribal, it grows more anti-Semitic. The white supremacist attack on a synagogue in Squirrel Hill is one symptom of a much larger problem.

The progressive Jews worry about the rare outbursts of white tribal anti-Semitism because that is the not particularly diverse population that these proponents of diversity live among. The working-class Jews of the inner cities worry far more about the daily diverse tribal anti-Semitism that surrounds them.

That is a ubiquitous anti-Semitism that their progressive brethren neither understand nor care about because it is inconvenient to their politics and alien to their experiences.

While Jewish communities around the world, from Crown Heights to Jerusalem, mourn for the massacre in Squirrel Hill, it often feels as if such outpourings of empathy are not reciprocated. When Jews were being stoned in Crown Heights by anti-Semitic mobs, the progressive Jews told them to stop embarrassing New York City’s first black mayor. When Rabbis were axed to death in a Jerusalem synagogue, the “innocent” progressives blamed Netanyahu and Israel’s imaginary ‘rightward’ drift.

They did not care that their tax dollars were being used to pay the terrorists murdering Jews. Nor do they care that the MSNBC news network that they were watching was paying a pogromist.

This “innocence” of theirs has a high price and for now, Jews in Brooklyn and Jerusalem are paying it. While progressive Jews live in the fading golden summer of the suburbs, working class Jews have lived through generations of looted stores, ransacked apartments, and random violent assaults. The dream of the former, their political policies and ideals, have been the waking nightmares of the latter.

But the age of innocence is coming to an end.

America is changing. The same forces that made Obama have also made Farrakhan relevant once again. Muslim migration will transform America the way that it did Europe. The cities will feel it first. But they won’t be the last. The combination of political radicalism and tribalism that is driving out the Jews of France, Sweden and now the United Kingdoms will not pass by the suburban shtetls of America.

White supremacism is one vector for anti-Semitism. Identity politics has created a dozen more.

The shootings at Squirrel Hill were not the worst of it. Unfortunately, tragically, and horrifyingly, the worst is yet to come. And when it comes, the old innocence will vanish as if it had never been.





Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

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Sunday, November 11, 2018

God and Guns in the Synagogue

By On November 11, 2018
There are two types of synagogues: those that believe in G-d and those that believe in government.

After the mass shooting in a Pittsburgh synagogue, the government synagogues turned to the government with calls for gun control. And those that believe in G-d, turned to the Almighty.

And then, trusting in the Almighty to stand with them against danger, they went out and got their guns.

Morning services at the synagogue these days begin and end with guns, with talk of tactical courses, firing ranges and concealed carry permits. “If someone comes to kill you, get up early to kill him first,” the Gemara, the Babylonian Talmud, that massive encyclopedic work codifying Jewish law, advises.

In synagogues across America, the teachers, actuaries and small businessmen rising early for morning prayers are preparing for a mass shooting attack. Every synagogue I have been to lately has members who carry concealed firearms. Members are attending security courses, training to identify, disarm or kill active shooters, while also preparing for the ugly aftermath of another synagogue massacre.

CPR courses. Stop the bleed. Triage.

While one faction of American Jews, the noisesome lefty one, shouts about gun control, the quieter, religious one, is choosing self-defense over gun control, and preparing to face another attack.

After the Pittsburgh shooting, the Jewish Community Relations Council of San Francisco recycled a gun control tract from 1999 warning that, "14 young people below the age of 20 are killed by guns in this country every day". That talking point about inner city gang violence had nothing do with the mass shooting of unarmed Jewish worshipers, but establishment politics tend to run on lefty autopilot.

But meanwhile in South Philly, far from San Fran, but all too close to the Pittsburgh massacre, religious Jews were going out and buying guns.

“I'm a daughter of a Holocaust survivor,” a 61-year-old Jewish woman was quoted as saying. “I lost all my aunts and uncles in the Holocaust, and I'm going to go down fighting. I'm not walking into a gas chamber. I'm not going to stand there like a sitting duck… and get shot at. I refuse.”

Yonatan Stern, an IDF veteran running tactical training courses at Cherev Gideon (Gideon’s Sword), suggested that the demand is coming from the more politically and religiously conservative Jews.

Meanwhile at a lefty protest in Philly, Rebecca Hornstein, a member of the If Now Now anti-Israel hate group, who backed anti-Semites like Keith Ellison and Linda Sarsour, claimed that nobody wanted guns.

But quite a few real Jews did.

The debate over firearms in synagogues has reached into Jewish communities from New York City to Philadelphia, and from Chicago to Colorado Springs, where Mel Bernstein of Dragon Arms offered local Rabbis in the area free handguns or AR-15s, along with training and ammunition.

“You have to have the tool to fight back, and this is the tool,” the Jewish gun store owner said.

The local ADL branch was unhappy with Bernstein’s offer, claiming that armed clergy sent the wrong message. Five local rabbis however thought that it sent the right message and took him up on it.

“The 97-year-old Holocaust survivor did not have good people that carry firearms during the Holocaust. But there are good people that carry firearms in American now,“ Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, the former head of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement, declared. “They should bring them inside with them to protect the people who are there.”

“If you are a Jewish police officer and you are off duty, when you come to worship, you should come with your handgun. If you are a Christian police officer, when you are off duty,” he urged in a press conference outside a Jewish institution, “come with your handgun.”

"No. No. No," Council Speaker Corey Johnson tweeted. "This is not how we heal and move forward."

Assemblyman Dov Hikind, an Orthodox Jewish politician from Brooklyn, however endorsed Adams' message and announced, "I am registering immediately for a gun license. And I encourage other Jews to do so to protect their institutions and synagogues."

David Pollock, the director of public policy and security at the New York Jewish Community Relations Council, however insisted that guns wouldn't work. "Having armed guards is not a panacea."

Rabbi Gary Moskowitz, a former NYPD officer and martial arts expert, who offers firearms training to Rabbis, has urged every congregation to arm its members.

“They tell me, ‘It’s not the Jewish way,’” he argued. “How can the rabbis say that it’s not the Jewish way when we just need to look at the Bible to see how David fought the Philistines?”

When Moskowitz had previously proposed allowing congregants in New York City to carry guns, he met with a cold response from local Democrats.

“We need fewer, not more, guns on the street, period,” City Councilman Mark Levine had insisted. “This would make us less safe, not more safe.”

But after Pittsburgh, unarmed synagogues increasingly don’t feel safe.

In Chicago, Jonathan Burstyn, the son of a volunteer policeman, guards his synagogue on the Sabbath and provides firearms training through Chi-Defense. A photo posted by Burstyn at the 2018 NRA Annual Meeting shows a group of Orthodox Jews touting some serious artillery.

In Virginia, Edward Friedman, the editor-in-chief of the NRA's Shooting Illustrated magazine, carries a concealed weapon to a Chabad Orthodox synagogue with the permission of the Rabbi.

“It’s something that’s incredibly important to me, and I think it should be to every single practicing Jew who goes to synagogue,” Friedman said.

At Temple Sholom, a small Reform synagogue in Springfield, Ohio, Rabbi Cary Kozberg took down the gun-free-zone sign. “Some realized that a gun-free zone can be an invitation.”

“I’m so not advocating that every Jewish person who goes to synagogue walk in with a gun,” he said. “But there are people who are OK with that, and those people need to be listened to.”

While an out-of-touch secular establishment still claims to speak for Jews on gun control, the growing number of religious Jews are far more comfortable with firearms. And after Pittsburgh, more places like Temple Sholom are willing to question the suicidal fanaticism with which the Left clings to gun control.

The choice between self-defense and gun control is at also a choice between dependency and independence. It’s the quintessential dilemma out of which the United States of America was born.

And more Jewish organizations are stepping forward to advocate for the Second Amendment.

“With all due respect, singing songs, lighting candles and posting the phrase 'Never Again', regardless of the number of exclamation points, is not going to stop anyone from killing Jews,” Doris Wise, the founder of Jews Can Shoot, wrote. “Fear of being shot by armed Jews. That’s what will stop them.”

“Self-defense is a God-given right. Here in America - all of America - we have the very good fortune to have the Second Amendment. Honor it, yourselves and all good people by making use of it.”

Jews Can Shoot is one of a number of rising Jewish organizations that connect Jewish civil rights to the right to bear arms.

The idea is not new to Jewish history.

Zionism began not with irrigating the desert, but with arming vulnerable Jewish populations. It’s a story that traverses Jewish history and goes back all the way to the very dawn of the Jewish monarchy.

When Shaul was anointed as the first Jewish king, the Philistines had disarmed the Jewish population leaving them without even a blacksmith, worrying, ”Lest the Hebrews make them swords or spears” (1 Samuel :13:19), until King Shaul and his son, Yonatan, were said to have received spears from heaven.

Then they led the rebellion against Philistine rule and created the first Jewish kingdom.

After the Jews returned from the Babylonian exile, the Book of Nehemiah relates that when the Arabs came to besiege Jerusalem vowing to kill the returning exiles and end the rebuilding of the Second Temple, the Prophet Nehemiah assembled the people behind the wall with “swords, spears and bows.”

And as they built the Temple, of which the present synagogues are only lesser models, struggling to raise the wall against the Arab invaders, they “worked with one hand, and held their weapon with the other”.

Today, the synagogues that believe in G-d, Jews are taking the prophet’s advice. "Do not fear them, remember the Great and Awesome G-d, fight for your brethren, for your sons and daughters, for your wives and your houses." (Nehemiah 4:8)

And after morning prayers, the men leave still talking of active shooter training and firing ranges.





Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

Tuesday, November 06, 2018

Harvard's Racist Diversity

By On November 06, 2018
“Diversity and excellence go hand in hand," Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana had declared two years ago. “Diversity is at the heart of the mission of the College."

Now, at the trial over Harvard’s racially discriminatory admissions policy, Khurana was asked about a different type of diversity by a lawyer representing Students for Fair Admissions. The group representing 20,000 students, parents and others was challenging Harvard’s discrimination against Asian students.

“Don’t you actually think that Harvard’s class should have a socioeconomic makeup that looks a lot more like America?"

Khurana demurred.

“We’re not trying to mirror the socioeconomic or income distribution of the United States,” he insisted.

Why is racial diversity at the “heart” of Harvard’s mission, but not socioeconomic diversity?

The lawsuit against Harvard by Students for Fair Admissions has successfully raised that question.

"The admissions process is designed to identify those students who manifest the qualities, academic and otherwise, that suggest they will become engaged participants and leaders in an increasingly diverse, complex society," Harvard's lawyers argued.

But the complex diversity of this society is defined in an extremely simplistic way. Harvard would like to map the United States, but not by income, only by race. And only by certain races.

Asian students had the lowest Harvard admission rate of any group at 8.1%. White students were admitted at a rate of 11.1% and black students at a rate of 13.2%. In the early oughts, black student admission rates actually approached an unprecedented 20%.

Harvard’s 2019 class boasted a makeup of 11.6% black students, 21.1% Asian students, and 13% Hispanic students. The 2022 admissions numbers have hit 15.2% black students, and 22.9% Asian students: though these don’t reflect the final enrollment numbers which are likely to be lower.

Black and Hispanic students get recruitment letters if they score only 1100 on their SATs. For Asian students, it’s 1350. According to the Princeton Review, the current average SAT score is 1060.

Asian students applying to Harvard had average SAT scores of 726.2 across the sections of the exam. White students had average scores of 712.7. Asian students admitted to Harvard had average scores of 766.6 and white students had average scores of 744.7.

Meanwhile black students admitted to Harvard had average scores of only 703.7.

Black students admitted to Harvard were the only group with SAT scores lower than those of the average white student applying. Asian applicants had higher SAT average scores than every admitted student group, except white students.

“Given racial bias in standardized testing and endemic racial inequities in educational opportunities in primary and secondary school, Harvard must consider race if it is to assemble a diverse student body," a filing by NAACP lawyers on behalf of Harvard student and alumni groups claimed.

The groups being represented by the NAACP include the Kuumba Singers of Harvard College, the Coalition for a Diverse Harvard, Fuerza Latina of Harvard, and the Harvard Islamic Society.

But why does this alleged “racial bias in standardized testing”, not to mention the endemic, epidemic and pandemic “racial inequities in educational opportunities” somehow pass Asian students by?

And if America is suffering from a pandemic of racial inequities in education, how is it that black students are able to get into America’s most elite institution with SAT scores that would get a middle- class white student from Brooklyn or Boston, who isn’t a legacy, laughed all the way out the door?

Harvard’s policy of racial quotas invalidates its own arguments in favor of those quotas.

The only racial minority suffering from “racial inequities in educational opportunities” is the one suing Harvard over it. If there were racial inequities at Harvard toward black students, the NAACP lawyers would be suing Harvard, instead of filing briefs in defense of the racial inequities that benefit them.

And if Harvard privileges black students, are we supposed to believe that the institution that asserts that it produces the nation’s leaders is an outlier in discriminating in favor of black students, rather than that it sets the tone for educational policy across the country?

The success of Asian students exposes the racist lie on which all the claims of white privilege are built. If America is a racist society that excludes non-whites, why do Asians succeed and thrive in it?

America is not a white supremacist society. It’s a fair and just society whose meritocracy has only been compromised by affirmative action. The lawsuit by Students for Fair Admissions reveals what racism in America really looks like. If you want to see institutional racism, skip the trailer parks where the last of the KKK wizards collect their food stamps, and look at Harvard’s affirmative action quotas.

Asian success represents a unique threat to the cult of diversity. Affirmative action is essentially a collectivist scheme for redistributing college admissions, jobs and business opportunities by race. To be in favor of it, and of any socialist scheme, you have to believe in your inability to succeed on your own.

The Harvard racial quota debate has divided Asian students between those fighting for their rights and those embarrassing themselves by supporting a system of racial discrimination against themselves.

At a Harvard rally in support of racial quotas that discriminate against students like her, an Asian student can be seen holding up a sign reading, "Yellow Peril Supports Black Power."

The Left builds its systems around ideas that seemed radical and relevant generations ago. After the rising middle class made Marxism seem like a quaint joke, the system of racial privileges that replaced it was born in an era when America’s racial conflicts were black and white. It was never meant for a world in which Asian students outperform white students.

Intersectionality has struggled to patch the holes in the bipolar origins of diversity, throwing in a goulash of identities, and privileging some at the expense of others. But that provides little satisfaction for the successful groups in the intersectional gulag, Asians, white women, gay men, who increasingly don’t need the quotas, and are being berated about their privilege by the beneficiaries of their discrimination.

The Harvard lawsuit asks Asians and every other identity group in America whether, as individuals and a community, they benefit or lose from opting out of meritocracy in exchange for group privileges.

That’s the essential question of the old debate between capitalism and socialism through the lens of identity politics. Some groups are willing to suppress individual merit for collective privileges even though accepting them sharply caps their individual ability to succeed. Others want off the plantation.

Socialism offered to cap individual potential in exchange for collective security. Affirmative action offers racial groups the same poisoned gift. It claims to do this in the name of fighting white privilege and institutional white supremacy. But what better tool of white supremacy could there be than seducing racial minorities into abandoning their best and brightest by offering them racial quotas and caps.

As the data out of Harvard shows, racial quotas work both ways. They reward a minority group as long as it performs poorly. But once it succeeds, they start punishing it for its success.

The fundamental flaw of affirmative action is the same flaw as that of welfare state socialism. It punishes hard work and rewards a refusal to work. No white supremacist plot could have done more damage to the minority communities that foolishly accepted the poisoned gift of affirmative action.

The Harvard lawsuit is waking up Asian-Americans to the real cost of affirmative action. That’s the true lesson being taught at Harvard and at countless educational institutions across the country.

Racial quotas help you when you fail. They punish you when you succeed.







Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

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Sunday, November 04, 2018

A Leftist Hatefest in Pittsburgh

By On November 04, 2018
As President Trump arrived in Squirrel Hill to pay his respects to the 11 Jews brutally murdered in the Tree of Life synagogue, If Not Now, a leftist anti-Israel hate group notorious for targeting Jewish charities, unleashed an ugly hatefest that defiled the solemnity of the day.

Keffiyahs, a symbol of Muslim anti-Semitic violence, SEIU shirts and multicolored wigs were visible in the mob. A handful of protesters misused ‘shofars’, a religious ritual item sounded on the holiest Jewish days of the year, and not meant to be desecrated in street protests. Despite attempts to appropriate Jewishness, there was nothing Jewish about the ugly hatred and exploitation of murdered Jews.

Even though three police officers had risked their lives and were wounded trying to stop the gunman, the If Not Now flyer for the event condemned the “police state” and touted the black supremacist hate group, Black Lives Matter, alongside Free Palestine. An If Not Now speaker bizarrely bleated, “More cops in shuls will not make us safer. More cops in schools will not make us safer.”

Where were If Not Now members while the officers, Daniel Mead, Michael Smidga, Anthony Burke and Timothy Matson, were being shot at in the Tree of Life synagogue? Blogging about intersectionality? Tweeting anti-Israel memes? Plotting their next hate rally targeting police officers and Israeli soldiers?

When the shooting was over and it was safe, they convened a hateful rally to attack Jews, Israel, Trump and the very police officers who had saved lives and stopped the rampage of a murderous gunman.

Batya Ungar-Sargon with The Forward, an anti-Israel leftist paper, claimed that the protesters, rather than Rabbi Jeffrey Myers of the Tree of Life synagogue who graciously welcomed the president, represented, "who the majority of American Jews are".

If Not Now represents Jews the same way that Robert Bowers, the Tree of Life gunman, represents Americans. It's a marginal hate group, animated by its animosity to the Jewish State and to Jewishness. A leading If Not Now figure, Rafael Shimunov, had even used The Forward to defend a leftist Washington D.C. politician who had accused Jews of controlling the weather.

Many of the marchers exploiting the murder of Jews, and claiming to speak for Jews, weren’t Jewish.

Putting the lie to Ungar-Sargon’s Forward fake news, the Pittsburgh City Paper noted that, "participants at the event were from a diverse background, including members of several progressive groups, residents of all races, and Latino and Black activists."

“Queer Catholic Protects Jews: End White Supremacy,” one sign read.

“We are here to send the message today that we don’t want you here,” Monica Ruiz of Casa San Jose ranted. "Trump, you are not a good neighbor.”

Casa San Jose is a Latino activist group defending illegal aliens.

Tracy Baton, the African-American director of the Women’s March, denounced Trump for inserting politics, “into a city in mourning, before the dead are buried, is unacceptable.”

Except that was the entire purpose of the rally, which even ended with a call to vote in the midterm elections. It was a power grab by marginal groups and a vile attack on a president paying a condolence call. While the president was laying flowers at makeshift memorials, a leftist mob was screaming hate.

And Baton was cynically appropriating Jewish pain while representing an anti-Semitic hate group.

The Women’s March leadership had become notorious for anti-Semitic rhetoric by Linda Sarsour and Tamika Mallory.

Both women are supporters of Louis Farrakhan who had praised Hitler and compared Jews to termites.

Sarsour had urged Muslims to dehumanize Jews, and Tamika Mallory had responded to Jewish protests against her support for Farrakhan by tweeting, “If your leader does not have the same enemies as Jesus, they may not be THE leader!” Then she targeted the ADL over its criticism of her anti-Semitism.

Baton had appeared with Tamika Mallory.

If there’s anything more inappropriate than a protest rally before the dead are buried, it’s an anti-Semitic hate group hijacking murdered Jews for its own political agenda.

One of the few "Jewish" speakers at the hate mob was Diana Clarke, an organizer for the If Now Now hate group. When Clarke isn't disrupting condolence calls for the Jewish dead, she is researching the evils of the Jews. Namely, "the way Ashkenazi Jews accessed whiteness by participating in the white settlement of Native lands and violence towards Native people."

No doubt the hate group activist trolling a condolence call for the dead has plenty of insights into how the “Ashkenazi Jews” murdered at Tree of Life “accessed whiteness” as they were being murdered by a white supremacist.

Clarke also appeared to have signed on to a letter by an anti-Semitic hate group calling for a boycott of Jewish Israeli theater.

Also there was Arielle Cohen, the surly co-chair of the Pittsburgh chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, who is also associated with the If Not Now hate group.

The DSA has supported at least one openly anti-Semitic candidate, Maria Estrada, a Farrakhan supporter, who had accused Jews of committing atrocities out of the belief that as "one of 'God's chosen people'" they feel "superior and justified". When rebuked for her anti-Semitism, Maria told a Jewish Democrat, “try keeping your party, your religion and your people in check".

The DSA’s 2017 convention featured representatives of anti-Semitic European leftists, including Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and France's Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a Holocaust denier. The Mélenchon issue offended even some of the DSA’s Jewish collaborators. But it didn’t stop them from continuing to collude.

The If Not Now march joined forces with another march by Bend the Arc. The media had initially misreported a statement by the leftist group that President Trump was not welcome in Pittsburgh as a declaration by “Jewish leaders”. In reality, Bend the Arc is headed by Stosh Cotler, an anti-Israel activist and former sex club dancer. Its PAC was set up by the son of George Soros

It was only fitting that the few Jewish participants in this deranged hatefest would be far more anti-Semitic than its non-Jewish participants. Jews who participate in anti-Semitic movements invariably feel the need to demonstrate that they belong by being more anti-Semitic than their non-Jewish peers.

The bizarre freakshow finally concluded at the Sixth Presbyterian Church, its ending every bit as Jewish as its beginning.

As President Trump arrived at the Tree of Life synagogue, Rev. Susan Rothenberg, a Presbyterian minister (pictured above), began screaming, “You are not welcome here!”

The Presbyterian Church has become notorious for its support of BDS and its affinity for anti-Semitic terrorist groups.

Earlier this year, the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh had cut ties with the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary for hosting a co-founder of the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center whose rhetoric was "theologically loaded" with anti-Semitism.

In an example of Sabeel anti-Semitism cited by the ADL, was the blood libel that, “Jesus is on the cross again with thousands of crucified Palestinians around him…The Israeli government crucifixion system is operating daily.”

The Sixth Presbyterian Church has welcomed BDS events targeting the Jewish State, including appearances by Sabeel speakers. It has advocated for BDS. Just this year, it promoted a boycott of HP over its ties to the Jewish State.

And so a march, supposedly against anti-Semitism, featuring an anti-Semitic hate group, wrapped up at an anti-Semitic church.

It couldn’t have been a more fitting end to a disgraceful orgy of leftist hatred.

This was not, as its participants insisted, a vigil. It did not mourn, it hated.

There was nothing Jewish about it, despite the disgraceful attempt to misappropriate Jewish phrases and rituals for political purposes. If Not Now activists rallied the crowd to sing, “Olam Chesed Yibaneh”, but ignorantly mistranslated, “Chesed” as “Love”.

They stepped over the bodies of dead Jews to lead a mob of anti-Semitic lefties to serve an anti-Semitic agenda. And they ended their orgy of hate at an anti-Semitic church.

“This evil, anti-Semitic attack is an assault on all of us. It is an assault on humanity. It must be confronted and condemned everywhere it rears its ugly head. We must stand with our Jewish brothers and sisters to defeat anti-Semitism and vanquish the forces of hate. Those seeking their destruction, we will seek their destruction,” President Trump said.

The hateful rally that greeted him is a reminder that those hateful anti-Semitic forces are everywhere.





Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

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