By: David Horowitz

A black man is arrested and murdered in an act of heinous violence while handcuffed and defenseless. Three fellow officers, in close proximity to the killer cop, watch the crime, listen to the black man plea for his life and do nothing to stop it. For the next several days angry mobs tear up American cities, looting stores, burning buildings, police cars and American flags and even killing individuals in their path. The rationale offered for their violence and criminal acts is that they are protesting a racist system – or in Senator Bernie Sanders more colorful words, “a grotesque system of ingrained racism and economic disparity that now more than ever needs to be ripped down.” These attacks on America are what the riots are really about. Sanders’ “grotesque system of ingrained racism” is a leftwing fantasy that fuels the rage of the rioters and their violence, which is directed not only against white Americans but also black Americans whose neighborhoods and shopping centers and businesses Sanders’ comrades are pleased to torch.

No one knows for certain the motives that actually led Officer Derek Chauvin to take George Floyd’s life and to do so in such a brutal manner. Chauvin was a bad cop with a long dossier of misconduct complaints and three killings already on his record. But let’s posit the most logical explanation: he was a racist. And so were his three accomplices. What does this say about “a grotesque system of ingrained racism” in America? Absolutely nothing.

Is there a cop, or a politician from the president on down, or a publication that in the week of George Floyd’s murder rose up to defend the murderer? Is there any public voice claiming that there were extenuating circumstances – that he was resisting arrest for example – that would justify the act? There wasn’t. The attorney general for the state of Minnesota is black; the police chief is black; the vice president of the city council is black, the congresswoman for the district is black. A normal view of this matter would recognize it as an isolated incident involving four bad cops who should long before have been removed from the force by the Democrat politicians who control the state.

But these are not normal times. In the same statement, Sanders accused President Trump of “advocating violence” against black communities across the nation because he called for law and order, while at the time praising those demonstrators who were actually protesting and doing so peacefully. We live in times when the Democrat Party and its leaders conflate the black community with its criminal element in order to indict white Americans as “white supremacists,” bearers of “white skin privilege – a term coined by the Weathermen, a domestic terrorist organization in the 1960s.

Fueling the flames of hate against white people, against police, against America’s president and America itself is the daily message of Democrat leaders like Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Stacey Abrams and Joe Biden. This hatred is magnified by the Trump-hating and America-trashing leftwing media. This hate has now born bitter fruit across the nation.

There are voices, however – black voices on the left – who see through the hypocrisy. Atlanta is a major American city that has been run by black politicians for decades. In Atlanta  rioters attacked the CNN Center, site of a channel that is relentless in attacking Trump, white America, and its allegedly racist system. CNN is openly blaming “white supremacy” for the riots. An Atlanta black rapper named “Killer Mike” had this to say about CNN’s role in fueling the hatred whose chickens had come home to roost: “I love CNN, I love Cartoon Network. But I’d like to say to CNN right now, ‘Stop feeding fear and anger every day. Stop making people feel so fearful. Give them hope.’”

Virtually every official in Minnesota with influence over the Minneapolis police and the decision to keep Derek Chauvin on the force despite his alarming record is a Democrat: the governor, the attorney general, the Minneapolis congresswoman and the mayor. The city council consists of 12 Democrats and a Green Party member. The Democrat Party is the “system” that protected the bad cop and led to George Floyd’s death.

Just as the Democrats protected the bad cops, so they encouraged the rioters by fueling the myth of America’s systemic racism, by not providing a sufficient police presence, when the mayhem started, to nip it in the bud, and by attacking Trump for “glorifying violence,” when he warned the rioters that if the local authorities failed to protect law-abiding citizens he would meet force with force.

The organizers of the violence were two far left organizations – Antifa and Black Lives Matter. Until the Minneapolis riots Attorney General and former DNC head, Keith Ellison featured a picture on his website advertising the Antifa handbook for conducting civil war. The proximity of the Antifa-spearheaded riot in Minneapolis prompted Ellison to remove the photo, because Antifa’s destruction of his capital city would obviously lead to bad press.

The racist organization Black Lives Matter, which has led the war on cops for several years, is officially endorsed by the Democrat Party, was invited multiple times to the Obama White House, and is funded along with Antifa by Democrat donors like George Soros.

The Democrat Party’s leaders without exception have spread the lies that there is an open season on black Americans conducted by (white) police. They neglect to mention  that police departments in major cities are frequently run by black Americans; that black cops are actually more likely to kill black suspects than white police officers, and that an unarmed black is less likely to be killed by police than to be struck by lightning. Black males are 6% of the population but they are responsible for more than 50% of the homicides and violent crimes. This is why virtually every civil rights cause celebre of the last fifty years has involved encounters with the law rather than racist vigilantes from the general populace.

Democrat leaders like Sanders, Warren and Harris feed the myth that economic inequality is a systemic oppression of blacks when the majority of African Americans are in the middle class, and the source of gross poverty is the bad behavior of individuals. It has been statistically shown that not having children out of wedlock and getting a high school education will lift an individual out of poverty. The Democrat Party controls virtually all the failed public schools in the nation where year in and year out 40% of the students drop out before they graduate and 40% of those who do graduate are functionally illiterate.

Democrat welfare policies and political dependence on teacher unions are 100% responsible for these deficiencies. The Democrats’ defense of their indefensible behavior is to blame Trump and Republicans for the resulting inequities and to call all their critics racists. Democrats are wedded to a collectivist ideology called Identity Politics, which erases the individual and individual accountability in order to indict and hold races responsible, as it happens the white race. This is the poisoned well of Democrat politics and it is why self-anointed champions of “black folk” have felt so free to dishonor the memory of George Floyd by burning American cities in order to advance their civil war against the United States.

(Front Page Mag)

David Horowitz is the author of Blitz: Trump Will Smash the Left and Win, which will be published on June 2, by Humanix Books.

As the unwelcome scrutiny given the extreme tweets of the social-media giant’s “integrity” chief shows, the company has started something it can’t finish.

By: Jonathan S. Tobin

Many cheered this week when they saw that Twitter had added a warning label to two of President Donald Trump’s tweets. The tweets concerned the president’s allegation that an election in which most ballots would be cast by mail could easily be tainted by fraud. But followers of the @realDonaldTrump account also saw a link appended to them that read “Get the facts about mail-in ballots,” which led them to a CNN article refuting the president’s claims.

Trump has often played fast and loose with the facts, and has used his bully pulpit on Twitter to attack his foes and set the national agenda by bypassing the filter of the news media and speaking directly to his 80.3 million followers—an audience that dwarfs that of even the largest publication or network. Trump’s detractors say the company didn’t go far enough and want him banned from its site.

The problem with the social-media giant moving a step closer to doing just that is that attempting to fact check political speech opens up a Pandora’s Box of unintended consequences that will impact far more than the man in the White House and might do more to feed hate than to combat it.

The first of those unintended consequences was the unwanted scrutiny that was subsequently given to the Twitter account of Yoel Roth, head of Twitter’s Site Integrity team, which was, at least initially, widely assumed to be the person leading the effort to fact-check Trump.

As it turns out, Roth’s Twitter feed was as incendiary as that of Trump.

Screenshots of his reactions to the 2016 election results and subsequent presidential inauguration denounced Trump and his White House staff as “Nazis,” and poured abuse on states in “flyover” country that voted for him as racist. When White House Counselor Kellyanne Conway called out Roth for his extreme opinions about the administration, which he has continued to vent in the last three years, she and other pro-Trump figures were accused of bullying him. But as far as Trump’s defenders are concerned, Twitter was engaging in flagrant hypocrisy by attempting to label Trump’s opinions as false when it could easily do the same to controversial or disputed assertions by a host of other politicians, world leaders and, yes, high-ranking Twitter employees.

That Twitter chose to single out Trump’s opinions about mail-in ballots rather than a lot of the other things he tweets about was curious. In recent days, Trump has made some indefensible and truly offensive false charges about MSNBC host and former Congressman Joe Scarborough being responsible for the death of one of his staffers 20 years ago that was ruled an accident. The family of the victim has pleaded with the president to stop. Trump ought to delete his tweets on the matter.

By contrast, Trump’s opinions about defending the integrity of elections and mail-in ballots may be disputed, but they are about something that might conceivably happen and shouldn’t be labeled as false. More importantly, if the same standard would be applied to everything that is published on Twitter, it would only be links to cat videos and pictures of cute children that would escape fact-checking of one sort or another.

Does Twitter have the right to pick and choose what it examines? Not really.

Both Twitter and Facebook have taken on the character of public utilities. Twitter has 330 million and Facebook a staggering 2.6 billion users. And thanks to a little known clause in the 1996 Communications Decency Act that says that “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider,” both Twitter and Facebook are treated by the law as online bulletin boards, rather than the moral equivalent of newspapers and magazines. That means that while conventional publications—like JNS—can be sued for libel if they publish false and defamatory material, the above companies are held harmless under the law for anything their myriad users might post.

That’s why Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) has proposed amending the 1996 law to remove their immunity unless they can prove that the algorithms and their practices for removing allegedly offensive content are politically neutral.

Whatever you may think of Trump, the warnings attached to his tweets—and not those of his opponents who make assertions their critics can also claim to be false—have exploded Twitter’s claim of neutrality.

What follows next should be of great interest to those who care about the Jewish community and the fight against anti-Semitism. While some, like actor Sacha Baron Cohen, who have bashed big social media for not censuring Nazis and hate groups, may be encouraged by this move towards more aggressive monitoring of posts and tweets, this is a weapon that can just as easily be turned on others.

Those who are appalled by, say, the anti-Semitic posts of the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan or those of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that call for Israel’s elimination would want them to be banned. But would Twitter’s clearly biased fact-checking team be just as inclined to ban Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or even the heads of Jewish groups who call out anti-Semitic hate in the Muslim and Arab worlds, which has been labeled by some as bigotry, even though those claims are objectively true?

The slippery slope here is one in which those who defend Jewish interests and wish to combat anti-Semitism are as likely to be targeted as hatemongers.

Twitter may think it can be objective when it comes to labeling what Roth described a few weeks ago during the introduction of the warning labels as “misleading information.” But by taking a side on what is essentially a political question in an election year, Twitter is exhibiting the sort of bias that should scare everyone who wants it to continue to be a free, if flawed, public-information highway.

(JNS.org)

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS—Jewish News Syndicate. Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin.

The widespread fury over the proposed extension of Israeli sovereignty constitutes merely shadow-boxing

By: Melanie Phillips

Has the European Union reached a tipping point over Israel? Or to be more precise, is the Europeans’ bluff finally to be called over Israel’s proposal to extend its sovereignty over parts of Judea and Samaria?

The E.U. has been mulling over punitive measures against Israel if it goes ahead with what its Western critics call “annexation of the occupied territories of the West Bank.”

A number of member states, headed by France along with Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, Poland, Belgium and Luxembourg, are calling for a hard line.

Measures being considered include supporting any U.N. moves against “annexation”; public support of proceedings against Israel currently underway in the International Criminal Court at The Hague; and increasing the boycott of settlements in various ways, along with increased financial support for the Palestinians.

The E.U. and Britain maintain that Israel is illegally occupying the disputed territories, and that its settlements there amount to a transfer of population into those lands in contravention of the Geneva Convention.

This is a serious misreading of international law. Israel is not “occupying” these territories. In law, occupation can only occur if the land belongs to a sovereign power, which was never the case here; and a state can also hold onto land which continues to be used for belligerent purposes against it.

It is also a gross misreading of the Geneva Convention, as the Israelis living in these territories were not transferred but moved there entirely of their own volition.

The animus against Israel by both the E.U. and Britain is of long standing. Let’s rephrase that: The animus against Israel by the European and British political class and intelligentsia is of long standing.

For although the E.U. and Britain condemn Israel for “illegal occupation,” fail to defend it against the malice of the United Nations and endorse the meretricious rulings against it at the European Court of Justice, they are nevertheless trading with Israel at ever-increasing levels, as well as depending heavily upon it for crucial military and intelligence support.

So while defaming Israel in the court of world opinion, they have been simultaneously milking its genius for their own benefit. They want to hurt it—but not enough to hurt themselves.

Their hostility is the product of three factors: historic and ineradicable anti-Jewish prejudice; the pathological inability to deal with collective guilt over the Holocaust; and the perception that their interests have for decades lain with the Arab world.

Now, though, something more interesting has been occurring to undermine this collective animus.

In 2004, the E.U. expanded to include a number of post-communist countries from central and eastern Europe, such as Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Unlike Western Europe, these countries are friendly towards Israel. This is not because their populations are free of anti-Jewish prejudice or that these states are free of Holocaust guilt. On the contrary, central and eastern Europe has a terrible history of deeply embedded Catholic anti-Semitism, anti-Jewish pogroms and atrocities against the Jews both during and after the Holocaust.

The friendship extended by these countries towards Israel is therefore all the more striking. A major reason is that, reacting against their recent experience of Soviet oppression, they are determined to assert once again their historic national identity.

They are having to do so in the teeth of a liberal orthodoxy that the Western nation is fundamentally racist, exploitative and dangerous, and that it must be superseded by trans-national institutions like the U.N. or the E.U.

These former Communist countries joined the E.U. because they believed it was in their economic interests to do so. Nevertheless, there stretches a deep philosophical chasm between them and the European monolith.

For the E.U. was founded on the idea—in line with the progressive belief that the West is fundamentally evil, and that nationalism leads straight to fascism—that the independence of the European nation state had to be obliterated.

That’s another reason why the E.U. is so hostile towards Israel, the paradigm nation state that has such a strong cultural and national identity—and, worse still for an E.U. that has a neuralgic aversion to military action, whose people are prepared to fight and die to defend their nation.

This is precisely why the former communist states, which are so anxious to retain their newly won independence and freedoms, identify so strongly with Israel and feel such an affinity for it.

Some other countries which similarly have been experiencing a resurgence of national spirit share this affinity.

Last February, six European member states, including Italy, Hungary, Austria and the Czech Republic successfully thwarted the E.U.’s proposed condemnation of the Trump “peace plan.” E.U. foreign-policy declarations must have the agreement of all 27 member states.

Some of the hostile measures being considered over “annexation,” though, do not require unanimous consent. Nevertheless, does the E.U. really think it’s still in its interests to pursue this vendetta?

It’s been reported that the E.U. Commission is considering proposals to include Israel in a series of funding and co-operation projects on education and science with high academic and research significance.

And there are signs that the E.U. is hesitating over its punishment of Israel. Earlier this month, after the E.U. Foreign Affairs Council discussed its response to Israel’s sovereignty move, its High Representative for Foreign Affairs, Josep Borrell, was cautious in his language.

The issue, he said, was complex, as were sanctions against Israel. Although some member states wanted to consider how to prevent “annexation,” “that doesn’t mean we’ll do it tomorrow.”

Moreover, asked whether Israel’s proposed action was similar to Russia’s annexation of Crimea, he said there was a difference between annexing territory that belongs to a sovereign state and that of the Palestinians.

Quite so. And coming from an E.U. official, such a statement of the obvious is a significant step away from its customary knee-jerk legal legerdemain.

It would hardly be surprising if the E.U. is now recalibrating just where its interests lie. Support for the Palestinians in the Arab world has collapsed; Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states badly need Israel and the United States to defeat Iran.

The only support for the Palestinian cause now comes from an alliance of Western liberals, Iran, and other rogue states and tyrannies. Is that really an alliance of which the E.U. can be proud?

Taking punitive action against Israel would also expose it to the wrath of U.S. President Donald Trump. And all this against the background of the catastrophic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, which threatens to hammer the final nail in the coffin of European economic health and may even accelerate the disintegration of the E.U. altogether.

If Israel with its stellar scientific record were to come up with either a vaccine or an effective antidote to the coronavirus, would the E.U. really want to be jeopardizing its own ability to benefit from this?

At the moment, though, the widespread fury over the proposed extension of Israeli sovereignty constitutes merely shadow-boxing. No one even knows the precise details of the territories involved because it seems these have not yet achieved final agreement.

If and when this does eventually turn into a concrete proposal, the European Union and the United Kingdom will finally have to decide how to react. And at that point, we will discover whether or not the unthinkable has actually happened and the world really has changed.

(JNS.org)

Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. Currently a columnist for “The Times of London,” her personal and political memoir, “Guardian Angel,” has been published by Bombardier, which also published her first novel, “The Legacy,” in 2018. Her work can be found at: www.melaniephillips.com.

The demonstrations may have no relation to Israel or Jews, but there’s always an inventive way to blame and attack them

By: Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld

Antisemitism has been an integral part of Western culture for more than 1000 years and that is still the case today. One of the many ways this can be seen is that antisemitism often infiltrates in mass demonstrations, which have no relation to Israel or Jews.

Corona

This is also the case in the current “hygiene demonstrations” against the Corona lockdown in Germany in a variety of cities. Thousands of people participate in these protests. In Berlin, many participants chanted “Freedom Resistance Traitor and We Are All the People.” Some threw bottles at the police who responded with pepper spray and arrests. Among the demonstrators were conspiracy theorists and right-wing populists.

At several demonstrations yellow stars were worn on protestors armbands or chests falsely equating the lockdown measures to the Nazi persecution of Jews and the current government with that of Hitler. On these stars is written “not vaccinated” or “Covid 19.” Subsequently the city of Munich has prohibited the wearing of a yellow star at these gatherings. Occasionally demonstrators wore concentration camp inmate clothing with the sign “mask makes free”, Demonstrations in a number of German cities promoted by the right wing AfD party have also featured Nazi symbols and references to the Holocaust.

Gideon Botsch, head of the antisemitism research department of the Moses Mendelssohn Center in Potsdam, said that while the participants in these demonstrations are very diverse, “the ever present though latent antisemitism behind conspiracy theorism is now becoming apparent.”

Saba-Nur-Cheema of the Anne Frank Educational Center said that antisemitism in the protests plays an important if not always open role. Footage of some demonstrators openly said that Jews are behind the Corona pandemic. That is, however, not common.

She added that the antisemitism is usually indirect. For instance, George Soros or Israel are accused of having initiated the virus. Nur-Cheema remarked that right-wing extremists wait for such a crisis situation to promote their ideology and attract additional members of the population.

Occupy Wall Street

The way that antisemitism infiltrates the current demonstrations is reminiscent of more or less similar occurrences at the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests. The protestors were not for the most part antisemites, yet antisemitism tainted those protests. The Emergency Committee for Israel was headed by William Kristol, the Jewish editor of the Weekly Standard. The committee prepared a video of the Occupy demonstrations in New York. One could see Jews being attacked and blamed for the financial crisis and financial assistance to Israel. The signs included “Gaza Supports the Occupation of Wall Street,” and “Hitler’s Bankers.”

An African American protestor was seen accusing the Jews of “taking over America.” He said: “The smallest group in America controls the money, media and all other things. The fingerprints belong to the Jewish bankers. I am against Jews who rob America. They are one percent who control America. President Obama is a Jewish puppet. The entire economy is Jewish. Every federal judge in the East Coast is Jewish.”

“Yellow vest” demonstrations in France

n 2019 the “yellow vests” manifestations took place on Saturdays in France. These protests began in November of 2018. They took their name from the highway safety jackets the demonstrators wore. The events were in protest for more economic justice. Initially, a major target was rising fuel prices and the high cost of living. The protest drew supporters from across the political spectrum. Part of them were very close to the radical left. Others were nearer to the positions of the far right.

These were not antisemitic demonstrations and had nothing to do with Jews or Israel.

Yet almost every Saturday there were verbal attacks against the Jewish community. Jean Yves Camus of the Jean Jaurès Foundation said that there was no system of order and anybody could join these demonstrations. He remarked that there were small groups participating who, if they did not show themselves at the protests, would remain totally unknown.

Antisemitism among the yellow vests received much publicity when on February 17, 2019 Jewish philosopher, Alan Finkielkraut – a member of the French Academy– passed the demonstration. A few demonstrators approached him and shouted, “Dirty s***, France belongs to us, dirty race, you racist, you hater, you are a hater. You are going to die. You are going to hell. The people are going to punish you. The Creator is going to punish you…you Zionist.” To the police one protestor said: “I have nothing against you. It is against this s***.” A policeman later recognized one of those who harassed Finkielkraut. He was brought before a court, which condemned him to a suspended prison sentence of two months.

The French “Day of Anger”

In January 2014, a mass rally in Paris took place. This “Day of Anger” was not related to any specific Jewish topic. Part of the protest was against French President François Hollande’s economic plans. However, various groups of participants started to shout antisemitic slogans. They included, “Jews, France doesn’t belong to you” and (the Holocaust denier) “Faurisson is right,” as well as “the Holocaust was a hoax.”

French journalist and public intellectual, Michel Gurfinkiel, wrote that it was shocking that nobody had acted to remove the antisemitic protesters. The police did nothing even though the shouts were in violation of French hate-speech laws. Gurfinkiel questioned whether French democracy was capable of holding antisemitism in check.

Black Lives Matter

If one deviates a bit toward some movements, which have a target not related to Jews or Israel, one may find similar phenomena. One of the clearest examples is the American Black Lives Matter movement. This organization aims to rectify the wrongs perpetrated against African American citizens in the past and present. Its 40,000 word manifesto accuses Israel of perpetrating genocide against Palestinians, labels Israel as an ‘apartheid state’ and joined with the BDS movement in calling for the total academic, cultural and economic boycott of the country. No such demands were made for any other state.

What more does one need to see how antisemitism is entrenched in Western societies?

(INN)

Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld is the emeritus Chairman of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He has been a strategic advisor for more than thirty years to some of the Western world’s leading corporations. Among the honors he received was the 2019 International Lion of Juda Award of the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research paying tribute to him as the recognized leading international authority on contemporary antisemitism.