In an opinion posted September 23, 2023, on CNN entitled “When will colleges stand up to campus antisemites?”, Jonathan Greenblatt, National Director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), claims that Jewish students on US college campuses are facing a rise in antisemitism. Mr. Greenblatt says that as a parent he worries about sending his own children to college.
Yet, again and again, Zionists like Mr. Greenblatt hope to continue injecting a false narrative in the national discourse by deliberately degrading legitimate opposition and criticism of the state of Israel's dehumanization policies vis-a-vis the Palestinian people down to baseless antisemitic attacks on Jewish people.
He says, "The threat of antisemitism has been growing across American society, and colleges are not immune. But while antisemitism nationally has diverse causes, often including ties to White supremacy, campuses more frequently witness boycotts and demonization of Israel that lead to attacking or ostracizing Jewish students because of their own perceived or actual support for Israel".
In substance, therefore, Mr. Greenblatt is suggesting that American students stop criticizing Israel for its apartheid repressive regime against the native Palestinian people in the Near East, in order to protect Jewish students on US campuses against attacks and ostracization. This is akin to demanding that US citizens stop criticizing the repressive regimes of Islamic Iran or Saudi Arabia in order to fight Islamophobia here in the US. This is a standard Zionist modus operandi.
Mr. Greenblatt says that his American Zionist organization - ADL - tracked 665 “anti-Israel incidents” at US university campuses during one academic year (2022-2023), including the “vilification of Zionism”. He defines Zionism as the “belief that Jews have the right to self-governance in the historic land of Israel”, which is a belief based solely on Stone Age biblical trash fiction. In ancient Canaan-Palestine, Hebrews (not Jews) had two separate and enemy kingdoms (Judah and Israel) for some 300 years about 3,000 years ago. Before them the Canaanites - ancestors of the Palestinians - were massacred by the nomadic Hebrews on orders from frikin' Yahweh in the first ethnic cleansing campaign in recorded history, though no reasonable person should believe the fictional self-serving ramblings of the Old Testament-Torah. After the Hebrews, it was the successive turns of the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Crusaders, Seljuks, Ottoman Turks, British crooks and finally colonial Zionist settlers to establish kingdoms and empires. Modern Jews are not the genetic descendants of Stone Age Hebrews. They are East Europeans and Russians who converted recently (a few centuries ago) to Judaism. Even if we grant that these non-native modern invaders of Palestine are cultural Jews, their claim to Palestine is so puny that any of these other civilizations that have ruled in historic Palestine can make at the very least an equal claim to Palestine. And even if one accepts that modern Jews have some claim to Palestine, it is disgusting to see that such a claim has become a license to kill, displace, terrorize, evict, and otherwise ethnically cleanse the land of its native indigenous population.
As he defends Zionism, Mr. Greenblatt speaks not as a Jew but as a European-American Zionist whose late 19th century colonial project began in 1897 to invade and conquer Palestine, massacre, displace and dispossess its indigenous Palestinian people of their millennial villages, towns and cities, and erect a brand new state over a land that last saw a Jewish person some 2,000 years ago. Not unlike all the other European colonial conquests in Asia, Africa, Middle East and Latin America that reached their climax in that same 19th century when each European state had its “empire”: Invade, conquer, massacre, displace, dispossess the natives and erect a brand new state ruled by the invaders, not by the indigenous owners of the land. With Zionism, European Jews embarked on a me-too mercantilist colonialist enterprise to build themselves an empire like their fellow French, Belgians, Dutch, Portuguese, Spaniards, British and other Europeans.
Is it “antisemitic” to analyze the creation of the state of Israel from the lens of a colonial enterprise like so many others that came out of the Europe of the 19th century? Is merely questioning in an academic setting the historicity of the creation of the state of Israel a crime? Is Israel infallible simply because, though born as a colonial enterprise, it came of age partly - not entirely - as a result of the Holocaust?
Just to be clear to my readers: There is a huge difference between antisemitism and criticism of Israel. Please read carefully and understand the distinction:
“Antisemitism” is a longstanding hatred of Jews by Europeans based on abhorrent false claims of blood libel, rejection and killing of Christ, conspiracy theories of world control, financial greed and so on. But these are not the arguments that today's critics of Israel put forward;
"Critics of Israel" make no such nonsensical claims; they simply argue that Israel is a documented practitioner of horrible policies against the colonized Palestinians that include walled separation, harassment, sieges, rampant discrimination, home demolition, dispossession, land theft, identity-denial… all with the openly stated objective by Israeli officials to one day annex the remaining Palestinian lands, declare Palestine dead, and deprive the 4 million Palestinians of their right to a state of their own on their own land. Israel is thus not only a colonialist settler enterprise; it adheres to an expansionist ideology for future land theft and ethnic cleansing. That is why in fact Israel does not have a constitution because writing one would force it to define its borders and legally prohibit it from stealing more land from the Palestinians and its neighbors.
Having not mentioned antisemitism early in his opinion, Mr. Greenblatt moves quickly to amalgamate criticism of Israel and vilification of Zionism with antisemitism, thus insidiously bridging the civilized pillars of freedom of opinion and defense of victimized people with the universally denounced and condemned belief in racist antisemitism. And this is where the crux of the matter is: Zionists continuously conflate a desire for debating the apartheid policies of the state of Israel with hatred of Jews. What does Mr. Greenblatt then call all those Israelis and Jews who condemn Israel for its policies? Is there such a thing as a Jewish antisemite?
According to Univstats, [ https://www.univstats.com ], there are 6,543 colleges and universities in the US. Therefore, the statistic of 665 “anti-Israel” incidents says that 10 out of each 100 colleges and universities have experienced some poorly defined “anti-Israel” incidents, which Mr. Greenblatt himself attributes largely to white supremacist actors, i.e. white anglo-saxon protestant racists who have sympathy neither for the Israelis nor for the Palestinians. Just read further below how a university conference on Palestinian literature is included in Mr. Greenblatt's list of "anti-Israel incidents".
Then the sneaking around the core argument begins with a pretentious waiver: “To be sure, criticism and debate over the policies of the State of Israel, just like criticism of the policies and actions of any country, is part of a healthy campus ecosystem. The First Amendment protects the right to boycott, as well as the right to engage in harsh and divisive rhetoric. Undoubtedly, one can criticize Israel’s leaders and actions without being antisemitic.” How civilized of Mr. Greenblatt! We ought to be grateful!
So I urge Mr. Greenblatt to put an end to the obfuscation and make two side-by-side lists: One list is for actions and arguments that critique Israel without being labeled antisemitic, and another list of actions and arguments that critique Israel and are antisemitic. Many around the world are utterly confused by the Zionist arguments – indeed confusion and obfuscation are probably the objective of Zionists since it allows them to say the same thing and its opposite at once - because it seems that any time someone criticizes Israel, they are immediately attacked as antisemitic by a wide range of Israeli apologists, from paid Zionist trolls on the web to senior officials in the Jewish government. A most recent and flagrant example was accusing the UN, Human Rights Watch and even the Israeli organization B’Tselem of being antisemitic for issuing their 2022 report calling Israel an apartheid state [See: https://lebanoniznogood.blogspot.com/2022/01/israeli-apartheid-report-can-critic-of.html ]
Next, Mr. Greenblatt unleashes his dual nature venom. Believing that he has firmly equated antisemitism with Israelophobia, he states, “One of the worst examples of campus anti-Israel activity in recent memory is the Palestine Writes Literature Festival set to take place at the University of Pennsylvania this weekend”. Notice that he labels this activity as “anti-Israel”, not as “antisemitic”, thus contradicting his own supposed welcoming of healthy debate on the Israel-Palestine question.
He then goes through a long list of outrageous extremist statements and positions by anti-Zionists on US campuses, essentially parading a tiny minority of extremist white Christian American supremacists and suggesting that they somehow are representatives of the Palestinian movement for justice. This is the same Zionist propaganda that equated the legitimate Palestinian national movement with a minority of “communist terrorist subversives” during the 1960s and 1970s, then with a minority of “Islamic terrorists” in the 1980s and 1990s. Hiding under these fake arguments, Israel has continued to steal Palestinian land, dispossess the Palestinians, deny them an identity, demolish their homes, expel them to no return, uproot their millennial olive orchards, kill them with indiscriminate bombings and assassinations, dispossess them of property in Jerusalem to the benefit of foreign settlers, etc.
But now that it has ran out of scarecrow labels to attach to the Palestinian national movement, and that the label of antisemitism has worn out its utility, Zionists are promoting an alternative lie and new misleading terminology, namely that criticism of Israel is hatred of Israel or “Israelophobia”, a new term Zionists have coined to malign anyone who dares criticize Israel for its endless torment, racism and hatred toward Palestinians – let's call it, in a tit-for-tat, "Palestinophobia". Zionists hope to surf on this new one for the next two decades or so until they exterminate or expel all the Palestinians and achieve their pure Jewish supremacist colony they call Israel.
But the 2020s are no longer the 1950s and 1960s when Zionists could blatantly disinform and misinform a captive audience with their monopoly on information; the Zionist jig is up. People now can see for themselves through the Zionist lies couched in guilt-infliction on the European Holocaust criminals. Palestine is today everywhere and on everyone’s mind. Sympathy for Palestine is quickly overwhelming the 1950-vintage pity for Israel. The Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) movement worked very well with apartheid South Africa. Despite outrageous lies and disinformation, the BDS movement will eventually work well to rescue Palestine from the claws of European Jewish racism and religious extremism. Apartheid South Africa did not have an international Zionist movement to lie and misinform on its behalf, but it allied itself with Apartheid Israel and its dumb American sponsors which aided it with finance and weapons. Israel was the only country in the world to defend Apartheid South Africa's dehumanization of the native African population.
The Zionist Movement was founded like many other European corporations, like the British East India Company, the Dutch East India Company and others, whose task was to colonize, subdue and exploit colonies anywhere they could around the world. The Zionist Movement first targeted Uganda in Africa, but later changed its target to Palestine when the British crooks offered Palestine to the Zionists (Balfour letter) in exchange for financial loans to aid the British war effort. The Basel Conference in 1897, which laid the groundwork for the Zionist Colonial Corporation, was a follow-up to the Berlin Conference of 1884 which effectively divided Africa among European powers like Britain, France, Germany, Portugal, Belgium, Italy and Spain. Always "special ones", the non-state European Zionists wanted their share of the pie.
In the post Word War II period, colonialism effectively came to an end. Virtually all former colonies of Europe have gained their independence, which leaves Israel today as perhaps the only British, now American, colony to remain a barbaric foreign racist implant of repression and dehumanization of native indigenous people. To paraphrase Hanan Ashrawi, the Palestinian people are the only remaining colonized people on Earth who are asked to guarantee the security of their colonial occupier, while Israel is the only colonial occupying country that demands to be protected from its own colonized victims.
Regardless of how long it might take to bring justice to Palestine, injustice will never prevail. As long as this monumental injustice persists in Palestine, perpetrated by foreign invading settlers and targeting a native indigenous population, there will never be peace.
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