By: Sean Durns June 3, 2021
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June 1, 2021 marked the eightieth anniversary of the Farhud, the massive pogrom in Iraq which resulted in nearly two hundred Iraqi Jews murdered and hundreds of others raped and wounded. The
Wall Street Journal commemorated the anniversary by publishing an op-ed by a survivor of the Farhud, Joseph Samuels. The
Washington Post, however, took another approach.
The
Post not only failed to note the anniversary, it published an op-ed that, if implicitly, called for dismantling the world’s sole Jewish state.
The op-ed, entitled “Opposition to a ‘one-state’ solution is often rooted in bigotry” and authored by H.A. Hellyer of the Carnegie Endowment for Middle East Peace, evidenced a historical illiteracy that, even in today’s day and age, is truly astonishing.
The Democratic Party will soon be the next “existential threat” to the Jewish state. And one thing we can be sure of, Zionists won’t take that lying down.
Perhaps you saw the letter. The one in which 175 Jewish studies and Israel studies scholars wrote, “we condemn the state violence that the Israeli government and its security forces have been carrying out in Gaza.” In the same letter, they wrote, “We also denounce expressions of antisemitism or Islamophobia in connection with ongoing events in Israel/Palestine.”
Or perhaps you read the Instagram post by the account “Progressive Jews,” backing Palestinian rights and safety, freedom and liberation, but also urging followers to speak out against antisemitism.
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Or perhaps you read about the millennial Jewish staffers on Capitol Hill who are working criticism of Israeli government policy into their day jobs, pushing back against conflation of criticism of the Israeli government with antisemitism.
Mohyeldin was born in Cairo
Egypt, not Illinois.
And white Leftists are falling in line. Popular HBO host John Oliver said likewise and claimed Israel practiced a “form of apartheid” [
The Daily Beast, May 16, 2021]. Feminist commentator Anita Sarkeesian, an immigrant from Canada with Iraqi Armenian parents, shared this sentiment:
Settler colonialism is a form of colonialism that seeks to replace the native population of the colonised land with a new society of settlers.
Israel did not exist until 73 years ago when they were a settler colony that took over Palestine and have been violently maintaining their position ever since. If you don’t know this history here is a good primer to get you started: https://t.co/CoDp1yUkDjpic.twitter.com/cSLL17Aepe Anita Sarkeesian (@anitasarkeesian) May 11, 2021
As the West reviews its unflinching support for Israel
As the West reviews its unflinching support for Israel
The writer is a former caretaker finance minister and served as vice-president at the World Bank
I write this as it is not clear even to those who have given their unflinching support to the Jewish state of Israel, how and when the current bloody conflict that is waging between the Palestinians and Israelis is likely to end. There are a number of reasons why the Americans and most of their government have cheered on Israel in its ways. This was the case even when the right wing of Israeli politics under long-serving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put greater than the usual pressure on the Arabs who were the citizens of Israel. While the most enthusiastic support for Israel came from the Democratic Party, it was the Republican Donald Trump who satisfied the long-standing Jewish demand that they should be allowed to shift the capital of their country from Tel Aviv to Jer