Antisemitism in the U.S. is much worse than it appears and is on the rise because of “woke culture,” intersectionality and parallels with the Black Lives Matter movement, the heads of a major U.S. Jewish group said this week.
Dianne Lob, chair of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, told the Times of Israel on Monday the increase in antisemitism comes from the discourse on the left wing of the U.S. political spectrum.
“I think we can’t underestimate the intersectionality piece,” she said. “The language is very parallel to the Black Lives Matter language.”
According to the group’s vice chairman Malcolm Hoenlein, who was with Lob and CEO William Daroff in Jerusalem, the recent 11-day war between Hamas and Israel was a turning point for adopting intersectionality against Jews.
“I think it’s a very serious moment. I think it represents a shift in the tectonic plates. It’s a fundamental shift,” he told the newspaper.
“I think because you’re targeting the collective Jew, the State of Israel, [claiming] that they oppress a people of color, and colonialism and all the code words that they were using in the woke culture and the cancel culture – a lot of which is antisemitic – to be applied against Jews,” he said.
He also said antisemitism had increased because the majority of incidents go unreported.
“We get reports all the time of it. I see it not only in my own community but from rabbis who call me and others. And often the police will not classify it as a hate crime because then the FBI has to come in, and the FBI doesn’t necessarily want to because it’s a lot of paperwork et cetera… But they’re encountering more hostility and the vast majority of incidents don’t go reported even though the number of reports is increasing sharply.”
The U.S. — and the rest of the world — has seen a major spike in antisemitic incidents in the wake of the conflict.
Synagogues have been vandalized; Pro-Palestinian protested have thrown fireworks from moving vehicles, assaulted and spat on diners at outdoor restaurants in New York and Los Angeles; and individuals wearing Jewish symbols have been attacked on the street. Meanwhile, everyone on the left, from universities to Democratic mayoral candidates, have apologized for condemning antisemitism or professing support for Israel.
Hoenlein pointed to an incident in which Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pushed Democratic New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Yang into retracting a tweet expressing condemnation of Hamas and support of Israel, as well as the front page of the May 28 New York Times, which featured photographs of the children killed in the recent war under the title “They Were Just Children.”
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Lob said BLM and other movements that promote intersectionality paved the way for Israel to be portrayed in a very negative light.
“I have to say they did a good job of it, through intersectionality, building it up over time; it’s not that it just happened. We saw it in Ferguson, we saw it in other places where they made the link. But the war gave them an opening to portray Israel in this very negative way, and to hold to account people who would speak up for Israel even to the degree that they qualified what they could say on antisemitism.”
William Daroff, Conference of Presidents CEO, echoed her comments, saying BLM and other movements have “been turned through intersectionality into anti-Israel movements” with “strong anti-Semitic components.”
The Conference of Presidents’ remarks come as a new landmark report titled Recognizing Anti-Zionist Antisemitism was released by the International Legal Forum (ILF), an Israel-based legal network committed to fighting antisemitism, terror and delegitimization of Israel.
Speaking to Breitbart, international human rights lawyer and CEO of ILF Arsen Ostrovsky, said: “It is time, once and for all, to dispense with the notion that these acts of wanton intimidation, harassment and violence are anything but Jew hatred and antisemitism disguised as anti-Zionism.”
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“Antisemitism cannot be honestly confronted unless civil society, mainstream media and public officials, some of whom have been responsible for fanning the flames of hatred, are willing to recognize one of its most powerful modern manifestations – that vilification of the Jewish state directly results in violence against Jews,” Ostrovsky told Breitbart.
According to Aaron Klein, Breitbart’s former Jerusalem bureau chief who now serves as senior adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, figures in the press, the entertainment industry and diplomacy used their platforms, “wittingly or not, to shamelessly parrot Hamas talking points, promoting the terror group’s false narratives about the causes of the conflict and Israeli self-defense actions.”
“Almost entirely missing from the public debate was Hamas’s obvious motive in starting the Gaza violence,” Klein wrote in a featured contribution to the Times of Israel.
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