Howard Epstein – SEISMIC FAULT THREATENING AMERICAN JEWRY
Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof (Vayikra- 25:10)
Inscribed on the Liberty Bell
An Israeli flag is burnt by a masked and black-clad figure, surrounded by a crowd motivated by and expressing hatred for Israel. A familiar sight all over the Middle East, we saw it in Tahrir Square, Cairo, in the midst of the so-called Arab Spring (or more accurately “Fall”), and we have seen it in many places that would not otherwise tolerate open protest, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and so on.
The scene depicted here is different: it occurred in a country that believes in freedom of expression and peaceful protest (the flag-burning being just the right side of the law in this regard). This expression of hatred, for an extreme act such as flag-burning can be nothing else, took place last week in Philadelphia just one kilometer from the Liberty Bell, the American symbol of liberty and freedom. Why there? you ask. Answer: the Democratic Party Convention was being held in the Philadelphia Convention Center to anoint Hillary Clinton, and the flag-burning was right outside. (Clinton’s campaign people denounced the outrage, although she, herself, has apparently not had time to do so.)
The event, not merely the flag-burning in a US city, or the fact that the perpetrators were sufficiently emboldened to undertake it openly and brazenly at a major political event, but significantly the fact that it took place a few blocks from the Liberty Bell – the visible font of American democracy, liberty, and tolerance – should operate as a wake-up call to Israel, to Jews everywhere and most of all to all American Jews. They, who still regard themselves as living in an inviolable space – not a bubble that could one day be drained of its energy and burst, but one surrounded by an impregnable carapace – need to see the incident for what it was: a significant crack in their supposed protective shell.
It was not for Americans, all that European decadence that led to one war after another. Being dragged into WWI (blamed by Henry Ford on the Jews) was bad enough for the US. The great president of that era, Woodrow Wilson, was unseated in 1921 by Warren Harding with the latter’s clarion call to America to return to “normalcy”, which meant staying aloof from European depravity and wars.
After WWII – into which the US was not so much dragged as pitched (by Japan at Pearl Harbor) – American Jews self-comfortingly interpreted normalcy, and American rejection of European vices, as amounting to an automatic and complete rejection of the deep-seated European vice: anti-Semitism. 
That Henry Ford had funded the publication in English of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that both the Rosenbergs were sent to the electric chair as an example, pour décourager les autres, for spying for the Soviets – Ethel Rosenberg was no more than an accessory and, had she been properly sentenced, could have been released after a suitable prison term to raise her two boys – and that quota systems had for years kept Jews out of university chairs and certain clubs and residential areas, faded for American Jews into pre-history. As the nation was increasingly entertained by the Jewish-dominated Hollywood and later TV scheduling, and as Jews were increasingly visible and welcome in every walk of American life from the Congress, the Supreme Court and the Fed down, so American Jews formed the impression that anti-Semitism was something that the Europeans did and it would never (again) manifest itself in the USA.
Time for a re-think. It is time to think again, not merely because Palestinian sympathisers have abused American freedoms to make an ugly protest within (theoretical – see image) earshot of the Liberty Bell, but also because there are many indicators that their long-held beliefs of inviolability are crumbling around the edges – and in the center and from on high. Let us start at the top – and you do not have to take just my word for any of this.
The headline “Anti-Semitism now ‘fashionable’ in the US, warn experts” appeared in The Times of Israel, February 18, 2015 edition. Subtitled: “Attacks against Jews account for close to 60% of hate crimes, despite strong cooperation between government agencies to combat the scourge”, it reported:-
“Unfortunately anti-Semitism has become fashionable again,” Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, executive vice president for the New York Board of Rabbis, told The Times of Israel. “It’s not a big deal to hate the Jews. The first group that gets attacked is the Jews.”
Well, Rabbi Potasnik, “unfortunately” may be said to be somewhat euphemistic. For those American Jews who are alive to this issue, who sensibly take your words at face value and do not seek, in denial, to explain them away, the new anti-Semitism zeitgeist you have identified may be measured (by my reckoning) at around 5.3 on the Richter scale of societal earthquakes.
There is more from the same source:-
“The world is witnessing an alarming rise in acts of anti-Semitism, and we must all do what we can to respond to this growing threat,” said Eric S. Goldstein, CEO of the UJA-Federation of New York. “History has shown us the ramifications of silence.”
“Very disturbingly nearly 60 percent of religious-based crimes are against Jews,” said Michael Lieberman, director of the Civil Rights Policy Planning Center for the Anti-Defamation League.”
Now, here is where things take a turn for the worse. Nowhere in the article is any reference made to Israel. In February 2015, none of the Jewish authorities quoted above spoke of hatred of Israel as a motivating factor behind the anti-Semitism they observed. They may have been seeking to deprive it of the oxygen of publicity or they may not have seen it that way. If the latter is correct, I suggest that they were looking the wrong way for, in 2014, the Louis Brandeis Center for Human Rights under Law reported:-
“According to the ADL, only nine percent of Americans hold anti-Semitic attitudes. This sounds good, but it translates to 21,000,000 people. It means that there are far more anti-Semites than Jews in America. This may be one reason why the Federal Bureau of Investigation regularly reports that anti-Jewish hate crimes exceed hate crimes against any other religious group. On some university campuses, Jewish students have recently been spit at and called “dirty Jews” and worse. The problem is greater for those students who are known to support Israel on campuses where anti-Israel activism runs high.” [My emphasis.]
(The Anti-Defamation League’s annual Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents for the calendar year 2014 reported a 21 percent increase over those for 2013.)
As I have pointed out in earlier blogs, it was in the universities of the pre-Bismarck German states (and following) that Hitler’s anti-Semitism, over a century later, was given legitimacy. Further, for the past forty years and more, it has been in the universities of the UK that academics have felt released from their post-holocaust shackles and succumbed to, or luxuriated in, full-throated anti-Semitism, increasingly dressed up as anti-Zionism. And, if it had ever gone away for more than a scintilla of time in the life of a nation, it has now returned to, and is these days commonly observed, in American universities.
Amcha Initiative – Protecting Jewish Students, in regard to their report to be found at:-
http://www.amchainitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Report-on-Antisemitic-Activity-During-the-First-Half-of-2016.pdf
stated:-
Anti-Semitism in the report was defined on the basis of the State Department’s definition as “incidents involving conduct that targeted Jewish students for particular harm based on their Jewishness or perceived association with Israel” – up 64% from 2015.
“Instead of just boycotting Israel, the anti-Zionists are now boycotting Jewish students,” Professor Leila Beckwith, AMCHA co-founder who led the study said. [My emphasis.]
To me, that increase of 64% over 2015, translates as some 6.4 on the Richter scale, up from the 5.3 observed earlier. Earthquakes of that magnitude often lead to tsunamis.
What was observed by Amcha Initiative should not be a surprise to the well-informed. The Clarion Project reported as long ago as June 2013:-
The U.S. Muslim Brotherhood isn’t the only Islamist group funding American universities. The Iranian regime has done the same thing on a massive scale through its New York-based front, the Alavi Foundation. The Foundation’s website openly lists 30 “academic institutions” in the U.S. and Canada it has awarded grants to.
The Alavi Foundation is accused of funneling money to an Iranian bank linked to the nuclear program. The president of the Foundation, Farshid Jahedi, pled guilty to destroying evidence before it could be submitted to the grand jury. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office investigations chief, Adam Kaufmann, said “We found evidence that the government of Iran really controlled everything about the foundation.”
Everything about these two extracts is disturbing, but note the initial reference to the Muslim Brotherhood. We see a two-pronged attack on American Jewish interests, emanating, as it does, from both the Sunni (the Brothers) and the Shia (Iranian) branches of Islam. The “investments” into American academia run into untold millions; and that is without any consideration of the cash payments that will have been made to their acolytes, all too ready to do their paymasters’ bidding. No wonder, then, that (on the scale I apply) matters deteriorated by several increased Richter scale points in a year – and remember, such increases are exponential.
Forward again to early 2015 to get some perspective on why it matters that American Jewish kids have to run the gauntlet at college – apart, obviously, from the fact that it is all deeply unpleasant, not to say dangerous, for those who are identifiably Jewish, and a catalyst for shedding one’s Jewish identity for those who are not. It matters also in the much broader sense, extrapolated from German history: from the universities it spreads out into every sector of society.
In an interview conducted in early 2015 by the Times of Israel, Malcolm Hoenlein, Executive Vice Chairman/CEO of the conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, speaking about rising anti-Semitism worldwide, including in the United States, was reported as saying (about the US):-
While it’s still not the popular, political anti-Semitism felt by Jews in Europe, there is a “danger of spillover,” said Hoenlein, as American criticism of Israel merges with anti-Semitic tropes, especially on campus.
There is “top-down anti-Semitism” in the US, said Hoenlein, and, much like in the United Kingdom, it is “the poison of the elite that trickles down into society.” [My emphases.]
Mr Hoenlein is, of course, correct. In May 2016, Bloomberg.com reported that the Koch brothers’ think-tank, The Charles Koch Institute, was hosting a conference featuring some of America’s most vituperative foes of Israel. It was to feature separate panels with Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, co-authors of the virulently anti-Israeli 2006 book “The Israel Lobby.” Bloomberg went on to say:-
The institute’s decision to host a conference that features Walt, Mearsheimer and a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Chas Freeman, is in keeping with a general realignment of U.S. politics in 2016. Under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, conservatives have embraced Israel and accused their partisan foes of not supporting the Jewish State, but this year has brought a shift. [My emphases.]
The shift is also important for what it says about the Kochs. …. The institute’s conference is one indication of the kind of policy that will receive greater Koch investment.
Bloomberg described the Koch think-tank as “one of the conservative movement’s most generous donors”. Since the Koch brothers themselves are amongst the wealthiest of Americans, it may be assumed both that their institute will not go short of funds and that there is going to be more anti-Israel activity in the USA where this came from. (For further reading, click:
The flag-burning in Philadelphia last week is just a graphic example of it. Less vivid and more prosaic are the armed guards increasingly see outside American synagogues. In “Forward”, the English-language successor to the esteemed Yiddish-language daily newspaper, it was reported back in September 2014:-
Rabbi Stuart Federow, who leads Shaar Hashalom, a Conservative congregation in Houston, said that because synagogues are a prime terrorist target, he is thankful for congregants who arm themselves. He said that dozens of people of all ages show up to an informal Jewish group called Glocks & Bagels, which meets infrequently at a local firing range.
Well, you may say, that’s Texas for you. Maybe, but these things have a habit of spreading. Not necessarily the carrying of a gun but the perceived need for it.
Could the American “yishuv” ever find itself propelled by an earthquake into a latter-day equivalent of the Garden of the Fitzi-Continis – corralled all together, impotently awaiting their fate, irrespective of wealth, fame and social-standing? Never? Never say never.
The only one of Philip Roth’s magnificent canon of novels that did not surprise me with its concept – official, systemic anti-Semitism – which I had long foreseen as a possibility in the UK, was The Plot Against America. Roth showed how Jewish safety in America can evaporate much more quickly than it took to form.
From the evidence reviewed above, American Jews as a whole should, before it is too late, be vigilant about this, and not rest easy in a state of denial. In any event, it should be now be clear to them that they can no longer achieve anything for their well-being by distancing themselves from, or seeking to shift blame onto, Israel. Plainly, that no longer gives them any sort of free pass.
As to what they may be able to do about it if circumstances akin to Roth’s imaginings were to come about (say, a complete fiscal collapse that is comprehensively blamed on the Jews – several chairs of the Fed, and Goldman Sachs, down) is likely to remain unclear to them for some time to come. To assist them, here is a hint: increased immigration from those countries (in Europe, the UK and possibly, down the road, America) where Jews are going to be increasingly less comfortable and gradually less welcome, should start to feature in Israel’s forward planning.
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Coda: Anyone who doubts whether the Anglo-Saxon nations would act as the Europeans, willing servants of the Nazi Germans, during the Holocaust should try to get hold of copy of the movie This is England, which depicts the activities of thuggish neo-Nazis in contemporary England, and, also, reflect on this: there were three Jewish women on the British Channel Islands when the Germans took them over at the start of WWII. They were all escorted to their transports to Auschwitz by otherwise genial British policemen.
As to America, do the Ku Klux Klan wear white?
© Howard Epstein July 2016
Howard Epstein’s book: Guns, Traumas and Exceptionalism: America in the Twenty-First Century is available now on Kindle.
