Rep. Thomas Massie Says Congress Members Should Not Be Dual Citizens, Gets Accused of Anti-Semitism
Chris Menahan – August 20, 2024 Tuesday
https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=64605EXTRACTCongressman Thomas Massie (R-KY) is being accused of anti-Semitism for stating that members of the US Congress should not be allowed to hold dual citizenship with other countries.
“Dual citizens elected to United States Congress should renounce citizenship in all other countries,” Massie said Monday on X. “At a minimum, they should disclose their citizenship in other countries and abstain from votes specifically benefitting those countries.”Though Massie didn’t call out any country by name, he was immediately accused of anti-Semitism by Jewish Florida State Rep. Randy Fine (R).
“This guy is just gross,” Rep. Fine said. “Who in Congress is a dual citizen? I think we all know the slur he is tossing around. The real question is why certain Florida politicians choose this bigot to hang around with.”
made anti-Semitic “littering” (aka leafleting) a felony punishable by five years in prison. Stew Peters: Hate speech laws about to be passed in Florida under FAUX conservative governor Ron Desantis. Penalty for having the “wrong” opinion? 3rd degree felony and 5 years in jail! Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis held a signing ceremony for the bill together with Fine while on foreign soil in Israel after dining with pro-Israel megadonor Miriam Adelson. Randy Fine: Made a secret trip to JERUSALEM (!!!) with @RepMikeCaruso to deliver @GovRonDeSantis HB 269, the strongest antisemitism bill in the United States. To Florida’s Nazi thugs, I have news: attack Jews on their property and you’re going to prison. Never again means never again. Mike Caruso: Hate crimes based on religious and ethnic animus is now punishable up to a third degree felony. Florida is saying no to hate. Massie struck a nerve with Israel Firsters earlier this year after he told Tucker Carlson that every GOP member of Congress has an “AIPAC babysitter” who guides them on how to vote in the interests of Israel.
“It’s the only country that does this,” Massie said. AF Post: Congressman Thomas Massie reveals to Tucker Carlson that his Republican colleagues have an “AIPAC babysitter” to ensure they vote in the interests of Israel at all times. “It’s the only country that does this,” Massie adds.
The House of Representatives passed the “Anti-Semitism Awareness Act” on May 2, by a vote of 320-91 in reaction to demonstrations on numerous university campuses and elsewhere against the brutal and genocidal policy of Israel in Gaza. The Act has now been sent to the Senate, where it seems certain to pass. This is an extremely dangerous bill that could criminalize the Bible, many Christian Churches, as well as any negative remarks about Israel and Jews. In brief, it threatens us with totalitarian thought control. We must do everything we can to oppose it.
First, let’s take an overview of the Act. It adopts the very broad definition of anti-Semitism of the “International Holocaust Remembrance Association.” The Act calls this definition “a vital tool which helps individuals understand and identify the various manifestations of antisemitism.” Gardner, Andy Buy New $19.57 (as of 09:02 UTC – Details)
What does this definition say? “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed in hatred of Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” How you can be anti-Semitic toward someone who isn’t Jewish isn’t immediately apparent.
The authors of the definition give someone examples of what they consider anti-Semitic. These include saying that the Jews control the media and Congress, saying that Israel is a racist state, propagating the “blood libel” that the Jews killed Jesus, minimizing or denying the Holocaust, and claiming that Jews in America have “dual loyalty.”
As a number of writers including Tucker Carlson and John Zmirak have pointed out, the definition allows large parts of the Bible to be banned. The most famous such passage is Matthew 27: 25. “His blood be upon us and our children.” This is the “blood libel” that the Act wouldn’t let us teach!
You might object that the Act would never be enforced in this way. The American people would never stand for it! But it would always be there, like a sword of Damocles, hanging over our heads. And don’t be so sure it wouldn’t be enforced! The Scottish Hate Speech Act was passed in 2021, and people predicted it would never be enforced. Beginning in April 2024, though, it has been enforced, and many people have been fined and imprisoned for violating it.
The biggest problem with the Act, though, isn’t the definition of anti-Semitism. If it were, we could substitute a more reasonable definition, such as “hatred for all Jews.” Even if this were done, however, we would still be in an untenable position. Banning any kind of speech, whether it is good or bad, is incompatible with a free society. As the great Murray Rothbard has taught us, all rights are property rights. Everyone can set the rules for speech on his own property, and no one has the right to control what anyone says on someone else’s property. This includes speech which counts as “offensive.” Of course, we don’t live in a libertarian society, but we should come as close as we can in practice to it. This means following the strictest possible interpretation of the First Amendment. “Congress shall make no law. . .abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”. ‘No law” means “no law” and that includes laws against so-called “hate speech.” As the great legal scholar Dr. Wanjiru Njoya says, “Jews must learn to live in a world where people say offensive things about them, same as anyone else. You shouldn’t jail people for saying offensive things about Jews or Israel.”
We need to ask ourselves, why the Act has been passed at the present time. The answer is obvious. It is to block all criticism of Israel. And Israel should be criticized, because of the genocidal policy it is following in Gaza. The US government, led by brain-dead Biden and his gang of neocon controllers, have supported Israel with money and advanced weapons throughout Israel’s invasion. Anthony Blinken, “our” Secretary of State, flew to Tel Aviv as soon as the invasion started and, standing beside war criminal “Bibi” Netanyahu, said, “I come before you not only as the United States secretary of state but also as a Jew.” See here.
Is it “anti-Semitic” to report this? One of the examples the International Holocaust Remembrance Day Association’s definition of anti-Semitism is to say that Jews have a strong influence on American foreign policy. But it’s the simple truth.
And what policy do Blinken and his cohorts support? It is Israel’s policy to exterminate the Palestinians who live in Gaza. The great Ron Unz has called it “the greatest televised massacre of civilians in the history of the world.” Under the Act, Unz could be prosecuted for saying that, because saying that Israelis are committing genocide, or comparing then to Nazis, is forbidden.
As if that were not bad enough, conditions in Gaza are getting worse. Because of Israel’s constant bombing and interdiction of food shipments to Gaza, a famine is occurring there. According to Cindy McCain, the Director of the World Food Program, “There is famine, full-blown famine, in the north, and it’s moving its way south.” Now it will reach the south, because Israel has just blocked food shipments to Rafah.
Should calling attention to horrendous news like this be an offense punishable by jail? You don’t have to be a libertarian to recognize that we can’t have a free society under the censorship conditions this Act would impose.
Many Jews would have to be banned by this standard. The eminent Jewish historian Omer Bartov said last November that “functionally and rhetorically we may be watching an ethnic cleansing operation that could quickly devolve into genocide.” His worst fears have come to pass since then. He too would be banned under the Act. So would Norman Finkelstein and John Mearsheimer.
Jews who don’t criticize Israeli’s war could also be banned under the Act. For example, some very religious Jews are anti-Zionist and don’t recognize Israel as a legitimate state. They could be charged with anti-Semitism. Also, what about Orthodox Jews who don’t recognize conversions to Judaism supervised by Reform rabbis? If they say that such converts aren’t Jewish, they could be charged under the Act as anti-Semitic. So could Reform rabbis who mock the Orthodox as benighted reactionaries.
One of the oddest aspects of this whole deplorable business is that the Act bans statements that the Jews have a lot of political power. One wonders how the Act passed by the astonishing margin of 320 to 91 without pressure from the Israeli Lobby. The sellout Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is bought and paid for. How then can the Act ban a statement that is obviously true and that the passage of the Act shows to be true?
One target of the Act is the heroic university students who are protesting what is going on in Gaza. The sponsors of the Act depict them as lawbreakers who need to be suppressed to preserve “law and order”, but students protests against criminal wars are part of the American tradition. Student protests against LBJ’s criminal war against Vietnam helped bring down his presidency. Libertarians and all other lovers of freedom should never forget that we are anti-war. Cushatt, Michele Best Price: $11.96 Buy New $11.88 (as of 09:07 UTC – Details)
Of course the neocons behind the Act don’t see matters this way. These days, students often learn about news through social media platforms like TikTok. Many students learned about what was going on in Gaza though discussions on that platform, and because of this, the neocons in Congress voted to force TikTok’s parent company to sell it within 270 days; if not, it will be banned in America. As Dr. Ron Paul notes, “ The head of the Anti-Defamation League was actually caught on tape complaining about the “TikTok problem.’”
When we talk about the neocons, we should never forget that they got us into the disastrous invasion of Iraq under George W. Bush. The US government killed a million people –half of them children thanks to the US starvation blockade — and cost us trillions of dollars. Despite this—or maybe because of it—neocons like Robert Kagan still praise the Iraq war today. This is the sort of person behind the Act.
In my opinion, the evidence for Israeli genocide is overwhelming, and those who want to ban people from saying so are calling for a ban on the truth. But suppose you disagree. You should still oppose the Act. As John Stuart Mill said in his great On Liberty (1859): “But the peculiar evil of silencing an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race;. . .those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”
You shouldn’t be surprised that neocons like Kagan smear this great libertarian and anti-war crusader as an anti-Semite.
We should take the opportunity provided by the Act to engage in a full and frank discussion of American foreign policy. Why are we supplying billions of dollars in aid to a country engaging in genocide? Why are we supporting Ukraine in a war against Russia that could lead to a thermonuclear war? What groups benefit from these policies? By the way, if you are looking for real anti-Semites, you should start with the pro-Nazi Azov Brigade backing the tyrannical dictatorship of Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Let’s do everything we can to get rid of the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act and to return to our traditional foreign policy of non-intervention, following the guidance of Dr. Ron Paul and Murray Rothbard.
Lawfare By New York Radical Leftist Letitia James Targets Peter Brimelow and VDARE, Immigration Critics for Destruction
Tucker Carlson recently interviewed Lydia Brimelow about New York Attorney General Letitia James’s attack on VDare.
Transcript:
Tucker [00:00:00] Illegal immigration into the United States is at its highest levels ever. Tens of millions of people have come here illegally over the past 15 years, and none of them will ever leave. Mostly they come from the poorest countries on the planet. We don’t know anything about them, really. We don’t know if they’re pro-America. We don’t know if they’re hostile to the people who already live here. We don’t know, in the case of the recent arrivals, what they’re going to do for a living as robotics eliminate low-skilled jobs. So what’s happening right now at the border that what’s often mentioned on TV is really undersold as a story. This is changing America forever, and almost certainly for the worse as we’re watching it. And no one is doing anything about it. The governor of Texas occasionally makes noises about it — it’s over his border that this human wave is flowing, and yet he’s taken no real steps to stop it. There are some media outlets that let you know that it’s happening in general terms, but they don’t seem particularly outraged by it. We’re sitting here as our country is destroyed and no one’s responding, and at some point you have to ask why? Are the majority of Americans in favor of this? Of course not. In fact, no one’s in favor of this. No one will defend this in public. No one will explain why we need it. Why it’s a good idea. How it’s going to help this country. How your grandchildren will live in a better place because of it. People are just silent, like it’s not even happening. And again, you have to ask why. And the answer, of course, is really simple because they’re afraid, they know they’ll be punished if they say anything about it. The story of Peter and Lydia Brimelow explains why they’re afraid. Peter Brimelow has been a journalist for 50 years. Worked at a whole bunch of what are now called mainstream publications. Was an editor — Barron’s, Forbes, National Review, Dow Jones, a legitimate old school journalist. And in the late 90s, he began to ask questions about our immigration scheme. Is this really good idea, is it helping America? And of course, no one could answer those questions because the answer is obvious. No, it’s destroying America; as it destroyed California, so it will destroy your state. That’s certain. But for asking that question, he was fired from his jobs and shunted off into what we call the fringes. But he didn’t stop. He started a website called VDARE. He runs it now with his wife, Lydia.
And for the crime in the supposedly free country of opposing the immigration system currently in place — not the official system, but the actual system — where anyone from the poorest parts of America [sic] with no skills whatsoever can come here and immediately go on welfare. That’s our current system. For saying that that’s a bad idea, powerful forces have just tried, to destroy their lives, not just their lives, the lives of their family, using the justice system to do it. And needless to say, you probably guessed, using something called the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is nothing to [do with] the South or poverty. It has to do with shutting down free speech in this country. They have descended on the Brimelows and have really kind of tried to destroy them. That’s not an overstatement, but you judge for yourself because Lydia Brimelow, who helps run VDARE, joins us now to explain what’s happened to her. Lydia, thanks so much for coming on.
Lydia Brimelow [00:03:13] Thank you so much, Tucker. It’ll be very nice to have our story told.
Tucker [00:03:18] So I have known your husband, sort of, since he was not a controversial figure at all. And he became a controversial figure when he began to say things like, hey, why are we doing this? And he was immediately called a white nationalist, a white supremacist. And I remember very well his response, which is, no, I’m not. And if I was, I’d say so. But that kept up and he wound up publishing with you, VDARE online. That would seem not a particularly controversial thing to do in a free country. But for your family, it’s been, a very risky thing to do. So I hope that you would explain to us what the government, we’ll start with the government, is trying to do to you for daring to oppose the immigration system.
Lydia Brimelow [00:04:03] Yeah, absolutely. So it’s hard to believe everybody who hears the story says it’s completely incredible. Peter founded VDARE Foundation, which has [as] its main project VDARE.com, back in the late 90s. As you said, we’re in our 25th year now, and I joined about ten years ago. I do the fundraising and the back office work, and he handles everything that goes up on the website VDARE.com. We’re a nonprofit journalism enterprise. So everything that we do, all of our people are paid through generous donations from individuals. I can tell you we don’t get any government grants or big foundation grants either. It’s all just grassroots. And we’re veterans of cancel culture at this point. So we’ve been kicked off a lot of mainstream services that most people use to distribute the media that they produce. And that is nothing compared to what we’re facing right now, which started about two years ago, originating out of the hate crimes division in the state of New York. A series of subpoenas were issued by Letitia James first, to Facebook, which I can explain a little bit in a minute. And then to us and our board members, at VDARE Foundation, with no clear trigger, they have refused to tell us what they’re investigating. It’s been two years of us just being crushed under this burden of investigation. The subpoenas were, like, 47 points each.
They want us to turn over essentially every document that we have interacted with, since 2016. And for a small organization, you know, at our peak, we had four full time employees. Right now we have two. That’s Peter and myself. This has just been an absolutely crushing burden. And I will say the Facebook subpoena was interesting because we had actually been kicked off of Facebook, years previous. So we had not even been on Facebook to interact with Facebook in many years, and they were asking for all of the data that VDARE had ever accumulated, created, while we were on Facebook, which we had incidentally, also requested. VDARE was kicked off of Facebook the same day that every one of the people involved in our organization was kicked off, including myself. I had never posted anything political online, at all, but they took all my baby pictures. The video of my daughter’s first steps, which was not saved anywhere else. Facebook still has that. They have, in fact, told my lawyers that we are too dangerous to get our data back, including my daughter taking her first steps. So that was the first subpoena that Letitia James’s hate crimes division issues.
Tucker [00:06:43] May I ask you to pause for one moment and just clarify something. So Facebook is calling you too dangerous to possess your own baby pictures? Has VDARE ever committed violence? Is there something we’re missing? Terrorism? Insurrection. Killing people?
Lydia Brimelow [00:06:59] Never.
Tucker [00:07:00] Okay, okay. Sorry. I just want to clarify that.
Lydia Brimelow [00:06:59] We’ve never even been accused of doing that, right? I mean, people use these scare smear words all the time, white nationalists, white supremacists, racist, xenophobe, whatever the flavor of the day is.
So we get accused of being those things all the time, which we would argue we are not. But violence is something we have never been associated with. We’re even careful to talk about the national divorce because of what implications that might have. I mean, we’re living in a very high-tension environment right now politically. And I think it’s important that people choose their words very carefully and choose their actions very carefully. I think it’s entirely justified that a large portion of the American population feels drawn to activism right now, but it needs to be chosen very carefully. And once you destroy something, you can’t take it back. And our enemies should remember that too. Once they destroy us, what are they going to do then?
But to go back to the subpoenas, we have our mainstream, you know, when I say mainstream, what I mean is like in normal times when VDARE is just surviving cancel culture and putting out this message that demography is destiny and that America is legitimate and real, that we’re a true culture and we have a national identity that’s worth defending, and that immigration has massive negative effects that nobody’s talking about.
Our operation is about $800,000 a year. In the last 12 months, about, we’ve had to spend half a million dollars just complying with the subpoenas.
There have recently been a number of incidents that would be of interest if one has concerns about the sorry state of free speech in Europe and the United States, the so-called “democracies” who tend to boast about their freedoms and the rights of their citizens. The chosen weapon in the US and elsewhere in the Anglo-sphere has been the designation “hate speech” which also covers “hate writing,” “possessing hate literature or films,” and even “hate thinking.” In Europe, where “hate speech” is often referred to using the English words, the expression is often preceded by the word “illegal” to make sure that the point about consequences is made and the potential penalty is clearly understood. Some Europeans have in fact been convicted and sent to prison when they have falsely believed they were exercising free speech.
Though the “hate” designation was originally coined to discourage racist language and other forms of expression it has increasingly been exploited by Israel and its associated Jewish support groups to criminalize any criticism of Israel or of Jewish group behavior. It has extended its reach by moving into subsets, notably “holocaust denial” and “antisemitism” which are also regarded ipso facto as hate crimes in a context in which Jews are always regarded as victims, never as perpetrators of violence.
Much of what is going on might be described in fairly simple terms: Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and its unprovoked lethal attacks on its neighbors might reasonably be described as “deplorable” or even genocidal in the case of the Palestinians. Beyond that, Israel, which pretends to be a democracy, operates a system of control over the Christian and Muslim minority within its own borders and also in the area it illegally occupies that is describable as “apartheid,” where the minority is compelled to accept limited resources and consistently harsh treatment from the dominant Jewish population. More to the point, the extremist government coalition headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made the situation even worse for those non-Jews that it controls, with talk of introducing mass expulsions and imprisonments. The death toll of Palestinians at the hands of the Israel Defense Forces has also been going up, with more than 150 Palestinians killed this year, including 26 children.
To be sure, Israel has become a home for Jews that can no longer tolerate anyone else. Some ministers in the new government are particularly vile in their views but it is to be assumed that Netanyahu and others in his administration are genuinely supportive of turning Israel into a truly and even exclusively Jewish state, which is in fact how it legally defines itself. The one minister most cited for his cruelty and racism is Itamar Ben-Gvir of the Jewish Power party. Ben-Gvir has been charged with crimes 50 times, and convicted on eight occasions, including once for support of a Jewish terrorist group. He is a former supporter of the now deceased right wing fanatic Meir Kahane, and, like Kahane, envisions an Israel that is as Palestinian free as possible and centered exclusively on Jewish interests. He has called for deporting Arabs who aren’t loyal to a Jewish Israel, annexing all of the West Bank and exercising full Israeli sovereignty over the Temple Mount, where the Muslim venerated Al-Aqsa mosque is located. He supports legislation defying international agreements to “divide” the Al-Aqsa site to permit regular Jewish worshippers and there have even been suggestions that the Israeli government will seek to rebuild the so-called Biblical Second Temple, destroyed in the First Century by the Romans, in that location.
Ben-Gvir is notorious for his provocations directed against Palestinian Muslims and Christians. He has led marches of armed settlers flaunting Israeli flags through Arab quarters of cities and towns and has even brought settlers and other extremists to the al-Aqsa mosque during Ramadan and to interrupt Friday prayers. To cap the irony, he has been since November 2022 the National Security Minister, which gives him authority over the police, to include the so-called Border Police as well as the police forces located on the illegally occupied West Bank. Indeed, as a practical matter, Ben-Gvir is seeking to have the Knesset pass legislation explicitly conferring legal immunity on all Israeli soldiers for any and all killings of Palestinians. He has also pressed the parliament to institute a formal, judicially administered death penalty for “terrorists”, which would mean any Palestinian who physically resists the Israeli occupation.
Another extremist who has obtained a major ministry in the Netanyahu government is Bezalel Yoel Smotrich who has served as the Minister of Finance since 2022. He has recently completed a controversial trip to the United States where he met with American Zionist leaders. Smotrich is the leader of the Religious Zionist Party, and lives in an illegal settlement in a house within the Israeli occupied West Bank that was also built doubly illegally outside the settlement proper. Smotrich supports expanding Israeli settlements in the West Bank, opposes any form of Palestinian statehood, and even denies the existence of the Palestinian people. He demands a state judiciary that relies only on Torah and Jewish traditional law. Accused of inciting hatred against Arab Israelis, he told Arab Israeli lawmakers in October 2021, that “it’s a mistake that David Ben-Gurion didn’t finish the job and didn’t throw all of you out in 1948.”
The increasing brutality of the Israeli government and its security forces have produced a reaction among many observers worldwide, so the supporters of Israel have engaged in their own first strike frequently using the “hate crime” weapon. They have basically turned the hate crime legislation to their advantage by convincing many nations to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of the “hate crime” antisemitism to automatically include criticism of Israel as being equivalent to hatred of Jews. When that doesn’t work the powerful Israel lobby can also resort to much more brutal threats. When Iceland sought to make illegal infant circumcision five years ago, regarding it as genital mutilation performed on an unconsenting child, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) threatened to unleash Jewish power to destroy their economy and international reputation as punishment for making their country “inhospitable to Jews.”
Now that the “hate crime” genie together with the associated links to holocaust denial and antisemitism have been released from the bottle, they are being used regularly to silence anyone who even indirectly criticizes prominent Jews like George Soros. Conservatives including Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk have recently been on the receiving end of the antisemitism label after referring to Soros and his “Globalist” agenda. It is my belief that Tucker was fired at least in part due to Jewish pressure on FOX as he had been very critical of groups like the hysterical ADL and its hideous director Jonathan Greenblatt.
Roger Waters, the former lead singer of Pink Floyd, has emerged as a powerful critic of Israeli treatment of the Palestinians. As a consequence, he has been hounded by authorities in Europe, has had his concerts canceled, and has been threatened with legal action to make him shut up. The Biden Administration’s antisemitism Czar Deborah Lipstadt has also attacked him, saying “I wholeheartedly concur with [an online] condemnation of Roger Waters and his despicable Holocaust distortion.” She was referring to a tweet stating that “I am sick & disgusted by Roger Waters’ obsession to belittle and trivialize the Shoah & the sarcastic way in which he delights in trampling on the victims, systematically murdered by the Nazis. In Germany. Enough is enough. Holocaust trivialization is criminalized across the EU.” The State Department, speaking for the White House, then piled on adding that Waters has “a long track record of using antisemitic tropes” and a concert he gave late last month in Germany “contained imagery that is deeply offensive to Jewish people and minimized the Holocaust… The artist in question has a long track record of using antisemitic tropes to denigrate Jewish people.”
One might observe that the depiction of Waters is basically untrue – he is a critic of Israeli crimes against humanity but does not hate Jews. One might also add how the fact that the United States State Department actually has a Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism speaks for itself and tells you exactly who is in charge in Washington. I wonder how much it costs to run Lipstadt’s mouth from a no doubt well-appointed office in Foggy Bottom each year? Maybe someone should do a cost/benefit analysis and give Debbie her walking papers.
Beyond that, several other recent stories show how it all often works in practice to confront and silence critics. Swedish pop star Zara Larsson is facing what is obviously a coordinated backlash on social media after criticizing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. In an Instagram message to her 6.3 million followers, the 23-year-old declared the ongoing cross-border violence, which is killing mostly Arabs, was a “crime” against Palestinians. Her effort to be somewhat even handed was ignored, in the message, which she later deleted, where she wrote “We have to stand up for Jewish people all over the world facing anti-Semitic violence and threats, but we must also call out a state upholding apartheid and KILLING civilians, funded by American dollars.” She ended the message with the hashtag “#freepalestine.”
Larsson was hardly calling for targeting Jews or anything like that, but the reaction to her comment was symptomatic of the typical overkill response engaged in by Israel and its friends whenever anyone challenges the standard narrative of Israeli perpetual victimhood. Two other instances of comments about Israel leading to an overwhelming response to punish the perpetrators took place during the past month in the United States at college commencement ceremonies. The first was on May 12th, at a graduation ceremony for the law school of the City University of New York (CUNY), where Fatima Mousa Mohammed, a Queens native who was selected by the graduating 2023 class to speak during the May 12 ceremony, praised CUNY for supporting student activism, citing in particular the acceptance of student groups protesting against Israel’s brutality towards the Palestinians. She said “Israel continues to indiscriminately rain bullets and bombs on worshippers, murdering the old, the young and even attacking funerals and graveyards, as it encourages lynch mobs to target Palestinians homes and businesses. As it imprisons its children, as it continues its project of settler colonialism, expelling Palestinians from their homes. Silence is no longer acceptable.”
The response to Mohammed was immediate, including a scathing news report in the New York Post, a call by several Jewish groups to cut funding to CUNY and demands that the law school dean be fired. And the controversy again made news when a second student spoke out at a commencement at El Camino community college in Torrance California. Jana Abulaban, 18, strongly criticized Israeli government policies during her speech on June 9th.
Abulaban, who was born in Jordan in a family of Palestinian refugees, reportedly felt “inspired” by the speech of Fatima Mousa Mohammed and she told the audience “I gift my graduation to all Palestinians who have lost their life and those who continue to lose their lives every day due to the oppressive apartheid state of Israel killing and torturing Palestinians as we speak.’’
There was, of course an immediate reaction to the Abulaban speech coming from a variety of West Coast and New York pro-Israel sources. Brooke Goldstein, a claimed human-rights lawyer founder of The Lawfare Project, said, “This is yet one more example of the systemic Jew-hatred we’re seeing on our college campuses. When a student gives a commencement speech targeting Jews, trafficking in modern tropes of antisemitism, it’s clear that there has been a complete failure in that school to promote social justice for the Jewish people. If any other minority group were targeted like this, there would be consequences for the bigot. The Jewish community deserves no less.”
Of course, both women only spoke the truth about what is happening in the Middle East. Neither attacked the Jewish religion or Jews per se and only criticized Israel’s appalling behavior. When I last checked, Israel was a foreign country with both foreign and domestic policies that are considered very questionable by most of the world, so why should it be protected from being challenged in the United States? The two women were brave to speak up as they did, surely knowing that they would be targeted by the Jewish state’s many friends and supporters. Those of us who continue to speak out on Israel’s genocidal policies can likewise expect no less, particularly as both the federal as well as many state governments and also the media are now on a witch hunt directed against those who seek to speak the truth. But we must persevere. As Fatima Mousa Mohammed put it, “Silence is no longer acceptable.”
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://CouncilForTheNationalInterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org
Abundantly Degenerate Liberals: An Expose of the ADL
The Anti-Defamation League has been in the news again. When, two years ago, the Southern Poverty Law Center (sic) was hit by a series of scandals concerning such matters as its dubious fundraising, amassed wealth, and deliciously ironic allegations of racial discrimination and sexual harassment leading to the firing of its founder Morris Dees and the resignation of its president Richard Levin, I hoped that some similar fate would befall the ADL. Sadly, this hope failed to materialize. Indeed, it might be said that in this period in which the SPLC’s reputation has sunk to an all-time low, the ADL’s influence has soared to new heights. Due, presumably, to its new director’s connections to Silicon Valley, the ADL has been working alongside Big Tech to censor online speech and purge the internet of opinions of which it disapproves, a campaign that has turned into a blitzkrieg of thought suppression in the course of the last year. It has now declared war on Tucker Carlson, the most popular talk show host on FOX News, basically for being the only mainstream television news persona with the stones to speak the unvarnished truth about immigration.
The Anti-Defamation League is decades older than the SPLC and is, to the best of my knowledge, the very first organization of this type to have been founded. Whereas most self-appointed, full-time, anti-racist watchdogs sprung up after World War II, during and after the American Civil Rights Movement, in order to capitalize on that era’s wave of popular sentiment against racism, the ADL predates the First World War going all the way back to 1913. While it is popular among some of the ADL’s foremost critics on the right today to maintain that the organization started well but got sidetracked during the tenure of its current director who had been a special assistant to Barack Obama, in reality the organization started out bad and became worse.
The ADL started out operating under the Chicago branch of the B’nai B’rith (Sons of the Covenant), a fraternal philanthropic organization that could roughly be said to be the equivalent for Jews of what the Knights of Columbus are for Roman Catholics. Its founders were two Chicago lawyers, Adolf Kraus who was the president of the order at the time, and Sigmund Livingston who became the first president of the ADL. Its stated purpose was to combat the defamation of the Jewish people in particular, and ultimately “to secure justice and fair treatment to all citizens alike and to put an end forever to unjust and unfair discrimination against and ridicule of any sect or body of citizens”. This, as good and noble as it sounds, was a mere façade. Apart from the fact that the ADL has never seemed to have any qualms about lying about (defaming) its enemies, thus making a mockery of its own name, throughout its history it has blurred the distinction between unfair and unjust words and acts towards Jews qua Jews and justifiable criticism of the same, just as it has blurred the distinction between criticism of Jews qua Jews whether unfair or justifiable and criticism of individuals who are Jewish on the basis of their words and deeds as individuals. It has also been susceptible to the charge of promoting Christophobia, which, of course, contradicts the second part of its purpose statement.
With regards to the first of these points, consider the incident that sparked the founding of the ADL in the first place. Earlier in 1913, Leo Frank, the factory supervisor of the National Pencil Company in Atlanta, Georgia was convicted of murdering 13 year old Mary Phagan, an employee of the factory who had been found raped and strangled in its basement. Frank was the president of the local chapter of B’nai B’rith and the story became the subject of contentious discussion throughout the United States. Powerful Jewish individuals in the American northeast such as Adolph Ochs, publisher of the New York Times, and Albert Lasker, the Chicago based advertising baron (he had just become the head of Lord and Thomas which became Foote, Cone & Belding) , became convinced, or at least took the public position, that Frank was innocent and was being railroaded for anti-Semitic reasons. The founders of the ADL were of the same persuasion and today their interpretation of these events is taken as established in the history books. It is curious though, that fabricated evidence at the site of the murder pointed to the black nightwatchman Newt Less, and the man whom the supporters of Frank’s innocence maintain was the real culprit, the janitor James Conley whose testimony to being Frank’s accomplice helped convict him, was also black. For the ADL’s interpretation of the incident to be correct, it would require that in the city of Atlanta, Georgia at the height of Jim Crow, anti-Semitism so trumped anti-black prejudice that a white man was framed for the rape and murder of a 13 year old white girl by a black man, because the white man was of the Jewish faith. The story did not end with Frank’s conviction. He appealed, with Lasker covering much of his legal fees, and eventually his sentence was commuted from death to life imprisonment. About two years after his original conviction he was kidnapped from prison and lynched to death near Phagan’s home town. An ugly ending to the story for sure, but it reinforces the point. How likely is it that in the Georgia of 1915 a white man would be lynched for a crime of this nature perpetrated by a black man?
I have given much detail about the Frank case because of its instrumentality in the founding of the ADL but it is hardly an isolated incident. In 1982 the ADL hosted a posh luncheon ceremony in which the legendary sharp-tongued comedian and actress Joan Rivers in an unusually teary-eyed and sentimental performance for her presented the “Torch of Liberty” award on their behalf to one Morris B. “Moe” Dalitz. A few years later they would name him “Philanthropist of the Year”. Dalitz, who had made a fortune in bootlegging and illegal gambling during the Prohibition era, had taken his ill-gotten gains and invested them in legal casinos in Las Vegas, where he later expanded his legitimate business interests into a more general property development, earning himself the nickname “Mr. Las Vegas”. In the post-World War II era he carefully constructed for himself the image of a reformed gangster turned legitimate businessman which he fiercely defended, famously suing Penthouse magazine in the 1970s for an article that maintained that a country club and spa resort that he had built near San Diego was built with mob money and serviced a mob clientele. Dalitz dropped the suit after the magazine published a letter of apology, although by Rolling Stone’s 1976 account of the case the defendants appeared to have been winning the suit. A more serious allegation was that beneath his veneer of legitimacy he was the head of operations for the Las Vegas branch of the activities of his life-long friend Meyer Lansky. Lansky, who died the year after Dalitz received the award from the ADL, was the co-founder, with his best friend Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel whom he later had killed, of Murder Inc., and who went on with Charles “Lucky” Luciano to build the National Crime Syndicate. He was the biggest mobster in the United States for half of the twentieth century and his criminal empire stretched around the globe. Siegel had run Lansky’s Las Vegas operations until his murder in 1947, and Dalitz, who began investing in Las Vegas casinos around that same time, was widely believed to have been his successor. Indeed, there have been allegations that the ADL itself basically functioned as a public relations firm for Lansky and while the ADL never honoured Lansky, who lacked a respectable public image, the way it did Dalitz, and Lansky does not seem to have directly donated to the ADL in his own name (many of his most prominent associates, Dalitz among them, however were substantial donors), there is plenty of circumstantial grounds for believing these allegations to be not entirely false. At any rate, the ADL had always been quick to make charges of anti-Semitism against those who concentrated on Lansky, Siegel, Dalitz, etc. in exposing organized crime.
With regards to the second point, the ADL’s promotion of Christophobia, this has been evident throughout the history of the organization but became especially prominent during the directorship of Abraham H. Foxman, who succeeded Nathan Perlmutter in that role in 1987 and continued as director until his retirement in 2015. In 1999, Foxman attacked the Rev. Jerry Falwell for saying that the Antichrist would be a Jewish male. Regardless of whether one agrees with Falwell’s understanding of Bible prophecy or not, this was hardly an anti-Semitic statement but a logical implication of the very idea of the Antichrist – the devil’s counterfeit of the true Christ who will arise in the last days as the ultimate villain of history. A counterfeit is a fake that is intended to be passed off as the real thing imitates. Therefore it has to be as close to the real thing as possible. Thus, that the ultimate counterfeit of the Messiah would have to be Jewish, can be logically deduced not only from Christian theology, which correctly asserts that Jesus of Nazareth was and is the true Christ, but from Jewish theology, which denies this truth but certainly teaches that the awaited Messiah will be Jewish. It does not require the belief that the Jews are the source of all evil, are the worst evil in the world, or any other such nonsense, and indeed, obviously contradicts such crudities because it is based upon the ultimate God-sent Deliverer being Jewish. Foxman, however, betrayed no capacity for understanding these points.
A few years later Foxman began attacking Mel Gibson over his film The Passion of the Christ. The attacks began long before the film was released and before Foxman had even seen it. Foxman condemned the movie as anti-Semitic because it portrayed the Gospel accounts of the betrayal, trial, and crucifixion of Christ accurately – to the point of using the actual tongues of the day with English translations in subtitles – without altering the story to place 100% of the blame for the crucifixion on the Roman authorities and excusing the Pharisees, the chief priests, and the Jerusalem mob. For Foxman, irrational though this false dichotomy be, it was either place all the blame for the crucifixion on the Romans and completely exonerate the Jewish leaders of two millennia ago or place all the blame for the crucifixion on all Jews of all times including those alive today. Underlying this irrational point of view was the idea that traditional, historical, Scriptural Christianity had been discredited by the Holocaust- despite the obvious fact that the Third Reich was the product of the shift away from Christianity in Modern German culture – and that therefore Christianity had to change its beliefs, wherever Jews found them to be offensive, even if this involved falsifying the facts of history as recorded in Christianity’s sacred texts of the New Testament. When groups like the ADL speak of meaningful interfaith dialogue between Christians and Jews this is precisely what they mean by it – a one-way discussion in which Jews speak, Christians listen, and then Christians make whatever changes to their own faith and practice that Jews demand. Those like Mel Gibson who are too traditionalist to go along with this nonsense are then vilified and condemned. When, several years later, the actor in a state of inebriation went into a tirade against the Jews, Foxman gloated that he, that is Foxman, had been vindicated in his accusations, demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of cause and effect, or of the simple fact that after years of being subjected to Foxman’s style of abuse, which included unbelievably arrogant demands that Gibson denounce his own father (a traditionalist Roman Catholic who rejected Vatican II, pointed to by ADL types as the prime example of a positive outcome of the kind of interfaith “dialogue” described above), if anyone was justified it was Gibson in his tirade and not Foxman by it.
Abe Foxman retired from his official position at the ADL, if not from his career as America’s foremost equine rump impressionist, six years ago, but the organization can hardly be said to have improved under the leadership of his successor, Jonathan Greenblatt, whose previous gigs included corporate executive and Obama administration advisor, and who looks like someone who crawls out of his parents’ basement only to do a bad cosplay of Lex Luthor at comic book conventions. Under Greenblatt’s leadership the ADL has moved much further to the Left than it was even under Foxman. Foxman was a liberal, for sure, but at the beginning of his tenure as National Director the ADL commissioned Harvey Klehr’s 1988 survey of Communist subversive groups in the United States published by Transaction as Far Left of Center: The American Radical Left Today, something that it would be difficult to imagine the ADL doing under the current leadership. Daniel Greenfield, Shillman Journalist Fellow of the David Horowitz Freedom Center (sic), has done an excellent job of documenting the ADL’s further-Left shift under Greenblatt at the Center’s e-zine Frontpagemag, including the ADL’s strange new alliance with the segments of the Far Left that are rather less than friendly towards either Israel or the Jews (see here, here and here for examples).
It is Greenblatt who in his capacity as ADL CEO has been writing letters and giving interviews on CNN, demanding that FOX News fire Tucker Carlson for having the audacity to use the word “replacement” in criticizing liberal immigration policy in the United States. “White supremacists”, use that word after all, and to use a word that “white supremacists” use is to fully embrace and endorse everything “white supremacists” believe, just as to be in the same room as a “white supremacist” or breathe the same air as a “white supremacist” is to implicate yourself in his ideology. Absurd as that sort of “argument” is, it is what has passed for logic at the ADL for decades, long before Greenblatt took over. Anybody who has perused the profiles they have put together of people they have accused of “racism”, “hate”, etc. over the years, will recognize the style.
Lachlan Murdoch has, so far, stood by Carlson and refused to give in to the ADL’s demands. Let us hope that he continues to do so. There are not many today who have the courage to withstand the ADL’s bullying and intimidation tactics for long, just as there are very few willing to speak the truths that Tucker Carlson has been speaking.
If Murdoch is willing to stand by Carlson for the long haul, then perhaps it is time for FOX News to go on the offensive, and shine the light of exposure upon the bullying, lies, and corruption of the ADL.
The ADL’s War on Freedom of Speech — Latest Target: Tucker Carlson — A Statement by Andrew Torba, CEO of GAB
The ADL’s War On Free Speech
Over the course of five years Gab has been attacked and smeared by many different Jewish groups including the ADL for simply defending free speech online. Now today the ADL is trying to cancel Tucker Carlson for daring to speak the truth about the reality of demographic replacement that is absolutely and unequivocally going on in The West. These are not “hateful” statements, they objective facts that can no longer be ignored.
You can’t be hostile and attack Gab while at the same time playing the “victim” when we respond. If you’re going to attack the Gab community you can expect a firm response with the Truth from us, which is what I seek to do in this post.
These attacks seek to silence millions of community members on Gab, to shut Gab down as a whole, to stifle free speech, and to throw me in prison for operating a free speech platform. Not only do these attacks undermine the freedom of speech, but they also fuel hatred against Jewish people by feeding into narratives about Jewish power, control, and victimhood.
In Acts Chapter 4 Peter and John were threatened by the Sadducees not to speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus. The ADL, the Jewish American Congress, and others are acting no differently than the Sadducees of 2,000 years ago by seeking to silence those of us who proclaim the name of Jesus Christ online and defend the freedom of speech for others to do so.
How did Peter and John respond?
They prayed for boldness and received it, which is exactly what I am doing. “Lord, look upon their threats and grant to your servants to continue to speak your word with all boldness.” Acts 4:29 “And when they had prayed, the place in which they were gathered together was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and continued to speak the word of God with boldness.” Acts 4:31
Jesus Christ himself was very critical of powerful Jewish people and groups of His time. Many of the things He said would have the ADL, the American Jewish Congress, and others deplatforming Him from the internet and trying to have Him jailed too.
In Luke Chapter 4 Jesus was driven out of the synagogue in his hometown of Nazareth to the point of Him almost being thrown off a cliff by His own people. Eventually Jesus Christ was sent to die on the cross, but praise God that He is Risen so that we may have eternal life by grace through faith in Him.
How would Jesus respond to the attacks of the ADL and other Jewish groups? “Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy. But I say until you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” Matthew 5:43-44
During the time of Jesus Israel had faced centuries of aggression from enemies and so while “hate your enemy” may not have been commanded directly the audience would have known what Jesus was talking about in regards to the rabbinic teaching of their day.
It’s very easy to hate our enemies, but that’s not what I am going to do. Not hating your enemies does not also mean pacifism and weakness. You can defend yourself against an enemy’s attacks while still loving him, as I seek to do with this post.
The Bible tells us that all who want to live a Godly life in Jesus Christ will be persecuted in 2 Timothy 3:12, so my life is no different than any other Christian facing persecution around the world for boldly speaking the Truth and fighting for my faith.
After five years of attacks from Jewish groups like the ADL, I’ve become used to the lies, hate, and persecution, but I have never once caved to their pressure and demands of censorship nor have I lashed out in hatred.
What these groups want me to do is project their hatred back at them.I refuse to do this because it’s not the Christian thing to do. There’s nothing hateful about anything I am saying. I’m stating objective and verifiable facts while quoting Bible verses.
I am praying for these people and writing this blog post as a way to show them the love of the Lord Jesus Christ. I am encouraging you all to do the same. I care about and am praying for the souls of our enemies even as they attack my family, community, and business.
I am not Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey. Gab is not Facebook or Twitter. We are not going to bend over backwards to appease the interests of the ADL, the American Jewish Congress, or any other interest groups.
We are going to bend over backwards to defend free speech online for all people, even those we disagree with. Groups like the ADL and American Jewish Congress have zero power or control over Gab, which is why they continue to attack us and lobby for our destruction.
There are many ethnically Jewish Christians who are on Gab and support our cause. There are also Jewish conservatives like Laura Loomer and others who have supported Gab for many years. There are also Jews on Gab who use Gab to criticize me and Gab itself and I will fight for their right to do so. I harbor no hatred for Jewish people, even those who relentlessly attack my business, my faith, and my family.
On the contrary I seek to show these Jewish groups who attack me the love, grace, and forgiveness of Jesus Christ my Lord and Savior in hopes of saving their souls from eternal damnation.
I shouldn’t have to say these things to justify an objective critical analysis of the attacks Gab is receiving from Jewish groups, but I want you the reader to know where my heart is. There’s nothing “anti-semitic” about stating the truth. The simple fact in the matter is that these coordinated attacks on Gab are perpetuating the very hatred that these Jewish groups are allegedly trying to stop.
Do you think that the millions of people on Gab aren’t connecting the dots together about the same group of people attacking Gab over and over again? People are smart. Pattern recognition is a gift from God.
Jewish groups are attacking Gab because people criticize Jews on Gab and because people say things that Jewish groups do not like on Gab. Tough luck. If “anti-semitism” is nothing more than speech the ADL doesn’t like, they are going to find “anti-semitism” under every rock. Their business model depends on it.
Criticism, mockery, and taboo discussions are legally protected by the First Amendment of the United States and thus are also protected on Gab and always will be.Threats of violence are obviously not free speech and we have always had zero tolerance for it. Criticism, mockery, and uncomfortable discussions are all welcome about any races, religions, ethnicities, and creeds.
I will never bend the knee to any special interests. The only one I bend my knee for is my King Jesus Christ.
Groups like the ADL and the Jewish American Congress are perpetuating Jewish stereotypes and generating more hatred of Jewish people by attacking free speech. They should be ashamed of themselves.
If the ADL and others want to counter speech they disagree with on Gab the best thing they can do is create an account and start posting, as we have invited them to do for years. Gab isn’t going to remove legal first amendment-protected speech just because they don’t like it.