Melanie Phillips's Blog, page 7

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe: the human cost of Britain’s appeasement of Iran

It’s wonderful that the British academic Matthew Hedges is now safely back in Britain after six months in jail in the United Arab Emirates. He faced the seemingly implausible charge of being a British spy, which both he and the British government strenuously denied, and was sentenced to life imprisonment after a farcical five-minute court hearing last week.

Rejoicing, however, must be muted because, after two and a half years in an Iranian jail on an even more implausible charge of being a spy, the Iranian-British dual-national Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is still there serving a five year sentence, separated heartbreakingly from her four year-old daughter as well as her husband in Britain.

Hedges was released after intense pressure on the UAE by the British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt. Celebrating this victory, Hunt also said justice would not be done until Zaghari-Ratcliffe was re-united with her family. And perhaps he will achieve that too. But so far he has not. And so we might ask why he succeeded with the UAE but has not managed to do so with Iran.

Obviously, we don’t know what has been going on behind the scenes. But what we do know suggests that the British had leverage with the UAE but not with Iran. And the reason for that latter failure surely illustrates the appalling human cost of Britain’s policy of appeasement towards the Iranian regime.

In short, while the British made the UAE understand it had a lot to lose through its treatment of Matthew Hedges, Iran not surprisingly believes that with Britain it has the upper hand.

The UAE is an important British ally. Yet because of its treatment of Hedges, Britain was suddenly casting it as a repressive police state. As this Guardian piece observed: “… the UAE was made aware that the Hedges affair could lead to it being put into the same authoritarian box as Saudi if it was not careful. The only beneficiary of this, waiting in the wings, would be the UAE’s regional foe, Qatar, increasingly seen as a haven of normality in comparison with the security states of the UAE and Saudi Arabia… The search for a face-saving formula was on.”

There is, however, no such search by the Iranian regime for a face-saving formula because it knows that Britain will not act against it. Indeed, in refusing to support the resumption of sanctions against Iran imposed by the Trump administration, Britain is actively attempting to thwart action aimed at bringing Iran to heel.

This is what the UK government currently says on its website about doing business with Iran:

“The UK government supports expanding our trade relationship with Iran and we encourage UK businesses to take advantage of the commercial opportunities arising from the lifting of sanctions… There is a positive outlook for UK-Iran trade relations. Iran is the biggest new market to enter the global economy in over a decade, offering significant opportunities in most sectors, with potential to grow as the market in Iran expands.”

And noting that the US has reimposed sanctions, it states:

“The UK fully implements UN, EU and UK domestic sanctions law. The re-imposition of the US sanctions against Iran may have commercial and legal implications for UK businesses and individuals dealing with Iran. Where necessary, legal advice should be sought.”

How disgusting is this! It should simply be unconscionable to deal with Iran given its war against the west and genocidal intention to erase Israel from the map. Britain’s risible justification for opposing sanctions is that it continues to support the nuclear deal it helped broker with the Obama administration and others on the basis that the deal prevents Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

This is, of course, the opposite of the truth: that the deal cements Iran’s ability to produce nuclear weapons, at best delaying it by a few years; and that through the associated relief of sanctions, Britain and the rest of the deal’s enablers have poured money into strengthening Iran’s infernal agenda of arming and training terrorists around the world and expanding its power in the Middle East and Africa.

More pertinently, Britain’s continued support for this pernicious deal has enabled Iran to play Jeremy Hunt over Zaghari-Ratcliffe. For while the British Foreign Secretary begged and pleaded with his Iranian counterpart for her release, Iran has been cynically using her as leverage to further undermine US sanctions. As the Guardian also reports:

“The UK has said that because of Brexit it cannot host the EU’s proposed special purpose vehicle, a device that could enable companies to continue to trade with Iran but avoid US sanctions. It is not clear if any country is willing to risk sanctions by hosting the SPV, a serious blow to Europe’s efforts to show its independence from US foreign policy.”

Feebly, Hunt has called on Iran to stop using Zaghari-Ratcliffe and other dual nationals as tools of diplomatic leverage. But the truth is that the continued detention of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is the direct result of Britain’s craven appeasement of Iran.

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Our crazy world: American hysteria, Brexit, nationalism

Our crazy world: American hysteria, Brexit, nationalism

Please join me here as I discuss with Avi Abelow of Israel Unwired the attitudes I encountered on my recent speaking tour in America. We also consider the importance of the idea of the nation and the way this is vilified. And of course, the ongoing crisis over Theresa May’s catastrophic handling of Brexit. Her betrayal of the people’s decision to leave the EU, by agreeing to terms which would deliver Brexit in name only but leave the UK under EU control, is beyond shocking. But what will happen as a result of this debacle, no-one can say.

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It’s time vilified men had their MeToo moment

Of course, women are sometimes victims of sexual attack, harassment or unwanted advances. MeToo, though, has created the impression that depravity is not just widespread but innate in the male sex.

This is a wild and sexually selective generalisation. Moreover, shouldn’t individual men be given the benefit of the doubt until such claims are proved? Aren’t they entitled to have such claims properly tested?

This growing contempt for the presumption of innocence is not just eroding fairness and the rule of law. It has destroyed the lives of men who have been wrongly accused, and on occasion has even replaced justice by tragedy.

The belief that men are incorrigible sexual predators has been given rocket fuel by the ferment over apparently depraved show-business cavemen. But this gender sectarianism has meant that, when it comes to unfairness and injustice, more and more men are now saying MeToo too.

To read my whole Times column (£), please click here.

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Driver tries to run down Los Angeles Jews

Another antisemitic attack in the US as a driver tries to run down Jews walking from synagogue in Los Angeles. Quick, let’s blame Trump! Oh wait…

Video from a security camera shows the driver apparently trying to hit two men dressed in clothing typically worn by Orthodox Jews on Shabbat. The driver, who has been identified as 32-year-old Mohammed Mohammed, reversed and tried to hit them again.

The man reportedly insulted a group of Jewish people leaving the synagogue before he got into his vehicle and attempted to run them over, the Los Angeles Police Department told the local NBC affiliate.

The suspect’s car crashed into another vehicle. No one was injured during the incident, according to NBC Los Angeles.

Mohammed, who was charged with assault with a deadly weapon with a vehicle, is reportedly being held on $55,000 bail.

“Why he chose us? Probably because of the yarmulkes on our heads,” one of the people targeted, who asked to remain anonymous, told CBS Los Angeles”.

So are we now going to hear, from the Anti-Defamation League and other progressive American Jews, excoriating denunciations of the evil, murderous ideology and its facilitators in the political class that created the conditions for this antisemitic attack, just as they fell over themselves to deliver after Pittsburgh?

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Echoes of another border invasion

When President Trump called the Central American migrant “caravan” an “invasion”, this was promptly denounced as yet more evidence of his racism.

Of course.

But of course it was an invasion, as is now plain. Yesterday, US Customs and Border Protection agents shut down the San Ysidro port of entry, among the largest border crossings between San Diego and Tijuana, after hundreds of migrants tried to breach the US-Mexico border fence and threw rocks and other projectiles at border police.

Trump ordered up thousands of troops to repel them. Tear gas and smoke pellets did so. Yet for some people, defending a nation’s borders against thousands of people setting out to overcome border controls by sheer force of numbers is further proof of… well, that nation’s racism and inhumanity.

What’s more, by some ideological alchemy defence becomes attack. One tweet I saw yesterday screamed hysterically that the US was “invading Mexico”. But the US was firing tear gas from inside the US border in order to defend itself against invasion.

The claim that these are asylum seekers was contradicted on CNN by Rodney Scott, the chief Border Patrol agent of San Diego.

“I do not believe that is true. I believe there are definitely people in that group that are trying — that are going to try to claim asylum. The vast majority of those, from what we call the northern triangle are economic migrants, though,” Scott answered.

“What I saw at the border yesterday was not people walking up to Border Agents and asking to claim asylum. Matter of fact, one of the groups that I watched … they passed 10 or 15 marked Border Patrol agents walking … west to east, numerous uniformed personnel, as they were chanting, waving a Honduran flag and throwing rocks at the agents. If they were truly asylum seekers, they would’ve just walked up with their hands up and surrendered, and that did not take place,” he said.

Meanwhile, this report by JE Dyer notes the tactic of pushing empty baby strollers.

“These folks are apparently going to put babies or toddlers in them and try to surge across the international border with the small children in tow. This isn’t “human desperation”; this is political manipulation, using children as tiny human shields.  The later behavior of the border-rushers clarifies what’s going on.  They laugh, high-five, run around like youthful fools, try to get the best video they can.  Some of them wave Honduran flags and shout as they approach a weak area in the fence (apparently a gate on hinges), where they’ve broken through.  They pile up at the aperture, eagerly watching to see what happens on the other side.  They throw rocks – always a thoughtful approach when seeking asylum in someone else’s country.

As Dyer says, it doesn’t mean there aren’t some people here legitimately seeking asylum.

“It does mean that what’s happening right now is not spontaneous, it’s not about overriding human need, and that it is false and even vicious to depict it as such”.

Vicious –– and perhaps missing the broader point too. For does anything here ring a few bells? Using a fake narrative of desperate need to camouflage a violent invasion? Using children as “human shields” to facilitate that camouflage? Employing violence against border authorities to produce a reaction that will cause the west’s useful idiots to blame the target country rather than the violent perpetrators?

You got it. Last month I wrote this:

This central American onslaught on the US border looks rather similar to the Gazan onslaught on the Israeli border. Similar optics: poor, downtrodden “refugees” using force of numbers and their own “defenceless” bodies to pit themselves against the firepower of the army of an “oppressive” state in order to storm illegally and (in Gaza) murderously into someone else’s country.

… During his confirmation hearings as Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo also noted that the “toxic crime-terror nexus” in Latin America, largely driven by the Lebanese Hezbollah group, “is fueling both the rising threat of global jihadism and the collapse of law and order across Latin America that is helping drive drugs and people northward into the United States.”

Vice-President Mike Pence told Fox News: “What the president of Honduras told me is that the caravan was organized by leftist organizations, political activists within Honduras, and he said it was being funded by outside groups, and even from Venezuela”.

Hamas runs Gaza. Hamas is trying to storm the Israel border. Hamas is supported by Iran. Hamas has its own deep ties with Latin America.

Join up the dots, folks.

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Brexiteers! Start promoting no-deal. Fast

Has there ever been a more hopeless, pathetic bunch of political clowns than Britain’s parliamentary Brexiteers?

The people of Britain have voted to leave the EU. Theresa May’s government is poised to spit in their faces by preventing that from happening through a sleight-of-hand deal which would be Brexit in name only, leaving the UK as a “vassal” state still in thrall to Brussels.

Rather than uniting behind a strategy and leader to fight this betrayal, the Brexiteers in parliament have been fighting each other like ferrets in a sack. Unable to agree on whether Mrs May should be brought down or stay on as Prime Minister, still hung up on the always impossible prospect of negotiating terms with the EU that would benefit Britain and consumed by personal leadership ambitions rather than concern for the national interest, the Brexiteers have allowed those set upon betraying democracy to put them onto the back foot.

The result of their farcical havering over whether or not to bring down the Prime Minister has allowed two potentially disastrous things to happen.

Rather than being seen correctly as someone who is about to betray the people and sign the death warrant for national self-government, Ms May is now being viewed sympathetically as doggedly carrying on in the face of bullying by both her fellow Tory MPs and the EU’s negotiators.

And while the Brexiteers have been marching themselves up the hill and down again over Mrs May, they have allowed the view that no-deal would be a disaster to go unchallenged.

In fact, the only realistic way in which the UK will be able to leave the EU is through no-deal. Yet the majority in parliament – and possibly in the country – are so thoroughly spooked by no-deal they oppose it. But there are good, cogent, evidence-based arguments why no-deal would not be a disaster but would be entirely manageable.

The tariff hit from leaving the EU on WTO rules would not only be liveable-with but would in time become nugatory given the economic advantages to Britain of being able to make free-trade deals. Moreover, it is very much in the interests of the EU’s member states to do bilateral “side” deals with British organisations and institutions to minimise disruption when Brexit actually happens; indeed, such deals are being discussed even now to safeguard the City of London, for example.

The relative silence about this while Brexiteers fixate upon Mrs May is intolerable. That silence has itself become a powerful threat to Brexit. It is a matter of the utmost urgency that the public case for no-deal should now be made, and as loudly and thoroughly as possible.

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The brain-frying insanity of the demonisation of Israel

Brendan O’Neill asks the obvious question. Denouncing the boycott by Airbnb of Israeli properties in the disputed territories, he wonders at the extraordinary double standard under which Airbnb doesn’t similarly boycott properties in Tibet or northern Cyprus or Crimea which are occupied by China, Turkey and Russia.

The same question can be asked of the British Quakers who have said they will no longer invest in any companies which profit from “the occupation of Palestine”, a move they offensively and misleadingly compare to their past protests against apartheid and the slave trade.  Paul Parker, the Quakers’ recording clerk, said: “…our beliefs compel us to speak out about injustices wherever we see them in the world.” Yet the Quakers also admit they have no policies “relating to other occupations”.

As O’Neill writes: “Israel is always singled out. It is treated by right-on Westerners as being more wicked, more toxic, more evil and more destructive than any other state on Earth. That is why they boycott it, rage about it and take to the streets about it in a way they never do about Turkey, Saudi Arabia or anywhere else. They hate Israel more than any other place. The question is: why?”

Why indeed. Certainly antisemitism is there in the mix. So too is leftist ideology which ludicrously regards Israel as a colonialist oppressor.

The question remains, however, why the Palestinian cause rather than any other became the issue of issues for the western left. One crucial factor is surely the strategic alliance in the 1970s between the PLO leader Yasser Arafat and the former Soviet Union to turn it into precisely such a defining cause.

Millions of dollars were spent on bombarding the universities and other western institutions with lies about Palestinian and Middle East history. Arafat and the Soviets had a joint interest in creating an entirely fake Palestinian identity, intended not only to bring about the destruction of Israel by casting it as the pariah of the world but also to undermine and destabilise the west by destroying its ability to understand the true threats to life and liberty and to mistake its friends for its enemies and vice versa.

The demonisation of Israel thus exhibits the signature motif of Soviet totalitarianism: a passage through the mirror into a nightmarish world where black is white and lies are truths and everything is the negation of reality, and those who state the facts are stamped upon as enemies of the people.

Which is why the extreme animus against Israel as displayed by the Quakers, Airbnb and a myriad others in so-called “progressive” circles isn’t just a double standard and vicious prejudice but also seems utterly, surreally, brain-fryingly mad.

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The nation as an island: the source of Israel’s resilience

At this week’s annual dinner in London of the Anglo-Israel Association, which promotes understanding of Israel in the UK, the Israeli thinker Daniel Gordis poignantly described Israel as an island surrounded by enemies.

This image of Israel under siege is currently all too apposite. With Iran’s regime now entrenched through its proxies in Lebanon, Syria and Gaza, Israel now faces a genocidal enemy on three simultaneous fronts.

In the face of these dangers, not to mention the recent mini-war when thousands of rockets from Gaza rained down on southern Israel, the resilience of ordinary Israelis is astonishing. There can surely be no other country which, despite its state of permanent embattlement, remains so cheerful and full of hope about the future.

This is because, despite the manifold divisions in Israeli society, the people pull together against their foes. Israel is able to defend itself in the way it does because it sees itself as a nation, governing itself in a land with which it has an unbreakable bond.

This relates way beyond Israel to the momentous argument now underway throughout the West over the very idea of a nation and the resurgence of nationalist feelings.

For more than half a century, the Western nation has been under attack from the dominant, progressive side of politics which damns it as intrinsically racist, colonialist and exploitative.

Under this orthodoxy, Western democratic parliaments and national laws must give way to transnational institutions such as the UN, EU, or international human rights law.

National borders, it is assumed, must be permeable; people should be able to flow across them. Immigration control is xenophobic. Transnationalism means the brotherhood of man and kumbaya. Nationalism means prejudice, hatred and war.

This is deeply mistaken. A nation is a large group of people bound into a shared project, rooted in a particular culture, history, laws, religion, language and other traditions and governing itself within a defined area of land.

Nationalism is merely the desire to be a member of, identify with and promote and defend such a nation. It became seen as bad in the West because German nationalism was held to have led directly to Nazism.

In fact, as Yoram Hazony has pointed out in his new book, The Virtue of Nationalism, Nazism was really a form of imperialism because it set out to conquer and rule other countries in a re-run of the Holy Roman Empire. And Hitler’s vision of the German nation was based on an unhinged requirement for racial purity that was particular to the Nazi regime.

That requirement may remain on the agenda of present-day neo-Nazis in America or Britain, but it most certainly does not apply to American or British national identity.

Across the West, millions have risen up in revolt against transnationalism and said they want their nations back. This was the major reason for the Brexit vote in Britain, the election of US President Donald Trump and the rise of nationalist or populist parties in Europe.

Some of these parties do indeed have troubling roots in fascist ideology. Yet all in the West who believe in their individual nation and its particular culture are tarred as nativists, white supremacists and neo-Nazis.

Nationalism is thought to threaten the return of the jackboot. But the nation is in fact a bulwark of protection for liberty and democracy.

Many in Britain viscerally understand this. Britain is an island nation which has fought off all invaders for the past thousand years. Many of its citizens understand that the political liberty it invented cannot exist unless the nation governs itself again free of EU control.

But many others in Britain no longer share that ancient cultural memory. The country is currently in the grip of a profound political and constitutional crisis as Brexit is being fought to the death – a fight led by those who realize that the return of Britain as an independent nation threatens their whole project to undermine it and its core values.

Most British Jews voted against Brexit, many of them fearful that British nationalism would unleash antisemitism. But antisemitism in Britain has already roared out of control principally among those on the left who oppose the nationalism agenda and for whom hostility to Israel is their default position.

British Jews have got this badly wrong. The most fertile soil for antisemitism is not a country with a strong sense of identity, but a country which has lost it.

Antisemitism denotes a society in trouble. For decades, normative Western values have been under assault in the belief that the Western nation is innately rotten.

Behind that is a loss of belief in the West itself and in progress and modernity. The Holocaust, which took place within the crucible of Western high culture, smashed to smithereens Europe’s belief in itself as the exemplar of superior cultural values.

America experienced a further cultural demoralization caused by its terrible and recent history of slavery and racial prejudice. Between both these shocks the West was unable to resist the onslaught by the left determined to remake society in its own image.

National identity was replaced by factional interest groups. Morality was replaced by a Marxist view of the world based on competing power blocs. Biblical morality was replaced by man-made, universalizing ideologies, such as moral and cultural relativism or multiculturalism.

Above all, the Western nation could never defend itself by force. Every conflict had to be resolved through negotiation, compromise and peace processes – even with non-negotiable, genocidal agendas. Hence the terrible Iran nuclear deal, and the reframing altogether of the Arab war of extermination against Israel as a conflict between two rival claims to the land.

In the Western progressive mind, therefore, Israel is damned many times over: as a (supposedly) Western, ethnic nation that defends itself with force.

Perhaps even more enraging to the Left than that, the ancient kingdom of Israel was the original paradigm nation, on which at some level America and Britain modeled themselves.

The current resurgence of antisemitism in the West is part of a far deeper and wider struggle. It’s a fight between two views of the world and of humanity itself. A fight over how we should live in this world, what it means to be moral and what it means to be human. And Jews are on both sides in this great battle.

But if the West is ever to learn to love the Jewish people and their nation in Israel, it will first have to learn to love again the Western nation itself.

Jerusalem Post

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Brexit: no-deal is better than trashing democracy

We can now see that when Theresa May said “no-deal is better than a bad deal”, what she really meant was that no-deal was not just worse than a bad deal but was in fact her personal red line.

This was singularly unfortunate, since it was obvious from the start that the EU would never agree to anything that would enable Britain to do what the Brexit vote intended it to do: become competitive and prosper.

Since the EU is a protectionist cartel designed to stifle competition and freedom from its diktats, no-deal Brexit was always the only show in town.

To read my whole Times column (£), please click here.

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The muddled obsessions of progressive American Jews

Having spent the past week or so in Los Angeles, I have been struck once again by the deep anxiety in the American Jewish community over the intensifying demonization of Israel on campus and over self-styled progressive Jews.

I have also been exposed to the even more intense divisions within that community over President Donald Trump. One of the most bizarre conceits among those who hate him is that he’s an antisemite, or at the very least knowingly encourages antisemites.

A guest of the Hanukkah celebration at the White House last year told me he had the opportunity to observe the president up close.

Surrounded by Jewish friends and Republican colleagues, Trump said proudly when his family arrived: “Here are my Jewish grandchildren.” It was simply inconceivable, said my informant, that anyone could seriously believe there was an antisemitic bone in his body.

For those who hate him, however, it’s as if all the evils and problems in the world are somehow his fault. It’s not simply a question of loathing his uncouthness or finding his personality objectionable. He has become their obsession. He occupies their every waking thought. He is their personal demon.

The same people, however, are overwhelmingly silent about the antisemites and Israel-bashers in the Democratic Party, more of whom have been elected to Congress in the mid-terms.

There’s silence from such quarters over Ilhan Omar, elected in Minnesota and who has said: “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.”

Silence over Rashida Tlaib, elected for a Michigan seat and who, asked if she would vote against military aid to Israel, replied: “Absolutely … I will be using my position in Congress so that no country, not one, should be able to get aid from the U.S. when they still promote that kind of injustice.”

Silence, too, over Women’s March leaders Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour, despite their support for Louis Farrakhan who raves about “satanic” Jews.

This evacuation of morality over American politics has echoes of the way Israel itself is treated: demonized by falsehoods and distortion while Palestinian depravity and antisemitism are ignored or even sanitized.

The issues of Trump and Israel intersect among many progressive Jews in a further distressing way.

They hate Trump also for his decision to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, which they think has somehow prevented peace in our time in the Middle East. And they hate Israel even more because Israel regards Trump as a true friend – not least because he moved the embassy to Jerusalem.

So Trump, himself toxified through an unhinged thought process which casts him as an enabler of antisemitism, is therefore in turn toxifying Israel in the eyes of progressive Jews – and all because he’s actually so philosemitic, one of the most pro-Israel presidents in American history.

Just how crazy is this?

Meanwhile, the problem remains how to combat BDS on campus. This weekend, despite an outcry, a conference is taking place at UCLA held by National Students for Justice in Palestine.

NSJP has a record not only of advocating Israel’s eventual destruction and supporting pro-terrorism figures, but also bullying and intimidating pro-Israel and Jewish students with vicious and sometimes antisemitic rhetoric and even physical violence.

Yet UCLA Chancellor Gene Block has refused to cancel the conference on the basis that all forms of speech must be permitted on campus.

He has acknowledged that anti-Israel statements can turn into “hostility against the Jewish people.” However, he said, NSJP still had a legal right to host its conference even if this was “infused with antisemitic rhetoric.”

“Ultimately,” he wrote, “we must combat speech that is distasteful with more and better speech.”

Would he say the same if, say, David Duke or the Aryan Nations group wanted to speak on campus? Of course not; these would rightly be seen as contributing nothing to rational debate but posing instead a threat to minority students.

To put it another way, despite expressing concern about NSJP Block is implicitly accepting there is some validity in what they say.

But since he accepts their discourse is “infused with antisemitic rhetoric,” he should consider no part of that discourse to be acceptable. He writes of “democracy’s commitment to open debate.” He therefore appears to believe that democracy has a commitment to permit antisemitism.

As Judea Pearl, professor of computer science at UCLA and father of slain journalist Daniel Pearl, wrote to the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles: “This is ‘viewpoint neutrality’ UCLA style.” He continued:

“When xenophobic Milo Yiannopoulos requested to speak at UCLA [he was invited by Republican students last February to speak on ‘Ten things I hate about Mexico’] Chancellor Block wrote (paraphrased): I can’t stop you legally but be aware, you are not exactly welcome on this campus, you are in fact disgusting, your values clash with ours.

“When antisemitic-Zionophobic NSJP requested to speak at UCLA, Chancellor Block wrote (paraphrased): I can’t stop you legally, but I won’t stop you even if I could, here’s why, here’s why, here’s why.”

Even Los Angeles City Council unanimously called on UCLA to cancel the conference, with one member telling Block he was “shocked and disappointed” that it was allowing it to occur.

Yet the response by both Hillel and the Anti-Defamation League echoed Block’s feebleness. UCLA Hillel Director Aaron Lerner said: “The Chancellor has made his voice heard, and confirmed his opposition to BDS. That’s a win.”

You wonder what Lerner would consider a loss. As for the ADL, it said it was “deeply concerned about the potential impact the SJP conference might have on the campus climate at UCLA,” and “on the safety and security of all students on campus.”

It called upon the university to ensure “that all UCLA communities are treated with respect, free from vilification and harassment, and to continue to denounce messages coming from SJP that are to the contrary.”

But allowing the NSJP to spread their poison on campus makes all students unsafe. Despite acknowledging this, though, the ADL accepts their right to do so.

Free speech is not an absolute right. It must be limited if it incites harm. Promoting Jew-hatred causes harm.

Yet like other campuses, UCLA permits this while kowtowing to those who want to silence free speech on the grounds of merely sparing people’s feelings – as in the troubling dismissal of conservative communication-studies lecturer Keith Fink, who had expressed robust views critical of UCLA on, of all issues, freedom of speech.

Progressive Jews and others accuse President Trump of sowing social division, hatred and antisemitism. They can’t see that that they are themselves effectively enabling social division, hatred and antisemitism by their spurious equivalence, tunnel vision and outright double standards.

The more they scream about Trump, the more they create an alibi for that very same ugliness in their own souls. And that, of course, is precisely what antisemites do to the Jews and to Israel.

Jewish News Syndicate<

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