February 5, 2018

(Jewish Group) Its Time For A Holocaust #MeToo Reckoning

(THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP! RESPECT!!)

Over the past few months, more and more women have been opening up about horrible stories of sexual harassment, assault and abuse. The #MeToo movement is a long overdue corrective to our culture. And yet the stories of one group of women have yet to crest into the mainstream and get the recognition they deserve: Holocaust survivors.

Holocaust museums, educational institutions and film archives are full of robust programs. But the stories of survivors who experienced sexual abuse are treated as taboo, or of secondary importance. They are never part of a museum’s permanent exhibition. And yet, we are becoming increasingly aware that sexual violence, whether through experiments, terror, coercion, rape or routine practices meant to humiliate and defile, was rampant during the Holocaust.

The reasons these stories remain hidden are complex. But one can’t ignore the simple fact that few women survivors have shared them.

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Over the past few years, mounting evidence has emerged that Jewish women were abused in far more ways than previously thought. During the Holocaust, sexual violence was routine. Despite Nazi race laws forbidding relations with Jews, sexual violence was woven into the fabric of their atrocities.

Recently declassified files found at United Nations War Crimes Commission Archives attest that rape and sexual violence — including forced prostitution, sterilization, nudity and corporal shaming — were so commonplace that there were postwar sex-crime tribunals set up to prosecute perpetrators.

But as the Nuremberg Trials lawyers honed in on their cases, rape was deemed secondary in importance. Subsequently, its perpetrators were never indicted; the victims were left to fend for themselves. Their traumas went undiagnosed in a world that didn’t classify sex crimes as war crimes until the International Criminal Tribunal of Rwanda in 1994.

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Rape is always a by-product of war and conflict. Even today, we see it all over the world. It's fucking maddening!

February 2, 2018

(Jewish Group) CST antisemitism report: high levels are the new normal

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The figures in CST’s latest antisemitic incidents report may not surprise many JC readers, but we cannot regard them as anything less than wholly unacceptable in every way.

The annual total, the highest ever, three per cent up on the record high 2016 figure, will of course grab the headlines, but the overall trend is what matters most.

The most explicit way of showing this is to say that from April 2016 to October 2017, inclusive, CST recorded more than 100 antisemitic incidents each month — that’s 19 months in a row. In the ten years before April 2016, we recorded over 100 incidents a month on six separate occasions, mostly in sudden and direct correlation to Israel being at war.

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Even more obvious and far more important is that this has occurred without any war in the Middle East. The rise is not a temporary spike of the type that we may — in our heart of hearts — like to think is somehow an external, passing matter.

Rather, this sustained high level of antisemitic incidents is British and is local in every sense. Even if it now slightly declines, as the November 2017-January 2018 figures suggest it may do, we have been warned just how much antisemitism in the shape of basic thuggery, hate and racism is out there.

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Interesting remark about the rise in anti-Semitism even though there has been no war in the ME (i.e. involving Israel), and just the other day someone here blamed Israel for anti-Semitism, not the anti-Semites. Little surprise given bigots often place blame on the one they have attacked.

February 2, 2018

(Jewish Group) Highest Anti-Semitism Figures Ever? I Wish I Was Surprised

(THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP! RESPECT!!)

On Thursday the Community Security Trust, released annual statistic on the number of anti-semitic incidents in the UK in 2017, showing once again that antisemitism broke records. The number of violent incidents rose significantly and for most of 2017 there were over 100 incidents per month, continuing trends from 2016. This is not reactive, no incident led to spikes in the statistics, this is the new normal.

Like millions of other young British people I have visible signs of my faith, I wear a Kippah, and Tzitzit, and this leads to both positive and negative responses from the wider public.

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Thing are worse online, “You have the blood of Palestinian babies on your hand” one stranger shouts at me through the keyboard. “Only big group collaborators in Poland was Jews. Learn history you ignorant,” I am told, in response to commenting on the dangers of the new Polish law banning discussion around Polish state or national complicity in the Holocaust.

Anti-semitism is often predicated on conspiracy theories and extreme world views. Terms such as ‘Zionist’ are used as a smokescreen for clear discrimination based on identity, not belief, as was shown this week with George Galloway’s targeting of Jewish comedian David Baddiel.

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February 2, 2018

(Jewish Group) Chris McDaniel Joined 9/11 Truther With Anti-Semitic Theories For Recent Interview

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Mississippi state Sen. Chris McDaniel (R) recently joined the radio show of an ardent conspiracy theorist who believes the 9/11 attacks may have been carried out by the “World Zionist Organization,” a curious choice for a man gearing up for another possible Senate run.

The controversial lawmaker is seriously considering a run against Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) this year after losing a close and nasty race to Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS) in 2014. McDaniel still maintains that election was stolen from him, and appeared as a high-profile guest on internet radio host and conspiracy theorist Ian Trottier’s show to help his longtime friend and ally Ryan Walters promote his book “Remember Mississippi,” which makes the same argument.

Before McDaniel and Walters joined last week’s show, Trottier talked up the views of his previous week’s guest — Christopher Bollyn, a man who argues that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by an international Jewish conspiracy and has been labeled an anti-Semite by both the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

“Look, whether he’s accurate or not regarding the World Zionist Organization, the likelihood that they have at least a hand in what may have transpired on Sept. 11, 2001 is extremely high,” Trottier said. “I don’t know if that attack was a hoax. I don’t know if the research that he has done is accurate. But when you listen to him speak it sure as heck makes sense and it sounds like he’s right on a trail that leads right back to understanding exactly what happened. Because it’s becoming ever so common that taking the whole Bin Laden angle just doesn’t make any sense.”



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DonViejo

February 1, 2018

(Jewish Group) Jewish boy, 8, beaten in Paris suburb in antisemitic attack

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Jewish boy was beaten by teen-age assailants in a suburb of Paris in what French prosecutors are calling an antisemitic attack.

The boy, 8, was wearing a kippa while walking to a tutor on Tuesday afternoon in the Paris suburb of Paris when two assailants, about 15 years old, knocked him to the ground and beat him, the French news agency AFP reported.

It is the second attack on a Jewish child in the same area this month. On January 10, a 15-year-old Jewish girl was slashed in the face while walking home from school, wearing the uniform of her Jewish private school.

French President Emmanuel Macron condemned the incident Tuesday night on Twitter. “An 8-year-old boy was attacked today in Sarcelles. Because he was wearing a kippa. Every time a citizen is attacked because of his age, his appearance or his religion, the whole country is being attacked,” Macron tweeted.

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Related

French Jews Criticize Media Indifference to Assault on 8-Year-Old Jewish Boy in Country’s Latest Antisemitic Outrage

One of France’s leading Jewish figures has sharply criticized what he described as media indifference to the news on Wednesday of the country’s latest antisemitic outrage, in which an 8-year-old kippah-wearing Jewish boy was subjected to a brutal attack.

The incident took place on Monday in the Paris suburb of Sarcelles, where a significant Jewish community lives among a much larger population of Muslims from the Middle East and Africa. The suspects — believed to be around age 15 — were hidden behind garbage cans and attacked the boy as he walked alone to a tutoring class. They pushed the boy to the ground and punched and kicked him, running off without stealing any of the items he was carrying. The boy is reported to be physically stable, but suffering from shock.

French President Emmanuel Macron denounced the assault as an “attack on the Republic,” while Interior Minister Gérard Collomb condemned what he called a “cowardly aggression.” But the reporting of the incident in the media led one influential Jewish figure to wonder aloud on Wednesday whether French journalists had genuinely understood the gravity of the attack.

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February 1, 2018

(Jewish Group) Antisemitic hate crimes hit record high as violent assaults increase by more than a t

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Antisemitic hate crimes hit record high as violent assaults increase by more than a third in a year

Antisemitic hate crimes in the UK have hit a record high, new figures show, prompting calls for more “visible and frequent” prosecutions for such incidents.

The Jewish community was targeted at a rate of nearly four times a day last year, according to statistics from the Community Security Trust (CST), a charity that monitors antisemitism, which recorded 1,382 antisemitic incidents nationwide in 2017.

This was the highest tally the organisation has registered for a calendar year since it began gathering the data in 1984, with the figure up by 3 per cent compared with 2016 – which had itself been a record annual total.

A breakdown of the crimes shows the number of violent antisemitic assaults increased by more than a third (34 per cent), from 108 in 2016 to 145. Three-quarters of all the antisemitic incidents were recorded in Greater London and Greater Manchester, where the two largest Jewish communities in the UK are located.

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February 1, 2018

(Jewish Group) 5 Things I Learned From Losing A Fight Against Anti-Semitism In My Own Town

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The local paper at the checkout line immediately caught my eye. My seemingly placid northern New Jersey town, Roseland, had erupted in Fury over a councilman, Thomas Tsilionis, who had exchanged vile texts with another council member, David Jacobs, in a group chat between the six city council members and the mayor. The texts contained crude, anti-black and anti-Semitic language. As I grabbed the paper to take a closer look, a stranger proceeded to berate it for reporting the story in the first place.

In the months that followed last year, I would try to figure out the answer to questions I never thought anyone in my family would ever have to ask again — at least, not in America. How do you respond to anti-Semitism when it’s in your own backyard? How do you convince others to fight it? What do you do when they don’t think it’s even a problem in the first place? How do you ultimately live with people you realize they might have ignored pogroms, lynchings and maybe even the Holocaust?

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Allies are Crucial

As Jews, we are a true minority. Outside of Israel and even places like New York and New Jersey, we are at best a small slice of the population. Fighting anti-Semitism requires allies. In standing up in my community, I was fortunate. I was not alone. Dozens of people joined me. Many of them were not Jews. Jew hating has to be seen as a part of a larger pattern. When people realize that people who hate Jews also probably hate them in some way, it becomes easier than ever to fight all forms of hatred.

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When you fight anti-Semitism, you’re not just doing it for yourself. You’re also doing it for other people. You aren’t fighting for Jews alone. You are fighting for everyone else.

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