AMCHA & CIJR’S OWN BARUCH COHEN: FIGHTING THE EVILS OF ANTISEMITISM & ANTI-ZIONISM

We welcome your comments to this and any other CIJR publication. Please address your response to:  Rob Coles, Publications Chairman, Canadian Institute for Jewish Research, PO Box 175, Station  H, Montreal QC H3G 2K7 –

 

Contents:

 

 

At 95, Baruch Cohen Still a CIJR Stalwart: Janice Arnold, Canadian Jewish News, Nov. 6, 2014 —At 95, Baruch Cohen still comes in almost every day to the downtown office of the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research (CIJR) and puts in several hours poring over the latest news and opinions on the Middle East and the Jewish world.

AMCHA’s Valiant Defence of Israel: Barbara Kay, Prince Arthur Herald, Nov. 7, 2014 — Global anti-Semitism is on the rise. Ground zero for the propagation of anti-Semitism is the university.

Obama’s Assault on Israel is a Moral Outrage: Washington Examiner, Oct. 30, 2014— During the 2008 presidential election, as skeptics of Barack Obama questioned his support for Israel, his campaign, with help from media allies, pursued an aggressive counteroffensive.

The Deeper Meaning of the Campaign for “Recognition of Palestine”: Paul Merkley, Bayview Review, Nov. 3, 2014— When, back in the 1890s, the first generation of Zionists proposed the creation of a Jewish State somewhere in “Palestine,” Arabs everywhere united in a declaration of eternal opposition.

On Topic Links

 

Who Does Jerusalem Really Belong To?: Lior Ackerman, Jerusalem Post, Nov. 6, 2014

‘Anti-Jewish Horror’: Marvin Sharpe, National Post, Nov. 6, 2014

Book Review: The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel.: Andrei S. Markovits, Fathom, Nov., 2014

Myths and Facts About American Campuses #4: Faculty Play No Role in Promoting Israel Denial on Campus: Mitchell Bard, Jerusalem Post, Nov. 6, 2014

Congress: Stop Subsidizing Biased Middle East Studies: Daniel Pipes, The Blaze, Oct. 8, 2014

                                                                            

                  

AT 95, BARUCH COHEN STILL A CIJR STALWART                                

Janice Arnold                                                                                            

Canadian Jewish News, Nov. 6, 2014

 

At 95, Baruch Cohen still comes in almost every day to the downtown office of the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research (CIJR) and puts in several hours poring over the latest news and opinions on the Middle East and the Jewish world. He’s had the same routine for 27 years, ever since CIJR was founded, and he continues to hold the title of (volunteer) research director. His greatest delight is working with young people and, despite the seven-decade age gap, they are captivated by his gentle, wise counsel. CIJR members and friends gathered at the Chevra Kadisha synagogue last week to celebrate Cohen’s landmark birthday. The institute’s founder and director Frederick Krantz, said the modest Cohen, who shuns accolades, is a “Hebraic hero.” “He’s usually there when I come in and still there when I leave,” Krantz said of the man he calls a role model in the best sense of the term for his moral courage and intellectual rigour. “His life has been one of commitment to truth and authenticity… He found his milieu in the institute and is known all over the world today for his articles in our publications,” as well as his poetry.

 

After defending the Jewish People as a whole, Cohen’s most ardent mission has been bringing to light the enormity of the Holocaust in his native Romania and that country’s history of anti-Semitism. To mark his birthday, Cohen’s writings are to be published in a book, edited by Joyce Rappaport, a CIJR board member and professional editor of scholarly works. Krantz, a Concordia University professor, recalled how he discovered Cohen, who settled in Montreal after living in Israel with his wife of now almost 71 years, Sonia, and their daughter, Malka (Monica). The first intifadah was raging, and Krantz was incensed by what he viewed as media bias against Israel. “The Palestinians had become Jews, and the Jews had become Nazis, something we face once again today.” He noticed incisive letters to the editor in the Gazette signed by Cohen, and traced him and asked to meet with him. Cohen had recently retired from work as a financial officer in a large company, and was pursuing a master’s degree in Judaic studies at Concordia. Krantz invited him to join a small group, mostly of academics, that would form CIJR, holding its first meetings in Krantz’s basement. They began writing articles for the media and speaking in synagogues in defence of Israel, feeling the organized Jewish community was not doing enough to counter Israel’s detractors.

 

Today, Krantz describes CIJR as “the only independent, pro-Israel, academic think tank in Canada,” with affiliates in Israel and the United States. “All this would not have been possible without Baruch,” Krantz said, because of his steady guidance. Cohen’s most cherished legacy is establishing an annual commemoration of the Romanian Holocaust, which has been held over the past 20 years in different synagogues. From the start, Cohen ensured that the participation of young people, from high school age on, both Jewish and non-Jewish, formed an integral part of the program. In recent years, he has gradually ceded the organization of that event to the new generation, first under the chairmanship of Jaclyn Leebosh when she was in university. This year’s commemoration, Nov. 16 at Congregation Tifereth Beth David Jerusalem at 10:30 a.m., is entirely run by young people on a volunteer basis. Co-chair David Anidjar, 22, a McGill University student, said Cohen inspired him and fellow co-chair Rivkah Azoulay to carry on this mission, even though neither has any personal connection to the Romanian Holocaust and are, in fact, Sephardi. While at Herzliah High School, Anidjar was “recruited” to be one of the readers of poetry – an integral part of every commemoration – not really knowing what he was getting into “I got to know Baruch, and a relationship developed, and got to know about what happened in Romania, which is not well known, though hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed – by their own government. “The responsibility to remember that should be for all of us, not just those with family that was affected.” Poetry, much of it by Romanian survivors, will again be included, along with the projection of their art, to illustrate that creativity was not extinguished by what they endured, Anidjar said…To salute Cohen’s contribution, CIJR is establishing more student internships in his and his wife’s name to enable young people to continue to learn from “this one-man guarantor of Jewish continuity,” Krantz said.       

 

                                                                       

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AMCHA’S VALIANT DEFENCE OF ISRAEL                                                         

Barbara Kay                                                                                                        

Prince Arthur Herald, Nov. 7, 2014

 

Global anti-Semitism is on the rise. Ground zero for the propagation of anti-Semitism is the university. On campuses everywhere, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction (BDS) movement is allegedly directed at Israel, not Jews. But to rational observers, the disclaimer has become increasingly untenable. Hammering multiple nails into the canard’s coffin is a new book of essays on the impact of the campus Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement: The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel, edited by Cary Nelson and Gabriel Noah Brahm. I had the recent pleasure of meeting and listening to Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, one of the book’s contributing writers, at a seminar sponsored by the Canadian Institute for Jewish research in Montreal. Rossman-Benjamin is an academic at the University of California at Santa Cruz (a hotbed of anti-Israel hysteria), and has been battling BDS activism for a number of years via a group she founded called AMCHA. This is not an acronym—rather it is the Hebrew word that means “ordinary people” or simply “the people.”

 

Rossman-Benjamin’s chapter, “Interrogating the Academic Boycotters of Israel on American Campuses,” takes for its focus the demographics of faculty BDS activists or endorsers. She arrives at some interesting findings. Of the 938 boycotting-bent faculty, only 7% are affiliated with engineering and natural science departments. A full 86% are in the humanities and social sciences. The most widely represented department is English Literature, and not, as I would have expected, departments of Middle Eastern Studies (whose members are certainly well represented proportionately, but numerically pale beside the numbers in English Lit). What explains the stats? Rossman-Benjamin writes: Predominantly hailing from the humanities and social sciences, many of the academic boycotters are involved with the study of Race, Gender, Class or Empire, and seem to be motivated by ideologies which divide the world into oppressed and oppressor and are linked to social movements which pursue social justice for the oppressed by combatting the perceived oppressor, in this case Israel. One possibility is that all four areas represent ideological paradigms…making it a short ideological leap to seeing the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in the same binary terms.

 

Rossman-Benjamin has no wish to deprive faculty members of their right to freedom of speech. She is, however, troubled by the problem that arises when free speech transmogrifies into a fanaticism so febrile that it becomes coercive, or stifles alternate views in the classroom, or turns discussion into intimidation. This is happening on many campuses across North America, and predictably on every campus where there is a strong Jewish presence. In Canada, the tension is worst at York, Ryerson, and the University of Toronto (OISE in particular) and Montreal’s Concordia and McGill Universities, not by coincidence those universities with the highest concentration of Jewish students. Compounding the discomfort for pro-Israel, or even neutral Jewish students is the fact that an enormous disproportion of BDS-supportive faculty are themselves Jews. It is by now apparent to all observers of the BDS phenomenon that anti-Zionism is to left-wing Jews what abortion on demand is to feminists: the litmus test that divides the political faithful from the infidels. Although all left-wing professors feel bound to hew to the party line on the “oppressor” state of Israel, Jewish faculty bestir themselves most frantically to disassociate themselves from any hint of pro-Zionist sympathy. Which also means that they must remain shtumm in the face of the overt anti-Semitism they frequently encounter in some of their fellow activists.

 

 The upstart AMCHA—a David to the collective faculty Goliath—makes a point of naming and shaming professors who have been identified as expressing “anti-Israel bias, or probably even anti-Semitic rhetoric.” Recently 40 professors that the group ‘outed” on this issue took great umbrage at the report in which they were named, a comprehensive review of attitudes regarding Israel demonstrated by some 200 professors who signed an online petition calling for an academic boycott of Israeli scholars during this summer’s Gaza incursion. They should not be outraged. Why shouldn’t students who wish to be taught by unbiased profs be made aware of their prejudice so they can avoid them? Though there is no true analogue to what Jewish students face on campus, imagine if there were professors engaged in a movement against homosexuality? Wouldn’t gay students have a right to be advised about that? No pro-Israel student, for example, would wish to study with UC Riverside Professor and academic boycott founder David Lloyd, cited by Rossman-Benjamin. As part of his course curriculum, Lloyd invited Omar Barghouti to speak to his students. Barghouti is a high-profile BDS leader and an overt anti-Semite, who has publicly voiced his desire to “euthanize the Zionist project.” The talk was funded and sponsored by the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, along with the Department of ethnic Studies, a third of whose faculty have endorsed the academic boycott of Israel, including the department chair. Students in eight courses were required to attend and listen to Barghouti’s talk, which “consisted of anti-Israel propaganda laced with classic anti-Semite tropes used to promote the academic boycott of Israel.” This is not academic freedom. This is anti-Semitism tout court, tricked out in the vestments of academic respectability.  

 

When asked why they never target other, objectively evil movements, such as ISIS, for condemnation, BDS people will respond, self-righteously, “one has to start somewhere.” But in fact, condemnation always starts and ends with Israel alone. Any attempt to condemn the objective evil of any entity other than Israel is instantly shot down. In October, for example, Britain’s National Union of Students (NUS), which has never considered the possible blowback for Jews of their anti-Israel activism, voted against condemning Islamic State after a Black Students Officer opposed the motion because “condemnation of ISIS appears to have become a justification for…blatant Islamophobia.” Strangely, the dreaded Islamophobia, over which so many hands are wrung, never seems to achieve liftoff, while anti-Semitism grows by leaps and bounds. In fact, FBI statistics indicate that acts of anti-Semitism occur with eight times the regularity of anti-Muslim incidents. Between 2011 and 2012 alone, the number of anti-Semitic incidents on campus tripled. The BDS movement is surely largely responsible for that escalation. Does anyone care? Not so you’d notice.

 

Rossman-Benjamin cites the conditions that permit anti-Semitism to flourish: the vagueness of academic freedom; the unwillingness of administrations to enforce existing university policies (“hostile environments” for gays, blacks, natives, and women are vigorously policed, for Jews ignored); and the common practice of humanities and social science departments to encourage political activism by incorporating the pursuit of “social justice” into their mission statements. For years, would-be defenders of Israel on campus were the proverbial deer in the headlights of well-organized exterminationist anti-Israel rage. It is good to see that paralysis dissipating, and a strengthening campaign under way by groups like AMCHA and many others to push back against the lies and the hatred. In our current political and cultural climate, the Goliath of Judeophobia cannot be brought down by a single well-aimed stone. We need many more Davids in the fight to restore the moral integrity of our universities. May their numbers increase.

 

Barbara Kay is a CIJR Academic Fellow

 

                                                                       

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OBAMA’S ASSAULT ON ISRAEL IS A MORAL OUTRAGE                                 Washington Examiner, Oct. 30, 2014

 

During the 2008 presidential election, as skeptics of Barack Obama questioned his support for Israel, his campaign, with help from media allies, pursued an aggressive counteroffensive. The strategy was to delegitimize reasonable criticism of Obama’s record by lumping it together with zany conspiracy theories from fringe figures and anonymous Internet commenters. Weeks before the election, the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg wrote a post titled, “Dear Jews: Stop the Obama Paranoia.” He urged, “all you rumor-mongering, fever-headed Jewish conspiracists: Support McCain, if you want, and there are credible reasons for doing so, but stop smearing Obama in the face of overwhelming evidence that the man is a great friend of Jews and of Israel. After a point, it becomes obvious that what you fear is not Israel’s destruction, but the presence of an African-American in the White House. And that’s disgusting.”

 

But critics of Obama have unfortunately been vindicated. For six years, the administration has taken an increasingly hostile stance toward its long-standing U.S. ally while bending over backwards to make concessions to an anti-American regime in Iran. And this week, Goldberg is out with a new article, quoting a senior Obama administration official who referred to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “a chickenshit.” It was both juvenile and absurd, but a natural progression of Obama’s policy toward Israel.

Defenders of Obama are eager to draw a distinction between being anti-Israel and simply disliking Netanyahu, whom they regard as obstinate. This is difficult to square with the threat that the administration may now “withdraw diplomatic cover for Israel at the United Nations.” Moreover, the distinction doesn’t excuse Obama’s calculated strategy of taking a more belligerent attitude toward Israel.

 

In the early months of his presidency, Obama criticized George W. Bush’s posture toward the Jewish state, arguing that “during those eight years, there was no space between us and Israel, and what did we get from that? When there is no daylight, Israel just sits on the sidelines, and that erodes our credibility with the Arab states.” Acting consistently with his worldview, Obama immediately chastised Jews for building homes around Israel’s capital city of Jerusalem, focusing on the issue as if it were the biggest obstacle to Middle East peace. Obama and top administration officials have since pointed the finger at Jewish housing construction whenever the peace process has stalled. This has been so even as they have held up Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas as a real peace partner, despite his history of Holocaust denial and support for terrorism, his rejection of the key tenets of the administration’s proposed peace “framework,” and the fact that he has no real authority to implement any significant concessions even if he actually agreed to them, because of the dominance of the terrorist group Hamas.

 

Despite his campaign promises to the contrary, the Obama administration has pursued talks with Hamas, even as the terrorists launch rockets and dig terror tunnels for murderous raids against civilians — and the group clings to its goal of exterminating Israel. Meanwhile, Netanyahu has been excoriated for refusing to agree to demands by the Obama administration that would put Israeli security at risk in the face of these threats. Netanyahu was portrayed as “a chickenshit” by the administration not only for lacking the political courage to side with Obama and Abbas over the Israeli public that elected him, but also for actually trusting the administration’s reassurances about Iran’s nuclear program. Back in 2012, in full re-election campaign mode, Obama declared in a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, “I have Israel’s back.” He urged Israel to have patience to let sanctions against Iran work. Yet the anonymous administration official quoted by Goldberg boasted that Netanyahu was essentially suckered by Obama into holding off on an attack that could have prevented Iran from becoming a nuclear power. “It’s too late for him to do anything,” the official said. “Two, three years ago, this was a possibility. But ultimately he couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger. It was a combination of our pressure and his own unwillingness to do anything dramatic. Now it’s too late.” This statement has reverberations that go far beyond Israel. The administration is signaling to allies, from the Middle East to Eastern Europe and beyond, that they cannot trust U.S. security guarantees. The message being sent is that if allies take Obama at his word and follow his advice, Obama will not only betray them, but they will be mocked and humiliated for actually believing him.

 

The policy of trashing a staunch democratic ally committed to fighting Islamic extremism, while fostering closer ties to Iran, a leading state sponsor of terrorism, is a moral outrage. If Iran obtains a nuclear weapon, it will hold the entire region at the mercy of its radical agenda, expand its terrorism operations, continue to abuse human rights with impunity and threaten millions of Jews in Israel with annihilation. But even if one puts morality aside and discards idealistic notions about defending U.S. values abroad — even, in other words, from the perspective of realpolitik — it is hard to see Obama’s Middle East strategy as anything but an abysmal failure…

[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed]                                                    

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THE DEEPER MEANING OF THE CAMPAIGN FOR

“RECOGNITION OF PALESTINE”                                                                          

Paul Merkley                                                                                                              

Bayview Review, Nov. 3, 2014

 

When, back in the 1890s, the first generation of Zionists proposed the creation of a Jewish State somewhere in “Palestine,” Arabs everywhere united in a declaration of eternal opposition. Then, after the State of Israel became a fact of life in 1948, this refusal to accept Israel’s creation was immediately replaced by an undying vow to remove it from the face of the earth. The campaign to achieve a State of Palestine is relatively new in the world, however, and can be traced back to November 15, 1988, when the Palestine Declaration of Independence was proclaimed in Algiers at an “extraordinary session in exile of the Palestine National Council.” The Declaration was promptly acknowledged by a range of countries, not limited to Arab and/or Muslim ones; and indeed by 1989 ninety-four Member States of the United Nations – about one-half of the membership at that time – had formally recognized the “State of Palestine.”

 

The proclamation of the Oslo Accords on the lawn of the White House on September 12, 1993, was supposed to have changed the programme for both Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Now the PLO was formally committed to peaceful negotiation with the Jewish State of all the differences over boundaries and all other matters that seem to the PLO to be obstacles to exercise of sovereign authority in a future State of Palestine. Nonetheless, despite its unambiguous commitments under the Oslo Agreement, the PLO (now formally entrusted with plenary responsibility for government of the Palestine Authority, the interim administration of the Palestinian Arab territories) has continued, without interruption, its illegal campaign for immediate recognition of a State of Palestine. On all Palestine Authority documents, “Palestine” described as having the boundaries that it would have if Israel surrendered all of its claims, and embraced all of the Palestinian ones. This unremitting campaign, conducted since 1993 in brazen violation of the Oslo pledge, had by September 2013, brought declarations of formal recognition of the State of Palestine from 134 of the 193 member states of the United Nations. Then, on November 29, 2012, in a vote of 138 to 9 (with 41 abstaining) the General Assembly passed Resolution 67/19, which promotes “Palestine” to the status of a “non-member observer” at the United Nations.

 

Particularly galling to Israel and friends of Israel was the fact that Mahmoud Abbas had contrived, with the complicity of the majority of the nation States, for the vote to take place on November 29, the sixty-five anniversary of the General Assembly’s decision for Partition of the Palestine Mandate. The intention was that this should be the moment when the United Nations formally expressed its considered regret for the decision taken on November 29, 1947. With this deed, the majority of the current member states officially saluted and signed on to a new motto: that the Partition decision, far from being the proud moment that it seemed at the time and that most decent people in our part of the world still consider it to be, was in fact “the Nakva (Catastrophe’) – the event around which the Palestinian politician have tried for decades to reorganize all thinking about the Middle East. In the months that followed the General Assembly’s grant of “non-member observer status” to “Palestine, a clear “spin-off effect” could be seen in accelerated campaigns in the legislatures of several Western nations for recognition of “Palestine” as a sovereign state. Sweden’s Parliament has now stepped out and become the first…

[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed]    

 

Paul Merkley is a CIJR Academic Fellow

 

CIJR Wishes all Our Friends and Supporters: Shabbat Shalom!

           

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On Topic

Who Does Jerusalem Really Belong To?: Lior Ackerman, Jerusalem Post, Nov. 6, 2014 —Many columns have been written about Israel’s inability to bring about quiet to the Gaza Strip and to reach a political or military agreement that would help normalize Gazans’ daily lives. But not much is written about Jerusalem.

‘Anti-Jewish Horror’: Marvin Sharpe, National Post, Nov. 6, 2014 —I find it bizarre that the Museum of the History of Polish Jews is dedicated to 1,000 years of Jewish existence and contribution to Polish life, as the Jews have never been considered to be Polish.

Book Review: The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel.: Andrei S. Markovits, Fathom, Nov., 2014—The editors deserve major kudos for having compiled an impressive anthology featuring contributions in opposition to the deeply sordid, yet potentially potent, Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

Myths and Facts About American Campuses #4: Faculty Play No Role in Promoting Israel Denial on Campus: Mitchell Bard, Jerusalem Post, Nov. 6, 2014—Students call or text home about the hostility toward Israel they feel on campus.

Congress: Stop Subsidizing Biased Middle East Studies: Daniel Pipes, The Blaze, Oct. 8, 2014—In return for receiving taxpayer funds for foreign regional studies, universities must agree, according to Title VI of the Higher Education Act (HAE), to conduct “public outreach” programs aimed at K-12 teachers and the general public.

 

 

 

               

 

 

 

                      

                

 

 

Rob Coles, Publications Chairman, Canadian Institute for Jewish Research/ L’institut Canadien de recherches sur le Judaïsme, www.isranet.org

Tel: (514) 486-5544 – Fax:(514) 486-8284 ; ber@isranet.wpsitie.com