Richard Silverstein, a well respected American Jewish blogger and columnist has been banned by Facebook for accusing Israeli settlers of stealing land (shock, horror) on the basis that it “disparage[s] ethnic or religious groups”.
I am a freelance journalist and political blogger with 5,000 Facebook followers on my personal account and 1,500 Followers of my blog page, Tikun Olam. I publish articles about the Israeli-Arab conflict.
On June 7th, I posted to Facebook this article from the site, AI Monitor, which reported that Palestinian landowners who had lost their homes through fraudulent real estate transactions perpetrated by Israeli settlers had regained them.
I added to the article my own comment: “Israeli settlers steal land.” The screenshot of my post and comment is attached.
Benjamin Balthaser reviews ‘Antisemitism: Here and Now’ by Deborah E. Lipstadt. He argues that contemporary antisemitism must be confronted. Yet liberals who dwell on supposed ‘left antisemitism’ and insist on equating leftists like Jeremy Corbyn with the open antisemitism of right-wing figures like Donald Trump are not only blatantly dishonest, but prevent us from fighting anti-Jewish bigotry.
Reprinted from The Jacobin by permission of the author
These are strange times to be Jewish in the US. We have a president attacking progressive representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib with false claims of antisemitism. Only a short time before, the same president ran the first openlyantisemitic presidential campaign in living memory.Strange as it seems, such gestures are hardly new. The mastermind of what was arguably the greatest antisemitic purge in US history, McCarthyism, also characterized himself as a great defender of Jews: J. Edgar Hoover blamed antisemitism not on his own anticommunist witch hunts, which disproportionately targeted Jews and relied on antisemitic imagery, but on the very communists he targeted.
Hundreds of white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and members of the “alt-right” march in the “Unite the Right” rally August 12, 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia
In an incredible act of chutzpah, Hoover claimed in his book on the communist menace, Masters of Deceit, that Nazism borrowed its antisemitism from Marxism, that the Soviet Union tacitly supported the Holocaust, and worst of all sins, the communists did not support Israel. Hoover said this while simultaneously hiring former Nazis as informants, sending two Jews to the death chamber on dubious conspiracy charges, not to mention sending countless other Jewish people to jail under the Smith Act. He finally concluded that Jews who support communism are not real Jews. Continue reading “Antisemitism and the Crisis of Liberalism”
On June 7th, I posted to Facebook this article from the site, AI Monitor, which reported that Palestinian landowners who had lost their homes through fraudulent real estate transactions perpetrated by Israeli settlers had regained them.