The scourge of NYC, the pride of NYU

Sometimes it can seem as if the major institutions of higher education in the northern and southern parts of Manhattan, namely Columbia University and New York University, are locked in an intense competition – not to produce the most important scientific research or to turn out the best educated students, but to be the Big Apple’s undisputed hub of inane and anarchic academic radicalism.

On February 15, the New York Post reported that one of the co-founders and leaders of Decolonize This Place, a gang of misfits who created havoc in the New York subways on January 31 – “destroying turnstiles, stranding thousands of commuters and spray-painting ‘F–k Cops’ on station walls “ – is an NYU professor named Amin Husain. (In fact, Husain’s Wikipedia page identifies him as the “lead organizer” of the group.) The eloquently stated goal of this initiative was to “f-ck sh-t up,” and it must be said that they succeeded: damages came to around $100,000. Even Mayor Bill de Blasio, who is not exactly famous as a crime-fighter, pronounced himself “repulsed” by the group’s actions, the ultimate goal of which is to obtain free public transport with no cops.

To be sure, the group, which has been described as carrying out “direct actions targeting five issues: Free Palestine, Indigenous Struggle, Black Liberation, Global Wage Workers, and de-gentrification,” didn’t accomplish everything it intended to do. Communicating with one another on social media, members encouraged one another to bring knives and “blind police officers.” The group’s website, as the Post noted, features information on “How to Shut Down the City,” how to kick people “in the face and groin,” and how to make use of nails and glass bottles.

Who is Amin Husain? That Wikipedia page calls him “a Palestinian-American activist” whose courses at NYU focus on “resistance and liberation and postcolonial theory.” For example, he teaches a workshop called “Art, Activism, and Beyond” in which he “interrogates the relationship between art and activism.” (“Interrogates” is a currently fashionable academic synonym for “examines” or “discusses.”) Like many such academic radicals he has founded or been involved with a long list of activist organizations, publications, and movements, among them the Global Ultra Luxury Faction, the magazine Tidal: Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy, NYC Solidarity with Palestine, NYC Students for Justice in Palestine, Occupy Wall Street, the Boycott, Sanctions, and Divestment movement. Oh, and Fatah. Yes, at a 2012 OWS rally, he stated that in the Palestinian territories, where he grew up, he was a member of Fatah and took part in the anti-Israeli “resistance” – throwing “rocks, Molotov cocktails, the like” at IDF members – after which “I came over here, searching for an American Dream that has never existed.”

The subway hooliganism wasn’t Husain’s first attempt to create mayhem in New York City. In 2006 he took part in a demonstration at the American Museum of Natural History that “demanded the removal of the now-controversial statue of a horse-borne Theodore Roosevelt flanked by two standing Native Americans at the entrance.” Last year he led a series of weekly protests at the Whitney Museum in an ultimately successful attempt to oust Whitney board vice-chairman Warren B. Kanders, whose company manufactures supplies for law enforcement and military uses.

Will NYU investigate, discipline, or fire Husain? Somehow it seems unlikely. The faculties of both NYU and Columbia are overflowing with haters of Israel, apologists for terrorism, and participants in violent protest. One can’t help getting the impression that it’s easier to get a teaching job at these places – and at many other supposedly distinguished American universities – with a rap sheet than with an award-winning work of scholarship. Husain, alas, is a very little piece of a very big problem that is infecting higher education from sea to shining sea.

Posted on February 25, 2020February 18, 2020 by usefulstooges 3

Mainstreaming Jew-hatred

Before World War II, anti-Semitism was an everyday part of life in most of the Western world. It was understood to take two forms. There was “vulgar” anti-Semitism and “genteel” anti-Semitism. The kind of people who were afflicted with the latter looked down upon the kind of people who were afflicted with the former. The “genteel” anti-Semites would never use certain “vulgar” anti-Semitic words. They might even have Jewish friends, because they distinguished between the Jews who were – how to put it? – clubbable, and those who weren’t. But they also joined “restricted” social clubs and golf clubs, stayed at hotels that banned Jews, and sent their kids to colleges that had quotas for Jewish students.

Many Jews who made it big kept their Jewish identity to themselves, or at least didn’t make a show of it. Jewish performers ditched their Jewish-sounding names and replaced them with WASPy monickers. In the 1930s, Jewish studio heads, producers, directors, and writers in Hollywood were reluctant to make movies about Nazi anti-Semitism for fear of drawing attention to their own Jewishness. For the same reason, the Jewish publishers of the New York Times downplayed news about the Holocaust.

It was, in fact, the Holocaust, when the entire story finally came out, that shone as bright a light on Jew-hatred as one could ever imagine. No, anti-Semitism didn’t vanish, but it was no longer considered respectable, at least not by anybody who wanted to be considered respectable. The Academy Award for Best Picture of 1947 went to Gentleman’s Agreement, a movie about anti-Semitism. In pretty much every country in the Western world, memorials were erected to the six million Jews killed in the Final Soultion and Holocaust museums were established. Some of us grew up in a time when anti-Semitism seemed surely to have become a thing of the past.

But we were wrong. In Britain, the head of one of the two major political parties, Jeremy Corbyn, is an undeniable anti-Semite. In the U.S., unapologetic Jew-haters have been elected to Congress. As the Washington Free Beacon reported recently, one of these House members, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, “was the keynote speaker at a conference hosted by a Muslim organization that traffics in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and that counts among its supporters many who seek Israel’s destruction.” The organization in question is the American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), and the conference took place in late November in Chicago. Also onstage was Linda Sarsour, the unlikely feminist leader who wears a hijab, hangs with Farrakhan, and fills her speeches with anti-Semitic bile. Yet another speaker was Zahra Billoo, who in a 2014 tweet wrote that “Blaming Hamas for firing rockets at Israel is like blaming a woman for punching her rapist.” Panel discussions at the conference called for the destruction of Israel and for the classification of Zionism as a disease.

In another recent article, this one for the Spectator, Dominic Green took on the curious case of Bernie Sanders, senator and presidential candidate, whose Jewish background – members of his family were murdered in the Holocaust – doesn’t keep him from being more than tolerant of anti-Semitism. For example, he’s a fan of Corbyn, even though the latter “detests the Zionist entity with a near-Soviet passion, and is visibly aroused when he gets to signal his vices by introducing Islamists like Raed Salah, a publicist for the primitive ‘blood libel’ that Jews bake with Christian blood, into the House of Commons.” Sanders, notes Green, has called Corbyn “courageous.” Moreover, Sanders is chummy with Sarsour, who spoke on his behalf at the AMP conference. Addressing the attendees in her role as his designated surrogate, she asked: “How can you be against white supremacy in the United States of America, and the idea of living in a supremacist state based on race and class, but then support a state like Israel that is built on supremacy? That is built on the idea that Jews are supreme to everybody else. How do you, then, not support the caging of children on the US-Mexican border, but then you support the detainment and detention of Palestinian children in Palestine? How does that work, sisters and brothers?”

Back in September the New York Post reported that “[p]ressure is mounting on Sen. Bernie Sanders to cut ties with longtime campaign surrogate Linda Sarsour, with critics such as Manhattan billionaire Ronald Lauder citing her long history of anti-Semitic comments.” Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, said at the time: “Linda Sarsour is a virulent anti-Semite who has publicly stated that ‘nothing is creepier than Zionism.’ Her views have no place in our political discourse and any candidate who associates with her is guilty of handing a megaphone to anti-Semites around the country.” Indeed, But Sanders shows no sign of cutting her loose. He still, apparently, views her as an asset. Which says something scary indeed about the current resurgence and mainstreaming of Jew-hatred in the West.

Posted on December 19, 2019December 23, 2019 by usefulstooges 2

New blood – and blood libels – at the Women’s March

There are two Women’s Marches. Or, rather, many. One – the most important one, and the one that got most of the media attention – was held in Washington, D.C., on January 21, 2017, the day after the inauguration of Donald Trump, whose unexpected election to the presidency over someone who had been expected to become the nation’s first female president had been regarded by many of the marchers as an outrage. On the same day, over 400 other Women’s Marches took place in cities around the country – and more than 150 marches took place in 81 countries around the world. The number of participants was staggering – perhaps over five million in the U.S. alone.

As it happens, moreover, the group that organized these events also goes by the name of Women’s March. Among its national co-chairs was Linda Sarsour, a previously obscure Palestinian-American activist who gave a high-profile speech at the Washington march that made her internationally famous and whom we’ve written about frequently on this site. Sarsour – a sometime director of the Arab American Association of New York who belongs to the Democratic Socialists of America and helped found Black Lives Matter – proved to be that most paradoxical of creatures: a self-declared feminist who supports jihad and sharia law and wears a hijab, a symbol of female subordination under Islam. She felt sorry for Saddam Hussein when he was captured by the U.S. and she won an “American Muslim of the Year” award from terrorist-linked CAIR. While smearing ex-Muslims and critics of Muslims such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Sarsour has been chummy with Siraj Wahhaj, an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and Louis Farrakhan, one of America’s most prominent anti-Semites.

Indeed, after Sarsour rocketed to fame, it became clear she, too, had – shall we say – problematic attitudes toward the Jewish people. She’s big on the BDS movement – the campaign to boycott Israel, divest in its companies, and impose sanctions on Israeli trade. She’s said that “nothing is creepier than Zionism.” And she wasn’t the only leader of the Women’s March whose attitudes toward Jews left something to be desired. Indeed, not to put too fine a point on it, the board was rife with Jew-haters. As this fact became well-known, it caused what the Washington Free Beacon described as a “year of turmoil” for the organization. The Women’s March experienced some bad PR after co-chair Tamika Mallory blamed Jews for the slave trade and said that Jews controlled all the world’s money. Like Sarsour, moreover, Mallory was friends with Farrakhan, whom she described as the “Greatest of All Time.” Another board member, Bob Bland, joined Mallory in defending Farrakhan on TV after one of the Nation of Islam leader’s occasional outbursts of passionate Jew-hatred.

In August, in an apparent effort to silence concern about antisemitism in the Women’s March hierarchy, Sarsour, Mallory, and Bland all stepped down from the organization’s board. But it doesn’t look as if this move will necessarily improve the image of the Women’s March. Of the 16 new individuals added to the group’s board, one, Zahra Billoo, who is executive director of the Bay Area chapter of CAIR, has called Israel a “terrorist state” and equated it to ISIS, while another, Palestinian-American activist Samia Assed, has questioned Israel’s right to exist. It seems as if the people who run the Women’s March just can’t keep Jew-haters out of their ranks. Somehow we wouldn’t be surprised if, in the fullness of time, it turns out that at least a few of the other 14 new board members have a distaste for the Hebrew folk as well.

Posted on September 24, 2019September 18, 2019 by usefulstooges 1

Hating Israel

Some facts are plain. Israel is a tiny democratic country surrounded by entities whose people live in various degrees of unfreedom, under dictators, kings, emirs, and terrorist groups. Arabs in Israel are better off than their coreligionists in Israel’s Arab neighbors. While some of those nations are rich because of their oil resources, they make very little in the way of a positive contribution to modern civilization; many of them have sponsored terrorists who have committed acts of jihad in the Western world, and have funded madrasses and mosques that promote the poison of supremacist Islamic ideology in cities throughout the West. Meanwhile, little Israel has accomplished scientific and technological advances that rival the achievements of some of the world’s largest and richest lands.

Jeremy Corbyn

And yet Israel-hatred thrives. In Western Europe, a large cohort of the leftist elite, as exemplified by politicians like British Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, has aligned itself with European Muslims who share its contempt for Israel, to say nothing of its outright antisemitism.

Benjamin Netanyahu

Still, not all that long ago it would have been incredible to hear that Israel was actually losing support among American Jews. This, alas, is the sad case. Since 2010, according to a non-profit called the Brand Israel Group, support for Israel among Jewish college students in the United States has declined from 84% to 57%. That is a massive drop. As one commentator put it, these students “appear to be abandoning support for Israel in droves.” Viewed from one perspective, this alarming development is nothing short of a shock – how, only three-quarters of a century after the Holocaust, can young Jews, presumably brought up to be intensely aware of that massive atrocity in which many if not most of them lost family members, turn against the Jewish state that was founded in its wake?

A gathering of Students for Justice in Palestine

From another perspective, of course, the hostility of so many young Jewish Americans toward Israel is no Asurprise at all. Like most other American college students, they have been fed a diet of ant-Israeli propaganda, both by their professors and by groups of their fellow students. They have learned to view the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a black-and-white affair, with the Israelis always being the bad guys and the Palestinians the victims. They have been taught to parrot the idea that Zionism is racism and to call Israel an apartheid state. Their campuses have been the sites of anti-Israeli events, rife with the vilest of propaganda that whitewashes Hamas, Fatah, and Hezbollah while depicting Benjamin Netanyahu as the most monstrous of men. A couple of generations ago, the Jewish group Hillel was very active – and very high-profile – at colleges around the U.S.; now one hardly ever hears mention of it, while the endless mischief-making of organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine is frequently the stuff of headlines. The pressure on some Jewish students must surely be considerable, but it is nonetheless scarcely short of tragic that so many of them should disavow their own people by rejecting the state founded in the cause of their preservation.

Posted on September 19, 2019September 14, 2019 by usefulstooges 0

Roger Waters, liar

The case of Roger Waters, the former front man for the rock group Pink Floyd and outspoken hater of Israel, illustrates a couple of important points. First, it’s possible to be a very gifted artist and a clueless fool at the same time. Second, some human beings are put together in such a way as to render them completely impervious to the plain facts, however often and however effectively they are presented with those facts.

Of course, we’ve written about Waters before. A lot. In November 2015 we wrote about the “pig-shaped balloon adorned with Jewish symbols, including a Star of David,” that was a feature of his concerts. In response to Waters’s comparison of Israel to Nazi Germany, Rabbi Schmuley Boteach penned an article reminding him that German Jews “did nothing to invite the aggression against them. Indeed, they were loyal citizens of a country that many of them had fought for courageously just 20 years earlier in the First World War. They did not blow up buses for political purposes. They did not send terrorists into schools to murder children. They did not preach that killing German children would get them virgins in heaven. They lived lives of humanity and decency and were murdered for no other reason than the fact that they were Jews.”

Did Waters listen? Of course not. So along came Israeli author Lilac Sigan, who in her own plea to Waters wondered how it was that at a time when other countries and terrorist groups across the Middle East were carrying out “senseless and brutal” slaughter, Waters remained obsessed with Israel.

Did Waters listen to her? Nope. Instead, he wrote an open letter begging Robbie Williams to cancel a planned gig in Israel – where, he insisted, the government views Palestinian children merely “as grass to be mowed.” Williams went ahead with the concert. Soon afterward, Waters tried the same thing with Dionne Warwick, whom he accused of being “profoundly ignorant of what has happened in Palestine since 1947.” She didn’t listen either.

Now it was film director Mark Blacknell’s turn to try to knock some sense into Waters’s head. In an open letter, he reminded Waters that Israel’s neighbors included Hezbollah, “Assad the Butcher,” ISIS, Al Qaeda, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the “Houthi Shiite rebels in Yemen,” the “jihad-plagued, complete insanity of Sudan,” the “ultra-religious, feudalistic Mecca of Islam, Saudi Arabia,” and the “’end of days’ cult of the Ayatollah in Iran.” Many of these fun folks treated Palestinians terribly. Why, Blacknell asked, didn’t Waters ever get exercised about them?

No reply. No change. Instead Waters went after Bon Jovi, writing an open letter that was even more accusatory than his earlier ones. In response, Bon Jovi said, quite simply: “I’m coming to Israel and I’m excited to come.” Only moments before Bon Jovi’s Tel Aviv concert, a terrorist attack hit Jerusalem.

Last year we caught up with Waters, noting that at the Jumbotrons at one of his recent performances had featured the slogan “Resist Israeli anti-Semitism” and that Waters, it now turned out, was one of the rich people who’d invested heavily in some shyster’s sleazy effort to shake down Chevron. In March of this year, we reported that during a concert in Brazil, he’d called Jair Bolsonaro (who was then a presidential candidate, and is now president) a fascist, and that, in response to the recognition by the U.S. and other countries of Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s president, called Venezuela under Maduro a “REAL DEMOCRACY.”

Waters hasn’t backed off. In May, along with hijab-wearing “feminist” Linda Sarsour (whom we’ve also covered here at length), he appeared on a panel about Israel at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he told a story about remarks he’d made at a 2006 concert in Tel Aviv, before he’d started boycotting Israel. According to him, 60,000 of his Israeli fans had responded negatively when he called for peace with Palestinians. When David Seidenberg of the Times of Israel examined an audio of the event, it turned out that Waters was lying through his teeth – the audience, in fact, had cheered. “Since at least 2017,” wrote Seidenberg, “Waters has been repeating this lie. He told it to an interviewer from the Munich-based Süddeutsche Zeitung, one of Germany’s largest dailies. He told it to Liberation News, a socialist newspaper. He told it at a Vancouver event in October 2017 to promote Canada’s participation in BDS.” Plainly, Waters is not to be trusted: he will say anything, true or not, to demonize Israel and idealize Hamas.

As for Venezuela, even as conditions in that country have gone from bad to worse, Waters has stuck by his pal, the dictator. On June 15, he announced in a Facebook post that Maduro had sent him a cuatro, a four-string guitar, a gift for which, he wrote, he was “deeply moved.” Good to know that even as his people are starving, Maduro has the time to keep his top-seeded foreign propagandist happy. “Thank you President Maduro for your kind gift and message,” the old rocker wrote. “I shall continue to support the people of Venezuela, and continue to oppose U.S. interference in your country, particularly the illegal and inhumane monetary sanctions that seek to make life intolerable for your people.” Appalling.

Posted on July 4, 2019July 5, 2019 by usefulstooges 0

Shame on Cambridge!

What is it about Oxford and Cambridge? England’s two great universities have had their moments of glory, but they have also played an outsized part in the history of useful stoogery. In 1933, just a week after Hitler became chancellor of Germany, the members of the Oxford Union proclaimed, by a vote of 275 to 153, that they would “under no circumstances fight for…King and country.” During the next few years, five Cambridge students – Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross – were recruited as Soviet spies, and over the succeeding two decades or so they passed a remarkable amount of sensitive information to their KGB handlers.

Both the Oxford Union and the Cambridge Union routinely invite famous figures from around the world to address them. Sometimes the guests are showbiz figures; sometimes they’re controversial leaders. In January, the Oxford Union welcomed Mahathir bin Mohamad, the prime minister of Malaysia. As Douglas Murray pointed out at the website of the Spectator, Mohamad, age 93, “is an exceptionally happy and virulent anti-Semite.”

Indeed, Mohamad has said that the word “antisemitic” is “an invented term to prevent criticizing Jews for doing wrong.” Back in 1970, he wrote: “The Jews are not merely hook-nosed, but understand money instinctively.” In 2010, as Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League noted at the time, Mohamad “accus[ed] the ‘Jewish lobby’ of preventing the U.S. from ending the war in Afghanistan.”

“I am glad to be labeled antisemitic,” Mohamad stated in 2012. “How can I be otherwise, when the Jews who so often talk of the horrors they suffered during the Holocaust show the same Nazi cruelty and hard-heartedness towards not just their enemies but even towards their allies should any try to stop the senseless killing of their Palestinian enemies?”

The Oxford Union event came and went without making major headlines. But on June 16, it was the Cambridge Union’s turn to host Mohamad. First Mohamad spoke for about twenty minutes. This was followed by an exchange with one of the student hosts, who deserves credit for challenging Mohamad. Right off the bat, he asked him about same-sex marriage, to which Mohamad, unsurprisingly, expressed opposition. Then the student queried Mohamed about his government’s past incarceration of people without trial.

Then came a question about Israel. Why did Mohamad ban Israeli athletes from an international swim meet in his country? Mohamad replied that Israel failed to show “respect” for other people. The Jewish state, he charged, had “stolen other people’s land, killed a lot of people, broken international laws, and done all kinds of things that have never been done by other countries.”

The interviewer did not let up. “Going beyond Israel,” he went on, “you’ve said some pretty hateful things about Jewish people in general.” He cited remarks Mohamad had made to the effect that the scale of the Holocaust had been “overstated” and that “Jewish people control the world by proxy.” Did Mohamad, the young man asked, still stand by those statements? Mohamad’s answer was, in effect, yes.

After a brief detour into the subject of Sudan, the interviewer returned to the subject of Jews. Was it fair, he asked, to blame all Jews for “the alleged crimes of the Israeli state”? Yes, said Mohamad, unless they explicitly distanced themselves from Israel’s actions. Confronted with his description of Jews as “hook-nosed,” Mohamed refused to apologize, explaining that it was natural to generalize about races and that only Jews seemed to resent this fact. On the positive side, Mohamad was willing to acknowledge that “not all Jews are bad” and even professed that he had “Jewish friends in Britain.” Lucky them!

Mohamad then took questions from the audience. Several topics were covered. Finally one of the audience members brought the conversation, once again, back to Jews, suggesting that Mohamad’s generalizations about Jews were unfair. Mohamad again defended his right to generalize. When the interviewer pushed him on this, Mohamad, at about forty-six minutes into the Cambridge Union’s YouTube of the event, came out with the statement that made the news. “I have some Jewish friends, very good friends,” he said. “They are not like the other Jews. That’s why they are my friends.”

And the reason this statement made the news is that the audience – or at least a sizable portion of it – laughed. Actually laughed. It did not sound like derisive laughter. It sounded like appreciative laughter.

Now, imagine if the interviewee had been, say, Donald Trump, and he has said something similar about blacks: “I have some black friends. They’re not like other blacks. That’s why they’re my friends.” Would the Cambridge audience have laughed? Surely not. They would have booed, hissed, walked out en masse. But in response to Mohamad’s ugly comment about Jews, they laughed, and proceeded calmly to the next question.

Alas, it is not really all that surprising to encounter such behavior on the part of privileged young people in the Britain of 2019. This is a time and place, after all, where the head of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, is, like Mahathir bin Mohamad, an outspoken anti-Semite, and where the Jew-hatred of Muslims is routinely granted a pass.

Posted on June 27, 2019June 21, 2019 by usefulstooges 0

To Israel, with hate

Every year, the Eurovision Song Contest, that annual marathon of mostly horrible songs from countries all over Europe, plus Israel and Australia, is held in the homeland of the previous year’s winner. Last year, the winner was Netta, a spunky, offbeat chanteuse from Israel who came out on top with an absolutely abominable tune called “Toy.” So this year the show is being broadcast from Tel Aviv. The first semifinal was on Tuesday; the second is tonight; the finals are on Saturday.

Cue the protests! As we noted in February, the BDS crowd was quick to protest the plans to hold Eurovision in Israel. In Britain, fifty-odd people who described themselves as laboring in the “creative industries” wrote a letter to the Guardian urging Eurovision officials to relocate the show to some other country and expressing concern about Israel’s “crimes against…freedom.” Among these people who cherish freedom so deeply were directors Ken Loach and Roy Battersby, both former members of the Workers Revolutionary Party; actress Maxine Peake, a former Communist Party member and winner of a 2014 award for an Outstanding Contribution to Socialism; stand-up comedian Alexei Sayle, also a former Communist Party member; actresses Julie Christie and Miriam Margolyes, both of whom are pro-Palestinian activists; playwright Caryl Churchill, whose play Seven Jewish Children has been described as “anti-Jewish agitprop” that seeks “to demonize the Jewish people”; and musician Roger Waters, whose deeply sick obsession with Jews we’ve written about a number of times on this site.

Fortunately, the protests were unsuccessful. On Tuesday, the first semifinal went off without incident, but not without controversy. Among the performers was Hatari, a self-described BDSM band from Iceland whose entry is a hideous three-minute stretch of noise entitled “Hate Will Prevail” that expresses the band’s disapproval of the rise of populism in Europe. Note, by the way, that BDSM stands for bondage, discipline, sadism, and masochism, and should not be confused with BDS, the anti-Israeli movement that calls for boycott, divestment, and sanctions; in this case, however, BDSM and BDS went hand in hand. For Hatari is not only into sexual kinks but also into the delegitimization of the Jewish state, the overthrow of capitalism, and the introduction of Communism. For we all know how tolerant Communism is of sexual deviance.

Anyway, before going to Tel Aviv, the members of Hatari felt compelled to make a statement about the idea of holding Eurovision in Israel. They called it a whitewash. “Eurovision is, of course, a beautiful thing in that it is based on ideas of peace and unity,” band member Tryggvi Haraldsson told the Guardian, “and this year it’s held in a country that’s marred by conflict and disunity….Letting the narrative of the fluffy, peace-loving pop contest go on unchallenged in this context in our view is extremely political. Everyone who takes part in this is taking part in a political statement whether they are aware of it or not.” As a show of solidarity with the Palestinians, the members of Hatari went to Hebron, on the West Bank, and spoke out against what they called “apartheid in action.”

All of which raises one big question: if Hatari hates Israel so much, why didn’t it boycott Eurovision? Why is it in Tel Aviv now? It’s a question Palestinians and BDS campaigners have asked. Haraldsson’s answer: if Hatari hadn’t traveled to Israel, it would have missed out on “an opportunity for a critical discussion.” But has Hatari actually sought to engage anyone in Israel in critical discussion? Not that we know of. Besides, Haraldsson added, if Hatari had refused to go to Israel, Iceland would’ve sent somebody else. It’s not exactly the world’s most principled-sounding position, but, hey, it’s a mistake to look to Israel-haters for principle. Finally, asked by the Guardian what’s next for the group, Haraldsson said they wanted to perform “in countries where there currently is not an illegal occupation taking place.” Why not try one of Israel’s neighbors, such as Syria, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, or the United Arab Emirates? Or why not set something up in Hebron or Gaza? Since you care so much about them, we’re sure their response to your act will be, um, explosive.

Oh, by the way: on Tuesday, international voters sent Hatari on to the final. So it’ll be performing again and may actually go home with the gold. Tune in on Saturday, if you have a high threshold of tolerance for bad music.

Posted on May 16, 2019May 15, 2019 by usefulstooges 0

Letting Ilhan slide

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Rashida Tlaib. Ilhan Omar. Among the many things that this callow, determined, and dangerously fanatical trio of high-profile freshman House members have in common is an undisguised anti-Semitism.

But if at this point you had to single out one of these young women for her Jew-hatred, it would have to be Omar, the hijab-wearing Gentlelady from Minnesota. Posting on Twitter in 2012, Omar expressed the wish that Allah would “awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.”

Later, while serving in the Minnesota state legislature, Omar compared Israel to apartheid South Africa and stood up for the BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) movement, which uniquely targets Israel for punishment for its purported human-rights offenses.

During her 2016 campaign for the U.S. House, Omar denied supporting the BDS movement. Not long after her election, in an interview with a Muslim publication, she affirmed her support for it. In Islam there is a word for lying to the infidel in the service of Allah: taqiyya.

In 2018, when someone dug up her 2012 tweet about Israel’s evildoings, she was widely criticized and apologized for it – kind of. But before long she was at it again. In a mid February tweet about the pro-Israel Beltway lobby, she hinted at stereotypical notions of Jewish avarice, thereby crossing a line that used to be respected by politicians of both parties on Capitol Hill. There ensued more criticism – and another sort-of-apology.

Rashida Tlaib, current runner-up in the House anti-Semitic sweepstakes

Days later, she essentially took the apology back. At a bookstore appearance on February 27, Omar told her audience that she considers it important to talk about the divided national loyalties of some political operatives and complained that those accusing her of anti-Semitism were just trying to keep her from introducing that discussion. Yet again Omar was in hot water: accusing American Jews of double allegiance is an old and familiar anti-Semitic trope. In any event, while concerned about the political influence of American Jews, she showed no interest in the powerful Washington lobbies of countries like Saudi Arabia.

By this point, Democratic Party leaders may or may not have been genuinely upset by Omar’s manifest anti-Semitism, but they were definitely concerned about its impact on the party’s fortunes. With that in mind, Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that a resolution condemning anti-Semitism would be put to a vote in the House on Wednesday, March 6.

The resolution was apparently a lame piece of work to begin with: in a draft that circulated on March 5, Omar wasn’t even mentioned by name. Even so, it turned out that the leaders couldn’t scrape together enough votes. New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote that while “older House Democrats” deplored Omar’s remarks about Jews, “their young liberal colleagues” felt that Omar was “being singled out for unfair treatment.”

On March 5, Pelosi and company announced a postponement: at the behest of the House Progressive Caucus, the resolution would be rewritten to condemn Islamophobia as well. As for Omar’s prized seat on the powerful House Foreign Affairs Committee – an appointment that was indefensible to begin with – the chairman of that committee, Eliot Engel of New York, told CNN’s Erin Burnett that he wasn’t even “close to” taking it away. “I’m looking to get rid of anti-Semitism, not looking to punish anybody,” said Engel, who himself is Jewish. Early on March 7, it appeared that the whole resolution thing had totally fizzled. That night, by a vote of 407-23, the House passed an anti-hate resolution that was so absurdly broad that Omar herself was able to support it. During the vote she was seen in the House chamber sharing a laugh with a colleague.

So it was that this lame, half-hearted effort to respond to Ilhan Omar’s Jew-hatred only underscored, in the end, just how devoid of backbone the Democratic Party has become on what should be the most clear-cut of moral issues.

Posted on March 14, 2019March 8, 2019 by usefulstooges 0

Now Roger Waters is supporting Maduro

Here at Useful Stooges, we call Roger Waters “Old Reliable.” Heaven knows there are plenty of useful stooges in show business. Some of them adore the Castro regime in Cuba. Some hate Israel and want to see its Jewish inhabitants driven into the sea. Some speak of burning down the White House. Some support Antifa vandalism and the violent closing down of the free speech of people with whom they disagree. Some blindly follow hijab-wearing “feminist” leaders with histories of defending Islamic gender apartheid.

Roger Waters, the 75-year-old rocker and former Pink Floyd front man, put almost all of them in the shade. He’s spoken up for Hamas, painted Iran as a victim, and served as a member of the UN’s discredited Russell Tribunal. He’s not only compared Israel to Nazi Germany but also accused it of “apartheid” and “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” and held concerts featuring a large, airborne “pig-shaped balloon adorned with Jewish symbols, including a Star of David.” He’s such a fierce enemy of Israel that he’s written accusatory open letters to other entertainers, such as Robbie Williams and Bon Jovi, trying to browbeat them into canceling gigs in Israel and telling them that, if they didn’t obey, they had the blood of children on their hands.

Last November, we reported on a new wrinkle: Waters, it turned out, was part of a shady campaign to shake down Chevron to the tune of billions of dollars.

Now Waters is at it again. As Marcelo Duclos put it last month in an article for the Panam Post, he’s “always on the same side: the wrong one.” Namely, the side of totalitarianism. Performing last year in Brazil, he told his audiences that Jair Bolsonaro, the anti-Marxist who was then running for president and is now in office, represented the “resurgence of fascism.” While he presumably expected his fans to cheer, many of them booed.

Not that he learned a lesson from it. On February 3, Waters took to Twitter to offer his two cents on the current developments in Venezuela. As readers of this site well know, most of the democratic countries of the Western Hemisphere have supported the claim of National Assembly leader Juan Guaido to be the legitimate president of that country; only Cuba, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Bolivia, and three small Caribbean island nations have stuck by the incompetent Marxist dictator Nicolas Maduro – along with such stellar international players as Iran, Belarus, Russia, China, Syria, and Equatorial Guinea. No points for guessing which side Waters is on.

In his February 3 tweet, Waters told the U.S. to “LEAVE THE VENEZUELAN PEOPLE ALONE” and claimed that Venezuela, under Maduro, enjoys a “REAL DEMOCRACY” superior to those of the United Kingdom and United States. He added the hashtag #STOPTRUMPSCOUPINVENEZUELA. Duclos quoted a reply by one of Waters’s fans: “I’m crying. My biggest musical idol has just defended the government that ruined my country and my family, which forced me to leave my own country to seek a better quality of life. Roger, you have no idea what is happening in Venezuela.” This fan was not alone in chiding Waters for his ignorance and his unconcern for Maduro’s victims.

Will he listen? There is no reason to expect him to. “Tho[ugh] his lyrics routinely decry authoritarianism, government power, and assaults on freedom,” Duclos pointed out, “it seems these things receive a pass from Waters when a left-wing government is the culprit.”

Posted on March 7, 2019March 6, 2019 by usefulstooges 2

Britain’s top Jew-haters

When Netta, a performer from Israel, won the annual Eurovision Song Contest on May 12, 2018, in Portugal’s Lisbon Arena, meaning that this year’s competition would be held in her home country, one thing was beyond doubt: that before the day appointed for Eurovision 2019 rolled around, Israel-haters from every corner of Europe would raise a stink about the venue.

Sure enough, in a letter published on January 29 in the Guardian, fifty members of “the creative industries” complained that although “Eurovision may be light entertainment…it is not exempt from human rights considerations – and we cannot ignore Israel’s systematic violation of Palestinian human rights.” Because of this violation, they argued, the BBC – which airs Eurovision in Britain – “should act on its principles and press for Eurovision to be relocated to a country where crimes against…freedom are not being committed.”

The fifty people, most of them British, who signed this reprehensible document are a mixed bunch. Some are relatively obscure writers or musicians who have no prominent record of this kind of activism. Others are pretty famous actors or directors and have long histories of far-left political activity. Several are ardent Communists or former Communists. A number of them are involved in pro-Palestinian causes. Many are fervent supporters of Labour Party leader and notorious anti-Semite Jeremy Corbyn. Here are some of the more familiar names.

Roy Battersby, a film and TV director, is the stepfather of actress Kate Beckinsale and a former Communist who was active in the Workers Revolutionary Party (so we know that he has good judgment about human rights). Maxine Peake, star of a number of BBC series, is a sometime member of the Communist Party of Britain, won a 2014 award for an Outstanding Contribution to Socialism, and calls Jeremy Corbyn a “beacon of hope.” Alexei Sayle, a stand-up comedian and author, is also a former member of the Communist Party of Britain who still considers himself a Communist and considers Corbyn “morally incorruptible.” Actress Miriam Margolyes is a pro-Palestinian activist who has been active in a group called Jews for Justice for Palestinians. Actress Julie Christie, now 78, won an Oscar for Darling (1965) and is a patron of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC).

Among the letter’s signatories, playwright and PSC patron Caryl Churchill has one of the most impressive records of hard-core Jew-hatred. In 2009, she banged out her play Seven Jewish Children in record time so it could be staged while that year’s Gaza crisis was still underway. Writing in The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg described it as “anti-Jewish agitprop” and “a drive-by shooting of a play” that contains a “not-entirely veiled blood libel” and seeks “to demonize the Jewish people.” In the Spectator, Melanie Phillips called it “despicable,” “a direct attack on the Jews” that denies the “Jewish claim to the land of Israel” and depicts Jews as “kill[ing] and persecut[ing] the Arabs out of some kind of strutting power complex.”

Peter Gabriel, formerly of the rock band Genesis, is no slouch either. Associated with Amnesty International for decades, he’s a co-founder of his own human-rights group, Witness, and, along with Jimmy Carter and others, is a member of a group called The Elders that seeks to resolve conflicts around the world. In 1992, along with such left-wing politicians as Jeremy Corbyn and Tony Benn, he called for British withdrawal from Northern Ireland; in 2014, he contributed songs to an album intended to aid Gaza. Film director Ken Loach has belonged to the Workers Revolutionary Party, the Socialist Workers Party, and the International Marxist Group, has been involved with Jeremy Corbyn and with the bilious Jew-hater George Galloway, has campaigned for a number of boycotts of Israel, and has condemned efforts to address anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. Fashion designer Vivienne Westwood is also a Corbyn supporter. And last but not least there’s Roger Waters, whose virulent anti-Semitism we’ve written about at length on this site.

In short, this campaign to steal Eurovision from Israel is an effort by the usual suspects. When one scans through the letter and picks out the familiar names at the end of it, it’s no surprise to see any of them there. This is what these people are. This is what they’re about. Together, they form an unsavory grab-bag, consisting of fervent fans of Corbyn and Galloway, of longtime card-carrying Communists, of committed Jew-haters. If you’re in search of a gallery of British useful stooges, look no further than this shameful roster of signatories.

Posted on February 19, 2019February 3, 2019 by usefulstooges 1