Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on March 3, 2021

Logos of US government agencies surround a map of Israel in a scene from a video promoting Jewish Voice for Peaces Deadly Exchange campaign, which opposes initiatives that promote joint training programs between American police and Israeli security forces. Photo: YouTube.

The group Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) claims to oppose bigotry, and to support security and self-determination for both Israelis and Palestinians. But a new campaign JVP has joined aims to block rumored plans by Facebook to add the term Zionism to its hate speech policies. Zionism is the belief in Jewish self-determination in their ancestral homeland in other words, supporting Israels right to exist.

@Facebook is considering whether to treat Zionist as proxy for Jew in its hate speech policy, JVP tweeted last week during a Twitter town hall. This would make Zionist a de facto protected category, letting FB shut down critical conversations about Zionists under the guise of fighting antisemitism.

If @Facebook restricts use of the word Zionist on its platforms, already severe censorship will grow, an account for the antisemitic BDS movement also wrote during the Twitter town hall. Palestinians will be blocked from describing our daily lives under Israeli apartheid, and our family histories of dispossession and military occupation.

An anonymous Facebook employee sent out an email detailing how the social media company was considering monitoring antisemitism on its platform, technology news website The Verge reported in November. We are looking at the question of how we should interpret attacks on Zionists to determine whether the term is used as a proxy for attacking Jewish or Israeli people, the Facebook employee wrote. The term brings with it much history and various meanings, and we are looking to increase our understanding of how it is used by people on our platform.

March 2, 2021 2:52 pm

JVP joined the campaign opposing the policy Facebook, We Need to Talk.

There are plenty of examples in which the term Zionist has been used as a slur against pro-Israel Jews. In December, the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, posted a meme on Facebook-owned Instagram instructing students to start Zionist shaming. The image showed a young man burying his face in his arms, surrounded by terms including, racist!, colonizer!, and go back to Brooklyn.

Similarly, the University of Southern California (USC) student government vice president resigned last August after she was pressured and harassed by fellow students who disagreed with her support for Israel. But because I openly identify as a Jew who supports Israels right to exist as a Jewish state i.e., a Zionist I was accused by a group of students of being unsuitable as a student governor leader, Rose Ritch wrote in a Newsweek op-ed. I was told my support for Israel made me complicit in racism, and that by association, I am a racist. Students launched an aggressive social media campaign to impeach [my] Zionist a**.'

Facebook announced an updated hate speech policy last August. Were also updating our policies to more specifically account for certain kinds of implicit hate speech, such as content depicting blackface, or stereotypes about Jewish people controlling the world, Facebook said.

A coalition of 130 Jewish and pro-Israel groups had called on Facebook to better moderate antisemitism after Facebook received harsh backlash over its previous hate speech policy, allowing cases of Holocaust denial and antisemitism to remain on its platform. The August policy update, which embraced elements of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliances (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, significantly moved the platform in that direction.

JVP, meanwhile, has proven to be an unreliable voice when it comes to confronting antisemitism.

A JVP antisemitism webinar in December included US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Temple University professor Marc Lamont Hill, as well as journalist Peter Beinart and activist Barbara Ransby. Both Tlaib and Ransby have supported convicted terrorist Rasmieh Odeh, who is responsible for the murder of two Israelis in a grocery store bombing. Hill has repeatedly called for a free Palestine stretching from the river to the sea, a dream that requires Israels elimination. Tlaib, Hill, and Ransby have also espoused antisemitic views publicly, on multiple occasions, without ever expressing any remorse.

This is also not JVPs first campaign delegitimizing Israel.

Last fall, the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) exposed JVPs antisemitic rhetoric which it tried to hide in promoting its Deadly Exchange campaign (a baseless antisemitic smear blaming programs that take American police leaders to Israel for police brutality against Black people in the United States).

Suggesting that Israel is the start or source of American police violence or racism shifts the blame from the United States to Israel, JVP wrote last June, trying to walk back its previous statements. It also furthers an antisemitic ideology. White supremacists look for any opportunity to glorify and advance American anti-Black racism, and any chance to frame Jews as secretly controlling and manipulating the world.

But thats exactly what Deadly Exchange did for nearly three years before issuing that update. The IPT spoke with US-Israeli exchange organizers and participants, who all agreed their experiences bore no resemblance to JVPs false and hateful smear.

And others who have signed on with JVPs new Facebook campaign about Zionism have their own anti-Israel and antisemitic histories. Linda Sarsours MPower Change signed on yet last summer, her organization backed a No Zionist Juneteenth rally in New York City that claimed to be open to all, minus cops & zionists [sic]. Sarsour has also pushed the Deadly Exchange blood libel, falsely claiming that American police traveling to Israel leads to killing unarmed black people across the country. She also argues that Zionists cannot be allies or feminists.

BDS leader Omar Barghouti admits to opposing a Jewish state in any part of Palestine. No Palestinian, rational Palestinian, not a sellout Palestinian, would ever accept a Jewish state in Palestine. He and BDS are leading advocates of the Facebook effort.

JVPs campaign to push Facebook away from making anti-Zionist rhetoric a part of its hate speech policy is yet another effort to excuse antisemitism. Its also an attempt to mislead the public into believing that JVP represents contemporary Jewish thought. But more than 90 percent of Jews worldwide consider themselves Zionists and support Israels right to exist as a Jewish state.

JVP instead keeps finding itself aligned with antisemites and pushing antisemitic messaging.

A version of this article was originally published by The Investigative Project on Terrorism, where the author is a contributor.

See the rest here:
Jewish Voice for Peace Fights to Preserve Anti-Zionist Hatred Online - Algemeiner

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