Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on March 4, 2020

On Feb. 20, 1939, New York Citys Madison Square Garden was the site of a gathering of 20,000 passionate, like-minded Americans.

There were flags and speeches and music and much pomp and pageantry.

The object of their affection?

The Third Reich.

It seems jaw-dropping in 2020 that one of Americas most iconic venues would have opened its doors to such a reprehensible event.

The whole thing sounds like an elaborate prank, except it has been preserved in filmmaker Marshall Currys 2017 documentary A Night at the Garden.

The unedited film runs only seven minutes, but thats long enough to underscore the depths of our denial. It also proves we know a lot less about ourselves than we thought.

Its a sight to behold. The stage is festooned in American flags. At its center is a three-story portrait of George Washington along with a platoon of uniformed drummer boys, all of it framed by two massive Nazi banners.

As keynote speaker Fritz Kuhn goes on a screed about Jews, Isidore Greenbaum, a plumbers helper from Brooklyn, vaults onstage to protest and immediately is pummeled. Police have to come to Greenbaums rescue.

If youre thinking A Night in the Garden couldnt happen in this day and age, it already did, in Charlottesville, Virginia, the same year the film was released.

If youre hoping Charlottesville was an aberration, youre dangerously behind the curve.

According to a new report the Anti Defamation League has released, the presence of hate-group material has doubled on college campuses, from 1,214 reported cases in 2018 to 2,713 incidents in 2019, the highest recorded in the ADLs existence.

Materials range from stickers to fliers to posters, some of which mimic the patriotic recruitment posters created during World War I. They have usurped such formerly innocuous words as heritage, culture, identity and American.

Its all designed to skew peoples patriotism and exacerbate their sense of loss and powerlessness.

They have fertile ground. The economy in Ohio isnt as robust as is being touted. A full 25% of the states children live in poverty.

There are counties where coroners are running out of room to store the bodies of people who have died from overdoses.

Mix anger with despair and resentment and you have yourself a bumper crop of people ripe for radicalization and recruitment.

The Southern Poverty Law Centers 2019 Year in Hate and Extremism report found the number of known hate groups operating in the region has grown from 42 to 49, with 36 in Ohio and 13 in Kentucky.

Nationwide, there is a record-high 1,020 such groups, the SPLC reports.

If there is a spark of redemption, it is that an unrepentant Greenbaum was charged $25 for disturbing the peace. Fritz Kuhn later was convicted of embezzlement, stripped of his citizenship and deported back to Germany during World War II. From there, his story ends.

But his spirit is alive and well.

To view A Night At the Garden, visit FieldofVision.org/a-night-at-the-garden.

Charita Goshay is a columnist for Gannett. She can be reached at charita.goshay@cantonrep.com.

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Goshay: Picture of hatred set on a loop - Bluffton Today

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Posted By admin on March 4, 2020

Election season is heating up. No, not that election. The other one, taking place now to elect delegates to the 38th World Zionist Congress, which will take place in October in Jerusalem.

As old as modern Zionism itself, the Congress was launched by Theodor Herzl in 1897. It takes place every five years and, among other objectives, it allocates nearly $1 billion to support diverse projects in Israel and across the diaspora.

All voting takes place online (for the low, low price of only $7.50) and is open to any adult Jew who accepts the platform of the World Zionist Organization, which affirms the legitimacy of Zionism and the Jewish state.

Fifteen slates spanning the ideological spectrum are in the running, among them slates sponsored by the Conservative movement, Sephardic Jews, the Jabotinksy movement, and several Orthodox slates. Once voting concludes on March 11, the tabulating begins, and the 500 seats in the Congress will be divvied up proportionally.

Among those vying for seats at the WZC are a number of Bay Area Jewish community professionals and activists.

One of them is Rabbi Beth Singer of Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco. Shes on the ARZA: Reform and Reconstructionist slate, and given that her name is 14th on the list of some 200 names, she has a good shot at making it as a delegate.

Were working very hard to turn out our vote, she said. The more votes we get [for our slate], the more representation of our viewpoint.

The ARZA platform includes advocating for Israeli government recognition of the diverse expressions of Jewish religious identity, supporting a two-state solution and long-term peace between Israelis and Palestinians, and assuring liberal denominations receive equal financial support and resources in Israel.

Singer said funding decisions made at the Congress make a difference. She noted that ARZA and its allies at the last Congress secured funding for organizations such as the Israel Movement for Reform and Progressive Judaism, which fosters Reform congregations in Israel and lobbies to allow Israelis to get married by the rabbi they would like, or have their conversion recognized, as she put it. Our slate is not anti-Orthodox in any way, shape or form. We just know there are many people who gravitate towards other forms of Judaism.

Added Singer: All 15 slates are composed of people who love Israel [but who have] strong differences about what needs to happen to promote peace and a strong secure State of Israel.

ARZA and Hatikvah, for example, are liberal slates, while slates such as Herut and the ZOA Coalition have platforms that promote expansion and support of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

The ZOA Coalition led the 23-year battle to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, reads their platform. We are now leading the battle to transform the World Zionist Congress and Israels national institutions under the WZC umbrella into bodies that will arise and assert the Jewish peoples rights to our land.

This view clashes with that of Hatikvah, made up of supporters of organizations such as the New Israel Fund, J Street, Truah and Americans for Peace Now, groups that are stridently opposed to Jewish settlements. Somehow, these divergent voices manage to sit together as one Congress.

There are lots of parties representing various interests, noted Daniel Sokatch, the S.F.-based executive director of the progressive New Israel Fund, and a prospective delegate for Hatikvah. But thats a reflection of the actual consensus around Israel. Whats different is that the Hatikvah slate represents the overwhelming majority of American Jews.

Sokatch, who was a delegate in 2015 when Hatikvah won eight seats, said his slate is getting more attention in 2020, in part because of liberal alarm over the increasingly rightward direction of the Netanyahu government. Given that he is fifth on their list this year, he will probably be seated again.

Progressive Jews in the U.S. troubled by [Israels] direction have an obligation to participate [in the WZC vote], he said. Overwhelmingly, American Jews are liberal, and if they know they have a say in questions about allocations of real money, then they would vote.

Along with the slates that have run before are new ones this year, including Israel Shelanu (Our Israel), formed by Israelis living inside the United States. That number is more than 700,000 by some estimates, and Israel Shelanus platform seeks to increase funding of educational and communal activities of the Hebrew language and culture.

Two members of the Israel Shelanu slate live in the Bay Area; one is Offir Gutelzon, a Palo Alto-based tech entrepreneur, who is second on that slates list. He, his wife and two young sons are involved with the Oshman Family JCCs Israel Cultural Connection, a program that caters to expats in Silicon Valley. Now he and his Israel Shelanu colleagues want to be represented in the WZC.

Its a historic time when Israeli Americans are creating a slate that is not affiliated with any other slate, he said. I feel Israeli Americans are a different breed from Jewish Americans. We want to keep strong connections to Israeliness, to culture, to language both for us and the next generation.

Like many secular Israelis living in the United States, Gutelzon has opted against joining a synagogue. [Our] main identity is driven by what is at home and in the [Israeli] community, he said. The reason for creating Israel Shelanu [is] that Israeli American is being part of Jewish America.

In the event of Israel Shelanu winning any amount of seats, Gutelzon has some funding proposals ready to go.

We want to make sure we get more Israeli culture centers around the [U.S.], he said. We want to work together with organizations such as the Jewish Community Centers of America, performing similar connections as what ICC is doing with the OFJCC.

Even though their views differ, members of the various slates agree on the importance of participating in as venerable an institution as the WZC.

For me, it really does feel like an umbilical cord back to Basel, Sokatch said, referring to the Swiss city that hosted Herzls debut Congress 123 years ago. Its heady. You feel like part of the Zionist enterprise.

Added Singer: When you look at the slates of every perspective, in some ways the WZC is that very rare institution that enables us to come together.

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Your vote in Israel: Here are the Bay Area Jews running for the World Zionist Congress - The Jewish News of Northern California

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Posted By admin on March 4, 2020

There are 15 Knesset seats rolling around in the street that no one wants to touch; 12.5 percent of the seats in Israels next Knesset will remain unoccupied. True, flesh-and-blood people will sit in them, representatives who were voted into office in a free election, but they have a fatal flaw that disqualifies them from Israeli politics. Theyre Arabs. Not only do they belong to the lowest caste in Israels economic and social hierarchy, theyre untouchables; anyone who touches them is contaminated.

Bibi went gunning for his only real rivalHaaretz Weekly Ep. 66

This fear of association isnt limited to the right, in its many shades. The self-styled left, too and I dont mean Kahol Lavan takes great care not to be tainted by the Arab blemish. It is puzzling how the left which should welcome all of Israels minorities, whether they be Christians, Muslims or Ethiopian Jews, has fumigated itself against these pests.

Imagine, however, if the seven measly Knesset seats won by the Labor-Gesher-Meretz hodgepodge had been joined by the Arabs 15 seats and by the Ethiopians two. All of a sudden, the left would have become an actual bloc not just in terms of size, but in its ability to offer an ethical platform that honors leftist ideas. It could have even trimmed a few Knesset seats from Kahol Lavan, in whose branches many voters without a political home reluctantly sheltered.

Its easy for the left to bemoan its election loss and to pin the blame on Israeli society, on Mizrahi culture and on the rights savagery, vulgarity and loss of values. Its not the lefts fault. At the same time, the left happily parrots the new jargon of the second Israel and the first Israel and the formers victory over the latter, which allows it to charge at the right, which had cultivated that same discourse and set Israels economically and geographically marginalized populations against the left. The leftists are wringing their hands over their failure to win over the second Israel, forgetting that they did nothing to challenge this divisive right-wing paradigm.

Bewildered, the left went through its closet and didnt know which dress to pick. Should it go with patriotism and Zionist ultranationalism, or with principled leftism? The left ignored the fact that ultranationalism was successfully appropriated by the center and the right and that it cant hope to wrestle it back from them, but it also grew tired of being deemed unpatriotic and of carrying the badge of Arab lover. The left, which cried out against the inherent contradiction in the term Jewish and democratic state, gave a significant boost to the ideology that enables it by cozying up to Labor Party Chairman Amir Peretz and his political partner and rejecting the potential alliance with the Arabs.

The election results demonstrate clearly and sharply that the left has nothing more to lose. Politically, it has absented itself from the Knesset, where its representatives now have as many seats as in an intimate family dinner. But the left is still breathing, and it could even get back on its feet if it decides to truly fly the leftist flag. The Arabs and their 15 seats wont roll out the red carpet, but they will be willing to forge a partnership with the left if the left takes off the makeup with which it had hoped to draw a few more votes.

The left no longer needs to worry about what people will say if it joins with the Arabs. Its all been said before. Thanks to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cronies, the lefts public legitimacy is now almost as low as the Arabs'.

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If Israel is hit with a fourth election, the Jewish left might find itself shunned, isolated like a coronavirus patient even by Kahol Lavan, which will undoubtedly seek to evolve from a centrist party to a sane right-wing party, a retro-Likud of sorts. The left can quit wooing the consensus and return to the avant-garde. It can be itself again.

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Posted By admin on March 4, 2020

The Schusterman Center for Israel Studies hosted a screening of Next Year in Argentina, a film about Argentinas Jewish diaspora, on Feb. 12. Dalia Wassner, the director of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute project on Latin American Jewish and Gender Studies, led a panel following the film with Raanan Rein, the vice president of Tel Aviv University, Tali Flomenhoft, the associate director of Parent and Family Giving at Brandeis and Adrian Krupnik, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Tel Aviv.

Argentina has the largest Jewish diaspora in all of Latin America, Wassner explained, which has resulted in Israels Latin American population being primarily comprised of Argentinian Jews. Between 1963 and 2002, Krupnik noted that Israel took in several waves of immigrants from Argentina. This mass movement to Israel was followed by a surge of return migration to Argentina, which Krupnik said caused great tensions between Israeli press, officials and migrants.

Next Year in Argentina documents the story of the Jewish-Argentine diasporas struggle with the decision to stay in Argentina or move to Israel in the midst of Argentinian social and economic turmoil. Following events such as the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires and the 1994 bombing of a Buenos Aires Jewish community center, the documentary discusses Jewish-Argentine migration, identity and Zionism.

According to the Jewish Virtual Library, Zionism is the national movement for the return of the Jewish people to their homeland and the resumption of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel.

Rein explained that Zionism allowed for many Argentinian Jews to better assimilate within a country consisting of many immigrant diasporas. With each successive diaspora having a connection to a different motherland, Rein said that for Jews, connecting with the ancient mythical homeland was a way to become Argentine, like everyone else in the immigrant society of Argentina.

At the Tel Aviv premiere of the film in 2005, Rein noted that the expression of Zionism in the documentary was a point of contention for viewers. In fact, some audience members flagrantly condemned the directors for not being Zionist enough and by extension, not Jewish enough. He explained that this wave of hostility stems from a failure on the part of Israelis to understand that everyones identity consists of a mosaic of components. Whether these components are ethnic or religious, some identity components take precedence over others, thus influenc[ing] the decision to move to Israel or go back to Argentina.

Criticism for not being Zionist enough, however, extends far past the filmmakers and is often directed towards Jewish Argentines who returned to Argentina following their move to Israel, Rein said. Krupnik added that at the time of the events shown in the documentary, leaving Israel was seen as akin to committing treason. In his interviews with returnees, Krupnik noted that many individuals still felt great shame over leaving Israel; some even cried when discussing their return to Argentina. Rather than shaming or viewing these individuals as a failure of Israel, Rein suggested to view them as a constant negotiation between Israel and the diaspora. Many returnees have even positively influenced relations between Israel and Argentina, he said.

Krupnik then looked at the film through a gendered lens, noting that blaming women for return migration to Israel was compatible with Zionist discourse. He explained that many Zionists painted Latin American women as lazy Jewish princesses who were unwilling to give up their lives of luxury in Argentina to live in Israel. Rather than studying immigration patterns, many Zionists used womens unwillingness to partake in domestic labor as an explanation of low migration rates to Israel.

Flomenhoft shared how her experience growing up as a Mexican-Israeli differed from the experiences of Argentinian Jews. The Mexican-Jewish community is a community of communities, she said. Unlike in the United States, Flomenhoft explained; within various ethnic communities living in Mexico, there is further division into many smaller sub-groups. Growing up attending a Zionist school, Flomenhroft said she was introduced to the importance of Israel to the Jewish people and aliyah [immigration to Israel] as being the ultimate goal of the youth movement.

One audience member, a Jewish-Colombian, explained that coming from a country with only 10,000 Jews unlike Argentina with roughly 400,000 Jews he never felt that the Jewish community ever truly assimilated. I never felt Colombian, he said. I felt Jewish and they made you feel it.

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Posted By admin on March 4, 2020

Dr. Rafael Medoff Dr. Rafael Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, and author of more than 20 books about the Holocaust, Zionism, and US Jewish history. His latest book, The Jews Should Keep Quiet: President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and the Holocaust was recently published by JPS, U. of Nebraska Press

Labor Zionist leaders in Palestine, Europe, and the United States repeatedly urged the Roosevelt administration and its allies to bomb the railway tracks and bridges leading to Auschwitz or the gas chambers and crematoria in the camp itself.

Labor Zionist representatives were not the only Jewish officials to press for bombing; but they were among the earliest and most active of the bombing advocates.

Sadly, the bombing never happened.

One of the first Jewish officials known to have lobbied for bombing was Yitzhak Gruenbaum, chairman of the Rescue Committee of the Jewish Agency (and a future Minister of the Interior in Israel). He raised the issue in a telegram to the U.S. governments War Refugee Board on June 2, 1944.

Yitzhak Greenbaum, Interior minister in the Temporary Government

There has been a definite German decision to proceed as rapidly as possible with systematic deportation of Hungarian Jews to [death camps in] Poland, Gruenbaum wrote. Every day a transport is to be sent and 8,000 from Carpatho Russia have already been taken. Suggest deportation would be much impeded if railways between Budapest and Poland could be bombed.

The deportations of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz had begun two weeks earlier, on May 15. They continued through July 9. Some 440,000 Jews were transported in cattle cars over those rail lines to their doom. By that time, the Allies controlled the skies of Europe. They frequently bombed railways and bridges, because the Germans used them to transport troops and military supplies. Railway tracks sometimes could be repaired relatively quickly; bridges, however, took much longer to fix.

The majority of Hungary's Jewish population was murdered in Auschwitz between May and July 1944

On June 11, Gruenbaum reported on his efforts at a Jewish Agency Executive meeting, in Jerusalem. JAE chairman and future prime minister David Ben-Gurion presided over the meeting.

Prime Minister David Ben Gurion meets Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt in his home in Tel Aviv

It is obvious from the transcript that the members of the Executive did not yet understand that Auschwitz was a death camp. Although some internal Jewish Agency documents prior to June 1944 had mentioned mass murder in Auschwitz, the information was not fully understood or absorbed by all the members of the executive. Thus Ben-Gurion remarked at the meeting that he opposed asking the Allies to bomb Auschwitz because "we do not know what the actual situation is in Poland."

Another member of the executive, Emil Schmorak, agreed, saying they should not request bombing because "It is said that in Oswiecim [the Polish name for Auschwitz] there is a large labor camp. We cannot take on the responsibility for a bombing that could cause the death of even one Jew."

No vote was taken, but Ben-Gurion concluded the discussion by summarizing what he said was the consensus of the participants: It is the position of the Executive not to propose to the Allies the bombing of places where Jews are located."

Two weeks later, however, Ben-Gurion and his colleagues learned the truth about Auschwitz.

During the last week of June 1944, they received a letter from the head of the Jewish Agency's office in Geneva, Richard Lichtheim, summarizing detailed information about Auschwitz that had been provided by two recent escapees from the camp, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler.

Lichtheim explained that the information revealed that the Agency's previous belief about Auschwitz being a labor camp was wrong:

"We now know exactly what has happened and where it has happened. There IS [emphasis in original] a labor camp in [the] Birkenau [section of Auschwitz] just as in many other places of Upper Silesia, and there ARE [emphasis in original] still many thousands of Jews working there and in the neighboring places (Jawischowitz etc). But apart from the labor-camps proper [there are] specially constructed buildings with gas-chambers and crematoriums.The total number of Jews killed in or near Birkenau is estimated at over one and a half million.12,000 Jews are now deported from Hungary every day. They are also sent to Birkenau. It is estimated that of a total of one million 800,000 Jews or more so far sent to Upper-Silesia 90% of the men and 95% of the women have been killed immediately

During the weeks following receipt of the report, Jewish Agency officials in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States actively promoted the bombing proposal. The president of the Jewish Agency and World Zionist Organization, Chaim Weizmann, together with the head of the Agencys Political Department (and future Israeli prime minster) Moshe Shertok, met with British Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs George Hall on June 30 and urged that the "death camps should be bombed."

On July 6 1944, Weizmann and Shertok met with British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden, and urged the bombing of both "the death-camps at Birkenau and other places and the railway lines leading to Birkenau. Shertok later sent Ben-Gurion a telegram reporting on the meeting.

Concurrently with Shertok and Weizmann's meeting with Eden,, other Jewish Agency representatives met with American, British, and Soviet officials to make the case for Allied air strikes on Auschwitz or the rail lines leading to the camp. Advocates of the strikes included Nahum Goldmann (cochairman of the World Jewish Congress) in Washington; Joseph Linton (later an Israeli ambassador, under several Labor governments) and Berl Locker (a longtime Poale Zion leader) in London; Richard Lichtheim and Chaim Pozner (former head of the Labor Zionists in Danzig) in Geneva; Eliahu Epstein (later Elath, Ben-Gurions first ambassador to the United States) in Cairo; Moshe Krausz in Budapest; and Chaim Barlas in Istanbul.

While the Jewish Agency pursued advocacy for the bombing, the Histadrut labor movement also acted to advance the cause, Many reports about the ongoing massacres in Europe were sent to Histadrut headquarters in Tel Aviv. The information was often handled by Golda Meir (then known as Goldie Myerson), chair of the Histadrut's political department. She had become a member of the Histadrut's executive board in 1934 and was also responsible for the Histadrut's ties to the United States, including contacts with its American representative, Israel Mereminski.

Golda Meir visiting a transit camp, 1950

Golda frequently sent the information she received about Auschwitz to Mereminski, in New York, who in turn provided it to leaders of the War Refugee Board. The board was a small government agency that had been established by President Roosevelt in early 1944, under strong pressure from members of Congress, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., and Jewish activists.

On July 29, 1944, Golda and another Histadrut executive committee member, Heschel Frumkin, cabled Mereminski that they had received horrible details concerning Hungarian Jews deported to Poland," which they said were provided to them in "a letter from Lvov [Poland] underground." They reported that "four trains arrive at Oswienzim daily, consisting of forty-five coaches each containing twelve thousand people to be exterminated." The message asked that the Allies be urged to undertake "the bombing of Oswienzim and railway transporting Jews" to the death camp.

The War Refugee Board undertook rescue activities in Europe that involved financial transactions or delicate negotiations, such as bribing Nazi officials, paying underground groups to shelter Jews, and financing the work of Raoul Wallenberg in Nazi-occupied Budapest. The board did not have the authority to utilize military resources; so when it received requests to bomb Auschwitz, it forwarded them to the War Department (today known as the Defense Department).

Mereminski replied to Golda that he had contacted the War Refugee Board concerning her request for "destruction of gas chambers, crematories, and so forth, and the board in turn had submitted the proposal to competent authorities.

Almost simultaneously,Jewish Frontier, the monthly magazine of the U.S. Labor Zionist movement, published an unsigned editorial calling for "Allied bombings of the death camps and the roads leading to them"

This editorial, which appeared in the magazines August 1944 edition, is the only known instance of an official organ of an American Jewish organization publicly calling for bombing of the camps; other Jewish groups confined their appeals to private channels. It seems likely that the editorial grew out of discussions among Mereminski and his colleagues regarding Goldas telegram.

The Labor Zionists requests, like the other Jewish pleas for bombing Auschwitz or the railways, were rejected by the Roosevelt administration.

The real reason for the rejections [of the request to bomb] was the Roosevelt administrations policy of refraining from using even the most minimal resources for humanitarian objectives, such as interrupting genocide.Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy was assigned to write the rejection letters. He informed the Jewish groups that the War Department had undertaken a study which concluded that any such bombings were impracticable because they would require the diversion of considerable air support essential to the success of our forces now engaged in decisive operations elsewhere in Europe.

McCloys explanation was false. No such study was ever conducted. No diversion of airplanes would have been necessary because U.S. bombers were already striking German oil factories in the Auschwitz industrial zone, just a few miles from the gas chambers.

The real reason for the rejections was the Roosevelt administrations policy of refraining from using even the most minimal resources for humanitarian objectives, such as interrupting genocide.

President Roosevelts public persona is anchored in his image as a liberal humanitarian, someone who cared about the downtrodden and the mistreated. In his first presidential campaign, he presented himself as the champion of the forgotten man. But when it came to the plight of Europes Jews during the Holocaust, it was Roosevelt who did the forgetting.

Dr. Medoff is director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, in Washington, DC, and author of more than 20 books about the Holocaust and Jewish history.

This essay originally appeared in Davar, the Labor Party publication, on February 26, 2020, and is reprinted by permission of the author

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Posted By admin on March 4, 2020

This is an excerpt of Rashid Khalidis The Hundred Years War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 (Profile Books, 2020)

In 1917, Arthur James Balfour stated that in Palestine, the British government did not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country. The great powers were committed to Zionism, he continued, and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land. One hundred years later, President Donald Trump recognised Jerusalem as Israels capital, saying, We took Jerusalem off the table, so we dont have to talk about it anymore. Trump told Benjamin Netanyahu, You won one point, and youll give up some points later on in the negotiation, if it ever takes place. I dont know that it will ever take place. The centre of the Palestinians history, identity, culture and worship was thus summarily disposed of without even the pretense of consulting their wishes.

Throughout the intervening century, the great powers have repeatedly tried to act in spite of the Palestinians, ignoring them, talking for them or over their heads or pretending that they did not exist. In the face of the heavy odds against them, however, the Palestinians have shown a stubborn capacity to resist these efforts to eliminate them politically and scatter them to the four winds. Indeed, more than 120 years after the first Zionist congress in Basel and over 70 years after the creation of Israel, the Palestinian people, represented on neither of these occasions, were no longer supposed to constitute any kind of national presence. In their place was meant to stand a Jewish state, uncontested by the indigenous society that it was meant to supplant. Yet for all its might, its nuclear weapons, and its alliance with the United States, today the Jewish state is at least as contested globally as it was at any time in the past. The Palestinians resistance, their persistence, and their challenge to Israels ambitions are among the most striking phenomena of the current era.

Over the decades, the United States has wavered, going back and forth between paying lip service to the existence of the Palestinians and trying to exclude them from the map of the Middle East. The provision for an Arab state in the 1947 partition resolution (albeit never implemented), Jimmy Carters mention of a Palestinian homeland, and nominal support for a Palestinian state from the Clinton to the Obama administrations were artifacts of that lip service. There are many more instances of American exclusion and erasure: Lyndon Johnsons backing of UNSC 242; Kissingers years of sidelining the PLO in the 1960s and 1970s and covertly making proxy war on it; the 1978 Camp David accords; the Reagan administrations green light for the 1982 war in Lebanon; the lack of will of US presidents from Johnson to Obama to stop Israeli seizure and settlement of Palestinian land.

Regardless of its wavering, the United States, the great imperial power of the age, together with Great Britain before it, extended full backing to the Zionist movement and the state of Israel. But they have been trying to do the impossible: impose a colonial reality on Palestine in a postcolonial age. Eqbal Ahmad summed it up: August 1947 marked the beginning of decolonisation, when British rule in India ended. It was in those days of hope and fulfillment that the colonisation of Palestine occurred. Thus at the dawn of decolonisation, we were returned to the earliest, most intense form of colonial menace . . . exclusivist settler colonialism. In other circumstances or in another era, replacing the indigenous population might have been feasible, especially in light of the long-standing and deep religious link felt by Jews to the land in question if this were the 18th or 19th century, if the Palestinians were as few as the Zionist settlers or as fully decimated as the native peoples of Australasia and North America. The longevity of the Palestinians resistance to their dispossession, however, indicates that the Zionist movement, in the words of the late historian Tony Judt, arrived too late, as it imported a characteristically late-19th-century separatist project into a world that has moved on.

With the establishment of Israel, Zionism did succeed in fashioning a potent national movement and a thriving new people in Palestine. But it could not fully supplant the countrys original population, which is what would have been necessary for the ultimate triumph of Zionism. Settler-colonial confrontations with indigenous peoples have only ended in one of three ways: with the elimination or full subjugation of the native population, as in North America; with the defeat and expulsion of the coloniser, as in Algeria, which is extremely rare; or with the abandonment of colonial supremacy, in the context of compromise and reconciliation, as in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Ireland.

There is still the possibility that Israel could attempt to reprise the expulsions of 1948 and 1967 and rid itself of some or all of the Palestinians who tenaciously remain in their homeland. Forcible transfers of population on a sectarian and ethnic basis have taken place in neighbouring Iraq since its invasion by the United States and in Syria following its collapse into war and chaos. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees reported in 2017 that a record 68million persons and refugees were displaced the world over. Against this horrific regional and global background, which elicits scarce concern internationally, there might seem to be little to restrain Israel from such an action. But the ferocious fight that Palestinians would wage against their removal, the intense international attention to the conflict and the growing currency of the Palestinian narrative all mitigate against such a prospect.

Given the clarity of what is involved in ethnic cleansing in a colonial situation (rather than in circumstances of a confusing civil-cum-proxy war interlaced with extensive foreign intervention, as in Syria and Iraq), a new wave of expulsions would probably not unfold as smoothly for Israel as in the past. Even if undertaken under cover of a major regional war, such a move would have the potential to cause fatal damage to the Wests support for Israel, on which it relies.

Nonetheless, there are growing fears that expulsion has become more possible in the past few years than at any time since 1948, with religious nationalists and settlers dominating successive Israeli governments, explicit plans for annexations in the West Bank, and leading Israeli parliamentarians calling for the removal of some or all of the Palestinian population. Punitive Israeli policies are currently directed at forcing as many Palestinians as possible out of the country, while also evicting some within the West Bank and the Negev inside Israel from their homes and villages via home demolition, fake property sales, rezoning and myriad other schemes. It is only a step from these tried-and-true demographic engineering tactics to a repeat of the full-blown ethnic cleansing of 1948 and 1967. Still the odds so far seem against Israeli taking such a step.

If elimination of the native population is not a likely outcome in Palestine, then what of dismantling the supremacy of the coloniser in order to make possible a true reconciliation? The advantage that Israel has enjoyed in continuing its project rests on the fact that the basically colonial nature of the encounter in Palestine has not been visible to most Americans and many Europeans. Israel appears to them to be a normal, natural nation-state like any other, faced by the irrational hostility of intransigent and often anti-Semitic Muslims (which is how Palestinians, even the Christians among them, are seen by many). The propagation of this image is one of the greatest achievements of Zionism and is vital to its survival. As Edward Said put it, Zionism triumphed in part because it won the political battle for Palestine in the international world in which ideas, representation, rhetoric and images were at issue. This is still largely true today. Dismantling this fallacy and making the true nature of the conflict evident is a necessary step if Palestinians and Israelis are to transition to a postcolonial future in which one people does not use external support to oppress and supplant the other.

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Posted By admin on March 4, 2020

The real cause of the descent into anti-Zionism and hatred of Jews is secular liberalism, and the cultural fissure that has opened up along fault lines stretching back to the 18th-century Enlightenment

By: Melanie Phillips

The annual parade in Aalst, Belgium, last Sunday turned into a carnival of monstrous Jew-hatred. Participants portrayed Jews as insects topped with furshtreimelhats andpeyot(sidelocks).

Others were dressed in Nazi uniforms, among other vicious Jewish caricatures, libels and insults.

The mayor of Aalst defended the carnival on the basis that it mocked Christians and Asians, too. He thus showed no understanding of the difference between vulgar mockery and the murderously dehumanizing, historical phenomenon of anti-Semitism.

This was followed by a carnival parade in the Spanish village of Campo de Criptana. Supposedly intended to commemorate the Holocaust, it featured dancing Nazis, concentration-camp prisoners in sequined tights andIsraeli flags, and a gas chamber float with a giant Hebrew menorah between two chimneys.

On Monday, the European Jewish Association revealed the results of a survey of 16,000 Europeans from 16 countries. One-fifth of them believed that a secret network of Jews influences global political and economic affairs. The same number agreed that Jews exploit Holocaust victimhood for their own needs, and one-quarter agreed that Israels policies make them understand why some people hate Jews.

In the United States, more than 50 Jewish community centers in 23 states have received emailed bomb threats within the past week.

There have been repeated attacks on ultra-Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn. There have been synagogue murders in Pittsburgh and Poway, and widespread bullying of Jewish students on college campuses. Members of the Squad of freshman congresswomen have made venomously anti-Israel or anti-Jewish statements.

Bernie Sanders, who is currently the frontrunner to secure the Democratic presidential nomination, is purposely not attending the upcoming AIPAC conference because he claims it provides a platform for leaders expressing bigotry and opposition to basic Palestinian rights.

In Britain, anti-Semitic incidents rose last year to an unprecedented high, marking the fourth successive year of record-breaking figures. In France, 12 Jews have been murdered since 2003 just because they were Jews, while anti-Semitic attacks soared by more than 75 percent last year and the year before. In Germany, anti-Semitic incidents are similarly rising with a murderous attack last Yom Kippur on the synagogue in Halle.

While anti-Jewish attacks are coming from the far-right, the left and the Muslim community, the greatest threat comes from the progressive side of politics.

This is because its worldview overwhelmingly dominates Western cultural and political institutions; it harbors profound anti-Jewish views within its own ranks; and its cultural reach means that its own anti-Jewish incitement legitimizes and encourages far-right anti-Semitic attitudes that were once treated as beyond the pale.

And this is all inextricably tied up with hatred of Israel, and the entirely false but widespread belief that the Jews have displaced the indigenous people of the land and behave illegally and with wanton cruelty towards the Palestinian remnant.

From these lies and libels flows the surreal irrationality of the anti-Israel discourse that has so shockingly become the signature cause of the Western progressive.

The obvious reasons for this include the takeover of progressivism by Marxism, the collapse of education into anti-Western propaganda, and the rise of identity politics and intersectionality. This has created an ignorant and brainwashed cohort of young people who have provided the groundswell for Sanders or Britains (now defeated) Jeremy Corbyn.

This week, the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs published a book of essays calledIsraelophobia and the West: the Hijacking of Civil Discourse on Israel and How to Rescue It.The book provides a thoughtful analysis of the nexus between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, where legitimate criticism of Israel stops and demonization starts, and the fundamental challenge to Israel from the left.

All this, though, has already been exhaustively discussed. Moreover, much of it merely produces the same old agonized discussion about how more effectively to challenge the lies and delegitimization. It thus assumes that the lies can and should be countered by a better application of reason.

This, though, misses the critical point: that both anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism constitute an irrational belief, akin to a cult, and are therefore impervious to facts and argument.

This is understood by French sociology professor Shmuel Trigano. In the most astute essay in the JCPAs book, he correctly says we are entering a new age of Jew-hatred, which cannot be argued with but must instead be fought.

The onslaught against Israel and Zionism, he points out, is part of the lefts broader reconfiguration of the West. Anti-Zionism, he says, is the creature of post-modernism and its satellite orthodoxies: post-colonialism, multiculturalism and gender doctrine, all of which are involved in deconstructing Western society.

As he writes, criminalizing the identity of the Jews as a people in the State of Israel is part of the European postmodernists war against their own cultures and nation-states.

But even that still doesnt explain this eruption of obsessive, primitive Jew-hatred.

For its not just that anti-Zionism is the contemporary mutation of anti-Semitism. The old, un-mutated anti-Semitism is still there: the open hatred of Jews as Jews. The question is why this has been allowed to roar once again into a cultural conflagration.

Contrary to what Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz said in a discussion about the JCPA book on Wednesday evening, the cause is not the polarization into political extremism on both sides.

This eruption hasnt been created by Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn; nor, as some believe, by the populism of Donald Trump or Hungarys nationalist prime minister, Victor Orbn.

Populism is not in itself an extremist movement (although some bits undoubtedly are). It is rather a response to the extremism that has overtaken the entire progressive movement, and which represents the idea of the West as intrinsically evil and sinful.

Sanders and Corbyn, who are both undoubtedly extreme, are not the cause of the phenomenon, but the product of a broad cultural shift. When Bernie Sanders called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a reactionary racist in Tuesdays Democratic presidential candidates debate, the audience broke into applause.

The real cause of the descent into anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist hatred is secular liberalism, and the cultural fissure that has opened up along fault lines stretching back to the 18th-century Enlightenment.

This proclaimed the death of God and the enthronement instead of the autonomous individual freed from biblical moral codes. This led to the destruction of hierarchies of values without which there can be no morality, the replacement of duty by man-made and highly contingent human rights, and the collapse of truth and reason.

The result is the moral and philosophical carnage we see all around us. Theres the psycho-pathological unmooring of individuals caused by the undermining of the family. Theres the abolition of objectivity in the universities by moral and cultural relativism.

And theres the apocalyptic environmental movement, which mirrors the belief by medieval, Jew-massacring Christians that fallen humanity must be punished for its sins to bring about the perfection of the worldand which has sanctified as its prophet a psychologically damaged child.

Better advocacy for Israel, necessary as that is, will not address this anti-Jewish derangement. Thats because whats driving it is the repudiation of the Jewish precepts at the heart of the Christian West. And the problemand tragedyfor the Jewish people is that so many of those subscribing to this liberal onslaught are themselves Jews.

(JNS.org)

Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. Currently a columnist for The Times of London, her personal and political memoir, Guardian Angel, has been published by Bombardier, which also published her first novel, The Legacy, in 2018. Her work can be found at:www.melaniephillips.com.

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From Aalst to America: The Post-Modern, Anti-Jewish Reconfiguration of the West - The Jewish Voice

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Posted By admin on March 4, 2020

Transportation Minister Bezalel Smotrich (Yamina) spoke to Arutz Sheva following the publication of the exit polls which predicted a majority for the right.

This is a very happy evening for the State of Israel and the people of Israel. We can carefully estimate that, when the true results come in and the votes of the soldiers are counted, we will have the additional seat to form a right-wing, national, Zionist, Jewish government that will do a lot of good for the people of Israel, he said.

We were spared from the disaster of a minority left-wing government that relies on the Arabs. We are embarking on a new path. We have to say a good word about Netanyahu who managed to bring a great achievement and mainly to the 8,000 activists of religious Zionism who conquered the streets of Israel on this day and brought this great achievement.

With Gods help we will see a right-wing government and we will be a dominant and significant player in it, concluded Smotrich.

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Smotrich: We were spared from a Gantz government - Inside Israel - Arutz Sheva

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Posted By admin on March 4, 2020

15 Inspiring Egyptian Community Work Activists and Organizations in the Last Decade

In the last decade, the culture of volunteering and carrying out community-minded projects that extend beyond charity have grown in many different and diverse ways. Science and technology in particular have helped expand the outreach to beneficiaries in more effective and innovative ways, prime examples of that include Magdi Yacoub, whose brilliant scientific achievements helped him build his foundation, as well as Bassitas Clickfunding model, which generates funds for social causes through social media campaigns.

Hans Rosling, a global health professor at Swedens Karolinska Institute, noticed that nations usually classified as developing are increasingly finding ways to develop the social sector despite economic disadvantages, and are achieving more progress in social sectors than developed economies. Now, social progress is often outperforming economical growth.

Many community work initiatives also reflect the growing economic inequalities that began to appear in Egyptian society, and the pressing concerns that are related to the environment, sustainability, animal welfare, and mental well-being.

However, more needs to be done to fully address these issues. According to recent statistics, 32.5% of Egypts population lives in poverty. Matching economic growth with social and community progress is necessary for more effective results.

Inarguably one of the worlds most respected cardiac surgeons, Sir Magdi Yacoubs work is a great example of how scientific achievements can be the focus of community work. He is a Professor of Cardiothoracic Surgery at the National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London and Founder and Director of Research at the Harefield Heart Science Centre (the Magdi Yacoub Institute).

Born in Belbes, Sharqia, Egypt in 1935 to a Coptic Orthodox family, Yacoub studied medicine at Cairo University and qualified as a doctor in 1957. He recalled that after witnessing the tragic death of both his father and aunt due to heart disease, he was inspired to pursue a career in surgery. In 1982, Yacoub performed a transplant for John McCafferty, who became recognized as the worlds longest surviving heart transplant patient by Guinness World Records in 2013, living over 33 years. In 2009, Yacoub launched the Aswan Heart Centre to provide free medical services to Egyptians and less fortunate children, which has conducted 2,180 surgeries since its establishment.

In 2014, the Magdi Yacoub Global Heart Foundation was created to support the Aswan Heart Centre, followed by the new Cairo Heart Centre in 2019. In the same year, he received the Order of Merit from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth for his efforts in combating cardiovascular diseases.

Dr. Sherif Abouelnaga is the founder of 57357 Childrens Cancer hospital, which opened in 2007. He graduated from Cairo University with a degree in medicine and had dreamt of establishing a childrens cancer hospital in Egypt since.

In the early 80s, he became responsible for the childrens ward at Egypts National Cancer Institute (NCI), where he witnessed the death of 13 children out of 16. Following this distressing experience, Abouelnaga sought to change the precarious conditions of the ward and cure cancer in children. Initially, he reached out to Sheikh El Sharawy and others to pledge EGP 50 each per month to fund the development of the pediatric oncology care program at the NCI.

For the next 10 years, more donors contributed, which helped establish a pediatric oncology department that grew from a room of 8 beds and a tiny outpatient clinic to a room of 120 beds. As the NCI became more crowded due to improved survival rates, more influential people in business and media offered to help in the first national fundraising campaign. The campaign saw huge success and prompted the government to establish 10 regional cancer centers.

From this experience, Professor Dr. Mohamed Reda Hamza, Dean of the National Cancer Institute in 1995, encouraged Dr. Sherif Abouel Naga to consider building a separate hospital for children with cancer. As a result, a huge fundraising campaign began in 1998 for the hospital, which reached EGP 8 million and helped to eventually establish the 57357 hospital.

Mama Maggie Gobran, who is often referred to as the Mother of Cairo, is the founder of the NGO Stephens Children and a nominee for the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize. Initially a professor of computer science at the American University in Cairo, Gobran gave up her academic career to serve the impoverished after a visit to the garbage slums through an annual Easter outreach. Her vision for Stephens Children stemmed from her eagerness to reach out to children in need, and as a result, she began working with other Egyptians to serve the short and long-term needs of the families living in slums.

The charity has been operating for almost 25 years and has helped reach over 30,000 families. The center provides vocational training for older children who were not enrolled in primary education to learn skills and basic literacy, family counseling and emotional and psychological care, and medical services, as well as special programs for mothers of impoverished families to discuss personal and family issues. In 2019, she was awarded the International Women of Courage Award by the US State Department and First Lady of the US Melania Trump.

Nehad Aboul Komsan is an experienced and well-known senior lawyer and gender consultant, with over 30 years of experience in the field. After graduating from Cairo University, she became the chairwoman of the Egyptian Centre for Womens Rights. She has worked with several international organizations for countless projects dedicated to improving the status of women in Egypt, such as the UNFPAs Safe Streets for All: Campaign against Sexual Harassment, which was the first campaign to tackle sexual harassment in Egypt, and the UN Womens Fund for Gender Equalitys A Wave of Womens Voices initiative.

Currently, she is a TV anchor for the successful program Hekayat Nehad, which airs on the Al Qahera Wel Nas channel and which focuses on simplifying complicated legal concepts for women and the rest of society in order to raise legal awareness on issues such as female genital mutilation, sexual harassment and rape. In late 2015, she opened the Gender and Legal Expert House, which focuses on providing legal assistance for women as well as free legal consultations through the website Mo7amek (Ask Your Laywer), the first such legal service for women in Egypt.

In a time where few resources were available to provide protection for the disabled, Nada Alfy Thabet founded the Village of Hope for Development and Rehabilitation of Persons with Intellectual Disabilities in Alexandria in 2000 to provide care to the mentally disabled. Her work ethic and devotion to help children with disabilities led her a Nobel Peace Prize nomination in 2005 and in 2018, she was named Mother of the Year for Intellectual Disability.

Thabets story began on March 2, 1980, when she first learned that her son Maged suffered from brain cell atrophy. When she took him to several Egyptian doctors, they reportedly told her to love him, but treat him like a cat or dog.

Since its foundation, the NGO has encouraged civil institutions to work on disabilities and coordinate with the Village of Hope as well as decision-makers to spread the culture of voluntary work in a manner that guarantees the rights of the disabled. The organization has fostered a network of childcare professionals who support and prepare patients aged between 15 and 30 to re-enter society, teaching them skills such as handicrafts, weaving and baking. On top of that, parents are also taught how to interact and communicate with their children to develop better family bonds.

Magda Haroun has been the head of the Egypts Jewish Community Council since 2013. Haroun took office during Islamist President Mohamed Morsis tenure, a time of increasing sectarian tensions, according to many observers.

Haroun was born in 1952. Her father, Shehata Haroun, was a lawyer and activist who joined the Communist Movement in the 1940s and refused to immigrate to Europe or Israel following the creation of the Jewish state.

Since taking over, she expressed deep interest in opening up the community to the Egyptian public. Since assuming the position, she has hosted a number of Ramadan iftars at Cairos synagogues and held public Hanukka celebrations for Jewish and non-Jewish Egyptians.Haroun has also been fervently vocal against Zionism, at one point proclaiming, an Egyptian Jew is an Egyptian first, then [a Jew].

By late 2017 and 2018, Haroun began talks with the Ministry of Culture regarding the transformation of Jewish synagogues into cultural centers and the restoration of the countrys Jewish cemeteries, which was previously considered impossible and politically contentious.

Founded in 2010 by a group of four women; Rebecca Chiao, Engy Ghozlan, Amel Fahmy and Sawsan Ghad, HarassMap aims to eradicate sexual harassment and raise awareness about the issue, as well as engaging the community in combating it.

From their experience in womens rights NGOs, the four women realized that laws alone couldnt change society in a context where there is social acceptability of the issue, or social reluctance to intervene (passive bystanding).

After they were introduced to a free software that can make an anonymous reporting and mapping system used online and through SMS, they took it as an opportunity to introduce a community-based approach in tackling sexual harassment by reporting incidents of harassment or intervention, and mapping each online.

Due to their efforts, HarassMap was recognized and awarded by national and international institutions, including the Cairo University Recognition Award in 2015, the Deutche Welle and Shabab Talk Local Hero Award in 2015 and the 2014 Nominet Trust 100, which celebrates people and organizations who using digital technology to create a positive impact.

Hannah Aboulghar has been working in the child protection field since 2001, and was the first to notice that the numbers of girls in the streets were increasing over the years, reaching around 50 percent of the total number of homeless minors.

While most foundations focused on supporting and caring for street boys, Aboulghar decided to turn her attention to street girls and set up the Banati Foundation, which was funded by the Sawiris Foundation and is considered the only foundation in Egypt to have its own building built and designed specifically for its cause.

The girls are reached by a team of social workers and psychologists to escort them to the organizations reception center, where they are interrogated to learn their reasons for leaving home and are then escorted back to their families.

During the process of rehabilitation, with cases that are difficult to reintegrate into society or that are facing more abuse at home, some girls are moved to the permanent shelter in Haram city. Along with the intense mental health support, the Banati Foundation also organize vocational and productive workshops by the education department to help provide income for the girls in the future. Rehabilitative activities include yoga and meditation, gardening, storytelling, origami, photography, art, jewelry making, crochet, pottery, and music, as well as excursions and field visits.

Founded in 2014, Bassita is an Egyptian startup that specializes in social media campaigning to promote social causes and inspire change. Their award-winning model is Clickfunding, which allows people to raise funds for social causes by clicking or tapping their screens.The bigger the social media interactions and engagements a campaign receives, the more funds are allocated to the initiative.

Bassita has since then launched many social campaigns, such as Lets Complete Each Other, which aimed to support diversity and social cohesion; One Click to Move, where funds were allocated for the design and implementation of entrances, tactile routes and furniture to aid persons with visual or physical impairments; and Education for All to bring education to 1,100 children living in Upper Egypt.

Bassita also co-founded with Greenish the VeryNile initiative, the first campaign of its kind in Egypt and which aims to organize large-scale cleaning events to remove trash from the Nile and partner with the fishermen and Zabaleen (garbage collectors) to develop a sustainable mechanism of garbage collection.

Centered on the power of the youth, Greenish is an environmental movement that focuses on increasing societys awareness of environment issues and pushing communities towards sustainability. They help design and deliver educational content about the environment to various schools, companies and universities to raise awareness, train environmental activists, as well as organize cleaning events in several communities to promote a sustainable and environmental way of living.

One of their achievements includes the Qusseir Clean Up initiative, which succeeded in collecting more than 5000 waste items from the beach. They are also partners with Bassita in the VeryNile initiative that aims to remove all wasteand trash in the Nile.

Mashrou Elsaada was founded in 2013 by a group of young artists and photographers who noticed that there was a psychological deficit in Egyptian society stemming from poor and harsh living conditions, particularly in most of Egypts slums. Based on the belief that art and color therapy contribute to the wellbeing of the soul and mind, Mashrou El Saada colours and paints the walls of slums in several areas in Egypt to unleash the potential of communities living in underdeveloped areas.

On top of that, they take a community-based approach to help develop the communities further through collaborating with different stakeholders to empower residents, with a focus on women and youth. For example, to preserve Nubian heritage, they held a three-day brass workshop, where women were able to learn handmade jewelry to diversify their sources of income.

Formed in 2007 by Mona Khalil, the Egyptian Society for Mercy to Animals (ESMA) mainly works to improve animal welfare in Egypt, covering street dogs and cats, working animals such as donkeys, horses and camels, animals for slaughter, wildlife, animals in the Cairo zoo, as well as those sold in pet shops and live animal markets. They carry out various activities, including the institution of a shelter for street dogs and cats that houses over 700 stray animals. The organization provides them with medial care, food, and shelter.

ESMA has also been active in treating starving and sick working animals, such as the horses in Nezlet Al-Samman, near the Giza pyramids.

Currently, they are active in advocacy and policy planning to ensure the implementation of Egypts animal welfare legislation, as well as campaigning against the governments policy of killing street animals by means of shooting and poisoning.

Helm is one of the most recognized and renowned organizations working for people with disabilities in Egypt, aiming for the inclusion of people with disabilities in the workplace and public life so that they can be well engaged and contribute effectively to society.

It provides advisory and coaching services for professionals, as well as a state institutions and other organizations on how to ensure the inclusion of people with disabilities. Helm also works with policy makers to ensure that legislation and strategies are well integrated and that they are effective in including people with disabilities.

It was recently recognized as one of the worlds most innovative practices that help improve the lives of persons with disabilities at the Zero Project Conference 2018, at the UN headquarters in Vienna, Austria. As of today, they have empowered over 1500 people with disabilities and provided over 5000 corporate trainings.

Established in 1984, El Gorah Community Development Association is one of the few that targets the vulnerable population living in war-torn and neglected areas of North Sinai. Their projects focus on providing psychological support to children and women affected by the wars in the governorate. They also help in providing legal support for the Bedouin community, and provide political and legal awareness for youth to help them actively participate in civil life. In 2018, they were awarded the 2018 Excellence Award for their contribution and positive impact on society.

Recently, they partnered with USAID on a project in North Sinai to help promote volunteerism and participation in decision-making processes among North Sinai youth. A youth volunteer center was established in Al Gora Village in Sheikh Zweyed District, where 900 community volunteers participated in training to collectively design and implement projects that address community problems. On top of that, 2,400 young community leaders participated in workshops to encourage youth representation in tribal decision making.

Injaz is one of the most successful projects working on promoting education and employment among Egyptian youth. It is also a member of Junior Achievement (JA), the worlds largest and fastest-growing economic education organization, serving more than 10 million young people worldwide.

For over a decade, Injaz has worked on promoting employability and entrepreneurship skills among Egypts unemployed youth and partnering with business and educational institutions to supplement and develop public school curricula to help build students potential and match their abilities with the current job market.

It delivers several programs, mainly the Work Readiness Program and the Financial Literacy Program, as well as several entrepreneurship programs. As of today, it has helped impact the lives of 700,000 students across the country and has supported many young entrepreneurs to launch their own startups.

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15 Inspiring Egyptian Community Work Activists and Organizations in the Last Decade - Egyptian Streets

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Posted By admin on March 4, 2020

Jersey City Board Member Gerald Lyons speaks about the LGBTQ History curriculum.Photo: Screenshot via Facebook

Gerald Lyons is an openly gay member of the Board of Education for Jersey City, New Jersey. He sat and listened to over 3 hours of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric from religious figures while debating the upcoming LGBTQ History curriculum.

Tonight, members of three religious groups came to the School Board meeting to attack the LGBTQ community, Lyons later wrote.

Related: Jersey mayor says LGBTQ rights are an affront to almighty God & shouldnt be mentioned in schools

He has had to endure several meetings such as this in recent months, even though the subject is mandated by a law that the state passed last year, and is not explicitly related to religion.

For example, a Coptic Christian speaker and a Hasidic Jewish speaker accused LGBTQ people of idolizing a pedophile in Harvey Milk, even though he was never accused of such a crime. The Hasidic Jewish speaker, a Mr. Teleki, further claimed that its unfair that Jewish hate crimes dont take priority over LGBTQ history subjects such as Milk, even though he was a pedophile, and did next to nothing in his career, he alleged. He then claims that schools should also teach children that the majority of HIV and Syphilis infections come from homosexual activities to students along with the curriculum.

Another speaker claimed that Martin Luther King is turning over in his grave that people think this is what he meant he said equality. He claimed that he, too, had a dream like Kings, that hoped that kids will be taught that true pride is to control their sexual desires.

Then came Karin Vanoppen, a Catholic mom. At the board meeting, broadcast live on Facebook, Vanoppen said that religious freedom is not about going to the Board of Ed, and telling them youre not allowed to speak on this and that. This is what religious schools are for, not public schools.

Vanoppen compared the anti-LGBTQ rhetoric to Hitlers, who led Nazi Germany during the Holocaust that also included gay people. She also quoted out soccer star Megan Rapinoe, hoping that she will be one of the people that will be included in this curriculum.

Vanoppen then held up a flag combined with both the American stars and Pride stripes while speaking. I hope my son will remember seeing her, because we went to France and took this flag to cheer [Rapinoe and Team USA] on, and say, great, we won We win because everyone is included.

This inspired Lyons to respond in a quiet, simple way. The retired high school principal and current college professor asked to borrow this American rainbow flagto wear until [the session is closed], he wrote on Facebook.

He wore the flag while more religious members spoke about how teaching LGBTQ history would somehow become detrimental to children. Parents threatened to keep their children home if subjected to any curriculum, compared it to teaching about the Palestinian state, and claimed that religion would die if this subject was taught.

When it was the boards turn to speak, many of their members reminded the speakers (many who left without listening to the other speakers or the board) that while the subject matter has been shaped, the curriculum has not been determined and students will only be taught about LGBTQ peoples role in American history.

Lyons spoke out against the rhetoric promoted by conservative religious figures and the invoking of Dr. King. We heard arguments that gays want to turn children gay, and that they need to be taught controlPedophilia and AIDS were brought up to support their arguments.

One speakersaid that Dr. Kings message of love for all would not include equal rights for the LGBTQ community. I find it very offensive that this hate monger would use Dr. King to spread his message of hate, Lyons remarked.

Unfortunately, Lyons was not met with the same respect that he granted the various speakers. While speaking, a Hasidic Jewish person walked up closer to the board and stared down Lyons while he spoke, prompting him to stop and ask if the person had an issue. Do you want to sit back down? Lyons challenged him. Did I sit while you were talking spewing your hatred? I did.

When the person began yelling, Lyons stopped acknowledging him while he spoke with that voice and moved on, saying anyway, Im continuing.

Its unclear if Teleki was the person yelling while Lyons was speaking, but he did later call Lyons a Nazi pig.

I really wish people would stop using Gods name to sow hate, he wrote in a Facebook post after the meeting.

Gov. Phil Murphy signed into law an extension of existing legislation, mandating that requires boards of education to include instruction, and adopt instructional materials about LGBTQ people in middle and high schools or where appropriate. This expands on the previous law necessitating the political, economic, and social contributions of persons with disabilities, racial minorities, and other marginalized communities are included in school curriculum.

New Jersey is only the second state in the nation after California to legally require LGBTQ history to be taught, and left the specific to be planned by school boards because The Department of Education sets academic standards, but does not write curriculum.

See the remarks at the board meeting in its entirety on The Jersey City Board of Educations Facebook. Lyons remarks starts at 3:16:52 in.

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The religious right got up in arms about LGBTQ curriculum. This out board member responded. - LGBTQ Nation

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