BS"D (not BDS) Concerned Citizens Alerting Their Communities of the Dangers and Infiltration of BDS
Wednesday, April 26, 2017
Monday, April 24, 2017
BDS Abuse of Freedom of Speech by CUNY City tax dollars paying for one who is an advocate and encourages terror to speak at the CUNY Commencement? Outrageous
Robin Ticker
Most of these emails are posted on Shemittahrediscovered.blogspot.com
Muslim Brotherhood Written Plan for North America influence on Park Slope Food Coop BDS (PSFCBDS) PSFC International Trade Education Squad ITES..More.Brainwashing disguised as Education?
Muslim Brotherhood Written Plan for North America. BDS supporters in Park Slope Food Coop (PSFC) and elsewhere follow this plan by vilifying Israel under the guise of freedom, democracy, equality etc. Who needs to hear facts?
Another opportunity to "Educate" or Brainwash?
Park Slope Food Coop International Trade Education Squad
https://coopites.wordpress.com/about/founding-the-ites/
FOUNDING OF THE ITES
Proposal: The PS Food Coop will form a International Trade Education Squad (ITES) to keep members informed about on-going international trade negotiations and how trade agreements affect our ability to maintain our values and realize the goals of the Park Slope Food Coop as put forward in our Mission Statement:“We try to lead by example, educating ourselves and others about health and nutrition, cooperation and the environment…We seek to avoid products that depend upon the exploitation of others…We strive to reduce the impact of our lifestyles on the world we share with other species and future generations…”Since the corporate mass media doesn’t inform us, many are confused about how international trade agreements affect our lives, our community and our Coop. To understand the process of how agreements are reached and the policies that trade agreements require that we accept, we agree to take responsibility to study and bring to Coop members information for discussion that can lead to individual and/or collective action.
Robin Ticker
Friday, April 14, 2017
Fwd: Kurtz Op-Ed: Understanding the Campus Free-Speech Crisis
From: "Zionist Organization of America" <info@zoa.org>
Date: Apr 14, 2017 2:07 PM
Subject: Kurtz Op-Ed: Understanding the Campus Free-Speech Crisis
To: "faigerayzel@gmail.com" <faigerayzel@gmail.com>
Cc:
Zionist Organization of America
Article
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Kurtz Op-Ed: Understanding the Campus Free-Speech Crisis
NEW YORK, April 14, 2017
By Stanley Kurtz
What's gone wrong on our college campuses and how can we fix it? This past week, Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald, a knowledgeable supporter of America's criminal justice system and thoughtful critic of the Black Lives Matter movement, was repeatedly shouted down by protesters at UCLA, then silenced and forced to escape with a police escort the next day, during what should have been her talk at Claremont McKenna College.
These incidents follow the February riot that forced the cancellation of a Milo Yiannopoulos talk at UC Berkeley, and the March shout-down at Middlebury College of conservative Charles Murray, followed by the violent attack that sent Murray's liberal interlocutor, Professor Allison Stanger, to the hospital.
The immediate lesson of the UCLA shout-down and the Claremont shut-down is that widespread condemnation by all sides of the Berkeley and Middlebury incidents has not restored campus free speech. On the contrary, America's colleges continue their descent into low-grade anarchy.
Why is that? The immediate explanation is that leftist college students are furious at the election of Donald Trump as president. Yet often-illiberal demonstrations swept over the nation's campuses during the 2015–16 academic year, well before Trump became a factor. The crisis of free speech has also been aggravated by a rising tide of shout-downs and disruptions of pro-Israel speakers since 2014. Before that, I reported in 2013 on a few of the more egregious silencing incidents sparked by the campus fossil-fuel divestment movement, then in full swing. In fact, I began covering campus silencing incidents for NRO in 2001, when I wrote about angry UC Berkeley students storming the offices of the Daily Californian to destroy a run of papers containing a David Horowitz ad opposing reparations for slavery. Today's problems are hardly new.
Back in 2001, as reported by ABC News, thefts of campus newspapers had increased by 600 percent over the previous decade and campus speeches by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, anti-preferences activist Ward Connerly, and Second Amendment supporter Charlton Heston were often disrupted or canceled. Here is a very partial excerpt from David Horowitz's description of his reception at various campuses in the early 2000s: "I once had to terminate a talk prematurely despite the presence of thirty armed police and four bodyguards at Berkeley. I had to be protected by twelve armed police and a German Shepard at the University of Michigan. I was rushed by clearly deranged individuals and saved only by the intervention of a bodyguard, twice — at M.I.T. and Princeton." (Sixteen years later, Horowitz has become the latest example of a campus free speech shut-down.)
A San Francisco Chronicle article from 2000 describes an incident at Berkeley in which 200 demonstrators broke through police barricades and blocked a talk by then-former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The incident was publicly condemned in a column by Berkeley mayor Shirley Dean and condemned as well in a joint letter by several members of the original Berkeley Free Speech Movement. These interventions by prestigious voices on the left were fueled by "cumulative frustration over several years of leftist demonstrations, particularly at the UC campus, disrupting speeches of those they view as criminal in one form or another." Targets of UC Berkeley disruptions stretching from the mid 1980s to the year 2000 included Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, and former NATO commander General Wesley Clark.
The first in this series of UC Berkeley speaker disruptions of the post-1960s era seems to have been the 1983 shout-down down of Ronald Reagan's United Nations ambassador, Jeane Kirkpatrick, by hecklers opposed to U.S. policy in El Salvador. Although her words were drowned out, Kirkpatrick went through the motions of reading her talk. Her follow-up Berkeley lecture was canceled, however. This incident, at a time when shout-downs were rare, sparked a national discussion and broad condemnation. Yet far from this condemnation preventing further disruptions, the virus quickly spread. Kirkpatrick was shouted down two weeks later at the University of Minnesota and her scheduled 1983 commencement address at Smith was canceled. The current era of campus shout-downs, shut-downs, and disinvitations had arrived. Yet the origins of this era lay still further back in time.
The campus disruptions of the 1960s and early 1970s set the pattern for all that was to follow from the mid 1980s onward. Most important for our purposes, Yale's Woodward Report of 1974, the classic defense of campus free speech, identified a series of shout-downs and disinvitations stretching back eleven years as the pattern that Yale would need to break. What the Woodward Report called Yale's "failures" began in 1963 when President Kingman Brewster, "in the interest of law and order" and in deference to New Haven's black community, canceled a scheduled talk by segregationist Alabama governor George C. Wallace at the height of the Civil Rights struggle.
Keep in mind that the report's chairman, Yale historian C. Vann Woodward, had advised Thurgood Marshall's legal team as it argued for school desegregation in what became the Brown vs. Board of Education decision of 1954. And Woodward's book, The Strange Case of Jim Crow, had been dubbed "the historical bible of the civil rights movement" by Martin Luther King Jr. himself. Yet this Civil Rights hero, along with other liberal faculty members at Yale, pressured President Brewster to defend the freedom of speakers such as George Wallace.
None of this is to deny that the problem of campus shout-downs and disinvitations is getting worse. Yet it's important to keep in mind that today's pattern is an intensification of a long-standing crisis that has had its ups and downs since the early Sixties, but has not fundamentally changed in form for well over five decades. What's clear after 50-some years is that the academy has proven itself incapable of solving its free-speech problem on its own. Let's see why.
We can think of the challenges to free-speech since the Sixties as washing over our campuses in four great waves. The first wave ("Young Radicals") was made up of the illiberal and violent Sixties student radicals. Notwithstanding the views of the Free Speech Movement veterans who condemned the Berkeley Netanyahu shut-down of 2000, a great many of the Sixties radicals rejected classical-liberal conceptions of freedom in favor of a neo-Marxist analysis. In this view, free speech and constitutional democracy are tools used by the ruling class to suppress dissent and protect an oppressive society.
The second anti–free-speech wave ("Long March") hit colleges in the early-to-mid 1980s, as the radicals left graduate school and took up junior faculty positions, bringing their suspicions of free speech with them. These faculty did away with required Western Civilization courses as well, helping to launch the academic "culture war" that began at Stanford in 1987. After allied leftist faculty and students succeeded in abolishing Stanford's Western Civilization requirement in 1988, student demonstrators began demanding speech codes (partly in hopes of silencing students who had challenged them during the Western Civilization debate)
The third anti–free-speech wave ("Takeover") began in the mid 1990s, as the older generation of professors began to retire. At this point, the younger and more radical generation of faculty members reached critical mass. That is, they had the numbers to control hiring. Not believing in the classical-liberal vision of a marketplace of ideas, these faculty used the tenure system, not to seek out and protect the finest scholarly representatives of diverse perspectives, but to solidify an intellectual monopoly of the Left. By the 2000s, the tenured radicals constituted a controlling majority in many social science and humanities departments, and stood as the most powerful plurality in the university as a whole.
The fourth anti–free-speech wave ("Transformed Generation") consists of the late Millennial students who began demanding safe-spaces and trigger warnings around 2014, just as the number of university shout-downs and disinvitations began to spike. Free-speech advocate Gregg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt attribute the new student sensitivities, in part, to parental coddling by the Baby Boomers. No doubt there is truth to this, but this college generation's K–12 curriculum also differed dramatically from past standards.
Although Lynne Cheney, former National Endowment for the Humanities chairwoman under Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush, managed to convince the U.S. Senate to condemn the proposed new multiculturalist National History Standards of 1994, the left-leaning post-Sixties generation of K–12 teachers adopted them in practice anyway. The rest of the curriculum was also quickly remodeled along lines that stressed group conflict and America's sins. The generation that brought us "micro-aggressions" and "white privilege" duly entered college 20 years later.
The key to solving the campus free-speech crisis lies in the decade-long interregnum between the radical Sixties and the kick-off of the campus culture wars in the mid 1980s. This was also a period of relative calm in the country as a whole.
The widely praised Woodward Report of 1974 marked the effective end of the Young Radicals phase (wave one), and ushered in the decade-long restoration of campus free speech. That restoration ended with the Jeane Kirkpatrick shout-down at Berkeley in 1983, which initiated the second wave of free-speech crisis.
What distinguished the Woodward Report of 1974 from Berkeley's response to the Kirkpatrick shout-down of 1983 was the issue of discipline. The Woodward Report not only eloquently upheld the principle of free speech, it insisted that students who shouted down visiting speakers must be disciplined. The Woodward Report also established a sanctions policy, and a system for warning disruptive students of potential disciplinary consequences. This approach carried the day at Yale and elsewhere during the post-Sixties restoration of free speech. In effect, the Woodward Report and its positive national reception helped return the credible threat of discipline for speaker shout-downs that had been abandoned by craven administrators during the 1960s.
A decade after the Woodward Report, things changed. While the Berkeley faculty as a whole condemned the students who shouted down Jeane Kirkpatrick in 1983, a faculty resolution to have Kirkpatrick's hecklers punished was defeated. This was likely a concession to the many junior faculty who openly defended Kirkpatrick's disruptors on the grounds that "oppressors" have no free-speech rights. Although many observers felt that disciplinary action against Kirkpatrick's hecklers had to be taken, the UC Board of Regents also declined to follow up on a demand for discipline initiated by Regents' chairman Glenn Campbell. Meanwhile, UC Berkeley chancellor Ira Heyman indicated that no disciplinary action would be taken.
With more leftist faculty streaming in over succeeding years, those who favored discipline for disruptors grew less powerful. The days when even (or especially) liberal Civil Rights heroes understood the need to grant free speech to segregationists were over. The policy of disciplinary sanctions for shout-downs instituted to national praise by Yale in 1974, definitively went by the boards at Berkeley in 1983. Speaker disruptions then slowly grew in frequency and force at Berkeley and beyond. So, the refusal to discipline the students who shouted down Kirkpatrick ultimately helped lock today's quasi-anarchic anti-speech system into place.
The thuggishness and violence of the Sixties demonstrations at their height exceeded what we see today. Yet today's chronic, pervasive, and steadily growing vice-grip of campus orthodoxy, punctuated and enforced by occasional shout-downs and meeting takeovers, is in its way more dangerous.
There are plenty of indications that campus free speech is more besieged nowadays than it's been in decades. Trigger warnings, safe spaces, and microaggressions signal a cultural sea-change. Anti-Israel shout-downs and disruptions have multiplied dramatically. These are no longer occasional embarrassing episodes but the fruit of a deliberate strategy devised by influential sectors of the campus left. FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), which keeps an index of disinvitations and shout-downs, says the overall rate of all such incidents is increasing.
Yet statistics tell only part of the story. We can't assume a constant rate of speakers attempting to counter campus orthodoxies. Top comedians and an unknowable number of conservative speakers now avoid college campuses. At some point, a decreasing rate of shout-downs may actually indicate that free speech, along with resistance to campus orthodoxies, has been successfully crushed. And in a world of social media and the 24-hour news cycle, a few well-publicized shout-downs may suffice to chill speech and encourage violent demonstrators across the entire country. Finally, in contrast to the Sixties, today's illiberal demonstrators, disruptive and ornery though they may seem, may actually be allied with significant sections of the faculty and administration (as KC Johnson has cogently argued).
So there are important reasons to believe that today's free-speech crisis is locked-in and unchangeable in the absence of outside intervention. The alliance of radical students with dominant sections of the faculty (precisely those faculty members who reject classical liberalism) means that few C. Vann Woodwards remain to pressure administrators into defending free speech. Meanwhile, the ideologically based "studies" programs (various ethnic studies, women's studies, and environmental studies majors) have grown to challenge the conventional academic departments in size and influence. This creates a large and permanent faculty and student constituency schooled in suspicion of classic liberalism.
Ultimately, the public has granted the academy certain rights and privileges — special financial and policy protections (especially tenure) — on the understanding that institutions of higher education will pursue truth under conditions of free inquiry and fairness to all points of view. There is a kind of implicit bargain or social contract here, and the academy has so consistently and persistently violated its side of the bargain that public action is now necessary.
In particular, the tenure system, designed to ensure freedom of speech and secure the marketplace of ideas, has been abused to create an illiberal intellectual monopoly. And precisely because of this monopolistic abuse of the unique privilege of academic tenure, along with the unresolved, decades-long crisis of campus free speech, the traditional policy presumption in favor of local control can no longer be sustained in this sector.
That is why state and federal legislators cannot look the other way but must act to restore our most basic liberties to the academy. And while legislation eliminating restrictive speech codes and so-called free-speech zones is very much in order, the underlying problem will not be solved until administrators are pressed to restore discipline for speaker shout-downs. The administrative refusal to discipline disruptors, which took off in the Sixties and resumed with the Kirkpatrick incident in 1983, must be reversed. Only a return to the policies and ethos of the Woodward Report offers hope.
There are several state-level campus free-speech bills on offer, but only the model legislation proposed in the Goldwater Report systematically addresses the problem of discipline for campus shout-downs. I have also offered a plan to tie federal aid to higher education to a restoration of discipline for speaker shout-downs, among other things.
The tattered campus climate of free speech ultimately rests on deeper cultural shifts that must be addressed by educators over the long-term. Yet legislative action to protect campus free speech could serve as the shock that initiates cultural change.
Short of legislative steps to restore discipline for disruption, even bipartisan condemnation of campus shout-downs will fail, as it has failed repeatedly in the past. The ranks of authentically liberal faculty members are far too thinned to do what Woodward and his colleagues did in 1974. Without an intervention by the public through its elected representatives, the structure of the anti-free-speech university is locked-in for the foreseeable future. After 54 years, we are indeed at an inflection point. Act now, or campus free speech will be lost for a lifetime.
This article was published by the National Review and may be found here.
About the ZOA
The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) is the oldest and one of the largest pro-Israel organizations in the United States. With offices around the country and in Israel, the ZOA educates the public, elected officials, the media, and college/high school students about the truth of the ongoing Arab war against Israel. The ZOA works to strengthen U.S.- Israel relations through educational activities, public affairs programs and our work on Capitol Hill, and to combat anti-Semitism and anti-Israel bias in the media, in textbooks, in schools and on college campuses. Under the leadership of such presidents as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, and current President Morton A. Klein, the ZOA has been - and continues to be - on the front lines of Jewish activism. www.zoa.org. For more information contact Morton A. Klein 212-481-1500.
This email was sent to faigerayzel@gmail.com
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Zionist Organization of America
P.O. Box # 4518
New York, NY 10163
Thursday, April 13, 2017
Fwd: fyi Fighting BDS by fighting the Left who Kills Free Speech - "*Berkeley Hates Free Speech - David Horowitz..."
- Members who disrupt a hate filled, antisemitic, BDS false narrative are guilty.
- Those who provide a platform for hate filled, antisemitic lies and propaganda are members in positions of influence obviously not guilty.
But the UC can't be bothered with actual concerns for public safety. In fact, the UC Police Department led by Captain Alex Yao, did nothing to stop or arrest the rioters, who as a result will not have to think twice before rioting again, say at my event or at Ann Coulter's which is scheduled to take place at the end of the month.
UAW union 3865 which represents over 16,000 "student-workers" across the UC system and sent out an email calling on the university not to give me a platform to speak on campus, citing alleged "Islamophobic and xenophobic campaigns my Freedom Center has sponsored."
....
Everyone is by now familiar with the left's desire to silence its political opponents. A liberal with integrity, Kirsten Powers, has even written a first-rate book titled, The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech. But the university regularly condones the antics of its leftist totalitarians, desperate for what all appeasers seek: peace in its time. So desperate is the administration to appease leftists within, in fact, that it willingly places placing crushing burdens on conservative students who want to hear other opinions – not possible in their classrooms because their professors and reading lists were long ago purged of conservative viewpoints.
Date: Tue, Apr 11, 2017 at 7:11 PM
Subject: Shared a post - "*Berkeley Hates Free Speech - David Horowitz..."
To: faigerayzel@gmail.com
Sally Zahav shared a post. | ![]() |
![]() | Berkeley Hates Free Speech - David Horowitz by David Horowitz The totalitarian acts of a cowardly university days before my scheduled appearance. Reprinted from dailycaller.com . The University of California Berkeley has an unearned reputation as the "home of the Free Speech movement," a reference t...
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Robin Ticker
Most of these emails are posted on Shemittahrediscovered.blogspot
Monday, March 27, 2017
From the Committee to Abolish BDS from the PSFC (Park Slope Food Coop): This Wed. March 29th at UN Headquarters: Another Anti Israel BDS Conference this time featuring Niki Haley determined to push for Action. Let us once and for all finally put an end to toothless anti -BDS resolutions and anti-BDS ineffective condemnations.
She says she is determined to push for action. We are following closely hoping and praying that under the Trump Administration and under his people they will follow through with concrete punitive measures like defunding UNRWA agencies who are enemies of Israel.Trump Admin Prepares Exec Order to End Funding for UN Agencies Giving Full Membership to PA, PLO http://www.jewishpress.com/news/breaking-news/breaking- nyt-report-trump-admin- prepares-exec-order-to-end- funding-for-un-agencies- giving-full-membership-to-pa- plo/2017/01/25/ Nikki Haley Puts U.N. on Notice: U.S. Is 'Taking Names'
UNITED NATIONS — The American ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki R. Haley, issued a stark warning on Friday to allies and rivals abroad, saying in her first remarks at the headquarters of the world body that the Trump administration would hold to account those who do not back the United States."You're going to see a change in the way we do business," Ms. Haley said. "Our goal with the administration is to show value at the U.N., and the way we'll show value is to show our strength, show our voice, have the backs of our allies and make sure our allies have our back as well.""For those who don't have our back," she added, "we're taking names; we will make points to respond to that accordingly."
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id= 18447 Nikki Haley's first hurrah By Ruthie Blum
Israel is accused of every evil. In particular, there is mention of "massacres," "ethnic cleansing," "famine" (of Palestinians), "indiscriminate bombings," and "acts of genocide." The terminology used is particularly savage, and the goal perfectly clear. To promote the boycott of Israel, Palestinian NGOs are trying to equate Israeli actions with those of the Nazis.
Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel, in France http://isgap.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/KnobelFlashpoint43.pdf2002 - 2010 By Marc Knobel Marc Knobel is a Scholar of History and Director of Research at the CRIF
...Terror involves two basic components: ideology and practical implementation. Both are often inter-dependent. Ideology comes through education, brainwashing, and incitement. Implementation comes from the availability, manufacture, supply or easy acquisition of weapons in order to implement the ideology.
Unfortunately, it is quite painful to say that the Government of Israel who is hosting this anti BDS conference is also to blame. They threw settlers from Amona and Ofra out of their homes very recently . The claim that they were built on Palestinian Land is highly questionable. The Jewish homeowners received all the proper permits form the State of Israel to build. In addition there is no Arab who is claiming the Land and there is no Arab who will have any benefit from this Land once the Jews were thrown out.Let there at least be be a transparent open and fair trial as per who are the rightful claimants of the property.The government of Israel has empowered the BDS narrative by forcing the Jews from their homes in their ancestral homeland.
FYIFrom: Zionist Organization of America [mailto:info@zoa.org]
Sent: Wednesday, March 22, 2017 1:19 PM
To: Ticker, Jay (NYSHCR) <Jay.Ticker@nyshcr.org>
Subject: NY Jewish Week Op-Ed: ZOA Fights Anti-Semitism at Food Coop
ATTENTION: This email came from an external source. Do not open attachments or click on links from unknown senders or unexpected emails.
Zionist Organization of AmericaZOA in the News
NY Jewish Week Op-Ed: ZOA Fights Anti-Semitism at Food Coop
For more information contact Morton A. Klein 212-481-1500
Follow @mortonaklein on TwitterNEW YORK, March 22, 2017
By Eytan Sosnovich and Susan Tuchman, Esq.
Two year ago, four individuals spoke out against hate. As a result, they, and every member of their households, were barred from their community for an entire year.The community is the Park Slope Food Coop and the form of hate is anti-Semitism.The Coop's mission is worthwhile: to make healthy and affordable food available to everyone who wants it. Yet, over the last several years, the Coop has seemingly become obsessed with bashing Israel – and only Israel – tolerating repeated efforts to have Israeli products removed from Coop shelves. It is difficult to understand what the Jewish state has to do with offering healthy and affordable food in Brooklyn, but then anti-Semitism has always been beyond reason. The Coop regularly features anti-Israel articles and letters in its bi-weekly newsletter, provides a platform to anti-Israel speakers at general membership meetings, and repeatedly raises boycotting Israeli products.By April of 2015, many of the Coop's members had rightfully had it. At yet another general membership meeting featuring an Israel-hating speaker, dozens of Coop members spoke out and demanded that the speaker stop his assault on Israel. Four members were singled out among the many who objected to the viciously biased presentation, and were suspended from the Coop for disrupting the meeting.
All of us should be deeply concerned about the failure of state and local representatives to stand up to the Coop's tolerance for unremitting anti-Semitic attacks on Israel. Upon learning of the injustice done to these Coop members and their families, the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) sent a strongly worded letter, reminding the Coop that boycotts against Israel are illegal in New York State and urged that the four members be reinstated. The Coop failed to respond. Undeterred, the ZOA initiated a petition that garnered hundreds of signatures, asking the Coop to stop its anti-Semitic obsession with Israel and reinstate the four members who spoke out against hate. Again, no response from the Coop.A former Coop board member did reach out to us in an unofficial capacity. His comments were illuminating – and alarming. He urged the ZOA to stop advocating for the suspended Coop members. He explained that it is Coop policy to allow anyone to speak about anything at general membership meetings, even if the speech is anti-Semitic. Yet he made an exception for speech that might be offensive to African Americans: He did not believe that the Coop would provide a platform to a member of the Ku Klux Klan. When we pushed him about this clear double standard, he explained that those who incite hatred of Israel and Jews at the Coop have "plausible deniability" to the charge of anti-Semitism because their hateful speech is masked as criticism of Israel. But according to the U.S. government's definition of anti-Semitism, demonizing Israel, and singling out Israel and holding it to a standard that no other country is held to – which is exactly what has been happening at the Coop – are forms of anti-Semitism.Given New York State's prohibition against anti-Israel boycotts and a New York City Council resolution condemning the anti-Israel boycott movement, we reasonably believed that state and local officials would be deeply troubled to learn that the Coop was punishing members who strongly objected to Coop activities that could be illegal and violated public policy. We were wrong. We contacted New York State Senators Jesse Hamilton, Kevin Parker and Diane Savino, New York Assembly Members Jo Anne Simon and Pamela Harris, and New York City Council Members Brad Lander and Chaim Deutsch. Each represented either the Coop or one or more of the suspended Coop members. Not a single elected representative intervened, even to express concern about the injustice of the Coop's harsh punishment and the unfair burden it was placing on the suspended members and their families."All of us should be deeply concerned about the failure of state and local representatives to stand up to the Coop's tolerance for unremitting anti-Semitic attacks on Israel."Their suspensions will end next month, but the ordeal they endured, and the failure of our elected representatives to step up to the plate to help them, is an important lesson not only for Coop members, but also for the rest of us. Coop members who simply want to buy healthy and affordable food are still being forced to tolerate fanatical, hateful attacks on the one Jewish state. The Coop's newsletter is still rife with anti-Israel and anti-Semitic articles. One recent article called for the boycott of Sabra Hummus, because it is "half owned by an Israeli company." Sabra Hummus, however, isn't produced in Israel, but in the United States.All of us should be deeply concerned about the failure of state and local representatives to stand up to the Coop's tolerance for unremitting anti-Semitic attacks on Israel. While we commend those representatives who supported legislation against anti-Israel boycotts, we – and all of you – expect more from our elected officials. Recent violence, vandalism and threats against Jewish institutions are getting heightened public attention. But the truth is that anti-Semitism has long been a serious problem in the U.S. The FBI's hate crime statistics bear this out: Jews have always been the biggest target of religious hate crimes. We need to know that when the anti-Semitism is expressed as anti-Israelism, community institutions like the Park Slope Food Coop – and our elected representatives – will not tolerate it. Otherwise, Jew-hatred, however it is expressed, will continue to grow.Eytan Sosnovich is the Director of Regional Affairs for the Zionist Organization of AmericaSusan Tuchman is the Director of the Zionist Organization of America's Center for Law and JusticeThis article was published by the Jewish Week and may be found here.
Full story can be found here:
About the ZOAThe Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) is the oldest and one of the largest pro-Israel organizations in the United States. With offices around the country and in Israel, the ZOA educates the public, elected officials, the media, and college/high school students about the truth of the ongoing Arab war against Israel. The ZOA works to strengthen U.S.- Israel relations through educational activities, public affairs programs and our work on Capitol Hill, and to combat anti-Semitism and anti-Israel bias in the media, in textbooks, in schools and on college campuses. Under the leadership of such presidents as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, and current President Morton A. Klein, the ZOA has been - and continues to be - on the front lines of Jewish activism. www.zoa.org. For more information contact Morton A. Klein 212-481-1500.
This email was sent to jticker@nyshcr.org
why did I get this? unsubscribe
Zionist Organization of America
P.O. Box # 4518
New York, NY 10163
Robin Ticker
Most of these emails are posted on Shemittahrediscovered.blogspot



