Kenneth Marcus, scourge of 'anti-Israel' academe

Kenneth Marcus, the pro-Israel scourge of U.S. academia, has just filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights against Columbia University.  Electronic Intifada reports on the story.  Though I haven’t read the complaint yet, I have read EI’s portrayal of it and I have to say it’s been a long time since I’ve seen such nonsense on a university campus.

Prof. Judith Jacobson circulated third hand complaint of anti-Israel bias which became basis of civil rights complaint against Columbia

The gist of it is that a student, presumably Jewish, sought academic counseling from the chair of the Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures Department at Barnard College.  Happens every day, right?  They were talking about what courses he might take and discussed taking a class with Prof. Joseph Massad, the controversial (in pro-Israel circles) Middle East scholar.  I don’t know what happened during the session.  But after hearing about it third-hand, a Columbia faculty member of the School of Public Health, Judith Jacobson who, like Marcus, is an officer with the right-wing Israel advocacy group, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, consulted with Marcus.  He in turn filed the complaint alleging that the department chair “steered” the student away from taking a course with Massad.  Jacobson, it should also be noted, was one of the Columbia faculty who campaigned against tenure for Nadia Abu El-Haj.  Further, her academic specialty is cancer and asthma prevention, a far cry from the Middle East.

It’s hard to speculate about what might’ve happened during that Barnard academic counseling session, but speaking as someone who spent twelve years doing undergraduate and graduate studies and who often consulted with faculty about which courses I should or should not take, I imagine the chair asked the student what he wished to study, perhaps even discussed the student’s political views.  The faculty member may have suggested to him that he might wish to take a course with a different professor.  That’s not “steering” that’s advising.  Professors do it all the time.  Marcus really wants professors to stop doing their jobs.  He wants to punish them for helping students find the most fulfilling academic programs they can.  He wants campuses to become beacons of pro-Israel correctness.

Interesting to note that Marcus is attempting to snare Prof. Massad in his net even though the latter had nothing whatsoever to do with the complaint.  Massad didn’t know about the incident until he heard a complaint was being filed.  This is Marcus pimping a ride from all the negative publicity Massad earned over the years from the David Project and other pro-Israel advocacy groups that attacked him.

Frankly, there is no such academic term as “steering,” as EI notes.  It derives from housing discrimination law, which Marcus is also familiar with as a former staff member of the U.S. human rights commission.  What he’s trying to do is to graft a totally alien term onto a new sphere of law so that he may wage pro-Israel lawfare against American campuses.  Make no mistake, this is a campaign against academic freedom and deeply hostile to the process of open inquiry and pursuit of knowledge that is the hallmark of great universities.

What Marcus aims for is restraining speech and action concerning Israel on campus.  He wants to outlaw certain speech, courses and professors who cross imagined red lines by being overly critical of Israeli policy in their teaching.

What beats me is how an academic press can publish a book by Marcus, as Cambridge University Press is doing.  To me, it’s the ultimate chutzpah for a pro-Israel shill to use such an academic publisher to advance a program so inimical to the academy.

Marcus, as I’ve noted here, previously filed a similar complaint against UC Santa Cruz which the OCR has accepted formally for investigation.  I hope to God OCR doesn’t find the Columbia complaint credible.  Otherwise, there will soon be a flood of such complaints, which will prevent OCR from actually investigating any real civil rights complaints on American campuses.

Marcus has also been sniffing around Evergreen College trying to gin up a case against that school.  Among his targets is Prof. Steve Niva, who he’s sidled up to via phone calls and e-mails attempting to elicit Niva’s personal views about Israel.  Unfortunately for Marcus, Niva has had better things to do with his time than furnish fuel for a future civil rights battle.

Interestingly, Marcus is teaming up with Stand With Us and Israel’s NW consul general, Akiva Tor in pursuing the Evergreen complaint, as SWU’s website attests.  Since we now know, thanks to Israel’s Channel 10 news, that the Israeli foreign ministry has officially sponsored a lawsuit against the Olympia food coop (Evergreen College’s hometown), it seems entirely reasonable to presume that the foreign ministry, at the very least, looks favorably upon this attack on American universities.  At the most, it may even be supporting them in far more direct ways.

Marcus is also exploiting Scholars for Peace in the Middle East as another venue for relaying intelligence about campuses which are ripe for attack.  I hope professors and administrators become aware of these points of attack which people like Marcus will exploit.

I’m deeply chagrined that Marcus’ work is being financed in large part by a $5 million life insurance policy paid off after the death of Prof. Gary Tobin, one of the Jewish community’s most distinguished demographers, who died in 2009.  The Institute for Jewish and Community Research, which he founded to be his academic home, turned to Marcus and his pro-Israel drivel after Tobin’s death.  The Institute was undoubtedly seeking a new raison d’être since it could no longer pursue the ground-breaking polling research that was Gary’s specialty.  It is a great tragedy that his widow, Diane, bought into Marcus’ vision of turning “anti-Israelism” into a kosher academic field.  One in which it was made equivalent to anti-Semitism, and which involved the demonization of anyone on college campuses who transgressed the pro-Israel line.

Gary Tobin, the late and renowned Jewish demographer, founded an academic institute before his untimely death in 2009 called the Institute for Jewish and Community Research.  I knew Prof. Tobin and studied his surveys of American Jewry with great interest when I was a fundraiser for Brandeis University, where he taught.

But I’m sorry to say that since his untimely death in 2009, the Institute, under the leadership of his wife, Diane Tobin, has taken an u-turn away from Gary’s core academic interests.  Ms. Tobin, it should be noted, has no academic background in Jewish studies, demography or any similar field.  Now, IJCR has largely been turned over to the concocted academic field of “anti-Israelism.”  Academics and wannabes use the term as almost synonymous with anti-Semitism and hope that they can raise consciousness in the U.S., to the extent that so-called anti-Israeli attitudes on American campuses and elsewhere will gain the same stigma that anti-Semitism has.

Last June, the anti-Israelism field was dealt a hard blow when Yale University closed its academic program for the study of anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism because it had become too politicized (i.e. anti-Muslim and pro-Israel) and because few faculty members would collaborate with it or take it seriously.  At a major conference organized by the program and its director, Charles Small, the main theme seemed to be bashing Muslims and warning of the threat Islam poses to Jews and the world.

Ken Marcus, Jewish Torquemada crusading against campus 'anti-Israeilsm'

A senior IJCR staff member, Ken Marcus, leapt to the Yale program’s defense and called its closure an example of political correctness run amok.  He all but claimed that the act by the University was due to pressure from Muslim pressure groups.

It’s not surprising then, to find that Marcus is one of the key intellectual authors of a new campaign to exploit newly written federal civil rights statutes (Title VI) which forbid campuses from creating a hostile environment for various ethnic and religious groups, including Jews.  Marcus and his friends at Stand With Us are uniting to explore campuses where they can apply their new theory.  To do so, they must find campuses where they can recruit sufficient Jewish students to complain that they are afraid to be Jews on campus because  of the environment of fear and intimidation created by pro-Palestinian groups.

All this will require a Department of Education that is sufficiently malleable to take all this seriously.  Given Pres. Obama’s need for the Jewish vote in the coming presidential election and his wish to be seen as uber-supportive of Israel, it isn’t at all clear that Education officials will throw this nonsense where it belongs–in the garbage can.  They’ve advanced farthest at UC Santa Cruz, where they’ve filed a formal complaint against the University.  They recruited a junior lecturer (I wonder why they couldn’t find a senior faculty member to take up the cause?), Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, to act as their sponsor on campus and filed the complaint in her name.  Said lecturer actually wrote an article for the far-right American Thinker asking whether Jewish students were safe on campus.  In it, she hails the groundbreaking research of “investigative journalist,” Lee Kaplan, one of the stranger crackpots (along with Debbie Schlussel and Pam Geller) on the right-wing pro-Israel scene.  I wonder if Rossman-Benjamin thinks publishing at American Thinker will add to the luster of her academic CV?  The Department’s Office of Civil Rights has agreed to open a formal investigation of her complaint against UCSC.

Marcus has repeatedly contacted an Evergreen College faculty member who is known for his sympathy to anti-Occupation groups on campus.  The former asked repeatedly by phone and in writing to interview the faculty member, seeking to know “his personal political views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”  He mentioned as well, that he’d already interviewed noted Jewish critics of Israeli policy, Noam Chomsky and Judith Butler, as if this might give the faculty member (who isn’t Jewish) cover.  Marcus clearly intended to build a dossier which might be used to bolster any complaint brought against Evergreen.  In short, this, for Marcus, is becoming a productive new venture.  A Jewish campus jihad.  We can expect a raft of such complaints against various campuses which allow protest against Israeli Occupation to be too vociferous for Marcus’ taste and those of his wealthy pro-Israel benefactors.

Marcus and the academic pro-Israelists (two can play at this game, you know) also must recruit students who’ve been “damaged” or traumatized by their treatment on campus.  So they seek out students who’ve transferred out because they felt there was a hostile climate for Jews.  Students who’ve appeared in Stand With Us videos attacking Evergreen have spoken about anti-Occupation protests on campus as if they were personal attacks on their Jewish identity.  They speak of trauma like a Jew might speak of trauma induced by anti-Semitism or Jewish suffering from the Holocaust.  As I wrote above, this is all part of a master plan by charlatans like Marcus to build both an academic field and legal theory that equates criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.

Like Daniel Pipes before him, Marcus is an ideologue clothed in academic robes.  He has some academic pretensions, but his heart is pledged to Israel and not academe.

Israeli’s Pacific NW consul general, Akiva Tor, is also intimately involved in the project as the StandWithUs website documents meetings he attended with Rob Jacobs and others at which the projected civil rights complaint against Evergreen was planned.  Given last night’s post I wrote which documents a proud boast by deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon that this is precisely the sort of tactic that the Israeli government is embracing, it seems clear the Israeli government is deeply engaged in this campaign of harrassment against American institutions of higher learning.

For anyone whom this development doesn’t trouble, let’s compare this to say, the U.S. government helping organize an Israeli campaign to direct debate on Israeli campuses about U.S. policy including the use of civil rights complaints filed with the Israeli government to force schools to police offending speech.  If this doesn’t seem outrageously intrusive in the domestic academic and political life of a country, I don’t know what is.

This attack on academic freedom corresponds with the efforts of Im Tirzu to compile and publicize lists of supposedly “anti-Zionist” Israeli campuses, departments and faculty.  There is a concerted effort to regulate speech so that certain subjects and views either can’t be discussed or their discussion will involve paying a price in public opprobrium.

Returning to Ken Marcus, why does he persist when universities like Yale are dismissing them and their colleagues as lacking academic rigor?  Because there’s gold in them thar hills.  Over $4-million worth (which excludes a $5-million endowment from Prof. Tobin’s life insurance policy) according to IJCR’s 2010 IRS 990 report.  There are scores of generously endowed Jewish foundations like the Schusterman Foundation and many others which lap this stuff up.  That’s why Schusterman, for one, funds campus efforts of Aipac.  Their idea of building strong young Jews is by training them to espouse pro-Israel views.  Secondarily, strong young Jews also learn that a major part of their identity involves detesting campus criticism of Israel.

The Marcuses of academia must not be allowed to succeed.  If they do, then any of us, including and perhaps especially the Jews, will be consigned to the hellish Inferno of self-haters and Israel-haters.  Anti-Israelism is a hoax theory perpetrated on academia and American campuses by a hoax theorist like Ken Marcus.  He wants to stigmatize what is protected speech on campus.  Not only should there be academic freedom on campus to express political views, there must be freedom of speech, an even more basic American right enshrined in our constitution.  Students must be allowed to protest.  It is part of a hallowed campus tradition.  If pro-Israel students dislike the protest let them mount their own–and they do.  But to take speech critical of Israel and seek to punish an entire university for allowing it is simply treif and un-American.

Ken Marcus may be a lawyer with experience dealing with civil rights and constitutional issues, but his interest doesn’t extend much beyond his own nose and his own co-religionists’ (and even a narrow band of those, at that).

Oh, and I almost forgot to tell you why Marcus may think he’s got a special “in” with the Department of Education in its review of these current and future civil rights complaints.  He’s a former litigator who also helped write, you guessed it, those new Title VI regulations which incorporated Jews as a protected group on campus.  He did that when he worked for…the Department of Education during the Bush administration.

Consumer activists and peace activists are rightfully indignant about the revolving door between government and industry which permits a federal official to write a regulation that will impact a business and then go out and take a job company for whom he wrote the regulation.  It encourages these officials to collude with potential future employers to write rules that will meet industry’s needs, rather than those of the consumer.  This is almost precisely what Ken Marcus did.  He helped write a rule and now he’s trying to exploit it for the imagined good of Israel and his poor, suffering pro-Israel students.

Marcus also boasts on his curriculum vitae that he is an official of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, an inaptly named group which engages in heavy pro-Israel advocacy.  He was staff director of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission under George Bush.  You can tell whose civil rights he championed when he was there and whose he likely ignored.

On a separate note, Electronic Intifada reports that the president of the Evergreen campus Hillel is a StandWithUs Northwest Emerson Fellow.  I have spent many, many hours of great Jewish enjoyment in campus Hillels at Columbia, UCLA and UC Berkeley.  When I was there, these were houses that welcomed all Jews.  There was a Hillel rabbi who took no sides in the Israel debate, but rather attempted to provoke discussion and learning, rather than exclusion.  Until recently, this was true of Evergreen Hillel as well.  It had been a place open to students with diverse views of Israel.  But increasingly, Hillel is becoming a place where only certain Jews are welcome.  Those who oppose the Occupation or support the campus divestment initiative no longer feel so.  That’s because StandWithUs, as Israel’s Channel 10 news noted in its interview with Danny Ayalon, is an arm of the Israeli government, in effect a lobbying agent for a foreign power.  Accordingly, Hillel is being turned into a cheering section for the Israeli government.  This is an infinitely sad development for those of us who’ve known and appreciated the wonderful Hillels at campuses where we’ve studied.

The Hillel president, Joshua Levine illustrates the confusion SWU and pro-Israelists encourage between Jewish identity and support for Israel.  He said this:

“There are days I feel uncomfortable walking across campus alone because I wear a yarmulke [Jewish skull cap] on my head,” Levine alleges.

There are many Jews wearing yarmulkes who don’t support StandWithUs.  Some who don’t support the Occupation either.  So the issue isn’t wearing a yarmulke.  That’s an expression of Jewish identity.  When you confuse Israel with Judaism you get into a terribly sticky wicket.  It is Levine’s extreme views that cause him conflict with those on campus criticial of Israeli policy.  It isn’t his yarmulke or his Jewishness.  After all, many of the campus leaders of the anti-Occupation protests are Jewish themselves.  And Joshua Levine has no monopoly on Jewishness.  There are many ways to be Jewish.  In fact, as many ways as there are to approach the issue of Israel.  Instead of suppressing this debate on campus, we should encourage it along with values of tolerance and civility.

Electronic Intifada and I have been reporting on the Olympia Food Coop BDS lawsuit brought by five members who claim the business violated its procedures by approving a boycott on nine Israeli products in its stores.  Up till now, we knew that Stand With Us and the Israeli consul general, Akiva Tor were instrumental in the process of initiating the suit as the SWU website indicates they attended key meetings at which decisions were made about the legal case including hiring of an attorney.

But now Tzinor Layla, Israel’s Channel 10 news program (at 3:04 of the above video) confirms via an interview with Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, that the Israeli government itself is willing to sponsor these lawsuits and presumably paying the legal bills.  Frankly, I find it astonishing that a foreign government would sue a U.S. company for such an alleged infraction.  First, I’ve never heard of a foreign government suing any overseas company for supporting a boycott against it; and second, I’ve never heard of a government initiating a lawsuit against an overseas company for political, as opposed to pecuniary reasons.

In interviews they gave to Electronic Intifada, Rob Jacobs of StandWithUs and Akiva Tor, Israeli consul general in the Pacific NW lied when the first claimed he knew nothing about where the funding for the lawsuit was coming from and the second lied when he claimed that he, and by extension his government had nothing to do with the suit.  You’d have thought that Tor and Jacobs would’ve coördinated things better with their bosses back in Tel Aviv.  Let’s watch to see how Tor and Jacobs worm their way out of this one.

In my earlier post I called this the pro-Israel version of lawfare, that noxious concept touted by Alan Dershowitz to deride human rights activists having the chutzpah to demand Israeli accountability for their actions.  It is a deliberate attempt to interfere with, and destroy American businesses willing to take a position that angers the Israeli state.  I say this is un-American and that it violates basic rights to free speech.  Besides lawfare, this is a perfect example of a SLAPP (strategic limitation of public participation) suit.  That is, a frivolous use of the legal system to strategically limit public participation in an issue that is rightfully part of social discourse.  On its merits, the Washington courts should throw this sucker out.  But the problem, as I’ve found, is that judges sometimes either get the law wrong or wish to allow a plaintiff to get his or her moment in court.  So they refuse to do the right and proper thing.  We’ll have to see how this plays out.

Concerning Stand With Us’ involvement in this process, an Israeli journalist who’s followed the group’s activities inside Israel and abroad told me: “Stand With Us is an unofficial arm of the Israeli government.”  In this blog, you’ve heard me often talk about groups like NGO Monitor, Im Tirzu, Middle East Forum, The Israeli Project and Stand With Us as doing the bidding of the Israeli government.  You’ve heard me claim that they closely coördinate their activities with the government and in effect become its mouthpiece.  But this is the first direct confirmation that SWU, at the very least, is literally joined at the hip with the MFA. In the video Ayalon specifically confirms the government’s “partnership” with SWU and acknowledges it has similar partnerships with other Jewish and non-Jewish American organizations. No sense of discretion here. Israel, under the Lieberman-Ayalon Plan, will throw its weight around the world, even attempting to smash food coops in Washington State.

Personally, I don’t mind having Israel lobby type organizations advancing their political agenda.  After all, that’s free speech and the American way.  But where I do begin to have a problem is when these groups become agents of a foreign government.  Of course, people like Rob Jacobs and Roz Rothstein are oblivious to the implications because for them loyalty to Israel is the same as loyalty to the U.S.  The interests of the two are virtually the same.  That’s the poison of this notion of pro-Israelism which posits no free will or independence on the part of American Jews and their leadership.

I’m hoping to inform the five litigants suing the Olympia Food Coop that they are fronts for the Israeli government in this matter.  It may not change their minds, but I hope it will at least give them pause.

One aspect of the legal strategy of the plaintiffs I find odd.  Since they are members of the coop they are filing their suit AS the coop.  They are claiming that they truly represent the coop and its interests whereas the board and staff and everyone else who voted to endorse the boycott are either impostors or abusers of the coop’s bylaws.  Keep in mind, that these five all ran for the Coop board and lost by a wide margin.  Another shrewd aspect of the legal thinking in this case is not to argue the merits or demerits of BDS.  The litigants know that not only will they fail if they put the issue to a vote, they know that a U.S. court would throw out a lawsuit against a company that was purely politically motivated.  The only possible legal grounds they have is to argue that the coop board violated its own bylaws in endorsing BDS.  Keep in mind too that all this brouhaha is over nine Israeli products taken off the shelves.

More interesting follow-up on the New York Times report about my work on the Leibowitz story.  The Seattle Times profiled me in an article published today.  One important element of this story is an interview with former Rep. Brian Baird, one of two Congress members monitored by Jewish community leaders before they took a trip to Gaza in the aftermath of Operation Cast Lead.  Baird wasn’t surprised at how he was treated:

“I rather assumed something like that was happening,” said Baird, who since has left Congress. “If we were indeed labeled anti-Israel, that’s unfortunate. There’s an attitude that anyone who questions Israel is anti-Israel. I find that anti-American.”

Jonathan Martin also quoted this evaluation of my work published in Haaretz:

Haaretz, Israel’s leading liberal newspaper, described Silverstein’s blog as an “international message board for reports that Israel’s courts and military censor withhold from publication…”

The Jewish Forward also published its own profile today which was remarkably fair considering how complicated my relationship has been in the past with its publisher, Jane Eisner.  The one ironic thing about the profile is that it quotes Yossi Melman’s criticism of my work:

“He spreads rumors without checking them,” countered Yossi Melman, a well-connected security and intelligence reporter for Haaretz, and a critic of Silverstein’s work. “He is an ideologue, not a journalist.

“He is speculative,” Melman said. “It is like at the casino: Sometimes he gets it right, and sometimes he doesn’t.”

What is ironic?  The fact that the Haaretz passage quoted by Martin was written by none other than…Yossi Melman.  By the way, I challenged Melman specifically to disprove my claim about Ali Reza Asgari or provide any information to do so.  He declined.  Interestingly, Melman did contact me for comment after the NY Times story was published, but refused to hold back his deadline so I could actually speak with him which, though unsurprising, I felt was at best incomplete journalism.

Stand With Us and its minions are probably making hay in the comment threads of both stories, so if you’re inclined to register a comment preserving some balance in the discussion there, I’d appreciate that.

For my Israeli readers, Israeli TV will air an interesting story tomorrow about another story I developed based on the original reporting of Electronic Intifada.  A major Israeli political insider will also be interviewed and it should be fun.  Sorry I can’t reveal more, don’t want to jinx things.

Akiva Tor: Israeli Pacific NW consul harrasses U.S. businesses supporting BDS

The eavesdropping transcripts Shamai Leibowitz leaked in 2009 contained information about covert Israeli penetration of the American political environment. If I had transcripts of current Israeli diplomatic traffic now, I’d be hearing conversations concerning the story I’m about to tell. Electronic Intifada reports that the Israeli consul in the Pacific Northwest, Avi Tor, has colluded with StandWithUs’ Northwest director, Rob Jacobs to gin up a lawsuit against the Olympia food coop because it voted for a boycott of Israeli products on its shelves.

In 2009, one of the major themes for Israeli diplomats in this country was provoking hostility and fear of Iran. Today, priorities have shifted somewhat and a new major theme is what the Israeli government falsely calls “delegitimization.” That is, campaigns like BDS and the Gaza flotilla which aim to end the Occupation, but not, as Israel claims, to destroy that nation. You can be sure that the diplomatic traffic and telephone conversations between Israel and its outposts here are filled with this sort of chatter. As will be the conversations between diplomats and American Jewish leaders, who aid and abet Israeli interests in this country.

Let’s return to the food coop lawsuit. This is a prime example of another fake concept dubbed “lawfare,” and popularized by pro-Israel hucksters like Alan Dershowitz to characterize alleged campaigns by pro-Palestinian groups to delegitimize Israel. He’s referring to international arrest warrants filed by human rights groups against Israeli military officers and government officials seeking accountability for potential war crimes like Operation Cast Lead. Of course, the ultimate goal of such suits, aside from actually punishing Israelis responsible for violating international law, is forcing Israel to resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict–and again, not to destroy Israel.

The Olympia food coop lawsuit and similar MFA-inspired operations aren’t designed to uncover any real wrongdoing (as the war crimes cases are). But rather, they’re simply designed to destroy the credibility of movements viewed falsely as attempting to destroy Israel.  The tools Israel and its agents here use in their campaign are ones of lies and fear.  For example, one of the claims in the letter threatening a lawsuit was that last year’s vote had instilled ““a climate of fear and terror for Jews.”  Say what?  A vote for a boycott instills terror and fear?  This is food folks, not the Warsaw Ghetto.  Only unbelievably audacious hucksters like SWU could come up with such a tissue of lies.

EI points out that a SWU video promoting its work in Olympia against the coop boycott displays a flyer with a Nazi swastika superimposed on a Star of David and calls it an “actual image from a handout.”  It doesn’t specify where the handout was distributed or who produced it.  It could be a document from anywhere.  Once again, this is typical of SWU’s three-card monte style of political agitprop.

Another proof of the fakery behind this lawsuit is that it doesn’t at all contest BDS or the boycott that members approved.  Instead, it claims unspecified technical rule violations disqualified the measure.  Not only does it not indicate what the board did wrong, it doesn’t indicate how the vote could be taken properly.  And further, the litigants have refused an offer from members to gather 300 signatures necessary to reopen the question and take a new vote.

I would have less problem with this lawsuit if it was one genuinely generated from within the food coop by members who conceived of the idea themselves and organized it themselves. In reality, the lawsuit was conceived, organized and promoted by the State of Israel through its official agents in this country, and by StandWithUs, working as a thinly concealed extension of Israeli government interests.

What’s more, Akiva Tor and Rob Jacobs have lied in characterizing their roles in order to conceal it.  I’ve written before about Jacobs’ tendency to lose track of the truth. Again, I would have less problem with this entire arrangement if SWU and the Israeli consulate was transparent about their actions. Something like what the Minneapolis JCRC did when confronted by its local Jewish independent newspaper. The JCRC director put out a statement essentially conceding that they worked on behalf of the Israeli foreign ministry in monitoring Rep. Keith Ellison, deemed by both of them, at least privately, as hostile to Israel.

But Tor and Jacobs conceal and lie rather than admitting their role and actions involving the lawsuit. This is perfectly of a piece with the behaviors and subterfuge laid out in the Leibowitz transcripts. So the question for Americans and American Jews is: is this the sort of behavior you approve of for a foreign power? And for Jews, is this the Israel that makes you proud? I’d like to be proud of Israel. I really would. But not THIS Israel.

Here is something like what I believe happened: Olympia has been on the radar of SWU and the Israeli consulate for quite some time due to the alleged anti Israel activism on the Evergreen College campus. Through its campus activism, SWU has been recruiting in the community for some time. As did the David Project at Columbia, it found willing students or local community members prepared to claim their religion had been disrespected and they had been harrassed merely for being Jews. Anti-Semitism is a powerful canard. And young Jews who have never experienced real anti-Semitism, and have been politically “attuned” to SWU’s skewed version of it, will be inclined to become student soldiers for the pro-Israel movement.

So when the food coop announced it would vote on a BDS resolution, SWU either asked its local recruits to join the coop or, if it was lucky, they already belonged. That’s how SWU and the consulate recruited the current crop of litigants. And to be clear, you’ll hear the consulate shrey that they had nothing to do with this and that it was solely an internal matter worked out among the complaining coop members. But in this matter I make virtually no distinction between SWU and the Israeli government. The two are working hand in glove and whatever the consulate can’t or won’t do because it is a foreign entity, SWU does for it. In that sense, SWU in this matter really is what many accuse Aipac of being, an agent for a foreign power.

Now, once they had the litigants they needed to recruit a willing local pro-Israel Jewish attorney. Through the good graces of SWU or the consulate they found Avi Lipman, who’s taken the case. Rob Jacobs again lies when he claims he knows nothing about how the lawyer was recruited and how he’s being paid. Jacobs swears that SWU isn’t funding the lawsuit. Perhaps he’s right. But if he isn’t, then a fatcat SWU donor (like say, Aubrey Chernick or someone like him) is. And that donor was, I’d be willing to bet, recruited either by SWU or the consulate (but more likely SWU).

There’s another chilling aspect of this story as reported by EI. Ali Abunimah writes, quite convincingly, that SWU may be trying to establish a record of violations of Jewish civil rights on campuses like Evergreen (UC Santa Cruz is another campus afflicted with SWU-like complaints of Jewish harassment) in order to lobby the federal government to file suit against these campuses for creating environments hostile to the civil or religious rights of students.

If he’s correct, this would be a further ratcheting up of pressure against the BDS/anti-Occupation movement on U.S. campuses. It would take the struggle out of the realm of the purely soapbox and bring it into the the courts and the halls of government. This is lawfare perfected to a high art.

To any who might dismiss the assault against the Olympia coop as a trivial matter think on this: if SWU and the Israeli foreign ministry are willing to lavish this amount of attention and effort on a grocery store, imagine how much effort they’d be willing to devote to plying the halls of power on behalf of Israel. Imagine how slavishly SWU or the Seattle federation’s political lobbyist or Aipac are willing to monitor our local Congressional delegation seeking tell-tale signs of flagging devotion to the cause.

Returning to Rob Jacobs, he fudges or lies outright a number of times in his interview with EI.  For example, he claims SWU is really a shoestring operation and that he’s devoted no more than a few hundred dollars worth of materials to the effort.  What this obscures is that SWU’s national budget is over $4 million and that Jacobs himself earned nearly $100,000 in 2008.  Rob Jacobs didn’t tell his interviewer how many hours he and his assistant have devoted to Olympia.  If we add that to the tally this is undoubtedly a major expenditure of resources for SWU.

Jacobs attempts to downplay his role in the lawsuit:

Jacobs told The Electronic Intifada his group’s contact with the five letter writers [litigants] was largely limited to providing printed materials, helping bring in speakers and offering advice…

Although Jacobs did acknowledge working with and meeting repeatedly with the letter writers, he characterized the relationship to any potential lawsuit as arms length:

“Since we’re not actually a party to anything down there, frankly we’re not in any of the loop regarding the legal matters. Just from an attorney-client privilege standpoint anything we would do with anybody would be violating some kind of potential privilege. So, we know that they’re doing some stuff. I know they’ve been working with an attorney. I know which firm it is but beyond that we have not in any way participated in the legal discussion.”

Jacobs acknowledged attending one meeting related to the potential lawsuit.

“We were at one meeting, I don’t know how many months ago, before anything actually happened,” Jacobs explained.

“We had been asked by some of the folks down there if we knew any attorneys up here [in Seattle], so we mentioned a number of names. But I was at a meeting where they had an initial — they had not retained any attorney or developed any permanent relationship with an attorney — when they had someone there talk off-the-cuff about what an attorney could do for them.”

Compare this mumbo-jumbo to SWU’s website’s characterization of its activity in Olympia (by the way, meeting reports are no longer publicly accessible on the SWU site, makes you wonder what Rob feels he has to hide):

A “Weekly Status Report” of StandWithUs Northwest, for the week of 5-11 March 2011 states that the following meetings took place:

“Rob [Jacobs] and Carolyn in Olympia with Olympia activists, Akiva Tor and Avi Lipman on Thursday – Presentation of legal case, discussion of Evergreen strategy and Olympia community speaker opportunities.”

EI raises an important question: why did the Government of Israel find it necessary for its official representative to be present at a planning meeting for a lawsuit against the Olympia food coop.  Let’s put the shoe on the other foot: would it be appropriate for the U.S. consul general in East Jerusalem to be present at a meeting during which Palestinians planned to sue the State of Israel; or at a meeting where settlers planned to sue their opponents?  What does this tell you about Israel’s priorities in this country?

Jacobs’ lies are further refuted here:

The agenda for an upcoming 27 September 2011 StandWithUs Northwest Executive Committee meeting includes the following items:

Project Status

• The civil rights complaint against Evergreen State College
• The law suit against the Olympia Food Co-op

JVP-LA organizer, Estee Chandler, and threatening flyer left at her home (JVP)

Why is Stand With Us assaulting American Jews?  I use the term “assault” both in its figurative and literal sense.  In tactics that echo those of the Israeli right-wing advocacy group, Im Tirzu, Stand With Us members have engaged in verbal and physical confrontations with activists from Jewish Voice for Peace in San Francisco-Oakland, Los Angeles and Seattle.  I too have been verbally harrassed locally here in Seattle.

SWU appears to have appointed itself the watchdog of Zionist purity among the American Jewish community.  It has singled out for special attention the fast-growing Jewish peace organization, Jewish Voice for Peace and attacked its activists both verbally and physically.  At a San Francisco demonstration a few months ago, SWU activists on video were heard warning the JVP marchers that they would disrupt their family lives.  Then a few weeks ago, at a JVP meeting in Berkeley, an Israeli-flag clad SWU leader Robin Dubner pepper-sprayed two JVP attendees in the face.

In Los Angeles, JVP is organizing a new chapter.  The lead organizer, Estee Chandler, who is relatively new to Israeli-Arab peace organizing has already had an education it takes many of years to earn.  An anonymous stalker left an ominous threatening flyer at her home displaying her picture, her employer, and names of child family members with the caption:

WANTED
Treason & Incitement Against Jews

The above-named suspect is wanted in connection with…acts of fomenting hatred…against the Jewish people and the Jewish State of Israel as the lead Los Angeles area organizer for the notoriously anti-Jewish and anti-Israel…Jewish Voice for Peace.

In this…capacity, the subject proudly uses her own presumed Jewishness as a weapon against the Jewish people and the Jewish State of Israel while conspiring with other well known anti-Israel groups to assist in Israel’s destruction and to otherwise engender hatred and incite…violence against the Jewish people and the Jewish State of Israel.

Suspect has been know to…consort with known antisemites [sic] and take care of her nephew xxx and neices [sic] xxxx.

There are several Los Angeles right-wing Jews who I can think of who would engage in such despicable behavior.  One who comes to mind and who has bragged in the past of her involvement in similar acts is Allyson Rowen Taylor, a former associate director of Stand With Us who describes herself as “a founding member” of that group.  She and others have been known to haunt left wing circles in Los Angeles and publicly harrass Jews they see as traitors to their race and Arabs they see as fellow travelers with Muslim terrorists.  I’ve written about her public outbursts several times earlier here.  Once at a public screening of the film about Daniel Pearl’s widow, A Mighty Heart, at which she trashed CAIR.  One of her earliest acts of online stalking involved asking Adam Horowitz provocatively, who worked then for American Friends Service Committee:

Why do you hate being a Jew, why are you in favor of murdering Jews?

Of course and to be clear, I can’t conclusively prove that Rowen Taylor is behind this threat against Estee Chandler and JVP.  But the language of the flyer and the brazen provocativeness of the act are of a piece with her past behavior and those of some of her individual personal allies.

I’ve written here that a past leader of the Seattle chapter of Stand With Us, David Brumer, wrote in an e mail that I should be spanked for my views.  The latest Stand With Us-related attack, came from Robert Wilkes, who describes himself as an “Advocate at Stand With Us.”  The SWU website lists him as a member of its media committee.  In last week’s edition of the JTNews he wrote:

Israelis have awakened with heavy hearts from their delusion. They understand the self-evident reality that they can do nothing by themselves to reach a formal peace with the Palestinians. The Palestinians will not abide it short of annihilation of Israel as a Jewish state.

Those who think differently remain afflicted with the Oslo Syndrome. Many Americans do, and many of them are Jewish. They support pro-Palestinian groups and the BDS movement (boycott, divest and sanction), and seek to delegitimize Israel. They employ tropes such as “apartheid” and “Israeli-Nazi war machine” to create a smokescreen of twisted facts and history giving currency to Lenin’s adage, “A lie told often enough becomes the truth.”

Among them are Seattle blogger Richard Silverstein, Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun, Naim Ateek of Sabeel Institute, Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, the International Solidarity Movement — the list goes on. They hyperbolically depict Israel as a Nazi state inflicting a Shoah on the Palestinians. Well meaning? I cannot assume otherwise. Deluded? Without doubt.

When my wife first read this, she may’ve presumed I wanted to ignore it.  There is so much idiocy out there and so little time to rebut it all.  But given that this was written in the community’s local Jewish media outlet I felt it was important to do so.  I contacted the editor hoping and presuming he would allow me to reply.  The answer wasn’t reassuring.  So I contacted a federation board member, who clearly hoped she didn’t have to get involved.  Then I contacted the newspaper’s board chair.  He too passed the ball back to the editor.  Finally, I offered a deadline for a reply and said I was willing to convene a beyt din if I didn’t have the opportunity to respond.  That did the trick.  My reply will be published in this week’s issue.

Needless to say, I affirm almost none of the views attributed to me above.  In fact, those who read my comment rules know that I am very careful to prohibit almost all uses of Nazi-related terminology to describe Israel or its actions, by me or other commenters.  That’s why Wilkes’ claims above are beyond ludicrous.  Here is a portion of my reply to be published this week:

I have never written, nor do I believe Israel is a “Nazi war machine.”  As a Zionist, I don’t believe in delegitimizing Israel.  That’s just a slogan tossed around by extremists like him with no substance.  Nor have I ever written or do I believe Israel “inflicted a Shoah on the Palestinians.”

As a teenager, I sat in my grandmother’s living room in Washington Heights asking about her family I never knew.  She told me of her brothers and sisters who perished in the Holocaust.  One heartbreakingly returned to Poland after emigrating here, telling her in disgust: “T’iz a genayvushe land!”

I once published an oral history of a Hungarian survivor of Auschwitz in the Los Angeles Times.  I participated in, and was a technical advisor to Pierre Sauvage’s award-winning PBS documentary, Yiddish: Di Mameloshn.

Unlike Robert Wilkes, I don’t abuse the Holocaust to score political points.  The memory of the six-million are too sacred for that.

Robert Wilkes doesn’t know me.  If he’s bothered to read a single word I’ve written he hasn’t understood it.  I’d prefer to think he hasn’t, and bases his calumnies about me on what others have told him.

But before I criticize the views of others I do due diligence and read what they’ve written.  I quote their words and then critique them.  Wilkes didn’t bother to do me that favor.

There is an odious, intolerant, violent process of demonization in this country that led to the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.  It’s also played out in the furor over the so-called Ground Zero mosque.  Listen to Glenn Beck on any given night and you’ll hear about Jewish bankers, or Nazi leftists, or jihadi Muslims or similar venom against the feared minority du jour.

That’s what Robert Wilkes represents.  He wants to turn me into a cartoon, a demon, someone you can hate as he does.

We Jews have given the world so much learning, culture, music, language, ideas.  Do we have to give the world hate as well?  Is that our legacy?

Judaism values one’s good name above all else.  Someone who lies about another’s beliefs commits a grave form of gossip called motzi shem ra.  Robert Wilkes has stolen my good name and I won’t let him do it.  I want my good name restored to me.

Estee Chandler wants her good name restored to her as well.  For the love of God, when will the Jewish community stop giving a megaphone to these haters?  When will it stop encouraging them and turn a blind eye when they commit the kinds of acts they did against Chandler?  What will it take for us to realize that Stand With Us, at least in its current form as represented by many of the acts enumerated above, is a poison?  Will it take someone getting shot?  Or will Jewish leaders even then take the position that FoxNews did after Glenn Beck incited death threats against a 78 year old politics professor, saying that the network had no responsibility for any of the hate spewed against her?

Seattle's anti-war bus ads

Like a good general, I have a rule I try to follow about blogging: I try to choose the terrain on which I will fight.  I like the terrain to favor me.  If my opponent chooses to fight on their terrain, I prefer not to engage unless I think it’s favorable to me.  That’s why I’ve declined to enter into the local fracas-become international cause celebre involving a series of Seattle Metro Bus ads which decry U.S. military aid to Israel and accuse it of committing war crimes during Operation Cast Lead.

Before entering this political swamp, let me make something clear: I have no problem with any of the issues raised in the ads, which is why I strongly attack King County executive Dow Constantine’s decision to pull the plug on them after an outcry from a local Israel lobby coalition.  I strongly support the right of the group which organized them to display them.  The issue of U.S. military aid to Israel is an important one as is the even more important issue of possible war crimes committed by the IDF in Gaza during the last war.

But I do have problem with both sides of this debate: both the advertisers and the pro-Israel baying chorus trying to take them down.  First, my problem with the ad.  If you want to make a political point AND influence people you make your argument coherent and plausible.  You don’t flaunt rhetoric.  You don’t score points.  You don’t shout when a calm voice will do.  There are thousands of different iterations of this ad which would’ve worked as effectively and made it harder for the pro-Israel crowd to get the ads taken down.

But the ad organizers went for the jugular.  They made their choice and undoubtedly are happy their ads were banned since it will play well to their constituency.  The other side will think it has won a victory and feel pleased with itself.  What it won’t realize is that any time you have to win a victory at the expense of fundamental constitutional principles of free speech and fairness, you’ve lost in the long run.  Meaning Israel has lost too.  And if your cause is Israel, then you’ve done your cause a disservice.

Now my much more serious problems with the smear campaign run by the local pro-Israel advocates including the Jewish federation, Aipac, American Jewish Committee and Stand With Us.  Here’s some of their rhetoric as mouthed by local King County Councilmember Jane Sprague, who’s dutifully repeating the Israel lobby talking points as all obedient U.S. politicians tend to do:

The ad reads “Israeli War Crimes Your tax dollars at work,” and has an image of a group of children staring at a destroyed building.  . Like many of you, I find the ad disturbing. Yesterday I sent a letter to the Executive and Metro officials demanding that they put a halt the ads…

We need to be mindful that inflammatory speech like this can affect many groups including our Jewish Community. I strongly believe in freedom of speech and our first amendment rights…Messages like these, that lack basic civility, can incite violence against minorities and various religious communities. We need to be able to protect those who can be hurt as a result.

What is “inflammatory” about this speech? That it accuses Israel of committing war crimes in Gaza? Major Israeli newspapers run stories virtually every day recounting stories of Israeli atrocities during the war and using terms like “war crimes” to describe them. Yes, I’d prefer to use terms like “alleged” or “possible” since the war crimes haven’t been proven in a court of law yet. But I find absolutely nothing wrong with putting forward a political argument in such ads claiming that Israel committed war crimes.

Now, as to whether U.S. taxpayers financed those atrocities with U.S. military aid: that seems incontrovertible. Israel’s military has used American weaponry liberally and even flagrantly in situations such as the mass firing of U.S. cluster bombs during the concluding hours of the 2006 Lebanon war, leaving Lebanese civilians to suffer the tragic consequences after the war ended as they unintentionally exploded the ordinance on their property and roads.

As to the ads “lacking basic civility,” well, excuse me but a cluster bomb in your backyard or an F-16 levelling your Gaza apartment building is a pretty uncivil message sent from the American people to Palestinians courtesy of the Israeli Air Force. Do the American people deserve the right to know about such things in bus ads? You bet.

But there is another deeply disturbing notion put forward by pro-Israel advocates in this message: that Israel=American Jews. That Americans somehow blame their fellow Jewish citizens for the acts of Israel. This is not only an offensive concept, it simply isn’t true.  America is not a place in which Jews will be blamed for Israel’s alleged crimes.  I reject this notion.

The anti-ad coalition views Israel and world Jewry as being inseparable, as being joined at the hip. But the vast majority of Jews in the world don’t accept this equation. I am a Jew, not an Israeli. Israel doesn’t speak for me, nor I for Israel. When Israel acts badly, I am not at fault nor do my fellow Americans see as such.

But it is convenient for Stand With Us and the rest of the Israel advocates to claim there is “no daylight” between Israel and us because then they can argue that hostility to Israeli policy=anti-Israelism and even anti=Semitism. Let me point out as clearly as I can: this notion is noxious. It is offensive. I utterly reject it as should all Americans and American Jews who care about Israel.

Israel doesn’t need all Jews to identify with it unconditionally. Israel need to become a normal nation in the Middle East. To do so, it needs to come to terms with its Arab neighbors. Having world Jewry’s identity confused with Israel’s will not help this process. It will indeed poison it. If you want to be a friend to Israel tell it to make peace with its neighbors and not presume all the Jews in the world think everything it does is honky dory.

King County’s executive has done a grave disservice to free speech in suspending these ads. Not only this, he has handed a victory to those sponsoring the ads.  He has given them the high ground. I hope they sue the county and get a judge to rule on this situation. It is really a contract dispute. The County signed a contract and then violated it. Grounds for reneging are specious. Metro approved those ads then took the Mideast Awareness Campaign’s $3,000.  After signing on the dotted line, they want to back out.  I’d love to see this tested in court.

Dow Constantine is a craven political coward.  Read the bullshit that he’s published under the name of the King County government:

“I have consulted with federal and local law enforcement authorities who have expressed concern, in the context of this international debate, that our public transportation system could be vulnerable to disruption.”

…Given the dramatic escalation of debate in the past few days over these proposed ads, and the submission of inflammatory response ads, there is now an unacceptable risk of harm to or disruption of service to our customers should these ads run.”

Yes, ads that are political speech and counter-speech will cause terrorism.  That’s what he’s essentially claiming.  Thank God, this is a view fully rejected by our nation’s Founders.  Speech is speech.  It is not an act and certainly not an illegal act.  What utter nonsense.  To retreat behind the skirts of a nameless federal bureaucrat who supposeldy told him to can an ad.  I want to know: which federal official did he consult and what did he say?  In fact, I’d like to file a Freedom of Information Act petition with Country government for every piece of internal information regarding this ad.  So, Dow Constantine, I’d be careful what you say and make sure it’s the truth.  You wouldn’t want to look awfully stupid if you mouthed nonsense like this, and were caught afterward doing so.

In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if David Horowitz’s counter ads were deliberately formulated in the most vitriolic terms possible, knowing that by doing so they would virtually force Metro to cancel the original ad, which was their real purpose.  Really, who cares what the counter ads would say as long as they didn’t explicitly advocate illegality or violence?  I’d like to see fools like Horowitz and his ilk voice anti-Muslim views on Seattle buses so the entire city can laugh them out of town.  What’s the cure to bad speech?  More speech.  Not no speech.  What Metro is doing is saying Seattleites are delicate flowers who can’t withstand the furor of political debate.  Somehow they must be protected from opinions that are too hot.  Otherwise, what?  What would happen?  Would the Seattle explode in WTO type riots merely because of a few bus ads?  C’mon.  Who’re they kidding.

You’ve heard conservatives deride the “Nanny State.”  Well, here in Seattle we have the “Nanny County” protecting residents from the bad, bad man saying bad, bad things.  I say let 1,000 flowers bloom.  So what if some are weeds?  A weed here or there won’t kill us.  It’s the garden of debate that is important.

The bullies who stand with Stand With Us are developing ever more belligerent, assaultive behavior in their jihad against the pro-peace movement.  Last week at one of its regular meetings, members of Jewish Voice for Peace were confronted with a number of hecklers who were also attempting to videotape the meeting against the express wishes of JVP.  I’m going to let JVP explain what happened:

Robin Dubner, Bay Area Stand With Us pogromist

…Up to a dozen members of San Francisco Voice for Israel/StandWithUs, a right-wing Israeli advocacy group with a documented track record of aggressively taunting and intimidating grassroots peace activists, attended a Bay Area Jewish Voice for Peace community meeting at a South Berkeley Senior Center.

…Wrapped in an Israeli flag, San Francisco Voice for Israel/StandWithUs (SFVI/SWU) member Robin Dubner, an Oakland based attorney, pepper-sprayed two JVP members in the eyes and face after they attempted to nonviolently block her ability to aggressively videotape the faces of JVP meeting attendees against their will. The members, Alexei Folger and Glen Hauer, were careful to make no physical contact with her or her camera prior to the attack.

Folger said, “I did not see it coming and all of a sudden there was gooey stuff all over my head and hand. I have never been pepper-sprayed before, my whole head felt like it was on fire.”

[At an earlier JVP street protest last June]…Caught on a widely seen videotape was a SFVI/SWU supporter pointing his camera to the faces of silent peace vigil participants while saying “You’re all being identified, every last one of you…we will find out where you live. We’re going to make your lives difficult. We will disrupt your families…”

For that reason, JVP members were particularly concerned about protecting the safety of meeting attendees and preventing the videotaping.

…Hauer, a retired attorney and member of San Francisco’s Congregation Sha’har Zahav who was treated for pepper spray explained, ”When one of the intruders [Dubner] continued standing and filming people despite the facilitator and facility manager repeatedly telling her that she could not, I first asked her politely to please put away the video camera, then several times told her to put away the camera, and then tried nonviolently to stay in front of the camera with my body, even when she shoved me. I could have taken the camera but decided instead to talk to the woman and to try to be the only person she photographed.”

…Dubner was accompanied by up to a dozen other StandWithUs members–including Dan Spitzer, Susan Meyers, Mike Harris, Bea Lieberman, Faith Meltzer, and Ross Meltzer–who repeatedly disrupted and aggressively videotaped the JVP meeting and JVP members against their will, wielding the cameras in an intimidating and belligerent manner. Despite repeated requests from the JVP meeting facilitator and other JVP activists to desist from recording and put away their videocameras, the SFVI/SWU activists – who had spread themselves throughout the room – continued to record and launch lengthy monologues while the presenters attempted to speak.

They were explicitly invited by the JVP facilitator to stay in the meeting and participate without videotaping but they refused. They also refused offers for floor time by the presenters. The manager of the facility asked the SFVI/SWU members to abide by JVP’s rules or face the police, and when SFVI/SWU refused to comply with JVP’s protocol, the police were called.

…When police arrived, Dubner was temporarily placed in handcuffs while other members of San Francisco Voice for Israel/StandWithUs remained inside the meeting blowing loud whistles, using videocameras to intimidate meeting attendees.

Dubner refused repeated requests by JVP members or the police to identify the substance she sprayed. A police officer later identified it as pepper spray and paramedics were called to help treat the victims of the attack. One of them, Alexei Folger, looked visibly red and swollen, as though she had been burned on more than half her face.

…This deliberate confrontation is part of a pattern of escalating intimidation and attacks against peace activists in the Bay Area. Earlier this year, the home of Tikkun Magazine editor Michael Lerner was covered in threatening posters. In addition to the videotaped harassment of Women in Black and JVP members, several months ago someone placed threatening graffiti outside of the JVP offices.

Americans for Peace Now and Meretz USA have denounced this attack. No word yet on when JVP will hear from the ADL or even J Street. Yes, yes, I know naysayers will say that these assaults are the acts of aberrant personalities who don’t represent the mainstream Jewish community or even Stand With Us. But look, Stand With Us is a deliberately confrontational organization. Perhaps Roz Rothstein or Rob Jacobs won’t douse anyone with pepper spray but clearly a significant number of their members will.  And they either cannot or will not control them.

This behavior is not exclusive to the Bay Area either. Here in Seattle, SWU board member David Brumer (he was even on the board of my shul at the time) wrote in an e mail to me that I should be spanked for my views. Brumer works as the geriatric social worker at the Kline-Galland Home, Seattle’s Jewish home for the aged. Neither the leadership of the Jewish community nor his employer finds anything untoward with Brumer’s verbally assaultive behavior.

Stand With Us plays an honored role in the Israel discourse in Seattle. At the Operation Cast Lead local community meeting, SWU’s Nevet Basker made the main presentation. Included on the Jewish federation’s Israel committee is Stand With Us. This is the same committee that organized the anti-Iran program last October at which the Israeli consul general and an Aipac flack with no experience dealing with Iran, spoke. They bring their dog and pony shows to Hebrew schools, synagogues, Hillels and universities with IDF veterans telling American Jews that Palestinians force them to kill them against their will. Stand With Us organizes gay tours to Israel to promote the notion that Israel is a paradise for gays–all this in order to juxtapose the supposed homophobia of Muslim countries.

When it all comes down to it, the behavior of Stand With Us is of a piece with Zionist Organization of America and Israel’s Im Tirzu and even mainstream Israel-apologists like Alan Dershowitz. The latter will not pepper spray anyone, but his rhetoric is no less brutal and inciting, as anyone who reads this blog will know from my posts about him.

There is a struggle for the heart and soul of the Jewish community and Israel going on in both places. I have no problem with Stand With Us existing in our community. But I have a problem with mainstream Jewish leaders refusing to recognize the quality of the people behind this group. They are thugs and pogromists. If you lie down with them you will get up with fleas.

Related articles

• APN Condemns Violence at JVP Event (peacenow.org)