Why Are the Left’s Favorite Muslims Anti-Semites?

On Monday, the organization that runs the now-annual anti-Trump Women’s March announced that, after a variety of complaints, it had severed its ties with three of its four former leaders: Bob Bland, Tamika Mallory, and Linda Sarsour. Presumably among those complaints were Mallory’s close association with Louis Farrakhan and Sarsour’s record of venomous hatred of the Jewish state. Siraj Hashmi comments on what followed:

Monday’s announcement should have been a turning point for a movement that has been tainted by the recurring strain of anti-Semitism. Instead, in a move both remarkable and disheartening, the Women’s March has managed to find yet another anti-Semitic Muslim woman to serve on its board.

Zahra Billoo [is] an attorney and the executive director of the San Francisco chapter of the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Billoo’s hateful and anti-Semitic tweets, particularly in relation to Israel, were brought back into focus when she was promoted to the Women’s March board. In a June 2012 tweet, [for instance], Billoo wrote, “Apartheid Israel kills children as a hobby.” . . . Billoo also made direct comparisons between Israel and the terrorist Islamic State (IS), posting on Twitter, “Who has killed, tortured, and imprisoned more people: apartheid Israel or IS?”

In the intervening days, the organization announced that it was removing Billoo from her position; but, to Hashmi, the incident points to a larger problem, which he sees as well in the progressive left’s elevation of Congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib and Minnesota’s Attorney General Keith Ellison:

Unfortunately, Billoo’s racist tweets do not stand alone. They seem to reflect the views of most prominent Muslims in America on the left. . . . [I]t’s disheartening, not least because not all Muslims are anti-Semitic. The left’s apparent alliance with American Muslims who hate Israel and are openly anti-Semitic is doing a great disservice to all Americans, including Americans who are Muslim like me, and is damaging to the fabric of our country.

Read more at Forward

More about: Anti-Semitism, Linda Sarsour, Muslim-Jewish relations, Rashida Tlaib, Women's March

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society