During interview with Joe Rogan, liberal comedian Bill Maher blasts woke left’s obsession with race, comparing it to the racism of the KKK.

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ADL and other Jewish organizations sue southern California district, accusing it of inserting antisemitic content into ethnic studies program.

By Menachem Wecker, JNS

The Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee, Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and Potomac Law Group filed a lawsuit against the Santa Ana Unified School District and its education board late on Friday.

The group alleges that the Orange County, Calif. district broke the law by inserting antisemitic content into new ethnic studies courses, and that it didn’t alert the public to or give it the opportunity to comment upon the hateful content in question.

The coalition further alleges that the school district didn’t adequately protect Jewish speakers, who were harassed at its meetings and subjected to anti-Jewish hatred.

The 86-page suit, which was provided to JNS over the weekend, was filed on behalf of the nonprofit Brandeis Center and its membership organization the Southern Californians for Unbiased Education.

Many of the ethnic studies courses that the district developed “contain controversial and antisemitic content that is—or would be, if properly made public—deeply disturbing to the local community,” the complaint states.

“The public was deprived of its legal opportunity to address the content of these courses before the board approved them,” it adds, “because the board failed to give the community the legally required opportunity to learn about the content and comment on it at public meetings of the board.”

‘Jewish question’

The suit states that an item on the agenda for an Oct. 4, 2022 meeting of the district’s committee that developed the ethnic studies courses in question was to “Address the Jewish question—do we have to create a response—consult with XITO, and the Ochoas.”

The suing coalition interprets the “Jewish question” as “potential objections from the Jewish community to antisemitic content included in the courses.”

“Instead of talking to the Jewish community, however, the committee chose to get advice from organizations with a history of antisemitism on how to ‘handle’ the Jews,” the complaint states.

XITO is “a controversial ethnic studies group that vocally defended the rejected versions of the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, and strongly objected to the removal of antisemitic materials from the final Model Curriculum,” it states. “XITO’s teachings and materials equate Israel with ‘settler colonialism’ and call Zionism ‘a nationalist, colonial ideology’ that has called for the ‘creation and expansion of Israel as a Jewish state in historic Palestine by any means necessary.’”

The coalition believes that the “Ochoas” refers to “Gilda and Enrique Ochoa, professors at Pomona College and Cal State Los Angeles, respectively, who are vocal supporters of the rejected draft model curriculum, including its antisemitic content.”

“Other minority groups were not treated as pariahs but still had to be carefully ‘vetted’ before providing input,” the complaint adds. “The Subcommittee Notes from its June 27, 2021, meeting say, ‘Yes can ask for help from Native American local community, but make sure to vet them.’”

‘Racist’ country

In late August, the education policy adviser to Calif. Gov. Gavin Newsom wrote to school leaders in the state cautioning them that some ethnic-studies materials that vendors had circulated discriminate against individuals or communities.

Some Jewish groups hailed the letter—which didn’t mention antisemitism in particular—but Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, director of AMCHA Initiative, told JNS it was “too little, too late.”

The state law AB 101, which California passed in October 2021, requires that public school graduates take at least one ethnic studies course in order to graduate. The law is slated to go into effect starting with the graduating class of 2029-2030.

Rachel Lerman, the Brandeis Center’s vice chair and general counsel, told JNS that the nonprofit shared the governor’s letter with counsel for the Santa Ana board the day it was issued.

“Counsel told us the next day that the letter did not change anything,” said Lerman. “Counsel told us the board had no plans to change the curricula despite the governor’s letter and our own letter to the board explaining why the curricula blatantly violates AB 101.”

Lerman told JNS that the Brandeis Center told the school board that it fully supports an ethnic studies program that “teaches students to appreciate the challenges and contributions of different ethnic groups in California.”

“Jewish organizations like ours know all too well the importance of courses like ethnic studies which aim to prevent bigotry and discrimination,” she said. “But when these courses are used to spread hate against a particular group, we need to speak out.”

The complaint also alleges that the Santa Ana district isn’t complying with Newsom’s letter.

“The governor’s letter directs school leaders to ‘closely scrutinize’ any curriculum or instructional materials for ethnic studies courses before they are selected to ensure they are free from bias, bigotry, or discrimination,” the suit states.

“This close scrutiny dovetails with the rules requiring that decisions be made after the public is given meaningful opportunity to review and comment on ethnic studies course curricula so that biased materials come to light.”

Santa Ana is one of several California school districts that haven’t complied, per the complaint.

“Based on the materials available to the public (and it is unclear whether this is everything), at least five ethnic studies courses” which the Santa Ana board approved, “including ethnic studies courses in world history, English and world geography, include one-sided anti-Israel screeds and propaganda,” it states.

The latter “teaches students—falsely—that Israel is an illegitimate, ‘settler colonial,’ ‘racist’ country that ‘stole’ land from a pre-existing country called Palestine and engages in unprovoked warfare against Palestinian Arabs,” it adds.

Antisemitic heckling

Beyond the board’s alleged decision to hide antisemitic components of its ethnic studies courses from the public, it also failed to protect Jewish attendees of its meetings, according to the complaint.

At a general board meeting on May 23, for example, “classic antisemitic tropes as well as threatening and violent language” were hurled at Jews and Israelis.

“Audience members hissed as the names of Jewish attendees were called, applause broke out in response to antisemitic slurs and during a presentation by two Jewish high school students, board meeting attendees shouted, ‘you’re racists’ and ‘you’re killers,’” according to the suit.

The complainants added that a meeting attendee followed a Jewish student to her car and harassed her, and the district’s security “was unable to provide sufficient protection or support.” Video of the board meeting also showed that attendees told a speaker wearing a yarmulke to “go home,” and that due to the board’s “insufficient response, attendees continued to interrupt and heckle Jewish speakers throughout the meeting.”

Lerman told JNS that the lawsuit is so urgent right now because all but one of the ethnic studies courses in question are currently being taught.

“We want the open meeting rules followed, so that the public is made aware of the content of these courses, as the law requires, and has a full opportunity to raise objections,” she said. “These courses are supposed to be vetted publicly, not pushed through under the radar. That is what our open meeting laws are all about.”

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It’s not why some may think.

By Danusha V. Goska, Front Page Magazine

I use the phrase “Judeo-Christian.” When I use it in a published piece, at least one disgruntled reader will shoot me a grumble of protest. “Judeo-Christian” is a controversial phrase. Since it raises hackles, why do I use it?

First, let’s look at the controversy. “Judeo-Christian” is so controversial that a 368-page scholarly book has been written about the history and usage of the phrase. Chicago University Press went so far as to call it “dangerous” and a “linguistic battlefield.” I guess that makes those of us who use the phrase warriors. Professor Mark Silk suggests that the phrase is “neo-fascist.” Others call it a “dog whistle myth for the far right.”

After Donald Trump used the phrase “Judeo-Christian” in 2017, Meredith Warren, Lecturer in Biblical and Religious Studies, University of Sheffield, insisted that she could read Trump’s mind, and expose to the world Trump’s hidden, nefarious intentions. Warren’s mission, as is so often the case in Woke rhetoric, is to take something positive and poison that something positive in the minds of the audience. “It might seem neighborly, even pluralistic, to include Judaism in a declaration of purported Western values,” Warren warns. You simple-minded people, she seems to say, you fall for a phrase that seems “neighborly” and “pluralistic” but really isn’t. I’m here to tutor you in Woke Think.

Let’s not slide right past Warren’s use of the words “purported Western values.” “Purported” means that Warren doubts that there is any such thing as the West, and, if the West really does exist, it does not have distinctive values. Anything distinctive about the West is probably bad, and not a real “value” that anyone should cherish.

Warren continues. Trump’s “‘Judeo-Christian values’ are about protecting Christians at the exclusion of others … It is only now that a new demographic of Muslim immigrants … have reached the West that Jews are being included … on someone else’s terms.”

Warren is insisting that Jews have always been excluded from American life. This news will surprise everyone from Haym Salomon to Philip Roth, from Louis B. Mayer to Louis Brandeis. It might also surprise Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, and their three children, who are all Jewish. Warren insists that the phrase “Judeo-Christian” was invented by Christians without the participation of Jews. It is used “on someone else’s” – that would be Christians’ – “terms.” This is false, as we will see, below.

Warren knows Trump’s real thoughts, feelings, and intentions. When “Trump uses the term what [he] really implies is an ‘us-versus-them’ division between the West and Islam. This is not about the inclusion of Jews in the values of these nations, then, but about the xenophobic exclusion of an ‘other.’” Warren insists that Donald Trump, who has had public and apparently mutually beneficial relationships with Jews and Muslims for decades, engaged in hate-filled dog whistles when he used the phrase “Judeo-Christian.”

Warren identifies, on Twitter, as “Dr. Meredith ‘Land Back’ Warren.” She further identifies as a Native American who wants her “land back” from Americans of European descent. In photos, Warren appears to be of European, not Native American, ancestry. Warren acknowledges some European ancestry, which she identifies as “settler.” A normal person, unaware of the dog whistle Warren is sending, might breeze right past Warren’s use of the word “settler” to damn her own, English ancestors, and her own blood.

“Settler” is a Woke ethnic slur used to demonize all European-descent diaspora populations, wherever they are found. Native Americans are “indigenous,” and “indigenous” is a privileged identity in the Woke caste system. In Warren’s case, the term “indigenous” is inaccurate. There were people living in what is now Canada when Warren’s Cree ancestors arrived. These vanished people are virtually nameless. They are dubbed the paleo-Eskimo, though they were different from more recently arrived populations. After what is now known as the Eskimo, aka Inuit arrived, the Paleo-Eskimo completely disappeared. By Warren’s own value system, today’s indigenous Canadians were “settlers” on land that “belonged to” the now vanished Paleo-Eskimo. And note that the Paleo-Eskimo have disappeared completely, whereas there are more Eskimo alive today than when Europeans first arrived. The “indigenous” Canadians Warren privileges may have been more efficient at physically and culturally erasing those occupying the land before their arrival than were Europeans.

Warren, a published and prize-winning scholar, participates in the historically revisionist Woke fiction that rejects evolution and the theory that Native Americans arrived in the Americas via a land bridge from Asia. Rather, Native Americans have always lived on “Turtle Island.” More recent arrivals, European-descent “settlers,” can only ever be seen as categorically different, that is as alien, genocidal, invaders. Warren rewrites history and participates in ethnic hatred, even as she condemns the phrase “Judeo-Christian” as a “problematic” exclusionary “dog whistle.”

And there’s more. The phrase “settler” is used to justify a genocidal approach to Jews living in Israel. Both history and genetics reveal that Jews have had a continuous presence in Israel for millennia. The Woke ignore that reality, and insist that Jews are “settlers” and Muslims are “indigenous.” There is no factual support for this position. Judaism predates Islam by a thousand years. The ancestors of today’s Palestinians were relatively recent arrivals. Historical revisionism is used to justify the call for Israel to cease to exist. Warren, a Woke woman who, ahistorically, condemns the phrase “Judeo-Christian” as intolerant of Jews, uses a Woke, anti-Semitic dog whistle, “settler,” that is used to justify a racist ideology, a false history, and a genocidal agenda against Jews living in Israel.

In short, look twice when someone tells you that the phrase “Judeo-Christian” is problematic. There may be an agenda behind their condemnation that is not immediately apparent. The speaker may be revising history. And those who insist that they are protecting Jews from the big, bad, threatening Christians, may very well be wolves in sheep’s’ clothing.

Judeo-Christian roots

Those “problematizing” the phrase “Judeo-Christian” travel back, linguistically, to its first usages. In the early nineteenth century, the prefix “Judeo-” might be used to describe Yiddish as “Judeo-German.” It was also used to describe those early followers of Jesus who had been born Jewish but came to be members of what would become a new religion; thus, they were “Judeo-Christians.” Eventually “Judeo-Christian” came to describe a posited worldview, cultural heritage, or ethical system first introduced to the world by Jews, inherited and shaped by Christians, and currently shared, to a limited but important extent, by Christians, Jews, and all participants in Western Civilization, no matter their provenance or their belief system. The Judeo-Christian tradition is frequently cited as one of the pillars of Western Civilization, along with Ancient Greece and the Enlightenment.

Anti-Semitism, along with other race hatreds, began to rise dramatically in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Anti-Semitism was rising even as Christian piety, certainly among the elite, was decreasing. In the new language of scientific racism, fueled by social Darwinism, Jews were characterized as a “race” apart from Europeans and others. Other groups were similarly suddenly distinct “races.” A 1924 US immigration law was supported by racists like Madison Grant who categorized Poles and Italians, for example, as members of distinct and inferior races. These diabolical trends would culminate in Nazism and the Holocaust. Nazis mass-murdered not just Jews, but also Poles, Soviet citizens, and Serbs, all members of so-called inferior Slavic races, and members of another so-called inferior race, Gypsies, as well as so-called racially worthless handicapped people and homosexuals.

In the 1930s and during World War II, Christians and Jews used “Judeo-Christian” as a form of resistance to murderous anti-Semitism at home and abroad, among Nazis and the KKK. These good people emphasized the many features that Christians and Jews share. The most important feature they shared during those cataclysmic years was their committed resistance to Nazism and their willingness to sacrifice blood and treasure to stop it.

According to Mark Silk, Professor of Religion in Public Life, Emeritus at Trinity College, “Ground zero of this means of affirming a shared religious basis for Western values was the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York — the site of the large convocations of liberal academics and intellectuals held annually from 1940 by the Conference on Science, Religion and Philosophy in Their Relation to the American Way of Life, Inc. Organized by Lyman Bryson of Columbia Teachers College and Jewish Theological Seminary’s [professor, provost, president, and chancellor] Louis Finklestein.” As Silk points out, Jews played a significant role in advancing the phrase “Judeo-Christian,” and they did so as part of a serious struggle against genocidal anti-Semitism. Contemporary Social Justice Warriors like Meredith Land Back Warren irresponsibly distort history and intentions when they erase this beneficent history of the phrase.

Silk reports that “Judeo-Christian” remained a popular tool of ideological warfare after World War II. Upon defeating the Axis, America entered another epochal conflict, that between freedom and capitalism in the West and totalitarian communism in the USSR and China. The Judeo-Christian tradition was opposed to Marxism. President Eisenhower referred to the Judeo-Christian tradition as a necessary foundation for Western values, the values that were at odds with communism.

Backlash

Times, and attitudes, changed. Some, not all, Jews came to hear in “Judeo-Christian” an anti-Semitic phrase. For these people, the phrase erased the distinctiveness of Judaism. The phrase, to their ears, signaled Christian “hegemony” and Christian “supersessionism.” Supersessionism is a theological concept. In this belief, the covenant between God and the Jews has been passed on to a “new” Israel, that is, Christians.

Some Jews came to feel that the US posed a new challenge to Jewish existence. American Jews, as opposed to their Ashkenazi ancestors, were less likely to follow the 613 commandments and many folkways that so distinguished Jews in the Old Country. Most American Jews trace their ancestry to the lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In those lands, for much of their history, Jews had their own official bodies regulating group member behavior. They spoke a different language, Yiddish, than non-Jews. They wore distinctive clothing and hairstyles. They worked in different fields than non-Jews. Marriage to a non-Jew might be followed by a period of mourning for the “lost” community member.

American Jews, by contrast, typically eat, dress, wear their hair, and speak like other, non-Jewish Americans. In 2020, Pew reported that, “Fully 42% of all currently married Jewish respondents indicate they have a non-Jewish spouse. Among those who have gotten married since 2010, 61% are intermarried.” “Jews in U.S. are far less religious than Christians and Americans overall,” Pew reported in 2021. Some call assimilation and lessened religiosity a “Silent Holocaust.” There is a Jewish folk expression, “You are not Jewish until your grandchildren are Jewish.” Assimilation to mainstream culture threatens that duty. A phrase like “Judeo-Christian” could be heard as the last straw of assimilation. “No,” those Jews who don’t like the phrase will protest. “We are not part of some melting pot identity. We are our own thing, separate from you.”

There are Christians who protest the phrase as well. Just like the Jews who don’t like the phrase, these Christians want to emphasize the differences between Judaism and Christianity. Some Christians who protest the phrase are clearly anti-Semitic. Some Gnostic Christians in the early days of Christianity wanted a divorce from the Old Testament. Their position is denounced as a heresy by mainstream Christians.

Some who protest the phrase are themselves atheists who insist on perpetuating invidious and inaccurate stereotypes of the Old Testament as irrational and its God as vengeful, as opposed to the God of the New Testament, who is stereotyped as a warm and cuddly Hippie figure. Richard Dawkins, one of the leading New Atheists, typified this approach when he wrote “The God of the Old Testament is … jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

In response to ignorant attitudes like Dawkins’, scholars like Dennis Prager and Dr. Jordan Peterson have disseminated very popular explorations of the truth of the Old Testament. One YouTube viewer offers praise of such material. “Watching JP’s lectures has been one of the most cathartic experiences of my life. His explanations have fundamentally changed the way I see the world. I am now a better man because I have regained the most valuable thing a human can have in their life: meaning.” Of course not all atheists reject the phrase “Judeo-Christian.” Douglas Murray, who identifies as an atheist, said, “The more atheists think on these things, the more we may have to accept that the concept of the sanctity of human life is a Judeo-Christian notion which might very easily not survive Judeo-Christian civilization.”

Recent years have seen a new phenomenon. Ever since the sixties counter-culture, it has been cool to be oppositional. The most recent manifestation of leftist, oppositional chic is Woke. “Christian” has become an insult, along with “white,” “hetero,” “American,” “cis-gendered,” and “male.” In Woke environments, being a white, heterosexual, cis-gendered, American, Christian male is the lowest possible life-form. There are Wokesters among both Christians and Jews. These folks do everything they can to dress their religion in Woke-friendly costumes. There are Christians who insist that Jesus was a socialist and that Mary, his mother, in the Magnificat, expresses a Che-Guevara-like revolutionary call. Similarly, there are Jews who revile the phrase “Judeo-Christian” for a new reason. These Woke Jews do not reject the phrase on theological grounds. Rather, they reject it because they adopt the Woke position that Christianity is uncool, and they want to be as far removed from Christianity’s uncoolness as possible.

Perhaps the height of this attitude was reached by actress Sandra Bernhard in 2008, when she, during a performance at Washington DC’s Theater J, criticized then-vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Palin was a punching bag for the Left. Obscene and misogynist language was used to denigrate Palin’s speech, her appearance, and her children, including a mentally retarded child. Bernhard’s anti-Palin rant was perhaps the most extreme example of anti-Palin rhetoric. Bernard said, “Sarah Palin jumps on the s— and points her fingers at other women. Turncoat b—-! Don’t you f—— reference Old Testament, b—-! … You stay with your new Goyisha crappy shiksa funky bulls—! Don’t you touch my Old Testament, you b—-! … You whore in your cheap fuckin’ New Vision cheap-ass plastic glasses!”

Bernhard insisted that a Christian woman, Sarah Palin, had no right to “my Old Testament.” Many Jews in ancestral shtetls would not certify Bernhard as a scriptural scholar. She is a lesbian, and her public behavior is often controversial. She posed nude for Playboy. In 1995, on TV, in she spat in the face of Christian and conservative Republican John Lofton saying to him, “If I had you, you’d be an abortion.”

A more recent, less controversial, but equally Woke rejection of the phrase “Judeo-Christian tradition” comes from James Loeffler, the Jay Berkowitz Professor of Jewish History at the University of Virginia. In an August, 2020 piece for The Atlantic, Loeffler objected to “conservative Christian” readings of the concept of human rights, as voiced by Mike Pompeo. Loeffler quotes Pompeo as saying that “America’s understanding of human rights” emerges from “fundamental moorings of the Judeo-Christian tradition on which this country was founded.” Loeffler scoffs. “That tradition never existed”! Loeffler insists. It’s “mythical.” It’s just a “political invention”! “An ecumenical marketing meme for combatting godless communism.” What appears to be so embracing, so tolerant, is in fact just another big, fat, American scam! It is really wickedly exclusive not Woke and inclusive. “Muslims, Native Americans, and other non-Western religious communities, but also atheists and secularists of all persuasions” are all left out in the cold, bitter air of American intolerance, preceded by “centuries of Christian anti-Semitic persecution,” and later in the same article, “thousands of years of persecution.” Oh, yeah, and what about “America’s postwar quest for global primacy in a decolonizing world.”

“American Jews viewed their ‘Judeo’ hyphen as little more than a fig leaf masking an unabashedly Christianist agenda,” Loeffler writes. Loeffler chooses to use “Christianist” instead of “Christian.” If being a “Christian” is bad, being a “Christianist” is even worse. Worse yet is an “unabashed Christianist.” “Judeo-Christian” which seems to imply brotherhood, is really anti-Semitic. And not just. “The phrase appears with regularity in rhetorical attacks on Islam.” The “Christian” part of “Judeo-Christian” is really the problem. “The catchphrase has failed to shed its Christian religious residue. Living through an unprecedented era of anti-Semitism, American Jews no longer wish to play the role of guest stars in someone else’s theological drama.”

To Loeffler, The Atlantic, and its elite readers, the “Christian religion” is a bad thing that, like a stain on underwear, leaves an undesirable “residue.” And Loeffler attributes todays’ “unprecedented” “anti-Semitism” to Christians. This is false; the anti-Semitism in Europe is largely a product of recent Muslim immigration. Violent and sometimes deadly anti-Semitism in the US is disproportionately a product of socioeconomic and race-related factors; for example see the 2019 Jersey City terror attack that left six dead. The assailants were believers in the Black Hebrew Israelite myth. According to this ideology, America’s blacks are the real Jews. Those who identify as Jewish today “stole” Jewishness from black people. Black Muslim Louis Farrakhan is a major proponent of this anti-Semitic ideology.

The idealogues who object to “Judeo-Christian” because it is not Woke are anti-Western. In the past, they would have been the relativists who said, “All cultures are equally worthy. The West should not be chauvinist.” They have since jettisoned that relatively anodyne position. They’ve adopted a newer, more toxic stance. The West is just plain bad and BIPOC, who, in this version, are ahistorically excluded from the West, are superior. BIPOC stands for “black, indigenous, people of color.” The same people who reject “Judeo-Christian” will tell you that the Enlightenment was nothing special, or, worse, that it oppressed BIPOC. In 2018, Jamelle Bouie, now a New York Times columnist, insisted that colonialism, slavery, imperialism, and racism can all be blamed on the Enlightenment. He cited major scholars in his indictment. They will also tell you that the Ancient Greeks didn’t originate anything that hadn’t already happened in Africa. These folks don’t object to “Judeo-Christian” because it’s too Christian or somehow, in some hidden way, secretly an anti-Semitic dog whistle. They hate the phrase because they want to end Western Civilization and replace it with a Marxist Utopia.

I use the phrase “Judeo-Christian tradition” because it is an accurate phrase that refers to a real phenomenon. To those like Sandra Bernhard who insist that a Jewish person like herself has nothing in common with a “goyisha Shiksa” like myself, I must say, sorry, you are wrong. Of course there are obvious differences between Bernhard and Palin, or Woody Allen and Matt Walsh. But when we use the phrase “Judeo-Christian” we aren’t comparing Bernhard and Palin, Allen and Walsh. Rather, we are talking about vast world cultures and their impact on human perceptions and behavior over the course of thousands of years.

Christianity accepts Jewish scripture. From the Vatican: “The sacred scriptures of the Jewish people are a fundamental part of the Christian bible … A perennial manifestation of this link [between Christians and Jews] to their beginnings is the acceptance by Christians of the Sacred Scriptures of the Jewish people as the Word of God addressed to themselves as well. Indeed, the Church has accepted as inspired by God all the writings contained in the Hebrew Bible.” This complete acceptance of another faith’s scripture is remarkable. It isn’t reflected in other world religions. Hinduism does not accept the Qur’an. Buddhism doesn’t accept the Bible. Islam does not accept the Rig Veda.

Sarah Palin inherited the Old Testament from Jews, who passed it on to non-Jewish converts, over the course of two thousand years. Christians believe in the truth of the Old Testament. Christians feel themselves to be bound by the Ten Commandments. Jesus was a Jew. His followers were Jews. The authors of the New Testament were Jews, with the possible exception of Luke, who may or may not have been a Hellenized Jew. The New Testament authors wrote in the tradition of the Old Testament. The New American Bible, like other Bibles, is replete with footnotes connecting New Testament texts with parallels in the Old Testament. See, for example, Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, a central Christian text. Footnotes refer the reader to parallel texts in the Old Testament books of Psalms, Isaiah, Exodus, and Deuteronomy. The final New Testament book, Revelation, is notoriously difficult to understand. That is because it, line by line, word by word, cites material from the Old Testament, predominantly the book of Daniel, but also Ezekial, Psalms, and Isaiah. Without an understanding of those works, the Book of Revelation is incomprehensible.

As I wrote the above paragraph, I could hear my friend Alex objecting. Don’t call the Hebrew Bible the “Old Testament,” Alex will say. But that’s the conventional term for the material and any use of a different name will obscure more than it clarifies, I respond. Alex will then go on to point out that the sharing of material has not prevented Christians from persecuting Jews. I never said it did, I insist to Alex, who is present, right now, only in my imagination, but who will surely raise all these objections if this piece is published. To Alex I say, yes, Alex, Christians have persecuted Jews. We acknowledge that, we repent, and we are doing everything we can to prevent persecution’s recurrence. There have been Christians working, for millennia, against persecution of Jews, from Gregory the Great to Bishop Cosmas to Wiktoria Ulma. Further, to Alex, and to anyone else who argues that persecution erases any shared cultural heritage, I submit the following analogies. Americans and Englishmen fought a bloody war and committed atrocities against each other. The violence of the Revolution did nothing to change the fact that both spoke English. Anyone studying the history of English would not rule out British or American English because of violence between the two populations. Protestants and Catholics managed to kill between four and twelve million people during the Thirty Years War. That slaughter does not change the fact that Protestants and Catholics share significant portions of their cultural heritage. To subsume Protestants and Catholics under the one word “Christian” is no attempt to rewrite history, to sweep historic wrongs under the carpet, to turn Protestants into Papists or to wrest rosaries from Catholics. It is merely culturally accurate.

Christians and Jews share Genesis. Given that Genesis is so well known, it may be assumed to be a standard creation text, similar to other creation texts around the world. Cultural relativists insist on this; Genesis is just like various Pagan creation stories. This is nonsense. Genesis is unique, argued the late Bible scholar Yehezkel Kaufmann. Kaufmann pointed out that Pagan creation stories include a feature that is absent from Genesis, that is, “a realm of being prior to the gods and above them, upon which the gods depend, and whose decrees they must obey.” Genesis gives us something found in no other creation myth: an omnipotent, omniscient, all-loving God who creates everything that exists ex nihilo and declares his creation “good.” This God creates the ancestors of all human life on earth. Jewish commentators on the Adam and Eve story insist that it renders all humans equally dignified. Nathan Ausubel paraphrases that interpretation thus,

“Why did God create only one Adam and not many at a time? He did this to demonstrate that one man in himself is an entire universe. Also He wished to teach mankind that he who kills one human being is as guilty as if he had destroyed the entire world. Similarly, he who saves the life of one single human being is as worthy as if he had saved all of humanity. God created only one man so that people should not try to feel superior to one another and boast of their lineage in this wise: ‘I am descended from a more distinguished Adam than you.’ He also did this so that the heathen should not be able to say that, since many men had been created at the same time, it was conclusive proof that there was more than one God. Lastly, He did this in order to establish His own power and glory. When a maker of coins does his work he uses only one mould and all the coins emerge alike. But the King of Kings, blessed be His name, has created all mankind in the mould of Adam, and even so no man is identical to another. For this reason each person must respect himself and say with dignity: ‘God created the world on my account. Therefore let me not lose eternal life because of some vain passion!’”

Further, God, alone among all his creations, created the human being in His own image. Genesis gives us the roots of individuality and human rights. The rest of the Old Testament reflects this emphasis on the value of each individual human person, as a unique individual, not merely a resource for his or her tribe, or a representative of an archetype. There is no other ancient literature that so consistently respects and captures the lives of named, average men and women. Greek literature gives us individuals, but they tend to be beautiful, powerful royalty. In the Old Testament, even a slave woman, Hagar, has a name and a personality, as does a starving widow, Ruth, and a mother, Hannah, who misses her absent son and makes him a little garment every year, guessing what size will fit him as he grows out of her sight. As a woman I am especially amazed by Leah, a woman less attractive than her sister, who is identified as the first person in history to praise and thank God. These are average women, and they have names and personalities. In other ancient material, women are archetypes, like Corn Mother, or royalty, like Sita from the Ramayana.

If you turn back the clock and erase the Old Testament, Western Civilization never develops. What would replace it? Myths like the foundational creation myth of Hinduism. In the Rig Veda, Parusha, the Primal Man, is sacrificed. From his mouth, the Brahman is created. From his arms, the warrior caste. From his thighs, the merchants. From his feet, the servants. Untouchables did not emerge from this body; they are outside of the human moral universe, and are subjected to uncounted abuses.

The individualism so typical of the West is not a feature of Hinduism or Buddhism. In those beliefs, individualism is an illusion and the goal is to overcome that illusion and to lose the self as a droplet loses its individuality when it enters the ocean. In Hinduism, the route to that liberation is dharma, carrying out the tasks assigned to a given caste. In Buddhism, the route is meditation. In simple language, the Judeo-Christian tradition is different from the Hindu-Buddhist tradition.

Anyone objecting to the term “Judeo-Christian tradition” would benefit from reading the Twenty-Four Filial Exemplars. Confucian-influenced tales prize the self-sacrifice of children to their parents, including abusive step-parents. A naked boy lays on a frozen river to melt the ice and acquire carp to feed an abusive step-parent. This is virtue. A man quits his job, travels to his birthplace, and consumes his father’s excrement as part of health care for his ill father. He prays to the gods, offering to die in his father’s place. This is virtue. Other children slice off bits of their own flesh and feed it to their parents to improve their parents’ health. This is called gegu and in Confucian literature it is virtuous. Confucian values contribute to ordered, law-abiding societies in China, Korea, Vietnam, and Japan. Confucianism is very different from the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Some advance the term “Abrahamic” as a Woke-approved replacement for “Judeo-Christian.” They like it because it is “inclusive.” Note that they do not like it because it is accurate, because it is not. In response to a question from me, Islam expert Robert Spencer wrote to me in July, 2023, “‘Abrahamic’ is misleading and useless as a classification for Judaism, Christianity and Islam because Islam lays claim to exclusivity and claims that the teachings of Judaism and Christianity constitute twisting and adulteration of the original faith of Abraham. In the Qur’an (60:4), Abraham says that there will be enmity and hatred between him and his people forever until they worship Allah alone. This enmity applies to the Jews and Christians who fondly assume they can achieve some accord with Muslims based on their shared Abrahamic origins.”

Again, the New Testament was written by Jews (with the possible exception of Luke). It was written in the land of Israel. It makes constant reference to the Old Testament; in fact it is incomprehensible without the Old Testament as key. Its main character, Jesus, was an observant Jew, descended from King David.

Nothing like the above can be said about Islam or the Qur’an. The Qur’an we know is in Arabic; there is debate about the language of the original material from which the Qur’an was compiled. The Qur’an was initially embraced by Arabs who had little cultural or genetic relationship to Jews of the land of Israel. The Qur’an is unstinting in its condemnation of Jews and Christians. The Qur’an takes bits and pieces of pre-existing Jewish, Christian, and Pagan material, garbles that material, and uses it to support a new religion, Islam. This new religion is very different from Judaism or Christianity. One must read the entire Qur’an to understand how completely it diverges from the Old and New Testaments. It is not, by any stretch, in the same category. Muslims recognize this. Modern Muslims condemn the entire Bible. Mere possession of a Bible is against the law, or at least highly dangerous in several Muslim countries.

One way to illustrate how a tradition impacts a population is to look at rates of female survival, as shown in sex ratio, and rates of female genital mutilation, child marriage, female literacy, honor killing, and fertility rates. On these objective measures, Muslim countries score poorly. They are frequently named among the worst countries on earth for women. Features other than Islam may not link these “worst” countries. Afghanistan is an arid, landlocked, and mountainous country in Central Asia. Sudan is on a coast in Africa. Yemen is on the Arabian peninsula. Malaysia, a humid island nation where female genital mutilation is increasing rather than decreasing, is in Southeast Asia. The feature that links these diverse countries is not language or history or terrain. It is Islam. By objective measures, Islam damages the lives of women and girls in a way that the Judeo-Christian tradition does not. The phrase “Abrahamic” should not be used to sweep the ugliness of gender apartheid under the rug. Further, largely Hindu and Muslim India, and Confucian-influenced China have “lost” one hundred million females to various culling methods like sex-selective abortions. There are no comparable statistics from nations influenced by the Judeo-Christian tradition.

“Judeo-Christian” means something. It doesn’t mean that one is an anti-Semite or a philo-Semite. It doesn’t mean that one is a xenophobe, an Islamophobe, or a fascist. “Judeo-Christian” is an accurate term that reflects a significant cultural trend that has existed for millennia. The term doesn’t even convey that that cultural trend is superior, or inferior to any other cultural trend. Woke “problematizes” that which it hopes to erase and replace with Marxist Utopia. We don’t have to knuckle under to that. To do so would be to abandon the best features of our shared Judeo-Christian tradition.

Danusha Goska is the author of God Through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery.

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Some archaeologists say the word ‘mummy’ undermines the humanity of ancient tyrants who enslaved Jews.

By Andrew Stiles, The Washington Free Beacon

What’s the problem? Mummies are being objectified.

What happened? According to CNN Style, a number of British museums have stopped using the word “mummy” to describe the mummified remains of ancient Egyptians on display.

Why? To encourage museum visitors “to think of the individual who once lived,” and to combat negative depictions in popular culture of mummies as “supernatural monsters.” Additionally, some museums have expressed concern that “mummy” is a relic of “imperial and colonial thinking and actions that were based on racial and racist understandings of the world.”

What’s the solution? Using alternative terms such as “mummified person” or “mummified remains of [the person’s name, if known]” to promote cultural sensitivity and inclusion.

Background: Mummification was an elaborate and expensive process typically reserved for Egyptian pharaohs, members of the nobility, and government officials. These authoritarian rulers and their wealthy allies are best known for their prolific use of slave labor and their animosity toward Jews.

What they’re saying: “By using terms such as ‘mummified person,’ we can begin to change our outlook and see these remains for what they really are—not objects or curiosities, but real humans who were once alive and had very specific beliefs about how their bodies should be treated after death.”

—Jo Anderson, assistant keeper of archaeology at the Great North Museum: Hancock in Newcastle

Bottom line: Don’t judge a mummy by its sarcophagus. In other words, we must always respect the humanity and cultural proclivities of long-dead aristocratic slaveowners.

This does not apply, obviously, to long-dead aristocratic slaveowners of British or European descent who played a role in the expansion of colonial empires or the founding of the United States.

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Democratic witnesses in House hearing push narrative that men can get pregnant.

By Lauren Marcus, World Israel News

Democrat witnesses testifying in front of a House committee on abortion rights refused to provide a definition of the word “woman” and said that men are capable of becoming pregnant, an inaccurate and biologically impossible statement.

According to a Fox News report, Rep. Dan Bisho (R-NC) asked Aimee Arrambide, the executive director of the abortion rights nonprofit Avow Texas, to define the term “woman.”

“I believe that everyone can identify for themselves,” she demurred.

Arrambide then answered ”yes” after Bishop asked if she believed “that men can become pregnant and have abortions.”

In postmodern discourse, the belief that sex is a social construct and not a biological definition has gained popularity.

Beyond believing that people can choose their gender or identify as the opposite gender to which they were born, some insist that biological markers distinguishing men from women are either irrelevant or not real.

Because there is a tiny number of women who become pregnant that self-identify as male, some advocates believe that any references in discussions or literature linking femininity to motherhood or pregnancy are inherently offensive.

Dr. Yashica Robinson, another Democrat witness at the hearing, appeared to subscribe to that line of thinking.

Bishop asked Robinson why she uses she/her pronouns, and how she defines “woman.”

“I think it’s important that we educate people like you about why we’re doing the things that we do,” Robinson responded, according to Fox News.

“And so the reason that I use she and her pronouns is because I understand that there are people who become pregnant that may not identify that way. And I think it is discriminatory to speak to people or to call them in such a way as they desire not to be called.”

Bishop pushed Robinson to explain what a woman is, and she declined to do so.

“Yes, I’m telling you, I’m a woman,” Robinson said.

“Is that as comprehensive a definition as you can give me?” Bishop asked.

“That’s as comprehensive a definition as I will give you today,” Robinson said

Some feminist advocates have noted that the word “woman” is disappearing from the conversation around pregnancy, with the Biden administration using the term “birthing people” when referring to mothers in a federal budget proposal.

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Teacher hiding in fear after being suspended for showing a picture of the Prophet Muhammed to students.

By Paul Shindman, World Israel News

A grammar school in England is at the center of a storm of controversy after a teacher was suspended for showing students a caricature of the Prophet Muhammed, the BBC reported Thursday.

The religious studies teacher at the Batley Grammar School was suspended last week after reportedly showing students an “offensive” cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad taken from the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. In a terror attack on the Paris office of Charlie Hebdo in 2015, Islamic terrorists murdered 13 people claiming the cartoon was blasphemy and an offense to Muslims.

The teacher was suspended for showing the cartoon and was “in hiding, fearing for their life” after his name was circulated on social media following the suspension, the report said.

The suspension sparked days of mass protests outside the school gates.

An online petition demanding the teacher be reinstated has so far received 70,000 signatures. It was posted anonymously by a person claiming to be a student at the school.

“The RS Teacher was trying to educate students about racism and blasphemy. He warned the students before showing the images and he had the intent to educate them,” the petition preamble stated. “He does not deserve such large repercussions.”

“He is not racist and did not support the Islamophobic cartoons in any manner. This has got out of hand and due to this, students have missed out on lessons because of ‘peaceful’ protestors,” the petitioner wrote.

Protests were held outside the school grounds by groups both for and against the suspension, forcing the school headmaster to issue an apology to try and calm the situation.

“The school unequivocally apologizes for using a totally inappropriate image in a recent religious studies lesson,” Batley headteacher Gary Kibble said in a statement, adding “it should not have been used.”

“The member of the staff has also relayed their most sincere apologies,” Kibble said. “We have immediately withdrawn teaching on this part of the course, and we’re reviewing how we go forward with the support of all our communities represented in our school.”

Local resident Abdul Ravat, whose daughter attended the school, told the BBC demographics have changed and the majority of the school is of a South Asian origin and of Muslim faith, “so you’ve got to factor that into the equation,” he said.

His daughter who is now in college said her “teacher did have a different take on lessons, but he was still a good teacher.”

Batley is located some 260 kilometers (160 miles) north of London and the school and was founded in 1612. The trust that runs five schools in Batley said it would hold an inquiry into the incident before taking any actions.

“We believe the right way forward is for an independent investigation to review the context in which the materials [which caused offense] were used, and to make recommendations in relation to the Religious Studies curriculum so that the appropriate lessons can be learned and action taken, where necessary,” the Batley Multi Academy Trust said on its website.

Last year in France a Muslim teenager beheaded a teacher for showing the same cartoon in a school near Paris. It later turned out a French schoolgirl lied about the events that led to his beheading.

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Sheet music can be linked to a “colonialist representational system,” the faculty alleged.

By Lauren Marcus, World Israel News

After months of global unrest and rioting sparked by the killing of George Floyd in May 2020, universities and companies throughout the world have rolled out critical-race theory inspired programs.

Many of these initiatives, which are ostensibly meant to inspire tolerance, have come under fire for promoting extreme ideas, including anti-white racism.

Now, Oxford University has joined the trend, by launching a revamp of their music department in an effort to make the program “less white.”

According to a report from The Telegraph, professors are striving to make a number of dramatic changes to “decolonize” the department’s syllabi.

Internal documents seen by The Telegraph included a claim from the faculty that sheet music, also known as musical notation, has not “shaken off its connection to its colonial past.”

Sheet music can be linked to a “colonialist representational system,” the faculty alleged.

Continuing to teach sheet music would be a “slap in the face” for non-white students, the faculty wrote, so the practice should be dropped entirely.

The document suggested that by teaching European-focused music and fundamental practices like sheet music, the department was guilty of being “complicit in white supremacy.”

Although Oxford’s music department offers multiple courses focused on non-European music, faculty said the current curriculum focuses too much on “white European music from the slave period.”

Traditionally, undergraduate students pursuing a degree in music were required to take courses in practical application, such as learning to play the piano or conduct orchestras.

The faculty explained that these skills “structurally center [around] white European music” and cause “students of color great distress,” so they should no longer be required.

A spokesperson from Oxford told music website Classic FM, “We are exploring ways to enhance our students’ opportunities to study a wider range of non-western and popular music from across the world than is currently on offer, as well as music composition, the psychology and sociology of music, music education, conducting, and much more.”

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They think it’s wrong that someone who isn’t black or Arab — or at least brown-skinned — is getting the part.

By Jonathan S. Tobin, JNS

I’m not sure the world needed another movie about Cleopatra. And the career arc of Israeli actress Gal Gadot, who became an international superstar with her “Wonder Woman” films, isn’t something that matters all that much in the general scheme of things.

Still, the announcement that Gadot would team up with Patty Jenkins, the director of her hit comic-book movie, to do a film produced by Paramount Pictures (with Gadot’s production company also playing a part) about the legendary queen of Egypt sent Twitter into a tizzy.

The buzz on social media about the project revealed that a lot of people think Gadot has no business stepping in the footsteps of Hollywood legends Claudette Colbert and Elizabeth Taylor in playing the ultimate vamp role. They think it’s wrong that someone who isn’t black or Arab — or at least brown-skinned — is getting the part.

A lot of those who spoke out on this issue simply resent Gadot for being Israeli, a veteran of the Israel Defense Force and that her family immigrated to the Jewish state from Eastern Europe (her maternal grandparents were Holocaust survivors, though her father is a sixth-generation sabra).

But their beef isn’t just rooted in hatred for Jews and Israelis. Speaking in the language of race theory and intersectionalism, critics say the film is yet another act of cultural appropriation by colonizers in which the heritage of indigenous peoples of Africa and the Middle East are being stolen by whites.

That’s why this dustup isn’t just the usual nonsensical hype coming out of the entertainment world about a movie that is still in the planning stages.

It matters because the debate about the prospective film illustrates the way ideological myths about race have distorted our public discourse and, more importantly, the way popular culture operates. The point being if studio heads and their sources of funding fear being “canceled” for casting a white Jewish woman as Cleopatra because the woke world demands a “person of color” in that role so much that they dumped Gadot, then it will be an important turning point not just for Hollywood but for so much else, too.

It would be one more indication of how broken our culture has become because of the growing dominance of far-left ideologues that peddle lies about both the past and the present.

The first point to be made about the film is that, contrary to the nonsense we’re hearing from Gadot’s critics, the real Cleopatra was neither black nor Arab. She and the other members of the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt were descendants of the first Ptolemy, who was one of Alexander the Great’s companions and generals. He and his successors were Macedonian Greeks.

Over the course of the 250 years during which his family ruled Egypt, they almost always married their siblings or cousins. That produced a lot of the usual problems with incest but it also, despite attempts to try and justify the depiction of Cleopatra as a black woman, ensured that the last of the Ptolemys was as European as the first.

Nor was Cleopatra a figure from the period before the writing of history. We know a great deal about the details of her life. She was one of the most famous persons in the world at the time and, via her romances (with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony) and political intrigues that led to her death and the end of the Egyptian monarchy, right at the center of the Roman civil war that determined the fate of the Mediterranean for centuries.

There are coins with her portrait, and though they are not the same thing as a photo, they make it obvious that speculation about her ancestry is foolish. All of which is to say that having a native Israeli or any other white woman from a Mediterranean background is entirely in keeping with a desire to tell her story in a way that doesn’t entirely contradict history.

Of course, the entertainment world rarely lets facts get in the way of a good story or a twist on a historic tale that they think might be a box-office blockbuster. So it’s a testament to Gadot’s enormous popularity that a major studio would dare to contradict those who spew Afrocentric myths about Cleopatra being black or those who claim she is an Arab. Indeed, although Twitter storms of outrage may routinely impact the decisions made by film and TV executives, the prospect of being able to cast the “Wonder Woman” star means more to them.

As such, Gadot is something of a symbol of the general failure of the BDS movement. Though the woke that dominate academia have made inroads in mainstream journalism, Israel’s enormously successful “startup nation” and booming economy have shown itself impervious to the efforts of those who wish to wage economic war on the Jewish state.

And as much as Gadot’s earning power may be enough to defeat her detractors, we shouldn’t underestimate the influence of those who propagate the myths that demanded the cancelation of her film project.

There’s no way to know whether Gadot’s Cleopatra will have any artistic merit. Still, we should cheer her ability to withstand her critics’ abuse and play a role for which the glamorous actress is eminently qualified.

In the distorted mindset of intersectionalism, Jews are not an indigenous people in the Middle East or of Israel, but foreign white colonial oppressors, regardless of the fact that the majority of them are of Middle Eastern origin.

Demanding that only “people of color” be depicted in historical epics isn’t a form of affirmative action for black or brown actors, but a measure aimed at silencing accurate narratives in favor of falsified history. The aim of such efforts — and related attacks on scholars and authors—isn’t diversity; it’s revisionism based on the false premises of critical race theory that seeks to divide us in a bigoted manner that contradicts attempts to bridge the divide between groups and to spread tolerance.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS—Jewish News Syndicate. Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin.

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Nearly 6 in 10 (58%) of staunch liberals feel they can say what they believe.

By Judith Bergman, Gatestone Institute

A recent survey of 2,000 Americans by Cato Institute/YouGov found that 62 percent of Americans say “the political climate these days prevents them from saying things they believe because others might find them offensive.”

This is up from 2017, when 58 percent agreed with this statement. “Majorities of Democrats (52%), independents (59%) and Republicans (77%) all agree they have political opinions they are afraid to share.”

People who defined themselves as staunch liberals self-censored considerably less:

“Strong liberals stand out, however, as the only political group who feel they can express themselves. Nearly 6 in 10 (58%) of staunch liberals feel they can say what they believe.”

If truly representative, the numbers are chilling: The U.S. nominally enshrines the most far-reaching freedom of speech, thanks to the First Amendment of the Constitution. Yet the average number of Americans who self-censor is slowly beginning to approximate that of Germany, where a survey on self-censorship a year ago concluded:

“Nearly two-thirds of citizens are convinced that ‘today one has to be very careful on which topics one expresses oneself’, because there are many unwritten laws about what opinions are acceptable and admissible.”

The difference, however, is that Germany has some of the most draconian hate speech laws in Europe. The U.S. does not have any hate speech laws.

“Nearly a third (32%) of employed Americans say they are worried about missing out on career opportunities or losing their job if their political opinions became known,” according to the Cato survey.

“Americans across the political spectrum share these concerns: 31% of liberals, 30% of moderates, and 34% of conservatives are worried their political views could get them fired or harm their career trajectory… Those with the highest levels of education are most concerned. Almost half (44%) of Americans with post‐​graduate degrees say they are worried their careers could be harmed if others discovered their political opinions, compared to 34% of college graduates, 28% of those with some college experience, and 25% of high school graduates”.

There is a noticeable difference between highly educated Democrats and highly educated Republicans: “About a quarter of Republicans with high school degrees (27%) or some college (26%) worry their political opinions could harm them at work — but this number increases to 40% among Republican college graduates and 60% of those with post‐​graduate degrees.”

The survey also found that younger Americans under 30 were more concerned than older Americans that their political opinions could harm their careers.

That young people especially are afraid to speak their minds — the survey suggests this is because they “have spent more time in America’s universities” — is particularly worrying for the future robustness of American democracy. It is, however, not surprising. American campuses have steered a “leftist” course for decades. The tilt has had familiar consequences: the proliferation on campus of “safe spaces,” trigger warnings, de-platforming of conservative voices and a “cancel culture” aimed at professors and students who do not conform to an on-campus political orthodoxy that has become increasingly totalitarian.

Most recently, the dean of University of Massachusetts Lowell’s School of Nursing, Leslie Neal-Boylan, was fired by the school after writing “Black lives matter, but also everyone’s life matters” in an email to students and faculty.

Cancel culture has moved from campus into American society. The topics no longer acceptable as legitimate subjects of unconditionally free and open public debate keep growing: Race, gender, the merits of Western history and civilization, and climate change currently top the list of taboo subjects.

In addition, there are uncountable words and concepts that are no longer considered legitimate, even names of food products. Those who publicly offer dissenting views on any of these issues risk immediate “cancellation,” especially since the killing of George Floyd and the beginning of the Black Lives Matter protests across the U.S., as reported by Gatestone. Cato’s poll is more evidence that the chilling effects that these “cancellations” have on people are severe and should not be underestimated.

When citizens stop voicing their concerns in public about current events, policies and ideas out of fear that they will lose their livelihoods and social standing, it is — or should be — a huge problem in a democracy. The free exchange of opinions and ideas is the bedrock of free and healthy democracies worthy of their name. How much speech can you shut down — and how many people can you “cancel”– before public discourse is destroyed altogether?

A democratic society of fearful citizens who dare not speak about what is on their minds – often important issues of their time — is doomed to succumb to the will of those who bully the hardest and shout the loudest.

Judith Bergman, a columnist, lawyer and political analyst, is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Gatestone Institute.

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Popular conservative pundit Ben Shapiro says lack of left-wing reaction to anti-Semitism shows it is the “last hatred that is allowed” in America.

By World Israel News Staff

Popular right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro said the lack of left-wing reaction to DeSean Jackson’s anti-Semitic tweets showed that anti-Semitism is the last hatred still allowed in American.

“You can literally quote Hitler,” said Shapiro, Fox News reported Thursday.

Shapiro lashed out at the phenomenon of “cancel culture,” the boycotting of individuals – especially celebrities – who have posted a questionable or controversial opinion, or who said or did something in their past that is on social media and found to be offensive by some people.

“Everyone will be canceled unless you’re on the full-on woke left, in which case you can say anything,” Shapiro said on his online show.

Shapiro said that the lack of outrage from many on the left-wing over the anti-Semitic social media posts made by Philadelphia Eagles player DeSean Jackson showed the hypocrisy of the “cancel culture” mentality.

“You can literally quote Hitler,” Shapiro said, referring to Jackson’s quotes on Instagram, which the football player attributed to Adolf Hitler.

On Monday, Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver DeSean Jackson posted to his Instagram, “Hitler said, ‘because the white Jews knows that the Negroes are the real Children of Israel and to keep Americas secret the Jews will blackmail America.’”

The quote posted by Jackson continues, “The white citizens of America will be terrified to know that all this time they’ve been mistreating and discriminating and lynching the Children of Israel.”

Shapiro called the reaction by the NFL team a “ridiculous” statement, because the team said they were “disappointed” by Jackson’s post, but stopped short of announcing any disciplinary action.

“Lets put it this way … If DeSean Jackson were white and quoted Hitler, how long do you think he’d be in the NFL?” Shapiro asked rhetorically.

“As long as you’re on the right side, you’ll never be canceled. If you’re on the proper woke side of the aisle, like Ice Cube, you can be as anti-Semitic as you want to be,” Shapiro said, referring to the long history of anti-Semitic social media postings by the popular rapper.

“The last hatred that is allowed in the United States is hatred of Jews,” Shapiro said.

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Elmer Fudd will get a scythe instead. 

By Aaron Sull, World Israel News

Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam, who always found themselves outsmarted by Bugs Bunny, were stripped of their guns by Warner Bros. in a new version of the popular Looney Tunes cartoons.

In May, HBO Max put up 200 new Looney Tunes cartoons on its streaming platform, replete with favorite characters, such as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Pepé Le Pew, and others.

However, viewers quickly noticed that something was amiss. Elmer Fudd, known for his catchphrase, “Shhh. Be vewy, vewy quiet. I’m hunting wabbits,” didn’t have his staple shotgun by his side. And Yosemite Sam, who liked to say, “Say yer prayers ya long-eared galoot,” was missing his two iconic pistols.

According to Warner Bros. animator Michael Ruocco, there is no place for them during an age of extreme gun violence.

“Think about context about what’s going on in the world, and how long ago our show started production,” Ruocco tweeted.

“Late 2017, early 2018. Right on the heels of a record number of mass shootings, particularly the horrific one in Las Vegas. NOBODY wanted to touch guns working in media.”

Ruocco also said the guns are not what make up the ethos of the characters.

This seemed a strange assertion to some given that Elmer Fudd’s main occupation is hunting rabbits and no one hunts a rabbit with a scythe. And Yosemite Sam will have a hard time being the “Hootinest, tootinest, shootinest bobtail wildcat in the West” without something to shoot with.

“You know how many gags we can do with guns? Fairly few. And the best were already done by the old guys. It’s limiting. It was never about the gun, it was about Elmer’s flawed, challenged masculinity,” Ruocco wrote.

However, the studio didn’t turn Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam into pacifists either. To aid in their never-ending pursuit of Bugs Bunny, the studio gave them other dangerous weapons to use instead.

Fudd got a scythe and Sam got a grass hook.

Other dangerous items such as TNT and Acme anvils are also included.

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In today’s “woke” world, it’s forbidden to offer explanations about Jewish success without being labeled as racist.

By Jonathan S. Tobin, JNS

Anyone who has, as I have, spent his professional life covering the Jewish world as a journalist is not likely to spend much time wondering why Jews are so smart.

I don’t think that “genius” is the best word to describe those in the organized Jewish world or how most Jews interact with that world, let alone defend their interests. From my perspective, Jews are both collectively and individually just as likely to believe in all sorts of idiotic notions as the members of any other ethnic or religious group.

And yet, there is the scoreboard some of us like to point to with that disproportionately high number of Nobel Prizes (Jews have won more than 20 percent of all Nobels that have been awarded) and the incontrovertible fact that, despite their tiny numbers, Jews have risen to the top of just about every conceivable field of endeavor except those from which they were excluded.

As New York Times columnist Bret Stephens noted, we inevitably are confronted with the following question: “How is it that a people who never amounted even to one-third of 1 percent of the world’s population contributed so seminally to so many of its most pathbreaking ideas and innovations?”

But as Stephens soon discovered, in today’s “woke” world in which any discussion about the achievements of any group, but especially the Jews, is forbidden, to even ask such a question is to call down upon oneself an avalanche of abuse.

The starting point for his rumination on the subject was a new book titled Genius and Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World, 1847-1947 by British Jewish historian and critic Norman Lebrecht.

The book focuses on the way exceptional Jewish thinkers impacted how science, politics, philosophy, literature and music are viewed. Without them, the history of the 20th century and the world we live in today would be unimaginable.

The Jewish “genius” these extraordinary people demonstrated was in rethinking existing paradigms and coming up with original concepts. That was true when Jewish monotheism came into conflict with the pagan world, as it was when Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud re-ordered the understanding of both the universe and our minds.

None of the theories that have been put forward to answer Stephens’s question — and which discuss the impact of persecution or the way Jewish faith and culture places such high value on education and critical thinking — are definitive. Such discussions are also prone to simplifications not rooted in science.

Stephens disdained such explanations, while also correctly noting that the special nature of Jewish achievements has also made this minority a target for hatred from bigots of every religious and ideological variety.

Yet the columnist’s citation of a 2005 academic study that attempted to probe why “Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average IQ for which there are reliable data” was enough to subject him to charges of supporting eugenics and being a racist.

The ostensible reason for this dubious outrage was that one of the three authors of the study proposed theories about the reasons for the advancement of human civilization that have been embraced by white supremacists.

That caused editors at the Times to issue a correction apologizing for mentioning the study, even though he had not endorsed its findings or the authors’ views. The editor’s note went on to say that his column had left “an impression with many readers that Mr. Stephens was arguing that Jews are genetically superior,” an assertion that is not backed up by a fair reading of the piece.

In doing so, the Times held a conservative (albeit one who is opposed to President Donald Trump) and the sole defender of Israel among its regular columnists to a standard it does not apply to its writers, who validate the liberal biases of its readership with pieces that regularly offend logic and even endorse anti-Semitic BDS schemes.

What is especially interesting about this controversy is that any discussion of Jewish achievements makes a lot of people (including many Jews) deeply uncomfortable. The only conclusion to be drawn from this debate is that the only acceptable approach is “don’t go there,” so as to avoid offending the sensibilities of those who believe that saying some people have done extraordinary things is an insult to everyone else.

Indeed, many Jews fear that any mention of their achievements will be used to justify anti-Semitic conspiracy theories or vile racist concepts about other’s supposed inferiority.

No one other than those who, like the late paleontologist Stephen Gould, think there is no such thing as a measurable IQ disputes the fact that Ashkenazi Jews have a high average, let alone that Jews as a whole have overachieved out of proportion to their small population.

Yet the Twittersphere’s explosion of vituperation directed at Stephens for “going there” speaks volumes about the way “woke” culture and the fear of offending others stifles intellectual discussions.

Even more important is that the particular sensitivity about the discussion of Jewish achievements helps us understand why the virus of anti-Semitism is so persistent and successful at grafting itself on to every new ideology or intellectual fashion that comes along.

The Jews are a people that can be joined and not a race. And not every Jew is smart, let alone dripping with genius.

Still, for some there is something profoundly unsettling about the realization that the Jews have not only refused to allow themselves to be erased from the planet (as many of their enemies have plotted), but that they have also done so while doing remarkable things that changed the world for the better.

However this came to be, it’s not a function of so-called “white privilege” or something the Jews should be forced to ignore or deny, or for which they should be ashamed.

Rather than calling out as racists those who recognize the reality of a certain genius that Jewish civilization has produced, it is those who find this notion insufferable who should be asked what it is about the reality of Jewish success that makes them so angry.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS—Jewish News Syndicate. Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin.

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The overwhelming uniformity of thought surrounding this kerfuffle brings to mind George Carlin’s line about the demise of individualism and rise of a stifling political correctness.

By Gidon Ben-Zvi

Israeli Education Minister Rabbi Rafi Peretz’s recent comments about gay conversion therapy have unleased a firestorm. Teachers are threatening to strike if their new boss doesn’t resign immediately, while outraged parents are vowing to remove their kids from the public school system.

For a fleeting moment, even Israel’s notoriously fractured political culture came together – to castigate Peretz for believing that it’s possible to convert someone from their homosexual orientation.

The overwhelming uniformity of thought surrounding this kerfuffle brings to mind George Carlin’s line about the demise of individualism and rise of a stifling political correctness: “Avoid teams at all cost. Keep your circle small. Never join a group that has a name.”

There’s little to suggest that gay conversion therapy is anything other than a junk science. Reparative therapy practices have been rejected by virtually every mainstream medical and mental health organization for decades. But it’s worth noting that therapists in Israel are allowed to practice conversion therapy, though the country’s Health Ministry advises against it. So what fireable offense did Israel’s Education Minister commit by believing in such voodoo?

Many otherwise intelligent, broad minded and professionally competent people continue to cling to debunked myths about human behavior. For example, the widely held belief that violent offenders usually have a diagnosis of mental illness isn’t backed up by science. Then there’s the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, which sought to prove that any one of us can turn bad depending on the situation we happen to find ourselves in. But people who cite this as evidence that bad barrels trump bad apples should keep in mind that the Stanford Experiment has subsequently been proven to be seriously flawed.

The most famous instance of a once widely-accepted belief about the human condition being thoroughly invalidated is psychoanalysis.The idea that talk therapy could give people the power to treat themselves caught on like wildfire during the first two-thirds of the 20th century. The foundational principle of Freudianism is that our feelings are hidden from us, which is why we need to talk to a therapist about them. The goal of psychoanalysis is to bring those emotions to light in order to expose the destructive issues afflicting our unconscious minds.

Terms taken from Sigmund Freud’s work – mommy issues, daddy issues, arrested development, death wish, Freudian slip, penis envy, anal retentive, Oedipus Complex, defense mechanism and cathartic release have secured his place in the popular culture. But as a research paradigm, psychoanalysis is no longer considered a credible theory of human behavior.

As such, let those same passionate civil rights advocates who are calling for the ouster of a freshly minted government minister who stated a belief in a debunked theory be consistent in their righteous indignation. Will those same Israeli politicians and cultural elites who are calling for the head of Rabbi Rafi Peretz also demand that any elected official who at some point sought or recommended psychotherapy be fired? To lift a line from Pygmalion: “Not bloody likely!”

And while there’s zero evidence to suggest that Peretz intends to impose gay conversion theraputic practices on Israel’s public schools, the country’s thought police asserts that a government minister’s primary purpose isn’t to serve the citizenry but to avoid offending specific members of particular groups in Israeli society.

Selective moral outrage

The problem with this mandated on the job sensitivity is its inconsistent application. The late Shulamit Aloni said during her tenure as Education Minister that organized tours by Israeli high school students to concentration camps in Europe were transforming Israeli youth into aggressive, nationalistic xenophobes. Aloni asserted that these young Israelis “march with unfurled flags, as if they’ve come to conquer Poland.” Yet Aloni is lionized by Israel’s PC Police for her impartial dedication to human rights. Apparently, ‘impartial’ means downplaying the continued existence of the Jewish people despite Nazi attempts at their obliteration. Such a worldview tolerates Jewish survival while sneering at open displays of Jewish sovereignty.

By suggesting that their goals are noble, Israeli political and cultural elites are hiding the ball from the Israeli public. Terms like human dignity, tolerance for diversity and equality are the thin end of the wedge. Israeli Education Minister Rafi Peret’z ouster is sought not because of his muddled views on a debunked psychological practice but because of his views on the issue of sovereignty over Judea and Samaria. In Israel, even moral outrage is selectively refracted through a political prism.

Epilogue: Irony of ironies. Peretz has undergone an overnight conversion therapy conversion. The good rabbi reversed course and has gone on record as opposing the psychological practice. Mind control: 1, Freedom to think freely and perhaps evolve over time: 0.

Gidon Ben-Zvi is an accomplished writer who left behind Hollywood starlight for Jerusalem stone. He contributes to several publications.

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The BBC report highlights “political correctness” as being especially responsible for the West’s indifference.

By Raymond Ibrahim, The Gatestone Institute

“Christian persecution ‘at near genocide levels,’ was the title of a May 3rd BBC report citing a lengthy interim study ordered by British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt and led by Rev. Philip Mounstephen, the Bishop of Truro.

According to the BBC report, one in three people around the world suffer from religious persecution, with Christians being “the most persecuted religious group.”

“Religion ‘is at risk of disappearing’ in some parts of the world,” it noted, and “In some regions, the level and nature of persecution is arguably coming close to meeting the international definition of genocide, according to that adopted by the UN.”

British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt is also quoted on why Western governments have been “asleep” — his word — concerning this growing epidemic:

“I think there is a misplaced worry that it is somehow colonialist to talk about a religion [Christianity] that was associated with colonial powers rather than the countries that we marched into as colonizers. That has perhaps created an awkwardness in talking about this issue—the role of missionaries was always a controversial one and that has, I think, also led some people to shy away from this topic.”

Whatever the merits of such thinking, the fact is that many of the world’s most persecuted Christians have nothing whatsoever to do with colonialism or missionaries. Those most faced with the threat of genocide — including Syria’s and Iraq’s Assyrians or Egypt’s Copts — were Christian several centuries before the ancestors of Europe’s colonizers became Christian and went missionizing.

The BBC report highlights “political correctness” as being especially responsible for the West’s indifference and quotes Hunt again in this regard: “What we have forgotten in that atmosphere of political correctness is actually the Christians that are being persecuted are some of the poorest people on the planet.”

Although the BBC report has an entire heading titled and devoted to the impact of “political correctness,” ironically, it too succumbs to this contemporary Western malady. For while it did a fair job in highlighting the problem, it said nothing about its causes — not one word about who is persecuting Christians, or why.

The overwhelming majority of Christian persecution, however, evidently occurs in Muslim majority nations. According to Open Doors’ World Watch List 2019[WWL], which surveys the 50 nations where Christians are most persecuted, “Islamic oppression continues to impact millions of Christians.” In seven of the absolute worst 10 nations, “Islamic oppression” is the cause of persecution.

“This means, for millions of Christians—particularly those who grew up Muslim or were born into Muslim families—openly following Jesus can have painful consequences,” including death.

Among the worst persecutors are those that rule according to Islamic law, or Sharia — which academics such as Georgetown University’s John Esposito insist is equitable and just.

‘Christianity is not permitted to exist’

In Afghanistan (ranked #2) , “Christianity is not permitted to exist,” says the WWL 2019, because it “is an Islamic state by constitution, which means government officials, ethnic group leaders, religious officials and citizens are hostile toward” Christians.

Similarly, in Somalia, (#3), “The Christian community is small and under constant threat of attack. Sharia law and Islam are enshrined in the country’s constitution, and the persecution of Christians almost always involves violence.”

In Iran (#9), “society is governed by Islamic law, which means the rights and professional possibilities for Christians are heavily restricted.”

Equally telling is that 38 of the 50 nations making the WWL 2019 are Muslim majority.

Perhaps the BBC succumbed to silence concerning the sources of Christian persecution — that is, succumbed to “the atmosphere of political correctness” which it ironically highlighted — because in its own report, it did not rely on the WWL. The problem with this interpretation is that the study the BBC did rely on, the Bishop of Truro’s, is saturated with talk concerning the actual sources of Christian persecution. In this regard, the words “Islam” and “Islamist” appear 61 times; “Muslim” appears 56 times in this review on persecuted Christians.

Here are a few of the more significant quotes from the Bishop of Truro’s report:

– “The persecution of Christians is perhaps at its most virulent in the region of the birthplace of Christianity—the Middle East & North Africa.”

– “In countries such as Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabia the situation of Christians and other minorities has reached an alarming stage.”

– “The eradication of Christians and other minorities on pain of ‘the sword’ or other violent means was revealed to be the specific and stated objective of [Islamic] extremist groups in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, north-east Nigeria and the Philippines.”

– “[T]here is mass violence which regularly expresses itself through the bombing of churches, as has been the case in countries such as Egypt, Pakistan, and Indonesia.”

– “The single-greatest threat to Christians [in Nigeria] … came from Islamist militant group Boko Haram, with US intelligence reports in 2015 suggesting that 200,000 Christians were at risk of being killed… Those worst affected included Christian women and girls ‘abducted, and forced to convert, enter forced marriages, sexual abuse and torture.'”

– “An intent to erase all evidence of the Christian presence [in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, north-east Nigeria and the Philippines] was made plain by the removal of crosses, the destruction of Church buildings and other Church symbols. The killing and abduction of clergy represented a direct attack on the Church’s structure and leadership.”

– “Christianity now faces the possibility of being wiped-out in parts of the Middle East where its roots go back furthest. In Palestine, Christian numbers are below 1.5 percent; in Syria the Christian population has declined from 1.7 million in 2011 to below 450,000 and in Iraq, Christian numbers have slumped from 1.5 million before 2003 to below 120,000 today. Christianity is at risk of disappearing, representing a massive setback for plurality in the region.”

Exposing the issue – better late than never

The BBC should be commended for (finally) reporting on this urgent issue — even if it is three years behind the times. As the Truro report correctly observes, “In 2016 various political bodies including the U.K. parliament, the European Parliament and the U.S. House of Representatives, declared that ISIS atrocities against Christians and other religious minority groups such as Yazidis and Shi’a Muslims met the tests of genocide.”

At the very least, it appears that the BBC has stopped trying to minimize the specter of Christian persecution as it did in 2013, when this situation was just starting to reach the boiling point.

The post OPINION: Genocide of Christians reaches ‘alarming stage’ appeared first on World Israel News.

The Israeli military is changing its enlistment forms to acknowledge sensitivities of the LGBT community. 

By World Israel News Staff 

The IDF is confirming that a directive has been issued to alter enlistment forms so that the spaces for a soldier’s parents will no longer  read: Mother and Father, but instead – Parent 1 and Parent 2.

The decision, reported on IDF Radio Tuesday morning, has been made to reflect sensitivities toward soldiers who are children of same-sex couples.

“The IDF updates and makes changes to its questionnaires periodically in accordance with directives which are received and needs which arise in the application process,” said the IDF spokesperson’s office.

The announcement follows a prolonged campaign waged by LGBT activists.

However, it has resulted in reactions of outrage from some religious groups, including one which called on soldiers to cross out the terms ‘Parent 1’ and ‘Parent 2’ from the form.

Opponents to the change accuse the IDF of making the switch without a public debate and in acquiescence to the demands of a small segment of the population without taking into account the sensitivities of a far-larger majority.

Some have mocked the decision, with one rabbi suggesting that the 10 Commandments should be amended from “Honor thy father and thy mother” to “Honor Parent 1 and Parent 2.” A religious journalist ridiculed the prospect that a baby’s first word would not be “Daddy,” but “Parent 1” instead.

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New York cleric Mufti Mohammad Ibn Muneer preaches the “virtue” of Jihad – struggle against enemies of Islam – and teaches that the “shahid” (martyr) who dies on the battlefield “is of the prime, highest level.”

He also slams political correctness, denying any need to apologize for comments against Christians and Jews, such as saying that Jews have earned the wrath of Allah.

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