Noteworthy Names Mentioned

• RON LAUDER

• ADL JONATHAN GREENBLATT

• KRAFT FAMILY

Our Oligarch- Jewish institutions have accepted hundreds of millions of dollars from Putin confidante Roman Abramovich. Will Russia’s invasion of Ukraine force a reckoning?

David Klion   Jewish Currents March 3, 2022 From <Our Oligarch>

In the first 48 hours of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Roman Abramovich, the 55-year-old close confidante of Russian President Vladimir Putin, boarded his personal Boeing jet in Monaco bound for Moscow. Even as he returned to Putin’s side, Abramovich, who is worth an estimated $14 billion, took some initial steps to protect his considerable assets from being seized by Western governments eager to sanction the Russian president and his inner circle: On Saturday, he announced he would be transferring control of the London-based Chelsea Football Club, which he has owned since 2003, to the trustees of its associated charitable foundation. Then, yesterday, following days of speculation in the British press, Abramovich announced that he would be selling Chelsea. In a statement, he wrote that the sale “is in the best interest of the Club, the fans, the employees, as well as the Club’s sponsors and partners.” Abramovich also noted that net proceeds from the sale would be donated “for the benefit of all victims of the war in Ukraine.” The Swiss billionaire Hansjorg Wyss, one of several people approached as a potential owner for the club, told the Swiss newspaper Blick that Abramovich was seeking to sell Chelsea FC “quickly” along with his real estate holdings, implying that he was aiming to avoid coming sanctions.

Abramovich is perhaps the most visible of the “oligarchs” surrounding Putin, who are widely perceived as extensions of the Russian president and keepers of a vast fortune that is effectively under the Kremlin’s control. Much of this wealth was extracted from Russia’s enormous energy and mineral resources, and is now stashed in secret bank accounts in the Mediterranean and the Caribbean, in empty mansions and condos from London to Manhattan to Miami, and in yachts and private jets on the French Riviera. A 2017 paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research estimated that as much as 60% of Russia’s GDP is offshore—which would amount to roughly a trillion dollars outside the country. As Russian forces bombard Ukraine’s cities, the United States and its allies are mobilizing to seize the oligarchs’ overseas assets as a way to isolate and undermine Putin’s government. “Putin views the money in the hands of so-called oligarchs close to the Kremlin as really his money, which can be deployed—and often has been—to pursue interests abroad,” said Ben Judah, a British journalist and author who has written extensively about Putin’s kleptocracy. “Dismantling this network of Kremlin wealth across the West is dismantling a system to advance Putin’s interests.”

Though calls to sanction the oligarchs are escalating, they preceded Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In January 2021, for example, the Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny put Abramovich at the top of a list of eight Russian business and political elites who he thinks should be sanctioned by Western governments, calling him “one of the key enablers and beneficiaries of Russian kleptocracy.” (Shortly thereafter, Navalny returned to Russia and faced immediate arrest, and he remains in prison more than a year later.) Navalny’s call is now being echoed by some of the most powerful people on earth. In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, President Joe Biden called out the oligarchs directly. “Tonight, I say to the Russian oligarchs and corrupt leaders who built billions of dollars off this violent regime, no more,” said Biden to bipartisan applause. “The United States Department of Justice is assembling a dedicated task force to go after the crimes of the Russian oligarchs. We are joining with European allies to find and seize their yachts, their luxury apartments, their private jets. We are coming for you.”

Abramovich has given half a billion dollars to Jewish charities over the past two decades, sending money linked to Putin’s kleptocratic regime circulating through Jewish institutions worldwide.

Abramovich celebrates Chelsea’s UEFA Champions League victory with player Didier Drogba in Munich, Germany, on May 19th, 2012.dpa picture alliance archive/Alamy

The reserved, gray-bearded Abramovich is notoriously litigious toward critics who seek to detail his close ties to Putin. Last year, he successfully sued the British journalist Catherine Belton, who claimed in her 2020 book Putin’s People that the Russian president dictated Abramovich’s major purchases, including his decision to buy Chelsea. He also extracted an apology from a British newspaper for calling him a “bag carrier” for the Russian president. Now, however, he finds himself and his relationship to the Kremlin in the international spotlight, along with the rest of Russia’s richest men. Both the British Foreign Secretary and the US State Department have indicated that they are actively considering sanctions for Abramovich and his peers. “I think he is terrified of being sanctioned,” Chris Bryant, a British Labour MP and the head of the parliamentary standards committee, told the House of Commons on Tuesday, adding that he was worried that Abramovich would sell his UK residences before the government could seize them. “My anxiety is that we’re taking too long about these things.”

What has gotten less attention is that Abramovich—who, like many of the most prominent Russian oligarchs, is Jewish—has for years been a prolific donor to Jewish philanthropies. He has given half a billion dollars to Jewish charities over the past two decades, sending money linked to Putin’s kleptocratic regime circulating through Jewish institutions worldwide. Lila Corwin Berman, a professor at Temple University who has written about the history of American Jewish philanthropy, struggled to think of a comparable single donor off the top of her head. “We know the names of people whose giving doesn’t even approach that level,” she said. “The megadonors like Adelson or Schusterman or Steinhardt roll off the tongues of people who are aware of American Jewish philanthropy, and this person’s name does not.”

The story of Abramovich’s rise from a modest Soviet childhood to the international elite demands close scrutiny. Among other things, he has profoundly influenced Jewish life on three continents, developing deep financial ties with major communal institutions. He is partly responsible for the preeminent role played by Chabad in the religious life of post-Soviet Russia, for the growth of major Jewish museums from Russia to Israel, for a raft of anti-antisemitism programming involving leading American and British Jewish organizations, and for the expansion of Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem. Now, as Putin’s Russia becomes a global pariah, the Jewish world is forced to reckon with its long embrace of Abramovich, and with the moral costs of accepting his money. So far, there has been no indication that Jewish communal institutions are considering disrupting business as usual. As Andres Spokoiny, the CEO of the Jewish Funders Network, told JTA this week, “I don’t see a problem yet . . . ​​I hope that the important work that people are doing in Jewish communities is not affected by the sanctions.”

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Those who have met Abramovich tend to describe him as a non-entity. He is famously press-shy; last year, he gave his first interview in 15 years to Forbes, which asked him only softball questions about his charities and his ownership of Chelsea. Felix Sater—a Russian-born, New York-based Jewish real estate developer best known for having tried to broker a deal for Donald Trump to build a tower in Moscow, and a longtime friendly acquaintance of Abramovich’s late former mentor Boris Berezovsky—described Abramovich as “the most disciplined man you’ve ever met in your life.” “He does not eat meat. He does not drink. He does not smoke,” Sater said. “He goes to bed at a specific hour and wakes up at a specific hour. The man is a machine, and he keeps his thoughts and his mouth closed.” He emphasized Abramovich’s taciturnity by recounting his behavior at one of the several star-studded New Year’s bashes that the billionaire hosted in St. Barts in the early 2010s: “He sat in the corner and didn’t speak to anyone for the entire party.”

Some basic facts about Abramovich have been established by his biographers, Dominic Midgley and Chris Hutchins. The future billionaire was born in Saratov in 1966 to Jewish parents who traced their roots to Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania. Before he turned three, both were dead—his mother, Irina, of complications from a back-alley abortion; his father, Arkady, in a construction accident—and the young orphan was taken to the frigid town of Ukhta, nearly 800 miles northeast of Moscow, to be raised by his uncle Leib, who ran the supplies department for the local timber enterprise and gave Abramovich early exposure to the informal commercial economy tolerated during the later decades of Communist rule. In 1986, the 20-year-old Abramovich began dabbling in street vending, and by 1988 he had founded a doll-making company, taking advantage of the liberalized business climate created under Mikhail Gorbachev’s program of perestroika, which sought to reform the ailing Soviet economy. A savvy businessman by all accounts, Abramovich began diversifying almost immediately, and within seven tumultuous years, he went from selling rubber ducks to Soviet children to selling oil and gas on international markets.

Certain Soviet Jews of Abramovich’s generation found themselves at the forefront of an emerging market economy. Concentrated in white collar professions but systematically excluded from desirable posts and from the top ranks of the Communist Party, they were unusually prepared—and, perhaps, motivated—to find legal and semi-legal points of entry into the tightly-regulated commerce between the Soviet Union and the West. This helps explain why, as the historian Yuri Slezkine writes in The Jewish Century, six of the seven top oligarchs of 1990s Russia (Petr Aven, Boris Berezovsky, Mikhail Fridman, Vladimir Gusinsky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and Alexander Smolensky) were ethnic Jews.

Abramovich with his mentor Boris Berezovsky in the hallway of Russia’s lower house of parliament in 2000.

ITAR-TASS News Agency/Alamy

The Soviet Union collapsed at the end of 1991, and Russia’s new president Boris Yeltsin soon initiated the firesale privatization of state-controlled industries at the urging of Washington and the IMF—a reckless transition from a command economy to a capitalist one that drove millions of Russians into poverty. It was precisely Russia’s proto-capitalists who stood ready to profit, including Berezovsky and Abramovich, who met on Aven’s yacht in 1995. The orderly, introverted Abramovich quickly became a protege to the gregarious, hard-partying Berezovsky, who was 20 years his senior. That same year, the Yeltsin administration implemented its infamous loans-for-shares program, selling off key state industries in rigged auctions to Russia’s new business elite for a fraction of their real value in order to stabilize the state’s finances in the short term. Berezovsky and Abramovich gained ownership stakes in Sibneft, one of the world’s largest energy companies, and became instant billionaires.

Russia’s new plutocrats wasted no time translating their wealth into political power. In 1996, the handful of leading oligarchs pooled their financial resources—and directed their media companies’ coverage—to reelect the deeply unpopular Yeltsin over his Communist challenger, Gennady Zyuganov, whose platform of re-nationalizing industries terrified both the Russian and Western business classes. At a meeting a few months after Yeltsin’s victory, the oligarchs discussed the dangers of acting as power brokers. “Individually, some of them had brushed up against anti-Semitism in earlier years, but now, as a group, they began to fret about the possibility of a public reaction to the ‘Jewish bankers,’” writes David E. Hoffman in his authoritative 2002 book, The Oligarchs. Fearing that it was unsustainable for a small group of mostly Jewish billionaires to prop up an ailing, visibly alcoholic president—especially after the ruble collapsed in 1998, dragging down a generation’s living standards and initiating a hunt for scapegoats—Berezovsky spearheaded an effort the following year to replace Yeltsin with a young, healthy, disciplined, and then-obscure former KGB officer named Vladimir Putin. It was a decision he would come to regret.

During his first year in office, the new president moved aggressively against any independent power base in Russia, weaponizing the intelligence services in which he had spent his career against the country’s nouveau riche. The oligarchs’ standing was revealed to be tenuous and theoretical; wealth so easily acquired could just as easily be taken away. In 2001, Putin hounded Berezovsky and Gusinsky—whose TV networks had criticized the president’s mishandling of a naval disaster—with criminal indictments for tax fraud, forcing them to sell their media and energy holdings at a fraction of their true cost. As a result, Abramovich, who had never challenged Putin, acquired control of Sibneft, while Berezovsky fled to the United Kingdom and Gusinsky departed for Spain and then Israel. Abramovich again came out ahead in 2003, when the oligarch Khodorkovsky was sent to a Siberian prison on tax charges after criticizing Putin for corruption, leaving his assets in the energy sector to be redistributed among those on good terms with the president.

The oligarchs’ standing was revealed to be tenuous and theoretical; wealth so easily acquired could just as easily be taken away.

“I don’t think there is a percent of independence in Abramovich,” said Roman Borisovich, a Luxembourg-based Russian banker turned anti-corruption activist who once encountered Abramovich through Berezovsky in the 1990s. “For Abramovich to stay alive, he had to turn against his master [Berezovsky], which is what he did, and he has served Putin handsomely ever since.” The New Yorker’s Masha Gessen, who has written a number of books about post-Soviet Russia, said that at this point even the word “oligarch” “betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how power in Russia operates.” Whereas in the Yeltsin era, the term identified a system dominated by truly independent tycoons, “Putin’s top priority when he came to power was to break that system, replacing it with a system of concentrated power in which men who are inaccurately referred to as oligarchs now have only as much access to wealth as Putin allows them to have,” Gessen said.

No one exemplified that new system better than Abramovich, who Forbes declared the richest person in Russia in 2005—although by that point his presence in Russia had become nominal. Even as he built up his credibility with Putin, he joined many of his fellow oligarchs in stashing his billions in Western financial institutions, which proved eager to assist. “Elites in the post-Soviet space are constantly looking to move their assets and wealth into rule-of-law jurisdictions, which generally means Western countries like the US or UK,” said Casey Michel, the author of American Kleptocracy, a recent book about international money laundering. Over two decades, Abramovich moved at least £200 million of his fortune into residential property in the UK, including a flat in the tony London neighborhood of Knightsbridge, a mansion in West Sussex, and a residence in the Channel Island tax haven of Jersey. In 2003, he also bought Chelsea FC, then a straggler in British football. The club’s turnaround under his ownership made him a folk hero to its fans, securing him waves of positive coverage in the British press. Chelsea also served as his entryway into elite society, allowing him to attend matches beside British and Saudi royals and leaders of the global business class.

Abramovich with President Vladimir Putin during a meeting in the Kremlin in Moscow on May 27th, 2005.

AP Photo/ITAR-TASS, Presidential Press Service

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But Abramovich’s relationship to the Kremlin followed him to the UK. In 2008, Berezovsky sued his former protege over his confiscated Sibneft shares; then, in 2012, seven months after a judge rejected all of his claims, Berezovsky died in his London home in an apparent suicide. Some former associates believe he might have been murdered. In 2017, BuzzFeed reported that US spy agencies suspect Russian involvement in as many as 14 mysterious deaths in Britain over the previous decade, including Berezovsky’s. In the wake of the 2018 poisoning of the defected double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, British intelligence services became increasingly wary of wealthy expats with close ties to the Kremlin. Diplomatic strain stymied Abramovich’s effort to acquire a Tier 1 British visa, which would have enabled him to stay in the country for 40 months. “There’s an increasing concern about the nature of dirty money in the UK, and a lot of that comes out of Russia,” Tom Tugendhat, a Conservative MP who serves as chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the British Parliament, told me last November. “It’s not just London, sadly—the whole world has been corrupted.” (Some observers have pointed out that corruption was hardly a vice imported from Russia: “No one forced the British or American real estate industries to toss their doors open to as much illicit wealth as they could find, or the state of Delaware to craft the world’s greatest anonymous shell company services,” said Michel. “Western policymakers crafted all of the policies that these oligarchs are now taking advantage of.”)

Along with the UK, Abramovich also safeguarded a significant part of his fortune in the US, especially during his third marriage to the Russian American socialite and fashion designer Dasha Zhukova. Even after their 2018 divorce, Abramovich began the process of converting three adjacent townhouses on Manhattan’s Upper East Side into what will eventually become the largest home in the city, an “urban castle” valued at $180 million—making him one of the many wealthy Russians sheltering assets in New York’s booming and conveniently opaque real estate sector. (The mansion is intended for Zhukova and their two young children; Abramovich also has five children from his second marriage based primarily in the UK.) He also owns at least two homes in Aspen, Colorado, a gathering place of the global elite.

Abramovich’s yacht Eclipse, the world’s second largest, moored near Cavtat, Croatia.

Terence Waeland/Destinations/Design Pics/Alamy

Roman Abramovich’s Fyning Hall Estate, West Sussex, England.

David Cooper/Alamy Stock Photo

If US markets have welcomed Abramovich’s investments, the US government has cast a skeptical eye on Abramovich himself. Following Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump signed the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, which includes a list of 96 Russian oligarchs believed to have close ties to the Kremlin and seen as potential targets for financial penalties. With the invasion of Ukraine, it’s widely understood that the US government is once again considering sanctions against Abramovich and several other names on the list, especially if Russia’s war on Ukraine continues. The measures under consideration could severely impact Russia’s top plutocrats; British Labour and Tory MPs and US lawmakers both left and right have variously proposed seizing homes, jets, and yachts, freezing bank accounts, and instituting travel bans, both to punish the actual owners of these assets and to pressure them to turn against Putin’s government. In short, the oligarchs are now credibly threatened with exile from the West. Countries like France and Germany have already begun confiscating yachts owned by select Russian officials. And although the UK is still struggling to come up with a legal basis for following suit, leading politicians like Labour Leader Keir Starmer are urging direct sanctions against Abramovich. “Abramovich’s reputation has finally collapsed, along with the other supposedly apolitical oligarchs,” Michel said four days after Russia invaded Ukraine. “There’s no recovery from this. This is a titanic shift in terms of how these oligarchs can operate.”

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But even as the US and European governments contemplate taking a tougher approach to Abramovich, Israel has been more hesitant to hold him to account. So far, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has been measured in his comments on the invasion; he avoided mentioning Russia directly in a joint statement with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz urging an end to “bloodshed.” He has also refrained from commenting on Russian airstrikes near the Babi Yar Holocaust memorial in Kyiv. Israel’s circumspection is partly motivated by Middle Eastern geopolitics, as Russia coordinates with Israel on periodic strikes on Hezbollah in Syria—but it is likely also influenced by the extensive financial and personal connections between Israelis and Russians, as exemplified by Abramovich.

In 2018, Abramovich acquired Israeli citizenship through the law of return, immediately becoming the second-wealthiest Israeli, behind Miriam Adelson. As a new Israeli citizen, he joined several dozen Russian Jewish oligarchs who have sought citizenship or residency in the Jewish state—a group that includes Fridman, Gusinsky, and the late Berezovsky. Since 2015, Abramovich has owned and sometimes lived in the 19th-century Varsano hotel in Tel Aviv’s trendy Neve Tzedek neighborhood, and in 2020 he purchased a mansion in Herzliya for $65 million—the most expensive real estate deal in the country’s history. Israel has proved an ideal base of operations from which to continue his activities in Britain while avoiding visa issues: As an Israeli passport holder, Abramovich is eligible to visit the UK for six months at a time and is exempt from paying taxes in Israel on his overseas income for the first decade of his residency.

Given his increasingly precarious geopolitical position, Jewishness has become Abramovich’s identity of last resort—and Jewish philanthropic giving has provided him with an air of legitimacy not only in Israel but throughout the Jewish world. Abramovich and his fellow oligarchs “need to spend some money to launder their reputations,” said Borisovich, the anti-corruption activist. “They cannot be seen as Putin’s agents of influence; they need to be seen as independent businessmen. So if they can exploit Jewish philanthropy or give money to Oxford or the Tate Gallery, that’s the cost of doing business.”

Given his increasingly precarious geopolitical position, Jewishness has become Abramovich’s identity of last resort—and Jewish philanthropic giving has provided him with an air of legitimacy not only in Israel but throughout the Jewish world.

Abramovich began his career as a Jewish philanthropist in Russia itself. The Soviet Union of his youth was officially atheist, but Russia’s 1993 constitution guaranteed freedom of religion, setting off a struggle between the Jewish oligarchs to decide the leading Jewish denomination in the country. (Today, most Russian Jews remain secular; Abramovich’s own level of observance is difficult to define.) Gusinsky co-founded the relatively liberal Russian Jewish Congress (RJC), while Berezovsky supported Chabad and its chief rabbi in Russia, Berel Lazar. Then aligned with Berezovsky, Abramovich and his friend Lev Leviev became the main funders of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia (FJCR), a group headed by Lazar that quickly edged out the RJC to become the country’s strongest Jewish organization. In 2018, FJCR’s president, Rabbi Alexander Boroda, credited Abramovich with 80% of the development of Jewish life in Russia, adding, “He never talks about it, but I want to, because people don’t understand who the source of it is—and it is him. We have more than 160 communities in all of Russia and Roman supports them all.”

Some have suggested that even this use of Abramovich’s fortune was undertaken at Putin’s behest. “When Putin came to power, he had to get rid of Gusinsky, but he was very concerned not to be called an antisemite,” said a researcher of Russian money in Jewish institutions, who requested anonymity out of concern for his safety and professional relationships. “So he decided to set up alternative Jewish organizations to the RJC, and Abramovich and Leviev were the two main people who helped him do that.” Some Jewish leaders regard FJCR as having staged “hostile takeovers” of Jewish communities in the major cities of Samara and Omsk. According to The Wall Street Journal, Omsk’s main synagogue was home to a Reform congregation until Abramovich met with the governor and the local Jewish community leaders in 2001, offering a huge boost in funding to the synagogue if it would switch allegiance to the FJCR—which it did. A 2017 article in Politico, which identified Abramovich and Leviev as “Chabad’s biggest patrons worldwide,” also referred to Lazar as “Putin’s rabbi.” Lazar has often run interference for the Russian president—for instance, by defending his initial crackdown on oligarchs like Gusinsky as not motivated by antisemitism, or by praising Russia as safe for Jews under his governance. (The researcher noted that Putin has also cultivated prominent loyalists in other Russian religious communities, including the Orthodox Church and Islam.) Meanwhile, Abramovich has continued to patronize Chabad’s growth both in Russia and around the world. He reportedly donated $5 million to the Chabad-affiliated Marina Roscha Synagogue and Jewish Community Center, Moscow’s largest synagogue, dedicated in 2001. In 2014, he attended the grand opening of an $18 million Chabad “mega Jewish center” in Aspen, which has “Dasha and Roman Abramovich” listed as donors on the wall of its entrance.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is greeted by Russia’s Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar during a visit to the Jewish Museum in Moscow on June 13th, 2013.

Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP

In addition to his support for Chabad, Abramovich also significantly funded the construction of the $50 million Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow, which opened in 2012 (and to which Putin pledged to donate a month of his presidential salary). In a 2016 article in The Forward, the scholar Olga Gershenson suggested that the museum’s narrative bordered on propaganda, framing Jews as “a model Russian minority” and “glorifying and mourning . . . without raising more controversial and relevant questions that would require the viewer to come to terms with a nation’s difficult past.” The anonymous researcher called the museum “a black hole of confusing information and narratives” that support Putin’s official account of Russian history. “It doesn’t concentrate on grief or on solemn commemoration of the Holocaust,” he said. “It concentrates on the Soviet victory over the Nazis, and then it ends by saying that Jews in Putin’s Russia are all good and content.”

ADL Connection

• RON LAUDER

• ADL JONATHAN GREENBLATT

• KRAFT FAMILY

• $1 million to ADL

Beyond Russia, Abramovich’s largesse also extends to leading Jewish institutions in the US and the UK. In 2019 the Anti-Defamation League put out a press release publicizing an exhibition match between Chelsea FC and the US-based New England Revolution to celebrate Chelsea’s “Say No to Antisemitism” campaign, and announcing that Abramovich and the Kraft family, which owns the Revolution, would each pledge $1 million to support the ADL and other Jewish institutions. ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt lavishly praised the campaign. “We cannot fight hate without willing partners,” said Greenblatt.

• That’s why we are so fortunate to have two world class teams getting together to both raise money and awareness of the problem of anti-Semitism in sports and broader society and to take a public stand against hate in all forms.” Ronald Lauder, the head of the World Jewish Congress and a major donor to Donald Trump, personally attended a Chelsea match with Abramovich in support of the same campaign. 

“Say No to Antisemitism” has brought together Chelsea players and management with many top Jewish groups; the currents heads of the ADL, the WJC, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, and the Holocaust Educational Trust, among others, are all listed on its steering committee. The campaign is at least in part intended to address the antisemitism of some Chelsea fans, who have been known to shout “Yid!” and hiss in imitation of gas chambers when taunting fans of the rival club Tottenham, which has a historically Jewish fan base that proudly refers to itself as “the Yid Army.” Last November, Israeli President Isaac Herzog described the campaign as “a shining example of how sports can be a force for good and tolerance.”

When asked whether they remain affiliated with Abramovich—both before the invasion of Ukraine, when the US government had already identified the oligarch as a potential target for sanctions, and after the beginning of Russia’s war—neither WJC nor the Conference of Presidents responded. The ADL initially replied on February 1st with a statement that it “proudly supports the ‘Say No To Antisemitism’ campaign and the wide range of activities by Chelsea FC to tackle antisemitism globally,” and confirmed on February 28th, four days into the invasion, that its statement still stood.

Per a report in the Portuguese media outlet NiT, Abramovich is also one of the primary benefactors of a Holocaust museum that opened in Porto last May. As of last year, Abramovich is a newly minted citizen of Portugal (and by extension, the European Union), which offers such recognition to anyone who can prove Sephardic ancestry dating back before the Portuguese expulsion of Jews in 1496. According to the Portuguese daily Público, the sole publicly available evidence for Abramovich’s previously unmentioned Sephardic heritage can be found on his Wikipedia page, which was edited 18 times between June and November 2021 by the curator of the very same Holocaust museum in Porto. Reached by email, Berel Rosenberg, a representative of the museum, denied that Abramovich had given the Porto Jewish community any money besides a €250 fee for Sephardic certification; regarding reports to the contrary, he alleged that “lies were published by antisemites and corrupt journalists.” However, Porto’s Jewish community does acknowledge that Abramovich has donated money to projects honoring the legacy of Portuguese Sephardic Jews in Hamburg, and he has been identified as an honorary member of Chabad Portugal and B’nai B’rith International Portugal due to his philanthropic activities in the country.

ISRAEL DONATIONS

• In Israel, Abramovich has made a $30 million donation for a nanotechnology research center at Tel Aviv University; 

• funded a football-focused “leadership training program” for Arab and Jewish children; and supported 

• KKL-JNF’s tree-planting campaign in the southern Negev, which is dedicated to Lithuanian victims of the Holocaust—and which has drawn opposition from local Bedouin communities who view it as a land grab. (Neither Tel Aviv University nor KKL-JNF responded to requests for comment.) 

DIRTY DEEDS - LAND-GRABBING

Abramovich has been happy to attach his name to such causes; by contrast, he has kept his support for Israeli settlements well-hidden. 

A 2020 investigation by BBC Arabic revealed that Abramovich has used front companies registered in the British Virgin Islands to donate more than $100 million to a right-wing Israeli organization called the Ir David Foundation, commonly known as Elad, which has worked since the 1980s to move Jewish settlers into occupied East Jerusalem. Elad also controls an archeological park and major tourist site called City of David, which it has leveraged in its efforts to “Judaize” the area, including by seizing Palestinian homes in the surrounding neighborhood of Silwan and digging under some to make them uninhabitable. Abramovich was responsible for nearly half the donations Elad received between 2005 and 2018, the last year for which records are available, making him by far its largest funder. (Elad did not respond to requests for comment.)

“In order for settlers to take over Palestinian homes, they need a lot of money, both to take advantage of poor Palestinians for the actual purchases, and then for the long and expensive legal struggle that follows, and that can bankrupt Palestinian families. The money is crucial.”

IMAGE: A Palestinian man surveys a demolished home in Silwan, on the outskirts of the City of David, on August 10th, 2021. Eddie Gerald/Alamy

“In order for settlers to take over Palestinian homes, they need a lot of money,” said Hagit Ofran, co-director of the Settlement Watch project at the Israeli organization Peace Now, “both to take advantage of poor Palestinians for the actual purchases, and then for the long and expensive legal struggle that follows, and that can bankrupt Palestinian families. The money is crucial.” Of Abramovich’s support for Elad, she added, “That’s a lot from one source; I assume that if you give such a big donation, you know what it is for.”

BUYING INFLUENCE WITH CHARITY--SELLING OUT UKRAINE TO PUTIN!y

yad hashem-show me the money!

As geopolitical tensions mounted last month, Abramovich seemed to step up his giving. Just two days before Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine, it was reported that Abramovich is donating tens of millions of dollars to Yad Vashem, the global Holocaust remembrance center in Jerusalem. Perhaps not coincidentally, in a letter sent to the US ambassador to Israel in early February and made public after the invasion, Yad Vashem chairman Dani Dayan joined the heads of multiple Israeli charitable organizations in urging the US not to sanction Abramovich. The letter was also signed by Chief Rabbi of Israel David Lau and representatives of Sheba Medical Center, Tel Aviv University, and Elad. In a column for Haaretz, Israeli journalist Noa Landau noted that organizations like Yad Vashem have become increasingly dependent on private donations, which may explain why Dayan “finds himself lobbying on behalf of the donor Abramovich in a situation Yad Vashem should not be involved in under any circumstances.” (Yad Vashem did not reply to a request for comment.)

Ofran suggested that Abramovich likely made the most recent donation “in order to buy the support of Yad Vashem, which is supposed to represent the Jewish remembrance of the Holocaust.” “I think it’s a cynical donation, and that Yad Vashem shouldn’t have taken it,” she said. “And even once they took it, they shouldn’t have written this letter.”

The international response to the war in Ukraine has put immediate pressure on Russia’s oligarchs; two of the most prominent, Oleg Deripaska and Mikhail Fridman, were already calling for peace negotiations just three days after the invasion. (Fridman and Deripaska are also major Jewish philanthropists, as are other Russian oligarchs including Petr Aven, Yuri Milner, and Viktor Vekselberg. All of them now face global scrutiny.) 

Abramovich himself accepted an invitation to help broker peace talks on the Belarusian border with Ukraine a day later, reportedly at the request of the Ukrainian government via Jewish community ties. Even before he announced he would be setting up a charity to help victims in Ukraine, members of Abramovich’s family were quick to distance themselves from the war: 

A contemporary art museum in Moscow co-founded by Abramovich and Zhukova has announced that it will halt all new exhibitions in protest of the war. Abramovich’s 27-year-old daughter Sofia, who lives in London, posted a message on her popular Instagram account that read, “The biggest and most successful lie of the Kremlin’s propaganda is that most Russians stand with Putin.”

But in spite of some of these oligarchs’ belated efforts to rein in the Russian president, there is no getting around the fact that Abramovich and others have spent more than two decades loyally serving and profiting off Putin’s corrupt and violent regime—one that has been accused of murdering and jailing journalists and political dissidents and of committing war crimes from Chechnya to Syria. And for much of that time, Jewish institutions worldwide have been more than happy to take money from Abramovich and his peers. Even alongside statements of solidarity with Ukraine—for instance, an email sent on Wednesday by the Conference of Presidents, which described the situation in Ukraine as a crisis but refrained from directly condemning Russia—the response from Yad Vashem, Tel Aviv University, and other Israeli organizations, as well as the silence from many Jewish institutions on the oligarchs, suggests that longstanding philanthropic ties may affect the Jewish communal world’s willingness to hold Russia accountable for its violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty.

“The view of much of Jewish philanthropic leadership has been the bottom line: If the purposes for which the philanthropy is given are positive, humane, and holy, then to sit and analyze whether the donor was exploitive or not would be hugely diverting, amazingly complicated, and divisive.”

Reached by phone, John Ruskay, the executive vice president emeritus of UJA-Federation of New York, was unambiguous in his criticisms of Russia’s invasion. “All occupations are disasters, and watching invasions is obviously appalling,” he said. But when asked whether Jewish organizations that have accepted money from oligarchs like Abramovich have an obligation to cut ties, Ruskay was hesitant. “I think the view of much of Jewish philanthropic leadership, right and left, conservative and liberal, has been the bottom line: If the purposes for which the philanthropy is given are positive, humane, holy, and seen to strengthen both the Jewish community and the whole of society, then to sit and analyze whether the donor was exploitive or not, and whether this was kosher or not, would be hugely diverting, amazingly complicated, and divisive.” He brought up other kinds of controversial donations, such as money made by insider trading or proffered by pharmaceutical companies, arguing that it was ultimately futile to question the morality of accepting such funds: “Should one begin to assess such matters, there would be no end.”

“Would it be preferable for the funds of the oligarchs, however obtained, to remain in their bank accounts,” he asked rhetorically, “or to be made available to Yad Vashem, the ADL, and many other nonprofits?”

NO RED LINES FOR SELLING OUT UKRAINE  / DEMOCRACY

Rabbi Jill Jacobs, executive director of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, acknowledged the difficulty of making ethical calls about donors, but argued that the attempt is still necessary. “In philanthropy, nearly all money is tainted, either because it was acquired by exploiting workers, by harming the environment, by selling harmful products, or by taking advantage of systems that benefit the wealthy to the detriment of others. That said, we can’t throw up our hands and say that we can either take no money or all money; there have to be red lines,” she said. (Jacobs is a member of the Jewish Currents advisory board.) Berman, the scholar of Jewish philanthropy, agrees. “It is tempting to say all money is fungible, so where it came from does not or cannot matter,” she said. “But no matter how much we might want to launder the money, wash it clean of its past and its connections to systems of power, the very act of doing so is an erasure, an act of historical revisionism. Even worse, it can actually participate in bolstering harmful systems of power, often by deterring institutions reliant on that money from holding a person or system to account.”

Jacobs says Jewish communal organizations should have a red line around money from “close associates of Putin” as he carries out a war that could lead to “mass death and displacement, and that could have disastrous consequences for democracy and the world order. Even if the money is supporting worthy causes, it also serves to prop up the image of these oligarchs, to offer them glory and honor, and to cleanse them from their association with the Putin government.” But as Putin’s war continues to escalate, it remains to be seen where the Jewish world will draw its line.

and a contributing editor at Jewish Currents.

Founded in 1946, Jewish Currents is a magazine committed to the rich tradition of thought, activism, and culture of the Jewish left.

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Walker's World: Putin, votes and money - UPI.com

By MARTIN WALKER, UPI Chief International Correspondent
upi.com  

July 31, 2003 / 7:20 AM

From <https://www.upi.com/Walkers-World-Putin-votes-and-money/48411059650403/>

From this week forward, everything that happens in Russia will be about the upcoming elections. There are two, the elections for the Duma (Russia's parliament) in December, and four months later the presidential election that seems almost certain to re-elect Vladimir Putin.

So this week's brisk visit to Moscow by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi (wearing his hat as current head of the European Union's Council) was really about setting a date in November for a Putin-EU summit that will give the Russian president a useful pre-election spot on the world stage.

Berlusconi says he wants eventually to see Russia join the EU, and has worked hard on his personal ties with the Russian leader, inviting Putin's daughters to his private estate on Sardinia last summer. Berlusconi is using his current EU leadership to build some permanent institutions -- like the EU-Russia summit -- designed to lock Russia and the EU more closely together.

Equally, this week's Moscow visit by the American insurance tycoon Hank Greenberg was really about setting an economic agenda for Putin's next summit with President George W. Bush in Washington in September. Greenberg's American International Group is about to make a big plunge into Russia's nascent home-mortgage market.

Putin wants to be able to go to the voters with some achievements under his belt, particularly when his war in Chechnya continues to grind fruitlessly on. Specifically, Putin wants Bush to scrap the 1970s vintage Jackson-Vannik amendment that still affects Russian-U.S. trade and he also wants some real progress on Russia's application to join the World Trade Organization.

But Putin also wants a lot more Hank Greenbergs in Moscow. The Russian leader said this week he cannot begin to understand why the United States is just at No. 8 in the list of foreign investors, way behind the Germans and British and Dutch.

The answer is fairly obvious. There are three problems. 

#1 First, Putin's henchmen, with their background in the Soviet-era KGB, do not take private property very seriously. The arrest of the Menatep finance group director Platon Lebedev earlier this month on fraud charges, part of the obvious campaign of intimidation being run against Yukos oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovski, has unnerved a lot of investors. The Russian stock market has plunged sharply this month.

Western investors may understand that most of the vast fortunes acquired in the post-Soviet years by the Oligarchs were dubiously or even crookedly made. And they may have swallowed the use of Kremlin power against Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky when they tried to use their wealth and TV stations to challenge Putin. But Western investors do not want to see private companies surviving only on the Kremlin's terms, particularly when Khodorkovski's Yukos group has led the way in corporate governance reform and in opening up the secretive ways of Russian business.

#2 Russia's second economic problem is that outside of Moscow and one or two other big cities, not many Russians are doing well out of the economic recovery that has come with higher oil prices.

A massive nation-wide survey by the Social Innovations non-profit group (commissioned by the Russian Peoples Party) found that close to 50 percent of Russians believe themselves to be living at below subsistence level. (The official figure is 30 percent). They complain about bad roads and housing, the lack of heating and the difficulty of getting to see a doctor, and the fact that even "free" public education now costs more in hidden extras than they can afford.

#3 The third big economic problem is that Russia remains uncomfortably dependent on the oil price. Energy exports still account for two-thirds of its foreign earnings, and overwhelmingly this is the sector where the foreign investors go. Ironically, it is also the sector where most of the Oligarchs initially made their money, and where they still keep a grip on this commanding height of the Russian economy while Putin thinks Russia's energy reserves are too strategically important to be left to the Oligarchs.

The combination of oil, power and money, with the Kremlin on one side and the Oligarchs on the other, is inherently unstable -- particularly when the Oligarchs are the main source of funding for the upcoming political campaigns. Indeed, Khodorkovski's main offence seems to have been his readiness to finance opposition parties.

But then Khodorkovski, like the other Oligarchs, is looking far ahead. They all assume that Putin will win re-election net year, but his ability to enact legislation will depend on the composition of the new Duma. Above all, with Putin on his second (and last) term, the Duma will be the place where the next generation of Russian politicians win their spurs and position themselves for the Presidential campaign of 2008. In that sense, December's Duma vote could be more important than Putin's re-election -- and the Oligarchs know it.

California Issues - Jewish Groups

State Financing

JPAC Promotes “Ambitious” Policy Agenda at 2023 Capitol Summit

JPAC Executive Director David Bocarsly told the more than 300 conference attendees that last year, JPAC succeeded in securing $140 million from the state budget toward their legislative priorities and helped pass 15 bills

By Aaron Bandler

jewishjournal.com

6 min

May 12, 2023

https://jewishjournal.com/news/358761/jpac-promotes-ambitious-policy-agenda-at-2023-capitol-summit/

May 12, 2023

• ADL Center on Extremism Vice President Oren Segal

• Regional Director Richard S. Hirschhaut,

• State Assemblymember Isaac Bryan (D-Culver City)

•  Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and The Diane and Guilford Glazer Foundation,

• JPAC Executive Director David Bocarsly 

The Jewish Public Affairs Committee (JPAC) of California promoted an “ambitious” policy agenda at their 2023 Capitol Summit on May 9-10.

The summit, which was sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and The Diane and Guilford Glazer Foundation, took place at the Sheraton Grand Sacramento Hotel. JPAC Executive Director David Bocarsly told the more than 300 conference attendees that last year, JPAC succeeded in securing $140 million from the state budget toward their legislative priorities and helped pass 15 bills. This year, the organization scored meetings with 103 legislative offices and added 80 organizations to the JPAC coalition, which Bocarsly hailed as the “largest single state coalition” of Jewish organizations in the country. Additionally, a quarter of the state legislature was present on the opening night of the conference.

“Our community is realizing more and more how much power there is at the state level,” Bocarly said.

JPAC’s policy agenda, which Bocarsly described as “ambitious,” included:

• lobbying for $80 million in security grants to protect nonprofit organizations from hate crimes, 

• $3 million toward Holocaust and genocide education for K-12 schools and

• $44 million for domestic and sexual violence prevention programs. 

• JPAC also supported bills making it easier to build affordable housing on property owned by faith institutions and nonprofit colleges, 

• increasing the CalFresh (California food stamps) minimum from $23 to $50 and 

• extending the timeframe for critical case management services for new refugees beyond the federal government’s 90-day limit.

“We take them on because they are a clear representation of our community’s values,” Bocarsly said.

Lobbying groups organized by JPAC visited state legislators at their offices on May 10 promoting the organization’s legislative agenda. American Jewish Committee Los Angeles Regional Director Richard S. Hirschhaut, who led one of the lobbying groups, told the Journal: 

“It’s so important to put a face to the Jewish community and to be able to relate one-on-one with members of the [state] Assembly. We have found them to be receptive to the legislative initiatives that JPAC is putting forward because they ultimately reflect universal human values, and this is a public service that the Jewish community is doing by being here in Sacramento.”

The state budget was a theme throughout the conference, as the state is suddenly facing a $31.5 billion deficit after having a nearly $100 billion surplus the year before. CalMatters columnist Dan Walters told conference attendees that the state revenue fluctuates every year because California’s burgeoning budget and progressive tax structure have caused the state to become more reliant on a handful of wealthy taxpayers who generate their income from “investment earnings.” “[It’s] difficult to estimate from one year to the next how rich people are doing on their investments,” Walters said, pointing out that during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the state assumed that the economic downturn that year would result in lower revenue so the state budget was lower. But that projection turned out to be inaccurate, as the state’s wealthiest people “did not suffer from COVID-19’s economic impact”; consequently, there was a surplus, according to Walters. The 2022 surplus prompted the state government to balloon the budget, but this ended up being a miscalculation, as the Federal Reserve’s higher interest rates resulted in lower earnings for the state’s wealthiest taxpayers, Walters said, thus resulting in less revenue than expected.

Shortly after the summit, California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) proposed 

$10 million in his budget to nonprofit security grants on May 12. 

“At a time where the Governor had to make significant cuts to his agenda, proposing new funding for this program is a major statement of support for our community,” Bocarsly said in an email to summit participants. “And it’s a testament to the impact you made at the Summit. It’s clear to me that the show of strength we exhibited this week influenced the Governor’s decision to support our community despite making cuts elsewhere.”

The issue of rising antisemitism was also brought up multiple times throughout the summit, as multiple speakers noted that the latest figures from the Anti-Defamation League — released just before the summit started — showing that that there were 518 instances of antisemitism in California in 2022, a 41% increase from the year before. ADL Center on Extremism Vice President Oren Segal pointed out that there were six extremist-related killings in California in 2022 and that the number of white supremacist propaganda incidents such as dropping flyers on people’s private property and unfurling banners across freeways “have exploded across California.” Segal attributed the rise in antisemitism to “hate, conspiracy theories, and disinformation” being “increasingly amplified in online spaces” and to influencers like rapper Kanye West, who has “more followers than Jews on the planet.” State Assemblymember Isaac Bryan (D-Culver City) argued that the spike in hate occurred during the two years of the COVID-19 pandemic and suggested that “we’ve got to force each other to have these conversations about equity” and inclusion.

Dan Schnur, a political communications professor at USC, UC Berkeley and Pepperdine and a Journal columnist, told attendees that the latest ADL figures don’t teach “us anything we don’t already know” but said that the way to address it is for the community to “make new friends” and “move forward together.” He then praised the California Legislative Jewish Caucus for doing “a phenomenal job in forging relationships” with other communities.

The Jewish Caucus received plaudits throughout the summit from other speakers. Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon (D-Lakewood), one of the summit’s keynote speakers, lauded the caucus for becoming “an incredible force not only within our caucus but in our legislature.” State Senator Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley) told attendees that the Jewish Caucus would counter “anti-abortion forces” citing God as reason to ban abortions by saying “that is not what our religion teaches.” Assemblymember Mia Bonta (D-Oakland), the wife of State Attorney General Rob Bonta (D), said that the caucus has had a “you lead, we have your back” mentality toward issues like reproductive rights and gender affirming care.

Assemblymember Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), who co-chairs the Jewish Caucus, told attendees that “we face so many challenges as a community” and that “we know antisemitism is there and our job as a caucus to have the community’s back.” Wiener’s fellow co-chair, Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel (D-Woodland Hills), declared that while “it is an especially complicated time for our community,” the community is “united.” He added that it’s “gratifying” that the caucus and community “is a big part of the policy conversation in Sacramento.”

Bocarsly told the Journal “What makes JPAC so special is the diversity of our coalition, which was put on display at JPAC Capitol Summit. We convened over 300 Jewish community leaders of all backgrounds, representing a beautiful cross-section of California’s Jewish life. Our delegation included leaders of dozens of major Jewish organizations that are working to combat antisemitism and hate, advance civil rights, and provide a wide range of social and human services to vulnerable Californians. And we all traveled to our State Capitol to uplift a bold, impactful, and unified policy agenda. It was clear that the 103 legislative offices we met with were inspired by our commitment to our Jewish values and our ability to come together across differences. I could not be more proud of this growing movement, and I know that the impact of this year’s Summit will reverberate in the halls of Sacramento long beyond our two days together.

“Special thanks to the leaders of the Senate and Assembly — Pro Tem [Toni] Atkins (D-San Diego) and Speaker Rendon— to co-chairs —Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel and Senator Scott Wiener —  and the entire Legislative Jewish Caucus, and to all of our amazing legislators and experts who addressed the Summit and made it so special,” he added.

Mobsters Muscled Into Film Industry

By Cecilia Rasmussen

Jan. 2, 2000 12 AM PT

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jan-02-me-50000-story.html

Italian - Frank “The Enforcer” Nitti, Bioff 

Right-wing Senator Barry Goldwater (AZ) - Pal of Bioff in AZ

Jewish - 100,000 payoff from Joseph Schenck, president of United Artists

The towering neon sign atop the Hollywood Taft Building at the fabled crossroads of Hollywood and Vine, which once guided fictional private eye Philip Marlowe through a thousand lonely nights, also cast its light on one of 1930s Los Angeles’ most colorful real-life mobsters.

The building was headquarters of the impeccably dressed and courtly Willie Bioff, a convicted Chicago panderer who used the mob’s muscle and labor connections to win a foothold for organized crime in the burgeoning film industry.

Sent to Los Angeles as the shadowy advisor to Al Capone’s Mafia chieftain Frank “The Enforcer” Nitti, Bioff dominated the movie workers union and dictated to movie studio giants desperate to avoid labor problems.

But, after a six-year reign over the motion picture industry, Bioff was indicted for violating the federal anti-racketeering statute. He was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Three years later, he turned informer and assisted the government in prosecuting eight Chicago mobsters, including Nitti, who allegedly committed suicide before his trial.

Bioff’s descent from labor autocrat to snitch was just one more bump in a turbulent career that began when he was 8 and his father tossed him out on the streets of Chicago’s tough South Side. The boy slept in doorways, peddled papers and ran errands for politicians and underworld big shots. Ultimately, the youngster from a kosher Jewish household began stealing Swift hams from the warehouse of the city’s meatpacking giant.

Somehow, the boy thrived, growing into a burly, 200-pound man. What he lacked in height at 5 feet 6 inches, he made up in ferocity. He could lift a man off the floor with one hand, at arm’s length.

His first career setback was a pandering conviction in February 1922. He was freed on appeal after serving only eight days of a six-month sentence, but his paperwork mysteriously disappeared.

Edging away from riskier endeavors, he began selling “protection” to kosher chicken dealers at Chicago’s Fulton Street Market. Another small-time hoodlum, George Browne, also sold “protection” in the same area, but to Gentile chicken dealers.

When they met, they formed a partnership, B&B;, and agreed to share their income equally.

With Browne’s political clout and trouble-shooting skills and Bioff’s flair for force, they discovered lucrative new business opportunities among the city’s labor unions.

Gaining control of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees local, the backbone of the film industry, they began to squeeze money from theater owners by threatening to pull union projectionists from the booths.

Word of their big scores--gained, in part, by Bioff’s alleged murder of Tommy Malloy, head of the Chicago Projectionists’ Union--reached Nitti, who offered them a partnership they couldn’t refuse. The syndicate promised to support Browne in June 1934 for president of the national stage employees union. Gangsters in major cities made sure that delegates voted “properly.”

The victorious Browne put Bioff in charge of the union’s locals with a $22,000 annual salary.

With the groundwork laid and a master plan to take over all film industry unions and extort 50% of film industry profits, Bioff headed for L.A. with Mafioso Johnny Roselli, a confidant of Harry Cohn, president of Columbia Pictures.

In 1935, they opened B&B;’s West Coast headquarters in the 12-story Hollywood Taft Building--a popular spot for dentists, including one who became famous for making Clark Gable’s false teeth. Bioff briefly returned to Chicago and allegedly killed Louie “Two-Gun” Alterie, a cop-turned-gangster who stunned even his crime buddies when he pumped a pistolful of lead into a horse that had thrown a crime overlord.

Back in L.A., Bioff threatened a nationwide theater strike if the studios’ 30,000 employees didn’t sign up with one of his union’s four craft locals. Although some new members grumbled over an unexplained 2% assessment, which netted the union $1.5 million, most workers went along. As a result of Bioff’s leadership, the studio unions were among the wealthiest labor organizations in the country.

But Bioff wanted control of every studio union, including the actors’ group. He demanded $2 million as the price of labor peace. Balking at the figure, the heads of Paramount, MGM, 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros. eventually made annual payments to avoid “accidents” on their sets.

With a $100,000 payoff from Joseph Schenck, president of United Artists, Bioff bought his wife, Laurie, an 80-acre ranch--both farmhouse and fortress--that he called the “Laurie A.” It stood at the corner of Shoup Avenue and Oxnard Street in Woodland Hills, near the opulent estates of Tyrone Power, Clark Gable, Robert Taylor and Barbara Stanwyck.

Aiming for a more respectable lifestyle after living out of hotel rooms for most of his 15-year marriage, Bioff enlarged an old adobe, planted alfalfa and a $600 olive tree, and retired each evening with his devoted wife, protected by a platoon of bodyguards.

Heckled by the press for living the grand lifestyle of a movie star, wearing $150 suits, $5 neckties and $15 shirts, he always shot back: “It’s the union that’s rich, not Willie Bioff.”

His most prized possessions were three solid gold, diamond-studded union membership cards from “admirers” in Cleveland, Chicago and Hollywood.

UNIONS FIGHT MOB WITH LONGSHOREMEN

In 1937, when a cadre of studio carpenters, electricians and other technicians called themselves the Federated Motion Picture Crafts and went on a wildcat strike, they hired tough, tattooed longshoremen from San Pedro for protection from Bioff.

Eager for battle, Bioff imported several Chicago hoods, supplied them with Lincoln-Zephyr cars and obtained gun permits from the cooperative Los Angeles Police Department.

But when the gun-toting mobsters arrived at the Pico gate of 20th Century Fox Studios, they found longshoremen armed only with their fists. Although Bioff eventually won the battle, it was the beginning of the mobster’s end.

The state Assembly’s Capital and Labor Committee began hearings in L.A. But no sooner had the shouting matches started than the committee abruptly adjourned. Rumors of a $5,000 payoff circulated but there was no hard evidence.

In 1941, Browne and Bioff were convicted of extorting the studio heads. Schenck was convicted of perjury in connection with the $100,000 bribe.

In prison, Bioff turned informer.

Six other members of the syndicate were convicted of extortion. With their convictions, the syndicate’s direct control of Hollywood craft unions came to an end. Browne is said to have died of natural causes soon after his release from prison.

Released, Bioff took the name Nelson and moved to Phoenix. He and his wife were soon hobnobbing with Sen. Barry Goldwater and being flown around in his private plane. At first, Goldwater protested that he had no idea that his friend, William Nelson, was the notorious Bioff, but later said Bioff was helping him in his study of American labor, and giving him a special insight into union racketeering.

On Nov. 4, 1955, Bioff walked out of his home and slid behind the wheel of his car. A moment later, an explosion rocked the neighborhood. Parts of Bioff and his car were strewn all over the driveway. Police found a dynamite bomb wired to the starter. The killers were never found.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jan-02-me-50000-story.html

jacobin.com

2023nov14 The Far-Right Israel Lobby Is Shutting Down Democratic Voices for Palestinian Rights

By Amos Barshad  14 nOVEMBER 2023

AIPAC is funneling mounds of money to pro-Israel candidates, including in Democratic primaries. Now, all Democrats likely know that expressing anything short of unwavering support of Israel’s siege on Gaza means they might be outspent in the next election.

 From <The Far-Right Israel Lobby Is Shutting Down Democratic Voices for Palestinian Rights>

 As Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip rolls into its sixth week, the United States continues to offer its overwhelming support to its ally. When asked about the chance of a cease-fire last week, President Joe Biden shot back, “None. No possibility.”

According to the Gaza Health Ministry, over eleven thousand Palestinians have been killed as a result of Israel’s assault. In 2023, Israel is scheduled to receive $3.8 billion in annual American military assistance as part of a decades long-agreement — and may receive another $14 billion, after Biden’s emergency aid package passed the House of Representatives. A cease-fire resolution introduced by Representative Cori Bush, a Missouri Democrat, has been cosponsored by just seventeen other lawmakers. Meanwhile, the House has censured Palestinian-American congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, a Michigan Democrat, for her rhetoric in support of Palestine. Along with 212 Republicans, twenty-two Democrats voted to censure Tlaib.

What could explain this mostly unflinching and unexamined backing of Israel among Republicans and Democrats alike? In large part, this is a political moment created by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the pro-Israel lobbying group. In 2022, for the first time, AIPAC targeted Democrats in primaries — including a Jewish, self-proclaimed pro-Israel Democrat. Now, every Democrat likely knows that supporting anything short of the full AIPAC line — which currently equates to unwavering support of Israel’s siege — means that, in your next election, you may just be spent into the ground.

Beth Miller, the political director of Jewish Voice for Peace, says AIPAC “has always been a hawkish organization that pushes for dangerous, warmongering foreign policy.” 

Founded in 1953, the group advocates for a complete policy symbiosis between Israel and the United States. In recent years, that’s meant pushing for American support for Israel, no matter how radically right wing Israel’s government gets.

“To empower Netanyahu, to empower the settlers, to have a global superpower saying you can do whatever you want,” adds Logan Bayroff, a spokesperson for the lobbying group J Street. “That’s the line that AIPAC has pushed for Israel.” (J Street, which calls itself “pro-peace, pro-Israel,” has also not called for a cease-fire.)

Last year, the ostensibly bipartisan AIPAC did something it had never done before: it spent money in Democratic primaries. From Ohio to Texas to California, in traditional primaries and in special elections alike, AIPAC and the AIPAC-aligned Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI) collectively backed at least fourteen centrist candidates against fourteen more-progressive opponents.

Even more peculiar was that in those races, the public-facing AIPAC and DMFI ads and messages did not focus on Israel, but rather on a wide spectrum of issues, including loyalty to the Democratic Party. It was a cynical strategy with clear efficacy. In Ohio, the popular Bernie Sanders ally and former Ohio state senator Nina Turner was defeated. In Maryland, the veteran former Democratic congresswoman Donna Edwards was defeated. In Minnesota, Ilhan Omar only managed to beat her primary opponent by a few thousand votes. Only three other candidates opposed by AIPAC and DMFI found a way to win office.

AIPAC’s success in pushing a hard-line, unconditional support of Israel is rooted in its “veneer of bipartisanship,” says Miller, and the traditional “overwhelming cross-party support for the Israeli government.”

But in the last five to ten years, Miller says, “you have a growing group of Democrats who are critical of the Israeli government and that goes beyond ‘The Squad,’” the collective nickname for Tlaib, Omar, and their fellow progressives, including New York Democratic representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman. “They saw the writing on the wall,” Miller says, “and were very appropriately scared.” So, Miller argues, AIPAC jumped into the 2022 Democratic primaries.

Looking back at AIPAC’s expansive 2022 election spending, the fate of one candidate in particular stands out as an indicator for how far the group was willing to go to control the conversation around Israel — and that’s Andy Levin.

“They’re Coming for Our Dad”

Michigan’s 11th congressional district covers an area just north of Detroit. In 2022, the Democratic primary for the district pitted Levin against incumbent Haley Stevens, a former chief of staff to President Barack Obama’s “car czar,” Steven Rattner, who is best known for forcing through massive worker pay cuts after the 2008 crash and paying $10 million to settle pension bribery claims. (Both Stevens and Levin had each served two terms in the House at that point, but they ran against each other as a result of the state GOP’s redistricting moves.)

Levin comes from a Michigan political family dynasty. He’s a former president of his synagogue. He’s explicitly pro-Israel. He also believes in the rights of Palestinians. In September 2021, he proposed a bill for a two-state solution that called for “an end to Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories.”

Levin’s two-state solution bill marked him as a wanted man. In an email to donors in Michigan in January 2022, a former AIPAC president called the Michigan 11th district primary “a rare opportunity to defeat arguably the most corrosive member of Congress to the US-Israel relationship.”

Ahead of their 2022 spending, AIPAC created an anodyne-sounding super PAC, the United Democracy Project (UDP). Then UDP went about splashing loads of cash gifted from folks like Paul Singer, the Republican donor and hedge fund billionaire, and Haim Saban, the creator of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.

AIPAC HYDRA MONSTER!!!

According to research from IfNotNow, the Jewish-American anti-occupation organization, outside of the AIPAC-aligned groups, there were eighty PACs active in the 2022 election cycle. Their collective expenditure was $24 million. AIPAC and its allies spent a total $30.5 million, dwarfing all those other PACs combined.

In Levin’s race alone, AIPAC spent $3.9 million running ads bolstering Stevens’s support of abortion rights and depicting her as a great champion of Detroit autoworkers. AIPAC spent another $390,000 on messages opposing Levin. One mailer said, “Andy Levin should be ashamed” and blasted him for his alleged “Republican-style mudslinging” against Stevens. The ads did not mention Israel.

For Eva Borgwardt, a progressive political organizer, AIPAC’s targeting of Levin — a genial, unassuming advocate for labor rights and climate change — was a call to action. “A lot of people saw it as, ‘They’re coming for our dad,’” she says, laughing.

Borgwardt, who is a spokesperson for IfNotNow, worked for Levin as a volunteer. Along with a group of likeminded activists, Borgwardt formed Jews for Andy, a grassroots effort to demonstrate that despite AIPAC’s outlandish claims, Levin was, indeed, good for the Jews. (The group was loosely inspired by the Jews for Jamaal group that formed in 2020 to support now-representative Bowman in New York, who was also combating AIPAC money.)

During Levin’s campaign, organizers fondly recall earnest arms-on-shoulders group sing-alongs and a genuine spirit of diverse cross-issue solidarity. People working to elect Levin included organizers from the climate-focused Sunrise Movement and the Muslim-American organization Emgage.

Levi Teitel, another member of Jews for Andy, remembers hearing about the AIPAC donor letter calling Levin “corrosive” and thinking: “We gotta get our shit together.” Jews for Andy had “extremely limited resources compared to AIPAC,” Teitel says — a massive understatement. Via door-knocking, social media, and a general abundance of positive vibes, they did their best to fight back.

Stumping for Levin on Instagram, they used the hashtag #MenschForCongress. Announcing a bagel brunch in support of Levin, they cheekily dinged AIPAC: “[They’re] running a smear campaign, we’re running a schmear campaign.”

They circulated a video in which a Jewish mom with her newborn strapped to her chest cooly stops Stevens at a campaign event to ask why she’s taking AIPAC money. Stevens completely ducks the question, replying instead “Well, thank you so much for coming and bringing your kiddo!”

Jenni Byers was Levin’s communications director and a longtime Levin staffer. She says the motivation behind Jews for Andy was the same one informing her support. “He brought together people with varying ideas,” Byers says. “Not every single person agreed with Andy 100 percent of the time, but they saw that he was always acting from deep moral clarity and was always guided by his values.”

On the question of a ceasefire in Gaza, Byers says, “We’re seeing right now how difficult it is to have a conversation about this topic with any kind of nuance, and that was one thing that Andy did really well. He spoke from his personal experience and his faith.”

During the primary, that moral clarity won Levin support from voters like the Michigan abstract artist Rene Lichter, an octogenarian Holocaust survivor. During the election, Lichter told the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz that for AIPAC to be “attacking Andy, it means they’re scared shitless.”

Says Byers, “I worked with Andy for years. It wasn’t just me who trusted him. You saw so many people” who campaigned or volunteered for Levin: “Muslim, Jewish, Zionist, anti-Zionist. He had such an important role in bringing people together.” Levin’s voice, Byers says, “was needed on so many emergencies.” AIPAC’s targeting of Levin, says Byers, was “incredibly painful to see.”

In the end, Jews for Andy’s scrappy efforts wouldn’t be nearly enough. Before AIPAC’S money came in, Levin and Stevens were running head-to-head in the polls. On August 2, election day, Stevens crushed Levin by nearly twenty points.

AIPAC’s Next Steps

Levin did not comment for this story. Just before his loss, he told Mehdi Hassan, “AIPAC can’t stand the idea that I am the clearest, strongest Jewish voice in Congress standing for a simple proposition: that there is no way to have a secure, democratic homeland for the Jewish people unless we achieve the political and human rights of the Palestinian people. That’s it.”

As civilian deaths continue to rise in Gaza and as calls for cease-fire continue to be ignored, it’s hard not to wonder what impact Levin might have if he were in the House. For her part, Stevens has used her platform to call for the release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas but not to push for relief for Gaza.

“The past few weeks have been extremely painful for me to watch as a Jewish person in America seeing the Israelis and the Palestinians who are subject to this awful violence,” Teitel says. “To have my now-congresswoman not being able to see Palestinians for who they are — which is humans — has been nothing short of disappointing.”

Of the twenty-two Democrats who voted to censure Tlaib, all but four have taken AIPAC money. Meanwhile, other Democrats are likely aware that if they say anything critical about Israeli policy, they could become an AIPAC target. The AIPAC-aligned DMFI is already spending money against Tlaib and backing primary opponents for others who haven’t supported Israel’s war.

For Borgwardt, the Michigan 11th district primary race demonstrated that AIPAC’s was not what it claims to be. “AIPAC is not a Jewish lobby, nor even a pro-Israel lobby,” she says. “It is primarily a vehicle for Republican billionaires to support the settlement movement and an antidemocratic, far-right vision for both Israel and the United States. And it is willing to destroy anyone, including and especially American Jews, who get in its way.”

J Street supported Levin in the Michigan congressional race but wasn’t able to match the money AIPAC was spending. J Street’s Bayroff says AIPAC’s support of Israel has actually harmed regular Israelis. “The people in power right now [in Israel] have said for decades, ‘We’re gonna keep you safe with no political solution, no Palestinian state, no diplomacy — we’re gonna weaken moderate Palestinians and empower extremist leaders,’” he says, adding that the October 7 attacks have proven that tactic “to be a complete and total failure.”

To fight for stability, Bayroff says, “What’s needed is exactly what people like Andy Levin propose: actual compromise, actual withdrawal from settlements, an end to the occupation, and the treatment of Palestinians as a legitimate people with a legitimate right to a state.”

The night of Stevens’s primary win, AIPAC boasted: “Being pro-Israel is both good policy and good politics.” But AIPAC, of course, did not actually buy ads about Israel — it did not actually engage in a conversation about the US government’s support of Israel. When reached for comment, an AIPAC spokesperson only pointed to the group’s success rate: “97 percent of [AIPAC] endorsed Democrats won their primaries.”

Miller argues that public opinion is not reflected by AIPAC or Biden or Capitol Hill. She ticks off numbers: a Data for Progress poll showing 66 percent of voters, and 80 percent of Democrats, support a cease-fire; a Quinnipiac poll showing 65 percent of voters aged eighteen to thirty-four oppose more military aid to Israel and 80 percent support more humanitarian assistance to Gaza. And despite the United States’ support of Israel, a lull in the fighting may be coming. The Washington Post is now reporting that an Israel-Hamas hostage-prisoner swap is imminent. The swap would involve a temporary cease-fire.

“AIPAC wants to make it seem fringe to support Palestinian rights,” she says, “but they won’t be able to because it’s simply not true.”

Despite the loss in Michigan’s 11th district, the experience of those who worked with Levin and Jews for Andy still reverberates — and still carries hope for the future.

Byers says that working for Levin “changed my life. It brought so many wonderful people into it. I learned so much. And he also taught me how to be a parent in activism. I still ask his advice. How do we repair the world? How do we raise our kids?”

https://jacobin.com/2023/11/aipac-democratic-primary-spending-andy-levin

timesofisrael.com

UN Palestinian rights official’s social media history reveals antisemitic comments

Francesca Albanese tells ToI she acknowledges ‘mistakes’ in past reference to a ‘Jewish lobby’; is latest UN official probing Israel to show evidence of blatant prejudice

 By Luke Tress 14 December 2022

From <https://www.timesofisrael.com/un-palestinian-rights-officials-social-media-history-reveals-antisemitic-comments/> 

A lawyer heading the UN Human Rights Council’s open-ended investigation into Israel’s treatment of Palestinians said during a 2014 conflict between Israel and Gaza terror groups that the “Jewish lobby” was in control of the United States.

Francesca Albanese, an Italian lawyer, was appointed earlier this year as the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories. The rapporteur is an independent expert appointed by the UN Human Rights Council tasked with investigating human rights in Palestinian areas, publishing public reports and working with governments and other groups on the issue.

Albanese, who now says she regrets the “Jewish lobby” remark, has long been a harsh critic of Israel, and the Israeli mission to the UN in Geneva formally objected to her appointment, arguing that she harbors significant bias against the Jewish state.

A review of her past social media posts, media appearances and talks with activist groups found that aside from inveighing against a “Jewish lobby,” she has also sympathized with terror organizations, dismissed Israeli security concerns, compared Israelis to Nazis and accused the Jewish state of potential war crimes.

Then, as now, she refers to Israel as a settler-colonial enterprise and to Jews in Israel and the pre-state British mandate as foreign interlopers subjugating an indigenous Palestinian population. In her first official report to the UN this year, she urged a rejection of the conflict paradigm, describing Israel solely as an oppressor and legitimizing Palestinian “resistance.” She rarely acknowledges Palestinian terrorism.

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In 2014, in an open letter posted to her Facebook page, Albanese castigated the US and Europe for their conduct during Operation Protective Edge, a war between Israel and Gaza terror groups that year.

“America and Europe, one of them subjugated by the Jewish lobby, and the other by the sense of guilt about the Holocaust, remain on the sidelines and continue to condemn the oppressed — the Palestinians — who defend themselves with the only means they have (deranged missiles), instead of making Israel face its international law responsibilities,” Albanese wrote.

She was not employed by the UN at the time, but had previously worked for the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) a UN agency that assists displaced Palestinians and their descendants, according to her LinkedIn profile. The letter she posted was meant to raise funds for UNRWA.

As of publication, the previously unreported post remained on her personal Facebook page, which is viewable by the public and identifies her as a UN investigator.

In another post from that year, which was hidden from view after her office was contacted by The Times of Israel, Albanese referred to the Israel lobby and Israel’s greed. The comments were directed at the BBC over its coverage of the conflict, even though the British broadcaster is often critical of Israel.

“The Israeli lobby is clearly inside your veins and system and you will be remembered to have been on the big brother’s side of this orwellian [sic] nightmare caused once again by Israel’s greed. Shame on you BBC,” she wrote.

And last year, she referred to Jewish and pro-Israel lobbies influencing Israeli arms sales and quieting criticism of Israel.

Responding to the revelations about Albanese’s statements, the Foreign Ministry claimed that antisemitism is widespread in the UN.

“Antisemitism is a persistent malice that has infected the United Nations Human Rights Council for far too long,” read a statement by Israel’s Permanent Mission to the UN in Geneva. “Comments made by UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese that surfaced today are yet another stain on the credibility of this body and yet another example of the impunity that exists today regarding antisemitism and antisemitic comments made by UN officials.”

The mission argued that the lack of accountability for statements by UN officials “only works to legitimize antisemitism and endangers the Jewish people.”

References to Jews and Jewish lobbies wielding disproportionate power are viewed as antisemitic because they conjure age-old tropes and conspiracy theories about Jews controlling the world from the shadows. Many of those stereotypes also depict Jews as greedy.

“Talking about a uniform and ever-powerful Jewish lobby feeds into the stereotype of Jewish power, that there is a nefarious Jewish hand manipulating governments,” said Susan Heller Pinto, the vice president of international policy at the Anti-Defamation League.

“When she’s saying America is subjugated by the Jewish lobby it reinforces that image of this Jewish lobby being all-powerful and America and America’s actions and policies being directed by this Jewish lobby, and that’s antisemitic,” Heller Pinto said. “It’s making generalized statements. It’s not a political critique of an Israeli action, it is blanket characterizations that invoke age-old antisemitic tropes.”

Earlier this year, an investigator with the UN Commission of Inquiry into the conflict apologized after a similar “Jewish lobby” comment caused an uproar.

Contacted by The Times of Israel via email, Albanese attempted to distance herself from her past remarks.

“Some of the words I used, during Israel’s offensive on the Gaza Strip in 2014, were infelicitous, analytically inaccurate and unintendedly offensive,” she said through her office. “People make mistakes. I distance myself from these words, which I would not use today, nor have used as a UN Special Rapporteur.”

“Following this clarification, our attention should not be distracted from the unlawful state practices which cause suffering for millions and denial of human rights on a daily basis in the occupied Palestinian territory,” she said. “This is what I am mandated to report on and which should be our focus.”

Code of conduct

In her application for the special rapporteur position, Albanese stated there was not “any reason, currently or in the past, that could call into question” her moral authority or credibility, and that she did not “hold any views or opinions that could prejudice the manner” in which she investigates.

Special rapporteurs are not paid for their work and are appointed to three-year terms, with the possibility of a three-year extension. The Human Rights Council code of conduct for mandate-holders stresses that they should be objective and eliminate “double-standards and politicization,” and act with “integrity, meaning, in particular, though not exclusively, probity, impartiality, equity, honesty and good faith.”

Previous rapporteurs into the Palestinians have also been staunchly opposed to Israel, which is the only country that is assigned a permanent investigator. A series of mandate-holders have held the rapporteur position on the Palestinian territories since 1993.

Albanese has also compared Israel to Nazi Germany, which is viewed as deeply offensive in Israel and an affront to the victims of the Holocaust.

In a 2015 post uncovered by The Times of Israel, she shared a picture of what she said was a Nazi trooper and a Jewish man, and next to it, an Israeli soldier and a Palestinian. And in an interview with Italian media, she compared the Nakba, the Palestinian word for the “catastrophe” of Israel’s creation, to the Holocaust, in a comment that was previously reported by the pro-Israel group UN Watch.

In the first pic a Nazi soldier, a dog, and a man on the ground – who is a Jew. In the second pic an Israeli soldier, a dog, and a man on the ground – who is a Palestinian.

Posted by Acsecnarf Albanese on Sunday, November 29, 2015

Comparing Israel to Nazi Germany is considered antisemitic according to the widely-accepted definition formulated by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. Albanese has recently spoken out against the IHRA definition.

Armed resistance

Albanese has also been heavily critical of Israel in other more recent or previously reported comments, repeatedly brushing aside Israeli security concerns, including since she took up the special rapporteur position, and has justified violence against Israel and Israelis.

Last month she told a podcast that Israeli security fears were “paranoia thinking.”

“Israel cannot claim self-defense while illegally occupying and while directing an act of aggression against another country,” she said. “Those who have the right to self-defense are the Palestinians.”

In an interview with Italian media earlier this year, she accused Israel of being “very effective in passing off the equation ‘resistance equals terrorism.’ But an occupation clearly necessitates and generates violence.” She said in another interview that Palestinian violence is “inevitable.”

Earlier this year, after a flare-up between Gaza terrorists and Israel, she said, “Palestinians’ right to resist is inherent to their right to exist as a people.” She also said the right to Palestinian armed resistance was a “necessary conversation” that had been “demoted.”

In a speech delivered to a gathering in Gaza via video earlier this month, she said, “There is a right to oppose this occupation.” The Times of Israel translated her comments from Arabic, although she delivered the speech in English, because the English audio was not available.

“The occupier cannot say he is defending himself,” she told the audience in the enclave, which has been ruled by the Hamas terror group since a bloody takeover in 2007.

Seven years earlier, she expressed joy over the European Union’s General Court taking Hamas off of its terror blacklist: “Two good news one after another from the radio while I was taking a nap. Normalization in the relations usa cuba and removal of hamas from the list of terror organizations. Was i dreaming???”

The post was also recently removed. The Times of Israel contacted Albanese’s office for comment on that post and several others but did not receive a response.

On at least one occasion she condemned Palestinian rockets fired at Israel.

“Indiscriminate rocket fire from Gaza is no acceptable response to Israel’s unlawful bombings, because it harms civilians and it is therefore unlawful too,” she said earlier this year.

Major crime allegations

She has rejected any Israeli presence in the West Bank as “foreign alien domination,” saying it has “no justification,” “no reason,” and calling it “an instrument to colonize the land.”

Israel justifies its presence in the West Bank, which sits on highlands overlooking the country’s central plains, on security grounds. There is also heavily documented evidence of a Jewish presence in the West Bank going back thousands of years which is recognized by UNESCO, among other bodies.

In 2018 Albanese posted a screenshot of a quote she attributed to David Ben-Gurion that said, “We will abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine.” The quote appeared to be a translation of a disputed 1937 letter Ben Gurion wrote to his son.

Albanese commented that “taking all of Palestine (and much more in fact) has always been the plan of the Zionists.”

She has also said Israel may be guilty of alleged major crimes including genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

he is unfit to take up this role,” Merav Marks, legal adviser for the Israeli mission to the UN in Geneva, said at the time.

The American Jewish Committee also condemned her appointment at the time.

Israel — backed at times by the United States — has long accused the Human Rights Council of anti-Israel bias and has generally refused to cooperate with its investigators.

Echoes of Kothari

Albanese’s “Jewish lobby” comments echoed recent statements by another UN official investigating Israel.

In July, Miloon Kothari, a member of the UN’s commission of inquiry looking into alleged Israeli crimes, said that social media was “controlled largely by the Jewish lobby.” He also questioned why Israel was allowed in the UN.

Kothari’s open-ended commission of inquiry has been described as harshly critical of Israel and the country’s backers point out that it almost entirely ignores Palestinian terror and violence.

Last week, 49 US Congress members wrote a letter to US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield expressing their concern about the commission’s bias, including due to Kothari’s “Jewish lobby” comment.

semitic tropes. In 2011, American jurist Richard Falk, who held the post at the time, was condemned for posting an antisemitic cartoon.

“The actions of Richard Falk at the time, statements by UN officials, it just feeds into the lack of confidence that people have in the United Nations to be even-handed and constructive when it comes to anything related to Israel and even related to Jews,” said the ADL’s Heller Pinto.

Defending Kothari

Albanese has defended Kothari, calling criticism of his remarks “preposterous allegations of antisemitism” and a “smear campaign.”

She said criticism of the commission of inquiry “seemed to be coordinated. I think that this should prompt scrutiny.”

She has also questioned Israel’s involvement in the UN, calling pro-Israel activities “vile.”

“This should trigger a proper inquiry inside the UN,” she said. “I’ve personally seen the breach of the code of conduct by Israeli authorities, the Israeli ambassador.”

Albanese said last week that Israel had granted her permission to visit the West Bank and East Jerusalem, but later posts appeared to say Israel had blocked the visit due to statements she has made.

Her first report as a rapporteur, released in October, called Israel an “intentionally acquisitive, segregationist and repressive regime.”

Reports by UN investigators are significant outside of the UN because they are cited by media and other organizations, making their way to the public, which is likely unaware of bias allegations.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/un-palestinian-rights-officials-social-media-history-reveals-antisemitic-comments/

Extremist murder statistics from recent years reveal a clear trend: from a high during the years 2015 and 2016, the number of extremist-related killings in the United States has generally been decreasing in the years since then. One of the primary reasons for this decline lies in the reason numbers in 2015 and 2016 were so high: in the mid-2010s, extremist murders were committed by a variety of different types of extremists, including right-wing extremists such as white supremacists and anti-government extremists, left-wing extremists such as Black nationalists, and domestic Islamist extremists. Moreover, extremists from all these sources conducted mass shooting attacks in the mid-2010s. As a result, the total casualty numbers were particularly high for those years. However, since then, murders committed by left-wing extremists and domestic Islamist extremists have dropped substantially. In the past five years, for example, left-wing extremists have been involved in only three killings, and domestic Islamist extremists have participated in only one. In other words, the extremist murders of recent years have overwhelmingly been committed by far-right extremists. While the decline in the number of deaths from those other types of extremism is welcome, the fact that the threat of lethal far-right violence remains significant is disturbing.

Oren Segal

VP, Center on Extremism, ADL

As Vice President of the Center on Extremism, Oren Segal leads the organization's efforts to combat extremism, terrorism, and all forms of hate both in the physical world and online. Recognized as a foremost authority on extremism, the Center on Extremism consists of a team of experts, analysts, and investigators who provide invaluable resources, expertise, and educational briefings to law enforcement agencies, public officials, and internet and technology companies.

Throughout his tenure at ADL, Oren has dedicated much of his time to evaluating and countering the trends, tactics, and impact of antisemitism and extremism across the entire ideological spectrum. He regularly appears on national and international media outlets, provides expert witness testimony, and speaks at conferences worldwide. In recognition of his exceptional service in the public interest, Oren was honored by the FBI in 2006. He was named one of the 50 influential, intriguing, and inspiring American Jews by the Forward in 2019. Prior to joining ADL in 1998, Oren worked for The New York Times and the Jewish Community Federation in San Francisco. He is a graduate of Wheaton College in Massachusetts.

From <https://www.adl.org/who-we-are/leadership/staff/oren-segal>

(why partner with ADL?) 

Princeton Univesity The Bridging Divides Initiative (BDI) is a non-partisan research initiative that tracks and mitigates political violence in the United States. BDI is based at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA), hosted by the Empirical Studies of Conflict (ESOC), and initially incubated at Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination (LISD). 

https://bridgingdivides.princeton.edu/

ADL and Princeton’s Bridging Divides Initiative Release New Report Tracking Over 400 Threats and Harassment Against Local Officials

New York, NY, October 20, 2022 … Today, ADL (the Anti-Defamation League) and Princeton University’s Bridging Divides Initiative (BDI) launched a new data collection initiative that tracks threats and harassment of local elected officials. This first-of-its-kind project is an ongoing study to systematically evaluate threats and harassment of local officials across the United States using public event-based data. “Threats and harassment against

 From <https://atlanta.adl.org/news/page/3/>

Carnegie Endowment Workshop: Should America Be Worried About Political Violence? And What Can We Do to Prevent It?

Rachel Kleinfeld September 16, 2019

Workshop summary

Rachel Kleinfeld, Senior Fellow, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP)

Nealin Parker and Shannon Hiller, Bridging Divides Initiative, Princeton University

Ashley Quarcoo, Democracy Specialist, USAID; Visiting Scholar, CEIP

Sadia Hameed, Founder and Executive Director, Thought Partnerships     

From <https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/09/16/should-america-be-worried-about-political-violence-and-what-can-we-do-to-prevent-it-pub-80401>

 PR: ADL and CJF Announce Joint-Incident Reporting System First Of Its Kind in the Nation

July 12, 2022

ADL and CJF Announce Joint-Incident Reporting System
First Of Its Kind in the Nation

Atlanta, GA, July 7, 2022 … In response to increasing levels of antisemitic incidents across South Carolina and the United States, ADL (Anti-Defamation League) and Charleston Jewish Federation (CJF) have created the first Federation/ADL partnership for the reporting of antisemitic incidents.

ADL’s annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents showed a staggering 67% increase in antisemitic incidents in South Carolina in 2021 and a 74% increase across the Southeast Region. Nationwide, ADL found that antisemitic incidents reached a high watermark across virtually every category. Attacks against Jewish institutions, including Jewish community centers (JCCs) and synagogues, were up by 61 percent, incidents at K-12 schools increased 106 percent, and incidents on college campuses rose 21 percent. Assaults – considered the most serious incident type because it involves person-on-person physical violence triggered by antisemitic animus – increased 167 percent, jumping to a total of 88 reports in 2021 from 33 in 2020. Incidents of harassment were up 43 percent, and acts of antisemitic vandalism rose 14 percent.

“The rise in hate against the Jewish community in the United States, the Southeast Region, and South Carolina is very troubling,” said Dr. Allison Padilla-Goodman, Vice President, ADL Southern Division. “We must work harder than ever to provide anti-bias programming for schools and communities, provide hate-crimes training for law enforcement, advocate for local social justice initiatives, and respond quickly to incidents. Thanks to this groundbreaking partnership, people in the Charleston region can quickly and easily report antisemitic incidents and notify both ADL and the Charleston Jewish Federation together, allowing for a faster, coordinated, multi-agency response.”

Judi Corsaro, CJF’s Chief Executive Officer, encourages anyone who experiences or witnesses an incident of antisemitism to please report it at https://www.jewishcharleston.org/incidentreport. “CJF and ADL will work together to assess the situation and respond as quickly as possible.” She stressed that all personal information provided will be kept strictly confidential. Both Padilla-Goodman and Corsaro added that if the incident is an emergency, please dial 911.

Excerpt from 2023 ADL Report on Murder & Extremism

Far-right extremists in the U.S. commit such a large proportion of murders for a range of reasons. It is not that only right-wing extremists are violent.

Left-wing extremists, for example, engage in violence ranging from assaults to fire-bombings and arsons, but in recent decades have only occasionally targeted people with deadly violence.

[THIS IS DISPUTED] A left-wing protester did shoot a Georgia state trooper in January 2023 before being killed in return fire, but the injury was not fatal for the officer.

Extremists on the left have been more likely to attack property than people.

Domestic Islamist extremists in the U.S. have proven willing to engage in deadly violence—including shooting sprees and vehicular attacks—but such incidents decreased significantly after 2017, primarily due to the decline of the terrorist movement ISIS/ISIL, whose calls to violence inspired many plots and attacks.

Arrests related to domestic Islamist extremists continue to occur in the United States but are primarily cases involving providing material support to terrorist groups abroad.[6]

From <https://www.adl.org/resources/report/murder-and-extremism-united-states-2023>

The family of a 'Cop City' protester who was killed releases more autopsy findings

March 13, 2023

By The Associated Press

 From <https://www.npr.org/2023/03/13/1163272958/cop-city-protester-autopsy-manuel-paez-teran>

Excerpt

The family's autopsy report describes Paez Terán's body as being torn up, shot at least a dozen times and that "many of the wound tracks within his body converge, coalesce and intersect, rendering the ability to accurately determine each and every individual wound track very limited, if even impossible."

The report also says it is "impossible to determine" whether the activist was holding a firearm at the time they were shot.

The autopsy was conducted by Dr. Kris Sperry, who was the investigation bureau's longtime chief medical examiner until he abruptly resigned in 2015 after the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Sperry "claimed hundreds of work hours at the GBI when he actually was working for clients of his forensic-science consulting firm."

Since Paez Terán's death, numerous protests have been held in Atlanta, some of which have turned violent, including when masked activists on Jan. 21 lit a police car on fire and shattered the windows of a downtown skyscraper that houses the Atlanta Police Foundation and.

On March 5, a group threw flaming bottles and rocks at officers as others torched heavy machinery at the construction site where the training center is expected to be built. Twenty-three people are facing domestic terrorism charges in connection with that attack. Activists maintain that those who were arrested were not violent agitators "but peaceful concert-goers who were nowhere near the demonstration

From <https://www.npr.org/2023/03/13/1163272958/cop-city-protester-autopsy-manuel-paez-teran>

No charges for Georgia State troopers who killed activist at Atlanta Public Safety Training Center site

By Aungelique Proctor and FOX 5 Atlanta Digital Team

Published October 6, 2023

Updated 7:44PM

Atlanta Public Safety Training Center

FOX 5 Atlanta

DEKALB COUNTY, Ga. - A special prosecutor will not charge the six Georgia State Patrol troopers who shot and killed an environmental protestor at the proposed site for the controversial Atlanta Public Safety Training Center.

Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, who went by "Tortuguita" and used they/them pronouns, was shot and killed by six Georgia State Troopers on Jan. 18 as officers raided campgrounds occupied by environmental demonstrators who had allegedly been camping out for months to protest the development of the training center, dubbed "Cop City" by critics.

After months of investigating, the Stone Mountain Circuit District Attorney’s Office says the troopers' use of lethal force was "objectively reasonable under the circumstances of the case."

In their report, officials say the troopers spoke with Tortuguita, who refused to leave and zipped up the tent in which they were living.

After an officer fired pepper balls at the tents, officials say that the environmental activist fired multiple shots - hitting Georgia State Patrol Trooper Jerry Parrish below his armor plate and above his belt on his right side and lodging the bullet in his spine. The troopers then returned fire, hitting and killing Tortuguita.

In a new report released Friday, the Stone Mountain Circuit District Attorney's Office says they found that the troopers "did not act with any criminal intent" due to the circumstances and said it was "not feasible" for the troopers to issue a warning before firing. 

From <https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/no-charges-troopers-manuel-esteban-teran-tortuguita-death-cop-city-atlanta>

adl.org

Antisemitism and the Radical Anti-Israel Movement on U.S. Campuses, 2019

https://www.adl.org/resources/report/antisemitism-and-radical-anti-israel-movement-us-campuses-2019

Published: 05.20.2020

Executive Summary

• In recent years, criticism of Israel has become endemic on college campuses across the U.S. While it is very likely that most of that criticism is a legitimate form of political discourse, some of the more radical expressions of anti-Israel sentiment can create an environment in which Jewish students, many of whom say they have a personal or religious connection with Israel, may feel besieged or threatened. Radical expressions of anti-Israel sentiment may include Israeli flags being removed from their displays, calls by student activists to boycott all pro-Israel groups on campus, the heckling of pro-Israel speakers and calling Israel a settler-colonial state.

• Radical anti-Israel activism on campus is driven primarily by Students for Justice in Palestine, a network of pro-Palestinian student groups across the U.S. that disseminate frequently inflammatory anti-Israel propaganda. These groups sometimes ally with campus chapters of Jewish Voice for Peace, a radical anti-Israel activist group, whose Jewish origins and membership help shield its activism and rhetoric from charges of antisemitism.

• Radical anti-Israel rhetoric and activities on campus often emerged from Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaigns against Israel; the implementation of annual Israeli Apartheid Week programs; the convening of conferences and lectures featuring all or almost all pro-BDS speakers; and events featuring Israeli or pro-Israel speakers, to which activists sometimes responded with heckling. Such activities can undermine efforts to normalize relations between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian movements and can contribute to broader efforts to delegitimize Israel as a sovereign state.

• Anti-Israel rhetoric on campus can become antisemitic when it demonizes Zionism, thereby implicitly demonizing many American Jews. Throughout 2019, claims that Zionists are racists or white supremacists were expressed by radical anti-Israel activists in a variety of forums, including anti-Israel exhibits, social media and official student newspapers.

• Antisemitism can also manifest in the radical anti-Israel movement when Zionist or pro-Israel students are targeted or excluded from elements of campus life. Such targeting, which took place on a number of campuses in 2019, inevitably results in discrimination and disenfranchisement directed at significant numbers of Jewish students.

• Some radical anti-Israel groups expressed support for terrorism against Israelis in 2019. Sometimes this support took the form of promoting the terrorist group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, applauding convicted terrorists Leila Khaled and Rasmea Odeh, condoning violent tactics of the terrorist group Hamas, or honoring Palestinians who were killed in clashes with Israel despite the fact that many of them were members of terrorist groups.

• Funding for radical anti-Israel groups came from a number of prominent charitable foundations. Most notable is the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF), an ostensibly mainstream charity but one that knowingly provides significant funding and symbolic support to Jewish Voice for Peace, a radical anti-Zionist organization. RBF also donates to the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, the Institute for Middle East Understanding and Grassroots Jerusalem, all of which have engaged in radical anti-Zionist rhetoric. Another notable funder is the Westchester Peace Action Committee (WESPAC), which provides significant funding to Students for Justice in Palestine. WESPAC’s own website includes antisemitic content. SJP is also funded by American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), some of whose members have a history of making antisemitic remarks.

Introduction

In recent years, criticism of Israel has become endemic on college campuses across the US. This trend continued in 2019. While most anti-Israel activism ostensibly took the form of legitimate political expression, a significant segment contributed to an atmosphere in which Jewish students felt under attack – and from which antisemitism often emerged. At a time when antisemitic incidents have increased across the country, including acts of harassment, violence and murder, campus antisemitism has a demonstrable impact on the morale of Jewish students and campus communities. It has contributed to the sense of siege felt by many Jewish college students. Colleges nevertheless overwhelmingly remain safe places for Jewish students, and panic around this issue is unhelpful.

The anti-Israel organization that engaged in antisemitic activity most frequently, by far, was Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). With its singular focus on the Arab-Israel conflict, SJP is the most visible anti-Israel group on campus in the U.S. According to SJP’s website, it includes approximately 200 chapters nationwide.

Anti-Israel student activists and professors expressed antisemitic ideas in a variety of ways, including through the denigration of Zionism, the idea of Jewish nationalism in the land of Israel. This demonization and negation sometimes took the form of equating Zionism with racism, Nazism, or white supremacy. Often “Zionism” was conflated with critiques of Israeli policy or Israeli leaders. This contributes to the movement to delegitimize Israel as a sovereign state.

While the state of Israel can and should be criticized like any other country, the demonization of Zionism and the isolation of anyone who supports or feels affinity with it frequently feels like an attack on Jewish students, a sizeable percentage of whom, like the majority of all American Jews, view a relationship with Israel[1] to be an important part of their religious, cultural or social identities.[2] It also undermines efforts to normalize relations between diverse groups of students with differing political views.

Another inflammatory and antisemitic phenomenon involved student activists calling for discrimination against Zionist or pro-Israel students or the expulsion of Zionists or pro-Israel students from campus, which has a disproportionate impact on Jewish students and could result in the exclusion of large numbers of Jews from campus activities. Despite SJP[3] officially stating its opposition to antisemitism on its website, members of the group frequently engaged in the aforementioned activities.

At times, radical anti-Israel activists on campus expressed support for terrorism targeting Israelis, which includes many American Jewish students’ family members.

In some cases, anti-Israel and anti-Zionist rhetoric on campus incorporated classic antisemitic tropes and images. Although anti-Israel activists often insist that this rhetoric targets Israelis, Zionists or supporters of Israel, and not Jews, swapping out the term “Jew” for the term “Zionist” does not absolve anti-Israel activists when they infuse their rhetoric with longstanding antisemitic images of Jews as greedy, controlling, bloodthirsty or hateful towards non-Jews. Indeed, this tactic of interchanging words frequently is used by hate groups that engage in antisemitism, including white supremacists.

It’s worth noting that some Zionists are not Jewish; however, Zionism is inherently linked to Jews, and the use of anti-Jewish tropes when expressing critiques of Israel and talking about Zionism is antisemitic. Throughout 2019, there also was a significant tendency among some anti-Israel activists to blame all pro-Israel students for every action taken by the Israeli government. Holding all Jews collectively responsible for the actions of the Jewish state is a classic antisemitic trope. Indeed, many activists knowingly ignore the fact that pro-Israel students have diverse opinions on Israeli politics and actually may hold critical views of Israeli policies.

Zionism and/or a connection to Israel is not monolithic. The connection that many Jewish students feel with Israel may include a pride of peoplehood and history, religious heritage, celebrations of Israeli culture, pride in Israel’s advancements in science and technology, a view of Israel as a safe-haven following millennia of anti-Jewish persecution, solidarity with fellow Jews who live there or even an appreciation of Israeli food. Condemning every Jewish student who claims a connection to Israel as morally deficient or racist (or complicit in racism) is itself an expression of bigotry. Such generalizations are an attack on diverse Jewish identities. This holds true even if many of those perpetrating such rhetoric are Jewish or Israeli, such as the case with JVP. While all these trends must be confronted, hysteria around anti-Israel activism on campus is unwarranted. Jewish students are not suffering from persecution on a daily basis, and physical assaults are extremely rare.

Claims that Zionism is a racist movement are divorced from the reality that Zionism is a multifaceted movement with broad support from different ethnic communities in Israel and around the world. It has helped establish an ethnically diverse, democratic state in which basic rights are protected and which shares a vision of equality and justice for all.

It should be noted that, in addition to discrimination from anti-Israel activists, Jewish students have experienced a barrage of explicit antisemitism from white supremacists over the past several years. This has often taken the form of white supremacist groups distributing propaganda, which frequently includes antisemitism. This trend has worsened in recent years, creating an even more hostile environment for Jewish students.[4][5]

Some anti-Zionist rhetoric is attractive to white supremacists because it confirms their beliefs about nefarious Jewish power. Although white supremacists are much more overt in their antisemitic rhetoric, some arguments made by left-wing anti-Zionist activists have the effect of perpetuating the anti-Jewish views of the far right.

The Radical [as in Pro-American?]  Anti-Israel Movement on US Campuses

A significant amount of the legitimate criticism of Israel on campus in 2019 had the effect of creating a more polarized and fraught atmosphere. In addition to SJP, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and occasionally IfNotNow (INN) contributed to anti-Israel activism on campus. Anti-Israel professors, guest speakers and students unaffiliated with any anti-Israel organizations also played a role.

Largely due to concerted efforts by both SJP and JVP, student organizations dedicated to addressing other issues, such as climate change, police brutality and income inequality, often actively supported SJP and JVP’s initiatives. These partnerships gave anti-Israel activity increased exposure across campus and helped in corralling support for anti-Israel resolutions considered by student governments. 

Main anti-Israel Groups

Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), the most active anti-Israel group on campus in the U.S., is a network of pro-Palestinian student groups across the country which disseminate anti-Israel propaganda often laced with inflammatory and at times combative and antisemitic rhetoric. They are a leading campus organizer of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns against Israel and specialize in using confrontational tactics such as disrupting student-run pro-Israel events and constructing mock “apartheid walls” and distributing fake “eviction notices” to dramatize what they consider Israeli abuses of Palestinians. They believe that Zionism is an inherently racist ideology. As proponents of “anti-normalization” between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel advocates, they make it more difficult for groups with diverging views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to work together and achieve mutual understanding.

Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) is a radical anti-Israel activist group that also supports BDS. Like SJP, JVP views Zionism as fundamentally racist and rejects the view that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a tragic dispute over land which has been perpetuated by a cycle of violence, fear, and distrust on both sides in favor of the belief that Israeli policies and actions are motivated by deeply rooted Jewish racial chauvinism and religious supremacism. Some of the more radical members of JVP engage in rhetoric that echoes language that is more typically heard from non-Jewish antisemites. The group ignores the full range of Zionist identities and equates the mildest expressions of support for Israel or celebrations of Israeli culture with the furthest fringes of hardline Zionist expansionism.

Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions

Support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel was a central feature of the anti-Israel movement on campus in 2019. The movement has a series of demands: an end to Israel’s occupation and the dismantling of its security fence, full equality for Israel’s Arab-Palestinian citizens, and the Right of Return for Palestinian refugees.[6] Other elements of the BDS movement include an economic boycott, which targets Israeli companies that contribute to alleged human rights violations against Palestinians, and an academic boycott, which prohibits exchanges with Israeli universities.  The BDS movement is dismissive of concerns over terrorism and does nothing to disrupt the cycle of distrust which drives much of the conflict. Many of its proponents deny Israel’s right to exist and seek to undermine its standing in the global community.

Both SJP and JVP officially support BDS.

Throughout 2019, student governments considered numerous BDS-inspired calls for boycotts against Israel or companies connected to Israel. Some proposals (at New York University[7] and Pitzer College,[8] for example) went so far as to call for the end of study abroad programs at Israeli universities. Many of these proposals were passed by student government bodies, and the attendant debate and voting processes – which often included time for public comments – were reported to be tense and emotionally challenging for students involved.[9]

While it is notable that none of these pro-BDS resolutions have been adopted by university administrations, it has been disappointing that administrations typically have not spoken out more vigorously against these campaigns.

Israeli Apartheid Week [every fcking day in the OT]

Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) was a prominent aspect of pro-BDS anti-Israel activism on campus in 2019. IAW, an annual worldwide series of anti-Israel and pro-BDS lectures, demonstrations and other events, was held on roughly 20 American university campuses in spring 2019, as it has been for several years. A disproportionate amount of controversial anti-Israel activism occurs during this time.

One of IAW’s primary purposes is to highlight the purported crimes, abuses and other nefarious activities undertaken by Israel. Exhibits called “apartheid walls,” which demonstrate the alleged brutality of Israel’s security fence against the Palestinian people, are a common feature of IAW activism. IAW amounts to a theatrical propaganda campaign that sometimes leaves Jewish students shaken by the vociferous anti-Israel animus they encounter.

Georgetown University SJP’s 2019 Israeli Apartheid Week exemplified this trend. The group held events Monday through Thursday nights during the first week of April. These included the building of an “apartheid wall,” a screening of the documentary The Lobby (which shows the allegedly outsized influence pro-Israel activists have on the U.S. government) and a panel on BDS that included controversial anti-Israel activist Taher Herzallah.[10] The week’s events unnerved the Georgetown Israel Alliance, a pro-Israel student group, which posted a statement on Facebook saying they were “disappointed that this week's events discourage dialogue and reject the Jewish connection to Israel in favor of a divisive, one-sided narrative.” The group noted that the week was “difficult…for many Jewish students on campus.”[11]

Divisive Panels and Conferences [Truth Hurts Bitches]

• Controversial panels and conferences also marked the anti-Israel landscape in 2019. May and November panels at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, organized by Professor Sut Jhally, featured only pro-BDS critics of Israel.[12] 

• One panelist at the May event, sportswriter Dave Zirin, remarked that what unites “Christian Zionists, AIPAC and arms manufacturers who are trying to intimidate us dissenters in the Jewish community…is that they see Palestinian life as less than human…they do not see Palestinians as worth living.”[13] 

• At the November event, renowned academic Cornell West remarked that while Jews had been “hated, despised, devalued, oppressed, attacked for 2,000 years,” they are now “in a top dog status and losing sight of their own underdogs, the precious Palestinians.”[14]

In May, the president of the university’s Student Alliance for Israel expressed her concern that the event that month “kind of feeds into possible incitement on campus,” and the head of Hillel wrote in a statement that “we are particularly disconcerted that the event is being co-sponsored by two University departments.”[15] In November, Hillel organized a “peace walk” at the same time as the event, and Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy released a statement affirming the university’s opposition to BDS and criticizing the event as “polarizing.”[16]

A March conference on Gaza co-sponsored by the University of North Carolina and Duke University also drew considerable controversy, prompting North Carolina Hillel to release a statement criticizing the conference for blaming Israel for the “humanitarian crisis in Gaza” and including a speaker who referred to Israel as “settler-colonialist.”[17]

Other Activism [Oh, Zionists got exposed to Truth & Piss their pathetic pink Panties]

In April 2019, INN at the University of Texas, Austin organized a petition calling for all students at the university to “denounce” an upcoming “Israel Block Party” hosted by Texas Hillel. INN is a group consisting of mainly young Jews who vocally and energetically oppose the occupation and many other Israeli policies through protests, statements and other activity. The April petition charges Texas Hillel with promoting a “whitewashed, idealized version of Israel.”[18] The petition followed INN’s sending and simultaneous publication in March of a letter they had emailed to Texas Hillel (which was ignored) demanding the party incorporate an acknowledgement of various issues, such as the occupation.[19] And in May, INN at Brandeis University vandalized a graffiti art cube[20] commissioned by the university’s Hillel with a sign reading “stop lying to young Jews #FreePalestine.”[21]

• Also in April 2019, SJP posted mock eviction notices on students’ doors at Emory University, where some [how many motherfcker] Jewish students felt they were being targeted in an act of antisemitism. The controversy around the mock eviction notices, which were designed to bring attention to what SJP considers the unjust confiscation of Palestinian homes by the Israeli military, attracted media attention.[22] Ultimately, a university committee investigated the matter and determined that the fliers were not antisemitic, with Emory University President Claire E. Sterk adding that while Jewish students may have felt “justifiably” threatened by the fliers, SJP did not intentionally target those students.[23]

  • [truth hurts] Anti-Israel student organizations sponsored a number of events that encouraged students to support[24] the BDS[25] movement[26] and propagandize the belief that Israel is an apartheid[27] state[28] that engages in genocide[29] against the Palestinians. This inflammatory rhetoric stokes divisions on campus, and for some Jewish students it feels like an echo of some of the historical allegations of Jewish malevolence.

• [OMG-Everybody didn't bow down to the Princes & Princesses of Evil ] There were also several instances of Israeli flags[30] being removed[31] from their displays, Israeli or pro-Israel[32] speakers being heckled,[33] and anti-Israel groups urging the student body to boycott[34] all pro-Israel advocacy and activist groups on campus.[35] Being heckled to the point where someone is prohibited from sharing their viewpoint is known as the “heckler’s veto” and is a direct violation of a speaker’s First Amendment right to free expression.

• [bitch TRUTH - YOU DID try to SINK it intentionally motherfcker] A small amount of activity from white supremacists might have contributed to the general anti-Israel atmosphere on some campuses in 2019. White supremacist propaganda campaigns sometimes included references to the USS Liberty conspiracy theory, which claims that Israel’s mistaken strike against an American warship during the 1967 Israel-Arab War was intentional. In October at Temple University and August at Indiana University, for instance, the New Jersey European Heritage Association, an alt-right group, distributed propaganda that read, in part: "Remember the USS Liberty! 1967 attack against America."

The Anti-Defamation League’s Challenge To Pro-Peace & Justice Groups

 2016 Mint Press News.

The Anti-Defamation League’s Challenge To Pro-Peace & Justice Groups

Grant F. Smith | AntiWar

GrantS@mith.com

From <https://mintpressnews.cn/anti-defamation-leagues-challenge-pro-peace-justice-groups/216909/>

Jonathan Greenblatt, left, incoming national director for the Anti-Defamation League, talks with Abe Foxman, former director of the ADL, during a reception for a special dinner in Foxman’s honor in New York.

On Monday morning NPR’s Tom Gjelten reported the Anti-Defamation League’s recent challenges interfacing with peace and justice groups in the aftermath of Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson and Black Lives Matter movement. According to Gjelten, the Anti-Defamation League arose in 1913 to “put an end forever to unfair and unjust discrimination against…any sect or body of citizens.” ADL stood alongside the NAACP to end discrimination against African Americans in the South, which was the focus of NPR’s story. The ADL’s new President, Jonathan Greenblatt, a former special assistant to President Obama, wants to rekindle the spirit of solidarity encapsulated in a photo he frequently shows of Dr. Martin Luther King, Robert F. Kennedy and the heads of the ADL and NAACP in a Rose Garden snapshot with LBJ just before the famous March on Washington.

The crux of the problem – according to Gjelten and the ADL – is that modern day movements like Black Lives Matter are more partial to advice from Palestinians living under perennial Israeli military occupation for tactics in dealing with heavily militarized police. The solution is to make the ADL “a consistently valued civil rights partner in a time of divided loyalties.” But how can the ADL accomplish that? Has it gotten too comfortable in the “suites” to ever march again in the “streets?” Does ADL have anything of value to offer in exchange for the “loyalties” of grassroots movements? Is that even the right question?

A review of the ADL’s unvarnished – yet little known – history may provide answers for how the organization could – but likely will not – become more relevant:

1. Stop throwing disenfranchised groups under the bus – especially when they inconvenience access to greater funding and power. The ADL’s moment of truth did not occur in Alabama of the 1960s, but rather California of the 1940s. The League had a genuine existential dilemma which resonates today. The ADL could have followed its principles and opposed the mass internment of West Coast Japanese-Americans during WWII. Or it could have supported the single most extremist anti-Japanese voice in America – John R. Lechner – and secretly prepared testimony to Congress about the threat still posed by interred but loyal Japanese Americans even as they languished in camps. Today the ADL likes to use Japanese American interment in its tolerance case studies and teaching materials. In reality – according to former Warner Brothers Studio Personnel Director Jack Holmes, the ADL secretly supported Japanese interment in order to temporarily divert Congressional investigations of alleged communist infiltration of Hollywood studios (PDF, page 32). At that time, a majority of ADL’s funding came from Hollywood studios, according to Holmes.

2. Stop infiltrating and subverting pro-peace & justice groups. In the 1960s the Organization of Arab Students was becoming too powerful, in the ADL’s view, by organizing large conferences to establish ties between students, scholars and activists interested in Pan Arabism in the Middle East. So it sent in two operatives, complete with cover stories as friendly journalists, to an OAS national conference to uncover exploitable weaknesses in order to take over and subvert the movement. A couple of decades later another ADL operative, Roy Bullock, was caught infiltrating and violating state privacy statutes collecting data on anti-Apartheid and pro-Palestinian groups operating in Northern California and elsewhere. Bullock popped up distributing Holocaust-denial literature at Palestinian conferences to smear the movement, operating undercover as a traveling art dealer sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. In reality, he was paid by the ADL through attorney Bruce Hochman, a conduit who allowed the ADL to also work closely with corrupt law enforcement officials. Although the ADL was caught holding classified information in the affair, Israeli pressure on the Department of Justice thwarted well-warranted espionage charges.

3. Unwind the ADL’s “special relationship” with the FBI In 2012 the ADL was the second-largest Israel advocacy organization in America with a budget over $50 million, 409 employees and 3,500 volunteers. The ADL has pursued a “special relationship” with the initially resistant FBI since 1940 when it offered up its entire network of operatives as informants in exchange for access to FBI files in order to avoid “duplication” of investigatory efforts.Since then, FBI directors have ordered all field offices to liaise with their ADL regional “counterparts.” Despite a history of bogus ADL “criminal investigations” into targets such as Arab UN diplomats and intel on a Minnesota professor getting too close to African American political movements, (PDF) the FBI-ADL relationship has grown closer, with ADL operatives now training all special agents at Quantico and holding joint training sessions for local law enforcement officers. Whether this training plays any role in the raft of recent dubious prosecutions against mentally challenged would-be “Islamic terrorist” suspects coaxed by informants to plot violence against US targets is unknowable – the FBI refuses to release ADL training materials under FOIA. (PDF) While Gjelton noted the “ADL chapter in St. Louis assists the U.S. Attorney’s office in staffing” such non-adversarial ADL “insider” relationships with powerful law enforcement agents are likely seen as a problem rather than solution for many pro peace and justice movement members used to taking to the streets and not the suites.

4. Ditch Israel The ADL is a bit like the recently retired Most Interesting Man Alive portrayed by Jonathan Goldsmith. He didn’t always drink beer, but when he did, he preferred Dos Equis. A great many American social welfare organizations that today are unconditionally pro-Israel were not originally Zionist. But during the Nazi march across Europe, the Holocaust, upon the formation of Israel in 1948 and after their sources of communal funding were taken over by Zionist activists, most of the affinity organizations that today make up the Israel lobby eventually became unconditionally pro-Israel.However, today few informed American peace and justice movement activists believe Israel is a shining example of harmonious co-existence between differing peoples. No banning of accurate histories from textbooks, periodic pink washing campaigns and Sabra hummus commercials are likely to change that. Increasing numbers instead believe Israel is a poster-child for apartheid. Many have come to understand – correctly – that the fulcrum of massive unconditional US government support is a multi-billion-dollar system of Israel lobbying organizations paying off politicians, channeling payola to influential university regents and think tankers, while infiltrating operatives into key positions of influence. A tiny handful even speculate – as once did an FBI agent – that key lobbying organizations in such close ongoing coordination with the Israeli government should openly register as Israeli foreign agents – as required by law. They are as focused on their core issues as the ADL once was.

In its initial announcement the League stated clearly that the “defamation of Jews on the stage, in moving pictures” created “an untrue and injurious impression of an entire people and to expose the Jew to undeserved contempt and ridicule” as leading sources of prejudice in most immediate need of redress. The League claimed it would act openly to publicly pressure producers and managers of theaters prior to the staging of defamatory productions, thus correcting “evils before any harm is done.” Defamatory newspaper and magazine articles would also be met with “protest to the editor” and “subsequent articles upon the same subject matter, thereby reaching the same reading public and correcting errors.” An economic boycott would be then made “by appealing to the patrons and advertisers for co-operation” to confront the most egregious cases of willful abuse.

Like many within the universe of pro peace and justice organizations today, ADL was once a tiny operation. Its Chicago headquarters was originally housed within the law office of Sigmund Livingston and started out with “a $200 budget and two desks.” In its early days the ADL was open to all who would sign a membership card. By 1930, the ADL successfully persuaded Roget’s Thesaurus to remove a hateful entry equating the word “Jew” as synonymous with “cunning rich, usurer, extortioner, heretic.” But ADL has launched no similarly effective campaign on behalf of today’s most disenfranchised groups. It cannot. Once again funding is a major constraint. Many of the Israel lobby’s biggest donors actively and richly fund Islamophobia.

Today it is Muslims, Arabs and Persians in general (Palestinians, Iranians and the territories where they live in particular) that are under constant assault – not byRoget’s – but vastly more powerful forces such as the military-industrial-congressional complex, Hollywood, the mainstream media and not coincidentally, many Israel affinity organizations. Like the Japanese-American internees once secretly targeted by the ADL, such groups are judged to be weak, disorganized, disenfranchised and unable to tell their own stories – or even possess stories worth hearing. They serve as convenient scapegoats for enfranchised elites and the national security state. Unlike evangelical Christians or Hispanic groups, they do not factor into the Israel lobby’s larger political calculations – and likely never will – absent a radical shift in Israel’s – and therefore the ADL’s – strategy.

But their stories and tactics are relevant. Not because of “competing loyalties,” but rather the sheer relevance of Palestinian resistance against all odds as an example for oppressed people tired of poverty, war and oppression around the world. Many in the peace and justice movement are both curious and have internet access. Armed with accurate information, they are unlikely to become sympathetic to the ADL’s highly selective and self-serving historical narratives of the good ol’ days.

Grant F. Smith is the author of the new book Big Israel: How Israel’s Lobby Moves America. He is director of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy in Washington (IRmep), D.C. Read other articles by Smith, or visit the Israel Lobby Archive website.

This article first appeared on AntiWar.com

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6月 2nd, 2016

Grant F. Smith | AntiWar

From <The Anti-Defamation League’s Challenge To Pro-Peace & Justice Groups>