On Monday, NowThis tweeted out a video from far-Left, viciously anti-Israel propagandist group IfNotNow. IfNotNow, which Republican Jewish Coalition Matt Brooks castigated last weekend as a “disgrace” that “in no way speaks for the Jewish community,” ventured last week to the congressional office of noted anti-Semitic conspiracy peddler Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI).
NowThis tweeted out its IfNotNow propaganda video, which features IfNotNow Founder Emily Mayer, only two days after Tlaib’s tweet. And suffice it to say that the video is…a doozy.
Mayer claims that the “real threat to us Jews” comes not from progressives, but from President Trump and white nationalists. While no one should ever downplay the horrific atrocities considered by white nationalists — including that upon Jews just last October at Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh — Mayer may want to check her overall statistics. As The Daily Wire reported on February 1, Fiamma Nirenstein of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs recently reviewed surveys of European Jewry and noted the following discrepancy in perceived anti-Semitism between Jews in the generally Left-leaning nations of Western Europe and the generally Right-leaning nations of Eastern Europe:
The [European] Jews who have felt the rise of anti-Semitism the most (70 percent) live in France, Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands; …British Jews — at 84 percent — expressed the highest level of concern about anti-Semitism in political life today. Together with Germany and Sweden, the United Kingdom has also seen the highest increase in the number of Jews considering emigrating over the past five years due to safety concerns. [In none of these countries does the far right dominate.]…
In Poland and Hungary, [by contrast], fewer than half of their Jewish populations are worried. …In Hungary, where Viktor Orban’s right-wing government is suspected of racism, the number of Hungarian Jews saying anti-Semitism is a problem has significantly dropped.
Similarly, as The Daily Wire has also reported, a recent survey from Britain’s Community Security Trust, pertaining to nationwide rates of anti-Semitic incidents, included the following tidbit: “It is likely that these higher monthly totals [of spiked anti-Semitic incidents] were partly caused by reactions to political events in the U.K. and overseas, involving the Labour Party and violence on the border of Israel and Gaza, during those months.”
Here in the U.S., Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro noted The New York Times’ “stunning admission” last November, wherein the Times plainly conceded that, “it is the varied backgrounds of people who commit hate crimes in the city that make combating and talking about anti-Semitism in New York much harder … bias stemming from longstanding ethnic tensions in the city presents complexities that many liberals have chosen simply to ignore. … When a Hasidic man or woman is attacked by anyone in New York City, mainstream progressive advocacy groups do not typically send out emails calling for concern and fellowship and candlelight vigils in Union Square, as they often do when individuals are harmed in New York because of their race or ethnicity or how they identify in terms of gender or sexual orientation.”
Mayer’s consistent references to Israel’s purportedly illegal “occupation” of Judea and Samaria are similarly highly tendentious, if not outright false. As Elliott Hamilton has argued for The Daily Wire, and Prof. Eugene Kontorovich has painstakingly demonstrated (video below), Israel is not an illegal “occupier” of Judea and Samaria in any legally coherent sense of the term. Israel has, without any question, the soundest legal claim — under international law — to legal possession of Judea and Samaria.
Mayer spends much of the rest of her propagandist screed defending such ignoramuses as Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), who routinely dabbles in the oldest of all anti-Semitic tropes, and Angela Davis, who The Federalist’s David Harsanyi has accurately described as “a champion of men like Marwan Barghouti, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades leader who coordinated suicide bombings targeting Jewish civilians.” Mayer’s defense of outright Jew-haters and their pusillanimous apologists is abhorrent beyond all belief — though, sadly, hardly unexpected.
Put simply, none of Mayer’s claims hold up. But such mendacity is par for the course for IfNotNow.
Throughout history, the Jewish people have so often been their own worst enemy. Today, despicable hate groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow continue this sordid, self-destructive tradition.