BERNIE SANDERS GETS ADVISER FROM ANTI-SEMITIC THINK TANK

Support for the terrorists and sanctions on Israel.

Matt Duss had once compared Israel’s blockade of Hamas to “segregation in the American South.”

After the murder of the Henkin family in front of their children, the stabbing of a two-year-old and his mother in Jerusalem, Duss wrote, “it shouldn’t shock anyone that Israel’s harsh occupation and abuse provokes Palestinians.” He blamed the “rising violence” on Israel and not the PLO terrorists.

“Israel does need to start facing some costs and consequences for an occupation,” Matt Duss had told Al Jazeera. “The BDS movement has helped to elevate a debate that was long overdue.”

Matt Duss had traveled to Gaza to meet with Hamas members. He then whitewashed the Islamic terror group as a moderate organization willing to accept a two-state solution and stop killing Jews.

When Hamas kidnapped and murdered three Jewish teens, one of them American, Duss whined that Israel had “turned a police matter into a war” and launched a “crackdown on Hamas infrastructure in the West Bank under the pretext of searching for the missing boys”.

He described the Hamas terrorists as “Palestinian activists” and claimed that despite the brutal murders, “Hamas had largely held to the terms of the cease-fire.”

“A better option for dealing with stone-throwing Palestinian protesters might be to stop stealing their land,” Duss had once tweeted.

“One can recognize that anti-Semitism is a particularly pernicious bigotry among bigotries, however, while still questioning whether holding such views makes any leader ‘irrational'”, Duss wrote when defending the Iran nuke sellout.

Now he’s formulating foreign policy for Senator Bernie Sanders.

Bernie Sanders had previously invited Duss to testify before the Democratic Platform Committee in a push for an anti-Israel platform. Duss had urged the Dems to call for an end to the Hamas blockade.

Before becoming a foreign policy advisor to Senator Sanders, Duss headed up the Foundation for Middle East Peace. Despite its misleading name, FMEP is a fixture of the anti-Israel lobby. It was founded by Merle Thorpe: Jr, a wealthy Washington D.C. lawyer who was the sugar daddy for anti-Israel causes.

The Foundation for Middle East Peace funds anti-Israel groups that directly or indirectly promote BDS.

Before that, Duss was at the center of a major anti-Semitic scandal when he headed up Middle East Progress for the Center for American Progress. CAP bloggers had escalated their attacks on the Jewish State by accusing Jews of “dual loyalty” and of being “Israel Firsters”.

Faiz Shakir, the editor-in-chief at ThinkProgress, had admitted that the hateful attacks by at least one CAP blogger used “terrible anti-Semitic language.”

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, the ADL and even the White House’s Jewish liaison, during the Obama era, all criticized the hatred at the Center for American Progress. The Wiesenthal Center had reportedly described CAP as “infected with Jew-hatred and discriminatory policy positions toward Israel.” And CAP tried to smear the Wiesenthal Center, an organization founded by a Nazi-hunter, as “the far-right Simon Wiesenthal Center.”

The White House’s liaison called the CAP situation “troubling” and emphasized that this attitude did not represent the administration.

But apparently it does represent a prospective Bernie Sanders administration. That’s not surprising.

Senator Bernie Sanders has used his ethnic origins to mask the ugly anti-Semitism of his political allies, including Keith Ellison, the former Nation of Islam member whose virulent bigotry was, according to the Minnesota Daily opinion editor, “a genuine threat to the long-term safety and well-being of the Jewish people.”

When a bigot demanded to know Bernie Sanders’s relationship with the “Jewish community” while claiming that the “Zionist Jews” were “running the Federal Reserve”, “running Wall Street” and “running everything”, the Senator from Vermont responded by disavowing and bashing Israel.

“I may be Jewish, but you’re not going to find any candidate running for president, for example, to talk about Zionism and the Middle East,” Bernie groveled.

Like Ellison, Jesse Jackson and the Sandinistas, whom Sanders had defended despite their ugly anti-Semitism, Duss benefits from the Bernie protection racket for bigots. If you work for a man whose parents were Jewish, then you can’t possibly be accused of anti-Semitism.

What sort of foreign policy could Matt Duss be drawing up for Bernie Sanders?

Two years ago, Duss had called for using “sticks” on Israel and compared Jewish families living in Jerusalem to Iran’s nuclear weapons program. He suggested that political pressure could prevent “Israeli voters” from voting in the pro-Israel and anti-terrorist candidates whom he disapproves of.

“Voters currently see no costs or consequences to the occupation,” Matt Duss had complained. “By beginning to make those costs clear, as floating the possibility of sanctions does, the EU could play an important role in sharpening the choice before Israeli voters.”

Duss suggested that pressuring “millions of voters” in Israel was “worth a try.”

And who better to roll out sanctions on Israel than President Bernie Sanders?

When Bernie brought on Cornel West and James Zogby to push for an anti-Israel platform, a message was sent. When you bring in a 9/11 Truther and BDS activist who calls Israel an “apartheid state” and describes efforts to fight Hamas as “Jewish racism”, that says it all.

So does bringing in Matt Duss to work on “foreign policy”.

Bernie’s foreign policy has been very consistent. He supported the anti-Semitic Sandinistas who ethnically cleansed Jews from Nicaragua. He honeymooned in the USSR which persecuted Jews.

“No guns for Israel,” Sanders declared before the Yom Kippur War, which nearly destroyed the Jewish State. In 1990, he said that he “would like to see the US put more pressure on Israel.”

When Bernie Sanders reached out for perspective on the Middle East during his campaign, he contacted James Zogby, who had defended Hamas and Hezbollah, and Lawrence Wilkerson, who had accused Jewish officials of dual loyalty and suggested that Israel was behind Assad’s chemical weapons attacks.

Matt Duss fits perfectly with the rest of the sad, twisted freaks in the anti-Israel lobby.

And he’s valuable because he’s smoother than lunatics like Cornel West, a 9/11 Truther, or Lawrence Wilkerson, who accused Israel of “false flag” WMD attacks in Syria.

Extremists always need someone like Matt Duss to make their ugly views seem palatable.

We already know what Bernie’s real foreign policy on Israel will be.

He wants to end military aid and divert money from Israel to Hamas. He’ll attempt to end the non-profit status of Jewish schools in areas claimed by Islamic terrorists. He’ll demand the ethnic cleansing of parts of Israel. And those demands will be backed by economic and political pressure.

That’s what Bernie wants. It’s what the radical extremists he panders to want him to do.

Duss is on board to make this ugliness presentable. And to help Bernie avoid tactical blunders like his lie that Israel had killed “10,000 innocent people” in Gaza.

When Bernie Sanders starts delivering his incoherent speeches attacking Israel, it will be based on the work of bigots and haters who have found a human shield with a Brooklyn accent for their agenda.

Originally Published in FrontPageMag.

The ADL’s new bedfellows

In an interview this week with the Australian media, Jordan’s King Abdullah became the latest Arab leader to express hope that President-elect Donald Trump and his team will lead the world’s to date failed fight against jihadist Islam.

Like his counterparts in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, Abdullah effectively ruled out the possibility that President Barack Obama will take any constructive steps to defeat the forces of global jihad in his last months in power.

Speaking of the humanitarian disaster in Aleppo for instance, Abdullah said, “I don’t think there’s much we can do until the new administration is in place and a strategy is formulated.”

Egyptian President Abdel Fatah a-Sisi was among the first Arab leaders to welcome Trump’s victory. Sisi has been largely shunned by the Obama administration. President Barack Obama supported the Muslim Brotherhood regime that Sisi and the Egyptian military overthrew in 2013.

Sisi was the first foreign leader to speak to Trump after his victory was announced. He released a statement to the media saying that he “looks forward to the presidency of President Donald Trump to inject a new spirit into the trajectory of Egyptian-American relations.”

The support that the incoming Trump administration is garnering in the Arab world stands in stark contrast to the near wall-to-wall opposition to Trump expressed by the American Muslim community. According to a survey of Muslim American opinion taken in October by the Council for American Islamic Relations, (CAIR), 72 percent of American Muslims supported Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Trump was supported by a mere 4 percent of the Muslim community.

Muslim American activists played key roles in the Clinton campaign. They were particularly active in swing states like Ohio and Michigan where Trump won by narrow margins.

As the Jerusalem Post reported Wednesday, since the election, Muslim American leaders have expressed concern and hostility towards the incoming Trump administration. Muslim Democrat activist James Zogby, who also heads the Arab American Institute published an op-ed in the Jordan Times to this effect after the election. Zogby expressed concern that the Trump administration would harm the civil rights of Arab Americans.

The gap between the Arab world’s support for Trump and the Muslim American community’s opposition to him is particularly notable because it reverberates strongly the growing cleavage between the Israeli government and public and large swathes of the American Jewish community.

Led most prominently by the Anti-Defamation League and its executive director Jonathan Greenblatt, in the wake of the election, American Jews are at the forefront of efforts to delegitimize Trump and his senior advisors. Unlike their Muslim American counterparts, who are keeping their criticism of Arab regimes to themselves, Greenblatt, the ADL and their allies on the Left have linked their opposition to Trump to legitimizing opponents of Israel.

Before assuming his role at the ADL, Greenblatt worked in Valerie Jarrett’s political influence shop in the Obama White House. As ADL chief, Greenblatt has used his position as the head of a major Jewish organization to support the Obama administration’s policies. To this end, since the election, the ADL has worked to tar the incoming Trump administration as anti-Semitic, focusing its fire on Trump’s senior strategist, former Breitbart News CEO Stephen Bannon.

The ADL spearheaded the campaign to label Bannon an anti-Semite. When its claims were shown to be entirely spurious, this week the ADL quietly acknowledged that Bannon has actually never made any anti-Semitic statements. But its quiet admission of spreading lies didn’t stop the ADL from continuing to traffic in them.

Even after it admitted that “We are not aware of any anti-Semitic statements from Bannon,” the ADL continued to insist that Breitbart has been a home for anti-Semites because some Jew haters wrote anti-Semitic responses to Breitbart articles.

The ADL’s smear campaign against Bannon is a hard sell because Breitbart is among the most pro-Israel websites in the US. But this brings us to the second aspect of the ADL-led campaign against President-elect Donald Trump and his team.

With each passing day, it becomes increasingly clear that the ADL and its allies are using the Trump victory as a means to draw a distinction between pro-Israel and Jew friendly while arguing that anti-Semites support Israel and that people who hate Israel are not anti-Semites. This was the clear goal at the ADL’s summit on anti-Semitism last week.

As Daniel Greenfield reported Thursday in Frontpage Magazine, ADL used the conference to legitimize the so-called BDS campaign to boycott Jewish Israeli products and divest from businesses that do business with Jewish owned Israeli businesses. It similarly normalized the general argument that there is nothing inherently anti-Semitic about opposing the Jewish state.

In a panel with the disturbing title, “Is Delegitimization of Israel Anti-Semitism?” the ADL featured anti-Israel activist Jill Jacobs and the Jane Eisen. Both women argued that BDS is legitimate. At the same time, they denounced fervent supporters of Israel like Bannon and Center for Security President Frank Gaffney.

Greenfield reported that the ADL gave a prominent platform at the conference supposedly dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism to Ford Foundation CEO Darren Walker. The Ford Foundation is one of the leading contributors to anti-Israel organizations in the US and to anti-Zionist political front groups in Israel.

Other speakers explained that it isn’t that Israel’s foes are anti-Semitic. It is just that Israelis and their supporters have become “hypersensitive” to criticism.

All in all, Greenfield concluded, “Instead of tackling anti-Semitism, the ADL was tackling Israel and pro-Israel Jews” and “normalizing anti-Israel rhetoric and organizations.”

A few days after the conference, the ADL took the next step towards normalizing hatred for Israel in America when it announced its support for Rep. Keith Ellison’s candidacy to serve as the next chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

Ellison became the first Muslim American elected to the House of Representatives in 2006. In the decades that preceded his election, Ellison built a long and documented history of membership in and advocacy and employment for the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam. In his capacity as a Nation of Islam spokesman, Ellison made anti-Semitic statements and promoted anti-Jewish and anti-Israel positions and activists.

Since joining the House of Representatives, Ellison has been one of the leading anti-Israel voices in Congress. He has spearheaded multiple anti-Israel initiatives. He openly supports the boycott of Israeli Jewish products and has castigated Israel as an apartheid state.

Together with James Zogby, last August Ellison served as a member of the Democratic Party’s platform committee. The men attempted to purge the platform of language in support of Israel.

Yet Wednesday the ADL released a statement extolling Ellison as “a man of good character.” The ADL praised him as “an ally in the fight against anti-Semitism and for civil rights.”

It even said that Ellison “has been on record in support of Israel.”

ADL is supporting Ellison – and opposing Trump and his pro-Israel advisors – because Greenblatt and his backers support Obama’s policies in the Middle East and want to make it difficult for Trump to abandon them.

Ellison and the leading American Muslim groups oppose Trump for the same reason. The difference between the two groups is that the ADL and its Jewish backers are acting in this manner because they support the Left, which Obama leads. Ellison and his allies at CAIR, the Islamic Society of North America, and the Arab American Institute and other groups oppose Trump because they support the substance of Obama’s policies.

The chief characteristics of Obama’s Middle East policies have been support for the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran against Israel and the US’s Sunni allies.

Former FBI agent and counterterrorism expert John Guandolo estimates that upwards of 80 percent of Islamic centers and mosques in the US are controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood.

The major American Muslim groups, including CAIR, ISNA and the Islamic Circle of North America are tied to the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood in turn supports Iran.

During his year in power in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Muhammad Morsi permitted Iranian warships to travel through the Suez Canal, hosted Iranian leaders and Hezbollah commanders in Cairo and took a series of additional steps to embrace Iran.

Trump’s foreign policy advisor Walid Phares gave an interview to Egyptian television after Trump’s election stating that Trump will support a bill introduced by Senator Ted Cruz to outlaw the Muslim Brotherhood in the US as well as its offshoots CAIR, ISNA and others due to their support for jihadist terror groups formed by Brotherhood members. Al Qaeda, Hamas and a host of other jihadist groups have all been formed by Muslim Brotherhood followers.

Trump’s National Security Advisor, Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, Rep. Mike Pompeo, whom Trump has selected to serve as his CIA Director as well as Marine Gen. James Mattis, the leading contender to serve as Trump’s Defense Secretary are all outspoken opponents of Obama’ nuclear deal with Iran.

Given the stakes then, it makes perfect sense that the Arab American groups oppose Trump.

It also makes sense that Arab regimes threatened by the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran support Trump and eagerly await his inauguration.

And it clearly makes sense for Israel to welcome Trump’s election.

The only thing that makes no sense is the American Jewish campaign to demonize Trump. The ADL’s leadership of the campaign to smear Trump and his advisors while legitimizing BDS and supporting Israel bashers is antithetical to the interests of the American Jewish community.

In adopting these positions, Greenblatt and the ADL along with their allies in J Street, Jewish Voices for Peace, If Not Now, the Forward, other far left groups and mainstream groups that have lost their way show through their actions that they have conflated their Judaism with their support for the Left. To the extent that the interests of the Jews of America contradict the positions of the Left, the Jews of America are behaving in an “anti-Semitic” way.

It is the responsibility of the segment of the community that understands “Jewish” is not a synonym of “leftist” to oppose the ADL and its backers. If they fail to do so, they will contribute to the descent of the community into powerlessness and irrelevance, not only in the era of Trump, but into the future.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post. 

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