John Podesta, Center for American Progress

The Washington Post has just published an article reporting that the Center for American Progress, the left-wing think tank whose policies and personnel have close ties to the Obama White House, has been “accused of anti-Semitic language.”

The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank closely aligned with the White House, is embroiled in a dispute with several major Jewish organizations over statements on Israel and charges that some center staffers have used anti-Semitic language to attack pro-Israel Americans.

The controversy reflects growing divisions among important allies of President Obama over Middle East policy that could complicate the president’s reelection outreach to some Jewish voters, just as he is seeking to assure them of his commitment to Israel’s security amid fears of an Iran nuclear threat.

Among the points of contention are several Twitter posts by one CAP writer referring to “Israel-firsters.” Some experts say the phrase has its roots in the anti-Semitic charge that American Jews are more loyal to a foreign country. In another case, a second staffer described a U.S. senator [Mark Kirk of Illinois] as showing more fealty to Israel and the prime U.S. pro-Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, than to his own constituents, replacing a standard identifier of party affiliation and state with “R-AIPAC” on Twitter….

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As many Breitbart readers know, my story is one of a former prominent Leftist revolutionary turned believer in the American Constitution.

My blog posts and public talks often detail the experiences I had and my journey towards believing and appreciating our system of governance. My speeches usually focus on the experiences that brought me from being an anti-American revolutionary to a patriotic American who, having felt a profound sense of owing our nation, began working undercover with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task force.

My writings and speeches usually avoid any discussion or mention of the guilt I often felt in my transition. However, I’d often think of how vocal I had been in critiquing America, our armed forces, and other men and women who protect our rights and our lives. Like most Leftists, I seized any opportunity to knock our heroes and point out any possible failure or shortcoming. I felt shame once my worldview began to mature.

The emotional aspects of the conversion are never as intense as when I think of how I once bought into the dominant left-of-center belief that Israel was to be included in any discussion of why the world was so evil and wrought with war and hatred. My world, though I thought it was full of a variety of information from different perspectives, was quite insular. My historical knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was, in fact, solely based on the perspectives of the enemies of the Jewish state.

Anti-Israel protestors at Houston Holocaust Museum, Jan. 2009

I had the privilege recently to visit the National Holocaust Museum and Memorial. I was, as most are, horrified to see what had occurred. The museum walks the attendee through the history of antisemitism; the media and propaganda that were used to dehumanize Jews; and through the subsequent actions to which that dehumanization led. The lack of involvement and intervention from other nations is well displayed, as well as the role such abuses played in the creation of modern state of Israel.

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Norman Finkelstein, one of America’s leading anti-Semites in the academic world, was invited to speak at Occupy Boston for the Howard Zinn Memorial Lecture Series. Mr. Finkelstein is on the lecture circuit and having gone to many universities. He, apparently, decided he might as well see the drop outs camping out at Occupy Boston. Like them, he, too, has rejected serious study. He has been fired from numerous positions for his substandard scholarship and fondness for conspiracy theories.

Finkelstein is the author of The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (2003), which argues that the Holocaust and its remembrance is and “has been used to justify criminal policies of the Israeli state and U.S. support for these policies.” As he argues in his book, the Israelis are Nazis.

“The Zionists indeed learnt well from the Nazis. So well that it seems that their morally repugnant treatment of the Palestinians, and their attempts to destroy Palestinian society within Israel and the occupied territories, reveals them as basically Nazis with beards and black hats.”

Finkelstein is also a fan of Hezbollah, writing that the terrorist, anti-Semitic organization represents “hope” for the Middle East.

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President Obama and his re-election strategists seem like moths circling the glow and heat of a candle as they cozy up to the Occupy Wall Street crowd. This just might be a grassroots movement we can call our own, they must be thinking.  Bad idea.

Occupy Wall Street was planned last summer in Vancouver, Canada by the anti-capitalist group AdBusters, and, in early October, the SEIU unveiled its plans to have the protesters march on the homes of wealthy New Yorkers.

Occupy Wall Street has turned out to be less of a movement and more of a place to be for those who simply long for a place to be or for others who harbor a wide variety of grievances–some legitimate, some simply far-left tropes, and some downright malevolent.  Terribly disturbing is the repetition of language railing against the rich paying less taxes than the middle class (which, of course, is simply not true), tax breaks for private jet owners and the evil millionaires and billionaires. These are all populist and divisive themes eerily similar to those crafted by Team Obama strategists.

According to a Washington Post report, “President Obama and his team have decided to turn public anger at Wall Street into a central tenet of their reelection strategy.”   Vice President Biden ‘s inference that those who oppose the President’s proposed tax on millionaires and billionaires will be responsible for increased rape and murder are the coming attractions for the campaign theater that is about to open. (more…)

Sometimes it seems as if every time someone in the Tea Party breathes, the mainstream press finds a way to label it as racist or promoting violence. Yet all of the anti-Semitic posters, chants and comments, as well as the ones demonizing Israel made by the Occupy Wall Street protesters, are virtually ignored my the media. Making matters worse, the media has been negligent in performing its investigative duties, because with just a little research they would discover that the anti-semitism may be a symptom of the fact that there are virulent Jew haters and Israel bashers in the ranks of OWS’s founding “fathers.”

Take Adbusters, for example.  In a post dated June 9, 2011 Adbusters issued the original Occupy Wall Street “call to arms”:

When it comes time to discuss Israel, Adbusters finds a way to describe the Jewish State in the most offensive of terms. While not specifically mentioning Jews, Adbusters substitutes other terms to make false and border-line anti-Semitic comments and tries to set up the Jews/Israel as the scapegoat for America’s problems. (more…)

The Anti-Defamation League is one of the most powerful and authoritative voices against bigotry of all kinds–not just in the United States, but throughout the world.

Yet the ADL’s message has been compromised by left-wing political bias, most recently in its failure to denounce the evident antisemitism of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement.

Photo at Occupy LA (Pajamas Media)

By contrast, the ADL was quick to accuse the Tea Party movement of antisemitism when it began.

In May 2009, shortly after the first Tea Party rallies in April, the ADL warned: “White Supremacists and Anti-Semites Plan to Recruit at July 4 Tea Parties.”

In November, the ADL issued a “special report” on the Tea Party and “anti-government conspiracies.” The ADL noted that “extremists were a tiny minority of Tea Party protesters,” but claimed Tea Party members were filled with “rage” and held ideas that “fall outside the mainstream.”

As of this writing, the ADL has said nothing about the “rage” and bigotry on display at several “Occupy” rallies. Instead, it is minimizing the antisemitism on display, effectively helping “Occupy” do damage control.

One ADL analyst told the Daily Caller:

“We have seen instances of individuals promoting these [antisemitic] views. We do not think that it is or has been institutionalized in the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movements,” she said. “But I think the bigger issue is sort of that when there is a heightened focus economic strife and the financial industry it is not surprising to see these messages. Yet, we will continue to be diligent, looking for them and combating the promotion of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories should they arise.”

Todd Gutnick, ADL’s media relations director, confirmed this morning: “Aside from the story in the Daily Caller in which we were quoted, ADL has made no statements on the Occupy movement.”

That is alarming, given the explicit anti-Jewish hatred on display at Occupy rallies across the country. (more…)

In the beginning, I was willing to accept that a group of unhappy citizens utilized their First Amendment rights to protest what they believe to be an injustice (as I have written here and here):  the picking of winners and losers by government with a weak coverup attempt via cronyism.  I accepted, at first, their claims of being a “non-violent” group wanting to have their grievances heard.

Yet, as the “movement” began to grow, it became obvious that being “non-violent” is “non-correct.” Quickly, the OWS protesters were co-opted by those who believe in violence as a legitimate means of achieving their objectives:  Van Jones, who wants to see an “American Autumn” emulating the Arab Spring (which was, and still is, very violent), Michael Moore — who has stated publicly that the “rich” can give up their money now, peacefully, or later (though he doesn’t elaborate on what happens to get the money later, one can imagine), and even Roseanne Barr got into the mix. Barr actually said she longed for the return of the guillotine and re-education camps for those who don’t give up their wealth willingly.

In my appearance on CrossTalk, I was joined by Jason Del Gandio – assistant professor of rhetoric at Temple University and author of “Rhetoric for Radicals,” (a handbook for 21st century activists) and Kevin Zeese, organizer of October 2011.org and activist.  In that program a few things came to the surface:

Both Del Gandio and Zeese pushed the meme that the organizations across the nation were non-violent. Zeese made it clear that they were not allowing themselves to be co-opted by Jones, Moore, the Democrat party or anyone else, claiming:

Van Jones is not part of the Occupy movement…he’s a Democrat…if Obama and the Democrats embrace us, they gonna be very sad to see that we will be protesting them as well…we see them as part of the crony capitalist corrupt economy that has resulted in 400 people having as much wealth as 154 million, not because they are smarter or work harder, but because they are politically connected and essentially bribing through campaign donations…

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Will the 400 leftist rabbis refute this?

This was some sick stuff. Anti-Semitism is alive and well at Media Matters.

Media Matters blamed the Egyptian crisis today on the US Jewish lobby and media-owning Jews.
Yid With Lid reported this from Media Matters.

If one needs additional proof that the “pro-Israel” lobby and the policies it dictates to US policymakers are bad for both the U.S. and Israel, look no further than what is happening in Egypt.

The regime that the Israeli government and its U.S. lobby have depended upon to enforce the status quo is going down. It is not clear when, but it’s going to be soon, much sooner than anyone ever anticipated. And you can be sure that any democratic government that takes Mubarak’s place is not going to play the role of America’s (let alone Israel’s) enforcer in the Middle East.

Hopefully, the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty will survive — thousands of lives on both sides have been saved by President Carter’s Camp David Treaty — but there are no guarantees. Far from it.

Of course, no one would even be worried about the peace treaty if the Israelis had agreed to implement the critical second part of the Camp David Accords.
That was the part that would have ended the occupation. But the Israelis chose to ignore it and the lobby and the ever-faithful Congress blocked Carter’s efforts to push it through.

Write Media Matters here and demand that they retract this awful anti-Semitic attack against American Jews.

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Holocaust Day (Yom HaShoah in Hebrew) is today. I, for one, am sick and tired of the fetishism of dead Jews and the endless memorials to Holocaust victims, while the world rubs its hands in gleeful anticipation of “Holocaust — the Sequel.” I am sick of the false narrative. The role of and that of the Muslim leader of the ummah, the Mufti of Jerusalem, was pivotal to the extermination of the Jews during World War II, and yet his role and that of jihad was scrubbed from the history books.

And here we are 60 years later, and Islam is back in full bloom, with Muslims sharpening their machetes for the beheading of the Jewish state — much the way Muhammad annihilated the Qurayzah tribe, beheading all the men of the last Jewish tribe of Arabia (after he exiled the other two). Sixty years after the Mufti Hajj Amin al Husseini sent 400,000 Jews to their deaths in Poland, we have Ahmadinejad and every Islamic leader, imam, and cleric calling for the death of the Jews.

Now a new survey shows that 2009 was the worst year for anti-Semitism in at least two decades. Anti-Semitic attacks and events around the world more than doubled in 2009. The European Jewish Congress (EJC) and The Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism at Tel Aviv University say that part of this increase came from an “orchestrated and concerted attempt to delegitimize the Jewish People and Israel” in Western Europe. There were “mass demonstrations and verbal and visual expressions against Israel and the Jews, with “the worst offenders” appearing in “Western Europe, particularly in the UK and France, followed by Canada.”

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During the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama’s website, Organizing for America – over which Obama has editorial control — played host to a series of vile anti-American, Jew-hating posts and pieces. It was overwhelming. There were numerous, heinous calls for Jewish genocide and incitement to hatred. And it is happening again, right now, on the official website of the man who is supposedly the leader of the free world.

The site was and is closely policed. The site moderators remove material that they consider to be “disrespectful to our other users” and to “detract from a welcoming community where all people can engage in positive discourse.” What they find disrespectful can be interesting: once during the campaign a conservative blogger, Bill Levinson, posted a blog on Obama’s website consisting entirely of a series of quotations from Obama’s own book, Dreams of my Father. Obama’s team did not approve of their standard-bearer’s words, and so Levinson’s blog and account were deleted from the Obama site in just under 36 hours. That’s right, Barack Obama’s website banned Obama’s own words. But the most disgusting anti-semitic ravings remained on the site, along with blogs advocating anarchy and the overthrow of the United States Congress.

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I am reaching the conclusion we on the political Right may have been deceived by Americans for Limited Government (ALG).

As readers of Big Government know, late last Friday, ALG issued a press release claiming it had received an offensive e-mail from Dateline NBC producer, Jane Stone. Within hours, the Rightroots had been mobilized and the story when viral.

Known as the “Bite me Jew boy” e-mail, both Ms. Stone and NBC were pilloried by the Right. Throughout the weekend, Matthew Vadum chronicled the exchange of statements and press releases here on this site.

So Now What?

It’s been five days and ALG has yet to provide indisputable evidence to prove its claim and NBC continues to back Ms. Stone’s assertion she never sent the e-mail in question.

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