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Izabella Tabarovsky
@IzaTabaro
Antisemitism antizionism Russia Ukraine Israel | Research fellow | | Personal acct
Joined September 2015

Izabella Tabarovsky’s Tweets

For Soviet-born parents whose kids are now in US colleges, the anti-Israel hate on campus is a return of a nightmare. Their parents faced the same exact hate in USSR & sacrificed everything for their sake to emigrate. And now their kids are facing it in the US—same slogans & all.
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Great news: the excellent Russian independent broadcaster , which was shut down by the Kremlin within days of the start of the war, will be resuming its broadcasts soon from Latvia, Holland, France & Georgia. Here’s , TV RAIN’s editor-in-chief:
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How many tweets would it take to build a🧵of all the environmental disasters Soviet state socialism left behind? I’ll list a few in no particular order to help out this depressingly uneducated Labour Party millennial. Please feel free to add more.
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The sea is on fire but some people *still* think capitalism can be managed.
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Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Pemex was nationalized in the 1930s. This has nothing to do with capitalism. reuters.com/business/energ…
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I just read a note from one such shocked parent. Her daughter’s assigned college roommates emailed her to say that they can’t live with an Israel-supporting Jew after she shared with them her worry about her Israeli family who were under rocket fire from Hamas.
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PSA for US journalists writing ab Zelensky: Please don’t refer to his Jewishness as ‘faith.’ Ze is a post-Soviet Jew. He doesn’t define himself as a Jew on basis of religion. And no, it doesn’t make him any less Jewish in his own or other Ukrainians’ eyes. Complex, I know
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A longish THREAD on Soviet anti-Zionism & some of its echoes today. As a note, I lived the first 19 years of my life in the USSR & so have personal experience w/some of this. 0/
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And here’s what occurred to me. Once these Soviet-born Jewish parents catch up to what’s going on, they may become a really valuable resource for fighting this. Like me (& unlike many US Jews for whom it’s new & who still think it will pass), they know exactly what’s at stake.
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Rutgers actually apologized for condemning antisemitism. 🤦🏻‍♀️ We’re turning into Absurdistan.
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Chancellor of Rutgers University-New Brunswick sent out an email condemning the recent spike in antisemitic attacks - then a second email apologising, saying it needed to be more "balanced" and not make antisemitism all about the Jews, because "diversity". dailycaller.com/2021/05/27/rut
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What I find morbidly fascinating in this brilliant interview is not only this Amnesty official’s ignorance about Israel but his entirely conspiracist view of it. It just reeks of your basic fat-right antisemitism. A few quotes below.
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The Omar/Tlaib presser yesterday especially made me feel like I was back in the USSR. Back in the 1960s-80s, the Soviets would also organize public events to condemn Israel & Zionism & trot out their token Jews to support their points.
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What she’s doing here is to try to undermine a central aspect of American Jewish identity, which is that Jews fight for justice. She is a very skilled propagandist, and this is a strategy. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more of this going forward.
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Wow... Ilhan Omar to @JakeTapper on her Jewish colleagues who criticized her comments: "they haven't been partners in justice... they haven't been, you know, equally engaging in seeking justice around the world." twitter.com/i/status/14099
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“When a Jew is harassed by a neo-Nazi, they count. When a Jew is harassed by a person from another minority group, not so much. When a secular Jew is attacked, they count. But when a Jew with a black hat is attacked, that’s ignored.” nails it in this devastating piece.
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Sarah Halimi was beaten mercilessly, her body thrown from her apartment window while her killer called her satan and a dirty Jew. Kobili Traoré had 22 prior convictions. But he will not be prosecuted for murder because . . . he smoked weed. #jewsdontcount bariweiss.substack.com/p/why-france-r
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If you’re having a hard time understanding the link betw left antizionism & antisemitism, see this piece. What we’re hearing from progressives today is precisely what the Soviets used to preach from 1967 onward. We know the results for the Jews.
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You forgot to tell the story of Soviet Jews. In the USSR antisemitism was officially prohibited but antizionism was official policy (especially in 1967-1990). Ask us if it was antisemitic or not.
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Sorry, Anti-Zionism Still Doesn’t Equal Antisemitism jacobinmag.com/2021/03/anti-z
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Some historical background: The USSR first equated Zionism w/antisemitism in 1965 at the UN. It continued to make this equation for the next 25 yrs, also equating Zionism w/racism, fascism, colonialism etc. They used this comparison as a tool against troublesome Jews at home.
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People often ask when anti-Zionism becomes antisemitism. In the age of Trump and Orban, it's time to ask a different question: When does Zionism become antisemitism? thttps://jewishcurrents.org/antisemitic-zionists-arent-a-contradiction-in-terms
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When I hear today’s far-left anti-Zionist discourse, I hear echoes of Soviet anti-Zionism. It feels weirdly ironic to hear young progressive activists use the idiom invented by one of the most oppressive regimes on earth. 22/
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Left: 1968, Poland. “We demand that the party is cleansed of the Zionist dirt.” Right: 1972, Moscow. “Zionism is a weapon of imperialism.” Polish & Soviet Jews pushed out of jobs, universities, forced to emigrate. Below: US college students, New York City, 2023.
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In case anyone questioned what the real aim of Fatima Mohammed’s speech was … at a CUNY Board of Trustees meeting, her supporters at CUNY Law demanded that all Zionists (85%+ of Jews) be kicked out of CUNY.  #CUNY @ChancellorCUNY @SAFECUNY
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Another thing that decades of Soviet experience, from Stalin to Gorby, teach us is that anti-Zionism goes hand in hand w/antisemitism—whether intended to or not. It’s a history that’s very much worth remembering today. 23/END
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This is symptomatic of the downgrading of concern w/antisemitism on the far-left. First they delegitimized the idea that their antizionism is antisemitic. Now they want to redefine antisemitism to show that it’s only a problem when it comes from the right.
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My take is that they’re all silent b/c they’re committed to the idea that antizionism is not antisemitism & that antisemitism only exists on the right. For them to own this pogrom is to destroy a fundamental part of their worldview. They can’t allow that. This is Corbynization.
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"While anti-Zionist gangs beat up Jews in her city, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was providing a quasi-intellectual basis for their actions" newsweek.com/how-many-jews- Every single line in this @seffikogen joint is steel-toed.
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Arguing that anti-Zionism & anti-Semitism are not the same makes for an interesting intellectual exercise but it goes against the historical experience of millions of Soviet Jews and Jews from the socialist bloc. In practice, the two always dance together.—Me in
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"The Soviet Union was a country of state-sponsored anti-Semitism. But I often think that it would be more accurate to call it state-sponsored anti-Zionism. It was under the banner of anti-Zionism that Soviet anti-Semitism blossomed," writes @IzaTabaro: forward.com/opinion/420508
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In case you’re wondering: this is what leftwing antisemitism looks like. Far-right tropes wrapped into a leftwing noble-cause wrapper. I’m sure David Duke would approve. Kudos to for this masterclass in journalism.
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This is a FABULOUS find. The Anti-Zionist Conmittee of the Soviet People was a pure KGB creation. Listen to its figurehead founders’ statement & you’ll understand why Soviet Jews feel like we’re back in the USSR when we hear today’s far-left’s anti-Israel/antizionism rants.
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During the Cold War the Soviet Union backed the Arab States against Israel, a US ally. This led to a campaign against “international Zionism”; a new and modern version of global antisemitic conspiracy theory. the founding of the “anti-Zionist committee of the Soviet Public”:
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On my recent visit to the guide pointed out this place to us. After all we saw, Höss’s punishment—being hanged at the site of his crimes—felt viscerally just.(A rare feeling, that one, at Auschwitz.) See the Museum’s thread about Höss’s hanging.
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16 April 1947 | SS-Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Höss, the first commandant of the German #Auschwitz camp was hanged after he was sentenced to death by the Supreme National Tribunal in Warsaw. [See entire thread - 1/9]
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Soviet propaganda digest. Literally stuff written into Soviet antizionist propaganda literature from the 1960s onward and spread throughout the world in every major language.
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“The Nazis and the Zionists saw eye to eye” - this is the insane curriculum Columbia University Professor Joseph Massad teaches his students in ‘Palestinian Israeli Conflict” course.
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Holocaust had nothing to do with religious discrimination. If it had, the Nazis would have spared the lives of millions of non-religious Jews they murdered (including 2.7 million ones in Soviet borders). Holocaust was about anti-Jewish racism. Amazing that it needs to be said.
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Today, we remember the 6 million Jews who were murdered during the Holocaust and redouble our efforts to stand up against antisemitism and all forms of religious discrimination. #HolocaustMemorialDay
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This is what conspiracist antizionism looks like: attributing every ill, incl unrelated opinions one doesn’t like, to Zionism. People engaged in this kind of thinking need to understand that their “antizionism” is a direct derivative of classic antisemitic conspiracy theory.
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This latest case of an antizionist slipping into antisemitism shows once again how thin of an ice antizionists walk on. It takes extreme mental acrobatics to stick to your antizionist script w/o stepping into antisemitism.Hence constant “misspeaking”& having to walk comments back
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CORRECTION: We have removed a segment of this video in which the speaker misspoke regarding Anne Frank’s death These Jewish and Palestinian students are speaking out against Trump for equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism in his Judaism executive order
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What history does show is that the far-left always comes for its useful Jews after they’ve served their purpose & helped destroy or oppress Jews who didn’t support the cause. As a Soviet-Bukhari Jew, Rafael should know that. I have a feeling his family does.
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Senator, I recall an oped you wrote promising American Jews you were the best presidential candidate because you’d fight antisemitism. Have you seen what’s happening in the streets? When will you start condemning AS? When will you recognize that your party’s rhetoric fuels it?
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The devastation in Gaza is unconscionable. We must urge an immediate ceasefire. The killing of Palestinians and Israelis must end. We must also take a hard look at nearly $4 billion a year in military aid to Israel. It is illegal for U.S. aid to support human rights violations.
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You’re not officially a Soviet Jew until an American 20-year old has explained to you on Twitter that the Soviet Union wasn’t actually socialist and that your experience of oppression and antisemitism there doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give socialism another shot.
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You’re not officially a Jew until someone with “social justice” in their bio has explained to you how your religion prohibits supporting Israel, & someone with “freedom” in their bio has accused you of being a Nazi. twitter.com/ShipBrief/stat…
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The massive precious metals factory in Norilsk, built in the 1930s by gulag prisoners in the midst of fragile Arctic tundra, is an unmitigated environmental disaster that I’ve seen with my own eyes. It produces 1% of the entire global emission of SO2.
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“…But that’s what makes it so challenging in some ways then to disentangle them when you put it all together.” In other words, dishonest Jews/Zionists have created a democratic system as a cover-up to distract the world from Israel’s evil nature, got it.
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Colonial studies are primarily focused on the critique of the West. It’s a perspective that is true in a number of academic fields & leads to numerous distortions. Also this, which is related:
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Replying to @EricaMarat @IndraOverland and @AmmonCheskin
Don't forget that Soviet propaganda touted the USSR as a liberator of oppressed peoples, freeing them from the chains of capitalism via Marxism-Leninism, and thus by definition the USSR could not be a colonizing empire. Many "non-aligned" nations swallowed this propaganda whole.
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Soviet Jews stood up to antizionism once before. Now they are helping the younger generation of American Jews—including their own children—fight back against a wave of defamation and hate. My latest in cc
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The beauty of history is that you can see what happens to ideas once they are implemented in practice. Watch Polish communist leader Władysław Gomułka announce the 1968 "antizionist & not antisemitic" campaign. Then read what happened in practice.
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He says Israel was the aggressor in 1967 (false), then the Polish purge of Jews began. He calls Jews strangers, rootless “cosmopolitans”; he demonizes Zionism, comparing it to antisemitism; he says Jews cant really be Polish. But this is not antisemitism, it’s “antizionism”:
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This is giving me goosebumps.The author of Hatikva was born in Galicia close to where the Israeli field hospital now stands.And the line “to live as free people in our land” hit me in a whole new way in the context of this war. It’s no wonder so many Ukrainians identify w/Israel.
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The #Israeli anthem ‘Hatikvah’ being played at the opening of Israel’s ‘Shining Star’ field hospital in #Ukraine.
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Shouldn’t you be asking Jews about it? It’s our religion, our liberation movement, our lived experience. Who gave you the right to speak over us? Do you define every minority’s identity for them?
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Palestinians & their allies have been preaching for 100+ yrs that Zionism is a political project & Judaism is a religion. Zionists have worked at highest levels to equate them to excuse/sustain Israeli violence. Combat antisemitism by joining us in insisting upon this difference.
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This is pretty extraordinary. “Greater Israel” is a meme that was widely used in Soviet propaganda. The “you [Jews] will not replace us” is a neo-Nazi slogan. This tweet is just another illustration of the idea that left & right antisemitism are two sides of the same coin.
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Syria is much easier in this regard, Luther says: there, you just investigate the massacres. But in Israel there are no massacres; there’s just the complex system of laws & policies that is so hard to disentangle. Pity the hard-working Amnesty bureaucrat!
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Remember that Soviet propaganda persistently equated Zionists/Israeli Jews, & ultimately all Jews it didn’t like, w/Nazis/Hitler. The KGB, Putin’s frmr employer, was peerless at manipulating the “Jewish Question.” When you know that history, this ⬇️ begins to make much more sense
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Live update: Russian foreign minister: So what if Zelensky’s Jewish, so was Hitler dlvr.it/SPb5bf
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“It’s such a complicated system & it’s a dizzying array of laws, policies & practices that interweave with each other…Any 1 component of those may mask the reality behind it or may have what appears to be an innocent & legitimate aim.” (Tricky Jews always masking the truth.)
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For socialism fans: story of a woman sent to gulag in 1962 for standing next to workers protesting Soviet regime halving their wages.Troops shot 26 to death, wounded 87; 7 received death penalty, 105 sent to gulag. But art in Moscow metro! & palaces of culture
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Valentina was labeled an enemy of the state and sent to the Gulag camps. Her crime? She attended a strike with other factory workers. When she tells her story today, young people are surprised she had been sent away for nothing. Watch her story: bit.ly/betraying-the-
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Russian Jews like to note that #Stalin got his stroke on Purim—a Jewish holiday celebrating the demise of an evil plot to annihilate the Jews. He died 4 days later—66 years ago today. 1/
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Amnesty didn’t even really want to do this investigation, except that Israel asked for it by creating such a complicated democratic system: “It’s the Israeli state that forces everyone to spend time disentangling it.” (Jews have always asked for it, as everyone knows.)
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“A vast poll of 12,000 voters, released tonight, showed Jeremy Corbyn was by far the single biggest reason voters gave for deserting Labour.”
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The polling that shows Corbyn is to blame for Labour’s decline | Coffee House blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/12/the-po
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50 yrs ago a group of daring Soviet Georgian Jews openly asked for freedom to live in the land of their ancestors—Israel. Through their letter to Golda Meir & the UN, they led the way in an unprecedented rebirth of Jewish identity among Soviet Jewry.
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A Letter to Golda via @IzaTabaro tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-an
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“Imagine if we had asked the Soviet Union to do a co-investigation of Chernobyl.”
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China ruled out a lab accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology before a WHO-led team arrived in China to look into how and where the COVID-19 virus originated. The team found that the virus most likely spread from wildlife farms to a Wuhan wet market. cbsn.ws/3lYPit8
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To start off, it turns out that Israel’s complexity is a ploy meant to prevent conscientious Amnesty officials from easily exposing its evil nature: there’s a “complexity of laws, policies and practices that’s difficult to disentangle,” Luther complains.
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She died of an infectious disease in a... “crowded detention facility”?? It’s amazing. They call detention centers on the border concentration camps & actual concentration camps designed for extermination detention centers.This is a whole other level of manipulation & distortion.
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People who say Anne Frank's death wasn't as bad as people think: - Jewish Leftists from @neveragainactn and @ifnotnoworg - Neo-Nazis
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Excellent piece. Some context: tokenism twrd Jews has a very long tradition on the left. The Soviets cultivated & excelled at it. Esp after the 6 Day War, they actively used Jews in their anti-Israel propaganda campaigns to show that they weren’t antisemitic, just anti-Zionist
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Here's my latest essay in @jdforward. Tokenism Is Racism - Except For Jews. When I see members of @jvplive posing and singing songs with @RashidaTlaib, I feel like she is making an obscene gesture to the mainstream Jewish community. buff.ly/2z83Yi2
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And then there’s everyone’s favorite one about powerful Israel having “managed to shut down scrutiny using the power of its relationships.” (These Zionists, forever buying influence and hypnotizing the world.)
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A perfect example of how the obscene Soviet lies I discussed in my piece on Mahmoud Abbas’s dissertation continue to live on today. Abunimah parrots them with extraordinary precision: from the Kastner story to how Zionists supposedly ‘used’ the Holocaust to get themselves a state
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Sarsour is one of the most disciplined propagandists I can think of today. She knows that 10x1000s will see her clip so she stays on message. It’s not about gaslighting Jews. It’s about teaching her followers what to say. It’s an intentional & consistent propaganda effort.
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FBI: in 2020 Jews experienced 620% more hate crimes than any other religious group. Linda Sarsour: "unlike Islamophobia, antisemitism isn't systemic" This is what modern antisemitism looks like. Stop gaslighting Jews.
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As Soviet Jews know all too well, demonization of Israel makes all Jews less safe. American Jews are beginning to discover this.
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Israeli Oppression Comes to Durham: The city council’s 2018 vote on Israel left many local Jews feeling unwelcome. Is it the new normal across midsize-town America? @SeanPatrickCoop reports: tabletmag.com/sections/news/
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The Soviets were also behind the UN’s infamous Zionism is Racism resolution. The propaganda campaign went on for 20 yrs. Despite its claims, it had nothing to do w/justice for Palestinians. It had everything to do w/Cold War politics & Soviet interests in the ME. /17
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The Soviets rejected accusations of antisemitism, claiming that they were bad-faith smears. Anti-Zionism, they said, was not antisemitism. But we, the Jews who lived with all of it, knew the truth of the matter./20
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Looking forward to giving this talk at the Arizona U’s Center for Judaic Studies: “Antizionism IS Antisemitism: Lessons from the Soviet Jewish Experience.” Tuesday, Dec 14, 8-9 pm Arizona time. Please join us if you can!
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I’ve been to Auschwitz (2x), Treblinka, Babi Yar, countless Holocaust museums & memorials. The most powerful Shoah memorial I’ve experienced, which never fails to bring me to tears, is the 2-minute siren here in Israel. Every diaspora Jew needs to come here to experience it.
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Fascinating to see this tweet on the very day we are marking the passing of the French pilot whose Air France TLV-Paris flight was hijacked in 1976 by Palestinian PFLP terrorists and members of the German far left terrorist group Revolutionary Cells. timesofisrael.com/french-pilot-w
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Anti-semitism is a right-wing force Anti-semitism is a right-wing force Anti-semitism is a right-wing force Anti-semitism is a right-wing force Anti-semitism is a right-wing force Anti-semitism is a right-wing force Anti-semitism is a right-wing force Anti-semitism is a right-win twitter.com/IlhanMN/status…
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Berman asks about the disproportionate scrutiny Israel faces at the UN & Luther replies: “You can look at UN resolutions, but you can look at UN inaction. Because [Israel] has influence over powerful allies who then manage to stop it, stop the scrutiny.” Okay then.
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One more from the comments:
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Replying to @IzaTabaro
Don't forget the time the Soviet Union had a gas fire that burned the volume of 12 Empire State Building's worth of gas every single day for THREE YEARS. Until of course, they just nuked it to finally put out the fire. interestingengineering.com/soviet-enginee
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One of the great things about Twitter is that you get to meet amazing people here you’d never meet otherwise. (Yes, I choose to be positive!) One such person I just met is , grandson of Mendel Beilis of the Beilis Trial fame. jpost.com/Jewish-World/J 1/
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“The Israeli state has made it so difficult to penetrate. They have tried to create a smokescreen around, & of course there is a democratic system, & there are judicial institutions that of course then call the state to account or at least challenge their decisions…
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Luther wants Israel to make it easier for him to smear it: “I would put it back on Israeli state. In some ways it ends up being a driver of complexity and a driver of resources unnecessarily spent on investigations by anybody b/c it’s made so damn complicated.”
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“The BBC should not give Israel a free ride. It should be rigorous, curious, sceptical & challenging, but at present it is sloppy, partial, hostile & distorting.” Well put Also great coverage of confusing a BBC presenter w/facts
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