Tag Archives: palestine

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The Oregon Food Bank Antagonizes Oregon Jewish Groups Over Gaza

Non-profit groups, like many academic institutions and corporations, have gotten in the unfortunate habit of opining on sensitive political and cultural issues. And they are paying a price. They often learn, too late, that their outspokenness is like stepping on a landmine.

A Portland-area non-profit taking issue with Israel’s actions in Gaza, to illustrate, is facing a backlash from local Jewish groups.

.In April the Oregon Food Bank drafted a statement calling for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war. 

The statement also accused Israel of perpetuating a “war against Palestine,” and said the Israeli military was “indiscriminately” hindering relief efforts in the region.

“As Oregonians, our tax dollars are funding the Israel army’s violence”, the statement said. “We call for immediate humanitarian aid and an end to Israel’s violence against Palestinians…”

The Food Bank’s president, Susannah Morgan, wrote to Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) that this kind of stance on an international conflict was a first for the organization.

The Food Bank has not expressed similar concerns about Russia’s indiscriminate killing of Ukrainians, the conflict in Sudan or Bashar al-Assad’s brutal war in Syria.

On June 4, the Food Bank issued a “statement to our community” thanking its supporters after its pronouncement generated controversy and a protest from local Jewish groups. . “Over the past few days, many of you have reached out, commented, posted, published written statements, signed petitions and donated in solidarity with Oregon Food Bank. Thank you for your support. We are touched by the overwhelming support we’ve received from community members…” 

But a dozen local Jewish organizations[1] persisted in their condemnation of the Food Bank’s actions. In a letter, they expressed their “deep disappointment” in the Food Bank’s statement and asserted, “In our view, the false accusations serve to further the flames of Jewish hatred.”

The letter made clear that financial support for the Food Bank from the organizations would cease and be directed, instead, to other organizations until such time as the Oregon Food Bank “…retracts its statement and issues one indicating it will maintain its focus on hunger and its root causes here in Oregon.”

You’d think the Oregon Food Bank would have been smart enough to have foreseen the consequences of stepping out front on the Gaza war., a divisive issue if there ever was one. 

A little knowledge of history would have given the Food Bank caution. 

In July 2023, for example, the CEO of Goya Foods said at a White House roundtable of Hispanic leaders, “We’re all truly blessed to have a leader like President Trump.” All hell broke loose, as his comment sparked ire against Goya from Trump opponents. 

Some employees, particularly young college educated ones, may push organizations to take strong public stances on controversial issues, but it can have devastating consequences in the public arena. If institutions fail to stand above divisive issues, choosing, instead, to add to public divisiveness, society becomes poorer for it. 

In April 2024, Bloomberg reported that a new survey of 600 C-suite leaders showed that nearly nine in 10 are now wary of wading into world events. Some 87% said that taking a public stance on current issues poses a greater risk for their company than not saying anything.

With 501(c)(3) non-profits, there is also the fact of restrictions on their political activity. They are generally not permitted to get involved in political issues and are permitted very limited lobbying. They may engage in general voter education about issues, including those which affect its mission, but only so long as all viewpoints are represented.Failing in that respect by taking a stand on current issues can affect a non-profit’s tax-exempt status.

Nonprofits should take heed, including whoever replaces  Susannah Morgan when she leaves her post in December.

[1] Jewish Federation of Greater Portland; Jewish Family and Child Service;  Mittleman Jewish Community Center ; Oregon NCSY;  Oregon Jewish Community Foundation; Portland Jewish Academy;  Portland Kollel; Congregation Beth Israel; Congregation Neveh Shalom; Congregation Shaarie Torah; Congregation Keser Israel; Congregation Ahavath Achim

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The Horror of Sexual Violence on Oct 7. Believe It.

“You haven’t talked about this until now. Why?

I decided to talk about it only after I heard that people are trying to say that it didn’t happen….I needed to talk for women. I need to talk because I won’t forgive myself if I will still see people that are saying  those things didn’t happen when I know that they did.”  

Testimony of an Israeli victim of sexual violence on Oct 7, Screams Before Silence

A claque of 59 academics who describe themselves as “professors of journalism and scholars of news media” from across the country are in high dudgeon about a Dec. 28, 2023 New York Times story describing a “pattern of rape, mutilation and sexual violence by Hamas” during its Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel.

Asserting there are compelling reports questioning the integrity of the story, the professors said in a letter to the paper, “We recommend that The New York Times immediately commission a group of journalism experts to conduct a thorough and full independent review of the reporting, editing and publishing processes for this story and release a report of the findings.”

Leaving aside that of all the things to complain about regarding coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict, a group of academics are focusing on a sexual assault story, it will be regrettable if the professors’ complaint is used to try to undermine widespread and convincing allegations of sexual violence committed by Hamas on Oct. 7.

Don’t let it.

Rami Davidian, who rescued some people from Nova, told Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, he saw women’s bodies tied to trees in the area of the party. “There were trees on which there was one body, and there were cases in which a number of bodies were tied to the same tree,” he related. “There was a case of a couple who were in an embrace, naked, and tied to a tree. Both of them had been shot in the chest.” Davidian said he had seen more than five bodies that had been mutilated “in intimate places… their organs were cut off, damaged. There was blood from the groin… There were also shots to breasts.”

The aftermath of the Nova massacre

In  Screams Before Silence, a new documentary film from Sheryl Sandberg, former COO of Meta, Sandberg interviewed multiple eyewitnesses, released hostages, first responders, medical and forensic experts, and survivors of the Hamas massacres..

“I’ll never forget what I saw there for so long as I live,” a witness to the massacre’s results said in the film ” I saw girls tied up with their hands behind them to every tree here…Someone murdered them, raped them, and abused them here on these trees. Their legs were spread. Everyone who sees them knows they were abused. Someone stripped them. Someone raped them. They inserted all kinds of things into their intimate organs, like wooden boards, iron rods. Over 30 girls were murdered and raped here. I had to close their legs and cover their bodies so no one else would see what I saw.”

“Every one of us, women and men, must speak up for these women and say, “We will bear your story. We will bear witness for you…what happened to you will be told.”   said Shari Mendes, an Israeli Defense Force (IDF) reservist. 

Whatever the reliability of the New York Times article, the professors need to acknowledge the truth of the larger story of sexual assault by Hamas.

Never forget that..

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College Protests and the Law of Unintended Consequences

An intervention in a complex system always creates unanticipated and often undesirable outcomes.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg understands unintended consequences. “[W]e all know that sometimes people mean well but cause harm nonetheless—out of ignorance, out of carelessness, out of deeply ingrained ways of thinking they haven’t examined, out of an emotional reaction that got the better of their lofty intentions, or … well, the list goes on,” she says.

There’s a message here for today’s rabid pro-Palestine student protesters convinced that their actions will bring about change.

If they are trying to emulate the protests against the Vietnam war in 1960s, the bloodiest and most dramatic of which occurred at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, they’re forgetting something. Those protests may have helped drive out President Lyndon Johnson, but they undermined the candidacy of the Democratic candidate for president, Hubert Humphrey, and invigorated the conservative supporters of Republican Richard Nixon.

In his first months in office, Nixon had the U.S. military increase, not decrease, its pressure on the battlefield and, in violation of international law, ordered secret bombings of North Vietnamese camps in Cambodia.

After he took office, another 21,200 Americans died in Vietnam and elsewhere in Southeast Asia, about one-third of all American deaths in the war (58,220), along with an estimated half a million Vietnamese., 

Nixon’s aggressive pursuit of the war also led to more protests on college campuses with deadly consequences. During one of those protests at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, National Guardsmen shot and killed four students. Just 10 days later, another two students at Jackson State University were killed by police.

Paul Berman, an American writer on politics and literature, wrote in yesterday’s Washington Post, about being involved as a Columbia University student in a late April 1968 campus uprising. He wrote about how professors upbraided him, warning about the potential dangers of the protests.

“The professors were haunted by Germany and its history, ” Berman wrote.” In 1968, the defeat of the Nazis was only 23 years behind us, and the era of World War II and the catastrophe of the Jews had not yet definitively disappeared into the past — at least, not in the professors’ eyes. They wanted me to understand that Germany’s leftists in the 1930s had failed to understand Nazism’s danger. Foolish left-wing radicalism had helped undermine the German universities, which ought to have been a place of anti-Nazi resistance. They wanted me to understand, all in all, that what people think they are doing might not be what they are actually doing, and, in the name of high ideals, society might be weakened, and the worst of disasters might be brought about.”

I bring all this up to remind today’s aggrieved student protesters that their aggressive actions may not lead events to where they want them to go. 

First, despite the protesters’ assumption that their peers have their back, the annual Harvard Youth Poll, run by the Institute of Politics (IOP) at Harvard’s Kennedy School, found that  Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 are not prioritizing the Israel-Gaza conflict. 

The poll found that young people are more worried about inflation, health care, housing and gun violence. The survey listed 16 issues facing the U.S., asking respondents which of two randomly paired issues most concerned them. The conflict in the Middle East ranked near the bottom at 15th.

The general public also can’t be counted on to support the protesters. Americans are actually quite divided about how – and whether – the U.S. should be involved in the Israel-Hamas war. According to the Pew Research Center, among US adults, only 22% say Hamas’ reasons for fighting Israel are valid and roughly six-in-ten Americans (58%) say Israel’s reasons for fighting Hamas are valid. 

In this environment, the student protests, particularly if they continue with violent events at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, may, as in 1968, lead to a conservative backlash that helps defeat President Biden and elect Donald Trump.

For most of the protesting students, that would surely be a worst case of unintended consequences. 

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Oregon Schools Are Fighting Rising Anti-Semitic Denialism

If there was ever a time for Oregon schools to teach about the holocaust, the time is now.

In a December 2023 YouGov/Economist poll, 20% of young American respondents aged 18-29 said the Holocaust is a myth. Another 30% said they don’t know if it’s a myth. And the proportion of respondents who said they believe the Holocaust is a myth was similar across all levels of education.

And now, denial of the well-documented Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel that left about 1,200 people dead is spreading, despite truly massive real-time documentation of the attacks.  

On social media, an expanding group of denialists link Israel itself to the attack, claiming it was a “false flag” event spurred by Israel to cast blame on Hamas. And as the Washington Post has reported, the denialism is “bleeding into the real world.”  

“Demonstrators have shouted the claim at anti-Israel protests and have used it to justify removing posters of hostages in cities like London and Chicago,” the Washington Post reported. “At a November city council meeting in Oakland, Calif., multiple residents disputed the veracity of the attack.”

According to the Post, “researchers are warning that Oct. 7 conspiracy theories may follow a similar trajectory to Holocaust denial, which was waning before social media platforms propelled a resurgence a decade ago.”

Fortunately, Oregon is ahead on educating its public school students on the Holocaust.

Claire Sarnowski, when she was a freshman at Lake Oswego’s Lakeridge High School, came up with the idea of mandating Holocaust instruction at Oregon’s public schools after hearing a Holocaust survivor, Alter Wiener, tell his story. Sarnowski approached state Sen. Rob Wagner, who agreed to introduce a bill, SB 664. 

The bill passed unanimously in the Oregon House and Governor Brown signed it on June 4, 2019. 

The bill required school districts across Oregon to provide instruction about the Holocaust and genocide in social studies classes, starting in the 2020-21 school year, to “enable students to evaluate the morality of the Holocaust, genocide and similar acts of mass violence and to reflect on the causes of related historical events.”

.As so often happens with legislation, the true believers expanded on Sarnowski’s vision and declared that the instruction must also address: the immorality of mass violence; respect for cultural diversity; the obligation to combat wrongdoing through resistance, including protest, and; the value of restorative justice. Like anti-terrorism laws, it was a classic example of mission creep.

But it was at least a start. And now it’s needed more than ever.

The question, of course, is whether schools are aggressively following the law’s mandates and whether students are absorbing the lessons. The State has also mandated drug prevention education in Oregon’s public schools, for example, but an investigative series from the Lund Report, the University of Oregon’s Journalism Project and Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) has revealed that what students are being taught varies widely and that many school districts don’t use programs backed by evidence that they are effective at delaying or preventing substance abuse. 

And then there’s the question of whether students are acting on what they are learning about the Holocaust.

Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) said recently in a Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Sermon at Central Synagogue NYC that when he was asked why he spoke out so frequently and forcefully about anti-Semitism, his answer was, “The question is not why have I chosen to be outspoken. The question is why have others chosen to be silent amidst the deadliest days for Jews since the Holocaust?”

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Hamas Even Hates Rotary Clubs

Do I have your attention?

Most media coverage of the war in Israel has inexorably shifted from the Oct. 7 barbarism of Hamas[1] to civilian casualties from Israel’s response. Hamas knew this would happen.

“After dealing with reporters through many rounds of violence since coming to power in Gaza in 2007, Hamas understood that most can be co-opted or coerced, and that coverage of Gaza would reliably focus on civilian casualties, obscuring the cause of the war, portraying Israel’s military operations as atrocities, and thus pressuring Israel to stop fighting,” Matti Friedman, a Canadian-Israeli journalist and author, wrote today in The Free Press. This has allowed Israel’s critics to claim the high ground without shame.

It is critical that this shift be challenged by going back to the reality of Hamas’ aims. 

The reality is in the Introduction to Hamas’ original 1988 charter.[2]

“…our struggle against the Jews is extremely wide-ranging and grave, so much so that it will need all the loyal efforts we can wield, to be followed by further steps and reinforced by successive battalions from the multifarious Arab and Islamic world, until the enemies are defeated and Allah’s victory prevails.”

Hamas perceived from the outset that it would have many enemies. 

“The enemies” who must be confronted “…stood behind the French and the Communist Revolutions and behind most of the revolutions we hear about here and there,” said Article 22. “They also used the money to establish clandestine organizations which are spreading around the world, in order to destroy societies and carry out Zionist interests. Such organizations are: the Free Masons, Rotary Clubs, Lions Clubs, B’nai B’rith and the like.”

“All those secret organizations, some which are overt, act for the interests of Zionism and under its directions, strive to demolish societies, to destroy values, to wreck answerableness, to totter virtues and to wipe out Islam,” added Article 28.

The shift in media coverage has allowed the reality of Hamas, as highlighted above, to recede into the background,

As one critical observer, Kevin Diamant, recently wrote in a Letter to the Editor in the Wall Street Journal, “”Hospitals and civilians are entangled in the fighting because the terrorist cowards want them to be — images of civilian casualties are the tool Hamas uses to turn weak minds to its cause.” 

Never forget.

[1] The New York Times reported on Nov. 28, 2023, that it had uncovered new details showing a pattern of rape, mutilation and extreme brutality against women in the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel.

[2] This is from a translation of the original 1988 charter of Hamas. A revised Hamas Document of General Principles and Policies was issued in 2017.

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A Message to Protesters: Show Your Face

A group of more than 40 interns working in President Biden’s  White House and other executive branch offices have sent a letter to Biden and Vice President Harris accusing them of having “ignored” the “pleas of the American people” and calling on the Administration “…to demand a permanent cease fire.”

“We, the undersigned Fall 2023 White House and Executive Office of the President interns, will no longer remain silent on the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people,” 

But despite the “We the undersigned” start to the letter, there were no names and signatures included. 

The demand for anonymity among protesters these days is cowardly, frustrating and annoying.

When Patrick Henry implored “Give me liberty, or give me death!” on March 23, 1775, he didn’t wear a face mask or send an anonymous letter to King George. He spoke up in a speech to the Second Virginia Convention at St. John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia.

But many of today’s most virulent protesters want no such personal exposure. They’d rather blend in with the mob, obscuring their individual responsibility. They want free speech without consequences. 

Observe the videos and photographs of ““From the river to the sea!” protests around the United States. 

In early October, the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee put out a statement on its Instagram page that was originally co-signed by 33 other Harvard student organizations saying they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence” in the wake of a deadly invasion of Israel by the Islamist militant group Hamas. 

But after an intense local and national backlash from lawmakers, professors, and other students, the organizers removed the list of student organizations from the open letter.

At a pro-Palestinian “Vigil for the Martyrs of Palestine,” by Georgetown University students, nearly every one of the students hid their face with a mask. Similarly, when Several hundred people gathered in Bruin Plaza at UCLA for a walkout and march in support of Palestine, and when pro-Palestinian students at Princeton staged a walk-out and demonstration, many wore masks. 

Come on now. Wouldn’t it be better for people to stand behind their convictions?