Civil Rights for Some Americans

US Commission on Civil Rights Serves Jewish Privilege: An E-Mail Exchange with Abigail Thernstrom

Is a Civil Rights Commissioner fit to serve that cannot acknowledge Jewish/ethnic Ashkenazi racism, extremism and biogtry as a major if not the main threat to civil rights in America today?

From U.S. Commission on Civil Rights - Commissioner Thernstrom

ABIGAIL THERNSTROM
Vice-Chair
Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute
New York City, New York
POLITICAL AFFILIATION: INDEPENDENT

Abigail Thernstrom is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute in New York, a member of the Massachusetts State Board of Education, and a commissioner on the United States Commission on Civil Rights. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Government, Harvard University, in 1975.

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E-Mails

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April 12, 2007

Dear Professor Thernstrom,

If you could pass this email along to your wife, I would be most grateful.

I saw the following item in the news.

U.S. Commission on Civil Rights to Launch Website against Campus Antisemitism
Published in: PRNewswire-USNewswire April 10, 2007

WASHINGTON, April 10 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ - On Friday, April 13, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights will launch a Web site that contributes to ending campus anti-Semitism by educating college students and others about anti-Semitism, urging victims and witnesses of anti-Semitism to report such incidents, and listing sources of assistance for students. This Web site is part of a campaign that the Commission undertook following the occurrence of anti-Semitic incidents on many of the nation's university and college campuses and receiving testimony from a panel of experts that too many college students are unaware of their rights and protections against anti-Semitic behavior. Campaign materials include the Commission's recent report Campus Anti-Semitism (http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/081506campusantibrief07.pdf ), and posters, postcards, and e-messages that will direct students to the Web site.

When: Friday, April 13, 2007, 9:30 a.m.
Where: U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 624 Ninth Street NW, Room 540
Washington, D.C.

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is an independent, bipartisan agency charged with monitoring federal civil rights enforcement. Members include Chairman Gerald A. Reynolds, Vice Chairman Abigail Thernstrom, and Commissioners Jennifer C. Braceras, Gail Heriot, Peter N. Kirsanow, Arlan D. Melendez, Ashley L. Taylor, Jr., and Michael Yaki. Kenneth L. Marcus is Staff Director. Commission meetings are
open to the media and general public.

SOURCE U.S. Commission on Civil Rights

I have been monitoring Harvard for many years for both Islamophobia and anti-Semitism. I know that Summers considered Divestment from Israel anti-Semitic in effect if not in intent, but he has some problems when the topic of Israel arises.

I know of no genuine incidents of anti-Semitism at Harvard, but Arabophobia and Islamophobia are quite commonly expressed often at the incite[ment] of the David Project and similar or related Israel advocacy organizations that operate on campus. Harvard is also in violation of the precedent of Bob Jones vs. USA in a very major way (something that should be extremely embarrassing because Professor Tribe played such a large role in the pleadings before the Supreme Court).

The US Commission on Civil Rights should seriously think about monitoring Islamophobia and Arabophobia incitement on campus and the very un-American ideological program with which such hatred is associated.

The article attached below provides a framework for addressing the problem.

Sincerely yours,

Joachim Martillo

The article entitled "The Significance of the AJC Attack on Progressive Jews" can be found at http://www.eaazi.org/ThorsProvoni/JewishPolitics/AJCattacks.htm .

Here is the critical section.

In order to be truly certain to block this "Muslim-liberal coalition," of which there is yet actually little evidence in the USA (it is more developed in the UK), these Jewish communal and Zionist organizations are trying to incite a form of Islamophobia on the model of Central and Eastern European Judeophobia or anti-Semitism of the late 18th through the middle 20th century. Here are some of the activities associated with this ongoing and expanding program.

1. Robert Spencer, who is author of Islam Unveiled as well as a frequent speaker at meetings and lectures to incite Islamophobia (see http://tinyurl.com/2uqqo8), and his ilk, who are generally well-funded by fanatic Zionist and Jewish Neocon organizations like the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, are scribbling these ridiculous books that are poor imitations of Eisenmenger's Entdecktes Judentum (Judaism Unmasked) or Rohling's Der Talmudjude (The Talmud Jew).
2. Too many (often Jewish) pseudo-scholars are babbling ignorantly about taqiyya (prudence), which is a permissible form of dissimulation in certain life threatening situations according to certain Shiite jurists. The concept has an exact counterpart in the thinking of the Rambam (Moses Maimonides or Musa bin Maimun, see his Letter on Martyrdom/Forced Apostasy, whose original Arabic uses the word taqiyya to describe exactly the same form of deception permitted to Jews subjected to certain forms of mortal danger).
   
   The concept of taqiyya also has a very close analogue in Roman Catholic ethics.
   
   The accusation that Muslims practice taqiyya to justify lying to non-Muslims is essentially equivalent to the common anti-Semitic slander that asserts that Jews never keep their contracts with non-Jews because the Kol nidrei prayer, which is part of the ceremony of Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) nullifies all such agreements.
   
3. Articles like Alain Besançon's "What Kind of Religion is Islam?," which appeared the May 2004 issue of Commentary, argue for a fundamental opposition between Islam and Judeochristianity. Such scholarly and non-scholarly literature represents a phenomenon essentially identical to the extensive 19th and 20th century literature that claims an unbridgeable gulf exists between Judaism and Christianity (Judentum und Christentum or sometimes Judentum und Deutschtum) in order to assert that Muslims today or Jews then are/were fundamentally alien to mainstream Western culture and must be removed. (See http://tinyurl.com/3yhv2m for a much less sinister hypothesis of the relationships among Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.)
   
4. Racist Neocon Islamophobes portray Islamic finance as something sinister just as 19th and 20th century anti-Semites depicted Jewish bankers as malicious and exploitive. "Playing by Islamofacist rules" (http://tinyurl.com/yuyex2) by Alex Alexiev is typical of this sort of defamation. Alexiev is the VP for Research at the extremist Neocon Zionist Center for Security Policy.
   
5. Arabophobes are using the international imperative to decrease consumption of fossil fuels to engage in a form of anti-Arab incitement that is modeled on traditional 1890s-1930s anti-Semitic cartoons, which gave the viewer a choice between trading at a small neighborhood shop belonging to a virtuous German Christian and buying from a giant department store owned by a sinister German Jew (see The Economist, "Green American," Jan. 27th - Feb. 2nd, 2007, p. 24, http://tinyurl.com/2lpeg2).

[Note how much the above billboard advertisement depends on reflexive racism. Maybe the guy on the left is some price-gouging Texas oil billionaire while the guy on the right is an Arab American humanitarian that is farming in Missouri.]

6. Jewish Neocons model phrases like the "War on Terror" or "Islamic terror" on 1920s - 1940s anti-Semitic terminology like jüdisch-bolschewistische Terrorbanden (Judeo-Bolshevik terror groups).

7. Zionist pseudo-scholars and media pundits have used two minor historical footnotes, to wit,
   
   1. Egyptian Kings Fuad I's and Farouk's flirtation with the idea of inheriting the Ottoman Caliphate and
   2. the angry reaction of the Ali brothers and other Indian Muslims
      i. to the abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate and
      ii. to the indifference that the British government showed toward the opinions of Muslim subjects

as the basis for crafting an Islamophobic fantasy comparable to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion or to the German Nazi propaganda about the jüdisch-bolschewistische Weltverschwörung (Judeo-Bolshevik world conspiracy).

In reality, polling data consistently shows the vast majority of Muslims (from the least to the most religious) have about as much interest in a restored Caliphate (or Imamate from the Shiite standpoint) as Jews have in being ruled by the Davidic House, for whose restoration Orthodox Jews beseech God daily according to the traditional Jewish prayer book.

In general, whereas Schoenfeld and the AJC as well as Abraham Foxman and the ADL (http://tinyurl.com/2753nw, http://tinyurl.com/2csatr) advocate restrictions on democracy and freedom of expression in the USA, American Muslims oppose the antidemocratic aspects of the Patriot Act, and Muslims outside the USA desire democratic reforms for their countries along with greater scope for freedom of expression.

8. Islamophobic Zionist organizations reward both ex-Muslims like Nonie Darwish, Ibn Warraq or Ayaan Hirsi Ali (http://tinyurl.com/2mn43z) and also self-described Muslim reformers like Irshad Manji for writing exposés of Islam or for lecturing on the need for Islamic reform in exactly the same way that Czarist Russian organizations used to pay government-anointed Jewish reformers to encourage change within the Russian Jewish community or would support Russian Orthodox Jewish converts, who were willing to tell "the truth about Judaism."

9. Fanatic Jewish Zionists like Melanie Phillips (author of Londonistan), Nidra Poller (author of "Betrayed by Europe: An Expatriate's Lament," http://tinyurl.com/2plbab), Giselle Littman (author of Eurabia under the pen name Bat Ye'or), and Bernard Lewis (see http://tinyurl.com/2bm9bp) are scare-mongering the Islamization or Arabization of Europe just as Henry Ford ranted about the Judaization of the USA in The International Jew and just as numerous Central and Eastern European anti-Semites denounced the Judaization of Vienna, Berlin, Warsaw or Łódź.

10. The organized Jewish community is attempting to make the denial of the Holocaust of popular discourse today the equivalent of denying the divinity of Jesus within traditional Christian Judeophobic discourse. The similarity of these two cardinal "sins" is particularly striking because scholarly discussion of the mass murder of Jews during WW2 like scholarly discussion of the historical Jesus during the 19th and 20th century differs massively from the popular conceptualization in both cases (see http://tinyurl.com/3dj6ob).
    
    
11. Various groups within the organized Jewish community or sponsored by it are churning out Islamophobic and Arabophobic movies that look more and more like German Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda films. Obsession, radical Islam's war against the West (http://www.obsessionthemovie.com/) and Columbia Unbecoming from the David Project (http://www.columbiaunbecoming.com/) are examples of this growing cinematic genre designed to incite anti-Muslim and anti-Arab prejudice.
    
    
12. The media and legal persecution of Muslim Arab Americans like Sami el-Arian (see http://tinyurl.com/3doa6g), Muslim American organizations like Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (see http://tinyurl.com/ysp5gt) or the Islamic Society of Boston (see http://tinyurl.com/yayd4n), and Muslim American converts like former US Army Captain James Yee (see his book For God and Country: Faith and Patriotism under Fire), José Padilla (see http://tinyurl.com/2v6mya, http://tinyurl.com/2nkrck) or Daniel Maldonado (see http://tinyurl.com/2rvwgs) is beginning to look like an attempt to create the sort of suspicion and hostility against Muslims that the Dreyfus Affair engendered specifically against French Jews and then contagiously against all Jews in general.
    
    
13. Not even a reworking of Nazi biological determinist or social Darwinist anti-Semitic arguments has been beyond the pale in the oeuvres of today's Islamophobes. Edward Rothstein, who often serves as a Jewish Zionist media gatekeeper at the New York Times, used the publication of Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel C. Dennett as an excuse to equate Muslims protesting vicious anti-Islamic xenophobia with ants whose brains have been eaten by parasites. His February 20, 2006 article is entitled "History Illuminates the Rage of Muslims." (See http://tinyurl.com/yrjncm).
    
    
14. Classic anti-Semites in the past and today's cutting-edge Islamophobes have striven for a normalization of their hatred via a form of deflection. When criticized by Americans for mistreatment of Jews, German Nazis and their supporters would refocus the discussion onto Jim Crow in the American South. Today, Zionists and their supporters set up organizations like Save Darfur or the American Anti-Slavery Group (see http://tinyurl.com/344gxh) to distract Americans and other Westerners from Zionist crimes against humanity (see http://tinyurl.com/2d6gey). Before Zionists thought of using current human rights issues to manipulate discourse about the conflict over Palestine, they tried to obfuscate the discussion of the Zionist genocide of Palestinians by referencing the mistreatment of native Americans by European colonists and their descendants.


The pattern outlined above is not only despicable, but it is also shamelessly clear. The purveyors of this sort of Islamophobia on steroids have a very clear goal to marginalize Western Muslims so drastically so that no respectable political group and especially that no progressives would ever have any association with American Muslims whatsoever — except, of course, for those vile and contemptible Jewish anti-Semites so graciously identified by the AJC.

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April 13, 2007

Dear Joachim Martillo:

My husband and I share his email, and so I got your message without any need to pass it on to me.

You should write to the staff director and ask him to forward your letter on to all other commissioners. Just write what you wrote to me. And tell him I suggested you write directly and suggested he send it around.

He is Kenneth Marcus kmarcus@usccr.gov

Thanks for getting in touch,

AT

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April 19, 2007

Dear Mr. Martillo:

When I suggested you send your email to Kenneth Marcus, I had not had the time to read it. I did no more than glance at it to see the subject and, on that basis, decided the staff director was the right person to contact.

But, having now read it with a bit more care, I see your message that "concerned Americans must begin seriously to consider whether fanatic and extremist Jewish Americans, more committed to Zionism than either to their fellow Americans or to basic human decency, should continue to play important roles in US media, academia and politics." Moreover, you characterize the American Jewish Committee and Commentary magazine as "un-American" and "subversive."

I would never have suggested you contact the staff director had I noticed what you had actually written. I suspect I am in the category of "fanatic and extremist Jewish Americans" myself.

Sorry for leading you astray; I am always short on time and should have taken a few minutes to read what you wrote. Lesson learned.

AT

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April 19, 2007

Dear Professor Thernstrom,

Have been following the changes in the AJC over the last few years?

The David Project, whose founding president Charles Jacobs, is probably involved in a criminal conspiracy to prevent Muslim American citizens from exercising their Constitutional and civil rights (see http://tinyurl.com/28n4x7, http://tinyurl.com/2dxcyg), testified at the US Commission on Civil Rights and recently shared the podium at the ZOA with Kenneth Marcus if I am not mistaken. If Jacobs is really interested in strengthening civil rights, he should stop trying to undermine them.

David Harris, president of the AJC, is supporting Jacobs and the David Project. One of the directors of the local chapter of the AJC quit over this issue.

You probably do not remember me, but I have taken classes from you. I simply do not believe that you would enter into a conspiracy to deprive either Muslim or non-Muslim American citizens of their Constitutional and civil right as Jacobs and his friends are doing. Maybe, I am wrong, but I have been studying the Boston Jewish community for years, and you simply do not belong to Jacobs' extremist and racist segment of the American Jewish population.

I generally have many disagreements with Bernard Lewis, but I have heard that he has come around to my opinion that current Islamophobia is beginning to look more and more like classic anti-Semitism of the late 19th century and first half of the twentieth century. He is supposed to be writing a book on the subject. I do not know whether he agrees with me that an identifiable class within the organized Jewish community is consciously trying to craft Islamophobia according to the mold of classic anti-Semitism, but his specialty is Turkish and Middle Eastern studies while mine is Jewish studies.

As far as I know, there are no suggestions that any institution of higher learning is violating the principles of Bob Jones vs. USA with regard to Jews, but if Harvard is doing it with respect to Arabs, probably other universities are as well. Yet, the US Commission on Civil Rights is setting up a web site to monitor anti-Semitism. Something seems wrong with the priorities.

I wrote the article The AJC attacks! (http://tinyurl.com/ytjojg) because most of the people Rosenfeld condemned are friends of mine. Now I do not have problems if a debate becomes heated, but I can make a good case that the AJC is attempting to shut down the discussion and is getting close to working to undermine freedom of expression for people, who the leaders of the AJC believe disagree with the organization's position on Israel. The possibility that American Muslims might begin to influence US politics with regard to Israel seems to lie at the core of the Roxbury Mosque conflict. The David Project is not a Jewish communal organization per se but states that its mission is Israel advocacy.

As for Commentary, which until January 2007 was published by the AJC, can you characterize as a passage like

...in the judgment of the political scientist Peter Skerry, we may now be witnessing the emergence of a new force in American politics. Writing in Time, and citing a whole range of such convergent interests, Skerry calls this a "Muslim-liberal coalition" (more accurately it might be called a Muslim/Arab-liberal coalition). If he is right, and if this coalition can be organized to act with any degree of coherence, it could indeed end up, through sheer numbers alone, wielding a disproportionate influence on American politics [my emphasis], to the clear detriment of the interests of American Jews.

as anything but subversive and un-American? [Note that Schoenfeld is a contributor to Commentary, and this passage is not exceptional.] Do you disagree that majority rule in theory is an intrinsic element of the American system? In the US political system we normally think of the exercise of influence by sheer numbers as proportionate not disproportionate.

Are you having a problem with my characterization because the AJC is a Jewish organization, because Commentary is supposed to be a Jewish intellectual magazine, and you yourself are Jewish? Arab and Muslim organizations like CAIR, MPAC or the AAI are subject to this sort of scrutiny all the time. Yet, Walt and Mearsheimer's (by my standards ) very unsophisticated analysis suggests that certain Jewish or Zionist organizations might unlike CAIR, MPAC or the AAI be genuine threats to American interests and the American political system.

Should the US Commission on Civil Rights be renamed the US Commission on Civil Rights for Some Americans?

Sincerely yours,

Joachim Martillo

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Summary

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In retrospect, I have to accept Abigail Thernstrom's characterization of herself as being "in the category of 'fanatic and extremist Jewish Americans.'"

She is a Jewish bigot unable to see Jewish bigotry. She has no legitimate place on the US Commission on Civil Rights.

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