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Friday, February 4, 2011

JOIN SUNDAY PROTEST OF ISRAEL- & HOLOCAUST- DEFAMING HATE TOUR

THIS SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 6, @ 4 PM, JOIN STAND WITH US-MI AND ZOA-MI
TO STAND AGAINST THE HATE-PROMOTING, TERROR-JUSTIFYING, HOLOCAUST-TRIVIALIZING, ISLAMOPHOBIA-HYPING, SEGREGATIONIST 'NEVER AGAIN FOR ANYONE' PROGRAM @ THE UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CHURCH, 23925 NORTHWESTERN HWY

Hajo Meyer: Never Again for Anyone Tour

Hajo Meyer: Never Again for Anyone Tour
"This event demonstrates better than any protest or counter-rally ever could the vehement anti-Israel and concurrently anti-Semitic sentiment growing not only on the campus of Rutgers but across the country." -- Student Aaron Marcus

Speakers, sponsors among most radical Israel-haters, according to ADL

Southfield will be the stop tomorrow for a national tour defaming Israel and the Holocaust whose public program at Rutgers University last Saturday made international headlines when Jewish students and Holocaust survivors were denied entry. The apparent discriminatory exclusion of Jewish students from a public program at a public university has provoked outrage and underscores the supreme hypocrisy of a Palestinian group that touts "diversity" while segregating out Jewish students.
 

This Sunday, the Unitarian Universalist Church,  23925 Northwestern Hwy, will  host the the  "Never Again for Anyone" Israel-demonizing fest.  The 4 PM program is open to the public for a nominal admission fee. StandWithUs/Michigan and the Michigan Region of ZOA encourage pro-Israel members of the community to join them at the event to challenge the radically hostile speakers and to demonstrate their support for Israel. It is a disappointment and an embarrassment that none of our other communal and Hillel organizations are even aware of the event, let alone care enough to take a stand against it. Yet in New Jersey, organizations rallied so many Jewish activists they overwhelmed the program and were thus shut out.
Aaron Marcus, the pro-Israel student who organized the protest against the program at Rutgers, chronicled the heated confrontation at which 400 Israel supporters were barred from the event. He wrote:
 
"This event demonstrates better than any protest or counter-rally ever could the vehement anti-Israel and concurrently anti-Semitic sentiment growing not only on the campus of Rutgers but across the country."

This event is part of the fast-moving BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) train careening on a collision course with Israel's very existence. The event comes hard on the heels of the presentation at U-M Dearborn two weeks ago by notorious Israel-basher Norman Finkelstein which our blog TT highlighted, the appearance here of Viva Palestina Hamas funder George Galloway, and precedes by three weeks an upcoming benefit concert in Dearborn for a multi-ship, multinational-sponsored Gaza Flotilla.  The timing of these events also conflate with the PA's attempt to declare unilateral statehood and is particularly dangerous, as such.

It claims to be a response to the "ethnic cleansing of Palestine" and "attacks on and persecution of Muslim and Arab communities in the US," the latter of which is a popular refrain here in Michigan from CAIR quarters.


Terror authority Steve Emerson said of the tour's lead sponsor in a report just last month:
They call themselves American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), but their rhetoric indicates their true goal is the elimination of the state of Israel.
The premise and focus of the program, which features Auschwitz survivor Dr. Hajo Meyer, is a desecration of the Holocaust itself and an odious affront to survivors, their families and those who do not so easily forget that the Shoah was a genocidal final solution to "liquidate" the Jews.  These haters of Israel and the Jewish people abuse with abandon the history and lessons of the Holocaust to invert perpetrator and victim. They obscenely equate Israel with the Nazis and grossly distort the facts on the ground to villify Israel for trumped up human rights crimes against the Palestinians.And they conveniently forget to mention in their falsified narrative that the Muslim Brotherhood, of which many are organizational and ideological progeny, collaborated with Hitler to murder the Jews.

According to an article in the Jerusalem Post, Marcus,  said that he,
"along with Rutgers University Hillel President Sarah Morrison and many others, viewed this event as an outright minimization of the Holocaust and defamation of the Jewish people."


To Marcus, who attempted to enter the gathering, it looked like “those in anti-Israel apparel, keffiyehs and hijabs, were taken aside, given green wristbands, labeled as ‘staff’ and given free entrance.” Other sources reported that students wearing yarmulkes were banned from the event.
It is also important to note that, as with so many of these programs and speakers targeting Israel on campuses and in communities, many of the organizations involved are Muslim Brotherhood-tied.  Watching the upheaval quaking Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen and Jordan, we must realize that the crisis is not isolated to the MidEast.  Because the Muslim Brotherhood is a global organization, with a nearly 40-year presence in the United States, the goals of its immediate affiliates (like the Muslim Student Association, CAIR, ISNA, etc.) and their spin-offs reflect the violently anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic roots of the MB.

Speaking at the program will be Drs. Hajo Meyer and Hatem Bazian, founders of Never Again for Anyone. Bazian, a senior lecturer in the department of Near Eastern Studies at UC Berkeley, is percharacterized as a "committed anti-Israel "propagandist and activist" who is a signatory to the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. He was a speaker at fundraisers for Kindhearts, a HAMAS charity whose assets were frozen and which was closed down by the US government in 2006 and listed as a specially designated terror organization. Having addressed its 2008 convention, he is listed among the pool of speakers for ISNA, an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation Hamas-support trial and one of the Muslim Brotherhood's designated affiliates. He also serves on the faculty of COMPASS, a management training program for MSA student activists. MSA was the gateway organization for the Muslim Brotherhood's foundation in America in 1963, with the locus of activity being on campuses in Michigan, Illinois and Indiana.


"Bazian has long been a fixture at Islamic extremist events, making all  kinds of incendiary remarks," observes intelligence analyst Patrick Poole in an article published by Campus Watch. He quoted the passage from the Hadith inciting violence against Jews at an American Muslim Alliance conference in California in 1999, as reported by terror authority Steve Emerson:
In the Hadith, the Day of Judgment will never happen until you fight the Jews. They are on the west side of the river, which is the Jordan River, and you're on the east side until the trees and stones will say, oh Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him! And that's in the Hadith about this, this is a future battle before the Day of Judgmented aAAAA
At an anti-war rally in 2004, he famously goaded the audience to take up violent uprising.
How come we don't have an intifada in this country," Bazian said. "It's about time that we have an intifada in this country that change[s] fundamentally the political dynamics in here. And we know every – They're gonna say some Palestinian [is] being too radical – well, you haven't seen radicalism yet.tive
Emerson's report continues: "During an AMP conference session on "Islamopohobia and American Muslims," Bazian, who also directs the Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project at UC Berkeley, claimed that "pro-Israel activists" in the United States have a "massive infrastructure that is spending 24/7 to demonize Islam and Muslims around the clock for their own strategic purposes."  Moreover, according to Emerson, AMP promotes the pro-Hamas group Viva Palestina and its leader George Galloway, who was just in Michigan two weeks ago. Emerson states that Viva Palestina has delivered millions of dollars to Hamas in Gaza.


The sponsoring organizations include several of the most virulent anti-Israel and anti-Semitic organizations working in overdrive to delegitimize Israel, some of which, like Friends of Sabeel and Jewish Voice for Peace, the ADL classifies as among the "top 10 anti-Israel groups in America,"  Other endorsers include the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network and the Israel Coalition on House Demolitions,  Michigan Peace Team, Pax Christi, UM SAFE, AAUUJME, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, International Socialist Organization.


The primary sponsor, American Muslims for Palestine, is described by the ADL as such in a new assessment:
American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), which has promoted extreme anti-Israel views since its founding in 2006, is facilitating and coordinating student advocacy in the U.S. through its outreach to Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), one of the primary organizers of campus anti-Israel events.  SJP, with chapters at nearly 75 American universities, was recently identified by ADL as one of the Top 10 anti-Israel groups in America.

"AMP's formal outreach to SJP has the potential to further pollute campus discussions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with more extreme messages and false claims," said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director.  "This disturbing alliance comes at a time when tactics to delegitimize Israel on campus, including boycott and divestment campaigns, are already a concern."
Not coincidentally, some of these same organizations sponsored Finkelstein's appearance at U-M Dearborn and SAFE (Students Allied for Freedom and Equality), sponsored the November production of I (Heart) Hamas on the Ann Arbor campus.SAFE is the primary pro-Palestinian organization on the U-M campus which sponsored the university's first major Divestment Conference and subsequent divestment initiatives.

-Hedy Epstein, a Kindertransport survivor and regular speaker on this national tour, has joined members of Jewish Witnesses and Friends for Peace, the group that harangues the Beth Israel Synagogue in Ann Arbor with their weekly "vigils" outside Shabbat services, as well as the High Holiday services, to protest Israel's policies.

Posted by:
MTB, AK45, CC




1 comment:

  1. This posting has an inaccuracy. A local Jewish organization, the JCRC, is "aware" of the program and does "care". It is contacting the host church, alerted its activists and ask them to attend, prepared a counterpoint piece, had representatives at the event and distributed the piece there. I would appreciate being in contact with the writers of the Talking Tachlis blog. Call me any time at 248-642-2641. --Allan Gale

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