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Michelle Obama’s Betrayal of African Girls

benjaminposer@gmail.com — Thu, 08 May 2025 14:59:02 +0000

We must bring back “#BringBackOurGirls” On April 14, 2014, the terrorist organization Boko Haram brutally kidnapped 276 Christian schoolgirls from the Nigerian village of Chibok. News of this atrocity spread around the world, and the hashtag “#BringBackOurGirls” quickly appeared on Twitter in response. Righteous outrage touched the hearts of decent people across the globe, from ordinary social media users to celebrities. Arguably the most influential celebrity on the planet at the time, Michelle Obama, then joined the campaign. Almost precisely 11 years ago, on May 7, 2014, the First Lady tweeted out a professionally taken picture of herself holding a piece of paper bearing the hand-written slogan. “Our prayers are with the missing Nigerian girls and their families,” she wrote. “It’s time to #BringBackOurGirls. —mo [sic]” Even though the girls — just like the Israeli hostages — had been violently dragged away from their village school by heavily armed men, and were hardly “missing,” the gesture made a difference. But then something happened. Just what cannot be known for sure, but, when Nigerian schoolgirl Leah Sharibu was kidnapped by the same terrorists not four years later — and then made “a slave for life” for refusing to convert to Islam — Mrs. Obama said nothing. She mentioned the Chibok girls again, at a World Bank event in 2016, but that seems to have been the end of her interest in the fate of victimized African women. Leah, now almost 22, was a black Christian teenage girl, just like the girls from Chibok. She was kidnapped, enslaved, and raped by precisely the same murderers. But a woman who has promoted herself as the Western world’s chief advocate for the dignity of black women is silent about her. Could it be that only later did she fully understand that the 2014 abductions were an act of jihad in the name of Islam — making the subject “politically incorrect”? Did Louis Farrakhan, an old and secret friend of her husband — and long-time ally and defender of Nigeria’s Islamic political elements — tell her to shut up? One can speculate endlessly, but the fact remains that Michelle Obama’s interest in the Chibok girls’ abduction rallied some public interest in their agony. Leah’s case, on the other hand, has received only a fraction of the mainstream media coverage, let alone social media fervor. Whatever the reason, Michelle Obama — now a woman with a podcast — abandoned her concern for (Islamic) violence against women in Africa. While she fills much of her podcasting time complaining about how American taxpayers only had to cover some and not all of her luxury White House expenses, Nigerian girls are raped and kidnapped regularly. This is why we formed the African Jewish Alliance. To, at least, if nothing else, bring “#BringBackOurGirls” back again.

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Muslims Slaughtering and Enslaving Africans

benjaminposer@gmail.com — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 17:12:00 +0000

The world prefers Muslim terrorists to their African victims Pastor Dumisani Washington, who partners with our African Jewish Alliance, exposes the racist nature of the African jihad now spreading across much of that continent in his latest Substack post. For people who claim to care so much about “system racism,” here it is — in Africa, against Africans. The world’s humane energy should be shifted from the made-up “genocide” in Gaza to the real one occurring throughout a continent. After you read his eloquent piece, please see our work at www.africanjewishalliance.org, especially our social media (see the icons at the top of the homepage) which is reaching a youthful audience.

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Help Kill New Hampshire Education Bill Mentioning “Palestinian Genocide”

benjaminposer@gmail.com — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 23:08:00 +0000

Help stop a New Hampshire Holocaust education bill promising to also prioritize “Palestinian genocide” studies The Israeli-American Civic Action Network (ICAN) has created a petition aimed at New Hampshire lawmakers, demanding that they remove language mentioning “Palestinian genocide” from House Bill 555-FN, a piece of legislation expanding Holocaust education mandates. The language in question reads: “Such instruction shall include at least 5 hours of study to include, at minimum, instruction on the United Nations (UN) definition of genocide, the UN resolution on human rights, the Holocaust (and other Nazi committed genocides), the Armenian genocide, the Rwandan genocide, the genocide of indigenous peoples in the United States, and the Palestinian genocide.” It goes without saying that this is unacceptable. Also, beyond the bill’s endorsement of Muslim Brotherhood propaganda, references to the U.N. are of great concern in themselves. The United Nations is among the chief political entities accusing Israel of genocide in the first place. Reliance on U.N. materials or definitions — in light, especially, of its own disgusting record regarding the Rwandan genocide in particular — lends legitimacy to Israel’s defamers. Please sign ICAN’s petition here.

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Join Us for a Critical Discussion of the Boston CJP’s 5-Point Plan to Fight Anti-Semitism

benjaminposer@gmail.com — Wed, 11 Jan 2023 20:49:39 +0000

Join the Jewish Leadership Project’s panel discussion on the New England Combined Jewish Philanthropies’ new five-point plan to address anti-Semitism. Sunday, February 12, 2023 12:00 P.M. (EST) Please click here to join at the appointed time.

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Playing defense is not working on campuses

cporter — Fri, 10 Jun 2022 18:51:05 +0000

Written by: William A. Jacobson & Johanna E. Markind for WhiteRoseMagazine. THE ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu said, “Security against defeat implies defensive tactics; ability to defeat the enemy means taking the offensive.” In other words, you don’t win a war by playing defense. Major Jewish and pro-Israel organizations have reacted to specific campus incidents of anti-Semitism (usually masquerading as anti-Israelism), such as student government boycott resolutions, but have consistently failed to counter the growing narrative that Israel and Jews are racist colonialists. That false narrative has now been joined by a related one, that Israel and Jews are white, anti-people-of-color oppressors, a narrative often promulgated by anti-Israel activists deeply embedded within “social justice” and Black Lives Matters movements. Both narratives have become primary weapons against Israel. Rather than disarming the narratives, establishment groups too often simply deny the former and pledge support for the latter “anti-racism” movement out of a sense of progressive solidarity—solidarity that is not reciprocated. Below we explore the trajectory of these narratives, and how groups like the ADL, which promotes progressive solidarity, have made the problem worse instead of better. The Problem – Durban Set the Formula for Delegitimizing Israel After the 2001 Durban anti-racism conference was hijacked into an anti-Semitic and anti-Israel hate-fest, campus anti-Israelism soared and became ever more clearly anti-Semitic. The Durban conference “gave birth to the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement and marked the beginning of baseless comparisons of Israel to apartheid South Africa.” The century-old anti-Jewish boycott was repackaged in social justice language to appeal to Western leftists. The century-old anti-Jewish boycott was repackaged in social justice language to appeal to Western leftists. Since then, BDS ideology has increasingly pervaded American universities, where anti-Israel activists have pursued a no-holds-barred campaign to delegitimize Israel as a pariah state. Faculty, students, and administrators have treated unfounded smears against Israel as fact, while actively shutting down expression of actual facts and pro-Israel opinions. They also stirred up hostility against Israel supporters and Jews in general, hostility that occasionally erupted into violence: On May 7, 2002, as a “Peace in the Middle East” rally at San Francisco State University was winding down, Jewish attendees were assaulted by anti-Israel counter-demonstrators who surrounded them screaming threats. On September 9, 2002, violent pro-Palestinian protesters at Montreal’s Concordia University stormed a university building and forced the cancellation of a speech by former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The university student union—which reportedly organized the protest—urged the government not to prosecute the rioters and authorized the use of student fees to cover rioters’ legal fees. The Problem Worsens – The Red-Green Alliance Jewish organizations responded to Durban by working to correct factual inaccuracies about Israel and to expose problems on campus. Unfortunately, the problem got worse instead of better. Following Israel’s 2008-09 Operation Cast Lead response to rocket attacks from Gaza, anti-Israel campus activists further ratcheted up their activities to stifle pro-Israel voices and advance their agenda. The various branches of the University of California (UC) were particular hot-spots. In February 2010, the Muslim Student Union disrupted a speech by Israel’s then-ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, at UC Irvine. Ten students were criminally charged and convicted of disturbing a public event, and UC Irvine suspended the MSU chapter for a year. In March 2010, the leader of UC Berkeley’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter rammed a shopping cart into a pro-Israel Jewish student who was holding a placard reading “Israel wants Peace.” During spring semester 2010, divestment resolutions were put forward at both UC Berkeley and UC San Diego, and only narrowly defeated. College professors at UC Santa Cruz and elsewhere increasingly inserted gratuitous and false anti-Israel commentary into classes and conferences. After the spate of anti-Israel attacks on American campuses that accompanied and followed Operation Cast Lead, more Jewish organizations jumped into the fray, including both top-down branches of existing organizations and bottom-up organizations founded at the campus level. However much good these groups have done, the problem worsened. The year 2014 was a watershed. That summer, in response to Hamas’ kidnapping three Israeli teenagers and firing rockets at Israeli civilians, Israel counter-attacked by invading Gaza. Predictably, the press focused on reporting collateral damage from Israeli attacks rather than Hamas’ war crimes in attacking civilian targets while hiding its personnel and military infrastructure in schools, hospitals, residential neighborhoods, and office buildings occupied by the press. The same summer, Ferguson police shot and killed Michael Brown, sparking riots by people charging police targeted blacks for violence. Anti-Israel activists were deeply embedded in the riots and turned them into anti-Israel protests. Among other things, anti-Israel activists made anti-Israel invective part of the protests, offering advice to rioters and spuriously claiming that Israel promoted police violence in the United States by offering police training in anti-terrorism techniques. The narrative took hold. Anti-Semitic attacks spiked after this double-whammy, both on and off campus. At both UCLA and Stanford University during spring 2015, the suitability of Jewish candidates for student government was challenged on the supposed grounds that they might show favoritism to Israel. Prominent figures like the late Jonathan Sacks, former chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, spoke openly of the return of anti-Semitism. Jews warning about rising anti-Semitism were told Israel and Jews were to blame. Sample Anti-Israel and Anti-Semitic Tactics Israel-haters have actively promoted a narrative casting Israel in the role of villain. Professors like Columbia University’s Joseph Massad have long taught their personal political views of hatred for Israel as though they were facts, and persecuted and shut down Jewish and other students questioning their opinions or expressing different views. In 2018, two University of Michigan educators—associate professor John Cheney-Lippold and graduate student instructor Lucy Peterson—refused reference letters supporting study abroad for the explicit reason that the requesting students sought to study in Israel. Anti-Israel activists have frequently prevented or shut down speeches by pro-Israel speakers, like Netanyahu’s planned 2002 speech at Concordia, Oren’s 2010 speech at UC Irvine, Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat’s 2016 speech at San Francisco State University, and 2016 and 2017 pro-Israel events at UC Irvine featuring, respectively, a film about the Israel Defense Forces and a talk by IDF reservists. The 2016 event at UC Irvine, in particular, featured crowds chasing attendees and putting the latter in fear of their safety. Since 2005, BDS advocates have organized an annual campus event called “Israel Apartheid Week,” designed to convince college faculty and students that Israel is a racist state that persecutes Arabs the way apartheid South Africa persecuted blacks. From its inception as a series of lectures at the University of Toronto, the hate-fest has grown into an annual event at dozens of universities. It features fact-free activities pushing a message that Israel is a Nazi-like, segregationist, racist, colonial, illegitimate state founded and maintained by oppressing Arabs—basically, that Israel is everything contemporary Americans and Western society loathe. These propaganda exercises have included: building mock “apartheid” walls (a spin on Israel’s anti-terror barriers, which have sharply reduced the number of suicide bombers able to cross into Israel), staging mock checkpoints (another basic strategy to keep terrorists out of Jewish areas) and “die-ins,” and serving mock eviction notices on dormitory doors of Jewish students. Another tactic is pushing for passage of student BDS resolutions condemning Israel. The point isn’t just to win passage. Rather, it’s to raise the issue and offer opportunities to propagandize. To squelch opposition, anti-Israel advocates purposely try to schedule debates or votes on Jewish holidays, when many pro-Israel students are unavailable. Passover is a particularly popular time to push what is, in effect, a modern spin on medieval blood libels. Examples include: At Cornell University in 2014, anti-Israel activists brought a BDS resolution to the student assembly during Passover. On April 9, 2015, which was during Passover that year, a student senate committee at the University of California Santa Barbara approved and passed on to the student senate a BDS resolution from SJP. Two years later, the UCSB’s SJP chapter launched a BDS campaign on Holocaust Remembrance Day 2017. SJP insisted that “the scheduling decision was made purely for pragmatic reasons,” and it “resoundingly reject[ed] the notion that this is in any way anti-Semitic.” In March 2016, the University of Indianapolis’ student senate conducted discussion of a BDS measure on the Jewish Sabbath. Portland State University’s student government found the Jewish holidays of Yom Kippur and Shemini Atzeret, 2016, to be preferred dates to discuss a BDS resolution. Tufts University’s student senate passed a boycott resolution the day before Passover, 2017. The University of Wisconsin’s student council passed a divestment bill during Passover 2017. The bill was irregularly voted on at its initial introduction, and the student judiciary later voided the vote for trying to deprive interested Jewish students of their voting rights. At Pitzer College (one of the Claremont Colleges), a BDS amendment was passed during Passover 2017. At the University of Maryland, College Park, a boycott resolution was scheduled for the middle of Passover week 2019. Anti-Israel activists have also hijacked other movements into vehicles for castigating Israel and its supporters. The entire rationale of today’s BDS movement is to paint the current situation in Israel as a latter-day version of South Africa’s apartheid regime. BDS supporters also tied the Black Lives Matter movement to Israeli anti-terrorism police junkets, and to racism generally. Campus black activists (for example, at Hamilton College and Oberlin College) have tied racial demands to demands for divestment. Besides these movements, anti-Israel activists have somehow managed to convince many LGBTQ activists that Israel’s positive record on gay rights, in sharp contrast to that of Palestinians and others in the Middle East, is mere “pinkwashing” designed to distract from Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. The pinkwashing charge is essential in enabling BDS activists to finesse the abysmally anti-gay record of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas on college campuses. Incredibly, they have succeeded in convincing gay rights activists—who face prison and death in Arab lands—to oppose Israel (even Israeli and Jewish LGBTQ groups) and support the anti-gay Hamas and Palestinian Authority. Ditto with “anti-fascists”: a 2017 anti-fascism rally at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign was converted into an anti-Israel rally, with activists chanting, “No Zionists, no KKK, resisting fascists all the way!” Activists have also tied women’s groups to hatred of Israel. Women’s March leadership has been explicitly tied to anti-Semitism, and the International Women’s Strike platform calls for “decolonization of Palestine”—in other words, the destruction of Israel. Both organizations have been active on campus. Anti-Israel and Anti-Semitic Activists Largely Succeed in Neutralizing ADL The Anti-Defamation League was a particular target of 2014 activists trying to tie Israel to the BLM narrative. An Ebony article published ten days after Michael Brown was shot already claimed a connection between the anti-terrorism training Israel has offered to American police departments (which activists dubbed the “deadly exchange” program) and the police shooting of Brown. The targeting of the ADL eventually led to a #DropTheADL movement to brand the ADL as racist and unwoke, a pariah with whom no woke person or organization should associate, but the broad outline was already visible back in summer 2014. A wiser organization might have concluded that the supposed fellow-travelers condemning it were themselves prejudiced and discriminatory, but the ADL seems to have concluded that it needed to redouble its efforts to prove its heart was with the self-identified victims of racial violence. Abraham Foxman, the ADL’s longtime leader, had given notice in February 2014 that he would step down in July 2015, and a search for his successor was underway. One of the candidates under consideration was Jonathan Greenblatt, then director of the Obama administration’s Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation in the Domestic Policy Council. As Greenblatt tells it, the ADL reached out to him rather than the reverse. His background was as a tech-savvy social entrepreneur, specializing in civic engagement and impact investing, and he was a professional left-wing partisan. By November 2014, the ADL had settled on Greenblatt as Foxman’s successor. Why? After taking over as ADL leader in July 2015, Greenblatt doubled down on ADL outreach to the left, while his condemnations of anti-Semitism on- and off-campus have been mostly tepid. Under his stewardship, the organization largely ignored BLM’s anti-Semitism; initially ignored Keith Ellison’s anti-Semitism while supporting his campaign to lead the Democratic National Committee; allowed the anti-Semites who ran the Women’s March to elbow the ADL out of participating in a Starbucks employee exercise in anti-discrimination—despite the fact that the ADL had helped put the exercise together and that Greenblatt used to be a Starbucks vice president—because the ADL was allegedly anti-Palestinian and “constantly attacking black and brown people”; ignored the anti-Semitism of Obama administration officials marketing the prior Iran deal; and ignored anti-Semitic comments by Democratic Party Young Turks like Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. By contrast, he has turned the ADL’s ire on Jews and Jewish organizations like Canary Mission, which works to expose anti-Semitism on campus. During the summer of 2020, Greenblatt’s ADL redefined racism to include only white racism against people of color. Given today’s inclusion of Jews among “whites,” the new definition appeared to deny the existence of anti-Jewish racism. (Greenblatt only tweaked the definition after Whoopi Goldberg made headlines by doing what ADL seemed to be...

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