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    Pro-Israel groups have set sights on unseating this progressive lawmaker. Will they succeed?

    Cori Bush was knocking on doors along Arsenal Street in southern St Louis where voters were not shy of asking hard questions of Missouri’s first Black female member of Congress. But none of them raised the one issue that looms over her re-election race like a spectre.Bush might have been expected to cruise to victory in Tuesday’s Democratic primary for Missouri’s first congressional district in St Louis as she did two years ago. But her path to re-election veered into rough territory after she characterised Israel’s assault on Gaza, following the 7 October Hamas attack, as a “collective punishment” of Palestinians and called for a ceasefire.“I strongly condemn Hamas & their appalling violations of human rights,” she wrote, “but violations of human rights don’t justify more human rights violations in retaliation.”Some Jewish and pro-Israel groups said Bush was denying Israel the right to defend itself and siding with terrorists. A coalition of St Louis Jewish organisations accused her of “intentionally fuelling antisemitism”.View image in fullscreenBush introduced a resolution calling for a ceasefire on 16 October. Within days, the St Louis prosecutor Wesley Bell announced he was dropping out of a race against a Republican for one of Missouri’s seats in the US Senate to challenge Bush for the Democratic nomination in the St Louis congressional district. It was swiftly apparent that Bell, who has firmly supported Israel’s actions, had the support of the US’s major pro-Israel groups which have now poured millions of dollars into trying to make him the Democratic candidate in one of the party’s safest congressional seats.Leading the way is the influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac). Its campaign funding arm, the United Democracy Project (UDP), has so far spent $8.5m to defeat Bush, accounting for more than 55% of all spending on the race outside of the campaigns themselves. Much of the UDP’s money comes from billionaires who fund Republicans in other races, including some who have given to Donald Trump’s campaign.In total, outside groups have spent more than $12m to support Bell as opposed to $3m for Bush.The UDP has committed more money in only one other primary contest so far this year: to defeat the New York congressman Jamaal Bowman, another member of the Squad of leftwing Democrats and outspoken critic of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, which has claimed nearly 40,000 Palestinian lives, mostly civilians.UDP advertising has flooded St Louis airwaves and mailboxes but, as in other congressional races targeted by pro-Israel groups, almost none of it mentions the Gaza war or Bush’s call for a ceasefire, which is supported by a majority of Americans. Instead, the ads go after her on unrelated issues. They may be working.‘It’s very fishy’When Peggy Hoelting answered her door on Arsenal street, she recognised Bush and greeted her warmly. But Hoelting swiftly said she had some questions, and began regurgitating criticisms of the congresswoman’s voting record that have been the target of UDP ads that paint Bush as too leftwing, and claim she is voting against the interests of her constituents.Hoelting asked about Bush’s vote against Joe Biden’s trillion-dollar infrastructure bill in 2021, a focus of the UDP messaging blitz. Bush explained that it was a parliamentary manoeuvre to protect parallel legislation, the Build Back Better Act, that included help for families, expanded public healthcare and green energy jobs. She said she knew the infrastructure act was going to pass anyway but the vote has come back to haunt her.After Bush moved up the street, Hoelting told the Guardian her questions were prompted by UDP advertising landing at her door.“We get probably five or six ads in the mail every day. I sit down and look at them all. A lot of them are talking about her voting against Biden’s infrastructure bill. I don’t understand that so I wanted to hear what she had to say,” she said.Hoelting said she wasn’t wholly persuaded by Bush’s explanation but was keeping an open mind. She was unaware of Bush’s position on Gaza but, when it was explained to her, said that would be a reason to vote for her.“Absolutely I want a ceasefire in Gaza,” said Hoelting.View image in fullscreenBush has also been the target of ads for supporting the “defund the police” campaign. The representative said she wants to see money now spent on militarised vehicles and equipment which belong in war zones instead used to fund social workers and other services that would assist the police in dealing with people with mental health and addiction issues.Bush acknowledged that the UDP ads were having an impact.“The one thing that people ask me questions about is the infrastructure vote. There’s a lot of people who say, ‘tell me about the infrastructure bill, I just want to understand what happened’. So then I explain why I voted the way I voted,” she said.Bush said that most voters accept her reasoning but it leaves some undecided. In contrast, she said her position on Gaza almost never gets brought up on the doorstep.“The only time it has come up is when people have said to me, ‘thank you’,” she said.This leaves Bush all the more frustrated by the influence on the campaign of pro-Israel lobby money, much of which comes from billionaires who also donate to Republicans.The UDP’s single largest donor for the 2024 elections so far is Jan Koum, the billionaire founder of WhatsApp who has given $5m. Koum is also a major funder of a group that supports Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and rightwing Zionist organisations.Other major funding has come from a long list of Republican donors including the billionaire hedge fund founders Jonathon Jacobson, Paul Singer and Bernard Marcus, the founder of Home Depot, all of whom are outspoken supporters of Israel.Bush accused the UDP of deceit because none of its advertising makes clear Aipac’s involvement or reference to Israel. She said Wesley Bell, her challenger, was complicit because, although legally his campaign cannot coordinate with the UDP or other outside groups, he has adopted their messaging.“It is confusing people. They’re wondering why Wesley Bell is allowing himself to be bankrolled by Republicans? People are asking, ‘is he a really Democrat?’ Some feel betrayed because he is allowing for Republicans to decide who is going to be their next representative. That benefits Republicans and that is shameful,” she said.Bush has called Bell “a faux-progressive, former Republican campaign operative” because he managed the 2006 congressional campaign of Mark Byrne, a Republican running for the seat Bush now holds. Bell put Byrne’s opposition to abortion to the fore of that ultimately unsuccessful campaign. Bell has played down the association by saying he was helping out a longtime friend.Bell has also denied being a stalking horse for pro-Israel groups. He claimed to have abandoned the race to unseat Missouri’s firebrand Republican Senator, Josh Hawley, because he kept hearing from Democrats that they were unhappy with Bush and wanted him in the US House of Representatives speaking for St Louis.Still, the timing of his switch has fuelled suspicions.Earlier this week, the St Louis television station KDSK revealed a recording of a phone conversation made a year ago between the now-rival candidates in which Bell assured Bush he would not challenge her.View image in fullscreen“I’m telling you on my word, I am not running against you. That is not happening,” he said.But days after the Hamas attack on Israel, Bell dropped out of the race against Hawley and announced he would run against Bush instead.Bell’s campaign manager, Jordan Sanders, told KDSK that when he made the statement, “Bell had no intentions to run against Cori Bush.”“He switched races and decided to run against her after being encouraged by stakeholders at the local, statewide and national level,” he aid.In downtown St Louis, Ernest Bradley, a former student development counsellor at a regional university, said he was not aware of Bush’s position on Gaza or the involvement of hardline pro-Israel groups in the election. But he was unhappy to see one Black candidate challenge another.“I respect Wesley but I think it’s bullshit. I think some money came his way and said to go this other way. I truly do. So when I hear that he’s getting money from the Republicans I wonder what’s really going on,” said Bradley.“I’m going to vote for Bush because it’s very fishy.”With Bush looking vulnerable, others have weighed in. The second largest spender in support of Bell after UDP is Fairshake, a group funded in good part by rightwing billionaires who also back Trump, such as Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and the Winklevoss twins. Fairshake has spent more than $1m to defeat Bush.View image in fullscreenBush has also come under scrutiny for employing her husband to do security work, which she has defended as legal and not funded by her congressional office. The justice department said it was looking into the issue but a congressional ethics investigation concluded that the payments were legitimate.Bush’s largest backer is Justice Democrats which has spent more than $1.8m in support of her campaign with messages telling voters that Bell is backed by Aipac and Republican money, and accusing him of misusing public funds.Bush also has some important endorsements, including that of the father of Michael Brown, whose death at 18 at the hands of a Ferguson police officer 10 years ago fired up the Black Lives Matter movement.Ferguson is part of the first congressional district, and Bush emerged as an organiser of social justice campaigns there after Brown’s death. Bell was voted on to Ferguson city council on the back of the protests. Later he was elected county prosecutor on a pledge to put the white officer responsible for Brown’s death on trial.But that never happened. Now, Brown’s father, Michael Sr, is appearing in a campaign ad for Bush claiming that Bell failed the family.“I feel like he lied to us. He never brought charges against the killer. He never walked the streets of Ferguson with me. He failed to reform the office. He used my family for power and now, he’s trying to sell out St Louis. He doesn’t care about us,” Brown said in the ad.‘More than half of American Jews support a ceasefire’What little opinion polling there is no clear sign of who will win, but Bush acknowledges she has a fight on her hands – one that is also dividing St Louis’s Jewish population.In early July, a group of St Louis rabbis and cantors wrote to a local newspaper, the STL Jewish Light, describing Bush as “one of Israel’s most unashamed enemies”. The letter called on Jewish voters to turn out in support of Bell and pointed to Bowman’s defeat in New York as the “tested roadmap to follow”. It said that the turnout of Jewish voters, who account for about 3% of the population in the district, but is probably a higher proportion of those who vote, could decide the race.View image in fullscreen“The national pro-Israel community is engaged in this race, but they aren’t casting ballots on August 6. Only our community can do that,” the letter said.A new ostensibly non-partisan group, St Louis Votes, is working to get out the Jewish vote. Although its charitable status precludes it from backing a candidate, its organisers include people who worked to unseat Bowman. The group’s website urges Jews to vote because “antisemitism is on the ballot”.A group called Progressive Jews for St Louis has pushed back against the rabbis’ letter by accusing them of misrepresenting Bush’s record.“What bothers these rabbis is that Cori Bush’s concern extends to Palestinians also. She called for a ceasefire early because she wants to save lives,” the group said in response.Hannah Rosenthal, a member of Progressive Jews for St Louis, has been canvassing for Bush in Jewish neighbourhoods.“The institutional Jewish community, mainstream institutions, are trying to create this message that Cori’s antisemitic because of her calls for a ceasefire. But we’re finding that when you have conversations with people about what Cori actually stands for, her principled moral leadership, then people are swaying more from their undecided positions,” she said.View image in fullscreen“More than half of American Jews support a ceasefire at this time and they understand that criticising the policies and practices of the [Israeli] state are not antisemitic.”Bush said she was perplexed by accusations of antisemitism, given that she has spent her political career speaking up about racism.“I can’t understand why I am wrong for wanting Palestinians to live and have their own self-determination. I want Israelis to live, to be safe, have their freedom. I want the exact same thing for Palestinians. What about that makes me antisemitic?” she said.“What that says to me, though, is there is hatred and it’s not coming from me. There is hatred for people like me for loving Palestinians the same way that I love Israelis and Jewish people in this country. If that is a problem, then they need to check their own heart, they need to check their own issues not mine.”Nonetheless, speaking up on Gaza has exacted a political price. Is it one worth paying?“It’s been challenging and puts me in a place where I have to do a lot more to be able to win. But that does not take precedence. The price has been paid by the 40,000 [Palestinians] that lost their lives, the tens of thousands who are injured. So if I have to piss off some people politically to be able to help save lives, then that’s how it is,“ she said. More

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    From the KKK to the state house: how neo-Nazi David Duke won office

    On 21 January 1989, the day after George HW Bush’s inauguration, David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, a neo-Nazi, and the head of an organisation called the National Association for the Advancement of White People, finished first in an open primary for the 81st legislative district of the Louisiana house of representatives. Running as a Republican, he came out ahead of the state party’s preferred candidate, John Treen. Republican National Committee staff members went to Louisiana to bolster Treen’s faltering campaign and work against Duke. “We will do anything to defeat this man,” the Bush campaign manager and then RNC chief Lee Atwater declared to the Wall Street Journal.The former and current Republican presidents endorsed Duke’s opponent and made advertisements on his behalf, to little avail: Duke would go on to win the runoff vote a month later and enter the state legislature. Over the next three years, Duke would aspire to higher and higher office. These subsequent campaigns, unsuccessful though they were, garnered Duke an ever-expanding platform for himself and his cause, bedevilled the establishment, and suggested deep structural failures in American society and its political system. But how did Duke, previously an abject failure in personal and political life, come to defy the direction of his chosen party and represent the crack-up of an old order?It was oil that brought the Dukes to Louisiana. David Hedger Duke, David’s father, originally from Kansas, was an engineer for Royal Dutch Shell who relocated his family to New Orleans after being stationed for a time in the Netherlands. Duke’s father was a deeply conservative Goldwater Republican and a harsh disciplinarian, and his mother was emotionally distant and an alcoholic. Duke was a lonely, unliked child – peers called him “Puke Duke” and refused to play with him. He retreated into books.In 1964, at age 14, he became interested in a network of organisations, the Citizens’ Councils, which were formed across the US south in the 1950s to oppose school integration and voter registration. Duke began to hang out at the Citizens’ Council office in New Orleans and make himself a nuisance to the staff, who took pity on him when they learned of his unhappy home life. When he showed up with a copy of Mein Kampf and started spouting off antisemitic opinions, members of the council would later say that they were horrified and tried to dissuade him from going full Nazi, but this version of events strains credulity. The group’s founder Leander Perez was hardly quiet about his antisemitism.Duke’s devoted nazism did not improve his social life. At Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge, he decorated his dorm room with a Nazi flag, a picture of Adolf Hitler, and German second world war propaganda. It was at LSU where Duke began his political career, delivering tirades against the Jews in Free Speech Alley on campus, otherwise home to anti-war and other radical protesters in the late 1960s and early 70s. Photographs of Duke tramping around campus in his Nazi uniform from this time would prove to be an encumbrance when he later tried to clean up his image for mainstream politics.Duke’s entire career would be characterised by attempts to simultaneously gain mainstream respect and be the predominant leader of the subcultural world of the Klan and neo-nazism. Until 1989, he would largely fail to accomplish either. In his bid to rebuild the Klan in the 1970s, he enjoined his lieutenants to avoid saying the N-word in public with the press present (an exhortation imperfectly heeded even by Duke himself) and to present themselves as a white civil rights organisation. Duke preferred to appear in public in a coat and tie rather than the traditional white robes. He permitted women full membership. As was required for recruiting in southern Louisiana, Duke’s Klan also dropped the organisation’s traditional anti-Catholicism.But Duke’s penchant for personal self-promotion alienated his lieutenants and supporters. During a failed state senate campaign, he fought with a deputy over a TV advertisement he wanted to air that showed him lifting weights in a tank top and short shorts; the dispute eventually led to the deputy’s resignation.Equally embarrassing were the pseudonymous books he wrote and attempted to sell. The first, African Atto, was a fake martial arts guide for Black Power militants, written by one “Mohammed X”, that diagrammed various fighting moves to use against white opponents. Although he later offered different explanations, it seems like the book was part of a misbegotten moneymaking scheme. Duke’s other volume, Finders Keepers, was a guide to sex and dating for the modern single woman. Written under the pseudonyms Dorothy Vanderbilt and James Konrad, the book advised ladies how to please their men, mostly with stuff cribbed from women’s magazines, equal parts revolting and banal. Duke had apparently hoped the book would become a bestseller and solve his financial difficulties, but it was an utter flop and further alienated his lieutenants, who quickly figured out that he wrote it. The salient thing about the book is that, as one of his aides said, it was “too hardcore for the right wing and too softcore for the perverts”. This remark sums up the essence of the Duke phenomenon: he was caught between his desire for publicity and mainstream acceptance and his infatuation with the secretive underworld of extremism.View image in fullscreenOne piece of advice Duke offered in Finders Keepers is notable for having a real echo in his personal life: its exhortation for women to engage in extramarital affairs. In reality, Duke’s compulsive womanising had begun to put a strain on his relationship with his fellow Klansmen. One recalled, “We had to get David out. He was seducing all the wives.”In 1979, Duke created the NAAWP, the National Association for the Advancement of White People, a group ostensibly focused on discrimination against whites. But efforts to make his operation more respectable did not succeed. Friends report Duke going from table to table at a Sizzler steak house asking for donations for the NAAWP, paying the bill with what he could scrounge up, and then pocketing the rest. Meanwhile, he would have his daughters share a hamburger to save money.Yet Duke did somehow manage to scrape together the money for plastic surgery. He went to Calvin Johnson, a top plastic surgeon in New Orleans, to get a nose reduction and chin implant. Then Duke underwent chemical peels to remove wrinkles around his eyes. Around the same time, while paying no income taxes because he claimed he did not meet the threshold, he was showing up in Las Vegas and playing craps for tens of thousands of dollars.Duke doggedly ran for office, losing again and again. In 1988 he even ran for president on the ticket of the far-right Populist party activist and Holocaust denier Willis Carto and received 0.05% of the vote – but he did not give up. In 1989, he decided to contest the special election for Louisiana House District 81 in Metairie.There were reasons why District 81 might be a particularly soft target for Duke. First of all, the district, plumped by white flight from New Orleans, was 99.6% white, petrified by the spectre of Black crime in the neighbouring metropolis. In addition, the state’s economic situation had significantly deteriorated during the Reagan years. While some of the US experienced the 1980s as a delirious boom time, Louisiana faced double-digit unemployment, and the low price of oil throughout the decade hobbled the state’s relatively generous public spending. On top of the state’s oil woes, Metairie was a victim of the broader stagnation of middle-income wages that the entire country experienced in the 1980s.When Duke began to make public appearances in Metairie, he found a receptive audience. Patrons at a working-class dive bar stood and applauded when Duke came through the door with campaign flyers. His appeal was not limited to downtrodden blue-collar white people; it crossed over, more quietly perhaps, into the precincts of middle-class respectability. Now registered as a Republican, he was invited by the party’s branch in Jefferson Parish to address their candidates’ forum. Behind closed doors, he received a friendly welcome, with the state Republican party chairman slapping him on the back and praising his presentation.Duke freely admitted to his past Klan membership, which, as he pointed out, he shared with many respectable public figures, including the long-serving senator from West Virginia, Robert Byrd, but he denied ever being a Nazi. When inconvenient photographs re-emerged of him in a brownshirt’s uniform on the LSU campus with a sign reading “Gas the Chicago 7”, Duke claimed that such antics constituted a “teenaged stunt” and “a satire” rather than “a defense of totalitarianism”.View image in fullscreenDuke’s platform was shot through with thinly veiled anti-Black racism: he denounced “welfare dependency”, affirmative action, and minority “quotas”. He put a eugenic spin on these issues, calling for a reduction in “the illegitimate welfare birthrate that is bankrupting us economically and is the source of much crime and social ills”. Duke was offering a standard Reagan-era conservative attack on welfare and affirmative action, aside from his willingness to touch the burning racial core of the issues. At the same time, he was attuned to the lower-middle-class homeowners he lived among: he also offered a full-throated defence of a property tax exemption for houses valued under $75,000.Duke had the advantage of facing a divided field: there were four other Republicans running. According to Louisiana’s open primary rules, every candidate regardless of party ran on the same primary ballot, and then the top two faced each other in a runoff. John Treen, the brother of the former Republican governor David Treen, was a particularly vulnerable opponent for Duke. Both Treens had been involved in the segregationist movement as members of the Citizens’ Council and the States’ Rights party, a fact that made a principled rejection of Duke’s racism awkward at best, and made civil rights groups hesitant to assist Treen’s campaign.In the first round of voting, Duke came in first with 33% of the vote; Treen came in second with 19%. New Orleans archbishop Philip Hannan issued a statement to his parish priests to read at services before the runoff: “The election will determine the convictions of the voters of the district about the basic dignity of persons, the recognition of human rights of every person, the equality of races made by Divine Providence.” Presumably, it was hoped that this moral message would resonate with the voters of the predominantly Catholic district. “This bishop in New Orleans, I never did like him,” Earline Pickett, the 75-year-old wife of a retired oil engineer, told the Washington Post. “He likes colored people. He says we should love colored people. But they’ve been different from the beginning, and God must have had a reason for making them that way.”The intervention of the national GOP had very little effect either. A party that was run by Atwater was ill-equipped to repudiate Duke’s politics of bigotry. Atwater, after all, was the mastermind of Reagan’s Southern strategy, which aimed to win votes from southern white people resentful of integration. More recently, in the 1988 presidential election, Atwater had been behind the infamous Willie Horton ad, which used the image of a convicted rapist to stir up fear of Black crime. Their meddling just allowed Duke to further burnish his outsider credentials.In February, the runoff vote was held. Turnout was unusually high for a local election: 78%. Duke edged Treen by 227 votes, thus winning office as a state representative. “If I had anything to say to people outside the state,” the author Walker Percy told the New York Times when they came down to report on the District 81 race, “I’d tell ’em, ‘Don’t make the mistake of thinking David Duke is a unique phenomenon confined to Louisiana rednecks and yahoos. He’s not. He’s not just appealing to the old Klan constituency, he’s appealing to the white middle class. And don’t think that he or somebody like him won’t appeal to the white middle class of Chicago or Queens.’”The Republican National Committee voted to “censure” Duke, but the Louisiana state party ignored the resolution, despite the efforts of a Louisiana GOP activist named Beth Rickey to discredit him. She had followed Duke to a convention in Chicago and recorded a secret speech where he told the crowd of skinheads and Klansmen, “My victory in Louisiana was a victory for the white majority movement in this country.” He concluded his speech: “Listen, the Republican party of Louisiana is in our camp, ladies and gentlemen. I had to run within that process, because, well, that’s where our people are.” Even when the press carried pictures of Duke shaking hands with the chairman of the American Nazi party, Louisiana Republicans did nothing.The party was scared of Duke’s voters, who had reacted angrily when the national GOP tried to act against him. There may have been other reasons for the lack of initiative. “I began to suspect that there was more agreement with Duke on the race issue than I had heretofore believed,” Rickey later reflected. Duke thought so, too. “We not only agree on most of the issues,” he told the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate, “we’ve come to the point of friendship. They’ve accepted me. The voters have accepted me. The legislature has accepted me.”Duke succeeded in continually getting mass media attention for himself. In November 1989, he appeared on ABC News’s Primetime Live with Sam Donaldson and Diane Sawyer. The usually formidable Donaldson had trouble with the soapy Duke. Donaldson read out some of Duke’s writing, and Duke denied having written it or finessed it into a more respectable-sounding opinion. When pressed about writing that “Negros are lower on the evolutionary scale than Caucasians”, Duke replied, “Well, I don’t think I wrote that. I do believe that there is a difference between whites and blacks. I think that there is an IQ difference. But I think the way to determine a person’s quality and qualifications is in the marketplace of ideas, through testing, for instance in universities, through applications for jobs.” (This opinion was gaining mainstream acceptance: in 1989 the solidly centre-right establishment American Enterprise Institute thinktank began funding the research of Charles Murray that would culminate in his cowritten book The Bell Curve, containing its own claims about race and IQ.)View image in fullscreenShowing a newsletter Duke had distributed during his days as a blatant Nazi, which suggested partitioning the country into different ethnic enclaves, Donaldson pointed to part of a map that had Long Island set aside as a homeland for the Jews. The New York studio audience laughed; Duke’s plastic face curled into an innocent-looking smile – he found his way out: “Sir, that map is tongue-in-cheek.” Duke encouraged viewers to write him at his Baton Rouge office. The volume of mail that poured in shocked the statehouse staff; it was more than they had seen for any other legislator. (The other feature on Primetime Live that night was Donald Trump, ranting about Japanese investment in the US economy, under the headline “Who Owns America?”)In 1990, at large, raucous rallies across the state, Duke parlayed his high profile into a US Senate race against the uninspiring conservative Democrat J Bennett Johnston. Duke won 43.5% of the vote to Johnston’s 54%. Johnston’s victory was due to the fact that he won nearly the entire Black vote. But Duke netted 59% of the white vote. Duke’s election night party at a Lions Club outside New Orleans was practically a victory celebration. There was much to look forward to: next year the governor would be up for reelection.“I will swing the pendulum back,” Duke told the small crowd at the announcement for his candidacy at the Hilton in Baton Rouge. No more “welfare abuse”, no more affirmative action, no more social programs for the “underclass”, but “more prisons”, an end to desegregation busing, and the death penalty for drug dealers. It would also be a liberation from the strictures of political correctness, a win for freedom of expression. “Don’t you see?” Duke told his followers. “You’ll be more free to say whatever you want to say, man or woman, if I’m elected.”As the 1991 election neared, the governor, conservative Democrat Charles Roemer, had good reason to feel confident. Early polling showed him comfortably ahead of his main opponents, David Duke and former governor Edwin Edwards, also a Democrat. Roemer had defeated Edwards in 1987 with a pledge to clean up the government. Edwards was amiable, fun, but he could not be called clean. First elected in 1972, he had been the first candidate since Reconstruction to campaign for the Black vote; he fused Louisiana’s downtrodden ethnic minorities into a powerful coalition with organised labour. While the good times rolled, that public tolerated Edwards’ excesses: the womanising, the gambling, the insider deals and corruption. But when Edwards returned to office in 1983, he failed to bring back the good old days of the 70s: the state’s fiscal straits were too dire, and he was forced to jam through budget cuts instead of expansive giveaways to an adoring populace.Roemer, a graduate of Harvard Business School, appealed to the public with his combination of technocratic competence and anger at corruption. But he was aloof, ill-suited for the glad-handing style of Louisiana politics. It turned out that eliminating corruption alone couldn’t rescue the state’s fiscal situation. Despite these disappointments, Roemer still harboured some ambitions. In early 1991, he switched his party affiliation to Republican. The national GOP was happy to bolster the ranks of the Louisiana party with non-Duke Republicans, and for Roemer, the attraction was equally clear: with Bush’s popularity soaring as a result of the Gulf war, any association with the president seemed like a vote-winner.View image in fullscreenAlthough the open primary system meant anyone could run, the GOP held a caucus and endorsed Clyde Holloway, a rock-ribbed fundamentalist who was popular with the state’s evangelicals and anti-abortion community. But Duke demanded to address the caucus. After attempting to forestall Duke’s speech, party leaders relented to the crowds, who were chanting, “Duke! Duke! Duke!” The leaders were shocked by the frenzy. “It’s like we’re attending a party convention in Germany in the 1930s and Hitler is coming to power,” a longtime GOP operative confided.Though Duke never successfully passed a bill as a legislator, he scored a partial victory in the 1991 session. He had proposed a bill to offer mothers on welfare $100 a year to have a birth control implant. In the end, the measure was watered down to just provide information about birth control. There was very little ambiguity in what was meant by “welfare mothers”. At a rally, Duke said, “The greatest problem facing this state is the rising welfare underclass,” and the crowd yelled back the n-word. Duke pretended not to hear. But when he trotted out similar lines at a Kiwanis or a veterans’ hall, he received polite applause.David Duke was an implausible tribune for the overburdened taxpayer. The Times-Picayune reported that he had not paid property taxes for three years. But charges of hypocrisy could not damage Duke, who had a strange power to make voters alter their opinions to fit him. Roemer’s staff organised a focus group of white, blue-collar swing voters from Jefferson Parish. They were asked a series of questions about a hypothetical candidate who had dodged the draft, avoided taxes, had plastic surgery and never held a job. The group reviled the imaginary pol. But when the same questions were asked naming Duke, the group grew testy and defended him. (“Only dumb people pay taxes,” one woman said. “Politicians and millionaires don’t because they are smart. Duke must be smart.”)Despite the evidence, Roemer simply could not imagine that Duke had mass appeal, and believed the polls that said he was comfortably ahead. He refused to air attack ads, and he spent the last Sunday before the election watching football. Edwards ran first with 33.7%, Duke second with 31.7%, and Roemer third with 26.5%. The incumbent governor had finished third and was now out of the race. Although Edwards was in the lead, he faced challenges in the runoff.Edwards was unsettled by the degree of rancour Duke could inspire. At a debate in front of the state convention of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), Edwards discovered how deep the Duke appeal went. Edwards promised improvements in services for seniors; the crowd wasn’t interested, but they lapped up Duke’s lines about the illegitimate birthrate and the welfare underclass. Edwards tried to appeal to facts: “A welfare mother only receives an extra $11 a week with each extra child she bears. Can you see a woman sitting around the kitchen table scheming to get pregnant to get another $11 a week?” The crowd shouted back, “Yes!” Edwards protested: “He’s appealing to your base emotions. Who is going to be next? The disabled? The old? You better think about it.” He was drowned out by boos. The Louisiana AARP endorsed Duke.But Duke soon came under assault from all sides, as if the immune system of the state and the nation was activated against a pathogen. Money poured into the Edwards campaign. Business interests aligned themselves with the Democratic candidate. Civil society groups focused on surfacing Duke’s past statements on race and the Jews. The press grew more aggressive against him. Even Roemer gave a full-throated endorsement of Edwards, his former foe.The massive onslaught yielded ambiguous results. Some polls showed Edwards ahead at just 46% to 42%; Duke was dominating the white vote with 58%. When pressed about Duke’s past, voters responded that Edwards, too, had an unsavoury past. “We know about Duke’s past, we know about Louisiana’s future, we know he doesn’t care for negroes, we know he won’t get along with the legislature and, just maybe, we like it!” one voter wrote to the Times-Picayune.Again, Duke had no problem attracting media coverage, particularly on TV. “Broadcast is always better,” Duke said. On TV he could avoid the two great enemies of demagogues: context and memory. If questioned too sharply, he could just play the victim. Here was this nice-looking, clean-cut guy being badgered by some snooty journalist. He always got his message across, one way or another: “I just think white people should have equal rights, too.” Now what was so unreasonable sounding about that? He could also just flat-out lie. He told a weekend anchor on a network affiliate in New Orleans that he had polled 8-12% of the Black vote in Louisiana – he was not pressed on it.“Take it from someone who has spent most of his adult life working in this medium,” Ted Koppel lectured sternly into the camera at the start of ABC’s Nightline. “Television and Duke were made for each other.” Then Nightline proceeded to give him 30 minutes of free airtime. Duke did Larry King Live and The Phil Donahue Show in ’91. Phil Donahue and his audience yucked it up to Duke’s jokes. The Times-Picayune called his Larry King appearance “a solid hour of largely uninterrupted propaganda and uncontradicted lies”.Contributions trickled in to Duke from around the country. He was breaking through to people who would not necessarily move in the Holocaust denial and KKK subcultures. He started to get small envelopes of $5, $20, $40. A retired schoolteacher in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, told the Boston Globe: “I like the fact that he thinks that everyone should get an even break – white or black or Jewish or anything else. I think we have had a lot of antiwhite racism.” George Marcou of Baraboo, Wisconsin, a retired brewery engineer, told the Chicago Tribune, “I don’t really think he is a racist. Either that or I’m blind. There are probably things we’ve all done that we’re sorry for.” And William J Zauner of Brookfield, Wisconsin: “He’s saying what a lot of people are thinking.”View image in fullscreenIn their first debate together, the surprisingly slick David Duke wrongfooted Edwards. With the last debate on 6 November, Edwards would make sure it would not happen again. He began smoothly, rattling off facts and figures about the state in his warm Cajun drawl, with a friendly, optimistic mien, a performance Duke could not match. Duke mostly held his own for the first half hour, then he started to get rattled. One of the panellists, Jeff Duhe, a political correspondent for Louisiana Public Broadcasting, asked, “Mr Duke, you claim and appear to be a spokesperson for the common man and his common ideals. Since high school, could you please describe the jobs you’ve had and the experience they’ve given you to run a $9bn organisation such as the state of Louisiana?”Duke fumbled with the answer, citing a long-ago teaching job in Laos, various small-business efforts and political campaigns. “Are you saying you’re a politician and you run for office as a job?” Duhe pressed. Duke became agitated and angry, citing the efficiency of his campaign. Edwards piled on: “Fella never had a job! He worked for nine weeks as an interpreter in Laos and then they fired him because he couldn’t understand anybody. He has been in seven campaigns in eight years, he won one. Is that an efficient kind of campaign? Heaven help us if that’s the kind of efficiency he’s gonna bring to state government.”Then it was the turn of panellist Norman Robinson, a Black correspondent for WDSU-TV in New Orleans. “Mr Duke, I have to tell you that I am a very concerned citizen. I am a journalist, but first and foremost I am a concerned citizen,” Robinson began slowly, with deliberate passion. “And as a minority who has heard you say some very excoriating and diabolical things about minorities, about blacks, about Jews, about Hispanics, I am scared, sir … I have heard you say that Jews deserve to be in the ash bin of history, I’ve heard you say that horses contributed more to the building of America than blacks did. Given that kind of past, sir, given that kind of diabolical, evil, vile mentality, convince me, sir, and other minorities like me, to entrust their lives and the lives of their children to you.”Duke tried to play down his record – as having been “too intolerant at times” – but Robinson would not relent: “We are talking about political, economic genocide. We’re not talking about intolerance … As a newfound Christian, a born-again, are you here willing now to apologise to the people, the minorities of this state, whom you have so dastardly insulted, sir?”Duke gave an impatient apology and tried to change the subject to reverse racism. Robinson tried to get Duke to admit that there was racism against Black people. “Look, Mr Robinson, I don’t think you are really being fair with me.” Robinson: “I don’t think you are really being honest, sir.” Duke sputtered, lost his temper, and never regained composure.On Election Day, 16 November 1991, Black voters turned out at a rate of 78%. The result was a blowout: Edwards 61%, Duke 39%. Still, Duke won 55% of the white vote statewide. And despite it being revealed during the campaign that he had made up the “Evangelical Bible Church” he’d said he attended, he won 69% of white evangelical and fundamentalist voters. He had also taken 56% of Cajuns, who had once flocked to their champion Edwards.Edwards addressed a jubilant crowd at New Orleans’s Monteleone Hotel. “I ask the nation, the national press, I ask all those whose opinions we respect to write and say of us that Louisiana rejected the demagogue and renounced the irrational fear, the dark suspicion, the evil bigotry and the division and chose a future of hope and trust and love for all of God’s children,” the white-haired governor-elect roared triumphantly, in the cadences of a time gone by.“Prophecy is reserved for those who are given that special gift, which I do not possess. But I say to all of America tonight, there will be other places and other times where there will be other challenges by other David Dukes. They too will be peddling bigotry and division as their elixir of false hope, they too will be riding piggyback on the frustration of citizens disaffected by government … We must address the causes of public disenchantment with government at every level … Tonight Louisiana defeated the darkness of hate, bigotry and division, but where will the next challenge come from? Will it be in another campaign in Louisiana? Or in a campaign for governor in some other state? Or a campaign for president of the United States?”Adapted from When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, published by FSG More

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    New York governor considers face-mask ban on subway to deter crime

    New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, is considering reimposing a ban on face masks in the Big Apple’s transit system over allegations that masked protesters are taking advantage of identity-concealing face wear to stage antisemitic attacks.The governor has not spelled out details of the policy or people who may be exempted. But she has said that she is motivated to act by “a group donning masks that took over a subway car, scaring riders and chanting things about [Nazi dictator Adolf] Hitler and wiping out Jews”.Hochul may have been referring to a recent episode involving a pro-Palestinian rally in which a man led a small group on a New York City subway car in chanting: “Raise your hands if you’re a Zionist – this is your chance to get out.”Another man is reported to have shouted allusions to the Holocaust, saying: “I wish Hitler was still here. He would’ve wiped all you out.”However, neither men was reported to have been masked.“We will not tolerate individuals using masks to evade responsibility for criminal or threatening behavior,” Hochul said on Thursday, adding that “on a subway, people should not be able to hide behind a mask to commit crimes”.The potential move comes close to four years after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic during which New Yorkers initially struggled to obtain enough masks to slow the spread of the virus. Masks then became a defining feature of the era, but recommendations to wear them have been dropped as protective vaccines have become available and the rate of spread has slowed.New York has historically had a push-and-pull relationship with face coverings dating to 1845, when they were banned in response to attacks by tenant farmers on landlords. That ban was repealed in 2020 in response to Covid, and masks became mandatory for two years until September 2022.Hochul, who last week put on hold a plan to charge drivers for entering lower Manhattan over concerns it could interfere with the city’s ongoing economic recovery, said the mask issue was “complex”.“We’re just listening to people and addressing their needs and taking them very seriously,” she added.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPro-Palestinian demonstrators have said that wearing masks is necessary because of police surveillance and threats by some employers in the finance industry that participating in demonstrations could render protesters unemployable.On this issue, Hochul appears to have the backing of the New York City mayor, Eric Adams. He told the political talk-radio show Cats & Cosby this week that “people have hid under the guise of wearing a mask for Covid to commit criminal acts and vile acts. Now is the time to go back to the way it was pre-Covid, where you should not be able to wear a mask at protests and our subway systems and other places.”Adams went on to invoke the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr. “Those civil rights leaders did not hide their faces,” Adams said. “They stood up. In contrast to that, the [Ku Klux] Klan hid their faces. Cowards hide their faces when they want to do something disgraceful.”The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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    Washington is pushing policies to combat antisemitism. Critics say they could violate free speech

    Against the backdrop of demonstrations against Israel’s war in Gaza on college campuses, the White House and Congress have announced a string of policies and commitments aimed at addressing what Joe Biden warned was a “ferocious surge of antisemitism” in the United States.Antisemitism was on the rise in the US before Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October, killing roughly 1,200 people and taking another 250 hostage. But the ensuing war has exacerbated the problem, with the law enforcement officials recording a spike in threats against Jewish Americans.Several of the proposals coming out of Washington DC have converged around college campuses, where hundreds of students have been arrested as part of pro-Palestinian demonstrations against Israel’s ongoing offensive in Gaza, which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and caused catastrophic levels of hunger.Many Jewish students have said that rhetoric common to the protests – for example, their denunciations of Zionism and calls for a Palestinian uprising – too often veers into antisemitism and poses a threat to their safety. A number of Democratic and Republican lawmakers, as well as the president, have echoed their fears, condemning documented instances of antisemitism on campus.But critics say some of the actions and polices under consideration threaten free speech and are part of a broader effort to silence legitimate criticism of Israel.“The view that these encampments, these student protests, are per se antisemitic, which I think some people have, is leading to very aggressive repression,” said Genevieve Lakier, a professor of law at the University of Chicago law school and an expert in the first amendment. “I also think it is incorrect, particularly when the student movement is being populated and led in many ways by Jewish students.”​The wave of student activism​ against the war in Gaza has renewed a charged debate over what constitutes antisemitism.Many supporters of Israel say the situation on college campuses validates the view, articulated in 2022 by the Anti-Defamation League’s chief executive, Jonathan Greenblatt, that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism”. But the Jewish and non-Jewish students involved with campus protests say their critiques of Israel, and its rightwing government’s prosecution of the war, are legitimate political speech that should not be conflated with antisemitism.In remarks at a Holocaust remembrance ceremony at the Capitol last week, Biden vowed to leverage the full force of the US government to fight hate and bigotry against Jews and outlined specific policy steps his administration was taking to confront antisemitic discrimination in schools and universities.The debate is also playing out on Capitol Hill, where the Senate is considering a bill that would codify into federal law a definition of antisemitism adopted in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), an intergovernmental organization based in Stockholm.The IHRA defines antisemitism as “certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews”. But it also includes several modern examples of antisemitism that alarm free speech advocates, among them “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination”, claiming Israel’s existence is a “racist endeavor” and “applying double standards” to Israel that are not expected of other countries.Supporters say the bill, known as the Antisemitism Awareness Act, is critical.“We really believe it’s the single most important thing that Congress could do right now to help bring under control the rampant antisemitism we’ve seen on campus,” said Eric Fingerhut, president and CEO of the Jewish Federations of North America, which is lobbying in support of the legislation.But opponents are urging the Senate to block the bill, recently approved by the House in a resounding 320-91 vote,“In a democratic society, we’re allowed to engage in political advocacy and political protests that criticize any government in the world,” said Tyler Coward, lead counsel for government affairs at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (Fire). “Taking some ideas off the table for one country is classic viewpoint discrimination that the courts just won’t tolerate.”Fire has opposed iterations of this bill since it was introduced in 2016, citing concerns that the definition is “vague, overbroad, and includes criticism of Israeli government policy”.If enacted, the Department of Education would be required to use the definition when conducting federal investigations into alleged incidents of discrimination against Jewish students. Colleges or universities found to have violated the law could be stripped of federal funding.Fingerhut said free speech concerns were a “red herring”, arguing that the legislation was designed to give the Department of Education and academic institutions a “clear” standard for punishing acts of antisemitism.But the bill has drawn condemnation from pro-Palestinian advocacy groups who view it as an attempt to quash their ascendent movement.The Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair) condemned the legislation as a “one-sided, and dishonest proposal about campus antisemitism that ignore[s] anti-Palestinian racism and conflates criticism of the Israeli government with antisemitism”.Since the Israel-Hamas conflict began seven months ago, the law enforcement officials have also warned of a rise in threats against Muslim and Arab Americans, and advocates are monitoring an uptick in Islamophobia on college campuses.One of the effort’s most notable opponents is a lawyer and scholar who authored the IHRA’s definition of antisemitism. Kenneth Stern, who is the director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate and is Jewish, has said the definition was created with the purpose of collecting better data on antisemitism across borders, not to be turned into a campus hate-speech code.“In my experience, people who care about campus antisemitism, and want to do something about it, sometimes advocate things that feel good … but actually do great harm,” he testified in 2017 against a previous iteration of the bill.That version stalled, but two years later, proponents won a significant victory when Donald Trump issued a sweeping executive order instructing federal agencies to use the IHRA definition when investigating civil rights complaints.In recent months, alarm over rising antisemitism – which Jewish groups say is not unique to college campuses – appears to have broadened support for the Antisemitism Awareness Act. Still, the vote split House Democrats, including some Jewish members of the caucus, who disagreed over whether it was the right legislative fix.The representative Josh Gottheimer, a New Jersey Democrat who sponsored the House bill, said it was a necessary response to the “tidal wave” of antisemitism, while Maryland representative Jamie Raskin, a Democrat and constitutional scholar, voted for the bill but called it “essentially symbolic”.“At this moment of anguish and confusion over the dangerous surge of antisemitism, authoritarianism and racism all over the country and the world, it seems unlikely that this meaningless ‘gotcha’ legislation can help much – but neither can it hurt much,” Raskin said.But the representative Jerry Nadler of New York, who describes himself as “an observant Jew, a proud Zionist, a strong supporter of Israel”, voted against the bill. In an op-ed for the Washington Post, Nadler explained that he supported the sentiment behind the bill, but feared the it could “sweep in perfectly valid criticism of the state of Israel that, alone, does not necessarily constitute unlawful harassment or antisemitism”.“I want my Jewish community to feel safe on campus, but I do not need it shielded from controversial views simply because those views are unpopular,” he wrote.The legislation has also drawn opposition from some conservatives over concerns that it could be used to persecute Christians who express the belief that Jews killed Jesus, an assertion widely regarded as antisemitic that historians and Christian leaders, including Pope Benedict, have rejected.Civil liberties advocates are also raising concerns about an anti-terrorism bill approved overwhelmingly by the House last month in the wake of Iran’s unprecedented missile assault on Israel. Proponents say the measure is a necessary guardrail to prevent US-based organizations from providing financial support to Israel’s enemies. But critics have called it an “Orwellian bill aimed at silencing nonprofits that support Palestinian human rights”.Last week, Biden announced a series of actions that build on what the White House has called “the most comprehensive and ambitious US government effort to counter antisemitism in American history”.It included new guidance by the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, sent to every school and college, that outlines examples of antisemitic discrimination and other forms of hate that could lead to a federal civil rights investigation. Since the 7 October attack, the Department of Education has launched more than 100 investigations into colleges and public school districts over allegations of “discrimination involving shared ancestry”, which include incidents of antisemitism and Islamophobia.The initiative also includes additional steps the Department of Homeland Security would take to help campuses improve safety.Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, House Republicans have vowed to use their majority to intensify scrutiny of antisemitism on college campuses, part of their election-year strategy to use the unrest as a political cudgel against Biden and the Democrats, who are deeply divided over the Israel-Gaza war.Wielding their oversight powers, several House Republican chairs have announced plans to investigate universities where pro-Palestinian student protests have flourished. On Wednesday, a House subcommittee held a hearing, titled Antisemitism on College Campuses, in which Jewish college students testified that their university administrations had failed to stop antisemitic threats and harassment. And during a congressional panel last week, Republicans challenged the leaders of some of the nation’s largest public school systems to do more to counter antisemitism in their schools.It follows a tense hearing on antisemitism with administration officials from some of the nation’s most prestigious universities that precipitated the resignations of the presidents of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania. A congressional appearance last month by Columbia University’s president, Minouche Shafik, escalated the antiwar protests at her school that then spread to campuses across the country.“There are a lot of shades of McCarthyism as the House keeps calling people in to shame and name them, to spread moral panic,” said Lakier of the University of Chicago law school.Facing enormous pressure from Congress and the Department of Education, as well as from students, faculty, donors and alumni, universities and colleges, Lakier argued, are collectively showing less tolerance for the pro-Palestinian student protests than they did for Vietnam war-era campus activism.On dozens of university campuses, state and local police officers, sometimes in riot gear, have dispersed pro-Palestinian protesters, often at the request of university officials. As many as 2,400 people have been arrested during pro-Palestinian campus protests in recent weeks, while many students have been suspended or expelled.“From a first amendment perspective, one hopes you learn from the past,” Lakier said, “but to be repeating it is distressing.” More

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    Are US campus protests antisemitic? Jewish students weigh in | Panel

    Theo Goldstine: ‘I didn’t join the protests because of slogans’I was in California for Passover when the encampment first came up. I was excited because I want to see an end to what Human Rights Watch calls a system of apartheid, which refers to the fact that there are over 65 laws discriminating against Palestinian citizens of Israel, roads in the West Bank are segregated, Israelis have civil law while Palestinians have military law, water allotment is unequal and so much more.I was hopeful because we urgently need a ceasefire, an end to crimes against humanity such as mass starvation in Gaza and to bring the hostages home. I assumed I would hear chants of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Even though I prefer a confederation so that both people can maintain national sovereignty while having their core interests met, that slogan is not a dealbreaker for me as long as it means one-person one-vote in an equal binational arrangement, which would end Israel as a Jewish state.However, at NYU and across the country, protestors regularly chanted “From the water to the water, Palestine is Arab” in Arabic. There were chants of “Settlers, settlers [referring to all Israeli Jews] go back home, Palestine is ours alone.” They were justifying and normalizing the egregious crimes Hamas committed against civilians on October 7 and glorifying Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis under the banner of “by any means necessary.”The protesters’ dream of a liberated Palestine looked a lot like pure revenge, rather than justice. I understand the desire for revenge, particularly for those between the River and the Sea. But I hold my peers – privileged US-based college students disconnected from the violence and existential antes — to a different standard. I support justice, freedom, liberty for the Palestinian people, but I could not and would not stand by a message filled with so much hate so I never joined the protests.However, I kept sticking around on the outside of the encampment because I did agree with a fair amount of what protesters were saying and wanted to see what was going on. I witnessed and heard many awful things said by both Pro-Palestine protesters and Pro-Israel counterprotesters. But then, something magical happened. I started having conversations with others at the protests where I realized how much we have in common.I realized that a sizable number of people did not in fact want the expulsion, subjugation, or death of Israeli Jews. Most important, these were conversations with Palestinians! In fact, I found the people I had common ground with the most were Palestinians.While eliminationist rhetoric divides us, I believe it is possible for the non-extremists on all sides to unite behind two goals: ending the war and bringing justice, freedom, and equality to Palestinians not at the expense of or dehumanization of Israelis. I believe that this vision could change the face of the earth. I will continue to do whatever small thing I can to make it reality.
    Theo Goldstine is an undergraduate at New York University studying international politics and computer science
    Benjamin Kersten: ‘It’s not antisemitic to criticize Israel’As a Jewish student who participated in the UCLA Palestine solidarity encampment, I find the charge that the encampments are antisemitic to not only be misleading but dangerous. All were welcome in the encampment who abided by the community agreements and engaged in good faith with its demands, including for the university to divest from weapons manufacturers and companies profiting from Israeli violence against Palestinians and to stop repressing pro-Palestinian advocacy on campus.For me, the encampments offered opportunities for Jewish learning and community building. We organized a Passover Seder and observed Shabbat and Havdalah, and we were part of a multicultural, interfaith space – a glimpse of the world we hope to build. Inside the encampment, students learned, imagined, disagreed and recommitted. We recommitted to the values of justice, equality and dignity for all without exception. The world we built was torn apart by outside agitators wielding two-by-fours, by police in riot gear and by UCLA administrators who opted to remain invested in genocide and violently suppress free speech rather than take seriously our calls for freedom for all. It was the administrators, counter-protesters and police that created an unsafe environment – not those protesting for an end to genocide.It is not antisemitic to criticize the state of Israel or to reject Jewish supremacy. The pervasive misidentification of antisemitism hinders our ability to understand and dismantle real antisemitism, which is expressed most violently by an increasingly empowered right wing. As we strive to end all forms of oppression, we must not look away from Gaza. Israel’s devastating assault on Palestine has killed tens of thousands, displaced millions, and left homes, hospitals and universities destroyed. I advocate for Palestinian freedom because Palestinians, like everyone, deserve to be free, and because our safety and liberation are intertwined.
    Benjamin Kersten is a PhD candidate in art history at UCLA, a fellow at the Leve Center for Jewish Studies and a member of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) at UCLA
    Maya Ilany: ‘By casting out hateful ideas, the protestors can keep the focus on their demands’Student protesters I spoke to at Harvard’s encampment are obviously motivated by an ambition to halt the death and destruction in Gaza, not by antisemitism. But to deliver on that crucial goal, the movement must improve at rejecting hateful and unjust ideas it has played host to on some US campuses.There have been expressions of archetypal antisemitism: like a cartoon of a hand with a Star of David and a dollar sign holding a noose around the neck of two men. Calls for violence against Israelis or “Zionists” have been similarly concerning. It was no less than the leader of Columbia’s student protest who explained why Zionists “don’t deserve to live”.It serves no one to flatly deny these incidents, or to ignore the impact they have on Jewish students and faculty, including many that share the protesters’ views about the war, Israel’s far-right government and the wrongs of the occupation. This denial masquerades as solidarity with Palestinians, but undermines the movement and its aims.By casting out these hateful ideas, the protesters can keep the focus on their just demands. As a longtime campaigner for a two-state solution, I believe some of their demands are not just the wrong ones, but are unjust, unethical and unworkable. Though these calls are protected free speech, I absolutely reject demands that amount to more violence (“globalize the intifada”), the end of a state of Israel (“from water to water, Palestine will be Arab”) or a “repatriation” of Israeli citizens (“go back to Europe”). But while these conversations may be uncomfortable, I am ready to argue for a just resolution to the conflict that allows millions of Israelis and Palestinians to live in dignity.
    Maya Ilany is a graduate student in the MPA program at the Harvard Kennedy School and a research fellow at Molad: the Center for the Renewal of Israeli Democracy
    Matan Berg: ‘I will continue to advocate for a just peace’Before leaving for the summer, I visited the encampment on “the Diag” in the heart of the University of Michigan’s campus. I brought a banner proudly displaying the flags of both Israel and Palestine. This was my way of expressing support for a negotiated ceasefire and hostage release deal, an end to the cycle of violence, a fight against antisemitism and Islamophobia, a future of mutual self-determination and equality enshrined in a two-state solution, and peace and justice for all Palestinians and Israelis.The reactions I received (a combination of friendly conversations mixed with extreme opposition to dialogue), as well as the general conduct and rhetoric of the encampment, helped me to realize two things. First, I believe this movement is counterproductive and does perpetuate antisemitic tropes. In my view, the messaging at these encampments often justifies and glorifies the attacks of 7 October with chants like “resistance is justified under occupation” and “free Gaza by any means necessary”. Their activism glorifies the actions of terrorists through “teach-ins.” They have even gone as far as to retweet an official statement signed by Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine that thanked Michigan students. All of this is morally reprehensible and antithetical to any rational strategy that can end the plight of the Palestinian people.However, a second thing is also true: it is neither helpful nor right to chastise these encampments and the larger movement they represent as antisemitic. Many of the protestors I interacted with agreed with my goals, even though they often had different beliefs for how to achieve them. Moreover, rebuking a group of people pleading for an end to the deaths of innocent civilians in Gaza by calling every single one of them antisemitic is grossly uncharitable and severely lacks the empathy that we desperately need.I will continue to advocate for a just peace, and I will continue to insist that, as hard as it may seem, this moment is not “us v them”, but rather “all of us – together”.
    Matan Berg is an undergraduate at the University of Michigan and the chair of its chapter of J Street U More

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    US public school officials push back in congressional hearing on antisemitism

    Some of America’s top school districts rebuffed charges of failing to counteract a surge of antisemitism on Wednesday in combative exchanges with a congressional committee that has been at the centre of high-profile interrogations of elite university chiefs.Having previously grilled the presidents of some of the country’s most prestigious seats of higher learning in politically charged settings, the House of Representatives’ education and workforce subcommittee switched the spotlight to the heads of three predominantly liberal school districts with sizable Jewish populations.The hearing was presented as an investigation into how the authorities were safeguarding Jewish staff and students in an atmosphere of rising bigotry against the backdrop of Israel’s war in Gaza.Calling the need for the hearing “a travesty”, Republican member Aaron Bean from Florida said 246 “very vile” antisemitic acts had been reported in the three districts – in New York City, Montgomery county in Maryland and Berkeley in California – since last October’s attack by Hamas on Israel.“Antisemitism is repugnant in all its forms but the topic of today’s hearing is pretty troubling,” he said. “It’s hard to grasp how antisemitism has become such a force in our kindergarten-through-12 [high] schools.”He cited instances of students marching through corridors chanting “kill the Jews”, a pupil caught on a security camera imitating Hitler and performing the Nazi salute, and Jewish children being told to pick up pennies.The three districts insisted in response that they did not tolerate antisemitism in their schools. They said they had taken educational and disciplinary steps to combat antisemitism following the 7 October attack, which led to an Israeli military offensive in Gaza that has triggered a wave of demonstrations on university campuses and beyond.However, the districts gave divergent answers on whether teachers had been fired for actions deemed antisemitic. Each district has received complaints over their handling of post-7 October allegations of antisemitism.David Banks, the chancellor of the New York City school system, engaged in a testy exchange with Republicans over an episode at Hillcrest high school, whose principal had been removed following a protest against a pro-Israel teacher but had been reassigned to an administrative role rather than fired.The Republican representative, Elise Stefanik – noted for her pointed questioning of three university presidents over free speech at a previous hearing last December – sparred with Banks and accused the school leaders of paying “lip service”.Banks stood his ground and appeared to challenge the committee, saying: “This convening feels like the ultimate ‘gotcha’ moment. It doesn’t sound like people trying to solve for something we actually solve for.”He added: “We cannot simply discipline our way out of this problem. The true antidote to ignorance and bias is to teach.”Banks said his district had “terminated people” over antisemitism.Karla Silvestre, president of Montgomery county public schools in Maryland – which includes schools in suburbs near Washington – said no teacher had been fired, prompting Bean to retort: “So you allow them to continue to teach hate?”Enikia Ford Morthel, superintendent of the Berkeley unified school district in California, said her authority’s adherence to state and federal privacy laws precluded her from giving details on disciplinary measures taken against staff and students.“As a result, some believe we do nothing. This is not true,” she said.“Since October 7, our district has had formal complaints alleging antisemitism arising from nine incidents without our jurisdiction. However, antisemitism is not pervasive in Berkeley unified school district.”Echoing previous hearings that featured the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Columbia, Bean asked all three district heads whether they considered the slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” antisemitic.Each said yes, although Silvestre and Morthel qualified this by saying their affirmation was dependent on whether it meant the elimination of the Jewish population in Israel – an interpretation disputed by many pro-Palestinian campaigners. Bean said tersely: “It does.”Responding to the three opening statements, Bean said: “Congratulations. You all have done a remarkable job testifying. But just like some college presidents before you that sat in the very same seat, they also in many instances said the right thing. They said they were protecting students when they were really not.”The subcommittee’s ranking Democrat, Suzanne Bonamici of Oregon, accused Republicans of being selective in their stance against antisemitism, singling out the notorious white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, whose participants chanted “Jews will not replace us”. The then president Donald Trump later said the rally included some “very fine people” .She described one of those who took part, Nick Fuentes, as a “vile antisemite … who denied the scope of the Holocaust”, but noted that Trump hosted him at his Mar-a-Lago retreat in Florida in November 2022.“I will offer my colleagues on the other side of the aisle the opportunity to condemn these previous comments,” Bonamici said. “ Does anyone have the courage to stand up against this?”When committee members remained silent, she said: “Let the record show that no one spoke at this time.” More

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    Republican candidate loses US House primary in victory for pro-Israel lobbyists

    Republican John Hostettler has lost his House primary in Indiana, delivering a victory to pro-Israel groups who sought to block the former congressman from returning to Washington. The groups attacked Hostettler as insufficiently supportive of Israel at a time when criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has hit new highs because of the war in Gaza.When the Associated Press called the eighth district primary race at 7.49pm ET, less than an hour after the last polls closed in Indiana, Mark Messmer led his opponents with 40% of the vote. Messmer, the Indiana state senate majority leader, will advance to the general election in November, which he is heavily favored to win because of the district’s Republican leanings. The victor will replace Republican congressman Larry Bucshon, who announced his retirement earlier this year.The primary concludes a contentious race in which pro-Israel groups poured millions of dollars into the district to attack Hostettler, who served in the House from 1995 to 2007. The groups specifically criticized Hostettler’s past voting record on Israel and some comments he made that were deemed antisemitic.In a book that he self-published in 2008 after leaving Congress, Hostettler blamed some of George W Bush’s advisers “with Jewish backgrounds” for pushing the country into the war in Iraq, arguing they were distracted by their interest in protecting Israel.Those comments, combined with Hostettler’s vote opposing a resolution expressing solidarity with Israel in 2000, after the start of the second intifada, outraged groups like the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) and United Democracy Project (UDP), a Super Pac affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.According to documents filed with the Federal Election Commission, UDP spent $1.2m opposing Hostettler while the RJC Victory Fund invested $950,000 in supporting Messmer.One UDP ad attacked Hostettler as “one of the most anti-Israel politicians in America”, citing his vote against the resolution in 2000. The CEO of RJC, Matt Brooks, previously lambasted Hostettler for having “consistently opposed vital aid to Israel [and] trafficked antisemitic conspiracy theories”.But the groups’ interest in a Republican primary is a notable departure from their other recent forays into congressional races. So far this election cycle, UDP has largely used its massive war chest to target progressive candidates in Democratic primaries. UDP spent $4.6m opposing the Democratic candidate Dave Min, who ultimately advanced to the general election, and the group has also dedicated $2.4m to supporting Democrat Sarah Elfreth in Maryland, which will hold its primaries next week.Aipac and its affiliates reportedly plan to spend $100m across this election cycle, so UDP may still get involved in other Republican congressional primaries. However, the groups will likely remain largely focused on Democrats, as Republican lawmakers and voters have generally indicated higher levels of support for Israel since the start of the war in Gaza.A Guardian review of the statements of members of Congress after the start of the war found that every Republican in Congress was supportive of Israel. Even as criticism of Israel’s airstrike campaign in Gaza has mounted, one Gallup poll conducted in March found that 64% of Republicans approve of Israel’s military actions, compared with 18% of Democrats and 29% of independents who said the same.Other polls have shown that most Americans support calls for a ceasefire in Gaza, and hopes for a pause in the war did briefly rise this week. Hamas leaders on Monday announced they would accept a ceasefire deal, but Israel soon dashed hopes of peace by launching an operation to take control of the Palestinian side of the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt. More