Yaakov Menken

Originally published in The Federalist

While Hamas, the openly genocidal terror organization ruling the Gaza Strip, launches missiles at Israeli civilians in hospitals, schools, and homes, even closing its airport, the members of “The Squad” are hard at work pointing fingers at the “real” culprit: the Jews.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., announced what “precipitated this cycle of violence” was “the expulsions of Palestinians and attacks on Al Aqsa.” Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., castigated the White House for failing to refer to “Sheikh Jarrah … the al-Aqsa raid … the 13 innocent children killed.” Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., likewise protests “forcing Palestinians out of their homes,” the “root causes of violence,” and “violence and oppression.”

A joint statement by Omar, Tlaib, and fellow Rep. Andre Carson brought these themes together, with references to “forced evictions in the predominantly Palestinian East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah,” “the violent assault by Israeli forces on the Al Aqsa mosque,” and “the Israeli military [having] launched airstrikes into Gaza” — appending “Hamas fired rockets into Israel,” as if this unprovoked attack on kindergartens, hospitals and homes were the response, rather than the cause, of the neutralization of the terrorists behind it.

As is typical for the “Squad,” reality is rather different.

When the Jordanian Army occupied Judea and Samaria in 1948, it forced all Jews from their homes at gunpoint. That is how the Shimon HaTzaddik neighborhood, named after the holy Jewish teacher buried there 1,800 years ago, became “the predominantly Palestinian East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah”: via antisemitic violence and ethnic cleansing. The Squad omits all of this, claiming instead that it is a “violation of international law” for Jewish property owners to go to court to reclaim property (purchased in 1875) from those who squatted on it after the Jewish owners were expelled.

In Rabbinic literature, the counterfactual accusation that Jewish property is somehow “stolen” is identified as the first hallmark of antisemitic bias. Put it this way: has the Squad — or anyone else — omitted such salient details when the rightful owners were not Jews?

The truth of the “attacks on Al Aqsa” is no more subtle. Israeli control of the Old City of Jerusalem, beginning in 1967, brought with it freedom of worship for all three major religions that revere the Holy City for the first time in 2,000 years. After the Jordanian Army rendered the Old City Judenrein, do we imagine they let Jews back in to pray at their holiest site?

Although Al-Aqsa Mosque was deliberately constructed upon the site of the two Holy Jewish Temples, the Temple Mount, Jews commonly worship today at the base of the Western Wall of the Mount, while Muslims worship on the Mount 100 feet above them — the mosques being under the administration of the Islamic Waqf. It is Jews and Christians who are often denied access to the Temple Mount, as happened this past Monday on Jerusalem Unification Day.

As a seminary student in Israel, I prayed at the Western Wall many times, including special occasions during the year when tens of thousands flock to the site. On one such occasion, about 15 minutes after the crowds had left, there was a rainfall of large stones onto the empty Western Wall plaza from the Mount 100 feet above.

Rioters on the Temple Mount had attempted mass murder, and I, as a Jew, was one of the targets. Had they not mistimed their barrage (I don’t call this “coincidence”), hundreds of innocent worshipers would have been injured or killed, and I might not be here to write this.

We are told not to rely on miracles. Al-Aqsa Mosque has been repeatedly misused as a repository for stones, Molotov cocktails, and other weaponry, and rioters have repeatedly thrown those stones down at Jewish worshipers 100 feet below. That is why Israeli police must maintain peace at the site, confronting rioters before they launch another bloodthirsty attack upon innocents.

The blame for the conflict on the Temple Mount lies with those who bring in weaponry, attack police, and attempt to get past them to kill Jews praying 100 feet below. The Squad demonizes Israeli police for preventing a massacre. Jews are quite familiar with this sort of inversion of reality: the Jews were blamed for the violence of Kristallnacht, the Nazi rampage against Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues, and forced to clean up the damage.

Any true humanitarian would decry bringing weapons onto the Temple Mount, a religious sacrilege that also violates the laws of armed conflict, and initiating race riots at holy sites. The Squad is interested in one thing, and one thing only: blaming Jews.

While House Speaker Nancy Pelosi claims to be very concerned about antisemitism, there seems to be a grave disconnect between Pelosi’s statements and her true commitment to expunging antisemitic bias from the chamber she leads. Congress, and the American people, deserve better.

Originally published in Newsweek

Both Twitter and Facebook have policies against incitement to “violence” on their platforms. Those policies are enforced so strictly that a former president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, is not permitted to use either due to accusations of having spurred a riot four months ago. Yet for the past two weeks, both social media giants have allowed openly genocidal leaders and terror organizations to incite violent attacks against worshipers, commuters and other peaceful bystanders. This should not be allowed to pass without consequence.

As so often happens with controversial matters involving the Jewish state of Israel, prominent figures around the world have sounded off seemingly in an effort to inflame tensions rather than ease them. Iran’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif, spread malicious disinformation when he tweeted about an “attack on Al-Aqsa Mosque and the killing of worshipers.” In reality, no Arabs were killed at Al-Aqsa Mosque—though several were killed in Israel by shrapnel from Hamas missiles launched from the Gaza Strip.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s English-language agents tweeted last year that “the struggle to free #Palestine is #Jihad,” a “holy war.” The Iranian dictator’s agents now add that “one can only talk with the language of power” with Israel, and Palestinian Arabs “must increase their strength, stand strong, [and] confront the enemy.” Khamenei’s Spanish-language account also shared a message about “precision missiles” landing upon a classically anti-Semitic cartoon of an Israeli soldier with a long nose, beard and side curls.

Still more explicit was the head of Hamas, Ismail Haniyyeh. For him, celebrating the bombing of civilian homes is nothing new, but last week on Twitter he advocated warfare with “rocks,” “bare hands” and “rockets.”

In some cases, these calls for violence have produced immediate results. Fatah, the largest component faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, a U.S.-government-recognized terrorist group, set to work fomenting riots over the past week. It called to “raise the level of confrontation” in Israel, and readers took to the streets, assaulting individuals and desecrating synagogues in mixed Arab-Jewish towns across the country. It demanded “united activity” around the world, and adherents blocked an ambulance in Minneapolis and bloodied a visibly Orthodox Jew in New York.

All of these exhortations to violence were posted to the world’s largest social media platforms. All of the aforementioned posts are live on Facebook or Twitter as of this writing. None have been taken down. None even come with a warning or “clarification.” Incitement to hate, to riot, even to kill, is there for the world to see—and embrace.

It is not as if these social media platforms have not been asked to cease and desist. Israeli minister of defense Benny Gantz lamented on Sunday that Facebook has been unresponsive despite repeated petitions to remove radicalizing content. Instead, that content has only gotten markedly worse in recent days.

Apparently, Pakistani actress Veena Malik crossed the line when she said Jews were worthy of genocide, tweeting out a fake quote from Hitler: “I would have killed all the Jews of the world…but I kept some to show the world why I killed them.” But Malik’s account, with its claims that “Israel is a terrorist” and that Palestine needs to be freed (of Jews, as always), remains active. Twitter apparently believes a woman anxious to finish Hitler’s work is less dangerous than investigative journalist James O’Keefe, who was suspended from the platform last month.

Social media platforms that do not engage in such one-sided censorship, such as Gab or Parler, cannot be easily held to account for abuse of the open forums they provide. But thanks to their bans of former president Trump and other public figures—people who share no obvious penchant for violence but articulate political views that differ from those favored in Silicon Valley—it is clear that Twitter and Facebook exert active editorial control. They are affirmatively responsible for platforming content that incites anti-Semitic hatred and violence. They have become the world’s leading purveyors of hate.

One wonders why the Department of Justice hasn’t yet launched an investigation into these two companies for providing material support to entities recognized as international terrorist organizations by the U.S. government. Such support is prohibited under federal law. If the genuine poison spreading on Twitter and Facebook at this very moment were to be addressed, America and her allies would be much safer.

Published on Fox News

We all expected President Biden to speak about hate in America during his first address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday night.

He did not disappoint.

He talked about the murder of George Floyd, systemic racism, and white supremacy. He mentioned attacks upon Blacks, Native Americans, and women. He celebrated a hate crimes act to protect Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.

This past weekend, in fact, provided Biden with an additional reason to discuss hate in America. Beginning Thursday night and proceeding through the weekend, four different synagogues and three vehicles were vandalized in a Jewish neighborhood in the Bronx. All were damaged in precisely the same way: smashed windows.

Every student of the Holocaust knows that the Nazis’ first wholesale, violent attack on Jewish property was Kristallnacht—the Night of Broken Glass.

Seeing it replicated in microcosm on the streets of New York traumatized the Jewish community, and gave Biden the opportunity to assuage its concerns with words of healing.

There’s one problem: he passed.

President Biden spoke about “the viciousness of the hate crimes over the past year,” but never mentioned the community that is, according to the FBI, overwhelmingly the most frequent victim. Given the small Jewish population of the United States, merely 2 percent of Americans, a Jew is several times more likely to be the target of a hate crime than all of those who earned Biden’s mention.

Could we imagine that President Biden would have said nothing if it had instead been four Black churches, or four mosques, vandalized last weekend?

Of course not. It would have been a leading element of his address, the centerpiece of his section on fighting bigotry.

For Biden to spend so much time talking about racism and hate in America, and to rattle off a long list of targeted groups—yet omit entirely the targets of multiple hate crimes carried out within the previous week—sends its own message: Jews don’t qualify as a targeted group.

Instead, Biden called for passage of a bill, the “Equality Act,” that would give state sanction to anti-Semitism. It provides a potent weapon to be used against anyone who dares to hold a Jewish wedding with a Mechitzah, a divider between men and women, in accordance with thousands of years of Jewish observance.

For Asians, Biden called for the passage of a new hate crimes act. For the more frequent Jewish victims of precisely the same random, violent assaults, he called to make their religious practices a violation of American statute… and to declare their Bible a bigoted document.

This is not entirely new. We did not have to wait for a joint session of Congress to wonder whether Jewish concerns were being ignored. One Biden appointee after the next has a track record of hostility towards the Jewish state and the Jewish people.

Biden placed Maher Bitar, whose animosity against the world’s only Jewish state is longer than his career, in charge of intelligence on the National Security Council.

As USAID Administrator he selected Samantha Power, the former U.N. Ambassador who, in 2016, architected the ridiculously anti-historical and obviously hateful UNSC Resolution 2334, which declared the site of the Jews’ Holy Temple, David’s city, the Mount of Olives, Judea and Samaria to all be “occupied Arab land.”

And as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Israel and Palestinian Affairs at the State Department, he picked Hady Amr, who responded to the neutralization of a notorious Hamas terrorist by decrying Israel’s “brutal murders of innocents” and implying that both Israelis and Americans deserved to be targeted in return. And this is by no means an exhaustive list of Biden appointees with similar records and attitudes.

Also, within the past week, dozens of rockets from Hamas terrorists have targeted Israeli towns, attempting to murder men, women and children indiscriminately for the “crime” of being a Jew trying to live on the Jews’ Holy Land.

Yet on Wednesday night, Biden claimed that “our intelligence agencies” not only regard white supremacy, biased thoughts, as terrorism, but “the most lethal terrorist threat today.”

The most frequent targets of terrorist threats would, of course, beg to disagree. But according to the Oval Office’s newest occupant, Jews aren’t a targeted group, after all.

Originally published in The Federalist

If it weren’t clear before, it is now nakedly obvious the far left aims to silence all who question or disagree. It perversely misuses terms like “diversity” and “tolerance” for precisely the opposite ends — to enforce its ideology, stifle dissent, and prohibit any alternatives. The full-scale legal assault on faith-based schools is merely the latest example of its scorched-earth campaign.

My son, a high school senior, plans to matriculate to a well-regarded rabbinical seminary in the fall. But let us imagine that he was so impressed by Baylor University’s NCAA men’s basketball victory that he suddenly changed his plans, wishing to trade Talmudic tomes for time playing for the Bears in Waco, Texas.

Baylor, the university notes on its website, “is governed by a predominantly Baptist Board of Regents and is operated within the Christian-oriented aims and ideals of Baptists.” It even has a chapel requirement for graduation. Given that strict standards of Jewish observance prohibit professing the beliefs of other faiths, my son’s Baylor hoop dreams would be swiftly quashed.

Could you imagine, though, my son suing Baylor for denying him his own form of religious expression as an Orthodox Jew? Preposterous, you say? Unreasonable? Agreed. Now try explaining that to the student participating in a class-action lawsuit to deny federal research funding to Christian universities, because Baylor neither supported her promotion of LGBT ideology agenda nor permits an accredited LGBT student club on campus.

The fact that Baylor would not support that student’s beliefs is still more evident than the way its regulations run afoul of Orthodox Judaism. The university offers a detailed statement on human sexuality that advocates “purity in singleness and fidelity in marriage between a man and a woman as the biblical norm” and asserts its expectation that students “not participate in advocacy groups which promote understandings of sexuality that are contrary to biblical teaching.”

Pursuing an Agenda, Not Discrimination

If the student in question had not grasped that a university promoting abstinence before marriage would not readily genuflect to her sexual preferences, was she truly ready for college?

Another party to the lawsuit similarly claims he “went into shock” when his admission to a nursing program was rescinded following his engagement to another man. Union University in Tennessee, to which he had applied, views itself as “equipping persons to think Christianly and serve faithfully,” and its ban on homosexuality, as the lawsuit acknowledges, is right in the student handbook.

Yet the litigants apparently believe that one young student’s self-identification should outweigh that of the entire university, which has been formally tied to the Tennessee Baptist Convention since 1874. It is clear that the agenda of this lawsuit is not to address actual discrimination, but to demonize those with different beliefs and to characterize the Bible itself as hateful, unworthy of being referenced or printed.

This is no exaggeration. A purported example of “hateful” conduct against the Baylor student was when a Bible with certain highlighted passages was left at her door with a note merely saying, “I’m praying for you.”

Even the slightest deviation from leftist doctrine is similarly described as “hateful” in order to drastically narrow the range of opinion Americans are now allowed to express. In February, Twitter suspended the account of a Christian magazine after its tweet described U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine as “a transgender woman, that is, a man who believes he is a woman.”

Last year, a professor at Shawnee State University was forced to turn to the courts to restore his freedom of speech and expression – and his unblemished record – after school administrators issued an official reprimand for refusing to address a male transgender student as “Ms.”

It Sounds Orwellian Because It Is

Proponents of the class-action lawsuit involving Christian schools, the Washington Post’s reporting confirms, hope to influence the debate regarding the Equality Act. This lawsuit should influence the debate, but by underscoring that the legislation would legalize bigotry and prohibit all traditional religious expression in the public sphere.

My own community, which separates the biological sexes at many lifecycle events, is at particular risk. Circumcisions, bar mitzvahs, and weddings would be banned as “discriminatory” under the Equality Act because these events are routinely held at restaurants, catering halls, and other public accommodations.

Fortunately, there is another way: genuine tolerance. Several Christian universities, like Union, require their students to subscribe to a creed or covenant that explicitly delineates particular religious beliefs. Similarly, I’m unaware of any traditional rabbinical seminary, such as the one my son plans to begin at this fall, that will accept a student who does not profess the beliefs and abide by the practices of Orthodox Judaism. (And they don’t even have basketball teams.)

The options are mutually incompatible, yet easily coexist. Americans can and do annually choose to attend a secular or a faith-based school (or neither, by pursing a different path altogether). All these institutions have flourished because no one has tried to force one type of institution to emulate any other.

To go through the effort to apply and matriculate to a school whose established and well-documented viewpoint differs from your own, and then accuse it of bigotry for maintaining that very viewpoint, requires a uniquely toxic brew of intolerance and hypocrisy. The type of litigation that flows from this is the “strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP),” an abuse of the legal system intended to censor, intimidate, and silence those who dare express opposing views.

Selecting an institution aligned with your worldview is consonant with the authentic practice of tolerance and diversity enshrined in our founding documents. It makes modern democracy possible. That involves both a genuine respect for human dignity, and recognition that true diversity requires tolerance for a spectrum of opinion and belief, including the parts with which we disagree

Current events provide alarming parallels to the slide into tyranny found in the biblical account. Promotion of illogical ideas, punishment of nonconformity and the gradual denial of civil liberties are all as present today as in ancient texts.

Published in the New York Post.

Originally published in The Federalist

The Founding Fathers recognized freedom of expression and religious liberty as core elements of diversity and tolerance. Now, nearly 250 years later, Congress is acting to stamp them out, ushering in a new era of government-sanctioned anti-religious bigotry.

While no one could argue this is motivated by anti-Jewish bias in particular, the disproportionate repression of Jewish religious practice — by a law unironically billed as an “Equality Act,” no less — is far too significant to ignore.

On Jan. 1, 2020, almost three months before COVID-19 limits on gatherings, more than 100,000 observant American Jews filled MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, and other locations across the country for a unique gala honoring religious education. Called simply “The Siyum,” meaning “the completion,” it honored the tens of thousands of religiously motivated men — and significant number of women — who completed a seven-and-a-half-year cycle studying the Oral Torah.

The Siyum celebrates not only education, but Jewish resilience in the face of persecution. The 2,711-day cycle was first set in motion in Poland in 1923, where the first Siyum ensued in 1931. In 1945, the main venues of the third Siyum were in Israel, but, incredibly, one was also held by Holocaust survivors in a displaced persons camp in Germany. Since 1990, the largest celebrations have taken place in the United States, each exponentially larger than the one before it.

But now the Land of Liberty might never allow another. With the Equality Act, Congress is waging a legislative effort to prohibit the next Siyum, scheduled to take place in June 2027, and other such “discriminatory” violations of human rights. Under the Act, observant Jews will no longer be legally permitted to gather to celebrate religious education, or any other occasion, in accordance with their beliefs.

The reason is simple: not only prayer services, but family lifecycle events of all kinds — from circumcisions to bar mitzvahs to weddings to funerals — are commonly divided by biological sex in traditional Orthodox Judaism. This is true whether or not ceremonies are held in synagogues.

Whether in restaurants, catering halls, funeral homes, or elsewhere, all of these gatherings are often observed in what the law describes as “public accommodations.” Every major Siyum event over the past century has observed this same strict separation of the sexes. The Equality Act would ban them all.

This piece of legislation mandates the “desegregation of public facilities [by] sex (including sexual orientation and gender identity).” This directly forbids traditional Jewish practice in any such location.

Lest you imagine that such a Jewish event would be protected by its religious nature, the act goes out of its way — for the first time in history — to prohibit recourse to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). That law was specifically to shield religious practice from “laws ‘neutral’ toward religion [which] may burden religious exercise as surely as laws intended to interfere with religious exercise.”

Stripping this protection from religious practice cannot be described as incidental. The Equality Act claims the notion that marriage is between a man and a woman is merely a “sex stereotype,” and that opposition to same-sex marriage is inherently discriminatory. Any “discrimination” on the basis of “gender identity” is likewise prohibited, even in the private sector.

Thus, the Equality Act explicitly targets the Bible, calling it a bigoted document filled with discriminatory stereotypes. These include the idea that male and female sexes are biological, not psychological (Genesis 1:27), created with procreation in mind (1:28), and that marriage is the unique, holy contract between man and woman forming the environment in which that procreation is intended to take place (2:24). And one cannot forget that which the Bible proscribes as an “abomination” in Leviticus 18:22.

The Siyum held on New Year’s Day 2020 brought a level of decorum unheard of in a sports stadium: an absence of fights, drunkenness, and disorderly conduct. Police, who maintained a high level of security, said they never felt such appreciation from the public as they did then. Combined with its educational focus, the celebration exhibited values that America has long cherished.

Congress, to the contrary, would now grant antisemites a powerful legal tool with which to prevent such public displays in the future. Yet President Biden has committed to putting his name to it. If bigots were bent on eliminating Orthodox Judaism from American soil, it is difficult to imagine a more ruthlessly efficient tool than the Equality Act.