America’s organized Jewish community is in turmoil following last week’s rejection of a membership bid from the anti-Israel left wing lobbying group ‘J Street’ to join the umbrella President’s Conference of Major American Jewish Organizations.
The President’s Conference – created in 1956 at the urging of President Dwight Eisenhower who wanted the disputatious Jewish community to create one address that he could deal with – faces fracture and possible dissolution after several left-wing member groups, lead by the largest of all member organizations, the Union for Reform Judaism, representing America’s 1.5 million Reform Jews, are threatening to withdraw in “protest” against the April 30th rejection of J Street’s membership bid. 22 of the 31 President’s Conference groups that participated in last week’s ballot voted to reject J Street’s application on the grounds that a group openly seeking to sabotage the key missions of the Conference does not belong inside the Conference.
J Street is not, as the New York Times repeatedly claims, ‘just another liberal Jewish organization’. It is anything but. Founded in 2008 as part of the Obama presidential campaign, J Street was launched to become an Obama front group inside the American Jewish community, helping the President change the American Jewish community’s pro-Israel consensus and ultimately replacing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) as the primary consensus voice on Israel inside the American Jewish community with J Street.
Any cursory examination of J Street’s positions and record proves there is nothing either “pro peace” or “pro-Israel” about it. The radical group opposes sanctions and all other punitive actions against the Islamic Republic of Iran, either to halt its illegal nuclear weapons program, or to punish its barbaric human rights record. J Street actively supports the demographic destruction of the State of Israel by championing the so-called Palestinian “Right of Return”, designed to inundate the Jewish state with millions of multi-generational Palestinian ‘refugees’ warehoused in UN sponsored ‘refugee’ camps since 1948..
While claiming to support Israel’s right to self defense in theory, in practice J Street condemns every action Israel takes to exercise that right. J Street denounced Israel’s 2009 counter-offensive against the Hamas terror group’s rocket war against Israeli civilians. It raises money from Israel’s most virulent critics to defeat pro-Israel members and candidates for the United States Congress.
For years J Street tried to hide the fact that its top donor was bitter Israel opponent George Soros, the billionaire financier and Hungarian Jewish Holocaust survivor who has written extensively about work as a Nazi collaborator during World War II. J Street echoes its Soros, who blames global anti-semitism on Israel, when it criticizes other liberal Jewish groups that denounce left wing anti-Israel groups and anti-Semitic groups.
While rising in rage against any suggestion it is anti-Israel, J Street targets for withering personal criticism anyone it suggests is “anti-peace”. People who expose the anti-Israel views and statements of Obama Administration officials are accused of “undermining peace” or being “Israeli propagandists.” J Street accuses groups like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of “exacerbating tensions” when they unmask Israel haters and anti-semites. Predictably, the left wing ADL is so “outraged” that J Street was denied the chance to ridicule, undermining and marginalize the ADL from inside the President’s Conference, it too is threatening to bolt the group.
J Street works closely with the Obama Administration to make the President’s anti-Israel positions and statements appear less hostile by providing Jewish cover to Obama’s left flank. J Street’s only criticism of the Obama Administration is when it is too supportive of Israel. It routinely condemns the Administration for not joining Israeli enemies in votes against the Jewish state at the United Nations.
Just before racing to defend US Secretary of State John Kerry for borrowing J-Street talking points equating Israel and Apartheid, J Street was celebrating the “unity” deal that merged the Gaza based terror group together with the PLO’s Palestinian Authority, as ‘a step toward peace’. Hamas calls for the extermination of Israel and the murder of Jews around the world.
J Street sponsors and recruits anti-Israel speakers and programs to slander Israel at colleges and universities across the United States. It lobbies against legislation preventing taxpayer funded support to colleges and universities participating in boycotts against Israel. Not only does J Street refuse to condemn anti-Jewish boycott efforts in the United States, it has openly supported groups trying to intimidate American colleges and universities into joining boycotts against Jewish owned companies in Israel.
J Street supports boycotting Jewish owned businesses in Israel but opposes boycotting non-Jewish owned business in Israel. By calling upon others to discriminate against the Jews of Israel through boycotts, divestments and sanctions at the same time it strenuously opposes boycotts or sanctions against those seeking to destroy the Jews of Israel, J Street is anything but ‘just another liberal’ Jewish organization. By encouraging and defending those who seek to single out and punish Jews for by Jews through boycotts, sanctions and divestment, J Street is nothing more than an anti-Semitic group itself. If truth in advertising laws were applied to J Street, it might well be required to rename itself Jews Against the Israel.
J Street doesn’t want to join the pro-Israel Jewish mainstream, it wants to destroy it. By offering itself as another “pro-peace victim” silenced by the “right wing” Jewish establishment, maybe J Street hopes it will get the media to help it discredit and delegitimize the pro-Israel consensus of the American Jewish community in general, and AIPAC in particular. The only problem is that the American Jewish establishment is anything but “right wing.” Nearly two thirds of the President’s Conference’s member organizations– the same groups that just rejected J Street, are liberal or left wing..
The mission of the President’s Conference, signed on to and shared by all its disparate members, include the commitment to “mobilize support for the security of the State of Israel”, to “halt Iran’s nuclear weapons program” and to fight “attempts to delegitimize Israel and the Jewish people.”
Insofar as J Street has fought to undermine the security of the State of Israel, protect Iran’s nuclear weapons program from sanctions let alone military action, and works daily to “delegitimize Israel” and nearly won its vote for membership anyway, maybe the American Jewish community would be better served without an umbrella group like the President’s Conference.