The Israel Lobby
Answering the libel that it controls what we think

December 8, 2023

Rutgers student Naima Abd-Elhameed portrays the Israel lobby as an all powerful organization that controls our politicians, our media and what is taught at our universities when the Arab lobby is older, richer and more powerful.  Portraying the Jews as a powerful cabal that controls people has a long history.  You can’t blame the Jews for everything if they are powerless, but you can if they are powerful.  Are the Jews controlling what you learn at Rutgers?  That’s an easy question to answer if you’ve taken Professor Jasbir Puar’s courses and been told that the Israelis steal organs.  It’s an easy question to answer if you’re a member of the AEPi Jewish Fraternity at Rutgers and see carloads of people in front of your frat shouting antisemitic slurs or your cleaning off eggs thrown at your building.    It’s an easy question to answer when you see hundreds of Rutgers students wearing Keffiyehs protesting Israel.  It’s easy to answer if you attended the Rutgers event called “Race Liberation and Palestine” and learned that if you are black or indigenous, your struggle is with Israel.  Never mind that Israel was indigenous to the region long before the Muslims invaded and long before the Romans called the area Palestine.   Never mind if it was Jews who fought for black civil rights and marched with Martin Luther King.  Teaching blacks that their enemy is the Jew is an inversion of the truth just as saying that the Jewish lobby controls what you learn at Rutgers is.     Who really has the power at Rutgers?  Clearly it isn’t the Israel lobby.  So, who does?  That question is easy to answer to when you hear that Chancellor Christopher Molloy and Provost Francine Conway were forced to apologize for saying that they were “saddened by and greatly concerned about the sharp rise in hostile sentiments and anti-Semitic violence in the United States.”  Is that something to apologize for?  Who could possibly hate the Jews so much as to force Christopher Molloy and Francine Conway to apologize for saying that?  Hint it isn’t the Jewish lobby.  Here’s another hint, from 2014 to 2019 Rutgers received over 59 million dollars of foreign gifts.  The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) did a research study called The Corruption of the American Mind, that showed that receipt of foreign funding from Middle Eastern countries is associated with increased levels of campus antisemitism.  There is no surprise there, when foreign countries give millions of dollars to Universities they expect something in return and they get it.   

One of the most welcoming universities to Jews was the University of Pennsylvania.  In 1967, 40% of Penn’s student population was Jewish.  Today due to diversity exclusion and inequality policies the Jewish population is down to 16% and falling.  The Jews who are there are afraid to be there. You can watch students from Penn, NYU, MIT and Harvard testify about the antisemitic nightmare their universities have become at getinsight.pro/hate.   

Much of our media is anti-Israel as well.  On October 7, 2023 Hamas invaded Israel and murdered entire communities, communities that who for the sake of peaceful coexistence had employed many people from Gaza.  Some if not all of those people used that opportunity to spy on those communities for Hamas.  During their murder spree Hamas abducted hostages, even babies and fired rockets into cities as far away as Tel Aviv.  In fact since October 7, they have fired 11,000 rockets into Israel and they are still firing them.  Israel has to stop the rocket fire and prevent Hamas from ever repeating the gruesome massacres of October 7.  The only way to do that is eliminate Hamas.  One would expect widespread support for Israel’s efforts to do so but instead our media that Ms. Elhameed says is controlled by the Israel lobby, echoes Hamas propaganda.  A particularly egregious example of that was when a newspaper reported on the Israeli bombing of the al Ahli hospital.  They showed a picture of a totally blown-up hospital under the headline “Israel bombs hospital”.  It turns out that the hospital parking lot was damaged and not the hospital and the picture was of another building.  It also turns out that it wasn't Israel who did it.  It was Islamic Jihad whose rocket that they fired at Israel from next to the hospital landed in the hospital parking lot.  It is not the Israel lobby that controls what Rutgers students think.