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Oscar Grant Becomes a Poster Boy for Jihad
by Bluetruth Thursday, Jan. 29, 2009 at 12:34 PM

Those outside the Bay Area may not know the backstory: Early on January 1, a young adult African-American named Oscar Grant was fatally shot at a BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) stop by a BART police officer. The incident was captured on a few cellphones as it happened. The officer has been arrested for murder and there have been several riots in downtown Oakland.

How is this connected to the recent action in Gaza, or to the Israel-Palestinian conflict in general? Nothing published about Grant suggested that he was politically involved in this issue. However, this incident has been cynically manipulated by the local anti-Israel groups to recruit support in the African-American community for their own jihadist agenda. So, to nobody's surprise, recent anti-Israel rallies in San Francisco featured posters attempting to link Grant's death to the Gaza situation, to recruit those angry over the shooting to the side of those for whom Grad and Qassam rockets are "legitimate resistance".

Here's Tzipporah's report from a "community meeting" held in Oakland 2 days ago. For upcoming attractions, just see what's been happening in France.


Violence Brewing in Oakland: A Forum to Incite African Americans to Hate Jews

Last night I fell down a rabbit hole and found myself in a world where honesty and truth were banished and lies reigned supreme. I was not out chasing rabbits though; I was at the Eastside Cultural Center in Oakland, along with about 200 other people, participating in a program called “From Palestine to Oakland: An Emergency Community Forum.”

The forum was co-sponsored by the Eastside Arts Alliance and the Gaza Action Committee. Speakers were from various anti-Israel organizations, such as the Arab Resource and Organizing Center, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Communities Against Police Execution (CAPE,) and Plan for a Safer Oakland (aka, CriticalResistance.org.) Many of the organizers looked familiar because I had seen them before, from other recycled ANSWER niche groups, such as Jews Against Zionism. The goal of the forum was to draw parallels between the so-called oppression of Palestinians and Oakland African Americans. This forum was clearly a slick attempt by anti-Israel groups to co-opt African Americans and draw them into the world wide movement against the existence of Israel and hatred of Jews.

Subtlety was not their strong point. First, three young people from the Eastside Arts Alliance and the Gaza Action Committee stood on the stage with crudely drawn maps of Oakland and Israel. In this rabbit hole, Israel was called Palestine. The speakers taught us that Palestine was once a great and peaceful Muslim country. But then in 1948 European Jews and the United States decided to work together to rid Palestine of Muslims and give the country to the Jews. These Jews are called Zionists: “Zionism: A political belief system started in the late 1800’s (sic) and based on parts of the Jewish religion that believes the land of Palestine was given by God to the Jewish People. (Not all Jews are Zionist and not all Zionists are Jewish). (sic)
The U.S and Zionist forces embarked upon genocide and ethnic cleansing because they felt that Palestine was in a strategic part of the world, and the U.S. and the European Jews wanted to have a foot-hold in the midst of the Muslim world. The speakers stuck pieces of paper with outlines of brown people on them all over the pre-Israel Palestine map. They added other pieces of paper symbolizing trees and orchards. When they declared that it was now 1948, they moved all the people to Gaza and the West Bank and filled the map with a dozen or so large blue Stars of David which took the place of the displaced Palestinians who were presumably huddling in fear on the edges of the map. They added pictures of Uzi machine guns and barricades to the map.

They taught us that “war broke out in 1967,” and Israel conquered more Muslim land. They did not explain the cause of the war. To them, war simply “broke out,” perhaps as a bad case of the hives might break out.

We learned that Israel was founded “with the purpose of creating a ‘Jewish only’ state even though the vast majority of the population was not Jewish. They told us that Muslims have curfews in Israel. Palestinians must carry ID cards that designate what limited rights they are entitled to. Only Jews have the full panoply of rights.

Then they asked the audience to make the connection to Oakland. Think, they exhorted us, how the same forces that oppress the Palestinians also oppress the Black people in Oakland. I wondered if Zionists control Oakland. Why yes, I learned, they apparently do. They moved the brown people from “occupied Palestine” to the map of Oakland. They pointed to Piedmont and stuck a couple of Stars of David there. Then they surrounded the brown, oppressed Oaklanders with the Uzis and placed barricades around Piedmont and other areas they considered to be Zionist identified.

The audience loved it. They were very receptive to this blatant anti-Semitism and Palestinian mythology. My heart was thumping and I was certain that the word “JEW” was written on my forehead. I kept my pepper spray handy. The crowd was pumped up - lots of cheering and clapping. Two hundred happy Jew-haters surrounded me.

The remaining speakers revealed the following amazing facts:
1. The CIA and the Mossad are one big organization;
2. Oakland and Boston Police go to Israel for training (this factoid was imparted by a member of the New England Committee to Defend Palestine;)
3. Members of the IDF come to Oakland to train police;
4. During Hurricane Katrina, the Mossad sent Israeli snipers to New Orleans with orders to shoot black people “who were trying to survive;”
5. Palestine is Oakland;
6. The condos in Oakland are equivalent to the Jewish settlements in Israel, because Black people were pushed out of gentrified areas of Oakland the way the gentle Palestinians were pushed out of Palestine;
7. A speaker who identified herself as Nicole Solis said she is a teacher at a rich private school in Oakland. She described the school as a bubble for privileged kids. She said she is not permitted to talk about the things that really matter, such as graffiti art, Zionists, and guns;
8. Black people dressed in baggy pants are targets for Oakland police who are itching to kill them;
9. Oakland is heavily policed because Black people live here. The police are here to occupy the Black neighborhoods and commit genocide. Their presence has nothing to do with crime. The Oakland police are equivalent to the Jews in Israel;
10. Palestinians and American Blacks have one enemy: the U.S. Actually two enemies, because Israel is an extension of the U.S.
11. Palestinians cannot walk more than 30 minutes without violating a curfew;
12. The same Israeli people building the “wall” in Palestine are also building the “wall” between the U.S. and Mexico;
13. Gang members are now prosecuted as domestic terrorists. (As a criminal defense lawyer in Oakland, I know this is not true;)
14. Their definition of occupation is an outside power coming into a neighborhood, city, or country by military or police force, conquering the native people, and then forcing them off their land. In Oakland, this is achieved by gentrification. Gentrification is occupation;
15. Tel Aviv was an Arab city. The Zionists changed the name as part of their colonization of Palestine;
16. Schools in the U.S. should teach Arab history;
17. Oakland schools teach that slavery was a good thing and slaves were happy;
18. Palestinian and Black leaders are kept illegally in prisons so they cannot organize the people;
19. The first thing Israel does when they attack a village is to destroy the agriculture, such as the olive trees;
20. Federal police working with Oakland police intend to destroy Black culture;
21. COINTELPRO is actively trying to divide Black and Palestinian people in order to disrupt their organizing;
22. An Israeli PR firm in San Francisco is trying to entice people from grassroots organizations to visit Israel in order to feed them false information;
23. “They” do not want us to make the connections between what is happening in Palestine and Oakland;
24. Jews have invented creation myths of persecution in order to justify the genocide and colonization of Palestinians;
25. Oscar Grant represents persecution, resistance, and a great wave of grief, and love;
26. Myths are perpetuated in churches and temples to control the people;
27. Jews paint themselves as eternal victims;
28. The Committee Against Police Execution (CAPE) defends the right of people to come together to destroy property. The people who were arrested in the Oscar Brand riots should have all charges dropped against them, and the Oakland police chief should be fired.
Several times during the meeting, we were urged to attend a demonstration later in the week on the Berkeley campus to protest a lecture by Benny Morris. They reminded us several times that violence is an acceptable response to “justice denied.”



After 90 minutes of this anti-Semitic rubbish, I left. The red queen was on her head.

www.bluetruth.net/2009/01/oscar-grant-becomes-poster-boy-for.html

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Beware of Anti-Semitism Germinating in Oakland
by Jonathan Bernstein Friday, Feb. 13, 2009 at 3:33 PM

Beware of Anti-Semitism Germinating in Oakland
By Jonathan Bernstein
ADL San Francisco Regional Director
This article originally appeared in Jewish Newsweekly of Northern California on February 13, 2009

After 20 years at the Anti-Defamation League, I shouldn't be surprised anymore, right? Wrong. Case in point is the latest anti-Israel and anti-Semitic slur percolating through parts of the Bay Area: that there are direct parallels between the conflict in Gaza and oppression in Oakland.



In early January we first noticed this phenomenon at protests over the New Year's Day shooting death of Oscar Grant, an unarmed black man, by a BART police officer. We saw signs there making the strange parallels about how "our taxes kill" in both Gaza and Oakland. Though the notion was absurd, my colleagues and I had a queasy feeling that it could catch on. And, unfortunately, we were right.



First, we noticed posters and speeches at anti-Israel rallies making the same link throughout January. Then late last month, I heard about a public event for Oakland youth sponsored by the Gaza Action Committee and the Eastside Arts Alliance, which describes itself a group of "artists, cultural workers and community organizers of color … that improves the quality of life for our communities and advocates for progressive, systemic social change." The promotional flyer declared that participants would "learn and discuss the connections between state-sponsored violence in Palestine and Oakland." I decided to attend and observe.



Once there, it didn't take long for me to understand how seriously the Jewish community needed to take this latest development.



The first thing I noticed were multiple posters of the wounded in Gaza taped on the exterior windows of the Eastside Arts Alliance building. Every one of these pictures was emblazoned with a large Jewish star with the U.S. presidential seal inside the middle of the star. The unequivocal message to me: Jews control the U.S. government, and both are responsible for the deaths in Gaza.



I listened with dismay to the presentations. After a brief, distorted history lesson about Israel in which Jews were portrayed as colonizing European interlopers with no prior connection to the land, speakers took turns convincing the audience that the experiences of a person of color in Oakland mirrored those of a Palestinian in Gaza.



To do this, they repeated one false claim after another: Palestinians have curfews just like youth in Oakland; Oakland police are trained by Israeli law enforcement to oppress minorities; during Hurricane Katrina, the Israeli Mossad shot black Americans trying to survive the devastation; the gentrification of Oakland is the same as "the Occupation"; the same company which built the security barrier in Israel is building the barrier between the U.S. and Mexico; and so on.



In sum, the young people attending this event learned that Jews and the Jewish state are responsible for Palestinian oppression, and that this is the same sort of oppression they feel in their own Oakland communities. Furthermore, they learned that to combat this oppression, the two communities needed to band together against their common foes.



To say the event was depressing for me is an understatement.



Yet I also knew that the Jewish community could not afford to simply dismiss this event as just a fringe phenomenon. We can all remember when only extreme activists made Nazi analogies at anti-Israel demonstrations — now the swastikas are routine.



The Oakland event drew about 200 young and passionate activists. These youths clearly had leadership skills. They were articulate and motivating, but the realization that they were capable of becoming community leaders startled me: What words and beliefs would they share with their peers now and in the future? How would Jewish youth find common ground with them?



The difficult question for our community is what can we do about this? I propose the following:



• Don't ignore dangerous parallels. Yesterday's fringe agitation might be today's routine occurrence.



• Build alliances with other communities, and reinforce appropriate parallels with them. Help others to understand our communities' perspective and experience. Talk to your neighbors. Plan a meeting with members of the church or other house of worship in your town. In other words, humanize us to them.



• Listen to the experiences of those around you. It makes sense that others will be more sensitive to us when we make a genuine attempt to be sensitive to them.



• When you see biased activism in your town, newspaper or community center, take action: Call the ADL, write a letter to the editor, plan a more balanced program to provide perspective, etc.



Changing attitudes is hard but rewarding work, and all of us should be a part of this effort in the workplace, home and community. At the ADL and other Jewish organizations, we strive to do this every day. I hope you will join us in this endeavor.

www.adl.org/ADL_Opinions/Anti_Semitism_Domestic/JewishNewsweekly_021309.htm

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