November 14, 2019
JEWISH GROUPS TELL JEWISH COMMUNAL FUND: STOP FUNDING ANTI-MUSLIM HATE
Islamophobia endangers people and threatens their lives.
Outside the Jewish Communal Fund (JCF) offices in NYC, a coalition of Jewish groups–the Defund Islamophobia Now campaign–called upon the JCF to end its funding to groups promoting Islamophobia and anti-Muslim hate. A report released in 2018 by three progressive Jewish groups documents how, according to JCF federal Form 990 filings, JCF has funded anti-Muslim hate groups going back at least to 2001, with six of them receiving a total of $2,082,212 between 2013 and 2017. (In the following year, JCF gave five of these groups nearly $600,000.) This funding coincides with a rise in white nationalist violence and with Muslim communities being increasingly targeted on our streets and by our government.
According to Elly Bulkin from Jews Against Anti-Muslim Racism (JAAMR), one of the members of the Campaign, “We have shared our report with the JCF and asked them to meet with us. Their answer has been silence. Two weeks ago, we delivered to their office a petition signed by over 5,000 people calling upon them to defund Islamophobia and, yet again, we asked for a meeting. No response. So we are standing outside their offices today having a teach-in and calling upon the JCF to defund the hate that they are funding.” “It’s not enough for us to say that Muslim lives matter as much as Jewish lives. We need to show it through our actions,” said Gail Miller from Jews Say No!, another member of the Campaign, who also appears in the video the groups created to highlight the issue. “We must remember that Islamophobia is not an abstraction. It endangers people and threatens their lives,” said civil rights lawyer Alan Levine.
“We wouldn’t—and shouldn’t–stand silent in the face of support for anti-Jewish hate. We also shouldn’t stand silent in the face of support for anti-Muslim hate,” added Asaf Calderon from Jewish Voice for Peace-NYC, also a Campaign member.
“We know the JCF funds groups that do important work. But that does not justify a penny going to the kind of vicious hate that places an entire community in jeopardy and is an affront to all groups that seek a more just society,” stressed Karen Ranucci, who has been a donor to the JCF. “I recently withdrew my money from the fund as they did not respond to my requests to meet with them to discuss this issue. I would encourage other donors who believe in justice for all to do the same,” she added.
Some of the Islamophobes who are funded by the JCF include:
· Pamela Geller, who writes that Islam “is an extreme ideology, the most radical and extreme ideology on the face of the earth”;
· Clarion Project, which funds virulently anti-Muslim films;
· David Horowitz, whom the Southern Poverty Law Center calls “the godfather of the modern anti-Muslim movement”;
· Steven Emerson, who forged a “dossier” linking American Muslim groups with terrorism; and
· Daniel Pipes, who claims Muslims wish to “impose Islamic law” in the United States.
The event, held at 6 PM in front of JCF offices at 575 Madison Avenue between 56th and 57th Street, was sponsored by the Defund Islamophobia Now campaign, initiated by three Jewish organizations–Jews Against Anti-Muslim Racism, Jews Say No!, and Jewish Voice for Peace-NY. They can be contacted at DefundIslamophobia@gmail.com. The event is also endorsed by Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, Kolot Chayeinu, and NYU JVP.
We present this special issue of Moving Forward to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, the Arabic word for ‘catastrophe.’ The Nakba refers to the expulsion and dispossession of 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland during Israel’s creation (1947-1949).In this issue, we lay out the historical record of those years to show that the Nakba was the result of a deliberate policy of mass expulsion, dispossession, and ethnic cleansing—a strategy designed to ensure that the Palestinians who had lived on the land for generations would be barred from ever returning. We also zero in on the fundamental role played by the 117-year-old international organization, the Jewish National Fund (JNF), in facilitating that dispossession.
Our goal is that there be a serious moral reckoning with this history, and it begins with that icon of innocence, the JNF’s small blue metal box that many of our readers will remember from their childhood, boxes that beckoned us to drop in coins that would help “make the desert bloom” and build the land of Israel. It was a mission that was legitimized by the governing principle of the Zionist cause: “A land without a people for a people without a land.” As seductive as that slogan was, it was willfully false, as amply documented in personal testimonies of Palestinians and Israelis, historical records, and scholarly research. How, after all, could 750,000 Palestinians flee “a land without a people”?
Jews Say No: Not In Our Name! 