This transcript was taken from a Stand in the Gap Today program originally aired on October 15, 2021. To listen to this program, please click HERE.
Isaac Crockett: Thanks so much for tuning in and welcome to this edition of Stand in the Gap Today. I’m Isaac Crockett and my co-host today is Dr. Keith Wiebe. Keith, thanks so much for being on the program with me today.
Keith Wiebe: Delighted to join you today, Isaac, I’m looking forward to it.
Isaac Crockett: Well, Keith and I are going to be interviewing a couple of attorneys. And if you’re listening and you’re thinking, “Oh no, lawyers,” and all the lawyer jokes start coming to mind, if you listen to us regularly, I think you’ll agree that the attorneys that we have on our program here are very good attorneys and know the law of the land, know the constitution, and are fighting for freedom, and on the side of freedom.
That is definitely the case with both of the lawyers we have on the program with us today. And Keith, you’ve worked a lot with the group they’re with, the ACLJ, the American Center for Law & Justice. These two young attorneys have quite the resume, both of them.
The one attorney is Attorney Benjamin Sisney. He’s been on this program before, he’s an author, and he is the Senior Counsel for Litigation and Public Policy in the Washington D.C. office of the ACLJ, that’s the American Center for Law & Justice. Then he is also going to introduce to us, in just a little bit, one of his colleagues, Rabbi Dr. Mark Goldfeder.
The two of them have done a lot of good work with the American Center for Law & Justice. They also both were attorneys for President Trump during the Mueller investigation, during his first impeachment. So they have done a lot of interesting things and just really so honored to have both of you with us today.
Ben, you’ve been on this program before and we want to talk today about one of the things that really got you involved with the ACLJ, one of the things that’s big on your heart, and that is the area of antisemitism. Today, I really want to discuss it and define it because it’s one of those terms sometimes gets used without people fully understanding it. In fact, I think we’ll find out in talking to both of you today, that’s a term that more and more Americans, especially younger Americans really aren’t very familiar with. Ben, thanks for being on the program again with us.
Could you maybe introduce your colleague and also maybe talk just a little bit about some of the things going on at the ACLJ that you are doing to push back against the antisemitism that is more than just creeping into our nation again. It seems to be rampant in many places.
Benjamin Sisney: Absolutely. And Isaac, first off, thank you for having me back on. It’s an honor to be on your show and to be back on with you again. And Keith, pleasure to be on with you and looking forward to today. It is also an honor to introduce my colleague and personal friend Mark Goldfeder. Dr. Goldfeder who definitely knows what he’s talking about on the topics that we’re going to address today. Not just academically though, he certainly knows that, but also in real life experience and litigation and representation and policy. I have learned so much from Mark. I grew up in a family that was always very pro-Israel and Israel’s interest and I knew some basics. I knew some of the basics of history, both in Europe and even here in the states. But I’ve learned so much in working at the ACLJ and in particular working with Mark on some of the cases that we’ve been able to work on together that deal with these issues.
You could say this topic is real but underneath that umbrella are so many sub-issues or manifestations of the underlying issues and the hatred the world has that you see creeping up and getting more and more influential and even American politics and it breaks my heart. It’s horrifying to see what’s happening and I’m grateful for you and your program to devote time to this because Americans need to know it. Of course, the American education system is failing miserably and not teaching things that matter or objective facts. It’s easy to just sort of think of it as sort of a distant thing, but the reality is it matters to us today, now, and here in the states and we’re going to be able to get into that a little bit today.
Isaac Crockett: Yes. Thank you so much Ben. It is an exciting thing to talk through with people who are so like-minded about what’s going on, what’s going wrong, what’s going right, what we can do, how we can be involved. Every one of you listening can have different levels of involvement with the things going on today. And that’s what’s so [inaudible 00:04:49] about the ACLJ, is how involved they are with grassroots Americans and just getting the ball rolling, getting things going. Mark, I just want to welcome you to the program and ask you, you wear a lot of different hats. You’re a lawyer and attorney with the ALCJ, you’re a professor, you’re a rabbi, you have things going on. You’ve been appointed by president Trump to the Holocaust, I think Memorial Council, you have a lot of different things that you’re doing for a young guy. Just wondering if you could maybe introduce yourself a little bit with some of information about yourself and maybe where we could go to read articles that you’ve written in some of your works.
Mark Goldfeder: Sure. First of all, I want to echo Ben in saying thank you for having us on the show. It’s an honor and a pleasure and Ben, thank you very much for that very warm and generous welcome. I do wear a lot of hats and someone says that a rabbi, a doctor, and a lawyer walk into a bar it’s usually me. I guess you could think of me as a walking punchline in that sense. But, I thank God I’ve been very blessed at the ACLJ and in other aspects to work on issues that I very much care about in terms of [inaudible 00:05:55] talking about today. I was the founding editor of the Cambridge University Press series on Law and Judaism. In my academic work I focused a lot on law and religion, antisemitism, and even criminal law to some extent.
And so, it’s been great working with Ben, [inaudible 00:06:14] will probably talk about a little bit later. He and I have worked together on three important federal cases in the DC Circuit of antisemitism at the highest levels of government. I look forward to getting into this conversation with you. Articles that I write about antisemitism they’re available. I put them on Twitter @MarkGoldfeder, @M-A-R-K-G-O-L-D-F-E-D-E-R. I always try to keep up to date with what’s going on in the world on this issue and to offer some practical suggestions, brown people can make it better.
Isaac Crockett: And that is what it’s all about. Thank you so much. It’s neat to know folks like you and Ben who aren’t just there to point out what’s wrong, but you’re involved through the ACLJ and then other areas of your lives actually doing something about this, actually in there. The both of you are in the front lines of battles, so to speak with the legal battles going on. That you’re in the courts and you’re filing these different briefs and different things. And so, we are so excited to have you all on and we are so thankful for the work of the ALCJ. When we come back, we want to go to you and find out what is a good definition of antisemitism. There’s so much of this stuff that’s talked about without always being defined. And so we want to start with those definitions and look at what’s happening in our country and really hear from you firsthand of things that are happening and what we can do to be involved in helping in any way that we can.
So, thanks so much for tuning in. We have a lot in store on this program, a lot of questions, a lot of answers coming our way. We’re going to take a brief time out to hear from some of our partners and we’ll be right back on Stand in the Gap Today.
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Isaac Crockett: Well, as we get ready to talk about antisemitism and some of the other facets of things that are kind of tied in with that, I just want to thank you again for tuning in, for listening. I’m Isaac Crockett and on this Friday, normally it’s me interviewing Sam Rohrer, the president of the American Pastor’s Network, but I have my co-host Dr. Keith Wiebe and we are interviewing attorneys from the ACLJ and we are talking about antisemitism. Sam will not be on with us today, he’s taking a bit of a vacation. He is doing well, but he’s away from the office. And so, those of you who were wondering where Sam is, he’s okay. He will be back in a couple of weeks, but we are so excited about our guest today.
I’m going to go with you Mark and ask you, let’s just start at the very beginning, very foundational of the whole topic here. Can you kind of define, or maybe give us several definitions or whatever is best, help us understand antisemitism.
Mark Goldfeder: Sure. It’s a good question. Antisemitism is loosely defined and we’ll see why in a second I say loosely, as the prejudice against or hatred of the Jewish people. It’s often called the oldest form of hatred in the world and unfortunately, it’s also perhaps the most persistent. Even though we’re still within living memory of the Holocaust, for the past several years antisemitism has been making something of a public comeback even in the United States and even during the pandemic. In order to really understand that phenomenon, I’ll start with an observation from the late Chief Rabbi Lord, Jonathan Sacks of the United Kingdom who believed that in terms of its focus, antisemitism often looks at Jews as a collective. The idea being that while an individual Jew might be tolerable, Jews as a separate collective identity should not be allowed to exist with the same rights as other groups.
And that’s why the majority of antisemitism in any given era tends to focus on the primary form of collective Jewish identity at that point in history. For example, throughout the middle ages, Jews worked for the most part as a religious community, and so they were hated for their religion. Even if the particular Jews are being oppressed, weren’t religiously Jewish. In the 19th and 20th centuries when many Jews became secularized, the primary unifying collective identity of Jews was their ethnicity. And so the hatred mutated to focus on race, even when the Jews are being oppressed only had… The Nazis would call a trace amount of Jewish blood in them. Today, when the primary collective embodiment of Jewish people on the world’s stage is the people of Israel in their nation state, Jews around the world are hated and held accountable for quote unquote “Their state,” even if they’re not Israeli.
The practical problem in defining antisemitism is that it’s a very mutating virus. Jews are criticized for being whatever a society or a particular part of society hates at that particular moment. So the right will call them radicals, the left will call them fundamentalists. They’re too liberal, they’re too conservative, they’re too rich, they’re a drain on society, they’re too strong, too weak, too influential, too [inaudible 00:10:48]. A definition of antisemitism that can encompass all of these possibilities and more needs to be able to cut through all these, what I call timely rationales that are given for a timeless hatred. Because if you don’t, then anti-Semites will just find another rationale and use that one and then another, and then another. Do you want to actually protect people? Practically speaking, you need a definition that focuses not on the reasons why people hate, but rather on the actions that are taken by those who are expressing or harboring that hatred.
So it’s called [inaudible 00:11:20] or conduct based definition if you will. The definition that best serves this goal is the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, the IHRA definition. And that’s precisely because the examples that it gives focus on the manifestations of antisemitism, meaning what anti-Semites do as opposed to why they do it. That’s what makes IHRA such a good definition. IHRA’s strength come from the consensus of tens of thousands of people across every spectrum agreeing that this definition best represents their own shared lived experiences. But the way that IHRA does that, the reason people feel that way is because while anti-Semites around the world may give different reasons for their feelings, those feelings actually tend to manifest themselves in very similar patterns.
Keith Wiebe: Mark, that’s an amazing definition of antisemitism and it makes so much sense. I did notice that the common denominator among all that was Jews. What’s interesting to me is that we live in a climate where everything is viewed through some kind of a racial prism. And so it’s just wrong to be racist by any definition. But yet we find a lot of pushback against the kind of definition of antisemitism that you are describing. We’ve seen several Democrats, particularly those that are part of the Squad pushing back against this. So Mark, why is it in a racially charged culture with such a clear enemy as Jews provide antisemitism, why is there any pushback against this definition?
Mark Goldfeder: I’ll get to that, but you actually raise a very interesting point, which people might not know. Jewish people have also been consistently othered in some insidious subtle ways. For example, in America, Jews were always considered non-white at times when whites were being privileged. And today, they’re told that they’re privileged whites when they demand recognition of their struggles. In the past, Jews were rendered alien to the West by being orientalized and today Jews are rendered aliens in the Middle East by being redefined as European colonialists. The pushback on adopting IHRA more broadly comes from the fact that among the list of potentially antisemitic behavior that it provides, the definition includes some useful examples of discriminatory anti-Israel acts that can sometimes cross the line into antisemitism. Now critics challenge the use of IHRA in policy making on two main grounds. First, they say that, well, it conflates political speech against Israel with antisemitism.
I’ll give you an answer to that on two levels. First of all, simple level, it’s not true. There’s actually literally in the IHRA definition a safe harbor provision, which explicitly says, and I quote, ” [inaudible 00:14:15] for Israel similar to that level against any other country is not antisemitism.” But the critics will say that’s insufficient. There may be good non-antisemitic reasons why a person wants to single out Israel from among all the other countries and hold them to a different standard. Great. And to those critics, I say again, read the definition because it never says that these examples are always antisemitic. In fact, their concern is precisely why the definition includes the explicit caveat that all of the examples given, including the ones about Israel could take into account the overall context be antisemitic. Again, context is crucial here as it is in all instances of alleged discrimination.
Antisemitism is no different in that way than racism or sexism in that context matters. And no two cases are ever exactly the same, but the reason the specific examples are provided in the IHRA definition and are so important is explicitly not because all forms of criticism of Israel [inaudible 00:15:16] antisemitic, and the definition takes pains to point that out. It’s precisely because there are those who claim that no criticism of Israel can ever cross the line and that’s equally wrong. Now the second objection to using the IHRA definition in a policy context is that in the wrong hands it could theoretically be used to stifle speech. That’s a completely valid argument, but it’s completely misleading. The correct conclusion from that concern isn’t don’t use IHRA, it’s don’t use IHRA improperly. Of course, this kind of policy making needs to be done carefully because free speech is a core aspect of our democracy and there is no general hate speech exception for antisemitism or any other kind of hatred.
And that’s why when people adopt IHRA, whether it’s in a state bill or a school policy, it can’t take the form of any kind of speech code. Everyone on both sides agrees with that principle. And when the Squad raises it, it’s a red herring to pretend that that’s an issue. The policies we’re generally talking about are not even about speech. They involve discriminatory harassment and sometimes criminal conduct. And those are not formed to [inaudible 00:16:20] speech. Unlike speech, that kind of conduct is absolutely subject to governmental regulation. And if you want, I don’t know if we have time, I can go on and explain to you, well, how do I know which conduct can be regulated? It turns out there’s an answer. There’s well established Supreme Court precedent, which says behavior that is objectively offensive can fall under the category of discriminatory harassment. And you might ask the follow up, how do you know if a behavior meets an objectively offensive standard? Well, you have to have an objectively well accepted definition. And again, that would bring us back to IHRA.
Isaac Crockett: So it’s kind of this cycle then if we’re not careful and that’s why we have to come back to a foundational definition, which is what you’ve done in the description you’ve given there too, is just something amazing to me. Very eye opening to see this kind of how it evolves and just keep cycling through different cultures over different decades. Real quick, just a few moments here left. Ben, you’re right there in D.C. and you deal with things on Capitol Hill all the time, do you get a sense that this age of being so careful not to offend people that there are some in political parties that don’t mind doing offensive things or antisemitic things because they have a different standard maybe for Jewish people as opposed to some of the other racial wars going on?
Benjamin Sisney: The hypocrisy is incomprehensible. I truly cannot believe what I see in here, not just by radicals or haters online or in social media, though there too. But coming from leadership of the left and leadership in political offices. It defies logic. Especially when viewed through the lens of sort of the times that we live in and the culture and some of the sources of tension that are kind of all around us. But yet, for whatever reason they just pretend that none of that applies to their hatred of Israel or Jewish people, whether religion or ethnicity. Just listening to what Mark was describing and he’s describing what I’ll call the academics, not really academic, I guess, but what’s wrong with what their surface arguments are.
I think that’s right. I would go just a little bit further and say that they all just jump on this too. I think a lot of people just feel like it’s sort of trendy and they just sort of follow along and they see their leaders spouting out this rhetoric and all of this on their Twitter feeds and they just jump on.
Isaac Crockett: That’s a great point. We’re going to follow up on that right after this break, but you’re so true. Sometimes people don’t even know why they’re going after a certain way. We’re going to come right back to that on Stand in the Gap Today.
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Isaac Crockett: Well, welcome back to the program. Before we dive back into more questions, I just want to check in with our program producer, Tim Schneider. Tim, do you have any updates for us? Any ministry updates or information for our listeners to know about our ministry here at American Pastors Network and Stand in the Gap Media?
Tim Schneider: Yes I do Isaac. Thank you very much. Good afternoon to everyone. Thank you for are listening. Some housekeeping announcements here we are on social media. So if you do social media, if you do Facebook, if you do Twitter, please like us on Facebook. Please follow us on Twitter by looking for our pages, American Pastors Network and Stand in the Gap Radio. Also, we are on BitChute, so if you do BitChute look for us over there. You may have to be a little bit more of a detective over there to find us because it’s not as easy to find us over there in BitChute but we are posting videos over there and some other things, but you might have to look for Stand in the Gap Media or Stand in the Gap TV or Stand in the Gap Radio. You may have to type that into the search bar in order to find it over there in BitChute, but we are over there.
If you do BitChute, go over there. This is part of our way of being able to go around places like Facebook and Twitter that are now censoring a lot of our content because of the fact they have an agenda and their agenda is not our agenda. Unfortunately we have to have other places to go and other sources. So if you’re on social media, BitChute, Facebook, Twitter, please look us up. Also, two great websites. We are on the americanpastorsnetwork.net, that’s one site and standinthegapmedia.org. If you do the americanpastorsnetwork.net please sign up for our e-newsletter. We send a couple of e-newsletters out a week. One of them usually will highlight the radio programs from the previous week. We’ll give you a transcript of one of those programs and just allow you to be able to see what we’ve been talking about Just in case you may have missed some of the radio content.
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We are a big organization. We don’t have deep pockets as sometimes you’ll hear us say this program, but we need to have things done. We need money to pay bills. We need money to pay employees. We need money… Money has, unfortunately the only way that we can to get things done. So financially it does matter. But please ask the Lord. If the Lord would want you to give something, if you’re blessed by this ministry, please consider asking the Lord how much he would like you to donate towards us in our ministry, no amount too big or too small is too much as we say, but just please consider giving financially and certainly please consider praying for us. I will go back to you Isaac with the two lawyers and Keith, and you can go ahead and continue today’s program.
Isaac Crockett: Thanks so much Tim. Again, just a wholehearted thank you to all of you listening and to those of you praying for this ministry. Whenever we hear from you, we really enjoy it. Tim and different ones often are sharing different emails or even letters that came in to the office. So thank you so much for that. If you’re going to contact us, we just really love to hear from you. This would be a great week to contact us and maybe just let us know what this program means to you and where you’re listening to it, how you’re listening to it and to share this information with others. So thank you for that. For just now tuning in, Sam Rohrer is off on a couple of weeks of vacation and he’s doing some pastoral work along with that, dealing with some pastor and things.
So he’s not here, but we have Dr. Keith Wiebe with us today as my co-host, so glad to have him on. We are talking, yes to a couple of lawyers, to a couple of attorneys, great guys from the ACLJ, the American Center for Law & Justice, they’re Ben and Mark. Thanks so much for making the time to be with us today and for explaining these things as we look into this topic of really getting to the foundation root causes, what is antisemitism and what’s going on in our nation? Ben, right before the break you were talking about how some people are falling into things because it’s just kind of this politically correct trendiness. It’s just part of the culture and they don’t even realize what it is. That’s why it’s so important to know the definition of antisemitism to recognize it, to see how it’s morphed itself over the generations. But maybe you could talk just a little bit more about how sort of a trendy thing sometimes that people fall into without necessarily really thinking about what they’re doing or saying.
Benjamin Sisney: Yeah, absolutely. We see this in a lot of areas where you sort of have the masses that are fed these talking points, whether it be from kind of mainstream media or their institutions or their education or their political leadership in the party that they like to follow and they get fed these talking point. You could sit down and try to have a logical debate with them and it’s fruitless because they don’t speak in facts. There’s no logic, it feels like there’s no more critical thinking and they just sort of spout out and if you challenge them with facts they just start yelling louder and that kind of thing, or throwing things at you as I’ve seen done here in Washington D.C.
You see that in a lot of areas, but you definitely see that with what we’re talking about today. I think it’s important to understand both sides of it. Like what Mark was talking about, which is the deeper strategy and then the flaws in the policy of those strategies that are being implemented from the leadership of this movement, this anti-Jewish movement that we see growing in our country and around the world. And then you kind of have the masses that just sort of follow along and they don’t even understand. It’s almost like they’re just told or they perceive that it’s popular because their celebrities that they have a crush on or whatever are tweeting this or their political party leader is tweeting this.
And they’re like, “Yeah. Jewish people are bad.” The ignorance is unbelievable, but it’s there and they fuel and continue to give the support to the leaders, whether they be celebrity type leaders or political leaders to keep moving forward and expanding. We’re seeing that today where it’s getting more and more influential in one American political party, in ideological movement. I don’t think it used to be like that. At least to this degree, we’ve seen it just evolve at an accelerated rate and just it feels to me, even in just the last few years. One of the ways we see that is the BDS movement, the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement and that comes in many forms.
I look forward to hearing Mark kind of walk us through some of that in more detail. But one of the forms that it comes in is in lawsuits and the idea of isolating Israel from the rest of the world in business. Of course, business means economic livelihood and you see that in a number of ways. And one of them is in these lawsuits where they sue American companies or American donors that basically do anything or want to conduct business in Israel, or want to send money to support Israel, or is pro-Israel interest. And so, they’re suing them in American court.
The self-described Palestinians are suing them in American courts, federal courts right here in Washington, D.C or Capital. In an effort, I don’t even think the goal is to win these lawsuits. Honestly, I think the goal is to just intimidate and scare and to have corporate counsel tell their corporate president, “Hey, it’s not worth it to do business in Israel because then we have to defend these lawsuits.” And so they take their contracts from their business and they go to a different country, that kind of thing. That’s one part of the BDS movement that I think we can get a little deeper in.
Isaac Crockett: That’s a great point. Mark, can you kind of give us some working definitions of the BDS movements since we hear it thrown around a lot, but what is that actually talking about?
Mark Goldfeder: Sure. The BDS movement operates as a coordinated sophisticated effort to try and disrupt the economic and financial stability of the state of Israel and to directly harm the economic interests of persons who conduct business in or with Israel, or frankly, even with people that they deem to be too closely affiliated with Israel. The way it works is activists spread dangerous lies about the Jewish state and they use the threat of withdrawing financial support in effort to coerce companies to seize or refuse to engage in business relationships with Israel or its nationals or its residents, but in practice, and especially in its accompanying, they also have the BDS and cultural and academic boycotts. The BDS movement also targets people who are Jewish or who do business with people who are Jewish. And again, that’s how the movement’s own supporters have described it. Others wouldn’t be so charitable and would point out that BDS has been a significant factor in the recent trend of antisemitic incidents, both globally and domestically.
And that the unambiguous goal of the international BDS movement is the elimination of the state of Israel. They might also point out that the nonprofit umbrella group for all US based BDS organization actually funnels money to terrorist groups that specialize in killing Jews and that call for Jewish genocide, most notably Hamas, but also the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. There’s a very inconvenient fact that more than 30 of the BDS National Committee leaders themselves are actual violent terrorists, including for example, [Muhammad Salala 00:28:58] who’s a longtime Hamas operative and the former military chief of their operations in [inaudible 00:29:04] or Leila Khaled who’s a senior PFLP member who hijacked not one but two commercial planes. With leaders like that it’s hardly surprising that the antisemitism, many BDS activists spout often breaks through that nonviolent veil and leads to people getting hurt. But it is worth noting that even in today’s highly polarized society, a position to the BDS movement is not a hyper part of an issue and I pray that it remains that way.
Both the Republican and the Democratic parties, except for the Squad have consistently denounced BDS in their platforms. In 2017, the governors of all 50 states signed onto a statement affirming their opposition to BDS. I’ll quote to you, it said, “The goals of the BDS movement are antithetic to our values and the values of our respective states and reiterating that BDS’s single minded focus on the Jewish state raises very serious questions about its motivation and its intention.” Now, the real question I think you might be wondering is, why is it antisemitic? In any given situation, I’m going to give your listeners a good test here, if you’re trying to determine-
Isaac Crockett: Mark, let me break in real quick. We’re coming up on a hardbreak. Let’s get into that and we have one more segment coming up and let’s talk about that, why is this movement, why is it antisemitic, what are the tie-ins there? We have a lot more to uncover in our last segment. So, please stay tuned. We’ll be right back after we listen to some more from some of our partner groups, we’ll be right back on Stand in the Gap Today.
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Isaac Crockett: Welcome back to the final segment of Stand in the Gap Today for this Friday edition. And it just time flies when you’re having fun and when you have a lot of more information you want to hear. We’ve got Ben Sisney and Mark Goldfeder from the ACLJ and we’re talking to these attorneys about antisemitism. Mark, I’ll go to you. Ben had brought up a lot of this hypocrisy going on with people who are trying to seek the favor of maybe the politically correct, or the supposed woke, but this kind of trendy thing of, “Oh, we’ll just boycott not China, not boycott what’s going on with the Taliban, not going with what China’s doing or Russia or so many other groups, governments that are hurting people.
The Democrat Republic of Congo, a lot of the supposed green energy it’s being born on the back of child labor and just slave labor in these different countries. No, that’s not what we’re boycotting, we’re boycotting Israel.” Mark, you started to get into this, but could you tie-in what we were talking about defining antisemitism and now connect that with the BDS movement that we hear of boycotting Israel?
Mark Goldfeder: Sure. Again, in any given situation, when you’re trying to determine if a particular decision or statement or movement, in this case concerning Israel involve antisemitism, it’s very helpful to apply what’s called the 3D test to the matter. The test actually was part of the basis for the IHRA definition of antisemitism and it involves a set of questions that were designed originally by the Israeli politician and human rights activist, Natan Sharansky as a tool to distinguish between legitimate criticism of Israel on the one hand and hatred of Jews on the other. It works like this, plastic antisemitism has always involved demonizing Jews by accusing them of horrible things from [inaudible 00:32:17] to blood libel, et cetera, or de-legitimizing the Jewish collective identity. Again, we talked about this before, whether that’s in religious terms, the middle ages or the race based approach, or the 19th and 20th centuries or the national framework of today, and the application of double standards for Jewish people.
For instance, the numerous specific laws enacted against Jews throughout the various countries of their exile limiting industries they could partake in et cetera. So those three Ds demonization, delegitimization and double standards are the three main weapons that anti-Semites have typically used when they’re making their case against Jews. Nowadays, when anti-Semites like the [inaudible 00:32:56] merely anti-Zionist, the line between acceptable critique of a democratic country like Israel and thinly veiled hatred of a people isn’t always as apparent. But all you have to do is ask if the proponents of a given position are making use of any of these three classic tools. Sharansky explained it like this, if you watch a 3D movie without 3D glasses, you only see a blurred picture, but when you put your 3D glasses on, everything becomes clear. And when you use the 3D test for antisemitism, it becomes clear and you can easily distinguish between legitimate criticism of Israel and antisemitism.
Let’s take BDS. The BDS movement is antisemitic, is not really debatable. Activists often use classic antisemitic tropes to discuss the quote unquote, “Collective Jew among the nation Israel”, as a proxy for how anti-Semites have historically talked about Jew. So, these include, for example, but they’re not limited to false accusations of Jewish conspiracies, blood libels, portraying Jews, not just as Israelis, but caricatures of typically religious Jews as satanic or demonic or evil. It involves denying history to claim that Jews are not indigenous to Israel or denying only the Jewish people their right to self-determination while at the same time, again, calling for the elimination of the world’s only Jewish state and ethnic cleansing of the region, or the genocidal extermination of the millions of Jewish people who live there. And so the BDS movement is antisemitic. It follows all three of the Ds, it demonizes, it delegitimizes, and it applies double standards to Israel. And that therefore is antisemitic
Isaac Crockett: Great way to look at it. And so if it demonizes, if it delegitimizes or if it applies a double standard, and so this boycott Israel, the BDS movement, and a lot of these, Ben, you called them trendy things, that’s exactly what they’re doing. Ben, could you give maybe a website of where people can find out more of information about the ACLJ and maybe more information about what you and Mark are doing right now, battling some of these lawsuits, Palestinians suing people in America over what we’re talked about here. Maybe you could give us some of that final information here in the last few moments we have on our program.
Benjamin Sisney: Absolutely. Again, thank you for having us both on and it’s an honor to be on your program, and it’s been exciting to see how your program has grown and your reach and the quality of your content and the contribution you make to our culture and the battle that we’re all fighting. It’s [inaudible 00:35:27] with you. Any of your listeners that would like to kind of go a little deeper on this and see what we are doing about the issues we’re talking about, what we’re doing about at the ACLJ, aclj.org and then backslash Israel, probably the easiest, aclj.org. And then there’s a part of the website devoted to news and updates on our cases and projects and the issues kind of in this general category. It’s quite a privilege to get to work at the ACLJ and the passion and commitment that Jay and Jordan Sekulow have and our leadership to this issue.
I’ll be candid with you. It’s one of the reasons I’m at the ACLJ and we’re going to keep fighting. Of course, we can only do that because of people that help us and support us. We’re going to keep fighting as long and as hard as we can to stand up for Israel and for what’s right. Here in America, and at the UN, we’re credited in Europe. We’re very busy on this and we plan to stay busy. As long as there’s something that needs to be fought, we’re going to fight it.
Isaac Crockett: Well, and I know… Keith, want to turn it over to you and get your final thoughts on this too, but I’m sure you would agree here at Stand in the Gap Media we appreciate the stand that the ACLJ has taken, the whole reason why it started and how it has grown and the work you all do in the courts and outside of the courts and in public arena. We thank you so much for being on with us and for the good work you’re doing, please keep up the good work. Keith, I’ll turn it over to you to have you close our program in prayer. But before that, maybe if you have any final comments to say about what we’ve talked about today,
Keith Wiebe: Thank you Isaac. It’s been a great privilege to have both of you Ben and Mark on the program. I so much appreciate the American Center for Law & Justice (ACLJ), the tremendous work you do and particularly in defense of the nation, Israel. I had the privilege to be in a conversation with a couple of members of the Israelis [inaudible 00:37:34] couple of years ago and they made it very clear that the big thing that distinguishes Israel and the big thing that all of their neighbors harp on is they refuse to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist. And that’s where the antisemitism comes from. One of tragic thing, the entire Old Testament is built around the premise that Israel, the Jewish people were God’s chosen people. It was through them that God chose to give covenants to Abraham, to David. It was through Israel that God chose the Jewish people, that God has chosen down the centuries to reveal his truth to all of us, his truth that is given to us in the Bible.
And to that degree, we are all in this struggle together in defense of Israel. Antisemitism is so utterly despicable no matter the form that it takes and it’s always there. The Squad today has their own particular version of it. And Mark, as you told us early in the program throughout different eras of time, it has always managed to take on different kind of forms. So our prayer is always that God will preserve the nation of Israel and that God preserves the Jewish people. And we’re grateful from our perspective that we believe the Messiah has come even through that same Jewish heritage that is so powerful to us. Heavenly father, thank you for the privilege of defending Israel. Thank you for the privilege today of having Ben and Mark with us, for ACLJ, for what they represent. And I pray that we may always be faithful to you and to your word. We pray in Jesus name, amen.
Isaac Crockett: Amen. Thank so much Keith and thank you Ben and Mark. Thank you for joining us and please stand in the gap for the Lord wherever you are today.
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