For more information: denevel@gmail.com
Jews Against Islamophobia (JAI), a coalition of three Jewish organizations, condemns the hate-mongering ads, sponsored by the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), that will begin appearing in New York City subway stations the last week of September. “During this period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, which, for many Jews, is a time of reflection and introspection, we must recommit ourselves to standing up against these ads and all forms of Islamophobia,” pledged JAI member Marjorie Dove Kent, executive director of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ), one of JAI’s member groups.
The ad states: “In Any War Between the Civilized Man and the Savage, Support the Civilized Man.” Below that statement, it reads: “Support Israel, Defeat Jihad.” “This message denigrates Muslims, Palestinians, and other Arabs,” said JAI member Elly Bulkin. “Its use of the term ‘savages’ has resonance for all communities of color in this country that have faced a long history of racism and discrimination against them.”
The American Freedom Defense Initiative ad is part of a nationwide campaign to demonize Muslim and Arab Americans. The AFDI also funded an identical ad that ran this summer on San Francisco municipal buses, as well as an advertisement vilifying Islam that it placed on Metro-North train platforms in August. In both cases, a wide range of interfaith and civil rights groups came together to denounce the ads and to stand up for unity and solidarity. The AFDI’s Pamela Geller is co-founder of Stop the Islamization of America, identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group.
This anti-Muslim ad campaign takes place in the context of a post-9/11 atmosphere of fear, hate, and bigotry in the United States that targets Muslims, Arabs, Middle Easterners, Sikhs and other South Asians. The ads also come at a time of recent violent attacks and acts of harassment in New York City and across the country: the burning to the ground of a mosque in Missouri; the firing of an air rifle at the Muslim Education Center in Illinois while 500 people were praying; the throwing of a homemade bomb at a Muslim school in Illinois and a Muslim home in Florida; worshipers harassed by teenagers at a California mosque; and the vandalism and desecration of mosques, including recently on Staten Island. The hatred of Muslims expressed in these acts, along with anti-Sikh sentiment, created an atmosphere of hate, suspicion, and bigotry that contributed to the August attack by a white supremacist who killed six Sikhs at their gurudwara in suburban Milwaukee.
While the blatant Islamophobia in the ads is shocking, clearly anti-Muslim attitudes are also displayed by New York City Police Department (NYPD) policies, including police surveillance of Muslims that has flagrantly violated the community’s civil and human rights. These policies contribute to the atmosphere of Islamophobia in which people like Geller thrive. An NYPD intelligence official recently conceded that the NYPD widespread surveillance of the Muslim American community and infiltration of mosques had not uncovered a single criminal lead. As civil rights lawyer Alan Levine, also a member of JAI, recently wrote in the National Law Journal: “The Muslim community should not have to wait a day longer for city officials to abandon a practice that so flagrantly affronts principles of equal justice and religious freedom.”
People across New York City are joining the Muslim community to oppose these ads and to ensure that the rights of all our communities are fully protected and that no group is subjected to any form of harassment or racism. Jews Against Islamophobia pledges to be part of that movement for justice. As JAI member Rebecca Vilkomerson, executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace, noted, “Knowing too well from our history how harmful bigotry and vilification of any religious or ethnic group can be, we feel especially obligated to speak out against Islamophobia. We urge the rest of the Jewish community, and all communities, to join us.”
Jews Against Islamophobia (JAI) is a coalition of three groups: Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), and Jews Say No! (JSN!). http://www.
thank you and well done for positive stand and being fair/just
Thank you from à French muesli. Your attitude honors your TRUE traditions. There are only just people and the others. Other factors are only letterature.
Farid (Paris, France)
Sorry a French muslim not muesli of course (even iPhones do not like us!)
Thank you for this move for peace and tolerance. Hope it will be followed by our fellow citizens here in France.
Hi,
i would like to thank you my brothers for your article and your action. In France, we heard about you, and we are happy to see that like here, there are people that fight against racism, anti-semitism and islamophobia.
Merci à vous. Ce serait bien de passer le message au CRIF
It is a really great initiative. Thank god there are still people promoting justice, dignity, equal treatment, nomatter what.
This is the only way toward a well living togheter. And we will reach this goal through our common and universal values ( justice, freedom, dignity, respect…).
Keep doing your great job. Thank you .
Je tiens à vous remercier, pour votre soutien et votre courage, contre l’islamophobie et l’anti-semitisme.
I want to thank you for your support and courage against Islamophobia and anti-semitism.
Thank you for your bravery and wisdom. Peace and blessings.
It means so much to us…
Thank you fellow brothers!
I am also a Jew against Islamophobia, living in Paris. My family is from Tunisia and Algeria, and I often feel more Arab than Jewish, especially when a lot of Jews are letting themselves be instrumentalized by hateful, violent campaigns against Muslims. Us Arab Jews have been forced to forget our Arab cultures, but I know my ancestors spoke Judeo-Arab, not Hebrew or Yiddish, and their neighbours were Muslims, they were Arabs and Berbers, not White European Christians. Our Jewish communities were established in North Africa thousands of years ago. And then the French colonizers tried to give some communities privilege over others, and used “divide and conquer” strategies. They made the Arab Jews that lived in Algeria French citizens, they incorporated them into the nation and they made them dress like French people, speak like French people, give French names to their kids. They pretended we would be spared, they wouldn’t inflict the colonial violence and the racism to us if we accepted to . So yes, we were privileged, we were the good ones, that kept quiet and thanked the oppressor and sided with him. But however much privilege they gave us to try to de-solidarize us from the rest of Algerians and Tunisians and fragment our societies into ethnico-religious categories, us Arab Jews are still communities that immigrated from countries that were colonized by France, and we still suffered racism and discrimination. So we should all be opposed to racism, islamophobia, colonialism and zionism which is inherently a racist, colonial, orientalist project that was born in the minds of white Europeans, whether Jewish or Christian, religious or secularized. Israel-Palestine is not about religion, it is about geopolitics, and I don’t understand how it would be in the interest of Arab Jews (some call us “sephardic”, or “mizrakhi”) to side with Zionism when really we are closer, historically and culturally, to Arabness. And our cultures are getting stolen, our memories are getting stolen, we are being forced to get rid of our Arabness. Being an “Arab Jew” is not even a thinkable identity anymore, people are supposed to be one or the other, we’ve become an oxymoron. And we have been forced to shed our Arabness and try to assimilate ourselves into the white Western nations, to side with the colonizers, to adapt to the Zionist aspirations of the Ashkenazi Jewish people, and to become racists against other Arabs, our brothers. I want to give an alternative slogan to the one that is appearing in the NYC buses: IN ANY WAR BETWEEN THE OPPRESSED AND THE OPPRESSOR, SUPPORT THE OPPRESSED. IN ANY WAR BETWEEN THE COLONIZED AND THE COLONIZER, SUPPORT THE COLONIZED. SUPPORT PALESTINE, DEFEAT ZIONISM.
Wow – I am in shock that you have used the term “Arab Jew”. Where I live in Brooklyn – it has turned into a predominately Syrian/Lebanese/Moroccon/Egyptian Jewish neighborhood… but not 1 single person would EVER say they are Arab. Although I have pushed neighbors saying “you speak Arabic, your family is from the the middle east therefore you are an Arab – they look at me in horror. I have been asked “what do you call a palestinian christian” to which the obvious answer is “an Arab christian”.
Pamela Geller is of Russian Jew descent – which is even more disgusting being welcomed into the country because of your “religious persecution” yet turning around and dehumanizing others based on their religion is just disgusting. Real Jewish people that were faced with persecution do not behave like that.
Quick story – as a teenager I lived with a Jewish woman (of russian descent) who did not practice her religion at all. She was like a foster mom (but she took me in on her own)… anyway … i moved to ny, we lost touch then i found her and we reconnected (after nearly 20 years)… she was so nice & kind – until she read on my facebook that I was Muslim – she stopped all contact. I sent her a nice Rosh Hashana message and her only response to me was “why muslim”. I cried when I read the message… it was heartbreaking to know that she isn’t judging me on what a wonderful woman I have become and how beautiful my children are … rather she is judging me based on my religion – and never contacted me again.
There are good & bad in this world – bad people of all faiths hide behind their “supposed” faith in order to deflect what themselves are doing (committing the gravest sins)…A person following Christianity would not burn Qurans, A person following Judaism would not post anti-Muslim adds and a real Muslim would not murder innocent people – PERIOD.
May those who practice have a peaceful Yom Kippur. Peace & Blessings, A MUSLIM AMERICAN in Brooklyn!
To Brooklynmommyofthree: I am sorry about this unjust and hurtful rejection. I am a Jew of East European descent-third generation immigrant. I appreciate the rich culture and diversity that Muslims and others bring to this country and the world. I oppose all forms of bigotry-racism and Islamophobia. It was so cruel and ignorant for your ex-friend to reject you because you are a Muslim.
Serving in the Peace Corps in southern Tunisia (Gafsa) in the mid 60s, I saw the pressures grow on the Jewish population until most, but not all of them left.
Yet the interactions that I saw between Muslim and Jew were almost always cordial and friendly. When I went back to Tunisia this Spring, some of my former students told me that they still missed the daughter of Gafsa’s Rabbi, who had moved to Israel and been lost from touch over 40 years ago.
I remember how shocked and angry I was when I learned how the French had made Algerian Jews into citizens in an effort to separate them from Algerian Muslims. I hate that governments and demagogs can succeed in dividing peoples from each other, but they can, unless we resist with all our hearts.
I am deeply moved by the words of Arab Jew Against Islamophobia. Please do not stop speaking out.
Bonjour,
Je tiens sincèrement à vous remercier de cette action qui vous honorent et me permet de croire et d’espérer en l’être humain.
C’est dans ces moments difficiles, que des gens courageux et honnêtes, font front ensemble, face à l’injustice.
Bon courage à vous.
d’une femme muslim de France
Hello,
I want to sincerely thank you for the honor you action and allows me to hope and believe in the human being.
It is in these difficult times, as brave and honest, are banding together in the face of injustice.
Good luck to you.
ps: I hope that I have translated my text
From France, thanks for your support, Love u all. Peace
thank you. Merci à vous pour cette initiative et surtout pour votre courage, vos ancêtre on vécu ce que nous vivons aujourd’hui en France…
Hello ,
thanks for your support!! peace on you!!!
a french writer!!
Thanks a million, sisters & brothers in justice. I’m thinking of you, and now my heart is soothed knowing that there are people with pure heart beyond the Atlantic …
Hi, your initiative is very welcome, thank you.
Thank you for what you are doing !
We need more people like you.
Just to say : MERCI
May God bless all people who desire to live with others in peace,
Ib. from Paris
Je tiens à vous remercier, pour votre soutien et votre courage, contre l’islamophobie et l’anti-semitisme.
Thank you for your bravery and wisdom
Merci !
thanks for your actions
God bless all of us.
Hi,
Juste : Thank youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu ! ^^
From Paris !
This movement by JAI is heart-rendering… Many times due to the pervasive overt and covert islamophobia , Muslims feel desperation …. And isolated , but when we hear and read about people like you, it gives us solace. Continue the great work…
Quran: chapter 2: 62. Those who believe ( in the Quran) , and those who follow the Jewish scriptures and the Christians and the Sabians , and who believe in God and Last day and work righteousness, shall have their reward with their Lord: on them there shall be no fer nr shall they grieve.
Be blessed !!!!
Thanks a lot !
You save the honnor of Banu Isra’il !
May peace be with you on the day of reckonning for the good you spread on Earth !
May the Almighty forgive you and may He grant you access to Paradise cause you have remembered how He saved you from Pharaon and because, when you see a bad thing, you try to stop it !
This is a sign of rightousness !
thank you for this – insightful information and views, and a very powerful stance against islamophobia.
Thank you a lot from France !!
God bless you.
Thank you for showing truth.
I really respect people like you, people who stays in the path of justice.
Again, Thank you from France.
Salam / Shalom / Bonjour / Hello
Bravo pour le courage de prendre à contre pied ce qui a l’air d’être la pensée dominante du moment : L’islamophobie.
Heureusement que dans le passé, des HOMMES LIBRES se sont opposés contre ce qui avait l’air d’être alors la pensée dominante : Le nazisme.
Il parait qu’on apprend de ses erreurs. Il faut croire que certains apprenent moins vite que d’autres …
Merci BEAUCOUP.
Peace / Paix
Shalom
Salam aleikoum
Hello
Thank you very much for doing this, we know that it’s hard to be against thoses big powers but you share a message of peace for everybody thank you very much <3
Merci beaucoup pour tout ce que vous faites !
Vous transmettez un message de paix à toutes ces personnes ignorantes …
<3
I’m muslim and I wanted to thank you.
Thank you for building a new world of love and tolerance between human beings.
Ps: I love you too.
Que Dieu bénisse toutes les personnes qui désirent vivre dans la paix Merci pour ce que vous faites!
Nous avons besoin de personne qui défends cette injustice contre la discrimination de islam est ces mensonge merci
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I’m from paris france an i want thanks your movement against islamophobie . I would like that all jews, christian, budhist.. around the world fight islamophobia in france.
shalom, salut, salam
Bravo. Christophe, athée, de France
Congratulation, Christopher, without religion, from France.
May the Peace of God be upon you!
I really would like to thank you for your support!
They all want to make us become the biggest enemies, but by your actions, it shows us that it’s not true! As I became muslim, and then my father chose to besome jewesh, it often brings problems in our house, because he think that we cannot live together. Thanks to you, I’m gonna prouve to him that jeweshes and muslims are not ennemies! but we all follow the same God! the Unique!
barak’Allahou fikoum
Salam Shalom Salut
Tank you so much for your sensibility. I’m a French muslim and i really appreciate !
God bless you!
Soufiane