PHILADELPHIA — An op-ed attacking AIPAC, authored by two Jews who oppose the existence of Israel as a Jewish state, would be unremarkable. Two people who hate Israel naturally also deeply despise AIPAC. Nothing surprising in that.
But an op-ed column attacking AIPAC by prominent figures in two mainstream American Jewish organizations—well, that’s something else entirely.
And that may explain what motivated the editors of a major daily newspaper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, to publish a harsh attack on AIPAC on April 24—and to hide the fact that its co-authors are avowed anti-Zionists.
The op-ed demanded that candidates for public office reveal whether they have received contributions from any political action committee linked to AIPAC. It didn’t include any call for candidates to disclose contributions from anti-Israel groups. That’s a curious double standard, to say the very least.
The key to the op-ed’s credibility—or lack thereof—was its description of the co-authors.
Christie Balka was identified as “a member of the Tikkun Olam Chavurah in Northwest Philadelphia.” The Hebrew name no doubt left the average Philadelphia Inquirer reader with the impression that it is a mainstream Jewish institution.
The byline did not explain what the “Tikkun Olam Chavurah” stands for. One has to go to its website to find out. There, the group defines itself as “an anti-zionist (sic), queer-led community,” meaning that it is part of the tiny fringe in the Jewish community that opposes the existence of Israel.
Balka’s co-author was a local Reconstructionist rabbi, Mordechai Liebling. According to the website of the anti-Zionist organization “Jewish Voice for Peace,” he is a member of its “rabbinic cabinet.”
But Liebling’s byline on the op-ed didn’t mention that. There, he was identified as an ex-professor and “a former member of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations.” That lent credibility to the piece by linking Liebling to the mainstream American Jewish community’s major leadership group.
But is that an accurate description? Anybody familiar with the Conference of Presidents knows that it’s a coalition of Jewish organizations, not individuals. (The I.D. line also misstated the Conference’s name, but that’s the least of the problems here.)
Forty years ago, Liebling was hired as executive director of the Jewish Reconstructionist Foundation, a small Jewish organization that happened to be one of the 50-plus organizations in the Conference of Presidents. That position didn’t make him a “member.” It didn’t make him a major Jewish leader. And it doesn’t change the fact that today, he is affiliated with an explicitly anti-Zionist organization. What’s more, no Reconstructionist movement affiliate is a current member of the Conference of Presidents.
What other anti-Israel organizations is Liebling involved with?
The Prayers for Peace Alliance prominently features Liebling on its website. The hate group IfNotNow and CAIR are both “sponsors” of the Prayers for Peace Alliance. The Anti-Defamation League examines the leadership role that IfNotNow has played in anti-Israel protests in its article “Who are the Primary Groups Behind the U.S. Anti-Israel Rallies?” on the ADL website.
On the Prayers for Peace Alliance website itself are accusations of “Israeli military’s campaign of ethnic cleansing” and that “Zionism has … produced a heavily militarized society in which a permanent state of occupation ultimately endangers everyone in the region.”
In 2009, Liebling was involved in the Jewish Fast for Gaza group, an entity that said their events were created “to call for a lifting of the blockade that prevents the entry of civilian goods and services into Gaza.” It was advocacy like this that led directly to the tragic easing of the blockade, allowing Hamas to rearm and expand its terror tunnel network. And we all know what that led to.
Lastly, as mentioned above, Liebling is on the Jewish Voice for Peace’s Rabbinical Council. The ADL has described JVP as a “radical anti-Zionist” and an “anti-Israel activist group” in multiple publications. JVP does not support a two-state scenario, and it is not advocating peace talks and negotiations. JVP calls for an end to the State of Israel.
It’s easy to see just how radical JVP really is with even a very quick review of their website, where they call for the removal of Jews from Israel. The section reads: “We imagine Arab, Middle Eastern and Southwest Asian/North African Jews having ethical and safe access to return to their original homelands.”
Balka and Liebling may hate AIPAC, but their real beef is with Israel itself. The organizations with which they identify, Tikkun Olam Chavurah and Jewish Voice for Peace, and the others, oppose the very existence of the Jewish state.
The co-authors and the editors of the Inquirer should have been upfront about that.
Moshe Phillips is national chairman of Americans For A Safe Israel, AFSI (www.AFSI.org), a leading pro-Israel advocacy and education organization.
Bloom, Jack Brian. Out of Step: Life-story of a Politician : Politics and Religion in a World at War. South Africa: Jack Bloom, 2005, p.111, pp.332-333
https://books.google.com/books?id=Kr2gAAAAMAAJ&q=%22arab-nazi%22
…Who was actually ethnically cleansed in the Middle East and threatened with genocide by people allied with the Nazis? In 1940, there were about 1 million Jews in the Arab-ruled countries and in Iran. Today, there are only about 25,000 Jews in these countries.
The Arab-Nazi link is well-established, extending well beyond the Mufti of Jerusalem and Adolf Hitler. Most Arabs aligned themselves with the Nazis, who inspire political movements such as the Ba’ath parties of Syria and Iraq . Sami al – Joundi , one of the founders of the ruling Syrian Ba’ath Party, recalled:
“We were racists. We admired the Nazis . We were immersed in reading Nazi literature and books”.
Gamal Abdul Nasser was a member of Young Egypt, a party that imitated the Nazis with its own version of storm troopers, torch processions and slogans.
Former Nazis served in Nasser’s army and secret police, and his personal bodyguard was SS General Oskar Dirlewanger.
Nasser said on 1 May 1964:” During the Second World War, our sympathies were with the Germans … the lie[sic] of the six million murdered Jews is not taken seriously by anybody.”
[…]
Even today, Hitler’s Mein Kampf ranks high on the best-seller list amongst Palestinian Arabs. The preface to the Arabic edition claims that his “theories of nationalism, dictatorship and race… are advancing especially within our Arabic states”.
When Palestinian police first greeted Yasser Arafat in the self-rule areas, they offered the infamous Nazi salute.
In April this year, a columnist in the Egyptian government daily Al-Akbar defiantly repeated his “thanks to Hi_tler, of blessed[sic] memory[sic], who on behalf of the Palestinians, revenged in advanced against the most vile criminals on the face of the earth. Although we do have a complaint attains him for his revenge[sic] on them was not enough”.
If you had any doubts about the true motivations and malicious agenda behind those promoting the “genocide” narrative, just look at how quickly the same biased and openly anti-Israel Wikipedia editors rushed to create a page framing any challenge to that claim as “denial.” The goal is not honest debate or historical accuracy — it is to delegitimize Israel, silence dissent, and distort the meaning of genocide itself. In many ways, this has become a sophisticated modern form of Holocaust distortion and even indirect Holocaust denial: by trivializing and weaponizing the term “genocide” against the Jewish state, they erode the historical uniqueness and documented reality of the Holocaust while turning its language against its survivors and descendants.