On June 13, 2005, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution apologizing for its failure to enact an anti-lynching law in years past, and on June 21, a Mississippi jury found a former Klansman guilty of manslaughter in the killings of three civil rights workers in 1964. These two redemptive milestones combined to form a welcome punctuation mark in history, symbolizing the burial of the last remnants of the shameful history of racist terrorist murder in the U.S.
Yet it almost seems a Newtonian law of human nature that when a form of evil is pounded into submission and left for dead, it simply pops up somewhere else, as if in a tragic game of “Whack-a-Mole.” Today it is the radical Left that actively supports lynching, and innocent Israeli civilians are the victims.
The new lynch mob’s “capital,” supplanting the Mississippi of old, appears to be northern California, a place that at one time had a reputation for tolerance. When the charred, twisted wreckage of Jerusalem Bus 19 was displayed throughout the U.S. in 2005, it was only in northern California that the exhibit ran into callous opposition from local government, followed by a counter-demonstration in support of murdering Jewish civilians on buses.
Among the cities on the tour, only Berkeley imposed a series of unreasonable delays and obstacles; when the Jerusalem Bus 19 anti-terror rally was finally allowed to proceed, thanks to the persistence of rally organizer Sanne DeWitt, the gathering was disrupted by violent pro-terror thugs who screamed, “Go back to Germany” Sanne DeWitt is a survivor of Dachau.
Former secretary of state Madeleine Albright and former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been prevented from speaking in Berkeley, where the police admit they cannot guarantee their safety. The same mentality was dramatically on display at San Francisco State University, where pro-Israel students and elderly Holocaust survivors trying to hold a rally were stopped by violent fascists screaming “[expletive] the Jews,” “Jews, go back to Russia,” “Too bad Hitler didn’t finish the job,” and “Get out or we’ll kill you.”
Today’s skinheads of the Left are not confined to the streets; they also enjoy an active media presence. One such journalistic propagandist is Alison Weir of Sausalito, a freelance reporter and executive director of the anti-Israel organization If Americans Knew. Shortly after the terrorist bombing of a Tel Aviv nightclub in 2005 that killed five Israelis and wounded more than 50, Weir sent out an e-mail press release expressing support for the massacre. (Even Palestinian leader/veteran terrorist Mahmoud Abbas, who alternately condemns and praises terrorism, condemned this particular attack, which occurred during a “truce.”)
It was not the first time Weir gave a big thumbs-up to a mass slaughter of innocent Jews. As Lee Kaplan reported in an article for FrontPageMag.com., Weir “once called a massacre of 60 yeshiva students in Hebron in 1929 by Arabs an ‘Arab uprising’ against Jewish oppression – even before Israel existed.”
Despite this disturbing record of hate-inspired falsehoods, the “progressive” Project Censored, founded in 1976 as a project of faculty and students of northern California’s Sonoma College, chose to feature an article by Weir – her distorted rewriting of Israel’s history, with the Jews cast as heartless villains throughout – in its anthology Censored 2005, as one of “the undercovered stories of 2004.”
To be included in this popular anthology is a rare honor. Project Censored has been lavishly praised by prominent mainstream progressives including Molly Ivins and Walter Cronkite, and by major book reviewers – Library Journal has hailed the annual volume as “a terrific resource” and the Los Angeles Times has called it “required reading for broadcasters, journalists, and well-informed citizens.”