For example, NIF recipient Adalah’s admitted mission is to erase Israel’s Jewish identity and get Israelis prosecuted for war crimes in foreign capitals. On its website, Adalah brags of its robust role in the now-retracted Goldstone Report that accused Israel of war crimes in Gaza. B’Tselem provides cameras to agitators involved in orchestrated confrontations with Israeli soldiers, even as it tolerates repeated child endangerment by Palestinian provocateurs in the process. Another NIF recipient, an online publication known as +972, has published a Photoshopped image graphically depicting Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders in their underwear holding their crotches while carrying rifles, as well as a cartoon depicting former Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barack raping and eating the limbs of Barack Obama in outer space.
On its website main page, Partners for a Progressive Israel, prominently encourages the boycott of such Israeli products as Ahava and Sodastream. If the Sodastream facility were being run by Mormons from Utah, Polish nuns from Warsaw, or Mennonites from Indiana, it would be up for a Nobel Prize. Moreover, when confronted and called on it, no one can reliably cite the international law Sodastream is allegedly violating with its factory known to treat all equally.
Now, several Jewish and Zionist organizations are vociferously demanding that the NIF, B’Tselem, and Partners for a Progressive Israel all be excluded from marching in the upcoming annual Celebrate Israel Parade. The NIF has participated in prior years. These grass-roots groups and individuals–about a dozen main ones– include Rabbi Elie Abadie of the architectonic Edmond de Safra Congregation in Manhattan, the Zionist Organization of America, Americans for a Safe Israel, and the campaign’s central mover, JCC Watch, headed up by Richard Allen, a private individual.
The anti-NIF protestors have been dismissed as a “fringe.” New York’s Jewish Week ran an NIF op-ed defaming the protestors as a “tiny extremist group.” Ardent Israel supporter Alan Dershowitz decried the exclusion effort. The Anti-Defamation League in a statement and New York’s Jewish Week in an editorial, denounced JCC Watch for a protest flyer featuring a photo of the 1933 iconic “April First” Nazi boycott of Jews in Germany.
In his flyer, Allen of JCC Watch was referencing that the organized international Arab boycott against Jews began on April 1, 1933, after the Mufti of Jerusalem imported Hitler’s April First boycott into the Arab and Islamic world. Few remember that the April First Nazi boycott was launched by Hitler after a million-man, anti-Nazi protest in Madison Square Garden and elsewhere a few days earlier on March 27, 1933. Even fewer recall that the March 27 rally was preceded earlier that month by a scraggly, rag-tag assemblage of Jewish War Veterans, who marched in New York City calling for a pre-emptive boycott of Nazi Germany. As they marched, those JWV were vociferously denounced, disowned and marginalized by the leaders of organized Jewry who labeled them as “nobodies” and “extremists,” saying they “speak for no one.” History immutably records that the JWV actually spoke for many — and long before others were willing to speak at all.
JCC Watch and its anti-NIF coalition might be a so-called “fringe,” with an unpolished website, inelegant rhetoric and few dollar resources. But its message has struck a chord. Perhaps one hundred chords. Perhaps wailed by one hundred shofars on a street corner in Manhattan. Kadish of AFSI says she has never blown a shofar before in her life — but on April 29, she intends to be in front of the UJA offices to sound off. Allen of JCC Watch says he has been assured, “Shofars will come from far and wide as we chant ‘Hear O’ Israel.'”