By Jay Bernstein
For American Jewry, the Hamas terrorist attack of Oct. 7 has been a rude awakening. Most obvious is the realization that antisemitism is not a fringe phenomenon confined to right-wing extremists, but also prevalent in academia and in so-called “progressive” circles.
Less obvious, but just as troubling, is the willingness of respectable groups and organizations right here in Maryland to associate with — and actually support — radical anti-Israeli elements whose mission is the demonization and delegitimization of Israel and the Zionist movement.
First, we have the Maryland Democratic Party and its youth affiliate, Baltimore County Young Democrats. On Feb. 19, BCYD joined a who’s who of local extremists in Annapolis for an event billed as “MD Youth Rally for a Free Palestine.”
BCYD‘s partners included Students for Justice in Palestine, whose national leadership and campus chapters have explicitly endorsed the Oct. 7 massacre; Maryland 2 Palestine, a radically anti-Zionist organization whose website proclaims that Israel is “a racist, settler-colonial entity on indigenous Palestinian land”; and the Party for Socialism and Liberation, which characterized the Oct. 7 pogrom as “a morally and legally legitimate response to occupation.”
Despite multiple requests to do so, the Maryland Democratic Party has not publicly denounced or criticized the decision of its youth affiliate to align with groups whose core ideology is the elimination of the Jewish State.
Next, we have the Maryland office of the NAACP. On Feb. 20, an NAACP representative testified in opposition to legislation pending before the Maryland House of Delegates to remove the Council on American-Islamic Relations from the Maryland’s Commission on Hate Crime Response and Prevention, describing it as a smear campaign designed to quash Palestinian voices and undermine democratic values.
In so doing, the NAACP allied itself with an organization whose Maryland director considers Israel to be “an inconvenient fact” engaged in “genocidal war crimes” and Zionism to be “a racist, deadly and violent ideology,” and whose national director declared he was “happy to see” the Oct. 7 attack. Removing spreaders of hate from a commission whose very purpose is to combat hate should be as non-controversial as removing arsonists from the fire department, particularly for a venerable organization dedicated to civil rights and to civil discourse.
Finally, we have The Fund for Change and the Baltimore Community Foundation. In addition to all of the good work they perform, these foundations also provide financial support to The Real News Network (TRNN), an online, Baltimore-based “news” provider that regularly spreads lies and slanders about the State of Israel. The long-standing, anti-Israel bias of TRNN has gone into overdrive since Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7, which the network portrays as the legitimate resistance of heroic freedom fighters against oppressive, genocidal colonizers whose very existence is immoral and illegitimate.
Readers of TRNN are informed that Israel is a “long-running regime of occupation, apartheid, and extermination that dates back to before the 1948 Nakba [the Arabic word for catastrophe],” and that reports of atrocities by “so-called Hamas terrorists” are “all the most horrific, lurid propaganda, which is bogus.” Requests that these foundations end all funding to, and publicly disassociate themselves from, TRNN have gone unanswered.
You are the company you keep, and the Maryland Democratic Party, the NAACP, The Fund for Change and the Baltimore Community Foundation are all keeping very bad company. To rally with, defend or fund extremist Israel haters — as distinguished from groups whose criticism of Israeli policies is measured and non-vitriolic — is to provide haters with a seal of approval, which is particularly outrageous when it comes from civic organizations that purport to work on behalf of the public welfare and to better our society.
A simple message needs be sent by our community to any political party, civil rights organization or community foundation which aligns with those whose true agenda is not a ceasefire or two-state solution but rather the elimination of the only Jewish State from the face of the earth: disassociate from them or we will disassociate from you.
An attorney and activist based in Northwest Baltimore, Jay Bernstein is chairman of the Israel Committee for Ner Tamid Greenspring Valley Synagogue.
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