Examining Jewish Voice for Peace. No ten foot pole needed.

JVP sign " Jewish community: Israel Demeans Your Religion" from Zombie

Can a Blog Supposedly Dedicated to Free Speech — But Supports Muzzling Its Opponents — Be Taken Seriously?

Our friends at "Engaging Zion" have written an excellent expose on the tactics of the anti-Zionist group, Jewish Voice for Peace, chronicling the actions of the group to stiffle dissent in the community.

Jewish Voice for Peace has a blog, MuzzleWatch (which incidently does not permit comments) With characteristic hypocrisy and hubris, JVP claims that Muzzlewatch tracks "efforts to stifle open debate about US-Israeli foreign policy.” Stiffling open debate is JVP's raison d'être. After succeeding in shutting out Israeli LGBT voices in Seattle Stefanie Fox, Director of Grassroots Organizing Jewish Voice for Peace virtually chortled in a mass email "I will never forget the feeling of jumping up and down and shouting for joy outside Seattle City Hall."

Yep. Jewish Voice for peace is that kind of organization.

From Engaing Zion "Muzzle puzzle"

MuzzleWatch, a project of the Jewish Voice for Peace, states its mission as, “Tracking efforts to stifle open debate about US-Israeli foreign policy.” With such a slogan one would expect the editors to be First Amendment purists. Yet, JVP recently (and again) gave a hollow ring to their stated values. Here is what happened.

Last month, JVP’s Seattle chapter participated in a successful effort to pressure the Seattle LGBT Commission, a sub-committee of the Seattle City Council, to cancel a planned program at Seattle City Hall that would have hosted a visiting delegation of Israeli LGBT activists. Here is the headline on the JVP website:



In part, the letter stated:

“LGBTQ Palestinians and Jews and their allies will deliver a thank you letter signed by 3461 people to the Seattle LGBTQ Commission in appreciation for the brave decision they made to cancel a meeting with a one-sided, government-sponsored propaganda tour of LGBT Israelis. Local activists took issue with the rightwing sponsorship and cooptation of LGBTQ issues to divert attention from Israel’s abuses of human rights and violations of international law.” (emphasis added)

The letter’s reductionist pigeon-holing language worked: Israeli LGBT civil rights activists were effectively muzzled in Seattle’s most public space, and JVP was quite proud of this achievement. (For further reading on what anti-Israel activists call “pinkwashing,” see Scott Piro’s critique of this accusation in his ‘Pinkwashing’ Deconstructed at the HuffPost Gay Voices site.)

Fortunately, the story didn’t end there. After the Greater Seattle Business Association, the largest LGBT chamber of commerce in the US, issued a statement expressing its “outrage” over the decision to “silence LGBT voices by cancelling the City Hall event with a delegation of Israeli LGBT civil rights leaders”, the Seattle LGBT Commission (to its belated credit) issued an apology that included this sharp rebuff to the organizers of the muzzling campaign:

“We also have heard from many who celebrate the cancellation of this event. We flatly reject the suggestion that there could be any joy or celebration in this outcome.”


Disrupting dissent is a time honored tradition at Jewish voice for Peace. Do read it all, here.

Jon at Divest this! sums up JVP nicely:

"You see, Jewish Voice for Peace (or JVP - an organization we have seen before) is committed first and foremost to being the Jewish face of the BDS movement. The trouble is, the Jewish Community (notably the Jewish Federations), in addition to running the Heroes campaign, have unanimously decided that BDS advocates are one of the few groups of people who have placed themselves outside of the “big tent.”

Now to most of us, the obvious answer is for JVP to continue to feel free to do what it wants (including advocating for BDS, for a cutoff of US aid to Israel, for interrupting Israelis at speaking events, and other things the wider community finds noxious) with an understand that in doing so they represent themselves and not the Jewish community as a whole. Ah, but you see JVP desperately wants to claim they represent more than a small minority. And thus they endlessly rail against Jewish organizations which they claim conspire to exclude them."

Hypocrisy at Muzzlewatch: AIPAC, PennBDS, and Mitchell Plitnick

Over at MuzzleWatch, Mitchell Plitnick is upset that AIPAC has taken back his press credentials, and will not give him media access at their Annual Policy Conference.

Now, AIPAC does not consult me about these things, so I don't know why his press credentials were either granted or revoked.  However, I would like to note that JVP, which produces MuzzleWatch, and of which Plitnick is a former co-director, did not protest or comment when, a month ago, the National BDS Conference at the University of Pennsylvania*, which JVP officially endorsed, revoked the press credentials of one local Jewish newspaper, the Jewish Exponent, and refused press access outright to the Philadelphia Jewish Voice.

MuzzleWatch's newfound concern about censorship rings hollow. They are happy to complain when AIPAC withholds press credentials, but the barring of the local Jewish press from a major anti-Israel conference (which JVP endorsed, did I mention that?) rates not even a yawn.

It's convenient to be the eternal victim over at MuzzleWatch, proudly wearing tape over your mouth for all to see. It's less convenient to hold all conferences to one standard, especially when one conference is being run by a group you want to please, and another by a group you despise. But that's the only way to avoid being rightly identified as a whiner and a hypocrite.

(I also hate to point this out, but AIPAC has had some trouble with JVP activists, which Plitnick certainly is, in the past. To the best of my knowledge, the Philadelphia Jewish Voice has no record of disrupting BDS conferences.)


*Please note an edit--this was formerly 'Pennsylvania State'. Thanks to a kind reader, the error has been corrected. I apologize profusely to Pennsylvania State University, and assure them that I did not mean any insult to Penn State students by suggesting that they would host an anti-Semitic conference like this on their fine campus.

Ishmael Khaldi Muzzled : JVP silent

Ishmael Khaldi in San Francisco 2008 (photo taken by Dan Kliman , z'l)

Many people in the Bay area have fond memories of Ishmael Khaldi, an Israeli Bedouin who rose through the ranks of Israel's foreign service to become the vice consul general of Israel in San Francisco. We remember his courageous outreach to Muslim students at UC Berkeley. We remember his article in the San Francisco Chronicle where he exhorted the organizers of Israel Apartheid Week,

"You are part of the problem, not part of the solution: If you are really idealistic and committed to a better world, stop with the false rhetoric. We need moderate people to come together in good faith to help find the path to relieve the human suffering on both sides of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Vilification and false labeling is a blind alley that is unjust and takes us nowhere."
Ishmael has been touring campuses in recent months and reports "The situation I encountered on many of the campuses in North America and Canada was horrifying.", describing a shocking climate of intolerance and hatred on American and Canadian campuses.

The situation deteriorated further when Khaldi came to Edinburgh University . Described as a scene “reminiscent of tyrants silencing their opposition,” security officers had to be brought in to contain the situation and the event was eventually canceled.

“This isn’t free speech; it is hatred, it is vandalism,” Khaldi told The Jerusalem Post . “These activists abuse the values of freedom and democracy of the UK, they put the seeds of hatred in Europe and they betray the cause of moderate Palestinians who, despite everything, are ready to do everything to reach reconciliation and peace with Israel, toward establishing an independent Palestinian state.”

And once again, the "Proud to be ashamed to be Jewish crowd" Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), who claim to "track efforts to stifle open debate about US-Israeli foreign policy" on their blog "Muzzlewatch", were totally silent. But why would we expect any different? The stiffling of free speech and open debate that they disagree with is one of their organizational tactics.

Khaldi, one of 11 children, began life as shepherd. He went on to serve in the Israeli border police, and earned a master's degree in political science from Tel Aviv University. His is a voice worth listening to, when he reminds the disruptors and demonizers

"You are betraying the moderate Muslims and Jews who are working to achieve peace: Your radicalism is undermining the forces for peace in Israel and in the Palestinian territories. We are working hard to move toward a peace agreement that recognizes the legitimate rights of both Israel and the Palestinian people, and you are tearing down by falsely vilifying one side."