[P2P-F] purported antisemitism of ows

Fri Nov 25 16:19:06 CET 2011

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/22/nyregion/occupy-wall-street-criticized-for-flashes-of-anti-semitism.html

The Occupy Wall
Street<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/o/occupy_wall_street/index.html?inline=nyt-org>protests,
now in their second month, have increasingly been criticized by a
variety of groups, most of them politically conservative, for flashes of
anti-Semitism. Among those calling attention to the issue have been the
Republican National Committee, Rush Limbaugh and the columnist William
Kristol.

But the protests have also, on occasion, had a distinctly Jewish flavor:
The encampment has coincided with the busy Jewish holiday season and has
witnessed, in its midst or on its edges, a crowded Kol Nidre service on Yom
Kippur, festive dancing with a scroll on Simhat Torah on Thursday night,
and the sukkah.

The protesters, clustered together in a kind of ad hoc Athenian democracy
in the canyons of Lower Manhattan, firmly deny that their demonstrations
against corporate greed and the political power of banks exhibit antagonism
that singles out Jews.

“You’re going to get a few wackos,” said Aaron Moses Miller, 25, a slender,
unemployed man from Ridgewood, Queens, who had been in the park for 16
days. “You can’t help it in a population of this size.”

Mr. Miller, who is Jewish, said that he had not seen the man holding the
anti-Semitic signs, but said: “If I had seen him, I would have said
something to him. My name is Aaron Moses Miller.”

Jeff Smith, 41, part of the press team for Occupy Wall Street, assailed
those who he said ascribed the views of one sign-holder to the entire
movement.

“To put someone out there to say, ‘This is who the group is,’ is about as
dishonest as you can be,” Mr. Smith, who is also Jewish, said. “It’s yellow
journalism.”

And Marjorie Dove Kent, executive director of Jews for Racial and Economic
Justice, which has taken part in the protests, said that the movement had a
diffuse leadership and that individual protesters had indicated their
condemnation of the sign-carrying man by shouting him down.

But much as the Tea Party movement initially grappled with accusations of
racism, Occupy Wall Street has been consistently confronted with
accusations of anti-Semitism. Several conservative Web sites and television
programs have shown video of the sign-holder, as well as of a woman at an
allied demonstration in Los Angeles who identified herself as a public
school teacher and decried “Zionist Jews who are running the big banks and
the Federal Reserve.”

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