From the ARCHIVE: Newsletter Special: Bari Weiss, Tikvah Fund David Project Rufo Neo-Con Queen of Cancel Culture: Beware, She WILL Cancel You!
David Shasha
Tikvah Tablet David Project Bari Weiss and the Neo-Con Crocodile Tears
Of late I have been tracking the reactionary Neo-Con Trumpist sludge that spews out of Alana Newhouse’s Tikvah Tablet morass.
I have provided background and context to the wild and wacky world of the late Zalman Bernstein in a special newsletter dedicated to The Tikvah Fund:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tcZ47eu45_GyLGHWIQYZiWtnTBZAgDXZVnixE0O3ZR0/edit
On her website Weiss notes her mainstream media and Ivy League bona fides, but never mentions Tikvah:
She moves from Columbia University to Tablet magazine to The Wall Street Journal and New York Times.
But Tikvah Tablet was not actually her first professional HASBARAH racist experience, as we will see.
As I wrote in my 2019 article “It Was The David Project Before it was The Tikvah Fund,” Ms. Weiss was a student activist at Columbia which perfected “Cancel Culture” before the Left Wingers ever got to it.
Weiss was a signatory to an open letter on “Cancel Culture” published by Harper’s, which occasioned some furious responses on the Radical Left:
https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/
Her participation in the letter is very interesting, given her checkered McCarthyite past.
I wrote an article on “Columbia Unbecoming,” a “Cancel” project to mark Columbia Middle Eastern Studies professors for dismissal, which was put together by the David Project, a group that the undergrad Weiss worked for.
In my article on the David Project event held in 2005, I stated the following:
The David Project is a Zionist-oriented organization that presents itself as a human rights watchdog. One of their campaigns is called “The Forgotten Refugees”; a project to acknowledge “the ethnic cleansing of one million Jews from Arab civilization and Iran.” We have in our newsletter addressed this problem of nomenclature previously in the case of Iraq and have asserted categorically that there is not one single shred of evidence that formal expulsions of Jews took place in the Arab world. The matter has become an issue to match the Zionist treatment of the Palestinians against a similar treatment of Jews by the Arabs. The evidence of Zionist interference with the Jews of the Arab world – as in the case of The Lavon Affair in Egypt or the Mas’uda Shemtob Synagogue bombing in Iraq – is thus elided and ignored. In the spirit of Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism, we as Sephardim find it completely unacceptable that non-Sephardim should be allowed to speak for us. I think of the famous scene in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” – the “bring out yer dead” scene – where one of the ostensible dead on the cart shouts out “I’m not quite dead yet!”
Sephardim do not wish to have The David Project speaking in their names.
The David Project produced a filmed record of the accusations of the students against various MEALAC professors. Professors are accused of various forms of verbal abuse and psychological intimidation. As I have said previously, such intimidation is a regular feature of campus life. This does not make it acceptable or correct and I make no apologies for the professors named in the film. But problems arise in the course of the film: Only one of the students appears to have attended the classes of the professor under attack, Joseph Massad. The film carefully interweaves decontextualized accusations without any evidentiary procedures. “Columbia Unbecoming” is a classic work of political propaganda: There is no footage of the professors to confront their accusers according to the procedures of due process; there is a fixation on MEALAC with no mention of possible issues in other departments; and the predominant voice in the film is Hillel Director Emeritus Rabbi Charles Sheer who has never attended any of the classes or lectures in question. Rabbi Sheer seems to be a nice man, but he is presented as an expert witness in the “trial” constructed by the film, and yet his presence is rhetorically measured rather than providing real evidence that might “convict” these professors.
Counterpunch published an article on the “Cancel Culture” letter by Jonathan Cook which focuses on Weiss herself:
As he states there:
Bari Weiss, before she landed a job at the Wall Street Journal and then the New York Times, spent her student years trying to get Muslim professors fired from her university – cancelling them – because of their criticism of Israel. And she explicitly did so under the banner of “academic freedom”, claiming pro-Israel students felt intimidated in the classroom.
The New York Civil Liberties Union concluded that it was Weiss, not the professors, who was the real threat to academic freedom. This was not some youthful indiscretion. In a book last year Weiss cited her efforts to rid Columbia university of these professors as a formative experience on which she still draws.
Weiss and many of the others listed under the letter are angry that the rhetorical tools they used for so long to stifle the free speech of others have now been turned against them. Those who lived for so long by the sword of identity politics – on Israel, for example – are worried that their reputations may die by that very same sword – on issues of race, sex and gender.
Weiss, like fellow New York Times Neo-Con Ross Douthat, is very good at the crocodile tears:
Indeed, on the very day that Weiss made her resignation from the paper public in the most ostentatious manner, Douthat was whining about “Cancel Culture.”
He liked “Cancel Culture” before it apparently turned into a Left Wing operation:
Is it cancel culture when conservatives try to get college professors disciplined for anti-Americanism, or critics of Israel de-platformed for anti-Semitism? Sure, in a sense. Was it cancel culture when the Dixie Chicks — sorry, the artists formerly known as the Dixie Chicks — were dropped by radio stations and tour venues, or when Bill Maher’s “Politically Incorrect” was literally canceled, for falling afoul of patriotic correctness? Absolutely.
But as the latter examples suggest, the last peak of right-wing cultural power was the patriotically correct climate after Sept. 11, a cultural eon in the past. Today the people with the most to fear from a right-wing cancel culture usually work inside Trump-era professional conservatism. (And even for them there’s often a new life awaiting as a professional NeverTrumper.) Attempted cancellations on the right are mostly battles for control over diminishing terrain, with occasional forays against red-state academics and anti-Trump celebrities. Meanwhile, the left’s cancel warriors imagine themselves conquering the entire non-Fox News map.
You see, when Right Wingers do it, it is okay because Right Wingers have no power anymore!
First, the fact that Right Wingers have made it central to their way of life is not lessened by loss of cultural power.
Second, the lives of those who were decimated by the attacks have not been magically revived.
Lastly, I am not sure how Right Wingers have lost cultural power, given that they own the three branches of our Federal government.
But Weiss and Douthat do not see themselves for what they are. They can only whine about others, the very others who they have been persecuting for so long with their religious fanaticism.
Like Trump, they never apologize for what they have done in the past, and what they plan to do in the future.
Indeed, Weiss has scrubbed her website clean of any references to the David Project or the Tikvah Fund. It is a lot easier to get hired by The New York Times that way.
Weiss’ rise in the mainstream media was meteoric and quick. She has, as I wrote in my article on her November 2019 appearance at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, become the go-to expert on Anti-Semitism, allowing her to bring Tikvah ideas to the mainstream media:
It is critical to keep these ideas in mind as we look at Bari Weiss and her increasingly influential thoughts on Anti-Semitism; largely because she continues to share many ideas with the pro-Trump Jews, in spite of her emphatic rejection of Trumpism and the Alt-Right Fascists.
So, while the first half hour of the Chatham program provides a thorough assault on the Charlottesville “Jews Will Not Replace Us” crowd, in the following half hour she moves into a more standard Tikvah Fund attack on the political Left and the Anti-Zionists.
A little past the half hour mark of the program she goes to great pains to insist that although the Alt-Right Trump Nazis present the more obvious physical danger to Jews, it is actually the Hard Left that presents the more “insidious” form of Anti-Semitism that now plagues us.
The Tikvah world is a great place to move up the professional food chain, and the slickly telegenic Weiss has made the most of her opportunities.
White Jewish Supremacy does have its advantages!
And now we finally get her resignation letter from the NYT:
My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m “writing about the Jews again.” Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.
Indeed, is her lawsuit far off?
There are terms for all of this: unlawful discrimination, hostile work environment, and constructive discharge. I’m no legal expert. But I know that this is wrong.
Weiss, like her pal Alana Newhouse, is very good at the Trump-style Projection. She comes from a world where “hostile work environments” are routine when it comes to those who do not abide the HASBARAH Neo-Con protocols.
She knows this, and yet whines on:
I do not understand how you have allowed this kind of behavior to go on inside your company in full view of the paper’s entire staff and the public. And I certainly can’t square how you and other Times leaders have stood by while simultaneously praising me in private for my courage. Showing up for work as a centrist at an American newspaper should not require bravery.
Part of me wishes I could say that my experience was unique. But the truth is that intellectual curiosity—let alone risk-taking—is now a liability at The Times. Why edit something challenging to our readers, or write something bold only to go through the numbing process of making it ideologically kosher, when we can assure ourselves of job security (and clicks) by publishing our 4000th op-ed arguing that Donald Trump is a unique danger to the country and the world? And so self-censorship has become the norm.
What rules that remain at The Times are applied with extreme selectivity. If a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome. Online venom is excused so long as it is directed at the proper targets.
“Bravery” is not something that people in the Tikvah world have. Weiss knows that, from the beginning of her career as a Neo-Con activist and rabble-rouser, she has not only dutifully done the Agit-Prop dance, but that she has sought to attack others who do not agree with her, and torpedo the careers of those who do not tow the HASRBARAH line.
She is a firm proponent of the White Jewish Supremacy, which allows Ashkenazim like those at the David Project use and abuse Arab Jewish history for Zionist anti-Palestinian talking points.
She proudly lists the authors she brought to the Times:
[T]he Venezuelan dissident Wuilly Arteaga; the Iranian chess champion Dorsa Derakhshani; and the Hong Kong Christian democrat Derek Lam. Also: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Masih Alinejad, Zaina Arafat, Elna Baker, Rachael Denhollander, Matti Friedman, Nick Gillespie, Heather Heying, Randall Kennedy, Julius Krein, Monica Lewinsky, Glenn Loury, Jesse Singal, Ali Soufan, Chloe Valdary, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Wesley Yang, and many others.
There are plenty of the usual Neo-Con racist suspects there, but I will leave them to those who are more directly victimized by the Right Wing bullying.
My concern is with Matti Friedman, who has become, like Weiss, a person who wishes to erase the Sephardic heritage and its values of Religious Humanism and Convivencia:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/matti/davidshasha/wuylouYh6oc/06PUusQvEVIJ
Friedman, like the Ashkenazim who currently run the American Sephardi Federation and Congregation Shearith Israel, is a Right Wing Zionist reactionary who has sought to deploy Arab Jewish culture as a weapon in the Netanyahu arsenal.
Indeed, Tikvah culture has found its way not only into the NYT, but into putative Sephardic institutions themselves.
It is therefore appropriate that we close our examination of Bari Weiss and her Neo-Con cultural hypocrisy with her article on the vile Joe Rogan, who represents the debasement of American Civilization:
That unpredictability, that willingness to take risks with topics, tone and guests, is one of the reasons podcasting is eating our lunch. The prestige press has become too delicate, worried about backlash on Twitter and thus shying away from an ever-increasing number of perceived third rails.
“There are a lot of holes that have been left by mainstream media,” Rogan said.
Think of Tara Reade. Anyone with eyes could see that her accusation against Joe Biden was treated differently by the press than the accusations against Brett Kavanaugh.
Reade’s claim was largely ignored for more than two weeks. Julie Swetnick’s accusation of gang rape was printed the day it was made.
You can rely on Rogan to talk about that double standard. Indeed, you can rely on Rogan to talk about just about anything at all.
Take the minefield of gender identity. When he talks about the sensitive topic — one that has become nearly untouchable inside the institutional world — there is none of the throat-clearing I’ve become used to.
“There is no balanced perspective to say: Be free! Change your pronouns, change your name, be whoever you want,” Rogan said. “On the Fox News side they want to say ‘This is left-wing lunacy and everyone’s losing their mind.’”
At the same time, on the left, “there’s an aggressive, progressive doctrine that has to be followed, and followed with full compliance and no room for debate,” he said. “When it comes to competition, especially combat sports, with transwomen fighting biological women, people are so progressive they let that slide, to the point that biological women are getting pushed over.”
“Nobody wants to touch it because nobody wants the blowback.”
The Joe Rogan article promotes the New Idiocracy and its Poptrash degeneracy in a way that accentuates Anti-PC reactionary culture. It is a perfect encapsulation of Weiss’ White Privilege and the way that Tikvah has served to construct her jaundiced view of the world.
She was a hatchet-man when she was a Columbia undergraduate, and she is a hatchet-man today. Not much has changed other than the size of her paycheck.
Leaving The New York Times is actually a good career move for her, and it is certain that she will make ample use of her new notoriety in order to continue her upward march in the ranks of the White Jewish Supremacy.
Yasher Ko’ach!
David Shasha
Tikvah Tablet David Project Bari Weiss and the Neo-Con Crocodile Tears
By: David Shasha
New York Times Resignation Letter
By: Bari Weiss
Bari Weiss: It Was The David Project Before it Was The Tikvah Fund
By: David Shasha
The Mess at Columbia University: The Zionist McCarthyites and an Orgy of Hate
By: David Shasha
Bari Weiss’ Triumphant Pittsburgh Homecoming: HASBARAH, Anti-Semitism, and the Usual Tikvah Fund Racism
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Our Debased Idiocracy: The Tikvah Fund Welcomes Joe Rogan!
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Joe Rogan is the New Mainstream Media
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