The Meaning of the OWS Day of Protest

From Ron Radosh, at PJMedia:

In the day’s OWS protest, the motley crew of old New Left veterans, younger self-proclaimed socialists, Communists, and anarchists, as well as a bunch of New York University students protesting their private university’s tuition hikes, were to be joined by the SIEU and other AFL-CIO affiliates, who have decided to link their dwindling power to the OWS bandwagon — a move that will eventually backfire and lead to further erosion of trade union strength. After all, a movement that seeks to prevent working people from getting to their jobs is not likely to be popular with the union rank-and-file.

This week, even the usually hesitant Anti-Defamation League released a report that showed how much of the OWS included supporters of Hamas, opponents of Israel’s right to exist, and old fashioned anti-Semites. “History demonstrates,” Abe Foxman of the ADL said, how “time and again… economic downturns can embolden anti-Semites to spread malicious conspiracy theories and promote stereotypes about Jews and money. As a consequence, these statements must not be left unchallenged.” To date, no official representatives of OWS have addressed this issue.

A few days ago, the ADL released a more definitive condemnation, obviously because no one from the OWS responded to Foxman, who implied that the anti-Semites were just a fringe element of the protest.

Citing the endorsement of OWS by the BDS movement, the ADL statement proclaimed the following:

The first formal attempt to unite OWS and the anti-Israel movement came from the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) National Committee, the coordinating body of the global BDS campaign against Israel. On October 13, 2011, the committee issued a statement expressing solidarity with OWS and describing the objectives of the two movements as similar. The statement, titled “Occupy Wall Street not Palestine!,” called on Occupy protesters to incorporate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into their demands: “So as you break your own chains and build your own effective resistance against corporate tyranny, we ask you to demand a just peace for all the peoples in the Middle East…. Palestinians, too, are part of the 99% around the world that suffer at the hands of the 1% whose greed and ruthless quest for hegemony have led to unspeakable suffering and endless war.” ADL also cites the words of Phyllis Bennis, a leader of the left-wing think tank, The Institute for Policy Studies, who put their united goals in these words:

“What we are really seeing there is really a classic example of the one percent, where most of our interests do not lie, controlling the 99 percent, the one percent being Israel and its supporters in the United States.”

Anti-Semitism, once condemned in the last century by the German Social-Democrat August Bebel as “the socialism of the fools,” is again emerging as part and parcel of the OWS protest in this country and abroad. It is clear that the participants and leaders see the two fights they are engaged in as one and the same. The ADL article continues with citations of anti-Semitic incidents all occurring at OWS protests in the last month. Read these if you are the slightest bit in doubt of the reality.

More at the link.