Anatomy of a Hate Crime

Police in Massachusetts Seize Flyers Protesting Massacres in Gaza and Lebanon

Copyright©2024 by Independent History and Research • www.RevisionistHistory.org

On October 8 cops in Cambridge, Massachusetts seized flyers posted on poles on city streets and the Harvard University campus as part of their investigation into a possible “hate crime” after a complaint from Hillel, the university’s Zionist student group.

In his report, Cambridge Police Department spokesman Robert Goulston noted, “The reporting party stated the flyers contained graphic content they felt was meant to be intimidating. Officers removed the flyers that were on city property and submitted them for evidence.”

“…graphic content …meant to be intimidating.” The police don’t seem to know that to be intimidated by a flyer containing no threats of harm to anyone is a snowflake response to a non-crime and a waste of taxpayers’ money.

One of the poles in Cambridge, Massachusetts where the anti-war flyers were affixed and subsequently seized by police. The flyer for the music event at the top of the pole was not removed by the officers.

Rabbi Jason Rubenstein, Harvard Hillel Executive Director said that “spreading words like these (flyers)… is recklessly irresponsible at a time of surging violence against Jews and Jewish institutions inspired by precisely these grotesque portrayals of Jews as collectively and uniquely sinful. As such, their appearance throughout campus is antithetical to…(the) central purpose of ensuring the safety and flourishing of Jewish life at Harvard.”

That’s the sanctimonious, partisan opinion of one man, on one side of a highly controversial, bitter dispute over the ravages of war-Zionism.

All of the flyers can be seen at this link and downloaded. Readers are asked to take a moment to view them. They are virtually Christian in their emphasis on sin and atonement.

The ironic twist to this fracas is the fact that it was a Judaic Harvard student who hung the Yom Kippur protest posters. The flyers contain quotes from the traditional Yom Kippur (“Day of Atonement”) solemn liturgy.

They represent an invitation to moral reflection on the sins of those who are complicit in enabling on-going massacres of Arabs in the Middle East perpetrated in the name of the Bible and “Israel’s right to defend itself” (a Palestinian and Lebanese right to self-defense is almost never mentioned in the U.S. media).

Harvard’s Hillel chapter was able to successfully pressure local law enforcement to do their inquisitorial work for them and confiscate (as “evidence”) leaflets that are clearly protected by the First Amendment — thereby assisting Hillel in excluding and censoring content which protests idolatry of the Israeli state and its mass murders.

The gate-keeping function of the Zionist movement is increasingly carried out by America’s local cops. This thought-policing is met with silence from terrified Right wing First Amendment campaigners who timidly pillory only Leftist and woke censorship.

What crime was committed in mounting the flyers on poles? It seems that the police were used as the first step in an attempt to label the flyers as “another anti-semitic hate crime!” —to be exploited by the FBI, the ADL, the New York Times and other aging, corporate “legacy” media.

The fact that the offending leaflets were distributed by a Judaic student and designed by a Judaic group (“Halachic Left”) complicates the matter considerably.

The conflation of Zionism with Judaism is the real act of intimidation. Atrocities perpetrated against Palestinians and Lebanese are being committed in the name of “the Jewish state of Israel,” a phrase that is a disingenuous linguistic trap.

The Zionist entity in the Middle East violates Talmudic injunctions by its very existence; it is not theologically Judaic from the point of the view of Judaism’s holiest text, the Talmud Bavli. In Ketubot 111a one encounters the “Three Oaths” taken when the Jews went into exile after the destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D.

They are: “One, that Israel not ascend the wall; another, that the Holy One adjured Israel not to rebel against the nations of the world; and another, that the Holy One adjured the gentiles not to oppress Israel too much.”

These Talmudic halachos forbade Jews from engaging in collective political organizing and the use of military force. For 1300 years an overwhelming majority of all rabbinic authorities upheld these prohibitions. It was only when the Zionist ideology came to the fore in the early 20th century that they were abandoned, or subjected to a reinterpretation that nullified them.

Moreover, as authentic followers of Jesus know, Christians are the true Israel, the genuine descendants of Abraham, and the inheritors of the Bible’s covenant promises (1 Peter 2:9, Gal. 6:16, Romans 9:6) to be a blessing unto humanity (Gal. 3:8).

The Judaic people who conceptualized the flyers and the Judaic student-activist at the university who distributed them on campus and in city streets in this instance can’t be as fully hate-criminalized (pardon the neologism) as a non-Jewish person.

This is not because Jewish life is sacred to Zionists. Far from it. Max Blumenthal and others have noted the tragic events of October 7, 2023 when the Israeli military activated the “Hannibal Directive” and employed “friendly fire” to kill Israelis as well as Hamas terrorists.

However, in the rarefied milieu of the nation’s most prestigious university, there is considerable sympathy among the Harvard faculty and student body for Palestinian victims and the Jews who defend them. Consequently, the apparatus of police repression that would’ve been employed against a non-Judaic black man or a “shiksa” is not operant in the matter at hand—the hate crime stigma is not being applied against the Judaic lady who distributed the flyers in Cambridge or the “Left Halacha” organization which originated them.

Whether Jew or gentile, any American has the right to leaflet, particularly when they believe that by means of the distribution of literature containing citations from the Scriptures, they are raising profound moral questions which are subsequently demonized as “intimidation” in that they exasperate and affront those who are propagandists for Israeli bombings of schools, hospitals and civilian apartment blocks.

Politicizing Hate Crime Labels

Aaron D.A. Shakow is a professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. On October 23, his editorial, “I’m a Jewish Faculty Member at Harvard. Hillel Does Not Represent Me,” was published in The Harvard Crimson newspaper. It is an eloquent and at the same time devastating clarification and takedown.

Prof. Shakow’s opening paragraphs could have been penned by this writer: