Artist Remy in the SF Reporter and Brian Yapko’s Rebuttal; Attend the Historic Review District Board Feb. 25

Voice Your Opinion on how the murals and sign on Old Pecos Trail do not conform with the City’s decorum, municipal code, and tolerance.

Here’s your chance to have a say about them directly to those who make the decisions for the City.  Save the Date:  Tuesday, February 25, 5:30 pm.  From Assistant City Attorney Sally Paez:

The appeal of the land use director’s decision to deny administrative approval of the mural artwork at 509 Camino Lejo will be heard by the Historic Districts Review Board on Tuesday, February 25, 2020. The meeting will be held in City Council Chambers at 200 Lincoln Avenue and will start at 5:30 p.m. This will be the last action item on the agenda, following 8 other cases. The meeting is open to the public, and there will be an opportunity to provide sworn public comment. Additionally, pursuant to Resolution 2011-24 (appeal procedures), persons who are not parties to the appeal may submit relevant documents, including letters of support or opposition, to the land use director. Such submittals must be received by 12:00 noon on Friday, February 14^th.  Submit comments by email to:  sapaez@santafenm.gov.

SF Reporter’s journalistic faux pas with Remy

The SF Reporter printed an interview with the Old Pecos Trail muralist, Remy, on their website on January 30 that appeared in the printed edition on February 5-11, 2020.  They showed the fictionalized mural of a soldier pointing his gun at a father protecting his son.  We blogged on January 27 showing why this image is a fake and a type of blood libel, reaching the point of anti-Semitism.  Yes, Elena Ortiz, it is anti-Semitic.

Using fake images to impugn (only) Jewish soldiers, and accusing Israel of reasonable actions taken against stone throwers – no matter their age – that are similar to every other nation’s actions, is anti-Semitic.  (More on Elena Ortiz’s my view in the New Mexican February 9 in a forthcoming blog posting.)

There are multiple allegations in this Remy interview not supported by the facts (“genocide,” “stolen land,” “Palestinians are resisting [only] with rocks,” [Israelis put kids in] “a system of cages to be terrorized, tortured”).  The Reporter allows Remy 1400 words of stream of consciousness that is uninformed, misleading, and, frankly, full of half-truths, lies, and ignorance.  Apparently the Reporter does not fact check or mind perpetuating lies; it seems it doesn’t know how to edit this kind of content either.  We reported on the photo-shopped photo above previously.

There’s a lot to be said about Remy’s comments.  Certainly he has a narrative.  Should narratives based on falsehoods be given the credibility the Reporter provides?  We think not.  Unfortunately the Reporter readers who are uneducated about the Middle East, like Remy, or have firmly held beliefs based on falsities, may believe some of his misinformation. Instead of working toward understanding, Remy is building divisiveness and hatred.  His photo-shopped reproduced images perpetuate falsehoods that are damaging to Israel, to Jews, to Christians who support Israel, and to the understanding that could be built among Santa Feans.  The Reporter needs to be more responsible.

Take Action:  Write to the Reporter to protest the historical lies and faked photo they printed that came from Remy.  In your own words take one or more of the points we made above or Brian Yapko makes below to write a letter to the editor (maximum 200 words) and send it to (snail mail) 132 E Marcy St., Santa Fe, NM, 87501, or email to editor@sfreporter.com. Letters should refer to this specific article in the Reporter:  “The Struggle interview with artist Remy” in the print edition of Feb 5-12.   Note that letters may be edited for space and clarity.

Santa Fe attorney Brian Yapko analyzes many of Remy’s points in the following article.  We thank him for his effort in producing this analysis.

REBUTTAL TO ARTIST REMY’S STANCE REGARDING AMERICAN INDIANS, ISRAELI JEWS AND PALESTINIAN ARABS

by Brian A. Yapko

In 1864, Colonel John Chivington led a massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians, killing and mutilating an estimated 500 Indians, most of whom were women and children. In his justification for killing children – even babies – he famously said “kill and scalp all – big and little. Nits breed lice.”

In the Nazi Ideology of Race, published to justify the systematic slaughter of 6,000,000 Jews, including 1,500,000 children and babies, the Jew was described as “parasitic vermin worthy only of eradication.”

“Oh, you who murdered Allah’s pious prophets
Oh, you who were brought up on spilling blood
You have been condemned to humiliation and hardship.
Oh Sons of Zion, oh most evil among creations
Oh barbaric monkeys, wretched pigs.”
Poem quoted on Palestinian Television on July 8, 2013

In an interview with the Santa Fe Reporter published on January 30, 2020 (“The Struggle”), Navajo Artist Remy stated that he created his anti-Israel mural on Old Pecos Trail in Santa Fe to express solidarity  based on perceived similarities between the Native American experience and that of the Palestinian Arabs. Remy’s views are wrong. American Indians and the Jews of Israel are two peoples who have been driven from their lands and subjected to repeated inhuman atrocities. Both peoples have struggled to preserve ancient cultures which were almost destroyed by blind hatred. The Jews of Israel and Native Americans should be natural brothers. For Remy to take the opposite view is a perversion of history.

1. Parallels Between the Indian and Jewish Experience

A. Genocide

Since 1492 the Native American population of the U.S. and Canada has been decimated – in part due to European diseases, but equally so from the hostile actions of European colonists.  Estimates for pre-Columbian Indian population in the U.S. and Canada average about 18,000,000. The present Indian population of the United States is estimated at 6,800,000 and Canada is about 1,400,000. With their loss of life and culture, American Indians are justified to use the term “genocide” when referring to their past.

Jews are also justified in asserting “genocide.” From 1939 to 1945 6,000,000 Jews were brutally slaughtered by the Nazis. The entire world population of Jews before the Holocaust was approximately 18,000,000. One of every three Jews on Earth was systematically murdered. Others were heinously targeted by the Nazis, including Romani, homosexuals and political “undesirables.” However, the  extermination camps, the poison showers, the crematoria were all was built to handle “the Jewish Problem” in a “Final Solution.” The Jewish population in 2020 has yet to recover its pre-War numbers.

Anti-Israel partisans such as Remy invoke the word “genocide” to describe Israeli treatment of Palestinian Arabs. However, for people who have suffered true genocide invoking the term for the Palestinians is offensive. The Arab population of the West Bank has increased from 667,000 in 1967 to 2,160,000. Its birthrate is the 48th highest in the world (out of 224 nations.) The Arab population of Gaza has increased from 354,700 to 1.79 million with a birthrate which ranks 31st highest. Wrongfully accusing Jews who have actually suffered genocide of perpetrating a fictional Arab genocide to manipulate public opinion is morally offensive.

The Jews of Israel (home to the remnant population of Holocaust survivors) and the Indians of North America share a true brotherhood based on the sorrows of genocide and the struggle to rise from the ashes. The Palestinians do not.

B. Blood Libel

The commonality between American Indian and Israeli Jew also exists based on long history of libels to which both peoples have been subjected.

Jews have been the object of blood libels for almost 2,000 years. The most frequent libel claims that Jews kill Christian children to use their blood for sacrifices at Passover. Such claims have been used to justify centuries of expulsions from the various countries of Europe, countless pogroms resulting in the slaughter of tens of thousands of Jews in places like Russia and Poland; and as a justification for the Holocaust.

Such defamatory incitements to violence are familiar to Native Americans. 19th Century American history is replete with examples of white settlers claiming Indian attacks that either never occurred or were actually defensive actions wrongfully re-characterized as offensive and often as a result of serial violations of treaties by a dishonorable U.S. Government.

Being the wrongful recipient of repetitive false accusations is something the Jews of Israel and the Indians of America have in common. It is, therefore, particularly appalling that Artist Remy would create a mural which is itself based on a falsehood – the blood libel that Jewish soldiers seek to kill innocent Palestinian children. Remy’s apparent intent is to incite hatred against Jewish Israelis who have sought peace constantly for 70 years and to romanticize Palestinian Arabs who regularly embrace violence and eschew every attempt to make peace. Remy’s views are emblematic of a moral compass which has lost its way.✓

C. Being Driven From the Land

A further parallel between Native Americans and Israeli Jews is a shared experience of being driven from lands where they have lived for centuries and finding few options for refuge.

For Indians, the Trail of Tears is illustrative. In the 1830s, President Andrew Jackson caused the expulsion of 125,000 Native Americans to Indian Territory – lands which were promised to Native Americans into perpetuity – a promise which was ultimately broken when this territory became the State of Oklahoma. An entire people uprooted with only a small territory allowed them. Who parallels this experience better: the Palestinian Arab or the Israeli Jew? When one looks objectively at 20th Century history the answer is clearly the Israeli Jew.

Artist Remy considers that Israeli Jews are “colonizers” and opportunists. However, let us look at some numbers:

Between 1920 and 1970, 900,000 Jews were expelled from Arab and Muslim Countries:

The vast majority of the Jews “ethnically cleansed” from Arab and Muslim countries sought refuge in Israel, and were absorbed there as equal citizens. As in World War II, most of the world’s countries refused these people. Israel did not. Israel has been the only reliable home for persecuted Jews in almost 2,000 years of prejudice and attack.  Jews have kept a continuous presence in Palestine for the

entirety of the last 3,800 years – they are the original indigenous people.  Indeed, the birth certificates of those Jews and Arabs born before 1948 had “Palestine” as their birthplace.  Palestine was a territory, not a country – not since the Jewish temple was destroyed in 70 CE.  The other ethnic group with oldest continuous inhabitation of the area are the Druze for about 1,000 years.

Those who today identify as “Palestinians” as a unique people are because of geography, not ethnicity.  Palestinians are Arabs who happen to live within the region called “Palestine.” There is nothing culturally unique about them. Their language is Arabic. Their religion is Islam. Their cuisine, their very clothing is Arab. Until 1978, the Arabs of the West Bank were Jordanian citizens – until the Arab League promoted the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as their rightful leadership rather than the government in Amman.

There are 22 Arab States which stretch from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian Ocean, including the Arabian peninsula. The Arab world consists of a population of 423,000,000 spread over a territory of 5.7 million square miles. The Palestinian territories are, of course, contiguous parts of this world bordering Jordan and Egypt.

Israel’s Jewish population is very small compared to the Arab world. Israel’s population totals 9,154,960 of which 6,300,000 are Jews. In other words, Jews are only 16/1000th of the population of the Arab world. Furthermore, Israel is a territory of 8,522 square miles – 0.16% of the territory of the Arab World. It would take 592 Israels to equal the amount of territory which Arabs possess. And yet the Arab world begrudges this small territory to the very Jews which it expelled.

Furthermore, the Jews of Israel are forbidden travel to the majority of Arab countries. Jews are deeply discriminated against in the Arab and Muslim worlds. But not in tiny Israel.

This is why artist Remy is so wrong. It is the Jews of Israel who are confined to a reservation in a very real way far more than the Arabs of Palestine.

D. Palestinian-Arab Injustices Against Israel and Non-Muslims

Further paralleling the American Indian experience is the fact that the Jews of Israel are being constantly defamed by an Arab world which drastically outnumbers them in a context where Palestinians have promoted grievous injustices against non-Muslims – especially Jews and gays:

• The Palestinians have denied non-Muslims most civil rights.
• The Palestinians have made it a death-penalty offense to sell any property to Jews.
• The Palestinians have criminalized homosexual conduct in Gaza and greatly discriminate against gays in the West Bank.
• The Palestinians have denied Jews access to Jewish holy sites,  including the Temple Mount and the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron.
• The Palestinians have treated Jewish holy places with contempt – they bulldozed the many-centuries old Jewish quarter of Old Jerusalem in 1948; they put up a garbage dump adjacent to the Western Wall – the holiest site in Judaism.

They attempted to destroy the Tomb of Rachel in the 2000 intifada.

• The Palestinians regularly attempt to dehumanize Jews by comparing them to apes and vermin. This dehumanizing is contained in the textbooks with which their children are taught.
• The Palestinians have acted as terrorists against the land itself by releasing weaponized incendiary balloons into Israel. As of 10 July 2018, incendiary kites and balloons from Gaza started 678 fires in Israel, destroying 2,260 acres of woodland and 1,500 acres of agricultural fields and substantial damage to open fields.
• The unwillingness of the Palestinians to abide by peace treaties which they had agreed upon.
• The attempts of Palestinians to manipulate the media with false narratives, false accusations and libelous claims.
• The fact that Palestinians, through their Grand Mufti, aligned with Nazi Germany during World War II in the hope of ethnically cleansing Palestine of its Jews.
• The Palestinian view that “the only good Jew is a dead Jew.” On July 14, 2019, Fathi Hammad, leader of the Gaza politburo, said “You have Jews everywhere and we must attack every Jew on the globe by way of slaughter and killing, if God permits.”

That Artist Remy – or, indeed, any Indian – would think that the Native American spirit aligns somehow with a people who have bullied and threatened and dehumanized Jews is sadly misguided and reeks of the most cynical of historical revisionism.

2. Remy is Unwittingly Guilty of the Racism He Claims to Deplore

Along these lines, Remy’s position regarding the Jews of Israel and Palestinians is only coherent if Remy himself is, perhaps unwittingly, guilty of the racism he claims to be fighting. He promotes the grossly inaccurate anti-Israel narrative which suggests – contrary to history — that the Jewish settlers of Israel were all simply European colonists with no intrinsic connection to the Holy Land.

However, in addition to being a false history, this view completely disrespects Jews as being ethnically unique. It ignores centuries of Jews being treated as “the other” in Europe and the Muslim World, and it ignores DNA evidence that Jews are indeed a separate ethnicity. It is convenient to look at European Jews as if they were privileged white colonizers, but it is not historically or scientifically accurate. Indeed, ask the eugenics experts of the Third Reich whether Jews were considered the equivalent to white Europeans. The ghosts of 6,000,000 dead Jews can attest that the answer is no.

In addition, Remy’s view completely disregards the fact that the Jews of Israel are multiracial in the extreme. While there are indeed Jews of European descent in Israel (many of whom are the world’s surviving holocaust survivors), over 50% of the Jews are of “Mizrahi or Sephardic” descent (sometimes known as Arab Jews). In other words, Jews who are from

other areas of the Middle East – as much “people of color” as any Arab. In addition, Israel is home to 121,000 black Ethiopian Jews who were rescued from potential genocide in the 1980s and 1990s.  When Remy, anti-Israelis and the media look at a “white colonizing Jewish population of Israel” they are inaccurate and grossly unjust.

There is no more racially diverse country in the Middle East than Israel. Artist Remy is wrong to disrespect that fact.

CONCLUSION

A huge amount of animus is being heaped upon Israeli Jews (and spilling over into anti-Semitism against Jews in America and Europe.) Much of this is being fueled by a sympathy for Palestinian causes which exists in defiance of the actual facts. As Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician once said: “People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.” Or as E.B. White said, “Prejudice is a great time-saver. You can form opinions without having to get the facts.”

Artist Remy and many perhaps well-meaning people who love a good freedom fight have nurtured a severe prejudice against the Jews of Israel “without having to get the facts.” The Jews of Israel have worked hard and, against all odds,  have succeeded in building up their tiny “reservation” in a sea of hostile Arab nations. To many who style themselves “social justice warriors” this success is unforgivable. But it is a dangerous thing to infer that a success that is real has not been earned. The Jews of Israel have survived an inferno of hate, murder, and expulsion from a huge number of countries. Yet they have survived and even prospered in a land which has known Jews – the truly indigenous people of Israel — continuously for over 3,800 years. What they possess they have earned many times over. It is time for the Palestinians to take responsibility for building their own future rather than staying mired in old hatreds and self-pitying victimization.

All peoples, whether Indians, Jews or Palestinians — have the choice of either being imprisoned by past hatreds, or of moving forward into a brighter future. This writer, at least, hopes that artist Remy can move forward into a future which promotes peace and mutual respect rather than an unfair hatred based upon dangerous ignorance.

[Editor’s note:  if Remy, JVP, and other anti-Israel organizations want to get the real facts about the Palestinian people’s plights because of the Arab rejection of the partition plan in 1947 and other rejectionist actions by the Arabs and Palestinians over the years, we suggest they attend noted historian Benny Morris’ talk at Temple Beth Shalom on February 23 at 4:00 pm.]

References related to the above arguments:

1. Four Documents on the Sand Creek Massacre, uh.edy/disp-textbook.cfm?smtD=3&psid=1
2. Victims of the Nazi Era: Nazi Racial Ideology, encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/ortick/victims of the nazi era-ideology
3. Palestinian TV Broadcasts Little Girls Calling Jews Barbaric Monkeys Wretched Pigs, thecommentator.com/article/3928/palestinian tv
4. Population History of Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, wikipedia.org/wiki/population history of indigenous peoples…
5. Holocaust Victims, org/wiki/holocaustvictims
6. Final Solution, org/wiki/finalsolution
7. World Jewish Community, spertus.edu/subject-guides/sherwin world Jewish community
8. Demographics of the Palestinian Territories, wikipedia.org/wiki/demographics of the Palestinian territories
9. Blood Libel, wikipedia.org/wiki/blood libel
10. Were American Indians Victims of Genocide? historynewsnetwork.org/article/7302
11. Trail of Tears, org/wiki/trailoftears
12. The Expulsion of the Jews from Muslim Countries, 1920-1970: A History of Ongoing Cruelty and Discrimination; jcpa.org/article/the expulsion of the jews… See also The 20th -Century Jewish Exodus Map You Have Never Seen Before, democracychronicles.org/jewish exodus map
13. Palestinians, org/wiki/palestinians
14. “Palestinian Nationality is an Entity Defined by its Opposition to Zionism, Not its National Aspirations” by Eli Hertz, June 12, 2019
15. Jordanian Annexation of the West Bank, wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordanian annexation
16. Arab World, wikipedia.org/wiki/arab world
17. Demographics of Israel, wikipedia.org/wiki/demographics
18. Geography of Israel, wikipedia.org/wiki/geography of Israel
19. Countries That Do Not Accept Israeli Passports, wikipedia.org/wiki/israeli passport#countries that do not accept Israeli passports
20. Human Rights in the State of Palestine, wikipedia.org/wiki/human rights in the state of Palestine
21. LGBT Rights in the State of Palestine, wikipedia.org/wiki/lgbt rights
22. The Danger to the Jewish and Christian Holy Places In Case of A Division, jcpa.org/preface-delusions-division/danger-jewish-christian places.
23. Anti-Semitism in Palestinian School Textbooks (16 Articles), jewishvirtuallibrary.org/anti-semitism in palestinian school textbooks.
24. Arson Terror From Gaza Continues to Devastate Southern Israel (August 8, 2018), mfa.gov.il/MFA/Foreign Policy/Terrorism/Pages/Arson Terror From Gaza
25. The Many Ways Palestinians Violate International Law, jcpa.org/article/the many ways palestinians violate international law
26. Refute Palestinian Lies to Promote Mideast Peace, wsj.com/articles/refute palestinian lies to promote mideast peace
27. Amin al Husseini, wikipedia.org/wiki/amin al husseini, palestinian arab nationalist
28. Senior Hamas Official Calls For Members of Palestinian diaspora to Kill Jews, timesofisrael.com/senior hamas official, . See also, Fathi Hamad, wikipedia.org/wiki/fathi hamad
29. Genetic Studies on Jews, org/wiki/genetic studies on Jews
30. History of the Jews and Judaism in the Land of Israel, wikipedia.org/wiki/history of the Jews

SFMEW is a beneficiary organization of the Jewish Federation of New Mexico.