January 15, 2024

The Qassam Brigades take Washington; Another Soros-funded port blockade; Elections in Taiwan

Jan 15, 2024

The Big Story

Here’s a scene from Washington, D.C. on Saturday, as protesters from the March on Washington for Gaza rally converged on Lafayette Square and attempted to breach the security perimeter outside the White House:

And here, courtesy of friend of The Scroll Julio Rosas, is a photo from the rally earlier in the day, showing a protester flying what appears to be the “jihadist flag,” bearing a white calligraphic shahada, or Islamic declaration of faith, on a black background:

And here’s a photo of a protester—assuming he’s not an actual Hamas militant—wearing the patch of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas:

So, who was behind the March on Washington for Gaza? Something called the American Muslim Task Force for Palestine, which boasts as members:

American Muslims for Palestine (AMP)
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)
The ANSWER Coalition

As The Scroll has reiterated on numerous occasions, AMP is currently the subject of a federal lawsuit alleging it is a “disguised continuance” of the Islamic Association for Palestine, an Islamic charity associated with the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) that was shuttered in 2004 for raising money for Hamas. CAIR, the Biden administration’s favorite Muslim civil rights group, was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the government’s prosecution of HLF—also for financing Hamas. ANSWER, meanwhile, is a front for the Marxist-Leninist Party for Socialism and Liberation. Readers of The Scroll might remember one of its co-founders, Eugene Puryear, who was caught on camera on Oct. 8 praising Hamas for “taking out at least several dozen hipsters” at the Re’im music festival, at which more than 300 civilians were murdered, some after being raped.

Not listed on the rally’s website, but present in Washington, according to the group’s X account, was the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), one of the main groups behind the series of “Flood” protests in New York. We’d love to tell you who funds them, but we don’t know, since PYM is a fiscal sponsorship of the WESPAC Foundation, a Westchester County, NY nonprofit that is not legally required to report its donors. But at least $97,000 of the $750,000 that WESPAC earned in 2022 came from the Tides Foundation, according to Tides’ IRS Form 990.

Tides, of course, is progressive dark-money behemoth funded by the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers, Peter Buffett, and—who else?—George Soros.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Poetry on the lost Jewish world of Washington Heights

The Rest

→The D.C. rally wasn’t the only Astro-Turfed protest over the weekend: also on Saturday, protesters from ANSWER and the Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC) blockaded the port of Oakland, CA, the ninth-busiest in the country, to protest the presence of a military vessel they alleged would be used to ship weapons to Israel. AROC, as we’ve previously reported, is a fiscal sponsorship of the Tides Center, part of the larger Tides network, of which the Tides Foundation mentioned in the Big Story is also a part. AROC is also under contract with San Francisco United School District to “provide cultural empowerment and leadership workshops”—meaning that they are receiving funds from taxpayers as well as from the Rockefellers and Soros.

→Sunday marked 100 days since the Oct. 7 attack. Hamas is still holding at least 130 hostages in Gaza, and tensions appear to be emerging within the Israeli war cabinet over what comes next. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated in a speech on Sunday that “nobody will stop” Israel “until total victory,” but reports in the Israeli press suggested that the government is internally divided over how to proceed. Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, both of Likud, favor continuing the war until Hamas’ power is broken, while War Cabinet Minister Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot (an “observer” who attends war cabinet meetings but does not vote), both of the National Unity Party, are said to favor a deal that would save the lives of the hostages, even at the cost of ending the war. Eisenkot reportedly told other members of the war cabinet Saturday that they are “lying to themselves” about their ability to bring the remaining hostages home alive. Tens of thousands of Israelis gathered in Tel Aviv on Saturday and Sunday to call on the government to bring the hostages home.

→Israel is currently in the dock at the International Court of Justice to defend itself against charges of “genocide” leveled by South Africa. As Temple University professor Jacob Shell points out on X, though, if Israel is attempting to commit a genocide with all the modern weapons systems it has at its disposal, it’s doing a remarkably bad job:

Mainstream scholarly estimates put the number of deaths during the Rwandan genocide between 500,000 and 800,000, so Shell is going by the high end of that range. But still, it’s helpful for putting things in perspective.

→The star of Friday’s Big Story, Georgia Fulton County special prosecutor Nathan Wade, was held in contempt of court during his divorce proceedings for “willfully” failing to disclose his income, according to court documents obtained by The Washington Examiner. Wade, the lead prosecutor in the RICO case against Donald Trump, was accused last week of being in a “clandestine” relationship with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and of using money earned from the case to pay for vacations for the two of them. The Daily Caller reported Thursday that Wade’s ex-wife had accused him of hiding from her more than $700,000 in income earned from the Trump prosecution. The contempt order was issued on May 10, 2023.

→The category of the “hate crime hoax” is an important one to keep in your head when reading about outrages supposedly committed against minorities in the United States. Such crimes do happen—witness the Emanuel AME and Tree of Life shootings for particularly tragic examples—but the fakes may be more common than the genuine article. In his 2019 book Hate Crime Hoax, for instance, professor Wilfred Reilly, who is Black, examined 346 hate crime allegations that made the news and found that fewer than one in three were genuine. Why are we bringing this up? Because Frontpage magazine reports that the highest-profile anti-Muslim hate crime since Oct. 7—one that earned coverage from The Scroll and statements from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris—was in fact a hoax.

The crime in question was the shooting of three Palestinian students in Burlington, Vermont in late November. And the hoax part wasn’t the shooting, which really happened, but the motive. Initial reports were that the attack was a textbook case of Islamophobia: the shooter, James J. Eaton, had allegedly “harassed” the students and then opened fire on them because they were wearing keffiyehs and speaking Arabic. Frontpage reports that in fact, Eaton was a known “progressive” who had made social media posts in support of Hamas in the aftermath of Oct. 7, and that he did not say anything to the students before the incident. The shooting probably wasn’t political at all: according to Eaton’s mother and girlfriend, he had a “history of violence and mental illness.” Probably, he simply picked his targets at random in the midst of an episode.

→The New York Post reported Thursday on the identities of some of the more than 300 people arrested for blockading bridges and tunnels into lower Manhattan this past Monday—before being released without bail. Let’s meet the wretched of the Earth:

Naye Idriss, a former organizer for the Columbia chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine and current NYU grad student
Ilana Cruger-Zaken, a graduate student at NYU’s Center for Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement
Daniel Kim, an NYU law graduate who works for the Bronx Defenders, a legal services nonprofit
Trava Tam, a population scientist for Zillow, 2016 Fulbright Scholar, and graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School
Azani Creeks, a graduate of Harvard Divinity School
Sunita Viswanath, who advised New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ transition team and was named a “Champion of Change” by the Obama White House in 2015.

→Voters in Taiwan went to the polls on Saturday, delivering a decisive victory to Vice President Lai Ting-che of the pro-Western Democratic Progressive Party, in what analysts are calling a firm rebuke of Beijing that is likely to increase tensions between the island and the mainland. Lai, who has championed Taiwanese independence in the past, triumphed with just over 40% of the vote in a rare three-way race. The candidate from the Kuomintang, which favors closer relations with mainland China, received 33%, while a third-party candidate, Ko Wen-je of the Taiwan People’s Party received 26%. The Wall Street Journal reports that Beijing is likely to increase its economic and political pressure on Taiwan in response to Lai’s victory, including through stepping up “gray zone” warfare—maneuvers designed to harass Taiwan’s military without openly initiating a war.

→New announcement from “anonymous U.S. officials”: Biden’s “patience” with Netanyahu is “running out.” According to the story from Axios’ Barak Ravid, Biden has refused to speak with Netanyahu since Dec. 23, when the two heads of state had a “tense” phone call that ended when Netanyahu rejected Biden’s demand that it release the tax revenues it’s currently withholding from the Palestinian Authority. Other sore points, according to the U.S. officials, include Israel refusing to countenance a return of the PA to Gaza after the war, not allowing enough humanitarian aid into Gaza, and not moving quickly enough to wrap up its “high-intensity” operations in Gaza. Not mentioned were the myriad reasons Israel has to be frustrated with the Biden administration, including its decision to send billions to the sponsor of the Oct. 7, Iran, and extend its protective umbrella to Iran’s prize proxy, Lebanese Hezbollah.

SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

Old Shul

Pinny Bulman’s new book of poems about the lost Jewish world of Washington Heights

By Jonah Raskin

Mr. and Mrs. Bulman named their son Paul after his great grandfather Pinchos. As a boy he acquired the nickname Pinny, which stuck through the years. It’s as Pinny Bulman that he writes and publishes a brand of poetry that might be described as Jewish American confessional. His newest book, old shul (Ben Yehuda Press, 2023), which his publisher calls a “bildungsroman,” explores the author’s boyhood growing up in Washington Heights in northern Manhattan, once a thriving Jewish neighborhood, with Orthodox synagogues and worshippers—including Pinny himself—that fell on hard times.

For many years, Pinny belonged to the Washington Heights Congregation at 179th Street and Pinehurst Avenue, next to the entrance to the George Washington Bridge, the biggest landmark in the neighborhood. old shul, which is divided into two parts, “old shul” and “beyond shul,” maps the decline and fall of Judaism in that neighborhood, and the impact of its disappearance on the poet himself, who appears in many of the poems finding both beauty and truth in the ruins around him.

Over the course of more than 100 poems that offer little sentimentality or schmaltz, old shul asks questions and seeks answers by way of personal, local, and autobiographical musings and meditations. These musings examine the world of Washington Heights from its highs and its lows, its sorrows and its joys, the distant past, the immediate present, and a future as yet unborn.

The first poem in the book, “hanging on,” sets the stage for the work that follows with the stench of the streets, shrieks that recall the Shoah and phrases such as “metal cages,” “empty benches,” “tired voices,” and “worn prayers.” They might make one wonder: Where are we, exactly, in a prison cell, in exile, banished from the Promised Land, in Germany in 1938?

The last poem in the book, “come away,” ends with the words “come away,” and invites members of the shul both near and far, actual and imagined, to pull the “wilderness” over their heads and follow “our pillar of fire.”

Such poems, with their images of rats and rust, decay and death, guilt and genizah, are not for the faint of heart, who crave fairy tales and happy endings. You who enter here might remember the prophet of the Old Testament in a den of lions, and would be advised not to forget Kristallnacht, when hundreds of synagogues were destroyed and tens of thousands of Jews arrested and dispatched to concentration camps. Still, Bulman doesn’t beat readers over the head with the facts of actual, historical fascism. He practices subtlety and restraint.

The book is also filled with great attention to the musicality of language. The third poem in old shul is about the “primordial language of Babel” and also about improvisation, which is spelled “imp0v1sati0n” in the title. In “bikes,” meanwhile, white space creates shape and meaning.

Alliteration works nicely in “ninevah”—“these shore rocks / are still slippery.” The words themselves sound slippery. Memorable phrases such as “desperate softness” and “nomadic hands” amplify the noirish atmosphere of the poems, while the judicious use of Yiddish words like shtiebel and minyan provides a sense of authenticity.

What stands out most in this collection, though, is Bulman’s sense of empathy for the elderly Jewish men and women in Washington Heights, and for the young, newly arrived immigrants from the Dominican Republic, that keeps the reader wide awake and engaged. The past, present, and future of this neighborhood appear in tragic and beautiful detail in the pages of this book which is meant for special occasions, whether Passover, Hanukkah, Shabbat or for any day of the week.

With his wife and two children, Bulman now lives in the Bronx and works as a pediatric psychologist. “I started writing at age 16, typical dark existential teen angst poetry,” Bulman told me. “But I didn’t start to write poetry as a vocation, as a need, until after my dad died in 2002 when I was 29.” Pinny’s father, Aaron Bulman, “was a wonderful poet published in [The] Paris Review and [The] Partisan Review,” Pinny says, “but he never received much publicity or recognition.”

Ben Yehuda Press, which has published old shul, runs the highly esteemed “Jewish Poetry Project.” The press puts into print dozens of books by Jewish poets as well as nonfiction books for both secular and religious Jews, including many works written by rabbis. Ben Yehuda’s bestsellers include Torah in a Time of Plague and Torah Without End. Not surprisingly, it has demonstrated that there's a real market for books by, for, and about Jews, who are fittingly known as the "people of the book.'' That market is not just among Jews, but among readers of all denominations and persuasions. The website for the press puts it poetically: “we see the larger Jewish community for the Noah’s Ark that it is, for the Tower of Babel that it is, and for the Garden of Eden that it can be.”

Readers who want to view Bulman as a foe of antisemitism and fascism will find that aspect of his identity in old shul. Indeed, he’s intensely sensitive to the sweep of history, especially to its catastrophes and crises, the pogroms and the gas chambers. In “swastika,” Bulman writes that a “small anonymous nazi pinwheel” which he notices in the neighborhood pushes him “to action / to go out that night armed / with a black sharpie … / blot out the swastika / mark up the area with Jewish stars.” In “jerusalem” he’s quietly defiant and profoundly spiritual. “I will not be silenced,” he writes. “My prayers will echo / off these indifferent stones / if only for a moment.”

It’s unsurprising that Bulman has absorbed the barrage of images and news stories from Israel and Gaza on a personal as well as a political level. He recently told me that “On October 7th, my aunt and uncle, their children, and their grandchildren were trembling in unlockable bomb shelters on Kibbutz Saad as friends of theirs were being murdered and kidnapped across the road in Kfar Aza.” He added: “My family members have been displaced for months from their home of many generations with no timetable on when they might be able to return or how a return may impact the PTSD so many of them are experiencing.”

At the same time, Bulman says that he has kept “his heart open” and that his “prayers are for a true lasting peace and a process that leads to an end result such that everyone is able to live their lives with dignity and safety.”

One expects no less from the author of old shul, who observes in the poem “copernicus” that “we can’t be / the center of creation” and that “creation lies within destruction.” Though in the last line he wonders, “or is it the reverse?”