Anti-Israel Group J Street Caught in Sexual Harassment Storm
Progressive working environments are also notorious for being some of the most hostile to women. This latest scandal involves J Street, the astroturf anti-Israel group favored by Obama Inc. The origins of this scandal involve an attempt to score points against Donald Trump which backfired rather badly when it ended up instead outing a lefty who had appeared at J Street.
This became increasingly problematic when it turned out that J Street had a previous complaint about him, and had quietly disinvited him, Without telling anyone else.
Stephen Flatow, a pro-Israel activist who suffered a personal tragedy at the hands of Islamic terrorists, picks up the thread at the Algemeiner.
J Street’s controversial response to the sexual harassment of one of its staff members raises questions as to whether its attitude toward women’s rights is compromised by its political goals.
After J Street learned, in 2014, that one of its staff members had been sexually harassed, it terminated its relationship with the harasser — Israeli journalist and Palestinian state advocate Ari Shavit. But J Street has now admitted that it never said a word about Shavit’s behavior to the other Jewish groups that organized Shavit’s speeches around the country.
J Street’s two-year silence on the abuse of an American Jewish woman was wrong. J Street’s silence about the abuse of Palestinian women is wrong, too, and both situations may well be related.
The left's cover-ups of such abuses are notorious. There was a recent case involving Students for Justice in Palestine.
Students For Justice In Palestine (SJP) Brown University has released a document condemning SJP NY for not condemning sexual assaults in their midst.
Brown University’s Statement on Recent Sexual Assault Controversies in NYC SJP and SJP East:
In order to maintain the political integrity of our SJP, we find it necessary to publicly condemn perpetrators of sexual assault within affiliated groups, as well as those who remain silent in the face of these unforgivable acts. If we are to call for justice, liberation, and emancipation, we cannot abide by such transgressions within our organizations. How can we possibly condemn sexual violence perpetrated by settler colonialism in Palestine if we fail to condemn the same acts within our own groups? We invite other SJP chapters to join us in this statement and intend to formally adopt organizational policies that make clear our positions on sexual assault within our group.
Specifically, in order to put this policy into practice, we ask the SJP East Board to join us in condemning two NYC SJP representatives, Tafadar Sourov and Khalil Antonio Vasquez and ban them from all SJP work. Moreover we also ask that NYC Students for Justice in Palestine be specifically barred and or castigated for their handling of this situation. These two representatives of NYC SJP were accused and found to be perpetrators of serious patriarchal behavior, including but not limited to abuse, manipulation and silencing...
But it's peculiar that while Shavit was swiftly purged, the name of Chaim Seidler Feller, whose violent assault on a female pro-Israel activist, became widely known, is still signing letters on the left.
On Oct. 21, 2003, in a corridor on the campus of UCLA, Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, the director of UCLA’s Hillel chapter, suddenly assaulted me when I merely asked him a reasonable question. He kicked and scratched me while trying to throw me down a flight of nearby stairs.
Fortunately, I was saved from possible concussion by several bystanders who pulled him off me in time. When these Samaritans were finally successful in prying the rabbi off me, he attacked me again. He assaulted me three times in the course of several minutes, and each time I had to be rescued by helpful bystanders. There was a wall of students separating him from me when I finally landed on the staircase and the rabbi stormed off screaming and shouting incoherently.
I later learned that after he assaulted me, he also shouted and screamed at another woman, Allyson Rowan Taylor, and had to be physically restrained from attacking her, too.
I suffered physical injuries that required medical treatment, and I am still trying to overcome the emotional trauma I suffered.
If Shavit is unacceptable, why is Seidler-Feller still around? Is it because assaults on anti-Israel women are wrong... but assaults on pro-Israel Jewish women are acceptable to the left?