6 | MARCH 25 • 2021 1942 - 2021 Covering and Connecting Jewish Detroit Every Week To make a donation to the DETROIT JEWISH NEWS FOUNDATION go to the website www.djnfoundation.org The Detroit Jewish News (USPS 275-520) is published every Thursday at 32255 Northwestern Highway, #205, Farmington Hills, Michigan. Periodical postage paid at Southfield, Michigan, and additional mailing offices. 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The Detroit Jewish News will inform and educate the Jewish and general community to preserve, protect and sustain the Jewish people of greater Detroit and beyond, and the State of Israel. VISION STATEMENT The Detroit Jewish News will operate to appeal to the broadest segments of the greater Detroit Jewish community, reflecting the diverse views and interests of the Jewish community while advancing the morale and spirit of the community and advocating Jewish unity, identity and continuity. DETROIT JEWISH NEWS 32255 Northwestern Hwy. Suite 205, Farmington Hills, MI 48334 248-354-6060 thejewishnews.com PURELY COMMENTARY continued on page 8 commentary ‘Progressive Except for Palestine’ R utgers University assistant professor of Africana studies Noura Erakat demands that self-professed progressives share her Israel-hatred, lest they carry the taint of “Progressive Except for Palestine” (PEP). She made this point laboriously during a March 3 webinar with Marc Lamont Hill and also Mitchell Plitnick, whose recent book, Except Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics, is dedicated to Erakat’s terrorist cousin, Ahmed Erekat, killed last June by Israeli border security after committing a car-ramming attack that injured a guard. Hill, professor of communications at Temple University, and Plitnick, former co-director of the radically anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and former vice president of the anti-Israel Foundation for Middle East Peace, spoke with Erakat as part of a book talk presented by Chicago’s leftist Haymarket Books bookstore. The trio invoked the tired litany that the State of Israel racially oppresses Arabs, whether its own citizens or their Palestinian relatives. Hill claimed absurdly that PEP is just as unacceptable as “Progressive Except for Slavery.” Erakat praised the infamous 2001 Durban, South Africa, United Nations World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, which degenerated into a hate-fest against Israel. She had had a tangential conference connection as a researcher for a conference paper titled “The Forgotten ‘ism’: An Arab-American Woman’s Perspective on Zionism, Racism and Sexism.” “Global, grassroots coalitions” went to Durban, she boasted, “intent on holding up the banner that Israel is an apartheid state.” The U.S. Durban delegation, led by America’s first black secretary of state, Colin Powell, thought differently. Disgusted by the conference’s antisemitism, the delegation withdrew. Erakat asserted without evidence that the “United States was using Israel to protect itself because it was going to be held to account for reparations for people of African descent in the United States.” For Erakat, Palestinians are always victims, never violent perpetrators. Last summer, she fantasized that Israeli border guards shot her Palestinian cousin during a tragic car accident and not a car-ramming attack, as video proved conclusively (all the more reason for Hill and Plitnick to honor him). Like Plitnick, who denigrated Zionism as a “European construct” akin to other previously Andrew E. Harrod jns.org