JP: Brooklyn’s Anti-Gentrication Groups are Pushing Antisemitic Narratives and Activism

From the Jewish Press:

Today’s situation of riots, anarchy, and anti-Jewish violence, has a lot of parallels to the Crown Heights riots of ‘91, and one of them is this: Jews in middle and southern Brooklyn are under siege again. The government, the police, and to a large extent, the organized Jewish community supposedly here to defend us, are AWOL. And while some of these problems are national, the violence against the haredi community began before the riots.

As anti-Jewish and especially anti-Orthodox violence began rising in Crown Heights and elsewhere in Brooklyn, groups like the ADL declined to point a finger, and seemed to think teaching elementary kids slogans of tolerance was a sufficient answer to assuage the increased violence from adults. But our institutions appear to have never asked the question: Who has been agitating against us locally?

This was unfortunate, even irresponsible, as the violence does appear to be coming at least in part from a perceived turf battle over territory, with the Jews as the “colonizers” in that battle. And we can identify at least two organizations promoting that narrative that have enjoyed nothing but fawning media approval, from the NY Times to Buzzfeed, and zero resistance from the ADL or any other Jewish organization.

Two radical activist organizations that are particularly noteworthy in their aggressive stands against the Jewish community for the sake of “anti-gentrification” are Decolonize This Place and Equality for Flatbush.

Decolonize This Place, run by Amin Husain, describes itself as an, “Action-oriented movement: Indigenous struggle, Black liberation, free Palestine, workers, degentrification, dismantle patriarchy.”

Decolonize This Place posted an instagram of George Floyd wearing a Palestinian kefiah even though he was not Muslim, never mind Palestinian.

A strong ally of Decolonize This Place in degrentification efforts, Equality for Flatbush (E4F), has consistently taken credit for coordinating harassment of a “Karen” who organized to call the police on the endless industrial-grade fireworks, as denying working people sleep for months on end is seen as a legitimate and effective weapon against gentrification. Like Decolonize This Place, E4F believes a critical element to NYC real estate wars is based in…Palestine. As E4F says, “People Power Movement say from Kingsbridge, Bronx to #Palestine #gentrification is a crime”

Both are part of the “Brooklyn anti-gentrification network.”

What are these groups really doing by associating gentrification with the Arabs in the Israel-Arab conflict? They are identifying the enemy in their struggle. And it isn’t the IDF. What does Palestine have to do with gentrification?