Reemed in Oakland

Michael Lumish

{Also published at the Elder of Ziyon, Jews Down Under and The Jewish Press.}

"You're lucky that you are in that wheelchair, motherfucker!"

That is what a young, six-foot-plus, twenty-something supporter of Rasmea Odeh and Reem Assil of Reem's antisemitic restaurant in Oakland shouted at Robin Durbin at the recent pro-Israel / pro-Jewish rally at the Fruitvale BART Station.

And so here the hostility comes again... even to a place as far away from Israel as the San Francisco Bay Area.

I have been aware of the rise of antisemitic anti-Zionism within the western-left for at least ten years - which makes me a late-comer, I know - but I honestly did not expect it see it banging on my door so closely and so quickly within my lifetime and certainly not here on the west coast of the United States.

Most of us who live in the Golden Land do not fathom that the swirling international whirlwind of manifold Muslim toxic bullshit can touch us.

Some of us looked up for a moment from our iPhones and double-tall non-fat foamy mocha lattes (extra-hot) to notice the Islamist rampage in San Bernardino but quickly shrugged it off like a case of fleas on the political landscape, quickly to be forgotten.

This is because we are smug and arrogant and think we are safe.

The truth is that the hip and vapid coastal strip from San Diego up to San Francisco never really did grow out of Frankie and Annette at Bikini Beach in 1964.

Which is precisely why they don't care about, or understand, Reem's genocidal ambitions for the Jews of the Middle East:



What we are witnessing is nothing less than the process of the normalization of Jew Hatred in an organic and gradual fashion through normal day-to-day retail activity in northern California.

Reem's Restaurant at the Fruitvale BART Station in Oakland (510-852-9390) venerates genocidal Jew Hater, Rasmea Odeh with a mural smiling down upon their mostly unwitting customers gnawing at their Man’oushe.

Apparently, Reem Assil, the radical hard-left Linda Sarsour-loving proprietor of this joint may know how to cook... perhaps.

What she does, if her menu can be trusted, is top a little flatbread with olive oil and za'atar, seasoned with thyme, sumac, sesame seeds, cherry tomatoes, cucumber, and mint.

It sounds pretty delicious to me, I have to tell you. In fact, I was hoping to eat there because initially it seemed like a much better alternative to the crappy steam-table Chinese joint that used to be at that spot.

In fact, I am getting hungry just writing about it. Sadly, I will never know if Assil's food is good, bad, or indifferent because I would rather rip my left arm out of its socket and beat myself silly with it then spend a single dime in a place that normalizes and, thus, promotes racism and violence toward the Jewish people... particularly in my own neighborhood, for chrissake.

Rasmea Odeh was a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), an organization most famous for the the Entebbe hijacking of 1976 and their desire to knock-out pro-Israel Jews as entirely as possible.

Her specific claim to chimpanzee-clapping glory is the murder of 21-year-old Leon Kanner of Netanya and 22-year-old Eddie Joffe of Tel Aviv in the Jerusalem SuperSol supermarket bombing in 1969, injuring nine others.

Therefore, we insisted upon another confrontation with the anti-Jewish / anti-Zionist racists associated with Reem Assil and her vile establishment as documented in the video above, despite the fact that we knew we were going to be outnumbered and out-muscled.

The obvious reason for our concern is that Oakland, California in 2017 should not resemble Berlin in, say, 1938.

The Larger Ideological Snapshot

What strikes me most about this whole situation, however - aside from the fact that it normalizes violence toward the Jewish people in my own city - is that it also reveals the remarkable hypocrisy that has crawled into the western-left.

Whether anyone likes it or not, the left is shedding liberalism and making a comfy cozy home of itself for antisemitic anti-Zionism.

Identity politics, multiculturalism, political correctness, and "intersectionality" have come together to shove Jewish people who care about Israel - which is to say, who care about one another - up against the wall.

That is to say, the progressive-left is happy to see diaspora Jewry surrounded by hatred and potential violence if it means that eventually we will capitulate to the demands of the Palestinian-Arab murderers that they tend to sympathize with... as a matter of "social justice."

Unless we display the necessary degree of contempt for our brothers and sisters in Israel then we are considered beyond the scope of human decency within the western-left and much of the Democratic Party.

And what that, apparently, means is that Jewish people in California must pass-by the grinning face of a Jew killer with equanimity if we wish to travel from Fruitvale BART into San Francisco or arrive at that station from anywhere on the line.

If we dare to object to this, however, we are spit upon with contempt by progressives, leftists, and more than a few Democrats as nothing less than "white supremacists."

The hard-left may not mind violent antisemites like Odeh, but they definitely despise Jews who dare to speak up for the well-being of the Jewish people, as a whole, or for the State of Israel as our national homeland.

The reason behind all of this, however, is not just about antisemitism.

It is far too easy to simply slap a label on people who - like Rasmea Odeh or her flatbread-hawking, hatred-spreading devotee, Reem Assil - would see Jewish people robbed of self-determination and self-defense.

The real problem is that the western-left is unmooring itself from the tradition of Enlightenment liberalism, which is also, by the way, the reason that Europe is committing suicide as their own elites urinate upon the Euro working-class.