Reem Assil's Racist Restaurant in Oakland

Michael Lumish

{Also published at the Elder of Ziyon and Jews Down Under.}

Fruitvale BART Station, Oakland

Reem Assil has placed a giant floor-to-ceiling mural of recently deported genocidal Jew murderer Rasmea Odeh in her bakery/cafe next to the Fruitvale BART Station in Oakland, California.

For Jewish people, it might as well be a giant Nazi Swastika.

As one of those who objected to this public veneration of an ideological killer of Jews near the entrance to a major San Francisco Bay Area transportation hub, her lawyers are dragging me into court for the purpose of obtaining a restraining order... for which they have already been twice denied by the courts.

Not that I ever came anywhere near the woman, but that is not the point... this is a matter of "lawfare."

The point is to silence pro-Jewish / pro-Israel voices in favor of antisemitic anti-Zionism and what is most insidious is that this is being done under the name of "social justice."

It is vile.

Assil is intentionally giving the small Jewish community in Oakland a little taste of 1930s Berlin wherein promoting violent hatred towards Jews was not the least bit uncommon.

Her case against me is that I stood with a few other people who objected to this transgression on the dignity and safety of the Jewish people and I wrote about it in a piece entitled Reemed in Oakland that was published in various small pro-Jewish / pro-Israel outlets such as the Elder of Ziyon, Jews Down Under, and The Jewish Press.

This is a scurrilous court case and if the law has merit Assil and her attorneys are going to lose.

Most people who follow American progressivism are familiar with the ethnic chameleon Linda Sarsour who claims to have magically transformed herself into a woman "of color" when she put on the hijab. Fewer know about her recently deported spiritual sister, the genocidal Arab-Supremacist / faux-feminist Rasmea Odeh.

Odeh and her partners in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) murdered two innocent college students in 1969.

She and her friends - including Aisha Odeh who named Rasmea as a co-conspirator - killed those kids and injured nine others at a grocery store in Jerusalem.

I was one of the people at the vigils on July 8 and July 22 - in memory of Leon Kanner and Edward Joffee - both of whom were college students in their early twenties when Odeh thought it would be a terrific idea to blow their bones all over a grocery store for the crime of being Jewish.

But the elevation of Rasmea Odeh from Jew killer to a hero of American feminism is going to make a fascinating story for some writer/researcher.

In the meantime, what I argue is that the case of Reem Assil's racist presence in Oakland represents an example of the deliberalization of the Western progressive-left.

That's the broader point.

The Left Has Embraced Racism and Deliberalization

Bigotry against any people including those heinous "white" people is anti-liberal.

In the United States for political-historical reasons, we tend to confuse liberalism with the Left but unfortunately what we are seeing today is the American progressive-left shedding its liberalism.

The primary method through which the Western-left embraces anti-liberal values is through the encouragement of racial agitation and the violent stomping on freedom of speech as we see in Berkeley and throughout universities within the United States.

While a discussion of the history of liberalism - from Magna Carta to the Constitution of the United States to the appearance of Martin Luther King, Jr. on the American political landscape - is well beyond the scope of this article, it must be understood that anti-racism is foremost among liberal values as they emerged out of World War II.

When I was growing up in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the American-Left primarily embraced liberalism. It stood up against racism and it championed freedom of speech as we saw in Berkeley in the early 1960s with Mario Savio.

Before I was born UC Berkeley was the heart of the Free Speech Movement in the United States.

Now UC Berkeley is the heart of the anti-Free Speech Movement in the United States.

Reem Assil's bakery and coffee shop directly at the access to the Fruitvale BART Station in Oakland - a major transportation hub in the San Francisco Bay Area - represents an excellent example of what more and more liberals are referring to as the "regressive left."

The idea, of course, is that the Left is decreasingly liberal and increasingly authoritarian and regressive.

What Dave Rubin, formerly of the Young Turks, and others call the "regressive-left" embraces three kinds of racism.

These are anti-white racism, antisemitic anti-Zionism, and what Manfred Gerstenfeld dubbed "Humanitarian Racism."

This last is the contemporary version of nineteenth-century American imperialist notions of "white man's burden." 

Reem Assil, as a neighbor is - much to my disgust - selling all three along with her flatbread.

Through promoting Rasmea Odeh at the Fruitvale BART Station - the very place where Oscar Grant was shot dead by an Oakland cop on New Year's Eve 2009 - Assil is using the concept of "intersectionality" to suggest that the Jewish minority in the Middle East, along with their supporters throughout the diaspora and in the United States, are responsible for the alleged oppression of the Palestinian-Arabs.

The fundamental idea is that just as "white" people are evil toward "people of color" throughout the world, so Jews are rotten to Arabs in Israel.

It is all alleged to be part of the same insidious racist, imperialist, colonialist, apartheid, mindset.

As someone who has been publicly outspoken in the movement against Jewish freedom and self-defense for many years, Assil joins people like Linda Sarsour and Rasmea Odeh in opposing Jewish self-determination out of a commitment to antisemitic anti-Zionism.

By supporting Linda Sarsour and Rasmea Odeh and, now, small-time local racist Reem Assil, the Left has betrayed its own values.

And that is what is most disappointing of all.