Training for NYPD Officers Categorized the Keffiyeh and Watermelon as Antisemitic Symbols [View all]

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https://jewishcurrents.org/training-nypd-keffiyeh-watermelon-antisemitism-israel-palestine

On January 8th, senior New York Police Department (NYPD) staff joined over 150 law enforcement officers, city officials, and religious leaders at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Lower Manhattan for a training on combating antisemitism. In a press release about the event, the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM)—which led the training alongside George Washington University’s Program on Extremism (POE)—said the presentation aimed to teach the police “how to recognize and address antisemitism in its many contemporary forms” and offered “tools to counter it.” But the presentation itself, exclusively obtained by Jewish Currents, was in large part concerned with pro-Palestine activism, casting the Palestine solidarity movement as a significant threat to Jewish safety despite consistent documentation that antisemitism in the United States is most prevalent among far-right white nationalists. The training, which focused heavily on student protesters, repeatedly conflated antisemitism with anti-Zionism. It categorized campus demonstrators as extremists tied to Hamas, and branded as antisemitic Palestinian symbols like the watermelon and the keffiyeh, as well as phrases such as “settler colonialism” and “all eyes on Rafah.”

Experts on antisemitism and civil liberties say the training reinforces a police culture that treats Palestinians (and Arabs and Muslims more broadly) with suspicion, while doing little to curb antisemitism. “They are actively conflating any care for Palestinian humanity or rights—and in some cases, Palestinian existence itself—with antisemitism,” said Dove Kent, the US senior director for Diaspora Alliance, a group that fights antisemitism and its weaponization. “None of this does anything to increase Jewish safety.” Instead, the trainings serve to worsen a situation where “law enforcement is on the front lines of violent anti-Palestinian repression—beating student protesters, surveilling them, and raiding them both on and off campus,” said Dylan Saba, a staff attorney at Palestine Legal (and a contributing editor for Jewish Currents). “With this training, police are being fed a description of pro-Palestinian students that, merely on the basis of their political expression, categorizes them as a security threat.” (The NYPD, the New York City mayor’s office, CAM, and POE did not return requests for comment.)

The two groups that led the NYPD training occupy different roles in the pro-Israel landscape. CAM was founded in 2019 by Adam Beren, a Trump-supporting oil tycoon. One of the organization’s main goals is lobbying elected officials around the country to adopt the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism—which classifies some anti-Zionist speech as antisemitic—into state law. CAM’s advisers include individuals with close ties to government officials around the country, such as Joel Eisdorfer, a former senior adviser to New York City Mayor Eric Adams who helped coordinate the seminar for the NYPD, and Gabe Groisman, a top ally of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Meanwhile, POE, created in 2015 and housed at George Washington University, describes itself as a “research center on all forms of extremism,” with a particular focus on “global jihadism, Islamism, domestic extremism and antisemitism.” The organization is led by Lorenzo Vidino, who “promotes conspiracy theories about the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe and the United States,” according to Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative, which researches Islamophobia. POE also employs numerous former national security officials—including a former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent who helped investigate the Holy Land Foundation, a Muslim group prosecuted by the Bush administration for giving humanitarian aid to allegedly pro-Hamas Palestinian charities. (Legal experts have harshly criticized the prosecution and conviction of the Holy Land Foundation due to the government’s reliance on the testimony of anonymous Israeli intelligence agents, and the fact that the Palestinian charities funded by the foundation were also funded by the US government.)

Now, CAM and POE have capitalized on law enforcement’s interest in anti-Zionist activity, which has peaked in the aftermath of October 7th, 2023 amid an upsurge of campus protests against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. Prior to the NYPD seminar this January, CAM and POE had teamed up in late 2024 to give trainings to law enforcement agencies in Virginia in sessions co-organized by Governor Glenn Youngkin. The presentations attempted to outline Hamas’s alleged “ongoing efforts to infiltrate the American education system,” and tried to link prominent Muslim American groups like American Muslims for Palestine and the Council on American-Islamic Relations to Hamas. Subsequently, Virginia lawmakers wrote a resolution commending the CAM and POE training for “resulting in real-world results,” with “investigators identifying and thwarting potential threats to public safety thanks to improved recognition of evidence associated with extremism during probes of unrelated criminal activities.” And Virginia is not alone in having CAM and POE present to its police. This January, then-Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody (who is now a Florida senator) announced that Florida’s federal, state, and local law enforcement officers would attend an April 30th seminar given by CAM and POE on “the presence of Hamas in America and campus protests,” building on post-October 7th efforts by government officials and Israel advocacy groups to allege without evidence that student protesters are violating “material support” laws against assisting Hamas.