The Woke Army: Organized Against Israel

To understand why undermining Israel is central to the woke agenda, read “The Woke Army: The Red-Green Alliance That is Destroying America’s Freedom,” a recently published book by Asra Nomani.

Nomani, a former Wall Street Journal investigative journalist, now reports and advocates against radical Islam, critical race theory, and everyday injustices. She didn’t intend to write “Woke Army.” Instead, Nomani was merely seeking the names of the individuals trolling and bullying her online in response to efforts to include women in Islamic prayer. In identifying her cowardly online assailants, Nomani uncovered a “wider network of ideologues using” the rhetoric and relationships of critical race theory to undermine Israel and American support for the Jewish state. She calls these people the “woke army.”

It includes academics, non-profit organizations, activists, politicians and so-called journalists, all coordinating with and getting support from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). As Nomani documents in her book, CAIR not only funded the individuals who cyber-stalked and threatened her. CAIR has also played a crucial role in getting politicians to participate in anti-Zionist activities and turning anti-Zionists into victims and a protected political class. As Nomani puts it, “CAIR is a critical part of a network that is anti-Semitic and has contempt for secular American values.”

The goal of the woke army is not to persuade or convince. Instead, it attacks, intimidates, insinuates, delegitimizes and de-platforms. It does not care for the truth. Rather, disinformation shapes every statement and effort, and each statement and action is designed to deliver the message that Israel needs to be eliminated.

Nomani does not dwell on her advocacy activities or the insults, libel and death threats she has received regularly in response to her efforts. Doing so would require tens of thousands of pages, which she compiled in securing the identity of her character assassins. (It is difficult not to feel angry reading about each incident.) She was initially attacked for daring to advocate for Muslim women organizing and leading prayer groups with an online campaign: DeathToAsra.

As she began to identify and connect different nodes of the network and its systematic effort to eliminate Israel, the attacks increased in frequency and fury. Network members pointed out she was friends with fellow WSJ reporter Daniel Pearl, who was kidnapped and beheaded by the Taliban in February 2002. Then they alleged that she gave birth to Pearl’s son. The term “Zionist whore” is used a lot.

Nomani notes that the woke army’s anti-Israel, anti-West network grew significantly stronger by joining forces with the Black Lives Matter movement in drawing a connection between perceived Israeli oppression of Palestinians and the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old Black man in Ferguson, Missouri.

The U.S. Palestinian Community Network, American Muslims for Palestine, Muslim Advocates, Students for Justice in Palestine and MPower helped organize protests. Linda Sarsour created Muslims For Ferguson and worked with Angela Davis to unite Islamists and critical race activists around the slogan “from Ferguson to Palestine, occupation is a crime.”

Nomani writes that the two networks grew in parallel before joining forces, and suggests that the relationship between the two was bashert, a perfect match.

Critical race theory, which borrows from Marxist ideologies, asserts that all institutions—including law, civil liberties, media outlets and corporations—are organized to support capitalism. Further, according to CRT, all Western democracies maximize capitalist power by ensuring all facets of life are constructed to exploit people of color, perpetuating colonialism and promoting white supremacy.

The Marxists and the CRT crowd has always regarded Israel as part of the colonial system of exploitation. The woke army successfully identified Israel as the leading cause of oppression worldwide and enshrined anti-Zionists as the core of CRT doctrine and activity.

The woke army successfully identified Israel as the leading cause of oppression worldwide and enshrined anti-Zionists as the core of CRT doctrine and activity.

When the woke army became involved with Black Lives Matter, it enshrined “from Ferguson to Palestine; occupation is a crime” as the organizing principle of the movement. It plays a pivotal role through CAIR, Students for Justice in Palestine, and activists such as Linda Sarsour in moving the BDS movement into a mainstream component of social justice. It quickly exploited anti-Trump fears to turn the Women’s March into a mouthpiece and platform for anti-Israel and antisemitic activities.

And at each critical juncture, American Jews, ranging from useful idiots to virulent anti-Zionists, greased the wheel of coalition building. The University of California, Berkeley professor Judith Butler worked closely with Hatem Bazian, a Berkeley student, to organize anti-Israel protests and launch Students for Justice in Palestine. Jewish groups locally locked arms with BLM and took the lead in explaining away the group’s affiliations with BDS. And organizations such as the National Council of Jewish Women, Bend the Arc, and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice led an effort to support Sarsour’s leadership of the Women’s March when critics charged her with being antisemitic and anti-Israel.

The surge in anti-Zionism and antisemitism (they are the same) is directly a result of the successful efforts of the woke army to make anti-Zionism acceptable, if not mainstream. The woke army was secretive and deceptive. It built the political equivalent of Potemkin villages to deflect the scrutiny Nomani pursued. But ultimately, it succeeded by working hard and using perfectly legal tactics to achieve its objectives.

For the remaining American Jews who still regard Israel as the eternal homeland of the Jewish people, Nomani’s book should be a wake-up call. Our response to the woke army’s attacks, including reactive overreliance on proclamations and task forces to root out antisemitism, is failing.

Defeating the woke army will require courage and more aggressive, proactive strategies. In the words of Theodor Herzl: “No matter how many petitions are signed or committees are struck: Antisemitism has grown and continues to grow—and so do I.”

Robert Goldberg is Vice President, Center for Medicine in the Public Interest and an adviser to the Pearl Project.