Last night, Black and Brown Social Club, the Lucy Parsons Project, QUIT (Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism) and allied groups showed up to fight the Zionist-Gentrification cafe Manny’s while white supremacist Zionists ate a meal in support of Manny’s: pic.twitter.com/Ff7g8VhZcx
— LucyParsonsProject (@LucyParsonsProj) December 27, 2018
The Left insists that it’s not anti-Semitism, it’s anti-Zionism. Except this is the latest incident that shows how close together the two are.
I have very little sympathy for the owner, who is learning a very old lesson, that no matter how much you pander to the anti-Semites, they will still hate you and come after you. The Jewish owner of a cafe in San Francisco did everything he could to pander to the Left.
When you wander into Manny’s at 16th and Valencia, everything is chill. It’s a big space. And it’s crowded. People are working on projects, sipping $1.75 cups of coffee, or reading the literature they can purchase in-house from an adjunct of Dog-Eared Books located in the store (curated titles from Franz Fanon, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Howard Zinn and many others for sale).
The Mission anti-gentrification activists wanted a “bicultural, bilingual environment for Mission families” with bilingual signage here. And that happened. They wanted Yekutiel to hire bilingual staff that “reflects the availability of qualified applicants in the local community,” and the staff here is now heavily composed of local people of color (many are also LGBTQ, like Yekutiel). United to Save the Mission called for “moderate price points” — and not only is the coffee a buck seventy-five, but Tecate runs you two bucks and a meal starts at six. The food here, in fact, is prepared on-site by Farming Hope, a nonprofit employing homeless, formerly incarcerated, and low-income community members — and they earn all the food revenue.
And, on top of that, the MOU calls for “community-serving groups” to use the event space here — for free. That’s happening, too (groups with a bit more cash pay $54 per hour, which is still low).
United to Save the Mission also originally wanted Yekutiel to have awnings, because, he was told, “certain physical traits supposedly make spaces more welcoming for Latino families.”
There are more bizarre details in Yekutiel’s op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle.
I worked on both the Obama and Clinton campaigns and, after 2016, was struck by the thirst for civic engagement. Here was a citizenry, with their hands raised, looking for a starting place for action and unsure of how to begin — that’s what 2016 inspired. Seeing this problem, I gathered a community to build a physical civic events space called Manny’s at the corner of 16th and Valencia streets in San Francisco.
The kitchen is staffed with formerly homeless individuals and run by the nonprofit Farming Hope. We’ve already given free or low-cost space to more than 25 nonprofits such as Mission Graduates, Indivisible, Citizen’s Climate Lobby and the Instituto Familiar de la Raza, who need to spend their money on programs, not expensive rental fees
They came for him anyway.
Boycott Manny’s and its ‘woke-washing’ of the Mission,” blared an email sent Dec. 5 to media outlets by “The Lucy Parsons Project,” a self-described “radical black queer direct action group fighting anti-blackness in the Bay Area.”
“Additionally, the proprietor of Manny’s, Emmanuel Yekutiel, has unequivocally espoused racist, Zionist, pro-Israel ideals that we will not tolerate or accept in our community. … We will not tolerate gentrifiers and Zionists attempts at invading and destroying our community through ‘woke-washing’!!”
And, surely enough, a handful of protesters began showing up, weekly, shouting through bullhorns and waving placards. Someone painted a Star of David on Manny’s exterior along with the words “Fuck Zionism.” A window was broken.
Meet the new woke Nazis.
What’s the basis for accusing Yekutiel of Zionism? Not much. In his op-ed, he writes…
I have complicated feelings about Israel. I do not support everything that its government does (nor everything our American government does). Israel and the United States have provided my family with safety when other countries haven’t, but that doesn’t mean I support the ending of innocent life. My hope for the Israeli and Palestinian people is to soon live in peace with mutual recognition in sovereign and safe borders.
That used to be a mainstream lefty position. Now it makes you a Zionist. Which is apparently indistinguishable from Jewish.
Claims such as the space is a Zionist takeover of the Mission has emboldened people to walk in off the street and demand to know if the owner is Jewish.
This is exactly the sort of anti-Semitic garbage that lefty groups like JFREJ provide political cover for.
The Left is an anti-Semitic movement. Any attempts to appease them will ultimately prove futile.
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