Cafe sued for refusing Jewish customers blames 'Zionist' harassment for its closing.

…(cont) Start with the word instead. The statement doesn't say "critics" harassed the shop, or "customers," or even "protesters." It says "Zionist." That is the specific word a business reaches for when it wants to describe the people organizing against it without describing what they were organizing against. It happens to be the same category of person the lawsuit says was turned away at the counter. The overlap is presumably a coincidence a jury will be asked to evaluate.

It is not the only accusation filed that week. On August 28, nearly a thousand members of the group called the Brigade accused actor Mark Ruffalo of invoking antisemitic tropes in his remarks on the Paramount merger — a different institution, a different deflection, four days ahead of a coffee shop's turn. That same week, the ADL surveyed Jewish members of teachers unions and found nearly three-quarters self-censoring inside their own union spaces. Three institutions in one week, and in each one the word does the same job: it moves the discrimination from the institution's ledger onto the discriminated-against.

So the official position holds: the cafe is the victim here, a target of harassment it will not itself describe in detail, closing its doors rather than describing it under oath at trial. I believe that position. I believe — no. The complaint names a parent and a child. The statement names a word. Only one of those has an address the court can serve papers to.