Pro-Israel Politicians and Donors Assault Academic Freedom in America
Widespread student protests on the US campuses against Israel's genocidal war in Gaza are being labeled antisemitic by pro-Israel politicians and donors. They have now joined forces to intimidate the leadership of top American universities. President Liz MaGill of the University of Pennsylvania has already been forced out. Leaders at Harvard and MIT are also under threat. The Pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Brandeis Center have called on 200 college presidents to investigate pro-Palestinian student groups. Faculty members and instructors at several public and private colleges have either been placed on leave or fired for comments about the conflict, according to Bloomberg columnist Noah Feldman. These actions are a direct assault on the academic freedom in America, with long term negative consequences for the world's most admired institutions of higher education.
|
Academic Freedom:
Academic freedom is about free exchange of ideas on campus by students and faculty. It is considered essential for learning. Limiting this freedom hurts pursuit of excellence which has helped American colleges and universities become the envy of the world. This freedom must be defended by all Americans to maintain the excellence of institutions of higher learning in America.
US Congress:
GOP politicians see these pro-Palestine protests on US campuses as a fundraising opportunity. Harvard alumna Rep. Elise M. Stefanik ’06 (R-N.Y.) aggressively questioned presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT to score points with the Israel lobby. “At Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment?” asked — to which Gay twice responded that “it depends on the context.”
GOP politicians like Stefanik are deliberately conflating slogans such as "From the River to the Sea, Free Palestine Free" with call for genocide of Jews. In fact, this chant is only about ending the long brutal Israeli Occupation of Gaza (along the Mediterranean Sea) and the West Bank (of the Jordan River).
Jewish Donors:
Several Jewish donors of major private sector universities have either cancelled their donations or threatened to do so over the Pro-Palestine protests. Investors Bill Ackman and Ross Stevens have been among the most vocal pro-Israel donors at Harvard and Penn. They both called for the ouster of the presidents of these universities over what they call "antisemitism" on campuses.
The aggressive behavior of Jewish donors is serving to reinforce the antisemitic stereotype of wealthy Jews. As former Labor Secretary Robert Reich put in a Guardian Op Ed: "As a Jew, I cannot help but worry, too, that the actions of these donors will fuel the very antisemitism they claim to oppose – based on the perilous stereotype of wealthy Jewish bankers controlling the world".
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion:
Some right-wing politicians and donors have attacked DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) programs as the cause of what they call "antisemitism" on campuses. These programs help bring in faculty and students from under-represented groups to colleges and universities that have traditionally been almost entirely white. They blame DEI because many new students from minority background tend to sympathize with Palestinians who they see as oppressed. Many of them see Israel as a "Western settler-colonialist oppressor par excellence", according to the Wall Street Journal.
Related Links:
Haq's Musings
South Asia Investor Review
Modi and Netanyahu: Two Sides of the Same Coin
Israel's Gaza Attack is Criminal, Not Defensive
Pictorial Review of Israel's Young Gaza Victims
American College Campuses Rise Up Against Israel's Genocidal War on Gaza
Israeli Settler Colonialism
Islamophobia Driving US Policy in Middle East and South Asia?
Israeli Scholars Offer Insights into Zionist Psyche
Total, Extended Lockdown in Indian Occupied Kashmir
What is India Hiding From UN Human Rights Team?
Indian JNU Professor on Illegal Indian Occupation of Kashmir, Manipur, Nagaland
Riaz Haq Youtube Channel
PakAlumni: Pakistani Alumni Social Network
Comments
Claudine Gay faced calls to step down as governing board stood by her
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/harvard-president-claudine-gay-resigns-e52adc44
Harvard University President Claudine Gay has resigned after facing mounting criticism over how she responded to antisemitism on campus and, most recently, allegations that she plagiarized the work of other researchers on several occasions.
Gay, a professor of government and of African and African-American studies, became president in July after serving as dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences for around five years. She had been under pressure for weeks regarding her response to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks on Israel. Her remarks at a House committee hearing on the matter in early December drew widespread criticism after she gave an equivocal response to a question about whether calls for the genocide of Jewish people violated the campus code of conduct.
She was also accused of plagiarizing other academics in several published papers and her Ph.D. dissertation. The Harvard Corporation, the university’s top governing board, said in December that reviews of her work uncovered some instances of “inadequate citation,” but that the omissions didn’t meet the bar of outright research misconduct.
Gay has requested four corrections on two academic papers and is updating her dissertation in three spots, according to the school, whose board has released statements standing by Gay.
https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/fzgps/date/2024-04-28/segment/01
ZAKARIA: In your "London Review of Books" essay, you talked about how one of the things going on at college campuses you believe is that people are coming to realize that there are large reservoirs of strong opposition to what Israel has been doing for the last few decades. Explain -- and that that is being misread in your view as antisemitism. ROBBINS: That is exactly what I think. I think that this is a
conjunctural moment, pardon with the academic professorial talk. It's Black Lives Matter, the COVID pandemic, and the fact that the young people these days have access and, no offense to CNN, to uncensored, no-gatekeeping visuals of the disruption in Gaza via social media. So they have access to information in a way that they have never had access before.
You put all those things together and I think what Israel is doing in Gaza is the symbol of evil for this generation. And the poll numbers suggest that there is a wave of feeling, a crystallization of feeling --
ZAKARIA: And you're saying, just to be clear, as a Jewish-American, you say that this is not antisemitism.
ROBBINS: I'm saying very, very much as a Jew. No, no, not at all. The simplest thing that we have tried, we, the Jewish faculty, there are many, many Jewish students who are involved in this. I mean, we of course feel as Jews that we're not being recognized, you know, because my president is telling me and Jewish Voice for Peace, an organization that I admire very much, that we're being antisemitic.
I'm sorry. This is a way of being Jewish. I'm a secular Jew. You know, I believe in universal principles, no double standards, no Jewish state without equal rights for everybody. So I'm really anti-double standards.
STEPHENS: I'm for a two-state solution which one-state solution would be a devastation for the Jewish people on a scale that hasn't been seen since the last devastation a century ago. And right now, this is an interesting discussion because we're talking about academia, but this has effects in the real world. And if the world gets behind the idea that Israel is this uniquely malevolent state, saying nothing about Syria, Sudan, and China, other abuses, but Israel is uniquely the state that must disappear and becomes the moral cause of this generation of students.
We will be replicating the tragedies that occurred on German universities in the 1920s and 1930s where the takeover by the left got to a takeover by the right. And one of the things that's so disturbing about these protests is there's no allowance for the idea that Israelis have suffered. There's no allowance for the idea that this -- that this clash in between the Israelis and the Palestinians is at the minimum morally complicated.
ZAKARIA: Last word.
ROBBINS: Oh gosh, what a responsibility. I don't think that people think that Israel is unique example of evil in the world. I think what's special about it is it couldn't do what it's doing without the support of the United States. So students in the United States think we have a responsibility. It's not just somebody else. I mean, the United States is not supporting North Korea, it's not supporting Syria.
[10:25:01]
There are a lot of bad places that are doing bad things that equal or worse, who knows, but they're not being supported by us. So we have a responsibility as Americans to do something about it. What's being done is being done in my name as an American and being done in my name as a Jew. And those things are unbearable to me.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/april/at-columbia
When Minouche Shafik, the president of Columbia University, testified before the House of Representatives on 17 April, she didn’t fall into the traps set a few months earlier for the presidents of Penn, MIT and Harvard, two of whom are now gone. They had been asked whether they would permit genocidal talk against the Jews on their campuses – a dark discourse that lurked, according to the questioners, in such terms as ‘from the river to the sea’ and ‘intifada’. All three university presidents last December came up with legalistic answers, invoking context. But Shafik last week did not. She presented herself as a relentless scourge of antisemitism. Her head will not fall – at least not as a result of congressional displeasure.
There is some question, however, about her future at Columbia. First, because of her craven and embarrassing submission to the House Republicans. And second, because on the following day she brought the police in to demolish a student tent encampment protesting against the Israeli slaughter in Gaza. The encampment is on a campus lawn allocated by the university for demonstrations. More than a hundred student demonstrators were arrested. Shafik may have avoided viral memes of awkward moments in Congress, but videos of the NYPD in action against peaceful demonstrators on 18 April, now circulating widely, amply illustrate the violence that Shafik was willing to inflict on Columbia and Barnard students in the name of assuring student safety. It’s the first time the police have been invited onto Columbia’s campus since 1968. Like 1968, 2024 may go down as an inauspicious year for university administrations trying to defend the indefensible.
The House Republicans who pressed the point about chants allegedly ‘calling for the genocide of Jews’ on university campuses had not previously displayed much concern for the wellbeing of American Jews. In 2017, Donald Trump, who will soon again be their presidential nominee, described some of the torch carriers who chanted ‘Jews will not replace us’ in Charlottesville as ‘very fine people’. You would not have to dig very deep to uncover friendly associations with white supremacists among the present committee members. (I would love to be challenged to document this.) Still, you could hardly call them dull. One invoked the Book of Genesis to back up his conviction that Columbia had to support Israel whatever Israel did. Did Shafik want to bring down God’s curse on Columbia? Please answer yes or no. Another raised the genocidal threat contained in the word ‘infantada’, a malapropism she used twice.
The many Columbia faculty members who were less than happy with Shafik’s pragmatic testimony, myself included, were not surprised that she declared herself a zealous and proactive foe of antisemitism on campus. We were not surprised that she failed to distinguish between the real threat of antisemitism and criticism of the industrial-scale killing of Palestinians in Gaza, a criticism that does not target Jews as Jews. And we were not surprised that she didn’t distinguish between real acts of antisemitism, which have been very few, and the anxiety or discomfort of Jewish students forced, perhaps for the first time, to confront the fact that much of the world disapproves of what Israel is up to.
In response to the attacks of 7 October, Shafik founded a Taskforce on Antisemitism. The Taskforce had no definition of antisemitism, conflated it with criticism of the state of Israel, and sometimes seemed interested solely in Jewish feelings of discomfort, even if those feelings seemed to have been brought on only by reactions to the bombing of Gaza. One faculty member suggested it be renamed the Taskforce on Campus Vibes.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/april/at-columbia
Meanwhile she was suspending and evicting from student accommodation Muslim and Jewish students who were protesting against the bombing of Gaza. She also suspended the campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and, the icing on the cake, Jewish Voice for Peace. I can’t be the only Jew on campus whose head was spinning all winter at the idea that, like the government of Germany, Shafik felt qualified to instruct me on what was and was not antisemitic. When people objected that the taskforce heads knew very little about antisemitism, the administration explained that it was providing hundreds of thousands of dollars so they could hire the appropriate researchers. No surprises, then, at Shafik’s performance before the House committee.
All the same, faculty members were taken aback, to put it as politely as possible, that she failed to stand up for the basic principles of the university she leads, such as academic freedom, shared governance, transparency and due process. She had already told the university senate on 23 February that she was ‘dismayed’ by the ‘low level of trust at Columbia’ – something of an understatement – but lack of trust in the administration is not hard to understand. Last October, two weeks after the Hamas attack, it changed the university’s policy on demonstrations without consulting the senate, although consultation is a mandatory procedure for any such changes. Henceforth the administration would have ‘sole discretion’ to determine ‘final and not appealable’ sanctions on student groups. There was general outrage on campus. The student governing board, representing more than a hundred student organisations, voted by an overwhelming majority to declare its non-co-operation with the administration on this change. The board was set up in response to the 1968 protests at Columbia. This is the first time that non-co-operation had been invoked in fifty years.
As for academic freedom, Shafik said in her written opening statement that ‘we believe we can confront antisemitism and provide a safe campus environment for our community while simultaneously supporting rigorous academic exploration and freedom.’ But questioned about Professor Mohamed Abdou, the author of Islam and Anarchism, who is untenured, she responded, on camera, that he ‘will never teach at Columbia again.’ The Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik said that he had posted: ‘Yes, I’m with Hamas and Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad.’ (What he actually wrote, as part of a much longer piece, was: ‘I’m with the muqawamah [the resistance] be it Hamas and Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad but up to a point – given ultimate differences over our ethical political commitments.’)
Stefanik accused Professor Joseph Massad – who has been targeted by petitions calling for his dismissal – of ‘stating that the massacre of Israeli civilians was “awesome”’. Shafik did not respond, as she might have done, by referring to what Professor Massad had actually written (‘No less awesome were the scenes witnessed by millions of jubilant Arabs who spent the day watching the news, of Palestinian fighters from Gaza breaking through Israel’s prison fence or gliding over it by air’; he also wrote of a ‘horrifying human toll on all sides’.) Instead, Shafik said she was ‘appalled by what he’s said’ and that ‘he has been spoken to.’ But even if he had said what they said he said, didn’t he have the right to say it? We don’t fire teachers who approve of dropping the atomic bomb.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/april/at-columbia
A vocal pro-Israel faculty member has been accused of harassing students on social media, and there is a move among students to get him banished. But forget about student anxieties for a moment. The Israeli army has been committing atrocities on a massive scale, while the International Court of Justice deliberates the possibility of real genocide in Gaza, as distinct from speculative calls to genocide that House Republicans deduce, falsely, from pro-Palestinian chants by demonstrators. That’s what Israel’s defenders are defending. When a small group of Jewish faculty members was preparing last week to meet with the provost to make our dissatisfactions known, we asked ourselves how we felt about the pro-Israel professor and we said, unanimously, that we defended his right to his opinions, loathsome as we find them. I don’t worry about his being driven out of Columbia. But I worry that our president shamelessly sacrificed the principle of academic freedom that all of us depend on, the Zionists included, to keep the project of free thinking alive.
This is certainly how she is perceived by a large and rapidly growing portion of Columbia faculty. An emergency meeting of the local chapter of the American Association of University Professors on 19 April reached its Zoom limit of three hundred people within minutes, leaving many faculty members clamouring to get in. The indignant talk was not about Palestine, but about the administration’s blatant lack of respect for the safety of its students and the principles of higher education.
Student protest on behalf of the Palestinians is very much alive, at least for the moment. When the police cleared out the encampment and dragged students off to jail, others hopped the fence and established a second encampment across the way, this time without tents. It is these students who have the most convincing grounds for anxiety. They too risk arrest and jail. Some have already been suspended from classes and evicted from student accommodation, leaving them homeless on the streets of New York. Those who have merely been suspended risk losing their tuition for the semester. The university administration seems to have decided that an encampment without tents can be left alone. Perhaps Shafik realises she has made a series of grave errors, and that if she makes another one, her administration may not survive the public shame.
-------------------
Ah, so you want India to become a superpower – like America?
by Roger Marshall
Read more at: https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/ah-so-you-want-india-to-become-a-superpower-like-america-3018901
In the agricultural sector, most US farms would be out of business but for cheap migrant labour from Central America, mainly Mexico -- the same Mexico whose lands were expropriated but whose people are still being shut out at the border.
———-
There are many Indians, politicians and ordinary citizens alike, who would like to see India become a superpower, much along the lines of the United States. Is this in keeping with the ethos of the Indian character? And to what end? To answer these questions, we need to understand what it is in the American character that enabled the US to grow from a 300,000 square-mile territory comprised of 13 original colonies bordering the Atlantic Ocean to a gigantic country covering some 3.5 million square-miles, extending out to the Pacific Ocean.
Read more at: https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/ah-so-you-want-india-to-become-a-superpower-like-america-3018901
Though the phrase ‘manifest destiny’ was coined in 1845 by Democrat John O’Sullivan, the ideology behind the phrase was operative even back in the 1620s, when the first European settlers, the Puritans from England fleeing religious persecution, set foot in North America. Manifest destiny refers to the divine right to “tame and cultivate” the new country by displacing the “uncivilised,” non-Christian peoples who did not take full advantage of the land God had granted them..
This ideology served to justify the violent displacement of native peoples and military takeover of their lands. When the US purchased the territory of Louisiana (over 800,000 square-miles) from France in 1803, it essentially bought Native American tribal land which France neither owned nor controlled, if only to prevent Spain, Britain and Russia from colonising the area. This area is what is now known as Middle America, populated almost entirely by the ancestors of white immigrants from northern Europe
That race has been a huge factor in America’s attainment of superpower status can be seen by examining legislation pertaining to immigration and trade over the last 200 years. While unrestricted immigration from Western Europe has always been allowed, it has been less so for Southern and Eastern Europeans but definitely not for Asians, unless they were slaves and indentured labourers. Even though it was cheap Chinese labour that built the American railroads in the 1870s, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 drove most of the Chinese out of America. American labour unions believed that Chinese coolies were responsible for declining wages and lowered standards of living.
Read more at: https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/ah-so-you-want-india-to-become-a-superpower-like-america-3018901
—————
Absent a moral or ethical compass, we suppose that any nation singularly focused on enriching itself can become a superpower. To quote John O’Sullivan, “Yes, more, more, more! . . . till our national destiny is fulfilled and. . the whole boundless continent is ours”.
Read more at: https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/ah-so-you-want-india-to-become-a-superpower-like-america-3018901
https://x.com/briebriejoy/status/1767987059279507636
----------------------
“We really have a TikTok problem, a Gen Z problem,” Anti-Defamation League (ADL) director Jonathan Greenblatt said in a recording. He notes that Israel is facing a “major generational problem” in the United States and that “the numbers of young people who think that Hamas’, you know, massacre was justified is shockingly and terrifyingly high.”
https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/exterminate-all-the-brutes
When those who are occupied refuse to submit, when they continue to resist, we drop all pretense of our “civilizing” mission and unleash, as in Gaza, an orgy of slaughter and destruction. We become drunk on violence. This violence makes us insane. We kill with reckless ferocity. We become the beasts we accuse the oppressed of being. We expose the lie of our vaunted moral superiority. We expose the fundamental truth about Western civilization — we are the most ruthless and efficient killers on the planet. This alone is why we dominate the “wretched of the earth.” It has nothing to do with democracy or freedom or liberty. These are rights we never intend to grant to the oppressed.
“Honor, justice, compassion and freedom are ideas that have no converts,” Joseph Conrad, who wrote “Heart of Darkness,” reminds us. “There are only people, without knowing, understanding or feelings, who intoxicate themselves with words, repeat words, shout them out, imagining they believe them without believing in anything else but profit, personal advantage and their own satisfaction.”
Genocide lies at the core of Western imperialism. It is not unique to Israel. It is not unique to the Nazis. It is the building block of Western domination. The humanitarian interventionists who insist we should bomb and occupy other nations because we embody goodness — although they promote military intervention only when it is perceived to be in our national interest — are useful idiots of the war machine and global imperialists. They live in an Alice-in-Wonderland fairytale where the rivers of blood we spawn make the world a happier and better place. They are the smiley faces of genocide. You can watch them on your screens. You can listen to them spout their pseudo-morality in the White House and in Congress. They are always
The Tucker Carlson Show
https://www.happyscribe.com/public/the-tucker-carlson-show/glenn-greenwald-antisemitism-attacks-on-free-speech-and-everything-you-need-to-know-about-brazil
.... Like, almost none, because hearing chants that are pro palestinian or anti israeli make them feel vulnerable. Like the conservatives in Congress, like Elise Stefanik and Virginia, all Mike Johnson, they had, like, a horde of jewish students from Harvard coming and saying, I don't feel safe at my school. The very things that conservatives have been mocking so viciously, when that came from black students or trans students or immigrants or Muslims or whatever, the hypocrisy, the stench of it is suffocating and nauseating.
[00:28:31]
From my perspective as an american, I think you can have any opinion you want on Israel. I'm not actually that interested. I personally like Israel. Whatever the red line for me is, this is my country. My birthright is free speech. God gave me that right. You cannot take it away. And if you're telling me what I'm allowed to say in my country, you're my enemy. It's just kind of that simple. You can't tell me what to say or think, period. Because I'm an american.
[00:28:56]
Exactly. And. But if there were a consistent standard, like, let's say there were consistent, period.
[00:29:00]
Like, let's just walk back from there.
[00:29:02]
Right. But if there were some consistent standard, like, western Europeans have hate speech laws, whatever that kind of. They don't really apply them consistently. But at least there's, like, a dogma. Like, hate speech is not part of free speech in the United States. We don't have a hate speech exception to the first. There is no such thing. So if you suddenly now start, you know, and it's not just in the discourse, they're passing laws. Oh, I mean, where, like, Greg Abbott issued an executive order that said there will be no more anti semitism, meaning anti semitism speech, antisemitic speech, or ideas allowed in the state of Texas. And you have, I don't know if you saw the video this week, but there was a video emerging where a school administrator went to a group of palestinian protesters and said, I just want you to know, if you chant from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free or globalized, the intifada, you will be turned over to law enforcement. We will call the police on you and you will be arrested and held legally accountable. That is now a crime. In Texas. They passed a law.
[00:30:04]
Is that actually true?
[00:30:05]
Yes. Yes. Yes. I mean, the whole point of Greg Abbott's executive order was to say no anti semitic speech is permissible in Texas any longer. You're allowed to have anti black racist speech. You're allowed to have anti muslim speech. You're allowed to have white, anti gay speech. You can have anti white speech. You just can't be anti semitic to the point where these students are now being told that if they do these political chants, no violence, no obstruction of buildings, nothing illegal, the chants themselves, the ideas themselves will be decreed illegal. Now, as you say, like, you don't have to hate Israel or whatever, but we talk all the time like you have at every pro Israel rally in the United States. You will hear people saying, wipe out all the Arabs. Turn Gaza into a parking lot. Gaza belongs to Israel. We constantly talk about bombing this country, bombing that country. We're always advocating violence against this group, against this country. You know, this country is illegitimate. There's only one country that has the protection of these laws, which is the country of Israel.
https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-responds-to-netanyahus-claim-that-criticism-of-the-israeli-governments-policies-is-antisemitic/
No, Mr. Netanyahu. It is not antisemitic or pro-Hamas to point out that in a little over six months your extremist government has killed 34,000 Palestinians and wounded more than 77,000 – seventy percent of whom are women and children.
It is not antisemitic to point out that your bombing has completely destroyed more than 221,000 housing units in Gaza, leaving more than one million people homeless – almost half the population.
It is not antisemitic to note that your government has obliterated Gaza’s civilian infrastructure – electricity, water, and sewage.
It is not antisemitic to realize that your government has annihilated Gaza’s health care system, knocking 26 hospitals out of service and killing more than 400 health care workers.
It is not antisemitic to condemn your government’s destruction of all of Gaza’s 12 universities and 56 of its schools, with hundreds more damaged, leaving 625,000 students with no education.
It is not antisemitic to agree with virtually every humanitarian organization in saying that your government, in violation of American law, has unreasonably blocked humanitarian aid coming into Gaza, creating the conditions in which hundreds of thousands of children face malnutrition and famine.
Mr. Netanyahu. Antisemitism is a vile and disgusting form of bigotry that has done unspeakable harm to many millions of people. But, please, do not insult the intelligence of the American people by attempting to distract us from the immoral and illegal war policies of your extremist and racist government. Do not use antisemitism to deflect attention from the criminal indictment you are facing in the Israeli courts. It is not antisemitic to hold you accountable for your actions.
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/on-gaza-an-american-rabbi-decries-hamas-but-finds-fault-with-israels-leaders-too-e5dbca0f?st=pwbkkr9rwpii6b1&reflink=article_email_share
American rabbis often avoid criticizing Israel from the pulpit. Particularly at a time of uncertainty and threat for Israelis and Jews around the world, many spiritual leaders worry they will alienate congregants and empower antisemitism if their view of Israel’s policies sounds disloyal. Rabbi Sharon Brous understands such reticence, but she argues that staying silent is irresponsible.
An influential rabbi with a fast-growing congregation in Los Angeles, Brous, 50, has spent much of her career advocating for human rights, including for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. This past September on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, she used her sermon to publicly warn that the future of “our beloved Israel” was under threat from within. She argued that by denying the “basic rights, dignities and dreams” of millions of Palestinians for decades, Israel’s increasingly “extremist” leaders were undermining the country’s Jewish and democratic ideals. “The existential threat to the state of Israel is internal,” she said. “The call is coming from inside the house.”
Even after Hamas’s attack on Israel two weeks later on Oct. 7, in which more than 1,200 people were killed and more than 200 taken hostage, her sermons have expressed concern for both Jewish pain and Palestinian suffering. She has railed against Hamas’s campaign of “brutality and terror” against civilians, including many Israeli peace activists, but argues that the real fault line is not between Israelis and Palestinians but between those who embrace violence as an answer and those who don’t. “You either believe that every single person is an image of God, or you don’t actually care about human life,” she said on Oct. 28.
Yet as someone who has lost friends and received death threats for calling for compassion across faiths and races, Brous admits that she has been horrified by efforts to defend Hamas among groups she had thought were allies. That a “retrograde, totalitarian, misogynistic terror regime” has become “a hero of the left” has rudely awakened her to the “very deep roots of antisemitism,” she says. She points to reports in October of protesters screaming “gas the Jews” in Sydney, Australia, and of rioters torching a synagogue in Tunisia. She has been alarmed by cases of pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses that have threatened Jewish students, including at Columbia University, her alma mater.
“Every time somebody finds themselves tongue-tied when asked to condemn the rape of Israelis on Oct. 7, I find myself thinking this is not hard,” she says over video from Los Angeles. “You should be able to simply say that under no circumstances do we condone acts of abduction, rape and murder of innocent civilians, and we must work toward a just future for Palestinians who suffer terribly under the status quo.” She adds that it is not possible to “build a society that is free of racism while holding on to one of the oldest racisms, which is against Jews.”
@amanpour
“If we shall not end the occupation, we shall not have security,” warns Ami Ayalon, former head of Shin Bet, “and if we shall not end this occupation, we shall not have democracy.”
In an extraordinarily candid interview, Israel’s former internal security chief condemns what he calls Prime Minister Netanyahu’s “toxic leadership,” and argues that as the war continues, “we are losing our identity as people, as Jews, and as human beings.”
Watch our full conversation here.
https://x.com/amanpour/status/1805295431355973645
-------------
In January 2024, Ami Ayalon, a former head of Israel's internal security force, the Shin Bet, said that Israel will not have security until Palestinians have their own state. Ayalon also called for Israeli authorities to release Marwan Barghouti, the jailed leader of the second intifada, to help negotiate the creation of a Palestinian state. Ayalon also said that Israel is not at war with the Palestinians.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/14/shin-bet-ami-ayalon-calls-on-israel-release-intifada-leader-marwan-barghouti
Ami Ayalon, a retired admiral who also commanded Israel’s navy and was wounded in battle and decorated for his service, also said destroying Hamas was not a realistic military goal, and the current operation in Gaza risked entrenching support for the group.
“We Israelis will have security only when they, Palestinians, will have hope. This is the equation,” he said in an interview at his home. “To say the same in military language: you cannot deter anyone, a person or a group, if he believes he has nothing to lose.”
He said Israel’s war in Gaza was a just one, after the horrors of the 7 October attack, in which Hamas slaughtered at least 1,200 people and took more than 240 others hostage. But too many Israelis could not accept that Hamas did not represent all Palestinians, or that they had a legitimate claim to their own state, he said.
Ayalon said most Israelis believed that “all Palestinians are Hamas or supporters of Hamas”, and they did not accept the concept of a Palestinian identity. “We see them as people, not ‘a people’, a nation,” he said. “We cannot accept [the idea of a Palestinian people] because if we do, it creates a huge obstacle in the concept of the state of Israel.”
He believes releasing Barghouti, a Palestinian who has been jailed since 2002, serving a life sentence for murder after leading the second intifada, would be a vital step towards meaningful negotiations. According to recent polls he would beat senior Hamas figure Ismail Haniyeh in open elections.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/why-pro-israel-groups-arent-going-after-ilhan-omar-after-helping-oust-others-in-squad/
Patrick Dorton, a spokesman for the United Democracy Project, a political action committee affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee that poured millions into the Bowman and Bush primaries, confirmed that the PAC was not involved in Omar’s race, but would not elaborate. AIPAC PAC, which is also associated with the lobby, and Democratic Majority for Israel, another pro-Israel PAC involved in targeting Bowman and Bush, likewise would not explain why they were ignoring Samuels this time around.
In 2022, pro-Israel givers rued not noticing earlier how well Samuels was doing. UDP dumped $350,000 in the race in its last few days. But it was not enough to get Samuels over the line, a regret pro-Israel fund-raisers continue to nurture.
UDP is a Super PAC that by law may raise unlimited funds, and this year, it and its allies started targeting vulnerable officeholders early. They spent more than $14 million defeating New York’s Jamaal Bowman in June, and more than $9 million defeating Missouri’s Cori Bush this week. (Both candidates were seen as vulnerable for reasons beyond their esteem among pro-Israel voters.)
But the pro-Israel strategist said the elements that favored Samuels in 2022 — and that pro-Israel donors noticed too late — were simply not in place this time.
For one, Samuels is trailing Omar substantially in the polls. In Bowman’s and Bush’s races, the numbers were in pro-Israel groups’ favor: Bowman had consistently trailed challenger George Latimer in polls, while Wesley Bell, who beat Bush, ran a close race before pulling ahead. Omar’s campaign, by contrast, says she’s beating Samuels by 25 percentage points.
In addition, in 2022, Omar was substantially outraising Samuels — but not spending the money. Joelle Stangler, Omar’s campaign manager, told Mother Jones this week that the campaign recognized it “took our foot off the gas” in 2022 — in other words, it was overconfident of a win.
This time around, the campaign is not repeating that mistake. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Jewish de facto leader of congressional progressives, has campaigned for her. And her campaign has highlighted far-right Republicans who have called on Minnesotans to back Samuels in the open primary, in which members of all parties can vote.
“Don Samuels and his conservative benefactors have a common enemy – DFL candidates and values,” an Omar campaign document said, using the acronym for the Minnesota affiliate of the Democratic Party. The document listed donors to Samuels who have given to Republicans, a tactic Bowman and Bush also employed.
https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-804047
British rock guitar legend Eric Clapton moved one step closer to Roger Watersterritory last week, telling an interviewer that “Israel is running the world, Israel is running the show.”
The 79-year-old musician, who has recently performed playing a guitar painted in the colors of the Palestinian flag, was interviewed on May 22 by David Spuria, an American Youtuber who hosts the popular Real Music Observer show.
Talking about the recent campus protests in the US against Israel, Clapton criticized the Senate hearings in which university presidents were asked about antisemitism on campus.
Clapton criticizes Senate hearings
“I was so enthused about what was going on at Columbia [University] and elsewhere. And then what I couldn’t believe, because it freaked me out, were the Senate hearings, which were like the Nuremberg trials, you know?” he said.
“The Senate committee chairman asked pointed questions to presidents of universities, saying, ‘I just want to hear yes or no. Don’t talk to me about context. Yes or no, are you promoting antisemitism on your campus?’ And I thought, what is this, the Spanish Inquisition? And it is! It’s AIPAC, it’s the lobby. Israel is running the show. Israel is running the world.”
Talking about the guitar painted with the Palestinian flag colors, Clapton said, “We’re doing a thing now on this tour that I wrote originally as a tribute to Jeff Beck [who died in 2023]. I performed it at a tribute concert and then I didn’t play it anymore. But for this tour I’m doing it under a different guise. It’s the same tune, but I devoted it to the situation in Gaza. It’s called ‘Blue Dust’ because that’s what’s probably going to be left there. And I play a guitar that’s painted like the Palestinian flag.”
Late last year, Clapton released a song called “Voice of a Child,” accompanied by a video featuring images of extensive destruction in Gaza that ignored the October 7 massacre committed by Hamas terrorists, which sparked the war.
In last week’s interview, Clapton also questioned the West’s support for Ukraine in its war with Russia. Talking about Russian President Vladimir Putin, he said, “he always tells you what he intends to do, and he tells the truth. So he gives you plenty of warning.”
https://www.tiktok.com/@lyon5947/video/7401982391167880480?_r=1&_t=8oqZitivIUA
@Tracking_Power
Surprise! The 'Arabs' were right all along about a 'Greater Israel'.
It's always been the plan.
In his Complete Diaries, Vol. II. p. 711, Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionism, says that the area of
the Jewish State stretches: 'From the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates.'
Rabbi Fischmann, member of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, declared in his testimony to the U.N.
Special Committee of Enquiry on 9 July 1947: 'The Promised Land extends from the River of Egypt up
to the Euphrates, it includes parts of Syria and Lebanon.'
It was even codified and published in the 1980s as the Yinon Plan.
https://x.com/Tracking_Power/status/1844692111477641684
@Gentilenewsnet
But when I say this it's an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
https://x.com/Gentilenewsnet/status/1846975999650804034
-------------------
Rabbi Shmuley
@RabbiShmuley
Incredible. The new Prime Minister of Britain has a Jewish wife who is actively involved in the Jewish community and keeps tradition and observes the sabbath. President Biden has two of three of his children who married Jew’s. President Trump has a Jewish daughter and Jewish grandchildren. Kamala Harris is married to a committed Jewish husband.
https://x.com/RabbiShmuley/status/1810353861116223661
Chris Menahan 🇺🇸
@infolibnews
Facebook's "Jewish Diaspora" chief Jordana Cutler explains how she uses her position to censor "hate speech" that "makes Jewish people feel unsafe."
She says Meta banned "harmful stereotypes like 'Jews run the world'" as "hate speech" after consulting w/ World Jewish Congress.
https://x.com/infolibnews/status/1848587365800976534
@haaretzcom
The extremism in the Israeli army disgusts him, he views settlers as the epitome of anti-Israeliness, and when he sees kids in war-torn Gaza he thinks of his own grandchildren | An interview with former IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz
https://x.com/haaretzcom/status/1852678291188273579
------------------------
The Israeli Army Chief (Dan Halutz) Who Became a Road-blocking Anti-government Protester - Israel News - Haaretz.com
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-10-31/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/the-israeli-army-chief-who-became-a-road-blocking-anti-government-protester/00000192-e2ca-d2bc-a99e-f2dea9390000
The extremism in the Israeli army disgusts him, he views settlers as the epitome of anti-Israeliness, and when he sees kids in war-torn Gaza he thinks of his own grandchildren, (although he still believes the IDF is moral). An interview with former IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz, who warns that if Netanyahu is re-elected, many citizens will have a major decision to make
"The phrase 'When the cannons roar, the muses are silent' is no longer valid," Dan Halutz declared at the October 6 demonstration in Caesarea, then adding, "The muses must shout out." It's precisely these words, a variation on a stale catchphrase, that reflect the depth of the change the former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff has undergone over the ...
https://apnews.com/article/australia-racial-discrimination-pakistan-pauline-hanson-mehreen-faruqi-3a4bfbf4f3c3051bd55da6f89f59419a
MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — An Australian judge ruled Friday that anti-immigration party leader Sen. Pauline Hanson breached a racial anti-discrimination law by crudely telling Pakistan-born Sen. Mehreen Faruqi to return to her homeland.
Faruqi sued Hanson in Federal Court over a 2022 exchange on the social media platform X, then called Twitter, under a provision of the Racial Discrimination Act that bans public actions and statements that offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate people because of their race, color or national or ethnic origin.
After the death of Queen Elizabeth II, Faruqi, deputy leader of the Australian Greens party, posted, “I cannot mourn the leader of a racist empire built on stolen lives, land and wealth of colonized peoples.”
Hanson, the leader of the One Nation party, replied that Faruqi had immigrated to take “advantage” of Australia, and told the Lahore-born Muslim to return to Pakistan, using an expletive.
Hanson has been known for her views on race since her first speech to Parliament in 1996, in which she said Australia was “in danger of being swamped by Asians” because of its non-discriminatory immigration policy. She once wore a burqa in the Senate as part of a campaign to have Islamic face coverings banned.
https://www.thecanary.co/uk/news/2024/11/10/sky-news-maccabi-tel-aviv-amsterdam/
Sky News has been caught in a storm over it’s deleting and then re-editing of a report on the Maccabi Tel Aviv fan’s rioting in Amsterdam. However, the original filmmaker who captured some of the footage it used has now come forward – and claims that it, and other media outlets, misrepresented it to shore up the narrative that the attacks were antisemitic.
Maccabi Tel Aviv/Sky News
On 8 November, media outlets and politicians decried“antisemitic attacks” on Israel’s Maccabi Tel Aviv football fans, with some referring to the incident as a “pogrom”, and others comparing it to the events of pre-war Nazi Germany. These same outlets and politicians received criticism for leaving out significant context on what happened in the run up to the later violence – but at the time, this didn’t include Sky News:
https://x.com/jewdas/status/1854803403311861860
https://x.com/marcowenjones/status/1855322800220725404
--------------------
Western media’s embarrassing errors covering the violence in Amsterdam
https://youtu.be/uI_ac_8iDno?si=QkA1c_Kvi9fBsi-n
In the wake of an ugly eruption of violence on the streets of Amsterdam, the media coverage of the story has been put under the microscope with editors scrambling to revise headlines, rework narratives, and reframe video content.
Contributors:
Dana Mills – Writer, Local Call and +972 Magazine
Marc Owen Jones – Associate professor, Northwestern University Qatar
James North – Editor-at-large, Mondoweiss
Samira Mohyeddin – Founder, On The Line Media
On our radar:
Incoming president Donald Trump has appointed Elon Musk - one of his most vocal supporters - to co-lead the brand new Department of Government Efficiency. Meenakshi Ravi looks at Musk's new role and how he could use his influence to get favourable government treatment for his companies.
The Headline Fixer
Throughout Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, critics have been tearing apart the media coverage - especially by news outlets in the United States.
Feature blurb: Israel's genocidal war on Gaza has shone an often-unflattering spotlight on media coverage by mainstream US news outlets. Such failings jump out at us because they often come in the form of headlines. Historian Assal Rad explains the mission she has undertaken to "fix" misleading headlines.
New data shows the worrying reality of how American Jewish teens view Israel.
https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/article-830230
A newly released survey from Mosaic United, conducted with Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combatting Antisemitism, reveals that Jewish teens in the United States are significantly more likely to hold critical views of Israel and sympathize with Hamas compared to their peers in other countries.
According to the findings, 37% of American Jewish teens expressed sympathy for Hamas, a stark contrast to just 7% of Jewish teens globally. Similarly, 42% of US Jewish teens believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, compared to only 9% of their international counterparts.
These disparities highlight a worrying divergence in how American Jewish teens perceive Israel, influenced by differences in culture, community, and education.
The survey also emphasized the correlation between Jewish educational engagement and positive attitudes toward Israel. Teens who participated in Jewish camps, day schools, or supplementary schools, or who had personal encounters with Israelis (mifgashim), were far less likely to harbor anti-Israel views.
Among those with a strong Jewish background, only 6% sympathized with Hamas, compared to 65% of teens with little to no Jewish educational experiences.
Connection grows with age, but challenges persist
Despite these concerns, the survey offers a hopeful trajectory as Jewish teens grow older. While 60% of 14-year-olds expressed sympathy for Hamas, this figure dropped to just 10% among 18-year-olds, suggesting that ongoing engagement and education can foster a deeper understanding of Israel’s complexities.
Minister of Diaspora Affairs Amichai Chikli called for increased efforts to bridge the gaps: “It is more important than ever to strengthen the bonds between Jewish teens in the diaspora and Israel. We are glad to see that 94% of Jewish teens feel a connection to Israel, but these findings show we must continue educating and supporting Jewish youth globally.”