Friday, March 01, 2024

03/01 Links Pt2: Shocking double standard of support for Ukraine and Israel; Berkeley Lets Loose an Antisemitic Mob; The left’s deathly embrace of Islamic identitarianism

From Ian:

Douglas Murray: Shocking double standard of support for Ukraine and Israel
“The Ukrainians must stop fighting in case they defeat Putin.”

Have you heard any of our leaders say that in the last two years?

As Ukraine enters its third year of war it is striking how committed political leaders of all parties are to that war.

And not just here but across the West.

At home — Democrat or Republican — almost everybody is committed to arming Ukraine until victory.

They don’t want Ukraine to fight to a stalemate.

They don’t want it to stop just before winning.

They want it to beat Putin back.

So how strange it is that another war, involving a far closer ally, gets such different treatment.

The historian Niall Ferguson noted the curious double-standard this week after a visit to Israel.

In Washington, London and every other Western capital, political leaders are not saying that they will stick with Israel until it defeats Hamas.

They are not saying “Victory at any price and at any cost.”

Instead they are insisting that Israel stop its war against Hamas as soon as possible.

This week President Biden suggested that there might be a peace deal by Monday.

And he seemed positively happy about the fact.

Despite the deal being an disastrously anti-Israel and Hamas having already rejected it.

But why do people like Biden want peace in Gaza?

Why should anybody want Hamas to crawl out of this war, dust itself off and be able to carry out the same terror against Palestinians and Israelis that it has carried out for years?
Seth Mandel: How to Solve a University’s Anti-Semitism Problem
A seminar on diversity? Bizarrely, and accidentally, Mogulof is getting warmer. Rep. Adam Schiff, leading Democratic candidate for the California Senate seat vacated by the late Dianne Feinstein, said, “What happened at Berkeley is just the latest, horrifying example” of anti-Semitism on campus. “It’s unacceptable in any setting, especially in a California university that prides itself on inclusion. And yet, this kind of intimidation — and inaction from administrators — is an all-too-common reality for so many Jewish students today.”

If you combine Schiff’s and Mogulof’s explanations, you have the makings of a solution. Schiff says it’s unacceptable at a school that “prides itself on inclusion.” Mogulof says he doesn’t know how to include Jews in the university’s diversity system.

Well, I do. Diversity, equity, and inclusion programs are theoretically designed to provide the targeted support that members of “underserved communities” need. In reality, DEI is an anti-Semitism-creating machine of unmatched efficiency.

What Jews on campus need, specifically, is security—just to make sure their events and prayer services and the like can be held without incident. DEI programs increase the security risk to Jewish students. The DEI budget at the University of California, Berkeley is $36 million.

Problem solved. Just redirect some of the $36 million the university spends on DEI toward protecting Jewish students and staff and events. That would satisfy Mogulof’s desire to develop DEI “policies that would be unique to the Jewish community that would be necessary or effective.” And it would make Adam Schiff feel so much better about the pride his state takes in inclusion.

Of course all this raises an obvious alternative: If spending DEI money puts Jews in danger, which then will be mitigated by spending more DEI money, wouldn’t it make more sense to not spend all that money in the first place?
NYPost Editorial: Redefining ‘jihad’ is part of the left’s insidious attempt to twist reality
If you had “jihadism gets a PR makeover” on your 2024 bingo card, feel free to mark it off.

Teachers who attended an “anti-Muslim bias” webinar offered by the New York City Department of Education on Feb. 20 were told the meaning of jihad was “struggle” and that it could apply to a person’s effort at self-improvement, showing a video that suggested that a “jihad” could mean always giving your “best effort,” building “friendships across the aisle” or working “to get fit.”

The video also tried to whitewash “sharia” as “personal religious or moral guidance.”

Of course, no one but ultra-lefties view “jihad” this way: Merriam-Webster’s first definition of the word is “a holy war waged on behalf of Islam as a religious duty.” The Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists aren’t interested in, say, shedding pounds from their own bodies but blood from nonbelievers.

When former Hamas leader Khaled Mashal called for a “global day of jihad,” on Oct. 23 following the Hamas attack on Israel, he wasn’t suggesting that Muslims worldwide slow down on the carbs and fats or look to make more friends.

“When the world, America, the West, and the Zionists see . . . that convoys of mujahideen are on their way to shed their pure blood on the land of Palestine, the battlefield will change, the balance of power will change,” he made clear.

In 1998, when Osama bin Laden signed a letter calling for “jihad” against “Jews and crusaders,” his meaning was clearly stated: “The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies — civilians and military — is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.”


WSJ Editorial: President Biden Reverses U.S. Policy on Settlements
Now is the time, President Biden has decided, to campaign against Israeli settlements. If this were a priority, he could have done it at any point in the past three years. The policy change occurred in the lead up to Tuesday's Michigan Democratic primary, in which Arab-American groups sought to embarrass the President. Some coincidence. The West Bank area was included in the League of Nations' Mandate for Palestine granted to Britain to create a Jewish "national home." Israel has a real claim, and so do the Palestinians - hence the dispute. The area, also known as Judea and Samaria, is the biblical Jewish heartland. Israel conquered it in 1967 not from Palestine, but from Jordan, which had invaded Israel.

Jordan had occupied the West Bank since seizing it in 1948, after which it expelled every Jew. Can the Israelis who later returned - and their children and grandchildren - all be condemned as squatters and international criminals?

U.S. policy has generally maintained that the dispute is fundamentally political, to be resolved in final-status negotiations rather than by lawyers or biased international bodies. President Reagan rejected the view that Israeli settlements are illegal, and that position held across U.S. administrations until President Obama's parting shot. In 2019, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo found that the settlements are "not per se inconsistent with international law."

Criminalizing all 500,000 Israelis in the West Bank won't bring peace closer. It tells the Palestinians, who have rebuffed every offer of statehood, that they needn't make concessions. The U.S. will make their dreams come true.

On Feb. 1, Biden created an open-ended sanctions regime that can hit any Israelis deemed to "threaten the peace, security, or stability of the West Bank," as well as their U.S. supporters. The entire Palestinian leadership would fit that criteria, but Biden is trying to award them a state.

Violence by Israelis is thankfully a marginal phenomenon, and it has declined since Oct. 7. The picture of wanton violence by Israeli civilians against peaceful Palestinians is an inversion of West Bank reality. In the first half of 2023, Israeli civilians living there faced more than 500 attacks a month.
Khaled Abu Toameh: Palestinians' Musical Chairs: Replacing One Mohammed with Another Mohammed
The assumption that a new Palestinian government headed by Mustafa (or any other figure selected by Abbas) would be different than the one headed by Shtayyeh is deadly mistaken. The cabinet shake-up is an insignificant cosmetic change.

If the Shtayyeh government was already working on a plan to revamp the Palestinian Authority (as the US administration is demanding), why is he being asked to be replaced with another Abbas loyalist? Is the new government headed by Mustafa going to come up with a different plan for reforming the PA? This just shows that Abbas's real objective is to play the Americans for fools by creating the impression that the new prime minister will be different than his predecessor.

Abbas is well aware that it is safer for him to live under Israeli security control than under the rule of Hamas, whose members killed dozens of his supporters during the 2007 Hamas coup against the Palestinian Authority.

Besides, Abbas knows that assuming control of the Gaza Strip in the post-war era would mean taking upon himself the almost impossible task of rebuilding the Gaza Strip and preventing Hamas and other terror groups from reasserting their power.

So, to appease the US administration, Abbas is once again playing the musical chairs game of the prime ministers. Abbas wants the Americans to believe that he is serious about revitalizing the Palestinian Authority and rebuilding the Gaza Strip. Abbas is hoping that his latest musical chair ploy will incentivize the international community to continue pouring millions of dollars into the coffers of the PA leadership.
Brendan O'Neill: The left’s deathly embrace of Islamic identitarianism
Galloway’s own career sums up the left’s turn from class and its embrace of the fake revolutionary thrill that comes from hanging out with angry Muslims. There’s a telling moment in his 2004 autobiography, I’m Not the Only One, where he describes being a 21-year-old political activist in the Labour Party office in Dundee in Scotland in the 1970s. He would often ‘let the doorbell ring’, he says, because he felt there was little he could do for the ‘hard-luck cases’ who came looking for help. Then, one day, a young Palestinian came knocking. He spent two hours telling Galloway the story of Palestine. It was ‘one of the most important [meetings] of my life’, Galloway says. Before long he was visiting Palestinian militants in Beirut where he became transfixed by this ‘different world I had entered’ – it was ‘bliss’, with ‘exotic Arabic music in the cafés and the whiff of revolution in the air’. Not like dull Dundee, then.

This is a perfect distillation of the dynamics behind the Islamo-left. The modern left seeks refuge from the pesky ‘hard-luck’ problems of its own society in the ‘exotic’ politics of Arab radicalism. Their feverish embrace of the Palestine issue is really a flight from class, a flight from the drudgery of trying to improve life at home in preference for the easy ‘exotic’ kick of mingling with non-white men with guns. And some are more than willing to turn a blind eye to Islamism’s deeply reactionary nature. Witness the very same chattering-class leftists who reached for the smelling salts over Gillian Duffy’s ‘bigotry’ now marching with Islamists who gleefully chant about the massacre of Jews.

To be fair to Galloway, he hasn’t entirely abandoned class. He is not like the flapper-girl socialists of Novara Media or the phoney Remoaner left of the Guardian. He supported Brexit. He isn’t woke. He even knows what a woman is. Yet he has moved towards Muslim identity politics. After being expelled from Labour in 2003, for saying Tony Blair and George W Bush had attacked Iraq ‘like wolves’, he sought re-election in constituencies with large Muslim populations. He won in Bethnal Green and Bow, then Bradford West, and now Rochdale. He’s like a helicoptering seeker of Muslim identitarian grievance in the hope he might ride it back to parliament.

In Rochdale, he made brazen shout-outs to Islamic identitarianism. He promised to give voice to ‘the people of Palestine in their agony’ and denounced the ‘killing of thousands of our brothers and sisters in Gaza’. He seemed to be appealing to Muslim voters less as British citizens than as members of an angry ummah; less as residents of Rochdale than as religionists whose grief over Gaza trumps all else; less as people with interests than people with feelings. This speaks to the treason of the left. A movement founded in the values of enlightenment and universalism now seeks to marshal religious fervour to the end of rattling the establishment. After class, there’s only the dead end of reactionary religious misery.

Galloway switched it up for non-Muslim voters, true. To them he said, ‘I believe in Britain’ and ‘I have no difficulty in defining what a woman is’. ‘There will be no grooming gangs on my watch’, he continued. Then came his cleverest line: ‘MAKE ROCHDALE GREAT AGAIN.’ Yet such populist cries felt like an afterthought to the main show, which was Gaza and sticking it to Keir Starmer over his support for Israel’s ‘war crimes’. This is the way under the Islamo-left – working-class concerns are always an afterthought, if a thought at all, to the more important, more ‘exotic’ business of Muslim identitarianism.

Some in the Islamo-left march alongside Hamas fanboys, turn a blind eye to misogyny and homophobia when it comes from Islamists, failed to denounce the fascistic pogrom of 7 October and engage in the most unhinged denunciations of the world’s only Jewish state, and then they have the gall to call us bigots? Come on. Working-class voters are rejecting the establishment – next they need to reject these anti-establishment fakes who pose as radical while providing moral cover to the most troubling reactionaries of our time.
Labour failed to declare £700k in donations amid anti-Semitism fears
Sir Keir Starmer’s campaign manager failed to declare £700,000 in donations amid concern that some of the funds came from a Jewish donor who needed to be protected from anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, The Telegraph has learned.

Morgan McSweeney’s think tank was investigated by the Electoral Commission after he failed to register donations received by Labour Together, an organisation he ran until 2020, when he became Sir Keir’s chief of staff.

Now The Telegraph has learnt that during the time Mr McSweeney failed to register support from millionaire venture capitalists and businessmen, concerns had been raised about protecting a high-profile Jewish donor.

Well-placed sources said that senior figures at the think tank wanted to ensure that Sir Trevor Chinn, who is a director of the organisation and a regular donor, kept a low profile because of “growing” anti-Semitism in the Labour Party.

Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOI) also revealed Mr McSweeney was told to declare donations received by the think tank but disregarded the instructions.

The donations came under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, but the disclosure that Labour-affiliated organisations felt that Jewish donors had to have their identities protected will once again raise questions about anti-Semitism within the party.
Bella Hadid shares Louis Farrakhan, anti-white ideologues on Instagram to 60 million followers: report
IMG model Bella Hadid has been using her platform of 60 million followers on Instagram to promote controversial ideologues, like Louis Farrakhan.

Fox News Digital reviewed the “highlights” section featured prominently on the top of Hadid’s Instagram page and discovered that over the years, the supermodel has shared videos on her social media of figures promoting anti-white ideology.

Hadid’s reps and IMG Models – whose official website links out to Hadid’s Instagram – didn’t respond for comment.

Hadid shared an old video from Nation of Islam leader and antisemite Louis Farrakhan where he admonished a white woman in the audience during “The Phil Donahue Show.” The white woman said she was afraid of violence, to which Farrakhan responded by saying the woman’s fear was a “deep guilt thing.”

“Now Whites fear violence from us… And what you fear is a deep guilt thing… You are afraid that if we ever come to power we will do to you what you and your people have done to us. And I think you are judging us by the state of your own [White] mind and that is not necessarily the mind of Black people,” Farrakhan said.

The Nation of Islam, which is “based on a somewhat bizarre and fundamentally anti-White theology,” according to the left-wing group the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The Nation of Islam believes that “White people were not created by God but by the evil black scientist Yakub… Because of the process by which Yakub created the white race, white people are inherently deceitful and murderous. Given these views, it is not surprising that white people are banned from NOI,” the SPLC states.

For decades, Farrakhan has been known to make antisemitic and anti-white comments, long before Hadid shared the video of his commentary.


Election Jihad: Islamic Groups are Hijacking Our Elections
Islamist networks in America have built a parallel political structure of nonprofits, action groups and PACs which tapped into funds from non-Muslim leftist and Democrat donors. This parallel Islamic election machine has solicited government grants and funds from foundations, but as the aftermath of Oct 7 shows, it has remained focused on its overriding goals.

And those goals are not only hostile to Israel, but to America and the free world.

The rise of Islamist political power was made possible by outside funding from federal and local governments, from Democrat and left-wing foundations. Muslim voter turnout initiatives at mosques feed into some of the billions flowing from Democratic Party allied organizations to boost minority voter turnout, and from local social welfare and health grants.

CAIR’s integration within the Democratic Party’s electoral machine has been so total that the Democratic operatives and donors of the Movement Voter Project are fundraising for it even though CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad was caught on video celebrating the Oct 7 attack..

Islamist political power is not an independent achievement, but a dependent one.

Cutting off public, political and private funding for the Election Jihad is crucial for national security and for reversing America’s drift away from resisting Islamic terrorism.


Reinstated Maryland Hate-Crime Commissioner Continues to Post Inflammatory Anti-Israel Content
Maryland hate-crime commissioner Zainab Chaudry continues to post inflammatory anti-Israel rhetoric on social media after being suspended from the body, and subsequently reinstated, for comparing the Jewish state to Nazi Germany.

Chaudry, the Maryland director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), was temporarily suspended in November by the state’s Commission on Hate Crime Response after she made social-media posts dismissing reports of Hamas killing Israeli babies as “fake.”

Ten days after the 10/7 atrocities, Chaudry compared Israel to Nazi Germany: “That moment when you become what you hated most,” she posted beside graphics of Nazi flags at the Brandenburg Gate in 1936.

In December, Chaudry was reinstated to the commission following attempts by CAIR to pressure Maryland attorney general Anthony Brown. The body, comprised of 20 representatives, was designed to “develop strategies to prevent and respond to hate crime activity and evaluate state laws and policies relating to hate crimes.” After being reinstated, Chaudry is back to bashing Israel on social media.

In a since-deleted post on X, Chaudry accused Jewish actress Mayim Bialik of “proudly endorsing” a “children’s book glorifying the murder” of children.

The book, Under the Rockets’ Glow, was written by Roman Sandler as a way of communicating with his young daughter “in the wake of October 7” the “complexities of the situation in Israel.” The cover features a father and daughter sitting together and looking out as rockets cross the Israeli night sky with farmland, suburbs, and a city in view.


‘Dark day’ for Jews as ‘demagogue’ Galloway wins by-election
Veteran anti-Zionist campaigner George Galloway’s sweeping victory in the Rochdale by-election – winning a majority of almost 6,000 with almost 40 per cent of the vote – has been met with deep concern in the Jewish community.

Campaign Against Antisemitism cited his “atrocious record”, including his comment in a speech in Bradford in 2014 that he wanted the city to become an “Israel-free zone”.

He had blamed a previous election loss on the “venal, the vile, the racists and the Zionists”, saying they would “all be celebrating”.

During the Rochdale race, the Workers’ Party leader, who dubbed himself “Gaza George”, described the October 7 massacre as “a concentration camp breakout”, and Hamas terrorists as “fighters”.

In what was a bitterly-fought race in the heavily-Muslim constituency, Galloway campaigned mainly on his fierce opposition to Israel’s war against Hamas.

Galloway celebrated his victory by delivering a stark warning to Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer over his support for Israel.

“Keir Starmer, this is for Gaza”, Galloway said, accusing him and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of being “two cheeks of the same backside. And they both got well and truly spanked tonight here in Rochdale”.

A Board of Deputies spokesperson told the JC: "George Galloway is a demagogue and conspiracy theorist, who has brought the politics of division and hate to every place he has ever stood for Parliament.

“His election is a dark day for the Jewish community in this country, and for British politics in general. We believe he should be shunned as a pariah by all Parliamentarians."
Galloway’s history should be a cause of immense concern to British Jews
George Galloway, the Workers’ Party leader and newly-elected MP for Rochdale, has campaigned ferociously against Israel, its friends and allies for many decades, having once told an interviewer that he had decided to “devote the rest of my life to the Palestinian and Arab cause” after a visit to Beirut in 1977.

Since losing his last seat in Parliament in 2015, that has meant working for the Iranian TV channel Press TV, which was banned from broadcasting in Britain in 2012 by the regulator Ofcom, and presenting shows on the pro-Putin Russian channel RT.

But tempting as it may have been to see him thus as a marginal figure, reduced to operating on the wilder political fringe, Galloway has proven time and again that he has a limitless appetite for staging comebacks, and the capacity to wreak havoc — especially for the Labour Party. He is now set to do so again.

It is not a surprise that Jewish organisations have reacted to Galloway’s win in Rochdale with dismay. A brutal political pugilist, he can be expected to use his renewed platform in the Commons to attack Israel and those who support it at every opportunity.

Previous examples of his anti-Zionist rhetoric would fill a sizeable book. But his comments include a pledge in a speech in 2014 to make Bradford — where he occupied a parliamentary seat for the period 2012-15 after winning another by-election — “Israel free”.

By this, he went on, he meant: “We don't want any Israeli goods, we don't want any Israeli services, we don't want any Israeli academics coming to the university or the college, we don't even want any Israeli tourists to come to Bradford, even if any of them had thought of doing so.

"We reject this illegal, barbarous, savage state that calls itself Israel. And you have to do the same.”

In January this year, shortly before the Rochdale seat became vacant with the death of the Labour incumbent Tony Lloyd, Galloway posted on X (formerly Twitter) that “Gaza is a concentration camp and the guards are murdering the captives, women and children first. Nothing complicated about it. You are either with the Gaza genocide or you are against it.”

According to the Campaign Against Antisemitism, he recently described the October 7 atrocities as a “concentration camp breakout”, and Hamas terrorists as “fighters”.


Muslim man arrested for alleged threat to kill UK election candidate over his pro-Israel views
A Muslim man was arrested after he made alleged threats to a candidate in a by-election in the United Kingdom for the candidate's pro-Israel views.

A video message with death threats was sent to Simon Danczuk, who is one of 11 candidates running to be Rochdale’s MP, earlier this week. The election was made after the death of the former MP, the Labour Party's Sir Tony Lloyd.

The man in the video refers to Danczuk, who was formerly in the Labor Party, as a "white devil" and threatened to “put one in his head." The Muslim man in the video became angered that Danczuk had as a tagline, "Vote for Rochdale not Gaza," on a campaign flyer.

Danczuk said that the video message has “caused lots of concern and distress” for him to the point where he will have two security guards with him for the rest of the campaign, according to the Guardian.

“It’s just unacceptable. They stopped me from speaking at a hustings meeting, I’m receiving death threats, and now we’ve got to have security personnel as a candidate going round in an election," he added.

“I’ve been doing politics for 35 years and I’ve never known it. It’s outrageous. This isn’t how British politics should work.”


WSJ: Berkeley Lets Loose an Antisemitic Mob
On Monday at the University of California, Berkeley, a pro-Palestinian mob surrounded a campus auditorium, broke a window, and harassed Jewish students trying to enter the building. Israeli lawyer Ran Bar-Yoshafat was invited by a Jewish student group to address the subject of Israel and international law. But the speech never happened, as some 200 protesters chanted "intifada" and "free Palestine" and banged on windows, surrounding and shouting at those trying to enter. Students and the speaker were evacuated for their personal safety.

Shouting down unpopular speakers is common on campus, but the vitriol directed at students sets this incident apart. One student captured on a video clip said the protesters shouted "Jew, Jew, Jew" in his face and spat at him. Silencing and intimidation are the intended outcome. Progressives claim that being anti-Israel or anti-Zionist isn't the same as being antisemitic. Events at Berkeley shows how dishonest that claim is.
University antisemitism task forces feature much talk, minimal action so far
In the aftermath of a surge in antisemitism that erupted following the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks in Israel, top universities including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania and Northwestern announced the creation of new bodies tasked with studying antisemitism on campus and identifying how to address it. Their impending work is framed with urgency, and the bodies are generally discussed using language about the importance of inclusivity on campus.

But nearly five months after the environment for Jewish students on these campuses began to rapidly deteriorate, questions remain over the efficacy and mandate of such groups. They will also face the thorny issue of campus free speech as they delve into questions about what, exactly, constitutes antisemitism on campus.

The question over the credibility of these antisemitism task forces was underscored this week at Harvard, following the resignation of business school professor Raffaella Sadun, the co-chair of the presidential task force, reportedly because she felt university leaders weren’t willing to act on the committee’s recommendations.

“They’ve utterly failed to protect Jewish and Israeli students. It’s shameful,” a Jewish faculty member at Harvard told Jewish Insider. They requested anonymity to speak candidly about interactions with students and administrators in recent months. The professor has seen numerous Israeli students kicked out of WhatsApp groups unrelated to politics because they are Israeli. The professor also described widespread opposition, among many students, to topics having to do with Israel — and a corresponding reluctance to act from administrators, who fear pushback from far-left students.

“If you’re an administrator, and you care about your own personal well-being, and you want to keep Harvard out of the news or off social media, you basically try not to engage with these people in a way that will provoke them,” the professor said. “In the end this backfired on Harvard, because their failure to take care of Jewish students contributed to the accusations of institutional antisemitism, the lawsuit, the congressional investigation.”
Jewish students recount a series of campus horror stories at congressional roundtable
For two hours on Wednesday, lawmakers heard from a parade of Jewish students, each delivering the same message: They do not feel safe on their college campuses.

Speaking to a roundtable organized by the House Committee on Education & the Workforce, Jewish students from Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia, Rutgers, Stanford, Tulane, Cooper Union and University of California, Berkeley spoke about about the harassment, threats and violence they’ve faced on their campuses since the Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

The students’ accounts were all remarkably similar, despite coming from a range of locations and school types, including openly antisemitic taunts and harassment, angry mobs rampaging through campus and overtaking campus buildings, vandalism and in some cases threats of or actual incidents of violence, all going largely or completely unaddressed by university administrators and campus police, despite repeated and sustained pleas from the students for help and support.

In some cases, the students said professors and administrators were complicit or actively involved in the antisemitic activity. Students said that they feared for their safety and even their lives.

The students, saying they felt abandoned by their universities and had no faith in them to act to protect them, pleaded for action from Congress. They said that they hoped their testimony could serve as a wakeup call to both Congress and the American public.

“As my friends from Harvard and UPenn can tell you, it doesn’t end simply because presidents are replaced. Systemic change is needed,” Kevin Feigelis, a Stanford student, said. “Universities have proven they have no intention of fixing themselves. It must be you, and it must be now.”

Shabbos Kestenbaum — a Harvard student who said he’d contacted the school’s antisemitism task force more than 40 times without a response and had been threatened in a video with a machete by a still-employed Harvard staff member — called Congress and the courts the students’ “last hope.”


‘It’s unspeakable’: UC Berkeley Jewish leaders decry university’s response to antisemitic mob
The day after an antisemitic mob at the University of California, Berkeley, forced the evacuation of Jewish students from an event where an Israel Defense Forces reservist was speaking, the university’s two top leaders sent an email to the entire Berkeley community.

“Upholding our values,” its subject line read.

When Danielle Sobkin, a third-year student and the co-president of the pro-Israel student group that had organized the event, saw the email, she hoped it would address the targeting of Jewish students that occurred during the Monday night incident. Roughly 200 protestors surrounded the building where the event took place and tried to push their way in, shattering a door and several windows while chanting “Intifada!” Three Jewish students were injured. A junior told J. The Jewish News of Northern California he was called a “dirty Jew” and a Nazi.

But rather than addressing anything specific about the protesters’ Jewish targets, the email — written by Chancellor Carol Christ and Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Benjamin Hermalin — described the incident as an attack on the “fundamental values of the university, which are also essential to maintain and nurture open inquiry and an inclusive civil society, the bedrock of a genuinely democratic nation.”

“The entire email didn’t even mention antisemitism. Not one word of it,” Sobkin told Jewish Insider on Thursday. “I think the entire response is a huge failure on the part of the administration, on the part of the chancellor. And I think students are just really disappointed that fear and the Jewish hate that was so blatantly perpetuated on Monday night has been essentially sidelined, not being recognized, nor has anything been done about it.”
Canadian student union rejects vote to boot Hillel from campus, boycott Israel
Student government leaders at the University of British Columbia rejected a ballot measure Wednesday night that would have called for an end to Hillel’s presence on campus, following intense pushback from Vancouver Jewish groups and capping months of discord between the Hillel and its critics in the student body.

According to the student newspaper, the council said the measure was rejected for technical matters and not because of the criticism directed at Hillel amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, which began on October 7 when thousands of Hamas terrorists from Gaza invaded Israel’s South, murdering some 1,200 people and taking 253 hostages. The council reportedly rejected the measure because it violated bylaws stating that all referendums be “clear and unambiguous” and that they contain a simple “yes or no” answer.

Known as Referendum 2, the measure would have pushed the university’s Alma Mater Society to “demand where feasible, that the University end Hillel BC’s lease,” in addition to demands that the school end partnerships with Israeli universities; divest from a list of companies that do business in Israel; endorse the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel; and compel the university to state that Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza.

In a statement posted to social media Thursday, Hillel BC said the verdict was “great news.”

“We are grateful that the AMS reached the right result and want to thank everyone who supported Hillel,” the statement read. “We are proud of our brave students and staff for their steadfast advocacy in preventing the erosion of spaces for Jewish community and culture on campus. Our commitment to providing students with a safe and inclusive environment is unwavering.”

BDS resolutions among North American university student governments are relatively rare but have been growing in popularity since the war; students at the University of Virginia held their own vote on the issue this week. But the inclusion of a clause specifically aimed at evicting Hillel, whose chapters support Jewish students on campus with religious services and programming as well as Israel activities, was unusual.
UVA professor cancels class to support BDS as referendum passes
A University of Virginia art history professor canceled her class on Monday in solidarity with a walkout on campus held two days before students voted overwhelmingly to call on the school to divest from companies with ties to Israel.

“I’m writing to let you know that I am canceling class today in solidarity with the ‘Yes on Divest Walkout’ that the UVA Apartheid Divest Coalition organized,” Christa Robbins, an associate professor of art history at UVA, wrote in an email to students, a copy of which was obtained by Jewish Insider.

“I realize this issue is polarizing right now, so I want to take a moment to let you know why I made this choice…My decision to cancel class comes from my own sympathies with the people of Palestine and out of a desire to see them live freely,” Robbins wrote.

Robbins did not immediately respond to JI’s request for comment.

Roughly 100 people gathered on the steps of the school’s Rotunda and marched about a half-mile across the Charlottesville campus to the Observatory Hill Dining Room during Monday’s walkout, the Daily Progress, a local paper, reported.
Jewish Students at Northwestern Petition Congress To Launch Anti-Semitism Probe
Jewish students at Northwestern University are petitioning Congress to launch a formal investigation into the school over its failure to stymie an outbreak of anti-Semitic incidents that include "intimidation, bigotry, vandalism, and other alleged hate crimes" that have transformed the campus into a hotbed for Jew-hatred, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.

The letter, sent this week to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, outlines an eruption of anti-Semitic hatred on campus that has endangered Jewish students and failed to garner an adequate response from the school's administration, including university president Michael Schill.

"We respectfully call on the Committee to exercise its oversight powers and investigate Northwestern's: (i) pervasive antisemitism on its campus; and (ii) failure to protect and hostile environment toward Jewish and Israeli students, faculty, and staff," the students wrote, according to a copy of the letter exclusively obtained by the Free Beacon.

The House committee, led by Rep. Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.), is already investigating several American universities—including Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT—for their failure to address a rash of anti-Semitic incidents that have broken out in the wake of Hamas's Oct. 7 terror strike on Israel. But this is the first time students have directly petitioned Congress to intervene on their behalf.

"Without external pressure, the school will continue to foster an environment which allows for, and implicitly encourages antisemitic action," Michael Rutsky, a student at Northwestern's Pritzker School of Law, told the Free Beacon. "Jewish students are hesitant to report discrimination in fear of retaliation and discouraged to report due to Northwestern's inaction to date. Action from Congress and media attention will hopefully serve as a wake-up call to the school."

The House committee has received the students' letter and is reviewing the information to determine the best course of action, a congressional source familiar with the situation confirmed to the Free Beacon.

Anti-Semitism at Northwestern has long been an issue, with a 2016 report identifying the school as "the worst university in the survey of 50 colleges," according to information contained in the student report. Three out of four students interviewed as part of that survey said that "Northwestern has a hostile environment toward Israel," and one in three said that "Northwestern has a hostile environment towards Jews."


Registration form for Jew-hating, rape-defender speech quickly changed, school 'reminds' organizers to let non-Muslims in
The Muslim Student Association at Queens College reversed course and changed a registration question for an event featuring a man who claims that Israel is actually behind ISIS, reposted a fringe conspiracy theory that Israel was involved in 9/11, and defended rape.

While the group said on Instagram that “Muslims and Non-muslims are invited” to the event taking place on Thursday night, the registration form required attendees to mark whether they are a “brother” or “sister,” terms used to refer to individuals of the Muslim faith.

It gave no alternative for non-Muslims to answer the question, which was listed as required for submission.

After Campus Reform reached out to both Queens College and the Muslim Student Association about the question and whether it violated the university’s non-discrimination policy, the registration form was quickly changed to remove the question as required for attendance.

”The student club in question has been reminded that the event must remain open to students of all faiths and backgrounds, as is true for all such speaker events. The RSVP list will not be used for admission to the event and registered students will be admitted on a first-come, first-served basis while space is available,” a university spokesperson told Campus Reform.


‘You continue to … elide’ blame of Hamas, State Dept scolds Palestinian reporter
During the U.S. State Department press briefing on Thursday, things got a little heated, as they often do, between the Foggy Bottom spokesman Matthew Miller and Said Arikat, Washington bureau chief for the Jerusalem-based newspaper Al-Quds.

As is his wont, Arikat pressed Miller with questions that repeatedly attacked the Jewish state.

“Hold on,” Miller said after Arikat interrupted him at one point. “Said, if you listened to what I said a moment ago,” he said seconds later. Moments later, he added, “Hold on, hold on. Said, please don’t interrupt me.” Later on, Miller told Arikat, “I don’t think you’re listening to what I said.”

Arikat persisted with his line of questioning: “Why is it so difficult for this government to say we condemn the killing of children, Palestinian women and children?” he asked.

That earned him a reproach from Miller.

“Whenever you ask me these questions, I do think you continue to kind of just elide over the fact that Hamas bears a great deal of responsibility for putting those children in harm’s way,” the State Department spokesman said.
Foreign Affairs Gets Lost in the Middle East
On Jan. 25, 2024, the magazine published an article by Ali Vaez, the director of the Iran Project at International Crisis Group. The timing is noteworthy.

A little more than a week later, two publications, Semafor and Iran International, announced that they had conducted a joint investigation into ICG and its former head, Robert Malley. Malley left ICG to serve as the administration’s envoy for Iran talks.

Iran International reported that “the Iranian government formed an undisclosed alliance with the International Crisis Group during the Obama administration and used the prominent think tank to lobby the U.S. government on its behalf about nuclear issues…the cooperation with Crisis Group was carried out through the Iranian Ministry’s in-house think tank, the Institute for Political and International Studies (IPIS), according to the cache of documents obtained by Iran International and shared with Semafor.” Among other things, IPIS has a history of Holocaust denialism.

Further: “The Crisis Group never made public the agreement it had with the Iranian foreign ministry, and its analysts never mentioned their close ties with Iranian officials.”

In September 2023—before Foreign Affairs published his article—Iran International and Semafor reported that more than 10 Iranian analysts in Western think tanks, including Vaez and his ICG colleague Dina Esfandairy, were “part of an influence network formed and guided by Tehran.

The documents viewed by Iran International and shared with Semafor indicate that talks between IPIS and ICG began in 2014—through Vaez.

Rob Malley, the former head of ICG, reportedly used Vaez to send messages to top Iranian officials, including then-foreign minister Javad Zarif, when Malley was serving in the Obama administration. The Biden administration appointed Malley to be Special Envoy to Iran in January 2021. In June 2023, it was revealed that Malley had been put on leave following the suspension of his security clearance.

Other recent Foreign Affairs contributors have been similarly problematic.

On Feb. 15, 2024, the magazine published an essay by Agnes Callamard, the Secretary General of Amnesty International and a former U.N. Special Rapporteur. In her essay, Callamard depicted Israel’s defensive war in Gaza as uniquely evil. That war, of course, was launched after Hamas and other Iranian proxies invaded Israel, brutally massacring civilians. But Callamard called the war “Israel’s campaign of retaliation” and lambasted the Jewish state as destroying the ”future of human rights.”

Callamard’s rhetoric is unsurprising—she’s an antisemite. As CAMERA’s David Litman, among others, has documented, Callamard has a long history of singling out Israel for opprobrium. Indeed, under her leadership Amnesty employees have argued that the Jewish state shouldn’t exist and authored mendacious and misleading reports accusing Israel of “apartheid.”

Indeed, on October 7—while the Hamas-led massacre was taking place—Callamard accused the Israeli government of “inciting violence” and blamed the Jewish state for “war crimes.” Like the organization she leads, Callamard has a long history of regurgitating Hamas propaganda, including relying on casualty statistics supplied by the U.S.-designated terrorist group.

Soliciting a piece from Callamard on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is akin to asking Osama bin Laden for advice on how to combat terrorism.
At NY Times, Subtle Skew Hides Amid the Big Blunders
Similar enough. But the print edition, which carries stories that had appeared online the previous day, gave editors another chance to emphasize and spin. The former piece, about Netanyahu, was placed the front page, above the fold, with essentially the same headline: “Netanyahu Snubs Hamas Proposal For a Cease-Fire.” The “spurn” became a “snub.” The latter story, though, was relegated to page 10, and the online headline about Hamas’s “rejection” was polished to a glossy sheen: “Hamas Says No Breakthrough Yet, Dousing Biden’s Claims of Close Deal.” The front-page story on Netanyahu’s “snub” wasn’t enough. The paper doubled down the next day, publishing a follow-up piece on page 8—still earlier in the print edition than its story on Hamas’s cease-fire rejection (or its statement-of-non-breakthrough, as print editors would have hit). Here, the reporters took aim at Israel’s government for its supposed responsibility for lack of progress in the negotiations:
“Mr. Netanyahu appeared more intent on delivering a fiery message aimed at his domestic audience.”
“He denounced the very proposal the Americans saw as a potential opening to a negotiated solution.”
“One stumbling block during [US Secretary of State] Anthony Blinken’s visit seemed to be the considerable domestic political pressures facing the Israeli prime minister.”
“But if Mr. Netanyahu prioritizes his domestic audience in the negotiations with Hamas, he could test the patience of Arab leaders…”
“Despite the potential rewards of a peace deal, Mr. Netanyahu sounded intent on pressing on with the war.”
“Mr. Netanyahu has rejected claims that he has allowed personal considerations to supersede Israeli interests.” All these statements were in the voice of the reporters themselves, who made their message of Israeli intransigence clear, even as they spared the antisemitic terror group, fresh off its orgy of murder, mutilation, and abduction, any such analysis. Day in and day out, news consumers have been on the receiving end of such subtle, almost subliminal, messaging. In the early aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks, New York Times coverage, though never without problems, largely took seriously the unprecedented horrors inflicted on Israelis. But as the conflict continues, its old habits have reclaimed more and more territory on the newspaper’s pages.
More ‘river to the sea’ whitewashing from the BBC
The BBC fails to inform readers that the organisation concerned – MECA – has engaged in anti-Israel political activity such as fundraising for George Galloway’s ‘Viva Palestina’, supporting the ‘Great Return March’ and promoting BDS. MECA’s staff includes Dr Mona Al-Farra – director of Gaza projects – who managed to write a post on October 7th which completely erased the Hamas massacre on the same day that is the context to what she described as “the Israeli bombardment”. She and other members of MECA’s staff have ties to a Palestinian NGO formerly known as UHWC (now called AWDA) which is linked to the PFLP terrorist organisation. In 2019, MECA partnered with UHWC to raise funds for “medical aid to Palestinians under siege in Gaza” and “provide fuel for Al-Awda hospital” which is run by that PFLP affiliated NGO. In other words, had Aitken done her homework, BBC audiences would have understood that the fundraiser in which Church participated benefits an anti-Israel organisation that cooperates with an NGO linked to a terrorist group: a fact which makes the inclusion of a slogan used by terrorists to deny Jewish self-determination at the event distinctly more understandable. Instead of providing background information which is obviously highly relevant to this story, Aitken however chose to focus on whitewashing the meaning of a call for the eradication of Israel.
The BBC, journalism and terrorism
Readers may recall that in early January, the BBC News website published a report by Shaimaa Khalil about the deaths of two Al Jazeera employees in the southern Gaza Strip: MORE BBC AMPLIFICATION OF AL JAZEERA’S ‘TARGETING JOURNALISTS’ FALSEHOOD Three days later, the IDF put out a statement concerning the links of the two men to terrorist organisations. The BBC News website then published another report in which it amplified statements from their families and employer denying the findings: BBC NEWS STICKS TO THE NARRATIVE AFTER ‘JOURNALISTS’ EXPOSED On February 26th the ITIC published a report on the topic of journalists killed in the Gaza Strip during the current war. “The government media office of Hamas in the Gaza Strip reported that as of February 18, 2024, 131 Palestinian journalists had been killed in the Gaza Strip since the beginning of the war (October 7, 2023). The Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center’s comprehensive examination of the 131 names revealed that approximately 60% were operatives in or affiliated with the terrorist organizations, Fatah or the Palestinian Authority.” Included in the ITIC’s list of journalists affiliated with terrorist organisations are the two Al Jazeera employees who were the topic of the above two BBC reports.


In Moscow talks, Hamas and Fatah vow to seek ‘unity of action’ on post-war Gaza
Palestinian factions including rivals Fatah and the Hamas terror group said on Friday they would pursue “unity of action” in confronting Israel after representatives met at Russia-hosted talks.

The meeting in Moscow on Thursday brought together Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Fatah and other Palestinian groups for talks on the war in Gaza and an eventual post-war period.

It came on the heels of the resignation of the Palestinian Authority government, which is led by Fatah and based in the West Bank.

Outgoing prime minister Mohammad Shtayyeh called for intra-Palestinian consensus as he announced his resignation, and some analysts said the development could pave the way for a government of technocrats that could operate in the West Bank and Hamas-run Gaza after the war.

Arab and Western leaders have been pushing for reforms to the Palestinian Authority as they discuss possible reconstruction efforts.

A statement on Friday by the Palestinian factions represented in Moscow said there would be an “upcoming dialogue” to bring them under the banner of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

Thursday’s “constructive” talks saw agreement on points including the need for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza and the creation of a Palestinian state, the statement said.
Hamas leader hosted as honorable speaker at PFLP-linked webinar
Masar Badil, an organization affiliated with the widely designated terror organization PFLP, hosted a webinar featuring Basem Naim, a prominent leader in Hamas, who left his constituents in the Gaza Strip before the October 7 massacre, heading to safety abroad.

The two-hour-long webinar featured opening remarks from Charlotte Kates, a Canadian national serving as the international coordinator of Samidoun. This organization was designated by Israel in 2021 for acting on behalf of and sharing staff and personnel with the PFLP; and internationally they have also had their funding channels blocked by US credit clearing companies, supposedly for their terror-related activities.

In her remarks, Kates commended the “heroic operation on October 7,” lauded vandalism against industries tied to Israel abroad, and implicitly praised the kidnapping of Israeli hostages, deeming them “captives and prisoners of war” and arguing that “the only successful way to achieve the liberation of Palestinian prisoners is by conducting a prisoner exchange with the Palestinian resistance.”

Kates also openly admitted that she had met with Naim in person last December in South Africa at an event that gathered representatives of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad; and which was led by Mandla Mandela and “The Global Campaign to Return to Palestine,” an organization with ties to Hezbollah.

Another speaker at the webinar who gave the closing remarks was Brussels-based Mohammed Khatib, who serves as the European coordinator of Samidoun and another one of its fronts named Masar Badil, and who is also referred to as a PFLP activist in several outlets, including the very website of the PFLP.
The price of freedom: The company making millions from Gaza's misery
Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered his military to prepare for a "powerful" ground invasion of the city but has not set out any plan for the evacuation of Rafah's 1.5 million residents.

Egypt has categorically rejected any suggestion that Palestinians should be allowed to flee en masse into Sinai.

However, footage shared by the Egypt-based group Sinai for Human Rights and verified by Sky News shows a large land-clearing operation is under way on the Egyptian side of the Rafah border, as well as the construction of a wall.

Sky has not been able to independently verify the purpose of the construction works, but Sinai for Human Rights says that it is intended to house an influx of Palestinian refugees.

Shoukry told Sky News that the activity was part of the "ordinary maintenance" of the border. "It is in no way related to providing any camps or shelter on our side of the border," he said.

As of 26 February, satellite imagery shows, an area of roughly 15 square kilometres has been cleared.

High-resolution imagery from the same date shows scores of trucks and construction vehicles in the area.

For parents like Amani, the mother-of-five in Rafah, it is difficult to see what kind of future their children can expect.

"This isn't life, living on the streets with no food or water," she says. "We are living in fear."

Amani's children have not seen their father Mahmoud in five months. It would cost the couple $17,500 to reunite their family.

"I want them to see their father but it's too expensive," Amani says.

"God willing, the price will fall."


MEMRI: Al-Ahram Editor-In-Chief Ashraf Abu Al-Houl: The Results Of October 7 Have Been Catastrophic For Gaza; If Hamas Did Not Manage To Protect The People Of Gaza And Their Homes That Means It Was Defeated
The editor of the Egyptian Al-Ahram daily newspaper Ashraf Abu Al-Houl said in a February 14, 2024 interview with Ibrahim Eissa on Al-Kahera Wal-Nas TV (Egypt) that the results of the October 7 attack on Israel have been catastrophic for Gaza. He said that Hamas cannot claim this was a victory while it failed to protect the people in Gaza and their homes. Abu Al-Houl asked whether the resistance was protecting itself and its rockets or the people. He added that sometimes it seems as though Hamas is focused on protecting its tunnel and commanders rather than schools, universities, and churches.

"Where Did [October 7] Get Us? Even If The War Stops Now, The Situation Is Catastrophic; People Who Return [To Gaza] Will Not Find Their Homes, They Will Have No Services, No Food, No Water"

Abu Al-Houl: "I do not care if even 10,000 Israelis die. But what happened on the ground? Where did [October 7] get us? What is the extent of the destruction [in Gaza]. Prior to October 7, the Israelis were outside of Gaza, whereas now, they are in Gaza. Not only that, Gaza has turned into rubble. So even if the war stops now, the situation is catastrophic. People who will return will not find their homes, they will have no services, no food, no water."

Is The Resistance Defending Itself, Or Is It Defending The People? If It Failed To Protect Homes And Landmarks But Got To Keep Its Rockets – What Kind Of Victory Is This?

Interviewer: "But [Hamas is saying] that the resistance has won, that Netanyahu said that the goals of the war are to destroy Hamas, to topple its rule, and to bring the prisoners back, and he could not achieve any of these three goals."

Al-Houl: "Look, this story about the resistance being victorious just because it managed to survive... Well, the people are annihilated. The philosophical [question] is: Is the resistance defending itself or is it defending the people? If you could not defend the people, you were defeated. If I could not protect the homes and the landmarks – what kind of victory is this? Is it a victory if you get to keep your rockets and your shells?

"Unfortunately, I sometimes feel that the resistance is focusing on protecting the tunnels where its commanders are rather than protecting the schools, universities, and churches."
The War in Gaza Had a Crushing Effect on the Egyptian Economy
The Egyptian economy has suffered a serious, unexpected blow from the war in Gaza.

Before the war, it was limping along - with the lingering effects of the pandemic, the Russian war in Ukraine having caused grain prices to soar, the Egyptian pound having fallen to an unprecedented low against the dollar, and the International Monetary Fund having halted loan payments to the country.

The war in Gaza had a crushing effect on two crucial sources of revenue. The tourism industry, in which three million Egyptians are employed, was swiftly crippled.

Cancellations, primarily at Red Sea resorts, hit more than 70%, many hotels shut down and many thousands of employees, guides and service providers were out of work.

The Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping and the diversion of shipping routes from the Suez Canal reduced the country's revenue from the canal by 40-60%, which translates into a loss of $4-6 billion a year.

This situation also has a direct effect on Egypt's textile industry, which relies on imported raw materials from India and the Far East.
Biden ‘Abused Classification System’ To Hide Iranian Assassination Plots, Cruz Says
The Biden administration suppressed information about Iran’s efforts to assassinate U.S. officials to ensure Congress and the American public were kept in the dark, according to a lawmaker on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

"What Americans don’t know is that the Biden administration has gone to great lengths to hide the extent and persistence of those threats" from Iran, Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) said during a Senate hearing Wednesday on Tehran’s network of terror proxies. Those threats include active plots to assassinate former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and other top U.S. officials.

The administration has been "abusing the classification system" to ensure these plots could not be discussed in a public setting, according to Cruz. "They find public discussion of Iran’s aggression politically inconvenient because it gets in the way of their appeasement of the regime."

This is the first time a senator has accused the Biden administration of classifying information it deemed inconvenient and damaging to its efforts to restart diplomacy with Iran, which have included sanctions relief and a $6 billion ransom payment last year to ensure the release of hostages detained in Tehran. Amid this diplomacy, Iran has continued efforts to kill former American officials, including the Trump administration’s Iran envoy, Brian Hook, who requires an around-the-clock security detail.

The administration is required to notify Congress about threats to former officials, but "took the unprecedented step" last year of classifying this notification to ensure the information did not become public, Cruz said as he discussed the situation with Hook, who appeared before the Senate committee.

Hook, who no longer serves in the government, said he is not privy to the current classification standard but thanked Congress for funding a security detail "that provides protection for me and my family."

"I wish we were in a place that it was not necessary, but that is where we are," Hook said, indicating the threats against him remain active.

The Biden administration, Cruz said, has allowed these assassination plots to continue through a soft approach to Tehran that has given the regime access to more than $100 billion in recent years.

"It is completely unacceptable that the current administration has flowed $100 billion to a regime that is actively trying to murder former senior U.S. officials," the senator said.
Don’t Let Sudan Go Back to Being an Iran-Dominated Hub for Terrorists
The regional struggle between Iran (backed by Russia) and pro-Western powers stretches beyond what we normally think of as the Middle East to places like Sudan. In 2020, following the ouster of the murderous dictator Omar al-Bahsir, Khartoum took steps toward joining the Abraham Accords. But just three years later, the country again devolved into a civil war far bloodier than anything happening in Gaza (albeit much less interesting to Western protesters). And that is when the African country abandoned any hope of diplomatic relations with Israel for a different kind of normalization, as Oved Lobel explains:


On October 9, while Israel was still fighting to clear its own territory of more than a thousand terrorists . . . who had invaded the country and carried out mass atrocities and kidnapping two days before, Sudan and Iran suddenly announced they were normalizing relations. This normalization of relations, ruptured in 2016 at the behest of the Gulf Arab states, follows a broader normalization between those states and Iran since 2022.

Up until 2016, and particularly during the 1990s, Sudan served the same purpose to the south of Israel as Syria did in the north: a command-and-control, training, financing, and logistics hub for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its Palestinian and Lebanese [allies]—Hizballah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ)—as well as al-Qaeda and other terrorist clients. Missiles and other weapons were transferred by the IRGC to Sudan and then smuggled into Gaza, necessitating multiple Israeli airstrikes inside Sudan.

The IRGC already has a substantial presence in the Red Sea, including on islands off Eritrea as well as in Somalia, where it arms al-Qaeda’s al-Shabaab—the current leader of al-Qaeda, Saif al-Adel, has been based in Iran since 2003—as well as, in the other direction, the IRGC’s branch in Yemen, Ansar Allah, widely known as the Houthis.

The upshot? If Sudan once again becomes a terrorist hub, and Iran obtains footholds on either side of the Red Sea, Lobel goes on to explain, Tehran will have almost unrestricted routes for smuggling arms to Gaza.


Iran’s Government Pressures Jewish Minority For Election Propaganda
The tiny Jewish community in Tehran is facing intense pressure from the clerical regime to mobilize its members to vote on Friday in the parliamentary elections.

Iran’s regime launched a high-intensity campaign to stop boycotts of the parliament and Assembly of Experts elections.

Tehran-born Ben Sabti, an expert on Iranian Jews from the Israeli National Security and Strategy Institute, told Iran International that there are reports from Tehran that the government "is pressuring the Jews to vote.” He said the regime is exploiting the Jews to promote the elections and “make propaganda for the election.”

Initial reports from Iran, as well as opinion surveys conducted from abroad, speak of the lowest ever turnout on Friday, as Iranians have become more disillusioned with the Islamic Republic and its highly controlled and manipulated elections.

Sabti said he does not recall such an organized campaign in the past. The Iranian Jewish community were provided buses to take members to a stadium to promote the election and had a “festival of joy” about the election. The Jewish community also notified its members that there are "five or six synagogues” where Jews can vote, according to Sabti.

Dr. Homayoun Sameyah, the Chair of the Tehran Jewish Association, who is also a member of Iran’s regime-controlled parliament, launched an attack against Israel.
‘At best,’ Chicago museum showed ‘willful blindness’ buying Nazi-looted art
The Art Institute of Chicago was at best intentionally indifferent to the antisemitic circumstances surrounding an Austrian expressionist drawing that it purchased, a 160-page complaint filed by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office alleges.

In the filing, Alvin Bragg seeks a warrant to search the premises of one of the country’s oldest and most comprehensive art museums, located on Michigan Avenue in downtown Chicago and perhaps best known from the 1986 comedy “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”

Bragg’s office states that Egon Schiele’s 1916 drawing “Russian War Prisoner” ought to be returned to judge Timothy Reif, David Fraenkel and Milos Vavra. The three are the heirs of the work’s original owner, Fritz Grünbaum, a “well-known Viennese cabaret artist” whom the Nazis arrested in 1938 and sent to Dachau, where he was killed in 1941.

Reif, a federal judge, contacted the Manhattan D.A.’s office on Dec. 2, 2022, about the work that belonged to his great-uncle, Grünbaum. (Reif’s grandfather was also Grünbaum’s cousin.) Vavra is the great-nephew of the late Elise Zozuli, Grünbaum’s sister, and Fraenkel and Reif are named as co-heirs, co-executors and co-trustees in the will of Leon Fischer, the grandson of Max Herzl—the brother of Grünbaum’s third wife Elisabeth, per the court filing.

The Manhattan D.A.’s office launched a grand jury investigation of 11 drawings that belonged to Grünbaum on Dec. 22, 2022. Those in possession of 10 of the 11 (including the Museum of Modern Art, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Morgan Library and Museum and Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh) agreed to return them. One was given directly to the heirs; seven were returned to heirs on Sept. 20, 2023; and two were given to the heirs on Jan. 19, 2024.
Antisemitism in Australia isn't a simple problem to fix
Who would have thought that in 2024 Hitler’s evil face would be featured in a leaflet being dropped in people’s letter boxes by white supremacists thereby promoting their genocidal worldview through this well-orchestrated blitz of hate?” asks Dr. Dvir Abramovich, chairman of the Anti-Defamation Commission, headquartered in Melbourne.

Abramovich is frequently interviewed by electronic and print media journalists and also writes frequent articles in both the Jewish and general press.

He takes his role very seriously and posts daily accounts of antisemitic incidents on social media.

There is nothing new about antisemitism in Australia, other than the fact that it has intensified.

Over the years there has been rabid antisemitism, and there have been times in which antisemitism was barely felt at all, though it never quite disappeared.

In the aftermath of October 7, it reared its ugly head with an unprecedented vengeance. This is partly due to the large number of Muslims currently living in Australia. According to the 2021 census, the number of Muslims totaled 813,392, whereas the number of people who identified as Jews was 99,956, though it is widely believed in the Jewish community that the number is closer to 120,000.

Because there are so many Jewish high achievers, many non-Jews think that Jews have more influence than is the case.
New York City marks 30 years since deadly antisemitic attack on Brooklyn Bridge
New York City will mark the 30th anniversary on Friday of the deadly shooting attack on the Brooklyn Bridge in 1994, when a Lebanese-born terrorist shot at a van carrying 15 Hasidic teenagers, killing one and wounding several others in one of the city’s worst pre-9/11 terror incidents.

An event will be held on Friday, with Mayor Eric Adams, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and FBI officials expected to attend, alongside Devorah Halberstam, whose son, Ari Halberstam, was the sole fatality of the attack. He was 16 at the time.

Some 10,000 mourners in Crown Heights attended the 1994 funeral for Halberstam, who was a member of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement and had been personally tutored by Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the movement’s leader. Rudolph Giuliani and Mario Cuomo, the mayor of New York City and governor of New York State at the time, were also in attendance.

The incident was originally classed as ‘road rage,’ but the killer later confessed that he had shot the Hasidic teenagers “because they were Jewish.” In 2000, the FBI reclassified the shooting as a terrorist attack.

The details of the confession were only released in 2012, almost twenty years after the incident itself, following years of dispute over the nature of the killing, which took place shortly after the Jewish terrorist attack in Hebron that saw the Brooklyn-born extremist Baruch Goldstein murder 29 Muslim worshipers at the Tomb of the Patriarchs.
Borehamwood estate agent fires manager who celebrated death of Lord Rothschild
A Borehamwood estate agent has confirmed that they have terminated the employment of an employee who praised the death of Lord Rothschild in an anti-Israel post.

Earlier this week, Amanda Hardy, who was listed on Linkedin as the branch manager for the office on Shenley road in Borehamwood posted: "The world is a better place with this Zionist dead. Just got to hope all the others follow."

Replying to a comment under the post she suggested a “street party” to celebrate his death.

At the time, Chris Newell, owner of Barkers said that she’d been suspended pending an investigation into her conduct.

And now, just three days later, confirmed that she’d been sacked.

Writing on Facebook, the company said: “Following the swift suspension on Tuesday (27th February) of Amanda Hardy, an employee of Barkers Estate Agents Borehamwood branch, after it was discovered that she had published on Facebook a deeply offensive post, appearing to celebrate the death of Lord Rothschild, Barkers confirm that she is no longer employed or associated with the business.
Orthodox Jew reportedly killed in San Diego area shooting
One person was killed and two were injured in a shooting at a dental practice in El Cajon, Calif., some 15 miles from San Diego. The shooter, reportedly a former patient, is in custody.

The El Cajon Police Department initially wrote that there were “at least three victims” in the incident that took place on Thursday evening. It later named the suspect—who fled in a U-Haul truck, and who is considered armed and dangerous—as Mohammed Abdulkareem, 29. Later on Thursday night, it said that the suspect was in custody.

Police said the shooting occurred on the 400 block of North Magnolia at a dental center, per emergency scanner reports, The Los Angeles Times reported. Sgt. Eric Thornton of the police department told the Times that the shooting left one person dead and two injured.

Smile Plus Dentistry, which is located at 480 North Magnolia Ave., lists Jack Harouni and Benjamin Harouni as dentists who are part of the practice.

The Daily Mail reported that Smile Plus, “which is run by the father-and-son team of doctors Jack and Benjamin Harouni,” was the site of the shooting.

“The office’s receptionist Yareli Carrillo, 28, was shot in the legs but is in stable condition and expected to survive,” the Daily Mail added. “A man in his 40s who has not been named was also injured but expected to survive.”

“It’s not clear if the Harounis were in the office at the time of the shooting,” the Daily Mail added.


Golders Green knifeman tells court he had ‘just drunk too much’
A knifeman who terrorised shop staff and demanded to hear their views on “Israel and Palestine”claims he had just drunk too much, the Old Bailey has heard.

Evyatar Reitman, 48, and his 18-year-old son Yosef Chaim had to fight off AbdullahGabriel, 34, when he approached them with “hate in his eyes”.

Reitman said later: “He came to ask about Israel Palestine and seemed to want us to say we were pro-Israel so he had a reason to attack.

“I could see the hate in his eyes.”

Abdullah admitted causing affray and being in possession of a knife in the terrifying incident that took place in Golders Green on 29 January.

Police initially treated the case as a hate crime - but decided just to charge Abdullah with affray.

His barrister said the incident was “was more linked to alcohol, which he was using as a crutch to self-medicate”.

Reitman told the JC at the time he had to fight off Abdullah while his son used his martial arts skills to try and restrain the knifeman.

Abdullah’s barrister Matthew Ness told the court his clientsuffers from paranoid schizophrenia.

Ness said his actions were triggered by alcohol which he had been using to self-medicate.

“Mental health contributed to this offence.

“Mr Abdullah said his mental health issues had never caused him to leave the house with a knife before, and he attributed this to a very high alcohol intake.”


Simon Sebag Montefiore: Jacob Rothschild created his own version of Englishness and Jewishness
The death of Jacob Rothschild is the end of the era but even in his era, there was only one Jacob.

Even though his achievements mean that he lives on in works of art and architecture, in the National Library of Israel, the restored Waddesdon and Spencer House, he personified a great spirit too, the humanist universalist spirit of generosity not just in terms of munificent philanthropy but of openness, curiosity and gentility. As a Rothschild heir, he could have rested on golden laurels or retired to crusty rusticity but he was ambitious and successful in all sorts of realms.

He adored history and was part of it: he created his own version of Englishness and Jewishness, liberal, tolerant, generous, acting like his ancestors as a patriarch of the British Jewish community and also like his ancestors as a philanthropist in Israel. He was multifaceted: an intellectual, philanthropist, leader, collector, impresario, iconoclast and traditionalist, restorer of the old and curator and commissioner of the new, at home in many worlds.

He was an urbane prince of the open world but in person he was modest, self-deprecating, shy, almost diffident – but also familial and warm of heart, highly intelligent and cultured, very sensitive, blessed with bold taste and charming demeanour, but deeply playful and fascinated by everyone in a quicksilverish, amused way.

Nothing in human nature would surprise him but much delighted him. When I was teenager and he was a famous financial buccaneer, he gave me a holiday job; when I started to write, he encouraged me; later, he discussed books and history with me and invited me to fascinating gatherings.

I thought of him as a friend – and there were few things more fun, more flattering, than to be spotted at some gathering by Jacob and invited to join him sitting far from the crowd to discuss great events and small.

There was no one like Jacob and wherever he is now, he will be enjoying the company, amused by the intrigues, encouraging the talented and helping the needy, thinking of fresh ideas and commissioning new works.
Brian Mulroney (1939-2024) was a steadfast supporter of Israel and the Jewish community
Brian Mulroney experienced the political extremes. Elected with a healthy mandate in 1984, he became one of the most unpopular prime ministers in history. But those reading his recent obituaries must have concluded that history has been kind, for Mulroney is now recalled as a committed leader wholly dedicated to Canada and as an international statesman whose voice was heard and heeded.

One thing that has gone unchanged over the decades is the view that Mulroney was completely supportive of Israel and of Canada’s Jewish community, and that his support was sincere, not just for political reasons.

His attitude was based “on the belief that the Jews, having suffered horribly over generations, have found a permanent home in a tangible defined Israel, and that they alone must make value judgments in respect of their national security,” he wrote in his 1,000-page memoirs, released in 2007.

Support for Israel must “rest upon a moral foundation,” he reasoned in a 1983 speech.

When Mulroney announced he was stepping down as Conservative leader in the spring of 1993 amid record-low standing in the polls, he was nevertheless hailed as a prime minister who should be “fondly remembered,” then Canadian Jewish Congress president Irving Abella stated.

“He understood the needs of our community. He was very sensitive to them and he had a visceral attachment to Israel,” Abella noted. “On more than one occasion, he called Jewish leaders to offer encouragement. We’ve lost a good friend.”




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This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For 20 years and 40,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.

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