Thursday, October 10, 2024

10/10 Links Pt2: What’s wrong with ‘demonising’ Hamas?; Does CBS News Know Where Jerusalem Is?; Mayim Bialik: Hillels Are Under Attack

From Ian:

What’s wrong with ‘demonising’ Hamas?
According to Guardian film critic Stuart Jeffries, ‘If you want to understand why Hamas murdered civilians… One Day in October won’t help’. Even worse, in his eyes, the documentary ‘does a good job of demonising Gazans, first as testosterone-crazed Hamas killers, later as shameless civilian looters’.

Of course, the documentary makes no such generalisations. It seems that daring to present the unvarnished truth of 7 October is the same as presenting all Palestinians as racists, murderers and looters, according to this midwit reviewer, at least.

To the normal viewer, however, this is a grotesque objection. The film does its job, which is to convey the unimaginable horror of 7 October, the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. It does not set out to ‘understand’ the motives of an anti-Semitic terror group.

One Day in October uses footage captured on the day, mostly recorded by the Hamas terrorists themselves. In one scene, GoPro footage shows a Hamas fighter panting with excitement, as he says: ‘I swear to God, we’ll slaughter them. I want to livestream this. We’ve got to show the folks back home.’ Other CCTV footage depicts armed Hamas terrorists swarming Kibbutz Be’eri.

We all know what happened next. But according to the Guardian, such footage – real footage of the atrocity, let’s not forget – makes the documentary little more than an ‘othering machine’. Heaven forbid that viewers might not see eye to eye with those who murdered, raped and kidnapped their way through southern Israel that day.

The review also complains that ‘all of our sympathies’ in the documentary are guided towards ‘relatable Israelis’, as if ‘sympathy’ were an unusual reaction to footage of a 15-year-old boy asking his father to bury him with his surfboard – or to an interview with Emily Hand, who was abducted by Hamas when she was just eight years old.

Time and again over the past year, we have seen supposedly progressive media struggling to grasp the horrors of 7 October and deflecting attention away from Hamas. But this review is something else. Apparently, even depicting Hamas’s barbaric crimes can be ‘othering’. The Western intelligentsia really has lost the moral plot.
Does CBS News Know Where Jerusalem Is?
In late August, Mark Memmott, the senior director of standards and practices at CBS News, sent an email to all CBS News employees reminding them to “be careful with some terms when we talk or write about the news” from Israel and Gaza. One of the words on Memmott’s list of terms was Jerusalem.

Of Jerusalem, Memmott wrote: “Do not refer to it as being in Israel.”

He continued, in a note sent to thousands of journalists at the network: “Yes, the U.S. embassy is there and the Trump administration recognized it as being Israel’s capital. But its status is disputed. The status of Jerusalem goes to the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel regards Jerusalem as its ‘eternal and undivided’ capital, while the Palestinians claim East Jerusalem—occupied by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war—as the capital of a future state.”

Jerusalem’s status is indeed contested. For instance, the United States’ embassy in Israel is in Jerusalem, and the Jordanian Islamic Waqf has custody of its holy sites. But acknowledging the competing claims on different parts of the city, or declining to refer to Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, are one thing. Denying that it is in Israel at all is quite another.

In which country is the Israeli Knesset, the home of the Israeli prime minister and the home of the Israeli president, located? The answer to that question is self-evident. Except, it seems, at CBS. In the rest of the United States, the answer is clear: Since 1995, when Congress passed the Jerusalem Embassy Act, the government has recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

This latest revelation comes after CBS Mornings host Tony Dokoupil was admonished by executives at the network for his interview of best-selling author Ta-Nahesi Coates about his new anti-Israel book, The Message.

Memmott’s Jerusalem guidance is in keeping with our previous reporting on the turmoil at CBS—and what The Free Press has heard from multiple people inside CBS today: that a double standard exists for journalism at CBS when it relates to Israel and Jews.

As we reported earlier today, a fractious meeting of CBS Mornings’ editorial team Tuesday included a debate about whether it is “fair to talk about whether Israel should exist at all.” We also noted that while Dokoupil was admonished for his tough questioning of Coates, CBS executives appear intensely relaxed about the possibility that his co-host Gayle King told Coates what questions she planned on asking him before the interview.

But the contrasts between the treatment of King and Dokoupil don’t end there.
In Israel, Every Day is October 7. In the U.S., Every Day is October 8.
Ever since witnessing an ecstatic pro-Hamas celebration in Times Square just 24 hours after the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, I thought nothing could surprise me. Then to commemorate the one-year anniversary of those atrocities, the Guardian published an essay by Naomi Klein titled, “How Israel has made trauma a weapon of war.”

“What is the line between commemorating trauma and cynically exploiting it?” Klein asks. “Between memorialization and weaponization? What does it mean to perform collective grief when the collective is not universal, but rather tightly bound by ethnicity?”

As someone who encountered gruesome videos of Hamas’s “cynical exploitation” and “weaponization” of Israelis’ trauma exactly a year ago, watched as terrorists referred to terrified Israelis in the South — those who just happened to be most likely to oppose “settlements” — as settlers and dogs, and heard firsthand from people who witnessed livestreams of family and friends held at gunpoint, most of them murdered or taken hostage, I found the premise grotesque.

It was particularly appalling because beyond the therapeutic effect of creating artwork, the cri de cœur that motivated the art installations from Tel Aviv to American college campuses, “kidnapped” posters across the globe, the Nova Exhibition, online maps of the massacres, and documentaries about October 7, is the denials of the trauma itself. And the feeling that since that horrific day, we have been abandoned. That we are profoundly alone. That every day in Israel is October 7th.

Given the depth of depravity of what happened that day, some Jews initially believed the world would finally stand with Israel. I didn’t. But I did think that everyone would at least condemn the atrocities. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Israel has faced obscene denialism and false accusations while young people across the globe celebrate monstrous barbarism and valorize those who perpetrated it. Jews across the world have the sense that the “universal collective” to which we thought we finally belonged has thrown us out and turned its back.

Where is the world’s outrage? Where is the world’s empathy? Where are the calls for Hamas to return our stolen souls? Where is the Red Cross? Where are the organizations and so-called allies with whom we stood, we marched, we campaigned? It’s #MeToo unless you’re a Jew.


Seth Mandel: The Hostile Takeover of the University of Michigan
The attitude on college campuses toward the pro-Hamas movement seems to be taken from the Guns n’ Roses lyric, “You can have anything you want but you better not take it from me.”

The University of Michigan is a good example. Anti-Semitic tent encampments taking over open spaces? A-OK. Assaulting Jewish students at a campus Jewish center? Nothing to worry about. Months of anti-Jewish harassment so common that the school had to settle civil-rights complaints with the federal government? What can you do.

But take away Ultimate Frisbee? What kind of monster does that?

In the spring, a slate of pro-Palestinian students ran for the university’s Central Student Government on a platform of Shut It Down. It’s was not a particularly confusing or vague slogan. The slate won and proceeded to shut down the student government, insisting they would turn the spigot back on only once the university divested from companies that the activists said had connections to Israel.

Promises made, promises kept.

Unfortunately, some students didn’t believe the shutdown would apply to activities they liked. That’s when the Wolverines would face down a crisis that threatened to tear their beautiful world asunder.

The New York Times set the dystopian scene: “There was an Ultimate Frisbee team without money to compete, an airport shuttle whose cost to students almost doubled without a campus subsidy, and a ballroom dance team unable to rent rehearsal space.”

Jews needed security just to get around campus at times, but what really shocked the consciences of college students was the dismal possibility of life without ballroom dance rehearsal.

Some were willing to brave the deprivation in order to stand with Hamas. “The sacrifice is worth it,” the president of the university’s stand-up comedy club told the Times.

Yet last night, the burden of sacrifice was lifted. The student assembly passed a petition to reinstate funding for students groups. As Thomas Jefferson famously said upon signing the Declaration of Independence, there will be Frisbee.

By the end of the night, said one student who voted to restore the funding, the pro-Palestine activists “were kind of mobbing us. They were literally in our faces.”

Some of the assembly members had to be escorted home by campus security.

“Tensions had already been high,” notes the Times report today. “Earlier Tuesday, the words ‘intifada’ and ‘coward’ were painted on the home of Santa J. Ono, the university president. The home of Erik Lundberg, the university’s chief investment officer, was vandalized on Monday.”

Winning hearts and minds, truly.
Thomas Friedman’s ugly 50th anniversary
In his New York Times column on Oct. 7, of all dates, Thomas L. Friedman stated that the Palestinian Authority “has endorsed the Oslo peace process.” The Oslo Accords require the P.A. to disarm and outlaw terrorist groups, arrest terrorists, and extradite them to Israel. It has not done any of that, which is what compels Israel to occasionally send its forces into P.A.-governed territory in pursuit of terrorists. Friedman knows this and yet ignores the fact.

Next month will mark the 50th anniversary of Friedman’s launching his public career as America’s most prominent defamer of Israel. Perhaps it’s fitting that in his Sept. 25 column, he sank to what may be his moral low point when he characterized Israel’s anti-terror operation in the Gaza Strip as “killing for killing’s sake.”

A person or country that kills “for killing’s sake” represents the essence of evil. The last time Friedman used that phrase was to describe Muslim terrorists who slaughtered 170 civilians in India. That’s what Friedman thinks of Israel defending itself against mass murderers and gang-rapists in Gaza.

And it is essentially what Friedman has been saying about Israel, sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly, for half a century now.

It was on Nov. 12, 1974, that Friedman began his career in attacking Israel. That was the day he and some fellow students at Brandeis University placed an open letter in The Brandeis Justice (the student newspaper) denouncing Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the American Jewish community for opposing PLO head Yasser Arafat’s appearance at the United Nations.

Friedman and his friends declared that the mass Jewish rally outside the United Nations would “only reinforce Jewish anxiety and contribute to Israel’s further isolation.” They demanded that Rabin “negotiate with all factions of the Palestinians, including the PLO.” Remember that it was a time when the PLO was not even pretending to be moderate or ready to live in peace with Israel. Just months earlier, PLO terrorists had proudly massacred dozens of Israeli schoolchildren in the towns of Kiryat Shmona and Ma’alot.

Friedman was very proud of his extremist position—until a few years later, when he realized that it would be to his advantage to pretend that he had never criticized Israel before.


Bernard-Henri Lévy on Why Israel Stands Alone | Think Twice
In this exclusive interview, Bernard-Henri Lévy lays it all on the table and discusses some hard truths about Israel’s current war and the Western world’s reaction.

Join JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin and French philosopher, filmmaker and author Bernard-Henri Lévy, the author of a new book about Oct. 7, Israel Alone.

They discuss Lévy’s moving trip to the site of the Oct. 7 massacre and what he experienced there. Lévy revisits any delusions some might have about peace with the Palestinians and has some choice words to share about the woke mob in the West.


The Theological Roots of the New Anti-Semitism
To Matthew Burdette, the progressive anti-Semitism that has become so evident over the past year resembles nothing more than the ancient Christian idea of supersessionism. This doctrine, rejected in modern times by the Catholic Church and many Protestant denominations, teaches that the Jews were chosen by God but lost their status with the arrival of Jesus, having been superseded by the church (in the sense of the collective body of believing Christians). Burdette writes:

Liberal progressivism is the product of a supersessionist interpretation of Christianity: it is an embrace of universalism and a rejection of particularity. It can tolerate difference only as long as none of the differences matter.

That God identifies himself as the God of Israel strikes [supersessionist] Christians as an intellectual embarrassment. It is untenable to imagine that the God of all creation should be radically identified with the concrete realities of human history. . . .

In order to avoid facing this contradiction, the supersessionist blames Israel: they cling to their special status, refusing to be one of us. Of course they have a place here, were they only willing to let go of their claim to be God’s covenant people.

But the result of this runaway universalism is exclusion: to the supersessionist, in Burdette’s words, “God is understood to be the God of all by being the God of all but the Jews.”
#Millennial #rabbi explores why we’re reluctant to discuss #antisemitism | EP 12 Rabbi Diana Fersko
Welcome to the 12th episode of "Here I Am with Shai Davidai," a podcast that delves into the rising tide of antisemitism through insightful discussions with top Jewish advocates.

In this episode featuring Rabbi Diana Fersko on "Here I Am with Shai Davidai," the conversation delves into various aspects of Jewish identity and activism. Rabbi Fersko shares her journey of becoming the person she is today, highlighting her upbringing in a committed Jewish family and her experiences that shaped her understanding of Judaism. She discusses the importance of Jewish activism and the challenges faced by Jews in contemporary society, particularly in the context of rising antisemitism.

Rabbi Fersko emphasizes the significance of Jewish community and the need for Jews to stand together, regardless of their level of religious observance. She reflects on her role as a rabbi and the impact of her work in fostering Jewish identity and activism. The discussion also touches on the concept of Jewishness versus Judaism, with Rabbi Fersko expressing her belief in the importance of embracing Jewish culture and community beyond religious practices.

Shai Davidai engages with Rabbi Fersko on these topics, exploring the nuances of Jewish identity and the role of education in combating antisemitism. The conversation is rich with personal anecdotes and insights into the challenges and rewards of being a Jewish activist in today's world.


Trump makes appeal to Americans in Israel – ‘Your fate is in your hands’
Former President Donald Trump appealed to American citizens living in Israel to vote for him in a new video on Thursday.

Standing in front of American flags, the former president said: “No one in history has ever stood with Israel and the Jewish people like I have.”

“No one knows this better than the tens of thousands of my fellow citizens in Israel, where I happen to be very popular,” Trump stated in the video that first aired on Channel 14, Israel’s right-wing news station. “Your fate is in your hands and the fate of the U.S.A. and Israel is also in your hands.”

“I won’t let you down,” Trump promised, adding that he has done far more for Israel than any other presidents.

However, he chose not to specify: “I won’t bother, you know just as well as I do.”

“I’ve also kept you safe and the other side doesn’t even like you,” Trump said. “Don’t let me down – I will never let you down.”


New billboards in Pennsylvania urge Jews to back Donald Trump: ‘Vote wisely’
Digital billboards are going up throughout the swing state of Pennsylvania urging Jews and other pro-Israel voters to “vote wisely” and back Donald Trump for president on Nov. 5.

The billboards are sponsored by a new group called Jews for Safety & Security, co-founded by former Brooklyn state Assemblyman Dov Hikind.

“This is just the beginning. We expect up to 10 million impressions from this first round of billboards which will be displayed from this week through the election,” Hikind, a former Democrat turned Republican, told The Post.

Ten of the 15 billboards are already up along roadways in areas with considerable Jewish populations, including in Philadelphia, Delaware, Chester and Bucks counties.

At least $250,000 will be spent on the messaging, Hikind said.


Full text: Biden holds High Holidays call, says Jewish leaders must be more progressive
"Without an Israel, every Jew in the world’s security is less stable," the U.S. president said. "It doesn't mean that Jewish leadership doesn't have to be more progressive than it is, but it does mean it has to exist."


67 Israeli police officers slain on Oct. 7 and since honored
“On October 7, we were 100% the bulletproof vests of the nation.”

This is according to Master Sgt. Dean Elsdunne, Israel Police international spokesperson, speaking to JNS on the sidelines of an emotional event at the Friends of Zion Museum in Jerusalem on Wednesday night, honoring the 67 police officers who died in the line of duty on Oct. 7, 2023, and over the past year, battling terrorists and defending the State of Israel.

The event was attended by police officers, including family members of those slain performing their duty, along with other officers who risked their lives on that bloody day.

Elsdunne addressed the audience, sharing that he felt many Israelis remain unaware of the huge role the Israel Police played on Oct. 7 and in the following weeks.

In addition to saving lives, officers were also charged with identifying victims, disarming unexploded rockets and IEDs, gathering 1.2 million digital articles and footprints from body cameras and CCTV footage to identify terrorists and more, he said.

Elsdunne also stressed their key part in Israel’s two hostage rescue operations in Gaza, led by the police’s Yamam anti-terrorism special forces, which resulted in safely bringing home six hostages.

“Even before 7 a.m. on October 7, the police Southern District commander gave the order to implement an emergency contingency plan that shut down the district, putting officers at strategic points throughout the region in order to not allow the terrorists to seep through even further into Israel,” he said.

“Officers didn’t wait for commands or mobilization, they grabbed their handguns and went out. They ran to the south to reinforce those officers who were already fighting, and fought in battle for 50 hours—along with commanders and border police, preventing the terrorists from penetrating deeper by blocking key arteries,” said Elsdunne.
Families of Canadian October 7 victims sue Iran, Hamas and Samidoun for $350 million
The families of two Canadian-Israeli women killed in the October 7 attack on Israel are suing a wide range of organizations, arguing they’re liable for $350 million for the death of their family members.

Among them is Samidoun, a Vancouver-based activist organization that organizes anti-Israel protests that have praised Hamas’s attack and that agitates on behalf of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails, some of whom are members of terrorist groups.

The lawsuit also names Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, two of the organizations behind the October 7 attacks, Fatah, the political party of Palestinian National Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the states of Syria and Iran, among multiple other organizations.

The terror groups, the lawsuit says, either “planned, organized and carried out the 7/10 Terrorist Attacks, including the murders of Judi, Gad and Tiferet,” and the state entities “supplied the Terrorist Entity Defendants with funding, training, propaganda, safe havens and other forms of support.”

None of the allegations has been proven in court.

The lawsuit was filed by Iris Weinstein Haggai, whose mother, Judi Lynn Weinstein, and father, Gad Haggai, were killed in the attacks, and Ohad Lapidot, whose daughter, Tiferet Lapidot, was killed at the Supernova music festival.
Stephen Pollard: Why is the Guardian shocked that terrorists are portrayed as monsters?
Don’t you just hate how Osama bin Laden is portrayed by the mainstream media? A man with a fully thought through programme for government, he is nonetheless demonised as some sort of mass murderer. And as for Hitler: all he was really doing was standing up for Germany after it was so badly treated at Versailles. Sadly, he is portrayed only as some sort of madman.

I haven’t encountered the work of the Guardian’s Stuart Jeffries before, but on the basis of his review of Channel 4’s superb documentary, One Day in October, I’ll make a stab at his view of Osama and Adolf. Misunderstood – or, rather, not properly understood. Caricatured as villains when in reality they are so much more complex.

Jeffries has had the misfortune to have had to watch and review One Day in October for the Guardian. Misfortune for us, that is, because his review has now been published. I would ordinarily have recommended you give it a miss – the review, not the documentary – because it is in many ways no more than the usual boilerplate Guardian drivel and it will just anger you.

But perhaps this time you might actually want to have a read of the review, because it is something quite special - even for the Guardian, which infamously ran a column by Osama bin Laden at the height of Al Qaeda’s success as a terrorist organisation.

The standfirst to Jeffries’ review makes clear where we are heading straight away: “This disturbing documentary about the attack on Be’eri kibbutz is full of troubling interviews and phone/CCTV footage. Sadly, it also demonises Gazans as either killers or looters.”

Ah yes, those poor misunderstood killers and looters. All they did was rape and murder 1200 Israelis. I mean, let’s get some perspective here. It wasn’t that big a deal. And they are people, too, you know. Don’t define them as murderers just because they, er, murdered people.

Jeffries then gets to the meat of his concerns: “If you want to understand why Hamas murdered civilians, though, One Day in October won’t help. Indeed, it does a good job of demonising Gazans, first as testosterone-crazed Hamas killers, later as shameless civilian looters, asset-stripping the kibbutz while bodies lay in the street and the terrified living hid.”
Guardian pulls controversial October 7 documentary review that didn’t ‘meet editorial standards’
The Guardian has deleted a review of a documentary on the October 7 massacre after it received backlash for its framing of Hamas and violence against Israelis.

Written by journalist Stuart Jeffries, the piece assessed Channel 4’s "One Day in October," which uses CCTV and GoPro footage to depict the deadly attack at Kibbutz Be’eri which killed over 100 Israelis and saw 32 hostages taken into Gaza.

In his review, Jeffries urged viewers to consider the broader context behind Hamas's actions, stating, "If you want to understand why Hamas murdered civilians, though, One Day in October won’t help."

The reviewer laments that, watching the documentary, “All our sympathies are with relatable Israelis...By contrast, Hamas terrorists are a generalised menace on CCTV, their motives beyond One Day in October’s remit.”

Despite giving the documentary a four-star rating, he criticised it for depicting Gazans negatively, stating they were shown as "testosterone-crazed Hamas killers" and "shameless civilian looters."

A Guardian spokesperson said, "The article did not meet our editorial standards, and we have removed it pending review. The independent readers' editor will respond to a number of readers who have raised concerns."

The review sparked immediate outrage before its withdrawal.

Dave Rich, director of policy at the Community Security Trust, remarked on Twitter/X that “if there’s something wrong with sympathising with an Israeli child cowering in fear rather than the terrorists coming to kill her.”


3,000 miles apart, two campuses plan to quietly mark Oct. 7 — and hope for peace
A bright sun beat down on Stanford’s campus on a cloudless Friday afternoon in late September, the perfect weather to usher in the first weekend of the school year.

The Palo Alto university was abuzz with activity befitting students’ return to campus: an intramural soccer game, people throwing a frisbee on a campus lawn, a coffee shop overflowing with students slumped over laptops.

At the Stanford Chabad house, the smell of fresh challah wafted from the kitchen before noon as Rabbi Dov Greenberg and his family prepared to welcome more than 100 students for Shabbat dinner that night. Across campus, Rabbi Jessica Kirschner eagerly awaited a similar number of students choosing to spend the first Shabbat of the year at Hillel. An Israeli flag hung from the building, and posters demanding “Bring Them Home Now” covered the walls inside.

The only outward sign of the dysfunction that had plagued the university during the spring quarter, which ended with anti-Israel protesters affiliated with a campus Gaza encampment breaking into the president’s office and dousing it in red paint, was a single booth at an activities fair at the law school advertising a club called Stanford Law Students for Justice in Palestine. Just a few students lingered next to the table.

Jewish faculty members, staff and students at Stanford and at Columbia University, another elite institution marred by antisemitism and divisive campus protests last spring, talked to Jewish Insider about their hopes for the new school year ahead of the anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks. At both campuses, they spoke with a gritty weariness developed after Oct. 7 upended life for Jewish students on campuses across the United States.

Taken together, these two prestigious universities — 3,000 miles apart — offer a window into what Jewish students are experiencing a year after the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. Today, they will gather to mourn and to come together, to mark the somber anniversary, while 101 hostages still remain in Gaza.

They will be attending events sponsored by their campus Hillel and Chabad houses, because the universities themselves have largely chosen to avoid getting involved with this now politically-charged anniversary. (Campus anti-Israel groups at both Stanford and Columbia are also planning events for Oct. 7.)

At Stanford, an event sponsored by the university’s office of religious and spiritual life will hold an event today titled “Holding Each Other Through a Difficult Week.” A campus sanctuary will be a “quiet space for prayer and reflection.” But nothing in the event says why, exactly, this will be a difficult week — no mention of Israel, Hamas, the war or even the Middle East at all. Meanwhile, at Columbia, no university-sponsored events will take place at all on Oct. 7.

Still, at the start of another school year, Jewish community members at Stanford described feeling cautiously optimistic, rooted in a hope — whether earned or not — that things can’t possibly be as bad as they were last year. (A university-sponsored committee described antisemitism as so pervasive that it was “in the air” in a report published in June.)

“It’s very challenging to be realistic and optimistic at the same time. But that’s what it is to be a Jew,” Greenberg said. “If we’re faced with hostility and hatred, we’re not going to let haters define our Jewishness.”

But while Israel has not been part of the public conversation on campus during the first few days of the school year, a latent sense of fear lingers for many in the Jewish community.

“There’s a level of surprise, I think, that it’s so quiet. It’s like people are waiting for the other shoe to drop,” said Jeffrey Koseff, a Stanford engineering professor and the co-chair of an advisory committee formed to study antisemitism at the university.
The Campus Problem Didn’t Start on October 7—And It Won’t End This Year
The horrors of October 7 unleashed a wave of antisemitism that, for many of us, was sadly unsurprising. We’ve seen this before.

In May 2021, when Hamas launched an 11-day war against Israel with a relentless barrage of missiles, anti-Jewish hatred quickly resurfaced. Critics seized on the conflict to vilify Israel, questioning its right to self-defense. “Why should Israel defend itself?” they screamed. The disparity in military capabilities was their rallying cry — as though Israel should willingly allow its citizens to become sitting ducks simply because defending them would result in an uneven death toll.

Their warped rationale reframed Israel’s very act of survival as aggression. To them, the lower number of Israeli casualties wasn’t a sign of successful protection but evidence of a moral failing.

The first wave of college campus protests — ostensibly in support of the Palestinians — came just days after October 7. Even as the bodies of massacre victims were still being recovered and identified, and while it remained unclear who had been killed or abducted into Gaza, American students were already gathering on campus lawns, chanting slogans like “Free, free Palestine,” “Palestine is here and proud,” and the infamous “From the river to the sea.”

The anti-Israel campus protests quickly mutated in the days and weeks following October 7. What began as rallies led by familiar groups like Students for Justice in Palestine and the ironically named Jewish Voice for Peace soon swelled into broader support from the general student population.

This escalation was enabled by the alarming inaction of college faculty and leadership, who stood by as student mobs commandeered campus quads to set up so-called “Zionist-free” zones. These makeshift encampments, they proclaimed, would remain until university administrations caved to their nebulous demands for “divestment” from companies with tenuous, if any, connections to Israel.

Yet, these student protests and the horrifying displays of antisemitism they showcased brought into sharp focus a long-festering issue that HonestReporting and others have been warning about for years: the pervasive antisemitism on college campuses.

For years, Israel’s efforts to defend itself from terrorists seeking its annihilation have been seized upon by college activists, eager to use them as a pretext for antisemitism.
Braverman’s Cambridge speech postponed after Palestine group’s ‘mob-rule tactics’
Suella Braverman has been forced to call off a speech at the University of Cambridge by pro-Palestinian protesters using “mob-rule tactics”.

The former home secretary was due to talk about her career and life in politics on Thursday to the Cambridge University Conservative Association (CUCA), which she led 20 years ago as a student.

But Cambridge for Palestine, a campaign group, called on supporters to “no platform” the “far Right”, claiming her “hyper-authoritarian populist policies on migration, policing and protest” represented “everything we stand against”.

“She’s showing up to a platform created by CUCA and we’ll embarrass her with numbers. Bring your flags, your friends and your anti-fascist energy,” the group posted on social media.

After taking security advice, CUCA and Mrs Braverman decided they could not guarantee her safety, or that of their guests, in the short time left before the event and would have to postpone it.

Mrs Braverman accused the “radical, militant” group of forcing CUCA to call off the event through “threats, intimidation, and mob-rule tactics”.

“This is not a peaceful protest; it’s an attempt to silence a democratically-elected Member of Parliament and an attack on free speech and British values,” she said.

Mrs Braverman added: “This week of all weeks, I refuse to be intimidated by the pro-Palestinian mob. I was resolute in my intention to speak to the Cambridge University Conservative Association, and whilst the event has been delayed for now, it will proceed at a future date.

“Conservatives will not back down. I will not be silenced and neither will the millions of British people and defenders of free speech who stand proud, firm and unyielding against radical mob rule.”
Mayim Bialik: Hillels Are Under Attack
In my time as an undergraduate and graduate student at UCLA, I thrived as a student leader at Hillel under the guidance of a boldly liberal Zionist rabbi. He said then what I still believe now: The Palestinian people have a right to self-determination and dignity, and deserve better from their own leadership as well as from Israel. As students, we sought to have peaceful, respectful conversations with students on campus who advocated for the establishment of a Palestinian state. We were met with accusations of racism, swastikas chalked on the bricks of Bruin Walk, and protesters who donned Hamas armbands and stared at us in stony silence. We watched in bewilderment as the “Zionism is racism” campaigns began to take hold on campuses across the country. It was astounding that students would not engage with even those of us who were trying to find common ground and believed in coexistence.

In the 1990s, many of us felt that we had little choice but to accept that a few student organizations were comfortable branding Zionism as a form of racism, or wearing regalia of terrorist organizations whose charters included the explicit elimination of the Jewish state. The refusal of some students to engage in dialogue was once an unspoken policy; now it is an explicit one. Anti-normalization is the name for this trend. It is rooted in the idea that merely talking with people who hold a different point of view from you is tantamount to recognition or acceptance of that view and should be avoided at all costs. The refusal to engage shuts down any dialogue and any sincere attempt to bridge our pain and find ways to communicate with empathy and compassion. This tactic reveals an intellectual weakness, an inability to respond reasonably to a point of view that is not your own. And it is fundamentally contrary to the basic values of the university and academia at large: exposure to and a free exchange of ideas, as well as the ability to find creative and positive outlets for differences of opinion.

It is, to put it plainly, undemocratic to support the tactics of drowning out and protesting Israeli or Jewish speakers simply because they are Jewish. It needs to be called out for what it is: anti-Semitism. It is anti-Semitic to seek to deny Jewish students the ability to access the most important organization for Jewish life on campus. We cannot allow this to be normalized.

As for me, I have been uninvited from venues since October 7 simply because I am Jewish. I have been shouted down, asked to leave, accused of a hatred I know not how to summon. And my response is one that I and generations of students have learned at Hillel. Hillel teaches that we should not be afraid to be Jewish. We can be proud to be American. And we deserve the rights and privileges awarded to every minority on campus: a safe place to gather, to pray, to learn, and to fight for what is right.
Double Erasure_ AP, Campus Free Speech & The Banishment of Jewish Students
One of the most glaring and outrageous features of the anti-Israel demonstrations and encampments on university campuses over the last year has been the effort — at times successful — to exclude Jewish students from campus space. There is no more fundamental curtailment of students’ right to free speech than preventing them from attending class or moving freely around the campus.

And yet, in its review yesterday of how the Israel-Hamas war and the accompanying campus disturbances have impacted students’ right to free speech, the Associated Press spared not one word for the most basic withdrawal of free speech rights: the right to attend class and be present in any campus space which all enrolled students are supposed to be entitled to use (“A year into the Israel-Hamas war, students say a chill on free speech has reached college classrooms“).

While the article alleged that students are afraid to speak freely on the Israel-Hamas conflict in their classrooms, and also cited complaints from anti-Israel students that new regulations are harming their protests, at no point did AP’s Collin Binkley and Michael Melia provide any hint that those very same protests often quash Jewish students’ most fundamental right of free speech: blocking them from reach their classes and other public spaces on campus.

Thus, the article quotes Mark Yudof, a former president of the University of California system: “The faculty are at odds with each other. The student body is at odds with each other. There’s a war of ideologies going on.”

Yes, there is. But only one side literally prevented the other side from reaching their classes — and a University of California school was a prime proving ground for the revocation of Jewish students’ rights of free movement, and therefore free speech.


Anti-Israel Columbia student group announces support for ‘armed resistance’
An anti-Israel student protest coalition at Columbia University announced on Tuesday that “violence is the only path forward” in its efforts to achieve “Palestinian liberation” in Morningside Heights in Manhattan.

The Columbia University Apartheid Divest group retracted an apology that it had made on behalf of Khymani James, a suspended Columbia student who told a university disciplinary hearing in January that “Zionists don’t deserve to live” and that they should “be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.”

“The anti-blackness and queerphobia that Khymani experienced, and continues to experience, from neo-liberals, neo-liberal media and fascists is disgusting,” the group wrote. “By issuing a so-called ‘apology,’ CUAD exposed Khymani to even more hatred from white supremacist and queerphobic liberals and fascists, along with the neo-liberal media.”

James, 21, who is gay and black, is suing the university for alleged discrimination. He thanked his “comrades” for their support and disavowed his previous statements, in which he said that he had misspoken when he called for the killing of “Zionists.”

“I never wrote the neo-liberal apology posted in late April, and I’m glad we’ve set the record straight once and for all,” he wrote. “Anything I said, I meant it.”

Columbia University Apartheid Divest—whose members include Isra Hirsi, the daughter of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.)—stated that it would no longer be “bending to neo-liberal media” by sticking to non-violent tactics. (JNS sought comment from Omar’s office.)


Propaganda, hate speech and disinformation_ the BBC’s idea of ‘a range of perspectives’
Despite the BBC’s claim that Jeremy Bowen ‘pressed’ the Hamas leader, al-Hayya was nevertheless given a worldwide platform from which to disseminate his terrorist organisation’s inadequately challenged propaganda and disinformation. Bowen later justified having asked Hamas for that interview by claiming that “it’s really important to talk to all sides of the story” and that doing so is part of “impartial reporting”.

Also on October 4th, the BBC News channel chose to air over forty minutes of live footage of a speech given by the Iranian leader Ali Khamenei in which he praised Hamas’ October 7th massacre.

A BBC spokesman apparently explained that decision as follows:
“The BBC News channel took rare footage from Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s first public speech since 2020 as part of analysis and scrutiny on the contents of the speech. As Iran’s involvement in the conflict has intensified, it is important and editorially relevant to hear from the key players to aid understanding of developments. Our journalists, including colleagues from BBC Persian, provided context and explanation for audiences.”

As we see, the days following the publication of Deborah Turness’ statement saw the BBC facilitating the mainstreaming of propaganda, disinformation and hate speech from the Iranian regime itself, from its apologists and from one of its terrorist proxies. While Turness, Bowen and others may choose to excuse that as provision of “a range of perspectives” and “a full picture”, many have already taken issue with those editorial decisions.

Contrary to Turness’ gaslighting claim, those criticising BBC coverage of the war do not do so “because it does not solely reflect their view of the conflict” or because of “echo chambers”. They do so because BBC coverage to date has repeatedly fallen short of the standards of accuracy and impartiality to which the corporation is obliged to adhere. The presentation of “a range of perspectives – including those you may not agree with” is one thing. Providing worldwide platforms for the inadequately – if at all – challenged propaganda of a terrorist organisation and a terror enabling theocratic regime is entirely different.

However, as Turness’ latest statement clarifies in no uncertain terms, introspection and accountability to its funding public are clearly not at the top of the BBC’s list of priorities.


Omissions in BBC report on Tulkarem counter-terrorism operation
Perhaps if the BBC went to the trouble of reporting all the terror-related fatalities in Israel it would know that since October 7th 2023:
“…40 people, including Israeli security personnel, have been killed in terror attacks in Israel and the West Bank. Another six members of the security forces were killed in clashes with terror operatives in the West Bank.”

Notably, Fatima chose to uncritically amplify talking points from the UN’s notoriously biased human rights office:
“The UN rights office condemned the attack in a statement on Friday.

“The strike is part of a highly concerning pattern of unlawful use of force by ISF (Israeli security forces) during military-like operations in the West Bank that have caused widespread harm to Palestinians and significant damage to buildings and infrastructure,” the UN said.

Tulkarm was one of the towns and Palestinian refugee camps targeted during a major Israeli military operation in August.

Last month UN rights chief Volker Turk said major Israeli operations in the occupied West Bank were taking place “at a scale not witnessed in the last two decades”.”

Fatima made no attempt to clarify to BBC audiences that targeting operatives from two proscribed terrorist organisations who were in the process of planning an imminent attack against civilians is not “unlawful”. Neither did she bother to explain that the reason for the “scale” of counter-terrorism operations in Palestinian Authority controlled areas is the rise in Palestinian terrorism since 2022 and she failed to provide relevant context by noting that Tulkarem and Nur Shams have become major hubs of terrorist activity.

Zahra Fatima’s report joins the many other items of BBC content which, over the past two-and-a half years, have failed to provide audiences with the information necessary for understanding of counter-terrorism operations in PA controlled areas.


NPR Corrects on Strikes Against Hezbollah
After CAMERA’s communication with NPR editors, the broadcaster corrected a headline that had wrongly claimed Israeli strikes on Hezbollah “targeted” civilians.

The headline, given to a segment describing Lebanese anger at Hezbollah, had initially read: “Some Lebanese people express anger at Hezbollah as Israel strikes at civilian targets.”

Israel makes clear that its strikes are on military targets, even if those are embedded in civilian infrastructure. We reminded the editors, too, that it’s not only Israel making such a claim, but also the Lebanese civilians heard on NPR decrying that Hezbollah hides weapons in civilian communities.

Shortly after our outreach, the headline was corrected to remove the tendentious language. It now reads: “Lebanese trapped in a war not of their own making express anger at Israel and Hezbollah.”
Le Journal De Montréal Cartoonist Depicts Israel As Conquering Warrior In Lebanon, Completely Erasing Hamas & Hezbollah
A Quebec cartoonist who has been previously accused of racism and problematic representations of his subjects is once again demonstrating his poor grasp of geopolitics. In Yannick Lemay’s September 29 cartoon in Le Journal de Montréal entitled: War in Lebanon,” the cartoonist depicted a tank operated by the Grim Reaper leaving Gaza in ruins, and turning toward Lebanon.



The drawing is highly problematic in its simplistic and false depiction of the war in which Israel finds itself nearly a year after it was attacked by Hamas terrorists on October 7.

Lemay’s cartoon depicted Israel as being on a bloodthirsty crusade, pivoting from one conquest to another, when the truth could not be more different.

On October 7, Israel was invaded by thousands of Hamas terrorists in a campaign of wanton terrorism. The very next day, Hezbollah in Lebanon joined the fray, sending rockets into Israel, unprovoked. And soon, the Houthis in Yemen did likewise. All three groups are supported by the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Far from acting as the “grim reaper” in each of these conflicts, Israel takes steps to both minimize civilian casualties and to provide necessities of life to those civilians in the form of humanitarian aid. Israel’s enemies, on the other hand, embed themselves in civilian populations to ensure maximum harm is inflicted on their own people, and this is in addition to their indiscriminate attacks on Israeli civilians across the country.

Lemay’s cartoon shows Gaza in the background as desolate, destroyed, as if this is the sum total of Israel’s engagement, and as if Israel, alone, bears responsibility for the damage inflicted. As long as Hamas continues to cower in the midst of Gazan civilians, and as long as Hamas continues to viciously hold Israeli hostages against their will for nearly a year, Hamas is putting the people and infrastructure of Gaza in danger.

Hamas has rejected multiple ceasefire offers brokered by the United States. They are acting as they always have – as a genocidal terrorist organization bent on Israel’s destruction. Israel, for its part, is fighting a defensive war, though it seems that Lemay was not able to summon a “visual code” to represent this.


US ambassador lauds Romania’s moves to foster Holocaust education
Kathleen Kavalec, the U.S. ambassador to Romania, talked about government initiatives to counter antisemitism during a Holocaust commemoration held this week in the capital of Bucharest as a response to the anniversary of the Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

“The Oct. 7 attack brought to the surface painful memories left by millennia of hatred and violence against the Jewish people,” she said on Wednesday. “It is our duty to protect Jewish communities around the world, and to speak out against antisemitism.”

Kavalec stated that in this context, “we are grateful for the important efforts by the Romanian government to expand Holocaust education.” She noted a mandatory high school course on the Holocaust and plans for a Museum of Roma Culture and History.

“We welcome the Romanian government’s project to establish a Museum of Jewish History and the Holocaust,” Kavalec said. “We hope the museum will quickly receive all the necessary approvals so that construction can start as soon as possible.”
“Had the Nazis taken Alexandria, we would have been part of the Holocaust”
“It was the 2nd of July 1942, my birthday. I was seven years old. and we lived in Alexandria Egypt. It was a Thursday. I asked my mom, “Who was coming for my birthday” and she cried. The milkman came to deliver the daily quart of milk, and in the hallway, he looked at my mother crying, and he also started crying. I was wondering what was going on!

In the summer of 1942, the Nazi general Erwin Rommel blazed through North Africa planning to overrun Egypt and the entire Middle East. He had just captured the vital British-held port of Tobruk in Libya and drove his infamous Afrika Korp within some 60 miles of Alexandria. Terror swept the Jewish community in Egypt and as far as Palestine.

From Egypt, Rommel would easily access the Suez Canal to Palestine and the oil-rich and strategically crucial Middle East. The Jews of Egypt of Palestine were in dire danger, and they knew it. Horrifying stories of Nazi atrocities reached us, and we had no allusions to their fate under Nazi occupation. As the Germans reached El Alamein, panic gripped these communities; a half -million Jews lived in Palestine at the time while 75,000 resided in Egypt

Although the Jewish population did not know it then, the head of an Einsatzkommando group – SS killing squad – Walter Rauff – had been flown to Egypt. Rauff’s mission was to coordinate plans with Rommel for a “special operation”: the annihilation of the Jews in the Middle East. In July 1942, Rauff flew to Tobruk to meet with Rommel who instructed him to station his SS in Athens until the moment was ripe to deploy his men in the Mddle East. As Rommel moved closer to Alexandria, I was told years later that mysterious chalk marks appeared over Jewish households overnight. It was discovered that the Arabs, anticipating Rommel’s arrival, marked the buildings to stake a claim.

In November 1941, at a meeting with Hitler, Haj Amin el Husseini, the virulently Jew-hating Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, told Htler that the Arabs felt great admiration for him: he stated that they were “fighting the same enemies: the Jews, the British, and the Bolsheviks.”

Husseini petitioned Hitler to create a fully-armed Arab Legion that would fight alongside German forces. Hitler confirmed that the Germans’ goal in this region was the destruction of Jews in the territory. He vowed to the Mufti that, once the German forces reached the Caucasus, the Arab world would essentially be free of Jews and the British.

The Jews in Alexandra, and for that matter in all of Egypt, were in a quandary. Should they stay and hope the British push back the Germans, or should they leave?


Unpacked: Who are the Chinese Jews of Kaifeng? | Explained
In the ancient city of Kaifeng, China, Jewish life thrived for centuries, blending with Chinese culture while maintaining its unique identity.

Today, with no synagogue, rabbi, or official state recognition, the community has dwindled, with some making their way to Israel to reclaim their Jewish roots. Meanwhile, those who remain in Kaifeng continue to live quietly, holding onto their ancient heritage in defiance of history’s attempts to erase it.

Special thanks to the organization Shavei Israel, who provided much of the footage and images for this video. Learn more at www.shavei.org

Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:39 Arrival of Jews in Kaifeng, China
02:09 Reunification with other Jewish communities
04:09 Re-isolation from other Jewish communities
05:11 Preservation of Jewish identity
06:29 Attempts to reintroduce Jews of Kaifeng to Judaism
08:50 Are Kaifeng Jews really Jewish?
09:34 Conversion and immigration to Israel
10:31 Hardships Kaifeng Jews face today




Golden Boy | Tom Reuveny Israel’s Olympic Champion
In this episode, we dive into the inspiring journey of Israeli Olympic windsurfing champion, Tom Reuveny. Born in Ramat Gan, raised between Israel and Ireland, Tom’s unique upbringing fueled his passion for windsurfing at a young age. Guided by his coach, Gal Friedman—Israel’s first Olympic gold medalist.

Tom shares how his childhood love for the sea shaped his path, his high-adrenaline lifestyle, and how the ongoing conflict in Israel impacted his focus as he competed under immense emotional pressure. With his brother serving in the IDF during the war, Tom explains how this victory was about more than personal achievement—it was a moment of pride for an entire nation.

Join us as we explore the mindset, dedication, and resilience behind one of Israel's brightest Olympic stars in the face of personal and national challenges.






Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!
 

 



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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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