Tuesday, November 19, 2024

11/19 Links Pt2: Israel’s Comically Inconsistent The harrowing tale of a former Hamas hostage; Critics; Coates the Charlatan; New HRW "report" is a work of fantasy and fake law

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Israel’s Comically Inconsistent Critics
Critics of Israel’s counteroffensive in Gaza, especially those in the media, really need to settle on a complaint. Too often they are effectively arguing with each other, though unintentionally. To read the daily newspapers is to see Israel accused of mutually exclusive sins.

Take the fights over humanitarian aid and postwar governance in Gaza. Today’s New York Times carries a story on the fact that an aid convoy of 109 trucks was hijacked and looted over the weekend. Only 11 of the trucks made it to their destination.

Who’s to blame? Well, we know the one group that isn’t looting convoys is the IDF. Miraculously, the IDF is also the one at fault, according to the press. “Aid agencies have said for months that woefully inadequate food supplies have led to looting, hoarding and profiteering, exacerbating the shortages,” the Times explains. That is, when food is let into Gaza, it gets stolen, usually by Hamas. This means if there are starving Gazans it is most likely Hamas that is starving them.

What’s the fix here? You guessed it—more cowbell. The aid agencies insist “that the only solution is a significant increase in deliveries.”

Just to review: Israel let in a convoy of over 100 aid trucks. Nearly 100 of them were looted. Had the convoy been 150 trucks, they would… not have been looted? It begins to sound like a riddle: How many trucks must an aid convoy be before Hamas chooses not to loot it?

And when it’s not Hamas looting the supplies, it’s still Israel’s fault. “Gaza is basically lawless,” a UN coordinator tells the Washington Post. “There is no security anywhere. Israel is ‘the occupying power,’ he said, so ‘this is on them. They need to make sure that the area is protected and secured.’”

The Post, in fact, makes a provocative accusation: that Israel is looking the other way as local gangs are becoming bolder in areas controlled by the IDF. Says the Post: “The thieves, who have run cigarette-smuggling operations throughout this year but are now also stealing food and other supplies, are tied to local crime families, residents say. The gangs are described by observers as rivals of Hamas and, in some cases, they have been targeted by remnants of Hamas’s security forces in other parts of the enclave.”

The problem, according to the Post and the UN, is that Israel is trying to crush Hamas. Local families are trying to take the reins from Hamas, and Israel stands accused of letting them steal cigarettes.

But it’s not clear the New York Times sees it that way. “The Israeli campaign in Gaza toppled much of the Hamas government, and there is no civilian administration to take its place,” states the Gray Lady. So Israeli security measures regarding humanitarian aid are too strict and too lax at the same time. Trucks are getting looted because Israel won’t reduce security enough to let more trucks in, and there’s no replacement for Hamas but also Israel needs to crack down on Hamas’s would-be replacements.
David Hirsh: Fear and denial – why we founded the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism
We set up the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism (LCSCA) because we were afraid. Antisemitism had been progressively spreading into academic disciplines in the social and human sciences, and it was becoming more and more acceptable and normal. This was an antisemitism that angrily denied being antisemitic, which was carried by people who thought they opposed racism and who were convinced they were the good guys.

We were afraid because anyone who challenged this antisemitism was more and more likely to be denounced by their academic colleagues as a charlatan who misused their academic talent and perverted their disciplines in an effort to delegitimise criticism of Israel.

Hamas was founded to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state. It hoped to destroy the peace process by murdering Israelis in buses and in restaurants in the name of Palestine. Hamas hoped to make Israelis believe that all Palestinians hated them and it hoped this would turn Israeli public opinion away from peace. More recently Hamas has encouraged Palestinians to murder Israelis randomly, using knives or cars, in the hope that Israelis would come to fear any Arab who they encountered. The founding document of Hamas made it clear that it regarded peace with Israel as a violation of the principles of Islam and it repeated Nazi-style antisemitism as though it was embraced by the single, authentic reading of Islam.

Happily for Hamas, the peace process did collapse, in January 2001. In August 2001, at the World Conference against Racism, in Durban, there was a formidable campaign to reset thinking about Israel from a maker of peace to an entity that was incurably evil. It sought to take us back to the 1970s UN and Soviet era. A week after Durban was the 9/11 attack on the USA, which revitalised antisemitic Islamist politics for the 21st century.

On 7 October 2023, Hamas showed its hand. It broke into Israel and murdered everybody it could find; it perpetrated a campaign of sexual violence; and it kidnapped 250 people. It turned out that by that time, there were enough people around the world who were ready to embrace elements of the Hamas view of the world.

People in our universities glorified the day of Jew-killing as ‘resistance’; they claimed that Israel’s inherently genocidal nature was the real aggression and that the day of Jew-killing was just a small, understandable response; they blamed the victims; and they denied that there was violence against Israeli civilians.

Strangely, all four of these responses to 7 October could co-exist within an individual.


Father of hostage to Israel’s legal heads: ‘Let IDF win’
The father of an Israeli being held hostage in Gaza on Monday urged Israeli Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara and State Attorney Amit Aisman to ease restrictions on the Israel Defense Forces that he said were hampering its efforts.

“As a father of a hostage and as a reservist fighter in the IDF … I demand the legal system let the IDF achieve decisive victory and free the hostages,” Tzvika Mor told the two at a meeting of the Knesset Law, Justice and Constitution Committee.

“Any legal action [against the IDF], subject to international law, must stop,” Mor continued.

“Look us in the eyes,” the father told them, pointing to IDF service members present in the room. “We are fighting so we can hold this discussion. We must be allowed to fight until the end. And we believe that fighting until the end will force Hamas to bring us back our hostages.”

Mor stressed that the IDF’s mission is to defend Israel. “Our military is moral not because a soldier provides water for a thirsty Arab woman in Gaza but because it protects the citizens of the State of Israel,” he said.

Before he was kidnapped by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7, 2023, Tzvika’s son Eitan Mor, 23, saved hundreds at the Nova music festival near Kibbutz Re’im in the western Negev, where he was working as a security guard.

Eitan and his friends from the security team were raised in Kiryat Arba, adjacent to Hebron.

Tzvika and his wife, Ditza, are founding members of the Tkuma (“Arising”) forum of hostages’ families, which opposes making a deal with Hamas to secure the hostages’ return. Instead, they insist that the only way to free them is by defeating Hamas and eradicating its regime in Gaza.
The harrowing tale of a former Hamas hostage
“There are always noises or smells that take you back there. I just wait until it passes,” Ofir Engel told JNS on Wednesday.

Engel, 19, was kidnapped from Kibbutz Be’eri on Oct. 7, 2023, while he was spending the holiday of Simchat Torah at his girlfriend Yuval Sharabi’s family home.

At 6:30 a.m. on that Black Shabbat—when they were awoken by rocket alerts—Engel, Yuval, her parents, two sisters and the family dog rushed to the safe room to wait for the all-clear.

“But the [sirens] didn’t stop,” Engel said, adding, “After two-and-a-half hours, friends started sending scary messages about hearing terrorists outside their houses and pleading for the army to arrive.”

One girl wrote that terrorists had shot her mother and that there was “nothing she could do,” he recounted.

Engel said that as time passed, he began to realize that the attack was much more serious than he had realized.

Recalling the sequence of events, he said, “After six hours, we heard a large ‘boom’ coming from the entrance to the house. We heard terrorists roaming around inside while we were still all in the safe room. A few minutes later, they tried opening the door to the room. Yuval’s dad, Yossi, was holding it closed. But he wasn’t able to overcome the three terrorists pushing it open.”

Engel continued, “They entered armed. The first thing they did was shoot Yuval’s dog. They then pointed their guns at us. They made us sit outside on the grass with the neighbors, the Shani family. Smoke was everywhere, as was the smell of gunpowder.”

‘We felt like animals at a zoo’

After moving both families to another part of the Kibbutz, the terrorists took them to the road where a small, old, black car was waiting.

“They put Yuval’s father inside. Yuval and I were holding hands. At first, they put us both inside, but then they signaled to her to get out. They put Amit Shani, the young son of the neighbor, inside instead, and we drove away, speeding like crazy,” Engel said.

“The last image I had of Yuval and all of her family, other than her father, was of them on the side of the road surrounded by two armed terrorists as we drove away. I was sure they either had been kidnapped or were murdered that day,” he added.

Engel, Yossi Sharabi and Amit Shani were taken to Gaza by two terrorists, one driving, the other pointing his gun at them. Engel still remembers the sight of dead bodies in the kibbutz and Gazans leaving the scene with bags full of supplies.


Thread Reader: New HRW "report" claiming Israel committed crime of “forcible transfer” is a work of fantasy and fake law.

Irish pub bans ‘Zionists’ – and is doing ‘loads of business’
In a complaint directed to the local tourism board, Sally Wickham wrote: “I usually enjoy visiting your lovely town. It is safe and welcoming and I love running or dog walking with my friends down the promenade at night. However, on my last visit, I was confronted by hate speech…

“I refer to the giant banner on the Celtic Marine Bar Restaurant. If it said No Catholics, Muslims, etc, I am sure it would have been removed by now. I hope this does not reflect the true nature of your town and that you are not antisemitic.”

Nealis insisted that he was not prejudiced against Jews. “Being anti-Zionist isn’t being antisemitic because Palestinians are semitic, Israeli Jews are not semitic,” he wrongly claimed.

“They’re not from the Middle East,” he insisted. “Zionism isn’t Judaism. Zionism is a political movement.”

Twelve years ago, Nealis and Alan Ryan, a dissident republican leader previously jailed over a terror training camp, were attacked by a gunman as they walked along a street in north Dublin.

A crime correspondent for RTE said Ryan had been shot in the head in a “planned, targeted killing”. The Dubliner was “very well known in criminal and republican circles both north and south of the border,” he added.

The Sunday World reported that Nealis was registered an owner of The Celtic Marine Bar in 2020.


Lord Pickles speaks of profound challenges posed to Holocaust memory by AI
Lord Pickles has warned of the “profound consequences” to society of faked imagery relating to the Holocaust produced through generative AI and other emerging technologies.

In a speech given at the UK co-sponsored Conference on Holocaust Distortion and Education in Bucharest, Hungary, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance chair said:” The consequences of cheap, widespread fakery are likely to be profound.

“It is possible to imagine Holocaust survivor testimony being manipulated.

“We may see Holocaust survivors with false words put into their mouths; the concentration camps were ‘not that bad’; ‘we had plenty of food’; ‘we played cards on a Thursday with SS’ and such like..”

He continued:”The threats associated with AI in safeguarding the record of the Holocaust are many, including the potential for manipulation by malicious actors, the introduction of falsehoods or dissemination of biased information, and the gradual erosion of public trust in authentic records.

“As this decade progresses, the number of survivors who witnessed the Holocaust as children will move from contemporary memory into history. In anticipation of this, much effort is being made to secure testimony and protect archives. The very depth of this knowledge might be our Achilles’ heel.”

Reflecting on how to meet this challenge, the Tory peer said:”The first thing we need to understand is AI is here to stay. That governments will always be playing catch up to cheep widely used AI.

“The second thing is: we ourselves will use AI to improve our archives, it will find links and connections. We will use it to improve training and teaching

“We need to enhance AI literacy and research skills so that users know how to verify AI-produced texts.”

He said key to this is the necessity of understanding Large Language Models, “and those in the Large Language Model community will need to understand the Holocaust to ensure its accurate representation,” added Pickles.

He noted that big tech companies struggle to understand the issues around the Holocaust “the same way we struggle to understand AI.”

“The intersection of understanding between policy makers, AI experts and Holocaust experts needs to grow,” added the peer.
Woman arrested for threats against doxxed Jews
According to The Australian, Victoria Police has made its first arrest as part of an investigation into a mass doxxing of Jewish creatives earlier this year.

“Moorabbin Crime Investigation Unit detectives arrested and interviewed a woman following an investigation into the posting of offensive material on a social media platform in February 2024,” a Victoria Police spokeswoman said.

“A 34-year-old Preston woman was arrested in September (and) is expected to be summonsed to attend a Magistrates Court at a later date.”

The allegations reportedly relate to alleged threats made against some of those Jewish creatives doxxed.

More than 600 Jewish community members had their personal details leaked online, prompting Victoria Police to launch an investigation. In response to that incident, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) led a push for the government to introduce the laws and in September, Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus proposed “anti-doxxing” criminal provisions that could result in imprisonment for up to seven years for people who maliciously use someone’s personal data.

“Doxxing exposes victims to significant and enduring harm, including public embarrassment, humiliation, shaming, discrimination, stalking and identify theft and financial fraud,” Dreyfus said.

“It can lead to threats to a victim’s life and safety, and the lives and safety of their families and friends. It can inflict significant and lasting psychological harm.”
“Significant” Twitch advertisers pause spending over antisemitism concerns: Report
Over 10 major companies have suspended advertising on Twitch over the platform’s response to alleged antisemitic content according to a report by Richard Lewis.

The controversy started in October, when it was revealed Twitch had prevented users in Israel from joining the streaming platform for a full year following the October 7, 2023 attacks.

The streaming site and its CEO Dan Clancy also faced calls by Democratic Rep. Ritchie Torres to “stop popularizing those who popularize antisemitism.”

In particular, Torres singled out Hasan’s political streams, saying “platforming any of these terrorist organizations, as Piker has done, is beyond the pale.”

Twitch’s CEO has come under fire for his response to antisemitism allegations on Twitch.

Although Clancy responded to the concerns in a blog post where he emphasized that Twitch wouldn’t tolerate antisemitism or Islamophobia, companies have reportedly paused their ads on the site.

As reported by Richard Lewis, “a number of significant companies have paused their advertising spending with the streaming platform” and cited allegations of antisemitism as the reason why.

Lewis reports that 11 corporations and agencies that represent multiple companies have paused spending.

Of note, Chevron was said to be furious at a TwitchCon panel segment where streamers rated content creators from “Arab” to “Loves Sabra” while a Chevron logo was displayed in the background. Critics of the segment noted that while Sabra can refer to a type of hummus, it also means someone who is born in Israel.

“After the clip from the panel went viral Chevron was very angry,” a Twitch employee said. “Having their logo in the background of a clip being used as an example of antisemitism prompted some very awkward conversations.”
Coates the Charlatan
Coates’s predetermined ideology leaps off the pages of The Message, especially when it comes to his attempts to gain background knowledge on the subjects he writes about with such forceful overconfidence. Tellingly, his poor excuse for a bibliographical essay is not actually included in the book itself but resides on Coates’s personal website. It is in those source notes that Coates describes those whom he trusts to inform him on the Israel–Palestinian conflict: the aforementioned Khalidi, Hamas defenders in scholarly garb such as Noura Erakat, and anti-Israel human-rights organizations, including those under the UN umbrella. These sources include almost no perspectives other than virulent anti-Zionism. Coates levels some of his most inflammatory claims in this glorified postscript, including that Palestinians face “a campaign of industrialized extermination”—a modern-day blood libel against the Jewish state.

Most interesting is how Coates refuses to ask “why” when faced with any Israeli decision. This is perhaps best represented by the personal anecdotes described above, in which he claims to have seen Israeli racism and bigotry up close. Coates has no interest in inquiring as to the purpose of those security measures and is more than happy to attribute them to evil motives. The 10 days he spent in Israel came at the end of May 2023, in the middle of a monthslong wave of Palestinian terrorism that claimed 13 lives and included more than 100 attacks in Jerusalem and its environs. This is clearly why security measures had been ramped up at major tourist sites and fancy hotels—prime targets for terrorists. Yet the man who describes his writing as “a kind of scientific process that, when correctly applied, must necessarily reveal the truth” had no interest in testing his hypothesis.

Ta-Nehisi Coates has been courting controversy for years with his progressive polemics, but he is not in the least controversial where it counts—in the rarefied world in which he travels. Ever since the essay he wrote for the Atlantic demanding that reparations for slavery be paid to people like him 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, his every word has been awaited with bated breath, his every publication has been heralded as a major event. The Message was treated as a Moses moment, with Coates coming down from the mountaintop, albeit with tablets he had written. But the book reveals Coates not as prophet or lawgiver, but as charlatan.

Ignorance is his stock in trade, camouflaged by purple prose, inane fluff, and (un)righteous indignation. The Message has proven that conclusively. His lack of self-awareness, simple errors of fact, parochial worldview, incuriosity about history or context, entrenched bias, and failure to ask basic follow-up questions make this book a searing indictment of its author and the cult that has grown up around him.

Ironically enough, Coates dedicates The Message to students in his journalism class. Throughout the book, he tries to inspire them in pursuit of his chosen quest. But that quest isn’t journalism, fact-finding, or working to reveal the truth, whatever it ends up being. It is instead to lambaste the United States, Western civilization, and the world’s lone Jewish state, all to the vapid applause of liberal elites. The Message is not a work of investigation or education about useful principles and ideas. But Coates is not in the business of edification. He is in the business of proselytization. And among the political elite, business is booming.


National Book Foundation facing scrutiny from Jewish groups over Paul Coates award
The National Book Foundation is facing criticism from several Jewish groups for its decision to move forward in presenting a lifetime achievement award to Paul Coates, the founder of Black Classic Press, at its annual reception later this week — even after he was recently found to have republished antisemitic and homophobic texts.

Coates, the father of the journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates, is set to receive the prestigious literary award at the 75th National Book Awards ceremony in New York City on Wednesday, where he will be honored for his longtime dedication to “celebrating the life of Black writers and bolstering their literary legacies” through his publishing company, founded in 1978.

But Coates, 78, has come under scrutiny in recent months for including in his catalog an antisemitic screed called The Jewish Onslaught, published in 1993 by Tony Martin, a former professor of Africana studies at Wellesley College, who sought to uphold a widely discredited conspiracy theory alleging Jewish domination of the Atlantic slave trade.

The book, which Black Classic Press had praised in a laudatory blurb, was recently removed without explanation from the company’s website following a Jewish Insider report, published in late September, that first highlighted its inclusion in the publisher’s online catalog.

In addition to Martin’s book, which was widely criticized as antisemitic at the time of its release, Coates has reissued several other works by authors who have espoused antisemitism and homophobia, the online journal Arc found in a review of the Black Classic Press catalog published last month.

The National Book Foundation, which in recent weeks has privately weighed its decision to honor Coates, has said that it will move ahead with the ceremony this week as planned, despite pushback from leading Jewish groups raising questions over the award.

In a statement shared with JI on Friday, the foundation said it “condemns antisemitism, homophobia, Islamophobia, racism and hatred in all its forms,” adding it “also supports freedom of expression and the right of any publisher to make its own determination on what it chooses to publish.”

“Anyone examining the work of any publisher, over the course of almost five decades, will find individual works or opinions with which they disagree or find offensive,” the organization said. “The National Book Foundation is honoring W. Paul Coates, not for the publication of any particular titles or authors, but for his tireless efforts of scholarship, to ensure that Black voices and stories, that might otherwise have been lost, are instead preserved as an irreplaceable part of American literary history.”

But Jewish advocacy groups, including some that Martin singled out in his book nearly three decades ago, voiced frustration with the decision, especially amid heightened concerns over increasing incidents of antisemitism in the literary and publishing worlds in recent months.
Report: Organized anti-Israel nonprofits driving Canadian Jew-hatred
A web of more than 100 anti-Israel organizations operate in Canada, according to a recent study by NGO Monitor, and nearly all of them overlap in activity and funding.

The study, titled “The NGO Network Driving Antisemitism in Canada,” was released on Nov. 4. It includes an interactive map highlighting the structure and dynamics of the NGO network—its organization, funding and partnerships.

In light of the Oct. 15 decision by the United States and Canada to designate Samidoun a terror entity, NGO Monitor sought to show how dozens of other groups “cooperated with Samidoun.” These groups were “leading the campaigns, the attacks, the antisemitism on university campuses within Canada, and are closely interrelated,” according to Gerald Steinberg, president of NGO Monitor.

Moreover, “organizations that are generally considered to be altruistic, non-political, are all myths. These are the organizations that are driving the antisemitism and hate on campus,” he told JNS.

NGO Monitor is a pro-Israel research institute that scrutinizes and criticizes non-governmental organizations “claiming to advance human rights and humanitarian agendas.”

The report aims to “put as much information in the hands of decision-makers, policymakers, government officials and members of parliament as possible so they can make informed decisions,” Steinberg said.

The “dangerous spike” in Jew-hatred is concurrent with “an increase in activity by an interconnected and coordinated network of NGOs, whose campaigns of anti-Israel demonization, antisemitism and intimidation create a hostile environment throughout Canada,” the report said. “A number of the leading groups are linked to Palestinian terror organizations and hide their sources of funding.”

Many of these groups have publicly celebrated the Oct. 7 atrocities and expressed support for Hamas and other Canadian-designated terrorist organizations.

The mapping of NGOs operating in Canada reveals concerns about transparency and funding sources. Out of 111 groups analyzed, 38 are registered with Canada Revenue as businesses or charities while 29 are known recipients of federal or provincial government funding.

The mapping also demonstrates Samidoun’s position as a central node within a broader network of anti-Israel and antisemitic nonprofits operating in Canada, with the report adding that the Palestinian terror-linked NGO is “one of the key groups promoting hate and incitement in Canada through its planning and promotion of numerous antisemitic events and extensive partnerships across the country.”
I Saw How Georgetown’s Prestigious School of Foreign Service Coddles Violent Anti-Semites—Who Are Plotting to Transform US Policy From Within
The school, which is a direct pipeline to Washington’s diplomatic and national security establishments, has become a hotbed of virulent anti-Semitism as well as anti-Western sentiment

After October 7
As was the case at many academic institutions, the reaction in the fall of 2023 to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel caused the simmering tensions about "post-imperialism" and "anticolonialism" to boil over spectacularly. In the days following Oct. 7, a large cohort of my classmates endorsed the attack as a "tangible event" toward decolonization. One student wrote in a widely read WhatsApp group chat that "nothing but violence can remove a violent and heavily equipped colonial regime." An Oct. 12th event was held to honor "martyrs" who had been "murdered by the occupation and to stand in solidarity with the struggle for Palestinian liberation."

Outside the School of Foreign Service building, students arranged vigils—not for the murdered or kidnapped Jewish victims, but for Palestinian "martyrs." The walls were covered in posters proclaiming "Glory to our Martyrs" and "Support Liberation." Georgetown’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, a radical group that has endorsed Hamas, held "Keffiyeh Thursdays" where students wore the checkered headdress that Palestinian terrorists use to conceal their faces.

As the size and tenor of the pro-Palestinian protests escalated, Jewish students began fearing for their safety. During a small meeting with some of the School of Foreign Service’s Jewish students held at Georgetown’s Center for Jewish Civilization, Joel Hellman, the dean of the School of Foreign Service, lamented the surge of anti-Semitism on campus but said many of the anti-Israel students’ actions are protected free speech. A senior DEI official at the meeting, Carla Koppell, also said that Jews are not recognized as a "protected" minority group under Georgetown’s DEI policies, but that the school is reviewing the issue (as far as I know, in the tumultuous year that followed, nothing has changed).

I was attending the meeting as a practicing Christian who was concerned about the treatment of my fellow Jewish students. I asked Dean Hellman how he could allow his faculty to call me a racist but hide behind the school’s free speech policies and do nothing when students called for the death of Jews. His response to this was that "the other side is also hurting, and they complain just as much as you."

The School of Foreign Service announced, a few weeks after the Oct. 7 attack, the hiring of Aneesa Johnson as the "primary point of contact" for masters degree students on "everything academic." Johnson had a well-documented history of virulently anti-Semitic and anti-Israel remarks—she had denounced so-called Zio bitches and retweeted a cruel meme that showed a Hasidic boy with glasses and braces that said "the world hates you." A simple Google search of Johnson’s name would have revealed her prolific online opinionating. Only a few days after she started work, Georgetown placed her on leave, claiming they had been unaware of her history.
Lawsuit challenges California school district’s handling of Jew-hate
On behalf of six families, the Deborah Project has sued the Sequoia Union High School District in Redwood City, Calif., charging systemic failures to address antisemitism among both students and staff.

The legal nonprofit’s suit, filed on Nov. 15, summarizes reported antisemitic acts and the alleged failure of administrators at the public school to take the threat seriously.

Sam Kasle, the lead plaintiff, said “I tried for months to get the school officials to respond like professionals. Instead, they allowed my daughter to be harmed, other Jewish students to be harmed and non-Jewish students to be taught that the normalization of antisemitism in our school district is acceptable.”

Incidents included in the filing include teachers using anti-Israel propaganda in classes; making jokes about the Holocaust; and telling a student that she appeared Jewish because of her nose. Students also reportedly used antisemitic slurs, said they wished all Jews would die and laughed about young diarist Anne Frank, who hid with her family in Amsterdam during World War II until they got captured. She died at the Bergen-Belson concentration camp in February 1945 at the age of 15.

Lori Lowenthal Marcus, legal director of the Deborah Project, stated that “the widespread, demoralizing antisemitism continued for months, yet the school district refused to obey the law or even follow their own internal procedures to stop the harassment and cease the hostile environment which they instead allowed and enabled.”

She said “our clients repeatedly attempted to follow the district’s rules to obtain redress for these egregious actions and ultimately realized they had to bring the school district’s actors to court to stop the harm.”
Harvard faculty condemn House committee report exposing anti-Semitism on America’s campuses
Harvard University faculty members recently criticized a House committee report that condemned Harvard, among other schools, for failure to effectively fight back against anti-Semitism on campus.

The report, released on Oct. 31 by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, condemns “antisemitic harassment, assault, trespass, and destruction of school property” that was allowed to take place at multiple colleges and universities. “At some schools, such as Columbia and Harvard, radical faculty members worked to prevent disciplinary action from being taken against students who violated official policies and even the law,” the report notes.

Among its other findings, the House Committee notes that “Harvard leaders’ failure to condemn Hamas’ attack in their widely criticized October 9 statement was an intentional decision” and that “Harvard’s faculty intervened to prevent meaningful discipline toward antisemitic conduct violations on numerous occasions.”

The day after the report’s publication, Harvard professors began attacking its findings, according to The Boston Globe.

Vincent Brown, Harvard professor of American history and African and African American Studies, called the report “upsetting” and said that disciplining disruptive anti-Israel students would have been unfair “punishment.”

“This doesn’t look like they’re trying to protect students on campus,” he said. “When you read the report, overwhelmingly, it looks like what they’re concerned with is universities’ failure to punish their students. I didn’t get into education to punish my students.”

Steven Levtisky, another Harvard professor, called the Committee’s findings a “political hit job disguised as a congressional report.”
'Zionists Are Not Welcome Here': Anti-Israel Harvard Students Protest Outside Main Campus Jewish Center
Anti-Israel students protested outside Harvard University's Hillel on Monday evening, shouting, "Zionists are not welcome here," as students walked into the Jewish community center.

The anti-Israel student group, Harvard Jews for Palestine, organized the protest against former Israel Defense Forces spokesman Ronen Manelis, who was speaking inside the Hillel. About a dozen agitators accused Israel of being a "terrorist state" and held banners with messages such as "Hillel Hosts War Criminals."



"Israel is solely responsible for the genocide it is committing. It always has been. There is no justification," Harvard Jews for Palestine wrote Monday on Instagram. "War crimes aren't 'Jewish life.' IOF off our campus out of Lebanon and out of Gaza."

"IOF," or "Israel Occupying Force," is an anti-Israel slur for the IDF.

Inside Hillel, Manelis was discussing how Iran's aggression toward Israel is reshaping the Middle East and the multi-front challenges the Jewish state faces in the evolving conflict. He told the Washington Free Beacon he condemned "the baseless accusations made by the protesters" and vowed to "continue to share Israel's voice around the world."

"It's surprising that at a place like Harvard, known for free speech and open debate, there's such ignorance and unwillingness to engage in real conversation," Manelis said. "Especially after the October 7th massacre, I believe students should be open to hearing different opinions instead of chanting empty slogans."
‘Mind Infection’: Meet The MIT Linguistics Professor Who Begged To Teach An Anti-Israel Seminar
In a seminar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, linguistics professor Michel DeGraff argued that Jews have no connection to Israel and that Israeli textbooks “weaponize trauma of the Holocaust.”

“They grew up with this trauma that made them fear that their existence is in threat, by anyone who doesn’t believe in the superior position of the Jewish people in Israel,” DeGraff said of Israeli youth.

The course’s full title is: “Language and linguistics for decolonization and liberation and for peace and community building from the river to the sea in Palestine and Israel to the mountaintops in Haiti and beyond.” DeGraff’s course was initially rejected by the university’s Linguistics department, citing his lack of qualifications. DeGraff specializes in Haiti and linguistics, not the Middle East. But DeGraff was permitted to teach the course as a not-for-credit speaker series beginning in the fall semester.

Wednesday’s lecture had just 20 attendees, one of whom was manning the camera. During the seminar, a keffiyeh-clad DeGraff covered a variety of topics during the seminar which spanned from what he believes “Zionism really means,” and why he believes the “on campus Israel lobby” is a wealthy foreign-funded industry, to the recent attack of Jews in Amsterdam.

Also in attendance were a few Jewish community members from MIT, there to make sure DeGraff did not use his position of power to attack a student.

Before DeGraff’s Wednesday class, he faced criticism after an MIT graduate student, Will Sussman, exposed the previous week’s seminar, which featured a speaker claiming that Jewish religious and student life groups like Hillel and Chabad promote Zionism and are “targeting critics of Israel.”


Yale undergrads to vote on anti-Israel divestment measures
An anti-Israel student group at Yale University has managed to advance a student vote on several measures against the Jewish state.

After collecting over 1,500 student signatures for the referendum items, the Sumud Coalition was able to force a vote by the Yale College Council. On Sunday, the student government’s senate voted in favor of a referendum with 17 votes, as well as 7 votes against, and 4 abstentions, according to The Yale Daily News.

The referendum questions include “Disclosure of Investments in Military Weapons Manufacturers” — including those that supply Israel — “Divestment from Military Weapons Manufacturers,” and “Fulfilling Yale’s Mission of Educational Preservation.”

”In 2021, Yale disclosed a dollar estimate of its total investments in fossil fuel companies in response to the global climate emergency,” the first question reads. “Should Yale also disclose its investments in military weapons manufacturers and suppliers, including those arming Israel?”

”In the past, Yale has divested from companies linked to apartheid in South Africa (1978-1994), genocide in Sudan (2006), and mass shootings in the US (2024),” the second question states. “Should Yale divest from military weapons manufacturers and suppliers, including those arming Israel?”

The third referendum item that students will have the opportunity to vote on invokes Yale’s Mission Statement, stating that the the university is “committed to improving the world today and for future generations through outstanding research and scholarship, education, preservation and practice.”

”Given the widespread destruction of schools and universities in Gaza, should Yale act on its commitment to education by investing in Palestinian scholars and students?” the final question asks.

The student vote on these measures will take place from Dec. 4-8, according to The Yale Daily News. If the items receive both 50 percent “yes” and enough votes totaling one-third of the undergraduate student total, the Yale Council College will issue a letter to President Maurie McInnis “expressing the sentiments of the‬‭ student body” and “[requesting] an official response.”


Gaza polio clinic blast coverage a classic case of ABC bias
The welfare of children in a war zone is a sensitive and emotionally loaded subject, which is why the care journalists must use to report accurately and responsibly on stories that involve them is that much greater. Yet the ABC failed to meet the appropriate standards as outlined in its charter regarding a story revolving around this topic last weekend – a story that originated with a tweet by the World Health Organisation (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on November 3 about an explosion in northern Gaza that injured six people, including four children, at a clinic dispensing polio vaccinations.

ABC NewsRadio prioritised the story, running it virtually every hour throughout the day and evening.

The following morning, Nov. 4, the ABC posted a story about the incident to its website.

Yet disconcertingly, ABC newsreaders repeatedly incorrectly claimed that the WHO had attributed the blast to an “Israeli airstrike”.

In fact, Dr Ghebreyesus had only called it a “strike”, without specifying if the blast had come from the air or land and did not ascribe blame – neither to Israel nor Hamas.

While correctly reporting that the IDF had denied responsibility, the ABC’s reports repeatedly parroted an unsubstantiated Palestinian claim that the attack had been specifically carried out by a “helicopter”, adding specificity to the allegation of an airstrike that, in the minds of the listener, could only lay blame at Israel’s feet.

Finally, in the website article the next day – Nov. 5 – the Palestinian allegation had morphed from an Israeli helicopter attack to a “drone strike”. Yet there was no acknowledgement in ABC reporting that Palestinian sources had changed their story.

After the IDF finalised its investigation – which ascribed the explosion to an IED planted by Palestinian terrorists – the ABC failed to update its online article to include the more detailed Israeli response.

Taken together, the way the ABC handled reporting of the incident serves as a classic example of the failure by ABC news programs to provide audiences or readers with accurate and up-to-date information, particularly when later developments exonerate Israel of malicious claims.

The following is a detailed look at the progression of this story onABC NewsRadio on Nov. 3, and the ABC’s online news reports the following day.


Turkey asked export group to help snuff out Israel trade, sources say
Turkey's government has asked one of the country's top export associations to help enforce a ban on trade with Israel, slowing the flow of goods in recent weeks, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Ankara has faced public criticism that trade may be continuing with Israel, given a spike in exports to the Palestinian territories since the ban in May. So it turned to the Central Anatolian Exporters' Association, the sources said.

The Trade Ministry has asked the association to require more checks and approvals of proposed shipments, including vetting with Palestinian authorities, they said.

One of the sources from an export association said the new system began in mid-October, causing an initial backlog. The "main concern was goods still going to Israel, so there is a procedural change in exports to Palestine," he said.

In response to a Reuters query, the Trade Ministry said goods were only shipped if approved by Palestinian authorities under a bilateral trade mechanism. "The destination is Palestine, and the importer is a Palestinian," it said.
Turkey bombs Syria, cuts off water for more than 1 million
Due to Turkish military airstrikes in northeastern Syria, access to water and electricity was cut off for over a million residents. The significance of this disconnection is critical as the area is known to be drought-stricken.

From 2019 to 2024, Turkey carried out over 100 attacks on oil fields, power stations, and gas facilities in the Kurdish-controlled areas of northern and eastern Syria.

These attacks have worsened the humanitarian crisis in the area, as in the last four years, drought has worsened due to climate change.

Turkey defended itself by claiming the target was to harm "sources of income and capabilities" of "Kurdish terrorist groups." Turkey further claimed they are aware of the drought and what they believe has worsened it is "mismanagement of infrastructure."

The official Turkish military statement said they attacked targets of the Kurdish insurgents, the PKK, the People's Protection Units (YPG), and the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD).


Canada to keep censoring names of 900 alleged Nazi war criminals who entered country post-war
Hedy Bohm, a 96-year-old Holocaust survivor from Toronto, “wasn’t surprised” when news broke earlier this month that Library and Archives Canada, a federal agency, refused to release the names of 900 suspected Nazi war criminals who sought refuge in Canada after World War II.

“They let in those Nazis, even at that time when they refused Jewish survivors, but even right now to protect them? Wow. Whose interest is it?” she told JNS. “Justice doesn’t seem to have much success.”

Born in Transylvania, she and her family were forced into a ghetto and then deported to Auschwitz in May 1944, when she was 16. At Auschwitz, Bohm was separated from her parents, whom she never saw again. She survived and was freed in August 1944.

Bohm testified against Oskar Gröning, the “bookkeeper of Auschwitz,” in 2015, and a year later against Reinhold Hanning, a former SS guard at Auschwitz who was found to be an accessory to the murder of at least 170,000 Jews, including Bohm’s parents.

In 1986, the initial findings of the Deschênes Commission report were made public, confirming that suspected Nazi war criminals had indeed settled in Canada. The Canadian government has kept the second part of the report, which names names, confidential for nearly 40 years.

Several individuals and organizations that requested freedom of information access to the report documents were notified on Nov. 5 that their requests had been denied. Holocaust survivors and scholars, who advocated for the release of the names, noted that they were not consulted ahead of the Library and Archives Canada decision.

Joseph Gottdenker was born in Nazi-occupied Poland. His parents, grandparents and most of his extended family perished in the Holocaust, but he survived because a Polish Catholic family hid him as an infant.

The 82-year-old Torontonian told JNS that he is “just incredulous” that the government would not release the names—a decision that he suspects is partisan.

“I don’t know what the reason behind it is, but it’s obviously political. What could be the political ramifications of putting out those names? I just don’t get it, unless there’s someone well-connected,” he said. “That’s the only thing I can think of.”
Brother of suspect in Boston antisemitic arsons pleads guilty to obstructing justice
The brother of a man suspected in four Boston-area arsons involving Jewish institutions in 2019 pled guilty in federal court Monday to charges that he obstructed the investigation.

Alexander Giannakakis, formerly of Quincy, Massachusetts, was working in security at the US embassy in Stockholm, Sweden, when he was arrested by Swedish authorities in 2022.

Giannakakis pleaded guilty to concealing records in a federal investigation, tampering with documents and objects, and tampering with an official proceeding. He is scheduled to be sentenced March 11.

“Alexander Giannakakis chose to destroy evidence and conceal these hate crimes and for deciding to stand on the side of acts of vile antisemitism, he now stands convicted and awaiting sentencing,” Acting United States Attorney Joshua Levy said in a statement. “It is incumbent on every person in the district of Massachusetts to call out acts of racism and bigotry, and to report hate crimes.”

According to the indictment, around February 2020, Giannakakis’s younger brother became the prime suspect in an investigation into the fires. At the time he was named as a suspect, Giannakakis’s brother was hospitalized in a coma, and he died that year.

The first fire occurred May 11, 2019, at a Chabad Center in Arlington; the second at the same location on May 16, 2019; the third at a Chabad Center in Needham; and the fourth on May 26, 2019, at a Jewish-affiliated business in Chelsea.

Giannakakis was convicted in Sweden of unlawfully possessing a firearm and other weapons. He served a sentence in a Swedish prison that ended in December. He was extradited in February to face the new charges.

Each of the charges carry a sentence of up to 20 years in prison, three years of supervised release, and a fine of $250,000.


H.L. Mencken Wasn’t Fond of Jews, but He Fell in Love with Zionism
While the history of American philo-Semitism is rich, and includes many of the country’s foremost thinkers, America has also had its share of prominent anti-Semites. In 1918, amid an outbreak of anti-Jewish violence in Europe that dwarfed anything we have seen recently, the great satirist H.L. Mencken wrote, “The case against the Jews is long and damning; it would justify ten thousand times as many pogroms as now go on in the world.” In 1930, Menken called Jews “very plausibly . . . the most unpleasant race ever heard of.”

While experts on Mencken have argued about the extent of his anti-Semitism, it was certainly hard to deny. But in 1934 he took a trip to Mandatory Palestine, and found himself enamored both with the scenery and with the local Jewish population. Oren Kessler writes:

He was impressed by the Zionist towns—particularly “brisk, sunshiny, spick-and-span Tel Aviv”—but less so by Jerusalem, “only a kind of mummy today.” More than anything he was dazzled by the communal farms, the kibbutzim. . . . “Jewish achievement in that land of primitive agriculture is really remarkable,” he gushed to a gaggle of reporters who swarmed his ship lounge upon his return. The settlement of Kibbutz Ein Harod, not far from the biblical Armageddon, “is one of the finest I have ever seen in my life.”

The British, he said, were “playing their usual politics” and using the Jews as “suckers” to solidify their own control on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean.
ZOA fetes Trump victory, ‘most pro-Israel cabinet’ in US history at annual gala
There were plenty of people Morton Klein was eager to praise as he ascended the stage at Cipriani 42nd Street on Sunday night to address a room dense with black ties, cocktail dresses, and kippot, some red and emblazoned with the word “TRUMP.”

Over the course of a 30-minute speech, Klein lavished compliments not only on the US president-elect — “the greatest friend we Jews have ever had in the White House” — or his incoming foreign policy team, which he called “the most pro-Israel cabinet in the history of the United States.”

Klein also praised some of Trump’s most controversial appointees, including his designated attorney general, Matt Gaetz, who has drawn backlash for, among other things, inviting a Holocaust denier to the State of the Union address in 2018.

While Klein did express reservations about Gaetz following the dinner, his address was unequivocally supportive.

“I find it remarkable that Jewish leaders are now condemning Gaetz, potential Attorney General Gaetz, for being antisemitic, for being hostile to Jews,” Klein declared. “Nonsense, I know him, he is very pro-Israel.”

The event was the annual gala of the Zionist Organization of America, which Klein has led for decades, and the mood was festive. Unlike in many other Jewish spaces, where attendees have mourned the election result or fretted over what the next four years might bring, the gala felt like a deferred victory party for November 5’s result.
Scene at the ADL’s ‘In Concert Against Hate’
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts rolled out the red carpet — or rather, blue carpet — as celebrities and Jewish activists descended on the nation’s capital Monday night for a star-studded evening in support of the Anti-Defamation League’s 30th annual “In Concert Against Hate,” where tunes from “Fiddler on the Roof” and a rendition of “Oseh Shalom” by the National Symphony Orchestra echoed through the halls.

Ahead of the sold-out concert — which featured performances by Israeli Eurovision star Eden Golan and nine-time Grammy Award-nominated singer Sia — celebrities, event honorees, philanthropists and Jewish leaders appeared on the blue carpet where several chatted with JI. Ben Stiller, who emceed the evening, said that times are “frightening,” with “antisemitism being at such an all time high.

It’s something I never thought I’d experience in my life. I grew up pretty sheltered from that in New York City,” Stiller told JI. “Right now we have to be positive and work toward unifying together, reaching out to people we disagree with and calling out hate when it happens.” While many other Jewish figures in Hollywood have remained silent about rising antisemitism, the Zoolander actor said he is not disappointed in his colleagues. “Everyone has their own personal journey and has to figure it out for themselves,” he said. “For me, it is important.”

In a separate conversation on the blue carpet, music executive Scooter Braun, who was honored last night with the ADL’s Spotlight Award for his efforts in bringing the Nova Music Festival exhibition to U.S. audiences, told JI that “it’s important to be here because we have to be a voice that’s louder than the people trying to divide us.” Braun has frequently condemned the silence from the music industry after more than 400 people were murdered at the Nova Music Festival on Oct. 7, last year.

“My message is hate never wins … all it takes is good people coming together,” Jonathan Greenblatt, ADL CEO, said on the blue carpet.

Inside the concert hall, 2,400 attendees looked on as several honorees were presented awards for taking a stand against hate. In addition to Braun, the awardees were: Mehnaz Afridi, director of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Interfaith Education Center at Manhattan College; Charles Chavis, a civil rights activist whose work focuses on Black-Jewish relations, and Holocaust survivor Rosette Goldstein. The event also honored four survivors of the Nova music festival — Ofir Amir, Danielle Gelbaum, Tomer Meir and Daniel Dvir — and three U.S. college students who have been on the front lines of combatting rising campus antisemitism— Noa Fay (Columbia University), Luda Isakharov (University of Oregon) and Einav Tsach (University of Maryland).

VIPs spotted in the audience included: Uri Levine, co-founder of Waze (Levine told JI he traveled from Israel specially for the event); Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism; Josh Kadden, CEO of the Nova Exhibition; Ari Ackerman, co-owner of the Miami Marlins; Katherine Kallinis, co-founder of Georgetown Cupcake and CNN journalists Dana Bash and Wolf Blitzer.




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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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