Tuesday, April 22, 2025

04/22 Links Pt2: The left’s grotesque betrayal of women and Jews; Green Days of Rage; Only 66,250 Holocaust survivors will remain in 2035

From Ian:

Brendan O'Neill: The left’s grotesque betrayal of women and Jews
The hatreds of the Dark Ages have cast their shadow on Britain once more. In Essex, on Saturday, people taunted Jews with dead babies. They carried dolls in shrouds stained with fake blood and hollered ‘Stop killing babies!’ as families walked home from synagogue after Sabbath prayers for Passover. In Edinburgh, also on Saturday, angry men openly dreamed of executing witchy women. ‘Bring back witch-burning… JK’, said a placard at a trans rally. The suggestion was as clear as it was sick: for the crime of her belief in biology, JK Rowling should be strapped to the stake and set alight. Another placard drove the point home: ‘Kill JK Rowling.’

It is 2025 and we are witnessing the public shaming of women and Jews, the taunting of them with slanders and threats. In Essex, life was breathed back into the medieval libel that damned the Jew as baby killer, as nefarious luster after the blood of innocents. Images of pious ‘pro-Palestine’ activists marching past Orthodox Jews while carrying blood-stained infants should chill the spine of all who know the history of Jew hatred. In Edinburgh there was the dream of witch trials. The cry went up: drag these bitches who deny the womanhood of men and punish them with fire for their disrespect.

In the UK, on the same day, in our supposedly enlightened era, the blood libel and the witch hunt made their return to public life. Jews, once again, found themselves surrounded by sick, dark whispers about baby killing. Women, once again, found themselves condemned for witchcraft. We need to talk about this. That two supposedly ‘progressive’ causes – support for Palestine and support for trans rights – can rekindle such pre-modern bigotries, such ancient hysterias, is both alarming and telling. Saturday might prove to be the day we learned just how menacing to civilisation the politics of identity can be.

All of Easter Saturday’s ‘political’ gatherings were grotesque spectacles. It was in Westcliff-on-Sea in Southend, Essex that the ‘pro-Palestine’ marchers assembled. This is a part of Essex with a significant Jewish population. And it was Sabbath. Passover, too. Yet that wasn’t going to stop the Israelophobes. To the horror of local residents, they chanted about Israel’s ‘targeting’ of ‘sleeping babies’. They waved their blood-spattered dolls in onlookers’ faces. They noisily accused the Jewish nation of laying waste to ‘the birthplace of Jesus’, getting perilously close to reanimating the trope of the Christ killer, the Jew as destroyer of messiahs.

‘Even by the standards of the past 18 months, the march in Southend was despicable’, said a spokesperson for the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA). The chants about the slaying of babies alongside those grim, funereal displays of shrouded dolls represented a ‘chilling echo of medieval blood libels’, the CAA said. It is nearly 900 years since the sick calumny about the bloodletting Jew was born, in Norwich, England. It is deeply shaming, intolerable in fact, that England’s Jews once again find themselves negotiating mobs of people howling about child slaughter and waving bloodied shrouds.
Gil Troy: How Harvard Can Reform Itself
One by one, led from within, institutions can change by taking out the trash of ideologically driven pseudo-scholarship—and inspiring others to do the same. Although change could come faster if the Harvards and Stanfords set the pace, Hutchins proved that this revolution need not be Ivy-covered. Universities with middling reputations, dwindling student bodies, and flagging endowments may be desperate enough to hire without political and identity-obsessed bias, improve teaching quality, and teach students to think critically rather than recite political catechisms. Administrators could bolster their case for change with surveys assessing students’ classroom experience to determine whether professors effectively define the goals, methodologies, intellectual components, workloads, and evaluation standards in the course—from the syllabus through grading the final assignments.

In consultation with professors, students, and outside educators, each university should develop a code of classroom conduct. It should define the teaching mission and the professors’ commitment to providing a high-quality, nonpartisan educational experience that respects students’ intellectual independence. It should also articulate a vision of professorial accountability, rejecting the arrogance that has thickened over the decades.

To make such reforms stick, university leaders will have to grow spines and bypass the learned societies. Currently, tenure cases require as many as six “outside reviewers.” Despite that moniker, most evaluators are the ultimate insiders. They usually derive their status from the learned societies that have shaped the generation now treating classrooms as revolutionary cells. Tenure evaluations should not just rely on those deemed to be experts by the ASA or the American Historical Association. Master teachers and expert alumni should be consulted—going beyond the academic clique.

To be fair, cultivating good teaching and fostering pathbreaking research takes time. Some insulation from the rush of modern society is justified. Senior professors should receive five-year contracts that are automatically renewable unless vetoed by colleagues, administrators, or students questioning teaching quality, academic productivity, or scholarly integrity. Universities should not judge professors by the political positions they take—or don’t take—but by the quality of their teaching, carefully defined, and their research.

Such procedures will make academics more accountable and reflective. Periodically contemplating accomplishments and goals, short- and long-term, can produce better professors. Moreover, with society, culture, technology, and knowledge changing so rapidly, locking in employees for three or four decades is a guarantee of obsolescence that seems radically unfair to students and to institutions as a whole.

Freeing the university from its tenure shackles will not be easy. Academics, who merrily assault everyone else’s “privilege”—real or imagined—go postal if you question their prerogatives. These tattooed Marxists in tweed with perpetual employment and rich pensions assail Americanism cushioned by middle-class entitlements they guard jealously.

Faculty unions will also go ballistic. Advocates for tenure will gaslight, claiming, as Henry Reichman, first vice president of the American Association of University Professors, recently argued, that “tenure is essentially a guarantee of academic due process and presumption of innocence.” Making tenure sound benign doesn’t make it OK; it proves its irrelevance. Standard employment contracts and labor laws guarantee basic fairness too.

Universities are long overdue for a robust debate about what they stand for and what they offer students and society. Despite professorial claims that ending tenure is an assault against universities and the republic, it will benefit professors and students. Students might start getting the teaching they, their parents, and the state have long been paying for. And professors might discover the joys of capitalism. Fostering competition and incentivizing excellence bring out the best in us, while lifetime guarantees produce torpor.
66,250 Holocaust survivors will remain in 2035, Claims Conference predicts
A report that the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany published today about aging Holocaust survivors suggests “sobering insights into the future of this incredible community,” per the nearly 75-year-old nonprofit, which estimates that it will distribute about $530 million in compensation this year to Holocaust survivors worldwide, and $960 million for welfare needs of survivors.

Some 1,400 (.6%) of the estimated 220,800 survivors in 90 countries today are centenarians, and half of the survivors live in Israel, according to the Claims Conference. The median age of survivors is 87, and 61% are women, per the nonprofit.

The Claims Conference’s new report, titled Vanishing Witnesses: An Urgent Analysis of the Declining Population of Holocaust Survivors, projects that just half of Holocaust survivors worldwide will remain in six years, with just 30%, or about 66,250, remaining in 2035. By 2040, just 22,080 survivors will remain, according to the Claims Conference.

Mortality rates differ, per the nonprofit, with 39% of U.S. survivors (from 34,600 to 21,100) and 54% of survivors in former Soviet countries (from 25,500 to 11,800) expected to be lost by 2030. Israel, which has the most survivors (110,100, as of last October), is projected to lose 43% by 2030, dropping to 62,900.

“This report provides clear urgency to our Holocaust education efforts,” stated Gideon Taylor, president of the Claims Conference. “Now is the time to hear first-hand testimonies from survivors, invite them to speak in our classrooms, places of worship and institutions. It is critical, not only for our youth but for people of all generations to hear and learn directly from Holocaust survivors.”

“This report is a stark reminder that our time is almost up, our survivors are leaving us, and this is the moment to hear their voices,” Taylor said.

Greg Schneider, executive vice president of the Claims Conference, told JNS that “we need to know the data around survivors—where they live, poverty rates, the type of persecution that they endured—and then to project that into the future first and foremost so that we can secure the maximum amount of funding and benefits.”

“Survivors are living longer, and we need to plan for that even as we are helping it happen. There are 300 agencies around the world that we fund to provide services, and this data is essential as they plan the coming years,” Schneider.


How Intersectionality Breeds Anti-Semitism
A few years ago, the general term for the progressive rejection of liberal ideas about race, now described as “woke,” was “intersectionality.” The less vague of the two terms, “intersectionality” was first articulated by the legal theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw. The theory, as Tal Fortgang explains, holds that all instances of oppression must be viewed together rather than separately, and the force of bigotry grows in proportion with the number of “intersecting” oppressed identities. In practice this means that every form of oppression must be subsumed into every other. Thus the EPA’s grant, recently canceled by its new Republican director, to a group claiming that “the path to climate justice travels through a free Palestine.”

Indeed, intersectionality has a strange way of finding Jews at every intersection:
By suggesting that the interconnected nature of oppression can be observed in the real world, intersectional activists encouraged a literal interpretation of the interconnectedness of all oppression. And if the various “common enemies” serve one overarching apparatus of oppression, someone or something must be behind it all. In addition to the usual left-wing “enemies”—whites, capitalists, imperialists—vulgar intersectionality tempted its devotees to find one group that could embody all sources of oppression at once. And who could be more white, capitalist, and imperialist than the Jews and the Jewish state?

With no room for nuance in intersectional analysis, the now-familiar terms crystallized: Israel was the oppressor, Palestinians the oppressed. . . . Intersectional thinking fundamentally reframed the way young Americans would analyze the Middle East, positioning Israel not as a nation with its own distinct history, but as part of a global power-relations matrix. And not in a good way.

Theories abound in activist fever swamps positing that police brutality in the United States is being directed by the Jews. . . . In Atlanta, protests against a police-training facility in early 2024 descended into half-baked intersectional explanations of how Israel was to blame. “The cops being trained by the IDF is a connection that can’t be overlooked,” said one activist. “The show of force we saw,” when Georgia law enforcement dispersed protesters with rubber bullets, “shows that all our struggles are connected.”
It’s not racist to criticise Islam
The University of Sussex was fined £585,000 last month by the Office for Students, the universities regulator, for failing to protect Kathleen Stock’s freedom of speech. In 2021, Professor Stock was hounded out of her job by a censorious mob that accused her of ‘transphobia’. Around the same time, the University of Bristol also refused to defend my own academic freedom, in the name of combatting ‘Islamophobia’.

In a social-media campaign, the University of Bristol Islamic Society (BRISOC) denounced me as an Islamophobe and called for my dismissal. This was because I had referred students to literature on Islam and human rights that BRISOC members thought cast their faith in a negative light. Although I was unequivocally exonerated by an official inquiry, the university nevertheless announced that it ‘recognised’ BRISOC’s ‘concerns’ about me. Bristol also removed the ‘Islam, China and the Far East’ module from my Human Rights in Law, Politics and Society course, in order to protect the ‘sensitivities’ of those taking it.

There is a grave risk that the working group recently appointed by the UK government to define ‘Islamophobia’ may make the misfortune I endured more likely for others. Deputy prime minister Angela Rayner announced the working group earlier this year, claiming that establishing an official Islamophobia definition would be a ‘crucial step’ in tackling anti-Muslim hate crime. The group is chaired by former Conservative attorney general Dominic Grieve KC, who wrote the foreword for the now notorious 2018 All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) report on Islamophobia. This produced a definition that is unhelpfully broad. It classifies Islamophobia as a ‘type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness’. If the definition created by Rayner’s working group ends up anything like the APPG one, we are in serious trouble.

It is not at all obvious that a new definition is a good idea. As it stands, there are already plenty of existing definitions of Islamophobia. This, in itself, indicates an acute lack of consensus about what the term actually means. The hope of this working group is that producing yet another definition will assist the government and other bodies to ‘understand, quantify and define prejudice, discrimination and hate crime targeted against Muslims’. But inciting anti-Muslim hatred is already a crime in the UK. Religious discrimination is also unlawful.

Besides, defining anti-Muslim hatred is one thing, countering it is another. There is no evidence, for example, that the non-statutory official definition of anti-Semitism has had any impact upon anti-Semitism itself.
Seth Mandel: Green Days of Rage
Indeed, the Nova massacre is one of the many ways that the world’s support for Hamas against Israel has exposed the hypocrisy of the self-styled liberal humanists. At the 2018 Grammys a group of artists—Maren Morris, Eric Church, and the Brothers Osborne—performed “Tears in Heaven” and dedicated it to the victims of the Las Vegas festival shooting in October 2017 and to the victims of the suicide bombing a few months earlier at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester. “The painful truth is that this year, in just those two events, 81 music lovers just like us went out to enjoy a night of music and never came back home,” Morris said from the stage. The performance was to “honor the memory of the beautiful, music-loving souls so cruelly taken from us.”

Morris & Co. were specifically chosen (or volunteered) likely because they had played at the Vegas festival that was targeted in the 2017 attack. It was a beautiful tribute.

Six years later, at the 2024 Grammys, the Nova victims were also mentioned. There were no big-name artists performing or introducing the brief segment despite the fact that the theater was full of them. It fell to Recording Academy head Harvey Mason to say that “music must always be our safe space.” The violation of that safe space “strikes at the very core of who we are,” Mason said.

He continued: “We felt that at the Bataclan concert hall in Paris. We felt that at the Manchester Arena in England. We felt that at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival in Las Vegas. And on Oct. 7, we felt that again when we heard the tragic news from the Supernova Music Festival for Love that over 360 music fans lost their lives and another 40 were kidnapped.”

A concert in Paris, a show in Manchester, a festival in Las Vegas and… a festival in some unnamed location. Presumably Mason had understood that those victims would be booed if he’d said the word “Israel” to a theater full of people who had long ago lost their sense of humanity.

Mason wasn’t finished contextualizing the tragedy: “That day, and all the tragic days that have followed, have been awful for the world to bear, as we mourn the loss of all innocent lives.” All lives matter, you see, not just those of music fans. (This time, at least.)

Mason then introduced an instrumental performance by musicians of “Palestinian, Israeli, and Arab descent,” having found a way to minimize Israeli suffering that his audience would find sufficient.

To be clear, it was almost surely better than nothing. Most of the time, as Coachella demonstrated, the Nova victims get nothing—or worse than nothing.


Sharon Osbourne calls for Kneecap's work visas to be cancelled after anti-Israel Coachella stunt
TV personality and music industry legend Sharon Osbourne has criticised the organisers of the 2025 Coachella music festival after an Irish hip-hop group projected an anti-Israel slogan during its set.

During its performance at the second weekend of the festival in Southern California, nationalist rap trio Kneecap projected slogans such as “F*** Israel, Free Palestine” on screen and accused Israel of genocide.

In a lengthy post on social media, Osbourne, who has been a judge on America’s Got Talent and The X Factor, called on her followers to join her in “advocating for the revocation of Kneecap's work visa” to the US.

"Coachella 2025 will be remembered as a festival that compromised its moral and spiritual integrity,” she wrote, adding: “Kneecap, an Irish rap group, took their performance to a different level by incorporating aggressive political statements.

"Their actions included projections of anti-Israel messages and hate speech, and this band openly support terrorist organisations.

"This behaviour raises concerns about the appropriateness of their participation in such a festival and further shows they are booked to play in the USA.”

Osbourne, whose father is Jewish, also criticised Goldenvoice, Coachella’s organiser, for its part in booking the band, saying: “Goldenvoice...facilitated this by allowing artists to use the Coachella stage as a platform for political expression.


A Poem for an Arab Terrorist
A defenseless Jewish woman is surrounded by a group of men with guns. The leader of the group raises a pistol and shoots the woman point-blank, killing her. It was a scene played out a million times and more during the Holocaust.

Except in this case, the year was 1978, the murderer was a 19-year-old Palestinian Arab terrorist named Dalal Mughrabi, and the victim was Gail Rubin, the niece of a U.S. senator. In recent days, the public’s attention has been drawn back to that atrocity by the controversy over Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia university student facing deportation. Mahdawi’s friends say he is against terrorism, but he has a long record of statements praising and admiring terrorists — including a poem he wrote in tribute to Ms. Mughrabi.

One of Mahdawi’s friends posted that poem on Facebook in 2013, and Mahdawi wrote comments expressing appreciation for the posting. The poem included these lines honoring Mughrabi: “I will breathe home … / And fill my shame / And clean my gun / And collect my packages, my bombs / And embrace my gun …”

What, exactly, did Mughrabi do with those “guns and bombs”? She was the leader of a heavily-armed gang of 11 terrorists who came ashore in northern Israel on March 11, 1978. Gail Rubin, an American Jewish nature photographer, happened to be on the beach that afternoon, taking pictures of rare birds. She was a niece of U.S. Senator Abraham Ribicoff (D-Conn.). After murdering Gail, Mughrabi and her gang made their way to the nearby Coastal Road.

The terrorists raked passing cars with gunfire, murdering several Israeli children and wounding others. Then they hijacked a bus, forcing it to drive towards Tel Aviv as they leaned out the windows, shooting at motorists. When the bus was forced to stop by a police roadblock, Mughrabi and the others began shooting passengers and setting off grenades. Fire tore through the bus. At one point, according to the courtroom testimony of the survivors, Mughrabi threw a Jewish child into the flames as the other terrorists clapped.

Descriptions of killers hurling Jewish children into fires are found in numerous accounts of the Holocaust. No wonder the Israeli consul-general in New York City characterized Mughrabi and her gang as “a Nazi organization.”


The BBC should be glad that Gary Lineker won’t be their problem for much longer
One of the BBC’s biggest problems can be summed up in two words: Gary and Lineker.

I am not saying that the Match of the Day host is the only problem with the corporation – far far from it – but that the sneery, condescension and arrogance of a man who thinks he understands facts – but gets them wrong – and who thinks rules are for other people to keep, epitomises how this once great institution has faltered.

Lineker is the highest-paid broadcaster at the corporation, but believes the rules about its neutrality are only for others. Since October 7, he has breached the corporation’s supposed neutrality rules on the Israel-Hamas conflict too many times to mention and his Twitter and Instagram feeds are a frenzy of anti-Israel material.

Since the war started, he has retweeted calls to have Israel banned from international sporting bodies – very much within his area of the BBC - and very much not neutral.

A year ago, I challenged him face-to-face. I begged him to understand that this was a war. I asked him to mention the hostages, which he has still not done. I also told him that he was retweeting Hamas fans who displayed the terrorist group’s inverted red triangle to his seven million followers – something he has done only once (I think) since.

Small mercies, eh? After our very public row, he’s no longer retweeting obvious terrorist fans, just daily hatred for Israel.

So now to this week. Over Easter, Lineker sat down with Amol Rajan for the Radio 4 Media Show in one of those slightly surreal conversations where one BBC person asks another BBC person about the BBC and BBC rules on the BBC.

Rajan challenged him on the controversy of his social media use in March 2023 when he said then-Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s announcement to stop migrant boats crossing the Channel was "an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s."

As the backlash mounted, Lineker was taken off Match of the Day and some of his co-stars came out in support, leading to a huge crisis for the corporation, which eventually backed down and even apologised to him.
Lineker says BBC chiefs ‘capitulated to lobbying they get a lot’ over Gaza doc
Gary Lineker has said the BBC “capitulated to lobbying that they get a lot” when it withdrew a documentary it aired on Gaza over complaints about links to Hamas.

The broadcaster, 64, was asked about his decision to join more than 500 media figures in a letter condemning the decision to withdraw the documentary Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone after it emerged that the child narrator, Abdullah, is the son of Ayman Alyazouri, who has worked as Hamas’s deputy minister of agriculture.

Speaking to Amol Rajan he said he would “100%” support the documentary being shown again.

“I think you let people make their own minds up,” said Lineker. ” We’re adults. We’re allowed to see things like that. It’s incredibly moving.”

He added: ‘I think [the BBC] just capitulated to lobbying that they get a lot’.

Linekar said he does not see Abdullah as an issue, and maintained that the corporation should not have admitted to “a number of serious failings in their commissioning and editorial processes”.

He also defended his right to make politcal statements,

Asked about the rules, Lineker questioned why he had to be “impartial”, saying he was a “freelancer”, and the rules were for “people in news and current affairs – they have subsequently changed”.

He added that this “left me, who always gave these honest opinions about things”, having to be impartial which, he said, “didn’t make any sense”, and called it a freedom of speech issue.

“I think this is the mistake… the BBC tries to appease the people that hate the BBC, the people that always go on about the licence fee, attack the BBC. They worry way too much about that, rather than worry about the people that love the BBC, which is the vast majority,” he said.


Antisemitic incidents rose over 80% on college campuses last year, ADL says
Antisemitic incidents in the United States increased once again in 2024, the Anti-Defamation League reported, reaching a new all-time high and providing the latest indicator of a continued surge in antisemitism following Oct. 7, 2023.

The report, released Tuesday, recorded 9,354 antisemitic incidents across the country, marking a 5% increase from the previous year. That figure is almost 10 times the number recorded a decade ago, in 2014. Tuesday’s report found that antisemitic assaults, vandalism, and harassment all rose year over year, while the use of antisemitic propaganda fell.

For the first time since the ADL began publishing the audits in 1979, a majority of all incidents were related to Israel or Zionism. Half took place at anti-Israel rallies.

And the report found that the increase was driven by an 84% spike in campus antisemitism in a year when the pro-Palestinian encampment movement swept campuses nationwide and, many Jewish students said, created a hostile atmosphere.

“This horrifying level of antisemitism should never be accepted, and yet, as our data shows, it has become a persistent and grim reality for American Jewish communities,” said ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt in a press release. “Jewish Americans continue to be harassed, assaulted, and targeted for who they are on a daily basis and everywhere they go. But let’s be clear: we will remain proud of our Jewish culture, religion, and identities, and we will not be intimidated by bigots.”

The audit appears to give statistical heft to widespread American Jewish anxiety over rising antisemitism, particularly on campus, since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel and the outbreak of the war in Gaza. For years, the ADL’s audit has been seen as an authoritative survey of antisemitism in the United States, trusted by groups across the political spectrum.

But in tallying thousands of instances in which it says criticism of Israel constituted antisemitism, the report touches on contentious territory. Pro-Palestinian groups have criticized the ADL for equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism and what they say is an outsize focus on their movement.

The findings also come as the Trump administration’s crackdown on campus antisemitism has reached a fever pitch: The White House is seeking to deport a string of student activists in the encampment movement and has frozen billions of dollars of funding to a growing number of elite schools. Some Jewish groups on the right hope to aid that effort and have criticized legacy organizations like the ADL for being too timid.
This Irish student had to leave campus for supporting Israel
A university student in Ireland last month received death threats, lost a campus leadership position and was forced to stay away from campus for a week amid antisemitic harassment after supporting Israel publicly.

The student, Jamie O’Mahony, 21, told JNS that Dublin City University had failed to adequately support him in the aftermath of the ordeal.

Disillusioned and shocked, O’Mahony is now questioning his future in his native country, where he and other critics fear that anti-Zionism has fused with antisemitism to poison the public discourse on Israel.

The ordeal began on March 6, when O’Mahony set up the Dublin City University chapter of the Students Supporting Israel international network (SSI). He and the chapter’s four other members held a tabling event on campus to advance their cause. The event occurred without incident, but an image of O’Mahony at the event was posted on Instagram, where it went viral with about 150,000 views and some 2,500 mostly negative comments. It led to a campaign of intimidation, he said.

“A lot of it focused on my appearance. People assumed I was Jewish and sent antisemitic messages,” he told JNS earlier this month. “But it got serious when my university timetable was posted online. People were saying, ‘He’s going to be in this room at this time—let’s get him.’”

As a result, O’Mahony stayed home for a week, missing classes out of concern for his safety. Though no physical attacks occurred, he described a hostile atmosphere on campus. “Even now, I walk through the hallway and hear insults. It’s not something you should have to think about when going to class,” he said.

One comment against Dublin City University’s SSI chapter, posted in response to a picture of O’Mahony and the remaining four members, read: “Can’t wait for these to get jumped,” followed by a skull emoji. Another said, “All 5 should be shot.” A third read: “Bring back public humiliation rituals.”
Brown University stops hosting controversial history program after Trump antisemitism crackdown
Brown University is cutting ties with the Choices Program, a high school history curriculum that is housed at the university, the provist announced in mid-April.

Provost Francis J. Doyle III noted that the program was "no longer economically viable in its current structure at Brown" and that the university would be discontinuing hosting the program. Antisemitism is at a record high. We're keeping our eyes on it >>

According to the Brown Daily Herald, university administrators had been working with the program since 2024 in an effort to try to balance Brown's $46 million spending deficit after funding threats from the Trump administration.

The program notably had pushback on the curriculum it presented on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy found that the program had ties to a non-profit attached to the Qatari royal family, Ynet reported on Friday.

However, Brown administrators have categorically rejected claims that the curriculum is antisemitic.

“We unequivocally reject claims that including views about the range of scholarship on the Middle East is antisemitic,” Brown leaders said in a press release. “As is the case with many subjects in the social sciences and humanities in a rigorous education, students must be encouraged to learn based on interrogating and confronting a range of perspectives.”


Leading Michigan Senate candidates condemn anti-Israel harassment of UMich regent
Two of the leading Democratic hopefuls looking to replace retiring Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) condemned anti-Israel protesters for harassing University of Michigan Regent Sarah Hubbard over the weekend.

Protesters could be heard in video of the incident, which began circulating on social media on Sunday evening, shouting at Hubbard that she had “blood on [her] hands” along with other insults as she was guided away by a uniformed police officer. “Your money has gone to kill Palestinian children. Your money has killed our families. We are your students, you answer to us,” one protester shouted as they filmed Hubbard.

In response, Hubbard wrote on X that, “I remain steadfast in my commitment to make our campus a safe place for all our students and will not be intimidated by protestors.”

The incident prompted quick statements of condemnation from Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, two of the Democratic Senate candidates looking to replace Peters. Abdul El-Sayed, a Bernie Sanders-endorsed progressive candidate, did not issue a statement and did not respond to Jewish Insider’s request for comment.

“The harassment and antisemitism we’ve seen against University of Michigan regents in recent months is wrong, plain and simple. Regent Hubbard should be able to walk to her car without a police escort. And Regent [Jordan] Acker’s family was terrorized in their own home when vandals threw jars of urine through their windows and spray painted graffiti on their car,” McMorrow told JI in a statement.

“The attacks and intimidation need to stop now,” McMorrow, who launched her campaign earlier this month, added.


Iran Is Using Organized Crime to Do Its Dirty Work in Europe
While Iran has been weakened considerably by the decimation of Hizballah, the collapse of the Assad regime, and the U.S. assault on the Houthis, its nuclear program is not its only tool for making mischief. On March 12, the State Department announced sanctions on Foxtrot, a mafia-like organization based in Sweden with tentacles throughout northern Europe. Foxtrot sent a few teenagers to attack the Israeli embassy with hand grenades and guns in October of last year, and it appears to have been hired to do so by the Iranian government.

As Tam Hussein explains, criminal gangs like Foxtrot are, for Iran, “a low-cost, effective way to achieve its goals that could always be denied if accusations were leveled,” which is harder in the case of groups like Hizballah.

Iran depends on homegrown kingpins such as Naji Sharifi Zindashti to attack its enemies abroad. Zindashti’s criminal connections stretch from Tehran to Istanbul, London, and Toronto. The crime boss hired Canadian Hells Angels members in a plot to kill Iranian dissidents. Turkish authorities say Zindashti was involved in the abduction of a Swedish-Iranian activist in 2020, who was later executed in Iran.

Foxtrot might even be considered small fry in comparison to the Irish Kinahan cartel, which has far older ties with Iran. The Kinahan cartel may have started from humble beginnings in Dublin, but by the time it began dealing with the Iranians, its criminal interest and reach spanned the world. The cartel’s ties to Tehran reveal how sophisticated the policy had become. Iran’s relationship with the Irish crime family dates back to at least 2016.
Trump Admin Sanctions Iranian Shipping Magnate Offloading Illicit Oil and Gas for Tehran
The Trump administration slapped sanctions on an Iranian national and his corporate network for laundering hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of illicit petroleum products "to evade U.S. sanctions and generate revenue for Iran," the Treasury Department announced on Tuesday.

Iranian shipping magnate Seyed Asadollah Emamjomeh has worked with Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) to illegally transport the hardline regime’s heavily sanctioned crude oil and liquefied petroleum gas, or LPG, to foreign markets across the globe, according to the department. Emamjomeh once attempted to transport LPG from Houston to China, though the effort failed. The ship he used, TINOS 1, is still in anchorage off Houston and was hit with sanctions under the latest order.

Emamjomeh’s shipping empire, the Treasury Department says, helped generate revenue for Iran’s "nuclear and advanced conventional weapons programs" as well as its "regional proxy groups and partners such as Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Hamas." Emamjomeh was sanctioned alongside his son, Meisam Emamjomeh, as well as a constellation of international companies controlled by the duo.

"Emamjomeh and his network sought to export thousands of shipments of LPG—including from the United States—to evade U.S. sanctions and generate revenue for Iran," Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement. "The United States remains committed to holding accountable those who seek to provide the Iranian regime with the funding it needs to further its destabilizing activities in the region and around the world."

The sanctions are the latest salvo in an escalating series of measures meant to cripple Tehran’s international oil trade and bankrupt the regime. They come as the Trump administration engages in negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program—negotiations that have sparked concerns among supporters of the "maximum pressure" sanctions campaign over mixed messages regarding Tehran's ability to enrich uranium under a prospective deal.

While most of the Trump administration’s recent sanctions have targeted Tehran’s crude oil business, Emamjomeh primarily moves LPG—a lesser known but still hugely profitable sector.


Two men tried to save the Jews—but no one listened
The role of Mordechai Podchlebnik was never going to be just another part for Jeremy Neumark Jones.The actor recognised the name as soon as he opened the script,even though the Holocaust survivor’s story is largely unknown (his Wikipedia page is a mere two paragraphs).

A decade earlier, a year out of university, Neumark Jones had sat down with a friend to watch Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. In the nine-hour documentary epic,Podchlebnik recounted how he had escaped Chemno to share the depraved truth about the first Nazi extermination camp with a disbelieving world.

Then there is the 35-year-old’s own lineage. His Jewish maternal grandfather fled Germany in the early 1930s, only to find himself interned as an enemy alien in Britain. He says he was “so moved by the script that I attached a note at the end of the audition tape telling Lior [Geller, the Israeli-American writer-director] a little bit about my family’s personal story”.

It is difficult to believe that Podchlebnik and fellow escapee Szlama Ber Winer – who is played by Oliver Jackson-Cohen and was responsible for the first eyewitness account of the mass murder of Europe’s Jews – have not been immortalised on film until now.

In The World Will Tremble, we meet them in Chemno in Poland as Sonderkommandos, prisoners forced to dig the graves in which to bury both their communities and the Nazis’crimes. Meanwhile, the waves of new arrivals are told to carefully label their belongings so they can reclaim them after being taken to Leipzig factories to work. It is all part of an industrial deceit designed to transfer the human cargo most efficiently into the back of the Nazis’ experimental gas vans.

Filming the agonising scene in which Podchlebnik recognises his wife and children while unloading bodies into a pit – before begging to be put to death himself – took its toll on Neumark Jones. “I was so worked up that when we moved on to take a different shot, I actually bust my head open with a shovel by accident,” he says on a video call from his home in Highbury. “I’d spent time with the people playing my family, so I could generate a bond with them. Sometimes Lior would yell ‘cut’, and we wouldn’t be able to look at each other in the face. We would pace around and feel completely bereft.”

Neumark Jones grew up as a member of Southgate and District Reform Synagogue, his life shaped by the “weekly rhythm” of synagogue and Sunday school. He still celebrates the festivals and was “at Purim with Lior just the other day. I think about my Judaism as being a part of my modern, very blended identity in a city that includes lots of blended identities,” he says.“I’m very happy to share it with people.”

The Londoner, who speaks four languages, is also proud to have recently reclaimed the German citizenship stolen from his granddad. Many recent films have garnered headlines for casting non-Jews in Jewish roles. Not this one. The shared heritage allowed the actors to commune over their inheritance. Neumark Jones says his co-star Charlie MacGechan, who plays Wolf, “had a whole installation of pictures in his room” – references to his great-uncle, Wolf Chevinsky, who died fighting for Britain in the war. “And then Oli, his father, was a Tunisian Jew.
Swedish Prime Minister Kristersson must allow access to information on Wallenberg case
January 17 marked the 80th anniversary of Raoul Wallenberg’s disappearance in the Soviet Union. After eight decades, the central questions in the Wallenberg case remain unanswered: What exactly happened to him after his trail broke off in Moscow in the spring of 1947? And why was the Swedish government’s passivity in the case so extreme?

We now know that Swedish officials consciously abandoned Wallenberg almost immediately after he disappeared in January 1945, a decision that had serious consequences for Sweden’s official handling of the case.

Despite document destruction and other forms of censorship, it is clear that highly relevant information remains available in both Russian and Swedish archives. Unfortunately, over the years, the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs has instead signaled that it is primarily interested in removing the issue from the Swedish-Russian agenda. This theme has run like a red thread through the Wallenberg case ever since 1945.

Swedish officials say that they do not know which documents about the Swedish diplomat are still classified – in their own archives or in collections held by other Swedish authorities – and they show no interest in finding out.

In 2019, the ministry announced that a total of 170,000 pages in the Raoul Wallenberg case are now available to the public and that only 230 pages remain confidential. The statement obscures the fact that the Foreign Ministry’s Wallenberg case file is far from complete. It also reinforces misconceptions about how the documentation of the case is organized.

Only a limited part is stored in the official case file at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Thousands of documents are held in various other collections in the ministry archive and in other Swedish agencies, including the Swedish Security Police (Säpo). The result is that neither Wallenberg’s family nor the general public have a clear idea which documents are stored in which archival collection.

Moreover, highly relevant documents about the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Jews were never formally registered or archived at all.
Documentary digs up story of Polish village that butchered its Jews after Holocaust ended
The documentary “Among Neighbors,” being broadcast on Yes Docu, Sting+ and local theaters for the upcoming Holocaust Remembrance Day, shows that there are still stories to be unveiled even 80 years after World War II — tales of violence and murder, as well as of unlikely miracles and survival.

Director Yoav Potash’s film, 10 years in the making, tells several of those interlaced stories, all connected to Gniewoszów, a small town in Poland where Jews were murdered by their neighbors months after the war had ended.

Potash, an award-winning filmmaker from California’s Bay Area, brings viewers to the rural village through interviews and footage, and uses dreamy, hand-drawn animation that tells the prewar and postwar history of Gniewoszów.

At the outset, Potash shows that no Jews are left in Gniewoszów decades after World War II, although Jews and their neighbors coexisted peacefully before the war.

Even the Jewish tombstones are gone, used as grindstones and paving materials by the residents.

Potash was first brought to Gniewoszów by Anita Friedman, a descendant of the town’s Jews.



Friedman, a Jewish communal leader from San Francisco, asked Potash to join her as she and another family member traveled to Gniewoszów to search out traces of their heritage. They planned to create a short, half-hour film about the town and its Jewish history. It was that initial visit in 2014 and the chilly reception they received from the townspeople that unlocked a much larger project for Potash.
Croatia commemorates victims of notorious Jasenovac WWII concentration camp
Croatia on Tuesday commemorated the victims of a World War II concentration camp where tens of thousands of people perished in the hands of a pro-Nazi puppet regime at the time.

Top Croatian officials and representatives of the Serb, Jewish, Roma and antifascist organizations attended the ceremonies marking 80 years after hundreds of prisoners attempted a breakthrough on April 22, 1945.

Only 92 people survived the breakthrough attempt out of some 600 men, according to the Jasenovac memorial center data. Prisoners at the camp, known as the Balkan Auschwitz, also included women and children.

Slavko Milanovic, born in 1937, was just a child when he was brought to Jasenovac with his mother, aunt and sister. Milanovic still remembers how prison guards separated children from their mothers.

“When my mother saw that she covered me and my sister with cloths that we used to sleep on,” Milanovic said. “My sister was fragile, she died right there in my mother’s arms.”

Milanko Cekic, who was also imprisoned as a child, was pushed into a freight train with his family and brought to Jasenovac. “I don’t remember ever being hungry… but we drank water from a lake with dead bodies floating in it,” he said.

Jasenovac, located about 100 kilometers (60 miles) southwest from Zagreb, the capital, was the most notorious in a system of camps in the area where victims were rounded up, brutally tortured and executed.

Official Croatian data show that more than 83,000 people were killed in Jasenovac, while Serbs say the numbers were much higher, possibly in the hundreds of thousands.
Yad Vashem denounces Latvia closing investigation on 'Butcher of Riga' Herberts Cukurs
Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, condemned Latvia's Prosecution Office's decision to close the investigation into the "infamous Latvian war criminal and Nazi collaborator Herberts Cukurs for his role in the Holocaust and involvement in the killing of tens of thousands of Jews," Yad Vashem announced in a statement on Tuesday.

According to the organization, this "decision is baffling because Cukurs's horrific war crimes are indisputable." Yad Vashem added that it is ready to "provide documents from its archive" to support prosecuting Cukurs.

Yad Vashem also denounced the "repeated attempts to rehabilitate Cukurs's image in Latvia by distorting and ignoring historical truth."

Latvian lawyer, David Lipkin, told KAN News that "The prosecution has come to the conclusion that Cukurs's actions do not contain elements of genocide or any other crime, and therefore the case dealing with his case is effectively closed."

However, Lipkin stated that he intends to appeal the decision, saying, "We will insist and demand that the prosecutor's office resume the proceedings, because we have a lot of evidence that proves Cukurs's guilt," KAN cited.
Fear of rising antisemitism in Ukraine after synagogue is attacked with Molotov cocktail
A synagogue in the Ukrainian city Kryvyi Rih was attacked on Saturday night with a Molotov cocktail. The incident, which is only one of several recent antisemitic attacks, has left the local Jewish community concerned about growing levels of antisemitism in Ukrainian society.

The city’s police have initiated a probe into the antisemitic attack. Ukrainian security forces were quickly dispatched to inspect the synagogue, and local authorities have vowed to apprehend and punish the perpetrators.

The city’s rabbi Liron Edri, who is also a Chabad emissary, stressed that the incident constitutes an assault on the city’s Jewish community.

“This was a direct attack on the Jewish community,” Edri said in an interview with the Jerusalem Post.

“The vandalism was clearly targeted,” he continued. “There was nothing random about it,” he added.

“Thankfully, the reinforced windows held up, and the firebomb didn’t make it inside. But the message was loud and clear,” the rabbi warned.

Elia Goldberg, the Chabad World Assistance’s Ukraine security coordinator, revealed that the synagogue was equipped with a security system thanks to assistance from the Jewish Agency’s Security Fund.

“The shielding we installed saved lives,” Goldberg stated. “It’s a reminder that preemptive protection is not just important – it’s essential,” Goldberg added.

While local authorities have promised to apprehend the perpetrators, Edri and other local Jews are concerned that there is a growing antisemitic trend in Ukrainian society.

“We’re starting to fear that this may not be isolated,” Edri warned. “There seems to be a growing pattern of coordinated attempts to intimidate and harm Jewish communities in Eastern Europe."

However, the Chabad rabbi vowed that the Jewish community will not be intimidated by antisemitism.

“We won’t be intimidated,” he said. “Light will overcome darkness. We will keep our doors open, and our community will continue to gather and pray."


Pope Francis cared deeply about Holy Land, Jews, but left ‘sour taste’ after Oct. 7
‘Disastrous’ response to October 7
After October 7, the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, the Pope’s statements and tweets left Jews feeling confused at times, and under attack at others.

In a November 2023 call with Israel’s President Isaac Herzog, Francis reportedly said it is “forbidden to respond to terror with terror.”

Shortly after the attacks, hundreds of Jewish leaders and scholars wrote an open letter to Francis, asking the Church to unequivocally condemn Hamas’s attacks and to distinguish terrorism from Israel’s war on the group.

It took three months for the Pope to respond in a letter that condemned antisemitism, reaffirmed the bond between the Church and Jews, and stressed that his “heart is torn at the sight of what is happening in the Holy Land, by the power of so much division and so much hatred” — but failed to mention Hamas.

German Catholic theologian Gregor Maria Hoff blasted the Pope’s response: “It is not enough to condemn violence without unambiguously identifying the responsible actors. It does not help to invoke the ‘path of friendship, solidarity and cooperation’ while the Jewish partner has to fight for his survival in his own country and on its borders.” Hamas terrorists enter the Nova music festival area near Kibbutz Re’im on October 7, 2023. (South First Responders)

Another letter from the pontiff, this one addressed to Middle East Catholics on the one-year anniversary of October 7, confounded those who care about Catholic-Jewish relations.

Francis decried “the fuse of hatred” lit the year before (though notably did not lay out who struck the match) and lamented “the spirit of evil that foments war.”

Then, quoting one of the New Testament verses most often used to justify Christian antisemitism, he wrote that this spirit was “murderous from the beginning,” and “a liar and the father of lies.”

“It is impossible to overstate what a disaster this is for Jewish-Catholic relations,” wrote Villanova University professor Ethan Schwartz.

In November 2024, Francis called for an investigation to determine if Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute “genocide,” according to excerpts from a forthcoming new book ahead of the pontiff’s jubilee year.

A month earlier, a seasonal nativity scene at the Vatican — at which Francis prayed — was removed after backlash over its depiction of the baby Jesus lying on a keffiyeh, the traditional scarf used by Palestinians as a national symbol.

The nativity scene drew criticism as it was suggestive of the trope that Jesus was a Palestinian rather than Jewish.

“It wasn’t in his DNA,” Shotz said, “and it’s very possible that this fact made him a little less sensitive to the importance of issues among us Israeli Jews than his predecessors.”
Israel deletes pope condolence tweet over backlash fear
Among the many condolence messages sent from around the world following the death of Pope Francis, the near-total silence from Israel stood out.

Aside from a statement by President Isaac Herzog, who expressed condolences to the Catholic world and voiced hope that “his memory will inspire acts of kindness and hope for humanity,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar were notably silent, neither issuing any comment nor tweeting about the Pope’s passing.

Israeli officials have not concealed the reason for this silence – it is directly linked to the Pope’s recent statements regarding Israel and the war in Gaza.

Over the past year, Francis remarked that what is happening in Gaza “is not a war. It’s cruelty,” and accused Israel of “bombing children and mowing them down with machine guns.” He also claimed that “what is happening in Gaza has characteristics of genocide.”

Nevertheless, several Israeli officials have criticized the decision to remain silent, arguing that the Pope was not just a political leader.

Raising eyebrows: Drawing attention to deleted post
“I think the decision is a mistake. We shouldn’t keep score like this after someone’s death,” Raphael Schutz, who served until last summer as Israel’s ambassador to the Vatican, told The Jerusalem Post.

He made it clear that the Pope’s remarks deserve strong condemnation and that Israel should have responded diplomatically at the time.

“But now, we’re not only talking about a head of state, but also a spiritual leader for over a billion people – nearly 20% of humanity. I don’t think silence sends the right message.”

The Foreign Ministry did briefly post messages on social media accounts – Instagram, Facebook, and X – saying, “Rest in peace, Pope Francis. May his memory be a blessing.” However, those posts were deleted shortly afterward, raising eyebrows and drawing attention.

The Pope’s funeral is scheduled for Saturday morning. Given both his past criticisms of Israel and the fact that the funeral will take place on the Jewish Shabbat, it remains unclear whether Israel will send an official representative.


Looking back on 30 years: Remembering Alisa Flatow, beloved daughter
Honoring Alisa Flatow's 30th yahrzeit at the Nishmat campus
So I thought of another family that we could involve in our planning – the students at Nishmat, the Jeannie Schottenstein Center for Torah Study.

To attend Nishmat, Alisa had taken a leave of absence from Brandeis University beginning in December 1994. By all accounts, she was the same Alisa who started yeshiva in 1979, anxious to learn. But this was her sixth trip to Israel, so she was also eager to do other things.

During her brief time at Nishmat, Alisa would slip away from the campus to pray at the Western Wall and attend more than one ceremony for IDF recruits. And on a short trip to Israel in January 1995, the last time our family would all be together with her, she took me to the low ledge at the rear of the Kotel plaza where she liked to sit and watch the goings-on. That ledge is gone.

Importantly, Alisa was living in an apartment with several other women. She managed her bus rides, found a gym to join, and learned – on a trip to the shuk – that a chicken for Shabbat was more than cutlets; it had a neck, legs, and wings, and stuffed inside it was a paper packet with its heart and liver.

Nishmat’s faculty, staff, and students quickly prepared for a siyum mishnayot [celebration upon completion of a set of Mishna] for the yahrzeit, and we arranged a dinner at the Nishmat campus in the Alisa M. Flatow Building.

We were pleased that many of the faculty who knew Alisa 30 years ago were with us, and it was joyful to be able to invite other expats from West Orange. With our son Etan and our Sabra granddaughters with us, it was a night that I do not want to erase from my memory.

And now, in the midst of Passover this year, I can only feel gratitude to that young child who decided that she was going to a “Jewish school” for kindergarten. Alisa was the leader of all things religious in our family. And now, when one of the grandchildren comes up with a new humra (“religious stringency”), we laugh and say, “It’s Alisa’s fault.” But all is good.

Some have ascribed Alisa’s murder on a bus near Kfar Darom to being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I see it differently. Because Alisa was in the Land of Israel, studying the religion of Israel, and among the people of Israel when the end came, she was in the right place. 




Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

    
 

 



AddToAny

Printfriendly

EoZTV Podcast

Podcast URL

Subscribe in podnovaSubscribe with FeedlyAdd to netvibes
addtomyyahoo4Subscribe with SubToMe

search eoz

comments

Speaking

Speaking

translate

E-Book

For $18 donation








Sample Text

EoZ's Most Popular Posts in recent years

Search2

Hasbys!

Hasbys!

2019 Nobel Peace Prize nominee

Elder of Ziyon - حـكـيـم صـهـيـون



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.

Donate!

Donate to fight for Israel!

Monthly subscription:
Payment options


One time donation:

Follow EoZ on Twitter!

Interesting Blogs

Show All

Blog Archive

Copyright © Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News | Powered by Blogger
Blogger Templates