Monday, December 08, 2025

12/08 Links Pt2: Unapologetic American Jewry Is the Future; F grades handed to 14 colleges in antisemitism ‘report card’ as Jewish students forced to hide identities

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Unapologetic American Jewry Is the Future
So what’s the dog that didn’t bark? That would be the legion of personalities connected to the UJA who ignored the haters and celebrated the gala and refused to consider a groveling apology in the days after the event. No apology was necessary or even appropriate, of course. But it is crucial that the organized Jewish community recognizes this.

Meanwhile Isaac Herzog, Israel’s president and a scion of the Labor left, was in New York last night and delivered an equally unapologetic speech to Yeshiva University.

In New York City, Herzog said, “We see the rise of a new mayor-elect who makes no effort to conceal his contempt for the Jewish democratic state of Israel, the only nation state of the Jewish people.”

Notice the word “Jewish” twice in that one sentence. The attempts by anti-Zionist groups to shame Jews into severing their history and heritage from their modern identity must fail.

Herzog slammed Mamdani’s justification for an anti-Semitic mob that descended on a Manhattan synagogue that was hosting an event about making aliyah. The incoming mayor had suggested the shul was facilitating the violation of international law by talking to prospective emigrants to a sovereign state. Herzog pulled no punches:

“Delegitimizing the Jewish people’s right to their ancient homeland and their age-old dream of Jerusalem legitimizes violence and undermines freedom of religion. This is both anti-Jewish and anti-American.”

Well said. Mamdani, let’s remember, is still vowing to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which would be a truly lawless act. Herzog and Netanyahu were once political rivals, but that could not possibly matter less at the moment. Herzog’s message to American Jewry was to be steadfast, unapologetic, and to be able to recognize those who seek its harm. That message is, thankfully, catching on.
Who You Gonna Call?
Amit Segal is having a moment. A longtime TV reporter for Israel’s Channel 12 and print journalist for Yediot Ahronot, the country’s most widely circulated newspaper, Segal burst into the English-speaking spotlight courtesy of multiple post–October 7 appearances on Dan Senor’s Call Me Back podcast, numerous op-eds in the Free Press, the Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere, and a popular Substack aimed at a foreign audience. He presents a cogent, witty, and likeable center-right perspective, often in friendly contrast to center-left sparring partners like Yediot’s Nadav Eyal, and he comes across as a happy warrior, a smiling avatar of mainstream, security-minded Israelis.

His latest book follows this blueprint, cheerfully but critically examining the history of leadership (and, at times, lack thereof) in the Israeli prime ministerial class. A Call at 4 AM is about some of the consequential choices of Israel’s premiers during the country’s eight-decade-long existence. “My aim,” Segal writes, “is to describe the political decisions that they made,” like the ones that helped create Israel’s byzantine electoral system under the guidance of its first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. In seating the 120 members of their Knesset, Israelis elect by party, not geography, a method used by Slovakia and the Netherlands and no other land on earth. And so, in Israel, Segal contends, “the movement is more important than the man; the party more important than the individual.”

Segal calculates that Israel, in its first 72 years, wasted more than 11 years on elections and coalition negotiations. The opportunity costs are no less steep. Had the 1969 elections been held on a regional basis, Ben-Gurion’s party would have won an astounding 103 seats. In 2020, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party would have secured 92 mandates. Equally striking is “the massive gulf between public opinion on matters of religion and state,” the result of the perpetual horse-trading created by Ben-Gurion.

Still, security questions dominate Israeli politics and have for half a century. The question that means the most to voters is this: “When the red telephone rings at 4:00 a.m., who should answer?” That notion, which provided Segal with his title, arguably originated with an actual 4:00 a.m. call on October 6, 1973, when Prime Minister Golda Meir belatedly came to realize a war was brewing. Her failure to act resulted in military and political disaster.

The prime beneficiary of Golda’s disaster was Menachem Begin, the long-suffering leader of Israel’s national camp, who overcame decades of electoral failure and finally secured the premiership in 1977. He cobbled together disparate center-right parties and appealed to the neglected Sephardi community, skillfully navigating what Segal calls the “multiple identities” possessed by all Israelis. Begin recognized that “internal contradictions do not always impede the creation of victorious political alliances; sometimes they are even a hallmark of them.”
David Collier: The Vermont Hate Crime Fantasy Sweeping the Nation
Who in the world wishes for a hate crime in their community? Apparently, Vermont elected officials do.

With no hate crime charge, no law enforcement or judicial finding of deliberate targeting, and no evidence establishing motive, Vermont U.S Senators Bernie Sanders and Peter Welch, and Representative Becca Balint used the two-year anniversary of the tragic shooting of three Palestinian students to tell Vermonters a divisive fiction – a story crafted to satisfy sectarian political appetites rather than to reflect the truth.

It is not a new pattern. In another era, during the Dreyfus Affair, French elites clung to a narrative too emotionally gratifying to question. The parallel is not the substance of the case but the psychology: when a story feels right, it becomes a story that must be true, no matter what the evidence says. The Shootings and the Race to Interpretation

On November 25, 2023, three college students were shot on a residential street in Burlington, VT – the largest city in America’s second-smallest state. The three, Hisham Awartani (Brown University), Kinnan Abdalhamid (Haverford College) and Tahseen Ali Ahmad (Trinity College) were visiting during their Thanksgiving breaks.

Two are U.S citizens and one a legal resident. All three are of Palestinian heritage. Two of the victims were wearing keffiyeh (the headdress associated with Arab Palestinian nationalism since it was adopted during the Arab Revolt in the 1930s). All three were wounded; Awartani was the worst-injured – according to his family, a bullet lodged in his spine left him paralyzed from the chest down.

Local CBS affiliate WCAX-TV was the first to report that the victims of this tragic shooting were Palestinian – a detail initially unsupported and unattributed, but later confirmed by police.

The anti-Israel movement weaponised the tragedy instantly. Neighbours targeted local Jews online, joking that their whereabouts at the time of the shooting should be investigated.


F grades handed to 14 colleges in antisemitism ‘report card’ as Jewish students forced to hide identities
A whopping 39% of Jewish college students have had to hide their identities on campus while 62% said they have been directly blamed for Israel’s military action in Gaza, according to a new report obtained by The Post.

The civil rights group StopAntisemitism issued its 2025 “report cards” grading how 90 colleges addressed the spreading hatred against Jews on campuses, with 14 schools flunking the exam — including two New York City universities.

“This report exposes a disturbing and undeniable reality. Antisemitism on American college campuses is systemic and tolerated, and in many cases enabled by the very institutions tasked with protecting our American kids,” StopAntisemitism founder Liora Rez said in a statement.

With antisemitism on the rise across the globe following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack against Israel, students at 90 colleges in the US have reported feeling unsafe on their campuses, according to StopAntisemitism’s student survey.

About 58% of respondents said they have personally experienced antisemitism on campus, with only 12% claiming that the reported incidents were “properly addressed.”

Another 65% described feeling unwelcome in specific campus spaces as anti-Israel protests run amok, with 58% agreeing that their schools had failed to protect them.

Both Columbia University and the New School — which saw massive anti-Israeli protests break out since the Oct. 7 terrorist attack — received an F grade for allowing this culture of “pervasive antisemitism” to run rampant.

“At Columbia University, Jewish students have faced repeated antisemitic incidents including vandalism, hate filled emails, and disruptions glorifying extremist violence,” the report said.

“Federal investigators found the university showed ‘deliberate indifference’ toward these issues and threatened to halt hundreds of millions in funding,” it added, slamming the New School for similar allegations.


Study challenges how antisemitism is measured
Nearly a decade ago, French President Emmanuel Macron warned that “anti-Zionism is a reinvented form of antisemitism,” the first such statement by a European head of state.

Austria’s Sebastian Kurz soon echoed him, calling, while he was chancellor in 2018, the ideologies two “sides of the same coin,” and in 2025 Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz said that some criticism of Israel had become “a pretext” for spreading antisemitism.

Long viewed as intuition rather than evidence, these claims now have empirical backing with the publication of a study that, for the first time, maps a measurable correlation between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.

The study from Sweden, led by the University of Gothenburg’s Professor Christer Mattsson, also suggests that antisemitism indexes in the West have vastly undercounted the phenomenon, because they did not measure or factor in the racist hatred’s migration from “Jews” to “Zionists,” Mattsson told JNS last month.

His study covered about 9,000 interviewees in Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. Half of the interviewees indicated agreement or disagreement with common antisemitic tropes, and the other half did the same on tropes where “Jews” were swapped for “Zionists.”

In all three countries, antisemitic statements about Jews—including that they are “particularly vengeful,” deceitful or control the media—received little endorsement, of about 5-10% of respondents in a representative sample of the general population. However, when the same assertions about “Zionists” were presented to a different representative sample from the same country, they elicited a near-neutral response, meaning that as many people agreed with the statement as those who disagreed with it.

The findings, Mattsson said, demonstrate that contemporary antisemitism often expresses itself through anti-Zionist rhetoric, making it socially permissible while preserving the same conspiratorial content.
UC San Fran Champions Dangerous Anti-Palestinian Racism Study
University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) has threatened its institutional credibility by backing a dangerous study on anti-Palestinian racism that seems to flout the most basic tenets of academic research. This comes as the university is still under a hiring freeze as a result of federal and state budget cuts.

The study, "Systemic Anti-Palestinian Racism Against US Healthcare Providers”, released earlier this year by the Institute for the Understanding of Anti-Palestinian Racism (IUAPR), has been shared heavily among activists and media.

However, upon closer examination, the study does more harm than good in its efforts to combat racial bias and bigotry endured by Palestinian healthcare workers, as it fails to meet even the most basic standards of sound research. For starters, the study claims to be the first nationwide survey to document 'systemic' racism against healthcare providers. In fact, 68% of participants were not healthcare workers. A survey of less than 400 medical professionals is, at best, a pilot study that cannot prove anything "systemic" about healthcare institutions in the United States.

Furthermore, over 72% of participants were not Palestinian. This raises the issue of construct validity, meaning the degree to which a study's data measures what it claims to measure. According to best practices in research, the main population surveyed in a study of anti-Palestinian racism (APR) should be Palestinians themselves. In this case, they were the minority, and the IUAPR report provides no specific information about their experiences with APR.

Additionally, IUAPR claims to have studied "a general population of people in the United States." Yet over 42% of the participants were Muslim and almost 36% were Arab or Arab American, despite the fact that each of these groups makes up roughly 1% of the total U.S. population. If the authors had openly stated that their intent was to disproportionately focus on these communities, that may have been legitimate. Instead, they framed their clearly skewed results as representative of the broader American public.
‘No Place for Jews Here’: Correspondent Avi Yemini’s Warning for Australia
Avi Yemini thinks the Jews are going to be driven out of Australia

“I think it is the trajectory we’re on,” Avi Yemini told The Media Line over a drink at his suburban Melbourne home. Handsome and dark-skinned, the Oz correspondent for Canada’s Rebel News is strong, outspoken, and deeply concerned, though he somehow still carries a broad, disarming smile on his face.

“There is no place for Jews in Australia,” he continued. “I think most Jews are going to end up in Israel.”

Yemini is one of Australia’s most influential commentators. But after Oct. 7, the father of four children, including two biological children and two stepchildren, was forced to invest close to $60,000 to secure his home from Muslim extremists who he believes want to harm him.

“It’s not what I think is gonna happen to me. It’s just preparing for the worst,” he said matter-of-factly. “I know the reality. There are a lot of people who would love to harm my family and me for sure.”

The threats feel personal and immediate.

It’s not what I think is gonna happen to me. It’s just preparing for the worst. I know the reality. There are a lot of people who would love to harm my family and me for sure.

One weekday morning, Yemini was at his local gym when a group of young Arab adults, one wearing a Free Palestine shirt, spotted him working out. They began filming him. According to Yemini, those videos are shared in online groups where even more extreme Muslims can identify where he lives and potentially plan something. He said he feels more exposed because he does not live within the Jewish community but “among regular Aussies,” in neighborhoods with many Muslims.

Australia’s census reports more than 800,000 Muslims living in the country and only around 100,000 Jews.

“You’re at the gym, and one of them’s got the Gaza top, and they’re pointing at you. And then I’m looking in the mirror, and I can see they’re filming. So my location has been compromised, so I’ve just got to be smart about it,” Yemini said. “If I go to the wrong place at the wrong time, I’ll get f***ing killed.”

When he needs to attend pro-Palestinian protests, he brings bodyguards paid for by his media outlet.

But despite the risks, Yemini has not stopped since Oct. 7. He believes Australians need to understand that what begins with the Jews will eventually target others as well.

“First, it’s the Saturday people, then the Sunday people. It’s real. It’s true. They hate you too,” he told The Media Line.
Jonathan Sacerdoti: The BBC's anti-Semitism training is an offensive parody
In truth, the disparity reveals another institutional failure. The BBC module incorporates the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, grounding its approach in a widely accepted, internationally recognised standard. No such consensus exists for Islamophobia. Efforts to define it have repeatedly unravelled, not due to lack of concern, but because any serious attempt must grapple with a fundamental tension: whether to classify criticism of Islamic doctrine, history, or religious figures as a form of bigotry. To enshrine such criticism as hate speech would not merely chill debate, it would criminalise dissent. And unlike Judaism, whose sacred texts and patriarchs are routinely and openly interrogated, even by believers, Islam is often protected from scrutiny through fear of violent retribution. This, ultimately, is the impasse.

The BBC’s treatment of Zionism is similarly incoherent. One slide offers a definition taken, bizarrely, from Dictionary.com. But nowhere does the course clarify why common slogans like ‘Zionism is racism’ are deemed anti-Semitic. It makes no effort to engage with the actual religious and historical foundations of Jewish attachment to Zion: the daily prayers, the Psalms, the daily grace after meals, the lamentations of Tisha B’Av, the High Holy Day liturgy – centuries of devotion saturated with longing for Jerusalem and Zion, not as metaphor, but as sacred geography and spiritual, historical centre.

Instead, we are offered feel-good sentences like ‘you are seen, your identity matters, you belong here’. It’s as if the problem were a lack of woke affirmation, rather than an entrenched editorial hostility towards Jews and Israel that regularly violates the Corporation’s own declared standards.

The real scandal is not that the BBC made a training module to address anti-Semitism. It is that this is all they did. No overhaul of editorial guidelines. No meaningful accountability for repeated breaches of impartiality. No willingness to confront how anti-Semitism can be structural, systemic and broadcast live in high definition.

What this training entirely fails to address is the deeper climate within the Corporation which we on the outside can all see clearly; one in which Jewish or non-Jewish staff may hesitate to challenge biased coverage of Israel for fear of professional consequences. The real concern is not whether a colleague might make an offhand remark at the watercooler, but whether speaking up in an editorial meeting risks being marked as suspect, unfashionable, or worse, partisan.

When a Labour MP publicly cast suspicion on a BBC board member for his association with a Jewish newspaper, the implication was clear enough: ties to Jewish institutions could be seen as compromising impartiality. The accusation came from outside the Corporation, but it underscored the kind of atmosphere the BBC must be willing to resist. A public service broadcaster that claims to stand against discrimination should be alert to how such narratives take root – and ensure that its own staff, particularly Jewish staff, do not feel that speaking up about bias or prejudice carries a professional risk.

The BBC parades this training module as evidence of institutional responsibility, yet it only exposes the depth of its institutional evasion. A broadcaster willing to confront anti-Semitism would start with its own output. Instead, it offers a caricature of concern: sanitised, superficial and unserious.


Policing minister declines to say she has ‘confidence’ in West Midlands Police chiefs
A minister has declined to say whether she has “confidence” in West Midlands Police leaders, as the force’s chief constable faces a call to resign.

Policing minister Sarah Jones told the Commons it was “clear that mistakes” were made, when Birmingham’s Safety Advisory Group (Sag) moved to bar Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters from their side’s game against Aston Villa.

Conservative MP Nick Timothy used an urgent question to summon Ms Jones to the despatch box, and said he thought Chief Constable Craig Guildford “must go”.

He said he feared West Midlands Police used artificial intelligence (AI) to come to its conclusions, relying on a false narrative which involved a made-up game between the Israeli team and West Ham two years ago, in 2023.

He asked Ms Jones whether she believed the evidence which Mr Guildford, Assistant Chief Constable Mike O’Hara and West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner Simon Foster gave to the Commons Home Affairs Committee at a meeting last week.


Pro-Hamas Students Aren't the Source of Campus Antisemitism
Students who set up encampments, barricade buildings, chant "from the river to the sea," harass and threaten Jewish students, celebrate Hamas's Oct. 7 massacre, and disrupt pro-Israel events are merely the symptom, not the cause, of campus antisemitism. The real driver is institutional.

Politicized academic departments and programs are using official school platforms - courses, events and announcements - to confer academic legitimacy on hatred of Israel and harassment of its supporters. Students are the foot soldiers, but the academic departments train and deploy them.

Over the past few years, departments on more than 100 campuses have issued statements swearing fealty to the Palestinian cause, many of them explicitly endorsing anti-Zionist activism and anti-Israel boycotts. Even among the schools most popular with Jewish students, more than half hosted events, sponsored by academic departments, that featured pro-boycott speakers last year alone. The worst offenders included Harvard (44 events), Georgetown (43), Columbia (36), UC Berkeley (25), New York University (22) and the University of Chicago (22).

If you work at a university, you're likely to see a constant stream of anti-Israel vitriol from academics. At our own campus, the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), all of the 28 events that some 20 departments have sponsored since the Oct. 7 massacre featured speakers bitterly hostile to Israel. Earlier this year, UCSC's education department held a colloquium urging prospective early-childhood teachers to bring "an anti-Zionist commitment" to kindergarten classrooms.

Our campus, like so many others, has permitted scholarship to be abandoned for political campaigns, paid for with taxpayer dollars and sanctioned by institutional authority. Jewish students must endure a campus climate deeply hostile to their participation in coursework and in campus life.

A serious survey of the Israel-Palestinian conflict would be highly beneficial to everyone, but it would have to examine arguments made by both sides - that's the difference between real academic instruction and political crusading.

And it would have to look at all the relevant historical facts, not just those relied on by one side. But that isn't what students are getting; they hear only a stridently political narrative. They hear why the state of Israel is illegitimate. They hear of violence against Palestinians but not of violence against Israelis - or if they do, it's celebrated. When are campus administrators going to confront the faculty whose grossly unprofessional behavior is the real source of their antisemitism problem?
Cal State investigating professor seen coaching class to oppose antisemitism bill
A prominent professor at a public university in California coached her students on opposing a state antisemitism bill and taught them that Israeli interests had subverted the US government, a video that surfaced this week showed.

The university said it was aware and investigating.

The class, by Prof. Melina Abdullah at California State University, Los Angeles, provided a glimpse into a prominent academic’s teaching of Israel-related issues on campus and normally out of public view, amid an aggressive Trump administration crackdown on antisemitism and anti-Israel activism at universities.

Abdullah is a professor at the university’s Department of Pan-African Studies and the former chair of the department. She is a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, the lead of the movement’s Los Angeles chapter, and involved in the organization’s national leadership, according to the university website.

Cornel West, a prominent academic and social activist, selected Abdullah as his running mate for his 2024 presidential campaign.

Abdullah livestreamed the video of her class on her personal YouTube page in September. The footage identified the lecture as part of a course called “Race, Activism and Emotions.” The video went unnoticed until it was picked up by the AMCHA Initiative, a nonprofit that opposes antisemitism at US universities, and shared with The Times of Israel.
Students form human swastika on Calif. high school football field — call for ‘annihilation of Jews’ in Hitler-themed Instagram post
Eight San Jose high school students formed a human swastika on their school’s football field in a horrifying display of antisemitism that has sent shockwaves through the Silicon Valley community.

The disturbing scene was photographed and shared in a since-deleted Wednesday social media post that featured an antisemitic 1939 quote from Adolf Hitler.

“If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe,” read what appeared to be an Instagram caption.


Branham High School announced Friday that an investigation has been launched. The eight students have been identified, but their names will not be revealed due to federal law.

“Our message to the community is clear: This was a disturbing and unacceptable act of antisemitism. Actions that target, demean, or threaten Jewish students have no place on our campuses,” school principal Beth Silbergeld said in a statement to the Los Angeles Times.


EXPOSED: Foreign Press Correspondents Honor Terrorists, Award Al Jazeera Cash Grant
The Association and Club of Foreign Press Correspondents USA bestowed honors on some of America’s most distinguished journalists at its gala in Washington, DC, including veteran NBC journalist Andrea Mitchell.

Yet the same organization also chose to bestow posthumous honors on individuals later exposed as active terrorists who had worked as “journalists” for Al Jazeera, the Qatari state broadcaster and a co-sponsor of the event. The channel itself was even awarded the association’s so-called “press freedom grant.”

According to a dinner attendee, the ceremony included a moment of silence for 10 Al Jazeera reporters and media workers killed in Gaza while “covering the Palestinian conflict with Israel,” with their photos displayed at a memorial table – a disturbing imitation of the empty hostage tables used to honor Israelis kidnapped by Hamas.

During the event, Fox News chief foreign correspondent Trey Yingst used his acceptance speech to eulogize Gazan reporters. He criticized Israel for restricting independent journalistic access to Gaza while omitting a crucial fact: Hamas routinely threatens, censors, and kills journalists, while selectively protecting cooperative reporters who comply with its messaging.

Yingst praised the “fearless and tenacious Palestinian journalists in Gaza who don’t have the luxury to leave when reporting becomes too dangerous,” adding after applause: “May we not forget their sacrifice and contributions to our industry.”

Since these “contributions” went unnamed, they deserve documenting.


FIFA assigns LGBT-themed World Cup game to Iran, where homosexuality is punishable by death
There was much excitement when the draw for the 2026 World Cup fixtures was made last Friday. Co-hosted by the US, Mexico, and Canada, soccer's quadrennial showpiece is a chance for the world's best nations to come together and see who is the greatest.

Seattle was named as one of the host cities over three years ago, and the June 26 match next year, to be played in the city's stadium, was designated a "Pride" match, to kick off Pride celebrations that weekend.

FOX 13 Seattle quoted the local FIFA organizing committee, stating the match is a "rare opportunity to make a lasting impact, one that educates the world, inspires our LGBTQ+ community, and uplifts those businesses and cultural organizations." They have pride match designs, "reminding all that inclusion is Seattle’s greatest strength."

"Our city is ready, the fans are ready, and I can't wait!" Mayor-elect of Seattle Katie Wilson wrote on X, "FIFA World Cup is coming to Seattle, and we are excited to be a part of the global celebration. With matches on Juneteenth and Pride, we get to show the world that in Seattle, everyone is welcome. What an incredible honor!"

However, some interest, and possibly some concern, has arisen after the draw on Friday means the "Pride" match will be played by Egypt and Iran, two countries with less-than-admirable LGBTQ+ records.
Iran 'paid heavy price' for supporting proxies, Palestinians, ex-FM Zarif says at Doha Forum
Former Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif questioned Arab support for Palestinians and said that Iran had been unfairly vilified in the region.

Speaking at the Doha Forum in Qatar over the weekend, Zarif said, “We have paid a heavy price. Not a single shot has been fired in the past 45 years by any of our so-called proxies in order to advance our interests. They have been fighting for their own interests, and Iran has paid the price.”

“We are resentful of our Arab friends because we supported the Arab cause more than the Arabs did. And we get blamed. We supported Palestine more than any Arab country did.”

Zarif then discussed his own experience with US sanctions, saying that the only reason he was being targeted was as a result of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s request to the Americans.

Zarif has been the subject of sanctions since 2019, when he was the Islamic Republic’s foreign minister. His time in the role coincided with Iranian negotiations with the permanent members of the UN Security Council: China, France, Russia, Germany, the UK, and the US, which culminated in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in July 2015, and the lifting of economic sanctions against Iran in January 2016.

According to Zarif, Iran is being blamed for regional instability that is primarily caused by Israel: “Tell me, why do we have to be blamed for problems that are caused by Israel?”

He also framed Iran as a benefit to the region, saying, “Our friends in the region have everything to gain through cooperation with Iran.”

“We have no territorial ambitions against our friends in the region,” he said, adding that Arab governments often expressed an obsessiveness regarding Iranian territory. “They’re talking about our territory – we’re not talking about theirs.”

“We do not want access to the high seas as [former Iraqi president] Saddam Hussein wanted,” Zarif said, adding that Iran is neither seeking land acquisition nor domination over its neighbors.


Algerian nanny charged after allegedly poisoning French Jewish family’s food, drinks
An Algerian nanny is on trial for poisoning a French Jewish family with toxic household products, Le Parisien first reported on Monday.

Leïla Y., 42, worked with the couple’s three children, aged two, five, and seven, from late 2023 to January 2024.

According to the report, on January 30, the father went to the police station to report an incident. A few days earlier, his wife had drunk wine that tasted like a household product. She also claimed that her makeup remover burned her eyes, and that, the night before, a few minutes after the nanny left, she had noticed foam on a bottle of grape juice and a smell of bleach in the wine.

Aside from the family, the nanny was the only one with access to the house.

The police seized several suspicious containers and cleaning products: an all-purpose cleaning spray and a bleach-based product called WC Activ.

Then, on February 3, the five-year-old daughter told her mother that she had seen the nanny decant a soapy product into a bottle of alcohol.

A toxicology report carried out by the police found polyethylene glycol (PEG) and other chemical agents in the family’s wine, whisky, fig alcohol, grape juice, and even pasta.

PEG is used in many products, such as eye drops and cosmetics, due to its surfactant and humectant properties. These chemicals are “harmful, even corrosive, and can cause serious injuries to the digestive tract,” according to the Criminal Court Referral Order (ORTC).


Canada: Jewish seniors ‘shocked’ after mezuzahs pried off doorways
A number of mezuzahs were torn from the doorways of Jewish seniors’ homes in an apartment building in North York, Toronto, Canada on Saturday.

Toronto police’s Hate Crime Unit launched an investigation into the matter, according to CTVNews.

No leads about the culprits were communicated to the public.

Toronto City Councilor James Pasternak tweeted that the vandalism was “an act of hate directed at Jewish residents—seniors who deserve safety, stability, and dignity in their own homes. There is no excuse for targeting people because they are Jewish.”

He added: “Toronto cannot look the other way while seniors are intimidated in their hallways. We will continue working with residents, Toronto Seniors Housing, and police until safety is restored.”


National Library of Israel unveils rare 14th-Century Maimonides masterpiece
The National Library of Israel is displaying a richly illuminated 14th-century edition of Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, encompassing all areas of Jewish law, as part of additions to its permanent exhibition.

Considered the pinnacle of the Sephardic intellectual giant’s scholarship, the Mishneh Torah was written between 1170 and 1180, while the scholar lived in Egypt. The extraordinary edition now on display was first copied in Provence approximately 150 years later. It subsequently reached Spain, where the Italian artist Matteo di Ser Cambio embellished it with vivid illustrations, gold ornamentation, and decorative motifs of figures, animals, and plants.

The work by Maimonides (also known as Rambam) contains proofreading notes, corrections, and omissions that testify to centuries of study and transmission. It also bears signs of 16th-century Christian censorship, including erasures on the final page and a censor’s seal dated 1574.

Also making its public debut is a small 15th-century prayer book from Lisbon, one of the last witnesses to the liturgical traditions of Spanish and Portuguese Jewry before the expulsion. Written in block lettering and adorned with colourful and gold decorations, it offers a poignant glimpse into a vanished world.
2,000-year-old Jerusalem city wall uncovered
A section of Jerusalem’s city wall dating from the Hasmonean period more than two thousand years ago has been unearthed in the city’s Tower of David Museum, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced on Monday.

The wall was discovered during an excavation on the grounds of the museum, located just inside the Jaffa Gate of the Old City of Jerusalem, adjacent to the citadel, within the historic complex known as the Kishle, the state-run archaeological body said.

The newly uncovered section of the wall known in ancient historical sources as the “First Wall” is particularly impressive in both size and degree of preservation, being over 40 meters long and about 5 meters wide, according to excavation directors Amit Re’im and Marion Zindel.

The historian Josephus details the originally 10-meter high wall and its gates, and contended that it was “impregnable,” with 60 towers standing along its length.

“There is much more to this wall than meets the eye,” the excavation directors said. “It is clear that it was systematically destroyed and razed to the ground.”

The researchers surmise that the wall may have been dismantled by the Hasmoneans themselves, or that alternatively King Herod, in seeking to distinguish his rule from that of the Hasmonean kings, deliberately destroyed their construction projects, including their monumental city wall, as a political statement.




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