Thursday, August 27, 2026

08/26 Links Pt2: Ex-hostage who dug his own grave describes cruelty of Hamas captivity; US declares Palestine Action as terrorist group; UK police officers probed for banning Maccabi Tel Aviv soccer fans

From Ian:

Gottheimer asks House leaders to sign onto bipartisan measure decrying Jew-hatred in both parties
After antisemitic streamer Hasan Piker tried to blame Jewish supporters of Israel for worsening antisemitism, Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) called on House Republican leaders on Tuesday to allow a vote on his bipartisan resolution condemning such voices in both parties.

“Hatred is hatred. Period,” stated Gottheimer, who is Jewish. “Let’s bring the vote to the floor.”

The resolution, introduced with Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), takes aim at both Piker on the Democratic side and Candace Owens on the Republican side for their attacks on Jewish Americans.

Piker has been welcomed by Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and others from the party’s left wing. He recently warned that Jewish Americans who support a Jewish state were stirring up antisemitism themselves.

“If Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone is going to come around and take action, not against the State of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews,” he said on a Twitch stream.

Owens “actively amplifies antisemitic figures on her shows,” including guests who praised Hitler, trivialized the Holocaust or promoted “Jewish mafia” narratives, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

She was named “Antisemite of the Year” in 2024 by StopAntisemitism.

“Telling millions of followers that Jewish Americans are bringing violence on themselves is blatantly antisemitic and one of the oldest tropes in the book,” Gottheimer stated.

“This is exactly why we introduced this resolution, and there’s no excuse left for Republican leadership to keep sitting on it,” he said. “Anyone still supporting or campaigning with these personalities is complicit.”

The American Jewish Committee joined the criticism of Piker. “Blaming Jews for the antisemitism directed at them is itself antisemitism,” it said.

The ADL has estimated that Owens has 35 million followers and Piker about 11.5 million.
Study: Genocide claims on US campuses largely grew out of preexisting BDS activism
Claims of genocide against Israel that became prominent on US college campuses after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack were largely concentrated among academics and speakers who had already supported the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, according to a Wednesday report.

The report argues that academics had granted legitimacy to the BDS movement’s aim of stigmatizing Israel.

The report, by the AMCHA Initiative, a nonprofit that documents antisemitism and combats anti-Israel activism on US campuses, analyzed 278 recordings of events sponsored by academic units at US schools. Academic units included departments, centers, programs, institutes and schools.

The events took place on 51 US campuses during the 2024-2025 academic year. The study, called “When Political Advocacy Acquires Academic Authority: BDS and the Genocide Accusation on US Campuses,” selected colleges and universities that Hillel International identified as being popular with Jewish students.

Of those events, 93 featured speakers who had promoted BDS before the October 2023 Hamas invasion of Israel. Support for BDS included signing onto petitions, published writing backing BDS, social media posts and participating in boycotts.

The analysis found that events with BDS supporters were 40 times more likely to include genocide accusations — 85% of those events accused Israel of genocide, compared to 2% of events that did not involve boycott activists.

The strong correlation between prior BDS support and genocide accusations suggested that the charge was “not simply a broadly shared feature of academic discussion about Israel and Gaza,” the report said.

“Rather, its use was overwhelmingly concentrated among speakers who entered the post-October 7 period with a preexisting commitment to taking action against Israel,” the study said.
Historian’s book on Nazi World War II propaganda targeting Arab world to be republished
A prominent historian’s book about Nazi propaganda targeting the Arab world during World War II will be reissued in the spring after going out of print, the author, Jeffrey Herf, said on Monday.

Herf, an emeritus professor of history at the University of Maryland, said it was important to reissue the book, “Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World,” to better understand the current moment and to dispel misconceptions about Hamas’s ideology, which he says echoes the Nazis’

“Hamas should be understood as a fusion of Nazi ideology and Islamist ideology,” Herf told The Times of Israel. “One of the most important falsehoods about Hamas is that it is a progressive movement.”

Yale University Press first published the book in 2009.

Herf said Yale University Press had later taken the book out of print.

“It’s been very frustrating with Yale and I do not understand why they’re taking this position,” Herf said. “They’ve made ready availability of the book more difficult.”

Herf said he did not know why the university’s press had let the book lapse.

The title remains available as an e-book on the Yale University Press website, but physical copies are hard to come by. The 335-page paperback costs more than $400 on Amazon.

Yale University Press told The Times of Israel, “It was a business decision to not reissue a title from 2009, and to return the rights to Professor Herf.”

“We wish him the best of luck with his book in its newest incarnation and with his new publisher,” a spokesperson said.

Herf said he had reacquired the rights to the book himself and that ibidem Press, an academic publishing house in Germany, will republish the print version.

The publishing house confirmed the company will republish the book as a paperback, with a new foreword by Herf, in the spring of 2027.

The book will be distributed in North America by Columbia University Press and will be featured in the Spring 2027 Columbia University Press Catalog, ibidem Press told The Times of Israel.

“Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World” examines the Nazi regime’s massive outreach to Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa from 1939-1945.


‘I wake up with nightmares’: Ex-hostage who dug his own grave describes cruelty of Hamas captivity
One year ago, Evyatar David appeared in a Hamas propaganda video, weak and skeletal, gripping a shovel in a concrete tunnel and digging what he said was his own grave.

This month, the former Israeli hostage smiled as he stood at his older brother Ilai’s wedding playing guitar with his sister as the couple exchanged vows.

“They tried to ruin our [lives] and our families’ lives and eventually they didn’t manage to ruin everything,” said David. He pointed to the wedding of another hostage, Eliya Cohen, as the ultimate form of triumph over captivity. “It’s the biggest closure and a huge moment of victory,” he said.

The 25-year-old was speaking to CNN in his first international media interview since his release nearly a year ago, and as any prospect of peace remains elusive. He spoke about the starvation he endured in captivity, how music has helped him through the difficult months that have followed his release – and of his determination to ensure the world doesn’t forget what he and his fellow hostages went through.

David was 22 when he was abducted from the Nova music festival during the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel alongside his childhood friend, Guy Gilboa Dalal. Two other friends in their group were killed in the attack. David and Gilboa-Dalal were taken to Gaza, where they spent most of their underground captivity together.

David was among the last 20 living Israeli hostages in Gaza, released on October 13, 2025, after 738 days in captivity as part of the US-brokered ceasefire deal.

In the months after his return, David largely avoided public appearances and focused on his rehabilitation. Last month, ahead of his first interview with Israeli TV, he revealed on social media that he is struggling with PTSD and other psychological effects.

“It can surprise me any time, one hour I can be fine and happy, and next I can remember something from captivity, and get flashbacks. I wake up at night with nightmares, and it affects me all day after that. It’s very unstable and random,” he told CNN.

David described what he calls “extreme starvation” during his captivity, which worsened in the months before the August 2025 video was filmed.

“The starvation – beyond the lack of food and physical feeling that you’re always hungry – is the mental feeling that you have nothing to eat, and you don’t know if you will have food in one hour, tomorrow, two days, you have no idea what is going to happen and maybe you are going to die from starvation,” he said. The deep hunger caused stress and conflict even between hostages, he added.


United States announces financial sanctions on Palestine Action as a terrorist group
The United States government has announced that it is levelling economic sanctions on Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation following on from the UK’s proscription of the group last June, with the US Treasury Secretary saying that “political terrorism has no place in our society”.

In a statement on Wednesday, the US Department of the Treasury confirmed that Palestine Action would be designated pursuant to Executive Order 13224, which freezes all property and bank accounts belonging to the group, prevents US citizens and businesses from conducting any business with it, and can result in stiff penalties for any foreign financial institutions which aid it.

In the announcement, the US Treasury department described Palestine Action as having “supported numerous acts of terrorism since July 2020, including acts that have physically injured UK law enforcement personnel, as well as acts intended to intimidate lawful commercial enterprises and coerce the UK Government.

“The group’s actions include multiple high-profile instances of breaking into defence infrastructure and British military installations, and causing millions of dollars’ worth of damage to military equipment. Palestine Action has promoted its violent, criminal, and terrorist acts on social media, encouraging the use of similar tactics internationally, including within the United States and along the U.S.-Mexican border.”

Established in mid-2020, Palestine Action became infamous for targeting branches of Israeli defence companies operating in the UK, but extended its activities to target a wide range of businesses – from international banks to local companies – that it described as having aided Israel. Last summer, its activists filmed themselves infiltrating the UK’s largest RAF base, Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, and damaging military aircraft. Soon afterwards, Yvette Cooper, then the Home Secretary, proscribed Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation. Since then, the group has fought a series of legal battles against the proscription, with the Supreme Court due to hear the case later this year.

The US described its announcement of sanctions on the group as “complement[ing] the UK’s proscription. Palestine Action is being designated pursuant to E.O. 13224, as amended, for having materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support for, or goods and services to or in support of, an act of terrorism.”

At the same time, the US government imposed sanctions on an Italian group, Autistici Inventati, and Masar Badil, described as a front for Samidoun, which is itself a front for the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine).


Powerful Hollywood execs accuse Mark Ruffalo of antisemitism in Paramount attack
A Hollywood industry group that includes producers Haim Saban, Lawrence Bender, Teddy Schwarzman and others released a statement on Tuesday accusing actor Mark Ruffalo of using “antisemitic tropes” in recent criticism of the Paramount bid for Warner Bros. Discovery.

The statement came from a group calling itself The Brigade, which describes itself as “a group of nearly 1,000 members, friends, and allies of the Jewish community who are proud to be working in film, television, music, Broadway, social and digital, and other platforms in and around the entertainment industry.”

The Brigade condemned what they said was Ruffalo’s use of antisemitic tropes and narratives in an Instagram post last week in which he accused father-and-son moguls David and Larry Ellison of “powering some of the most destructive and inhuman forces in the world.”

In the actor’s August 21 post on Instagram, where he has 20 million followers, Ruffalo posted a past clip of Paramount board member Safra Catz, former CEO of Oracle, discussing “really profoundly scary technologies” that Larry Ellison’s Oracle used to assist the Israeli military following the October 7, 2023, Hamas terror attack on Israel, when 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage to Gaza.

Ruffalo referred to Larry Ellison as a “classic Oligarch” in his post, and warned of danger he said was posed by Ellison’s son, Paramount CEO David Ellison, who is bidding to combine Paramount with Warner Bros. Discovery.

The actor has opposed the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger over concerns about Hollywood jobs. He has also long condemned Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank. Mark Ruffalo attends HBO’s “Task” premiere at Perelman Performing Arts Center on September 04, 2025, in New York City. (Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images North America/AFP)

In reference to the Catz clip, Ruffalo told his followers to “look how she revels in what we now have come to see as a genocide, which was built on an apartheid system of oppression powered by Oracle.”

Software-maker Oracle has long supplied products to the Israel Defense Forces. The head of its sales division, Shmulik Hauser, told the Ynet news site in 2025 that “supporting Israel is in our DNA – even if it costs us clients. That’s our agenda.” Oracle Israel, a subsidiary of the parent company, has two locations, in Petah Tikva and Beersheba.
Marvel stars join campaign to free Barghouti, but ignore his victims
It extends no such courtesy to the five people Marwan Barghouti was convicted of murdering.

An Israeli court did not take the state’s word for this. In May 2004, a three-judge panel in Tel Aviv heard the evidence and convicted Barghouti on five counts of murder, arising from three attacks: the June 2001 shooting of a Greek Orthodox monk, Tsibouktsakis Germanus, on the Jerusalem–Ma’aleh Adumim highway; the January 2002 shooting of Yoela Chen in Givat Ze’ev; and the March 2002 grenade-and-gun attack on the Seafood Market restaurant in Tel Aviv, which killed Eli Dahan, Yosef Habi, and Salim Barakat, and wounded 25 more.

The same panel acquitted him of 21 further murder counts across 33 other attacks – not for lack of guilt in the campaign’s telling, but for lack of evidence tying him personally to the trigger. The court still found he led the organization, al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, that carried out the broader campaign.

Salim Barakat is worth sitting with for a moment, because his name complicates the “Palestinian versus Israeli” framing the campaign leans on. He was an Arab Israeli, killed alongside two Jewish patrons at a restaurant table.

The Free Marwan campaign’s own biography page, by outside accounts of it, presents Barghouti as a “husband and father” and “nation builder” and simply does not mention what a court found him responsible for. That’s not a simplification. It’s a redaction, and every celebrity who signs the letter without independently checking the verdict is co-signing the redaction, whether they know it or not.

Ignorance, or something worse
I don’t think most of the names on that list are antisemites. I think most of them are people accustomed to lending their fame to causes vetted by someone else’s staff, and this cause arrived pre-packaged with a Nelson Mandela comparison that made due diligence feel unnecessary. Robben Island photo ops. Desmond Tutu quotes recycled from a 2013 campaign launch. The emotional architecture does the thinking, so the signatory doesn’t have to.

That is a real distinction from malice, and it is also not much of a defense. A five-minute search – the Washington Post’s contemporaneous trial coverage, the court’s own findings, the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s public accounting – would have surfaced the same five names I’ve just listed.

Cumberbatch and Ruffalo did not have to dig. They had to decline to look away. A smaller number of repeat organizers behind these campaigns know the record cold and use the Mandela framing anyway, because they’ve calculated, correctly so far, that it works better than the truth.

Whose grief doesn’t trend
My daughter Alisa was murdered by Palestine Islamic Jihad in April 1995, on a bus near Kfar Darom. I have spent 30 years arguing, in this space and elsewhere, that the men who plan and order these attacks do not stop being murderers because a peace process needs them released, or because a campaign needs them mythologized. I am not going to pretend Alisa’s case is uniquely illustrative here. It isn’t the case at issue. Barghouti was never charged in her killing.

What her case and Salim Barakat’s and Yoela Chen’s and Eli Dahan’s and Yosef Habi’s and the murdered monk Germanus’s cases share is simpler and, I’d argue, more damning for the campaign: none of them get to sign anything. They don’t get an Instagram post. They don’t get their profession listed under their name. The asymmetry is the whole story – a campaign that trades in the currency of famous names, built around the erasure of the five names a court of law took the trouble to establish beyond reasonable doubt.

Nelson Mandela was never convicted of ordering the murder of a restaurant patron. The comparison was always doing more work than the facts could bear. It is doing that work again this week, with better production values and a Marvel logo.


Irishman, 60s, arrested after telling Jewish woman he would ‘put a bullet’ in her head in France & faces 5yrs in prison
AN Irishman was facing up to five years in prison in France tonight after being arrested for allegedly telling a Jewish woman that he would “put a bullet” in her head.

The man – who is in his 60s but who cannot be named for legal reasons – is also accused of making anti-Semitic comments referring to Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust.

He was in custody in the Marseille area of southern France on Wednesday after being identified in a graphic video involving two Australian tourists.

It was shot in the area around Avignon earlier this month, and was circulated globally by the alleged victims.

Public expressions of anti-Semitic hatred can be punished in France with up to five years in prison and fines reaching €45,000.

In the footage, a woman accuses the man of having said: “I’m sorry Hitler didn’t finish the job.”

This is a direct reference to the wartime Holocaust, when millions of Jews were massacred by the Nazis.

While there is no film of the man saying the words, he is clearly heard to say: “You get the f*** away, before I put a f***ing bullet in your head.”

Announcing the suspect’s arrest on Wednesday evening, French Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said: “Kudos to the gendarmes for their investigation following the anti-Semitic threats and remarks made against tourists this summer.”

Mr Nunez added: “Anti-Semitism must be fought firmly and relentlessly.”

A French government spokesman said the Australian couple were “violently confronted in a French supermarket by an Irish national,” who “allegedly made serious antisemitic remarks before issuing death threats.”


UK police officers probed for banning Maccabi Tel Aviv soccer fans from 2025 match
A former British regional police chief and three other officers are being investigated for misconduct over a decision to ban fans of Israel’s Maccabi Tel Aviv soccer team from attending a game last year, the UK’s independent police watchdog said on Wednesday.

The probe follows reports earlier this year that the ban was based on inaccurate intelligence and may have resulted from bias. The chief constable of West Midlands Police Craig Guildford resigned in the wake of those allegations.

On Wednesday, the Independent Office for Police Conduct said it was now investigating Guildford and a staff member for gross misconduct, and three other officers for lesser misconduct offenses.

“We have examined a wealth of material, hundreds of pieces of evidence, and believe there is an indication some people serving with the police may potentially have behaved in a manner that could justify disciplinary proceedings,” IOPC Director of Engagement Derrick Campbell said in a statement.

The West Midlands police force, which covers Birmingham in central England and is one of Britain’s biggest, had recommended that the Israeli fans not be allowed to attend a Europa League match against Aston Villa last November because of security concerns.


Why everything you’re told about Israel is a lie | Roy K Altman on The Brendan O’Neill Show
Roy K Altman – US district judge and author of Israel on Trial – is the latest guest on The Brendan O’Neill Show. Roy and Brendan discuss why the Gaza war is not a ‘genocide’, why there is no ‘apartheid’ in Israel, and why Israelis are not ‘colonisers’.

0:00 – Cold open: 'six main claims' about Israel, all false
1:01 – Introducing Judge Roy Altman and Israel on Trial
2:09 – Why Altman wrote the book after 7 October
7:21 – Claim 1: 'settler colonialism' and the castle-doctrine analogy
13:07 – Defining colonialism: rocks in the ground, words on the page, blood in the veins
19:00 – The 'white coloniser' myth and the Goebbels 'big lie'
27:03 – Claim 2: is Israel 'apartheid'?
33:56 – Israel's Arab Muslim citizens in the courts, parliament and universities
37:28 – Claim 3: the genocide accusation
41:01 – Kill ratios and the case against genocide
44:02 – Alice Nderitu: fired for telling the truth at the UN




HonestReporting: Campus Protest or KGB Psy-Op? Izabella Tabarovsky Reveals The Force Behind Today's Anti-Zionism
In 2018, Izabella Tabarovsky walked past a protest on an American university campus and recognized the signs. Not the sentiment, the actual sentences. She called her father and read them out. His answer: we've heard all of this before.

So she went looking for a paper trail, and found one in the archives of the National Library of Israel. The Soviet Union didn't merely dislike Israel. It assigned the problem to research institutes and told them to build a scientific-sounding case against Zionism. What they produced looks like scholarship: footnotes, endnotes, citations to Hannah Arendt and to Theodor Herzl. Tabarovsky checked those citations one at a time and realized they're fake — real quotes were turned to mean the opposite of what they meant.

The scholarship was never the point, it was the costume.

From there the trail runs out of Moscow into a UN resolution, into Mahmoud Abbas's Soviet dissertation, and into an American Communist Party book that a successor organization quietly serialized "for our young readers" one month after October 7th.

Ben Chertoff talks with her about where the vocabulary came from, why it outlived the state that built it, why the far-right hears it perfectly for what it is, and what a nineteen-year-old is actually supposed to do about it now.

Izabella Tabarovsky is a fellow with the Z3 Institute for Jewish Priorities, a fellow at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and the Comper Center at the University of Haifa, and a contributing writer at Tablet.

📕 Her book — Be a Refusenik: A Jewish Student's Survival Guide, foreword by Natan Sharansky:

Chapters:
00:00 Cold Open & Introducing Izabella Tabarovsky
03:15 Siberia: a Jewish childhood with the Judaism removed
07:10 Double think and how antisemitism presented in the USSR
17:34 Not an echo — the actual propaganda, still running
25:32 Zionology, and the footnotes that turned out to be fake
31:23 Mahmoud Abbas's Soviet dissertation
35:35 Making Jews into Nazis, the secular devil
40:38 1967: The war that changed everything in Moscow
49:23 How it reached America — and the book reprinted after October 7
1:09:28 Why Marxist-Leninist socialism produces antisemitism
1:12:41 David Duke, Ilhan Omar, and the red-brown handshake
1:26:54 Be a Refusenik — what the refuseniks actually did
1:34:35 Closing thoughts




EXCLUSIVE: Multiple Abdul El-Sayed Donors Also Gave Thousands to Hitler-Praising, Jew-Hating Dan Bilzerian's Congressional Run
More than a dozen donors to the Hitler-praising, neo-Nazi congressional campaign of Dan Bilzerian have also contributed to Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed—in many cases spreading thousands of dollars between the two candidates, the Washington Free Beacon found.

Bilzerian, a far-right social media influencer with a trust fund, and El-Sayed, a far-left epidemiologist, have no policy overlap except strong opposition to AIPAC and Israel, but their donors include a man who has equated Zionism to Nazism and a Texas subprime auto loan entrepreneur who also threw his weight behind Israel-bashing Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie.

The overlapping donor list suggests that El-Sayed's virulently anti-Israel rhetoric appeals to the kind of Muslim-American donors who also buy into Bilzerian's hateful Jew-baiting and offensive trolling.

The most significant Bilzerian and El-Sayed donor is Ibrahim Awad, who has given more than $19,500 between both candidates, Federal Election Commission records show. That haul included a $12,651.88 jumbo gift to the Bilzerian Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee. The figure is above the legal limit and potentially a campaign finance violation if passed along to Bilzerian's campaign committee.

Awad is a Georgia-based personal injury attorney—with a mixed record.

"I don't think he cares about anything but being paid. I actually ran into the judge in the street, and he told me I had poor representation and that was the only reason I lost my case!" one aggrieved former client on a Yelp review.

The Palestinian cause is also central to Awad's worldview. He is the cofounder of Palistory, an anti-Israel nonprofit, and in YouTube videos has boasted about his cooperation with the terrorist-aligned Council on American-Islamic Relations.

"Zionism is Nazism. And history will remember every single person who calls themselves a 'Proud Zionist' as a Proud Racist, Genocide Enabler," Awad said in an X post from March 2025.

The Texas subprime auto loan entrepreneur Hussein "Sam" Mahrouq is also a donor to both the El-Sayed and Bilzerian campaigns. Mahrouq has ponied up more than $150,000 to support anti-Israel candidates around the country. Other beneficiaries of his cash have included Reps. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.), and Summer Lee (D., Pa.), as well as former Rep. Cori Bush (D., Mo.).
Soros-Funded Fake News Site Falsely Identified Abdul El-Sayed as 'Veteran' in Mailer Sent to Michigan Voters
A left-wing dark money network funded by the Democratic megadonor George Soros sent voters in Michigan unsolicited mailers resembling a newspaper that falsely identified Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed as a "veteran."

The mailer, from the Michigan Independent—part of a national left-wing organization founded by the Democratic operative David Brock, the American Independent—is designed to look like a nonpartisan local newspaper. Partisan content aimed at propping up Democrats is peppered amid recipes for "Blueberry Streusel Coffee Cake" from "The Mitten Kitchen." The partisan content includes a piece on El-Sayed's primary win headlined, "El-Sayed — veteran, doctor, and former health official — is Democratic Senate pick." El-Sayed has never served in the military, and while he attended medical school and has described himself as a "physician," he has never been licensed to practice medicine, Politico reported.

The mailer is the latest example of Brock's outfit attempting to influence elections through misleading mailers masquerading as news. In 2021, the "Virginia Edition" of the American Independent sent unsolicited mailers to voters falsely claiming that then-Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin called COVID relief "unnecessary," the Washington Free Beacon reported. The following year, in 2022, the group's state arms in Pennsylvania and Arizona ran paid Facebook ads pushing articles like "Arizona Republicans out of touch with constituents on abortion rights."


Hugh Hewitt: Just how bad was Abdul El-Sayed’s interview with Jesse Waters? Byron York joined Hugh to discuss

Hugh Hewitt: Matt on Hasan Piker’s malevolent presence in American politics and El-Sayed’s collapsing campaign



Minnesota college offers ‘Palestine’ course covering ‘ongoing genocide’ in Gaza
Macalester College, a private liberal arts college in Saint Paul, Minn., is offering a sociology course in the upcoming fall semester called “Palestine.” with central topics of discussion including on Israel’s “continued territorial expansion” and the “ongoing genocide of Palestinians.”

According to the college, the course, listed as a three-hour evening class taught by sociology professor Khaldoun Samman, covers “the history of the conflict from the rise of Zionism and resistance to it, including both Palestinian resistance and the contemporary voices of dissenting American Jews.”

“Students will learn and apply concepts such as biopolitics, necropolitics and more, in the context of Israel’s historical and contemporary policies, and will analyze the United States’ regional role,” the course description states. It is approved to meet the school’s Internationalism requirement.

The course says students will use primary and secondary sources to assess policy strategies, regional power dynamics and the historical forces shaping the region. The required reading list includes three books, among them How to Sell a Genocide by Adam Johnson and Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal by Mohammed El-Kurd.

Students Supporting Israel, which is calling on the college to cancel the course, stated that El-Kurd’s book “argues that focus on condemning Hamas and rising antisemitism distracts from Israeli violence and portrays accusations of antisemitism as a tool used by Israel and Zionists to silence Palestinians.”

According to the Anti-Defamation League, El-Kurd “justified” the Hamas-led attack against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and “mocked” the Israeli hostages taken that day. He has also stated that “Zionism is genocidal,” per the ADL.

SSI also pointed to Macalester’s handling of a 2024 student divestment campaign proposed by the Mac for Palestine student group, saying the college had “drawn a line before.” The Board of Trustees unanimously rejected the proposal in November 2024, instead approving “a series of institutional investments in peacemaking and conflict resolution.”


Newspaper apologises for allegation that JK Rowling ‘engaged in Holocaust denial’
A newspaper has apologised for an article which included the accusation that JK Rowling “engaged in Holocaust denial”, saying that the allegation was “wrong” and had been removed from the piece.

In a story published on Monday evening, The Metro described changes in the cast for a new Harry Potter TV series, and talked about accusations of transphobia levelled at the best-selling author of the wizarding books. The piece then included, as a statement of fact, that Rowling had engaged in Holocaust denial. The claim was present in the online story for more than 18 hours, until, after it began to be widely noted on social media, the article was updated to remove the reference.

In 2024, Rowling responded to claims on Twitter regarding the treatment of transgender people by the Nazis; subsequently, an employee of the far-left Novara Media site responded by accused Rowling of Holocaust denial. That employee later made a public apology, describing her allegation as “false and offensive”. Subsequently, however, hundred of anonymous social media accounts hostile to Rowling repeated the accusation.

In comments at the time directly addressing the falsehood, Rowling said:
“While I’m used to the gross distraction techniques used by the more extreme faction of trans activism, the claim that I am a Holocaust denier is baseless and disgusting,” Rowling said.

“I have always been a staunch supporter of the Jewish community and have spoken out consistently and repeatedly against antisemitism.”

She went on to say that: “I’m familiar with such activists’ assertions that transgender people have been uniquely persecuted and oppressed throughout history, but claims that trans people were ‘the first targets’ of the Nazis – a claim I refuted on X, and which led to these accusations – and that I ‘uphold [Nazi] ideology around gender’ is a new low.”


Man who attacked Jerusalem nun acquitted due to mental illness, hospitalized for up to six years
The Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court acquitted Yona Simcha Schreiber on Wednesday over his attack on a Christian nun near King David’s Tomb on grounds of mental illness, ordered him to be hospitalized for up to six years.

Judge Ophir Tischler found that the evidence established that Schreiber did commit the acts described in the indictment, but he accepted the district psychiatrist’s conclusion that Schreiber was psychotic at the time and could neither understand the nature of his actions nor stop himself from carrying them out.

The ruling means that Shreiber cannot be held criminally responsible for the attack because of his mental condition at the time.

He had been charged with assault causing actual bodily harm motivated by hostility toward a religious group, as well as common assault. On April 28, he pushed a nun to the ground, then returned and kicked her, and finally assaulted a passerby who tried to intervene.

Acquitted by reason of insanity
The district psychiatrist diagnosed Schreiber with schizophrenia, finding that he had been psychotic for many years and lacked insight into his illness.

There was no conclusive evidence that specific psychotic thoughts directly caused the attack, the psychiatrist said. He nevertheless concluded that Schreiber’s illness directly influenced his actions and that, at the time, Schreiber could not understand what he was doing or refrain from doing it.

The psychiatrist recommended inpatient treatment, a position the prosecution ultimately accepted after requesting additional clarifications.

Under the court order, Schreiber’s hospitalization, dated from August 24, may continue for a maximum of six years, corresponding to the maximum penalty attached to the most serious offense in the case.


Antisemitic vandals target Dolly Parton's Wikipedia page just hours after her death
Dolly Parton's Wikipedia page was allegedly targeted by vandals with antisemitic content and offensive modifications within an hour of the public announcement of her death at age 80 on Tuesday.

As millions around the world mourned the loss of the legendary cultural icon, social media users shared screenshots of modifications to her profile.

The alterations included replacing her profile photo with an image of a Nazi swastika, changing her name to “Jew lover,” and altering her display title to reference Adam Lanza, the perpetrator of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, that claimed the lives of 20 children and six adult staff members.

One screenshot shared on X/Twitter captured a Google search result listing her Wikipedia page title as “Dolly Parton – Adam Lanza was a hero.” The edits were quickly identified and reversed using Wikipedia’s revision history safeguards, restoring the page to its proper state.


Nazi salute directed at Mount Scopus students at zoo
A student from another school made a Nazi salute at Mount Scopus Memorial College students during a Year 11 excursion to Werribee Open Range Zoo on Tuesday.

The incident happened during a safari bus tour of the site at the end of the day, after the students had completed the main part of the excursion.

“What’s been reported to us is a student from another school had seen students from Mount Scopus in uniform, and proceeded to make a Nazi salute to our students,” Mount Scopus principal Dan Sztrajt told The AJN.

Sztrajt said staff were in a difficult position because the group was on a moving bus.

“It wasn’t as though we could physically remove our students from where this happened, but our staff acted very quickly to remove our students as best as they could,” he said.

Staff spoke with the students involved, provided support and reported the incident to both the other school and the zoo. Sztrajt said he expected to speak with the other school later that day. The college has also been in contact with the parents of the students directly involved.

“At the moment, we’re still going through an investigative process and trying to ascertain exactly what happened, who was involved, how it all happened and how we can support those students that were involved,” he said.
Israel’s ‘new hope’ for spinal injuries
The “holy grail” of orthopaedic research — helping paralysed patients with spinal injuries to walk again — may have come a step closer, thanks to scientists at Tel Aviv University (TAU) and the biotech company Matricelf.

New technology developed by Matricelf, the Loewenstein Rehabilitation Medical Centre and the Sagol Centre for Regenerative Medicine at TAU will enable “the world’s first implantation of an engineered spinal cord in a paralysed patient.”

The Loewenstein team is looking at selecting suitable patients for the treatment, and collecting blood samples for the production of personalised neural implants. This is a significant step toward implementing Matricelf’s technology in humans, to test its effectiveness in enabling paraplegics to walk again. Ultimately, the aim is to implant an engineered spinal cord in a patient.

Matricelf estimates that if everything progresses as planned, it will be possible to complete the process and begin treatment of a selected patient in the first half of 2027.

The scientific breakthrough is based on a revolutionary organ-engineering technology developed at TAU by Professor Tal Dvir of the Sagol Centre for Regenerative Biotechnology, who also serves as Matricelf’s chief scientist.

A personalised neural implant is produced from the patient’s own cells and tissues — a kind of biological “spare part” for replacing the damaged tissue — and then implanted in the area of the spinal cord injury. By using the patient’s own cells and tissues the researchers intend to reduce the risk of implant rejection and improve its integration into the body.

Loewenstein Rehabilitation Medical Centre, one of the world’s leading centres for the rehabilitation of people with spinal cord injuries, is responsible for the collaboration’s clinical aspects, including the identification and evaluation of patients and supporting them throughout the process.





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