From Ian:
The entitlement and intolerance of the campus Gaza camps
Thankfully, some students are bravely challenging the protesters. One third-year Cambridge student held an Israeli flag aloft just across the road from those blocking Peter Thiel’s talk.
But what about those in charge of our universities? When students behave like toddlers, refusing food, demanding hot-water bottles and yelling ‘genocide’, where are the adults? Far from condemning the actions of the students, over 300 members of staff at Oxford University have signed an open letter in support of the protesters. It describes their camp in grandiose terms as ‘a public-facing global education project’. One signatory is Vernal Scott, Oxford’s head of equality and diversity. Last month, Scott made headlines after he publicly praised the Belgian authorities for trying to close down the National Conservatism Conference in Brussels. This support for free speech sounds hollow when it comes from those only interested in hearing views they endorse.
When a high-profile senior manager and hundreds of academics take a public stance on an issue, their view risks becoming, by default, the institutional position. It is only a small step away from saying ‘The university thinks…’. When it is clear what ‘the university thinks’, then academic freedom is rendered meaningless. Anyone who thinks differently knows they are putting their neck on the line if they challenge the consensus. At universities, where the Transgender Pride flag is flown from buildings, toilets are gender-neutral and staff training is provided by activist groups such as Gendered Intelligence, gender-critical feminists know they may technically have academic freedom, but also that expressing gender-critical views will come at a high price.
Earlier today, university leaders went to Downing Street to meet with the UK prime minister to discuss how to balance supporting free speech while preventing harassment of Jewish students. Good. But the fact that this meeting was even necessary shows that many university managers need reminding not just that academic freedom is important, but also what it actually entails.
Academic freedom demands tolerance. It calls on us to allow viewpoints we disagree with to be heard and to use our intellectual muscles to challenge ideas we find offensive. However, academic freedom does not give protesters the right to shout down or silence other people, physically bar people from buildings or intimidate students into staying away from campus. Defending academic freedom means stopping students from engaging in these activities.
Academic freedom also means students and scholars have the right to question every intellectual, moral and political orthodoxy. For this reason, adopting an institutional position on an issue is not an expression of academic freedom, but rather a means of restricting it.
In a university that truly values academic freedom, students should have the right to protest. But this is a limited right. It stops when other people’s freedom of speech, freedom of movement and right to disengage from politics and pursue scholarship are curtailed. It is good that Rishi Sunak is meeting vice-chancellors. But there is much further to go if we are to truly defend academic freedom.
South Africa asks World Court to order Israel to withdraw from Rafah
South Africa has asked the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to order Israel to withdraw from Rafah as part of additional emergency measures over the war in Gaza, the UN’s top court said on Friday.
In the ongoing case brought by South Africa, which accuses Israel of acts of genocide against Palestinians, the World Court in January ordered Israel to refrain from any acts that could fall under the Genocide Convention and to ensure its troops commit no genocidal acts against Palestinians.
Israel did not immediately respond to requests for comment. It has previously said it is acting in accordance with international law in Gaza, has called South Africa’s genocide case baseless, and accused Pretoria of acting as “the legal arm of Hamas.”
In filings published on Friday, South Africa is seeking additional emergency measures in light of the ongoing military action in Rafah, which it calls the “last refuge” for Palestinians in Gaza. Israel says the operation in the southern city is crucial to defeating the remaining Hamas battalions holding out there.
South Africa asked the court to order that Israel cease the Rafah offensive and allow unimpeded access to Gaza for UN officials, organizations providing humanitarian aid, and journalists and investigators.
According to South Africa, Israel’s military operation is killing the Palestinians of Gaza while at the same time starving them by denying them humanitarian aid to enter.
“Those who have survived so far are facing imminent death now, and an order from the Court is needed to ensure their survival,” South Africa’s filing said.
Prominent legal blog: Anti-IHRA statement from 1,000 Jewish professors ‘bizarre, ultimately dishonest’
A statement signed by more than 1,000 Jewish professors denouncing the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)’s working definition of antisemitism for “conflating antisemitism with legitimate criticism of Israel” is “bizarre and ultimately dishonest,” David Bernstein wrote on the popular legal blog The Volokh Conspiracy.
Bernstein, a university professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School and executive director of its Liberty and Law Center, wrote that much of the opposition to the Antisemitism Awareness Act over its codification of the IHRA definition “has been hysterical and counterfactual.”
“If one had hoped an academic letter would be more reality-based, one would be disappointed,” he wrote.
The 1,000-plus faculty members say that the IHRA definition considers criticism of Israel to be necessarily antisemitic.
“The IHRA definition of antisemitism, however, never says that criticism of Israel, etc., is ‘in and of itself’ antisemitic. Indeed, it specifically says ‘criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic,’” Bernstein writes.
“Not only have Jewish critics of Israel, indeed Jews who don’t think Israel should exist, not been silenced, it seems like they never shut up,” he added. “The latter group is a tiny fringe of the Jewish community, but they appear disproportionately in both mainstream and social media.”
Bernstein added that he expects “very little from the academy these days,” so he’s not surprised to see so many signatories of “this (at best) hyperbolic letter.”
“I am at least a little disappointed to see some prominent law professors on the list,” he added. “But maybe I should reduce my expectations of the legal academy, too.”
From Ian:
Douglas Murray:
Biden betrays Israel for the feeling of a few clueless college students
What a difference a day makes.
On Tuesday President Biden was speaking at the Holocaust Memorial Museum commemoration at the Capitol in Washington.
There he drew a direct comparison between the events of the Holocaust and the attacks on Israel of October 7th.
That is not my comparison. It was President Biden’s. Talking about the phrase “Never Again” he said:
“Here we are not 75 years later but just seven and a half months later, and people are already forgetting. They’re already forgetting that Hamas unleashed this terror. It was Hamas who brutalized Israelis. It was Hamas who took and continues to hold hostages. I have not forgotten, nor have you. And we will not forget.”
As I say, what a difference a day makes.
Within hours the same President who uttered those words was attempting to prevent Israel’s victory in Gaza. By withholding arms shipments to Israel Biden made it clear that he does not want Israel to achieve its military objectives in the final battle of Rafah.
Opponents of the war have briefed for months about the need for a pause or a ceasefire. But there has been an effective pause for months as Israel has waited for this push into Hamas’s final stronghold.
It is believed that Rafah is the place where the remaining Israeli hostages are being held, and the place where Yahya Sinwar — the mastermind of the October 7th attacks — is hiding.
Most likely surrounded by “the best” hostages — which to his sick mind would include the remaining child captives.
“Never again” indeed.
If the Israeli army does not destroy Hamas in Rafah then the war is effectively for nothing, and all the pain and grief on all sides might as well not have occurred.
As I have said before, there is no point in putting out 80% of a fire. Until the Israeli army can clear Hamas out of Rafah the fire of Gaza is not out.
But Biden seems to be bowing to pressure from some of his own base. As someone joked a few months back, Biden does indeed want to focus on a two-state solution, but the two states are Minnesota and Michigan.
He is desperate to chase the few tens of thousands of voters who might turn on him because they care about Hamas more than they care about America.
Bret Stephans:
President Biden Just Made His Biggest Blunder
The munitions cutoff helps Hamas.
The tragedy in Gaza is fundamentally the result of Hamas’s decisions: to start the war in the most brutal way possible; to fight it behind and beneath civilians; to attack the border crossings through which humanitarian aid is delivered; and to hold on cruelly to Israel’s 132 remaining hostages, living or dead. Whatever else the arms cutoff might accomplish when it comes to Israel, it is both a propaganda coup and a tactical victory for Hamas that validates its decision to treat its own people as human shields. And it emboldens Hamas to continue playing for time — especially in the hostage negotiations — with the idea that the longer it holds out, the likelier it is to survive.
It doesn’t end the war. It prolongs it.
No Israeli government, even one led by someone more moderate than Benjamin Netanyahu, is going to leave Gaza with Hamas still in control of any part of the territory. If the Biden administration has ideas about how to do that without dislodging it from Rafah, we have yet to hear of them.
That means that, one way or the other, Israel is going in, if not with bombs — and the administration is also considering barring precision-guidance kits — then with far-less accurate 120-millimeter tank shells and 5.56-millimeter bullets. Other than putting Israeli troops at greater risk, does the Biden administration really think the toll for Palestinians will be less after weeks or months of house-to-house combat?
It diminishes Israel’s deterrent power and is a recipe for a wider war.
One of the reasons Israel isn’t yet fighting a full-blown war to its north is that Hezbollah has so far been deterred from a full-scale attack, not least from fears of having its arsenal of an estimated 150,000 rockets and missiles decimated by the Israeli Air Force. But what if the Lebanese terrorist group looks at reports of Israeli munitions’ shortages and decides that now would be an opportune time to strike?
If that were to happen, the loss of civilian life in Tel Aviv, Haifa and other Israeli cities could be immense. Biden would have no choice but to authorize a massive airlift of munitions to Israel — reversing this week’s decision. And the United States might have to even more directly support Israel militarily.
Jake Wallis Simons:
The West is proving that Islamist terrorism works
What would be the worst foreign policy message imaginable? There are many contenders, but the frontrunner has to be simply that “terrorism works”. Once this lesson has been learnt, the door will be open to years of violence against us. It’s called appeasement, and history has taught us where it leads.
If you, like me, are concerned by the rise of Islamist extremism around the world, the danger it poses to Jewish communities everywhere, and the way it threatens both the firmness of liberal values and our national security, the inconstancy of Western support for Israel in its mission to destroy Hamas – including here in Britain – should fill you with dread.
Most voters want our country to stand up for democracy, not capitulate to the terrorist forces rising to menace it in the most brutal manner imaginable. Why can’t our leaders express without equivocation that backing Israel in its fight to destroy Hamas completely was, and is, the right thing to do? Why do they stay silent, giving succour to our enemies.
Instead, seven months on from October 7, Western politicians seem intent on pursuing what Ronald Reagan called the “utopian solution of peace without victory”. As he put it during the Cold War: “They call their policy ‘accommodation’ and they say if we only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he’ll forget his evil ways and learn to love us.” Of course, the opposite is true.
From Ian:
Melanie Phillips:
Amichai Chikli’s rescue remedy
The current pandemic of vicious antisemitism targeting both Israel and Diaspora Jews has prompted many to wonder what can be done to tackle a deranged prejudice that is frighteningly out of control.
It has also prompted many to wonder yet again why Israel is so ineffective at putting its case across.
I raised this a few days ago with Israel’s Minister of Diaspora Affairs Amichai Chikli. A combative member of the Likud Party, Chikli has socially conservative views that have caused Diaspora hackles to rise. This reaction is myopic. His thinking is sharp, coherent and insightful.
What did he make of the antisemitism and incitement in the anti-Israel encampments on campuses in America and Britain and at the massive street demonstrations over the Gaza war?
While acknowledging the involvement of the hard-left and several revolutionary anti-West and pro-Palestinian funders, Chikli stressed the role played by Islamic radicals.
Unlike Muslims who don’t have imperialist aspirations, Islamists treat Islam as a political movement whose aim is to impose Islamic rule across the world. This is the philosophy of the Muslim Brotherhood, which developed in the early decades of the last century and in the late 1980s spawned Hamas.
For Chikli, this is the link not just between Gaza and the demonstrations and encampments but with the progressive Islamization of the West.
The Brotherhood, he said, is a diffused, decentralized movement. It’s not controlled by one body. It operates through mosques, community centers, charities and welfare services. Its subversive agenda is therefore difficult to pin down. But it certainly exists.
Documents from Israel’s civil command of Gaza in the late 1980s, said Chikli, observed that the greatest threat came from these Brotherhood groups, but they were small and difficult to erase because they were spreading throughout society. Today, the Brotherhood links Gaza to Minnesota and Michigan, London and Leeds.
We learn this, said Chikli, from their identical language, ideology and texts. The spiritual guru of Hamas, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, was based in Qatar, which today remains Hamas’s patron and funder. It was Qaradawi who said Muslims don’t need to fight to dominate Europe because Sharia law would come to dominate British society in any case.
Seth Mandel:
The Post-Biden Flood Is Already Here
It’s true that Biden is the last Democrat of his kind and therefore this moment always seemed close at hand. But every political battle that Biden won against his party had a measurable effect on the power balance between the radicals and the moderates. To abandon that fight is to surrender to the barbarians at the gate, ensuring the post-Biden transition is not only imminent and irreversible (in the near term, at least) but chaotic, authoritarian, and baldly anti-Semitic.
Even if you believe the battle to be all but lost you still go down fighting. The alternative is to live as a cog or a figurehead without honor. Exhaustion is not a crime. But surrender is a choice.
One of the few beliefs shared across the partisan divide is this: après Biden, le deluge. After Biden, the radicals prophesied and the moderates feared, comes the flood. It is both bitterly appropriate and bone-chilling that this moment would come at a time when the “flood” metaphor is the animating call-to-arms of America’s domestic extremists.
Al-Aqsa Flood was the name of the pogrom that started all this, when Hamas murdered and raped and tortured its way through more than a thousand innocents, including children and the elderly, and then took hundreds hostage.
It was this barbarism that lit a fire under progressive and Islamist demonstrators in the West. Left-wing protest culture had never been so inspired as it was when witnessing the most depraved human behavior possible. Cosplaying trust-fund radicals got high from seeing civilization at its low. The post-October 7 protest movement that sprang forth from hell named itself after the Hamas operation: “Flood [x] For Gaza” became the template for the months of protests, in major cities and across college campuses, in celebration of the Hamas attacks. The conscious decision to name themselves after a campaign of child murder and sexual torture was the first but by no means the last indication that what we were seeing was not an antiwar movement but the wildfire spread of homegrown extremism.
And this is who Biden has surrendered his policy to. The argument in Biden’s favor was always that as long as he was in office, at least, he could stem the tide. But now the difference between Biden being president and some other Democrat being president is negligible. We are, functionally, after Biden. And the flood is here.
Bret Stephens:
A Thank-You Note to the Campus Protesters
Dear anti-Israel campus protesters: Supporters of Israel like me have reasons to give thanks to militant anti-Zionists like you, who demonized anyone who supports Israel's right to exist - which includes a vast majority of Jews - as modern-day Nazis?
For every student who became ardently pro-Palestinian during the protests, another one, perhaps a Jewish student with previously indifferent feelings about Israel, finally saw the connection between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. For every professor who lent support, you've lost a fair-minded liberal with your Maoist-style sloganeering and your arrogant disdain for the genuine fears of some of your Jewish peers.
And for every commencement ceremony whose cancellation you've effectively forced, or which you intend to spoil, thousands of apolitical students have taken an intense and permanent distaste to you and everything you stand for. In short, the game you're playing is paying bigger dividends for my side than it is for yours.
I am a Zionist for the most personal of reasons: because I see Israel as an insurance policy for every Jewish family, including mine, which has endured persecution and exile in the past and understands that we may not be safe forever in our host countries. That kind of insurance is one Jews can't afford to lose. What happened on Oct. 8 - the moment your protests began - gave me a glimpse into what America might yet become for Jews if people like you were to gain real power.
I get that many if not most of you see yourselves as dedicated idealists who want to end suffering for Palestinians. There are ways you could do that without making common cause with people who hate Jews, want to kill us and often do. You are my daily reminder of what my Zionism is for, about and against.
From Ian:
Douglas Murray:
I witnessed Israel choosing life as it fights against a 'death cult'
Adapted from Douglas Murray‘s speech Monday as The Post columnist accepted the Manhattan Institute’s Alexander Hamilton Award.
I think, finally, of the extraordinary evening in November last year.
I was at the Schneider Children’s Hospital when the helicopters came returning the first hostages, the first children who Hamas had stolen from their homes in the south.
But when the helicopters emerged in the night sky, the people of Tel Aviv realized what was happening, and every car stopped.
And I noticed there was applause from the citizens, the Tel Avivians, and then there was singing, all the way through the streets of Tel Aviv.
They were singing “Haveynu shalom aleichem”: We brought you peace.
Now there’s millions of stories like this across Israel.
The country rings with them, it resounds with them.
The thing is, perhaps it does require life to become serious again.
Perhaps the students that we see at these destroyed universities, perhaps they just need a dose of reality someday.
I always pray that that day never comes to them because it’ll be the biggest wake-up call anyone has ever had.
But all I would say is that any country should be so lucky as to have a young generation like that in Israel.
They were weighed in the balance since October the 7th, and they’ve been found to be magnificent.
What Israel has been up against is not just a people of death, but a cult of death, a cult, which wishes to annihilate an entire race, and which after dealing with that race has made very clear what it wants to do with Christians, everyone in Britain, everyone in America.
I want to dedicate my acceptance of this award to the people of Israel who in the face of death, choose life.
John Podhoretz:
Biden’s Shameful Betrayal
Joe Biden deserves nothing but condemnation, censure, and withering contempt for his announcement tonight that he will withhold significant amounts of the recently approved aid to Israel should the government begin a full-on siege of the last Hamas redoubt in, around, and under Rafah.
For seven months now, I have defended Joe Biden. On our podcast and on this website, I have repeatedly said that while the president may have felt—wrongly, in my view—that he needed to maintain some rhetorical space from Israel because of the imagined need to keep young people and Arab-Americans in his electoral camp, the actual policies and support he was offering and providing the Jewish state were consistent and solid. For months, for example, he pushed for a significant aid package even as he criticized tactics and strategies employed by the IDF to fight in Gaza. And he supplied important logistical support to protect Israel—first by deploying ships to the Lebanese coast to deter Hezbollah and then in the air campaign that rendered the direct Iranian attack all but harmless.
That was then, this is now. That aid package he fought for? He’s now blocking much of it himself—and is promising to do worse in days to come. That support for Israel? He is now pursuing policies that are designed to keep Hamas alive. This long-time friend of Israel? At an incredibly critical moment, he is giving Barack Obama a run for his money as a singularly destructive American “ally.” We’re told the decision to act this way came last week but that Biden wanted to keep it quiet until he delivered his speech commemorating the Holocaust.
That disgraceful and two-faced effort to earn emotional plaudits from speaking strongly about the greatest historical tragedy of the Jewish people even as he was working to cripple the Jewish state suggests Biden possesses a level of chutzpah that would make even the man who kills his parents and then throws himself on the mercy of the court for being an orphan say “Now you’ve gone too far.”
WSJ Editorial:
Biden Withholds Bombs to Spare Hamas in Rafah
The Biden Administration confirmed this week it is blocking the delivery of weapons to its main ally in the Middle East.
The message from the White House is that Israel shouldn't have large bombs or small bombs, dumb bombs or smart bombs, and let it do without tank shells and artillery shells too.
Now isn't a good time to send the weapons, you see, because Israel would use them.
U.S. officials explain that the goal of the embargo is to prevent a wider Israeli attack on the Hamas stronghold of Rafah, home to Hamas leaders, hostages and four military battalions.
If Israel can't complete its invasion of Rafah, Hamas wins.
No matter how fiercely the President trumpets his "ironclad" support for Israel, his denial of weapons now puts the Jewish state in danger.
Israel is at war, assaulted on multiple fronts. Denying it U.S. arms is an invitation to its enemies to take advantage, in hostage talks and on the battlefield.
It hasn't been four weeks since Iran attacked Israel directly, in the largest drone attack in history, plus 150 ballistic and cruise missiles, while Hizbullah fires dozens of rockets each day, depopulating the north of Israel for seven months and counting.
Israel needs to be ready now, and its enemies need to know the U.S. stands behind it. That's why Congress approved military aid to Israel in April, 79-18 in the Senate and 366-58 in the House.
From Ian:
Seth Mandel:
Biden’s Missed Opportunity
President Biden spoke late this morning at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on anti-Semitism, and while he missed the opportunity to deliver a still-needed rebuke to his own party, Biden did manage to avoid repeating the two biggest mistakes he’s made on this issue: the false equivalence and the “legitimate grievance” trap.
Last month, for example, he demonstrated both blunders in the same answer to a question about the anti-Semitic protesters at various U.S. college campuses: “I condemn the anti-semitic protests… I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.”
There, in one breath, the president gave equivalent condemnation of those committing anti-Jewish violence and those who lack sufficient empathy for the violent anti-Semitic protesters. Underlying it all is the idea that the protesters have a legitimate grievance with their victims.
It was the closest the president has come to his own “there are very fine people on both sides” moment.
Fact is, Jews are being openly harassed in the U.S. as retribution for something the protesters are falsely accusing the state of Israel of doing thousands of miles away. That’s it—that’s the whole scene. There is, in other words, no possible justification for the actions of these pro-Hamas extremists. There is no “both sides.”
Similarly, we all know exactly what Gaza has to do with the guy who threw a bottle at a Jewish man’s head at the Columbia gates and told him to “go back to Poland”: Nothing at all.
The examples go on for days, but the point is clear: Anti-Semitic violence as a response to the war in Gaza is indefensible on any level. Linking the two as some sort of cause-effect equation is nothing less than making anti-Semites’ arguments for them.
The Times centers Palestinians in coverage of Biden's Holocaust speech
However, why would Dawber expect the US president, in a speech commemorating the systematic murder of six million Jews by the Nazis, mention Palestinians?
There are many ways to read this, but, given the context, as well as having covered the journalist’s writing over the years, it seems to be a way of legitimising the odious canard that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza. It also reflects a broader media pattern of centering Palestinians in articles about antisemitism, such as when reports on efforts to promote the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism includes complaints that IHRA will ‘silence’ Palestinian voices. This is particularly absurd narrative given that Palestinians are, based on polling, among most antisemitic people on the globe.
But, in the context of the war, the Times journalist’s framing also likely represents an effort to pushback at Biden’s correct assessment that, on Oct, 7, the Palestinian terror group which runs Gaza carried out the most lethal and barbaric (trigger warning) antisemitic atrocity since the Holocaust.
In fact, Biden’s speech included the observation that “That [ancient antisemitic] hatred was brought to life on October 7th in 2023. On a sacred Jewish holiday, the terrorist group Hamas unleashed the deadliest day of the Jewish people since the Holocaust.” The president also said that “Too many people denying, downplaying, rationalizing, ignoring the horrors of the Holocaust and October 7th, including Hamas’s appalling use of sexual violence to torture and terrorize Jews.”
Dawber’s insistence on downplaying antisemitism is also evident in a sentence further into the article:
Victor Davis Hanson:
The End of Old Left-wing Mythologies
The current radical and often violent protests on mostly blue-state, supposedly elite campuses have exposed in toxic fashion what the left has become. And yet, in a paradoxical fashion, the campus insanity has offered the nation some moral clarity.
What’s surprising is not that the demonstrators are violent and nihilist, but that they are, on the one hand, so openly and crudely anti-Semitic, racist, and anti-American, and yet on the other hand, so passive-aggressive, narcissistic, and weepy.
Nevertheless, the antics of the campus cry-bullies have exploded myths that were for so long foisted on the American people by politicos and the media.
#1. Anti-Israel/Anti-Semitic: We have been lectured ad nauseam that hating Israel has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. The last month has blown up that old shibboleth for good. The left makes no distinction in their eliminationist chants between Israel and Jews. “Go back to Poland” is a homonym for “From the River to the Sea.” Both are shorthand for eliminating Jews—aside from the explicit threats to kill Jews and occasional praise for Hitler and the Final Solution.
When pro-Hamas thugs chase Jews into libraries, block their entrances on campus, and scream “beat the Jew” as they hit piñatas, they do not first ask Jews whether they support Israel—because they could care less. For the Islamist Middle Easterner on a student visa or green card and his useful American student, it is enough that their targets are Jewish—period.
Remember, the protests started on October 7, not on October 27, when the IDF went into Gaza. At that point, campus and street protests merely changed from euphoric triumphalism on the news that Hamas had slaughtered, decapitated, mutilated, raped, or kidnapped hundreds of Jews (“exhilarated,” a Cornell professor gushed of the carnage), to furor and violence. So after three weeks of celebrating dead Jews, the street protests grew furious only when the IDF finally began fighting back and destroying Hamas, even as its terrorists cowardly hid beneath mosques, hospitals, and schools to ensure enough collateral damage to incite pro-Hamas Western throngs.
#2. Pro-Palestinian/Pro-Hamas: The left also blew up the ancient pretense that being “pro-Palestine” was not “pro-Hamas.” But the campus and street demonstrations now make no distinction between the two. The calls for the destruction of Israel and “death to America” come right out of the Hamas credo. Hamas (and Hezbollah as well) logos and flags are easy to find among the protestors. Interviews with the protesters repeatedly reveal massive support for Hamas, to the extent of staging lessons in hand-to-hand combat.
Polls in the Middle East still show strong Gazan support for their one-election/one-time Hamas autocracy. Apparently, any anger that Gazans bear toward Hamas for destroying the peace on October 7, wrecking their state, and getting civilians killed by using them as human shields is outweighed by the plus side on their ledger of the murder of 1200 Jewish civilians. In other words, the campus protests promote the fascistic, terrorist Hamas clique because of, not despite, its murder of Jewish civilians.
David Collier:
BBC (fake) News – written by terrorists – the proof
This exclusive shows without doubt that the BBC puts out blatant fake news reports, and it also proves that the sources they rely upon for news include Al Jazeera, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad!
Hamas propaganda – the mass graves of Nasser Hospital
As part of the move south, the Israeli forces began to close in on the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis. In mid-January fighting between Israel and the terrorist factions became intense in the *vicinity* of the hospital. Hamas propaganda channels were reporting dozens of casualties by January 22. On the same day, Palestinians began burying the bodies (almost certainly mostly dead terrorists) in the grounds of the hospital:
Videos were released showing them ‘burying their martyrs’. A week later, on the 27th & 28th January – along with undated evidence presented in additional footage – we are told by Hamas channels that more bodies were buried in the grounds of the Nasser Complex. One Hamas (QNN) post claimed an additional 150 bodies were buried (January 27th).
Therefore, Hamas claimed that in the last weeks of January 2024, over 200 bodies were buried by Palestinians in the courtyard of Nasser Medical Complex. Most of them almost certainly dead terrorists.
The creation and spread of fake news
On the evening of April 20th (close to midnight Gaza time), Hamas propaganda channels (eg QNN) began reporting on a mass grave being found on the grounds of Nasser hospital in Gaza. By the morning, hundreds of bodies were reported to have been found.
At 10:07am (Gaza time) on April 21st Al Jazeera English spread the story around the globe. By 17:30, Al Jazeera was reporting that at least 180 bodies had been found. Al Jazeera showed footage of Palestinians digging up the bodies, and claimed that Israeli forces carried out the massacre.
Hamas was now blaming Israel for mass graves which they themselves had reported were dug in January by Palestinians following a battle between Israeli forces and Hamas!
Amateur, blatant, stupid
The fake news story being promoted by Hamas was obvious from the start. Al Jazeera picked it up because it is a Hamas mouthpiece. But to any decent journalist or reporter, the attempt was amateurish, blatant and stupid. All anyone had to do was compare images between the January and April incidents.
From Ian:
Sinister Hamas deal would let it keep most hostages, win the war, inflame the West Bank
On Tuesday night, more than a day after Hamas claimed to have approved what it said was the Egyptian and Qatari mediators’ proposal “regarding a ceasefire agreement,” the US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller finally declared publicly, “That is not what they did.”
Rather, said Miller, “They responded with amendments or a counterproposal.” The US, he said, was “working through the details of that now.”
In fact, close examination of the Hamas document, as issued (Arabic) by the terror group itself, shows that far from containing “amendments” or a remotely viable counterproposal, it is constructed with incendiary sophistication to ensure that Hamas survives the war and regains control over the entire Gaza Strip. (Quotations from the Hamas text in this piece are from a translation by the Qatari-owned Al Jazeera website.)
But that’s far from all.
It is also calculated to ensure that Hamas secures further key, immensely far-reaching goals without having to meet the prime Israeli requirement for a deal: the release of all the hostages. In fact, Hamas can abrogate the deal, with all of its key goals achieved and then some, while continuing to hold almost all of the hostages.
Among those goals is one of the most central Hamas objectives since it invaded Israel on October 7 — seeing its declared war of destruction against the Jewish state expand to the West Bank. By extension, the terms of the document are also designed to destroy US President Joe Biden’s grand vision of Saudi normalization and a wider Middle East coalition against Iran.
A stream of ominous changes
Much has been made of the fact that, whereas Israel has repeatedly insisted it will not end the war as a condition for the release of the hostages, Hamas, in the opening paragraphs of its own sinister alternate proposal, specifies that one “aim” of the deal is “a return to a sustainable calm that leads to a permanent ceasefire.” But relatively speaking, that’s splitting hairs: The proposal conveyed by the mediators to Hamas late last month, and described by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken as an “extraordinarily generous” Israeli offer, reportedly provides for an “arrangement to restore sustainable calm” — which sounds like a near-euphemism for a permanent ceasefire.
Much has correctly been made of the fact, however, that, in the Hamas document, Israel is to cease military operations in the first six-week stage of the three-stage deal, in which 33 hostages are to be freed, and that the IDF must “withdraw completely” from Gaza and a “permanent cessation of military operations” must take effect before any more hostages are freed in the second stage.
Less widely appreciated is that the Hamas proposal states that, in the first stage, “internally displaced people in Gaza shall return to their areas of residence” and that “all residents of Gaza shall be allowed freedom of movement in all parts of the Strip,” with all Israeli “aviation (military and reconnaissance)” in Gaza to cease for much of each day.
Combined with a partial withdrawal of IDF troops as further specified for this first stage, the effect of these demands would be to enable Hamas’s gunmen and officials to retake control of the entire Gaza Strip. The Hamas proposal does use the word “unarmed” in one clause to describe the displaced persons who would be allowed to return to their areas of residence, but the accompanying demands and provisions mean that Israel would have no right and no means under the proposal to impose any such limitation.
Even more significant, and largely unrecognized, however, is the radical reconfiguration in the Hamas document of the terms and process for the release of Israeli hostages.
Many of the relatives of the 128 Israelis still held in Gaza since October 7, alive and dead, have pleaded, desperately and understandably, for a deal at any or almost any price, including an end to the war, in return for the release of all, most, or even many of the hostages.
But the Hamas proposal is structured to enable it to release very few of the hostages in return not only for an end to the IDF’s campaign in Gaza and its survival and resumption of full control there, but also for a planned surge in support for Hamas in the West Bank, the further neutering of the Palestinian Authority, and the potential major escalation of violence against Israel in and from the West Bank.
How so?
Gadi Taub:
The Gantz Megillah
In the eyes of the Biden administration Hamas is the smaller problem. The bigger problem is Benjamin Netanyahu. The U.S. is willing to live with Iran’s proxies everywhere, as part of its “regional integration” policy—i.e., appeasing Iran. But they are unwilling to live with Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition. The stubborn Netanyahu clearly does not want to learn from his would-be tutors like U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken how to “share the neighborhood” with genocidaires in Gaza, Judea and Samaria, Lebanon, and Tehran, whom his electorate understands to be bent on murdering them.
If the Netanyahu problem is too big to contain, then it follows that it must be solved. And it seems that the Biden administration has zeroed in on what Tony Badran has called a Herodian solution: finding a local proxy who will impose the U.S. agenda on a reluctant Israeli electorate.
King Herod the Great won his throne because the Roman Empire stepped in and helped him defeat his Israelite adversaries. The American empire wants to help install Benny Gantz as Israel’s next prime minister for the same reason: The plan is for the administration to help him defeat Netanyahu, then for him to assemble a dovish coalition that will return Israel to the two-state track negotiations—which, though unlikely to produce two states, would nevertheless help “de-escalate” in Gaza, the last hot spot in the region where Iran’s power is actually challenged.
Since the whole Democratic Party’s Middle East policy is at stake, the pressure on Israel has been relentless. Never before has an American administration worked so systematically to undermine Israeli democracy and sovereignty, an effort that is especially shocking in the context of an existential war for survival following a heinous, large-scale terrorist murder spree. Wars provide opportunities, and it seems clear that the opportunity that the Biden administration saw in the Oct. 7 attacks had less to do with ensuring Israel’s security than it did with stifling any remaining resistance to Washington’s pro-Iran regional integration policy.
The U.S. is holding Israel on a leash by rationing the American-made ammunition on which the war effort depends; it has forced us to supply our enemies with “humanitarian aid” which Hamas controls and which sustains its ability to fight; the U.S. is building a port to subvert our control of the flow of goods into Gaza; it refrained from vetoing an anti-Israel decision at the U.N. Security Council at the end of March; it leaked its intention to recognize a Palestinian state unilaterally; it allowed Iran to attack us directly with a barrage of over 300 rockets and drones without paying any price whatsoever; and then told us that Israel’s successful defense against that strike (which was mostly stopped by a combination of superior Israeli tech and faulty Iranian missiles that crashed all over the Middle East, and to some extent by U.S. interceptors) should be considered “victory”; it consistently protects Hezbollah from a full-fledged Israeli attack; it did all it can to prevent the ground invasion of Rafah, which is necessary for winning the war; it is trying to stop the war with a hostage deal that would ensure Hamas’ survival.
The U.S. is not protecting Israel from the kangaroo courts in The Hague which now threaten to issue arrest warrants against Netanyahu and others. Instead, it is goosing those warrants, in part by itself threatening to impose sanctions on a unit of the IDF, thus subverting the chain of command and pressuring IDF units to comply with American demands rather than with orders from their superiors. At one point, Secretary of State Blinken outrageously asked for a one-on-one meeting with IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi (he was refused), treating the commander of Israel’s armed forces as if he was answerable to a delegate of a foreign power.
Meanwhile, the entire Democratic Party apparatus from Joe Biden on down has continued directly attacking Netanyahu in the harshest, most personal and demeaning terms, publicly proclaiming their contempt for Israel’s wartime leader. Biden called Israel’s elected prime minister “a bad fucking guy,” while Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer went so far as to explain to Israelis they made the wrong choice in their elections. Senior Democratic Congressman Jerrold Nadler went Schumer one step better, proclaiming Netanyahu to be the worst Jewish leader in “2,000 years”—i.e., in the period since Herod.
Jonathan Tobin:
Biden’s double game on Hamas should fool no one
Preserving Hamas in Rafah
But once the IDF had backed Hamas into the last enclave it held in Gaza, Biden stopped talking out of both sides of his mouth and made it clear that he opposed Israel going into Rafah and destroying the last operational Hamas military forces that had retreated there.
He’s gone to great lengths and expense to support humanitarian aid for civilians in Hamas-held portions of the Strip and blamed Israel for interrupting the flow of supplies there, including the building of a U.S. floating harbor to assist in the distribution of food and fuel. That has happened even though it’s long been obvious that if there is any real privation there, it is solely because Hamas is stealing the aid that arrives and reserving it for its own use.
Just as troubling, he’s put the full force of American influence behind an effort to broker a ceasefire deal with Hamas that will essentially hand the terror group a victory in the war it started.
The terms of the proposed deals that Washington has backed are appalling. They call for the release of some hostages, but only a percentage of those Hamas is still holding under who knows what horrible conditions. And the pressure that Washington has exerted on Netanyahu to take a deal on virtually any terms and conditions—along with the way it has coordinated this with Hamas’s ally, Qatar—has given the terrorists all the leverage. That’s why Hamas continues to turn down even the most lopsided of agreements; its leaders are convinced that Biden will not let them be defeated. That means they think they can hold out for a deal that will end the war and return the situation to the pre-Oct. 7 status quo in Gaza and still not give up all the hostages, let alone be held accountable for mass murder.
Even when it comes to the surge in antisemitism in the United States, the gap between Biden’s Holocaust speech rhetoric and the reality of his policies grows wider every day. He may have chided the pro-Hamas protests for their violence, rule-breaking and antisemitism. But the only people trying to hold the universities accountable are his Republican opponents. There is no sign that the administration is willing to take any action to withhold funds from these schools.
Moreover, even though the protesters won’t forgive him for his pro-Israel statements and have labeled him “genocide Joe,” Biden has refused to break with openly antisemitic members of his party like Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). Just as telling was his administration’s invitation to the anti-Zionist IfNotNow group that has spread antisemitic blood libels to a meeting about antisemitism and its inclusion of the pro-Hamas Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) among those who were allowed to give input on an antisemitism initiative that was nothing but virtue-signaling anyway.
Actions speak louder
So, while Biden’s Holocaust speech soothed the feelings of American Jews who are reeling from an unprecedented spike in antisemitism, especially at educational institutions where Jews have thought they were welcome, his actions speak much louder than those words.
An administration that is using every tactic it can think of to prevent Israel from eliminating Hamas can’t claim that it has not forgotten Oct. 7. Stopping Israel from going into Rafah isn’t about saving Palestinian lives; Hamas is all too happy to sacrifice as many of its people as necessary if that advances their goal of isolating and smearing Israel. It’s about an effort to convince American leftists and Hamas supporters that Biden isn’t as pro-Israel as he sometimes wants to pretend to be.
Having allegedly run for president in 2020 because of his supposed concerns about the hate on display from neo-Nazis at the August 2017 “Unite the Right” neo-Nazi march in
Charlottesville, Va., he is now trying to hold onto office by intermittently appeasing left-wing antisemites and undermining Netanyahu’s efforts to prevent Hamas from committing more atrocities on Israeli soil. The only calculus to judge Biden’s touting of the Holocaust or Oct. 7—or to determine if he truly cares about preserving Israel’s security—is whether he will let Hamas be destroyed. If not, all of his rhetoric about those subjects is nothing more than hypocrisy and hot air.
From Ian:
Melanie Phillips:
A Holocaust remembrance day like no other
Israel and the Jewish diaspora are not only traumatised by this mass disdain for Jewish life and wholesale adoption of psychotic lies about Israel. They are also astonished by Britain’s suicidal refusal to join up the dots.
They can’t understand why Britain can’t see the direct connection between the Islamists’ aim to destroy and colonise Israel and their aim to destroy and colonise Britain (and America). They are shocked that the British authorities believe seven months of weekly hate-marches screaming “globalise the intifada” and for the destruction of Israel, and which have terrorised British Jews, constitute the legitimate expression of “free speech”. They are astounded that Britain has done nothing to prevent the emergence of a Muslim bloc that now threatens to upend British politics by religious sectarianism.
Israel and its supporters view such a bloc as innately and irredeemably anti-Jew and anti-west; they note the remarks made by some of these people and their supporters that they are now well on course to Islamise Britain; they are amazed at the near-omerta in Britain over this sectarian voting and bigotry against Israel and the Jews; they are appalled that political leaders are not only doing nothing to challenge this but are actively fanning the flames by regurgitating Hamas propaganda lies about Israel; and they observe that anyone expressing concern about any of this is dismissed as the “Islamophobic” fringe.
Isolated by the west; with rockets still flying from Gaza and Lebanon, with Israelis continuing to be attacked and with tens of thousands of them still displaced and unable to return safely to their border homes; with the dread knowledge that the toll of young conscripts falling in Gaza is bound to rise along with anti-Israel global hysteria as the IDF go into Rafah; with the threat of an American weapons embargo and lawfare in international tribunals aimed at the destruction of the Jewish state hanging over Israel’s head; with Iran sprinting towards building its genocide bomb; with our hearts permanently in our mouths but our spirit unbowed, those of us in Israel nevertheless feel it’s safer — and such a privilege — to be a Jew here rather than in Britain at this pivotal moment in Jewish destiny.
Columbia Custodian Trapped by ‘Angry Mob’ Speaks Out
It’s the viral image that captured the clash between the anti-Israel protesters who stormed Columbia and the campus workers who tried to stop them. As the mob invaded Hamilton Hall in the early hours of April 30, a facilities worker was photographed pushing a demonstrator against a wall.
Later, it emerged that the protester was a 40-year-old trust fund kid named James Carlson, who owns a townhouse in Brooklyn worth $2.3 million. The man who tried to hold him back was Mario Torres, 45, who has worked at Columbia—where the average janitor makes less than $19 an hour—for five years.
Now, in an exclusive interview with The Free Press, Mario Torres describes the experience of being on duty as protesters stormed the building in the early hours of the morning, breaking glass and barricading the entrances. “We don’t expect to go to work and get swarmed by an angry mob with rope and duct tape and masks and gloves,” he said.
“They came from both sides of the staircases. They came through the elevators and they were just rushing. It was just like, they had a plan.” Mario said protesters with zip ties, duct tape, and masks “just multiplied and multiplied.”
At one point, he remembers “looking up and I noticed the cameras are covered.” It made him think: “This was definitely planned.”
Torres was trying to “protect the building” when he ended up in an altercation with Carlson: “He had a Columbia hoodie on, and I managed to rip that hoodie off of him and expose his face.” (Carlson was later charged with five felonies, including burglary and reckless endangerment.) “I was freaking out. At that point, I’m thinking about my family. How was I gonna get out? Through the window?”
Torres has not been to campus since the incident. He says he does not feel safe. “When it comes to the public safety, the workers’ safety, people don’t feel comfortable walking through a mob to punch in to get into campus. That’s crazy,” he said.
He added that he’s worried Columbia might take disciplinary action against him for speaking out. He worries about losing a job he loves. He worries about supporting his young family.
“Is Columbia going to retaliate and find a reason to fire me? Is someone going to come after me? So I’m taking a big risk doing this, but I think that they failed. They failed us. And I think that’s the bigger story. They failed us. They should have done more to protect us, and they didn’t.”
Transit union honcho to sue Columbia alleging mistreatment of staffers in building takeover
A prominent transit union leader plans to sue Columbia University over alleged mistreatment of school staffers during a building seizure last week — the latest labor group to wade into the debate surrounding campus unrest.
John Samuelsen, international president of the Transport Workers Union — which represents 155,000 workers across the airline, transit, railroad, universities, utilities and service sectors — castigated Columbia President Minouche Shafik for waiting too long to authorize the NYPD to clear out Hamilton Hall after demonstrators occupied it last Tuesday night.
“It’s on them to protect their workforce and they didn’t do it,” Samuelsen told POLITICO. He called dissidents’ behavior toward staffers working at the time of the takeover, including two custodians and a security officer, “an outrageous affront to working people.”
One of the union’s local branches represents 725 workers at Columbia, including custodians, security officers and electricians.
Officials should have known the building was a target given its history as the site of an occupation by students advocating for racial justice in the 1960s, he charged.
“We’re exploiting every legal means at our disposal against Columbia, against the individual occupiers of the building … [who] thought that they could hold our custodians hostage to their ideology,” he added.
Yisrael Medad:
The anti-Jewish collegiate revolution
We are facing, I would suggest, a situation in which could be said that never have so many university students been not only on the wrong side of history but on the most immoral side as well. That is true at least since 1933 at Oxford, when 428 students against 275 voted in favor of the resolution, which Winston Churchill termed “that abject, squalid, shameless avowal” not to fight for king and country “under no circumstances.”
Any fair observation of the happenings across campuses this past month in the United States would not be wrong to characterize them as aggressive, threatening, menacing, occasionally out-right violent, foul-mouthed, damaging and very anti-Jewish.
Even a correspondent for The New York Times, Katherine Rosman, could not avoid writing on April 26 that the “issue at the core of the conflict rippling across campuses nationwide [is] the tension between pro-Palestinian activism and antisemitism.” Three days later, she highlighted how it works when three Jewish students approached a tent village at Columbia University and the cry went up: “We have Zionists who have entered the camp.”
At the University of California, Los Angeles, a campus journalist was prevented from walking about. A Jewish female student there was beaten and required medical attention and an older man was attacked and threatened. One Christian, supporting Israel at the University of Pennsylvania by holding the blue-and-white flag, was “ghettoized,” having a chalk circle drawn around him (at 0:54 on a CNN video). At Stanford, a protester dressed up as a Hamas suicide-bomber. This violence—actual and implied—and more probably led to the ugly scenes the night afterwards. But the atmosphere of violence was initiated by the pro-Palestine proponents.
This has led to a situation whereby students have termed as “conditionally Jewish” those Jews who are barely acceptable in polite society on campuses, as Tessa Veksler explained to Mandana Dayani. There’s a scale now for being Jewish, and it has nothing to do with Judaism as a religion or ethnicity. Rather, it has to do with the degree of revolutionary value—specifically on behalf of the ideology, Palestinianism—that seeks to eliminate both Jewish national identity and as many Jews as possible.
From Ian:
NYPost Editorial:
Biden betrays Israel with Hamas ‘deal’ that wasn’t
Joe Biden betrayed Israel last night.
Hamas announced with great fanfare that it had accepted a ceasefire proposal. There were celebrations in Gaza, and the White House said it was “reviewing” the deal.
Except: The Israelis knew nothing about it.
The supposed agreement wasn’t even on the table. Hamas had changed the terms of a previous treaty to one more favorable to the terror group. To take just one horrific alteration: Rather than turn over hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, Hamas would surrender dead bodies of the hostages it had killed.
That Hamas would try to pull this ruse, with the help of negotiators in Egypt and Qatar, is typical. It wants to pretend that Israel was the one “rejecting” a ceasefire it never knew about. Anti-Israel protesters in the US and a compliant media would eat it up, and they did.
But there’s a shameful twist. Axios reports that the US was aware of the Hamas deal but did not brief Israeli officials.
“Two Israeli officials said the feeling is that ‘Israel got played’ by the U.S. and the mediators who drafted ‘a new deal’ and weren’t transparent about it,” the outlet says.
Just as those same officials are willing to give Iran everything and more for the terrible nuclear deal, so Biden would bend over backwards for Hamas if only it will placate the Israel-haters on his left.
But this is beyond the pale. To push through an agreement without Israel’s input? To let Hamas, which attacked Israel, killed, raped and took hostages, dictate the terms? The US is siding with terrorists!
Seth Frantzman:
'The Godfather' in Gaza: What a mafia movie tells us about Hamas war
Again, it’s worth going back to that scene in The Godfather when the heads of the mafia families meet and Don Corleone finally realizes that it was “Barzini all along” who had been behind this war. The war that Hamas launched on October 7 was not just launched by Hamas in Gaza. This is evident from the fact that the Hamas leadership in Doha was not surprised by the attack. They didn’t run and make frantic phone calls to their hosts, saying, “We didn’t do this; we had no idea.” Their hosts didn’t call their allies in the West and say, “Hamas has betrayed us; we hosted them but they have carried out this terrible attack.” In fact, if you go back to October 7, there is no evidence that anyone linked to Hamas was surprised by this attack. Moscow didn’t make frantic calls. Tehran didn’t. Ankara didn’t.
Back on October 6, Israel was being sold a story that portrayed Hamas as “deterred.” Back on October 6, Israel was being sold a story that portrayed Hamas as “deterred.” After October 7, we are told that it is almost impossible to defeat Hamas because of how strong it is, and that defeating most of its 24 battalions is enough of a “win” in Gaza. The two narratives don’t make sense. If Hamas was deterred and incapable of doing much damage to Israel, then how is it also so powerful that it is almost impossible to defeat? And, if Hamas was actually known to be very powerful, with 24 battalions of fighters – 30,000 terrorists – then why was the border left almost undefended against a genocidal terrorist group?
Clearly, the answer to that question is that Israel trusted Hamas because Hamas was filtered through a kind of Don Barzini character. After Hamas lied about being deterred and carried out a huge massacre, it continued to rely on its hosts and backers abroad during the war on Israel. For instance, Israel was told in December to transition to a lower intensity war in Gaza. In February, Israel was told it should do a ceasefire for Ramadan. Then Israel was told to postpone a Rafah offensive. At each stage, Hamas got the breathing space it needed and was able to Shanghai the hostage talks. We now understand that Israel was likely deceived throughout the entire process using a strategy of bait and switch. The macabre talks have been prolonged by Hamas, which continues to refuse to hand over a list of living hostages. Hamas has said that it wants to release one hostage for each day of a ceasefire so that it can parade them to get applause in the region.
It now wants up to a weeklong ceasefire for each hostage. Hamas’s goal and the goal of its backers is to use the hostage deal as an end to the war in order to take over the West Bank in the long run.
It’s now fair to say that it was Barzini all along. The powers that stand behind Hamas and have been influencing this war from the start, in order to keep Hamas in power in Gaza and bring it to power in the West Bank, are Barzini.
24 States Urge Congress To Permanently End Funding for ‘Anti-Semitic’ UNRWA
A coalition of 24 state attorneys general are calling on Congress to permanently end all American funding to the United Nations’ chief Palestinian aid group, citing its anti-Semitic bias and links to the Hamas terror group.
Led by Iowa attorney general Brenna Bird and South Carolina’s Alan Wilson, the state officials want Congress to enact a permanent ban on American funding to the United Nations' Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), saying that lawmakers must step forward to "stop funding anti-Semitic education efforts run by the United Nations body tied to terror organization Hamas," according to a copy of the letter sent Tuesday to congressional leaders and obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
"Not one more dollar should go to fund this organization so long as it is committed to spreading anti-Semitism—much less an organization 10% of which had links to foreign terror organization Hamas," the attorneys general write, citing information indicating that UNRWA employees participated in Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror rampage through Israel. The letter follows similar calls from outside advocacy groups, as well as efforts by Republican lawmakers to permanently freeze UNRWA’s funding as a result of its ties to Hamas.
The letter signals a growing appetite on the state level to hold UNRWA accountable for its history of promoting anti-Semitic educational materials and allowing Hamas to overrun its facilities in the Gaza Strip. Earlier this week, Israel struck a Hamas command center located in an UNRWA facility, one of several that have been discovered over the course of the seven-month war. At the state level, some officials and advocacy groups have floated the possibility of stripping the tax-exempt status enjoyed by UNRWA USA, the aid group’s American fundraising arm.
"The U.S. should not be funding terrorism. Period," South Carolina’s Wilson told the Free Beacon. "We’ve known UNRWA is used by terrorists and has helped facilitate terror attacks for decades. The UN’s own investigation confirms what we’ve been raising the alarm about for months. It’s time to permanently cut funding for UNRWA, and we need to do it before they receive another dime."
UNRWA, the state officials say in their letter, has mainlined anti-Semitic propaganda to a generation of Palestinian children that have become radicalized supporters of Hamas’s campaign to eradicate Israel. American funding—which totals millions and accounts for a sizable portion of UNRWA’s budget—is responsible for spreading anti-Semitic hatred, the attorneys general say.
From Ian:
The war against the Jewish story
On the occasion of Yom HaShoah, which began yesterday evening, Yossi Klein Halevi isn’t calling for more or better Holocaust education, but for something else:
The ease with which anti-Zionists have managed to portray the Jewish state as genocidal, a successor to Nazi Germany, marks a historic failure of Holocaust education in the West. This moment requires a fundamental rethinking of the goals and methodology of Holocaust education. By overemphasizing the necessary universal lessons of the Holocaust, many educators too easily equated anti-Semitism with generic racism. The intention was noble: to render the Holocaust relevant to a new generation. But in the process, the essential lesson of the Holocaust—the uniqueness not only of the event itself but of the hatred that made it possible—was often lost.
Holocaust education was intended, in large part, to protect the Jewish people. . . . Yet the movement to turn Israel into the world’s criminal nation emerges from a generation that was raised with Holocaust consciousness, both in formal education and the arts. And this latest expression of the anti-Semitism of symbols is justified by some anti-Zionists as honoring “the lessons of the Holocaust.”
Unlike the Iranian regime, which clumsily tries to deny the historicity of the Holocaust, anti-Zionists in the West intuitively understand that coopting and inverting the Holocaust is a far more effective way of neutralizing its impact.
Johnathan Tobin:
Yom Hashoah after Oct. 7: How Holocaust education failed
We keep being told that many of those who demonstrate in favor of an end to the current war that would leave Hamas alive and well—and able to make good on its promises to repeat the horrors of Oct. 7 again and again—are well-meaning and simply sympathetic to the suffering of Palestinians. But the objective of the movement these supposedly well-meaning people support is to strip the Jews of Israel—and Jews everywhere, for that matter—of the ability to defend themselves against Islamists for whom Oct. 7 is just a trailer for what they wish to do to every Jew on this planet.
Simply put, if you are demonstrating for Hamas’s survival, you are on the side of a group that wishes to repeat the Holocaust. No matter how well-intentioned you may claim to be, that makes you no different from those who viewed the Nazis, who had their own narrative of grievance, with equanimity.
The German people suffered terribly as a result of the war that they launched, yet today, those who claim to speak for humanitarian values believe that there can be no consequences for those who commit or condone (as is true for the overwhelming majority of Palestinians) the mass murder of Jews and that Jews who defend themselves against genocide are the Nazis. Would those who demonstrate against Jewish self-defense apply the same lessons to the Allies who, in order to liberate the Nazi death camps had to kill many people, including civilians?
By the same token, those who wish for universities and other institutions to engage in discriminatory commercial conduct that would divest from anything to do with Israel are not criticizing Israel’s policies or leaders, but supporting a contemporary version of Nazi boycotts of Jews.
It is also just as clear that the leftist/Islamist attack on Israel is also aimed at the West and the United States. This debate over the war against Hamas is not one about whether Israel or its government and military are perfect but about a struggle for the future of the West, much as was true of the war against the German Nazis. The Jews are, as they were during the Holocaust, the canaries in the coal mine, warning humanity of the dangers of tolerating genocidal hate.
As we remember the Shoah, rather than stick to our usual routine of memorialization, it’s time for decent people of all backgrounds and faiths to understand that the war on the Jews didn’t end with the defeat of the Nazis. It continues to this day under new slogans, flags and worse, with many of those who claim to stand for enlightened thought allowing the enablers of Jew-hatred to pose as advocates for human rights and the oppressed. Those lies must not be allowed to stand.
There should be no Holocaust Memorial Day observance without it being made clear that there can be no proper honor given to the Six Million slain by the Nazis without linking that struggle to those against the antisemites of our time. We must not tolerate those who shed crocodile tears for Jews murdered in the past while tolerating or even supporting policies that enable antisemitism in the present, envisioning Israel’s destruction and the continued slaughter of Jews. If we cannot understand that, then invocations to remember what happened or ensure that it is “never again” allowed in this world are nothing more than pointless and counterproductive virtue-signaling.
An Israeli survivor of the Holocaust and Oct. 7 says after the recent atrocities, we ‘held our heads high’
As for the connection people are drawing between the Oct. 7 attack and the Holocaust, Ben Yosef said that “over the decades, fate brings us all kinds of ups and downs, and that was one of the most difficult low points, but to compare the days of the Holocaust and Oct. 7 — it’s not the same.”
“In the time of the Holocaust, we were spread all over the world and when we were massacred, we couldn’t do anything. Today we are in our own country with our own army. The losses were tremendous, the shock was great — but we held our heads high,” she said.
Ben Yosef took part in a project initiated by the Israel office of Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, called “Sharing Memories,” in which influencers upload videos of Holocaust survivors telling their stories. This year Meta Israel is highlighting survivors who were in Israel’s south on Oct. 7. The participants are mostly Israelis, so the videos are mostly in Hebrew, but actor Michael Rapaport produced content in English; they have an aggregate following of over 7.2 million people on Instagram. The project will raise funds for Israeli NGO Latet to provide essential needs to impoverished survivors, and the clips were available to watch on the VOD service of one of Israel’s biggest cable companies, Yes TV, starting on Sunday night.
Hamas murdered several Holocaust survivors on Oct. 7, including some of the 15 elderly people found dead in the street in Sderot, where they were waiting to board a bus to the Dead Sea. One of them was Moshe Ridler, 91, the oldest resident of Kibbutz Holit, who escaped a concentration camp when he was 11 years old.
The eldest of the hostages held by Hamas in Gaza, Shlomo Mantzur, 86, is a survivor of the Farhud, the 1941 pogrom against Jews in Baghdad, inspired partly by Nazi influence in Iraq. Farhud survivors are recognized as Holocaust survivors under Israeli law.
In the Farhud, Shlomo’s sister, Hadassa Lazar, told a Knesset committee earlier this year, the Iraqis “murdered, raped, tortured babies, kidnapped, decapitated… It was the Kristallnacht of Iraqi Jewry and the world was silent. Shlomo saw things that stayed with him his whole life. We used to think ‘never again’ – it did not occur to us that such things could happen again when we have a sovereign state.”
Some of the other hostages have close relatives who are Holocaust survivors, including Michael Kuperstein, 82, the grandfather of Bar Kuperstein, 22, who was kidnapped from the Nova music festival, and Tsili Wenkert, 82, whose grandson, Omer Wenkert, was taken from the festival and appeared in a hostage video released in January. Bella Chaim is the grandmother of Yotam Chaim, who was kidnapped to Gaza and accidentally killed by IDF soldiers. Ruth Haran, 89, had seven relatives kidnapped and three murdered; her grandson-in-law Tal is still being held hostage in Gaza and her daughter Sharon, daughter-in-law Shoshan, grandchildren Noam and Adi, and great-grandchildren Neve and Yahel were kidnapped by Hamas and released in November.
Haran, who was born in Romania and spent years fleeing the Nazis, survived the Oct. 7 attack on Kibbutz Be’eri and said that “people who survived the massacre talked about death, murder, women raped and the destruction of our community. The whole trauma of being a Holocaust survivor came back to me…As a Holocaust survivor, I know how to deal with pain, but this time I don’t know how to cope.”
From Ian:
Genocide Enablers
The man who ignored the information which arguably could have saved nearly a million lives was Kofi Annan, then U.N. under-secretary general for peacekeeping operations. Annan told PBS in 2004 that he ordered Dallaire to share his intelligence with the genocide’s architects because “sometimes it is a very good deterrent” to inform rogue states that “we know what you are up to”—as if such a tactic has ever worked before or since. Not surprisingly, during Belgian government investigations into the Hutus’ murder of Belgian peacekeeping soldiers, Annan blocked Dallaire from testifying, and declined to testify himself.
Annan made another telling remark in the PBS interview. Pointing the finger at Security Council members, the former secretary general noted that, although these states had even better intelligence than his office, he knew the “mood in the council”: The members, Annan said, were not going to say, “We are going to send in the brigade” or “send reinforcements to General Dallaire.” While clearly self-serving, Annan’s remark is a reminder of the complicity of the so-called “international community,” including the U.S., which, at the time, did not wish to even utter the word “genocide.” “If we use the word ‘genocide’ and are seen as doing nothing,” Susan Rice, then director for international organizations and peacekeeping at the National Security Council, said, “what will be the effect on the November [congressional] election?”
The author who later excoriated Rice for this comment was none other than Samantha Power, who, two decades later, would nevertheless join Rice in government as ambassador to the U.N., when the Obama administration was abetting the mass slaughter in Syria. In her current role as USAID administrator, Power, in order to advance the Biden administration’s obscene policy of “surging” aid to Gaza, has falsely claimed that Israel is causing a “famine.”
Annan’s boss during the genocide, then-Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, was the one responsible for covertly selling the Rwandan government much of their weapons stockpile in the first place. That $26 million worth of weapons, approved by Boutros-Ghali while still Egyptian foreign minister in 1990, made up a large part of the supplies the U.N. blocked Dallaire from seizing. Boutros-Ghali later dismissed Dallaire’s original fax as merely one among many “alarming reports from the field,” thus not worth serious consideration at the time. Once the genocide was in full flood, however, all Boutros-Ghali and Annan allowed Dallaire to do was attempt to negotiate an impossible cease-fire between the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front and the very government slaughtering their kin. Though he admitted to PBS in 2004 that “I failed in Rwanda,” he never truly took personal responsibility. When he traveled to Rwanda in 1995 and reluctantly visited the site of the barbaric Nyarubuye church massacre, he toured the untouched mounds of putrefied innocents for 18 minutes, told the living to be of good courage, and then left.
Current U.N. secretary general, Antonio Guterres, did something arguably worse 28 years later. Barely two weeks after Oct. 7, he appeared to give subtle justification to Hamas’ own Nyarubuye massacre of Jews, saying that it “did not happen in a vacuum.”
Still, perhaps the most stunning correlation between the U.N.’s abetment of genocide in Rwanda and in Israel 30 years later is its insistence upon “humanitarian” support for mass murderers and their civilian accomplices. A less-remembered side effect of the Rwandan civil war was the exodus of around a million Hutus into Tanzania and Zaire, whom the U.N. and international community aided lavishly. Many of these refugees were known at the time to have either supported the genocide’s aims or personally been part of the Interahamwe death squads, but they were given food, medicine, and shelter anyway. The thousands of killers among them became community leaders within the refugee camps and then, when the genocide was over, returned to their villages to live in sight of those few who had survived their butchery.
Today, the U.N. demands that Israel supply food, medicine, and shelter to people who passionately support Hamas and their genocidal exploits. Under severe U.S. pressure—including threats of stopping arms supplies, sanctions, and support for ICC prosecution of Israeli officials and IDF soldiers—Israel has been forced to oblige, even though they know that Hamas will steal the aid for itself, as it habitually does. The Biden administration has even begun constructing a $320 million pier to supply the terror group’s enclave, and is demanding Israel protect the aid convoys replenishing its enemy.
Nevertheless, there is one difference between the U.N.’s perfidy in Rwanda and hostility toward Israel. In Rwanda, the U.N.—even while often refusing to use the word—did understand that Hutus were, in fact, committing genocide against Tutsis. Today, however, the same U.N. actually accuses the victims of an act of genocide of being the murderers, while blessing the act’s perpetrators as the true victims.
It is only fitting, then, that one U.N. official reportedly described pointless cease-fire talks between the RPF and Hutu killers as “rather like wanting Hitler to reach a cease-fire with the Jews.” No observation could better encapsulate three decades of moral depravity dressed up as idealistic decency.
The women cheering on Hamas rapists are an insult to feminism
For all the loathing she received on social media, Karen was harmless. Her successor is not. This woman throngs university campuses, leading protests, wrapped up in keffiyehs and a face covering, passionately crying out for what she calls freedom fighters and their “just war” against Zionist apartheid, genocide and occupation, and the general existence of the Jewish state.
What she is doing – perfectly explicitly in many cases – is teeny-bopping for Hamas, as girls used to yell and scream for the Beatles. It’s truly chilling. In the sick world of too many pro-Hamas, pro-Palestine women protesting, the acts of sexual violence carried out by Hamas on October 7 are Zionist fabrications, designed to further deepen the Israeli stranglehold on Palestinian self-determination and freedom. Others know perfectly well that the rape, torture and abductions happened, but seem to think it’s all wonderfully noble “resistance”.
A sick irony lives in the fact that these protest babes, ardent, self-righteous, self-avowed progressives, are cheering on terrorists who, when not raping women, insist on a brutal patriarchal society.
Do these women really want an Isis-style caliphate? Do they want rape and the threat of murder as an instrument of control as the framework for society in which all must live? Or do they only want these things for the “Zionists”?
Perhaps they don’t really know what they’re wishing for, but they should be careful nonetheless. They might just get it.
Why the Left failed on October 7
A sentence I never imagined I’d write: I now think Jeremy Corbyn did Jews in Britain a favour. His time as Labour leader, between 2015 and 2020, was an extremely weird one for British Jews, but eye-opening all the same: I now think it prepared many of us for the Left’s reaction to October 7, whereas American Jews seemed far more surprised. The gaslighting (the attack didn’t happen), the defences (if it did, Jews deserved it), the hectoring moral superiority (how can you care about that when this is so much more important?): all that we saw after October 7, we had seen under Corbyn.
Now is not the place to rehash the many examples of Corbyn’s jaw-dropping attitudes towards Jews, never mind Israel, ideas some of us naively thought had died out with Stalin. Those are specific to Corbyn, whose political relevance is now, thankfully, in the past. But two general truths emerged from that era that would prove extremely relevant after October 7.
The first was how little people across the Left cared when Jews pointed out the obvious antisemitism they saw in the Labour Party. In 2018, 86% of British Jews said they believed Corbyn was antisemitic; and still the Left supported him, and still The Guardian backed him in the 2019 general election. Would they — good Lefties one and all — have done this if the vast majority of another minority said they believed Corbyn was bigoted against them? Would the Left have supported an Islamophobic leader in 2018? A homophobic one? A racist one? It’s hard to imagine. “What are Jews so scared of? It’s not like Corbyn’s going to bring back pogroms,” a prominent figure on the Left asked me. I briefly amused myself by imagining a response: “Why are black people so against the Tories? It’s not like they’ll bring back lynching.” But I stayed schtum. The Left doesn’t care about antisemitism if they deem it inconvenient to their cause. They just call it “anti-Zionism” and carry on, and that was — it turned out — a good lesson to learn.
There was another lesson, too. When Corbyn was pushed out of Labour in 2020, I dismissed him as a useful idiot, which was right. I also dismissed him as a blip, an aberration, one I needn’t think about again, which was wrong. Because then October 7 happened. I realised that the Corbyn era had opened a Pandora’s box and some ghosts cannot be controlled.
Antisemitism found a new point of entry through identity politics, which argues that in order to see the world clearly, we need to divide it up into particular group identities, specifically racial and sexual identities, and quantify the degrees of their oppression. As Yascha Mounk writes in The Identity Trap, adherents of identity politics believe that, in the name of fairness, liberal democracies need to jettison universal values such as free speech and respect for diverse opinions — values long championed by the Jewish Diaspora. Instead, we should now see everyone through the prisms of race and sexual orientation and treat them differently, depending on their identity group and how much oppression they have historically suffered.
To make this simplistic ideology even more simple, identity politics divides the world into two racial categories: “white” (defined as colonising oppressors) and “people of colour” (the oppressed). This is how the Left pivoted from talking about class to talking about race. It is also why antisemitism is thriving again on university campuses, as supporters of identity politics combine with activists for black and Muslim causes, who see Jews as ultra-white and therefore oppressive. And to be clear, those activists aren’t necessarily Black or Muslim themselves; in fact, as multiple students have told me, they are often white, but see supporting these causes — and trashing Israel and Jews — as a means of proving their allyship and exonerating themselves from white guilt.
From Ian:
Ruthie Blum:
Never again?
Sadly, the obligatory Holocaust Remembrance Day mantra rings hollow in the wake of the Simchat Torah bloodbath. With 132 hostages still languishing in Hamas captivity, a ground operation in Rafah repeatedly postponed and an explosion of antisemitism around the world, it seems that a genuine renewal of the vow—not simply a chanting of the mantra—is in order.
Nevertheless, in “Oct. 6 mode,” Halevi went on to reiterate it.
“Never again will the Star of David be a mark of shame,” he declared. “Instead [it is] a symbol that proudly flies on the nation’s flag. Never again will we be a scattered, homeless and persecuted people in exile, [but rather] a strong and independent people united in its land and homeland. Never again will we be a nation without a force to protect it, but…[one] whose ranks include heroes and heroines who stand tall and proud, fighting shoulder to shoulder as part of the IDF.”
All true, but utterly out of place in the midst of a battle that even our closest ally, the United States, is preventing us from executing properly, let alone winning. The words are especially jarring in view of the way in which Washington is forcing Jerusalem to engage in “negotiations” with Hamas’s Hitler in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, for a “ceasefire” that doesn’t necessarily include the release of all the hostages.
Halevi ended his missive by paying homage to those who perished at the hands of the “German inferno” and the survivors who “mustered the rest of their strength to take part in establishing a state for the Jewish people.” It’s in their name, he said, that the IDF continues to stand strong.
Invoking the “just war” being fought right now—peculiarly against a vanishing perpetrator—he said that the memory of those Jews should be the “source of our strength and a reminder of the importance of maintaining a protective force for our people.”
Yes, he concluded, “We shoulder the responsibility to continue fighting for the freedom of the people of Israel and to ensure: Never Again!”
Whether he will be as forthcoming during a post-war investigation about “shouldering the responsibility” for the Oct. 7 fiasco—the victims of which included Holocaust survivors and their families—remains to be seen. But what became painfully clear seven months ago is that the mass slaughter of Jews can and did happen again.
Netanyahu to Holocaust survivors: If need be, Israel will stand alone
In a meeting ahead of Israel’s Holocaust Memorial Day, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told survivors of the Shoah that the Jewish state would stand alone if necessary to defend its very existence.
“If we need to stand alone, we will stand alone,” Netanyahu told the Holocaust survivors gathered at his office in Jerusalem on Thursday. “If it is possible to recruit the nations of the world, how much the better. But if we do not defend ourselves, nobody will defend us,” he added.
The premier’s remarks came during an annual event where Israel’s government leaders meet with the Shoah survivors selected to light torches at the official state ceremony on May 5 marking Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.
This year’s torch lighters include Itzhak Kabilio and Michael Bar-On. Netanyahu referenced comments from the survivors highlighting the reality that Israel is the sole guarantor of the Jewish people’s safety.
“Izi [Itzhak Kabilio] said here: ‘The State of Israel is the one and only sanctuary of the Jewish people.’ This is so correct,” he stated. “And Michael said: ‘We cannot rely on the nations of the world who make promises.’”
The Israeli leader then cited the examples of former U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill during World War II, arguing that even those powerful figures failed to take critical action to try to save Jewish lives during the Holocaust.
“Great leaders like Roosevelt, who was told what was happening at Auschwitz and Birkenau and in the [other] death camps. They told him and he knew. His answer was that he would be not prepared to lose a single pilot and he also refused to accept the Jews,” Netanyahu said. “Churchill, who I greatly admire, tried to involve his army, but his army rebelled against him.”
Israel marks first post-Oct. 7 Holocaust Remembrance Day
Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day began at Sundown on Sunday, with the official state opening ceremony taking place at 8 p.m. in Warsaw Ghetto Square, Yad Vashem, on the Mount of Remembrance in Jerusalem.
Israel’s President Isaac Herzog and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were both set to deliver remarks at the ceremony. Yad Vashem Chairman Dani Dayan will light the memorial torch, and Haim Noy was selected to speak on behalf of the survivors, including Yitzhak Perlmutter, who was chosen to recite the El Maleh Rahamim prayer for the souls of the martyrs.
During the ceremony, Holocaust survivors Pnina Hefer, Allegra Gutta, Arie Eitani, Raisa Brodsky, Michael Bar-On and Izi Kabilio will each light torches.
The live broadcast will include simultaneous translation into English and Hebrew as well as French, Spanish, German, and Russian. Additionally, Yad Vashem will offer simultaneous translation in Arabic available on the Yad Vashem YouTube Channel in Arabic. The live feed will also be accessible via Facebook (only live in English and Hebrew).
“This evening we will honor the memory of our six million brothers and sisters who were murdered in the Holocaust,” Netanyahu stated in remarks issued ahead of Holocaust Remembrance Day.
“Last Thursday, my wife, Sara, and I met with the Holocaust survivors who will light the memorial torches this evening. We met with 96-year-old Izi Kabilio, a Holocaust survivor, from Yugoslavia. He told us about the horrors he, his family and his friends endured,” said the premier.
He continued, “Izi told us: ‘Today, the State of Israel is the one and only haven for the Jewish people.’
Friday, May 10, 2024
