05/04 Links: From Colombia to Columbia, an unceasing war on Israel; American Exceptionalism and the NYPD; Antisemitism not only sanctioned, but rewarded on college campuses;

From Ian:

FDD: From Colombia to Columbia, an unceasing war on Israel

Last Thursday, Colombia’s far-left president, Gustavo Petro, announced that he was cutting diplomatic ties with Israel—a move warmly lauded by Hamas, the Palestinian Authority and the Islamist regime in Iran. In a speech delivered at a May Day rally, Petro perfectly captured the left’s Palestinian fetish, along with the fervent belief that the defeat of “Zionism” will usher in a new era of people power. “Today the world could be summed up in a single word, which vindicates the need for life, rebellion, the raised flag and resistance,” Petro declared. “That word is ‘Gaza,’ it is ‘Palestine,’ they are the boys and girls who have died dismembered by the bombs.” Petro, who was elected in 2022, is a genuine revolutionary with the life experience of one, having joined the M-19 terrorist organization while still a teenager and having been tortured at the hands of Colombian military officers. Nonetheless, his words resonated deeply at the other Columbia—the Ivy League university in New York City—where pro-Hamas demonstrators playing at revolution while their parents pay exorbitant fees set up an illegal tent encampment.

They resonated as well in Tehran, where Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi lauded “the uprising of Western students, professors and elites in support of the oppressed people of Gaza,” while foreign ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani expressed satisfaction with “the awakening of global society … regarding the Palestinian issue and the depth of public hatred toward the crimes of the usurping Zionist regime and the genocide supported by America and some European governments.” Again, these are exactly the same sentiments being articulated at Columbia, at UCLA, at George Washington University, and at the other American campuses turned upside down by the wave of solidarity with Hamas.

To many Jews, all this will seem like a colossal failure—a failure of Holocaust education, which Jewish communities have been deeply invested in for several decades; a failure to accurately convey the true nature of Israeli society beyond the “settler-colonial” caricature pushed by much of the left and some far-right influencers; a failure to maintain constructive relationships with those other minorities where sympathy for Hamas and its atrocities is rife, particularly American Muslims, many of whom originate from non-Arab countries, and African-Americans. Perhaps the toughest aspect of all is the realization that debate and argument are fruitless, not least because refusal to communicate with “Zionists” has become an article of faith at the pro-Hamas rallies and demonstrations.

Still, at the same time, we need to shake off the myth that these demonstrations are an expression of “civil society”—individuals and volunteer groups mobilizing for Gaza out of desperation at the bloody scenes in that territory. From Moscow to Bogota to Ankara to Tehran, the world’s authoritarians are delighting in the opportunity to wield the language of human rights in the faces of gullible Westerners. Rather than persuading, we should be focused on defeating at the source. That means, in Colombia’s case, lobbying U.S. legislators to impose trade restrictions and other sanctions on its government for as long as it demonizes Israel, a democracy and a stalwart American ally, as a rogue state. Doing so will anger and alienate the left even more, but we have no choice. All we can do is act. And, from time to time, laugh

Seth Mandel: American Exceptionalism and the NYPD

One of the most telling aspects of the pro-Hamas student encampments is their participants’ pathological aversion to police—both for what it says about the campus bubble and for what it reveals about the demonstrators’ antipathy for Jews.

“I don’t really know how to process the fact that, at the bare minimum, there are going to be 100 cops at the [graduation] celebration,” Columbia student Suleyman Ahmed told the Wall Street Journal. Ahmed wasn’t part of the protests, the Journal explains, but when he heard there was going to be a police presence on campus through the end of the semester a couple weeks away, “he couldn’t concentrate on cramming.”

Whether that’s true—it’s hard to imagine a person carrying such exquisite fragility into adulthood—or whether Ahmed was just mimicking the debilitating sense of entitlement around him is less important than the fact that he was unashamed to say this sentence out loud to a newspaper reporter. In the bubble of “elite” campus culture, this is a normal thing to say. One is left wishing there were some institution that could prepare college graduates for the world.

Meanwhile, the reluctance to call in the police by campus administrators has, in roughly 100% of cases, proved not just foolish but dangerously irresponsible. At Columbia, about a quarter of those arrested for violently taking a campus building were unaffiliated with the university. At the City College of New York the same night, more than half of those arrested were unaffiliated with the school. Twenty-two of them violently impeded police clearing of an occupied building.

NBC’s reporting shows just what a tourist attraction these protests had become. One of those arrested was anarchist James W. Carlson, whose rap sheet over nearly twenty years of violent demonstrations includes aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and attempted lynching. Another arrestee had reportedly been fired from the New York Botanical Garden for cheering on Hamas’s campaign of mass slaughter, child murder and sexual torture on Oct. 7.

Two others have arrest records related to their behavior at various protests over the years. The cause isn’t what matters to these folks; what matters is causing violence and disorder. If you are the parent of a student at one of these schools, you have plenty of reason to wonder why the institution cultivated this atmosphere and then delayed allowing police to restore safety and remove violent trespassers from campus.

Andrew Neil: It's easy to mock the entitled know-nothing student protesters who couldn't find Gaza on a map. But they are useful idiots making common cause with genocidal Islamists who want to see Israel wiped out

There is increasing evidence in the U.S. that hardline agitators and anarchists are now orchestrating the protests, with privileged, naive students their useful idiots. A Leftist website, CrimethInc.com, run by veterans of BLM, Antifa and Occupy Wall Street, has been publishing lessons learned and coordinating activities across the country.

According to the NYPD, half the protesters arrested at Columbia and New York's City College were not students. They push for the occupation of buildings wherever possible — and that is when violence and vandalism are most likely to occur.

They were behind the occupation of Hamilton Hall, which was roundly trashed, and behind the wilful and appalling damage done to the library at Portland State University in Oregon.

There was a feeling in America this week that perhaps the worst was over. The university authorities had acted at last, major figures on the Left and Right had condemned the encampments, police intervention from Los Angeles to Texas to New York had been effective (and largely non-violent) and even President Biden was wheeled out to give his tuppence worth.

It was the first time we've heard from 'Silent Joe' since the campus unrest took root. He has proved strangely reluctant to condemn the protesters and even on Thursday did no more than spout a few mealy-mouthed platitudes about free speech and peaceful protest.

He needs the youth vote — essential to his victory in 2020 — to be re-elected in November and has been keen to court that vote with a $160 billion student debt write-off (with more to come before election day) and the reclassification of cannabis, effectively decriminalising it.

Saying a few robust home truths to student protesters has so far eluded him. And this could come back to hurt Biden.

If the protests continue and the Democratic convention in Chicago in August is hijacked by violent protesters, as the 1968 convention (also in Chicago) was by anti-Vietnam war protesters, then a sense of lawlessness would only help Donald Trump as it helped Republican Richard Nixon in 1968.

So Biden might have to stiffen his resolve and his response before the summer is out to secure his re-election chances.

More fundamentally, sensible politicians of all persuasions need to think seriously about why so many young Americans — especially the ones who are supposed to be the smartest — are so easily prepared to make common cause with a genocidal Islamism.

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05/03 Links Pt2: Bibi Between a Rock and a Hard Place; Lawyer behind push for Netanyahu’s arrest defended Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks; Red Cross official exposed as Hamas stooge

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Bibi Between a Rock and a Hard Place

On a recent episode of the COMMENTARY podcast, Tablet’s Noam Blum made an astute point about Benjamin Netanyahu’s staunchest critics: Some of them dislike Bibi so much that they have convinced themselves he has dictatorial powers that mirror those of Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas terrorist leader on the other side of the hostage negotiations. According to this line of thinking, anything that happens—or doesn’t happen—can be blamed on Netanyahu, who governs according to his own will.

The May 2 Wall Street Journal gives us a perfect example of what happens when observers buy into that fallacy. The rather amazing headline is: “Fate of Gaza Cease-Fire Talks Hangs on Two Hard-Liners: Netanyahu and Sinwar.”

The article text is more nuanced, but it still follows the same flawed logic. Here is the crux of the argument as it relates to Israel’s prime minister: “Netanyahu, who faced criticism within Israel over the security and intelligence failures around Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack that sparked the war, has seen his sinking polling numbers stabilize as the conflict drags on….He is now concerned about the possibility that the International Criminal Court could indict him for alleged war crimes, an outcome he has rejected as an assault on Israel’s right to self-defense. Stopping the fighting risks a political reckoning that could eventually push him from power.”

It’s true that “stopping the fighting” would start the clock on a wave of political pressure and possibly an election season, if the coalition dissolves. But this framing puts Bibi between a rock and hard place: If he had finished off Hamas already, he would have done so over the objections of the Biden administration. In patiently placing the overall war on pause in order to get more humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip and to maximize the chances at a deal with Hamas, Netanyahu (along with the war cabinet) is doing what every world leader, but especially Biden, wants him to do. Yet in acquiescing, he is accused of drawing out the war so that he doesn’t have to face a “political reckoning.”

Meanwhile, virtually everyone involved is making it harder for Israel to actually get a deal in place. The anti-Netanyahu protests in Israel have come to serve as a release valve for a public stuck in a limbo mostly of Joe Biden’s making. Those protesters, as Blum mentioned, assume Netanyahu is the obstacle to a deal. But in fact, it is Hamas that has continually walked away from objectively generous deals and appears to be doing so again. Simply as a matter of strategy, the protests arguably contribute to the negotiating stasis, because Hamas interprets them as a destabilizing force in domestic Israeli politics. And Israel’s threats to go into Rafah, the last major Hamas redoubt in the Strip, are consistently muffled by the sound and fury of the Biden administration’s opposition to such an operation, making it less of a credible threat. Hamas can be forgiven for thinking time is on its side.

Seth Mandel: The Fight to Define Anti-Semitism

In January, the Forward carried a head-scratcher of a story: The Nexusites were—in the midst of a global hurricane of left anti-Semitism, no less—building a political operation to challenge IHRA and ensure not only that the American Jewish community spends resources fighting amongst itself but that this intra-communal fight would take on a political shade.

Now, when you read about the Jewish community preparing to punch itself in the stomach, the first question that comes to mind is, of course: How is J Street involved? And the answer is Kevin Rachlin, who announced he was stepping down as a top J Street lobbyist to take the helm of Nexus’s newly formed political operation.

“We’re not anti-IHRA,” said Rachlin about the organization created solely and specifically to oppose IHRA.

In any event, Democratic politicians loved the idea of being able to hand out “get out of anti-Semitism free” cards to party members who were poised to be like teenagers speeding down the highway with a PBA card in the glovebox. In December, reportedly on the advice of Nexus-affiliated activists, Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) led a Democratic revolt against Republicans’ attempts to slap down rising anti-Semitism dressed up as criticism of Israel. I explained at the time how Nadler’s own argument disproved the point he was trying to make, but the effect was clear: Whatever semblance of a truce the American Jewish community had going since Oct. 7 was off. We’d been agreeing with each other far too much and it was giving Jerry Nadler indigestion.

Lawler’s bill, helped by Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer’s efforts, today overcame Nadler’s disapproval to advance a common understanding of anti-Semitism at a crucial time. But the Democrats have been unnerved by the so-called “tentifada”—the various Jew-baiting encampments springing up around college campuses—and a number of powerful politicians are very clearly terrified of the quad-dwellers occupying buildings and making demands.

The hope is that the bipartisan IHRA support can outrun its challengers, or build up enough momentum to shame Nexus into finding better things to do with its time and resources than politicize anti-Semitism and re-divide the Jewish community at a moment when doing so would be especially damaging.

Jonathan Tobin: The House bill will hinder campus antisemitism, not free speech

Faced with an opportunity to do something that would actually help give the federal government the ability to punish American universities that have let their campuses become hotbeds of antisemitism, a bipartisan majority of Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives did the right thing and passed a bill that can make that possible this week by a vote of 320-91.

But the number of “no” votes was still discouraging for two reasons.

It showed that 21% of House members aren’t willing to act on antisemitism, even in the face of the surge of prejudice and even violence against Jews especially on college campuses that has been on display since the Hamas attacks on Israel on Oct. 7.

Just as troubling is the fact that significant portions of both the Democrat and Republican caucuses opposed the act for different, albeit equally specious reasons. The strength of the opposition—both from politicians and pundits on both ends of the political spectrum—is problematic because it demonstrates how distorted the debate about the issue of antisemitism has become. Even worse, the fact that 70 of the 91 voting against it were Democrats may make it unlikely that the self-anointed shomer, or “guardian,” of Israel and the Jewish people in the Senate, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), will allow the law to come to vote in the upper body.

Civil rights also apply to Jews
The Antisemitism Awareness Act builds on the historic executive order issued by former President Donald Trump in December 2019 that echoed the past rulings of the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, and accepted in principle by the Biden administration, about dealing with Jew-hatred.

Trump mandated that the government extend the Title VI anti-discrimination in education protections in the 1964 Civil Rights Act to Jews and other minorities. He also took the important step of also ruling that the U.S. Department of Education must use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism when deciding whether to sanction schools that violate the rights of Jewish students by cutting off their federal funding. And that funding is the leftist educational establishment’s Achilles heel, since without it all but the wealthiest institutions would be brought to their knees.

While the Education Department has conducted a series of investigations into schools for such violations, which have grown in number and severity over the last two decades, to date no institution of higher education has yet received the ultimate penalty for violating the civil rights of its Jewish students by enabling an atmosphere of antisemitic incitement. As we’ve seen in recent weeks, intimidation, harassment and even violence against Jewish students by woke leftist mobs of students, professors and professional agitators have become endemic. With many school administrations, especially at elite institutions, paralyzed by their fear of offending the mobs and often seeking to appease them in ways that will only make the problem worse, stopping federal funding may be the only way to fix the problem in the short run.

Inside the College Democrats’ antisemitism problem

As anti-Israel encampments on college campuses sprung up at dozens of universities last week, the national leadership of the College Democrats of America (CDA) asked the group’s Jewish and Muslim caucuses to draft a statement condemning the antisemitism that was quickly appearing among some protesters.

The byzantine process that followed would lead the College Democrats’ top Jewish leader to accuse the influential organization of ignoring antisemitism at campus protests to further a one-sided, anti-Israel agenda, after the organization’s leadership nixed the inclusive statement that had been created by the top Jewish and Muslim activists in the group.

Allyson Bell, chair of the CDA’s national Jewish caucus and an MBA student at Meredith College in Raleigh, N.C., got to work writing a statement about antisemitism with Hasan Pyarali, the Muslim caucus chair and a senior at Wake Forest University. The two of them turned in a draft of a statement detailing antisemitism at Columbia University and stating that the College Democrats “absolutely and irrevocably denounce the antisemitism that has taken place at Columbia University and other college campuses over the past week,” according to a document shared with Jewish Insider.

But College Democrats’ national leaders weren’t pleased with this draft, Bell stated. “They wanted us to write a 50/50 approach, to both protect the peaceful side of the protesters and stand against antisemitism,” Bell told JI on Wednesday night. So she and Pyarali gave it another stab. (“It’s been really tough for people to work together on this issue, so I’m so glad that we’ve been able to work together,” Pyarali told JI.)

This time, the draft statement began with a denunciation of antisemitism and a statement of support for the “broad and interfaith coalitions of students who call for a ceasefire, release of the hostages, and a two-state solution where both Israelis and Palestinians can live side by side in peace.” This too, was voted down.

The statement that was ultimately released by the College Democrats on Tuesday ignored the middle path proposed by Bell and Pyarali. Instead, the statement described “heroic actions on the part of students around the country to protest and sit in for an end to the war in Palestine and the release of the hostages.” It called Israel’s war against Hamas “destructive, genocidal, and unjust” — language that Bell had never seen. An Instagram post with the statement touted the endorsement of Pyarali and the Muslim caucus, with no mention of the Jewish caucus — except a comment on the post from the Jewish caucus’ own Instagram account.

“This should not have ever been released without Jewish students’ support. Protect Jewish students, do better,” the College Democrats’ Jewish caucus commented.

“It’s a hurtful thing, not only to not feel heard, but also to know that the organization you’re in doesn’t believe that the antisemitism is happening and doesn’t care enough about it to even include the factual things that we’ve seen on video,” explained Bell.

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Israel might allow Palestinian workers back in from the West Bank - with electronic bracelets

Palestinian media is reporting that  Israel has worked out a deal with the Palestinian Authority so West Bank workers who have nearly all been unemployed from their jobs in Israel - with severe limitations.

Ultrapal reports that PA minister Hussein Al-Sheikh, head of the General Authority for Civil Affairs, met recently with IDF COGAT head Ghassan Alyan to discuss arrangements to allow the gradual return of about 100,000 Palestinian workers to the Israeli labor market within strict security requirements. 

Security procedures that Israel plans to implement, according to this article, include:

* Worker signatures one entry and exit from Israel

* Electronic bracelets with GPS to allow Israel to know where they are at all times

* Israel provides buses from the checkpoints into Israel and to return them at the end of the every day

* No workers may stay overnight

* No working in residential areas. Construction work will be limited to new construction where no one lives.

According to the article, as many as 10,000 workers may start working as early as Monday.

A significant number of workers in Israel have always been unregistered, sneaking in over or through the security barrier. I would hope that extra security measures would be put into place to minimize or stop that from happening. 

The lack of workers has hurt Israel's economy, and the lack of work has devastated the Palestinian economy. 

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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05/03 Links Pt1: College idiots calling for ‘Intifada’ have no idea how many innocents have died from that word; Where’s Biden’s Anger at the Feckless Universities?

From Ian:

Douglas Murray: College idiots calling for ‘Intifada’ have no idea how many innocents have died from that word

This one is for the morons.

For the students busily cosplaying at being terrorists on our city’s campuses.

The automatons whose new radical-chic uniform is an Arab keffiyeh.

Specifically to the ones who have decided to chant for “Intifada” and unveil a vast banner down the side of Hamilton Hall at Columbia this week.

“Intifada,” the banner said, in huge letters as the mob below shrieked approval.

Most of these students weren’t born when the Palestinians last had an “Intifada.”

So although youth and ignorance aren’t any real excuse, perhaps I can educate these students about what they are actually calling for.

I invite them to “do the work” of understanding what it means when people call for “Intifada” and what it actually means.

In June 2001, the Intifada that Palestinian clerics and politicians had called for was in full flight.

Every day Israelis boarding buses had to look around in case one of the other passengers was wearing a suicide vest and about to turn the vehicle into a charnel house.

On June 1, young people in Tel Aviv were enjoying a beautiful summer evening.

Many of them were milling around a nightclub much like those that the students at Columbia go to on a weekend.

But this one was more beautifully located, sitting on the city’s beachfront.

The Dolphinarium club was packed that night.

Outside were crowds of young people hoping to get in.

The Hamas terrorist detonated the bomb amid the queue of young women who were hoping to get into the club.

He killed 21 young people.

Sixteen of the victims were teenagers. Not even college age yet.

The youngest of them was 14-year old Maria Tagilchev.

Many of the victims were children of parents who had emigrated to Israel from the Soviet Union.

Their parents fled one totalitarian regime only to lose their children to terrorism in Tel Aviv.

Eyewitnesses described the limbs of the young women lying strewn across the road.

Some of the bodies were lying in piles.

This is what Intifada means.

But perhaps the students at Columbia don’t care about those 21 people who never grew up.

Abigail Shrier: There Are Two Sets of Rules for Speech

Speech on college campuses has been stultifyingly narrow—and very far from free—for decades. That pro-Hamas students cheer freely for “intifada” doesn’t make it any freer now. The fact that certain students are allowed to call for the death of their Jewish classmates does not herald a new era of free expression. It only underscores that some bigotries enjoy the official sanction of these schools, and are accepted, tolerated, and rewarded with special dispensations and, indeed, goodies.

Use of the N-word on campus or misgendering a classmate will no doubt be met with as swift punitive consequences as they have been for decades, as have a vast and more minute array of “microaggressions.” I invite anyone who doubts this to parade through any of our elite campuses with insulting cartoon depictions of the Prophet Muhammad.

After weeks of violent, destructive protest, which left campuses trashed and buildings damaged and graffitied, administrators have at last begun to enforce their own rules and call in the police. Perhaps they felt they had no choice: commencement ceremonies loom and lawsuits, recently filed by Jewish students, are on the way.

But watch the marble carefully as university administrators spin the cups. When a favored group is attacked, they discover a “community safety” concern with remarkable alacrity. When it’s a disfavored group, suddenly the cup reveals “free expression.” The game is fixed, and the administrators show their hands. “Community safety,” or was it “free speech”? Surprise! They don’t believe in either.

My Friends Wish I Was Dead

What does it mean to be a Zionist student on a college campus today? I have friends at schools all over the country who are struggling. People who are afraid to wear their necklace with a Star of David for fear of repercussions. To be a Zionist is to be an outcast. Classmates think that you are supporting a genocidal, apartheid state. They don’t care enough to hear your story. They don’t care that you lost dear friends and are mourning the pre-Oct. 7 Israel that will never exist again. They turn a blind eye to facts and choose to look only at social media posts that support their antisemitic narrative. What’s the point of arguing with such people? I am reminded of Golda Meir’s line, “You cannot negotiate peace with someone who has come to kill you.”

Now they have come for me. The antisemitic posts began on Oct. 7, and swung into a higher gear after I spent a week volunteering in Israel over Bates College’s spring break in late February. I pulled three choice quotes of what my fellow students had to say about me. Spoiler: They apparently wish me dead.

“Big nose mafia going to cancel me but man you know who should’ve finished the job.”

“Phoebe Stern did [go to Israel] … She fat and ugly anyways … just because she supports genocide doesn’t mean we get to be misogynistic.”

“She’s a racist bigot and the only question we should be asking ourselves is if she really believes the violent, racist lies she’s been spreading.”

My mind was reeling. Other Jewish friends at Bates were also attacked. They were accused of being racists and bigots, in writing, both online and on their dorm doors. One post from a Bates classmate advocated that “Hitler should’ve finished off the job.” People were using the anonymity of social media to spread lies and put words in my mouth, that I was going around campus telling people that my Arab peers want to kill me—a sentence that I have never uttered in my life, and wholeheartedly disagree with.

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Where are the children's books about Jewish life in Israel for Jewish American Heritage Month?

May is Jewish American Heritage Month, and New York City public schools have lots of material to teach kids about Jews.

Looking at their list of recommended books, I do not see any that mentions or appears to take place in Israel.

Early Readers (3K–Grade 2)

Bubbe and Bart’s Matzoh Ball Mayhem, by Bonnie Grubman; illustrated by Deborah Melmon

Emma’s Poem: The Voice of the Statue of Liberty, by Linda Glaser

Emmy Noether: The most Important Mathematician You’ve Never Heard Of, by Helaine Becker; illustrated by Kari Rust

Feivel’s Flying Horses, by Heidi Smith Hyde; illustrated by Joana van de Sterre

Gittel’s Journey: An Ellis Island Story, by Lesléa Newman; illustrated by Amy June Bates

Hannah’s Way, by Linda Glaser; illustrated by Adam Gustavson

Kibitzers and Fools: Tales My Zayda Told Me, by Simms Taback

Mitzvah Pizza, by Sarah Lynn Sheerger; illustrated by Deborah Melmon

The People’s Painter: How Ben Shahn Fought for Justice with Art, by Cynthia Levinson; illustrated by Evan Turk

The Tower of Life: How Yaffa Eliach Rebuilt Her Town in Stories and Photographs, by Chana Stiefel; illustrated by Susan Gal 

Elementary (Grades 3–5)

All Three Stooges, by Erica S. Perl

The Book Rescuer: How a Mensch from Massachusetts Saved Yiddish Literature for Generations to Come, by Sue Macy; illustrated by Stacy Innerst

Going Rogue (At Hebrew School), by Casey Breton

Hammerin’ Hank: The Life of Hank Greenberg, by Yona Zeldis McDonough; illustrated by Malcah Zeldis

Hidden: A Child’s Story of the Holocaust, by Loïc Dauvillier; illustrated by Marc Lizano

Honey and Me, by Meira Drazin

How To Find What You’re Not Looking For, by Veera Hiranandani

I Dissent: Ruth Bader Ginsburg Makes Her Mark, by Debbie Levy; illustrated by Elizabeth Baddeley

The Librarian of Auschwitz: The Graphic Novel, based on the novel by Antonio Iturbe; adapted by Salva Rubio; illustrated by Loreto Aroca

Osnat and Her Dove: The True Story of the World’s First Female Rabbi, by Sigal Samuel; illustrated by Vali Mintzi

Middle School (Grades 6–8)

Black Bird, Blue Road, by Sofiya Pasternack

Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword, by Barry Deutsch

The Length of a String, by Elissa Brent Weissman

Linked, by Gordon Korman

Lucky Broken Girl, by Ruth Behar

Music Was It: Young Leonard Bernstein, by Susan Goldman Rubin

This Is Just a Test, by Madelyn Rosenberg and Wendy Wan-Long Shang

The Trouble with Good Ideas, by Amanda Panitch

Turtle Boy, by M. Evan Wolkenstein

The Unfinished Corner, by Dani Colman, Rachel Petrovicz, Whitney Cogar, and Jim Campbell

Upper Grades (Grades 9–12)

Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank

Bernice Sandler and the Fight for Title IX, by Jen Barton; illustrated by Sarah Green

Color Me In, by Natasha Díaz

Dissenter on the Bench: Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Life and Work, by Victoria Ortiz

It’s A Whole Spiel: Love, Latkes, and Other Jewish Stories, edited by Katherine Locke and Laura Silverman

Lucy Clark Will Not Apologize, by Margo Rabb

Recommended for You, by Laura Silverman

Someday We Will Fly, by Rachel DeWoskin

They Went Left, by Monica Hesse

The Way Back, by Gavriel Savit

I understand that this is meant to focus on Jewish Americans, but there are books about the Holocaust and others that take place in vaguely European Shtetl-type settings.

I remember as a child I had a book published in 1964 called Eli Lives in Israel, which is long out of print. And it appears that outside of Jewish publishing houses, the number of books that treat Jews as normal people living in Israel is very small.

This has been noticed by others. There is an unofficial boycott on publishing Israel-themed books, both for kids and in novels for adults. 

One reason appears to be that publishers don't want to deal with the anti-Israel crowd.

Then there was Haley Neil, a new Jewish young-adult novelist, who reportedly felt compelled to rewrite her first novel, debuting in February (2021). Why? Hostile critics left 1-star reviews on Goodreads, because the story was rumored to take place on a Birthright trip to Israel, a popular tour for young Jews to reconnect with their heritage. Bloomsbury’s director of publicity for children’s books emailed the Washington Examiner, “We don’t comment on specific changes made in the editorial process,” before adding, “It’s worth noting that early commentors were not responding to any draft of the book, as it was not released.”  

So even though nearly half of the Jews in the world live in Israel, kids don't know this - or they only see the Jews as aggressive soldiers through the distorted lens of Palestinians, who publish lots of children's stories that all include subtle or not-subtle anti-Israel components. 

The message is clear: Jews in Israel must be treated like monsters, or ignored altogether. They do not have their own lives independent of the conflict, their own hopes and dreams and struggles like kids worldwide.

This is the kind of antisemitism that Jews have to live through that is accepted by the enlightened world of book publishers, teachers and public school systems. 

(h/t Mattis)

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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American Association of University Professors chooses sides - against proud Americans and Jews

There was a counter-demonstration at Rutgers University this week where a group of people went to the anti-Israel protests and chanted "USA! USA" and later sang the national anthem.

There was a human chain of anti-Israel protesters to stop the counterprotesters from walking on the public lawn.

Some of them wore T-shirts saying "Solidarity: Rutgers AAUP-AFT", meaning they were teachers at Rutgers. The T-shirts also feature the raised fist logo associated in recent decades with Marxism.

Freedom of expression is important. But the American Association of University Professors seem to want to ensure that this freedom goes only one way.

Professors have every right to publicly and fearlessly express their political opinions outside the classroom. Inside, they must leave space for other opinions. But when their association openly supports only one side of a political question, that chills the ability of students - who are dependent on the professors for their grades, and their entire future - to express their own opinions.

And the AAUP publicly celebrates May Day but not the Fourth of July or Christmas.

The AAUP has been issuing statements and tweets in support of the protesters under the excuse of academic freedom. But I can find nothing about supporting the rights of Jewish students to safely express Zionist opinions on campus. 

On the contrary - they are against the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism, falsely claiming that it hinders legitimate criticism of Israel. They want to define antisemitism as merely Nazi-style hate for Jews, and they do not admit what everyone else has finally come to realize: that antisemitism comes from the Right, the Left, from the Arab world and from minorities, and from everyone in between. And they are not just against the internationally accepted IHRA definition - they are openly contemptuous of it, defending their stance not by quoting it but by the logical fallacy of proof by appeal to authority of anti-Zionist Jews. 

I cannot find a single statement from the AAUP defending the rights of Zionist Jews on campus to freely speak, to invite Israeli speakers, to walk around without fear, even with hundreds of examples of how Jews have been intimidated even before October 7. Nor has the AAUP ever condemned any of the hundreds of classic antisemitic incidents on campus since October 7. 

The theoretical and never occurring fear of the IHRA definition being used to chill speech is prominent in AAUP statements. The very real chilling of speech of proud Jews by the students they are cheering is ignored.

Isn't that also a freedom of expression issue? Apparently those freedoms end when the political opinion is one that the AAUP disagrees with.

The rot at universities is not only from the privileged students who demand the right to have sex on public lawns as "support for Palestinians." It starts with their own instructors, as well as with the administration that caves to student demands given under threat.

(h/t MtTB)

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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The story no one wants to tell: Over 80,000 Gazans have paid tens of millions in bribes to escape to Egypt

We've been reporting about how tens of thousands of Gazans have been desperately trying to leave the war zone, and are paying thousands of dollars in bribes to Egyptian officials to be called "VIPs" who have permission to take the bus from Rafah to Egypt.

This is a story that Palestinians and other Israel haters do not want the world to know, since they want to spread the myth the Gazans do not want to leave and choose to stay in Gaza due to their "sumud" (steadfastness.) Jordan and Egypt, for their part, want to tell the world that Gazans don't want to take refuge elsewhere, and world media for the most part accepts that lie without any fact checking.

Now, we have some specific statistics on how many Gazans have been leaving after raising the funds for the bribes - and how a single Egyptian company, whose owner is close to Egypt's President Sisi, has been enriched by charging these exorbitant fees.

Middle East Eye reported that the Hala company, owned by Egyptian businessman Ibrahim Al-Arjani, has the exclusive contract to transport Gazans through Rafah. It has increased it profits dramatically during April compared to earlier months this year.

Hala Consulting and Tourism Services charges Palestinians at least $5,000 per adult and $2,500 per child. The company has a monopoly on providing transportation services at the Rafah crossing.

An analysis of the passenger list published by Hala online reveals that in April, the company earned at least $58 million from approximately 10,136 adults and 2,910 children who crossed the border through its “VIP list.”

Before the war, Hala charged every person leaving Gaza via the Rafah crossing only $350 per person.

Based on passenger lists published since February 2, Hala's earnings from Palestinians are estimated at  $21 million in February, $38.5 million in March, and $58 million in April.

There are no public records between October 7 and February 2. According to the Palestinian ambassador to Cairo, Diab Al-Louh, between 80,000 and 100,000 people traveled from Gaza via Egypt since the start of the war.

Al Arjani does not only rip off Gazans. Another of his companies also charges charities going through the Rafah crossing to bring aid in.

One  international charity bringing in an aid truck into the Gaza Strip through the Rafah crossing was forced  to pay $5,000 in the form of “management fees” to an Arjani company called “Sons of Sinai.” The charity described the fee as a bribe, and accused the Egyptian state of profiting from humanitarian aid.

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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05/02 Links Pt2: Why Biden Is Saving Hamas; And the Prize for Photography Goes to ... Hamas?; Israel's Citizen-Soldiers; This year, Eurovision actually matters

From Ian:

Lee Smith: Why Biden Is Saving Hamas

Crucially, the Abraham Accords also ignored the Palestinians. After all, the Palestinians could never normalize relations without forfeiting their ability to project power and demand tribute. Like Sadat, Trump and his diplomats understood that peace could only be made by sidelining the Palestinians and whoever was sponsoring them, in this case Iran.

Naturally, the Abraham Accords were repugnant to the Obama faction. The normalization deals undid Obama’s balance of power project—i.e., strengthen U.S. adversaries at the expense of allies—and pushed the left’s longtime darlings, the Palestinians and the Islamic Republic to the margins. Accordingly, the Biden administration unfroze money to fill Iran’s war chest and undermined regional normalization under cover of expanding it to Saudi Arabia. Any direct talks between Israel and Saudi, the steward of Islam’s holy shrines, would, if only for the sake of protocol, have to involve the Palestinian cause. Thus, the Biden administration put the Palestinians at the center of the region again.

That’s how we got to Oct. 7. Contrary to the Biden administration’s talking points, the Iranians didn’t see Saudi-Israeli normalization talks as an existential threat; rather, they correctly saw it, and other Biden moves, as an invitation to disrupt and destabilize the regional order that Trump had rebuilt. Subsequently, in traditional regional fashion, the Iranians mobilized their Palestinian proxy.

And yet for many good-faith observers, it remains a mystery why Obama and then Biden sought to undo the U.S. order of the Middle East, an arrangement that has kept a volatile and strategically vital region relatively stable. Is it ego alone that requires Obama and his party must be proven right, and that Trump’s successes must be transformed into failures at America’s expense—and at the additional price of destroying the prospects of a relatively hopeful future for Middle Easterners?

The key fact is this: The regional order that Trump restored has long been part of the formula that ensures continued U.S. domestic peace and prosperity. To put it another way, the moves made by Obama and now Biden are not primarily about destabilizing the Middle East. Rather, they are designed to destabilize the United States.

The Biden team’s moves to shelter Hamas are best understood in the context of a revolutionary program of domestic initiatives that aim to reconstitute American society on a new basis, and which in turn require the outright rejection of the country’s history and culture, its existing social arrangements, and constitutional order. The current regime has weaponized the security state, labeled its opponents “domestic terrorists,” and waged a third-world-style campaign against the opposition candidate because it’s a revisionist faction. Its political and cultural manifesto is a program for remaking America, whether through social pressure, or censorship, or bureaucratic fiat, or threats of violence, or actual violence. Among other devices to transform America, the Biden administration has opened the border to at least 7 million illegal aliens (and counting), many from places in the Middle East where Hamas is revered, and for whom political violence means steady, well-paid work.

It’s not the traditional U.S.-led order in the Middle East that the revisionist faction, Obama’s faction, is most determined to dismantle but rather the existing order in the U.S. And it’s not Israel that it’s most keen to grind into dust, but America. For the party that Obama remade in his image to triumph at home, the Palestinians must win.

Eugene Kontorovich: Already a Travesty, the ICC Eyes Charges Against Israel

The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court is reportedly considering arrest warrants against Israeli leaders for alleged war crimes. This would be the first time the ICC has taken this step against a liberal Western democracy. Such charges would allow unaccountable bureaucrats in The Hague to put Israel's elected officials on trial for decisions they made to defend the Jewish state against Hamas.

The charges alone would harm Israel by serving as a diplomatic catalyst for sanctions and boycotts of the Jewish state. But the diplomatic damage depends on a mistaken view of the ICC's legitimacy. It isn't some grand "world court." The countries most likely to use military force have chosen not to join. Despite a $200 million annual budget, the ICC has convicted only six people of the mass-atrocity crimes it was created to adjudicate in 2002. Incumbent dictators such as Russia's Vladimir Putin have simply ignored ICC indictments.

The ICC can't deter dictators and warlords. The likeliest outcome of an ICC charge against Israel would be to make it harder for small democracies to defend themselves from aggressive neighbors. In 2020, the ICC prosecutor shelved an investigation into allegations of torture by U.S. troops in Afghanistan when President Trump imposed sanctions on her and a colleague. After the Biden administration lifted those sanctions in 2022, the ICC promptly reopened the investigation.

J’Accuse: The antisemitic lies of 2024

The Jewish people are used to lies being spread about them. Nearly a millennium ago, the first of many blood libels accusing the Jews of murdering gentile children to consume their blood emerged. This was joined by accusations that Jews committed ‘host desecration,’ the supposed mistreatment of Communion Bread, and the accusation that Jews poisoned wells causing the Black Death.

Each of these false accusations led to massacres of innocent Jews. Unfortunately, lies about Jewish evil did not end with the enlightenment, nor did their deadly consequences.

The false charges against Alfred Dreyfus in France in the 1890s, the publishing of the antisemitic forgery ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ by the government of Tzarist Russia in 1903, Henry Ford’s diatribes against the ‘international Jew’ in the Dearborn Independent, and of course, the originators of the ‘big lie,’ Adolph Hitler and his Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, whose lies dehumanized the Jewish people enough for the Holocaust to be committed.

As the world’s only Jewish nation, it is not surprising that Israel has frequently been the victim of many ‘big lies’ designed to foment hate and justify the murder of its citizens.

American readers will remember how in 2000, the Associated Press wrongly captioned a photograph of an American Jewish student, Tuvia Grossman, who had been beaten by Palestinian Arabs in Jerusalem as a Palestinian, leading readers of the New York Times and other newspapers to conclude that Israeli police had beaten an Arab man when the police had saved the American citizen.

This was nothing compared to the ‘big lie’ that was told two years later, when, after 30 people were murdered in a suicide bombing at a Passover Seder in Netanya, the IDF went into Jenin to put an end to the terrorism plaguing Israel’s streets. The Palestinian Authority and so-called human rights NGOs such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International accused the IDF of “war crimes” and a “massacre” of as many as 500 people. These claims were reported without question by British media such as The Guardian and the BBC, which worked to spread the ‘big lie’ of the non-existent massacre. In reality, about 55 Arabs were killed in the battle, most of whom were combatants, and 23 IDF soldiers were killed, in part because of the IDF’s efforts to prevent civilian casualties. But a ‘big lie’ turned an otherwise unremarkable military engagement into a crime that justified any actions taken against Israel, Israelis, and Jews.

The sheer abundance of lies about Jews throughout history makes it easy to draw comparisons to past instances where such lies led to Jews being murdered. It is common nowadays to look at the horrific scenes on American college campuses, the intimidation, threats, and assaults against Jewish students, the open calls for genocide against Jews, and the failure of college administrations to combat this hate, and say that we are now living in a repeat of 1938 Germany.

The current situation could also be considered reminiscent of France during the Dreyfus Affair. Indeed, one of the chief propagators of the ‘big lies’ against Israel deliberately invited such comparisons soon after the Hamas massacre of October 7.

In late November, less than two months after the worst massacre committed against the Jewish people since the Nazi Holocaust, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese published a book she titled 'J'Accuse: The 7 October Attacks, Hamas, Terrorism, Israel, Apartheid in Palestine and the War.’

‘J'Accuse,’ meaning “I accuse,” was the title of an open letter published by the journalist Émile Zola in the L’Aurore newspaper on January 13, 1898 in which he laid bare the facts of the conspiracy to frame Alfred Dreyfus for treason and to protect Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy, the man who had actually committed the crime for which Dreyfus was falsely accused.

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Is Columbia University A Model Of How To Deal With The Protestors? (Daled Amos)

 by Daled Amos

Meet Columbia University President Minouche Shafik:

At the very least, Shafik did not seem to be quite as tongue-tied and did end up trying to defend antisemitism.

But she did not come across as being in control of the university.

Yet, by Tuesday she seemed to handle the demonstrations and encampments better than some other universities did.

For example, The New York Times optimistically reported: At Brown, a Rare Agreement Between Administrators and Protesters.

Some agreement!

“Although the encampment will end, organizing to ensure that the Brown administration fulfills our calls to act on divestment will continue until the corporation vote in October,” the Brown Divest Coalition said in a statement on Tuesday.

“This feels like a real moment of realizing our collective power,” said Rafi Ash, a sophomore at Brown who participated in the protests. “This is something that demonstrates that the mobilization of the student body can force the university to listen.”

Northwestern handed their protestors an even bigger victory:

In other words, the University will have five permanent scholarships for students and two visiting Palestinian faculty in perpetuity, given that they can find a donor, which shouldn’t be hard if Qatar is around.

The National Review reports that Northwestern caved on other demands as well: 

Other concessions in the deal Schill and the rest of Northwestern’s leadership struck with the encampment occupants — one of whom assaulted a student journalist attempting to take video — include student oversight of the university’s partnerships with suppliers and the investment of its endowment.

“The University will include students in a process dedicated to implementing broad input on University dining services, including residential and retail vendors on campus,” Northwestern’s leadership wrote, as well as forming a committee on “investment responsibility” with “representation from students, faculty, and staff.”

Compare that to Columbia, where the university seemed to take a strong stand, calling in the NYPD who cleared out the protestors who had barricaded themselves inside Hamilton Hall. Nothing like the timid university president above who, like others who testified before Congress before her, appeared indecisive on how to protect the students, especially Jews, who are her responsibility.

But look at the Message From the President, where Shafik describes how "patient" the board had been with what she admits were "unauthorized demonstrations." As it turned out, the fact that the university made no concessions had nothing to do with any determination or strength of will on the part of the school. Instead, the demonstrators didn't get the concessions that Brown and Northwestern did because they overplayed their hand. 

Shafik writes:

The University offered to consider new proposals on divestment and shareholder activism, to review access to our dual degree programs and global centers, to reaffirm our commitment to free speech, and to launch educational and health programs in Gaza and the West Bank. Some other universities have achieved agreement on similar proposals.

Now that they see that other universities were forced to make major concessions, will the students quietly return to the classrooms and finish the school year? The university president thinks so, suggesting that the students "will use the weeks ahead to restore calm, allow students to complete their academic work, and honor their achievements at Commencement."

But in that same message, Shafik suggests that the disruption and destruction that Columbia has faced is not the work of the students alone, but rather "outside activists."

She may have a point.

Jonathan Schanzer, Senior Vice President of Research for the. Foundation for Defense of Democracies confirmed the influence of these outside activists during the Monday edition of his FDD Morning Brief. Here is a short excerpt that he tweeted:

The protests are not spontaneous.

The protests are not organic.

Outsiders are driving this.

My thoughts for the ⁦@FDD⁩ morning brief today. pic.twitter.com/HJkKDiYIlP

— Jonathan Schanzer (@JSchanzer) April 29, 2024

In a nutshell:

Hat tip: Ian

The New York Post reports that not all of the non-students were not necessarily associated with terrorist groups :

Several agitators busted Tuesday night when police raided encampments at Columbia University and the City College of New York are seasoned anti-Israel protesters who don’t even attend the Big Apple schools.

If Shafik and Schanzer are right, and there are external influences (let alone outside funding) at play here, how can the university president be sure that the worst is over? At Columbia and other universities, the protestors have gotten away with too much for too long.

Equally worrying is that in her message, Shafik makes no mention of Jews, Israel, or October 7. She and the trustees ignore the context of the protests, convincing themselves that they are dealing with a reawakening of the 1960's.

Columbia has a long and proud tradition of protest and activism on many important issues such as the Vietnam War, civil rights, and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. Today’s protesters are also fighting for an important cause, for the rights of Palestinians and against the humanitarian tragedy in Gaza. They have many supporters in our community and have a right to express their views and engage in peaceful protest.

Columbia University has no idea what is happening or what they are dealing with.

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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Hamas, Democrats Credit Each Other With Idea To Inflate Numbers With/Of Dead People (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook page.

Rafah, May 2 - The Islamist militant group that has governed the Gaza Strip since 2007 and the political party that controls both the US presidency and the US Senate traded compliments today, which one claiming they had merely copied the established practice of the other, and vice versa, of using the dearly departed to create an artificially high statistic for political purposes.

Hamas and the Democratic Party credited each other Thursday with developing and advancing the idea of inflating voter and/or death toll counts. In separate interviews with journalists, each organization voiced the belief that the other had come up with it, and that their own organization had merely applied the concept to their own milieu: the Democrats, to inflate voter rolls and ballot boxes with the names and "votes" of the deceased; Hamas, either to tout high numbers of innocents killed in Israeli strikes, or to dig up mass graves that Palestinians themselves had dug long before the arrival of Israelis on the scene, and call those locations "site of mass killing by the IDF."

"Of course we simply copied the Democrats," stated Fawzi Barhoum of Hamas. "They mastered the art of registering and soliciting votes from beyond the grave decades ago. We could never perform at that level, for several reasons. One, they have been at it much longer, and two, we're not into voting and democratic processes. So we have to adapt the principle to this context. I'm proud of the success we have so far enjoyed with the practice."

Meanwhile, in Washington, Democratic strategists gave the credit entirely to Hamas. "The counting of the mass grave bodies as victims of Israeli strikes was nothing we could ever even think to try," acknowledged Ben Rhodes, an advisor to former President Barack Obama. "We're going to implement something of that sort with the upcoming presidential election, but Hamas are the real professionals at this. They can put up numbers that we'll never reach."

Both sides acknowledged that no one had an absolute monopoly on such manipulations. "You can't have a discussion of this phenomenon and not mention Ferdinand Marcos," admitted Barhoum. Marcos, President of the Philippines in the 1980's, became notorious for "winning" election by more votes than had been cast.

For their part, Democrats pointed to the prevalence of autocratic Arab leaders into the twenty-first century who boasted of winning reelection with 99% of the vote, if only because even they acknowledged that claiming 100% seemed excessive.

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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05/02 Links Pt1: The ivory tower jihad; Herzog issues ‘urgent’ message of support for Diaspora Jewry; Hamas' Education of the Ivy League

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The ivory tower jihad

More fundamentally still, the shocking scenes on campus are the outcome of the West’s willed educational collapse. The understanding of education as the transmission of a culture to the next generation was junked decades ago in favor of a propaganda narrative of Western oppression.

This opened the way for the colonization of curricula by anti-Western ideological causes. The admission of students selected on the basis of identity politics rather than intellectual ability further reduced education standards to positively infantile levels.

This was illustrated at Columbia by the keffiyeh-clad Johanna King-Slutzky, who spoke to the media on behalf of the encampment. Jaw-droppingly channeling Hamas’s strategy in Gaza, she stated that the university had an obligation to bring in food and water to the illegal encampment, demanding, “Do you want students to die of dehydration and starvation? … This is like basic humanitarian aid.”

Her remarks attracted widespread incredulity and ridicule. But so should Columbia’s educational standards.

In her biography on the Columbia website, now deleted, King-Slutzky describes her dissertation as “a prehistory of metabolic rift, Marx’s term for the disruption of energy circuits caused by industrialization under capitalism … theories of the imagination and poetry as interpreted through a Marxian lens in order to update and propose an alternative to historicist ideological critiques of the Romantic imagination.”

This gobbledygook is beyond parody. Alas, it’s all too typical of what now passes for higher education in America and Britain. The universities, the supposed crucibles of knowledge, intellectual challenge and open minds, are now in the business of propaganda, dumbing-down and the closing of the mind. They have become the principal vehicles for coercing cultural conformity to hatred of both Israel and the West.

In the appalling scenes on campus, a number of monstrous chickens are now coming home to roost.

Jonathan Tobin: Don’t compromise with pro-Hamas students; expel or suspend them

Shafik and her board deserve little credit for her decision to act. She had tolerated an intolerable situation on the Manhattan campus for weeks. During that time, Jews on campus were subjected to an unprecedented atmosphere of intimidation and threats from students, faculty and others spouting lies about Israel committing a Palestinian “genocide” and who made no secret of their identification with the Hamas terrorists responsible for the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. Rhetoric about not tolerating the existence of “Zionists” had become normative, as had advocacy for antisemitic BDS resolutions that seek to target Israelis and Jews for discrimination.

Buying quiet on campus
But as appalling as Shafik’s performance has been, it was far better than what happened at Northwestern University and Brown University. In both cases, the schools gave in to student demands and allowed them a say in whether these institutions would implement divestment from Israel in exchange for quiet on campus.

For those administrators, it seems like a good bargain; they probably thought that they bought peace rather cheaply. After all, implementing boycotts at these schools will be a long, drawn-out affair and may not ultimately lead to the discriminatory agenda the pro-Hamas students seek. Among other complications, the state laws of Illinois and Rhode Island rightly hold BDS to be a form of illegal discrimination.

Opponents of Israel, however, have reason to celebrate both the weakness of those school’s administrators and the willingness of mob leaders to take “yes” for an answer. Many of the protesters, outside agitators and their funders think that the ongoing spectacle of shutting down campuses and crowds at major institutions cheering on terrorists helps their cause. Some may even believe that outcomes in which the protests are ended by police action also turn them into martyrs or help make them appear sympathetic to liberals who view student demonstrations from the Vietnam era with nostalgia.

But the object of all the post-Oct. 7 protests is to mainstream the demonization of Israel and Zionism, and to essentially ostracize and silence Jewish students who refuse to bow to fashionable opinion on campuses and join the mobs. Schools that make these sorts of concessions only make that problem worse.

Authorities are not wrong to view the anti-Israel demonstrations as a challenge to the normal functioning of institutions of higher education as well as to public order. For example, Columbia’s very liberal regulations allow all sorts of protests but still require that, among other things, demonstrations be conducted in a manner that does not impinge on the rights of other students. Such rules cannot be flouted with impunity if the university is not going to be ruled by the whims of radical mobs assembled at the behest of any cause.

Nor should any university permit libraries to be commandeered by protesters, which occurred at Portland State University in Oregon. Or, in the case of the University of California, Los Angeles, its sprawling anti-Israel encampments made it difficult or impossible for students to access classes or parts of the school grounds.

At its heart, this nationwide struggle is not just a matter of preserving law and order on college campuses. It’s about a sinister movement whose aim is to single out Israel and Zionism—the national liberation movement of the Jewish people—for opprobrium, isolation and destruction. It is nothing less than a 21st-century variety of antisemitism rooted in woke ideology that grants a permission slip for Jew-hatred. If any other minority group—African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians—were being treated in the way that Jews are now being hounded on campuses, there would be no debate about the necessity of a zero-tolerance policy for such behavior. Those who have broken school rules or gone so far as to commit violence to further their hateful cause should be suspended and expelled, not coddled as misunderstood idealists. Universities that tolerate this behavior and allow hostile environments for Jews to be imposed by campus radicals should be stripped of federal funding for violating Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Statements from President Joe Biden that create false moral equivalencies to media coverage that legitimizes the protests or concessions from universities to the anti-Israel protesters, must all be seen as part of the same moral failure on the part of much of our political and educational establishments. Toleration of antisemitic mobs will only lead to more antisemitism.

Washington Free Beacon Editors: The Invisible President

For more than a week now, the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic protests convulsing university campuses have been the biggest news story in the country.

The protests, in many cases abetted by university faculty, have put a national spotlight on the illiberalism and intellectual rot at the heart of American "higher" education and the DEI regime that makes it hum.

We’re not in the business of offering political advice to President Joe Biden, but it is hard to miss his absence from the situation. The New York Times calls him a "bystander," and the president has forsaken the bully pulpit for strongly worded statements meted out through various spokesmen. "The president believes that forcibly taking over a building on campus is absolutely the wrong approach," the spokesman, John F. Kirby, told reporters hours before officers cleared the hall. "That is not an example of peaceful protest."

Good to know. The chaos engulfing the campuses is but a first foretaste of the bitter cup which will be proffered to Biden at the Democratic convention this summer, when the same protesters, with degrees from the same "elite" institutions bring their "peaceful" protest tactics to Chicago intent on wreaking havoc.

Biden wants to blend into the curtains. In a mirror image of his approach to the Israel-Hamas war, Biden aims to straddle the unbridgeable divide between the lawless and the law abiding, the intolerant and the tolerant, the virtuous and the contemptible. "I condemn the anti-Semitic protests," he said late last month. "I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians and their—how they’re being… ." He didn’t finish the sentence.

Biden is, of course, not taking a strong stand because the left wing of his own party, already inflamed by his mealy-mouthed support for Israel, is actively participating in these protests. Reps. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) dropped by to fist bump the Columbia campers. Biden can’t afford to alienate them further, and like Columbia’s president Minouche Shafik, will soon realize you can’t reason or negotiate with a mob.

The president’s choice is to act in the national interest and pay a political price or to continue to hide under his desk and be forced, like Shafik, to pay the same price later—with interest.

Biden: 'People have the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos'

President Biden delivered unscheduled remarks on Thursday morning from the White House in his first public condemnation of the escalating protests sweeping college campuses across the country.

Biden inserted himself at a pivotal moment in the anti-war, pro-Palestinian movement that's now seen several nights of violent clashes between students and heavily armed law enforcement called in by university administrators to dismantle Gaza solidarity tent encampments.

On Wednesday, for the second night in a row, riot police in tactical gear stormed the encampment on UCLA's campus, where local reports estimated 300-500 people were gathered. More than 2,000 supporters were standing outside of the encampment when California Highway Patrol moved in to start arresting protestors who refused to disperse.

Photos captured the standoff between police with shields and batons across from students wearing hard hats and Keffiyehs.

Reporters pressed the White House to hear from Biden all week as this scene played out not only in California but in Texas, Georgia, and New York.

The White House has carefully choreographed its response to balance calling for the rule of law with supporting First Amendment rights. Balancing free speech with rule of law

"We've all seen the images, and they put to the test two fundamental American principles," Biden said on Thursday. "The first is the right to free speech and for people to peacefully assemble and make their voices heard. The second is the rule of law. Both must be upheld."

The US is not an "authoritarian nation," and peaceful protest is the best tradition for Americans to respond to consequential issues.

"But neither are we a lawless country. We're a civil society, and order must prevail," Biden said. "Throughout our history, we've often faced moments like this because we are a big, diverse, free-thinking, and freedom-loving nation."

Biden said this is a moment for clarity - not politics.

"So let me be clear: Violent protest is not protected. Peaceful protest is," Biden said.

He added vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, instilling fear in people, and shutting down campuses are against the law and not peaceful protest.

"Dissent is essential to democracy, but dissent must never lead to disorder or to denying the right of others so students can finish the semester and their college education," Biden said.

People have the right to protest but not the right to cause chaos, Biden said, adding that people have the right to get an education and walk across campus safely without fear of being attacked.

"Let's be clear about this as well: there should be no place on any campus, no place in America for antisemitism, or threats of violence against Jewish students," Biden said.

Biden said there is no place for hate speech or violence of any kind, whether it's antisemitism, Islamophobia, or discrimination against Arab Americans or Palestinian Americans.

"It's simply wrong," Biden said. "There's no place for racism in America. It's all wrong. It's un-American."

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The American DON’Ts to Israel (Forest Rain)

The American DON’T

On October 7^th, Israel was invaded by Gaza. They raped, tortured, and burned our families alive.

In the north, Hezbollah (who is Iran, not Lebanon where they are based) began pummeling Israel with missiles. Israeli communities in the south near Gaza and the north near Hezbollah were evacuated. It was and still is too dangerous for them to live in their homes.

And then the Houthis from Yemen started shooting missiles at Israel. They are shooting from far but can reach Eilat where many of the evacuees are taking refuge.

And then Hamas in Judea, Samaria, and Jerusalem rose up, and attacked individual Israelis. Attackers came from Jordan and even from Turkey. Attacking anyone they could get their hands on -soldiers, peace activists and even children in a school bus. They tortured Benjamin Achimeir the same way people in Be’eri were tortured.

And then America said DON’T.

Not to the enemies trying to wipe us off the map – they said it to Israel.

Don’t finish off Hamas. Feed them. Fuel them. Make them strong.
Don’t protect yourselves. Protect THEM.  
Don’t make it safe for Israelis to return to their homes.
Don’t stop the weapons being smuggled into Gaza.
Feed them the invaders. The rapists. Those who took the heads of your boys and put them in their ice cream coolers. Those who promised to attack you again and again and again until you no longer exist. Don’t!

Don’t attack Hezbollah.
Never mind that the north is evacuated.
Never mind your people are suffering. Never mind that you are not protecting them. Never mind that their businesses are ruined and they have no homes to go back to.
Don’t!

And then Iran attacked Israel directly.

And America smiled and said: “See, you managed not to die. You didn’t allow them to wipe you off the map. That’s good enough.”

And with a smile America said: “See, we’re helping you. Do what we say and maybe you will get some of your hostages back. You don’t need weapons to defend yourself. You don’t need to prove that you meant it when you said NEVER AGAIN. Do what we say, and everyone will all be happy.”

And what do they say?

Release murderers. Of course, they will murder again but that’s not the problem now, is it?

Let Hamas survive. They will stay in power. Of course, they will learn that taking hostages gets them whatever they want but you want the hostages they already have, don’t you?

Let Hamas join with the Palestinian Authority. They can run Gaza and the territory they already control in Judea and Samaria. Give them the power of a State. Never mind that they tried to destroy you when they had less power. Now, it’s time to give them more. After all they are the chosen leaders of the [so-called] Palestinians. Yeah, yeah, they both say they want to replace Israel with Palestine and they have maps in their homes and offices showing what they want: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” – of Jews. Yeah, yeah, on October 7^th we all saw how they intend to achieve that. Yeah, yeah, they promised to do October 7^th over and over until the job is done….
October 7^th, that will be a great date for their Independence Day! What a fabulous idea.

And America smiles and says: “We’re your friends. You should listen to us. We are helping you”

Somehow the threat of international criminal trials is being waved in the faces of our government and military leaders. And America says: “Oh. So sorry. We can’t do anything about that.”

Strange how the politicians and military leaders that encourage adhering to America’s “friendly” advice aren’t being threatened…

Strange how Israeli opposition politicians and internal agents of chaos and America are using the same terminology, stating the same goals, and equating our elected politicians with the terror mastermind of the October 7^th massacre.  

Strange how American “help” negotiating a hostage release deal is keeping Israel from putting any pressure on Hamas that would actually incentivize their release.

People wonder, if Israel cannot vanquish Hamas, the weakest of Israel’s enemies, how can Israel handle Hezbollah or Iran itself?

And there is the crux of the issue. Israel CAN vanquish Hamas. Israel can address attacks from Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Yemen, Iraq, and Iran all at once.

We never imagined America would wage war against us. THAT is what we are up against.   

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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