Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, May 05, 2024

Experts had estimated tens of thousands of deaths in Gaza by now that never happened. Why does no one call them out?

In February, a group of experts from Johns Hopkins University and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine analyzed the data from Gaza - mostly based on Hamas sources - and determined what they felt were the likely number of excess deaths in Gaza over the following six months, based on three scenarios: immediate ceasefire, status quo and escalation.

They were nice enough to break up the projections into two three-month chunks - meaning that we can see what their estimates of deaths would be from February 7 to today, May 6, and we can compare it with what the same Gaza authorities claim today.

As of February 7, Hamas claimed 27,708 deaths. Today, they claim 34,622, an increase of 6,914 from then.

Here are the estimates from the experts for the same time period:

If you assume that we have kept the status quo - there has been no ceasefire since February 7, and the IDF continues to attack Hamas - we see that the experts estimated over four times the number of excess deaths than the Ministry of Health has reported (including the ten thousand phantom deaths that the MoH now calls "incomplete data.")

If you only count their projections from deaths from traumatic injury - meaning, directly from Israeli fire - the numbers are still way, way above what even Hamas claims today for the past three months.

Their estimates of the number of people who would die from epidemics ranged from 0-30,540. The actual number is zero.

Now, when the study was released, it received plenty of attention from mainstream media. Now when we see that the projections are nowhere near the reality by anyone's numbers, no one bothers to correct the reports.

Even though the people behind the report created an entire website for it, they have not updated the website with newere numbers - because that would show that they were wrong. So the website of these supposedly unbiased researchers is frozen in amber, including the raw data they keep on GitHub.

As we've seen a number of times in this war, the supposed experts are quick to find reasons to believe Hamas numbers and very reluctant to correct their wrong data when the truth is found to not conform with their assumptions of Israeli evil. I have tried to contact a few of them, such as a Columbia professor who wrote in Newsweek with confidence that 30,000 had been killed in Gaza, asking specific questions about apparent problems in their methodology - and not one has bothered answering me.

This is not how scholars are supposed to work. They are supposed to admit mistakes, or at least defend their methods from any reasonable objection.

But instead these supposed academics, scholars and experts stubbornly stick to their increasingly untenable analyses, and then hope everyone forgets about it.

Bias and science do not mix. These supposedly objective data scientists and statisticians, relying on bad data to estimate even worse projections, are not issuing corrections or mea culpas. Which makes them worse than journalists who at least sometimes are forced to make corrections.

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!

Ninety members of the faculty of Connecticut College have signed a letter of "solidarity with student protestors" nationwide that not only ignores facts, and not only explicitly lies about Israel, but it even spreads the antisemitic slur that Jews engage in "Jewish supremacy."

The college has 187 full-time and 67 part-time faculty members, meaning that up to nearly half of the faculty there signed this letter.

Every paragraph includes lies and ignorance:

Institutions of higher education have never been apolitical spaces, and choosing to remain neutral in the face of a genocide is, itself, a political position.

There is no genocide by any definition of the term - except the attempted genocide by Hamas.

Criminalizing students for peaceful protest demonstrates these institutions’ deplorable commitment to the repression of academic inquiry and the shackling of critical thought.

If students are violating university policies, refusing to leave when requested, making areas of campus no-go zones for other students including Jews who support Israel, this is no longer peaceful protest. No one has a problem with peaceful protest.

The criminalization of nonviolent student protesters constitutes a willful and cynical flouting of the mission of universities as speech havens, where the strong protections of academic freedom must apply and be upheld.

Not a word about the suppression of free speech of Jewish students, of the intimidation of Jews on campus, of the violent attacks that some Jews have suffered. These teachers, in other words, don't give a damn about free speech except the speech they agree with, which means they don't care about free speech.

Divestment is a tried and true political strategy. Faculty play a crucial role in supporting student demands for universities and colleges to divest from companies supporting Israeli state violence, genocide, apartheid, and occupation.

For a letter from academics, there isn't even a pretense of evidence for the accusations. Like all good propagandists, they lie about "genocide" and "apartheid" and "occupation" as if these are established truths.

We also stand in solidarity with Israeli organizations and activists who oppose Israeli apartheid and Jewish supremacy such as Shoresh.

I had never heard of Shoresh, and for good reason: it was just founded after October 7 and it is not an Israeli organization at all, but a tiny group of a few ex-Israelis who live in the US. it was profiled by Al Jazeera in March, and that is about it. It doesn't have a webpage, just a page on Action Network where they describe themselves as pretty much an ex-Israeli JVP: "We offer a leftist vision for radical change between the river and the sea" where Palestinians would have a right to "return" but Jews would have no national rights. No names of the leaders, no official statements, no mention of where funding comes from, nothing. The very faculty that claims to care about transparency in college investments has no problems with propping up an alleged organization that is completely opaque.

But like JVP and Neturei Karta, they serve a purpose: to shield today's bigots from charges of bigotry. "See? I'm not antisemitic when I say there is 'Jewish supremacy!' I have an organization of Jewish Israeli expats who agree with me!"

There is no pushback I can find at Connecticut College except a single article in the campus newspaper by Professor Andrew Pessin condemning this letter. Besides the points I make, he emphasizes that a letter like this by itself chills the free speech of those who attend these people's classes:

In general I believe it is inappropriate for a mob of faculty to promote their opinions to you this way. There is a bullying process that goes into acquiring signatures that is inconducive to free and open inquiry. This document may also make some of you uncomfortable, and feel unsafe in the classrooms of those who signed it. Are these professors looking at their Jewish students, thinking about those Jews and their evil Jewish supremacy? How could you object to or protest this statement, and expect to prosper in that professor’s class, under the threat of the professor’s grade? For that reason alone I register my objection to it.

The rot in today's higher education is far worse than we knew before October 7.

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!

Latest Hamas lie that the UN parrots: "Israel booby-trapping cans of food to kill kids"

Last week, UN-OCHA reported in their Flash Update #160 for the Gaza war:

On 29 April, the Government Media Office (GMO) reported that a 14-year-old boy was seriously injured, and sustained limb amputations, after opening a booby-trapped can of food found while looking for his belongings in his house that had been shelled by Israeli forces in Khan Younis. The GMO indicated that many people have been recently injured due to the explosion of booby-trapped canned goods, urging the population to exercise maximum care.

This is an obvious lie and an absurd antisemitic libel.

The GMO is Hamas, and they already have a seven month track record of making things up. But OCHA's mentioning it allows other media to quote the lie as if the UN is the one accepting the absurd allegations.

The UN is, as it has for months, launders Hamas lies to make them appear legitimate.

After OCHA published the accusation someone had second thoughts. But instead of pointing out that Hamas has a track record of making similarly slanderous accusations that have been proven false afterwards, they merely appended, "Booby traps are not a threat UN specialized agencies have documented in Gaza."

The rumor seems to have started in January. The Times of Gaza tweeted, "Israeli jets dropped explosives disguised as cans of food to lure in displaced people facing starvation in southern Gaza." Quds News Network added to the lie, saying "Two children, one man, and one woman were killed by the fake cans."

Of course, no names are given.

France24 debunked that video, as have others. The objects shown were fuses meant to explode mines but by themselves they were not dangerous, and they were not "disguised as cans of food." In fact, they are so small that no one would think they contained food.

So now Hamas has brushed off the lie and published it, and OCHA happily parrots whatever Hamas says, with the weak caveat of quoting the "Government Media Office" which sounds official but is some Hamas guy on Telegram.

Hamas lies every single day, and the media either ignores the lies or repeats them - but almost never points out the pattern of provable lies from that source that we have seen since October 7.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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)

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

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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)

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

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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.

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!

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.

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.

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!

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.

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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.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

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