Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, February 04, 2026

The University of Ottawa has a very bad antisemitism problem - and it actively covers it up

Last October, Marie-Eve Sylvestre, the University of Ottawa’s president and vice-chancellor, sent out a vague email to all students condemning an antisemitic graffiti incident. The contents of that email was not published nor was the incident reported in the media at the time. The university did not issue any statement, and neither did police who were investigating it.

Three months later, we finally have details on what happened. Swastikas were painted outside a Jewish student's dorm room on campus.

The silence around this case highlights a larger problem about campus antisemitism at uOttawa, one tackled by Isabelle Leahey Jay, the reporter at the student newspaper who broke this story.

The campus Chabad Rabbi Chaim Boyarsky said that students reported to him that there were desks etched with swastikas at the campus library, students joking during lectures that “Jews are the cause of natural disasters”, Jewish students enduring insults and slurs as they walk on campus.

Soon after October 7 2023, Jewish students met to pray for the victims of the attacks and were harassed by anti-Israel students tell them to leave.

Perhaps most disturbing, the students are reluctant to report these incidents because they believe that this will only make things worse for them. They have good reason to think this: even after this report in the Fulcrum, an online discussion included people justifying hate against Jews because of "Palestine" and others calling it a Jewish false flag operation.

Nevertheless, the university spokesperson Jesse Robichaud said in December that the graffiti was an "isolated incident."

The University of Ottawa created a position of Special Adviser on Antisemitism held by Professor Jonathan Calof. Surprisingly, he was not quoted in this article. He reports to the Vice-Provost, Equity, Diversity and Inclusive Excellence which makes one wonder how effective he can be; antisemitism is not just another form of bigotry that can be fought with similar tools and diversity/inclusivity/equity teams are often the problem more than the solution.

The head of the EDIE group at uOttawa, Awad Ibrahim, organized a conference in 2024 that was meant to be about antisemitism, Islamophobia and "anti-Palestinian racism." Yet the only Jews invited to the panel were both members of an anti-Zionist group who railed against the "Israel lobby" - evoking the very antisemitic tropes they are supposed to fight against. . This is not just an oversight - this shows how little the DEI at the university understands about modern antisemitism.

I am concerned that this position of special adviser on antisemitism, reporting to a leader who is either ignorant about antisemitism or actively tries to minimize it, is more a figurehead rather than having any teeth.

For example, Professor Calof does not have a webpage where he can issue statements directly to students. After the swastika incident occurred in October, he was quoted as saying that there were three more antisemitic incidents that week alone. Shouldn't these be publicized (without identifying victims)? Shouldn't the news about this incident have come from his office before the student newspaper uncovered it? It seems like the university is very interested in sweeping antisemitism under the rug, and Dr. Calof does not have the tools to do anything real besides counsel student and faculty victims of antisemitism.

“I’ve had students crying in my office because they have been isolated by people, they thought they were their friends, who are now afraid of wearing a Magen David,” said Calof. “I’ve had faculty say that their colleagues stopped speaking to them due to differences in opinion. It has gotten really bad. The illegal encampment, protests and graffiti of last year have given way to a more institutionalized form of antisemitism.”

Calof did not respond to my request for comment.

The role was created in 2024, but the professor who was appointed was forced out after only three months for tweeting his support of Israel's pager operation against Hezbollah, calling it "brilliant." Which it was. If the person who is meant to fight antisemitism at the university cannot be publicly and proudly pro-Israel, then the role is all but meaningless - it means that anti-Israel activists have veto power over a role that would expose them as antisemitic.

The fact that the adviser role remained vacant for over a year afterwards makes one wonder how important fighting antisemitism is to the university compared to making it look like they are taking it seriously.

More than half of all hate crimes in Ottawa are against the small Jewish community there. Based on the reporting I'm seeing, it seems that this is a severe undercount.

Working behind the scenes has its advantages, but from all appearances, the University of Ottawa is more interested in hiding its antisemitism problem than publicly fighting it. When that happens, light is the only real disinfectant.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

200 years ago: the Papal Government reimposed laws on Jews startlingly similar to the Nazi Nuremberg Laws

This is a news item from February 4, 1826 in the "Public Leger," Richmond, Indiana:

These are not medieval laws. These were laws in the heart of Italy that lasted until 1870. Napoleon had rescinded these laws but these particular laws were reinstated after Napoleon's defeat.

The parallels between the Papal Government laws and Nazi laws re inescapable:

Aspect	Medieval Christian Laws	Nuremberg Laws (1935) & Nazi Extensions
Identification & Segregation	Required badges (e.g., yellow wheels or hats) or clothing to mark Jews publicly (1215 Lateran Council; enforced in Papal States).	Mandated yellow Star of David badges (1941 onward); confined Jews to ghettos (1939–1941), mirroring 1555 Roman Ghetto.
Intermarriage & Relations	Banned marriages/relations between Jews and Christians to prevent "contamination" (e.g., 339 CE Constantius laws; repeated in canon law).	Prohibited marriages/extramarital relations between Jews and "German blood" citizens; invalidated existing ones.
Citizenship & Rights	Denied full citizenship, public office, or property ownership; treated as perpetual outsiders (e.g., Magna Carta 1215 limited Jewish debts; expulsions stripped rights).	Revoked citizenship for Jews; excluded from professions, voting, and public life (over 400 decrees by 1939).
Economic Restrictions	Barred from guilds, land ownership, or certain trades; heavy "tolerance taxes" (e.g., under Maria Theresa in Hungary).	Banned from businesses, property ownership (1938 decrees); forced asset registration and Aryanization.
Humiliations & Violence	Forced conversions, ritual murder libels, pogroms (e.g., Black Death blame); Luther's calls for destruction.	Propaganda revived libels; led to Kristallnacht, deportations, and genocide.

History textbooks typically describe the Nuremberg laws as if they were unique innovations by Nazi Germany, but in fact many of them mirrored how Christians treated the Jews for centuries. They didn't seem outrageous at the time because they mirrored how Jews had been treated in Europe by Christians in living memory.

The Nazis would have claimed that their restrictions were different. After all, Christian antisemitism was based on irrational religious bigotry while the Nazi version was based on the latest race science and social Darwinism.

The reasoning was different - racist bigotry compared to religious bigotry - but the effects were the same.

And if you think about it, today's "anti-Zionist" flavor of antisemitism echoes both of these. Not nearly as blatant - after all, today's anti-Zionists also think of themselves as modern and progressive - but the parallels are pretty clear when you examine them.

Israelis don’t need badges - they are identified by their Hebrew names and shunned and protested against. Zionists are not allowed to join progressive spaces or groups. Israelis are increasingly banned from visiting other countries under bogus pretenses. BDS groups boycott any Jewish-owned Israeli businesses. Zionists are publicly demonized. Any attempt by Jews in universities for dialogue are shunned. Vandalism against Jewish and Zionist sites are increasingly common.

Antisemitism is often more a structure than an ideology.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Arab reporter says Palestinians would bring their kids to riots hoping they'd be injured or arrested so they would get paid by the PA

Palestinian Media Watch has a huge scoop.

Mustafa Al-Miqdad, a respected Syrian journalist who works with the British think tank Arab Progress Center for Policies, was interviewed on Palestinian TV this week where he publicly admitted something astonishing: that it is well known that Palestinian parents would bring their children to participate in violent demonstrations in the hope that they would be injured or imprisoned by Israeli forces.

So they could get paid in the PA's "Pay for Slay" program.

Years ago, at the Gaza border, there was friction with the Zionist enemy. There were those who would go out to marches and protests there. There are stories I won't hide from you, that we all know, meaning as families, some would go together with their children, etc., so they would be injured or something would happen to them, so they could later receive the monthly aid or the monthly salary, or even be arrested and imprisoned to receive just what would support their families as a result of this situation, as a result of the existing neediness.

Read that again: Palestinian parents would deliberately put their children in harm's way to make money.

We've seen isolated incidents, like this 2016 episode where a father urged his 3 year old son to throw rocks at IDF soldiers and dared them to shoot and kill the boy.

But no one reported that this was routine behavior.

Some people claim that the PA's "pay for slay" program, where they pay families of "martyrs," prisoners and those injured by Israeli forces, is not a reward for terror, but just a social program. This shows this to be a lie: it is not only a reward, it is an incentive to teach kids to try to murder Israelis.

One detail of this sickening story is perhaps nearly as bad.

Notice also how Al-Miqdad, speaking to a Palestinian TV interviewer, says that "we all know" about families going out to get their kids injured, speaking to a Palestinian audience.

Palestinians know it. Their reporters know it. The NGOs that attend the protests know it. The Palestinian "human rights activists" employed by international NGOs know this.

But no one publishes it.

Even this story has not yet been picked up by any media as of this writing.

I'm sure there are some Palestinian mothers who love their children, who tell them to stay out of trouble. But we never see stories about them, even in Arabic media.

Apparently, Palestinian lives aren't worthless. They are worth an annual salary.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

02/03 Links Pt2: Did the Bondi Attack Actually Change Australia?; Congressional watchdog says UNRWA wrong to say its report absolves agency

From Ian:

Matti Friedman: New Wave, Old Land

Can a foreign observer show up in another country, without living there or speaking the language, and say something original and definitive about it—something that wouldn’t strike locals as illiterate or banal?

Almost never. My answer would be the same, I imagine, as that of most Israelis, flooded as we are with the confident fantasies of countless such observers in every corner of social media and what’s left of the international press. Whether believing themselves to be journalists or tourists, what most outsiders see in a foreign country is nearly always what they bring with them from home. They mine distant lands for shiny rocks in which to view their own reflection. This seems truer of Israel than of other places because of the way this country and its residents have featured in the fantasy lives of others for so long.

But there are glorious exceptions. One of them was screened in a recent exhibit at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem: a documentary film of under one hour, shot in four weeks in the spring of 1960 by the French director Chris Marker. The film, Description of a Struggle, deserves to be more famous than it is. This is not just because it’s a portrait of this country—now weathered and scarred by hard living—as a newborn. It’s because the film is a master class in how to see a place and its people, and a restorative for anyone despairing of our ability to look at the world and create an impression in words or images.

When Marker arrived in Israel with his French crew, another foreign film was already shooting here: the Hollywood epic Exodus, starring Paul Newman. This movie, like the Leon Uris bestseller that inspired it, is an example of a fantastical projection with little connection to the actual place in question. In ticket sales and press attention, Exodus was to Marker’s modest film—in which the stars are anonymous kids, farmers, and a few Israeli cats and owls—what a Royal Caribbean liner is to a birch canoe. Sixty-five years later, Exodus is unwatchable and Description of a Struggle is hypnotic.

Chris Marker, who became famous as part of the French New Wave of the 1950s, was a slippery and playful artist. He claimed at times to have been born in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia. In fact his birth occurred, more mundanely for a Frenchman, in France, to parents who called him not “Chris Marker” but Christian Hippolyte François Bouche-Villeneuve. He chose his new name, he once explained, to make it easier to travel. Marker was active into his eighties, experimenting with video games and YouTube in his little studio in Paris. He died in 2012 at age ninety-one.

Seth Mandel: What People Don’t Understand About Jewish Security

This is where the misconception comes in. Jewish institutions across Western Europe, especially in places like France and Germany, have beefed up security. So in many cases, the Jewish children are safe—inside the building.

“But if we take three steps outside,” the Potsdam Jewish leader said, “we are completely on our own.”

When the German office tasked with tallying and categorizing incidents of anti-Semitism completed its report on 2024, it found a rise in Jew-hatred that was not particularly unexpected but nonetheless striking: “In 2024, RIAS reporting offices documented a total of 8 incidents of extreme violence, 186 assaults, 443 cases of targeted property damage, 300 threats” and, for good measure, about 7,500 “cases of abusive behavior.” One example of “extreme violence” was an ISIS terror attack that killed three.

One type of abusive behavior tracked by RIAS: anti-Semitic gatherings, of which there were over 1,800 in 2024: “In 2024, there was an average of 35 antisemitic gatherings per week, compared to 16 in 2023.” Such gatherings—think of the ubiquitous pro-Hamas marches and rallies in major Western cities since the war began—act as a way to “mobilize” anti-Semites, RIAS notes.

Let’s boil it down: There are daily calls for violence and near-daily violent anti-Semitism in Germany. These incidents aren’t taking place inside fortified daycares. The presence of secure buildings in Germany did nothing to slow down the country’s incidence of anti-Semitic violence: People have to get to and from those buildings.

In this way, the argument over securing physical locations, while important, remains incomplete. A wave of anti-Semitism hit Jews in Germany in broad daylight. The only way to avoid it would be for Jews to have simply stayed home. That’s one reason for the suggestion in the Potsdam case that the benefits of securing the daycare center might be offset by the downside of calling attention to the presence of Jewish children: The building will be a gathering place of Jews coming to drop off and pick up their children.

Jews work at offices, eat at restaurants, visit parks, etc.

In 92NY talk, Bret Stephens urges ‘dismantling’ ADL, investing more in Jewish identity

In a speech that described antisemites as an “axis of the perfidious, the despotic, the hypocritical, the cynical, the deranged and the incurably stupid,” Bret Stephens asserted that supporters of the Anti-Defamation League and other Jewish defense groups should largely abandon their current strategy for combating antisemitism and instead redirect their resources toward strengthening Jewish life itself.

Stephens, the conservative New York Times columnist and founder of the Jewish thought journal Sapir, said antisemitism is largely impervious to appeals to tolerance, reminders of Jewish and Israeli accomplishments, or mandatory Holocaust education.

Instead, he called for large-scale investment in Jewish day schools, cultural institutions, philanthropy, media, publishing and religious leadership, arguing that the infrastructure already exists but lacks sufficient scale and coordination.

“What we call the fight against antisemitism, which consumes tens of millions of dollars every year in Jewish philanthropy and has become an organizing principle across Jewish organizations, is a well-meaning, but mostly wasted, effort,” Stephens said, delivering the annual “State of World Jewry” address at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan on Sunday. “We should spend the money and focus our energy elsewhere.”

In an onstage conversation after the talk, Stephens told Rabbi David Ingber, the Y’s senior director for Jewish life, that if it were up to him, he would “dismantle” the ADL, the leading Jewish group fighting antisemitism.

“That’s not how Jewish money should be spent,” Stephens told Ingber, acknowledging that the ADL’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, was in the audience. “That’s not helping raise a generation of young Jews who are conscious of their Jewishness as something other than the fact that they saw ‘Schindler’s List’ and they visited the Holocaust Museum. That cannot be the locus of Jewish identity. If we’re going to survive, victimization cannot be at the heart of our identity.”

02/03 Links Pt1: The Trump Administration's Delusional Gaza 'Master Plan'; Is Iran Attending Its Own Funeral?; The shameful disinformation over the Gaza death toll; IDF find weapons in UNRWA aid sacks

From Ian:

Khaled Abu Toameh: The Trump Administration's Delusional Gaza 'Master Plan'

Even if Hamas does agree to surrender some of its weapons as part of a façade to appease Trump, the terror group will undoubtedly continue to keep or replace as many as possible to maintain a military, political and security presence in the Gaza Strip.

Hamas is not worried about the newly established Palestinian technocratic committee that is supposed to govern the Gaza Strip: the committee does not pose a direct threat to the terror group. The committee is primarily tasked with managing civilian affairs, delivering essential services such as water, electricity, healthcare and education, and rebuilding infrastructure. Security will remain in the hands of Hamas....

Building skyscrapers and an airport in the Gaza Strip will not change the Palestinians' views on Israel. The Palestinians are not going to give up the "right of return" because of foreign investment in the Gaza Strip. Hamas is not going to recognize Israel's right to exist or give up its Jihad (holy war) against the "Zionist entity" because of new homes, luxury apartments and tourist resorts. The only way to change the hearts and minds of Palestinians is through a deep and thorough process of re-education and actual serious pressure, for once, from the outside world. This requires brave, strong and pragmatic leadership -- both from the Palestinians and the international community -- an attribute that, unfortunately, does not seem to exist.

Ruthie Blum: Doctors Without Borders is getting the treatment it deserves

If there was any doubt about that, NGO Monitor has provided proof that MSF is not only far from a neutral humanitarian organization, but is openly partisan. Against Israel, of course.

It’s accused Israel of “genocide,” “collective punishment” and “apartheid,” while lobbying foreign governments to halt arms sales to the country. Nor has it ever condemned the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7, 2023.

But it has frequently decried Israeli operations in Gaza, downplaying or omitting Hamas’s systematic use of hospitals, ambulances and medical infrastructure for terrorist purposes. No wonder it’s been refusing to disclose the identity of its employees.

By resisting such transparency, it thought it could dupe Israeli authorities into allowing it to continue collaborating with mass murderers under the protective international cloak—and guise—of selfless physicians devoted to helping Palestinians in need of medical treatment.

How ironic that it’s been doing so for the very people whom the terrorists have purposely maimed and killed, as well as tried to starve, in order to frame Israel for their deaths. Talk about giving new meaning to the Hippocratic Oath.

As NGO Monitor founder and president Gerald Steinberg told JNS’s David Isaac on Monday, “MSF has gotten away with using its massive annual budget ($2.4 billion) and the influence this buys to promote antisemitic propaganda … and to avoid accountability for links to Hamas. But attempts to use bullying tactics through journalists and European political allies to avoid vital Israeli counterterror registration have failed. Their moral medical facade has been exposed for all to see.”

Indeed, even the best surgical masks can’t hide the group’s true face and ill will—for which there’s no cure.

Au revoir, MSF. Don’t let the door hit you in the derrière on your way out of Gaza.

Seth Mandel: Is Iran Attending Its Own Funeral?

A Mideast summit this Friday looks like it will play host to a group of countries that claim to want to save Iran from U.S. strikes—but in reality want to bury the Islamic Republic alive.

For Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which both plan to be represented at the meetup in Istanbul, it’s pretty straightforward. The Saudis are rivals for Iran’s influence and power projection around the Gulf, and Egypt stands to benefit from a loosening of Iranian proxies’ troublemaking in the Red Sea shipping lanes and its sponsorship of Hamas.

The reason for Turkey and Qatar’s bad-faith participation in the summit becomes clear when you see the kind of proposed “solutions” coming out of Ankara. Haaretz reports: “Turkey might propose, among other things, that the enriched uranium in Iran — including around 440 kilograms (970 pounds) that are enriched to 60 percent — be transferred to Turkey, with a promise that it would never be returned to Iran.”

There’s no reason to spend time listing all that’s wrong with that idea: Everything is wrong with it. But the Turks might as well shoot their shot; Haaretz notes that Russia has offered to hold the nuclear material for Iran and that “Trump may see Turkey as a more reliable entity than Russia.” Well, the planet has yet to see an entity less reliable than Putin’s Russia, so it’s all relative.

Though Ankara’s diplomats will never say so, Turkey is essentially proposing that Iran and Turkey switch places, with Recep Tayyip Erdogan as the steward of all the mullahs’ ill-gotten gains. Nuclear material? Put it in Turkey. Terrorist proxies around the region? Let them answer only to Turkey. Russia’s regional patsy? Turkey reporting for duty, comrade. Counterweight to Israel? Turkey.

The Qataris are playing a similar game. They have an American air base and have ingratiated themselves with Trump’s team. They may be Iran’s ally, but they do not need Iran’s protection. Iran’s newfound weakness poses minimal threat to Qatar, but Doha stands to gain substantial clout in Tehran’s absence. The Qataris, therefore, don’t want Iran to be destroyed by American and Israeli strikes, but they would like Iran to be locked into its current state of weakness, preferably through a deal that would freeze it in place without enabling its resurgence.

Right now, Iran doesn’t have a lot of friends, even among its friends.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Arab newspaper says Hebrew isn't a real language and came from Arabic. It existed 1300 years BEFORE Arabic!

The daily antisemitism in Arab newspapers remains a story that is ignored by the world.

Here's an article in Al Quds that says that Hebrew isn't a real language, and all linguists know this:

Through a long and systematic effort, the Jews succeeded in promoting a set of ideas and beliefs that lack any sound scientific basis, to the point that they became acceptable to broad segments of global public opinion, particularly in the Arab world. This endeavor was not accidental or arbitrary; rather, it was part of a comprehensive project aimed at establishing the intellectual and cultural foundations upon which the Zionist entity, now established on the land of Palestine, is built.

Among the most prominent of these narratives is the myth of the so-called "Hebrew language," the very name being a corruption of the word "Arabic," which represents the linguistic origin of what is known today as Hebrew. Any linguist, possessing even a modicum of objectivity, can discern the fragility of this claim; the Hebrew currently spoken in occupied Palestine does not, in terms of structure and characteristics, rise to the level of an independent language, for several scholarly reasons.

On the one hand, Hebrew has only about 2,500 root words, roughly one-tenth the number found in Arabic, revealing its limited vocabulary despite repeated claims of historical antiquity. On the other hand, the majority of its vocabulary consists of Arabic words with altered pronunciation, with a crucial difference: Arabic is a dynamic, inflectional language, rich in conjugation and semantics, while Hebrew appears rigid and limited in its development, as if it were borrowed at a later stage from its Arabic source.

The earliest known Hebrew text is from around the 10th century BCE (Gezer calendar, pictured.) The earliest Arabic text is from at least a thousand years later, and many date it to around the third century CE.

Which means even Hebrew writing with the current square script, recognizable to any Hebrew reader nowadays and used as early as the 5th century BCE, also pre-dates Arabic by many centuries.

I guess the ancient Israelites had a time machine where they decided to steal Arabic from the Arabs - just like they are now claimed to have stolen everything else that they had first.

You know, like the Temple.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

A reporter's question proves that the "two state solution" is a stage to destroy Israel

James Kariuki is Chargé d’Affaires at the UK Mission to the United Nations and this month he is leading the UN Security Council. he gave a press conference at the UN yesterday.

A reporter from Al Quds al-Arabi, Abdul Hamid Siam, asked a question that was more interesting than the answer.

Mr. Ambassador, I have two questions related to each other.

The first question about UK recognition of the state of Palestine on 22nd September. Would you give us more details about how the UK planning to put this resolution into motion that will help the Palestinians see their independent state.
As you see, the settlers are taking over almost and the confiscation of land is increasing rather than decreasing.

The other related question that the State of Palestine, sir, had came very late.I mean, Israel was established not because of a promise from God, but a promise from England.
The Balfour Declaration that helped to create the State of Israel and the Palestinians had to pay for that.
Would you foresee one day England will stand bravely and say, I am sorry for the Balfour Declaration? Thank you.

The first question was about the UK recognizing "Palestine" as a means to get to a two state solution. Yet Siam - and much of the Arab world altogether - certainly doesn't see it that way. And the second, "related" part of the question proves that.

Pressuring the UK to apologize for the Balfour Declaration is meant to delegitimize Israel as a state retroactively.

So when the Arab world sees the UK, France, Canada, Spain and others recognize "Palestine," it is not seen as a means to bring about a two state solution. It is seen as s stage for the ultimate destruction of Israel.

This shows the naivete of those recognitions. Recognizing "Palestine" didn't being peace closer - it hardened Arab positions by giving the message that eventually, without the Palestinians giving any concessions, the entire area will become "Palestine."

Kariuki deflected the Balfour question, simply saying "I'm not going to go into historical analysis." Yet even that gives support to the Israel haters.

Kariuki said, "It was a historic moment in our recognition of Palestine back in September, and I think, we're very pleased to have done that." But for Balfour he cannot bring himself to say that the UK is equally pleased to have helped bring about a Jewish state of Israel.

If the UK really supports Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state, it should publicly say it is proud of the Balfour Declaration. It cannot.

While the Western countries congratulate themselves on pretending to help bring about peace, in fact they are setting the stage for encouraging the Arabs to believe they will eventually destroy Israel.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

02/02 Links Pt2: Bondi A minute-by-minute account of Australia’s worst terrorist attack; Anti-Jewish hate crimes up 182% in New York City in January; Avdija named NBA All-Star, a first for an Israeli

From Ian:

David Collier: The BBC Sides With the BDS Agenda

The Extremists Within the “Minor” NGO
Both the BBC’s legitimisation of the UNHRC, and the whitewashing of the SPSC were inexcusable. This leaves the article’s remaining credibility resting almost entirely on Uplift, the minor NGO which commissioned the legal report.

Uplift is not a neutral or detached actor either. A brief review of some of its personnel highlights serious concerns. Its Digital Content Manager, Oliver Goulden, also serves as a trustee of Take One Action, an organisation with a documented history of supporting BDS initiatives, including campaigning alongside Mick Napier’s group, the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

Other figures associated with Uplift reinforce the same pattern. Lauren Macdonald, the group’s Lead Stop Rosebank Campaigner, maintains public timelines containing demonstrably inaccurate and demonising claims about Israel that are entirely unrelated to the Rosebank project. Meanwhile, Uplift’s Head of Strategic Communications, Tamasin Cave, previously led Spinwatch, a research group with a longstanding fixation on Zionism and lobbying, alongside the conspiracy theorist David Miller. Cave was a director of “Public Interest Investigations” the legal entity behind both Spinwatch and Powerbase, and her footprint is still visible in numerous documents focused on pro-Israeli lobby groups.

Eddy Quekett, Uplift’s Social Media Officer, has posted imagery containing the slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free“. The image incorporated a “Friends of Al Aqsa” (FoA) Palestinian flag. Friends of al Aqsa is a hard-line Islamist organisation led by Ismail Patel, and opposed to many of the fundamental freedoms taken for granted in the West. FoA seeks Islamist control over Jerusalem. This post has nothing to do with climate issues. It was a straightforward call for the destruction of Israel.

At this point the final pillar collapses. This is not a collection of disinterested experts raising a narrow legal concern. It is a network of highly politicised climate activists with a clear and established record of engagement in anti-Zionist campaigning. Treating their claims as though they carry inherent national news value, without disclosing that background, materially misleads the audience.

The undeniable pattern at BBC News
British Jews have seen it all from the BBC:
Repeated attempts to rewrite Holocaust history.
The shifting of blame onto British Jews for the violence directed at them.
The sanitisation of Hamas operatives by presenting them as medical staff.
The production of a documentary that concealed the Hamas ties of its central figure.
The creation of misleading reports about Israeli military actions in Gaza.
The reframing of an errant Islamic Jihad rocket into an Israeli strike on a hospital.
The use of Iranian IRGC-backed figures as impartial media sources.
The presentation of children with underlying illnesses as starving victims of famine.
The creation of a flagship “BBC Verify” populated by hacks spreading false claims about Israel.

The situation is so hostile that the Jews left working in the BBC village have become targets of internal campaigns to smear them and force them out.

There is an undeniable pattern here. This is a one-way traffic pattern which demonises the Jewish state, acts as a mouthpiece for terrorist factions, invents stories, revises Holocaust history, and invariably places Jewish people as hostile actors who incite whatever violence befalls them.

Yet in some respects, this latest article is even more revealing than those earlier institutional failures.

Creating a BDS narrative
First, a non-story is elevated into national news. Then, institutional authority is imported through an unqualified reference to the UN. Finally, activist groups are presented without disclosing information that would materially affect how readers assess their claims.

The result is a familiar pattern: activist lawfare against Israel, repackaged through climate discourse and laundered through respectable-sounding institutions.

But this is taking place on the BBC website, not in some fringe student-led magazine.

The BBC will respond by claiming it has placed dissenting voices inside the article, but this is a false position. The BBC does not need to explicitly endorse boycotts or anti-Israel campaigns. It achieves the same effect by deciding which claims deserve oxygen, and by stripping away the context that would allow audiences to judge those claims critically.

What the BBC has done here is elevate the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign into a conversation for the day.

This is not journalism exposing power. It is journalism amplifying it – selectively, predictably, and at Israel’s expense.

Jewish groups warn of ‘agenda-driven’ anti-Israel programming at US universities

There is a “disturbing” pattern on U.S. college campuses of academic programming that prioritizes political, “agenda-driven” activism over scholarship, according to the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis and the American Jewish Medical Association.

In a joint statement issued on Monday, the organizations cited a January speaker series at Harvard Medical School focused on Gaza and an upcoming “Conference on the Jewish Left” at Boston University.

“When Boston University lends its name and resources to a slate of speakers who minimize the scope of antisemitism and spin the Oct. 7 massacre as a moral indictment of Israel and its supporters in the Jewish community, it suggests university support for rhetoric that targets the identity and safety of Jewish students,” the organizations stated.

Jewish student leaders at BU told CAMERA that they fear for their safety, concerns echoed by the campus Hillel chapter. A university working group formed after Oct. 7 found Jewish and Israeli students had been targeted by aggression and cited insufficient protections.

Last year, Douglas Hauer-Gilad, an adjunct professor, said he resigned from Boston University’s law school after facing hostility for being Israeli and opposing anti-Jewish rhetoric.

A member of BU Students for Israel stated that the conference reflects a broader trend on campus.

“After everything that has happened on campus this year, it’s hard not to see this conference as part of a pattern,” he said. “Jewish students are repeatedly told these events are ‘academic,’ even when the rhetoric involved mirrors the hostility we experience day to day.”

Bar-Ilan University to award Jonathan Sacks Prize to historian Deborah Lipstadt

Professor and Jewish historian Deborah Lipstadt, former U.S. envoy for monitoring and combating antisemitism from 2022 to 2025, is set to receive Bar-Ilan University’s 2026 Jonathan Sacks Institute Prize for Outstanding Achievement as a Public Intellectual.

The award, established by the Gewurz family of Montreal in memory of Samuel Gewurz, honors figures whose work advances the ideas and moral vision of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, who died in 2020.

It comes with $32,500, which will be presented to Lipstadt at a Bar-Ilan ceremony in May, where the 78-year-old is slated to deliver a public lecture titled “Antisemitism: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.”

“Professor Lipstadt exemplifies the rare combination of intellectual rigor, moral courage, and public engagement that Rabbi Sacks so deeply admired,” said Jonathan Rynhold, professor and academic director of the Jonathan Sacks Institute. “Her work has shaped global discourse on antisemitism, truth and democratic resilience at a moment when these issues are more urgent than ever.”

Professor Arie Zaban, president of Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, said that “Lipstadt’s work reminds us that standing up for truth requires courage, clarity and persistence.”

Lipstadt, a longtime Emory University professor, is known for her successful legal defense against British Holocaust-denier David Irving. In the announcement from the university, Bar-Ilan highlighted her books Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory and Antisemitism: Here and Now.

“I have been blessed to receive many honors in my life,” Lipstadt said. “But this one, to paraphrase the last chapter of the book of Proverbs, surpasses them all because of its connection with Bar-Ilan.”

02/02 Links Pt1: This ayatollah fanclub heaps shame on London; Anti-Israel, former president of Chile nominated to be next UN secretary-general; 6,000 Miles of Context: Why the U.S. Comparison Collapses in Gaza

From Ian:

Brendan O'Neill: This ayatollah fanclub heaps shame on London

We need to grapple with the seriousness of what happened in London on Saturday. Mobs of people sided with Islamist fanaticism. They cosied up to the killers of women. They aligned themselves, publicly and proudly, with the venal ayatollah classes who are content to lay waste to thousands of lives if it will help them to preserve their Koranic power. Rarely has the moral decay of the protesting classes been so starkly on display – a psychotic religious regime massacres thousands and these people either say, ‘But what about Israel?!’ – or worse, ‘Good’.

Saturday’s march was a funeral for moral decency. No one of good conscience, no one of sound moral standing, can be the least bit confused as to what side to take in Iran. This is a theocracy that savagely punishes women for living freely, and which ruthlessly locks up dissenters and apostates, and which has brazenly slain thousands for daring to desire freedom. If you look at this and think to yourself, ‘It’s complicated’, then you have fully vacated the realm of reason. You have made your peace with barbarism.

Some say the Gazaholics of the activist class are being hypocritical. These people weep for the dead of Gaza but shrug their shoulders over the dead of Iran. I disagree. There’s moral consistency here. For in both their anti-Israel fury and their nonchalance over the butchery in Iran, these people are siding with the carnival of bloody reaction that is Islamist fanaticism. Their 7 October apologism and their shameful silence on the Iranian massacres spring from the same dark, warped source – a creepy sympathy for Islamism, a belief that this religious mania represents some kind of resistance to the West, to Israel, to capitalism, to modernity. Their anger over the war in Gaza and their coolness over the mass murder in Iran are both grim proof of the moral rot of identitarianism.

For how much longer will we surrender our streets to the Israel haters and the ayatollah fanclub? To the intifada-cheering middle classes and the mullah-loving Islamists? To those who think the Jewish nation fighting back against its invaders is ‘genocide’ but the mass murder of protesters by tooled-up theocrats is nothing to get worked up about? Mass solidarity with Iranians is what we need right now. The only time I want to see the flag of the Islamic Republic on the streets of London is in the minutes before someone sets it on fire.

Anti-Israel, former president of Chile nominated to be next UN secretary-general

Backed by Mexico and Brazil, Gabriel Boric, Chile’s outgoing president, nominated former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet, a harsh critic of the Jewish state, to be the next secretary-general of the United Nations.

Boric, who is also anti-Israel, made the announcement on Monday. José Antonio Kast, a right-wing politician who is set to assume the Chilean presidency next month, would be unlikely to nominate Bachelet, 74, for the role.

Bachelet, who was Brazil’s president twice—from 2006-10 and 2014-18—was the first head of U.N. Women and served as U.N. high commissioner for human rights.

She was a frequent critic of the Jewish state, which broke ties with her office in 2020 over her decision to implement a U.N. Human Rights Council resolution mandating the publication of a blacklist of companies engaged in business in Judea and Samaria and eastern Jerusalem.

According to U.N. Watch, Bachelet issued 14 comments about Israel, more than any democratic country. She made the same number of statements about Syria and fewer about Iran, according to the watchdog.

Bachelet used her final hours in office to decry Israel over its denial of visas to her staff. She ignored antisemitic comments made by a member of the Human Rights Council’s commission of inquiry on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for which the commissioner later apologized.

New York Times Misleads Readers on Gaza Death Toll

Edward Wong, who covers the State Department for the New York Times, has a news article in the Feb. 2 newspaper that says "the Israeli military has killed about 70,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to statistics from the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants."

That’s more or less standard Times language. It’s problematic in its own right, failing to disclose that the health ministry is part of the Hamas-controlled Gaza government, and using the term "combatants" instead of "Hamas terrorists."

What really caught my eye, though, was the new language in the following paragraph. It says, "A senior Israeli security official told Israeli journalists that was an accurate number."

This is scraping the bottom, even by the Times’s own very low standards—relying on what an anonymous source supposedly told some other journalists. For verification, the online version of the Times article links not to anything written by "Israeli journalists" but rather a piece in the far-left British newspaper the Guardian by a former visiting scholar of Chinese literature at Peking University who "also worked in Cuba for a year," Emma Graham-Harrison. That Guardian article relies largely on the far-left Israeli newspaper Haaretz, whose own published articles on the topic say nothing about "a senior Israeli security official." The Guardian also links to an article from the Times of Israel’s Emanuel Fabian, who mentions an anonymous "senior Israeli military official."

Even the Times’s "senior security official" is a vague term and could apply to a variety of figures, including political rivals of the current Israeli prime minister and disgruntled former military officials who have been ousted.

Meanwhile, the official Israel Defense Forces international spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani, posted on Jan. 30 to debunk the false claim that the IDF has accepted the casualty figures. "The IDF clarifies that the details published do not reflect official IDF data," Shoshani said. "Any publication or report on this matter will be released through official and orderly channels." The Times didn’t share that denial with its readers.